Touché. I'll have to remember that argument. Although it doesn't destroy the original point (since digital media were not available in the VCR's heyday), it certainly does weaken it.
Another part of the story: the only way to fill these enormous optical disks is with streaming media at some reasonably high quality. When necessary, Dreamcast release groups would downsample or recompress sound and video to fit in the 700MB requirement. You really can't tell the difference.
The point of "security" on a console is to be an anticompetitive measure to control the software market for the device. The people who make video game home systems are bare knuckle capitalists. They want to extract the maximum profit from the system--by taking a toll from every piece of software sold, by limiting the number of titles and copies that ship to customers, by using product supply as a cudgel in negotiations with retailers, by controlling the mass media coverage of their systems.
Slashdot is all about being angry at MS; appropriate, since MS is the monopolist controller of the PC world. But we should be mindful of the fact that MS's business practices are nowhere near as bad as those of computer monopoly pioneers like IBM and Univac. At one time everything was bundled: software, hardware, support. Your one vendor had you by the balls and was in a position to extract every possible dollar from you, just short of driving you away. That's what the video game market is like. When someone has a monster platform like Sony Playstation, they can just milk it and milk it, since there really is no competition for those PS software dollars.
This article had some technical errors that should have been caught before publication. Indeed I'd question the qualification of the author Daniel Turner to write about this subject if he made these mistakes in the first place:
"Quadratic texture maps" There is no such thing. The author repeatedly used this term when he was trying to talk about quadratic surfaces.
"The rigs... [cost] upward of $6,000..." You really cannot spend $6000 on a gaming PC unless you are just pointlessly spending money on parts with no relationship to performance. I don't know where this number came from. A very fast gaming PC costs about $2000.
"...Nvidia is targeting the professional 3D workstation market with its Quadro line of chipsets. These go into the monster boxes that render 3D scenes more complex and lifelike than is possible on a mere mortal's machine." A Quadro 4 is extremely similar to a GeForce 4. That's sort of the point. NVidia leverages its enormous consumer level product development budget to create products that can also succeed in the higher-margin but much smaller workstation market. Workstation graphics are no longer more complex than consumer level graphics.
I also found it annoying that the author never clarified some of the basic performance characteristics of a 3D graphics system. Words like resolution and fill rate were not used. Frames per second were mentioned, but counting FPS only makes sense in the context of a particular resolution.
I also would have liked to see some kind of characterization of the performance changes over the years covered by the story. Non-computer-geeks don't understand the rapidity of change in silicon. From the software renderers of 1993 to the Geforce 3/4 cards, we have gone from less than one million texels per second to one billion texels per second. Each product generation often doubles the performance of the previous one. At one point the author refers to "a precious extra frame per second (fps) of computer video" as being something that would motivate the purchase of a new card. But of course that's quite silly. No one buys a new card for a 1% or 10% performance gain. The upgrade treadmill relies on massive improvements.
Mmm... I think you're safe. Godwin's rule applies to "You want to be dictatorial like the Nazis!". But not to "Your armored fighting vehicles are the world's best, like the Nazis'!". Nor to this case, "You are fighting a losing battle like the Nazis!"
Here in Manhattan it is quite common to see bicycle quick release levers tied down with duck tape as well as other insecure security measures such as hose clamps. The point being to make your wheel just a little more cumbersome to make off with. Time for a new metaphor.
You're right. The sound bite synopsis of this policy would be "You have to use it at night". Which of course is just the way shared, scare computer resources are... but Joe User doesn't know that.
When I got capped I did send a pleading mail to my ISP (rcn.net) asking them to cap more intelligently; they don't give a fuck and told me so.
To play hardball means to be tough and aggressive. Your sentence doesn't make sense. Perhaps you meant "Now what theater will want to play ball with a film producer..." To play ball means to work together.
Microsoft managed to screw every American Dreamcast owner who wasn't willing to import the English subtitled, European version of Shenmue II out of the Dreamcast version of Shenmue II with an exclusivity license with Sega.
And by import, I mean download and burn. alt.binaries.dreamcast, y'all!
Okay, calling the guy a troll is uncalled for, given that he is right and you are wrong.
If you take a look at current SPEC Viewperf results you will see that NVidia's most recent "Quadro 4" chipset for professional users clocks in a lot faster than SGI's Octane personal workstation using their fastest graphics offering. The Quadro 4 cards cost $700-$1500. Granted the SGI is doing 12-bit per channel color instead of 8-bit on the PC. Few users care.
Today you have to spend not $20K but $200K to buy an SGI that is flat out faster than a $2K PC.
Is it a 'magic box' or a high-tech hoax? Northeast Florida man attracted millions from investors who now say they were scammed
By Matthew I. Pinzur Times-Union staff writer
Madison Priest's history is filled with people who call him a con artist, a geek who invented nothing more than a beautiful lie.
None of them, though, can prove it.
He appeared with his magic box, promising it could convert plain copper phone lines that run to almost every home in the country into greased-lightning pipelines for data and video, four times faster than the most advanced fiber-optic cables. It was a magic box that would shock communications like the television had, transform technology like personal computers had, redefine entertainment like Nintendo had. It was a magic box he built from $100 worth of spare parts.
He choreographed elaborate demonstrations, quickening the pulses of engineers shocked by its innovation and capitalists stunned by its potential.
He asked for money and received it, sometimes more than a million dollars at a time, enough to move him from a cobblestone street in Palatka to a gated community in St. Augustine.
And then he stalled, stymied and stonewalled. Prototypes were destroyed by lightning, floods and plane crashes, he said. They were too unstable for independent tests. Just a little more money, he said, and it would be ready. Just a little bit more.
Every time, he wore out his partners -- rich partners like Blockbuster and Intel, prominent partners like former U.S. Sen. Paula Hawkins and the son of Atlanta media czar Ted Turner, partners who brought him to Silicon Valley and partners who brought him to Capitol Hill.
MULTIMEDIA
'Magic Box' comparison test
Pyramid of Players Sometimes they sued him, sometimes they threatened him and sometimes they just threw up their arms in disgust, but they walked away and left their money with him. Priest -- who declined repeated interview requests -- never needed to mourn the loss of old partners; he just found new ones. He has had many since 1994, and they have paid him at least $6 million.
They could never quite prove that his stories -- not his magic box -- were the inventions.
Madison Priest shows a patent certificate issued by the U.S. government for his magic box technology. Priest said the box could transmit data much faster than any existing system, and could do it through an ordinary household telephone line. -- Special
If it is a scam, they concede, it is truly a beautiful one.
The Revelation
A fortune can become a failure with a single phone call, which four Jacksonville-area entrepreneurs learned as their deal with Priest unraveled in 1998.
The four, including Teddy Turner, formed a company called Zekko in 1997, and soon its only business plan was to turn Priest's invention into a product.
None of them really liked Priest, but none of them cared. He was their Bill Gates, and his invention was their Microsoft.
It was almost a sure thing.
Priest was ferociously protective of its secrets, though, and by mid-1998 he was missing deadlines to turn over working prototypes.
But the investors wanted so badly to believe, and they moved on their faith and on their greed. By September 1998, Zekko had raised almost $6 million, with as much as $1 million going directly to Priest and his wife, Linda. Another $36 million was on its way.
And then the phone call came, a pinpoint moment where hope and trust became betrayal and panic.
The day after a critical fund-raising trip to woo major telecommunications firms in Chicago, court records show Linda Priest called one of Zekko's founding fathers.
Linda Priest solders components to a circuit inside the Priests' Palatka workshop. In September 1998, Linda Priest told investors that her husband's magic box was a hoax. -- Special
It was all a hoax, she said. There was no invention. There was only The Revelation.
Selling the Holy Grail
Today the Priests live in a 6,000-square-foot waterfront home, where five motorcycles, two trucks, a Jaguar, a Lincoln Town Car and a Mitsubishi Eclipse are all registered in their names, as are two small propeller airplanes.
But in 1994, they were living in a far more modest home, a mile or two from sleepy downtown Palatka.
Priest, a 40-something ex-con who dropped out of high school in rural Citra, had devised his invention just a year or so earlier. He had neither the connections nor the savvy to get rich off his magic box.
Hooking up with a former U.S. senator changed that. Paula Hawkins, a one-term Republican from the Reagan era, never invested any money with Priest. But she and her husband, Gene, had a golden Rolodex, and Priest gave them a 10 percent stake in his invention to mine it.
About this series The Times-Union's coverage of Madison Priest and his "magic box" is the result of a five-month investigation by reporter Matthew I. Pinzur and editor Marilyn Young.
Roughly four dozen interviews were conducted with partners, investors, engineers and others familiar with Priest's dealings. Hundreds of pages of public records and other documents were inspected, including seven lawsuits filed in state and federal courts in Florida, California and Colorado.
Neither Priest nor his wife, Linda, agreed to be interviewed, despite repeated verbal and written requests.
About the photos
Most of the photographs in this series were provided by Mark Strong, a former business partner of Madison Priest. Many are still frames taken from videos shot by Strong at meetings, tests and demonstrations spanning from 1996 through 2001.
Meetings the Hawkinses arranged with politicians such as Sen. Orrin Hatch were encouraging, but nothing compared to to the response from top executives at Blockbuster.
Blockbuster wanted Priest's invention badly, Gene Hawkins said, as if the entertainment giant's survival depended on it. And, in fact, it might have. Video stores could crumble if people could watch movies over their phone lines, and Priest promised exactly that ability.
Phone lines have long been considered far too slow to carry the huge amounts of data necessary for high-quality video. Those limits created the need for cable modems and other high-performance data lines, like the T-1 and T-3 lines running in many businesses. Priest's invention would make those old phone lines faster than anything on the market, decimating the communications speed limit.
"That was the enormous breakthrough," Gene Hawkins said. "It was just conventional, regular, plain old telephone lines."
Gene Hawkins said he worked steadily on the project for months. He led Priest to Wayne Huizenga, then the chairman and CEO of Blockbuster. He also connected Priest with US West CEO Richard McCormick and other six-figure investors.
Court records indicate the Priests netted at least $2.25 million in those early deals, primarily from Blockbuster. Blockbuster and US West declined to comment.
In what would become an unwavering pattern, Priest took the investment cash without turning over working prototypes. By the end of 1996, Blockbuster and US West appear to have walked away.
"The bigger the fish you go after, the less likely they are to come after you," said Bob Mons, an investment banker and one of Zekko's founding partners in Ponte Vedra Beach. "They don't want to admit to being taken by a flimflam man from Palatka."
By that time, Gene Hawkins said, he and his wife had discovered Priest's criminal record, including numerous arrests and at least one conviction for grand theft. The arrests were years earlier, but were enough for the Hawkinses to stop working with him.
"That was very hurtful and disappointing, so we turned very, very sour, my wife in particular," Hawkins said.
The Priests' history is vague, clouded by years of varying stories the Priests told their business partners.
Priest, now 46, sometimes spoke of being a graduate of the Air Force Academy, lawsuits and interviews show. There are no records of his attendance there, which he explained by telling people he was assigned to super-secret covert operations. Sometimes he told potential investors he had worked on a classified missile and weapons design team for aerospace defense contractor Martin Marietta, according to a lawsuit filed by Zekko. But according to that lawsuit, he was never more than a low-level assembly line worker, and was fired for stealing equipment.
"Depending on the audience, the story would take on different embellishments," said Mark Strong, a Naples investor who became the Priests' closest business partner and later their most determined opponent. "If he thought the audience was really clueless, he would really spread it on."
