www.johnsoncountydems.com

(Credit:
Microsoft)

If the Ars Technica report is true, then, Microsoft could be the first to break the magic $200 barrier and such a move could go a very long way to helping the company reach its declared commitment to winning the console wars.

Microsoft said it does not comment on rumors.

Remember, just prior to E3, Microsoft lowered the price of the 20GB Xbox 360 from $349 to $299.

Update (Monday, 2:43 PM): This story has been modified to reflect correspondence from Microsoft this morning.

If you can see past the extremely odd prose style of this Ars Technica piece Friday by Ben Kuchera, there’s actually some potentially very interesting news there: Microsoft may be ready to truly reach out to the mass market with its
Xbox 360.

If I hear from Microsoft with comment about this, dear readers, so will you.

According to Kuchera, Microsoft may well be readying a new round of price cuts for the Xbox 360.

Now, writes Kuchera, courtesy of his source, “the mole,” Microsoft is planning to roll out new pricing on the entire line of Xboxes. For a console with no hard drive, the price could be $199; for one with a 60GB hard drive, it could be $299; and the high-end model, known as the Elite, with a 160GB hard drive, could go for $399.

Right now, the lowest-priced of the next-generation consoles is Nintendo’s
Wii, which runs $249. Sony’s
PlayStation 3 can be had for $399 for a model with a 40GB hard drive, and this fall it plans to introduce an 80GB model for that same $399 price.

If the report is true, however, Microsoft could be making an important move. According to many industry observers, the magic price point in video game machines is $200. Go below that, the theory goes, and you potentially open up your machine to the truly mass market.

If you need to create a custom keyboard shortcut to open Notepad, press the Windows key and use the arrow and Enter keys to navigate to the Notepad shortcut on the Start menu (All Programs > Accessories > Notepad). Press the context-menu–which is sometimes called the application key–and then type R. (Note that Shift-F10 opens this menu in some applications.)

Do it quick, before you forget where you put your spare mouse.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Press Ctrl-V to paste the plain text into a blank file, and type Alt-F, A to open the Save As dialog box. Give the file a name–”shortcuts.txt” works for me. Just be sure to use the “.txt” file extension and save the file to your desktop or some other location that’s easy to access.

Open Notepad by pressing the Windows key (or Ctrl-Esc) and N. You can also open it by pressing the Windows key and R (if necessary), typing notepad.exe, and pressing Enter.

Save a list of keyboard shortcuts as a text file for easy access.

If I could remember any, I would begin this post with an anecdote about how wonderful a good memory can be.

Now open the file in Notepad and either make the Notepad window inconspicuous so it doesn’t block your work apps, or keep it minimized and Alt-Tab to Notepad when you need to refer to the file. To move or resize the Notepad window (without using your mouse, of course), press Alt-spacebar, S, and then use the arrow keys to adjust the window size.

Instead, I’ll just tell you how to put all your keyboard shortcuts and Windows commands in a text file that you can open quickly via keystrokes, or keep minimized for even faster access. And you can do it all without grabbing your mouse.

Add Windows’ commands to the list
Be sure to add your custom keyboard shortcuts to your shortcuts.txt file. While you have the file open, add all those commands you always forget about when you want to use Windows’ command line to open a program or system tool. Microsoft provides a list of commands to open Control Panel applets. You’ll also find a bunch of Windows commands in an article I posted in January.

Start by finding a list of keyboard shortcuts. The one Microsoft put together works for me. Select all the text on the page from “General keyboard shortcuts” to just above “Other information.” Press Ctrl-C to copy the text to the clipboard. (That’s one of the few shortcuts I can actually remember.)

Use the Tab and arrow keys to navigate to the Shortcut keyboard text box under the Shortcut tab. Type the keystroke combination of your choice (Ctrl-Alt-N is one possibility), and press Enter.

Tomorrow: use Gmail as a network drive.

Meanwhile, Marbridge Consulting, whose staff watch the Chinese tech industry closely for a variety of clients claims to have confirmed with unnamed authorities that Tudou has been ordered to shut down, but they don’t say whether the report they’ve translated is accurate in saying that the shut-down may be temporary.

