Okay, so do you remember back in grade school when you went through your little phase of rampant dinosaur obsession, and at some point you read somewhere that the Brontosaurus had a nervous system so slow and primitive, if you jabbed the tip of its tail with a pin, the impulse to experience pain wouldn't reach its brain for, like, ten minutes or something? For all we know it's a long-disproved theory no longer accepted by serious paleontologists, or maybe it was always a total crock that just sounded good for My First Dinosaur Book; heck, they aren't even called Brontosauruses anymore, so any Fun Dino Facts we retained from reading the back of the Prehistoric Animal Cracker box are likely to be pretty suspect. All we know is, that's what popped into our heads when faithful viewer Jan Adriaenssens forwarded us the latest development in the Disney Leadership Crisis saga this morning; Michael Eisner got jabbed in the tail over six months ago, and he just now said "ow."

Yes, after receiving a blistering and completely unprecedented 45% vote of no confidence at Disney's shareholders' meeting last March, Eisner has only just now announced that he's finally going to leave his post as Disney's CEO. But if you think his six-month reaction time is slow, wait'll you see how long it takes him to actually do something about it; according to the New York Times, Eisner won't actually vamoose until September of 2006. Why? Because Eisner is calling his departure a "retirement," and that's when his current contract expires; ludicrously enough, he's actually claiming that his decision to leave has nothing whatsoever to do with all the opposition he's received over the past couple of years. But who knows? Maybe his nervous system is even slower than we thought and the fact that no one wants him running Disney hasn't actually sunk in yet.

Or maybe he's sharper than he appears (which wouldn't be hard), because his timing is very interesting; remember, despite the fact that talks had reportedly been going nowhere for months, Steve Jobs's surprise announcement that negotiations had collapsed and Pixar and Disney would be parting ways came at a suspiciously good time for the anti-Eisner brigade, who used the evaporation of billions of dollars of future Pixar revenue as heavy artillery in its newly-mounted and massive campaign to get shareholders to vote against Eisner. Future hints that Pixar might possibly consider returning to Disney as long as Eisner were gone raised some suspicion that Steve staged the whole thing just to get Eisner fired, possibly so that he could take the CEO spot himself; after all, why else would he announce the end of the partnership nearly two full years before the current Pixar-Disney agreement expires?

But now Eisner has said he's retiring, which makes it a lot tougher for anyone to justify kicking him out, and he won't be cleaning out his desk until nine months after the Pixar deal ends. Was this a final salting of the earth? Because if Steve never had any serious intention of splitting Pixar from Disney and always planned to re-ink a deal once Eisner got canned, now his bluff's being called; if he wants to stick with Disney, he's going to have to deal with Eisner to do it. If that was Eisner's intention, he's a brilliant tactician.

Or he's got a brain the size of a large apple, there's no retaliatory conspiracy, and this is all just a massive coincidence. Whatever. In any case, Eisner's days at Disney (at least as CEO) are numbered, and while he's pitching his second-in-command and favorite puppet Bob Iger as his successor, investors reportedly aren't crazy about the idea. Is it any surprise that on every list of potential candidates kicked around by analysts and industry pundits, Steve Jobs's name glows like blinking neon? The question is, was he angling for the job all along, and if so, will he split his CEOsity three ways, have Disney buy Pixar, have Disney buy Pixar and Apple, or just leave Apple in the lurch? Things just might get interesting, folks.

Who says today's teens and young adults are apathetic? More to the point, who cares? And anyway, it's just not so; give the youth of today an issue near and dear to their hearts, show them a real injustice being perpetrated that highly offends their core set of values, and they'll protest as loudly as any generation before or since. Don't believe us? Then just take a gander at what's happening with the students down at Cornell University, for example; we guarantee you'll change your tune.

See, Cornell is one of those poor sucker schools who got more or less blackmailed into signing up with Napster for music subscriptions for all its students in hopes of staving off "Illegal Campus Fileswapping" lawsuits by the RIAA. As we mentioned a couple of months ago when this phenomenon really started to take off, there's a slight problem with a school telling its students, "here, we got you Napster subscriptions, so go wild and keep it legal": Napster isn't Mac-compatible, and with Mac use among students in higher education reportedly on the rise in a big way, that means what probably amounts to a sizeable minority (one estimate at Cornell is "close to 20 percent") of the student body won't be able to partake.

