(empo-plaaybizz) Another "fight club" games post

I'm not a movie person or anything - I defer to Jandy Stone on all things cinematic - but I know enough to cause trouble, as I have already demonstrated via my August 17 post with a tangential reference to the "minimal rules" idea from "Fight Club." In that post, I talked about the rule-light game "Sleep is Death."

But let's take a look at another game, Foursquare, which has an established set of rules.

Or does it?

If you're a Foursquare user, take a moment and think to yourself exactly what the rules of Foursquare are.

Take a moment. I'll wait.



OK, now read this description from an About Foursquare post.

If you’ve spent much time on foursquare at all, you’ve no doubt noticed that some users play the game a little, well, differently than everyone else. You’ve probably also noticed the vast majority of those users are from Indonesia.

Judging by their foursquare histories, they appear to trot all over the globe, unlocking a badge in Los Angeles one minute and another in London the next. Without some sort of teleportation device, it would be impossible to travel as quickly as they do. Yet, with some digital trickery, they’re able to unlock new badges within minutes of them first becoming active.

This has inspired a lot of "cheater" accusations, as evidenced in this thread. In response to a request that the mobile Foursquare website be banned (in other words, requiring you to use a GPS-enabled smartphone to use Foursquare), one person replied:

Some ppl don't have bb's or iPhones (like me) & need the mobile website. But I still agree with you that the cheating needs to be curbed. WHY CHEAT? It's stupid & immature & it's not like 4sq gives you actual prizes & stuff for badges. It's suppose to be fun.

But About Foursquare claims that's exactly what the Indonesians are doing - having fun.

So what if a user has unlocked almost every badge without leaving their couch in Indonesia? Someone who looks at the game a different way doesn’t affect the way I play the game at all....

In conversations with some of these “cheaters,” (who will not be named) it’s become clear to me that they simply view foursquare differently than most Americans. To them, the badges are a puzzle to solve, similar to a crossword or jigsaw puzzle. In many ways the cryptic clues given by foursquare do make badges difficult to solve.

They tell me their fascination began because mayorships soon became boring and there were few badges that were naturally unlockable in Indonesia, so they thought it would be fun to try unlocking some of the badges that were tied to US venues.

When considering whether Foursquare should ban the Indonesians, or ban the dumb-phone people like me, or ban people who use their smartphones to check into nearby sites that they don't actually visit, we need to keep one thing in mind. The people who are checking into Foursquare locations are NOT Foursquare's customers.

Let me repeat that (I've been listening to too much Jim Rome, I guess) - Foursquare's customer base is NOT the people using their iPhones or Android Phones or netbooks to check into Foursquare locations.

Foursquare's customer base is the locations themselves. And are the locations harmed by Indonesian visitors? According to About Foursquare, they are not:

For businesses who sponsor the badges, there’s no harm in having more users unlock them, if anything the branding value increases as those badges get posted to Twitter and Facebook, whether they were unlocked honestly or not.

Now there is a scenario in which the so-called cheaters could have an effect on the so-called honest players. Let's say that I'm trying to earn a mayorship at the northwest Ontario, California Starbucks. Now let's say that, instead of the mayorship being held by an employee of a nearby business, it's instead held by someone in Jakarta. Now obviously the person in Jakarta is never going to come to Mountain and 6th to claim any prize - but at the same time, I am denied the prize.

Think through this. If I want to earn whatever prize that Starbucks has to offer, then I have to check in more times than the person in Jakarta.

Remembering that the Starbucks, and not the Foursquare player, is Foursquare's customer, this sounds like a win-win for Foursquare, no?

Is the renaming of high fructose corn syrup REALLY designed to eliminate confusion?

I've previously written about high fructose corn syrup, but there's a new story...um...brewing about it. After reading this FriendFeed share by William Harryman, I decided to visit the Corn Refiners Association website to get their side of the story. While there, I found this press release:

CORN REFINERS PETITION FDA FOR USE OF “CORN SUGAR” AS ALTERNATE NAME FOR HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP
ELIMINATING CONSUMER CONFUSION IS THE GOAL

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
September 14, 2010

CONTACT: David Knowles
202-331-1634
dknowles@corn.org

Fact Sheet | Press Release | Commercials | CornSugar.com

Washington, DC – In an effort to help clarify the labeling of food products for consumers, the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) today petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow manufacturers the option of using ‘corn sugar’ as an alternative name for high fructose corn syrup.

“Consumers need to know what is in their foods and where their foods come from and we want to be clear with them,” said CRA president Audrae Erickson. “The term ‘corn sugar’ succinctly and accurately describes what this natural ingredient is and where it comes from – corn.”

Contrary to widespread consumer belief, high fructose corn syrup – a safe and affordable natural sweetener found in many popular products on grocery shelves – is not high in fructose when compared with other commonly used nutritive sweeteners, including table sugar, honey and fruit juice concentrates. Like table sugar, it is roughly half glucose and half fructose and is metabolized by the body in the same way as regular table sugar. In fact, the high fructose corn syrup that is used in many foods, such as baked goods, is lower in fructose than table sugar.

But independent research demonstrates that the current labeling is confusing to American consumers.

For example, independent research indicated that despite the fact that high fructose corn syrup and table sugar contain approximately the same amount of fructose, nearly 58 percent of respondents believed high fructose corn syrup has more fructose than other table sugar.

Corn sugar – or high fructose corn syrup – has been used for more than 40 years to enhance flavors in foods and beverages and maintain freshness.

A continuing series of inexact scientific reports and inaccurate media accounts about high fructose corn syrup and matters of health and nutrition have also increased consumer uncertainty.

Yet, the facts are straightforward. For example, in a December 2008 report, the American Dietetic Association confirmed that high fructose corn syrup is “nutritionally equivalent to sucrose (table sugar)” and that the sweeteners contain the same number of calories per gram. The ADA found that “once absorbed into the bloodstream, the two sweeteners are indistinguishable.”

As Americans grapple with an “obesity epidemic,” well-renowned nutritionists question whether sweetener confusion could lead consumers to make misinformed decisions about sugars in their diets.

“The last thing we want is for Americans to think that avoiding high fructose corn syrup is the answer,” said Registered Dietitian Carolyn O’Neil. “All added sugars should be consumed in moderation – corn sugar, table sugar, honey and fruit juice concentrates. These sugars contain an equal number of calories that must be burned off– or the body will convert them to fat.”

“We hope that the FDA will act positively on our petition in the interest of consumer clarity,” said Erickson.

###

The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) is the national trade association representing the corn refining (wet milling) industry of the United States. CRA and its predecessors have served this important segment of American agribusiness since 1931. Corn refiners manufacture sweeteners, ethanol, starch, bioproducts, corn oil, and feed products from corn components such as starch, oil, protein and fiber.

I love the press release, and especially the fact that it merely states that the manufacturers want the option of using an alternative name.

Well, I don't use the phrase "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim," and I don't use the phrase "LA/Ontario International Airport." And I'm not planning on using the phrase "corn sugar."

Privacy issues that Mark Zuckerberg would never dream about

A lot of people in the tech world speak of privacy in terms of what Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or your friendly neighborhood Internet Service Provider could potentially do to you. However, in most cases, the people at Facebook et al aren't armed and don't have jail cells that they can use to detain you.

Let's insert the necessary disclosure - I work for a company that supplies equipment and software to law enforcement agencies. Now that I've clarified this, I'll present (without comment) another type of privacy issue that has been getting play for the past few months.

What information are you required to provide when you cross an international border?

More to the point - what information are you required to provide when you cross an international border into your own country?

Now answers to the latter question vary widely, and include some responses such as "If you don't have anything to hide, then why not respond?" or "It's best to be as cooperative as possible with the law enforcement personnel."

Paul Karl Lukacs has a different view. Back on April 24, he wrote a post that began as follows:

I was detained last night by federal authorities at San Francisco International Airport for refusing to answer questions about why I had travelled outside the United States.

The end result is that, after waiting for about half an hour and refusing to answer further questions, I was released – because U.S. citizens who have produced proof of citizenship and a written customs declaration are not obligated to answer questions.

After refusing to answer questions such as "Why were you in China?", Lukacs was subject to secondary questioning before being released. You can read the full story here.

This post received a lot of attention from Boing Boing, the Consumerist, and other sources, which led Lukacs to write a follow-up post in which he explained his rationale. In addition to citing various sources which justified a U.S. citizen's right to re-enter the United States, Lukacs cited some practical reasons for refusing to answer questions.

