Category: Personal

HP/CPQ: It’s all bad

The Merc had a major takeout on the merger this morning. Scott Herbold, the stock columnist, said the merger wasn’t worth a hill of beans. Dan Gillmor said: “When one beleaguered giant buys another, you can smell the desperation. It’s oozing from the corporate pores” at the two computer makers. Some observers see this as indicator of a wave of consolidation; Ernst & Young, for example, is staffing up its San Jose office, which focuses on mergers and acquisitions. Employees are nervous and with a projected reduction of 15,000 staff I can’t blame them.

The Reg has an insightful analysis of how the talks began. Another side effect of SirCam?

Make better, not fancier, movies

Two recent articles and a talk with my buddy have me thinking lately about what’s up with Hollywood.

My buddy says he just won’t cough up $8.75 or more for every film that comes along the way he would last year and before. The tipping point for him were films like Pearl Harbor and The Score that came with big press and expectations but bored him silly. And beyond the basic quality issue is cost: it’s gotten too expensive with tiny bags of popcorn costing $3 on top of the high ticket price. For the most part he’s willing to wait and rent a DVD or see it on a cable movie channel. What’s the rush, he asks?

Joe Baltake, movie critic for the Sacramento Bee, complains standards are declining, that critics (and viewers) are being forced “by the entertainment industry to systematically lower our standards.” Baltake says the problem applies to TV shows as well, pointing to putdowns and sex jokes as “the only laugh-getters that writers can come up with nowadays.”

Stuart Maschwitz, speaking at the Ars Electronica festival, says that the tools are becoming available to allow independents to make major studio quality films and this will only get easier. This might be a solution to the quality and price issue in a few years. In the meantime, though, he says the studios are so enamored of the possibilities digital effects allow that the films are being overwhelmed. Maschwitz, who worked on Star Wars: Phantom Menace supervising the space battle scenes, cites this as an example and says the original film even with its much poorer f/x was far superior as a movie.

But I am willing to still believe in the magic. I can’t wait to see such effects-laden films as Jet Li’s The One, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and especially Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring

Tonight’s movie: Masterminds

Think of Home Alone except (a) the bad guy is Englishman Patrick Stewart (b) the Macaully Culkin character is a 16 year old hacker (c) the setting is a ritzy private school (d) Stewart and a surprisingly large crew of baddies hold the students hostage (e) the target is $650 million in bearer bonds and you have 1997’s Masterminds. Stewart must have a had a really hard time keeping a straight face while the cameras were rolling but he goes way over the top here (think of him in Conspiracy Theory) only to end up plunging his hopped up ATV escape car into a sewage outlet pond–literally! Vincent Kartheiser is cool as Ozzie Paxton, our slacker hero, who not only has to stop Stewart and crew but patch up his family. In an odd coincidence, Kartheiser was born the day after me, 18 years later. Mr. Showbiz called this a “Die Hard for kids” but I prefer my analogy.

Finally finished the Italy Book writeups

Okay, I got home two months ago, but somehow I forgot to input the last of the Italy 2001 Book Reviews, which I’ve now done. Phew!!! Still a little more work on the Italy Pages to go, hopefully done soon.

Today’s book: Breaking Windows

After seeing lots of fuss over this book from various weblogs and others, I couldn’t resist picking up this look inside Microsoft by Wall Street Journal reporter David Bank. A very interesting read focusing on the years 1996-2000 as Bank had boxes full of Microsoft email and other internal documents thanks to the antitrust case and interviews with many key MS employees, including Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Worth the read.

Dave Winer published an excerpt online (with the publisher’s permission).

HP-CPQ: More people think its a stupid deal

Forbes.com weighs in to call it the Deal Of The Year–In 1998. Mike Langberg, writing in the SJ Mercury News (a site to which I prefer not to link since they charge for access after seven days), calls for government regulators to reject the deal on antitrust grounds; a combined company, assuming today’s market shares stand up (not likely in myopinion), would have a 67% share of the retail PC market.

