I wrote the "flaming bag of poo" comment earlier. Everything you said is spot on. One thing about the iPhone that I suspect will be there is a copy of the Preview app that is on the Mac. It's Apple's own PDF viewer, which is standard. It'll open most PDF documents out there and its fast. It also opens most photo files too. Since the iPhone is built on OS X, I can't imagine a version of Preview would be that hard to include with the phone.
As for Office Document Reader, who knows? it's certainly possible but I wouldn't mind an iPhone version of iWork (Pages, Keynote, etc).
I own an HTC phone, specifically the Cingular 8125 from last year. The new Touch replaces it and the 8525 model that came after the 8125. The 8125 is a Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC device. Having used this thing for several months, I'm confident in proclaiming my phone as a flaming bag of poo. The design is terrible...the dial buttons are too easy to push and if the phone is unlocked, it's real easy for the phone to dial people by itself while its in your hip holster. And I've had phone calls cut off if the hang-up button is accidentally pressed while in the hip holster. The Windows interface is a poor paradigm for handheld computing...devices like this were not made for pull down menus. It crashes...a lot. Pocket Internet Explorer is a complete waste of time....buggy and almost unusable. The only two things my phone is good for is push mail (where my company wrote a specific client) and my Slingbox client. I'd be really pissed if I had to pay full price for this thing (thank you steep company discount).
Slingbox for Mac went 1.0 a few weeks ago I think. I'm not sure why it's just making Slashdot now.
That being said, Slingbox Mac is working very well for me, paralleling the performance of the PC version (I have the Slingbox Pro with HD adapter). The only thing I haven't seen the Mac version do is a "half screen size" mode which the PC version does. Otherwise the feature set seems identical.
My post is an affront to free expression? Oh please, get a life! You have no clue as to what free expression means. First of all, free expression in the United States is wider and deeper thsn virtually every country on earth. But it's not without limits. You can't yell "fire!" in a crowded theater where none exists. You can't libel someone maliciously without opening yourself to civil penalty. You can skewer someone by parody as this is expressly protected speech....but that is not what occured here.
The real conversation I was trying to comment on is the difference between traditional journalism and wiki-style reporting. Journalism has 200+ years of experience and isn't perfect but generally works and is self-correcting when things go wrong. If things do go wrong, corrections are explictly printed, reputations can be damaged and sometimes people get fired. In wiki reporting, the whole openess of the editing process is suppose to regulate the system. The problem is that while it may work in theory, there is no accountability when someone anonymously prints something clearly libelous against a private party. Yeah the article may get revised eventually, but someone can do a hachet job on someone and have thousands of people read it and believe it weeks or months before it's corrected.
You say it's up to Mr. Seigenthaler to correct any misstatements? What if he or anyone else isn't online and doesn't choose to be? What then? I don't read the NY Post, but if someone tells me that I've been libeled by them, I can call them and complain, and they have the responsibility to act. If you're injured on Wikipedia, why is it my responsibility to set things right when someone injures me? And what if the same unknown person does it again? I have to keep tracking my Wiki bio to make sure it's correct? You're serious, right? Most of us have lives and better things to do.
And calling John Seigenthaler Sr. irresponsible for taking to the media and making his point shows how out of touch you really are. He has a beef and is making a criticism in a standard forum. Internet and open-source resources are not above scrutiny and review like anything else. Wikipedia ain't perfect and to criticize him for saying otherwise shows that's he's forgotten more about journalism than you will ever know.
BTW, just because you never heard of him until now doesn't mean he's a nobody. Any news editor in this country and most journalists and journalism students know who he is, not to mention thousands of people here in Nashville. Again, you're the shortsided idiot for brushing off his reputation in this business.
Bottom line....you're the thin-skinned, classless cretin, not him.
I doubt most of you have ever met Mr. Seigenthaler but I have. He's personal friends with my brother and his wife and I've met him socially on a few occasions. He's a completely gentile man who is one of the most respective citizens in Nashville, regardless if you agree or not with his politics.
Seigenthaler has worked his entire career at the pinnacle of traditional journalism, both in Nashville as the longtime editor-in-chief of the Tennessean newspaper and editorial page director for USA Today for nearly a decade. He was brought back to USA Today in the past year to investigate allegations of reporters fabricating events in stories (which he proved). His Freedom Forum project is also highly respected for the work it does. And his son is someone most of us have seen on TV as the weekend anchor for NBC Nightly News and he regularly fills in for Brian Williams during the week.
