I have to confess, I like twitter. I never thought I would. I made an account a while back and well... I didn't get it. Never used it. Yeah, I was one of those. Those people with the handfull of tweets about not getting it. I followed some tech community people, but didn't tweet much. I got a smartphone a few months ago, and decided to give it another try. I made another account with my online moniker, so as to confuse the coworkers I would be making fun of. I learned it's much more enjoyable to be able to tweet during the day while not at a computer. Almost everyone in the tech community is active on twitter. This is great for a nerd like myself to build a twitter feed of geekery. But no sooner did I start using twitter again, when the mainstream came on full force.
Everyone is suddenly on it. That's fine I guess. I don't care what Brittney Spears' publicist has to say, I just don't follow her. I don't care that celebrities are given special treatment on the "suggested user list", allowing them to surpass my geek icons. What really bugs me, is how much the mainstream media talks about twitter. When something reaches a certain level of popularity, it runs a serious risk of being uncool in the eyes of the fickle internet generation. If tech people start leaving, I'll go too. Who wants to hang around a wasteland populated by the likes of Brittney Spears? Not me, man... not me.
I'm almost remiss to use the term "mainstream media". It sounds so cliché, but it's the best way to describe it. Every time there's a news story about it, it's just sort of introduced. Some stogery old guy that can't check his email starts spouting the terminology, trying to sound as cool as possible. And would you please excuse him so he can go smoke a blunt with his homies? Cool. We know what twitter is. Most of us have been aware of its existence for some time now. Those that don't, will probably not use it on the advice of the old media. I'm just getting sick of hearing about it.
It's all making me feel like the party's already over. Is twitter going to be the new Myspace? Seems like when the media latches on to something like that, it's as good as doomed. I mean, if you ask me, Facebook is already languishing in the seventh circle of super-poke hell. The golden age of p2p came to an end when the old media got around to sensationalizing piracy. Myspace stopped being acceptable long, long ago (right around the time my mother opened an account... sorry mom). And here's twitter... doing something interesting... maybe not long for this Earth.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Games in the cloud.
Edit: Apparently, they're using 720p video. Which really isn't high enough. That's about 4Mb/s... see below
If you're a nerd, you may have heard the big gaming news recently. A company called OnLive claims to have a completely new take on gaming. Basically, instead of installing a game on your PC, and running it on your hardware, you just stream video of it. So your control inputs are transmitted to them, and the video is piped back to you. Presumably, they have a way of compensating for the lag in transmitting your control actions to their servers, and then sending the video back. I have to say, this is interesting.
As I referenced previously, I don't like the idea of being entirely dependent on the cloud for my PC to work. But any geek that's spent hundreds of dollars on a video card, only to see a game come out a month later that completely owns the brand new card, is a potential customer here. Because all the rendering and such is being done off site, your PC only needs to be powerful enough to display hi-res video (you can also use a TV with some little streaming box they have). Of course, you'll also need a crazy fast internet connection. These days, even on an online game, you're only transmitting a small amount of data; all the textures and physics are being produced on your machine or console.
That's the problem though. Most people's connection won't be able to cut it. A serious gamer will want HD level resolutions. That's what you get used to when you buy these expensive graphics cards and run games locally. Most gamers these days are running wide screen resolutions with 1050 or 1200 lines (sort of like how HDTV is 1080 lines). Transmitting that amount of video data takes up about 9-10Mb/second. That's a lot. I just don't think you'll be able to get gamers to accept a lower quality image; especially if you are promoting all these cutting edge games. Take away the eye candy, and honestly, a lot of them aren't very compelling.
With various internet providers clamping down on "excessive" usage, this whole idea may be dead before it gets off the ground. As an example, Comcast has a 250GB/month usage cap. A sustained 10Mb/second stream of video (i.e. 1.25MB/s) means that you'd use about 4.4GB per hour of play. After about 50 hours of game play, your cap has been reached for a whole month. That's not even including ANY other usage. Comcast has a fairly generous (but still lame cap). Some ISPs have lower caps like 100 or even 50GB. At that rate you'd run through you cap (if you don't do anything else on the connection) in 22 and 11.3 hours respectively. A serious gamer could easily run through even the Comcast cap. When you add in other normal uses of a connection, the picture becomes grim.
I signed up for the beta anyway. I'm just interested... even though I'm skeptical.