CBP officers are law enforcement (pictured), who can detain you, arrest you and testify against you in criminal court. You place yourself in jeopardy every time you speak to them about anything....

If a federal officer claims you lied to him, you can be arrested and charged with the crime of making false statements. You do not have to make the statements under oath (which would be the different charge of perjury).

This statute – which is referred to as Section 1001...is the reason why Martha Stewart has a Bureau of Prisons number.

Lukacs then poses the question: "What about telling the truth?"

If, in the course of your conversation, you mis-remember something or speak inarticulately, you can now be arrested. Innocent mistake? Prove it in court after being jailed, charged, tried and paying for a lawyer.

I'll stop there, and (as previously noted) without further comment.

But let's carry this back to the tech world, where people can't detain you, but they can sell any information that you give them. What would a Lukacs-like view of the world mean when you were signing up for the latest and greatest service...or connecting to the latest and greatest service via an existing service?

Even Apple won't sue over this one

I've been reading Clients from Hell for the past few weeks, and ran across this good one about a mockup design layout. The Clients from Hell entry reads, in part:

Client: “....I’ve seen this text in Apple’s word processor, are you copying Apple?”

Me: “It’s Lorem Ipsum, standard dummy text used in mockups.”

Of course, you can be sure that some lawyer somewhere is going to unearth the "Lorem Ipsum" patent and sue EVERYBODY.

The Curious Urinal Explains Why Pia Beathe Pedersen REALLY Quit

After recounting the story of Pia Beathe Pederson's dramatic on-air radio resignation, the Curious Urinal provides information not available from any other source (in other words, T.C.U. made it up):

Pia Beathe Pedersen accused her employers at the radio station of putting too much pressure on the staff. She went on, saying, "I mean, seriously, the station plays too damn much Justin Bieber! No one can stand that kind of pressure!"

A dissenting view on Microsoft's playfulness - dare I say double standard?

As I previously noted, both Steven Hodson and I have written posts which discussed, in part, the celebration of the Microsoft employees who released the new version of Windows Mobile. A fun little story, right? Not the prevailing view elsewhere.

Jeff LaMarche, after stating that he hopes that this new version of Windows Mobile will succeed, explains why he was bothered by the goings-on.

Who throws a victory party before the race has even started? Hell, who even throws themselves a parade??

LaMarche links to a Wil Shipley tweet:

I’m all for Microsoft’s people celebrating successes! Throwing *yourself* a parade is just gauche, tho. And reeks of corporate.

I just have to wonder. If Microsoft is being criticized about holding a big celebration surrounding a product release, does this same "hold your nose" attitude apply to other companies? Subsitute words like "Zune" into this description and see if you gag - whoops, I mean, go gaga.

9:34 am: John, Kara and Adam are here waiting for the doors to open at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the start of the event.

9:54 am: Packed house today as these events often are. Seated in the theater, we’re treated to another variation on the Jobsian playlist: The Beatles, Clapton, etc.

9:58 am: A first “take your seats” warning. There’s a piano stage right, presumably for today’s musical guest. Long shot speculation in the audience that it may be Lady Gaga who was reportedly spotted on the Apple campus about 2 weeks ago.

10:00 am: Jobs takes the stage at 10 AM sharp to enthusiastic applause.

Remember how holding a parade for yourself is undignified? How about parading between all of your stores?

10:01 am: And with that, we’re off. First a quick retail update. Jobs discusses Apple’s new stores in Paris and China, notes that the latter with its massive glass cylinder is a monument to glass engineering.

10:03 am: On to London. Another slick store in Covent Garden, Apple’s 300th. Jobs notes that Apple now has stores in 10 countries and will soon add an 11th — Spain. “We’re seeing 1 million visitors to our stores on some days, several days a month.”

And while people in Washington are doing dance moves, people in California are talking about - themselves:


Apple Unveils New iPods, iTunes Social Network, Video Rentals

by John Paczkowski
Posted on September 1, 2010 at 9:28 AM PT

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Steve Jobs held court this morning at Apple’s traditional September music event, unveiling goodies like a refreshed lineup of iPods; Ping, a new social network built into iTunes 10; and an updated Apple TV, with support for TV and movie rentals. Also announced was iOS 4.1, with a multiplayer Game Center, High Dynamic Range photos and HD video uploads over Wi-Fi.

The complete liveblog coverage:

9:34 am: John, Kara and Adam are here waiting for the doors to open at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the start of the event.

9:54 am: Packed house today as these events often are. Seated in the theater, we’re treated to another variation on the Jobsian playlist: The Beatles, Clapton, etc.

9:58 am: A first “take your seats” warning. There’s a piano stage right, presumably for today’s musical guest. Long shot speculation in the audience that it may be Lady Gaga who was reportedly spotted on the Apple campus about 2 weeks ago.

10:00 am: Jobs takes the stage at 10 AM sharp to enthusiastic applause.

10:00 am: Job recognizes his “partner in crime” who’s in the audience today: Steve Wozniak.

10:01 am: And with that, we’re off. First a quick retail update. Jobs discusses Apple’s new stores in Paris and China, notes that the latter with its massive glass cylinder is a monument to glass engineering.

10:03 am: On to London. Another slick store in Covent Garden, Apple’s 300th. Jobs notes that Apple now has stores in 10 countries and will soon add an 11th — Spain. “We’re seeing 1 million visitors to our stores on some days, several days a month.”

10:04 am: “Our stores are bringing a lot of new users into the Mac family,” says Jobs, noting that about half of Mac purchases are made by first-time Mac buyers.

10:05 am: Moving on now to iOS devices. Apple’s shipped 120 million iOS devices since the first iPhone launched, says Jobs, adding that Apple is activating 230,000 iOS devices a day. “People throw out a lot of numbers about how many devices they’re activating per day,” he says. “We are doing 230,000 activations a day. …We think some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers … and we think we are ahead of everyone — if we were counting upgrades, our number would be WAY higher.”

10:06 am: “200 apps are downloaded from the App Store every second … we’ve got over 250,000 apps in the store and over 25,000 of them are iPad apps,” says Jobs. “Today we’re introducing iOS 4.1.”

And so on, and so on, and so on.

Now let's talk about all of the celebrities that showed up at Microsoft's event to further demean it. Oh, there weren't any. Around 11:10 am, Chris Martin from ColdPlay showed up. OK, I will give Martin points for joking around (or is this demeaning too?).

11:21 am: After a few songs, Martin pauses: “I’m not sure what to do … is Steve around to tell me what to do next …We’re moving on now to Coldplay 2.6 … this one has a lot a features, multiple chords that our competitors aren’t yet aware of …. it’s in the chord of ‘i minor’”

Now I have no problem with Steve Jobs and his friends going on and on about how wonderful Apple is. And I have no problem with Larry Ellison and his friends going on and on about how wonderful Oracle is - well, I have a personal problem with the Psychedelic Furs, but other than that I'm OK.

So what's the harm in Microsoft throwing itself a party?

Bigger fish are harder to acquire, and Hewlett Packard is finding more fish food

Remember my worthless speculation about who, other than Oracle, might want to try to acquire Hewlett Packard?

Well, it's a truism that if you have to avoid getting acquired by a bigger company, then you should get bigger yourself. And guess what HP is doing? The New York Times:

The computer maker Hewlett-Packard said Monday that it would buy ArcSight, a maker of security software, for about $1.5 billion as it continues its recent buying spree....

The ArcSight deal comes only two weeks after H.P. defeated Dell in a heated bidding war for 3Par, a data storage company. H.P. ultimately agreed to pay about $2 billion for 3Par, well above the $1.15 billion Dell initially offered for the company.

More here.

Now perhaps adding a billion here or a couple of billion there won't necessarily make Hewlett Packard harder for someone to acquire, but if HP continues to execute this strategy as much as...oh, as much as Oracle does...then HP increases its chances of staying independent.

Now of course things can go the other way, and a company may choose to make itself smaller - something that my former employer Motorola is in the process of doing right now, and something that one of my current company's competitors may be doing (not that I have anything to contribute on the matter, for obvious reasons - my current employer is a unit of Safran). The business world is filled with these rounds of consolidation and divestment, proceeding in an endless cycle.

Does that mean that Timothy Vernor couldn't BUY AutoCAD either?

As long as we're talking about court cases...

All Points Blog links to a Reuters article about a recent court decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Software manufactured by Autodesk Inc (ADSK.O) cannot be resold on eBay Inc's (EBAY.O) online auction network by a man who bought a copy at a garage sale, a federal appeals court has ruled.

