Into Tech

With the positively yawn-inducing news over the weekend that Yahoo had rejected yet another offer from Microsoft, Joel West is reminding people that big acquisitions almost never make sense and very often destroy value. As an example, he points to the news that AMD is writing down $880 million on its acquisition of ATI only 8 months after it already wrote down $1.6 billion. That’s $2.5 billion wiped out in a very short period of time. As West notes, small acquisitions can make sense for small companies, at least in allowing their founders to cash out — but for big companies it’s usually more about ego: helping them move up the Fortune 500. But those deals almost never work out:

The fundamental problem of acquiring public companies is that you have to pay more than the market price — so the claim is either you know better than the market (never true) or that you will realize synergies that increase the value of the acquired company (almost never true). So the choice is between buying overpriced good companies, or troubled companies not worth buying at any price. Acquiring a troubled company means you acquire their troubles — whether it’s exposure to an industry past its peak (AOL Time Warner, Viacom-Blockbuster) or a company with a justifiably lousy market position (Daimler Chrysler).

The other aspect that he doesn’t touch on is that with big companies, there are always investment bankers crawling all over management trying to convince them to buy up other companies one week, and sell off pieces the next. This “buy ‘em up, sell ‘em off” strategy almost never works for anyone but the investment bankers who take their fees both coming and going. So as the silly battle continues around Microsoft and Yahoo, rest assure that pretty much whatever happens, you can expect to see a destruction in value rather than any “synergies” revealed.

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Microsoft has confirmed the existence of a 60GB version of the Xbox 360 console and the best bit is that it’s going to cost the same as the 20GB ‘Premium’ version. The console has just been announced in the US and will cost around $349 [the equivalent 20GB model here costs around £160]. It ships there on August 4.

As a result, the price of the 20GB version has had $50 knocked off to $299 -something that leaked here last month - and will stay that way until stocks run out. According to Albert Penello, Xbox director of product management at Microsoft:

In 1997, the name Slashdot was cool, because most people really weren’t familiar with the idea of web addresses: we’d tell them to go to “slash slash slash-dot dot org” and their eyes would glaze over. The /. site was pretty cool, too. It was billed as “News for Nerds” and the net had a very high proportion of nerds back then.

What it didn’t have was a plethora of blogs where someone could post a short story with a link so that thousands of people could pile in and discuss it. But at the time, I thought of Slashdot more as a replacement for Usenet newsgroup discussions than a precursor of blogging.

Either way, Slashdot soon became so popular that it gave rise to “the Slashdot effect”. Slashdotters would see a new user-submitted story and click the link, and the target site would promptly collapse under the sheer weight of visitors. Sites that carried stories about Linux and open source, and geeky science news, usually hadn’t been set up to handle huge spikes in traffic.

Naturally, many people tried to exploit the Slashdot effect, including me. There was no quicker way to get noticed.

Unfortunately, one of the downsides of nerdy sites is that they attract loads of nerds. These are the people who don’t have girlfriends or proper jobs; who live on pizza in their parents’ basement, and rarely see the sun; who have an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars but no common sense. It’s a running gag on Slashdot that everyone is like that, even though they’re not.

Slashdot’s standard nerd hypocrisy is another running gag. Everyone knows that anything related to Apple/Linux/open source is innovative and cool, whereas if Microsoft had done exactly the same thing, it would be evil and monopolistic. Double standards rule.

But unlike Usenet, Slashdot has an innovative and cool Karma system to bury a lot of the rubbish. Comments are labelled (flamebait, troll, redundant, insightful, interesting, informative, funny etc) and rated, and Slashdotters can vote them up or down. The perceptive comments should therefore get voted up to +4 or +5 while the stupid ones are voted down to -1. If you browse Slashdot with a threshold set at +3, you can read the best and ignore the rest.

The good stuff on Slashdot is still very good, but perhaps the site is past its best. Although it has expanded beyond the nerd ghetto into politics and YRO (Your Rights Online), the site has been superseded by newcomers such as Digg and Reddit, Techmeme and Tailrank and other sources of news links. Slashdot’s responses to this competition - which include Idle and Firehose - don’t seem to have the same sort of momentum.

Any site that has signed up more than a million members and has several million visitors a month is clearly getting lots of things right. It’s still the primary place for nerds to discuss news. However, as the internet grows, the proportion of nerds declines, and so does Slashdot’s relative importance.

Microsoft is not known for its design flair on the hardware front but this new crescent-shaped mouse is definitely a step in the right direction.

It’s a collapsible portable mouse that offers the size and feel of a desktop mouse but which can be folded to make it useful for traveling with. That’s the pitch anyhow but it’s certainly a looker and it would be nice if Microsoft let the designer of this product loose of some of its other peripherals. According to the marketing material:

Moving music

We want to put our existing iPod libraries on to the new PC.
Jane McNicol

JS: Apple’s website provides instructions for moving your music library either via a CD or DVD or using an iPod (support.apple.com/kb/HT1329). However, this requires the use of iTunes 7 on both machines. One alternative is to use iGadget software ($15), which has replaced iPod Agent by the same developer, but there are many others. The main problem is transferring any protected files bought from the iTunes store. According to Apple, you must authorise the new PC by selecting Authorize Computer on the Store menu in iTunes. You can then attach the iPod, go to the File menu, and select Transfer Purchases from iPod (support.apple.com/kb/HT1727). Of course, you can always copy your files onto CD or other storage medium and add them to iTunes on the new PC. However, this will lose the metadata you had in the old library.