So you can imagine someone of his journalistic credentials is smeared not only in Wikipedia but also in two other places, he's likely not going to take that lying down. Especially when he was a close personal friend of the guy the "article" implies he had a hand in murdering. I'd be pissed too. And whoever did this hatchet job certainly underestimates the resources that he has at his disposal to find out who did this. Libel is not protected by the First Amendment, period. Reading back the text of the First Amendment ignores 200+ years of constitutional case law on this subject. I've seen responses to this Slashdot article that say "well, it's Wikipedia...he should just edit it himself" or "well, you can't prove libel for things that might be in dispute". Horsehockey.
First, he wasn't participating in the Wikipedia process and doesn't feel he should intervene to set the record straight because if there was a real editing process, it likely would have never seen the light of day. Virtually ever single newspaper and newsroom in the country would do a fact check before publishing a bio on him. Wikipedia as a concept has proven to be interesting and very useful and is an interesting read on many topics. But its Achilles' Heel is that fact that anyone can edit an article anonymously and that makes it susceptible to libelous edits like this. Journalism is just about good editing as well as reporting and research. Wikipedia has a few editorial controls but a lot of junk can get in and stay there before anyone notices the fraud.
In the end, I think the whole brouhaha will be good for Wikipedia in general because it will cause the project to pay closer attention to some of these edits. The anonymous nature of the reporting process will undoubtedly come under close scrutiny. The fact that the online community is talking about journalism and wiki in the 21st century is a good thing. And maybe Mr. Seigenthaler will actually be able to confront his accuser in a court of law.
This is puzzling. Why not go with the Mobility 9800 if you're doing a refresh? Yeah, the Mobility X800 would have required a PCI Express bus, but that's doable too, especially with the Powermacs that were just introduced.
Somehow I have a feeling that these PowerMacs won't be around for long and that whenever Apple introduces Intel Macs, these will be some of the first to go. At that point, I expect better buses and video cards. Changing the screen and DVD drive was probably easy and cheap...no motherboard change required.
The tower PowerMacs on the other hand will be the last models to go to Intel. Either that or Intel and PowerPC models will be available together for a little while. Mac professionals are loathe to change their hardware towers for any kind of significant technology paradigm shift, and it doesn't get more significant than this. If anyone remembers in the old days, there was actually a run on 68K Mac II sales before PowerPC debuted, and again on Nubus machines when the Nubus->PCI transition happened.
I've been saying since the announcement that if Apple does anything with Dell, they might try offering OS X Server on Dell Xeon servers way before they do desktops (if ever). Apple has a nice, but limited server strategy. Dell sells all sorts of servers of all sizes and price points except the big 32 processor boxes that Unisys makes.
Apple could offer OS X Server to Dell server customers at a price point below Windows but still get lucrative maintenance and service agreements. OS X customers will get a choice of server hardware outside of the Xserves. Since Xserves aren't for everyone and many companies have existing hardware contracts with Dell, the procument process could be a lot easier for them going through Dell.
First, the idea of Microsoft complaining about locked in proprietary DRM and hardware is hilarious enough as it is. But seriously, how would Microsoft arrange a deal where they could magically provide users of their service all the songs they've purchased from another service? First, the copyright holders would want to be paid...again. Second, who has those records? I'm sure that ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and all the major labels all have royalty data from Apple, but I doubt seriously it's broken down by user. And I'm sure that Apple would have something to say about it even if they tried. I'm sure that Apple was smart enough to stipulate that the royalty data would not be shared with any other party.
The "excuse" that they are investigating stock issued for compensation is not a lame excuse. Given the turmoil going on at Canopy right now, William Mustard is trying to make sense of the largess of equity compensation that was given out at Canopy and its daughter-companies. SCO is probably a particular target for Mustard's investigations since he has to oust Yarro from its board on orders from the Noordas, and then investigate all of the stock and options deals these guys have been doing. Heck, they were even issuing equity to their lawyers, a highly unusual move.
It's probably very complicated and I imagine that they are racing to do as much forensic accounting as possible to realize what's truly going on before filing the 10-K and making other appropiate financial and personnel decisions.
I do expect that the 10-K will get filed soon before they get delisted, but the other shoe is about to drop at SCO. Hang on to your butts....
After reading Dan's blog, a few things come to mind...
