Month: April 2005

Kottke has a great summary of the links for the Adobomedia/Macrodobe story here.

In my opinion, this quote sums up what is wrong with this merger.

The combination of Adobe and Macromedia strengthens our mission of helping people and organizations communicate better. Through the combination of our powerful development, authoring and collaboration tools – and the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash – we have the opportunity to drive an industry-defining technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content and applications across a wide range of devices and operating systems. [here]

The Adobe and Macromedia Marketing/Press Relations teams need the help of the Bullfighter software.
Flash makes web products that are great for online games…and useless for anything else. Adobe makes a PDF reader, which I can replace with any number of free readers.
I can feel gravity dragging this merger into the pit of despair.
I agree with Om Malik and Russell Beattie — I vote “-1” on this merger.
More here and here and here and here
Richard Koman says this is a good deal…Flash on Mobile devices merged with a lighter version of Acrobat.
Sramana Mitra says that Apple should buy Adobe now. [here]
Strategize says Adobe everywhere, all the time. [here]
Roland Tanglao quotes Marc Canter, who is happy to see Macromedia disappear.
More from Roland here.

Spent Saturday prepping for a yard sale, and today we executed on the plan. Lot’s of geek books went cheap to deserving homes: a former full-time Linux admin who has been downgraded to working in a liquor store by the economy, and a grad student who nearly cried when he saw what I was selling cheap.
Also sold the 1970 iPod (Pioneer S-3500 Receiver/Turntable), and a bunch of records.
It’s amazing what people will buy.
Off to bed…

First Gupta was removed from Gupta.
Then Siebel was removed from Siebel.
Just a thought…

Scott Jones posits a possible relationship (M&A?) between Accenture and Siebel. [here]
I find this connection completely plausible and may be one way for Siebel to claw it’s way out of the hole it’s in.

Seth Godin points out that Amazon has moved their buy button from the natural righ-hand column to the nerve-jangling, eye-ball focused left-hand column. [here]
I don’t like it. Not one bit. Change it back.
The freaky thing is that when I went to Amazon, Freakonomics, the book that Seth screenshot for his post, is the one that popped up on my main screen.

Hmmm, looks like GSK can’t shake the bad news that seems to follow Paxil/Seroxat wherever it goes. [here]
If I wasn’t addicted to the stuff, I would be worried.

Someone exploited a hole in the version of MySQL I was running (4.1.10) this morning by sending the following malformed URL:

http://www.newestindustry.org/index.php/2005/04/
2005-04-14-13:33:16%7c-1%7c104%7c2005-04-14-13:33:04%7c151.99.208.233
%7c3%7c-1%7c0%7c-1%7c0%7c-1%7c-1%7c10%7c-1%7c7%7c7%7c
http://www.newestindustry.org/index.php/2005/04/2005-04-14-13:33:16
%7c-1%7c104%7c2005-04-14-13:33:04%7c151.99

You can try it now, but it does not cause the database to crash anymore, because I have upgraded to MySQL 4.1.11.
DOH!

Now, I never even heard about this Comcast outage until this morning. [here]
One reason that I likely didn’t notice it is that I run my own caching name servers on my home network. I do this because I have never trusted any provider’s overworked name servers (goes back to the history of the industry I work in; more on that some other time).
This is still a fairly crippling outage. Surely there is some redundancy in the Comcast name server infrastructure…please?
There is a list of possible workarounds to this problem linked from here.

Neuvo reports that Scoble wants a Powerbook.
Get the *&&^^%##$%#^%()*)()*(&*& outta my way Scoble! I’m first in line for Powerbooks!

Someone else scores a new Powerbook! [here]
Damn you! Damn you all!

Obviously BillG has spent too much time blowing glass with Dale Chiluhy; no oxygen getting to his brain.
BillG believes that the dinosaur campaign was good! [here]