More here, but not much more. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (again), who obviously has views on this matter, provided this summary:

In a triumph of legal formalism over reality, the Court held that the copyright’s first sale doctrine – the law that allows you to resell books and that protects libraries and archives from claims of copyright infringement – doesn’t apply to software (and possibly DVDs, CDs and other “licensed” content) as long as the vendor saddles the transfer with enough restrictions to transform what the buyer may think is sale into a mere license.

And I'm sure that someone has already noted somewhere that even books might not have these protections if you buy them for display on a Kindle or a similar device.

But I'm wondering something. Let's assume that this case makes it all the way up to the Supreme Court and they side with the 9th Circuit, and with Autodesk. Does this give Timothy Vernor the right to find the original garage sale people and sue THEM, arguing that they shouldn't have charged him for AutoCAD because they didn't have the right to sell it?

Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

If you believe some people, Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are complete polar opposites, with one intent on destroying society as we know it and the other protecting us from the threat levied by the first one.

But according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they have one thing in common, at least as far as Facebook is concerned. The EFF links to Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which (as of August 25) included this provision (sub-item 8 under item 4):

You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers, your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.

Now as far as Facebook is concerned, this not only applies to real people (such as a Palin or Obama staffer), but also bots. And as far as Facebook is concerned, that's a violation of Federal law:

But violating a website's terms of use is a big deal, according to Facebook. In fact, Facebook says it's a federal crime.

In Facebook v. Power Ventures, Facebook has sued a service that lets social network users view all their information from various social networking sites on one page. Like the way Sarah Palin's ghostwriter accesses Sarah's account, Power's service uses your password to access your account, with your permission. Facebook claims that this violates its terms of use, and any act that violates its terms of use is a violation of computer intrusion laws such as the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits intentionally accessing certain computers without authorization or in excess of authorization. Violations of this law are punishable by both civil and criminal penalties.

And a Harvard law web site speculates that Facebook may claim that it has to prevent Power Ventures from accessing its data. Why? To protect our privacy.

[U]sers are very concerned about their privacy and Facebook has faced vocal criticism in the past whenever it instituted policies that users felt were threatening (e.g. Facebook Beacon). It would be even more difficult for Facebook to protect its users’ privacy if the data was shared with third-parties.

Quite literally, a tangled web - kinda like when John Fogerty was sued for writing songs that sound like John Fogerty songs.

¿Cómo se dice "vast wasteland" en español?

James Joyner of Outside the Beltway linked to a Tyler Cowen post on education. The post includes the following:

If I think of the Mexican village where I have done field work, the education sector "works" as follows. No one in the village is capable of teaching writing, reading, and arithmetic. A paid outsider is supposed to man the school, but very often that person never appears, even though he continues to be paid. Children do have enough leisure time to take in schooling, when it is available. I am told that most of the teachers are bad, when they do appear. You can get your children (somewhat) educated by leaving the village altogether, and of course some people do this. In the last ten years, satellite television suddenly has become the major educator in the village, helping the villagers learn Spanish (Nahuatl is the indigenous language), history, world affairs, some science from nature shows...

Oh, and they learn one other thing:

...and telenovela customs.

Heaven help us.

Then again, what do U.S. kids learn from Survivor and American Idol?

My personal problem with Twitter's retweets - let's give Dana Franks proper credit for the Pia Beathe Pedersen story

As Twitter aficionados know, Twitter went its own way when it created its official Twitter retweet capability. In essence, if you retweet something, you don't really create something in your own Twitter feed - you effectively link to the item in the originating Twitter feed. While there are certainly pros to this approach, there are also cons.

My Pia Beathe Pedersen post was inspired by a retweet from Dana Franks. However, when I linked to the retweet, I didn't link to an item in Franks' feed, but to an item in the CBS News Twitter feed. All right and fine, since CBS News created the content, but I may not have heard of it if Dana Franks hadn't found it first.

What if someone were to read my post and think to him/herself, "Self, that Dana Franks finds really good stuff! I ought to follow her!"

Well, this esteemed blogger neglected to provide any way to do so.

So if you want to follow Dana Franks on Twitter, her name is @ariedana. Here's her bio:

# Bio A Brit at heart, a Southerner by birth and a Midwesterner by location. Day job is in TV news. Tweets about TV (when I remember) at @danadoestv.

Be sure to visit her Posterous blog, which was where I found the IKEA "herding cats" video that I mentioned in my "play at work" post.

Now I wonder - was Pia Beathe Pedersen an anomaly, or will her willingness to speak out about NRK cause the other temporaries and staffers at NRK to start running around like crazed cats?

Pia Beathe Pedersen - what is Norwegian for "overworked"?

Dana Franks, who works in the broadcasting industry in the United States, retweeted something from CBS News:

Norway Newsreader Quits in Live Radio Broadcast, Refusing to Read Day's News Because "Nothing Important Has Happened"

The link in the tweet went to an Associated Press article (so much for quoting it) about Pia Beathe Pedersen, who worked for Norwegian broadcaster NRK for 18 months until she decided not to read the news during a two-minute news segment, but instead complained about the pressure placed on staff. She resigned, stating that she wanted to be able to "breathe."

Not a lot of detail, and initially the only other article that I could find was from the New York Daily News, who compared her to former JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater.

But then I found something written by Pedersen herself. Let me share an excerpt from a letter that she wrote:

«Etter å ha gått på en lang kronglete sti, i ulendt terreng, i hele mitt yrkesaktive liv, var det en drøm å få slippe inn i NRK som journalist. Etter flere år som gründer var en stor og trygg arbeidsgiver med faste forhold og lønn på konto hver måned rent gull for meg.

Luckily, Google Translate handles Norwegian. Here's how it translated the first paragraph:

"After going on a long winding path, in rugged terrain, in my professional life, it was a dream to be let into the NRK as a journalist. After several years as an entrepreneur was a great and safe employer with a permanent relationship and salary account every month of pure gold to me.

Her initial exuberance was short-lived however (language warning).

There is an unhealthy culture, an attitude to the employees who are sick. And as you might have to come outside to see;

- You should be fucking grateful that you are allowed to work in NRK.

She then says that she could write a book about her experiences - overwork, antiquated systems, noise, lack of information about how NRK is doing. But this one hit home for me:

The leadership that refuses to listen, and removes the cubicles because they have decided that it should be open landscapes.

I know that some techies love the open tables, but I have problems thinking even in cubicles. If I were at an open table, I'd upgrade my headphones to Bose headphones.

And this little tidbit was interesting:

Some job description, I have never seen. I do not know if I've done a good or a bad job, I know not what they expected of me, if I have adhered to the requirements of the undefined set.

If true, this is troubling. As much as some of us ridicule performance reviews, at least you (presumably) get guidelines regarding what your performance standards should be. What if you're being measured and you don't know the measurements?

So Pedersen chose to leave her position, which seemed impressive to outsiders, to resume her time in a "twisting path." But hopefully she'll be happier.

[11 SEP 4:45 PM PDT - ALLOW ME TO GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE. SORRY, DANA.]

Play at work - why people work at Microsoft and IKEA

There are companies, and there are companies.

I have worked at several different firms during my career, ranging from the U.S. Department of the Interior to a small technology company. Even my current company has been in several different configurations - a private firm, a publicly-traded (NASDAQ) firm, a part of Motorola, and a part of Safran.

But even my experiences don't cover the wide range of different companies that are out there...or the different company cultures that are out there.

I would not be able to function in a highly formal and serious firm. There are people that work at such places, love them, and thrive on them, but such a place is not for me. I need barbecues in the parking lot, Halloween costume parties, and the like. But some companies go beyond that.

Steven Hodson alerted me to a little story out of Microsoft headquarters. Microsoft is getting ready to release a new version of its mobile operating system, and the employees wanted to have a little fun. So they staged a funeral procession for the iPhone and the Blackberry. Oh, and they did a little dance.



But tech firms don't have a corner on the whimsy market. Dana Franks alerted me to a "herding cats" episode that took place inside an Ikea store. Yes, 100 cats were let loose inside an Ikea one night. But this was not a prank on Ikea; the company sponsored the danged thing, and released a video of it.



OK, now I'm going to lay down a challenge to any company (Oracle, are you listening?). I want to see 100 cats doing the "Thriller" dance.

Division 2 men's hockey? The Internet's got that.

Last night, I was questioning whether the Internet was big enough.