First, producing and working in live television is hard. Most TV shows manage entropy and mistakes in retakes and edits. Live TV has to work every time, and in the case of TSS, every day. To complicate things further, they had to manage (at least back then) a live audience and viewer call-ins during the show. This is very difficult to manage and still get an informative and entertaining segments while still hitting your time checks for commercials. So I have a lot of respect for people who can do it well and keep the show entertaining. The old TSS was pretty good at this.
I'm not surprised not upset that TSS used to use caller emails to choose and screen people for the show. This is actually a regular practice in the business....take NPRs Car Talk. In order to call in for that show, you first leave a message on an answering machine earlier in the week introducing yourself and describing your problem. The show's producers choose 9-10 interesting ones with people who seem like they sound good on radio and call them back asking them to be available for the show's taping (they get up to 1000 calls a week). Not only does this ensure a smoother, more entertaining show, but it allows the show to do some research on the issue before airtime. That way Tom and Ray can have some ideas on what to say with specific details about the car in question without having to "um" and "ah" their way through the conversation. Since their show isn't live, the show can easily be edited for time. All this is akin to what TSS used to do under Dan's stewardship and ok to do (although professionals like Leo don't like even doing that since he appreciates the challenge of coming up with advice on the fly).
What's not okay is start staging all this with preselected questions and bringing in people to ask them. Hell, you might have just started hiring actors since that's what it would have eventually come to...you would have ran out of family and friends to use. And despite what the producer thinks, viewers can smell that kind of fraud a mile away. Part of the "charm" of live call-ins is dealing with people who don't work in TV or radio every day. The good on-air talent can guide them to the question (if they ramble) and can get them to the point, answer their question and move on. Most talk radio hosts have to master this skill and people like Leo do this very well. Going to staged calls means that you're cheating and don't want to do the additional work your job requires.
Which of course is just a reminder of the sad state of affairs of the ship that is G4TechTV and TSS in particular. This whole fiasco is a classic business school case of what can and often goes wrong in a merger or buyout. Usually one side of the equation "wins" and the other side is eventually reduced or marginalized. G4 wanted TechTV's viewer assets and network access..nothing more. They made token attempts to keep certain shows alive, but clearly this was secondary in their overall strategy. Their mistake was even thinking that most of the old TechTV viewers would stick around with the programming changes. After all, you don't want to chase away viewers that advertisers are paying for. But advertisers aren't stupid and smelled this business plan a mile away. All advertisers who catered to people who were over the age of 25 bolted for the door immediately. The network execs who made this business plan have shown a shocking ignorance to M&A basics that wouldn't survive any b-school class immediately...and of course these viewers had the most money to spend!
Actually, the real reason this is happening has to do primarily with maximizing advertising dollars, and maybe secondarily to keep people from changing the channel. This tactic trips up DVRs mostly since they are robots who make the general assumption that programs will start and stop at normal times.
A friend of mine at ABC put it like this: Desperate Housewives is a very popular show and can command higher ad revenues that Boston Legal, the show that follows it. So if DH is extended one additional minute into the next time slot, that's one additional minute of ad revenue that ABC can sell for a popular show, versus a lesser popular show. You do this enough, and this ads up to real money over an entire season.
This potential case has already been decided in U.S. case law.
The case that recently decided this issue on the federal level was SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co. It's the case where the estate of Margaret Mitchell, the author of "Gone With The Wind" went after Alice Randall, author of "The Wind Done Gone" for copyright infringement. The case claimed that it was illegal for Alice Randall to take the story and characters of Gone With The Wind, put it in a blender and use them to make a new story that made a social and political statement.
The SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co. case was first affirmed for the plantiff but was overturned on appeal. The issues of that case aren't any different from this potential case. Can parody be defined as making a political satire or statement? Is it legal to take an entire previous work and use the characters and places and story line to make your own case for such parody?
The reason I know about all of this is because it is very personal to me. Alice Randall is my sister-in-law. And in the end, the plantiff not only lost the case, but decided to contribute to charities dear to the defendant.
You can read the case yourself. But if I were the holders of the Woody Guthrie copyright, I would read this case carefully and choose not to file. Because I guarentee that the defense will be using this case as the cornerstone of their argument.
Comcast needs much more than a semi-friendly offer. They need a game plan. Here's an unsolicited one for their unsolicitited bid.
1. Retain the Walt Disney Company name after merger. Regardless of egos, the Disney name is one of the best known brand names worldwide. Comcast is only known in North America, and not terribly fondly by many of its customers. Also, it will help employee morale, especially in the old-Disney side. People like to say "I work for Disney". Nobody likes to say "I work for a cable company".
