Here’s the company’s official statement: “The individual in question violated the company’s standards of conduct by repeatedly copying and distributing a variety of materials without permission.”

Not that it needs much unpacking, but just to be clear: NBC is saying, without actually saying so, that its position is that it canned the leaker for behavior beyond posting that single clip.

And not to be too square and get-off-my-lawn about it, but there are lots and lots of companies–including, for instance, Google, which owns YouTube–that fire people for distributing things on the Internet that aren’t supposed to be distributed on the Internet.

As PaidContent’s Andrew Wallenstein argues, the fact that the clip is funny and interesting and had already been on TV 17 years ago–and on NBC’s own Web site today–doesn’t mean the NBC guy had the go-ahead to do it. (It also points out the complexity that YouTube has in policing authorized and unauthorized clips, but that’s a different story.)

But, as noted: The clip is funny and interesting! And reminds us of what Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric used to look like. Let’s watch it again!

The good news is that Gartner has revised its outlook upward. Companies and governments will spend $3.6 trillion on IT this year, which is more than the prior $3.4 trillion forecast, amounting to growth of 5.1 percent. Sounds great, right?

Yes, but it’s complicated, especially from the U.S. point of view. The weak dollar makes the figures look a little better than they are. In 2010, Gartner says, IT spending grew 2.2 percent, but more than half of that–1.6 percent–can be attributed to the devaluation of the dollar against other currencies. Companies and governments spending other currencies can get more dollars for their money, and so this tends to inflate the appearance of growth, Gartner’s Richard Gordon told me.

A weak dollar is generally good news for U.S. companies that do a lot of global business. U.S. products and services look more attractive to non-U.S. buyers. But in cases like this, U.S. companies end up paying more for items that get imported and for raw materials.

That’s not to say there isn’t actual growth. Gartner says spending is picking up fastest on telecom equipment, with computing hardware and enterprise software following close behind.

Spending on discretionary items like IT services and consulting is coming back the slowest. When the economic crisis hit in late 2008 and early 2009 these were the first items on the chopping block, and spending on them is only now beginning to make a comeback.

Mr. Ellison plans to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. (JAVA) and transform Oracle into a maker of software, computers, and computer components–a company more like the U.S. conglomerates of the 1960s than the fragmented technology industry of recent years.

“It is back to the future,” he told financial analysts in October.

Mr. Ellison is among the executives reviving “vertical integration,” a 100-year-old strategy in which a company controls materials, manufacturing and distribution.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The estimated bill of materials for the G1: $144. The estimated bill of material for Apple’s 8GB iPhone 3G: $160.

Now, iSuppli’s estimated bill of materials for the G1 is based on component and materials costs alone. It doesn’t account for other expenses like research and development, software, shipping and distribution. It does, however, account for “wow factor,” of which the G1 apparently has a paucity. Though Tina Teng, iSuppli senior analyst of wireless communications, described the G1′s interface as better than average, she said it “still has a gap to close with Apple’s interface” and “lacks the wow factor of some of its slicker competitors.”