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Especially since this story:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-twice-as-much-as-sending-every-subscriber-a-free-kindle

Printing (and sending) The New York Times (over a year) Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

While I agree that this looks pretty harmless, what if they alter the portrait to make someone ugly?

That's not hypothetical, either. At least one TV station likes to play with photos of people they hate and doesn't appear to mention that fact.

Yahoo's problem is that they can't sell ads. Few companies want to buy ads on #2 or #3 when they're so far behind. That's the killer. Yahoo outsourced most of their ad operation to Google, which, over time, dooms them to irrelevance. Even Google's ad operation is in trouble. Online advertising is flat and has probably peaked. Google is no longer a growth stock.

Once you reach a certain level, search quality doesn't seem to affect market share much. Yahoo's search engine is fairly good. For about half of 2007, it was better than Google's. Yahoo had added all those specialized subengines (weather, stocks, celebrities, etc.) and Google had to catch up, which they did by late 2007. Yahoo's market share did not improve while they were better than Google. Search quality does matter if it's awful (see Cuil and Rushmore Drive), but once over the entry threshold, further improvements don't seem to affect the bottom line much. Advertising targeting matters more.

Yahoo still tries to be a "portal", but does anybody still use Yahoo as a home page other than people who somehow got it installed with their browser and doesn't know how to change? The trouble with "portals" is that the targeting is terrible; when the ads are displayed on the home page, the portal has no idea what the user wants yet.

This is really a silly comment. Do some research, RIM has increased its market share over the iPhone since the iPhone's inception. Here is an interesting article from July: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/rim_increases_lead_over_apple_in_corporate_market . Now while the article does point out that Apple is starting to go after Corporate accounts with their new options and offerings, I can firmly say that my organization already has a significant sunk cost in Blackberry technology and as a responsible spending company there is no incentive to switch technologies. Perhaps 2 or 3 years ago when we had a shack out back of the home office filled with cash that we would occasionally go take baths in... (/endsarcasm). The Blackberry does one thing, and it does it quite perfectly and quite quietly (with a reasonable level of security). Not to mention that to enable the iPhone to work properly you have to use Microsoft Activesync AND you have to have a dedicated Exchange admin that knows his security stuff to be able to properly administrate the Exchange System. Now the bigger concern on the other hand is the fact that Blackberry has never really truely marketed it's product to the average non business consumer, no real media playing ability. Introducing Thunder and Flame. "Looks bad for RIM." Those Canadians know what they are doing.

I applaud Scott Adams for his research. It seems while some economists may find BHO a good pick people who own websites favor Senator McCain.
.
"Want to know what the Web's small entrepreneurs think of the election? Domain registry Register.com polled its customers and found ... nearly 50% intend to vote for John McCain in November compared to just over 35% for Barack Obama."
.
In short, those who are actually hoping to make money, create jobs and survive as business people don't favor the Democratic nominee.

I dunno, I have to say I think it'd be a pretty big sign if all the good devs abstained and some worthless shovelware/nibware like I Am Rich gets "Best iPhone App." Apple does not want that to happen, I assure you.

Finally found a link: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/the_scrabulous_snag__money

What's replacing radio?

Not sure. But something certainly is:

Radio's Popularity Declining Unevenly

CBS Acquires Last.fm Seeking To Overcome Declining Radio Business

In decline: TV, radio, newspapers, books, mags

Radio Keeps Declining, Wall Street Keeps Getting Surprised

Advertising is insanely profitable, just look at Google. Almost all Google's revenue is from advertising, but Google is not only making 50% profit, it's doing so on a growing sales base.

Of course, none of that means that Facebook is worth $15 billion. To justify that price, I would want to see indications that it would have $30 billion in revenue in the next ten years. That's conceivable, but MySpace still has more traffic and time spent per user: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/news_corp_don_t_worry_about_revenue_myspace_is_doing_great

MySpace is still only doing $900 million in advertising -- is there any reason to think that Facebook is making more than $300 to $400 million? Those revenue figures suggest that MySpace is worth about $4.5 billion and Facebook about $2 billion. Facebook may grow enough to justify $15 billion -- that's aggressive but not impossible.

Advertising is insanely profitable, just look at Google. Almost all Google's revenue is from advertising, but Google is not only making 50% profit, it's doing so on a growing sales base.

Of course, none of that means that Facebook is worth $15 billion. To justify that price, I would want to see indications that it would have $30 billion in revenue in the next ten years. That's conceivable, but MySpace still has more traffic and time spent per user: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/news_corp_don_t_worry_about_revenue_myspace_is_doing_great

MySpace is still only doing $900 million in advertising -- is there any reason to think that Facebook is making more than $300 to $400 million? Those revenue figures suggest that MySpace is worth about $4.5 billion and Facebook about $2 billion. Facebook may grow enough to justify $15 billion -- that's aggressive but not impossible.