2. Increase the offer and make it at least partially cash. Disney is undervalued right now and Comcast will need to bring more to the table. Given some of the awful all equity/debt deals of recent past (AOL-TW anyone?), investors are going to want some money in their pocket. Stock prices come and go...but cold hard cash is more palitable, especially to institutional inventors.
3. Figure out a way to decrease the overall debt without letting go core assets. With Disney debt, the new Disney-Comcast will have a over $25 billion in debt. Time Warner is dealing with their debt problem now, which was also one of the bad parts of their deal. Be prepared to sell things like the sports teams, publishing firms or other things to get the debt down. Most core Disney assests should stay together, although things like ABC television could be considered for divestiture.
4. Invite the Disney family back to the board. Getting their support will be key to help put pressure on Eisner and the current board to take the deal. There is a lot of Disney shares tied up in current and retired employee hands. Roy Disney is still popular and still is Disney's largest shareholder. He can sway a lot of people to vote in your favor. And put him back in charge of feature animation where he belongs.
5. Get Pixar to commit to reopen negotiations once the merger goes through. Steve Jobs may be willing to talk to new management since he can't stand the old one. This will tell the street that new management is serious about putting Disney's critical partnerships back in the right direction.
6. Clarify the relationship that Microsoft will have with the new company for the sake of regulators. Microsoft will likely be the new largest shareholder in the merged company according to reports. Since nobody trusts Microsoft anyway, this could leave a bad feeling in people's mouths when they decide their vote.
My company provides key enterprise software to IBM. We've been told this is for real.
Moving IBM to a completely different system is a monumental task, but it's been done before when IBM abandonned OS/2 internally and more recently, Token Ring for networking.
IBM will stick to a well planned process in order to make it work. That's what IBM has done for decades. They will port internal apps to Linux and I'm sure that many of these were already in the works. They will convince vendors to support their Linux initiative. Windows desktops will still linger in some places, but IBM really wants to stop writing Microsoft the check they have to pay every year for software and support. That is the real goal.
I'm actually surprised that Apple chose to use benchmarks like this to make their point. Oh sure, a new class of processor is always going to have these kinds of benchmarks in their specs. But who runs benchmarks in the real world to get anything meaningful done (unless you are Tom's Hardware)?
The benchmarks that really matter is what Apple has been doing for years: real applications doing real things with real OSes and all the fixin's. Nobody cares if a Mac can run an Excel spreadsheet recalc quickly. But for Apple's key professional markets (Publishing/Imaging, Audio/Video, Scientific), the new hardware is a dream come true.
Second, nobody's mentioned anything about the hardware itself. It looks like Apple has borrowed a page from a tweaker's ideal setup. An aluminum case configured for maximum cooling (9 fans!)...A 1 GHz (!) FSB, PCI-X, point-to-point hypertransport (people forget that Apple is also a chipset maker, unlike virtually everyone else), Serial ATA, Firewire 400/800, USB 2.0, optical audio in/out, etc...all great stuff.
If you read the SCOSource Q&A document from their site, it explains when SCOSource was created in the first place (January 22nd, 2003) and why ("As a publicly held corporation we have an obligation to our stakeholders - our investors, customers, resellers, developers and our employees - to manage these important assets responsibly and to derive value from them.")
Read further and it gets interesting. Quote:
Is SCO going to sue Linux vendors?
SCO is a Linux vendor and a member of United Linux. We have no interest in suing Linux vendors. While we haven't formulated the details of our new SCOsource effort, we're confident that we can work together with other vendors to clear up IP issues in a fair and amicable way.
Two weeks ago an industry publication headlined a story saying SCO was threatening to sue Linux vendors.
The story was wrong. SCOsource is now one day old. We haven't made any plans to sue Linux vendors, and we certainly haven't threatened any vendors. This story was damaging to the Linux community and made assumptions that were incorrect.
Unquote. So much for not threatening any vendors. They claim to have been in discussions with IBM, but IBM probably recognized a shakedown early and promptly laughed at them. I'm sure that they recognized the threats of a dying enterprise with few cards to play.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote the "flaming bag of poo" comment earlier. Everything you said is spot on. One thing about the iPhone that I suspect will be there is a copy of the Preview app that is on the Mac. It's Apple's own PDF viewer, which is standard. It'll open most PDF documents out there and its fast. It also opens most photo files too. Since the iPhone is built on OS X, I can't imagine a version of Preview would be that hard to include with the phone.