Before stepping back, Gene Hawkins said he introduced Priest to K.C. Craichy, a Tampa businessman who became close with the inventor. Craichy and a friendgave Priest about $500,000 for a stake in VisionTek, the company the Priests formed to sell their invention. Craichy also agreed to serve as its CEO.
At the same time, in mid-1996, Orange Park real estate broker Walter Williams and at least 10 other investors from Florida saw demonstrations and invested nearly $300,000. Citing confidentiality agreements from a lawsuit settlement, Williams refused to discuss the deal with the Times-Union.
As many as 25 or 30 others may have invested at the same time, Strong said.
"He literally sold it to anyone who walked through the door -- friends, relatives, whoever he could get money from," said a source familiar with Zekko, who requested anonymity because a confidentiality agreement bars him from discussing the matter.
That money, like all the rest invested in VisionTek, went directly to Priest and his wife, according to many of their former partners.
Potential investors were dumbfounded by the demonstrations, which seemed generations beyond state of the art. With a conventional modem, one computer can transmit a music video -- with a small, fuzzy picture -- in an hour or more. At Priest's demonstrations, though, investors saw that same computer send video instantly. The Eagles' performance of Tequila Sunrise showed up on the second computer in digitally perfect full-screen glory, the music as clear as a compact disc.
Even with top-grade fiber optic cables, that kind of quality was rare at the time. Amazingly, the computers at Priest's demonstrations appeared to be connected with ordinary telephone cord. The only other wires were the electric cords that plugged the computers into a power strip.
The results were so staggering that investors said they overlooked Priest's demand -- his paranoia, even -- that no one so much as touch a keyboard.
"He had a Holy Grail that was the telecommunications equivalent of cold fusion," Mons said.
Craichy had seen Priest's elaborate show for about a year, always at places carefully prepped by Priest with computers provided by Priest and videos selected by Priest. Now Craichy wanted independent tests in which he controlled those variables.
As soon as he suggested it, Craichy said, Priest vanished.
"He wouldn't take my calls, he wouldn't come see me," Craichy said. "He disappeared."
Tomorrow: As Priest's deals begin to unravel, his claims become even more daring.
Deception revealed
The day after Linda Priest's 1998 confession to Zekko technology chief Herb Presley, he and Mons drove to Palatka to investigate.
It was Sept. 11, 1998, and it was the beginning of The Revelation.
Mons, who had been the primary fund-raiser for the nearly $6 million Zekko collected that year, said he planned to confiscate whatever prototypes he and Presley could find. Linda Priest's phone call notwithstanding, he still believed they would find some components, which could be given to engineers and possibly still turned into a product.
But any hope of keeping Zekko alive dissolved in the next few hours, according to interviews and court records.
Linda Priest stands next to testing equipment during an examination of Madison Priest's magic box at Intertek Testing Services in Orlando. Though some tests of the box appeared successful, investors now suspect the technology does not exist and the box was a hoax. -- Special
A computer at the Priests' home, which Strong said Linda Priest believed was a key part of her husband's network for that demonstration, turned out not to be a computer at all. Inside the steel computer case, Mons said, there were no circuit boards, no disk drives, no power source.
There was only a VCR.
The Revelation continued when Linda Priest took them to Kay Larkin Airport, a municipal airstrip in Palatka, where her husband rented a hangar for his planes. They found no prototypes, nothing that could have salvaged Zekko's investment. What they did find was plenty of evidence to suggest a massive fraud.
There were boxes of unused components. There were circuit boards configured with what the Zekko source called "obvious sneaks." And there was the power strip.
Hidden inside two power cords that plugged into the strip was a single piece of coaxial cable, which could secretly connect two computers. Sending video over coaxial cable is old technology, the basis of cable television. By hiding that cable in a power strip, Priest could make it appear that the video was traveling over phone lines.
"We found stuff that really scared the hell out of us," Mons said.
Arrogance, anxiety
As Priest's relationships with Craichy and the Hawkinses were crumbling around 1996, he found a new source of money and influence.
Strong had just sold a successful chain of medical imaging companies and was itching for a new business venture. He saw a demonstration in Tampa and was hooked.
"I thought I would be the guy that finally got this technology developed," Strong said. "That was my supreme arrogance."
He consulted Geoff Workman, a San Francisco merchant banker experienced with high-tech innovations, who advised him to move slowly.
"We've got an uneducated country bumpkin with a weird background in aerospace, who invented this in his workshop," Workman said. "I told Mark, 'This is going to require a lot of due diligence and vetting before we know if anything's even there.'"
Priest, though, was masterful at urging people to invest quickly, Strong said.
"If you didn't jump on this, some big company would get on it and you'd be aced out," Strong said.
Strong invested $100,000, and six months later he was ready to buy Priest's entire company. He had negotiated test-site agreements with three institutions, including the University of Florida and Columbia Hospital Corp. As soon as he had 40 working units for those clients, Strong said, he would sign the deal.
He never received them.
Strong's concern blossomed into heavy anxiety in April 1997, when Priest was nearly killed in a car wreck in his bright red Corvette.
"They said there was a chance he could die," Strong said. "If he died, the project was over."
During Priest's convalescence, Strong realized the risk of keeping the invention's secrets locked in its inventor's brain. He shifted his pressure on Priest from building the 40 units to documenting the technology.
Priest had always refused to draw complete schematics. Engineers who examined his diagrams were baffled when they showed components working beyond their capacity or being used in ways never intended. But like every story Priest told, there was always a nugget of truth, however obscure. The designs were implausible, the engineers said, but never quite impossible.
"His ideas are interesting and provocative, so he's got a good story," said Hal Puthoff, a Texas physicist considered an expert in the concepts Priest said he was using. "It might not be a true story, but it hangs together, at least in his own jargon."
After the wreck, Priest promised to explain everything in writing, calling Strong five or 10 times a day to update him.
"It was just all talk," Strong said. "He never filled in all the blanks."
While Strong waited, Priest began building the foundation for his next set of partners.
Presley and another high-tech industry entrepreneur, Michael Newman, were planning to invest $2 million in the project just after Priest's wreck. Within six months, Presley and Newman had joined Mons and Teddy Turner to form Zekko, and Strong had been almost completely cut out.
The deal with Zekko, detailed in an October 1997 letter, handed the Priests a lump payment of $500,000 and the potential to earn millions more.
The deal itself would not be signed for more than six months because the Priests, Linda especially, would call for endless revisions. Zekko officers now believe they were simply stalling for time.
"She was a first-time girl trying to be a lawyer," Mons said of Linda Priest, who did not respond to interview requests. "She was unbearably difficult to negotiate with."
But in late 1997, everything still looked stable. Presley and Newman found experts to examine the invention while Mons and Turner sought investors to fund it.
Priest, though, became their biggest obstacle on both fronts, Zekko officials said. Potential investors, most worth at least $1 million, were put off by his rural Florida twang, his T-shirts that said "rocket scientist," and breath so bad it could choke a man in close conversation.
Scientists and engineers were also frustrated in conversations with him: The self-taught inventor spoke a different scientific language than the Ph.D.s. They would praise the invention's potential, but refused to vouch for it until they could take the box apart and test it themselves.
None of it deterred Zekko. Priest claimed to be using theories called low-energy or zero-point physics, an obscure new scientific terrain.
"This is like the netherworld of physics," Mons said. "You cannot get anyone to come in and vet this and give it absolute verification."
While Presley struggled to arrange conclusive tests, Mons and Turner began raising more than $1.5 million from individual investors in late 1997. That Turner was attached to the project only made investors more confident.
"Obviously that was a good name, and there was some talk that CNN would be an end user," said Dave Wild, a South Florida investor who put $63,000 into the project.
Indeed, Turner arranged a demonstration for his father at CNN's Atlanta headquarters, according to Mons. Ted Turner did not return phone calls, and his son declined to discuss the matter, but Mons said CNN wanted to be the company's first client. Ted Turner provided Priest workspace at the CNN building, Mons said, and asked him to build a prototype. It never happened.
Looking back, Zekko's founders and investors see how Priest's endless stalling and laughable excuses should have made them more cautious.
At least 10 times, according to court records, Priest said working prototypes were hit by lightning. Other times he would claim they were damaged in floods, damaged in rains or otherwise became "unstable."
No one could force Priest to work faster or deliver the independent tests.
"Every time we told him to put up," Mons said, "he threatened to blow up and go away."
A half-mile lie
Even the phony computers and trick power strips did not prepare the Zekko bosses for the next day, when The Revelation continued and grew as they revisited buildings where Priest had hosted demonstrations.
At one site after another, Mons said, they found hidden lines of coaxial cable. In some places it was buried shallowly in the dirt. In others it was snaked along bushes.
The most dumbfounding was at the Fort Gates Ferry, a ramshackle barge that crosses the St. Johns River near Welaka. Priest would often demonstrate the invention there, transmitting video from a computer on one side of the river to a partner on the other side. It seemed, the Zekko executives thought, an impossible test to fake.
Then they saw more than a half-mile of coaxial cable coiled on the dock.
"Madison had actually run co-ax under the St. Johns River there," Mons said.
The ferryman at Fort Gates, Dale Jones, confirmed to the Times-Union that Priest had paid him to string the cable, but refused to discuss the matter.
The river is about a half-mile wide at the ferry, long enough that the cable would need special devices to amplify the signal. The Zekko source said the company had provided Priest with just such devices.
Rush to settlement
By the time Zekko's partners were getting queasy about Madison Priest, they were in too deep to retreat. In addition to more than $1.5 million Mons raised in late 1997, court records show prominent California computer chip maker Level One invested $3.5 million from October 1997 to January 1998.
The cash was flowing out of Zekko even faster than it was coming in. The contract with Priest had already paid him $500,000, and both Mons and another Zekko source said the inventor eventually got as much as $1 million of Zekko funds. In addition, the inventor's previous partners, including Craichy, Strong and the Hawkinses, began laying claim to the technology's rights. "We needed a clear title to this technology," Mons said, "and we were in a hurry."
So Zekko settled with everyone, according to company documents, paying out more than $1 million. Strong, who had signed non-circumvention agreements with Zekko bosses, received the juiciest deal: $525,000 cash, a $15,000 monthly consulting agreement and possible royalties. Craichy received $30,000 to $50,000, and the Hawkinses -- who invested only time, never money -- settled for a consulting agreement that was supposed to pay out $360,000. However, Gene Hawkins said they never received more than about $20,000.
"All those consultants; maybe only one worked for the company," the Zekko source said. "The rest were getting paid to settle."
No one from Level One, which has since been purchased by Intel, would comment on their investment in Zekko. Priest repeatedly postponed delivery of working prototypes during 1998, and by September, Zekko's officers could not imagine why Priest continued to miss delivery deadlines and stall on conclusive testing. Before flying with Priest to meet with eager investors from Ameritech and GTE in Chicago, one of Zekko's executives confronted Linda Priest, the Zekko source said.
If this was a hoax, she was warned, Zekko would pursue them like Captain Ahab followed his whale. Major corporations like Blockbuster might have been willing to write off their losses to avoid the negative publicity associated with lawsuits, but Zekko had no such compunctions.
Because Linda Priest had become the court-appointed liquidator for VisionTek, the Zekko executive assured her she would be easier to convict than her husband and serve more jail time. If she had anything to confess, he told her, now was the time.
