| Dog Days at Cerberus
When that failed, Cerberus abandoned the deal on Nov. 14, just days before it was set to close. The news chopped $1.2billion off United's market value. Two days later, United sued a Cerberus-affiliated group for pressuring its board to accept a lower price. That isn't the only headache for Cerberus these days. In recent months two of its other deals have fallen apart, several investments have soured, and the problems at its big plays, Chrysler and GMAC, have worsened. In hindsight, Cerberus' bets on housing, financials, and autos look perilous. It bought GMAC Financial Services, which owns a mortgage lender, as the real estate bubble was bursting. Now, say sources close to Cerberus, the $26 billion firm has slowed its pace of dealmaking with the credit crunch in full force.
Piggybacking On ATM
Happenstance brought Hannaford to ATM: In 1996, Verizon had installed a statewide ATM network in Maine, linking all government agencies and schools at a speed of 10 megabits per second. "I just asked Verizon if we could ride this network but attach at 1.5 megabits instead," Homa recalls. "They agreed. Otherwise, we never would have tried ATM." Homa says desperation for a better network inspired him with the idea to piggyback on the project. Hannaford's growth, in terms of store locations and sales, has doubled since the mid-1990s, some of which Homa attributes to the faster, more reliable network. "The network infrastructure has dramatically changed the business," he says. The streamlined technology made it possible for Hannaford to eliminate 1,000 servers across its then 100 locations, with one or two remaining in each store.
Eating up Spam
As its name indicates, The Tumbleweed anti-spam appliance is an e-mail firewall, separating your internal e-mail servers from the Internet. All incoming Internet e-mail must first filter through the anti-spam server before passing through to your internal network. Setting up the appliance (which the company calls Tumbleweed MMS) was fairly straightforward. All I had to do was plug the box into the network and ask my ISP to change the DNS Mail Server (MX) records for my domain so all incoming Internet mail goes directly to the anti-spam appliance�s built-in SMTP service. Then I set up the appliance to relay messages not rejected by the anti-spam and policy engines to my Exchange 2003 server. The appliance itself is nothing more than a rack mount computer (the model I reviewed had dual processors and 1 GB RAM) running Windows 2000 Server, on which is installed Tumbleweed�s MMS 5.5 E-mail Firewall Service and the anti-spam add-on.
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Richardson is the latest member of the Fenty administration to leave out of frustration. The former senior staffer submitted his resignation Thursday afternoon, effective Friday. The resignation comes just weeks after Fenty's Attorney General Linda Singer quit. Sources close to Singer say she quit because Fenty's General Counsel, Peter Nickles, was over stepping his authority. Last April, Merrit Drucker, Fenty's Director of Community Services and Relations quit. He told the Washington City Paper, "I was not going to be a toothless lapdog." Richardson tells WTOP he grew increasingly frustrated with being shut out of Mayor Adrian Fenty's decision making process, and he says he's not alone. "I think as I listen to the folks in the neighborhoods and I talk to people in the Wilson Building and other government buildings, I think there is a growing frustration that there's one single voice making all the decisions in the city.
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