Yes, I know that the Internet is awfully big, but sometimes I have the expectation that I should be able to find ANYTHING on the Internet.

Hotel in a small town outside of the booming metropolis of Wangen bei Olten, Switzerland? Found it.

Track listing for an album by my former neighbor's former band? Found it.

Information on left-handed smoke shifters? I found a video.

But sports coverage? Forget it.

OK, it wasn't like I was looking for Redskins-Cowboys pre-game coverage. My need was a little more esoteric.

When people think of Boise State, they think of the university's football team. Well, Boise State also has a men's hockey team, and a family friend (Jeremiah Padilla) is on the team. Their first game was Friday night against BYU, so I thought that I'd try to find some online coverage during the game.

Because I have been pre-programmed to do so, I immediately went to ESPN's web site and dug deep until I found its college hockey coverage. However, NCAA hockey does not cover all college hockey, which means that ESPN has no coverage of either Boise State or BYU.

It turns out that these schools are members of the American Collegiate Hockey Association (ACHA), and that the BYU at Boise State game was listed on its website. However, the website did not offer any coverage during the game, and even now (almost 12 hours later) it hasn't posted any game results.

So I turned to Twitter, figuring that someone was sitting at the game and tweeting it. The best thing that I found, however, was a tweet from @SeanParker7 that was ABOUT the Boise State men's hockey team...and that was tweeted on September 3.

Eventually, someone from the team commented on Facebook that they had JUST signed a contract with Fast Hockey. The contract hadn't been signed in time to allow online broadcasting of the games against BYU (the two teams play again tonight), but they hope to broadcast future games.

So, who is Fast Hockey?

FASTHockey (http://www.fasthockey.com) is the premier online destination to see live streaming video of amateur ice hockey games from across North America. The feature rich platform is frequented by scouts, recruiters, coaches, players, parents, and fans from around the world. Hockey fans can not only see live and archived games, but also build robust profiles, research and track teams, get updates on recent scores & news, and monitor college commitments.

Our company operates and evolves in accordance with our core values: Community, Connections, and Content. As the most comprehensive destination on the Web, FASTHockey delivers high value content to a diverse audience. We have revolutionized the way players, coaches, scouts, parents, and fans think about how hockey and technology come together.

Starry-eyed futurists, and even some people who are grounded in reality, may note that services such as Fast Hockey are the future of sports coverage. There are definitely tiers in sports, with the National Football League and National Basketball Association at the very top of the pyramid (in the U.S.), and sports such as cricket and Division 2 men's hockey way, way down toward the bottom. (OK, native American junior high football is lower.) Over-the-air television providers certainly can't provide all of this, and even cable and satellite providers can't provide all of this. Some sports are going to be forced to offer their coverage on the Internet, just because no other outlet is available. And as this happens, some of the premier sports may end up complaining that because of money, their coverage is ONLY available on television and radio.

P.S. As long as we're talking about NCAA and ACHA, this comment, found in a Penn State thread, explains why some teams are in the ACHA and not in the NCAA.

There are three obstacles to becoming a varsity team: 1) an appropriate rink, 2) money, and 3) Title IX.

The current rink does not have the amenities (locker rooms, etc.) and seating to support an NCAA DI team. The money needed is not what you think. With only 18 scholarships (NCAA maximum) their cost is nowhere near $1.5M but the total cost to run a nationally competitive program is substantial. In my opinion a men's team could break even with operating costs if they had a reasonable size area. My basis forthis is that PSU students are from hockey-rich areas (Pittsburgh, Philly, NJ with NHL teams, Harrisburg/Hershey, Wilkes Barre/Scranton, Philly, Johnstown with minor league hockey) and would support an NCAA program. The final item is Title IX, gender equity. This would require Penn State to add a new women's NCAA team. There is no team they could add, including a women's hockey team (it is currently a team sport) that would not lose money. So, the picture is complicated for upgrading hockey.

How does Rackspace define hate speech? And should we be worried?

There are times when we praise companies for doing cool things. But if we take a moment to think about them, we may want to withhold our praise.

I think it's fair to say that as of today, not a lot of people like Terry Jones. Sure, he was great when he played the organ nude on old Monty Python TV clips, but by the time he became a pastor in Gainesville, Florida and decided to burn the Koran, most people decided that he was not so great.

Including Rackspace, their (now former) web site host.

An Internet hosting company based in San Antonio is no longer supporting the website for the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida....

Rackspace spokesman Dan Goodgame says the company acted on a complaint that the church was publishing hate speech on its site.

Read the rest here, including Jones' complaint that his First Amendment rights were being violated. Unfortunately, Jones is misreading the First Amendment, which applies to the government, not private companies. Rackspace is not obligated to host sites that say Islam is of the devil, any more than the Dove World Outreach Center is obligated to publish tracts saying that the Bible kills people.

However, there's another issue here. While any private company is free, within some limits, to set any "terms of use" policy, often those terms of use policies are extraordinarily broad and vague. While it's hard to come up with a precise definition of a term such as "hate speech," it's very easy to categorize just about anything as "hate speech" if you feel like it. As an example, take a look at Rackspace's Acceptable Use Policy (although this issue is NOT confined to Rackspace):

Offensive Content

You may not publish, transmit or store on or via Rackspace's network and equipment any content or links to any content that Rackspace reasonably believes:

* Constitutes, depicts, fosters, promotes or relates in any manner to child pornography, bestiality, or non-consensual sex acts;
* is excessively violent, incites violence, threatens violence, or contains harassing content or hate speech;
* is unfair or deceptive under the consumer protection laws of any jurisdiction, including chain letters and pyramid schemes;
* is defamatory or violates a person's privacy;
* creates a risk to a person's safety or health, creates a risk to public safety or health, compromises national security, or interferes with a investigation by law enforcement;
* improperly exposes trade secrets or other confidential or proprietary information of another person;
* is intended to assist others in defeating technical copyright protections;
* infringes on another person's copyright, trade or service mark, patent, or other property right;
* promotes illegal drugs, violates export control laws, relates to illegal gambling, or illegal arms trafficking;
* is otherwise illegal or solicits conduct that is illegal under laws applicable to you or to Rackspace; or
* is otherwise malicious, fraudulent, or may result in retaliation against Rackspace by offended viewers or recipients, or is intended to harass or threaten.

Content "published or transmitted" via Rackspace's network or equipment includes Web content, email, bulletin board postings, chat, tweets, and any other type of posting or transmission that relies on the Internet.

For the moment, assume a U.S.-based content provider. (Things can get really sticky if you go overseas, as everyone knows.) While some of the provisions are fairly clear, some are murky. Presumably a case can be made that Terry Jones' actions incited violence or included hate speech. But if Terry Jones incited violence, can't an equal claim be made that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. incited violence? Are paparazzi permanently banned from Rackspace because they violate someone's privacy? Are fast food outlets banned from Rackspace because they create a risk to a person's health? Is NORML banned from Rackspace because they support illegal drugs?

If you are going to apply a ban on Terry Jones, then isn't Rackspace morally, if not legally, obligated to deny services to all others who violate its Acceptable Use Policy?

Again, this is not exclusive to Rackspace. Most if not all service providers have similarly vague policies that allow the service to pull the plug on content providers. See Nicole Ferraro's comments on Facebook and Terry Jones; inasmuch as her post is entitled "Facebook: Hoster of Hatred, Again," I think we know where she stands on the issue.

So, what is the solution?

Should San Bruno investigators look to Rancho Cordova? Jerry Hill thinks so.

San Bruno Views shared Assemblyman Jerry Hill's thoughts on the gas explosion in San Bruno, California. (See my previous post.) Hill's statement, which can also be found on Hill's website, includes a link to a National Transportation Safety Board accident report (PDF) concerned a December 24, 2008 explosion in Rancho Cordova, California. While PG&E personnel investigated a report of a leak on the morning of the 24th, the NTSB stated that personnel were improperly trained on the procedures to follow, and that a person died as a result of this. There were also concerns about piping material. The report, written just a few months ago, concluded:

The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the December 24, 2008, release, ignition, and explosion of natural gas in Rancho Cordova, California, was the use of a section of unmarked and out-of-specification polyethylene pipe with inadequate wall thickness that allowed gas to leak from the mechanical coupling installed on September 21, 2006. Contributing to the accident was the 2-hour 47-minute delay in the arrival at the job site of a Pacific Gas and Electric Company crew that was properly trained and equipped to identify and classify outdoor leaks and to begin response activities to ensure the safety of the residents and public.