TinyURL revisited

What’s the best way to follow up your many TinyURL references?
Tom Garrud

My system - Firefox 3, Zone Alarm Security Suite, Windows XP - will not let me access any TinyURLs.
David Gompertz

JS: TinyURL references work as published if you type them directly into the address bar of your browser or, at worst, stick http:// on the front, eg http://tinyurl.com/owd8n etc. But it’s probably easier to follow the links from the Ask Jack blog, where I use the full address of each link instead of the TinyURL. Some websites and security programs may block TinyURL addresses as they can be used to take people to malware sites. The Zone Alarm Suite now does this via its Spy Site Blocking tab, but this is not part of the free firewall program.

Saving boot time

I can remember having to wait for radio valves to warm up. Why do I have to wait even longer after switching on my Windows XP PC?
Hugh Roberts

JS: When correctly set up by the manufacturer, Windows XP boots in about 30 seconds, resumes from Hibernate in 20 seconds, and resumes from Standby in five seconds. The boot time for a well-used PC is generally more like 60 to 90 seconds, depending on how many applications are being loaded in the background. These will usually include a firewall and antivirus software, but most other preloads are unnecessary. Search for [windows startup manager] and you will find lots of programs that allow you to control which things are loaded. I use AnVir Task Manager Free for this purpose, though Windows Vista has a utility built in. Otherwise, you can go to the Control Panel, click Power Options, and set your PC so that it will hibernate after a specified time. This uses very little power but it will start up quicker.

Data destruction

I’ve bought a replacement for my broken down PC, and would like to dispose of it, but it still has my data on the hard drive.
Barbara Evans

JS: Simply remove the hard drive before disposing of the base unit. If the drive is big enough to be worth the effort, you could mount it in an external drive case and use it as a USB drive with your new machine. If it’s a small drive and you don’t need to rescue any data, you can do enough physical damage to render it inoperable - eg, wrap it in a tea towel and whack it with a hammer. The tea towel is to stop bits flying around, but you should also wear appropriate protective equipment such as goggles.

What’s Kontiki?

I have installed the BBC iPlayer, but every time I activate it, a program called Kontiki pops up.
Denis

JS: When you download TV programmes using iPlayer - as distinct from watching streamed versions online - they are downloaded using Kontiki (kontiki.com). This is a peer-to-peer file sharing program, which is also used by similar services such as Sky by Broadband and Channel 4’s 4oD. Kontiki seems to load and use your bandwidth, even if you are not using iPlayer: use the Windows Task Manager to see if Kservice is running. The BBC has a page that explains how to stop it running on startup and when you are not using iPlayer (tinyurl.com/4h2t26). You can remove it altogether using the kclean.exe program from tinyurl.com/5msknq. However, if you do, any Kontiki-based programs such as iPlayer may not work.

Backchat

Vista user JH Prentice wanted a photo retouching program to replace Microsoft’s Picture It! I suggested the Picnik website and Paint.net. Two readers suggested Picasa (picasa.google.com), which is mainly a photo organiser, while Marcus Fallon proposed XnView (xnview.com), which is mainly a viewer. I’d go for XnView too, if its retouching facilities meet your needs. A great pro solution is Adobe’s Lightroom, if you have £200 to spare.

theodp writes "Microsoft was just granted U.S. Patent No. 7,392,326 for Text Entry in an Electronic Device. From the patent: ‘the invention may automatically add a ‘www.’ and a ‘.com’ to the text the user is entering and display this combined text’. To get the point across, Microsoft included an illustration showing the ‘invention’ in action, transforming ‘foo’ into ‘www.foo.com’. Sure it’s not sorcery we’re dealing with?"

The specifics of the patent show it to be for easier data entry on mobile devices, but it’s difficult to see how this qualifies as either new or non-obvious. Basically, the concept is pretty straightforward and has been done on desktop browsers for some time. To simply add “and on mobile devices” doesn’t seem deserving of a patent. Does anyone really believe this functionality wouldn’t have been developed without a patent?

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It’s the merger story that never dies. Despite however many times that Yahoo and Microsoft have insisted that any potential deal between the two companies is over and done with (despite trying a few times), there’s indications (once again) that Microsoft isn’t out of this yet, and could potentially come back in and do a new deal if Carl Icahn gets the board slate that he wants. Again, though, it seems like Icahn’s talkative nature actually devalued the deal a bit. In talking about how much he wants to sell Yahoo (if he gains control over it), he’s making it that much easier for Microsoft to buy at a lower price than otherwise. It’s difficult to see how that’s possibly in Icahn’s own best interests. Still, the longer this goes on, the more of a mess it becomes — and the happier Google gets.

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A little while ago we saw Bill Gates demonstrate Microsoft’s Surface technology, which followed on from the touch-sensitive Table that seemed to attract a fair amount of ridicule in tech circles.

