May 2008
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The New York Times ad…Firefox Flicks…the Firefox crop circle…Operation Firefox…you name it! The Firefox community is always up to some cool, collaborative way to declare their passion for Firefox. What better way to do this than band together to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours?!
It’s a whole lot easier and safer than donning a beard of bees or underwater jump roping. All you have to do is download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day — some time in June. In the meantime check out Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. We’ll let you know when Firefox 3 goes out the door, kicking off our 24-hour attempt.
Here are some other ways you can help in the run up to Download Day:
* Get the word out; tell your friends, your neighbors, your grandma, anyone and everyone to participate in Download Day.
* Host a party to download Firefox; you provide the people and we’ll provide the party favors.
* Put a Download Day badge on your blog, profile or website.
With your help the Firefox community can go down in history! If you have any questions or ideas please drop us a line at worldrecord @ mozilla.com.
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Written by mary on May 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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A couple weeks ago i wrote about the
Ala Carting of Video on the Net. The premise was very simple. To paraphrase an old saying, "If you give away the milk for free, there is no need to buy the cow". If you give away your best stuff on an ala carte basis, then the value of everything that depended on that "stuff" declines.
Some folks agreed, others searched for ways to disagree. Many in their responses seemed to think that because I own
HDNet that I am biased and my judgement is clouded. In fact, its the exact opposite. I co founded HDNet in 2001 because even then, the writing was on the wall that digital delivery of content over a network that can control the quality of its service would always deliver a superior product over the open, net neutrality driven internet. Particularly when Sd camcorders were replaced by HD camcorders and consumers showed a bias towards content shot and delivered in high definition. So HDNet is the result of my analysis. My analysis is not the result of my owning HDNet. Make sense ? But I digress from the post topic.
The Ala Carting issue is a primary issue for corporate producers of content. What about the little guys ?
The newest and biggest problem for independent creators of internet video is that their financial futures are controlled completely by Google.
Google, by way of YouTube has done an astonishing job of hiding the true economics of web video. For the vast majority of internet video creators, their perception of cost is limited to their actual work and cost to create the content and upload it to YouTube. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
The cost of delivery of video on the net, because of its unicast or 1 to 1 mechanics increases as its audience size increases. So unlike regular TV, where as the number of viewers increase, the cost of delivery per viewer decreases, internet video is the exact opposite. As the number of viewers increase, your cost per viewer increases. Considerably.
Google , along with MySpace and other popular webhosting sites have done a masterful job of hiding the real costs of video delivery by fully subsidizing the cost. Why should anyone care if Google or MySpace is picking up 100pct of the tab ?
If you are an INDEPENDENT video producer who would like to get paid at some point for your work, you should care. A lot. Why ? Because at some point even Google and Myspace will grow tired of subsidizing all of this cost.
In the words of Google CEO Eric Schmidt "We're working but have not yet in my view gotten a breakthrough around monetization," Schmidt said during an interview for CNBC. "We're working on that. That's our highest priority this year."
Right now Google has no way of making money on content. They are experimenting. But what happens when the lightbulb goes off ? What happens when they finally find a solution to monetization ?
Thats easy: "All your video does belongs to US".
When they turn on the light, if you are a content producer who would like to get paid for your work, you will be required to license your video to Google and all those who copy what Google does. Exclusively ? Maybe, but probably not. But if you like the taste of free video hosting from Google, you will have to do what you do not have to do today, give something in return. Which is a license to your content.
Those who are even more cynical than I tend to be, will be the first to say that this is already happening. That in order to get paid by Google, you have to sign a content licensing deal. After all, the DMCA specifies that Google cant know what content is on Youtube unless its licensed to them, so there is no way for them to pay anyone unless they sign a deal. Which is of course true.
What it doesn't take into account is that 99pct of content producers have no idea how the economics have worked for the 1pct of content producers that have signed deals. if they did, they would know that the number of producers actually making minimum wage for their work is few and far between.
But it gets worse.