She said nothing, and the trip to Chicago went on as planned, with Priest joined by Presley and another Zekko board member. The companies offered to write a check for more than $36 million on the spot. The Zekko executives held off, though. Both company sources and David Hodges, a Jacksonville private investigator hired by Strong, said Zekko wanted to be completely secure in the technology before putting major telecommunications companies on the hook for that much cash. Had the top executives accepted the check, some would have received bonuses as high as $875,000.
"The day before, you thought you were a billionaire," the Zekko source said. "Then you've got serious questions."
Profiting from belief
Ironically, it was fallout from Priest's Chicago demonstrations that destroyed Zekko.
Linda Priest's version of those events, according to Mons and other sources, went like this:
She believed her husband usually demonstrated the technology by connecting to a modem in their home computer, so she expected him to call from Chicago and tell her to turn it on. Unbeknownst to her, he was using the computer in his shop, which was already on. When he failed to call that day, she grew suspicious and opened the home computer. Inside the case she found nothing but a VCR.
When Priest returned to Palatka the next day, his wife was gone. She had emptied their house and filed separation papers in court. She initiated The Revelation when she called Presley, Zekko's technology chief, and told her story. She also called the FBI.
"She was in this up to her eyeballs," Mons said. "Now she was trying to extricate herself."
The accusations sent Zekko into a tailspin. The company's officers spent the next few days discovering staggering evidence of a massive scam. Many resigned in disgust, their investors' stock apparently worthless. Zekko stopped paying Priest and everyone else.
"This is a very well-orchestrated con, and there are a lot of people involved," Mons said.
It might have all ended here, with Priest dismissed as a scheming nerd who knew nothing special after all.
But Madison Priest knew one thing had not changed. People -- even smart, rich and powerful people -- want to believe in a magic box.
Within three months, Linda Priest would recant her accusations and reconcile with her husband. They would enigmatically explain the damning evidence as fallout from amnesia related to Priest's car accident -- amnesia they never mentioned at the time. They would accuse Zekko of breaking its contract, voiding the company's claim to the invention.
They wrapped the same old box with a ribbon of fresh, new stories. This time, the plan -- and the stakes -- would be even grander.
Times-Union library director Jennifer O'Neill and staff writer Marilyn Young contributed to this report.
Staff writer Matthew I. Pinzur can be reached at (904) 359-4025 or via e-mail at mpinzur@jacksonville.com.
Investors shaken by amnesia, alien Accused of faking his 'magic box,' Madison Priest makes new promises -- and looks for more money
Is it a 'magic box' or a high-tech hoax? 'Magic Box' comparison test Pyramid of Players
By Matthew I. Pinzur Times-Union staff writer
He blamed amnesia.
When Madison Priest was confronted with evidence he had been faking demonstrations of his invention -- an invention that had already brought him at least $4 million -- he blamed amnesia from a Corvette wreck that happened 18 months earlier. He had never mentioned memory loss before, his investors said, but now he made it the keystone of his defense.
Priest, who declined repeated interview requests, said he had forgotten how to build the magic box that transformed regular home telephone wires into ultra-fast video and data lines. Until he could remember, or at least reverse-engineer his working units, Zekko bosses said he said he had to fake demonstrations to keep the investment cash flowing. And he begged them not to abandon him.
Desire and greed will give a man faith, but their faith was already worn down. They had run out of ways to convince themselves it was anything other than a hoax.
About this series The Times-Union's coverage of Madison Priest and his "magic box" is the result of a five-month investigation by reporter Matthew I. Pinzur and editor Marilyn Young.
Roughly four dozen interviews were conducted with partners, investors, engineers and others familiar with Priest's dealings. Hundreds of pages of public records and other documents were inspected, including seven lawsuits filed in state and federal courts in Florida, California and Colorado.
Neither Priest nor his wife, Linda, agreed to be interviewed, despite repeated verbal and written requests.
About the photos
Most of the photographs in this series were provided by Mark Strong, a former business partner of Madison Priest. Many are still frames taken from videos shot by Strong at meetings, tests and demonstrations spanning from 1996 through 2001.
There was a problem, though.
Even when his tales became absurd, even when he replaced deadlines with excuses, even when his wife of 22 years condemned the whole thing as a scam, no one could prove he was lying.
That was always the way with Madison Priest.
Teddy Turner, son of the Atlanta mogul, was finished believing. He had founded Zekko in 1997 with three other men, eager to take their place among the instant zillionaires of dot-com glory. His name -- his father's name, really -- conferred legitimacy on the unknown company and its unknown genius, giving many investors confidence.
Little more than a year later, after Priest's wife's catastrophic revelation, Zekko officials uncovered damning evidence suggesting a scam.
When they confronted Priest, he spun his story of amnesia. Then he disclosed, for the first time, how he developed his invention: The idea was brought to him by an alien being he called a "hopper," which traveled from planet to planet and revealed technological advances, recalled Bob Mons, one of Zekko's founders who attended the meeting.
"That's when we started to realize he was delusional and a total fraud," said Mons, who had raised nearly $6 million for Zekko.
By the end of the meeting, Turner had resigned in disgust. Others would follow in the next days and weeks. With no money left and no faith in their only asset, Zekko soon abandoned the project.
"Madison's endgame was a stalemate," said Mons, 41, a Ponte Vedra investment banker. "When it came time to put up, he just jumped on another horse."
Zekko was added to the list of Priest's jilted partners, joining Blockbuster, US West, First Coast real estate broker Walter Williams and others. More were on the horizon.
Priest connects computers to the magic box during one of five tests of the system conducted at Intertek Testing Services in Orlando. -- Special
There were always more investors for Priest, because that magic box could be worth billions of dollars. Just as his earlier supporters had accepted stories about amnesia and aliens and dark forces hunting him for his secrets, new crops of partners would blithely embrace new tales: miraculous improvements that made the magic box wireless, prototypes that were ruined by incessant acts of God until the inventor himself destroyed the last working models, and then a strikingly similar technology he began to sell overseas.
They believed, at least for a time.
For a shot at getting in early on a technology like that -- to be the one who invested in Microsoft when Windows were still made of glass -- people will let themselves believe crazy stories.
Grasping at hope
Mark Strong had thought he was finished with Madison Priest. The two had briefly been business partners before Zekko was formed, but Strong felt betrayed by the deals between Zekko and Priest.
Zekko had paid Strong $675,000 to go away, but he still felt cheated out of the fantastic wealth he had expected to achieve with Priest. When the deal with Zekko collapsed in the fall of 1998 and Priest again came calling, Strong saw a second chance. Strong believed Priest and his wife, Linda, had possibly tricked Zekko into believing the technology was a fraud, hoping the company would walk away.
"I knew they were trying to get rid of Zekko," Strong said. "I knew he might give them false information, even if it was incriminating."
Over the next three years, Strong would become Priest's most enduring partner. He would settle lawsuits against Priest, locate millions of dollars in investment cash, broker deals with Intel and General Dynamics.
His commitment was so strong, in fact, that others who dealt with Priest over the years believe Strong must have been part of the con -- including David Hodges, the Jacksonville private eye Strong himself hired to investigate Priest.
"I look at Strong as a hustler," Hodges said.
Strong failed to tell at least some of his investors about Priest's criminal history or Linda Priest's accusations of fraud.
"Maybe in retrospect I was too naive and put too much trust in Mark," said Doug Motley, Strong's friend and fishing buddy from Naples, who invested $60,000. "I really hope that if he was aware of that he would have made me aware of that."
But Strong said he simply made the mistake of believing Priest's tales and set out to become the one person Priest could trust with his secrets. His company, Hyperlight, acquired all the rights to Priest's invention, even though Strong said he already saw Priest as a duplicitous liar.
Testing empty boxes
Strong's first priority was arranging independent tests of the device. He had been burned by Priest the first time they worked together, like the 1996 embarrassment with an Arizona physicist who was going to test the magic box.
"We open them up, and they're empty," said Jim Dilettoso, the scientist. "It was a power cord connected to a power supply connected to some red lights. Other than that was some stuff super-glued in there, pieces of junk, to give it weight and bulk."
Priest later said he just did not feel safe entrusting his secrets to anyone else.
Strong was prepared to not let the same thing happen again. He scheduled five sessions at Intertek Testing Services, a respected Orlando lab, beginning in November 1998. Priest still refused to let anyone take apart and analyze the units, but consented to setting up tests that were designed and witnessed by Intertek engineers.
Priest demonstrates his invention's high-speed data delivery capabilities in the workshop behind his former home in Palatka. -- Special
Letters to Linda Priest from those engineers confirmed the first three tests were all successful. An Intertek engineer declined to comment, saying the test results were confidential.
Priest and Strong also enticed General Dynamics, the Virginia-based technology giant, which paid the Priests $70,000 in good-faith money and signed a deal in August 1999 to develop a marketable product.
That deal gave Hyperlight the cachet it needed to move forward. Strong amassed around $1.5 million from high-stakes investors, most from Naples.
The Priests received more than $1 million of that and bought the half-million-dollar house in a gated community in St. Augustine, as well as at least five motorcycles and three other cars and trucks.
The Priests also cashed in on a deal a month later with a telecommunications company called Telecom Wireless Corp. The company went bankrupt, but not before paying the Priests $400,000 and investing another $300,000 in Hyperlight.
The deal also connected Hyperlight with John Sununu, former White House chief of staff under the first President Bush. Sununu, an investor in Telecom Wireless, said he offered to bring in engineers to help perfect Priest's invention.
Sununu never invested in Hyperlight, though, as he became convinced Priest was hiding something.
"He [Priest] seemed very secretive," said Sununu, who has a Ph.D. in engineering. "I can understand when people are telling me something, and when they're avoiding telling me something."
Stalling for dollars
After the General Dynamics and Telecom Wireless deals were signed, Priest's stall tactics resurfaced. At least 10 times during his relationship with Strong, court records indicate, Priest claimed prototypes were fried by lightning strikes.
"That was a running joke," Strong said, "but nobody could laugh at it."
The next month, General Dynamics terminated its agreement with Hyperlight because Priest failed to deliver working prototypes. At a shareholders meeting that fall, Strong and Priest were visibly at odds.
"He [Priest] was stonewalling and Mark [Strong] was extremely frustrated," said Motley, Strong's friend who invested in Hyperlight. "Madison said he couldn't perform under all this pressure."
Still, though, Strong pushed forward, and Priest's claims about his invention grew even more audacious.
Forget the phone lines, he said in late 2000 -- he had made the system wireless. With just a regular mobile phone and his magic box, anyone could have a super-speed data connection anywhere, 1,000 times faster than a traditional dial-up. He even demonstrated a completely mobile version, powered through a car's cigarette lighter.
The implications were staggering. Some of the possible uses listed in a confidential memo that Hyperlight sent to potential investors in March 2001 included:
Wireless modems for laptop computers, with connections fast enough to not just surf the Internet but also watch live television.
Television set-top boxes that would allow viewers to instantly order any movie or music selection.
Global positioning satellite units with full-color, high-resolution aerial photos with animated map lines. Two more Intertek tests that winter showed the wireless units performing as promised. Video of the January test shows Priest -- using nothing more than a Nokia mobile phone and a Hyperlight unit -- receiving live satellite television, supposedly being sent over the mobile phone from Priest's home. The wireless breakthrough launched Hyperlight into its most ambitious and potentially profitable deal, signing with Intel, one of the largest and most dominant technology firms in American history.
'Greed in overdrive'
It was the deal they had been waiting for, one that not even Priest could bypass in hopes of something better coming along. It would have paid Hyperlight $1 million on delivery and unimaginably more in royalties. There was only one hurdle: Priest had to turn over working prototypes by Sept. 25, 2001.
