February 13, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Is Yahoo Worth Buying?

If I had a billion dollars, I’d be rich (with my apologies to Barenaked Ladies). If I were trying to buy Yahoo, I wouldn’t even be in the running.

Microsoft offered $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, a 62 percent premium on Yahoo’s share price at the time, for Yahoo. And what did the Yahoo board do? They sneered at it because the offer “substantially undervalues” the company.

Boy, I wish I could sneer at $44.6 billion. So, what would Yahoo consider a fair price? Maybe, some stock analysts have suggested to me, oh say, $60 billion. No offense to my day trading friends, but I think they’re getting a wee bit greedy with those estimates.

Indeed many people don’t care for the proposed Microhoo. Google, of course, doesn’t like it, but they’ve got their own priorities and messing with Microsoft’s proposed Yahoo deal is near the top of the list. The more the deal costs Microsoft the better, as far as Google is concerned.

Some people, however, really hate the idea. Henry Blodget, the well-known CEO and editor in chief of Silicon Alley Insider, a New York digital business community news site called the proposed acquisition a “disaster” in the making. Blodget went on to say that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer “is not used to losing. They’re doing something that’s conceptually smart, but that’s not going to work.”

Why? Well there are the usual reasons. There’s no real synergy between Microsoft’s Windows-based software and Yahoo’s FreeBSD/open-source Web 2.0 applications. The two companies’ corporate cultures are as mixable as oil and water. And, lest we forget, Yahoo’s in trouble. As I started writing this story, I see that Yahoo began firing, excuse me, laying off the first of 1,000-plus employees.

Yahoo, tell me again how Microsoft has undervalued the company. I’m sure your newly unemployed staffers would love to hear the details.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is undeterred and insists that it’s going to buy Yahoo. It’s not upping its offer, yet. Instead, it seems to want to see if it can get the stockholders to accept its offer over Yahoo’s board recommendations. Some of Yahoo’s stockholders, an informal group named Group B, seem to be in favor of the deal.

For more than a year now, Group B has been doing its best to get Yahoo to radically change course. They believe that Yahoo’s former CEO, Terry Semel, and current board, have been driving the company into the ground. Given Yahoo’s lousy track record for the last few years, it’s easy to see their point.

Eric Jackson, the leader of the group of 100 current and former Yahoo employees that own 2.1 million shares, are in favor of taking the best offer on the table. And, for now, that’s Microsoft. As Jackson said in his blog, “We have no desire to see Yahoo! continue independently with the current board and management team in place.”

For better or worse, though, Group B, while looking for others to join it, owns only a tiny fraction of Yahoo’s total stock holdings. Microsoft is hoping that others will join with them.

I suspect, however, that Microsoft is going to have to up its ante before it can make a deal. I still think Microsoft needs Yahoo. I also agree that it’s a potential disaster. And I also agree that it’s going to take a tremendous amount of work to pull these two companies together. On the other hand, what other choice does Microsoft have?

As my Microsoft Watch colleague Joe Wilcox recently said, “Microsoft’s bid, assuming that it is sincere, reveals that the services platform is vaporware. Sure, Microsoft has built out something, but it’s not nearly enough to compete with Google. Microsoft has tacitly admitted that it’s even farther behind Google than anyone suspected.”

I agree completely. In chess, there’s a horrible situation you can end up in called zugzwang. It’s a German word that means that you’ve got to move but that any move you make is only going to make your situation worse, usually a lot worse. Welcome to zugzwang, Microsoft. You’ve got to buy Yahoo to try to improve your online position, but, for now, no matter how you do it the move is going to hurt.

A version of this story first appearedin eWEEK.

February 13, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Apple TV Take 2 is Here!

It took longer than expected, but not as long as I had feared, this morning, February 13th, Apple delivered the Apple TV Take 2 update.

I’ve just downloaded and installed it on my 40GB Apple TV In a word: “Sweet.” After an 8-minutes download, over a 3Mbps DSL Internet connection, and a reboot, the Apple TV was delivering all the goodies that Steve Jobs had promised in his January MacWorld speech.

Anyone can update their Apple TV. All you need do is Updating head over to Settings on your Apple TV, pick Update Software, and press the Apple Remote’s Play/Pause button and you’re on your way. You don’t need to do a thing with your computer or iTunes.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the menu is different. All your choices are available on a single main menu. It may not look as fancy as the older Apple TV menu, but unlike that one, anyone who can point and click can navigate this menu.

