This Week’s Top News

So many notable quotes, so little space to recount them — that's the annual conundrum as we think back on the year and recall comments that stuck with us long after they were uttered. We've assembled some of those notable comments from stories we wrote and stories we read and offer them here in not-quite chronological order because we wanted to let Oracle CEO Larry Ellison have the last word.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

So much for holiday spirit
"It seems Ellis got fed up with Danny being obsessed with the Wii and refusing to play with him. He was told it was his turn on the Wii next, but he took it a bit too literally and used his secret weapon to sabotage the machine." — Kerry Emsley, the mother of Danny Emsley and his 4-year-old brother Ellis, who ruined Danny's Wii by, well, weeing on it after his brother refused to share.

"It must surely be counted as a leak." — Darren Emsley, the boys' father, who spent months trying to find the Wii for Danny, commenting that he hoped the "accident" would be covered by home-owner's insurance.

Lights! Cameras! Action!
"In a funny sort of way, I now know why Britney Spears is so screwed up. I'd never been to this kind of a photo shoot before. So I flew down to La Guardia and was driven to Soho Studios, which has this cool post-industrial look, which is very good for this kind of thing. I went into this studio and immediately had a makeup person, a wardrobe person, and a person who was offering me vegetarian smoothies. And I thought, if you lived in a world where people were doing your hair, your face, dressing you and bringing you smoothies, you might really believe that you are somebody more than an average human." — John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and the CareGroup, in a January interview with CIO, talking about his appearance in a BlackBerry advertising campaign.

Who cares?
"Let a marketing person loose for 10 minutes and they'll come up with a category. You can say UMPC or MID, what the hell's the difference?" — Phil McKinney, then-CTO at Hewlett-Packard, expressing exasperation at the Consumer Electronics Show regarding various terminology used to describe ultramobile PCs.

Feeling Blu
"As you can probably guess, all of us at Sony are feeling blue today. But that's a good feeling." — Sony CEO Howard Stringer speaking at CES two days after Warner Bros. announced plans to back Blu-ray Disc.

But there's another view of Blu-ray
"You know, Blu-ray is a bag of hurt. I don't mean from a consumer point of view — it's great to watch movies — but the licensing is so complex. We're waiting until things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives." — Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Do no evil
"While the rights they've reserved themselves are very broad, it's probably a case of their actual practice being more conservative. We just have to hope they maintain their stance of not being evil." — Josh King, vice president for business development and general counsel at Avvo.com, a legal advice site, talking about Google's claims that its terms of service gave it a license to user content in various of its products.

Labels
"All these labels — 'geek' and 'nerd' and 'mild Asperger's — are all getting at the same thing…. The Asperger's brain is interested in things rather than people, and people who are interested in things have given us the computer you're working on right now." — Temple Grandin, an associate professor at Colorado State University, on the connection between people with a form of autism called Asperger's Syndrome and IT professionals.

Shortage? What shortage?
"We've got four 300-millimeter fabs, so we can really hose this stuff out," said Sean Maloney, executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer at Intel, explaining in June how the company planned to fix a shortage of its low-cost, low-power Atom processors. By October, the shortage was over.

A bunch of what?!
"I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them" — Linus Torvalds, with characteristic color, explaining why he's fed up with security companies hyping software vulnerabilities.

Hamilton, Madison, Jay turn in their graves
"I get the sense that the court is suffering from a poor understanding of how anonymous speech works in the Internet age. I find the court's attempt to compare The Federalist Papers to the likes of penis enlargement e-mails not only wrong-headed but ultimately offensive to the reasons why we have a First Amendment." — Ray Everett-Church, director of privacy and industry relations at e-mail marketing vendor Responsys and a critic of spammers, questioning a Virginia Supreme Court decision in September.

Ouch! That will leave a mark
"When you have an object that extends from the surface of Earth to geosynchronous altitude, every satellite currently in orbit, every piece of debris, and every satellite in the future will crash into the elevator. Every one, with no exception." — Ivan Bekey, a former NASA scientist currently with Bekey Designs, speaking at a "space elevator" conference.

Burp
"It's not good to have lots of undigested products in your range. Symantec and McAfee both have indigestion." — Websense CEO Gene Hodges on his company's plans to eschew the acquisition fervor that hit the enterprise security software market. As for whether Websense would be acquired, Hodges said that's "in the hands of the gods."

Application squirts
"All you do is squirt applications to the cloud." — Richard Payling, Capgemini vice president of global outsourcing regarding a partnership under which is company and Amazon.com will offer application development and hosting services using Amazon's infrastructure.

Woe unto the engineers
"Engineers will no longer have any influence or say whatsoever in the way that their product appears to the outside world," either to end-users or IT administrators. — Avaya president and CEO Charles Giancarlo at VoiceCon regarding the effect of a product development reorganization at his company.