Anyone who has looked through sites such as SurfTheChannel is probably familiar with Tudou, which means potato and is named with “couch potato” in mind. Whereas YouTube tends to take down copyrighted material relatively quickly, Tudou is less vigilant about copyright.

Rumors
are
flying: Tudou, a hugely popular streaming video site based in China, has been instructed to shut down by a Chinese government authority. Tudou is still online as of this writing, but if it goes down, a major haven for streaming television will be gone.

The rumor can be summarized quickly. China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) supposedly instructed Tudou to close its doors, and word is it’s because the people responsible for taking down illegal material missed some porn.

As for its potential shutdown, Danwei, one of the most reliable sources on Chinese internet news, tracked down some facts but nothing conclusive. One unnamed Tudou source told a Chinese source that they haven’t been asked to shut down.

Yup, what’s old is new again all around this security nexus. It would be easy to say that the marketing folks are either tired or lazy, but I see a completely different meaning here. We are still struggling with basic security problems, after all these years, and the industry is thus going “back to the drawing board,” if you will.

Let’s just hope we get it right this time around, or we all may be in deep trouble.

Compliance. Everyone is resurrecting their focus on regulations such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and a host of others.

Data security. Large organizations are desperately trying to get their arms around their data by answering questions like: Where is my confidential data? Who is accessing it? What the heck are they doing with it?

Identity. Think of this as the personalization of IT. Chief information officers want to know who is on the network and what they are doing. Armed with this knowledge, they can block bad behavior and accelerate productive business activities.

Jon Oltsik is a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.

It’s a little slow at this year’s RSA Conference, but there is still plenty of hoopla to go around. It’s a retro RSA in that this year’s hot topics are all oldies but goodies. The list includes:

Posted after the break is a video of the yet-to-be-released application in action, which was made by AppleiPhoneNotes.com. One thing that might keep MagicPad from making it onto the device is if it does not meet Apple’s stringent human interface guidelines, which protect things like the keyboard configuration to keep the end user from getting confused.

Write notes, and use rich text elements including copy and paste, with MagicPad.

(Via Macrumors)

If you’re one of the many waiting for Apple to get its act together and offer a copy/paste feature on the
iPhone, there’s a promising development called MagicPad from software creator Proximi. It’s an application similar to the notes tool that ships with the iPhone. The big difference is that it’s got support for multiple fonts; rich text elements like underlining, italics, and strikethroughs; and the much-wanted copy/paste.

It manages to do all this by adding a small toolbar over the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard. Using the small loop magnifier you can highlight strings of text, then copy them into a virtual clipboard. From there it can be pasted into other notes, then sent off. Unfortunately you can’t carry the clipboard to other applications, which is what most people are hoping Apple will provide.

(Credit:
Proximi)

First Look – MagicPad from Apple iPhone Apps on Vimeo.

What does “getting ready for IE8″ mean for web sites? IE8 displays content in IE8 Standards mode – its most standards-compliant layout mode – by default. In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed how this aligns with our commitment to Web standards interoperability. However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of IE to display differently than intended. This creates a “get ready” call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in IE8.

As Microsoft noted on its IE blog:

Yet no one really capitalized on this.

Mary Jo Foley notes that the more standards-compliant Internet Explorer 8 may cause some problems for website owners. Why? Well, many have tailored their websites to non-standards compliant IE7 (as well as prior versions), and may find that opening the doors to
IE8 may not be painless.

In the past, Microsoft competitors have failed to capitalize on these moments when Microsoft gets out of sync on compatibility with its own products. For example, Office 2007 file formats are different from earlier versions of Microsoft Office. Microsoft makes a lot of noise around the importance of sticking with the standard – its own Office product – to ensure file compatibility, but compatibility between different versions of Office on different platforms and across different versions has been spotty, at best.

Watch this space.

It also creates a “get ready” call to rival browsers, and particularly Mozilla’s
Firefox, to capitalize on Microsoft’s incompatibility with itself to remind website creators that web standards are just that: Standards that should lead to greater cross-platform/browser compatibility. As more websites code for IE8, it should lead to those same sites working better with Firefox,
Safari, and other browsers.

