This column has a global audience so sometimes I have to defend my tendency to see things from an American perspective. But I’m not sure there even IS a defense for this particular item so I’ll just jump into it, because I think even readers from Kazahkstan and Kuwait (my two big K’s) may ultimately find it interesting. It’s about Apple and Hulu and the direction Internet TV is going in the United States.
It’s not headed where you think it is.
Hulu is the ad-supported video distribution site set up by NBC-Universal and Fox. It’s where, in addition to the TV network pages, viewers can go to watch thousands of television shows, old and new, […]
So Oracle ends up owning Sun Microsystems. I couldn’t believe it at first, thinking somehow that it was all just a ploy to get IBM to pull out the Big Checkbook. And while the deal may have begun with that thought glowing in the mind of Jonathan Schwartz, it ends with the heart of Sun moving a few miles up 101 to where it will certainly die.
I’m not the biggest fan of Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Okay, I am not a fan at all. But I have to give the guy credit for keeping up company morale, because when I polled my Sun contacts recently on why they thought IBM might be interested in buying the company, each thought it was because of his or her division. What charming — if misguided — loyalty. These people still feel good about their company.
Last week Google revealed to the world its shipping container modular data centers that I was the first to write about almost four years ago.
This past weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. If you are old enough you may remember where you were at that time and what it was like. I remember VERY well because I was on my way to the crippled plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our President at the time, Jimmy Carter, was also a micro-manager and a former nuclear engineer: he wanted his own eyes and ears on the scene. Our little group eventually coalesced into the Presidental Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, led by Dartmouth College president John Kemeny, who was also the co-author of BASIC.
“Where are the tumbrils?” asks my friend Adam Smith.If, like me, you have no idea what is a tumbril, it is a type of horse cart used during the French Revolution to transport condemned prisoners to the guillotine for beheading.What Adam wonders is how we can get so deep into such a hellacious financial crisis without finding at least a few bad guys to behead?
