Facebook blames a bug for the disappearance of posts about same-sex marriage

Some recent cases of news articles about same-sex marriage disappearing from the newspaper page on Facebook appear to have been caused by a bug and not a policy violation, the social network said.

Several regional daily newspapers, such as The Mercury serving Pottstown, Pennsylvania, started seeing in late July that stories covering developments on the issue of same-sex marriage were mysteriously disappearing from their pages on Facebook. A post Friday at the website for the Poynter Institute, a journalism education and training center, called attention to the issue.

"In all likelihood this was a bug and not a policy violation," a Facebook spokeswoman said Friday, referring specifically to The Mercury's issues. If it had been a policy violation, the page administrators would have received a notification of the article removals, which they did not, Facebook said.

The circumstances surrounding some of the posts' disappearances are a bit odd. At The Mercury, for instance, online editor Eileen Faust noticed the trend when a local county began issuing licenses to same-sex couples on July 24. Roughly five to six articles disappeared from Facebook after they were posted, she said, but no stories covering other topics disappeared in a similar way.

The articles that disappeared covered news dng with both support and opposition to same-sex marriage, she said.

The paper has not experienced any major issues with articles disappearing since then, but that may only be because The Mercury has not been posting as many articles on same-sex marriage, Faust said.

"We're going to keep an eye on this," she added in an interview.

The Mercury's posts on same-sex marriage have since been restored to the paper's page on Facebook, the social network said.

Other regional newspaper companies, such as 21st Century Media papers in the Philadelphia region and papers owned by the Los Angeles News Group, have also noticed that their stories on same-sex marriage have disappeared from their Facebook pages, The Mercury reported in its coverage of the issue.

21st Century Media and the Los Angeles News Group could not be immediately reached to comment.

Though The Mercury paper's issues were probably caused by a bug or some kind of glitch, Facebook said, the issue did arise just before the company announced an aggressive new strategy to better detect controversial content on its site that may be violent, graphic or sexual in nature.

Facebook has a complicated way for classifying what is offensive content and what is not. In terms of graphic content, "We understand that graphic imagery is a regular component of current events, but must balance the needs of a diverse community," the site says in its community standards.

The Mercury's Faust said she would like to have a more direct contact at Facebook to communicate with when issues occur. "We can't easily connect or get a response from them," she said.

http://www.freeprwebdirectory.com/business_and_economy/law/

DealBook: Worried About Defeat for Dell Offer, Board and Bidders Prepare Maneuvers

Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesMichael Dell and Silver Lake are working to convince Dell shareholders that they will not raise their $24.4 billion bid.
A high-stakes game of poker is now being played over the fate of Dell Inc., less than 36 hours before shareholders are scheduled to vote on the computer company’s proposed $24.4 billion sale to its founder.
A special committee of Dell’s board is poised to adjourn the vote on Thursday morning because it is concerned that the offer may be defeated by shareholders, people briefed on the matter said on Tuesday. The directors have signaled for days that they would rather postpone the shareholder meeting, giving them time to either elicit a higher bid from Michael S. Dell and his partner, the investment firm Silver Lake — or get the buyers to declare their current offer of $13.65 best and final.

Meanwhile, Mr. Dell and Silver Lake are working behind the scenes to convince shareholders that they will not raise their current offer and are prepared to walk away.

The jockeying comes amid more signs that the deal faces stiff investor opposition. BlackRock, which owns a nearly 4.5 percent stake, has voted no, according to one of the people briefed on the matter. And the mutual fund manager T. Rowe Price, which owns a 4 percent stake, said publicly on Monday that it remained opposed to the deal.

The primary opponents to the leveraged buyout, the billionaire activist Carl C. Icahn and the asset management firm Southeastern Asset Management, have pressed their argument that the proposed sale would shortchange investors. They contend that their plan, in which the company would buy back 1.1 billion shares for $14 apiece, would deliver more to fellow shareholders while letting them participate in any revival of the computer company.

In a letter to investors sent on Tuesday, the Dell special committee again sought to rebut Mr. Icahn’s claims, arguing that a so-called leveraged recapitalization would leave shareholders owning stakes in a more indebted company. Moreover, Mr. Icahn’s offer requires investors to completely replace Dell’s board with the activist’s own slate of candidates.

Still, the directors remain pessimistic because of the tough threshold for approval of Mr. Dell’s deal. More than 42 percent of the company’s shares must be voted in favor of the transaction. More than 21 percent of Dell’s shares — including the roughly 13 percent stake held by Mr. Icahn and Southeastern — is currently arrayed against the proposal, this person said.

By briefly opening the shareholder meeting and then adjourning, the special committee buys more time to twist arms. The maneuver will let the company maintain the current record date of June 3, the day by which investors must have owned shares to participate in the vote. (That said, Dell directors may be ultimately fine with moving the date.)

Both the special committee and the buyer group believe that many of Dell’s shareholders are wagering that Mr. Dell and Silver Lake will blink and raise their offer. By some estimates, nearly one-quarter of Dell shares held as of June 3 are now in the hands of arbitrageurs, who bet on the outcome of mergers.

But people close to the would-be buyers argue that there is less incentive than ever for the consortium to increase their bid, pointing to the company’s declining earnings; increasingly negative analyst outlooks on sales of personal computers; and the rising cost of debt borrowing.