Perhaps it’s because there have been no sizable, credible competitors to Microsoft Office. The same is not true in browsers, however, where Firefox commands at least 20 percent of the global browser market. There’s a real opportunity for Firefox to take market share from Microsoft as IE7 shifts to IE8.

commentary

If you use Microsoft Project, you might want to seriously consider three alternatives that run completely on the Web. In addition to supporting more contemporary features right now, and getting updated with even newer gadgets more frequently than Microsoft can muster, these products, being completely Web-based, offer much more robust collaboration tools.

Then there’s Clarizen, the 2.0 version of which comes out this week. This product has a very nice, very Web 2.0 user interface, but what I like best about it that most users will never see the UI: managers can set up projects on the Clarizen site, but people responsible for delivering on those projects never have to use it. The product sends e-mail queries that users can update directly, bypassing the main site and the $50 monthly per-user fee as well.

surveys – Take Our Poll

Join me at Under the Radar!

First up: Liquid Planner. We saw this product at Demo 2008 but it will be on stage again at the Under the Radar conference that I’m moderating on Thursday. This tool’s special sauce is its embrace of uncertainty. Users can put in best-case and worst-case estimates for their tasks, and the product combines all the estimates to tell you how likely you are to make deadlines, and also which sub-tasks are the most critical to achieving project goals.

I stink at project management and can’t offer an expert opinion on these products, but I do think that if you are a project management software user, you might want to try one of these Web-based tools. Of course, don’t forget to also check out Basecamp.

Finally, there’s the specialized Mumboe, which we’ll also see at Under the Radar. This is a Web-based “CLM” (contract lifecycle management) app, but it’s apparently one of the first to have a completely free subscription tier. The tool tracks the documents that go into a business agreement, and lets you specify start and end dates, deliverables, commitments, and tracking metrics. You can delegate tasks, of course, and also see your entire list of deliverables and commitments on one dashboard screen. Mumboe will also be at Under the Radar.

Over the years, I’ve noticed something lots of techies have in common–they like things to be black-and-white. Sorry if that offends you, but in my experience, it’s true.

Take the emotion out. Never negotiate in an emotional or agitated state. If it’s something you feel strongly about – as is often the case – you’ll have to find a way to diffuse your emotion. You don’t want it clouding your judgment or biasing your opponent against you. Try to get to the bottom of why you feel the way you do and put things in perspective before entering into negotiations. Better to push things out a day or two than to come in agitated and unprepared.

Bottom line
Negotiations are hairy and scary for everybody, even experienced professionals. No kidding. But just like anything in life, with knowledge and practice comes confidence, skill and ultimately, success. Good luck.

Never negotiate with yourself. After you’ve stated what you want and explained why it makes sense, be quiet and wait for the opposing party’s counter-offer. Make sure they’ve responded fully on every term before you counter. That way you’ll have time to think and prepare your response. For example, if they hold firm on one term, then it’s reasonable to ask for more on another.

Support your terms with backup. Always state your case and explain why you deserve what you’re asking for, why it makes sense. Site precedence for credibility. After receiving a counteroffer, and before you respond with your own, state your case again, term by term, emphasizing the points where the counteroffer fell short of your bottom line.

Here are five things you need to know to negotiate effectively. They’ll help you in all your work-related relationships – with peers, managers, subordinates, customers, vendors, everyone. They’ll help you to negotiate better compensation packages, promotions, and even exit packages.

How do I know this stuff? Let’s see, 25+ years in high-tech – 10 of them in executive management and 14 in sales and marketing – 18 years of marriage, 51 years of life … you get the picture. I’ve spent decades learning and honing negotiating skills.

Who knows, they may even help to improve your personal and personal business relationships. After all, so much of family and business life involves negotiating.

Five keys to effective negotiating

Study precedent. Much of negotiating is about precedent, i.e. if they did it before, they can do it again. Think things through and gather data on precedent from similar situations. Based on that, determine your bottom line (what you must have) and what you’d like to have but are willing to negotiate. Start from the latter, give yourself wiggle room, and never give without getting something in return.

Unfortunately, the real world is gray. Like it or not, living and thriving in a gray world, especially a gray workplace, involves negotiating. None of us are born with negotiating skills. We have to learn them. This will help.

