The Weekly Round-Up: 01.07.05

Sounds romantic, doesn't it? Until you find out that is actually Sun CEO Scott McNealy describing a year of negotiations with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Putting aside the horrific idea that he meant 'dancing' in the prison sense, it becomes clear this is a metaphor for how the two flirted with one another and moved in and out of discussions which led up to a major deal bringing 'peace in our time' to the often controversial relations between the two tech giants.

McNealy was speaking this week about that year of dancing.

Of how he first approached Ballmer, McNealy said: "I called him up and said let's go play golf."

As you would.

"We played down in Monterey because we figured we'd be less recognised down there," he added, before complimenting Ballmer on being prepared to get in his plane and fly down to play a round with Scott.

Ballmer and his chum Bill Gates also attended a meeting at Sun's headquarters, while the staff were all on "a smoke break" and McNealy described an encounter between Gates and one remaining Sun employee outside the gents toilet which left a puzzled Sun staffer thinking 'that can't be Bill Gates... can it?' - more because he'd not expected to see Gates on Sun property than because he assumed Gates doesn't need to pee like the rest of us.

Still on the subject of going to the toilet, the Round-Up couldn't subdue a chuckle when McNealy bragged: "I've had strong number twos for several years."

Unfortunately he was only talking about the various characters he's had serving as his second in command.

More romantic than the image of Ballmer and McNealy doing the Lambada - horizontal or otherwise - are the goings on in Indian outsourcing centres which are increasingly turning into hotbeds of lustful activity.

This is in light of events last week which saw one call centre worker allegedly liberate the details of 1,000 British bank account holders, as exposed in an investigation by The Sun.

That scare reminded bosses they need to be stricter about monitoring their staff but it turns out that when the cameras are turned on and zoomed in on the activities of staff they catch a lot more stolen moments than stolen data.

The India Times reports one case of love among the outsourcing community with the touching tale of 24-year-old Mandakini Sandhu and her beau Ashish Gupta.

The couple work 12 hour days and live 50km apart, so the only chance they get to spend time together are the stolen moments around the office.

The Round-Up is pretty sure we're talking about nookie, here though you do have to cut through a wealth of euphemism not witnessed since the chairwoman of the Little Barchester Town's Womens Guild had to tell the vicar he was flying low and the mouse was no longer in the house.

For example, what does "units are slowly becoming hubs where inter-personal bonding takes place" really mean?

What is this interpersonal bonding?

"For us, the office is practically everything," explained Sandhu. "And in such a situation, intimacy is a foregone conclusion."

So we are talking about sex, right?

Sandhu says she has gone to "fourth base" with her fella, according to the paper, but she has "refrained from having a quickie in the workplace as it's quite a risky proposition".

So she's been to "fourth base", which sounds like it belongs in any number of John Hughes American teen movies, but she hasn't had a quickie.

What's going on here? Is she actually playing baseball? The Round-Up is confused.

The paper does eventually explain a little further. "It comes as little surprise that many also give vent to their sexual urges in the office space," the article says.

Whoah there! Sorry but it would come as a surprise. Nobody really wants to walk in on their colleagues venting anything of the sort. And the Round-Up - while no puritan - refuses to believe anybody would take that with no "little surprise".

'Ashish, I've got those reports you requested, I'll just put them over here, next to Mandakini's discarded underwear and let you guys finish off. Sounds like you're nearly done so I'll make myself scarce. Email me when you're ready to go over the findings.'

Another worker, Nicola D'Costa, 26, said: "Most of us have shed a lot of inhibitions when we come into this sector. Couples walking with their arms around each other or grabbing a quick kiss in vacant corridors does happen."

But certainly not everybody is as restrained as Mandakini and Ashish, and not everybody leaves it at a kiss and cuddle in the corridors. One Mumbai-based outsourcing operation admits it has caught couples making 'the beast with two backs' in their office cubicles.

Naughty, naughty.

It seems some people have had sex on the brain this week. Take for example a rather unfortunate typo on a Microsoft security website.

The site offers a transcript of a video and begins... "Hi and welcome back to sunny Redmond," which is a nice beginning - informal, welcoming and indeed informative as the presenter confirms "it actually is sunny today".

So he wasn't lying, which is nice to know.

"My name’s Michael Howard," he continues, though the Round-Up presumes not THE Michael Howard - current, soon-to-be-replaced Tory leader who boasts 'something of the night' about him.

What follows is several paragraphs of fairly technical security speak before you get to this piece of advice:

"...you then build a thing called a threat tree, which is derived from hardware fault trees... And lastly, but by no means least, you need to wank the threats by overall risk."

You need to do what?

You need to type more carefully, that's what you need to do.

And speaking of unfortunate typos - unless that last blunder was due to a rather too accurate transcribing of speech affected by a Jonathan 'Woss' style impediment - word of a costly typo hit the headlines this week as a banker lost her job over an erroneous keystroke.

The unfortunate female worked in Taiwan for brokers Fubon Securities and was charged with making a trade on an order from Merrill Lynch but rather than putting through a relatively small order for £1.4m-worth of shares she put in an order for £140m.