As recently as last week, the research firm Gartner estimated that worldwide PC shipments had fallen from the year-ago period by roughly 11 percent, to 76 million units. That is the fifth consecutive quarter of falling sales.

Meanwhile, raising the offer above $13.65 a share could prove expensive. A 25-cent increase of the bid would require an additional $400 million or so in new equity, hurting the potential return of Mr. Dell and Silver Lake.

Any bump in price would need the approval of both partners, even as many shareholders are hoping that the company founder would succumb to pressure and make additional concessions to allow an increase in the price.

Shares in Dell closed on Tuesday at $13.02, down almost 1 percent.

Four things CIOs need to know about Microsoft's reorg

Last week’s big Microsoft reorganization should have caught exactly zero people by surprise. A couple of high-ranking executives departed, and departments were shifted so the senior leadership team can purportedly focus on engineering excellence and becoming more relevant across a spectrum of devices.

Read PCWorld’s analysis of what Microsoft’s new product groups mean for you

But what does this mean for the CIO? What do Microsoft’s internal machinations imply for its corporate customers? From my perspective, it means four different things for you. Let’s take a look at each of them.
When CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in his memo to the troops that this was a reorganization “that will enable us to innovate with greater speed, efficiency and capability in a fast changing world,” he wasn’t kidding about the greater speed part.

Windows 8 is getting a quick facelift with the August arrival of the 8.1 update.
You’ve probably noticed by now that the ill-received Windows 8 is receiving a quick facelift in Windows 8.1. This will be released to original equipment manufacturers for inclusion in their devices by the end of August, according to the company’s Tami Reller at the recent Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston.The head of Windows Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform, said at the TechEd conference that his team targets updates to cloud services inthree-week intervals.The Microsoft Exchange team has switched to a servicing model that releases quarterly updates. These are deployed like an entirely new version of Exchange, as opposed to just a service pack. This is a reflection of the company as a whole, which seems to be eschewing the concept of service packs and instead focusing on delivering changes via more frequent updates.
This is a huge change for IT departments everywhere, but especially in larger enterprises, who typically wait months, if not even a year or more, before deploying new releases of critical software en masse to users.
It’s entirely unclear whether this faster release cadence is solving a problem that anyone outside of Microsoft has, but for the time being, the message is clear: Get used to being only 12 months away from a shiny new version of whatever you’re using, regardless of whether this accelerated timetable actually aligns with your organization’s strategic plans.
The fire hose is turning on. Hope you’re thirsty.
Microsoft’s current line is that it gives you the best of both worlds-best-in-class operating systems for your own server rooms and data centers, and the same operating system that works the same way in private cloud services and up on Windows Azure.
This is absolutely correct. No competitor even comes close to creating the so-called “virtuous cycle,” where improvements in on-premises software make their way up to the company’s cloud services, while the best practices, feature improvements and bug fixes found by running hundreds of thousands of servers in the cloud make their way into the engineering for the next release of the on-premises operating system. This is a real win.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer
However, this virtuous cycle can still be virtuous for Microsoft without being so valuable to non-cloud customers. In fact, the days of on-premises Microsoft line of business software for your own datacenters may well be numbered, even if the company currently promises otherwise.
It’s not difficult to see an era where, as Microsoft steers its ship into the harbor of devices in services, it decides to develop more in the cloud and, perhaps, save some of the effort and expense of engineering new operating system releases. (That doesn’t appear to be in the immediate future, given the quick follow-up Windows Server 2012 R2 release only about a year after the original Windows Server 2012 release to manufacturing.)
If Redmond is creating devices that exist to consume its services, those services will naturally be a key area of investment for the company. They’ll also drive recurring revenue, whereas perpetual software licenses generally do not, and are less “sticky” to boot.
The slow but steady decline of the personal computer has not been kind to the outlook for the software giant, while the emergence of Microsoft Surface as a sort of tablet window into the era of personal devices has not gone as well as the software giant had hoped, surely.
The Windows franchise lives and breathes at this point with PC shipments, and with Barron’s reporting that PC shipments fell by 11 percent this quarter as compared with the same period last year, the problem is clear: Microsoft needed to shift, even on the server and enterprise side, one of the billion-dollar, consistently profitable segments of the company.
Ballmer was nervous and needed to light a fire. The reorganization, according to Ballmer, is intended to help transform the company into an era where PCs are just one piece of a much larger pie.
“The form of delivery shifts to a broader set of devices and services versus packaged software,” Ballmer writes in his memo, indicating that he wants Microsoft relevant in more than just PC and Xbox.
Microsoft is playing for more than enterprises and knows that PCs aren’t where the money is anymore. For the CIO, this means a Microsoft that’s not as laser-focused on business tools as it has been throughout its existence, with some exceptions, but is attempting to reach consumers, gamers, executives, artists and so on.

News flash: Microsoft desperately wants you to subscribe to the cloud. It really wants your mail and collaboration in Office 365, it wants your Web services hosted on Windows Azure, it wants your sales force using hosted Microsoft Dynamics, and it wants your spam filtering done by Exchange Online Protection. It wants to hook you in, send you an invoice every month, and seal you into the Microsoft ecosystem-and for the trouble, you’ll receive upgrades, support and (hopefully) always-on service.
You know what? For some businesses, this is exactly where to be. This message is compelling for resource-challenged small to medium-sized businesses to play at a scale that Microsoft can offer for pennies per hour. The majority of small businesses have no reason to run an in-house email server. The majority of medium-sized businesses can’t roll out a Web application on a scale and in the timeframe by themselves that they could by spinning up some Windows Azure instances.

