Maszman Speaks!

It just occurred to me that Google going pub­lic opens up the pos­si­bil­ity that some­one with a lot of cash (like Microsoft) is now in a bet­ter posi­tion to acquire them. The finan­cial report­ing rules for a pri­vate com­pany are much dif­fer­ent than for a pub­lic one. That knowl­edge can help a poten­tial pur­chaser size their offer. If they can do that and also con­vince the share­hold­ers it’s a good idea, there’s lit­tle the founders can do to stop it (look back to the HP pur­chase of Com­paq for reference).

Rochester, home of super­glue. Now you know.

One of the many down­sides to the recent media con­sol­i­da­tions is sup­pres­sion of “incon­ve­nient” news.

I don’t have cable or satel­lite and my local ABC affil­li­ate is owned by, you guessed it, Clear Chan­nel so at least I can watch this if I wish.

If you were won­der­ing how bad the recent North Korean train explo­sion was, try this com­par­a­tive overview of the blast-affected town of Ryong­chon.

If you liked the Hon­ey­well kitchen com­puter, you’ll love the Amer­i­can Busi­ness Com­put­ers Cat­a­log. See what state-of-the-art meant in 1981.

Physi­cists at Berke­ley have fig­ured out a way to dig­i­tally record the grooves of records and even wax cylin­ders with­out actu­ally touch­ing them. The tech­nique also allows the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of defects in the grooves that can then be edited out. The Library of Con­gress is a likely user of this tech­nol­ogy given their enor­mous col­lec­tion of early sound record­ings and will allow them to open the record­ings up to a much larger audience.