I am not opposed to all wars, What I am opposed to is a dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.— Barack Obama
Author: Mohamed Marwen Meddah
Mohamed Marwen Meddah is a Tunisian-Canadian, web aficionado, software engineering leader, blogger, and amateur photographer.
Microsoft Offers $44.6B for Yahoo
WOW…
Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo Inc. with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in its boldest bid yet to challenge Google Inc.’s dominance of the lucrative online search and advertising markets.
The surprise offer of $31 per share, made late Thursday and announced Friday, comes with Sunnyvale-based Yahoo in a vulnerable position.
In a statement Friday, Yahoo said it will “carefully and promptly” study Microsoft’s bid.
[…]
In a letter to Yahoo’s board of directors, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer indicated the world’s largest software maker is determined to bring the two companies together.
To underscore its resolve, Microsoft is offering a 62 percent premium to Yahoo’s closing stock price Thursday.
[Source: Yahoo News]
Rumors have been going around for quite some time now that Microsoft would eventually attempt to buy Yahoo, and now they have come true.
If Yahoo shareholders decide to sell, what would it mean for the Internet?
Would it make the companies’ combined portfolios better suited to take on Google?
What would happen to all the different Yahoo services? Especially if they have existing competing Microsoft services? It’d certainly be a shame to see services like Flickr or Delicious take a down turn because of this.
Many questions, and still too early to know for sure what the answers are.
Personally, I would prefer for this deal not to happen, because the way things are now allows for more competition and more creativity. Anyway, even if the deal goes through, I’m not sure it will change much in Microsoft’s position against Google, especially if they start trying to take Yahoo the Microsoft way and start MS’ing their products and services and badly re-branding them.
If the deal goes through, what I think they should do is leave Yahoo a lot of its independence and spirit, not change the product/service names, drop MSN altogether and study quantitatively and qualitatively competing products in the portfolio to take decisions on which to integrate everything into as a brand.
Anyway, I guess we’ll just wait and see how all this plays out. But it has the potential to change a big part of the geography of the online world.
Internet Outages Hit Middle East
Internet goes down, everything goes down…
Life came to a standstill in Dubai, home of the renowned “Media City” and modern “electronic government,” after an extensive Internet failure affected much of the United Arab Emirates…
[…]
Besides the Internet, the outage caused major disruption to television and phone services, creating chaos for the UAE’s public and private sectors.
[…]
The outage heavily crippled Dubai’s business section, which is heavily reliant on electronic means for billions of dollars’ worth of transactions daily.
[Source: CNN]
And all around the Middle East and beyond as well:
Internet services and usage have been disrupted across large parts of the Middle East after an undersea cable in the Mediterranean was damaged.
Egypt’s telecoms ministry said 70 per cent of the country’s internet network was down on Wednesday.
India was also affected, losing more than half its bandwidth initially.
Residents of Gulf Arab countries reported a slowdown in internet connectivity and disruption of services…
[Source: Al Jazeera]
This is what’s so scary about technology; we quickly get so used to it, we integrate it into our everyday lives and work, we become dependent on it for everything we do, and then when it fails for one reason or another our lives stop, we’re left crippled and helpless; we can’t go back and we can’t move forward; we just have to wait for things to be sorted out so we can go back to life as usual.
We’re too dependent on technology, and we don’t have a fail-safe plan; a major technological meltdown in the future could bring the whole world to a stand-still; and blow us back centuries into the past.
Israeli Lobby Unwritten Contract With American Media
Andrea Levin, president of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) said in a speech: “The American media is much, much more geared to understanding that there is an unwritten contract between them and us…”
What is this “unwritten contract”? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s an agreement to censor anything and everything that offends the Lobby and its glorified, sanitized view of Israel. Here, after all, is a country that practices apartheid, imprisons children, and was founded on ethnic cleansing and bigoted religious obscurantism – and yet they present themselves to the world as a valiant little “democracy,” a beleaguered outpost of “the West” in the midst of an Arab sea. It takes a lot of cosmetics to hide the true face of this dog, and that’s what CAMERA is all about – prettifying an increasingly ugly reality. The Lobby reserves the right to censor any material that presents Israel in a more realistic light, and anyone who opposes them in their mission on behalf of a foreign power is smeared as an “anti-Semite.”
— Full article: The Lobby, Unmasked by Justin Raimondo.
Your Self-Esteem & People
…And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.
This goes to a friend I had a little chat with today; and to everyone who ever found themselves in a moment they started to doubt themselves in.
links for 2008-01-29
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Cool, soft and comfortable cushions shaped like stones.
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Easy online publication. Upload documents, create magazines, share and embed anywhere.
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A cool advertising comic about how the glasses you wear affect your image.