This Microsoft, for these businesses, is a good thing. More power and capability has never been available at a lower price than now. This focus of Microsoft means good things in these capacities for these audiences. 

Kanye West Rants About "Heartbreaking" Black Skinhead Nude Video Leak

North West's daddy is damn angry! Kanye West took a break from tending to love Kim Kardashian and their infant daughter to bemoan the leak of his "Black Skinhead" video late Tuesday, July 9. In the widely circulated clip, a shadowy, CGI version of an extra-muscular West (shirtless, wearing a gold chain) raps the provocative track from his acclaimed Yeezus album, dancing and jumping energetically. Towards the end of the video, the murky West figure appears to be completely nude.

The clip, however, is not ready for prime time. "The BLKKK SKKKN HD video that leaked yesterday was not the official version," West, 35, tweeted. "Me and Nick Knight have been working on this video for 5 months and for creatives it's heartbreaking when something like this happens."

Continued the very emotional new dad: "The final version will be ready within the next week. So any website that may have the unapproved / unfinished ruff. I ask you to please take it down. Allow me and Nick to give the world what we've been losing sleep over."

"And to who ever leaked the video," he fumed, "F-- YOU!" West and Kardashian, 32, have been holed up at Kris Jenner's home during little Nori's first days. "He doesn't leave North for more than an hour," one pal told Us. Added another: "Kanye holds the baby all the time."

Sharknado: Stars Tweet About Syfy Movie Starring Tara Reid, Ian Ziering

Ian Ziering and Tara Reid star in Syfy's Sharknado, which became a Twitter sensation when it premiered on July 11, 2013.
Sharknado became a Twitter sensation when it premiered on the Syfy network on Thursday, July 11. The movie -- about a tornado filled with sharks -- stars Tara Reid, Ian Ziering and Cassie Scerbo. Dozens of celebrities weighed in on the over-the-top flick via the social networking site.

"As usual, the beach youths all deserve to die," former MTV News staff Kurt Loder wrote. "Rooting for the sharks #Sharknado." Actor Patton Oswalt joked, "Dear @SyfyTV: please follow up SHARKNADO with PARTLY CLOWNY. Sky. Clowns. Michael Pare (probably)." 30 Rock alum Judah Friedlander also pitched a movie to the network, writing, "SharkFart vs Diarrhea Whale. Call me @Syfy. That's my movie pitch. #Sharknado."

PHOTOS: Celebs' horror movie pasts

Ziering, 49, wasn't able to catch the premiere. "#LiveTweetingSharknado I cant believe how this movie is blowing up ALL social media," he wrote. "Working with @Chippendales tonight, seeing it tomorrow." The Beverly Hills, 90210 alum added, "After seeing myself in a wetsuit at 207lbs I'm surprised I didn't get eatin first.. #lardandincharge."

PHOTOS: Stars supernatural movie and TV roles

To see how the rest of Hollywood felt about Sharknado, read on:

Olivia Wilde, Drinking Buddies
I just recorded it based on this review: "@MiaFarrow: Omg omg OMG #sharknado"

B.J. Novak, Saving Mr. Banks
I'm afraid that now when we have a real sharknado everyone's going to treat it like a joke.

Chrissy Teigen, model
Say what you will about Tara and Ian but I don't see any of YOU starring in shark tornado tv movies

Christina Applegate, Anchorman 2
We can't just stay here and let sharks rain down on us.....,

Josh Gad, 1600 Penn
The Producers of Planet Earth are watching #SharkNado tonight asking themselves, "why do we even try?"

PHOTOS: Summer movie guide

Autumn Reeser, Entourage
On @NecRoughness set w/ @Karissaleelee and we are flabbergasted at the amount of people tweeting about #Sharknado. And now we feel left out.

Horatio Sanz, G.B.F.
I wish I could join in on the shenanigans, But I had a cousin that was killed by a #Sharknado back in '93. #RamonRIP

Elizabeth Banks, The Hunger Games
Well, there goes my Emmy. RT @Syfy: . @oliviawilde @MiaFarrow We have roles for you both in the #Sharknado sequel @DamonLindelof is writing"

Michael Chiklis, Parker
Clearly SyFy is employing the old, "so bad, it's good," method with tremendous effect. #TrendingForHours #SharkNado"

Drumbeat about Microsoft reorg grows louder

Reports of an imminent and broad Microsoft business reorganization keep mounting, including an anonymously sourced article from The Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD blog that says CEO Steve Ballmer will unveil the plan on Thursday.

Microsoft critics have pointed out for years that the company has a product lineup that is too big and too varied, and that it could make sense to split up the house that Bill Gates built into more independent subsidiaries or even spin off some units entirely.

Melissa J. PerensonSteve Ballmer
This, observers have said, could bring more agility and innovation to the different teams by streamlining the decision-making process both at the product development and business strategy levels.

Currently, Microsoft has products as disparate as the Xbox gaming console, the Bing search engine, and the SQL Server enterprise database.

Far from consolidating and paring down its product roster, Microsoft has ventured into new areas, like its surprising decision last year to build its own tablet device—the Surface—while risking alienating its hardware partners.