The whole episode caused Jerry Hill to declare:

“The residents of San Bruno deserve to know if PG&E used the correct procedures in the days and weeks leading up to this disaster,” Hill said. “State and federal investigators need to determine if PG&E personnel had the proper training and equipment and whether or not this disaster could have been prevented.”

Presumably this will be investigated in the upcoming weeks, especially since SFist reports something else that concerned Jerry Hill:

San Mateo Assemblyman Jerry Hill, according to reports, "said he was 'outraged' to learn that some residents had complained to PG&E about gas leaks in the neighborhood 'for up to three weeks' before the explosion."

Not that SFist is jumping to any conclusions, but the name of the page that includes this report is "pge_at_fault_for_san_bruno_explosio.php" - well, at least it wasn't called "pge_murders_in_san_bruno.php" or anything like that.

Pacific Gas & Electric - or someone else - is having a very bad morning

I don't live in the San Francisco area, but I've been monitoring it as the area prepares for Oracle OpenWorld, although I spent last night watching (of all things) Jeopardy.

Sadly, I woke up this morning to discover that for the last 12 hours, people have been monitoring the San Francisco area for an entirely different reason:

Firefighters poured water on flaming and smoldering wreckage early Friday after a massive explosion sent blazes roaring through a neighborhood in the hills south of San Francisco, killing at least one person, destroying more than 50 homes and damaging dozens of others.

Thursday night's explosion shot a fireball more than 1,000 feet in the air and sent frightened residents fleeing for safety and rushing to get belongings out of burning homes, witnesses said.

Utility officials said a gas line ruptured in the vicinity of the blast, which left a giant crater and sent flames tearing across several suburban blocks in San Bruno just after 6 p.m.

As of this hour they're still fighting the fire (Fox News is showing it nonstop), but you know that there will be an investigation into this. And Pacific Gas & Electric is preparing for it.

"If it is ultimately determined that we were responsible for the cause of the incident, we will take accountability," Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said in an e-mailed statement Thursday evening.

But later Thursday the company's president, Christopher Johns, said he didn't know what sparked the explosion.

"I don't have any details about if there was any work going on," Johns told KTVU-TV. "That will be part of the investigation as we go forward."

Past experience with disasters has shown that when something like this happens, it's not just one thing going wrong - it's many things going wrong at once. And this is clearly a disaster - the last TV report that I heard indicated that six people have died.

It's too early to see a news release from PG&E on this, but there probably will be one forthcoming.

(empo-tuulwey) How to misuse a storage medium and a household device and create a whole new industry

Now, of course, when you misuse things, you can do very bad things, perhaps resulting in the death of a person.

But on the other hand, misusing things could change the world as we know it. Whether it's changed for better or worse is up to you.

Several decades ago, data were stored on big reels of magnetic tape that were attached to the monstrous computers of the day. In those days, you would need these huge reels of tape to input data into your computer system.

That's when IBM engineer Forrest Parry had a really stupid idea - take that magnetic tape, cut it up into little bits, and attach each little bit to a piece of plastic. Never mind the fact that the little snippet of tape could store hardly anything - Parry wanted to do this anyway. The fact that he was working on a government contract was part of it - as we all know, the government has no common sense whatsoever. If you want to read about all the stupid ideas that the government has conceived, just use the Internet to look them up.

So anyway, Parry continued to pursue his stupid idea, but he couldn't figure out how to attach the magnetic tape to the piece of plastic. That's when Parry's wife had an even stupider idea. According to Wikipedia, Mrs. Parry said:

Here, let me try the iron.

From that beginning, things progressed, a bunch of ISO standards were created, and we gave birth to the credit card industry...and the driver's license industry...and a bunch of other industries that, even today, are dependent upon magstripe cards.

You Don't Own Me

In my view, Lesley Gore's best song ever is "You Don't Own Me" - better than "It's My Party" or "Judy's Turn to Cry" or "Judy Took Out a Restraining Order" or whatever. Although originally intended to be a song about a woman asserting herself with regards to a man, it could also be applied to the hippie peace-sign-waving faction who is resisting the Corporate State, or the world envisioned in George Orwell's 1984.

Which brings us to Apple. Alan Reiter noted that Apple has filed a patent application entitled SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR IDENTIFYING UNAUTHORIZED USERS OF AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE. (Bold italics in the original title, and throughout the patent application.)

So, how do you become an unauthorized user of an electronic device? Simple. Take a device that you don't own and use it without the owner's permission.

Obviously this applies if you own a device and I find it in a bar and pick it up. But it also applies if an Internet Service Provider owns a device and I use it without paying my bill...or after calling the president of the ISP a nasty name...or do anything that the ISP doesn't like.

I like to pretend to myself that I have taken all appropriate precautions against this problem. When I bought my netbook, I didn't buy it via a special offer from a wireless provider. No, sir - I bought it lock, stock, and barrel from a store.

But this means nothing, since even though I own the hardware device, I use it to access various software services. And if I get locked out of them, then it doesn't matter whether my computer fan is working or not - I won't be able to do anything.

Reiter noted the irony of this entire patent:

In one of the greatest-ever television commercials, Apple introduced the first Macintosh by showing a young woman with a sledgehammer running up to a huge screen where Big Brother is speaking to gray worker drones. The woman throws the hammer into the screen, smashing it. The commercial ends with: "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'"...

Apple's patent describes monitoring capabilities that make 1984's telescreen pale in comparison.

Locating the crime (BerlaCorp and Blackthorn2)

When a police officer is examining a crime scene, he or she will obtain various types of evidence. However, either the officer, or someone in the department, needs to know how to analyze the evidence. (Hint: the usual TV show presentation, in which a single detective is expert in every type of forensic analysis, is hogwash.)

So if you plan on committing a crime while using or carrying a GPS device, think again:

Our 3-Day Advanced GPS Forensics Training and Blackthorn2 Certification, is structured to provide attendees with the necessary skills to successfully acquire and analyze information obtained from GPS devices, as well as, prepare attendees to qualify as an expert witness and testify in court. This training will give attendees a basic understanding of the Global Positioning System and the skills necessary to conduct a full forensic examination, produce a final report, and testify on their findings.

This training class is a hands-on course and will allow attendees the opportunity to acquire and analyze automotive, maritime, handheld and aviation GPS devices in a manner consistent with the best practices of handling digital evidence. Each student will be provided with a workstation, multiple GPS devices, and a Blackthorn2 kit for use during the training class. While this is a cradle to grave class, this course is best suited for attendees with prior forensic examination experience.

This course is offered by BerlaCorp, but presumably other companies offer similar training. Of course, the other companies probably won't offer training on Blackthorn2:

Blackthorn2 is the premier GPS forensics acquisition, examination and analysis platform for Garmin, TomTom, and Magellan automotive, maritime, aviation, and hand-held devices.

Supporting

* Operators in the Field
* Forensic Examiners in the Lab
* Intelligence Analysts

Built for the law enforcement, military and homeland security communities, Blackthorn2 encompasses the requirements of Operators, Examiners and Analysts into a single application, while still providing the inherent and distinctly different capabilities each discipline requires.

(empo-tuulwey) How to misuse a number of things (my response to "scmeadow")

Back on Thursday, September 3, 2009, I wrote a post in my Empoprise-BI business blog which was entitled "Why doesn't Arthur Meyerhoff's name stick in our brains?" This was posted ten minutes after a companion post in my Empoprise-NTN blog which also mentioned Meyerhoff. The business blog post mentions a bit about the corporate history of PAM cooking spray, beginning in 1957 and extending to 2000. The two posts recently elicited some comments about something that doesn't appear in the PAM corporate history. The comment added to Empoprise-NTN, by someone who only identified herself as "scmeadow," is perhaps more instructive.

WoW! Arthur Meyerhoff, Sr. is a triva question? His claim to fame? Hahaha! My brother is dead because of his "precious" PAM, His initals and "Product of". Whya not make a trivia question of how many young people died from his "invention"? No warnign lables of how inhailing this KILLER can effect lives of those who remain. Not to mention the numbers who suffer from brain damage but survived. Wonder if Meyerhoff tested this on animals and it slid on by the those who approved this product and ones like it. DONT BUY PAM OR ANY SPRAY GREASES FULL OF DEATH FOR THE YOUNG!

