Microsoft’s growth touted
U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez called Microsoft Corp. an example of a small company that used entrepreneurship to grow into one of the world’s leading technology giants, on a tour Thursday to promote President Bush’s competitiveness initiative.
Gutierrez visited Microsoft’s mock home of the future at the company’s Redmond headquarters. There, he got a glimpse of technologies such as a kitchen counter that flashes recipes based on ingredients sitting on it, and mirrors that tell what clothes match a shirt being held up.
He said he wanted to visit Microsoft because it is a great example of a company that has taken a good idea and, in not too many years, turned it into a large and successful company.
New York
Icahn drops Time Warner bid
Financier Carl Icahn is scaling back his drive to shake up Time Warner Inc., abandoning efforts to seek control of the giant media company by nominating only a partial slate of directors, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The newspaper, citing unnamed people familiar with Icahn’s plans, said Icahn would nominate only five directors at Time Warner’s next annual meeting, not enough to ensure control, amid signs that the dissident investor could be near some kind of an agreement with the company.
Time Warner declined to comment, and Icahn did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Washington
Airlines lose more bags in ‘05
U.S. airlines last year lost about 10,000 bags a day on average, the worst performance since 1990.
The rate of lost suitcase reports per 1,000 passengers on flights soared 23 percent from a year earlier, according to recent numbers from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Among the reasons: a surge in the number of passengers, airline budget cuts, backed-up flights and tighter inspections of luggage.
In all, passengers filed with airlines more than 3.5 million reports of lost bags, most of which eventually find their way back to owners.
US Airways, which exited Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year, had the highest lost-bag rate of major carriers.
San Jose, Calif.
Apple embeds poem for hackers
Apple Computer Inc. has resorted to a poetic broadside in the inevitable cat-and-mouse game between hackers and high-tech companies.
The maker of Macintosh computers had anticipated that hackers would try to crack its new OS X operating system built to work on Intel Corp.’s chips and run pirated versions on non-Apple computers. So, Apple developers embedded a warning deep in the software – in the form of a poem.
The embedded poem reads: “Your karma check for today: There once was a user that whined/his existing OS was so blind/he’d do better to pirate/an OS that ran great/but found his hardware declined./Please don’t steal Mac OS!/Really, that’s way uncool./(C) Apple Computer, Inc.”