It turns out such mistakes don't sit well with bosses, especially when the sale ends up losing them millions and sending the market into disarray.

According to newspaper reports Victor Kung, a Fubon exec, said "something like this is very difficult to explain to superiors".

Which sounds like glorious understatement.

Of course, the fickle nature of the markets means she could just as easily have been lauded for a masterstroke if the misguided transaction had proved a money-spinner.

But it didn't, so she was sacked.

Some you win, some you lose.

Speaking of which. Also rocking the markets this week was the PartyGaming IPO which saw the online gambling company become the single biggest corporate entity in the universe... or something like that.

The £4.6bn float certainly gave PartyGaming a market cap that put it up there ahead of household names such as British Airways, Sainsburys and Wm Morrisons (the artist formerly known as Safeway in some parts of the country).

(Speaking of Sainsburys, we received an email this week from Lord Sainsbury's PA asking that we don't refer to the DTI big wig and president and majority shareholder in the Sainsbury's empire as a 'grocer', which is something we did sometime last year. We'll get onto it - and then see him become a grocer again.)

But back to PartyGaming.

Although the company was set up by California lawyer Ruth Parasol and boasts more punters from the US than any other country, there are large question marks hanging over the legality of the site in its spiritual homeland (not to be mistaken with its actual homeland, which is a bunker somewhere in Gibraltar where conditions - by which the Round-Up means laws and taxes - favour such businesses).

Of course the other internet company going from strength-to-strength post-recent-IPO is Google and the folks in the notorious Googleplex - where the magic happens - are certainly not resting on their laurels.

Developments continue apace and one currently in its beta stage is the occasionally impressive - but practical-use-defying - Google Sets.

In a nutshell, you type in names or items which may belong to a set and it will predict the other members of that set. For example if you were to type in John, Paul, George it will offer Ringo as the likely final member of that group. Clever, you see.

The Round-Up suggested Google sets might like to complete the rest of the World Cup winning team of 1966 and gave it a start with Banks, Moore, Charlton, Charlton, Hurst... but sports knowledge appears not to be a strength... adding Davis, Johnson, Thomas, Lunt and Ivey to the line-up... whoever they are.

But clearly, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Googlites know their pop culture.

Given Mr Pink, Mr Brown and Mr White from Reservoir Dogs, Google sets completes the line-up with Mr Blue, Mr Blonde, Mr Orange, Nice Guy Eddie, Joe Cabot and even '2 cops'.

Not quite so terrifying a group of people but observing the same naming convention, the Round-Up typed in Mr Nosey, Mr Tickle and Mr Bump. For the record Google only knows three other Mr Men - Mr Topsy Turvy, Mr Busy and Mr Mean (who the Round-Up had never heard of but doesn't like the sound of).

The fun continues but the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time technology also throws up some interesting results...

Want to know the names of some comedy greats?

Well, there was Curly, Larry and... Hitler, apparently, doubtless to Moe's consternation - though the search giant did include him as well in a list of results which wasn't so much the Three Stooges, more the 20 or so entirely unrelated people.

Moving on, but while still in list mode, let the Round-Up offer thanks to the latest companies to back silicon.com's Three Peaks fundraising effort.

Thank you Unisys for a very generous pledge, may all your server-based dreams come true. And thank you also to our friends in the PR industry, from Band & Brown, Lighthouse and Portfolio - may you win many large clients and keep all the ones you deservedly have on your books already.

And finally, a silicon.com staffer was floored by comments from one antivirus vendor this week who suggested the press - though possibly not silicon.com included, surely - are guilty of blowing things out of proportion where security issues are concerned.

To make matters worse the accuser was none other than the indefatigable Sophos mouthpiece Graham Cluley - friend to the Round-Up and a man not known for resisting the temptation of hyperbole.

"We have to hold these things in proportion," said Cluley of the tendency among the press to get carried away with the threat posed by viruses.

His current bug bear is the hype around mobile viruses.

"There have been more stories about mobile viruses than there are mobile viruses," said Cluley.

Fair point. So let us learn from the masters of 'proportion'.

Take this press release for example: "Users risk smackdown as WWE screensaver worm discovered," wrote Sophos of a virus which never really materialised to any even-negligible level in March this year.

Now, let's see which media organisations failed to keep those strong claims in proportion.

Oh, hang on. In fact, the only title to run with that story appears to have been the no doubt excellent Wrestling-News.com which may well not be primarily known as an IT-focused title.

So who's getting things out of proportion here?

We wait to see this new found maturity reflected in the Sophos press release mill.

And finally, finally, the silicon.com virtual mailbag received its strangest reader comment of all time, ever, this week in response to a story so unrelated to its subject matter it's not even conceivable to imagine the train of thought.

"I will like to know the names of the two doctors that killed Pope John Paul II and their intentions, and also the people that sent them to kill a man of God," wrote our reader.

It's a good, if entirely mental, question.

(The Round-Up's guesses would be Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy.)

Careful, that's how rumours get started.

Until next week the Round-Up is off to explain to our lawyers that of course we weren't suggesting two Dr Who actors really took out the Pope.

Now read some news.