Be honest and respectful. If you’re not honest about your requests you risk losing your credibility, and that’s really bad in negotiations. Sure, you can stretch or spin things a bit, but don’t cross a line you’re uncomfortable crossing. You’ll be nervous and it’ll show. Respect the opposing party. I don’t care what some of the books say, a win-win is the best outcome.

He also teased Social Media Club club founder Chris Heuer for comments he made to me for that story.

The best part of that, he said, was when Forbes’ editor put out a bounty to uncover his identity.

So, rather than carry on the subterfuge, he told Forbes that he was, in fact, Fake Steve Jobs, and thus began his official relationship as Fake Steve with his own employer.

Right away, he said, he attracted a large audience–90,000 unique monthly viewers after six months–and a worldwide manhunt to figure out who he was.

Some examples of those antics: His portrayal of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as a baboon, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison as a pimp, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz as a My Little Pony doll–”I did that before I knew he was (speaking at Web 2.0 directly) before me”–Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as Uncle Fester and, perhaps best of all, his take on Microsoft’s shipping of Vista, which he had portrayed on the blog with a picture of an elephant defecating and the headline, “Vista drops tomorrow.”

In a frenetic keynote address Friday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo here, Fake Steve–otherwise known as Forbes writer Dan Lyons–gave his unique take on the world of technology, the people who drive it, and the future of media.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET News.com)

“I just want to apologize in advance for the next 25 minutes, for the 25 minutes you’re never going to get back,” Fake Steve/Lyons said. “Please don’t Twitter attack me.”

SAN FRANCISCO–If there’s one person in the world of Web 2.0 technology–or tech in general–who hasn’t yet been skewered by the infamous blogger Fake Steve Jobs, get ready: He’s coming for you.

And that, he seemed to say, is really the essence of Web 2.0.

He said there is one commenter, known as Fake Vladimir Putin, who appears nowhere else but in the Fake Steve Jobs blog comments section.

“If you’re the founder of something called the Social Media club, you’ve got a lot of balls talking to me about wasting my time,” said Fake Steve, adding that as he understood it, the club was for people to talk about what’s being talked about on Facebook.

Instead, he began his own blog, and began–with impersonating Steve Jobs as if he was really saying what he felt instead of being little more than a PR voice like many corporate bloggers–being Fake Steve Jobs.

Of course, as is his style, he lampooned the concepts in the story. He pointed out that in some ways, the article had focused on Web 2.0 Expo and so he said that based on the story, he had been fearing getting in front of 5,000 angry audience members ready to jump him if they didn’t like what he had to say.

He then continued with a history of how he came to start his blog. He explained that as he saw traditional media organizations getting their lunch eaten by bloggers, he wanted somehow to join the new generation of media players.

At least, it seemed to be. With Fake Steve Jobs, the snark level always makes it a little difficult to tell what the real message is.

Even better, Fake Steve said, was when he wrote to the editor offering to write the blog for Forbes.com.

So he said that he asked Forbes.com, the Web venue of his employer, Forbes magazine, if he could start a blog. They said no, he reported.

“I have no reputation,” he said.

Ultimately, though, he said that the best part of the experience of writing the blog has been that it has created what he called a “platform” for others to come and “perform” via the comments section.

“It’s like Webkinz for adults,” Fake Steve said of Facebook. “It’s the biggest waste of time ever invented.”

Fake Steve began his talk with a discussion about the issues related to surviving backlash from audience members at conferences. I was rather pleased to see that as his prop, he used an article I’d written earlier this month on the subject.

To Fake Steve, that comment was well worth a bit of his wit.

“So,” he continued, “Oh God, I hope no one impugns my reputation. I’ll never get that job at BusinessWeek.”

Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, gave his unique view on Web 2.0 and other issues at the Web 2.0 Expo Friday morning.

He proceeded to explain how, over the course of the time that he’s been writing his Fake Steve Jobs blog, he has pretty much killed his reputation with some of his antics. The point? That it doesn’t really matter what people think of him or what he says.

“Time is our most valuable asset, and if it’s being wasted, we’re not going to take it,” Heuer had told me. “We want our time to be well-invested.”

