The retailers can build CurrentC but they can't force customers to use it. The payment process sounds terrible; it'll be easier to just pull out your credit card and pay with that.
If I pay with my Visa card, I get cash back, and an extended warranty on my purchases. So far I haven't heard that CurrentC has any of these benefits.
The typical routine for a new PC is to install the OS, and then find and install drivers for the hardware you have.
With a phone, the hardware is often proprietary and different from device to device. In the PC world, you get your video card driver from the guys who sold the video card, but with the phone, all the hardware comes from the device manufacturer, so they'd need to be the ones supplying updated drivers.
And the incentive just isn't there for Samsung or HTC to spend money working on software that enables an older device to run a newer OS. Samsung makes money when you buy the hardware, and that's it, unlike in Apple's world, where they also make money when you buy software, so it's in their interest to keep your phone current.
One solution would be for Google to declare a reference platform and if your phone is based on the reference platform, then you can get Google's OS and install it directly. Problem there is the carriers don't want that.
So if Google is going to succeed here, they're going to need to sell a cheap phone ($199 range - you've got to compete with carrier subsidized phones) that's good enough quality that people actually want it, sell it direct, and support it themselves. Problem is, I'm not sure there's any profit in doing that.
Canada Post is still profitable, but it's probably just a matter of time.
One of the things that happens here occasionally is postal strikes. We just went through one. When there's a threat of a postal strike, billers (like utility companies and whatnot) step up efforts to get people to switch to electronic billing. And once someone has switched to electronic billing, they're probably not switching back once the strike is done.
I don't think the postal employees realize the damage they're doing to their own business by going on strike.
Jambi wouldn't be quite the seamless cross platform experience you get with AIR, though, and it looks like you would need to develop separate installers for each supported platform. With AIR, you can post the *.air file somewhere and Mac, Windows and Linux users can grab it and use it.
It depends on what you're looking for - for some applications, native widgets would be an advantage; for others, consistency between platforms would be an advantage.
Q: How is PS3's new distribution model going to affect retail?
A: PS2's old distribution model was great at retail, therefore PS3's new model will also be great at retail.
Seems like a valid question to me, but then again, I'm really looking forward to not having to stand outside EB at midnight to get the hot new game of the month. (But I'm also not looking forward to waiting a week for it to download because they don't have adequate bandwidth.. let's hope Valve's streamed release of Half-Life 2 taught the industry some lessons).
I'd like to be able to subscribe to TV shows through any service, in Canada. Why is it so difficult to bring content available digitally in the US to other countries?
What he's talking about is a feature of Vista, called SuperFetch.
The idea is that the OS predicts what pages of what files you're going to need based on it's analysis of your usage of your computer, and caches those on any faster-than-disk-but-not-RAM storage you may have, like a flash drive.
So if a game occasionaly needed to load something up and the prediction algorithm figured this out, then it'd be cached on the flash drive where it can be read faster than going to disk to get it.
It's a great idea, but it doesn't have anything to do with Intel.
Unfortunately your gmail address is also the name used in the URL for your page. At least MSN Spaces set it up so your email address wasn't part of the site URL.
This creates a huge opportunity for companies to take over supporting legacy operating systems.
License the Windows XP code today, wait a few years for Microsoft to stop supporting it, and then sell support contracts to companies that have chosen not to upgrade and still need security patches and bug fixes.
It's an interesting spin he's got, but there's a grain of truth to it.
Apple may have invented USB (I don't know the history of it), but today most USB devices are connected to Windows based computers. If Windows hadn't adopted USB, it wouldn't have become the standard that it is. Apple has had it's share of proprietary failures too - I don't see a lot of NuBus systems today for example.
It's an ecosystem, and both companies are part of it.
The quality difference between DVD and HD on a large HD set is obvious. I stopped buying DVDs once I got my new TV; I plan to start again once I can buy them in HD.
The killer for me is HD. I have an HDTV, and the XBox 360 games look beautiful on it.
If you take away the HD advantage (ie, hook the XBox 360 up to a standard TV) then yeah, there's nothing advanced about the current generation of games. But on a good TV, nothing compares.
