Category: Business

New Build An-124 Plans Proceed

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Demand for the services of the An-124 Ruslan airlifter has been growing by leaps and bounds, and now Russia and the Ukraine appear to be on the verge of restarting productions(Paid Subscription Required).

It’s not surprising. The aircraft offers an absolutely unique capability in terms of outsized and heavy lifting, and VolgaDnepr charter service for the aircraft has been doubling turnover annually.

It would be significantly upgraded:

The upgrade, known as the An-124-150, includes a glass cockpit capable of reducing the flight crew to four from six, along with airframe improvements, digital brake control, improved thrust reversers and major improvements in the aircraft’s Motor Sich D18-T engines. The 124-150 will have a maximum lift capacity at nominal range of 150 metric tons, compared with 120 tons for the basic aircraft. It will permit 10,000 flights and 45,000 flight hours with a first A-check required only after 500 hr. on the wing.

One item of note, is that this would theoretically mean that two, rather than one MBTs could be carried.

EADS, Euro Governments at Odds on A350 Outsourcing

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In an attempt to cut costs, and deal with the falling US dollar, EADS is looking at aggressively outsourcing to the US and cheap overseas countries, and the governments that generally back Airbus are saying that their backing is contingent on local manufacture (Paid Subscription Required).

This is not surprising. Boeing and its partners aggressively pursued all sorts of tax abatements and set asides with the 787, and you would never expect (for example) Georgia to pay for a plant in North Carolina.

I would also add, as Peter Hintze, the German aerospace secretary, that Boeing’s distributed base has thus far proved a major disappointment.

Heavy Internet Users Targeted

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So, now the cable companies are looking toward an “application agnostic” way of limiting bandwidth, see here and here, combined with metered service, where you are charged for bandwidth over a certain level.

The basic problem here, and it’s a Google search away, is that in the rush to get to broadband quickly, the cable companies came up with an inadequate network architecture, so they are afflicted with problems that do not hit DSL of fiber (FIOS).

The real solution is fixing their networks.

RIAA Employed Terrorist Takes Down Web TV Network

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MediaDefender, a criminal software firm employed by media companies to engage in illegal attacks on sites that they deem infringing, just took down the completely legal web broadcasting firm Revision3, which is, conveniently enough, a direct competitor to MediaDefender’s parent company.

It Revision3 uses BitTorrent to distribute its programming, but only its own stuff, but MediaDefender hacked in using a back door to place their own material on the server, and when this back door was shut down after it was discovered, a massive (8000/second) DDOS attack occurred.

At this point they say that they lack the resources to sue, but I’ve sent them an email saying that I would throw in a few bucks for a legal fund.

The New McScarfyism*

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It started innocently enough, with an ad from Dunkin’ Donuts:

Rachael Ray, who gets pictured eating in so many places that I expect the Phoenix Mars lander to snap a picture, doing an add for Dunkin’ Donuts frozen drinks.

Notice the paisley silk scarf? So did Michelle Malkin (sorry, no link to her, ever), and she claimed that it was the Arab headdress known as the Keffiyeh, and that Dunkin Donuts was “hate couture”, and an endorsement of Jihad.

Well, the donut and coffee purveyor, did not do the sane thing, which would be to suggest that Malkin needs her meds adjusted, but pulled the ad and issued an apology, once again showing how American business capitulates to Jihadists.

Why am I calling Malkin a Jihadist? Let’s compare Ray and run the numbers:

  1. Woman’s parents were born and raised in the country which has had the longest Islamist insurgency, the Phillipines?
  2. Woman born in the United States to parents who were not legal residents at the time, giving them a leg up in getting their green card, aka the, according to Malkin, an “Anchor Baby”.
  3. Uses threats and intimidation against perceived enemies, including the publication of names and addresses.
  4. Wears a Keffiyeh.

It’s pretty clear to me which one is a Jihadist.

In any case, I am now boycotting Dunkin Donuts for capitulating to a terrorist.

*Credit where credit is due. I did not come up with this term. Tritumi at SP gets credit for this.

Viacom Going Postal On YouTube

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The DMCA is pretty clear on this. If someone posts something to an internet service, and they get a notice, and then take it down, it’s no harm, no foul.

This appears to be YouTube at a glance, but Viacom is now claiming, “that YouTube is guilty of public performance of such content due to the way it presents and plays the videos“, because it allows for embedding and sharing (actually referrals) to the material.

This is going to get very, very ugly.

Right to Resell Software Reaffirmed

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The court case, Timothy Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc., was fairly simple: Mr. Vernor bought old copies of Autocad, one at a garage sale, and three from an architectural firm, and Autodesk sued, claiming that he violated the terms of the license.

Mr. Vernor asserted the right of first sale, which allows a person who has purchased a copyright work to resell it, but Autodesk claimed that it was not a sale, but a license.

The judge was having none of it, see here, here, and here, and ruled on behalf of Timothy Vernor, noting that Autodesk does not require an annual payment, or to return it when done.

Additionally, Autodesk was done in by their own sales literature and web site, which referred to purchase options for buying the sortware.