From the Yahoo-Microsoft saga
"Until now I naively believed that self-destructive doomsday machines were fictional devices found only in James Bond movies. I never believed that anyone would actually create and activate one in real life. I guess I never knew about [Jerry] Yang and the Yahoo Board," billionaire investor Carl Icahn, in a June 4 letter to Yahoo Board Chairman Roy Bostock, referring to a severance plan Yahoo adopted shortly after Microsoft made its acquisition bid, and which Icahn termed a poison pill measure to scare Microsoft away.

"To this day I would say that the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo." — Jerry Yang on Nov. 5, during a keynote appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, shortly after the Google search ad deal collapsed and days before announcing he would step down as CEO as soon as a replacement is found.

[ For the complete saga of Microsoft's attempted takeover of Yahoo, check out InfoWorld's special report ]

Tell it, Larry!
"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

"We'll make cloud computing announcements. I'm not going to fight this thing. But I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That's my view." — Oracle CEO Larry Ellison during a meeting with analysts when he was asked what Oracle is doing about cloud computing.

Stephen Lawson, James Niccolai and Agam Shah in San Francisco; Fred O'Connor and Elizabeth Heichler in Boston; Juan Carlos Perez in Miami; Sumner Lemon in Singapore; and Jason Snell of Macworld contributed to this round up of 2008 quotes.

Apple's stock fell abruptly on Tuesday, but later recovered some ground, after an online report said CEO Steve Jobs bowed out of next week's Macworld Expo keynote address because of declining health.

In a report it labeled "rumor," the gadget blog Gizmodo quoted an unnamed source as saying Apple "is choosing to remove the hype factor strategically" by holding the keynote without Jobs, whose "health is rapidly declining." Gizmodo said the source had been correct in the past, though only about Apple products and not about Jobs. Apple did not comment for the Gizmodo post and did not immediately respond to IDG News Service requests for comment.

[ Related: "No Jobs keynote at Macworld '09." ]

Apple's Nasdaq stock (AAPL), which had closed at $86.61 on Monday, fell as low as $84.72, a drop of about 2 percent. But shares ended the day at $86.29, down just $0.32, or 0.37 percent.

Apple announced on Dec. 16 that Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, would deliver the keynote at Macworld Expo in San Francisco on Jan. 6. For many years since he returned to Apple in 1997, Jobs has given that speech and used it as a launch platform for important products, including the iPhone in 2007 and the MacBook Air in 2008.

At the same time, Apple said it would stop exhibiting at Macworld Expo after the January event. The company said trade shows had become a minor part of its marketing strategy.

Concerns have been raised about Jobs's health since his appearance at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June, when some observers said he appeared gaunt. Jobs said in 2004 that he had undergone surgery for pancreatic cancer. On Oct. 3, Apple shares fell more than 10 percent after a report that Jobs had suffered a major heart attack. The stock recovered after Apple said the report, from a "citizen journalist" on an unfiltered section of CNN's Web site, wasn't true.

So many notable quotes, so little space to recount them — that's the annual conundrum as we think back on the year and recall comments that stuck with us long after they were uttered. We've assembled some of those notable comments from stories we wrote and stories we read and offer them here in not-quite chronological order because we wanted to let Oracle CEO Larry Ellison have the last word.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

So much for holiday spirit
"It seems Ellis got fed up with Danny being obsessed with the Wii and refusing to play with him. He was told it was his turn on the Wii next, but he took it a bit too literally and used his secret weapon to sabotage the machine." — Kerry Emsley, the mother of Danny Emsley and his 4-year-old brother Ellis, who ruined Danny's Wii by, well, weeing on it after his brother refused to share.

"It must surely be counted as a leak." — Darren Emsley, the boys' father, who spent months trying to find the Wii for Danny, commenting that he hoped the "accident" would be covered by home-owner's insurance.

Lights! Cameras! Action!
"In a funny sort of way, I now know why Britney Spears is so screwed up. I'd never been to this kind of a photo shoot before. So I flew down to La Guardia and was driven to Soho Studios, which has this cool post-industrial look, which is very good for this kind of thing. I went into this studio and immediately had a makeup person, a wardrobe person, and a person who was offering me vegetarian smoothies. And I thought, if you lived in a world where people were doing your hair, your face, dressing you and bringing you smoothies, you might really believe that you are somebody more than an average human." — John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and the CareGroup, in a January interview with CIO, talking about his appearance in a BlackBerry advertising campaign.

Who cares?
"Let a marketing person loose for 10 minutes and they'll come up with a category. You can say UMPC or MID, what the hell's the difference?" — Phil McKinney, then-CTO at Hewlett-Packard, expressing exasperation at the Consumer Electronics Show regarding various terminology used to describe ultramobile PCs.