Carly Fiorina, chairperson of HP and of the combined company, told reporters, “Hang with us, it’s going to be a great party.” Not if you’re one of the thousands of workers who’ll be losing a job as a result of this deal. The two have already announced over 17,000 layoffs this year but execs are projecting another $2.5 billion in savings from the deal, which means several thousand more employees will get the big L. C|Net News.com analyzes the challenges and sees a hard road ahead.

If this deal does not go through, I have to wonder if Fiorina and Compaq chair Michael Capellas will keep their jobs. Fiorina, especially, is under pressure to deliver after a previous acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers fell through last fall and she completely mishandled Wall Street over the first half of this year as HP forecasts fell and fell and fell.

I have to fess up to a small error in my previous entry where I said that Compaq had thrown away their entire investment in Digital. That isn’t completely true as they retain a very large and profitable services group; what they did throw away was Digital’s hardware business, which once was number two only to IBM. Of course, when they were number two, founder and then-chairman Ken Olsen famously said something to the effect of “Who needs a PC on their desk or in their home?”

I stand with my earlier sentiment: these are two drowning rats trying to use each other as life preservers. A Giga Research analyst had positive comments but that isn’t surprising given the amount of money the two companies pay Giga and the other maket research firms. More importantly, Wall Street is not reacting well, and both stocks are down in the initial trading with HP off 15%!

HP and Compaq merger: more stupid people?

In a stunning move, the NY Times is reporting that Hewlett-Packard to Acquire Compaq in $25 Billion Deal. While they’ll be the number two computer company after IBM, independently they are 2 and 3 now. Compaq recently killed their non-Intel business (throwing all that money they spent acquiring Digital Equipment and Tandem away) but they do bring a big consulting group to the table. HP still has servers based on their PA-RISC chips although those are going away since HP help Intel develop the 64 bit Itanium line. Both companies get major revenues from PCs and I wonder how that number will hold up in a consolidation, and will they be sold under the HP or Compaq or a new/combined brand… I just don’t get the benefits of this deal other than lower operating costs.

One note: the article mentions “a new operating system for computer servers that was developed by Intel (news/quote) and Hewlett-Packard.” But this is a mistake, they co-developed the chip as I mention above.

Stupid people do stupid things

Too bad they are such prominent people with so much ability to influence the world and our lives. First, there is the ongoing matter of George W. Bush as exemplified by the latest on China and its nukes. Then there are the people out to ruin the UN World Conference on Racism by turning truth on its head. And, since bad things come in threes, let’s end by mentioning those religious zealots running Afghanistan and their ridiculous persection of foreign aid workers; after all, Afghans have an incredibly high standard of living and don’t need charity from anyone else, do they?

What are Web Services?

And why do we want them? Web services are the hot new thing in internet applications but so far people are having difficulty understanding why they want to use them and what functions are bested suited to be deployed as web services. In this XML Magazine interview, Adam Bosworth, chairman, CTO, and co-founder of (acquired by BEA) Crossgain gives an excellent overview on the subject, the best I’ve read yet. More credentials for Bosworth: he was the man who got Bill Gates to approve the XML project at Microsoft and he wrote one-third of the code for Borland’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet before moving to Microsoft to build the Access database; Bosworth is mentioned quite often in Breaking Windows, an excellent book I’m reading just now.

The key advance, as I read this, is that web services ships data (in the form of XML documents) from place to place where previous n-tier architectures such as client/server and CORBA/DCOM shipped code. Bosworth cites three characteristics that are critical for successful architectures that can span processes, companies, and the Internet: they must be loosely coupled, they must use coarse-grained communication, and they must support asynchronous interaction. Worth reading.

