Did HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn attend the Richard M. Nixon school of management? In an effort to uncover HP board members
who had leaked information to reporters, Dunn hired “security consultants” to secretly collect their personal phone records
and then apparently tried to cover up the deed. Back in Nixon’s day such consultants were called “plumbers,” and several did
time. Dunn didn’t wobble her jowls and declare, “I am not a crook,” but HP's board has had enough. Dunn is officially done.
The flame game: It’s not just Apple and Dell owners who get to roast weenies over their laptops. Cringester Eric H. says a Gateway notebook
in his firm’s IT office turned into a burning hunk of love last month, causing 500 employees to evacuate. Gateway quickly
replaced the incendiary device and sent a box of wireless mice as a gift. Company spokesfolk say it was an isolated incident,
unrelated to the Sony recall. No word on whether they sprayed the mice with flame retardant.
The feast of St. Steven: Last Tuesday the patron saint of Cupertino walked amongst us, bearing a passel of new iPods and downloadable movies. Amazingly, Jobs violated Apple’s First Commandment
-- Thou shalt not speaketh of unreleased products -- when he unveiled the iTV device for displaying iPod movies on TVs, due
out next year. As Jobs left, he healed a sick laptop by changing Windows into OS X and was borne into heaven by a choir of
angels. Or so I hear.
Vista, we missed ya: After a brief spat, Microsoft Vista and nVidia’s graphics drivers appear to have kissed and made up. Cringester David S. says Release Candidate
1 installed on his system without any video conflicts. Company spokesdude Andrew Fear says nVidia saw a handful of issues
with earlier Vista betas, but nothing unusual, and nada since RC1. He says virtually any nVidia card released since November 2002 should work with Vista. Now that we’ve got that settled, it’s time to resolve the tiff between
Madonna and the Russian Mafia.
Send hot tips or charred laptop bits to cringe@infoworld.com and you may snag a cool bag.
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(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