Selling your content through Google is a 100pct commission business. You don't get anything unless they sell something. That works great in an adsense model where your cost to produce and deliver a webpage is minimal. That works great when every word in your webpage is indexed and there are millions of SEO tricks available to drive traffic and increase your revenue from Google.
That sucks when you have to go in the hole to produce video of any quality at all. It sucks worse when there is no inexpensive way to drive traffic to your video to generate ad revenue.
Creating content is expensive. The cost of the tools may have dropped considerably,
but the value of your time increases every minute you live past the age of 25, or move out of your parents house, which ever comes later. At some stage in your life, you reach a point where Mac and Cheese and free food at happy hour and buying used clothes are disapointments rather than choices. At some stage in your life, asking your friends to work for free is no longer "hanging out", its imposing or freeloading. Its at that point you are going to realize that you are working really hard and scared shitless about whether you will be able to make a living doing what you love.
Then it will hit you that you are subsidizing the cost of video advertising inventory for Google or MySpace or whoever, while not being able to make ends meet. That is the future of internet video as it stands today.
Im sure Google and MySpace and every video host is trying to find their "Overture Moment". Their cost per click equivalent that will cover the costs of video delivery to the hundreds of millions of viewers of internet video. But what about the content creators and their profitability and viability ?
In order for video on the internet to work for them, the CPMs and traffic PER VIDEO are going to have to be HUGE. Will they ?
Of course the Internet Video Fanboys will say yes. I say no.
Not only am I not convinced that video creators will get enough of a return on their work to continue to invest in working for what amounts to free,
I also think that there will be competition for advertisers from digital delivery of TV that will completely blow away anything we see on the net.Addressable set top boxes. Encoded Triggers. Video Hot Spots. Video Quality. Broadcast costs per user rather than unicast. All the features that have been promised as part of internet video and TV for years are finally starting to happen for real on your HDTV. While internet video is looking for a box to replace the set top box,
Digital Cable is looking for ways to completely remove the set top box. The excitement in video over the next 5 years is not going to happen on the Net.
Deal with it people. As exciting as people watching 10 minute videos on Youtube is. As exciting as the growth patterns for those videos are, digital video is no longer limited to the internet. While Google and others are searching for ways to monetize video, its already happening on your HDTV.
Which also means that for video content producers, the money will be where the money is right now. On TV rather than the net.
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Written by Mark Cuban on May 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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Get ready to participate in the Firefox Screencast contest! This is your chance to use your talents and passion for Firefox to create support screencasts for the Firefox Support (SUMO) knowledge base on support.mozilla.com.
We have prepared a list of the top 100 most popular support articles from the SUMO knowledge base and ask YOU to create screencasts for one, two, three, or all of them! You can enter as many screencasts as you like. With 100 different articles, anyone can choose whatever article for which they would like to create a screencast.
Mozilla will not be hosting the videos during this contest, so please use a third-party application like Jing to record your screencast and send us the link so we can view it. Ever used Jing? Here’s a great online demo. Click “Video Tour” on the front page to see how to use it…it couldn’t be easier! Just download and begin recording!
All entries will be judged by a team who will look at the submissions and pick the best one for each of the 100 articles. That’s 100 winners!!
What are you waiting for? Go to the Firefox Screencasts contes and start sharing your knowledge!
Any questions? We’ve got the answers.
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Written by David Tenser on May 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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OK, maybe I can't say for certain why the NFL opted out of their current CBA. But what I can speak to is the problem with salary caps as they are structured in the NHL, NFL and NBA, so that sports fans can understand why the NFL is doing what it is doing and why it could and probably will happen in any league governed by a salary cap.
The basic structure of a salary cap is that the revenues of the league are aggregated into a total pool, call it football, basketball or hockey related income.
Every league is different in the specifics of which revenue is included. Generally its 100pct of national revenue, such as national TV and marketing deals and the net margin dollars of nationally sold merchandise at the top level. In addition to the national revenue, the collective bargaining agreements for each league specify which local revenues from each team are added to the pool as well.