As for Office Document Reader, who knows? it's certainly possible but I wouldn't mind an iPhone version of iWork (Pages, Keynote, etc).
I own an HTC phone, specifically the Cingular 8125 from last year. The new Touch replaces it and the 8525 model that came after the 8125. The 8125 is a Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC device. Having used this thing for several months, I'm confident in proclaiming my phone as a flaming bag of poo. The design is terrible...the dial buttons are too easy to push and if the phone is unlocked, it's real easy for the phone to dial people by itself while its in your hip holster. And I've had phone calls cut off if the hang-up button is accidentally pressed while in the hip holster. The Windows interface is a poor paradigm for handheld computing...devices like this were not made for pull down menus. It crashes...a lot. Pocket Internet Explorer is a complete waste of time....buggy and almost unusable. The only two things my phone is good for is push mail (where my company wrote a specific client) and my Slingbox client. I'd be really pissed if I had to pay full price for this thing (thank you steep company discount).
Slingbox for Mac went 1.0 a few weeks ago I think. I'm not sure why it's just making Slashdot now.
That being said, Slingbox Mac is working very well for me, paralleling the performance of the PC version (I have the Slingbox Pro with HD adapter). The only thing I haven't seen the Mac version do is a "half screen size" mode which the PC version does. Otherwise the feature set seems identical.
My post is an affront to free expression? Oh please, get a life! You have no clue as to what free expression means. First of all, free expression in the United States is wider and deeper thsn virtually every country on earth. But it's not without limits. You can't yell "fire!" in a crowded theater where none exists. You can't libel someone maliciously without opening yourself to civil penalty. You can skewer someone by parody as this is expressly protected speech....but that is not what occured here.
The real conversation I was trying to comment on is the difference between traditional journalism and wiki-style reporting. Journalism has 200+ years of experience and isn't perfect but generally works and is self-correcting when things go wrong. If things do go wrong, corrections are explictly printed, reputations can be damaged and sometimes people get fired. In wiki reporting, the whole openess of the editing process is suppose to regulate the system. The problem is that while it may work in theory, there is no accountability when someone anonymously prints something clearly libelous against a private party. Yeah the article may get revised eventually, but someone can do a hachet job on someone and have thousands of people read it and believe it weeks or months before it's corrected.
You say it's up to Mr. Seigenthaler to correct any misstatements? What if he or anyone else isn't online and doesn't choose to be? What then? I don't read the NY Post, but if someone tells me that I've been libeled by them, I can call them and complain, and they have the responsibility to act. If you're injured on Wikipedia, why is it my responsibility to set things right when someone injures me? And what if the same unknown person does it again? I have to keep tracking my Wiki bio to make sure it's correct? You're serious, right? Most of us have lives and better things to do.
And calling John Seigenthaler Sr. irresponsible for taking to the media and making his point shows how out of touch you really are. He has a beef and is making a criticism in a standard forum. Internet and open-source resources are not above scrutiny and review like anything else. Wikipedia ain't perfect and to criticize him for saying otherwise shows that's he's forgotten more about journalism than you will ever know.
BTW, just because you never heard of him until now doesn't mean he's a nobody. Any news editor in this country and most journalists and journalism students know who he is, not to mention thousands of people here in Nashville. Again, you're the shortsided idiot for brushing off his reputation in this business.
Bottom line....you're the thin-skinned, classless cretin, not him.
Flame off.
I doubt most of you have ever met Mr. Seigenthaler but I have. He's personal friends with my brother and his wife and I've met him socially on a few occasions. He's a completely gentile man who is one of the most respective citizens in Nashville, regardless if you agree or not with his politics.
Seigenthaler has worked his entire career at the pinnacle of traditional journalism, both in Nashville as the longtime editor-in-chief of the Tennessean newspaper and editorial page director for USA Today for nearly a decade. He was brought back to USA Today in the past year to investigate allegations of reporters fabricating events in stories (which he proved). His Freedom Forum project is also highly respected for the work it does. And his son is someone most of us have seen on TV as the weekend anchor for NBC Nightly News and he regularly fills in for Brian Williams during the week.