Although there is a rumor going around about a settlement, apparently, at least something is still on-going....

The last entry in June 4, indicates a hearing and exihibits were being submitted so there's a probably a settlement conference on this, but maybe it hit some sort of last minute snag...

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/apple_s_iphone_smashes_larger_market_on_web_video_music_usage

The most important thing about the iPhone isn't the sleek design, the touchscreen, iTunes integration, or any other single feature. It's the way that people use the device. Specifically, it's that people actually use it to do stuff besides making phone calls. Examples:

Almost 85% of iPhone owners browse the Web on their phones, versus 58% of the U.S. smartphone market and 13.1% of the overall U.S. mobile market, according to mobile research firm M:Metrics.
Some 31% of iPhone owners watch mobile TV or video, like Google's (GOOG) built-in YouTube software, compared to 4.6% of the overall market.
About 20% of iPhone owners access Facebook, versus 1.5% of the overall market.
And 74% of iPhone owners listened to music on their phones, compared to 28% of the smartphone market and 6.7% of the overall market.

Even if the usage is overstated that's still a hell of a lot of mobile Internet users.

The iPhone isn't like a regular smartphone. Rather than trying to supplement an experience for someone with existing shitty expectations of the big boy Internet on mobile devices, it's trying to broadly appeal to the market and it's becoming a catalyst that is literally changing the dynamics of the mobile data market.

Saying that people will be loading binary apps will kill off web development is like saying Web 2.0 is pointless because we all have Windows.

Well, at least we know where Jimmy Wales gets his spending habits from.

Well, no. Apple's confirmed that they intended "10 million in 2008". See: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/mystery_solved__what_apple_s_10_million_iphones_goal_means__aapl_

Ballmer has called their bluff and now Yahoo! are begging like Jonesing crack whores for a hit of Microsoft's money stick.

Epic fail, Yang. EPIC FAIL.

Your post's third paragraph is completely discredited by this: http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/battered_yahoo_caves_admits_it_overplayed_hand_now_open_to_new_microsoft_talks

*sigh* No, no it didn't.

To be honest, the only reason I go to Slashdot anymore over programming.reddit & news.ycombinator is because the comments and moderation are better and I get a higher %age of stories relevant to my interests. But then I see this epitome of lazy editing...sigh.

Here's the link for your reference:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/battered_yahoo_caves_admits_it_overplayed_hand_now_open_to_new_microsoft_talks
As the url would imply, Yahoo is caving. Ballmer is thus (much to my dismay) validated.

I guess not so much lately though...Losing 35% of your stock price in 5 months (that's around $80 billion USD if you must know) doesn't paint the rosiest picture.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=GOOG&t=6m

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/2/2008/2/google_disaster__comscore_reports_awful_january

What if I say that things got sloppy because our bureaucracy is so big it can no longer effectively run, as has been for decades?

50% of a truism is the learned helplessness that causes people not to penetrate the "dumb field" that renders the truism immutable.

Over the last three decades we've experienced the most abrupt revolution in communications technology in the history of humanity. The internet, and its crown jewel, the internet search engine, rival the printing press and the written alphabet in its transformative potential on the course of human civilization.

It might even manage to challenge the truism-of-unthinking-debate that government is 99% moronium, completely impervious in its own level of function to the progress of the society it governs. Was it your intent to bestow miraculous powers of immunity on society's least esteemed organ?

Here's a simple way America could have functioned with less government: enact far more restrictive laws concerning telescopic polyderivatives and mark-to-market accounting back in the early 1980s.

We've recently discovered that selling derivatives of derivatives of derivatives carries similar risks as feeding cattle brains to cattle. Of course, as the ageless truism about bloated government would have it, no civil servant earned their paycheck in the rapid bailout of Bear Stearns with special backing by the Fed.

The road to smaller government is to impose an oppressively tight regulatory environment where Enron and the sub-prime melt-down can't happen in the first place. Fewer bulls, fewer bears, and fewer giant economic messes that our small, effective government would be insufficient to clean up.

Software developers, of all people, ought to have a better perspective on scope creep. One mode of increasing government is the ever popular "grandfather regulation", where for example, about 10,000 compounds already in use in the 1960s were exempted from safety standards required to approve new compounds. It would have made for less government if all compounds had been blanketed by the same rules. Does any software person not get this? Expensive for the private sector, who I presume would have been overjoyed to foot this bill, in order to reap the benefits in future of a smaller more effective government.

The division of labour between the public and private sector in modern America seems to run along this fault line: private sector generates massive, unsustainable profits, then the government steps in to "restore confidence", and the cycle repeats.