The salary cap for the league is then calculated by multiplying a percentage of revenue specified by the collective bargaining agreement and then dividing that result by the number of teams. So if a hypothetical league has 2 billion in cap related revenue and the multiplier is 50pct , then you take (2 billion x 50pct ) and then divide by 20 teams to get a cap of 50mm dollars per team.
Its a simple concept. The idea behind having a cap is that when total revenues for the league go up, then the amount of money available to players should go up as well. Makes perfect sense for a hypothetical league where BOTH local and national revenues per team are consistently equal.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, while national revenues per teams are split equally, the amount of revenues generated locally per team varies enormously market by market. This is a huge problem for salary cap based leagues.
Why does this create a problem ? Because in the biggest of big markets, significant increases in revenues can increase the value of the salary cap by more dollars than some other teams can increase their local revenues.
So in our hypothetical league, lets say there is a team in Metropolis, a big city, that just signed a TV deal for its preseason games, increased their ticket prices, and added a huge video board , that when all is said and done, for the next season, will add a total of $ 40mm in revenue.
Another big market just opened their new stadium, which now seats 100k people and has 200 suites that they are charging an arm and a leg for because their teams is on a roll, having made the playoffs the last couple years, with what appears to be a bright future. In this first year of the stadium, they expect to add 100mm in local revenues more than they had last year.
In BFE, one of the smaller markets in the league, they just had a terrible season. Although they have a stadium they moved into just 8 years ago, they have no pricing elasticity for tickets or advertising, and in fact their attendance is declining. As a result, despite the additional TV revenue they will get from the new TV deal the league has signed, they will see a decline in total revenues of 5mm dollars this year and if they don't have a good season, revenues could decline further in future years.
For the sake of this example, we will assume the other 17 teams had a net revenue impact of zero
Overall the business for this hypothetical league is good. Their national TV deal just renewed, and merchandise and advertising sales are great. At the national level, total league revenues will increase 5mm per team, or 100mm dollars.
So in this hypothetical example, to figure out the how the cap would change, we would take the 40mm increase that Metropolis had , add it to the 100mm dollar change for the 2ND big market team, add to it the 100mm dollar increase from the new national TV deal and then subtract the 5mm decline that BFE had, for a net increase of 235mm for the league. Then to get the salary cap increase, we multiply that number by 50pct ($117.50) and divide by 20 teams. So the salary cap would increase by $ 5. 875k from 50mm to 55.875mm per team.
As you can quickly figure out, for the teams with new, big market size TV and stadium deals, the increase in the cap is no big deal. For those teams from BFE, who don't have pricing elasticity or markets that can support stadiums that seat 100k, things are not so good. Every year seems to bring an increase in the salary cap , which their local fans and their own desire to win pressures them to spend up to, yet their total revenues never seem to keep up with.
Add to this pressure, the design of how contracts are structured so that teams which perform the worst and have the least pricing elasticity, get the highest draft picks and must write out checks for huge signing bonuses for their rookies, who they have no idea whether or not they will preform. Its not that they don't want the high draft picks, but there is no question that their financial risk equation escalates dramatically.
These same teams, also feel the greatest pressure to sign new free agents. Again, which carry significant financial risk with big upfront payments, and on field performance risk. There is no template for winning and the stress levels go way up when its eating up every dollar you have to try to win.
At this point, most fans argue that this shouldn't matter because teams in the NFL, oops, I mean our hypothetical league are making huge sums of money, so what does it matter ? Honestly, I don't know if 100pct of the teams are making money or not. What I do know is that with new stadiums being built in Dallas and New York that the local revenue numbers are so huge that the NFL had to ask that some of the NY stadium money be excluded from the cap calculations. There is no way for small market teams to be able to keep up with the big markets. Their sheer market size allows them to increase revenues, which in turn increases the cap by a magnitude that the small markets won't ever be able to keep up with.
This becomes more evident when you see a small market team like Buffalo smartly sell some of their home games to a much larger city of Toronto.
Which is exactly why, IMHO, the NFL opted out of their agreement. The small market teams see the writing on the Income Statement and Balance Sheet walls. They see the look in their bankers bloodshot eyes. Things will get worse before they get better, so better plan on changing things now.