With the new menu you can easily buy or rent HD or SD movies. With your remote you can shop your way through the iTunes Store and get a good deal of information on each movie without any need to use your PC. At this time, I’m sorry you can’t rent TV episodes or series, you can only buy them. You can also use your Apple TV as a Flickr/.Mac photo browser.

You can, of course, still watch videos already in your networked iTunes library or on your Apple TV.

I haven’t had much of a chance to play with the new Apple TV, but I can say one thing. It, as I expected it too, destroys old-style video rental. Who needs to go to a Blockbuster, wait for a Netflix envelope or only have the small, collections of cable and satellite rental movies when you have an Apple TV? I don’t. As Apple adds more movies to its collection, over several hundred now by my count, the Apple TV is going to become an essential in anyone’s serious video setup.

February 11, 2008
by sjvn01
2 Comments

So long HD-DVD

I recently discovered that a neighbor had bought an HD-DVD player. Whoops. If only I had known I would have told them the last thing they should be buying is an HD-DVD player.

The writing on the wall has been clear for some time now. HD-DVD is dead. Oh, you can still find HD-DVD players and discs. In fact, you can often find the players at clearance prices.

Before you rush out and buy one keep in mind that that they’re not worth a dime on the dollar. You see, by year’s end, you’re going to be as likely to find new HD-DVD movies as you are new 8-track tapes.

Continue Reading →

February 11, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Apple TV 3.0?

While we’re still waiting around for direct to Apple TV video rentals, aka Apple TV 2.0, some hints have recently arrived at what Apple TV 3.0 might look like.

These hints were discovered in an Apple patent about placing ‘widgets,’ small, useless applications you can run on a computer, on a multimedia center. Or, in other words, putting widgets on your television courtesy of Apple TV.

Most of us know widgets that do jobs like telling us the weather, stock market quotes and the like. In Mac OS, these are made available on the Dashboard. From the Apple patent, it looks like we can expect to see similar functionality on our TVs somewhere down the road.

Continue Reading →

February 11, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Thunderbird security woes

When Firefox 2.0.0.12 came out on Feb. 7, it brought with it fixes for three critical security holes and seven that were not quite so serious. According to the security advisories, many of these problems were also fixed in the Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 e-mail client. Unfortunately, there is no Thunderbird 2.0.0.12.

The Mozilla Foundation’s press release focused on the Firefox 2.0.0.12 security fixes. The Foundation also reported, though, in its MFSA (Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory), that these same bugs had been fixed in the fictitious Thunderbird 2.0.0.12.

Specifically, the following critical security advisories were reported to be fixed in both Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0.0.12: MFSA 2008-01 (crashes with evidence of memory corruption) and MFSA 2008-03 (privilege escalation, XSS, remote code execution). In addition, the serious security bug MFSA 2008-05 (directory traversal via chrome: URI) and moderate security bug MFSA 2008-08 (file action dialog tampering) are reported to have been fixed in the nonexistent Thunderbird 2.0.0.12.

All of these security problems can be traced back to how the Web browser engine behind both Firefox and Thunderbird, Gecko, handles JavaScript. Or, to be more exact, the core problem lies in how this layout engine mishandles JavaScript.

The brute-force solution is simply to make sure that JavaScript is never enabled in Thunderbird. Unlike in Web browsers, where disabling JavaScript is far more serious in that it also disables some JavaScript-dependent Web sites, there’s seldom any call for using JavaScript with HTML-formatted e-mail messages.

Still, it is upsetting that Mozilla reports that these problems have been fixed in a version of Thunderbird that doesn’t exist. The latest version of Thunderbird is 2.0.0.9.

DesktopLinux.com tried to reach the Mozilla Foundation Feb. 8 for an explanation, but, as of the afternoon of Feb. 11, the Foundation had not replied.

There has long been concern that Thunderbird was not a real priority for Mozilla. In September 2007, Mozilla announced that it was spinning Thunderbird off into a company of its own: MailCo. Only weeks later, Scott McGregor, one of Thunderbird’s two key developers, left Mozilla. This reignited Thunderbird users’ fears that Mozilla was not so much moving Thunderbird out as throwing it out.

Since that time, MailCo has still not left the launch pad. Dr. David Ascher, formerly chief technology officer and vice president of engineering for ActiveState, and a director of the Python Software Foundation, is heading the effort to found the company. On his blog, Ascher reported that as of Jan. 15, Dan Mosedale, once he’s done with his work on the forthcoming Firefox 3, will be helping to get MailCo off the ground.

It appears, though, based on the postings in the blog, that MailCo is still months away from opening its doors. In the meantime, there appears to be little work being done on Thunderbird despite these misleading messages indicating that security fixes are still being delivered to the popular open-source e-mail client.

