Its been two days since John McCain announced that Sarah Palin, Gov of Alaska, will be his running mate. The announcement has been a shock and we've all been processing it.

The immediate reaction from everyone - Republicans included - was "WTF?"

On closer inspection, there are some things to like, at least from a Republican perspective. She has a strong anti-corruption record and has proven herself to be a pork cutter by selling the governor's jet, firing the governor's chef, and giving Washington back its funds for the Bridge to Nowhere. She's taken on the oil companies, but speaks pretty compellingly about oil policy in a much more familiar way than I have seen from anyone else on the national stage. She makes a pretty compelling case that lots of people in Washington and environmentalists who don't really have their facts straight are telling Alaska what to do with its natural resources at a time when we desperately could use more sources of supply, particularly domestic ones. Her husband, the First Dude, is a union worker for BP and she has a lot of blue collar appeal. And for Christian conservatives who were very iffy on McCain, she has, at least for the moment, re-invigorated the base. She is anti-abortion so much so that she refused to abort her youngest child even though she knew via genetic testing that he had Down Syndrome. And she's a lifelong member of the NRA and loves her guns. Oh, and did I mention, she's a woman and steals a little of the history making thunder from the Obama camp. She has a lot going for her.

But there are some major minuses. She's only been a governor for less than 18 months and immediately prior to that, she was the mayor of a town with only 7000 people. Despite all her positives, Sarah Palin is hardly prepared to be president. And with a 72 year old running mate who has a history of cancer, you have to think about these things. Tom Brokaw asked an excellent question this morning. Can they honestly say she is the best choice? Better than Romney on the economy? Better than Tom Ridge on security? And if he wanted a woman governor, he could have picked Christie Todd Whitman who has her own maverick reputation in standing up to Bush over environmental policy. But he chose probably the least experienced person he could find with no, zero, zilch national experience.

You have to admit, McCain has big balls. Insiders say that he realized that he was losing with the experience argument, even though he was making some traction with it. He had to change the dynamics of the race. He needed to get himself a piece of that change stuff the kids are so hopped up on these days. Palin let's him cast this as a maverick ticket and fight off Obama's chief argument that McCain is Bush's third term. At least for the moment, it seems to be working in that regard. McCain looks a lot less like Bush today than on Friday. And from a purely tactical perspective, McCain pushed Obama out of the news cycle Friday morning, though the damage was already done with the huge TV audience Obama pulled in.

As an aside, I find it completely laughable that Republicans are out there trying to say with a straight face that Sarah Palin has more experience than Obama. Its a joke. They keep forgetting that Obama was a state senator from 1997 to 2004. I suppose Sarah Palin has been in public life longer technically, if you count her experience on the City Council and as Mayor, which I don't.

With the Palin choice, McCain has taken the experience debate off the table. Obama can't attack her on it because it looks hypocritical. McCain can't attack him on it for the same reasons. Its mutually assured destruction. So this debate will shift to be about whether Obama's "Yes, we can" style of change is better than McCain's "maverick" version. It actually could become a more issue filled debate.

Net net, I see the rationale for McCain, but I think he's going to regret this. Its desperate and shows that he's in a tough spot. Mike Murphy brought up a good point this morning. She doesn't really bring anyone new into the McCain fold. Christian conservatives were going to vote for him any way, although maybe she has some effect on turnout. Maybe she lures in a few blue collar votes. But for the most part, she's playing to his existing base. This whole notion that she is going to win over Hillary women is insulting. As if women don't know the difference between Hillary and a person who is diametrically opposed to the woman's social issues that Hillary stands for. I expect Obama to dispatch Hillary to take Palin on because only Hillary can really crush her on this.

Time will tell, but I think this was a bad choice for McCain and god help us if she winds up in the Oval Office. But Obama has to realize today is different from Thursday and the playing field has been reset.

Last night, I watched Dream On Silly Dreamer, the documentary about the layoffs at Walt Disney Feature Animation in 2002. I had always wanted to see it, but never could get a copy until it popped up on my Apple TV for $1.99. It just gets me all riled up again about what a totally terrible CEO Michael Eisner was. To think that he would actually end the artform that made the company what it is today is shocking but even more shocking is how totally poorly managed feature animation was.

Of course, we all know what happened right after this documentary. Pixar was purchased and John and Ed immediately restored hand-drawn animation. The first fruit of this, Princess and the Frog, comes out next Christmas and word on the street is that it is a return to form for Disney.

One thing the movie brought up was that terrible hat building and how it was designed for marketing Disney not as a functional place for animators to work. It got me thinking, if only there were a place on the lot that was truly designed for animation. I wonder why someone never thought of that?

Oh wait this did. And his name was Walt Disney. And building is still there. Only now it houses production offices for companies that do business with Disney, mostly on the TV side of the house. Its really a crime. Every now and then you hear rumors on the Internet about Disney building a new building for its animators. Why? Why not return them to where they belong in the original animation building. Move the production offices somewhere else and then gut the original animation building. Take the best aspects of Walt Disney's design (natural light for all) and the Pixar building (collaborative design) and give the old animation building a makeover. Add another floor if you need. Or here's an idea. How about expanding the building to envelope the theater (but be careful to preserve the original legends area out front. Combine the old and the new.

You don't even have to change the sign on the front door.

How will it do this weekend? Could it open huge? Even a $20M opening
would be big for what is essentially the premiere of a TV show.

Thanks Gizmodo!

In Apple's recent earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer said that margins would suffer in the following quarter due to a product transition Apple would announce in September. Since then, everyone has been trying to figure out what the hell he meant.