Have the days of salary caps come and gone ?
The salary cap was a very smart move during an era when the scale and growth of national TV and other national league revenue sources more than compensated for the variances in local revenues of small and large markets. In those days, whatever money came to teams, regardless of source seemed to go right back out of their pockets. The cap helped protect us sports owners from ourselves, equally..
Is a salary cap still a smart move ? Or is it better to be cap less, like baseball, but with a very strong tax and revenue sharing program ?
The bottom line problem for current cap systems is that one teams financial success can have a significantly negative impact on the financial performance of another. Rather than enjoying the success of the new stadiums in the big markets, or the big local TV or advertising deals they sign, small markets are shell shocked by the annual increases in the cap they create. Increases that they can't possibly keep pace with.
When this happens, teams have to "give up" on their players and seasons more often in order to try to rebuild, which in turn hurts not only the fans and the league, but also the players as higher priced players lose slots to lower priced and younger players.
That's not a good situation for anyone. Its a huge problem that needs to be solved.
A cap can work if its based on national rather than local revenues. Even if its a higher percentage of those revenues than is currently paid. If only national revenues are applied to cap calculations then the change in the cap available to teams every year impacts all teams equally. if a team can manage their local business successfully, they will make money. If the teams succeed, the league succeeds and the national money will grow and the money paid to players will grow at the same pace.
Can a league survive without a cap ? Yes, but I think it must be a league where it takes
more than 1 or 2 players to lead a team to a championship. Otherwise, the richest teams can just buy those 2 players, with a 3rd as insurance, which means the competitive balance of the league is purely dependent on finances. That is not a good position to be in. Baseball and football are 2 leagues that I can think can survive (as baseball has) quite nicely without a cap. The NBA and NHL would struggle competitively without them.
Hopefully this helps explain, at least from my perspective, why the NFL would opt out of its CBA when its doing so well
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Written by Mark Cuban on May 25th, 2008 with no comments.
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Related to the IE Blog post around mashups in Internet Explorer 8, the Jscript team has a great post on ECMAScript, Security and Mashups over on their blog. Check it out!
Kristen Kibble
IE Program Manger
Written by ieblog on May 23rd, 2008 with no comments.
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This Friday, May 23, will be a special day for Mozilla as we’ll be hosting the very first Support Firefox Day*. You’ll get a chance to learn more about Mozilla, Firefox 3, and Firefox Support (SUMO) — and have your voice heard. We’ve got lots of things planned! In particular, we’ve lined up a prestigious group of Mozilla celebrities who will be taking YOUR questions and feedback about a variety of subjects. We’ll also have workshops where we’ll be focusing on user-to-user support, and some of the upcoming goodies in Firefox 3.
Here is the action-packed schedule:
- 8:00 AM PDT - 10:00: Support session #1
- 10:00 – 10:45: Workshop: Supporting Firefox 3 users with Live Chat. In this workshop, you’ll learn all you need to know about the cool user-to-user support solution on SUMO to start helping others. Host: Lucy Connor
- 11:00 - 11:30: Chat with Mike Connor, Developer Lead of Firefox 3. Mike will be taking your questions about the upcoming release of Firefox 3 and all its new features, including the all-new product help (yes, SUMO!)
- 11:30 - 12:30: Support Session #2
- 12:30 - 1:15: Workshop: Learn all about the new bookmark system in Firefox 3 (tags, smart location bar, keywords) to better help others. Host: Dietrich Ayala
- 1:30 – 2:00: Chat with Mike Beltzner, Phenomenologist & Usability Design Expert. This is your chance to get your questions about the Mozilla way of designing software answered straight from the source. You’ll learn, among other things, how user feedback and support continuously loops back into product.
- 2:00 - 3:00: Support Session #3
- 3:00 - 3:45: Workshop: Learn how to troubleshoot Firefox 3 like a pro. You’ll find out more about how Firefox works, and at the same time you’ll become an expert of user-to-user troubleshooting. Host: Matthew Middleton
- 4:00 - 4:30: Chat with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corporation. John will be available to answer your questions about Mozilla, including how it was started, where it’s going, and any other things you can think of.