There has been dissatisfaction among investors about stagnant growth in the stock price, and the company has been criticized for adapting too slowly to key trends, including cloud computing and consumerization of IT.

Glaring examples of missed opportunities by Microsoft are the minor presence of its Windows OS in tablets and smartphones. While Microsoft is trying to remedy that with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, the OS is very far behind iOS and Android, and Microsoft has missed three years of blazing hot sales for these devices, which many people now use both at home and at work.

On the enterprise software side of things, Microsoft has also scrambled to respond to fast-moving trends. For example, it spent $1.2 billion a year ago to buy Yammer in order to boost the weak enterprise social networking capabilities of its SharePoint collaboration server and of other business software like Office, Exchange, Lync and Dynamics.

In addition, rivals have been sniping at the Office franchise for several years, offering up less expensive, cloud-only options like Google’s Apps suite that have found success in a market Office has historically dominated.

According to AllThingsD’s report on Monday, the reorganization will be drastic and has many company leaders on pins and needles because Ballmer has apparently kept the details confidential, sharing them with only a select few. According to a Fast Company article, the restructuring intrigue and uncertainty played a part in Don Mattrick’s decision to leave his job as president of the company’s Interactive Entertainment unit and join Zynga as CEO.

MicrosoftDon Mattrick
But the overall goal, according to AllThingsD, is to bring “functional coherence” to the company and group some products under different leaders, including the creation of a new unit for cloud computing and business products led by Satya Nadella, who is now in charge of the Servers and Tools division.

Qi Lu, now head of Online Services, which includes Bing, would also oversee Office and other apps. A Bloomberg article last week also included details on a number of such moves that are reportedly part of the plan.

Of course, major restructurings and reorganizations are common among large IT vendors, and often the plans end up being so convoluted and hard to implement that they do more damage than good. Sometimes the plans slow down the company or simply prove outright unwise, leading down a path of failure.

An unwanted byproduct can always be that enterprise customers and employees interpret these shakeups as signs that the vendor is in crisis and rudderless, leading them to lose confidence in the companies. Customers then begin to second-guess their decisions to invest in the vendor’s products, while employee morale dips and staff turnover increases.

David Johnson, a Forrester Research analyst, said that Microsoft's internal divisions are getting in the way of its progress. The division leaders are judged on the financial performance of their business unit, but also on potentially conflicting goals including product integration, quality and shared financial results.

"It can be extremely complex to track progress and success and failure across a confusing organizational structure and set of priorities, and divisional revenue will always trump other goals, so when the pressure is on for revenue or profits in one division, it can be difficult or impossible to get collaborative, cross-silo work done," Johnson said via email.

The potential upside is that, given the company's enormous capabilities and resources, Microsoft could speed by competitors and blaze a trail of innovation if its inner workings were properly coordinated, he said.

 (Andy Beal)Satya Nadella, head of the Servers and Tools division
The best purpose of a large company is the ability to coordinate resources and talents across a large number of things, to get a few very important things done," Johnson said.

"But the way they're structured now, they can innovate but only in silos or pockets, and so they're not bringing the full potential of a well-coordinated, large organization to get that handful of really important, high-value things done," he added.

Johnson expects a more prominent role will be given to Nadella and to the software-development-tools line of products.

"Microsoft's best work is when they give people development tools that are so easy to use for incredibly powerful things, that they will commit themselves and careers to mastery of them," he said.

That was the case with Visual Studio early on, and with Visual Basic for Applications with Excel, according to Johnson.

"Microsoft democratizes software development by lowering the barriers to entry like no other company. This is a part of their DNA and culture I'd like to see come back. The shift to cloud gives them the change to do it again, and I was blown away by the improvements I saw with Visual Studio 2013 at Build 2013 in San Francisco," he said, referring to the recently concluded Microsoft conference for developers.

Johnson is also betting on the consolidation in a single Windows division for PCs, tablets, smartphones, and even wearable devices.

"Microsoft needs to unify the experience across all devices, and stop treating them as separate businesses with separate priorities and revenue goals," he said.

This reorganization would also give Ballmer a good chance to tear down the notorious stack ranking system that Vanity Fair magazine detailed in a devastating article a year ago.

That story, titled "Microsoft's Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant," described this annual review system, which forces team leaders to give glowing, fair, and bad reviews to a pre-determined percentage of their employees, even if it just so happens that on a given team everybody delivered good and excellent performances.

"Such a system has benefits, but the negative consequences can be severe. When employees know that someone on their team is going to take a bullet every year, competition and not cooperation between people is the natural result, along with all of the negative behaviors that go with it," Johnson said.

Instead of promoting collaboration, communication and sharing of information and resources, which are the things Microsoft needs to survive and thrive, this system leads employees to engage in information hoarding, noxious corporate politics and blame games, he said.

Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst, said there have always been reports of lack of cooperation and in-fighting among Microsoft units, a situation that has likely prevented the company from maximizing the potential synergies among products, which would yield a competitive advantage.

"At this point, Windows and Windows Phone should offer a much better combined experience, but the two are very separate," Silver said via email.

Microsoft also needs a better effort in marketing, which Silver said has been "subpar to say the least."

In addition, the company needs a more coherent design and user experience across its products. "They need someone to deal with this across the whole product line to ensure consistency and improve the user experience on every product individually and together," Silver said.