True, the marginalization of Mac users is nothing new; heck, if we ever got treated like first-class citizens our heads would probably collapse with the sudden pressure change. But what about iPod users? By all accounts, the iPod holds a commanding lead in portable digital music player sales each quarter, so it's reasonable to assume that the majority of Cornell students with players just happen to have iPods. And Napster isn't compatible with iPods, which means that Cornell's little plan to keep itself out of court wound up ticking off an Apple-loving majority as well.

Now, while the service is currently free to students (it's reportedly being paid for by a grant from, of all companies, Sony-- so much for Sony Connect), this whole stinking situation is more rude and clueless than unjust. But since Cornell plans to force all students to pay for Napster starting next year, some people are getting understandably riled up about it. Faithful viewer David Poves points out an article in The Register describing a "small revolt" that's simmering at Cornell, with the university newspaper getting "bombarded with letters from current and past students... complaining about the anti-Apple stance of Napster." And rightfully so; who wants to be taxed $20 per year for a mandatory entertainment service, especially one that they can't even use?

Even more insulting is the way in which Cornell is telling Mac users to shell out 149 clams for Virtual PC so that they can run Napster; surely if the school is going to choose a mandatory service that requires additional software for a fifth of its student body to use in the first place, then it should provide that software itself. Not that any sane Mac user would actually want Virtual PC running in the background just to listen to music anyway, but it's the principle of the thing, you know?

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how the kerfuffle eventually turns out. We're not suggesting that students are about to handcuff themselves to the gate in front of the Bursar's office and sing "Kumbaya" until they get tear-gassed and clubbed into submission all because of a $20 yearly music fee, but it's nice to see people telling The Man that it's not cool to assume everyone's a Windows user or that iPod users are rich enough to buy their own freakin' music and still help foot the bill for everyone else. Fight the powers that be.

Geez, is it really Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day again? Why do we feel like we just finished one of these? Maybe it's because Labor Day means we wound up with one fewer broadcast between installments. Maybe it's because that scene about how control of the Royal Navy's nukes will soon be in the twitchy hands of Windows took a decidedly WO-TM-BDesque turn just three days ago. Or maybe it's because we walk around muttering expletives about Microsoft under our breath pretty much every waking minute of every day, so every little thing seems to smear together into one nonstop simmering Goulash of Senseless Redmond Hate. (Try it with noodles.) In any event, it's that time again, but since it doesn't feel like that time, how about we go with a topic just slightly more esoteric than usual?

See, normally we wouldn't go near something as abstruse as the influences that led a London borough to sign a ten-year deal to use Microsoft technologies over the open source solutions it had formerly seemed to favor; it's just too far afield to hold most people's interest, and indeed, The Register needed three dense pages to document exactly what had happened to cause the flip-flop. Fortunately, there's a nice, dramatic hook at the center of the whole thing that clarifies the crux of why the Newham Council eventually abandoned the idea of using Linux and similar technologies in favor of joining itself at the hip-- and wallet-- to Microsoft for the entire coming decade.

No, it wasn't aliens. Good guess, though, especially since, as The Register reported a few weeks back, the Newham Council (one of the "standard bearers for open source trials") eventually came around to believe that "as well as being cheaper than open source software, Microsoft is more secure." Seriously, if bodysnatching alien pods aren't to blame, what is?

Well, this is what did it: an "IT audit and analysis" carried out by some firm called Cap Gemini, whose representatives apparently stop just short of wearing big circus hats with the words "WE ARE INDEPENDENT FROM MICROSOFT" flashing on and off in big red letters on the front. It was that "independent" study which convinced the council that Microsoft software is cheaper and more secure than open source alternatives. That's fair, right?

Except that, as faithful viewer Chris Pepper pointed out, it's since come to light that not only was that "independent" study paid for by Microsoft, but it also based key conclusions entirely on data given to it by Microsoft itself. Apparently the entire "Microsoft is cheaper" verdict arises from the following excerpt: "Microsoft have also offered figures for a (current configuration) to Linux migration that they have generated from the same Gartner model using input data validated with the ICT group. We have not independently validated these figures... Microsoft believe that a desktop migration to an open source solution based on a Linux Platform could potentially generate... potential cost savings to the council over five years of £1.6m, or roughly half that available from the deployment of a Microsoft based solution."

In other words, this oh-so-independent Microsoft-funded study states that the Newham Council can save twice as much money by using Windows instead of Linux... because Microsoft says so. We especially love how Cap Gemini even admits that it's just passing along Microsoft's figures which it didn't bother to "independently validate." What is this, the "Redmond Justice" trial all over again? When does Microsoft bring in the faked videotapes?