“He wrote back, ‘Oh, Fake Steve, you’re a genius, we’d love to hire you,’” he said.

If there are 400,000 unlocked iPhones in China — where Apple has no contract and may or may not be able to even get one — that’s 10% of all iPhones sold to date. So if Apple hits its target of 10 million phones, 1 million of them will be in China, unlocked.

Much of the
iPhone’s profitability comes from revenue-sharing agreements that Apple has in place with AT&T Inc., as well as its three European wireless partners.

See? It’s an inverse relationship. For every X number of phones you can put on a revenue sharing contract by adding another cellular provider, you must reduce the monthly rate for all phones, and by a lot.

Could be. No one knows for sure, but that’s possible.

Right you are.

If these phones are in countries where Apple has no contract, the only thing you can say is that Apple should get an exclusive contract there faster (easier said than done). If they’re being used by people who just don’t like the exclusive provider Apple’s signed with, then these are people they’ll never get anyway.

[Bernstein Research analyst Toni] Sacconaghi estimated that between 25% and 30% of the more than 4 million iPhone units already sold have been unlocked to work on other wireless networks…

If you want to play the “but they could have contracts with multiple companies!” game, then you can’t use the $15.42 multiplier. And not only for the incremental phones they’d gain, you can’t use it for phones they’ve already sold under contract. Why? Because you just threw exclusivity out the window.

$370 over two years implies a $15.42/month revenue share per phone. There’s a lot of debate as to what the actual amount is Apple gets from AT&T — Scott Bourne of the Apple Phone Show thinks it’s around $9/month and Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray has estimated it as high as $18/month. So, $15.42 isn’t outrageous, but it’s a little on the high side. But the key thing to remember is that number is what it is because the contract is exclusive.

Banana pony lollipop!

Seriously! It’s apparently not as hard as it sounds! Let’s have a look!

Indeed. It was kind of surprisingly large to everyone, including the Macalope.

Hey, kids! Do you like math?! Sure you do!

Splort – chortle – hack – cough.

Apple doesn’t disclose how much revenue it gets from AT&T or its European partners, O2 in the U.K., T-Mobile in Germany and Orange in France. Those carriers each give Apple a payment every month for each customer that activates an iPhone on their its network.

Let’s try this one more time.

With jelly on it!

Oh, no, you dih-unt, girlfriend.

… and that each unlocked iPhone results in Apple’s missing out on $370 in earnings over the phone’s two-year contract period.

Again, please see the definition of opportunity cost and how it actually has to have a realistic opportunity, not a fantasy bozo lala gum drops opportunity.

That. Makes. No. Sense.

if you’ll excuse the Macalope, he’s going to go lie down and apply a cold compress right between the antlers.

Thanks to this report we can see Sacconaghi’s math and, hey, the Macalope’s 9th grade chemistry teacher (and the Macalope) was right! In a nutshell, Sacconaghi estimated that if Apple hit its target of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008, that would mean that something like 3 million of them would be unlocked. 3 million times $370 is 1.11 billion!

Well, how’d you like to be an analyst at a Wall Street research firm?!

Well, sure. Of course they do! It’s only fair!

Which is why — and, jeez, how many times does the Macalope have to say this? — it makes absolutely no sense to say that Apple is losing this money.

Arrrrgh.

This may not be the same estimate referred to in those pieces, but the number’s around $1 billion, so let’s take a look at what horrid alchemy went into creating it.

Good god.

Poof. There goes 1/3 of that $1 billion.

Just after the Macalope sent off some emails to the writers of the pieces Todd Sullivan linked to to ask who the heck these “analysts” were, he noticed this piece at MarketWatch.

But the issue of users buying an iPhone only to “unlock” it from those carriers rose following Apple’s last quarterly earnings report. Analysts noted a discrepancy between sales figures provided by Apple and those from AT&T, and some concluded that as many as 1 million devices had been unlocked.

$370? Each?!

So, hey, let’s do some more math! Since it’s just multiplication of a bunch of numbers we read on the Intramets somewhere like Sacconaghi did! Remember, being an analyst is something you can try at home, kids!

The hell?!

This. Is. Not. Lost. Revenue.