- 4:30 - 5:00: Chat with Asa Dotzler, Spokesmodel and Storyteller. Asa has been a part of Mozilla since the very early days and is the perfect person to ask your questions — any questions — about… anything!
Of course, the big highlight of the day will be the best new Firefox 3 feature of all: Firefox’s new user-based support system. All throughout the day, we’ll be showcasing the various aspects to the support system: from the collaboratively written knowledge base to the forums and chat-based support and inviting you to take part. We’ll be around all day in #sumo to answer questions and help you get started helping your fellow users and Firefox enthusiasts.
Hope to see you on Friday! If you’re coming, please let us know so we can better plan the events.
*) OK, we did host something similar that we called SUMO Day last month, but with the new name, we think this is a fresh start. 
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Written by David Tenser on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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Editor’s note: Mozilla announced Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 on Friday, May 16, 2008. See Mike Beltzner’s comprehensive post on Mozilla Developer News, crossposted below.
Please note: The Firefox 3 Release Candidate is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this release.
The first Firefox 3 Release Candidate is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.
New features and changes in this milestone:
- Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
- Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability.
- Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.
(You can find out more about all of these features in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.)
Testers can download the Firefox 3 Release Candidate builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 45 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.
Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3 Release Candidate announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.
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Written by Paul Kim on May 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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Hello, I’m Sunava Dutta and I’m the Program Manager focused on improving our AJAX scenarios in IE8. In this short post I’ll introduce you to a feature we’re implementing in the browser that enables safer mashups. The Same Origin Policy (SOP) requires that browsers prevent script from accessing the contents of another domain to prevent cross site script attacks. Web sites today, like Facebook and Live among others, allow users to drag and drop third party ‘gadgets’ or applications to their page. As the BBC News reports, there are many challenges to doing so safely. These components are usually embedded third party scripts. Unfortunately these third party scripts run with the same privileges as the parent page and can potentially access personal data, cookies and other credentials. Attempts are currently underway to secure such script based applications. Other forms of embedding applications exist such as inserting the gadget in an IFrame, however while these are secure they can’t communicate with the page and aren’t as useful.
In order to allow rich mashup scenarios where components can exchange information and permissions with the parent page, the IE team and other members of the HTML 5.0 Working Group are developing a cross document messaging feature. Communication using strings is enabled by a postMessage method. Hosting pages or gadgets are advised to check the origin domain of the content before inserting it in its DOM. For more details, please refer to our MSDN Dev Center Article on cross document messaging.
Sunava Dutta
Program Manager
Written by ieblog on May 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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There is a very specific NBA rule that says that team personnel can not talk to High School players unless it is at an approved event or function. No one associated with an NBA team can shill, sell, preach, promise, promote or praise to , with or around High School players.
This is a good thing. A very good thing. However, the lack of open communication between anyone at the NBA and High School players and coaches creates an obvious information gap. As with any business, when there are millions of dollars available each and every year, there will be those that insert themselves into the gap with promises that they can provide the link between the have and have nots. Politicians can find every loophole available when it comes to fund raising and agents can find every loophole when it comes to enticing kids with stories of sugarplum fairies, first round picks and unspeakable riches.
Why compare politicians and agents ? Well if you have met either, you have met both. One size does not fit all, but it certainly fits many, in both worlds. Both professions thrive on plausible deniability. Neither seem to have any more than a superficial understanding of how money they direct will finally be used. Which to them is a good thing. It allows them to deny that the money they gave one of their employees to give one of their associates to give to an affiliate of a local group that truly sounded like a very worthy charitable organization was used for anything other than what they thought it would be used for: to help those far less fortunate than themselves.
In this entire OJ Mayo story, the only thing I find highly implausible is that only 30k dollars was identified as changing hands. There are far too many agents competing in the market for projected 1st round draft picks for a high school senior who some consider a lottery pick to settle for 30k. Even High School kids learn quickly to play one agent off against the other. How do you think they picked the shoe company that put shoes on their family's feet ?