While I was able to find out who "scmeadow" is, I have no way to confirm her story. However, it is quite possible that scmeadow's brother died as described, as this Teen Drug Abuse page notes:

According to the most recent study by the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, nearly seventeen million Americans have tried huffing or inhaling the intoxicating fumes from common household products. Despite a small decline in huffing since 1995, experts say that millions of American kids will try huffing at least once, and some of those will develop a habit. This is the “silent epidemic” and it needs to be more recognized.

PAM Cooking Spray does appear on the list of items that can be abused in this way. But there are a number of items on that list:

The following are some known substances that are categorized as being abused by inhalation:
• Hydrocarbons
• Nitrites
• Anesthetics
• Alcohol
• Halogen compounds
• Airplane glue
• Scotch-guard
• Pam cooking sprays
• Carbon tetrachloride - used in swimming pools
• Gasoline
• Paint thinner
• Butane
• White out or correction fluid
• Colored markers

While I acknowledge that scmeadow is going through pain - the fact that she is dwelling on this subject 37 years after it happened shows this - the question that is raised is how much responsibility a corporation bears when a product is misued in ways the corporation could not have foreseen. Should the Monkees be demonized because of what Michael Nesmith's mother did? Should El Barrio's Operation Fightback, Inc. be demonized because of where its grant money originated?

Of course, it helps if you can get Wal-Mart involved in the story, because everybody believes that Wal-Mart is evil anyway. And Wal-Mart figures into a story in which someone lapsed into a coma:

Authorities have confirmed reports to Disclosure that Leitha Vaughn, 40, purchased “dozens of cans” of a computer-cleaning product, CleanSafe Dust Remover, from Harrisburg’s WalMart very early in the morning (between 2 and 3 a.m.) and is alleged to have gone on a huffing spree with them in her minivan in the parking lot there.

For the record, the manufacturers of CleanSafe Dust Remover tried to take steps to prevent this abuse.

One of the reasons it’s supposed to be ‘safe,’ however, is because it contains “Bittergent,” an ingredient that makes misusing the product unpleasant because of the foul taste/odor it leaves behind from breathing it (huffing).

But Bittergent apparently wasn't bitter enough.

After approximately 27 cans, it’s been reported to us, she actually is alleged to have punctured the cans in order to release the propellant that pushes the air out of the can (to clean the keyboards) and also makes people high if breathes in close quarters.

So why is Wal-Mart allegedly evil in this case?

Why WalMart sold her so many cans, however, is probably a matter best left for further investigation....

However, a limit on the number of cans that can be purchased at any one time is not a foolproof solution. Vaughn seems to be a motivated sort of person, and if Wal-Mart only sold one can per person, she could just as easily have driven to 27 Wal-Marts, or Targets, or whatever. (If you don't think that Vaughn's motivated, consider that after falling into a coma and being hospitalzed...guess where she went after being released from the hospital? That's right, back to the Harrisburg Wal-Mart to buy some more canned air.)

No matter how much you try to outlaw something that people (for good or ill) want, people are going to get it anyway. Consider eSarcasm's story about Craiglist supposedly censoring adult services; as eSarcasm notes, people just started filing their adult services ads in other categories. I've verified this locally - see this "Creative Services" ad:

blonde needs help (inland empire)
Date: 2010-09-04, 4:37PM PDT

Hello I'm a student looking for some help with bills..I'm open minded to ideas so if your upscale please let's see if at can work something out?

So you can blame PAM, you can blame the computer cleaning aisle at Wal-Mart, you can blame Craigslist, you can blame Facebook...but at some point a person has to take personal responsibility for his or her actions.

(empo-tymshft) Going back to work after 30 years

This German video is commonly available in a 5-second version, but this 21-second version puts things into context.



As a former clerk-typist with the Department of the Interior, circa 1980, I can relate.

Printing information - printernational.org

While researching something online, I ran across the website printernational.org, which includes the following statement of purpose:

Printernational offers information and tutorials about all aspects of graphic and print design, illustrator, photoshop, indesign and everything related to it. We also offer information on paper sizes, formats and design standards for working for print.

Comprehensive, helpful (at least to a novice like me), and recommended.

Authentec and UPEK merger

As long as I'm talking about mergers and potential mergers, I should note a merger that is taking place in my own industry. The partners aren't as big as Oracle or Hewlett Packard, but this merger will certainly shake things up in a particular vertical market.

AuthenTec (NASDAQ: AUTH), a leading provider of security, identity management and touch control solutions, and privately-held UPEK, a leading supplier of fingerprint solutions for consumer, business and government applications, announced that the companies have combined, creating the world’s largest provider of fingerprint sensors and identity management software, as well as biometric and embedded security solutions.

More here.

And incidentally, I have no further comment (other than the one I reproduced here) on the other merger taking place in my industry at the moment.

Worthless speculation - who else could acquire Hewlett Packard?

Now that NetworkedBlogs allows my Empoprise-BI posts to appear in Facebook almost instantaneously, I'm trying to make more use of my Empoprise-BI page on Facebook (available at the http://www.facebook.com/pages/Empoprise-BI/98783891478 URL - if you're a Facebook user, feel free to like it and follow the discussion). One of the items that I've shared on the page was the Tom Foremski article "Could Hurd + Oracle Acquire H-P?" Foremski speculated:

HP has a market value of about $93 billion compared with about $95.3 billion in the wake of Mr. Hurd's departure. Oracle stands at $121 billion, a $5 billion increase over the same period.

Yes, it is a big pill to swallow however, it would enable Larry Ellison, CEO and co-founder of Oracle to perform an end run in the massive global IT market and also leave a substantial legacy on his upcoming retirement.

If there is one thing we know about Larry Ellison is that he is motivated by big goals. Is this one too large for him?

It's worthwhile to know that HP itself is the product of a number of different acquisitions - a fact that I know all too well. In the late 1990s, the company where I was working (Printrak) was supplying its sixth generation AFIS software on Digital Equipment Corporation computers. Printrak had just acquired a computer aided dispatch unit that supplied its software on Tandem computers. In the meantime, Printrak was starting to incorporate standard Compaq computers into its customer hardware configurations. And Printrak was a subcontractor to EDS for a major statewide system. Within a short while, Compaq had acquired DEC and Tandem, and HP had acquired Compaq and EDS.

Personally, I think that an Oracle acquisition of HP appears to be far-fetched. Any acquisition has to clear regulatory hurdles, not only in the United States, but around the world. Could an Oracle-HP merger get past the regulators in the United States, the European Union, China, and every other country in which the two companies do business?

So if Oracle would meet some resistance, is there a company who could acquire HP without meeting such resistance? Let's take a look at the top U.S. companies by market capitalization as of August 31, 2010 (courtesy The Online Investor):

Exxon Mobil XOM $302.71
Apple Inc. AAPL $222.10
Microsoft MSFT $204.40
Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A $193.72
Wal-Mart Stores WMT $188.60
Procter & Gamble PG $169.32
AT&T Inc. T $147.02
Johnson & Johnson JNJ $157.86
Int'l Business Mach. IBM $156.08
General Electric GE $155.61
JPMorgan Chase JPM $144.37
Google Inc. GOOG $143.70
Pfizer PFE $129.30
Coca-Cola KO $121.62
Bank of America BAC $124.92
Wells Fargo WFC $123.46
Cisco Systems CSCO $115.72
Oracle ORCL $120.18

First off, the company acquiring HP would have to have a complementary line of products. Oracle and Sun were complementary; Johnson & Johnson and HP are not. So that rules out the oil, banking, and consumer companies (although a Wal-Mart/HP combination would certainly be intriguing).

I don't know enough about Warren Buffett to know if he'd consider a run at HP.

So who does that leave? Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, GE (possibly), Google, and Cisco.

Of those companies, the two potential acquirers that seem most intriguing to me are IBM and AT&T. For the same reasons that Oracle would want to acquire HP, IBM would want to ensure that Oracle would NOT acquire HP. However, an IBM-HP combination would face more regulatory hurdles than an Oracle-HP combination.

But what about AT&T-HP? This would give AT&T another market, would provide devices that could be used over AT&T's network, and would counter AT&T's dependence on Apple (or is it Apple's dependence on AT&T?).

Now some would claim that AT&T would never be so bold, but remember that this is not your father's AT&T. Still, who knows how likely such a move would be.

But it's good for worthless speculation, and we're certain to see a lot of worthless speculation over the next few weeks.

(empo-tuulwey) How to misuse LinkedIn

Jason Alba linked to a Tom Nixon post about how to use LinkedIn, and Nixon's points seem to be good points that slot into my "a tool is not a way of life" mantra. Or, more accurately, "don't blame your hammer when it is not a good tool for flossing your teeth."

