Oracle's SAP attack, old media fights back

As you surely have surmised by now, this is the last Notes From the Field that will ever bleed ink. But that doesn’t mean I’ll be slinking off into the sunset with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red under one arm and a redhead on the other. Cringeville is merely getting a new ZIP code in the blogosphere. Look for the same bad puns and snarky commentary in tasty snack-sized pieces starting next week on InfoWorld.com.

SAP trap  Oracle has accused SAP of “corporate theft on a grand scale.” The Ellisonians claim employees of SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow posed as Oracle customers and downloaded some 10,000 proprietary documents and software updates. Henning Kagermann, CEO of the German software giant, denies all charges. Also: There’s no truth to the rumor SAP got caught when its employees tried to swap the materials on a Bitte Torrent network.

Putting the boob back in tube  Media mastodons NBC and Fox hope to cut the legs out from under YouTube by distributing some of their shows for free via AOL, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo. They’re banking that repeats of Cops or Passions will prove more captivating than those sneezing panda videos. Me, I’ve got my money on the bears.

No no, no Net  A Parks Associates survey says roughly a third of American households don't have Internet access and like it that way. The reason? Nearly half of anti-Netters say there’s nothing online worth looking at. (Apparently they haven’t seen the panda videos either.)

Office affairs  In my item on Office 2007 going medieval on Outlook Express's spellchecker, I mistakenly referred to the French language in the feminine and not the masculine. La Belle Francaise actually means “the beautiful French woman.” Cringester Keith U. adds that if I know how to meet beautiful French women using OE, it’s probably an infringement of Microsoft’s IP rights.

Send hot tips or beautiful French women to cringe@infoworld.com and you may receive un beau sac in return.