That day, Priest told Strong he had a serious accident while working on his son's car that injured his hand so severely that he could not bring the units to St. Petersburg, where a manufacturing lab associated with Intel was supposed to take possession of the technology.
Priest demonstrates his invention's high-speed data delivery capabilities in the workshop behind his former home in Palatka. -- Special
"Madison... he's like Lex Luthor," Strong said. "He will really use anybody."
When Priest once again failed to deliver, Intel terminated the agreement, and Strong and Hyperlight finally turned against the inventor. Intel officials did not return repeated calls seeking comment.
Strong filed suit in Naples last October, accusing the Priests of fraud. If the technology does not exist, Strong wants to end the fraud. If it does exist, he wants to force Priest to turn it over to Hyperlight.
Priest, 46, was in jail last week -- the first time he has served related to his invention -- serving a 90-day sentence for contempt of court. After a three-hour hearing on April 24, a Pinellas County judge enforced an existing contempt order against the inventor, written in January when he failed to produce prototypes in court.
In videotape of a January meeting, Priest tells Strong that no working prototypes exist today. He destroyed them, he said, after Intel pulled out.
"I saw no need to maintain hardware that could be a security risk to Hyperlight," Priest said.
Strong was incredulous that Priest had destroyed his prized invention, leading his lawyers to press for Priest's incarceration.
Priest was immediately sent to jail at the hearing last month, but the brief victory celebrated by his embittered former partners disappeared even faster than the dream Priest once promised them.
The judge's order said Priest could be released early if he delivered the technology, but at an April 24 hearing the inventor testified he cannot build replacements because he has been unable to find acceptable parts.
Priest's lawyers argued to an appeals court he was being held improperly because he was jailed for failing to turn over something he said he could not possibly produce. A week after he was booked into the Pinellas jail, he was again a free man.
"There is no money left from this, and the prospect of litigation going on for God knows how long," Strong said. The same issue eventually forced Zekko to settle with Priest last summer for little more than stock in Hyperlight.
But while Priest fights Strong and Hyperlight, he appears to be starting the cycle again with new sets of investors.
"As a fresh tuna, you don't know anything about this, and, what's more, you don't care," Strong said. "Your greed is in overdrive."
New test casts doubt
Information about Priest's current deals is far more vague than his past, but some investors suspect the stakes exceed anything he has attempted before.
Burl Sheppard, a Tampa high-tech fund-raiser who saw a demonstration of the wireless technology last spring, was smitten. He and his partners spent three or four months -- and hundreds of thousands of dollars -- arranging more demonstrations and soliciting investments. They were planning on paying $10 million for exclusive rights to distribute the technology in the United States and China, Sheppard said.
Before any money began flowing in, though, Sheppard said he made a shocking discovery during a demonstration in Myrtle Beach, S.C. While displaying the wireless technology for a high-tech firm, Sheppard picked up the mobile phone that supposedly was being used to receive the data.
Priest, always rigid about anyone handling the equipment, shot out of his seat and yelled at Sheppard to put the phone down.
"The screen [of the phone] was black," Sheppard said. "There wasn't even a call taking place."
He now suspects that Priest was somehow broadcasting the signal with a briefcase DVD player. Sheppard pulled back almost immediately, he said, but not all his investors were convinced it was a scam.
On Sept. 26 -- the day after the accident Priest said kept him from traveling to St. Petersburg -- the inventor and at least one of Sheppard's contacts flew to Norway for a massive fund-raising trip, according to Sheppard and other sources familiar with the deal. They said that trip led to $5 million to $10 million in new investments. Priest has also recently been linked with an electric company in Philadelphia, and he testified in court that he has developed a separate technology that sends data over power lines.
Madison Priest holds up a mobile phone showing the Palatka phone number he used to demonstrate the wireless version of his magic box technology during a test in Orlando. -- Special
Strong hopes that power-line technology will be Priest's undoing. He argued it is simply an evolution of Hyperlight's magic box, and is therefore owned by Hyperlight under an intellectual-property contract Priest signed in 1999. The judge in St. Petersburg has ordered Priest to produce a power-line unit in court by the end of June, after which experts for both sides will argue whether it is truly a different creation than the Hyperlight technology.
But Strong and others who have followed Priest's story said the inventor has faced deadlines before. They are skeptical that this one will be different, because Priest has always managed to elude a moment of truth.
"The cleverness is not in the invention, but the deception," said Strong, who said he is now 90 percent sure the entire affair was a hoax.
But does it work?
Engineers have tested the box -- engineers hired by Zekko, by Strong, by General Dynamics -- but they could never prove it really worked. Labs have tested the box -- reputable labs that run tests for Intel, Sony and Yamaha -- but never without Priest running the tests. Over eight years of deals and contracts, none of Priest's major investors has ever possessed a working unit.
But no one has been able to disprove the technology, which may be why Priest has collected at least $6 million and possibly many times that.
"He's a little country bumpkin with bib overalls, but he'll get the gold out of your teeth," said Al Keyser, CEO of a South Carolina technology company that hosted a demonstration last summer. "He's got some heavyweight people that he's put this with -- it's going to bite him."
The shadow of doubt, though, dwells in his mind, as it does with investors at every stop on Priest's timeline. For every obvious scam, hoax and con, there have been demonstrations so convincing that neither engineers nor scientists can fathom how they were staged. Unless Strong or another of Priest's jilted former partners succeeds in forcing his hand in court, investors and scientists say no one may ever really know the truth. Linda Priest said she reported Priest to the FBI while they were estranged in 1998, and Mons said he was interviewed by an agent. The FBI will not comment on whether a case exists, but a law enforcement source said there is no active investigation.
Even if the technology does work, many investors suspect they will never see profits without a lengthy court fight -- a fight most of them cannot afford.
"I put money in knowing it was a risk that the technology might not work, but I never thought the guy might be a fraud and a con man," said Dave Wild, a candle-shop owner from South Florida who invested $63,000 with Zekko and the Priests. "When you find out he's a fraud and a crook, it's no different than him walking into my house and stealing $63,000 worth of my stuff."
Strong has another theory, based on years of watching Priest's glee at forcing corporate multimillionaires to coddle him. As long as they needed the secrets locked in Priest's brain, they were forced to make him the center of their universe, flying him around the country on their private jets and hosting him at lavish meals. Turning over the technology would have made him rich, Strong said, but yanked him from the spotlight.
Priest, who originally agreed to be interviewed but changed his mind on his lawyer's advice, made only a single comment about his invention:
"I'm not sure that technology will ever see the light of day."
Times-Union library director Jennifer O'Neill and staff writer Marilyn Young contributed to this report.
Staff writer Matthew I. Pinzur can be reached at (904) 359-4025 or via e-mail at mpinzur@jacksonville.com.
I originally wrote a longer post, remarking about exactly why the GPU only makes sense in a graphics application. I edited myself down to keep it simple. But since you mention it...
Accuracy is certainly a problem. Today's PC graphics hardware computes results with 8 bits of accuracy. But just as important, I think, is the fact that the GPU is not a massively parallel unit in the first place. I.e., it does not have the ability to process in parallel more than a handful of data.
There is a reason for that: 3D graphics does not parallelize all that well. It is a big pain in the neck to try to fill multiple graphics pipelines. The applications programmers are not going to like it. So you keep it simple, deal with one polygon at a time. You might keep a few pixel pipelines full but even that only works well if your polygons are pretty big on screen.
Consequently these folks try hard to make their mostly serial hardware fast. It costs more money to make such a fast part.
If your problem is embarrassingly parallel, why try to reuse some expensive graphics specific part with a bunch of accuracy limitations? You can put a bunch of cheap DSPs on a board and go nuts. The original poster wanted to spend $15M on a large cluster, networked together with game controller cables and safety pins. That's nuts. It is not the cheapest way to get a large DSP array.
People do use MMX and other SIMD instructions, because they need to do media processing, and the desktop PC already has one CPU. For cost reasons it's not a good idea to squeeze a separate DSP in there. But don't tell me you would build a cluster of MMX enabled PCs to do a big parallel DSP task. Again it would not be the cheapest way.
Re: your headless idea. XBox has a UMA, so the frame buffer can be located in one chunk of main memory, and the GPU can be off chewing on some other part. So you could have a pretty display on your XBox cluster.
I would certainly be interested if you can substantiate that claim about MS-DOS. In a little googling all I could come up with was Microsoft Xenix on 68000 at
You're right that portable OSes have assembly in them. But portable software must be built portable from the start, so that for example the application programmer is shielded from directly calling those assembly routines. MS-DOS was never built with portability as a consideration. Portability would not be possible without emulation.
Oh for Christ's sake. The whole point of public key cryptography is that you don't have to fly to Peru and exchange floppy disks in order to have a private communication. You need an authenticated channel but not a private one to exchange public keys. Are you so paranoid that you think the NSA is not only reading your email but also carefully rewriting your key exchanges? If you are that paranoid, can't you just talk to the person on the phone for 30 seconds and give a key fingerprint string?
Apple's Lisa was the first machine you could buy, and the Mac was the machine that sold well, that brought something other than CLI or blinkenlights to the masses.
I do agree that there seems to be a higher percentage of Mac users with some kind of clue. But I chalk it up to my belief that the Mac user base includes more long time users. Mac had a greater than 10% share back in the 1992 period. Mac share proceeded to slump. I think those Mac sales consist largely of happy Mac users.
Meanwhile the PC was the main beneficiary of the Web fad. All kinds of idiots bought PCs. And all kinds of idiot companies put PCs on every desk. Result: lots of idiots running their PCs. People who have used PCs for ten or twenty years are a small minority.
The reason it's hard is that Java has syntax. You have to parse Java before you can manipulate it. Parsing Algol-like languages is not that easy to do well. This is why the Lisp family has no syntax. You write the parse tree directly. Manipulating this tree via macros is a cinch.
Another possibility is the Smalltalk approach where everything is an object, including the class definitions and runtime behavior. Again you can get access to that parse tree and mess with it. In either language, no one would ever manually write boilerplate code for variable access.
The fact that they use free software really has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Using free software doesn't create any obligation to anybody. That's one of the most charming things about free software. Or Free Software, depending on your preference in capitalization.
Despite what these other lunkheads are saying, you are right about the jaggies on PS2. Many PS2 games run in a low res mode with only 240 lines. The lines are doubled to fill the 480 line active area of an NTSC signal.
These PS2 games look worse than XBox or Dreamcast, both of which can do a 480p display of most any 3D game. People who don't like the way the PS2 looks should get a Dreamcast & a VGA adapter and glory in the resolution.
I don't know if this is an elaborate "Beowulf" troll or what. Your post makes no sense. The GPU on an XBox is not useful for anything other than graphics. Making a cluster of these things is a bad idea.
All Dreamcasts can read CDRs. The ones made after Oct. 2000 just refuse to boot the most popular format (in terms of CD sessions) for burned Dreamcast games. You can use another format that works fine on later-manufactured Dreamcasts. See the dreamcast articles at for more details.
paper-based materials will in many, many cases, simply be the ONLY copies of certain materials
In the mighty near future we will employ intelligent robots to replace human labor. Along the way we will certainly use this cheap labor to digitize all existing media. The Enterprise computer will get to have everything. Of course the Enterprise will be no larger than a shoebox and the crew will be person simulations, but still the computer will have all the old media.
