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Gadget Geek News

By Brian Filed in Links, Media, Tech Tagged with , , , , November 17th, 2011 @ 11:30 am

From the various tech/geek blogs:

Via Singularity Hub comes word that Square, the smartphone credit card swiper, is going to be sold at Wal-Mart. The device has been available through other electronics retailers for a while, but, as with everything else in retail, once WallyWorld gets its hands on something, it goes to a whole new level. Square makes it easy for almost anyone to accept credit card payments. You don’t even need to be a business to use their service, and they charge less than other credit card processors. Making the readers available through the world’s largest retailer is a brilliant move to grab a big share of that market.

The Register says that the end of the road is officially in sight for music CDs. According to their report, the record labels plan to stop issuing albums in CD format by the end of 2012, moving to all-digital-download distribution. Unquestionably this has been an inevitability for years, but I was surprised to learn from this story that they still sell so many more CDs than downloads even at this point. Of course, part of that may be because so many people don’t BUY digital music.

Also totally over: 3D. Not just 3DTV, which never even got off the ground in the first place, but the bloom is off the rose for 3D movies too. In the end, 3D has failed AGAIN for the same reasons it has failed every other time: it’s expensive, it doesn’t work all that well, it gives people a headache, and the content sucks donkey balls. To me, the bigger surprise was that anyone really thought this time would be any different.

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Steverino Giveth And Steverino Taketh Away

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , , , December 15th, 2008 @ 1:04 pm

No sooner was the rumor last week about a $99 4Gb iPhone at Wal-Mart posted around the web (including here), than it was swatted down by several other tech news sites. Ars Technica says that Bloomberg News got the straight poop: WallyWorld will be selling the same 8Gb iPhone as everybody else, but at their own price point a couple of bucks cheaper than Apple’s MSRP.

But don’t stop believin’ in Steven, because this morning Engadget found this story from a generally-reliable Mac rumor mill that shows a prototype of a smaller iPhone that could be one of the new product announcements from Steve Jobs’ keynote at the January MacWorld Expo. The smaller device is being touted as being branded the “iPhone Nano”, and the only difference between it and the existing 3G iPhone is size. THIS could actually turn out to be the $99 Wal-Mart iPhone…stay tuned for more rumor control…

(Oh, and speaking of oft-rumored-but-still-unseen products, Engadget also reports that the FCC has issued its technical approval for the Garmin Nuviphone I lust after, but that’s a whole different story.)

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Linkapalooza – Tech

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , , , , , , , December 4th, 2008 @ 3:41 pm

How Do You Like THEM Apples? — MacRumors.com is spreading the story that Wal-Mart is about to start selling Apple iPhones for $99. They will carry a 4GB version of the second-generation 3G iPhone, and the phone will still come with the mandatory 2-year contract with AT&T Wireless. When the iPhone first came out in 2007, there was a 4GB version, but it was discontinued with the feature bump in the 3G models. The model Wal-Mart will have is NOT the original 4GB version, but rather the current version with less storage. Speaking as someone who owns and loves a 4GB iPod Touch, I would be plenty happy with 4 gigs on an iPhone, and the $99 price tag is going to make this a serious consideration for me, even if I do have to sign up with AT&T Wireless. MacRumors says that they are expected to show up on the shelves immediately AFTER Christmas — so if you get some crappy Wal-Mart gift for Christmas, you can return it to the store in exchange for a shiny new iPhone.

Measure For Measure — Back in October, I mentioned to any readers who live in Eastern Massachusetts that Comcast was pushing the DOCSIS 3.0 firmware to our cable modems to increase bandwidth. There was no big public announcement from Comcast when this happened, so knowledge of it came through blogs and news reports and such. It appears that they’ve finished with the rollout, though, because late last week I got an e-mail from Comcast trumpeting the “free” increase. They’re also bringing out several tiers of service levels for people who want even more throughput. Though the DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade has been in the works for a while anyway, much of the marketing around their new services comes from the brouhaha about their other announcement earlier in the fall to impose usage caps. The basic tier has a 250GB/mo. cap, which is a very generous amount to most of their customers and only seriously impacts people engaged in very heavy BitTorrent or other P2P uses. The new tiers offer the options of paying for bigger caps. There was also some criticism that most customers have absolutely no clue how much bandwidth they use and thus would not know if they were pushing that 250GB barrier or not; Comcast did not immediately have a response, but now they are about to roll out a “bandwidth meter” that will let customers keep track of their usage. I predict that non-tech-savvy users will discover that they are using hardly anywhere near 250GB and there will be some calls for Comcast to offer even cheaper tiers with reduced bandwidth and throughput caps…or, it will be the side door through which the much-dreaded per-use billing will arrive.

