For about the second time since the Comcast-takeover, I checked out the rotting corpse that used to be TechTV. It's truly sad. One of their most-played shows consists of a half-hour of the little cinematic sequences that you see before your level starts on your game. Leo Laporte, who was undoubtedly the best thing they had on the network, is now gone for good. The shows carried over from G4, all of which were bad, are now the cornerstones of the network.

Ugh. UGH! If TechTV was a horse, I'd shoot it.


On another note, but also sucky, Corel bought JASC. This now means that Corel owns THREE high-end bitmap editing programs (Paint Shop Pro, Corel PhotoPAINT, and Painter). They assure us that the products are very very different. After all, Painter has an innovative "virtual paint metaphor", PSP is aimed at the Photoshop crowd, and PhotoPAINT. . .umm. . .comes free with CorelDraw.

Problem is, despite their claims to the contrary, the feature-sets of these products are 90% the same. PhotoPAINT and PSP also have a "virtual paint metaphor", but they don't flog it as the cornerstone of the product. PhotoPAINT and Painter do photo-adjusting like Photoshop.

Bottom line is that AT LEAST one of these products is doomed to suffer the same fate as Bryce, which Corel bought, neglected for several years, then sold off to a smaller company.

Yeah there's a slim chance that the development teams will merge, and they'll take the finest features of each product and use them to build the premier bitmap-editing suite on the market today, but Corel doesn't have a good track-record of that. They bought up Micrografx Designer and the company that made the product that became CorelCAD with the aim of making the finest CAD/Illustration suite on the market, but it didn't happen. CorelCAD was sold off to IMSI and Designer is still sold as a separate product, competing with their own CorelDRAW.

I'm hoping for the best, but there are better companies that could've bought JASC.