The seeming stupidity of corporate America never ceases to amaze me. AT&T for the past few years has been snapping up huge cable companies and generally growing, now their stock is in the dumpster. So what are they doing? Breaking up into four separate companies. You wonder how much money they spent on the acquisitions, and how much they’ll now spend on the breakup. Are they going to be any better off now than they were before they bought TCI?

Is it only me who finds the deal between Ajuba and Interwoven interesting? Ajuba, formerly known as Scriptics, is the company founded by the creator of TCL to try to commercialize the language. Interwoven is a maker of content management software of dubious quality. Vignette is, of course, another maker of content management software of dubious quality, and they rely on TCL as the core scripting language for their product. I wonder if Interwoven bought Ajuba in order to give Vignette problems in the future …

I managed to download Groove last night and install it, and it looks really cool. I haven’t had a chance to collaborate with anyone else using Groove yet, but hopefully I’ll get someone at work to install it so that we can play with it. What I’m really interested in is developing some new tools to use within Groove, that I’ll discuss on this page later. For now, I’m reading the Groove Developer’s Guide.

Big news: Wired News is now inserting a hyphen in the word e-mail. I know you wanted to read three pages of utter garbage explaining why. (The column should probably be enshrined in a gallery of self-aggrandizement.)

As everyone who’s plugged in already knows, Groove has finally taken the wraps off of its seriously hyped new collaborative tool. The O’Reilly Network has an interview with Ray Ozzie about the product. It’s hard to pin the tail on a revolution before it happens, but Groove certainly has potential.

Salon has an article on the MoodWatch feature in the latest version of Eudora. Like all content filtering algorithms that I’m familiar with, it doesn’t really work.

BountyQuest is a company that will allow people to anonymously post bounties for prior art that can be used to nullify patents. I’m glad to see that someone is off and running with this idea. I had the idea of starting a prior art repository myself, but allowing people to anonymously offer bounties for prior art is a small stroke of brilliance. Tim O’Reilly and Jeff Bezos are both investors. One of the first bounties is for prior art that will eliminate the infamous Amazon.com one click shopping patent.

I haven’t been paying attention to the problems at Pacifica radio lately, mainly because I live in an area that has no Pacifica affiliate (much to my chagrin), but it looks like the corruption of Pacifica’s original mission persists. Monkeyfist reports on problems between Pacifica and Democracy Now, one of the best radio programs currently aired. In my opinion, Democracy Now is an essential part of the media landscape, and the idea that it’s being harassed by higher-ups at Pacifica is deeply disturbing. Kendall’s report on Democracy Now took me on a brief trip down memory lane, and reminded me that the show had a large role in molding my current political philosophy, back when I listened to it on the way to work in rural Pennsylvania.

Remember when I pointed to the Salon article that reported that all of the SDMI music protection schemes had been cracked? Well, maybe that’s not the case. It seems we’re short on some hard facts in all this, and there’s no way to know for sure who’s telling the truth.

For all the bad things I’ve said about Microsoft, I’ve long admired Bill Gates’ dedication to providing medical aid for people living in third world countries. At an idiotic conference where technocrats tried to figure out how to turn starving people in Africa into (hopefully money-spending) computer users, Bill Gates pointed out that what these people need is medicine, not wireless access to online banking. It’s amazing how stupid and myopic people in the computer industry can be.