Okay, some more details, from somebody who helped negotiate the deal:
Sinclair is asking for about $1/month plus $40M-$60M up front for 3 years (about $5-$7/month per subscriber).
Mediacom agreed to pay Sinclair whatever they have paid other broadcast companies or whatever Sinclair has received from other cable companies in the past four years. Sinclair insisted on more. They wanted $1 million dollars over the highest deal of any market, for all 22 Sinclair stations carried by Mediacom, regardless of the size of the individual market. That is to say, they want $1 million dollars more than the deal for the largest market, but for each individual market, including the small ones. So, essentially, they’re being really greedy. They’re wanting many millions more than any comparable deal between any broadcast company and cable company.
That’s exactly the sort of information needed to determine which company is being greedy. From those numbers, we can fairly reliably guess that Sinclair is mostly to blame here. I had a Mediacom employee contact me the other day with some more numbers. He’d like his identity withheld, so I will summarize the information he provided.
Basically, Mediacom offered to match any deal Sinclair has made with other cable providers (like Comcast). Sinclair refused that offer. Then, Mediacom offered to match any deal they’ve done with other stations (over 400 other stations). Sinclair also refused that offer.
So, Mediacom has made multiple attempts to strike a deal with Sinclair. Sinclair seems unwilling to take anything less than what they’re asking. Read more
Sort of. I read this over on Ajaxian yesterday but didn’t get a chance to check it out until this morning. The folks over at Remember The Milk have taken notice of the fact that a great number of their users are using Google Calendar to keep track of events, while continuing to use Remember The Milk for daily tasks. So, the fine people at Remember The Milk have come out with Remember The Milk for Google Calendar:
We know that many of you are managing your tasks with Remember The Milk and your events with Google Calendar, and we thought it would be very cool if we could bring the two together. This new feature adds a small task icon to the top of each day in Google Calendar — click on the icon to:
Review your tasks for the day
Add new tasks and edit existing ones
Easily complete and postpone tasks
Review your overdue tasks
Optionally show tasks with no due date
See where your tasks are located on a map
This exciting for me. I’ve been waiting on Google to add official tasks to Google Calendar, but this will suffice. Actually, I like this because I really enjoy using Remember The Milk, and would like to continue using it. Looks like I’ll be able to keep using it indefinitely now that RTM has support for Google Calendar. Yay!!
Last Friday, I bought an Xbox 360 at my local K-Mart. It was probably a mistake getting it from K-Mart, but I sort of decided to buy it on the spot, didn’t really put much thought into it. After getting my Xbox 360 out of it’s box and all hooked up, I started wishing I had made the purchase directly from Microsoft instead. All is fine and well now, but I had nothing but problems for a few hours after setting the Xbox 360 up.
At this point, I did the initial configuration on the Xbox 360. I setup my profile and just started playing Need For Speed: Carbon. That didn’t last long though, the 360 started freezing up every minute or two. I kept rebooting it, hoping for a better result, but nothing.
After a few reboots, and barely getting a profile created in Need For Speed, I was presented with the error seen to the left. Click the image to make it bigger, sorry for the shitty picture. My heart really sunk at that point, the description of the E71 error message is rather disappointing: “E71: possibly a dashboard update error, there is no solution at present the console must be sent back to MS for repair.” There’s a nice post over at the xbox-scene forums that covers error codes and what to do about them. After finding the meaning of the E71 error message, I set out getting my Xbox 360 on my network. I was hoping a network connection would force the 360 to check for a dashboard update or something…anything.
Getting my Xbox 360 online wasn’t a problem, the hardest part was finding an ethernet cable long enough to go from my switch in the office to the living room. Once I had the network cable in the Xbox 360, I turned it on and it immediately said there was an update to download from Microsoft. It must have grabbed an IP really quickly from my DHCP server and checked for updates. Had I not had a DHCP server running, I may not have gotten the update. I don’t think I could have gotten into the dashboard to manually configure tcp/ip settings for the 360. It would have frozen up and that would have been it.
Anyway, the update downloaded and was installed, and my Xbox 360 was rebooted. After that, the 360 finally came up and my freeze problems were gone. So, if you’re having all sorts of flaky issues with your Xbox 360, try getting it on a network with an internet connection and see if it’ll download a dashboard update. I haven’t had any problems with stability since the initial update was downloaded, thank god! I really didn’t want to have to send my brand new Xbox 360 into Microsoft for servicing the day of purchasing it.
If you are experiencing problems like I was and this fix works for you, please let me know. This has probably been written about elsewhere, but unfortunately I couldn’t find it.
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Fortunately for me, there’s really nothing I have to do to take advantage of this new spec. I’ve had a sitemap file for quite a while, and it gets updated dynamically with every new post I make. My sitemap xml file is quite large.
Joseph Scott brings up an important aspect of this new spec, pinging. Pinging basically means that when you make an update to your blog or site, you can ping Google/Yahoo/MSN to let them know you’ve made an update. That way they can crawl your site sooner to index your new content. Pretty neat.
Just a few minutes ago, I saw 20,000 unique visitors here at longren.org. I started tracking about one year ago when I first started using Mint.
I thought it’d be 2+ years before I saw 20,000 unique visitors, guess I was way off. I never anticipated releasing a theme for WordPress or joining some of the blogging communities I’m a member of. Yay for 20,000! I’ll be at 40,000 uniques by early May, hopefully.