Slashdot Mirror
Touché. I'll have to remember that argument. Although it doesn't destroy the original point (since digital media were not available in the VCR's heyday), it certainly does weaken it.
Another part of the story: the only way to fill these enormous optical disks is with streaming media at some reasonably high quality. When necessary, Dreamcast release groups would downsample or recompress sound and video to fit in the 700MB requirement. You really can't tell the difference.
The point of "security" on a console is to be an anticompetitive measure to control the software market for the device. The people who make video game home systems are bare knuckle capitalists. They want to extract the maximum profit from the system--by taking a toll from every piece of software sold, by limiting the number of titles and copies that ship to customers, by using product supply as a cudgel in negotiations with retailers, by controlling the mass media coverage of their systems.
Slashdot is all about being angry at MS; appropriate, since MS is the monopolist controller of the PC world. But we should be mindful of the fact that MS's business practices are nowhere near as bad as those of computer monopoly pioneers like IBM and Univac. At one time everything was bundled: software, hardware, support. Your one vendor had you by the balls and was in a position to extract every possible dollar from you, just short of driving you away. That's what the video game market is like. When someone has a monster platform like Sony Playstation, they can just milk it and milk it, since there really is no competition for those PS software dollars.
Fair enough. I was just being a smartass anyway. Your original point was a correct one.
There is no such thing. The author repeatedly used this term when he was trying to talk about quadratic surfaces.
You really cannot spend $6000 on a gaming PC unless you are just pointlessly spending money on parts with no relationship to performance. I don't know where this number came from. A very fast gaming PC costs about $2000.
A Quadro 4 is extremely similar to a GeForce 4. That's sort of the point. NVidia leverages its enormous consumer level product development budget to create products that can also succeed in the higher-margin but much smaller workstation market. Workstation graphics are no longer more complex than consumer level graphics.
I also found it annoying that the author never clarified some of the basic performance characteristics of a 3D graphics system. Words like resolution and fill rate were not used. Frames per second were mentioned, but counting FPS only makes sense in the context of a particular resolution.
I also would have liked to see some kind of characterization of the performance changes over the years covered by the story. Non-computer-geeks don't understand the rapidity of change in silicon. From the software renderers of 1993 to the Geforce 3/4 cards, we have gone from less than one million texels per second to one billion texels per second. Each product generation often doubles the performance of the previous one. At one point the author refers to "a precious extra frame per second (fps) of computer video" as being something that would motivate the purchase of a new card. But of course that's quite silly. No one buys a new card for a 1% or 10% performance gain. The upgrade treadmill relies on massive improvements.
Mmm... I think you're safe. Godwin's rule applies to "You want to be dictatorial like the Nazis!". But not to "Your armored fighting vehicles are the world's best, like the Nazis'!". Nor to this case, "You are fighting a losing battle like the Nazis!"
Here in Manhattan it is quite common to see bicycle quick release levers tied down with duck tape as well as other insecure security measures such as hose clamps. The point being to make your wheel just a little more cumbersome to make off with. Time for a new metaphor.
You're right. The sound bite synopsis of this policy would be "You have to use it at night". Which of course is just the way shared, scare computer resources are... but Joe User doesn't know that.
When I got capped I did send a pleading mail to my ISP (rcn.net) asking them to cap more intelligently; they don't give a fuck and told me so.
To play hardball means to be tough and aggressive. Your sentence doesn't make sense. Perhaps you meant "Now what theater will want to play ball with a film producer..." To play ball means to work together.
I can't believe you didn't get a Funny out of that.
Microsoft managed to screw every American Dreamcast owner who wasn't willing to import the English subtitled, European version of Shenmue II out of the Dreamcast version of Shenmue II with an exclusivity license with Sega.
And by import, I mean download and burn. alt.binaries.dreamcast, y'all!
Okay, calling the guy a troll is uncalled for, given that he is right and you are wrong.
If you take a look at current SPEC Viewperf results you will see that NVidia's most recent "Quadro 4" chipset for professional users clocks in a lot faster than SGI's Octane personal workstation using their fastest graphics offering. The Quadro 4 cards cost $700-$1500. Granted the SGI is doing 12-bit per channel color instead of 8-bit on the PC. Few users care.
Today you have to spend not $20K but $200K to buy an SGI that is flat out faster than a $2K PC.
Is it a 'magic box' or a high-tech hoax?
... he's like Lex Luthor," Strong said. "He will really use anybody."
Northeast Florida man attracted millions from investors who now say they were scammed
By Matthew I. Pinzur
Times-Union staff writer
Madison Priest's history is filled with people who call him a con artist, a geek who invented nothing more than a beautiful lie.
None of them, though, can prove it.
He appeared with his magic box, promising it could convert plain copper phone lines that run to almost every home in the country into greased-lightning pipelines for data and video, four times faster than the most advanced fiber-optic cables. It was a magic box that would shock communications like the television had, transform technology like personal computers had, redefine entertainment like Nintendo had. It was a magic box he built from $100 worth of spare parts.
He choreographed elaborate demonstrations, quickening the pulses of engineers shocked by its innovation and capitalists stunned by its potential.
He asked for money and received it, sometimes more than a million dollars at a time, enough to move him from a cobblestone street in Palatka to a gated community in St. Augustine.
And then he stalled, stymied and stonewalled. Prototypes were destroyed by lightning, floods and plane crashes, he said. They were too unstable for independent tests. Just a little more money, he said, and it would be ready. Just a little bit more.
Every time, he wore out his partners -- rich partners like Blockbuster and Intel, prominent partners like former U.S. Sen. Paula Hawkins and the son of Atlanta media czar Ted Turner, partners who brought him to Silicon Valley and partners who brought him to Capitol Hill.
MULTIMEDIA
'Magic Box' comparison test
Pyramid of Players
Sometimes they sued him, sometimes they threatened him and sometimes they just threw up their arms in disgust, but they walked away and left their money with him. Priest -- who declined repeated interview requests -- never needed to mourn the loss of old partners; he just found new ones. He has had many since 1994, and they have paid him at least $6 million.
They could never quite prove that his stories -- not his magic box -- were the inventions.
Madison Priest shows a patent certificate issued by the U.S. government for his magic box technology. Priest said the box could transmit data much faster than any existing system, and could do it through an ordinary household telephone line.
-- Special
If it is a scam, they concede, it is truly a beautiful one.
The Revelation
A fortune can become a failure with a single phone call, which four Jacksonville-area entrepreneurs learned as their deal with Priest unraveled in 1998.
The four, including Teddy Turner, formed a company called Zekko in 1997, and soon its only business plan was to turn Priest's invention into a product.
None of them really liked Priest, but none of them cared. He was their Bill Gates, and his invention was their Microsoft.
It was almost a sure thing.
Priest was ferociously protective of its secrets, though, and by mid-1998 he was missing deadlines to turn over working prototypes.
But the investors wanted so badly to believe, and they moved on their faith and on their greed. By September 1998, Zekko had raised almost $6 million, with as much as $1 million going directly to Priest and his wife, Linda. Another $36 million was on its way.
And then the phone call came, a pinpoint moment where hope and trust became betrayal and panic.
The day after a critical fund-raising trip to woo major telecommunications firms in Chicago, court records show Linda Priest called one of Zekko's founding fathers.
Linda Priest solders components to a circuit inside the Priests' Palatka workshop. In September 1998, Linda Priest told investors that her husband's magic box was a hoax.
-- Special
It was all a hoax, she said. There was no invention. There was only The Revelation.
Selling the Holy Grail
Today the Priests live in a 6,000-square-foot waterfront home, where five motorcycles, two trucks, a Jaguar, a Lincoln Town Car and a Mitsubishi Eclipse are all registered in their names, as are two small propeller airplanes.
But in 1994, they were living in a far more modest home, a mile or two from sleepy downtown Palatka.
Priest, a 40-something ex-con who dropped out of high school in rural Citra, had devised his invention just a year or so earlier. He had neither the connections nor the savvy to get rich off his magic box.
Hooking up with a former U.S. senator changed that. Paula Hawkins, a one-term Republican from the Reagan era, never invested any money with Priest. But she and her husband, Gene, had a golden Rolodex, and Priest gave them a 10 percent stake in his invention to mine it.
About this series
The Times-Union's coverage of Madison Priest and his "magic box" is the result of a five-month investigation by reporter Matthew I. Pinzur and editor Marilyn Young.
Roughly four dozen interviews were conducted with partners, investors, engineers and others familiar with Priest's dealings. Hundreds of pages of public records and other documents were inspected, including seven lawsuits filed in state and federal courts in Florida, California and Colorado.
Neither Priest nor his wife, Linda, agreed to be interviewed, despite repeated verbal and written requests.
About the photos
Most of the photographs in this series were provided by Mark Strong, a former business partner of Madison Priest. Many are still frames taken from videos shot by Strong at meetings, tests and demonstrations spanning from 1996 through 2001.
Meetings the Hawkinses arranged with politicians such as Sen. Orrin Hatch were encouraging, but nothing compared to to the response from top executives at Blockbuster.
Blockbuster wanted Priest's invention badly, Gene Hawkins said, as if the entertainment giant's survival depended on it. And, in fact, it might have. Video stores could crumble if people could watch movies over their phone lines, and Priest promised exactly that ability.
Phone lines have long been considered far too slow to carry the huge amounts of data necessary for high-quality video. Those limits created the need for cable modems and other high-performance data lines, like the T-1 and T-3 lines running in many businesses. Priest's invention would make those old phone lines faster than anything on the market, decimating the communications speed limit.
"That was the enormous breakthrough," Gene Hawkins said. "It was just conventional, regular, plain old telephone lines."
Gene Hawkins said he worked steadily on the project for months. He led Priest to Wayne Huizenga, then the chairman and CEO of Blockbuster. He also connected Priest with US West CEO Richard McCormick and other six-figure investors.
Court records indicate the Priests netted at least $2.25 million in those early deals, primarily from Blockbuster. Blockbuster and US West declined to comment.
In what would become an unwavering pattern, Priest took the investment cash without turning over working prototypes. By the end of 1996, Blockbuster and US West appear to have walked away.
"The bigger the fish you go after, the less likely they are to come after you," said Bob Mons, an investment banker and one of Zekko's founding partners in Ponte Vedra Beach. "They don't want to admit to being taken by a flimflam man from Palatka."
By that time, Gene Hawkins said, he and his wife had discovered Priest's criminal record, including numerous arrests and at least one conviction for grand theft. The arrests were years earlier, but were enough for the Hawkinses to stop working with him.
"That was very hurtful and disappointing, so we turned very, very sour, my wife in particular," Hawkins said.
The Priests' history is vague, clouded by years of varying stories the Priests told their business partners.
Priest, now 46, sometimes spoke of being a graduate of the Air Force Academy, lawsuits and interviews show. There are no records of his attendance there, which he explained by telling people he was assigned to super-secret covert operations. Sometimes he told potential investors he had worked on a classified missile and weapons design team for aerospace defense contractor Martin Marietta, according to a lawsuit filed by Zekko. But according to that lawsuit, he was never more than a low-level assembly line worker, and was fired for stealing equipment.
"Depending on the audience, the story would take on different embellishments," said Mark Strong, a Naples investor who became the Priests' closest business partner and later their most determined opponent. "If he thought the audience was really clueless, he would really spread it on."
Before stepping back, Gene Hawkins said he introduced Priest to K.C. Craichy, a Tampa businessman who became close with the inventor. Craichy and a friendgave Priest about $500,000 for a stake in VisionTek, the company the Priests formed to sell their invention. Craichy also agreed to serve as its CEO.