Feeling Blu
"As you can probably guess, all of us at Sony are feeling blue today. But that's a good feeling." — Sony CEO Howard Stringer speaking at CES two days after Warner Bros. announced plans to back Blu-ray Disc.

But there's another view of Blu-ray
"You know, Blu-ray is a bag of hurt. I don't mean from a consumer point of view — it's great to watch movies — but the licensing is so complex. We're waiting until things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives." — Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Do no evil
"While the rights they've reserved themselves are very broad, it's probably a case of their actual practice being more conservative. We just have to hope they maintain their stance of not being evil." — Josh King, vice president for business development and general counsel at Avvo.com, a legal advice site, talking about Google's claims that its terms of service gave it a license to user content in various of its products.

Labels
"All these labels — 'geek' and 'nerd' and 'mild Asperger's — are all getting at the same thing…. The Asperger's brain is interested in things rather than people, and people who are interested in things have given us the computer you're working on right now." — Temple Grandin, an associate professor at Colorado State University, on the connection between people with a form of autism called Asperger's Syndrome and IT professionals.

Shortage? What shortage?
"We've got four 300-millimeter fabs, so we can really hose this stuff out," said Sean Maloney, executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer at Intel, explaining in June how the company planned to fix a shortage of its low-cost, low-power Atom processors. By October, the shortage was over.

A bunch of what?!
"I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them" — Linus Torvalds, with characteristic color, explaining why he's fed up with security companies hyping software vulnerabilities.

Hamilton, Madison, Jay turn in their graves
"I get the sense that the court is suffering from a poor understanding of how anonymous speech works in the Internet age. I find the court's attempt to compare The Federalist Papers to the likes of penis enlargement e-mails not only wrong-headed but ultimately offensive to the reasons why we have a First Amendment." — Ray Everett-Church, director of privacy and industry relations at e-mail marketing vendor Responsys and a critic of spammers, questioning a Virginia Supreme Court decision in September.

Ouch! That will leave a mark
"When you have an object that extends from the surface of Earth to geosynchronous altitude, every satellite currently in orbit, every piece of debris, and every satellite in the future will crash into the elevator. Every one, with no exception." — Ivan Bekey, a former NASA scientist currently with Bekey Designs, speaking at a "space elevator" conference.

Burp
"It's not good to have lots of undigested products in your range. Symantec and McAfee both have indigestion." — Websense CEO Gene Hodges on his company's plans to eschew the acquisition fervor that hit the enterprise security software market. As for whether Websense would be acquired, Hodges said that's "in the hands of the gods."

Application squirts
"All you do is squirt applications to the cloud." — Richard Payling, Capgemini vice president of global outsourcing regarding a partnership under which is company and Amazon.com will offer application development and hosting services using Amazon's infrastructure.

Woe unto the engineers
"Engineers will no longer have any influence or say whatsoever in the way that their product appears to the outside world," either to end-users or IT administrators. — Avaya president and CEO Charles Giancarlo at VoiceCon regarding the effect of a product development reorganization at his company.

From the Yahoo-Microsoft saga
"Until now I naively believed that self-destructive doomsday machines were fictional devices found only in James Bond movies. I never believed that anyone would actually create and activate one in real life. I guess I never knew about [Jerry] Yang and the Yahoo Board," billionaire investor Carl Icahn, in a June 4 letter to Yahoo Board Chairman Roy Bostock, referring to a severance plan Yahoo adopted shortly after Microsoft made its acquisition bid, and which Icahn termed a poison pill measure to scare Microsoft away.

"To this day I would say that the best thing for Microsoft to do is to buy Yahoo." — Jerry Yang on Nov. 5, during a keynote appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, shortly after the Google search ad deal collapsed and days before announcing he would step down as CEO as soon as a replacement is found.

[ For the complete saga of Microsoft's attempted takeover of Yahoo, check out InfoWorld's special report ]

Tell it, Larry!
"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

"We'll make cloud computing announcements. I'm not going to fight this thing. But I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That's my view." — Oracle CEO Larry Ellison during a meeting with analysts when he was asked what Oracle is doing about cloud computing.

Stephen Lawson, James Niccolai and Agam Shah in San Francisco; Fred O'Connor and Elizabeth Heichler in Boston; Juan Carlos Perez in Miami; Sumner Lemon in Singapore; and Jason Snell of Macworld contributed to this round up of 2008 quotes.

Here's a time-saver for IT executives swamped by last-minute budget cuts and end-of-the-year performance reviews: We've written your 2009 goals for you, with our list of nine Web sites you need to study during the next 12 months.