Blu-Ray For Hollywood! — Despite the intense marketing and all those side-by-side comparison demos you see at electronics stores showing just how much better the video quality of a Blu-Ray disc is than a conventional DVD, AND the surrender of the HD-DVD format a few months ago, it seems like retailers are still having to twist arms to get people to buy standalone Blu-Ray players. One thing that might help player sales is the coming bump in storage capacity without sacrificing compatibility with existing players. Pioneer has publicly demoed a 16-layer, 400GB Blu-Ray disc that they expect to start shipping in 2010. The current 2-layer media “only” holds 50GB, so this is an 8x increase in storage (and a 100x increase over the original single-layer 4GB DVD). Imagine having an entire season of your favorite TV series or an entire movie series on a single disc instead of a box set. Then, in 2013, we have 1-terabyte Blu-Ray discs to look forward to. The only problem I can foresee is that by 2013 people may abandon disc players entirely for streaming downloads and set-top boxes selling on-demand services.

That’s Life — A team of Korean researchers have published their results on developing a new material for use in LiON batteries that could increase the length of time a charge lasts by 1000%. A typical Lithium-Ion battery in a laptop, for example, is good for a max of about four hours under ideal conditions. With this new technology, you might not have to recharge that battery for almost six months of continual use. The work they are doing involves using a variation of graphite using porous silicon. The pores increase the surface area in the graphite, which massively increases the number of lithium ions that can cling to the material, and also help the graphite hold up structurally for a longer time under repeated use. This technology might also become a critical innovation for electric cars, significantly extending the range of an electric vehicle on a single charge, which in turn would make it much less expensive to build networks of recharging stations.

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Bail! Bail! Bail!

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , , , , November 26th, 2008 @ 2:07 pm

I think you know by now that I am strenuously opposed to all of the bailouts that the federal government has been throwing at the various flailing tentacles of the dying capitalist monster. While I can see some rationalization for injecting cash into the financial sector to revive liquidity, I see absolutely no good reason for the government to literaly flush money down the toilet by giving it to the “Big Three” car makers. The “too big to fail” argument only underscores how over-dependent our country is on automobiles and auto manufacturing and just how badly we need to let that industry die so that other forms of transportation can find their way to the market.

In his weekly strip for Salon, cartoonist Keith Knight points his sharp black marker at a much better idea than a government bailout: Let the oil companies, with their massive windfall profits, bail out the car manufacturers. After all, that’s a symbiotic relationship in the first place. Then, take all that money that would have gone into Detroit’s ripped pockets and invest in rail services, public transportation systems that decrease suburban dependence on automobiles, and anything else that helps to bring down the curtain once and for all on the Automotive Era.

“Jonco” from “Bits & Pieces” offers this alternative to having the government pay for all the bailouts:

1 . At Wal-Mart, Americans spend $36,000,000 every hour of every day.

2 . This works out to $20,928 profit. Every minute!

3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick’s Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.

4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target + Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.

5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people and is the largest private employer. And most can’t speak English

6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.

7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger & Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only 15 years.

8. During this same period, 31 supermarket chains sought bankruptcy (including Winn-Dixie).

9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.

10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are SuperCenters; This is 1,000 more than it had 5 years ago.

11. This year, 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at a Wal-Mart store.
(Earth’s population is approximately 6.5 billion.)

12. 90% of all Americans live within 15 miles of a Wal-Mart.

13. Let Wal Mart bail out Wall Street

Just to put the various bailouts into historical perspective, this blog has run the numbers and says that the total cost of all the bailouts, loans, and other federal interventions to date (including the proposed bailout for Citibank) comes to $4.6 trillion dollars. That is more money than we spent on the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Apollo Program, the Marshall Plan, the New Deal, the Louisiana Purchase, the Iraq Invasion, the Savings-and-Loan Bailout, AND the budget for NASA for the last 50 years COMBINED. Even the entire cost of the Second World War (in adjusted dollars) was “only” $3.6 trillion.

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Return Of The Zombie!

