Couldn’t Help But Notice (072007)

Congrats to Justin at Right on the Right on Two Full Years of Blogging.

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iPod, therefore iMac? — “Apple didn’t make the top five in worldwide PC shipments, but in its home turf in the United States, the company boosted Mac sales year over year by 26.2% to 960,000 units, IDC estimates. Apple’s share of the U.S. market rose to 5.6% from 4.8%, or 760,000 units, a year ago.”

3-1/2 years ago (Q4 2003), Apple’s US market share was barely over 2%.

Context, though, requires noting that HP and Dell are the big cahunas: “Worldwide PC shipments increased 12.5% in the second quarter year over year to 58.8 million units, according to IDC. Hewlett-Packard(HP) continued to lead, increasing shipments by 35.5% to take a 19.3% share of the market. Dell remained firmly in second place with a 16.1% share, but shipped 4.9% fewer units.”

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In an administration that is supposedly a group of sellouts to the business class, the Bush Justice Department has a strange way of demonstrating its affection:

Quick: How Many CFOs Have Been Convicted?

While Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco offer the marquee examples of CFOs brought down in the past five years of legal action against accounting abuses, a report issued by the President’s Corporate Fraud Task Force calculates that at least 53 finance chiefs have been convicted since 2002.

In what is becoming a great year for fifth anniversaries of corporate enforcement activity, the tally of convicted CFOs appeared in the task force’s review of its own first five years in business. It said that there have been 1,236 convictions in all in such corporate cases, including 214 chief executives, 23 corporate counsels or attorneys, and 128 vice presidents. The task force gave itself significant credit, noting that it “has compiled a strong record of combating corporate fraud and punishing those who violate the trust of employees and investors.”

In addition to the convictions, the task force noted, more than $1 billion dollars in fraud-related forfeitures has been distributed to victims of corporate fraud over that span.

Quick: During which administration did the crimes of many, if not most, of these execs take place — espcially the big ones?

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This report from Dayton TV station WHIO alleges confusion about the credit monitoring process put into place by the State of Ohio as a result of the mid-June data theft (HT to an e-mailer):

The letters are from the Ohio Department of Administrative Services and not the tax department or from Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland.

People like Bill Burnett, of Miamisburg, are upset that the data was compromised in the first place. He is even more upset that the letter asked him to send his personal information to a company in Texas for identity theft protection.

State authorities said they are getting calls from taxpayers, too, asking if the letter is for real or if it is a scam.

State officials said if the letter comes from the Department of Administrative Services, it real, and yes, they are advising people to send in an application for identity theft protection.

The company that the state is buying the service from is in Texas.

Though the state is obviously in an awkward situation no matter what it does, it seems to me that the letter should have come from the governor himself, with news reports announcing a guv-signed letter. Of course, some people would be skeptical of a letter like that, but I believe that their number would be lower, and that the rate of people signing up for the needed protection would be higher, because of the authority behind such a letter.

As to Debix, the company in Texas the state has chosen for the year of free credit monitoring — I think the state should have insisted that the sign-up portal for those affected have a lot less (or no) promotion of Debix’s paid protection products. How convenient it is for Debix that it gets to aggressively push its products to a captive audience of hundreds of thousands.