Perhaps slideshow presentations and spreadsheets weren’t the best approach to show this off then, because a similar technology developed by UbiqWindow looks far cooler.

SD or xD?

Looking at digital SLR cameras, most appear to use xD cards. I already use SD cards. What is the difference?
Maurice

JS: The SD (Secure Digital) card standard was developed by Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba to provide a small protected storage format for devices such as PDAs, MP3 players and mobile phones. There are now miniSD and microSD versions, plus SDHC cards.

The SDHC cards look the same but are generally incompatible with older devices that lack SDHC support, so this is the main point to watch. Digital SLRs that use SD cards are available from Nikon, Canon, Pentax, Panasonic and Samsung.

The xD (extreme Digital) storage format is similar, but was introduced later by Olympus and Fujifilm. This now has variants called Type M and Type H, so again, watch out for compatibility problems. Since xD is less popular that SD, prices are usually higher and cards will fit fewer devices. Frankly, I can’t see any reason for choosing xD rather than SD or CompactFlash - an older but very reliable format that uses a much bigger card - and I avoid the numerous Sony Memory Stick cards for the same reasons. If you have multiple devices, then it should be cheaper and more convenient to stick to a couple of popular formats, instead of having a different type of card in each device.

OE? Oui!

I like Outlook Express but cannot use spellcheck with my new laptop because it has only French spelling.
GP Ray

JS: Funnily enough, this is a common complaint, because Microsoft Office 2007 installs English, Spanish and German files that are incompatible with Outlook Express 6. This is a problem because OE does not actually have a spellchecker: it borrows one from Microsoft Office or Microsoft Works. Microsoft’s Help Centre article offers a solution. It says: “There are a variety of third-party free spell-checking programs available on the Internet”. One popular option is Vampirefo’s Spell Checker For OE, which is also available from SnapFiles. You could also use the inline spellchecker in Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7 with IE7Pro. If you really want to try to fix the problem, however, Tech-Pro.net has an article on How To: Fix spell checking in Outlook Express 6.

Replacing Picture It

For several years I have been very satisfied with Microsoft’s Picture It! program. However, having changed my computer, it is no longer available.
JH Prentice

JS: Microsoft’s Picture It! was included in the Microsoft Works suite and subsumed into the Microsoft Digital Image Suite. Microsoft discontinued it after adding most of the features to Windows Vista. However, your old CD could work: according to web reports, Picture It! 9 and 10 will work in Vista if you run it in XP compatibility mode and check the box “As Administrator”. Sadly, the very easy photo retouching features were not added to Vista, and I don’t know of any other program that takes the same non-geeky approach. The closest may be an online Flash-based picture editor, Picnik. Otherwise, Paint.net is a good free picture editor for Windows, though it’s in the traditional mould.

NetSnake corralled

One of my three anti-spyware programmes keeps reporting a Trojan backdoor in the internat.exe Windows file. This has a large query as its icon, and properties describes it as a Keyboard Language Indicator Applet. If I let the program remove it, or if I delete it myself, then it promptly reappears.
Richard Parish

JS: Try running a search for internat.exe, the name of the software that detects it and “false alarm”, because that’s what it probably is. There are at least two versions of internat.exe, one of which puts a small blue square in the SysTray to let you change languages. Most UK users don’t need this feature and don’t run it. This has a question mark icon and is about 20K. The Trojan version is about four times larger and has a zip file icon. If it also says “Hello. I’m NetSnake” on startup, then it’s definitely a virus. For more information, see Symantec’s write-up.

Backchat

· Bill Taylor has come up with “a very simple typo that causes a Word document to be closed without saving” - which was Stafford Linsley’s problem. It’s “Ctrl+W - an unadvertised keyboard shortcut for Close”. He says he learned the hard way by typing “When” and hitting Ctrl instead of the shift key. I’ve previously recommended Ctrl-W as a quick way of closing unwanted popups and browser windows.

We never understood the hype around Powerset. It was the latest in an extremely long line of startups that claimed to focus on “natural language search” — which is one of those holy grails for computer scientists who never stop to ask whether or not there’s actually any market demand for it. As Google has shown, people don’t need to use natural language to search. They’re just fine doing keyword search. Yet, for some unclear reason, Powerset was able to raise a ton of money at a ridiculous valuation, and did so using all sorts of buzzwords (and vague patent threats). But when it finally released a product (just to search Wikipedia) it proved to be rather ho hum. Searching Wikipedia via other means was still more effective.

Now comes the news (first leaked last week) that Microsoft has bought Powerset. While both sides will present this as a big win, the numbers being tossed about ($100 million) are not a big win at all for Powerset’s investors, and the exit certainly falls well short of the hype around Powerset. If Powerset was actually seeing any traction at all it never would have agreed to sell at that price. Basically, Powerset discovered what was widely known by industry watchers for years: natural language search is a neat challenge, but it’s not something the market is demanding. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft actually does anything with the technology, but my guess is that it will slowly fade away. If anything, Microsoft may do a little saber-rattling over the patents Powerset hyped up, but little else.

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