Newt Gingrich: still a doofus.

Apple reported a fat $178 million profit for the quarter yesterday, and announced that they’re rewarding Steve Jobs with a jet and 10 million shares of Apple stock for the big turnaround that he has engineered. Apple spent about 90 million bucks to purchase the plane and take care of all the taxes Jobs would owe on it.

Veteran Transmeta and Linux watcher Andrew Leonard provides coverage of yesterday’s Crusoe launch for Salon.

I would like to talk about one hypothetical scenario under which the Transmeta stuff becomes very interesting. As we all know now, the chips will use “code morphing” to translate x86 instructions to Crusoe instructions. One must assume that “Mobile Linux” will run natively on those chips. If the Crusoe chips become incredibly popular for laptops and handhelds due to their low power consumption, then the fact that Mobile Linux will run faster than Windows on those chips could give Linux a very nice inroad into the OS market that it doesn’t already have.

I feel obliged to report that Transmeta finally announced what they’ve been working on in secret for all these years — a low power microprocessor that will emulate Intel x86 chips in software. The one they’re releasing now will power handhelds, and one released later this year will attempt to supplant Intel chips in laptops. Linus Torvalds has been working on a mobile version of Linux to run on the chips. The most interesting thing about all this is the level of exposure Transmeta is getting thanks to their obsession with total secrecy until now. Another brilliant marketing move … people were dying to see the announcement, even though their product offerings are useful but not thrilling. I defer to EE Times for stories about silicon, here’s a link to their article.

perl.com has an article about development teams and coding standards that’s pretty interesting.

More guerilla marketing news today: a Georgia songwriter snarfed some domain names like stephencase.com that were related to the AOL/Time Warner merger, wrote a song about it, and then directed those domains to a place to download an MP3 of the song. Now they’re writing news stories about him. Brilliant.

The guy who bailed out Microsoft when their passport.com domain name expired is a marketing genius. He continues to garner boatloads of publicity for his good deed by shrewdly manipulating the press. Most recently, he has decided to auction off his reward check from Microsoft and donate the proceeds to charity.

It’s important not to send Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba because the process of indoctrination offered here in the United States is so much better. The people involved in the pathetic manipulation of this luckless child make me ill.

I never knew that there’s actually a duct tape fad. Sometimes I feel so old.