Here is the kind of useless analysis that perpetuates these myths:

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/pathetic_bear_stearns_bailout_who_to_blame

Give us a break. If Bear Stearns goes to zero, there will only be one party to blame: Bear Stearns management.

Duh. It's actually quite easy to set up a competitive situation in game theory where each of the parties has the incentive to outperform (a routine provision in executive compensation packages in the private sector). Anyone who decides to hover nervously-close to the safest exit makes little profit compared to the more aggressive players (aka no performance bonus for Mr Safety Pants).

No one knows the exact moment when the music will stop. When the music does stop, this group as a whole is overextended, and this can only be put right by savaging the carcass of the bank that happened to be slightly more overextended (aka which fails to land on a chair) than the other banks at that precise moment in time.

If the profit model was driven by flipping the hot potato, you can't choose not to touch the hot potato, you just have to hope you can unload it fast each time you take the risk. Of course, someone has to get caught with it if the system as a whole is overextended.

The best part of this: the eulogy that the corpse deserved its fate.

The solution seems simple to me. Apple et. al., should charge $20-40 per iPod for 2-3 year unlimited access to the DRM'ed iTunes catalog, then allow users to buy permanent rights to individual songs DRM free for $ 0.25-0.50 per song.

Music companies get the best of both world, i.e., the steady income from subscriptions plus the ability to benefit from a mega-hit via direct sales.

Users benefit since they can try before the buy, and only buy music they really wan to keep. Additionally 2-3 years is the expected life of most iPods anyway, so most users won't be inconvenienced when the subscription goes out. They will simply buy a new iPod, or alternatively, they could be sold another term subscription.

The actual numbers make sense since according to Silicon Valley Insider, the music industry makes only about $20 in downloads per iPod anyway.

Finally, the cheaper, DRM-free purchase ability will separate those of us willing to pay a fair price for music we'd like to own from those just looking to justify their own personal piracy. (Personally, I think this group does the majority of the complaining hear on /.)

As long as no one (Apple, consumers, and the music industry) gets too greedy, I think working out a deal for unlimited subscriptions could be the detente everybody needs.

TakeTwo already did say that.

Management rejected the hostile offer. Insiders hold 12% in TakeTwo which, is not an insignificant amount, but it is far from a majority.

EA announced this almost three weeks ago so that outside investors holding shares of TTWO would potentially sell the company to them.
Due to the rejection, one such investor has sued.
Others have sold off much of their stake, cashing in on the rise in price while (I presume that) everything else in the market is tanking.

This time, EA is just stating that they are committed to the original offer.

I've been following this since before the original announcement - super pissed at myself that I didn't set up the brokerage account a week earlier than I did (initial funding delay absolutely killed this one). +50% ... man, I hope I learned my lesson. Anyway, all I needed to know was: (1) I'm buying GTA4 when it comes out (a very unusual practice for me), and when reflecting on the Activision/Blizzard deal (2) a similar move by a software giant seemed obvious, and (3) nobody in financial news was talking about TakeTwo's highly anticipated sequel.

...super super pissed...

If you'd extended your query and searched for "yahoo 40 counter offer". Plenty of articles would have popped up.

The first results say nothing about a Yahoo! counter offer. The fifth one "'Yahoo Board To Microsoft: 'Raise Your Offer and We'll Talk.'" does not actually say Yahoo! made a counter offer to Microsoft, only "Yahoo has used the Journal to counter Microsoft's $31 offer with a price of $40 a share." Of the rest of the results on the first page, 10 total, one said page not found and another gave me a "Unable to connect" message. Plenty of articles but not one says Yahoo! actually countered MS's offer.

Not they aren't. Yahoo's board doesn't have the funds to take Yahoo private.

But it's Yahoo!'s board that turned the offer down.

They couldn't pay the $40/share price if Microsoft said no, so who is Microsoft really up against here? Who is going to step up and buy Yahoo if Microsoft does not raise its bid? No one.

Again, the board doesn't want to accept the offer, so all MS can do is take the offer to Yahoo! shareholders. And the biggest ones have said MS needs to raise the offer to at least $40.

First, the Week in Review article wouldn't carry the news since it would only be covering news that happened in the last 7 days (2/14 - 2/22). We're already established that new of the offer came much earlier.

When was this? You have not provided one link saying Yahoo!'s board made one counter offer to Microsoft.

Alley Insider is a reputable widely-read industry periodical. It does little good to criticize its journalistic integrity.

And where is it? Even adding "Alley Insider" to your search I still don't find a result on the first page saying the board actually made a counter offer to MS.

Look, I know you have an emotional attachment to this deal not going through at $31, but whether you like it or not it probably getting

WOW! You know what I think or feel. NOT!!!

Using Google isn't resourceful?

