* Posts by Jeff Silver

5 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2007

HP pays $13.9bn for EDS

Jeff Silver

On spending money for a name

Perhaps of some historical interest, regarding payments to PR agencies: I was at SD-Scicon when EDS bought it. The staff were gathered in a meeting to be told that some large sum of money had been paid to a PR agency to assess the competing merits of various possible names for the company. Said PR agency declared that the best mix of reputation and market presence (my apologies for the jargon) was "EDS-Scicon". And thus were we named.

So far, so irrelevant. But almost exactly a year later, we had an almost identical meeting to tell us that the exact same exercise had this time produced the answer that we should be called...

...EDS.

Beyond satire!

Jeff Silver

@Rodrigo

Writing as both an ex-HP and an ex-EDS employee, I have to say that Rodrigo has pretty much the right idea. On the other hand, since C.Fiorina converted that delightful Californian company into a Texan one (philosophy; not location), maybe you won't notice much difference.

(No icon, 'cos there isn't one for "just mildly depressed".)

Dell spills its Guts over Ubuntu gear

Jeff Silver

Why bother with Dell anyway...

...when Novatech will sell you a laptop with no OS at all, and you can put whatever distro you want on it? Personally, I'm a long-term RedHat/Fedora man, but I recently installed a Ubuntu system. It just whizzed right through and worked straight off. Faster and simpler than WinXP.

(I have no connection with Novatech other than as a customer.)

Need hard facts? Try Conservapedia

Jeff Silver

BCE isn't new

It's a sign of the blinkered nature of Schlafly that he hadn't previously come across BCE, and leapt to the conclusion that it's a Wikipedia invention. The term has been used in non-Christian circles for at least 20 years to my personal knowledge.

US troops to scatter crawling Wi-Fi mini-droids

Jeff Silver

Did we need another neologism?

"Dismounted warfighter" ?? Is that what used to be called an infantryman?