At the same time, in mid-1996, Orange Park real estate broker Walter Williams and at least 10 other investors from Florida saw demonstrations and invested nearly $300,000. Citing confidentiality agreements from a lawsuit settlement, Williams refused to discuss the deal with the Times-Union.
As many as 25 or 30 others may have invested at the same time, Strong said.
"He literally sold it to anyone who walked through the door -- friends, relatives, whoever he could get money from," said a source familiar with Zekko, who requested anonymity because a confidentiality agreement bars him from discussing the matter.
That money, like all the rest invested in VisionTek, went directly to Priest and his wife, according to many of their former partners.
Potential investors were dumbfounded by the demonstrations, which seemed generations beyond state of the art. With a conventional modem, one computer can transmit a music video -- with a small, fuzzy picture -- in an hour or more. At Priest's demonstrations, though, investors saw that same computer send video instantly. The Eagles' performance of Tequila Sunrise showed up on the second computer in digitally perfect full-screen glory, the music as clear as a compact disc.
Even with top-grade fiber optic cables, that kind of quality was rare at the time. Amazingly, the computers at Priest's demonstrations appeared to be connected with ordinary telephone cord. The only other wires were the electric cords that plugged the computers into a power strip.
The results were so staggering that investors said they overlooked Priest's demand -- his paranoia, even -- that no one so much as touch a keyboard.
"He had a Holy Grail that was the telecommunications equivalent of cold fusion," Mons said.
Craichy had seen Priest's elaborate show for about a year, always at places carefully prepped by Priest with computers provided by Priest and videos selected by Priest. Now Craichy wanted independent tests in which he controlled those variables.
As soon as he suggested it, Craichy said, Priest vanished.
"He wouldn't take my calls, he wouldn't come see me," Craichy said. "He disappeared."
Tomorrow: As Priest's deals begin to unravel, his claims become even more daring.
Deception revealed
The day after Linda Priest's 1998 confession to Zekko technology chief Herb Presley, he and Mons drove to Palatka to investigate.
It was Sept. 11, 1998, and it was the beginning of The Revelation.
Mons, who had been the primary fund-raiser for the nearly $6 million Zekko collected that year, said he planned to confiscate whatever prototypes he and Presley could find. Linda Priest's phone call notwithstanding, he still believed they would find some components, which could be given to engineers and possibly still turned into a product.
But any hope of keeping Zekko alive dissolved in the next few hours, according to interviews and court records.
Linda Priest stands next to testing equipment during an examination of Madison Priest's magic box at Intertek Testing Services in Orlando. Though some tests of the box appeared successful, investors now suspect the technology does not exist and the box was a hoax.
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A computer at the Priests' home, which Strong said Linda Priest believed was a key part of her husband's network for that demonstration, turned out not to be a computer at all. Inside the steel computer case, Mons said, there were no circuit boards, no disk drives, no power source.
There was only a VCR.
The Revelation continued when Linda Priest took them to Kay Larkin Airport, a municipal airstrip in Palatka, where her husband rented a hangar for his planes. They found no prototypes, nothing that could have salvaged Zekko's investment. What they did find was plenty of evidence to suggest a massive fraud.
There were boxes of unused components. There were circuit boards configured with what the Zekko source called "obvious sneaks." And there was the power strip.
Hidden inside two power cords that plugged into the strip was a single piece of coaxial cable, which could secretly connect two computers. Sending video over coaxial cable is old technology, the basis of cable television. By hiding that cable in a power strip, Priest could make it appear that the video was traveling over phone lines.
"We found stuff that really scared the hell out of us," Mons said.
Arrogance, anxiety
As Priest's relationships with Craichy and the Hawkinses were crumbling around 1996, he found a new source of money and influence.
Strong had just sold a successful chain of medical imaging companies and was itching for a new business venture. He saw a demonstration in Tampa and was hooked.
"I thought I would be the guy that finally got this technology developed," Strong said. "That was my supreme arrogance."
He consulted Geoff Workman, a San Francisco merchant banker experienced with high-tech innovations, who advised him to move slowly.
"We've got an uneducated country bumpkin with a weird background in aerospace, who invented this in his workshop," Workman said. "I told Mark, 'This is going to require a lot of due diligence and vetting before we know if anything's even there.'"
Priest, though, was masterful at urging people to invest quickly, Strong said.
"If you didn't jump on this, some big company would get on it and you'd be aced out," Strong said.
Strong invested $100,000, and six months later he was ready to buy Priest's entire company. He had negotiated test-site agreements with three institutions, including the University of Florida and Columbia Hospital Corp. As soon as he had 40 working units for those clients, Strong said, he would sign the deal.
He never received them.
Strong's concern blossomed into heavy anxiety in April 1997, when Priest was nearly killed in a car wreck in his bright red Corvette.
"They said there was a chance he could die," Strong said. "If he died, the project was over."
During Priest's convalescence, Strong realized the risk of keeping the invention's secrets locked in its inventor's brain. He shifted his pressure on Priest from building the 40 units to documenting the technology.
Priest had always refused to draw complete schematics. Engineers who examined his diagrams were baffled when they showed components working beyond their capacity or being used in ways never intended. But like every story Priest told, there was always a nugget of truth, however obscure. The designs were implausible, the engineers said, but never quite impossible.
"His ideas are interesting and provocative, so he's got a good story," said Hal Puthoff, a Texas physicist considered an expert in the concepts Priest said he was using. "It might not be a true story, but it hangs together, at least in his own jargon."
After the wreck, Priest promised to explain everything in writing, calling Strong five or 10 times a day to update him.
"It was just all talk," Strong said. "He never filled in all the blanks."
While Strong waited, Priest began building the foundation for his next set of partners.
Presley and another high-tech industry entrepreneur, Michael Newman, were planning to invest $2 million in the project just after Priest's wreck. Within six months, Presley and Newman had joined Mons and Teddy Turner to form Zekko, and Strong had been almost completely cut out.
The deal with Zekko, detailed in an October 1997 letter, handed the Priests a lump payment of $500,000 and the potential to earn millions more.
The deal itself would not be signed for more than six months because the Priests, Linda especially, would call for endless revisions. Zekko officers now believe they were simply stalling for time.
"She was a first-time girl trying to be a lawyer," Mons said of Linda Priest, who did not respond to interview requests. "She was unbearably difficult to negotiate with."
But in late 1997, everything still looked stable. Presley and Newman found experts to examine the invention while Mons and Turner sought investors to fund it.
Priest, though, became their biggest obstacle on both fronts, Zekko officials said. Potential investors, most worth at least $1 million, were put off by his rural Florida twang, his T-shirts that said "rocket scientist," and breath so bad it could choke a man in close conversation.
Scientists and engineers were also frustrated in conversations with him: The self-taught inventor spoke a different scientific language than the Ph.D.s. They would praise the invention's potential, but refused to vouch for it until they could take the box apart and test it themselves.
None of it deterred Zekko. Priest claimed to be using theories called low-energy or zero-point physics, an obscure new scientific terrain.
"This is like the netherworld of physics," Mons said. "You cannot get anyone to come in and vet this and give it absolute verification."
While Presley struggled to arrange conclusive tests, Mons and Turner began raising more than $1.5 million from individual investors in late 1997. That Turner was attached to the project only made investors more confident.
"Obviously that was a good name, and there was some talk that CNN would be an end user," said Dave Wild, a South Florida investor who put $63,000 into the project.
Indeed, Turner arranged a demonstration for his father at CNN's Atlanta headquarters, according to Mons. Ted Turner did not return phone calls, and his son declined to discuss the matter, but Mons said CNN wanted to be the company's first client. Ted Turner provided Priest workspace at the CNN building, Mons said, and asked him to build a prototype. It never happened.
Looking back, Zekko's founders and investors see how Priest's endless stalling and laughable excuses should have made them more cautious.
At least 10 times, according to court records, Priest said working prototypes were hit by lightning. Other times he would claim they were damaged in floods, damaged in rains or otherwise became "unstable."
No one could force Priest to work faster or deliver the independent tests.
"Every time we told him to put up," Mons said, "he threatened to blow up and go away."
A half-mile lie
Even the phony computers and trick power strips did not prepare the Zekko bosses for the next day, when The Revelation continued and grew as they revisited buildings where Priest had hosted demonstrations.
At one site after another, Mons said, they found hidden lines of coaxial cable. In some places it was buried shallowly in the dirt. In others it was snaked along bushes.
The most dumbfounding was at the Fort Gates Ferry, a ramshackle barge that crosses the St. Johns River near Welaka. Priest would often demonstrate the invention there, transmitting video from a computer on one side of the river to a partner on the other side. It seemed, the Zekko executives thought, an impossible test to fake.
Then they saw more than a half-mile of coaxial cable coiled on the dock.
"Madison had actually run co-ax under the St. Johns River there," Mons said.
The ferryman at Fort Gates, Dale Jones, confirmed to the Times-Union that Priest had paid him to string the cable, but refused to discuss the matter.
The river is about a half-mile wide at the ferry, long enough that the cable would need special devices to amplify the signal. The Zekko source said the company had provided Priest with just such devices.
Rush to settlement
By the time Zekko's partners were getting queasy about Madison Priest, they were in too deep to retreat. In addition to more than $1.5 million Mons raised in late 1997, court records show prominent California computer chip maker Level One invested $3.5 million from October 1997 to January 1998.
The cash was flowing out of Zekko even faster than it was coming in. The contract with Priest had already paid him $500,000, and both Mons and another Zekko source said the inventor eventually got as much as $1 million of Zekko funds. In addition, the inventor's previous partners, including Craichy, Strong and the Hawkinses, began laying claim to the technology's rights. "We needed a clear title to this technology," Mons said, "and we were in a hurry."
So Zekko settled with everyone, according to company documents, paying out more than $1 million. Strong, who had signed non-circumvention agreements with Zekko bosses, received the juiciest deal: $525,000 cash, a $15,000 monthly consulting agreement and possible royalties. Craichy received $30,000 to $50,000, and the Hawkinses -- who invested only time, never money -- settled for a consulting agreement that was supposed to pay out $360,000. However, Gene Hawkins said they never received more than about $20,000.
"All those consultants; maybe only one worked for the company," the Zekko source said. "The rest were getting paid to settle."
No one from Level One, which has since been purchased by Intel, would comment on their investment in Zekko. Priest repeatedly postponed delivery of working prototypes during 1998, and by September, Zekko's officers could not imagine why Priest continued to miss delivery deadlines and stall on conclusive testing. Before flying with Priest to meet with eager investors from Ameritech and GTE in Chicago, one of Zekko's executives confronted Linda Priest, the Zekko source said.
If this was a hoax, she was warned, Zekko would pursue them like Captain Ahab followed his whale. Major corporations like Blockbuster might have been willing to write off their losses to avoid the negative publicity associated with lawsuits, but Zekko had no such compunctions.
Because Linda Priest had become the court-appointed liquidator for VisionTek, the Zekko executive assured her she would be easier to convict than her husband and serve more jail time. If she had anything to confess, he told her, now was the time.
She said nothing, and the trip to Chicago went on as planned, with Priest joined by Presley and another Zekko board member. The companies offered to write a check for more than $36 million on the spot. The Zekko executives held off, though. Both company sources and David Hodges, a Jacksonville private investigator hired by Strong, said Zekko wanted to be completely secure in the technology before putting major telecommunications companies on the hook for that much cash. Had the top executives accepted the check, some would have received bonuses as high as $875,000.