If MS were to big [sic] higher they'd be bidding against Yahoo!'s board.

however this one dated 14 February says "Yahoo Inc's second-biggest investor urged Microsoft Corp to raise its $42 billion bid for the Web pioneer and warned Yahoo it has few options left, raising the pressure on them to seal a deal." Week in review: Microsoft the magnanimous? dated 22 Feb'08 also says nothing about a counter offer.

Be resourceful dude. This article took me two seconds to find. Microsoft will stay at $31. Why would they bid against themselves? They want Yahoo. They don't need Yahoo. There's a big difference.

I mean there are advantages in terms of server load I'll give you that, but if you've licensed all the tunes then why not follow the imeem model and centralize everything on a website - no special p2p software needed just a flash player and a modern browser. P2P services were percieved to have some sort of limited deniability for a while because the content and sometimes the indexes did not exist on any of the developers servers, but there's no need to that here.

I mean downloading movies and tv shows via p2p is popular, but it's nothing compared to the amount of pirate movies and tv shows shared on youtube, stage6, veoh and all those other sites indexed by clones of tv-links - if you can get instant gratification most people will take the easy option. So for the same reason I see imeem.com remaining popular since you can find pretty much every record on there in cd quality, available for instant listening and of course licensed by the record labels.

Oh I see that the press release claims that they've signed on all 4 major labels, which it turns out is BS Warner Music Group hasn't signed on so users will have to do without Madonna when the site launches.

Here is a Slashdot story submission that helps explain why corporations have not adopted Firefox. The submission was rejected: "008-01-09 02:36:24 Mozilla gets a new CEO (Features,Mozilla) (rejected)".

Many people depend on Slashdot to help them learn about important events in computing. But this event hasn't been covered, and apparently is being ignored: It appears that Firefox does not have more market share because Firefox development has been very poorly managed.

Here is the Slashdot story submission:

Winifred Mitchell Baker has given up her position as CEO of Mozilla.

Firefox is now partly a profit-making effort. There has been considerable discussion about the possibility of Firefox issuing stock and becoming a public corporation. Firefox made a profit of $47,000,000 on revenues of $67,000,000 in 2006.

That enormous profit percentage that raises a question: Why did Firefox take in $67 million, but only spend $20 million? What is happening with the rest of the money?

Firefox development has been glacially slow. For example, in 6 years the CPU hogging and memory hogging bugs are still not fixed (although there has been considerable improvement).Thunderbird development has been abandoned. Opera is able to restore sessions, but the Firefox session restore feature throws away URLs if response is slow. Why is that, when millions of dollars are spent on development each year?

Firefox makes money when people use it to visit ads. Google pays because Firefox uses Google as the default search engine. It seems likely that a profit-making Firefox will eventually prevent add-ons like AdBlock Plus that stop the display of ads which many users find annoying.

The former CEO, Winifred Mitchell Baker, has no technical knowledge. She is a lawyer. She took the job when no one thought there was money in development of Netscape/Firebird that became Firefox.

Will the new CEO manage better? Or will Firefox development begin to be unfriendly to the user so that it will make money?

Here is a Slashdot story submission that helps explain why corporations have not adopted Firefox. The submission was rejected: "008-01-09 02:36:24 Mozilla gets a new CEO (Features,Mozilla) (rejected)".

Many people depend on Slashdot to help them learn about important events in computing. But this event hasn't been covered, and apparently is being ignored: It appears that Firefox does not have more market share because Firefox development has been very poorly managed.

Here is the Slashdot story submission:

Winifred Mitchell Baker has given up her position as CEO of Mozilla.

Firefox is now partly a profit-making effort. There has been considerable discussion about the possibility of Firefox issuing stock and becoming a public corporation. Firefox made a profit of $47,000,000 on revenues of $67,000,000 in 2006.

That enormous profit percentage that raises a question: Why did Firefox take in $67 million, but only spend $20 million? What is happening with the rest of the money?

Firefox development has been glacially slow. For example, in 6 years the CPU hogging and memory hogging bugs are still not fixed (although there has been considerable improvement).Thunderbird development has been abandoned. Opera is able to restore sessions, but the Firefox session restore feature throws away URLs if response is slow. Why is that, when millions of dollars are spent on development each year?

Firefox makes money when people use it to visit ads. Google pays because Firefox uses Google as the default search engine. It seems likely that a profit-making Firefox will eventually prevent add-ons like AdBlock Plus that stop the display of ads which many users find annoying.

The former CEO, Winifred Mitchell Baker, has no technical knowledge. She is a lawyer. She took the job when no one thought there was money in development of Netscape/Firebird that became Firefox.

Will the new CEO manage better? Or will Firefox development begin to be unfriendly to the user so that it will make money?