Some of the speculation is that Apple is going back to PowerPC because they purchased PA Semi which specialized in embedded PowerPC applications. I am going to go out on a limb and say that is not going to happen. Apple just completed the Intel transition and that transition has been paying off in spades. Major corporations are starting to buy Macs because they can run both Windows and Mac OS X and many companies - including my own - are using Parallels as a workaround for the continuing lack of full support for Exchange on the Mac. But more than that, there's no problem on the Intel platform. Remember that Apple left PowerPC for a reason. They could not get new chips. They could not get lower power chips. That situation has only gotten worse and Motorola and IBM aren't even making the PowerPC chips Apple used to use. Going back to PowerPC so quickly would be crazy and capricious. Apple is getting everything they need from Intel and MacBook Air proves that. So this is just not happening.

The second bit of speculation is that Apple is moving to its own chipsets (northbridge and southbridge). I find this pretty likely. Buying the CPU from a company that spends billions a year to be the leader in that area is one thing, but chipsets are another. Chipsets have become commodity, thrown in for free in the processor price. If you use the same chipsets as everyone else, you have the same features as everyone else. And I could totally see Apple developing its own chipsets to stay unique and to improve in areas like power management where the current Intel chipsets do a pretty crap job.

Now Cringeley is saying that he thinks Apple is going to add H.264 hardware to all its computers that will allow it to compress a 1080p stream down to 2 Mbps. This is an interesting one because if it is possible, I am sure Apple will try to do it. Apple needs to differentiate itself from NetFlix and Amazon and Tivo and this may be it. I have an Apple TV. For the first year, I never used it. When they announced the 2.0 software, I tried the VOD feature and it took so long to download a movie, I gave up for a few months. Then recently I tried it again and it worked great. Even on my pokey DSL connection, it only takes about 2 minutes to be able to start your show and I have never really had it hang up after that. The quality looks terrific and frankly I don't care if its not HD. But if Apple could make the move to 1080p HD video with a broad selection of content, that would be a big deal, sort of.

The biggest problem with Apple TV is not the video quality, its the windowing and the rental window. 24 hours is just not long enough. By the time I get home, put the kids to bed, and can start watching TV, its 9 pm. If I rent a movie, I will probably fall asleep in the middle and so I need to pick it up the next day. But by the time I can do that, the video rental window has expired. Blockbuster and most disc rentals give you a couple of days to a week to watch your movie. And if you don't watch it in that time, you can hold on to the disc and pay a late fee. With Apple TV, the second your movie expires, it deletes it and you have start all over. So if you were half way though the movie, you have to download it all again and wait for the movie to get back to the part where you left off. Not a great experience. The other issue is the window. Apple TV rentals come out in the VOD window which is 30 days after the movie comes out on DVD. Movie studios do this to protect their DVD sales, although they allow Blockbuster and others to rent movies day-and-date with DVD sales, so you might ask yourself why VOD is treated any differently from my local Blockbuster. There are a lot of movies that I miss in theaters and I want to see them as soon as they come out on DVD. I can't get them on Apple TV yet, so guess what, I go to the grocery store and rent them from the DVD kiosk there. How exactly did the studio win on that one? In any case, its the studios that are holding Apple TV movie rentals back. As usual, the studios make extremely stifling decisions when it comes to new technology and it hobbles it to the point of uselessness.

Meanwhile, let me make my own prediction. Apple will introduce free-to-watch TV advertised content this Fall. The writing is on the wall really. ABC and others have served a lot more streams of TV content that Apple has of downloads. Ad-supported streaming is working and it only makes sense for Apple to be there too. After all, there is nothing that sells hardware like free software. But will Apple meet the industries demands? Apple will need to lock play controls during TV ads forcing users to watch the commercials. And they will have to track user behavior and report back what ads got watched. Will they do it? You bet your ass. If Apple can do ad-supported TV, it will be a bonanza for Apple TV and iPod/iPhone.

Let me finish my own off-the-wall prediction that not even I believe. What if Apple's big transition is not Mac related at all. What if its from iPod to iPhone. What if Apple is phasing out the Classic and the Touch and forcing people to buy an iPhone. What if Apple introduces a Nano phone for $100 and starts to do the same thing for Nano. That would impact margins in the short term. But like I said, I'm not so sure.

I think Apple's more likely move is to drop the touch wheel on the Nano and move it to the touch screen. The future of that platform is about apps. Apple has done almost all it can with video and audio. Touch and iPhone are still a small part of the user base. Nano is the lion's share of the users. If Apple can get Nano users using apps they will solidify themselves as the Microsoft of portable devices (as if they aren't already) and have a great position to upsell people to iPhones.

TV Squad says of the Doctor Who finale:

"The latest season of Doctor Who gets resolved with a story that seems rushed, confusing and filled with self-love on the part of showrunner Russell T. Davies. But that doesn't necessarily mean it was bad."

I agree with the first sentence, but not necessarily with the second.

I will forever be grateful to Russell T Davies for bring back Doctor Who. I thought the first season was terrific and David Tennant has proven to be an equally great Doctor with many strong episodes, some of which are among the best Doctor Who stories ever. But...

As TV Squad always says, the man can't write science fiction. My continual pet peeve are the over-the-top confusing silly sensational season enders he insists on and with them this retarded insistence on killing off all the Daleks every season only to bring them back the next. Its just dumb. I hate it in superhero movies when they do this and I hate it here. Why is it necessary to kill all the Daleks? You know they are going to come back. What's the point? Its become a cliche with each new Dalek episode starting with "I thought you were destroyed!" Just let them get away as they did in the old days.

I for one cannot wait for Stephen Moffat to take over so we can be treated to his excellent writing and taste every week.