I've seen that 70,000 new blogs per day figure, but you really need a filter on top of that to determine the real number of new blogs. Is blogging a phenomenon that millions of users are getting into? Or does it just look that way from the states?
I wrote and ran some software for a while that tracked blog posts by fetching data from ping.blo.gs and analyzing it looking for trends. The biggest trend I found was that most of the pings were spam.
Spam accounted for ~70% of the posts that came through. You can see it on http://www.weblogs.com/. There are probably (by now) millions of blogs on the major blogging services that exist solely as vehicles for spam. It sucks. A fraction of the data that I got was actually real blog posts written by real humans, and only a small fraction of that was useful content.
Doesn't monopoly mean you have no choice but to buy their products?
If Microsoft moves out and people switch to alternative products, doesn't that just prove they weren't a monopoly?
If everyone buys my donuts and the competition goes out of business, am I now forced to sell abusive customers donuts because I'm the only donut company left?
Looks like a great way for folks who don't know much about the underlying tech to experiment with web apps. Best part of it is you can take any existing application, clone it, and you instantly have the start of a new app that you can customize.
It's cool to hear Andreessen is behind it; this gives it a little more legitimacy than it would otherwise have (ie, less likely to disappear thanks to not having a business model).
The innovation is in new stuff, not in ripoffs of existing sites.. will be interesting to watch whether Ning will really make this possible.
It was Intel and Microsoft together that were insisting on this.
Same business interests sure but Microsoft probably has a little more clout here than Intel does. For me, this would be the deciding factor between HD DVD and Blu-Ray.
Slashdot Mirror
The retailers can build CurrentC but they can't force customers to use it. The payment process sounds terrible; it'll be easier to just pull out your credit card and pay with that.
If I pay with my Visa card, I get cash back, and an extended warranty on my purchases. So far I haven't heard that CurrentC has any of these benefits.
Why would I use it?
The typical routine for a new PC is to install the OS, and then find and install drivers for the hardware you have.
With a phone, the hardware is often proprietary and different from device to device. In the PC world, you get your video card driver from the guys who sold the video card, but with the phone, all the hardware comes from the device manufacturer, so they'd need to be the ones supplying updated drivers.
And the incentive just isn't there for Samsung or HTC to spend money working on software that enables an older device to run a newer OS. Samsung makes money when you buy the hardware, and that's it, unlike in Apple's world, where they also make money when you buy software, so it's in their interest to keep your phone current.
One solution would be for Google to declare a reference platform and if your phone is based on the reference platform, then you can get Google's OS and install it directly. Problem there is the carriers don't want that.
So if Google is going to succeed here, they're going to need to sell a cheap phone ($199 range - you've got to compete with carrier subsidized phones) that's good enough quality that people actually want it, sell it direct, and support it themselves. Problem is, I'm not sure there's any profit in doing that.
Did you watch the video? It makes unreadable text readable. That falls into the category of making missing data suddenly appear.
Canada Post is still profitable, but it's probably just a matter of time.
One of the things that happens here occasionally is postal strikes. We just went through one. When there's a threat of a postal strike, billers (like utility companies and whatnot) step up efforts to get people to switch to electronic billing. And once someone has switched to electronic billing, they're probably not switching back once the strike is done.
I don't think the postal employees realize the damage they're doing to their own business by going on strike.
This should be great for tracking UFOs!
And eating plates of food off the floor. That's not a good lesson to be teaching kids either. Nobody ever mentions that.
If a Flash app on the iPhone sucks, either Apple won't approve it, or users won't buy it.
If it doesn't suck, then what does it matter how it was developed?
Jambi wouldn't be quite the seamless cross platform experience you get with AIR, though, and it looks like you would need to develop separate installers for each supported platform. With AIR, you can post the *.air file somewhere and Mac, Windows and Linux users can grab it and use it.
It depends on what you're looking for - for some applications, native widgets would be an advantage; for others, consistency between platforms would be an advantage.
Q: How is PS3's new distribution model going to affect retail?
A: PS2's old distribution model was great at retail, therefore PS3's new model will also be great at retail.
