Hewlett-Packard has announced the resignation of CEO Carly Fiorina. Fiorina began her stint as Chairman and CEO in 1999, and during that time she oversaw HP through a takeover of Compaq and the HP-Apple iPod partnership in January 2004. CFO Robert Wayman will fill in as interim CEO until a permanent replacement is found.

HP Press Release

Spam is evil. At the time of writing my Junk mail box in Mail contains 1180 unread spam. Only the odd one or two a week get missed by the junk mail filter but it appears to adapt after a while of setting them as junk. And this leads to one of the greatest ways to fight spam. Ignore it. I don’t mean ignore the problem, but ignore the cause of the problem, the actual spam mails themself. Maybe if everybody stopped making such a fuss about spam then the spam senders would realise that nobody really reads them.

It appears that 3 major search engines have had this idea to help combat blog spam. Blogging is on the increase and as with anything technological that get’s a lot of people reading it, if there’s a way to post then there’s gonna be spam. Now one way to fight this is with randomly generated images that only humans can read. But this is a bit overboard for a simple blog comment system (though it is offered as an option in blogging software such as ExpressionEngine).

But Google, MSN Search and Yahoo have all got together and agreed to add something to their search bots. Any link with the new attribute rel="nofollow" will be ignored by the search bots. So while blog spam will still happen the only real benefit of it, boosting search engine ratings by having the links all over, will be gone. Most major blogs have either been updated…
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So I ordered a monitor to go with my Mac mini, and after 6 days of it not turning up and the company in question sitting on it, I was getting mightily dischuffed.  The company was not responding to my emails asking what had happened to my order, and I couldn’t find any phone numbers on their web page.  So, off to directory enquiries I went and found their head office number.  Phoned them up and got a nice prerecorded lady telling me that all customer service was dealt with over the internet and could I please hang up… Not much use.  So after a little googling I found the number of a couple of people in the company and managed to work out the format of their phone numbers.  Logically I started by adding ext 001, and decided to work through them until I managed to speak to someone.  Now, as it turns out, extension 001 was the direct line to the managing director of this company.  So with him I had a lovely chat in which I barely managed to keep my voice level because I was so angry, and he told me that he would see to my order.  Anyway, I hung up the phone at 10:40, and at 10:41 low and behold there’s an email sitting in my inbox… “Your order was packed and dispatched at 10:41"… Now that’s what I call service, the MD must have gone down onto the shop floor and personally bollocked someone.…
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So I’m writing this on a Windows PC right now and running AIM Express, what seems to be a Java-based (or DirectX or something?)version of AIM which runs in your web browser. And I have to tell you, I love these abmiguous buddy status icons. The icon for “Away” is what appears to be a yellow sticky note or notepad. The “Idle” icon is a water droplet. Wow. That’s excellent, intuitive UI design right there. iChat’s green/yellow/red icons are sooo confusing. I’m so happy I found a better way.

And yes, I am being sarcastic.

Holy crap.

$295 million profit (USD). $3.49 billion (USD) in revenue. 4.5 million iPods sold, 1 million Macs sold.
wow.

Apple press release