"The day before, you thought you were a billionaire," the Zekko source said. "Then you've got serious questions."
Profiting from belief
Ironically, it was fallout from Priest's Chicago demonstrations that destroyed Zekko.
Linda Priest's version of those events, according to Mons and other sources, went like this:
She believed her husband usually demonstrated the technology by connecting to a modem in their home computer, so she expected him to call from Chicago and tell her to turn it on. Unbeknownst to her, he was using the computer in his shop, which was already on. When he failed to call that day, she grew suspicious and opened the home computer. Inside the case she found nothing but a VCR.
When Priest returned to Palatka the next day, his wife was gone. She had emptied their house and filed separation papers in court. She initiated The Revelation when she called Presley, Zekko's technology chief, and told her story. She also called the FBI.
"She was in this up to her eyeballs," Mons said. "Now she was trying to extricate herself."
The accusations sent Zekko into a tailspin. The company's officers spent the next few days discovering staggering evidence of a massive scam. Many resigned in disgust, their investors' stock apparently worthless. Zekko stopped paying Priest and everyone else.
"This is a very well-orchestrated con, and there are a lot of people involved," Mons said.
It might have all ended here, with Priest dismissed as a scheming nerd who knew nothing special after all.
But Madison Priest knew one thing had not changed. People -- even smart, rich and powerful people -- want to believe in a magic box.
Within three months, Linda Priest would recant her accusations and reconcile with her husband. They would enigmatically explain the damning evidence as fallout from amnesia related to Priest's car accident -- amnesia they never mentioned at the time. They would accuse Zekko of breaking its contract, voiding the company's claim to the invention.
They wrapped the same old box with a ribbon of fresh, new stories. This time, the plan -- and the stakes -- would be even grander.
Times-Union library director Jennifer O'Neill and staff writer Marilyn Young contributed to this report.
Staff writer Matthew I. Pinzur can be reached at (904) 359-4025 or via e-mail at mpinzur@jacksonville.com.
Investors shaken by amnesia, alien
Accused of faking his 'magic box,' Madison Priest makes new promises -- and looks for more money
Is it a 'magic box' or a high-tech hoax?
'Magic Box' comparison test
Pyramid of Players
By Matthew I. Pinzur
Times-Union staff writer
He blamed amnesia.
When Madison Priest was confronted with evidence he had been faking demonstrations of his invention -- an invention that had already brought him at least $4 million -- he blamed amnesia from a Corvette wreck that happened 18 months earlier. He had never mentioned memory loss before, his investors said, but now he made it the keystone of his defense.
Priest, who declined repeated interview requests, said he had forgotten how to build the magic box that transformed regular home telephone wires into ultra-fast video and data lines. Until he could remember, or at least reverse-engineer his working units, Zekko bosses said he said he had to fake demonstrations to keep the investment cash flowing. And he begged them not to abandon him.
Desire and greed will give a man faith, but their faith was already worn down. They had run out of ways to convince themselves it was anything other than a hoax.
About this series
The Times-Union's coverage of Madison Priest and his "magic box" is the result of a five-month investigation by reporter Matthew I. Pinzur and editor Marilyn Young.
Roughly four dozen interviews were conducted with partners, investors, engineers and others familiar with Priest's dealings. Hundreds of pages of public records and other documents were inspected, including seven lawsuits filed in state and federal courts in Florida, California and Colorado.
Neither Priest nor his wife, Linda, agreed to be interviewed, despite repeated verbal and written requests.
About the photos
Most of the photographs in this series were provided by Mark Strong, a former business partner of Madison Priest. Many are still frames taken from videos shot by Strong at meetings, tests and demonstrations spanning from 1996 through 2001.
There was a problem, though.
Even when his tales became absurd, even when he replaced deadlines with excuses, even when his wife of 22 years condemned the whole thing as a scam, no one could prove he was lying.
That was always the way with Madison Priest.
Teddy Turner, son of the Atlanta mogul, was finished believing. He had founded Zekko in 1997 with three other men, eager to take their place among the instant zillionaires of dot-com glory. His name -- his father's name, really -- conferred legitimacy on the unknown company and its unknown genius, giving many investors confidence.
Little more than a year later, after Priest's wife's catastrophic revelation, Zekko officials uncovered damning evidence suggesting a scam.
When they confronted Priest, he spun his story of amnesia. Then he disclosed, for the first time, how he developed his invention: The idea was brought to him by an alien being he called a "hopper," which traveled from planet to planet and revealed technological advances, recalled Bob Mons, one of Zekko's founders who attended the meeting.
"That's when we started to realize he was delusional and a total fraud," said Mons, who had raised nearly $6 million for Zekko.
By the end of the meeting, Turner had resigned in disgust. Others would follow in the next days and weeks. With no money left and no faith in their only asset, Zekko soon abandoned the project.
"Madison's endgame was a stalemate," said Mons, 41, a Ponte Vedra investment banker. "When it came time to put up, he just jumped on another horse."
Zekko was added to the list of Priest's jilted partners, joining Blockbuster, US West, First Coast real estate broker Walter Williams and others. More were on the horizon.
Priest connects computers to the magic box during one of five tests of the system conducted at Intertek Testing Services in Orlando.
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There were always more investors for Priest, because that magic box could be worth billions of dollars. Just as his earlier supporters had accepted stories about amnesia and aliens and dark forces hunting him for his secrets, new crops of partners would blithely embrace new tales: miraculous improvements that made the magic box wireless, prototypes that were ruined by incessant acts of God until the inventor himself destroyed the last working models, and then a strikingly similar technology he began to sell overseas.
They believed, at least for a time.
For a shot at getting in early on a technology like that -- to be the one who invested in Microsoft when Windows were still made of glass -- people will let themselves believe crazy stories.
Grasping at hope
Mark Strong had thought he was finished with Madison Priest. The two had briefly been business partners before Zekko was formed, but Strong felt betrayed by the deals between Zekko and Priest.
Zekko had paid Strong $675,000 to go away, but he still felt cheated out of the fantastic wealth he had expected to achieve with Priest. When the deal with Zekko collapsed in the fall of 1998 and Priest again came calling, Strong saw a second chance. Strong believed Priest and his wife, Linda, had possibly tricked Zekko into believing the technology was a fraud, hoping the company would walk away.
"I knew they were trying to get rid of Zekko," Strong said. "I knew he might give them false information, even if it was incriminating."
Over the next three years, Strong would become Priest's most enduring partner. He would settle lawsuits against Priest, locate millions of dollars in investment cash, broker deals with Intel and General Dynamics.
His commitment was so strong, in fact, that others who dealt with Priest over the years believe Strong must have been part of the con -- including David Hodges, the Jacksonville private eye Strong himself hired to investigate Priest.
"I look at Strong as a hustler," Hodges said.
Strong failed to tell at least some of his investors about Priest's criminal history or Linda Priest's accusations of fraud.
"Maybe in retrospect I was too naive and put too much trust in Mark," said Doug Motley, Strong's friend and fishing buddy from Naples, who invested $60,000. "I really hope that if he was aware of that he would have made me aware of that."
But Strong said he simply made the mistake of believing Priest's tales and set out to become the one person Priest could trust with his secrets. His company, Hyperlight, acquired all the rights to Priest's invention, even though Strong said he already saw Priest as a duplicitous liar.
Testing empty boxes
Strong's first priority was arranging independent tests of the device. He had been burned by Priest the first time they worked together, like the 1996 embarrassment with an Arizona physicist who was going to test the magic box.
"We open them up, and they're empty," said Jim Dilettoso, the scientist. "It was a power cord connected to a power supply connected to some red lights. Other than that was some stuff super-glued in there, pieces of junk, to give it weight and bulk."
Priest later said he just did not feel safe entrusting his secrets to anyone else.
Strong was prepared to not let the same thing happen again. He scheduled five sessions at Intertek Testing Services, a respected Orlando lab, beginning in November 1998. Priest still refused to let anyone take apart and analyze the units, but consented to setting up tests that were designed and witnessed by Intertek engineers.
Priest demonstrates his invention's high-speed data delivery capabilities in the workshop behind his former home in Palatka.
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Letters to Linda Priest from those engineers confirmed the first three tests were all successful. An Intertek engineer declined to comment, saying the test results were confidential.
Priest and Strong also enticed General Dynamics, the Virginia-based technology giant, which paid the Priests $70,000 in good-faith money and signed a deal in August 1999 to develop a marketable product.
That deal gave Hyperlight the cachet it needed to move forward. Strong amassed around $1.5 million from high-stakes investors, most from Naples.
The Priests received more than $1 million of that and bought the half-million-dollar house in a gated community in St. Augustine, as well as at least five motorcycles and three other cars and trucks.
The Priests also cashed in on a deal a month later with a telecommunications company called Telecom Wireless Corp. The company went bankrupt, but not before paying the Priests $400,000 and investing another $300,000 in Hyperlight.
The deal also connected Hyperlight with John Sununu, former White House chief of staff under the first President Bush. Sununu, an investor in Telecom Wireless, said he offered to bring in engineers to help perfect Priest's invention.
Sununu never invested in Hyperlight, though, as he became convinced Priest was hiding something.
"He [Priest] seemed very secretive," said Sununu, who has a Ph.D. in engineering. "I can understand when people are telling me something, and when they're avoiding telling me something."
Stalling for dollars
After the General Dynamics and Telecom Wireless deals were signed, Priest's stall tactics resurfaced. At least 10 times during his relationship with Strong, court records indicate, Priest claimed prototypes were fried by lightning strikes.
"That was a running joke," Strong said, "but nobody could laugh at it."
The next month, General Dynamics terminated its agreement with Hyperlight because Priest failed to deliver working prototypes. At a shareholders meeting that fall, Strong and Priest were visibly at odds.
"He [Priest] was stonewalling and Mark [Strong] was extremely frustrated," said Motley, Strong's friend who invested in Hyperlight. "Madison said he couldn't perform under all this pressure."
Still, though, Strong pushed forward, and Priest's claims about his invention grew even more audacious.
Forget the phone lines, he said in late 2000 -- he had made the system wireless. With just a regular mobile phone and his magic box, anyone could have a super-speed data connection anywhere, 1,000 times faster than a traditional dial-up. He even demonstrated a completely mobile version, powered through a car's cigarette lighter.
The implications were staggering. Some of the possible uses listed in a confidential memo that Hyperlight sent to potential investors in March 2001 included:
Wireless modems for laptop computers, with connections fast enough to not just surf the Internet but also watch live television.
Television set-top boxes that would allow viewers to instantly order any movie or music selection.
Global positioning satellite units with full-color, high-resolution aerial photos with animated map lines. Two more Intertek tests that winter showed the wireless units performing as promised. Video of the January test shows Priest -- using nothing more than a Nokia mobile phone and a Hyperlight unit -- receiving live satellite television, supposedly being sent over the mobile phone from Priest's home.
The wireless breakthrough launched Hyperlight into its most ambitious and potentially profitable deal, signing with Intel, one of the largest and most dominant technology firms in American history.
'Greed in overdrive'
It was the deal they had been waiting for, one that not even Priest could bypass in hopes of something better coming along. It would have paid Hyperlight $1 million on delivery and unimaginably more in royalties. There was only one hurdle: Priest had to turn over working prototypes by Sept. 25, 2001.
That day, Priest told Strong he had a serious accident while working on his son's car that injured his hand so severely that he could not bring the units to St. Petersburg, where a manufacturing lab associated with Intel was supposed to take possession of the technology.