So what should be done ? I can tell you that an NBA study, as well as an NBA / NCAA joint effort would be meaningless. Why ? Because the root of the problem is that there will always be those that try to profit from other people's dreams. It may be a dream of playing in the Olympics. It may be a dream of playing in the NBA. It may be a dream of being rich. It may be a dream of going to college. Unless there is an efficient market of information going between those who can make the dreams come true and the dreamers, which I don't think is possible given the way the NCAA and High School organizations interact with student athletes, then there will always be room for the scammers to capitalize on those dreams.
Fortunately there is a simple solution.
Bring in the IRS. I think I can say with certainty that there were not any contracts signed between the parties giving and receiving money on the behalf of High School students. Agree ?
I think I can also say with certainty that those who gave more than 10k dollars in gifts did not pay any gift taxes on amounts given to individuals. If the amounts were given to charities, I'm guessing some, if not most of those charities were either not qualified or did not live up to their certification requirements.
Get the IRS involved, and I bet not only would the investigation pay for itself with untold millions coming back to the US Treasury in taxes and penalties, but the agents would clean up their acts very , very quickly. It would also clean up much of what ails "amateur" basketball. Its a world that has become dependent on a thriving underground economy. its a cash business. Just the kind the IRS should and could step in to clean up.
Hey, it worked on Al Capone, and the reality is, some of the agents in the game today, are not much more legit.
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Written by Mark Cuban on May 18th, 2008 with no comments.
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Is there anything more fun than sitting around, growing your hair, drinking a Bud while listening to Jethro Tull and pondering how to change the balance of power in the search world and unseat Google ?
Better search ? Too subjective. Better monetization ? After the fact. Better User Interface ? Will we know it when we see it ? A new and different search ? Semantic ? Human powered ? We won't know till we know.
But what about the Google Index, all the websites that are indexed by Google ? What is it worth to be in the Google Index ? What would you, as a website owner require in order to remove your site from the Google Index and no longer be available when someone does a google search ?
It should just be a matter of dollars and cents and sense, shouldn't it ?
How many websites would have to recuse themselves from the Google Index before Google Search was negatively impacted ?
Mahalo.com thinks it needs to support the 25k most common search terms in order to be successful. What would happen if MicroSoft or Yahoo or a MicroHoo went to the 5 top results for the top 25k searches and paid them to leave the Google Index ?
A theoretical maximum of 125k sites, but with overlap, probably closer to 100k or less, times how much per site on average ?
The math starts to get interesting. At $1,000 per site average times 100k sites, thats only $ 1 Billion Dollars. The distribution would obviously favor the larger sites, so of that billion dollars, would the top 1k sites take 500k each and the remaining 99k split the rest ?
Given the stakes, why stop at $ 1 Billion Dollars ? Would the top 1k most visited sites take a cool $1mm each, plus a committment from MicroSoft or Yahoo to drive traffic through their search engines to more than make up for the lost Google Traffic. After all, once consumers realized that Google no longer had valid search results for the top 25k searchs, that traffic would most likely go to MicroSoft and Yahoo.
And why we are at it, why not require that these 100k sites switch from Googles Publisher Network to Yahoo's or MicroSofts ? It would start to earn back the $1 Billion paid out very quickly.
On top of that, in order to grease the skids even further, why not issue advertising credits to the sites that switched off Google ? Its soft dollars, that would sweeten the pot and drive more traffic.
IN essence, its no different that any other content aggregation play. Its paying for content . But, It would take some big ones to go for it and see if it worked. However, without question, every search engine has some number of core sites, that when removed from its index , destabilizes the value of its search.
The question is how many ? What would it cost to get that number of sites to turn Google off and stay off, and would the traffic created as users switch from Google more than compensate for the cost ?
Or would Google recognize the risk and jump in and offer more to websites to stay ?
Sure would be interesting to find out.
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Written by Mark Cuban on May 14th, 2008 with no comments.
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