Rumors about the restructuring plan began floating around weeks ago. Microsoft will report its fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday of next week.

Elevator Pitch: Why Care About Washington

­­My friend, Mark Leibovich — a New York Times reporter — has written a book about the inner watchworkings of Power Washington called This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital. Among the incestuous cognoscenti of the Capital City, This Town has more buzz than a top-bar beehive.

"His tour through Washington only feeds the worst suspicions anyone can have about the place — a land driven by insecurity, hypocrisy and cable hits, where friendships are transactional, blind-copying is rampant and acts of public service appear largely accidental," observes Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post.

"In a super-literal way, the city that I live in—where people live on the Green Line or in Bloomingdale/Eckington/LeDroit Park or out on H Street NE—is a very different city from the one Leibovich profiles," writes Matthew Yglesias in Slate. "It's become a city of principle, and a city where much less gets done in backroom deals. But it's also a city with much more vicious partisanship and much less of a spirit of 'let's compromise for the public good.' It's a city that people have come to hate for whole different reasons and in whole different ways."

Lozada and Yglesias are both Washingtonians. As are many of the people who are at once drawn to and repelled by the behavior described in This Town.

So my question to Mark: Why in the world would anyone Outside the Beltway care to read about Washington's wretched ways? You've got 30 seconds. Go.

"People from out of town should read This Town because no one truly knows what the whole giddy carnival here has become. All of the vanity, opportunism and shamelessness that ever was has been amplified by so much big money and so much New Media. It captures a moment — meaning, the nation's capital in the 21st century — that people don't fully appreciate in all its decadence. It's a serious story. But people seem to be laughing hard at it, so that's good, too..."

Further Reading:

The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins by Jeff Connaughton, a 2012 Washington scather by a former aide to Vice President Joe Biden

What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, a 2008 tell-some by Scott McLellan, former press secretary to Pres. George W. Bush

'Shark Tank's' Barbara Corcoran 'Nervous' About 'Drop Dead Diva' Acting Debut

April Bowlby, left, and Barbara Corcoran
Barbara Corcoran is a pro at doling out business advice on ABC's Shark Tank, but when it came to playing a fictionalized version of herself on Lifetime's Drop Dead Diva, the real estate mogul found the job a little intimidating.

Her story line in Sunday's episode finds her giving advice to Stacy (April Bowlby) about her business, The Pakery.

PHOTOS: Life After the Finale: 17 TV Shows Brought Back From the Dead

"This was my first acting experience, and based on the job I did, I think it will be the last," Corcoran quipped in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "I was nervous, flubbing my lines, doing them again and again and again. I can't imagine looking good, really." (While the charmingly self-deprecating businesswoman remains humble about her acting skills, she can rest assured that she has nothing to be embarrassed about.)

Ahead of her episode premiere, Corcoran talked to THR about why she signed on for the role, her love for the show and why she's sticking with unscripted TV from now on.

The Hollywood Reporter: How did this guest-starring role come about?

Barbara Corcoran: I am a fan of the show, but then who isn't? I got a call out of the blue, asking if I would consider a guest spot. It also happens to be the favorite show of three of the most loved people in my life -- two nieces and also my stepdaughter -- so I had to say yes.

THR: Are they excited to see your show?

Corcoran: I haven't told them. I'm going to call them the morning of; they're all busy and I want to make sure they see it. I'm going to surprise them, and we're going to watch it together.

STORY: 'Drop Dead Diva's' Lex Medlin on Owen's Feelings for Jane, Nearly Playing a Woman and What's Next

THR: Was it less intimidating since you were playing yourself?

Corcoran: Remember, I wasn't really playing myself. I was playing myself as a shrewd operator, as a shark; it was half real and half not real. It felt like acting because I had a script. What's great about reality TV is you say something only once, and you say whatever you want. But I realized when I got this gig, with scripted TV, I must have said every line 30 times -- different angles, different intonations, different camera people -- again and again and again. I'm never going to see a scripted show anymore without thinking that the actors are being underpaid. It's hard work. Reality TV is so much easier.

THR: Was the cast helpful in preparing you?

Corcoran: The minute I stepped onto the lot, everybody was acting as if they were waiting for me. They were so warm and welcoming. I got lucky because they all happen to be Shark Tank fans. After being on the set, I'm the biggest fan of Stacy because [Bowlby] was so terrific on the set. She's a real pro. I was awestruck at how good she was. It was the first time in my life I wasn't jealous of someone who looked as good as she looks. [Laughs.] That speaks a lot to her spirit. She was enormously generous in helping me out.

THR: Will you be pursuing any more acting jobs?

Corcoran: Let me tell you, I can't imagine anyone inviting me. We'll see, but I think reality TV is for me.

STORY: 'Drop Dead Diva' EP on Budget Cuts, Cast Changes and What's Ahead in Season 5

THR: You've already started filming the next season of Shark Tank. Anything you can reveal?

Corcoran: We have two new sharks, as you know [Steve Tisch, chairman and executive vp of the New York Giants and partner at Escape Artists Productions, and John Paul DeJoria, co-founder of the Paul Mitchell line of hair products and the Patron Spirits Co.]. There are a couple of other surprises, but I've been forewarned not to spill the beans.

Drop Dead Diva, from Sony Pictures Television, airs at 9 p.m. Sundays on Lifetime. Watch a preview of Sunday's episode below.

