But in this game, the team has to prepare an offensive gameplan that allows O’Sullivan enough time in the pocket. WR Isaac Bruce has played extremely well in the past three games and it may be time for him to have another big game. But in order to get Bruce and the rest of the receivers involved in the game, the running game may be the biggest point of focus for the 49ers.

Two weeks ago, the Patriots were dismantled by the Dolphins running game. With direct snaps and trick plays, the Patriots were caught off-guard. Now I know the Patriots have preapred themselves to ensure that they wouldn’t be embarassed like that again, but if the 49ers can estbalish a big enough threat on the ground (whether through RB Frank Gore or even a bit of DeShaun Foster), the team can open up the passing game.

It’s not often Matt Drudge posts a headline about a company laying off fewer than 20 workers–especially nowadays.
announcement 19 employees would be released while the company would ditch its traffic based writer bonus payments and readjust its priorities. Gawker’s announcement is more important than just the 19 jobs lost because of what it says about the economy via-a-vis new media companies.

A little background here. Gawker Media is the company responsible for Gizmodo, Fleshbot, Defamer, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Valleywag and Gawker (the up-to-date list is tough to compile as there are conflicting lists on Gawker’s own sites). As
, Gawker’s definition of journalism is decidedly not old school.

“…a chain of professionally staffed blogs that eschewed media conventions like, oh, fairness and reporting, for brutal, well-turned takes on fairly mannered industries.

Where Gawker is old school is its pursuit of cash and fear of a flat economy. As published on
, Gawker’s chief Nick Denton minced few words in defending his defensive position even while year-to-year revenue is up 30%.

“But now the credit crisis is clearly going to affect every sector of the economy. Advertising buys typically plunge after the Christmas shopping season, and 2009 is obviously going to be exceptionally difficult. We have to prepare for the worst, now, rather than when the worst comes upon us.”

Among the Gawker blogs set to take the biggest hit is
–a personal favorite and daily must-read for me. Yesterday, in an open letter to his readers, editor Ben Popken revealed he’d be cutting Consumerist’s staff in half–from four to two.

“This means it will just be myself and Meghann posting during the week. Not sure what to do about the weekends, maybe we’ll just post some raw reader letters. It’s very sad.”

Consumerist is successful if your only metric is traffic. In the real world all readers are not equal and Consumerist has more trouble than the other Gawker blogs turning traffic into cash. This doesn’t bode well for this one-of-a-kind website.

It’s no surprise to see old media companies like newspaper publisher
trading at ½¢ per share. JRC is being undercut by new media at every turn. But isn’t Gawker supposed to be the leaner, meaner, more able to thrive media? Nick Denton says, maybe not.

“The golden age of the blog is over, people will say. Gawker Media is behaving like those big media companies that we mock so easily. I could come up with some bullshit line about how much worse it would have been to wait until we were forced to control costs; or how much more unpleasant life will be at the many internet ventures and newspapers
that won’t make it through the downturn. I could give you my optimistic spin about the glorious future that awaits us on the far side of this downturn.

But there is no escaping the fact that we’re losing some excellent colleagues and the environment next year will be bleak. The one consolation is that there will be plenty of news for us to break –starting with this email, which you are free to leak.”

It’s a sad day on the Internet.

I got a chance to chat with
.

Sam: With Matt Cassel as the starting quarterback for the Patriots, some people are wondering how he could replace a player like Tom Brady. From what you’ve seen so far, what does he bring to this Patriots team that is similar to what Brady has done in years past?

Jamie: Matt Cassel’s skill set is far different from Tom Brady’s, even when you compare the 2001 Tom Brady to Matt Cassel. The only true similarity was through the play calling, when the coaching staff had a similar dink-and-dunk approach to moving the ball, bolstered by a strong running game. However, there were shots taken down the field when the opportunities presented themselves. So far, there has not been a concerted effort to try the big play. Making matters worse, the running game against Miami was not as strong as it was against the Jets, which ultimately, in my opinion led to the offensive ineptitude 2 weeks ago. I’m not sure that the coaching staff has the confidence in Cassel that it had in Brady years ago. During the preseason prior to Brady taking over for Drew Bledsoe, you could see that Brady had a command of the offense and could move the ball. Cassel, as widely publicized, did not show that this preseason, despite getting all of the starter’s snaps.

But those are a bunch of what ifs and we cannot dwell too much on it. But what we can do is look at how the team can be built for it. First of all, the team had a great game in terms of moving the ball. Those drives that were stalled were well-balanced, and more importantly, the route running was precise. If we take away some of the constant pressure on O’Sullivan in the pocket, it may have been one of the better passing games for him. But as the game went on, the blitzes and O’Sullivan’s inability to just throw the ball away cost the team the game.

It has been announced that he is ruled out for this Sunday’s game against the Patriots. The hamstring strain might only sideline him for one game, but it’s starting to get real frustrating to see Lawson’s development as a player take a detour due to injuries and lack of playing time. Tully Banta-Cain would probably end up taking Lawson’s place on Sunday.

T Jonas Jennings is also out for this Sunday’s game. CB Shawntae Spencer has yet to be place on injured reserve, but the team should do it pretty soon once they can find a proper player to sign to take that spot.

The protection for O’Sullivan has not been great, but the team is slowly learning. One of the biggest issues that comes to mind is the readiness of the players to run the routes. In a new complex system that requires receivers to run precise routes, if a route doesn’t work out, improvisation is a tough one for receivers to get to. The receivers are starting to come into their own, but with a strategic passing game like Martz’s, this may take a whole season to develop.