Today’s task: site update

Another milestone in the billsaysthis redesign. Every page conforms to a standard, structured layout that include the top row elements (logo, page title or saying on the home page, and site search), site navigation bar along the left side, and the page’s individual content occupying the remainder. Used modular programming in PHP to get this and hopefully future design changes will not require updating every single page. I know that a content management system would also get to this point with less work from me but part of the reason for doing the site is to do my own programming and not use a package

Today’s movie (2): Beautiful

I wonder if I watched the same move as James Berardinelli, who called the film “a wretchedly insipid effort that makes a mockery of its name.” How can any film with both Minnie Driver and Joey Lauren Adams be that bad? Okay, the story is a little implausible and how anyone can think Adams could play the schlumpy best friend is a mystery to me. I admit that Sally Field doesn’t do the movie any favors in her directorial debut, though. At least Andy Klein of New Times L.A. agrees with me.

Today’s movie: Shane

In this 1953 Academcy Award nominated film, Alan Ladd plays the loner who walks in and saves the day. George Steven’s Shane is considered one of the quintessential movie westerns pitting ranchers against homesteaders in 1880s Wyoming. This could be simplistic but reaches deep to make the bad guy understandable–although the rancher is shown ordering murders he also gets an excellent speech explaining how he came to his position–and brilliantly uses a young boy to focus us tightly on Ladd’s stoic hero. Hollywood gets its material from elsewhere and in the case of most westerns, that source was Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian who argued that the continuously receeding western frontier was the central story of America in the 19th century.

Can you make it to all 51?

National Geographic names the 50 Places of a lifetime, “destinations no curious traveler should miss.” I’ve been to Jerusalem, New York, San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, the Amalfi Coast, the British Virgin Islands, Coastal Norway, and Cyberspace. Only eight but I’m young yet. How many have you been to?

(P.S. I had a six hour tour of Paris by bus once, does that count?)

Liverpool 5, Germany 1

In World Cup qualifying today, Liverpool took apart Germany. Well, really it was the English national side that did the trick but Red players scored all the goals, Michael Owens leading the way with a hat trick. This puts England in excellent position to move through to the finals with a game in hand on Germany and the next match at home against Albania on Wednesday. The win was England’s first in Germany since 1965 and only the second home loss ever in Cup qualifying for the Germans. Read the tears and gloating (and confusion) on metafilter.

Short and to the point

Only two days after being delisted from NASDAQ, NetObjects issued a two sentence press release:

“REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Sep 1, 2001 (BUSINESS WIRE) — NetObjects, Inc. today announced that it will cease operations effective today. The Company intends to sell its assets as expeditiously as circumstances permit.”

Four years ago IBM purchased 51% of this company and we at NetDynamics thought of it as an important competitor, but almost immediately it fell by the wayside. Per the latest 10-Q filing, IBM owned 48% but there is no statement from them about this.

Today’s movie: Rat Race

A goofy bunch of losers are gathered by eccentric Vegas casino owner (Monty Python’s John Cleese) to race 660 miles for a gym bag filled with $2 million in Rat Race. We laughed a lot. This is a throwback to movies like Cannonball Run (remember Jackie Chan in that one?) done surprisingly well. Seth Green and Vince Vieluf as the Cody Brothers have a lot of the best laughs although Amy Smart’s helicopter pilot has the best scene buzzing her no-good boyfriends backyard pool. Except for maybe Cuba Gooding’s time driving a bus full of Lucy Ricardo fans. There’s almost no foul language or sexual material, so this flick is recommended even for kids.

CSS: Where to get the goods

Oh, have I been struggling with CSS for the past week. But I think I’m getting somewhere, thanks to the following resources:

This kind of thing won’t help Sun

Blatantly biased (note the “Prepared for Sun Microsystems” right at the top) whitepapers like J2EE vs. Microsoft.NET by Chad Vawter and Ed Roman of The Middleware Company will not be swallowed whole by developers. Even with ‘promises’ like “We promise to compare these choices at a logical, neutral, and unbiased level.” Bought and paid for analysis is usually worth a lot less than it costs.