Roundup: Schmidt is bullish, Yahoo spikes New York Times traffic, Windows 7 on a thumb drive

Eric Schmidt says it’s “reasonable to be optimistic for 2010″ — Here’s an excerpt from Reuters report on Schmidt’s appearance at the Cannes Lion advertising shmoozefest in the south of France:
“The rate of jobless claims is decreasing although the absolute number is increasing,” he explained. Schmidt said he did not want to comment on a report that Google had set up a team of engineers to study the technical specifications of Bing, the search engine launched recently by Google rival Microsoft (MSFT.O), as he had not seen it.
I’ll believe him when Nick Denton tries to hire me back to Valleywag. [Photo from The Age]
Michael Jackson traffic set off cyberattack alarms – “We’re sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.” Many Google users were greeted with this message on Thursday afternoon as they searched for info on the King of Pop’s passing away. That’s because Google’s automated defense systems interpreted a sudden tsunami of “Micheal Jackson” [sic] queries as an attack. I’ve gotten similar stories under FrieNDA from IT people at a couple of other places, too. We all went a little Jacko-crazy yesterday.
Yahoo link sends record traffic to New York Times — In two hours, a link from Yahoo’s front page sent more than nine million page views to the Gray Lady’s servers. What was the big story? A Home and Garden feature about a gorgeous circa-1800 farmhouse located a few feet from a freight railroad line. The Times headlined the story “The Unfortunate Location.” Hands up, everyone who thinks having real trains run through your yard would be awesome.
Windows 7 may be available on a thumb drive – Now that a significant fraction of Windows users are on netbooks that don’t have a CD or DVD drive, Microsoft is considering making it super-easy for them to buy and install an upgrade to the next version of Windows. If Steve Jobs put Snow Leopard on a pretty aluminum USB dongle, the Internet would fall all over itself to praise His Genius. Go for it, Redmond, go!
Wikinvest reinvents itself as Yahoo Finance competitor - A new beta version of the site includes much more company drill-down data, plus embeddable graphics. The Wall Street Journal’s overview says, “A page on Southwest Airlines, for example, provides its fuel cost per gallon, fleet size and average fare, while Apple’s includes data on iPhone, iPod and Mac sales as well as research and development costs per quarter.” Don’t forget the cool part: On Wikinvest, you can edit the entries.
Hewlett-Packard makes retro emulators of its classic handheld calculator — Shown here is the 12C, which sells for a surprising $14.99. For even more, $29.99, you can get a 15c Scientific Calculator. CNET’s Stephen Shankland says the 15C turns out to be “better at handling trigonometry and integration than mortgage payments and net present value.” Ah, Stephen, remember when you didn’t have mortgage payments and didn’t care about net present value?
[Photo: Stephen Shankland / CNET]