Priest demonstrates his invention's high-speed data delivery capabilities in the workshop behind his former home in Palatka.
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"Madison
When Priest once again failed to deliver, Intel terminated the agreement, and Strong and Hyperlight finally turned against the inventor. Intel officials did not return repeated calls seeking comment.
Strong filed suit in Naples last October, accusing the Priests of fraud. If the technology does not exist, Strong wants to end the fraud. If it does exist, he wants to force Priest to turn it over to Hyperlight.
Priest, 46, was in jail last week -- the first time he has served related to his invention -- serving a 90-day sentence for contempt of court. After a three-hour hearing on April 24, a Pinellas County judge enforced an existing contempt order against the inventor, written in January when he failed to produce prototypes in court.
In videotape of a January meeting, Priest tells Strong that no working prototypes exist today. He destroyed them, he said, after Intel pulled out.
"I saw no need to maintain hardware that could be a security risk to Hyperlight," Priest said.
Strong was incredulous that Priest had destroyed his prized invention, leading his lawyers to press for Priest's incarceration.
Priest was immediately sent to jail at the hearing last month, but the brief victory celebrated by his embittered former partners disappeared even faster than the dream Priest once promised them.
The judge's order said Priest could be released early if he delivered the technology, but at an April 24 hearing the inventor testified he cannot build replacements because he has been unable to find acceptable parts.
Priest's lawyers argued to an appeals court he was being held improperly because he was jailed for failing to turn over something he said he could not possibly produce. A week after he was booked into the Pinellas jail, he was again a free man.
"There is no money left from this, and the prospect of litigation going on for God knows how long," Strong said. The same issue eventually forced Zekko to settle with Priest last summer for little more than stock in Hyperlight.
But while Priest fights Strong and Hyperlight, he appears to be starting the cycle again with new sets of investors.
"As a fresh tuna, you don't know anything about this, and, what's more, you don't care," Strong said. "Your greed is in overdrive."
New test casts doubt
Information about Priest's current deals is far more vague than his past, but some investors suspect the stakes exceed anything he has attempted before.
Burl Sheppard, a Tampa high-tech fund-raiser who saw a demonstration of the wireless technology last spring, was smitten. He and his partners spent three or four months -- and hundreds of thousands of dollars -- arranging more demonstrations and soliciting investments. They were planning on paying $10 million for exclusive rights to distribute the technology in the United States and China, Sheppard said.
Before any money began flowing in, though, Sheppard said he made a shocking discovery during a demonstration in Myrtle Beach, S.C. While displaying the wireless technology for a high-tech firm, Sheppard picked up the mobile phone that supposedly was being used to receive the data.
Priest, always rigid about anyone handling the equipment, shot out of his seat and yelled at Sheppard to put the phone down.
"The screen [of the phone] was black," Sheppard said. "There wasn't even a call taking place."
He now suspects that Priest was somehow broadcasting the signal with a briefcase DVD player. Sheppard pulled back almost immediately, he said, but not all his investors were convinced it was a scam.
On Sept. 26 -- the day after the accident Priest said kept him from traveling to St. Petersburg -- the inventor and at least one of Sheppard's contacts flew to Norway for a massive fund-raising trip, according to Sheppard and other sources familiar with the deal. They said that trip led to $5 million to $10 million in new investments. Priest has also recently been linked with an electric company in Philadelphia, and he testified in court that he has developed a separate technology that sends data over power lines.
Madison Priest holds up a mobile phone showing the Palatka phone number he used to demonstrate the wireless version of his magic box technology during a test in Orlando.
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Strong hopes that power-line technology will be Priest's undoing. He argued it is simply an evolution of Hyperlight's magic box, and is therefore owned by Hyperlight under an intellectual-property contract Priest signed in 1999. The judge in St. Petersburg has ordered Priest to produce a power-line unit in court by the end of June, after which experts for both sides will argue whether it is truly a different creation than the Hyperlight technology.
But Strong and others who have followed Priest's story said the inventor has faced deadlines before. They are skeptical that this one will be different, because Priest has always managed to elude a moment of truth.
"The cleverness is not in the invention, but the deception," said Strong, who said he is now 90 percent sure the entire affair was a hoax.
But does it work?
Engineers have tested the box -- engineers hired by Zekko, by Strong, by General Dynamics -- but they could never prove it really worked. Labs have tested the box -- reputable labs that run tests for Intel, Sony and Yamaha -- but never without Priest running the tests. Over eight years of deals and contracts, none of Priest's major investors has ever possessed a working unit.
But no one has been able to disprove the technology, which may be why Priest has collected at least $6 million and possibly many times that.
"He's a little country bumpkin with bib overalls, but he'll get the gold out of your teeth," said Al Keyser, CEO of a South Carolina technology company that hosted a demonstration last summer. "He's got some heavyweight people that he's put this with -- it's going to bite him."
The shadow of doubt, though, dwells in his mind, as it does with investors at every stop on Priest's timeline. For every obvious scam, hoax and con, there have been demonstrations so convincing that neither engineers nor scientists can fathom how they were staged. Unless Strong or another of Priest's jilted former partners succeeds in forcing his hand in court, investors and scientists say no one may ever really know the truth. Linda Priest said she reported Priest to the FBI while they were estranged in 1998, and Mons said he was interviewed by an agent. The FBI will not comment on whether a case exists, but a law enforcement source said there is no active investigation.
Even if the technology does work, many investors suspect they will never see profits without a lengthy court fight -- a fight most of them cannot afford.
"I put money in knowing it was a risk that the technology might not work, but I never thought the guy might be a fraud and a con man," said Dave Wild, a candle-shop owner from South Florida who invested $63,000 with Zekko and the Priests. "When you find out he's a fraud and a crook, it's no different than him walking into my house and stealing $63,000 worth of my stuff."
Strong has another theory, based on years of watching Priest's glee at forcing corporate multimillionaires to coddle him. As long as they needed the secrets locked in Priest's brain, they were forced to make him the center of their universe, flying him around the country on their private jets and hosting him at lavish meals. Turning over the technology would have made him rich, Strong said, but yanked him from the spotlight.
Priest, who originally agreed to be interviewed but changed his mind on his lawyer's advice, made only a single comment about his invention:
"I'm not sure that technology will ever see the light of day."
Times-Union library director Jennifer O'Neill and staff writer Marilyn Young contributed to this report.
Staff writer Matthew I. Pinzur can be reached at (904) 359-4025 or via e-mail at mpinzur@jacksonville.com.
I originally wrote a longer post, remarking about exactly why the GPU only makes sense in a graphics application. I edited myself down to keep it simple. But since you mention it...
Accuracy is certainly a problem. Today's PC graphics hardware computes results with 8 bits of accuracy. But just as important, I think, is the fact that the GPU is not a massively parallel unit in the first place. I.e., it does not have the ability to process in parallel more than a handful of data.
There is a reason for that: 3D graphics does not parallelize all that well. It is a big pain in the neck to try to fill multiple graphics pipelines. The applications programmers are not going to like it. So you keep it simple, deal with one polygon at a time. You might keep a few pixel pipelines full but even that only works well if your polygons are pretty big on screen.
Consequently these folks try hard to make their mostly serial hardware fast. It costs more money to make such a fast part.
If your problem is embarrassingly parallel, why try to reuse some expensive graphics specific part with a bunch of accuracy limitations? You can put a bunch of cheap DSPs on a board and go nuts. The original poster wanted to spend $15M on a large cluster, networked together with game controller cables and safety pins. That's nuts. It is not the cheapest way to get a large DSP array.
People do use MMX and other SIMD instructions, because they need to do media processing, and the desktop PC already has one CPU. For cost reasons it's not a good idea to squeeze a separate DSP in there. But don't tell me you would build a cluster of MMX enabled PCs to do a big parallel DSP task. Again it would not be the cheapest way.
Re: your headless idea. XBox has a UMA, so the frame buffer can be located in one chunk of main memory, and the GPU can be off chewing on some other part. So you could have a pretty display on your XBox cluster.
I would certainly be interested if you can substantiate that claim about MS-DOS. In a little googling all I could come up with was Microsoft Xenix on 68000 at
You're right that portable OSes have assembly in them. But portable software must be built portable from the start, so that for example the application programmer is shielded from directly calling those assembly routines. MS-DOS was never built with portability as a consideration. Portability would not be possible without emulation.
Oh for Christ's sake. The whole point of public key cryptography is that you don't have to fly to Peru and exchange floppy disks in order to have a private communication. You need an authenticated channel but not a private one to exchange public keys. Are you so paranoid that you think the NSA is not only reading your email but also carefully rewriting your key exchanges? If you are that paranoid, can't you just talk to the person on the phone for 30 seconds and give a key fingerprint string?
What a load. MS-DOS has substantial assembly language pieces. It has never been ported to any architecture other than x86.
IE on Mac is not composed of libraries littered across the OS, as it is on Windows.
You are right about a Mac being able to emulate a PC and run Windows that way. But anything can emulate anything given enough storage.
Apple's Lisa was the first machine you could buy, and the Mac was the machine that sold well, that brought something other than CLI or blinkenlights to the masses.
The Xerox Star went on sale in 1981.
I do agree that there seems to be a higher percentage of Mac users with some kind of clue. But I chalk it up to my belief that the Mac user base includes more long time users. Mac had a greater than 10% share back in the 1992 period. Mac share proceeded to slump. I think those Mac sales consist largely of happy Mac users.
Meanwhile the PC was the main beneficiary of the Web fad. All kinds of idiots bought PCs. And all kinds of idiot companies put PCs on every desk. Result: lots of idiots running their PCs. People who have used PCs for ten or twenty years are a small minority.
The reason it's hard is that Java has syntax. You have to parse Java before you can manipulate it. Parsing Algol-like languages is not that easy to do well. This is why the Lisp family has no syntax. You write the parse tree directly. Manipulating this tree via macros is a cinch.
Another possibility is the Smalltalk approach where everything is an object, including the class definitions and runtime behavior. Again you can get access to that parse tree and mess with it. In either language, no one would ever manually write boilerplate code for variable access.
Did I mention that life sucks?
...Sorenson has no problem using Free Software...
The fact that they use free software really has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Using free software doesn't create any obligation to anybody. That's one of the most charming things about free software. Or Free Software, depending on your preference in capitalization.
Despite what these other lunkheads are saying, you are right about the jaggies on PS2. Many PS2 games run in a low res mode with only 240 lines. The lines are doubled to fill the 480 line active area of an NTSC signal.
These PS2 games look worse than XBox or Dreamcast, both of which can do a 480p display of most any 3D game. People who don't like the way the PS2 looks should get a Dreamcast & a VGA adapter and glory in the resolution.
I don't know if this is an elaborate "Beowulf" troll or what. Your post makes no sense. The GPU on an XBox is not useful for anything other than graphics. Making a cluster of these things is a bad idea.
All Dreamcasts can read CDRs. The ones made after Oct. 2000 just refuse to boot the most popular format (in terms of CD sessions) for burned Dreamcast games. You can use another format that works fine on later-manufactured Dreamcasts. See the dreamcast articles at for more details.
paper-based materials will in many, many cases, simply be the ONLY copies of certain materials
In the mighty near future we will employ intelligent robots to replace human labor. Along the way we will certainly use this cheap labor to digitize all existing media. The Enterprise computer will get to have everything. Of course the Enterprise will be no larger than a shoebox and the crew will be person simulations, but still the computer will have all the old media.