Now I am not about to claim that there is a single right way to use LinkedIn - the way that each person will use LinkedIn will be different, and some people will get different results by using LinkedIn in different ways. But Nixon notes that there are some ways in which LinkedIn can be misused.

For example, Nixon refers to "speaking in tongues," in which you use language appropriate in one social network and apply it in another. Nixon's point is that many LinkedIn users do not speak the language that is spoken on Twitter. His example should have some familiarity to Twitter users - even if they aren't familiar with the particular hashtags, at least they have an idea what is being said.

RT: @hankfan36 Seven ways from Sunday! tinyurl.com/93043 #hocort #FF.

But if you're sending every one of your tweets to LinkedIn, and this is one of them, there are going to be a lot of puzzled faces who aren't going to have any idea what you're talking about.

While my Twitter stream is linked to my LinkedIn account, the only tweets that show up in LinkedIn are those that include the #in hashtag. For example, this tweet was shared with my 300+ LinkedIn contacts:

The big news in my industry today is 3M's acquisition of Cogent. Now there's another player with both ID and AFIS capability. #in

And yes, I know that this is pending stockholder approval and government approval bla bla bla. But certainly a tweet like this is more appropriate for LinkedIn than one of my other tweets. Like, say, this one:

@ezrabutler I could survive being in a car with Barney. But if Baby Bop were there too, I'd aim for a cliff.

I don't think that my next employer, whoever or whenever that may be, is necessarily going to care about my feelings about Baby Bop - unless, of course, I were to apply for a position with HIT Entertainment.

Be sure to read Nixon's other points here.

I fear that the University of Kentucky's Facebook Places promotion may not end well

I Am Geek shared something that sounded like an eSarcasm headline: "Giant Wooden Pointers at University Remind Students to Check In on Facebook." But the shared post, from ReadWriteWeb, sounds like something that eSarcasm wouldn't conceive in its wildest dreams.

The school has built huge wooden sculptures shaped like Facebook's teardrop pointer and map logo to remind students to check in around campus using the new location feature, Facebook Places. The human-sized signs will inspire more buzz about the school on Facebook, recruiters hope.

A University of Kentucky representative explained the reasoning behind this campaign in an AdAge article:

"We're encouraging students to check in, so when they do, it'll show up in their news feed and maybe their friends still in high school will see it over and over again," said Kelley Bozeman, Big Blue's marketing director, adding that the university's marketing efforts are focused on undergraduate recruitment.

I just have one question for Ms. Bozeman.

What are you smoking?

I suspect that the University of Kentucky marketers envision that their marketing effort will result in a bunch of updates like this:

Heading off to my Marketing 101 class. The prof is fantastic!

Wow, this cafeteria food is swell!

I love attending basketball games here at the University!

Well, I'm going to let the marketers in on a little secret - sometimes university students do things that the university might NOT want to put in its admissions materials. Let me tell a little story about myself. Back when I was in college, Facebook and smart phones didn't exist, but if they did, it's quite possible that I might have shared something like this in my feed:

Cutting across Eastmoreland Golf Course. We're all drunk. I have to pee.

And that was in my first month of my time at Reed College. It might even have been my first week. I don't exactly remember - for some reason my mind is hazy.

Anyone with any amount of sense and any experience at college should realize that encouraging college/university students to check into Facebook Places could potentially be a recipe for disaster.

Oh, and there's always the danger that university faculty and staff may decide to check into Facebook Places, also. Just look at former University of Kentucky staff member Rick Pitino, who by 2003 had ended up at the University of Louisville. Pitino found himself at the Porcini restaurant on the evening of August 1, 2003. If Facebook Places had existed then, Pitino (who had been drinking) might have shared an interesting story about what he was doing with Karen Sypher.

P.S. Incidentally, eSarcasm has shared one bad thing that could happen if someone checked in a little too much. And alcohol wasn't even involved.

Now THAT'S a religious war - Jif vs. Skippy

When we use the term "religious war," naturally we know that there are TRUE religious wars out there.

And there are also things that we call religious wars - Android vs. iPhone, Republican vs. Democratic (or Labour vs. Conservative), etc.

But what about the true religious war of our time - the peanut butter religious war? Jim at Phoood described this war as follows:

One of the most hotly debated issues in America has been which peanut butter is better - Jif or Skippy. Families have been torn apart, friendships have been ended, and states have got to battle against other states.

However, he then said:

OK, I'm exaggerating just a bit.

Dang. A wild food fight would have been good for the blog.

For the record, Jim preferred Jif. But others have looked at the issue. Izatryt preferred Skippy. Thomas J. McCabe couldn't decide.

Opinions are obviously all over the board on this one. So who can we turn to as an authoritative source on this controversy? Perhaps a Mouseketeer can help here.



A paper on the Northwestern University website analyzes this period:

Skippy’s national market share ranged between 20 and 22% from 1970 until 1990. During this time, Skippy was positioned as the healthy brand supported by the claim that Skippy had less sugar. In the mid-1980s, Skippy used Annette Funicello as the spokesperson for the brand. She had grown up with that generation of mothers who were familiar with Annette from her appearances on the Mickey Mouse Club. Annette was seen as a good spokesperson because she was perceived as wholesome and had children herself.

This carries a frightening thought - someday, Courtney Love may become a peanut butter spokesperson.

As for my personal preference...I'm with Annette.

Fire your salvos in the comments.

Phillips and Hurd - one thing in common, but only one's at Oracle

Curiouser and curiouser.

I figured that I'd peek into Google Buzz tonight, and it's a good thing that I did, because Fuad Arshad shared some Oracle-related news from the New York Times.

When you dig a little below the surface, the news is mystifying.

What news? Namely, that Mark Hurd, formerly of Hewlett-Packard, had joined Oracle as a co-president. Normally this would mean that there would be three people in Oracle's crowded co-presidency...except for the fact that Oracle also chose to announce the resignation of one of two of the existing Oracle co-presidents, Charles Phillips.

The reason that the whole thing is seemingly mystifying is because Phillips privately expressed his desire to resign last December. In Phillips' timeline, this desire was expressed after he began divorce proceedings in 2008, but before Phillips became the talk of Times Square in January 2010 after pictures of Phillips and YaVaughnie Wilkins appeared on Times Square (and in other places).

Lest you've already forgotten, the whole reason that Hurd was available to join Oracle was because he resigned from Hewlett-Packard, apparently due to financial misstatements that resulted from HIS affair with a woman.

So why did Oracle trade one guy who was fooling around for another guy who was fooling around?

Or is that the whole story?

Reader of the Empoprise-BI blog will recall that Jean-Louis Gassée had some suspicions about Hurd's exit from Hewlett-Packard.

This is pure speculation on my part, but perhaps Hurd's move to Oracle has been planned for some time - maybe even since last December, when Larry Ellison realized that he needed someone to replace Phillips. Of course, this could not happen until Hurd left HP, and perhaps the financial issues, coupled with the animosity toward Hurd within HP that Gassée hinted at, were what drove Hurd toward the big red blob.

Man, I wish I were going to Oracle OpenWorld this year. Sudden last-minute changes can make things really interesting, especially at a forum like OpenWorld where a lot of companies in co-opetition with each other show up.

Failure is an option - more about Bob and Lisa

On Sunday I shared some thoughts about Kapost, WinExtra, and Microsoft Bob. As I was writing my Kapost post in response to Steven Hodson's original post, I kept on thinking of someone other than Bob.

I kept on thinking about Lisa.

No, Lisa wasn't Bob's girlfriend - Lisa is a over a decade older than Bob, after all. But I kept on thinking about how people perceive Lisa to be a failure, even though Lisa directly led to the Macintosh - arguably the most important computer in history (and yes, I rank the Macintosh in front of the IBM PC in that regard).

So I began wondering if anyone had compiled a list of so-called failures that included both the Apple Lisa and Microsoft Bob - and sure enough, Miguel Carrasco came up with such a list back in 2006. The list not only included Bob and Lisa, but also included their uncle Alto (the Xerox Alto), Lisa's cousin NeXT, Lisa's little brother Newton, Bob's little brother ME, and various other notorious creations from several different computer companies.

But I hope that everyone who read Carrasco's post continued on to the end:

What do all of these stories have in common? Yes they were all mistakes (at the time), but almost all of them paved the way for some of the largest success's in computing history. Sometimes for the same company, sometimes for other companies. The lesson here is persistence, determination, and perseverance.