A version of this story first appeared in DesktopLinux.

February 8, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Reviving OS/2’s best in the Linux desktop

Get over it. We’re never going to see OS/2 open-sourced. If you want to run OS/2 today, the closest you’re going to get is Serenity System’s eComStation. But, it just might be possible for Linux desktop users to get one of OS/2’s best features: SOM (System Object Model).

IBM, I’m told by developers who should know, still has all of SOM’s source code and it all belongs to IBM. It’s because IBM doesn’t have all the code for OS/2 and some of it belongs to Microsoft that IBM open-sourcing OS/2 has proven to be a futile hope.

Of course, many of you are asking, “SOM, What’s the heck is SOM?” I’ll tell you. It’s a CORBA object-oriented shared library. Those of you who aren’t programmers are doubtlessly staring cross-eyed at the screen right about now. For you: SOM is an easy-to-use universal programming library that both KDE and GNOME developers could use to create programs that would work in any Linux desktop environment.

The closest many users ever got to SOM was OS/2’s Workplace Shell, its desktop interface. What made SOM so powerful in the Workplace Shell was that it made it so easy to customize the desktop and its applications. With SOM, getting an application to look and act like a KDE, GNOME or what-have-you desktop program is almost trivial. Instead of delicately playing with APIs to move an application from, say, Ubuntu GNOME to OpenSUSE KDE, an SOM-aware application simply needs to call on the WinReplaceObjectClass API to use the KDE set of classes instead of GNOME’s.

If this were adopted, it would be much easier for developers to create, if I may borrow Java developers’ pet phrase, “Write once, run everywhere” applications. However, unlike Java applets, which are often slowed down by the need to be run in a Java interpreter, SOM-enabled applications and desktop environments wouldn’t face such delays.

Technically, it would work by GNOME and KDE using gtk and qt bindings to one common SOM library. Thus, today’s desktop developers really wouldn’t need to learn anything new about how to program for this new desktop environment. They would need to learn enough about OOP (object-oriented programming) to use SOM effectively, but that’s nothing compared to the kind of hoop-jumping needed currently to move an application from one desktop interface to another.

SOM wouldn’t be good just for hooking applications to the desktop. You can also use it with other programming languages. For example, SOM-aware Java, PHP, Python, Ruby or what have you would give Mono and Microsoft .Net some interesting competition on both the Linux and Windows platforms.

The other advantage of course is that OOP tends to create more stable and flexible applications from the very first version. The best example of that today is Apple’s Mac OS X’s Cocoa and Carbon. Now, while the debates over which of these is better than the other continue to rage in the same way that old-school Unix and Linux users still argue over vi vs. EMACS, one thing is certain. Mac OS X applications are stable and they always work in the same way.

Linux, while it uses OO languages like C++, really doesn’t have a universally accepted OO library. If Linux were to adopt SOM for that purpose, it could avoid the Carbon versus Cocoa arguments, and become — dare I say it? — the best desktop programming environment of all.

Another plus for SOM is that IBM designed it to work on any architecture, from mainframes to PCs. It’s also already been ported to AIX, IBM’s Unix. Put this together and it means that porting SOM to Linux should be simple.

If this is such a great idea, why hasn’t Linux already had its own OO system? Well, actually, there have been such attempts. The best known of them was probably GNOME’s Bonobo. It didn’t really go much of anywhere.

Bonobo ran out of steam not because the idea was wrong. The idea was fine. Indeed, like SOM, Bonobo was based on CORBA. The problem was that creating an OO framework is enormously time-consuming and difficult. Once an OO framework and its libraries are built, it’s easy to use, but the upfront costs can be a killer. With SOM, of course, that’s not a problem. That work has already been done.

Of course, for any of that to make a difference for Linux, SOM would need to be open-sourced. That shouldn’t be a problem. IBM hasn’t used SOM in a product in ages. Since SOM is just collecting virtual dust, why shouldn’t IBM open-source the code?

Heck, IBM doesn’t even need to release or clean up the development tools. Linux is loaded with developer tools. Just open-sourcing SOM alone, with perhaps some demonstration widgets, would be all that it would take.

Would the result look anything like OS/2? No, not at all. But what it would do is give Linux an outstanding OO framework that would go a long way toward making desktop Linux much more attractive to ISVs, and those applications would help make Linux even more interesting to desktop users.

Oh, and, IBM, since SOM can also be run in a network-aware DSOM (distributed mode), it would make integrating Linux desktop and IBM middleware running on IBM servers, especially the AIX and z/OS hardware, very easy for enterprise customers. Need I say more?