So you can imagine someone of his journalistic credentials is smeared not only in Wikipedia but also in two other places, he's likely not going to take that lying down. Especially when he was a close personal friend of the guy the "article" implies he had a hand in murdering. I'd be pissed too. And whoever did this hatchet job certainly underestimates the resources that he has at his disposal to find out who did this. Libel is not protected by the First Amendment, period. Reading back the text of the First Amendment ignores 200+ years of constitutional case law on this subject. I've seen responses to this Slashdot article that say "well, it's Wikipedia...he should just edit it himself" or "well, you can't prove libel for things that might be in dispute". Horsehockey.
First, he wasn't participating in the Wikipedia process and doesn't feel he should intervene to set the record straight because if there was a real editing process, it likely would have never seen the light of day. Virtually ever single newspaper and newsroom in the country would do a fact check before publishing a bio on him. Wikipedia as a concept has proven to be interesting and very useful and is an interesting read on many topics. But its Achilles' Heel is that fact that anyone can edit an article anonymously and that makes it susceptible to libelous edits like this. Journalism is just about good editing as well as reporting and research. Wikipedia has a few editorial controls but a lot of junk can get in and stay there before anyone notices the fraud.
In the end, I think the whole brouhaha will be good for Wikipedia in general because it will cause the project to pay closer attention to some of these edits. The anonymous nature of the reporting process will undoubtedly come under close scrutiny. The fact that the online community is talking about journalism and wiki in the 21st century is a good thing. And maybe Mr. Seigenthaler will actually be able to confront his accuser in a court of law.
Well at the rate of product announcements from Cupertino, how about next week at this time? ;-)
This is puzzling. Why not go with the Mobility 9800 if you're doing a refresh? Yeah, the Mobility X800 would have required a PCI Express bus, but that's doable too, especially with the Powermacs that were just introduced. Somehow I have a feeling that these PowerMacs won't be around for long and that whenever Apple introduces Intel Macs, these will be some of the first to go. At that point, I expect better buses and video cards. Changing the screen and DVD drive was probably easy and cheap...no motherboard change required. The tower PowerMacs on the other hand will be the last models to go to Intel. Either that or Intel and PowerPC models will be available together for a little while. Mac professionals are loathe to change their hardware towers for any kind of significant technology paradigm shift, and it doesn't get more significant than this. If anyone remembers in the old days, there was actually a run on 68K Mac II sales before PowerPC debuted, and again on Nubus machines when the Nubus->PCI transition happened.
OK, they have a 9-12 months to performance tune before an OS X/Intel of any kind gets released. What other excuse do you have?
I've been saying since the announcement that if Apple does anything with Dell, they might try offering OS X Server on Dell Xeon servers way before they do desktops (if ever). Apple has a nice, but limited server strategy. Dell sells all sorts of servers of all sizes and price points except the big 32 processor boxes that Unisys makes.
Apple could offer OS X Server to Dell server customers at a price point below Windows but still get lucrative maintenance and service agreements. OS X customers will get a choice of server hardware outside of the Xserves. Since Xserves aren't for everyone and many companies have existing hardware contracts with Dell, the procument process could be a lot easier for them going through Dell.
Food for thought...
First, the idea of Microsoft complaining about locked in proprietary DRM and hardware is hilarious enough as it is. But seriously, how would Microsoft arrange a deal where they could magically provide users of their service all the songs they've purchased from another service? First, the copyright holders would want to be paid...again. Second, who has those records? I'm sure that ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and all the major labels all have royalty data from Apple, but I doubt seriously it's broken down by user. And I'm sure that Apple would have something to say about it even if they tried. I'm sure that Apple was smart enough to stipulate that the royalty data would not be shared with any other party.
The "excuse" that they are investigating stock issued for compensation is not a lame excuse. Given the turmoil going on at Canopy right now, William Mustard is trying to make sense of the largess of equity compensation that was given out at Canopy and its daughter-companies. SCO is probably a particular target for Mustard's investigations since he has to oust Yarro from its board on orders from the Noordas, and then investigate all of the stock and options deals these guys have been doing. Heck, they were even issuing equity to their lawyers, a highly unusual move.
It's probably very complicated and I imagine that they are racing to do as much forensic accounting as possible to realize what's truly going on before filing the 10-K and making other appropiate financial and personnel decisions.
I do expect that the 10-K will get filed soon before they get delisted, but the other shoe is about to drop at SCO. Hang on to your butts....
After reading Dan's blog, a few things come to mind...