Seems like a valid question to me, but then again, I'm really looking forward to not having to stand outside EB at midnight to get the hot new game of the month. (But I'm also not looking forward to waiting a week for it to download because they don't have adequate bandwidth.. let's hope Valve's streamed release of Half-Life 2 taught the industry some lessons).
If you have a good HDTV, it's necessary.. if you don't, it's not.
I'd like to be able to subscribe to TV shows through any service, in Canada. Why is it so difficult to bring content available digitally in the US to other countries?
What he's talking about is a feature of Vista, called SuperFetch.
The idea is that the OS predicts what pages of what files you're going to need based on it's analysis of your usage of your computer, and caches those on any faster-than-disk-but-not-RAM storage you may have, like a flash drive.
So if a game occasionaly needed to load something up and the prediction algorithm figured this out, then it'd be cached on the flash drive where it can be read faster than going to disk to get it.
It's a great idea, but it doesn't have anything to do with Intel.
Unfortunately your gmail address is also the name used in the URL for your page. At least MSN Spaces set it up so your email address wasn't part of the site URL.
This creates a huge opportunity for companies to take over supporting legacy operating systems.
License the Windows XP code today, wait a few years for Microsoft to stop supporting it, and then sell support contracts to companies that have chosen not to upgrade and still need security patches and bug fixes.
It's an interesting spin he's got, but there's a grain of truth to it.
Apple may have invented USB (I don't know the history of it), but today most USB devices are connected to Windows based computers. If Windows hadn't adopted USB, it wouldn't have become the standard that it is. Apple has had it's share of proprietary failures too - I don't see a lot of NuBus systems today for example.
It's an ecosystem, and both companies are part of it.
Do you have an HDTV?
The quality difference between DVD and HD on a large HD set is obvious. I stopped buying DVDs once I got my new TV; I plan to start again once I can buy them in HD.
They're also having trouble executing, something that they never had until recently.
Google Reader was horribly slow when it was released, and Google Analytics is still shut down to new traffic and days behind on stats.
The killer for me is HD. I have an HDTV, and the XBox 360 games look beautiful on it.
If you take away the HD advantage (ie, hook the XBox 360 up to a standard TV) then yeah, there's nothing advanced about the current generation of games. But on a good TV, nothing compares.
400k XBox 360's isn't that far from Sony's 500k PS2's when it launched, and the XBox 360 is going to be restocked faster than the PS2 was.
Yeah.. they won't get their homework done but at least they'll learn shell scripting.
I've seen that 70,000 new blogs per day figure, but you really need a filter on top of that to determine the real number of new blogs. Is blogging a phenomenon that millions of users are getting into? Or does it just look that way from the states?
:)
I wrote and ran some software for a while that tracked blog posts by fetching data from ping.blo.gs and analyzing it looking for trends. The biggest trend I found was that most of the pings were spam.
Spam accounted for ~70% of the posts that came through. You can see it on http://www.weblogs.com/. There are probably (by now) millions of blogs on the major blogging services that exist solely as vehicles for spam. It sucks. A fraction of the data that I got was actually real blog posts written by real humans, and only a small fraction of that was useful content.
All that said, I run WordPress and I like it.
Doesn't monopoly mean you have no choice but to buy their products?
If Microsoft moves out and people switch to alternative products, doesn't that just prove they weren't a monopoly?
If everyone buys my donuts and the competition goes out of business, am I now forced to sell abusive customers donuts because I'm the only donut company left?
The thing I'm looking forward to with the 360 is HDTV 1080i support in all games. 640x480 games look like crap on a 57" TV.
Looks like a great way for folks who don't know much about the underlying tech to experiment with web apps. Best part of it is you can take any existing application, clone it, and you instantly have the start of a new app that you can customize.
It's cool to hear Andreessen is behind it; this gives it a little more legitimacy than it would otherwise have (ie, less likely to disappear thanks to not having a business model).
The innovation is in new stuff, not in ripoffs of existing sites.. will be interesting to watch whether Ning will really make this possible.
Same business interests sure but Microsoft probably has a little more clout here than Intel does. For me, this would be the deciding factor between HD DVD and Blu-Ray.
Wrote a bit more about this here.