Note that this is bigger than it sounds:

If Jones’s ruling is upheld on appeal, it will have important consequences for the software industry, where the legal fiction that software is merely licensed is widely employed. In addition to discouraging the market for used software, software firms have also attempted to use the “licensed, not sold” theory to enforce restrictions on reverse engineering that would otherwise be fair use under copyright law. If software is sold, rather than licensed, then no license is required to install and use the software, and the terms of shrink-wrap licenses may not be legally binding.

Of course, the vendors could get around this by going with a real annual license, but in the real world of PC software, with a very few exceptions, you would eliminate 90+% of your customers if you did that.

Carlyle Group to Buy/Split Booz Allen (Yep, I Worked for Them*)

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It looks like Carlyle group will buy Booz Allen and spin off their commercial business.

About 75% of their staff, and so I would assume business is in government services, and they thought that the two groups were going in different directions, particularly after 911, when government work ramped up rapidly.

Assuming that a Democrat gets into the white house, my guess is that they will one day rue this decision, as the privatization of is a racket, and if it is reviewed by anyone other than right wing ideologues, it’s going to be cut back significantly.

Then again, we all know about my predictive powers.

*I worked at United Defense for two years, which was owned by the Carlyle Group, and then a year more at BAE Systems, which bought them out.

Airbus A350 Updates

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We have some rumors that the A350 is significantly overweight, to the tune of about 8 tonnes.

I’m inclined to believe that it is overweight at this point, much of the work in development at this point is about refining the design and saving weight, but 8 tonnes on an aircraft with an empty weight somewhere around of 105 tonnes, even at this relatively early stage, seems to be excessive.

Related to this, Airbus is announcing that it will be able to, “finalise the A350 XWB’s ‘aero-lines’” in July, but that it will continue to “refine” the wing of the A350-1000, the largest, and last to be delivered, variant over the next two years.

Airbus is claiming no “major” changes for the -1000 wing, simply mods to the pylons and the high lift devices (flaps and slats), but with 20% greater max gross weight, I’m inclined that some more significant differences may creep in over the next 2 years.

Spirit AeroSystems Snags Airbus A350 Fuselage Section 15

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Sprint just signed a contract with Airbus to design and build this component. (See picture below)

The kicker is that until 2005, Spirit was Boeing, but they spun the company off to appease shareholders, and now the expertise, including experience with the complex composite structures it developed for the 787, will be benefiting Airbus.

Boeing’s aircraft’s current business model appears to be similar to the Lead System Integrator (LSI) concept that has consistently underperformed in all of its large defense related contracts so badly that Congress is looking to ban the practice.

Was BAE’s Purchase of United Defense the Beginning of a Trend?

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When I was working at United Defense*, the Carlyle Group sold it to the UK firm BAE, and used the proceeds to buy Dunkin Donuts.

BAE paid a significant premium in order to buy UD, because they saw it as an entry point into the US defense market.

Well, Finmeccanica has now purchased the defense electronics firm DRS Technologiesat a 32% premium for what appears to be much the same reason.

I believe that we will see more of this, particularly with the dollar weak, as the US now spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined.

Additionally, we will see many more of the joint ventures of the type that EADS and Northrop Grumman have entered into for the tanker competition.

*Yes, I have worked everywhere. Maybe I can’t hold down a job, but more likely this has been my role as “technical hit man”, where you are parachuted in to take care of a specific need.

More on the Thielert Collapse

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Daimond is looking at developing its own aircraft diesel engine as an alternative to the Thielert engine, as a result of of the Bankruptcy of the engine manufacturer, and Cessna has delayed its turbodiesel Skyhawk.

I’m still not sure what was involved, the founder of the company was terminated for some sort of accounting shenanigans, and I’m not sure what, though some of the comments in the various aviation fan boards there are indications that the company was getting hosed by warranty claims.

Cablevision Buys Newsday From Tribune

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Cablevision outbid Rupert Mordoch on the deal, which was driven by the problems that Sam Zell had with the debt involved in picking up the media chain.

This is, I think, a good thing. Murdoch wanted Newsday as a financial backstop to the New York Post, which is in a real way his US flagship newspaper*, which would have been bad for its readers.

Newsday is a pretty good mid-market newspaper, and it would have been cannibalized by Murdoch.

*Yes, there is the Wall Street Journal, but it’s not in an philosophical sense a Murdoch paper, which is right wing tabloid.

Citi Plans to Dump Almost Half a Trillion in Assets

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Their new (started last December) CEO has announced a restructuring, with the standard quote about getting back to “core” businesses.

Ultimately, Citigroup said it would get rid of roughly $500 billion in so-called legacy assets that currently make up about 22% of the company. Given the current market conditions, the company said it expected to wind down those assets to less than $100 billion over the next two to three years.

This is more than a refocus, this is going to be a significant amount of losses in order to raise capital and to get out of losing business.

Of all the really big banks, Citi is the one that I am least confident in.

Looks Like Murdoch Won’t Get Newsday

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Sam Zell bought Tribune company, and then couldn’t handle the debt, so he’s looking at selling Newsday, arguably one of the crown jewels of the empire.

A bidding war has erupted, with Rupert Murdoch (NY Post) and Mort Zuckerman (NY Daily News) fighting it out, but now it appears taht cablevision has trumped them both, bidding $650 million as vs. the roughly $580M of Murdoch and Zuckerman.

Newsday has generally had a good reputation for covering its region (Long Island), and it not becoming a part of Murdoch’s Newscorp is a good thing.