This list is not for geeks. It’s for IT professionals of a certain age, who don’t spend every waking hour online but need to keep up with the latest innovations on the Internet.

[ Want more career pointers? Spruce up your resume with our tips for techies. | Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

Master these Web sites, and you’ll prove you can innovate during the most trying economic times. And you’ll do it more efficiently than your 20-something employees, who waste too much time chasing the new, new thing on the Internet that may not survive the downturn.

1. LinkedIn
Forget Facebook. In the last six months, LinkedIn has become the de rigueur Web 2.0 site for IT professionals. LinkedIn has 30 million members, almost double what it had a year ago. And it raised more than $75 million in venture capital during 2008, so it has staying power. It has a host of new features that make it the most productive networking site on the Web. Spend some time updating your LinkedIn profile and reaching out to current and former colleagues. You can show your boss that you’re well connected, and you’ll be ready in case you’re on the next layoff list. In 2008, LinkedIn made our list of the 20 most useful social networking sites on the Web.

2. Google Apps for Business
Call it what you like – software as a service or cloud computing – but it’s the future of enterprise IT departments, and you need to get on board with it. You’ll be under more pressure than ever in 2009 to find cheaper ways to deliver IT services. One way to do that is to pilot a Google Apps project, such as document sharing via GoogleDocs or video sharing via Google Video. Your staff can build one of these collaboration projects in a jiffy, and the information will be available to employees from any location on any computer. Among Google Apps proponents: The District of Columbia government. 

3. VMware Communities
Chances are you’ve already embarked on a server virtualization project, and continued consolidation of your servers is a key money-saving goal for 2009. Most of you are using VMware for your server virtualization projects, and our product reviewers recommend you stick with VMware over Microsoft’s Hyper-V for the foreseeable future. To get the best real-world feedback on how best to deploy VMware, keep your eyes on the VMware Communities Web site. It’s got user groups in your community and lots of tips from other VMware developers that can help you solve problems faster.

4. Secunia
Security will continue to be a top priority for 2009, but you’ll need to figure out how to do it on the cheap. That’s where Secunia.com comes in. This site aggregates security vulnerability information from leading vendors, providing you with one-stop shopping for the latest news about security bugs and the software patches available to fix them. The site has an active community of IT security folks who can help you fix operating systems and applications before you get attacked. Secunia made our list of 20 useful IT security Web sites in 2008.

5. Green Grid
With the economy in shambles and energy prices plummeting, you’re likely to hear a lot less about global climate change and carbon neutral business operations than you did six months ago. Nonetheless, green IT can still be a huge advantage for IT departments because it will save you money. Plain and simple: Green IT saves greenbacks. So get to know the Green Grid’s Web site and make sure that whatever you buy in 2009 for your datacenters is in line with their advice and metrics. Here’s more information about the Green Grid along with three other organizations that offer advice about lowering datacenter power consumption.

6. Twitter
At first glance, Twitter seems like a colossal waste of time. But the fact is this real-time messaging service is taking off in IT circles. And if you don’t jump on the bandwagon soon, you might be too late. Twitter provides an easy way to keep your staff and coworkers informed about where you are and what you’re doing. You can also sign up for the latest technology headlines from Wired, Slashdot, and others. It doesn’t take long to sign up for Twitter – give it a whirl so that you’ll know what your Generation Y employees are talking about. See 20 must-follow Twitter feeds here.

7. Yammer
If Twitter seems too frivolous to you, try Yammer. It’s essentially Twitter for the office. The benefit of Yammer is that it’s a private communications channel for coworkers to share quick messages about what they’re working on, get questions answered, or blast out news. Xerox and Cisco are among the 200-plus companies enjoying improved collaboration thanks to Yammer. One benefit of Yammer over Twitter: It seems to have a sustainable business model. 

8. Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails is one of the best open source tools to appear in recent years. This Web development framework lets you create working applications in a matter of hours. Advocates of this development platform include the New York Times, Yellowpages.com, Twitter, and Hulu. See 15 amazing Web applications built with Ruby on Rails here. Version 2.2 of Ruby on Rails came out in November, so you don’t have to worry about being on the bleeding edge.

9. Enterprise Mobility Matters
Like it or not, the latest smartphones – the BlackBerry Storms and Apple 3G iPhones (slideshow: Smartphone showdown: iPhone vs. BlackBerry Storm ) – are headed toward your corporate network. So you better get ready to protect sensitive corporate information from the risks that these consumer devices open up. If you don’t want to encrypt them, make sure you have centralized control over them so that you can wipe data from lost or stolen cell phones. We like the Enterprise Mobility Matters Web site from market research firm Strategy Analytics because it offers a comprehensive look at enterprise mobility issues.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.