First, producing and working in live television is hard. Most TV shows manage entropy and mistakes in retakes and edits. Live TV has to work every time, and in the case of TSS, every day. To complicate things further, they had to manage (at least back then) a live audience and viewer call-ins during the show. This is very difficult to manage and still get an informative and entertaining segments while still hitting your time checks for commercials. So I have a lot of respect for people who can do it well and keep the show entertaining. The old TSS was pretty good at this.
I'm not surprised not upset that TSS used to use caller emails to choose and screen people for the show. This is actually a regular practice in the business....take NPRs Car Talk. In order to call in for that show, you first leave a message on an answering machine earlier in the week introducing yourself and describing your problem. The show's producers choose 9-10 interesting ones with people who seem like they sound good on radio and call them back asking them to be available for the show's taping (they get up to 1000 calls a week). Not only does this ensure a smoother, more entertaining show, but it allows the show to do some research on the issue before airtime. That way Tom and Ray can have some ideas on what to say with specific details about the car in question without having to "um" and "ah" their way through the conversation. Since their show isn't live, the show can easily be edited for time. All this is akin to what TSS used to do under Dan's stewardship and ok to do (although professionals like Leo don't like even doing that since he appreciates the challenge of coming up with advice on the fly).
What's not okay is start staging all this with preselected questions and bringing in people to ask them. Hell, you might have just started hiring actors since that's what it would have eventually come to...you would have ran out of family and friends to use. And despite what the producer thinks, viewers can smell that kind of fraud a mile away. Part of the "charm" of live call-ins is dealing with people who don't work in TV or radio every day. The good on-air talent can guide them to the question (if they ramble) and can get them to the point, answer their question and move on. Most talk radio hosts have to master this skill and people like Leo do this very well. Going to staged calls means that you're cheating and don't want to do the additional work your job requires.
Which of course is just a reminder of the sad state of affairs of the ship that is G4TechTV and TSS in particular. This whole fiasco is a classic business school case of what can and often goes wrong in a merger or buyout. Usually one side of the equation "wins" and the other side is eventually reduced or marginalized. G4 wanted TechTV's viewer assets and network access..nothing more. They made token attempts to keep certain shows alive, but clearly this was secondary in their overall strategy. Their mistake was even thinking that most of the old TechTV viewers would stick around with the programming changes. After all, you don't want to chase away viewers that advertisers are paying for. But advertisers aren't stupid and smelled this business plan a mile away. All advertisers who catered to people who were over the age of 25 bolted for the door immediately. The network execs who made this business plan have shown a shocking ignorance to M&A basics that wouldn't survive any b-school class immediately...and of course these viewers had the most money to spend!
Actually, the real reason this is happening has to do primarily with maximizing advertising dollars, and maybe secondarily to keep people from changing the channel. This tactic trips up DVRs mostly since they are robots who make the general assumption that programs will start and stop at normal times. A friend of mine at ABC put it like this: Desperate Housewives is a very popular show and can command higher ad revenues that Boston Legal, the show that follows it. So if DH is extended one additional minute into the next time slot, that's one additional minute of ad revenue that ABC can sell for a popular show, versus a lesser popular show. You do this enough, and this ads up to real money over an entire season.
Mitsubishi HD rear projection televisions have already had this feature for over a year. I should know...I own one. Move on, nothing to see here....
This potential case has already been decided in U.S. case law.
5 31 01petrhr.pdf
The case that recently decided this issue on the federal level was SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co. It's the case where the estate of Margaret Mitchell, the author of "Gone With The Wind" went after Alice Randall, author of "The Wind Done Gone" for copyright infringement. The case claimed that it was illegal for Alice Randall to take the story and characters of Gone With The Wind, put it in a blender and use them to make a new story that made a social and political statement.
The SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co. case was first affirmed for the plantiff but was overturned on appeal. The issues of that case aren't any different from this potential case. Can parody be defined as making a political satire or statement? Is it legal to take an entire previous work and use the characters and places and story line to make your own case for such parody?
The reason I know about all of this is because it is very personal to me. Alice Randall is my sister-in-law. And in the end, the plantiff not only lost the case, but decided to contribute to charities dear to the defendant.
You can read the case yourself. But if I were the holders of the Woody Guthrie copyright, I would read this case carefully and choose not to file. Because I guarentee that the defense will be using this case as the cornerstone of their argument.
http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/suntrust/wdg
Comcast needs much more than a semi-friendly offer. They need a game plan. Here's an unsolicited one for their unsolicitited bid.