By Brian Filed in Media Tagged with , , , , , , , May 9th, 2008 @ 2:49 pm

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the name given to all those unpopular and generally ineffective technologies used to try to prevent people from doing whatever they want with their digital content (movies, games, music, etc.). Security guru Bruce Schneier wrote this piece all the way back in 2001 entitled “The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention”, which pointed out that all DRM schemes can and will be broken, and the only thing imposing DRM on customers does is to treat them like criminals. Nevertheless, DRM technologies continued to be a way of life with digital content until last year, when Apple went out on a limb and offered DRM-free music downloads from a major record label (EMI). Shortly thereafter, Wal-Mart demanded DRM-free music from their suppliers, and before you could say “Metallica Sucks” DRM was virtually gone from every record label.

But while the labels acquiesced on DRM, the RIAA has not stopped their witch hunt for “pirates”, and this Ars Technica post quotes the technical chief at the RIAA as saying that DRM will rear its ugly head yet again, especially as people stop buying single track downloads and/or CDs and move to subscription services. Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow didn’t mince words about this:

The RIAA believes in “intellectual property,” which is a fancy way of saying: they believe that they get to own property, and you have to rent it. The bits on your hard-drive belong to them, and that means you have to install DRM that lets them control your PC so that you don’t do bad things with their bits. In the information age, “property” is the exclusive preserve of giant companies that can afford to register copyrights and sue to defend them, while the rest of us get to sharecrop all our embodiments of their property, from furniture to t-shirts to music to games to cars to PCs.

Meanwhile, on the software-and-games front, BioWare, the producers of the game Mass Effect said that the PC version of the game will use a DRM technology called SecuROM (which is well-known and despised by gamers everywhere for causing their games not to run) AND an activation system that will require the computer to validate itself online every ten days. But what really has people shooting steam out of their ears is that the guy who said this also claims that the very highly-anticipated game Spore will feature the same activation/validation scheme.. Les, who blogs as “Stupid Evil Bastard”, is so pissed off that he says he might not even buy Spore as a result, and my friend Solonor isn’t pleased that if he goes on a long business trip and shuts off his PC, his game won’t work anymore.

My online friend Art Wells said it best over at The Site Which Must Not Be Named:

You don’t buy software. You rent the right not to be sued or prosecuted for using it.

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RFID Hype Wearing Off

By Brian Filed in Links, Tech Tagged with , October 8th, 2007 @ 11:31 am

If you with me back in the murky distant past of 2003, you’ll remember that at the time Wal-Mart was all hot and bothered about implementing RFID tags throughout their operation. They even went so far as to set up the Wal-Mart in Brockton, MA (just south of Boston) to be a test site where every item in the store was going to be tagged, inventoried, and checked out using RFID, only to bail at the very last minute.

In the end, Wal-Mart stepped away from retail RFID and instead went ahead with an initiative to make use of RFID in their warehouse and distribution centers, which have traditionally been the real key to their success. This extensive article in BaselineMag.com looks at the successes and failures of Wal-Mart’s experiment and their implications for the adoption of RFID throughout the retail sector. In short, don’t hold your breath. The initial hype predicted a widespread use of RFID by 2008, but more realistic projections now put the timetable at a good 10-15 years out. There’s also not much talk about in-store RFID at all

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Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , , July 23rd, 2007 @ 12:00 pm

woolworth.jpg

This short American Heritage web article (via) talks about the rise and fall of one of the first major national retailers in the United States: F. W. Woolworth’s.

The American Heritage article doesn’t go into a lot of detail except to point out that the culprit behind Woolworth’s demise was suburbanization. The actual discount retail concept itself hasn’t even remotely gone away, it has just reshaped itself into Wal-Mart and has even found a niche in the flourishing “dollar store” retailers. Some local “five and dime” stores remain even to this day, particularly in towns that go out of their way to retain “local character”.

Among my own earliest memories is being taken to Woolworth’s by my grandmother and riding the escalator. Sometimes we would even eat at the lunch counter. Marcel Proust would be pleased to know that my strongest memory of the place is the smell, which includes the unmistakable aroma of stale buttered popcorn, the mingled perfume of hundreds of old ladies, and a je ne sais quoi that I can only call “department store”. I’ve never been in a Wal-Mart that smelled like a Woolworth’s, although I have found the same aroma in other department stores.

Even though Wal-Mart seems invincible, I think the take-away from this article is that all things must pass, and the greatest giants are often humbled even as they seem most powerful. Nice to know that insignificance is an equal-opportunity effect.

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