Lions QB Jon Kitna was sacked 63 and 51 times in his past two seasons under Martz. But at the current pace, J.T. O’Sullivan may end up getting squashed like then rookie QB David Carr.

This is for the "That’s How I See It" campaign, getting fans from all over the country to tell the nation in the commercial about why they love their team and football.

What: Samsung, The Official HDTV of the NFL, is looking for fans to come out and share their stories of "That’s How I See It" with a chance to have their story turned into a commercial that will air on NBC during the pregame show of Super Bowl XLIII on Feb. 1, 2009.

Fans are invited to stop by the NFL Super Ad mobile studio this weekend at Best Buy in San Francisco and at Candlestick Park to tell
their story of pregame rituals, family traditions surrounding the NFL or defining moments while watching football. Selected stories will be posted on
where fans can vote on their favorites Nov. 20, 2008 – Jan. 4, 2009.

The geekily quirky, unfortunately named,
a few days ago, it’s getting more and more difficult to know what’s significant based solely on the naming and numbering scheme. GIMP.org says, “GIMP 2.6 is an important release from a development point of view.” I’ll treat it that way.

which is the current image manipulation standard.

There is no doubt GIMP does lots… certainly most of the things Photoshop does. It just doesn’t do them as gracefully or easily. As soon as I fired up GIMP 2.6 I opened a photo I’d taken–a jpeg file. I tried to sharpen it. No problem, except, unlike Photoshop, GIMP only previews the sharpening in a small window. There’s no way to see what you’ll do to the whole image until you’ve done it.

The same goes for levels control–a feature on Photoshop I couldn’t live without. As I slid the level control points on GIMP there was no change to the photo until I stopped. There is no instantaneous feedback. It’s tough to find just-the-right-spot this way.

One prior shortcoming of GIMP is about to be overcome–or is overcome if you’re willing to enable an experimental mode. “Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework
L, meaning that the interal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL. ” That should please critics who passed on GIMP because of 8-bit color limitations.

I have never felt so guilty about writing a review. I really want to like this program–almost as a matter of principle. Don’t get me wrong. I really like GIMP. It’s a fine graphics program without considering its unbeatable price. However, there are finer. Even with its welcome enhancements GIMP isn’t the top-of-the-line graphics program it might someday be.

In a
on Microsoft’s Live Labs site, Microsoft said that the market has “caught up” to where it was going with Deepfish, and that there was no need to continue the program.

The proxy service Microsoft was using for Deepfish was shut down on Sept. 31.

“Mobile browsing is now advancing to the point where mobile devices rival the desktop–which is what we wanted to see,” Microsoft wrote. “User experience advances such as usable touch and intuitive zooming interfaces weren’t widely available at the time. Deepfish helped drive that innovation. And now that the marketplace has caught up to where we thought it needed to go and continues to advance.”

“It wasn’t our intent to create a full browser for the preview, but rather simply demonstrate that a novel and simple new user experience was the best way to achieve that,” the post said.

In March 2007, Sascha Segan
is also available.

earlier by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley.

If you commute to the office or school, you know that the trip can be boring–and a little entertainment goes a long way. Some decent reading material can take the edge off, and
is designed to provide plenty of options.

The service offers hundreds of free eBooks that you can download and read on your iPod or other mobile device, including classic literature and popular novels. And in the unlikely case that you don’t find something in the catalog you’d like to read, the service allows you to convert your own documents, your favorite RSS feeds, and even entire Web sites into eBook format.

There’s no shortage of eBook download sites on the Web, but eBook Hood combines a broad catalog of interesting books to download and read with a document converter that lets you take your own material with you when you leave the house. The ability to convert documents and load them up on your mobile device or your iPod is really compelling, and the ability to parse and convert Web pages and RSS feeds is particularly useful. The Web and RSS conversions aren’t perfect, and work best with feeds that are either text-only or at least majority text without a ton of formatting, but the fact that the features are there is impressive.

eBook Hood’s catalog of books is also impressive. The service boasts a broad selection of books from classics such as James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and George Orwell’s “1984″ to more modern works, such as Steven King’s “The Shining.” The site’s developers have been having trouble with the catalog database recently, so browsing and searching the entire collection has been off and on, but you can see a sample of the available books on the sidebar.

Click on one of the books’ names, and you’ll be taken to its download page, where you can select whether you’d like to download the ebook in iPod format or plain text. You can also select
and Bookeen Cybook formats if they’re available, and the service is beginning to offer PDF downloads. If you love a book and want a paper copy, a link to purchase the book at Amazon is usually available in the eBook notes.

Additionally, registered members of the service can vote on books, add the book to their favorites, and add their comments to the book’s discussion section. Members who have added the book to their favorites are shown at the bottom of the page, and you can click on any member’s name to view their profile, see the books they’ve uploaded to share with the community, view all of their favorite eBooks, or add them as a friend.

If the user reciprocates and adds you as a friend as well, you’ll be able to see any books they may have uploaded that have copyright restrictions or that might be part of their personal collection. If you visit the community section of the page, you can see all of the eBooks most recently uploaded to the site, the service’s top readers and top users, and the service’s most popular eBooks.

eBook Hood’s community is growing, and it’s obvious that the site is suffering some growing pains. The service is well worth the attention and a little patience while the developers steady themselves, however. Its broad collection of books and the robust user community would be enough to make anyone want to sign up, but the ability to build out your own library of notes and books from your own files, your favorite Web pages, and other documents is a huge benefit.