What to do about a failing hard drive

Reader Kjeld Sorenson had a nasty shock and doesn’t care to be surprised again. He writes:

I happened to have Disk Utility open the other day and much to my surprise I saw a warning about my Mac’s hard drive—that it had failed something called a SMART test and wasn’t reliable. First, should I replace the drive and secondly, how can I see alerts like this automatically?

S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology and is a scheme built into hard drives, rather than computers. If a drive reports that it’s failed this diagnostic test it indicates that the drive is on its way to giving up the ghost, not that it will seize up in the next couple of minutes. This should allow you plenty of time to back up your data (which you should already have been doing) in preparation for that drive’s eventual demise. Of course, as in your situation, it’s possible that it failed the S.M.A.R.T. examination weeks ago and is that much closer to the grave.

In either case, given how inexpensive storage is, I wouldn’t ignore the problem. At the very least, get an external hard drive and clone the failing drive to it using a utility such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. That way you not only have a complete backup of your failing drive, but you also have a drive you can boot and work from. You can later replace the failing internal drive if you care to.

As for your second question, I agree, launching Disk Utility each day to check your drive’s integrity would be tiresome. Fortunately there are utilities you can use to automatically monitor it. Starting with the least expensive (as in “free”), CoreCode has a free version of its SMARTReporter utility. Launch the application and it places an icon in your Mac’s menu bar that indicates the health of your ATA, SATA, or eSATA drives (including internal SSD drives). USB, FireWire, and SCSI hard drives can't report S.M.A.R.T. status. It monitors your drives from time to time throughout the day and if it detects a failed S.M.A.R.T. test it issues a warning—a Growl notification, alert dialog, launches an application, or sends an email message. This version is out of date and unsupported by the developer, though it works perfectly well with Mountain Lion.

iStat Menus makes it easy to monitor your drives' S.M.A.R.T. status.
For $5, however, you can have the fully-supported version 3 of SMARTReporter (pictured above). This adds the ability to check for data I/O errors that may indicate a problem.

Bjango’s $16 iStat Menus 4 is another worthy option. It not only monitors your ATA, SATA, and eSATA drives’ S.M.A.R.T. status, but, in regard to drives, it can report how much of their capacity is being used as well as their read and write statistics. And iStat Menus reports a whole lot more about your Mac—it tracks how your CPU is being used, shows memory allocation, a network graph relaying information about sent and received data, includes a temperature sensor, and provides detailed information on your portable Mac’s battery.

And then you can turn to the Big Guns—ProSoft Engineering’s $99 Drive Genius 3 or Micromat’s $50 (currently on sale for $30) Checkmate or $100 Techtool Pro 7. Drive Genius and Techtool Pro can not only monitor but also repair your drive (though no software utility can repair a problem with the drive’s hardware). Checkmate is a monitoring application, but one that goes beyond simple S.M.A.R.T. status reporting. It will additionally check your Mac's RAM, laptop battery, volume structure, RAID status, the integrity of the hard drive's surface (looking for bad block, for example), file structure, I/O check, and Power On Self Test.

What [BLANK] Folks Don't Understand About Rachel Jeantel

Witness Rachel Jeantel continues her testimony to defense attorney Don West during the trial of George Zimmerman on Thursday.

Rachel Jeantel. Her hours-long testimony spanned two days of the George Zimmerman trial, and I bet you'll be talking about it with your friends over the weekend. She's the 19-year-old key witness for the prosecution who had a cellphone conversation with Trayvon Martin moments before he was killed.

And she most definitely touched a nerve.

Multimedia reporter Sherri Williams created a pretty thorough Storify with what she called "good, bad and ugly tweets about Rachel Jeantel," since Jeantel's national television debut this Wednesday. Most of the tweets are just plain "bad and ugly." Folks say Jeantel is overweight; that she has poor diction, bad fashion, and an even worse attitude.

And #RachelJeantel is not just trending on Twitter. (Assume anything we link to in this post has salty language.) I woke up Friday morning to a conversation about her "unusual testimony" on drive-time commercial talk radio, and bloggers have been busy analyzing why Jeantel has been such a target for the past few days.

GlobalGrind had two posts that touched on similar issues — how Jeantel's testimony would be misunderstood by white people. Rachel Samara wrote that Jeantel's defensiveness on the stand would most likely be misunderstood by a predominantly white jury. "Rachel Jeantel's attitude is exactly what I would expect from someone from the hood who has no media training and who is fully entrenched in a hostile environment," she wrote. "There's nothing wrong with it."

Her colleague Christina Coleman wrote about how stark cultural differences between black and white Americans created a "lost in translation" situation in the courtroom. Black people watching the trial would get why Jeantel might not call the police after she knew there had been an altercation, Coleman said, "because the fear and doubt that comes with dealing with law enforcement is as entwined into the tapestry of [black] culture as is our slavery past."

On Twitter, many other people (including Geraldo!) echoed this argument.

But a good number of the tweets I came across during Jeantel's testimony were from people of color, many from folks eager to see George Zimmerman convicted. And those tweets paint a complicated picture.

Jeantel's testimony during the Zimmerman trial stirred up a lot of complicated feelings, including among people of color. There were tweets of shame, embarrassment, and anger at the public education system right alongside feelings of pride and solidarity. Not as easy to unpack as a binary that says, White people don't get her and black people do.