I recently had occasion to re-examine the video of Gene Kranz with the late Travis Clark (a video that I shared over a year ago in a post in my Empoprise-IE Inland Empire blog). Kranz, of course, gained his fame within the NASA of the 1960s and 1970s. NASA, then and now, engages in extremely complex tasks, and the outcome of those tasks can sometimes be deadly - something that prompted Kranz's famous phrase, "Failure is not an option." Kranz's words certainly ring true when addressing life and death situations, but as many within both Apple and Microsoft know, failure can be the best thing that can happen to you, since it can sometimes spur you on to great success.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to smoke

Freedom.

Is it the freedom to run your business any way you want, or is it the freedom to get every government goodie you can?

The Goddess of Garey linked to a recent Chuck Baldwin post. But before looking at the post, let's look at who Chuck Baldwin is. In addition to being a pastor, former head of the Florida Moral Majority, and talk show host, Baldwin is probably most famous for his vice presidential and presidential campaigns.

VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE 2004: On May 2, 2004, Constitution Party Presidential Candidate Michael Peroutka asked Dr. Baldwin to join him as his Vice Presidential running mate for the 2004 general election. The Constitution Party officially selected Michael Peroutka as its Presidential candidate and Dr. Chuck Baldwin as its Vice Presidential candidate at its national convention in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania on June 25th and 26th, 2004.

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE 2008: On April 26, 2008, state delegates of the Constitution Party elected Chuck Baldwin to be their Presidential candidate during their national nominating convention in Kansas City, Missouri. Chuck won the nomination with a percentage vote of 74% to 24% over Ambassador Alan Keyes. Chuck chose Memphis, Tennessee attorney Darrell Castle, a former Marine Corps officer and Vietnam veteran, to be his Vice Presidential running mate. During the campaign, Mr. Baldwin travelled more than 30,000 miles and visited more than 30 states to promote his message of liberty and constitutional government. On Election Day, November 4, Chuck Baldwin and Darrell Castle received more than 200,000 votes, which is a record for any Constitution Party Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket.

Now the Constitution Party isn't exactly the Libertarian Party, but they're certainly a long way from the neo-conservatives who run the Republican Party today. The party platform opposes conscription, deployment of troops without a declaration of war, the granting of Federal money to states for unconstitutional purposes, the existence of the U.S. Department of Education, and a number of other things dear to the hearts of Bush, Cheney, et al.

So you can guess how Chuck Baldwin feels about "freedom." And guess what? Florida isn't free enough for him:

[T]he only thing that could move me from the pulpit of Crossroad Church was a clear and definite call and leading from God. 35 years ago, that call led my wife and me to Pensacola, Florida. Today that call has led us to the Flathead Valley of Montana, some 2,500 miles away....

God has led us to the conviction that Montana (along with other Mountain states) is going to be the tip of the spear in the freedom fight; and we believe God wants us to be part of that fight....

Back in the 1880s, Montana experienced a gold rush. I believe that in the 2010s, Montana is going to experience a FREEDOM RUSH. And for us, the rush is on!

But on the same day that I read this, I saw another story from Montana. It's an AP story, so I'll limit my quoting:

...text message...pot...Sheriff...

However, I found the full story in the Helena Independent-Record:

A Helena teen sent out a text message last week looking to buy marijuana, only instead of texting the drug dealer, he hit a wrong number.

Who received it?

The Lewis and Clark County sheriff.

The text message said: “Hey Dawg, do you have a $20 I can buy right now?”

Sheriff Leo Dutton initially thought someone was playing a joke on him, but quickly realized it was a real request for a drug exchange.

In the end, the detective didn't press charges - instead, he had the two teens who showed up for the fake "drug deal" face their parents.

So is Baldwin heading for a repressive place where a citizen can't smoke a joint in peace? Well, the Constitution Party has a stand on that:

The Constitution Party will uphold the right of states and localities to restrict access to drugs and to enforce such restrictions.

I wonder if the State of Montana classifies Red Bull, coffee, and sugar as drugs.

What about Bob? I done Kaposted

About a month ago, Steven Hodson launched an experiment on his WinExtra blog:

I came across a new service called Kapost via a post by Alex Wilhelm over at The Next Web and was immediately intrigued by what it is offering; which as Kapost phrases it – a virtual newsroom.

Now as anyone who knows me can attest to, I don’t normally jump onto each new shiny thing that comes along but the thing that I really like about Kapost is that it lets you, our readers, participate. It is one thing for myself or any of the other writers here to post stuff about Microsoft and Windows but it is another thing for our readers to be able to add their thoughts and opinions to the mix. This is what Kapost allows for and by the looks of it fairly easily.

At the time, I commented (in part):

I’ve already exercised the feature a bit by voting on one of your recent posts. I’ll exercise it more when I have an on-topic contribution to make on one of your posts.

Now ordinarily the types of comments that I make on WinExtra are short, reactive, and not really worthy of a post all their own. But that changed today, when I read Hodson's post Priceless moments in Microsoft’s history – Microsoft Bob. Hodson opens the post with the following:

If there ever has been one unmitigated failure that continues to haunt Microsoft it has to be the infamous Microsoft Bob.

Over the years it's acquired a "Heaven's Gate" kind of reputation, but Hodson rightly points out that many people aren't really familiar with it. But if you go to Hodson'e post, you can see a video (not made by Hodson) in which someone uses the Microsoft Bob interface.

Perhaps I was in a contrarian frame of mind, but I was moved to use Kapost to write a response, Was Microsoft Bob truly a failure? Here's how I opened my post:

I never used Microsoft Bob when it appeared, so I took the opportunity to watch the video that Steven shared in his post on Microsoft Bob. And after watching the video, I'm not quite ready to completely consign Bob and his friends to the dustbin of idiocy.

First off, you need to remember where user interface design was in the 1990s. While most popular interface designs from previous decades consisted of command line interfaces, all of us were falling all over ourselves in worship of the dramatic new interface ideas being shared by Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft. What were the components of that revolutionary new interface? Two-dimensional file folders scattered across a two-dimensional desktop.

I encourage you to go here to read the rest. Oh, and I also encourage you to go to the upper left hand corner and vote for the post. (Nothing wrong with a little campaigning here and there...)

P.S. If you want to learn more about Kapost, go here.

Test post - am I networked?

I recently received a request from NetworkedBlogs to confirm that Kol Tregaskes is the author of the Kol Tregaskes Photography Blog.

I had completely forgotten about NetworkedBlogs, although my profile already noted that I'm following A Place to Crash (Posterous link here).

So I figured that I'd inform NetworkedBlogs of the existence of Empoprise-BI. (I may or may not inform NetworkedBlogs of my other three blogs later, depending upon how this works out.)

My biggest hope is that NetworkedBlogs will offer a better way to get blog posts into my Empoprise-BI page on Facebook. Using Facebook's native services, it can sometimes take days for posts to show up there. I'm not sure if this is a Facebook issue, a Google (Feedburner) issue, or something else.

But if I did everything right with my setup, then this post will show up in both my Empoprise-BI Facebook page and in a NetworkedBlogs page called Empoprise-BI.

Let's see what happens. 3...2...1...

A Blind Eye - Germany, Facebook, and Employment Decisions

There have been many stories posted lately about how someone lost a job because of something posted on some social media profile. Well, according to Nicole Ferraro, at least one information source may be verboten in Germany.

A proposed law, now on its way through the Bundestag, drafted to protect workers' privacy, would restrict employers from using Facebook to recruit. Employers would still be allowed to search the Web for public information on a job candidate, as well as LinkedIn or Xing pages, seeing as those are business networks. But they would not be allowed to use Facebook for screening purposes.

Ferraro sourced her information from a New York Times article, which attempts to explain why Germany is taking this action, as well as a related action limiting secret videotaping of employees.

Germany’s Nazi-era history has made the country extremely cautious on matters of individual privacy. Concerns have been heightened in recent years by scandals involving companies’ secret videotaping of employees, as well as intercepting their e-mail and bank data. The explosion of Web-based information tools has added to the unease.

The German authorities are investigating Google for having collected private Internet information while doing research for its Street View mapping service, and they have asked Apple to explain its data-collection policies for the iPhone.

And Facebook itself has come under fire in Germany, and in other countries, for its own privacy policies.

But I just have one question. How can someone prove that an employer did, or did not, use a Facebook profile in its hiring decisions? Even if a company, or an entire country, has an official policy banning the practice, what will stop an individual HR person from doing a little bit of web surfing as he or she sorts resumes into two piles?