i.justrealized

Back in September, McCain’s top economic advisor, Holtz-Eakin, held up a Blackberry and announced that the device won’t be around if not for John McCain. “He did this,” Holtz-Eakin flashed the Blackberry. The internet (represented by Digg, Reddit and 4chan) ridiculed the statement. The McCain camp then clarifies the senator’s involvement in Blackberry.

This reminds me of Civilization IV where the internet upgrade icon as Al Gore’s head which I thought is just brilliant.

Carly Fiorina, a McCain advisor, was asked if she thinks Sarah Palin is ready to lead a company like HP. To which Fiorina responded, “No, I don’t, but you know what? That’s not what she’s running for.” Fiorina then clarifies that running a company is different from running a country.

It’s okay, ahem, the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

I love to see what the McCain camp has to say about technology. They haven’t exactly been the tech guys in politics and, if anything, they’re rather anti-Internet. McCain himself confessed he couldn’t do these techie stuff.

Then, oops, yesterday morning, a couple hours before the event began, the McCain camp emailed to say that, actually, no, sorry, Holtz-Eakin can’t make it for the 12:30 debate. Apparently he had very important meetings to attend. Right. Apparently, though, he stepped out in the middle. At 1pm he was on MSNBC attacking Obama, trying to tie him to George Bush’s economic policies. Meanwhile, Reed Hundt ended up talking about complicated tech issues alone. The event was still fascinating (and you can see video here) but a huge opportunity was lost.

In short: the McCain camp chickened out. Spinning is easy; debating is hard. And defending John McCain’s record on broadband deployment, spectrum issues, and net neutrality is particularly hard. “If I was voting on technology issues only, even I wouldn’t support McCain,” said one Republican who I interviewed while researching the scorecard. (Source: Wired)

But no. McCain camp won’t be doing tech talks. Gobama 2008.

My web host, Slicehost, has been acquired by Rackspace.

Big news - Rackspace and Slicehost

What an amazing day for Slicehost and our customers! Our acquistion by Rackspace has been announced and we couldn’t be more excited. Jason and I started Slicehost two years ago and it grew beyond our wildest dreams.

We believe that Slicehost and Rackspace are fantastic complements to each other. Our technology strengthens their position in the cloud hosting world. Their expertise, experience and resources enable us to improve our product and continue meeting our customers’ needs. Fear not loyal Slicehosters, we promise to keep doing what we’ve always done – listening to you and building a product that solves your problems. (Source: Slicehost)

Who is Rackspace Hosting?

Rackspace, now 10 years old, is one of the most respected companies in our industry and are now on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RAX) after recently going public. Rackspace delivers computing-as-service, striving to make it reliable and affordable. One of the reasons we like Rackspace is because they think like we do… they value their customers above everything else.

I think it’s good news. I’m happy for Slicehost. Rackspace has been reputable in server offerings. Acquiring Slicehost betters Rackspace’s developer relationship and is inline with their cloud hosting ambitions which would compete directly with mights such as Amazon.

Slicehost will be a subsidiary of Rackspace. At the upcoming Rackspace Cloud Hosting event, Slicehost would be announcing larger slices and a price reduction.

Google is coming out with Google Chrome, an open source browser that takes cues from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Does the world need another browser?

We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

The blockquote represent statements from Google blog. And just so you know, the world does not need another browser.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

Ahahaa, love what they wrote there. Isn’t every product development about adding value to consumers and driving innovation. What a cliché.

We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

Yay, one more browser to optimize.

We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

It’s great that they’re taking cues from WebKit. You can see some Google Chrome comics here.

In general, an additional browser is a good thing for innovation. It’s probably the worst thing that could ever happen to web design or developing. Okay, actually the second worst, the worst being developing an additional skin for the iPhone just so to prettify things.

There was a time when Microsoft Internet Explorer is the de facto browser. While everyone’s not happy, remember that back then we only had one browser to test in. And that time Internet Explorer this version does not look the same as Internet Explorer that version, isn’t that just like what is happening right now?

This is quite interesting, Amnesia Group did an unboxing of Microsoft iTable Surface. As we all don’t already know, Amnesia Group is a subsidiary of Avenue A Razorfish, which in turn is a subsidiary of aQuantive, which was acquired by Microsoft about a year ago.

The multi-touch enabled table comes with niceties like demos, instruction manuals and a giant zip lock bag you probably can put your friend into.

Read more at Amnesia Group. [via Long Zheng]