It's a cliche to say that no group of people is monolithic. But seriously, no group of people is monolithic. What we see in Rachel Jeantel says more about us as individuals than as members of a group, and certainly more than it says about Jeantel herself.

Follow me on Twitter @ sajilpl

Miranda Kerr's Summer Style: All About Her "Classic, Chic" Looks

Miranda Kerr accessorized her denim look with metallic flats, Linda Farrow sunglasses and a Balmain X Aurelie handbag in New York City June 17, 2013. Credit: NCP/Star Max/FilmMagic

Hot mom in the city! As the epitome of a stylish mom, supermodel Miranda Kerr -- named by Us Weekly readers as their Celebrity Style Crush for the week of June 17 -- makes summer fashion look easy. "For me it's all about keeping things simple and feeling comfortable in what I am wearing," Kerr, 30, tells Harper's Bazaar of her look, which she characterizes as 'classic and chic.' "I prefer investing in classic, well-tailored pieces."

PHOTOS: Stars' timeless wardrobe tips

Running around New York City in recent weeks with baby boy Flynn in tow, that's nothing but evident as Kerr treats the city sidewalks like a runway, showing off her impeccable taste -- and fabulously fit figure. During a June 17 outing in NYC, the former Victoria's Secret model -- now working on the release of her second book, Empower Yourself, and her skincare line, Kora Organics -- made denim-on-denim look fab by adding metallic ballet flats, Linda Farrow shades and a Balmain X Aurelie handbag to her ensemble.

PHOTOS: Take your outfit from day to night

One day later, Kerr switched up her style during an outing with Flynn wearing an Isabel Marant skirt, shirt and shoes, along with Stella McCartney sunglasses and a straw hat.

Miranda Kerr (toting son Flynn in NYC June 18, 2013) wore an Isabel Marant skirt, shirt and shoes, along with Stella McCartney sunglasses.
Credit: Alo Ceballos/FilmMagic

Though her summer style is breezy and chic, the model mom isn't afraid to push the envelope for her evening looks on occasion. Case in point: May 6's MET Gala Costume Ball, where she dared to bare in a cutout Michael Kors custom black crepe gown.

Miranda Kerr showed some skin in Michael Kors' custom black crepe cutout gown at the 2013 MET Costume Ball in New York City.
Credit: Kevin Mazur/WireImage

Pulling together her daily outfits and red carpet looks can often be a daunting task for Kerr. "I look for something that I haven't worn before . . . which sometimes can be hard," she has admitted. "I look for something that is flattering because every woman's shape is different."

PHOTOS: See 100 red carpet looks from the Met Gala

Telling Us she's forever in a comfy robe at home when she's just lounging around, Kerr's stunning style often takes Hollywood's A-list aback. At the 2013 MET Ball, fellow attendee Gwyneth Paltrow (in pink Valentino) told Entertainment Weekly she complemented the model during the event. "I was like, 'Is it weird to be that pretty?'" the Iron Man 3 actress recalled to the magazine, laughing. "And she was like, 'No.'"

To vote for your Celeb Style Crush, click here -- we'll highlight the winner's best looks on UsMagazine.com next week

 

Is Microsoft About to Change Its Tune on Indie Development?

Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi announces World of Tanks: Xbox 360 Edition at E3 2013.

 

 

Just one week after reversing its DRM policy for the Xbox One, Microsoft appears to be rethinking its attitude towards independent developers.

 

Currently, developers must go through a small group of approved publishers if they want to get their games onto Xbox 360's Live Arcade download service, a policy Microsoft said it is not changing for Xbox One. Rivals Sony and Nintendo, not to mention other platforms like iOS and Android, let developers publish their own games. This can give developers more revenue, as well as more creative freedom.

 

However, it seems as if Build, a Microsoft developers conference coming to San Francisco this week, may bring with it a change to that strict policy.

 

“Some people seem to think Microsoft will announce some self-publishing/indie Xbox One stuff this week at their Build Developer Conference,” a Kotaku columnist named Superannuation reported on Twitter on Sunday. Minecraft developer Notch seems to know something, too.

 

It’s not much of a stretch to say Microsoft has something of a bad rep among indie developers, even those who’ve had big Xbox Live Arcade hits.

 

“Microsoft treats independent developers very badly,” developer Jonathan Blow told Wired in April. Blow’s first game, Braid, debuted on Xbox Live Arcade, but his sophomore effort The Witness will debut on PlayStation 4. Blow was even invited to show it off on stage when Sony unveiled the new console.

 

Phil Fish, whose game Fez also debuted to critical acclaim on Xbox 360, recently told Polygon his next game may not appear on Xbox platforms at all. “[Microsoft has] made it painfully clear they don’t want my ilk on their platform,” he said. “I can’t even self-publish there. Whereas on PS4, I can. It’s that simple.”

 

Microsoft allows developers to self-publish games on the Xbox’s “Indie Games” channel, but these games are difficult for consumers to discover, and Microsoft barely promotes them, if at all. (Disclosure: I developed and released a game on this service.)

 

Eventually, developers like Halfbrick, which created little-known games like Echoes and Rocket Racing for Xbox Live Indie Games, abandoned the platform and moved to iPhone, producing hits like Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride.

 

The Xbox 360's game ecosystem is bifurcated, and neither option is especially palatable for these developers.