The World’s Richest Arabs
ArabianBusiness.com have just released a list of the world’s 50 richest Arabs.
Most of them are from the gulf region, mainly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates; with the rest divided among Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and one person from Jordan.
No one from the Arab Maghreb is anywhere to be seen on the list.
Here are the Top 10 sorted by net worth:
1. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud (Saudi Arabia): US$ 29.5 Billion
2. The Al Rajhi Family (Saudi Arabia): US$ 24 Billion
3. The Hariri Family (Lebanon): US$ 17.8 Billion
4. Nasser Al Kharafi (Kuwait): US$ 12 Billion
5. Maan Al Sanea (Saudi Arabia): US$ 10 Billion
6. Mohammad Al Amoudi (Saudi Arabia): US$ 9.2 Billion
7. The Bin Laden Family (Saudi Arabia): US$ 8.5 Billion
8. Abdulaziz Al Ghurair (United Arab Emirates): US$ 8 Billion
9. The Olayan Family (Saudi Arabia): US$ 7.2 Billion
10. The Sawiris Family (Egypt): US$ 6.2 Billion
Check the full list and more details here: Arabian Business Rich List 2007
Bionic Eyes: Contact Lenses With Circuits And Lights
Remember those bionic eyes some of our favorite sci-fi characters had to zoom in on far-away things, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs?
Well those could become an attainable reality for everyone soon enough.
Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.
Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside; opening many doors for useful applications of these contact lenses.
Installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out; and even thought the current prototype contact lens does not correct the wearer’s vision, the technique could be used on a corrective lens.
Future improvements will add wireless communication to and from the lens. The researchers hope to power the whole system using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens.
I personally think this is a very cool invention which could be used in several areas, for serious and professional purposes as well as for leisure purposes too.
I can’t wait to see this rolled out and the different uses it will be applied in. I’d certainly want one, that’s for sure.
[Source: Science Daily
Tunisiana’s GPS Weenee Brings GPS To Tunisia
Just a couple of days ago I was wondering when GPS would finally make it to Tunisia, and to my great surprise today, by accident, I came across a new website launched by Tunisia’s first private mobile operator Tunisiana publicizing a new product they’re launching called GPS Weenee. (Weenee in Arabic means: Where am I? or Where is it?)
The product should be currently available at Tunisiana’s service centers in the Grand Tunis area: Les Jardins du Lac, La Marsa (Zephyr), Ariana, Medina, Tunis-Carthage Airport.
The details of the service are as follows:
– Coverage: The Grand Tunis area and inter-urban Tunisia for the time being.
– Vocal and symbolic guidance
– 2D and 3D Maps
– Multilingual: Tunisian accent, Arabic, German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
– Search for interest points in the proximity, sorted by distance
– Search for addresses in the Grand Tunis area
– Automatic route recalculation
– Optimised route calculation (time/distance)
– Possibility to save favorites and last addresses
– Alerts when speed limit is exceeded
– Positions for hotels, restaurants, fuel stations, …etc.
I’ve found no information about the price on the website, so I guess I’ll have to pass by one of the service centers to check that out. Hopefully them not putting the price doesn’t mean it’s really expensive.
I can’t understand why I had to find out about this by coincidence, where is the communication a product like this deserves? where are the ad campaigns? where are the billboards?
Personally, I find this very very interesting, a great move by Tunisiana, a product everyone needs and that simply sells itself, something I’ll totally go for if the price is right.
Update: The information I got about the price from a Tunisiana insider is a one-time 900 DT for the device. Very expensive and unpractical, I think.
A friend of mine rightfully joked after hearing the price: You could spend your whole life getting lost in Tunis and taking taxis to wherever you want to go and it still wouldn’t amount to 900 DT.
Aquaduct Mobile Filtration Vehicle
The results of the Innovate or Die competition, which challenged inventors to evaluate environmental issues and develop ingenious solutions surrounding climate change using pedal based machines, have recently been announced.
Team Aquaduct was declared the winner out of 102 entries by utilizing the human ability to pedal to bring an easy and effective solution and lots of hope to people in the developing world who struggle daily to gather, transport, filter, and store clean drinking and cooking water.
A peristaltic pump attached to the pedal crank draws water from a large tank, through a carbon filter, to a smaller clean tank. The clean tank is removable and closed for contamination-free home storage and use. A clutch engages and disengages the drive belt from the pedal crank, enabling the rider to filter the water while traveling or while stationary.
Aquaduct is the creation of Adam Mack, Brian Mason, John Lai, Paul Silberschatz, and Eleanor Morgan. The quintet will share the $5,000 grand prize, and each will receive a Specialized Globe bicycle