1. Retain the Walt Disney Company name after merger. Regardless of egos, the Disney name is one of the best known brand names worldwide. Comcast is only known in North America, and not terribly fondly by many of its customers. Also, it will help employee morale, especially in the old-Disney side. People like to say "I work for Disney". Nobody likes to say "I work for a cable company".
2. Increase the offer and make it at least partially cash. Disney is undervalued right now and Comcast will need to bring more to the table. Given some of the awful all equity/debt deals of recent past (AOL-TW anyone?), investors are going to want some money in their pocket. Stock prices come and go...but cold hard cash is more palitable, especially to institutional inventors.
3. Figure out a way to decrease the overall debt without letting go core assets. With Disney debt, the new Disney-Comcast will have a over $25 billion in debt. Time Warner is dealing with their debt problem now, which was also one of the bad parts of their deal. Be prepared to sell things like the sports teams, publishing firms or other things to get the debt down. Most core Disney assests should stay together, although things like ABC television could be considered for divestiture.
4. Invite the Disney family back to the board. Getting their support will be key to help put pressure on Eisner and the current board to take the deal. There is a lot of Disney shares tied up in current and retired employee hands. Roy Disney is still popular and still is Disney's largest shareholder. He can sway a lot of people to vote in your favor. And put him back in charge of feature animation where he belongs.
5. Get Pixar to commit to reopen negotiations once the merger goes through. Steve Jobs may be willing to talk to new management since he can't stand the old one. This will tell the street that new management is serious about putting Disney's critical partnerships back in the right direction.
6. Clarify the relationship that Microsoft will have with the new company for the sake of regulators. Microsoft will likely be the new largest shareholder in the merged company according to reports. Since nobody trusts Microsoft anyway, this could leave a bad feeling in people's mouths when they decide their vote.
NOT funny! Sheeesh....
My company provides key enterprise software to IBM. We've been told this is for real.
Moving IBM to a completely different system is a monumental task, but it's been done before when IBM abandonned OS/2 internally and more recently, Token Ring for networking.
IBM will stick to a well planned process in order to make it work. That's what IBM has done for decades. They will port internal apps to Linux and I'm sure that many of these were already in the works. They will convince vendors to support their Linux initiative. Windows desktops will still linger in some places, but IBM really wants to stop writing Microsoft the check they have to pay every year for software and support. That is the real goal.
I'm actually surprised that Apple chose to use benchmarks like this to make their point. Oh sure, a new class of processor is always going to have these kinds of benchmarks in their specs. But who runs benchmarks in the real world to get anything meaningful done (unless you are Tom's Hardware)? The benchmarks that really matter is what Apple has been doing for years: real applications doing real things with real OSes and all the fixin's. Nobody cares if a Mac can run an Excel spreadsheet recalc quickly. But for Apple's key professional markets (Publishing/Imaging, Audio/Video, Scientific), the new hardware is a dream come true. Second, nobody's mentioned anything about the hardware itself. It looks like Apple has borrowed a page from a tweaker's ideal setup. An aluminum case configured for maximum cooling (9 fans!)...A 1 GHz (!) FSB, PCI-X, point-to-point hypertransport (people forget that Apple is also a chipset maker, unlike virtually everyone else), Serial ATA, Firewire 400/800, USB 2.0, optical audio in/out, etc...all great stuff.
I second the nomination of Darl McBride caricatured as Dr. Evil. If Bill Gates can be the Borg, then...
If you read the SCOSource Q&A document from their site, it explains when SCOSource was created in the first place (January 22nd, 2003) and why ("As a publicly held corporation we have an obligation to our stakeholders - our investors, customers, resellers, developers and our employees - to manage these important assets responsibly and to derive value from them.")
Read further and it gets interesting. Quote:
Is SCO going to sue Linux vendors?
SCO is a Linux vendor and a member of United Linux. We have no interest in suing Linux vendors. While we haven't formulated the details of our new SCOsource effort, we're confident that we can work together with other vendors to clear up IP issues in a fair and amicable way.
Two weeks ago an industry publication headlined a story saying SCO was threatening to sue Linux vendors.
The story was wrong. SCOsource is now one day old. We haven't made any plans to sue Linux vendors, and we certainly haven't threatened any vendors. This story was damaging to the Linux community and made assumptions that were incorrect.
Unquote. So much for not threatening any vendors. They claim to have been in discussions with IBM, but IBM probably recognized a shakedown early and promptly laughed at them. I'm sure that they recognized the threats of a dying enterprise with few cards to play.