 

If you want to publish your game on Xbox 360, you have two choices. You could go through a publisher, signing your rights away and giving someone else control over your creative product. And that all presupposes that you can find a publisher willing to work with you. Or you could put your game on the Indie Games channel, a Wild West dominated by Minecraft clones where it is exceedingly likely that your game will disappear and you will make very little, if any, money.

 

Apple’s solution is to throw everyone into the same pool, and attempt to get the best products to surface to the top of its iTunes store.

 

Sony and Nintendo attempt to walk down the middle. Developers aren’t allowed unfettered access to the download store, but Sony and Nintendo evaluate projects individually and give developers their blessing to publish games on Wii U and PlayStation 3 if they like what they see.

 

In particular, Sony’s outreach to independent developers has brought games like Journey, which won this year’s DICE Award for Game of the Year, to PlayStation platforms. At its E3 show, it invited a whole parade of small developers to show off their PlayStation 4 projects.

 

If Microsoft wants the same level of participation from developers like Jonathan Blow and Phil Fish on Xbox One, it seems like it must adopt a similar policy. If the rumors are true, that’s just a few days away.

 

 

Lydia McLaughlin Shares New Details About Tamra Barney's Wedding

In a rare occurrence, the women of The Real Housewives of Orange County steered clear of the drama when they all got together for Tamra Barney's June 15 wedding to Eddie Judge. Costar Lydia McLaughlin -- who joined the series in its current eighth season -- spoke about the CUT Fitness owners' nuptials when she stopped by Us Weekly's New York City offices on Monday, June 17.

PHOTOS: Real Housewives' biggest fights ever

"It was actually so sweet because we all were there," McLaughlin said of costars Gretchen Rossi, Vicki Gunvalson, Heather Dubrow and even Barney's erstwhile foe, Alexis Bellino. "It was a real bonding moment for us."

'The Real Housewives of Orange County' at Tamra Barney's wedding to Eddie Judge.
Credit: Christine Bentley Photography

Barney, 45, recited her vows in an $8,900 hand-beaded Mark Zunino Haute Couture gown. "She looked like she could just be on top of a cake," McLaughlin said. "It was perfect." The 32-year-old Bravo reality star added, "Tamra had three wedding dresses, and they all were so different and unique."

PHOTOS: Stars' stunning wedding gowns

McLaughlin also praised costar Dubrow, who brought down the house when she sang "Come Rain or Come Shine" for 100 well-wishers at Dana Point, Califiornia's St. Regis Monarch Beach. "She has an amazing voice. It's very kind of sultry and deeper than I expected," she told Us. "She's so good. Way better than I could ever do!"

PHOTOS: Before they were Real Housewives

For more details on Barney's big day -- and for more on what went down during her bachelorette party in Mexico -- watch the video above now. The Real Housewives of Orange County's 100th episode airs Monday, June 24, at 8 p.m. EST on Bravo.

 

The Real 'Unavoidable Truth' About Used Games

In the aftermath of Microsoft’s decision to reverse course and allow customers to sell, rent, borrow, lend and buy used copies of Xbox One game discs, more game developers have come out of the woodwork with essays promising hard truths about the used game market.

 

Former Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski promises “brutal, honest thoughts on this whole debacle” in a blog post. Writing for Edge Online, Bleszinski’s fellow Epic Games alum Lee Perry lays out what he calls “a pretty unavoidable truth for consumers.”

 

Fundamentally, both of these arguments boil down to the same thing: When you buy a used game, you’re not supporting game developers; the triple-A game industry is not making money; therefore used games are killing the triple-A games industry and you should not buy them.

 

Sigh. Actually, there is a real hard truth that has to be confronted here, but that is not it.

 

I won’t rebut these arguments again. I would like to quote one of the preeminent legal thinkers of our time — here I refer of course to Judge Marilyn Milian of The People’s Court — who said, “Where you’re going, I’ve already been there, had a soda, and come back.” If you’d like to learn more about the fallacious logical underpinnings of this argument, please read:

 

The console videogame market is a vast, intricate and inextricably tangled web of interactions. It goes beyond the fact that there is no used game unless someone buys it new in the first place, and that the consumer is factoring in eventual resale value into the $60 sticker price in the first place (as mentioned in that study). It extends to other scenarios as well. One example: Guy who doesn’t care about Gears of War borrows his friend’s copy. Guy loves it and buys Gears of War 2 on day one for full price. Without “used games” — i.e., licenses tied to discs and not accounts — that doesn’t happen.

 

Anyone who tries to tell you that they know, for certain, the effects of moving licenses from discs to accounts is grossly underestimating the complexity of the market. Is it possible that, in the final reckoning, once any and all effects of the current system of game ownership are accounted for, licenses tied to discs are a net negative for the game industry? It is possible. But there is not a whole lot of evidence in favor of that argument and a mountain of evidence against it, now including the fact that when Microsoft tried to take used games away, a huge part of the market voted with their dollars and pre-ordered the PlayStation 4 instead.

 

As I said, there is a hard truth here that some people will have to face. It is this: Increasingly, there are not enough people buying triple-A games, and they do not spend enough money, to make the production of triple-A games as it is undertaken today a financially viable endeavor.

 

If you are a maker of such games, it is much, much easier to believe that GameStop is the source of all the industry’s ills than to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the business.