Update: They say that they're using 720p, so at 4Mb/s that's less data. And also much less impressive looking. You're looking at about 125 hours of just game play on the Comcast cap. More reasonable, but still a lot of data when you figure in other uses. I don't know that a lot of gamers will be willing to go down to 720 lines from 1050 or 1200.
If you're a nerd, you may have heard the big gaming news recently. A company called OnLive claims to have a completely new take on gaming. Basically, instead of installing a game on your PC, and running it on your hardware, you just stream video of it. So your control inputs are transmitted to them, and the video is piped back to you. Presumably, they have a way of compensating for the lag in transmitting your control actions to their servers, and then sending the video back. I have to say, this is interesting.
As I referenced previously, I don't like the idea of being entirely dependent on the cloud for my PC to work. But any geek that's spent hundreds of dollars on a video card, only to see a game come out a month later that completely owns the brand new card, is a potential customer here. Because all the rendering and such is being done off site, your PC only needs to be powerful enough to display hi-res video (you can also use a TV with some little streaming box they have). Of course, you'll also need a crazy fast internet connection. These days, even on an online game, you're only transmitting a small amount of data; all the textures and physics are being produced on your machine or console.
That's the problem though. Most people's connection won't be able to cut it. A serious gamer will want HD level resolutions. That's what you get used to when you buy these expensive graphics cards and run games locally. Most gamers these days are running wide screen resolutions with 1050 or 1200 lines (sort of like how HDTV is 1080 lines). Transmitting that amount of video data takes up about 9-10Mb/second. That's a lot. I just don't think you'll be able to get gamers to accept a lower quality image; especially if you are promoting all these cutting edge games. Take away the eye candy, and honestly, a lot of them aren't very compelling.
With various internet providers clamping down on "excessive" usage, this whole idea may be dead before it gets off the ground. As an example, Comcast has a 250GB/month usage cap. A sustained 10Mb/second stream of video (i.e. 1.25MB/s) means that you'd use about 4.4GB per hour of play. After about 50 hours of game play, your cap has been reached for a whole month. That's not even including ANY other usage. Comcast has a fairly generous (but still lame cap). Some ISPs have lower caps like 100 or even 50GB. At that rate you'd run through you cap (if you don't do anything else on the connection) in 22 and 11.3 hours respectively. A serious gamer could easily run through even the Comcast cap. When you add in other normal uses of a connection, the picture becomes grim.
I signed up for the beta anyway. I'm just interested... even though I'm skeptical.
Update: They say that they're using 720p, so at 4Mb/s that's less data. And also much less impressive looking. You're looking at about 125 hours of just game play on the Comcast cap. More reasonable, but still a lot of data when you figure in other uses. I don't know that a lot of gamers will be willing to go down to 720 lines from 1050 or 1200.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
If you don't give AT&T your money, they will cut you.
In the euphoric afterglow of the iPhone 3.0 OS preview, I'm reminded of how irritating cell providers are. There was a very telling exchange in the Q&A section of the presentation today. When asked about "tethering", the Apple reps gave a hand-wavy answer about having built tethering into the new OS, but they would have to work out the details with the service providers. Tethering is the ability to connect a device to a PC and use it as a cellular modem; basically like having a 3G data card in a PC. A lot of phones support this, but AT&T has stifled it on the iPhone.
There are a lot of iPhones, and that's a lot of people that might pay extra for a tethering plan. A tethering application showed up briefly on the app store, only to be taken down at the request of AT&T. See, they'd much rather charge an extra $60/month for the tethering service. Apple has pulled their fair share of douchebag moves, but this one is all AT&T.
Why should it matter to AT&T where the data is coming from? If you pay for unlimited cell data on your phone, it should be none of their business how you use it. Oh, and the tethering plan will have a 5GB/month cap on it. It seems like an outrageous price to me, but when you think about it, there are worse offenses.
Do you know how much a single text message costs on AT&T? If you don't have a plan (or you go over) they cost you $0.20 each. That's sent and received. That's plain ridiculous to charge so much for a few bytes of data. That's all it is. There's nothing special involved. All the data that goes out over the wireless antenna is the same to a carrier. They'll basically let you download and upload all the data you want for $30/month, unless that data happens to be in the form of a text message. But there's money to be had.
Lets put this another way. If you want 1 megabyte (MB/1 million bytes) of data for your phone, you pay $5/month. Frankly, a little steep. But if all you do is check sports scores or the weather, that's fine. A text message is a maximum of 160 bytes of data. At $0.20 per message, that runs a little over $1300 for 1MB of data. Does that make even a LITTLE sense? Nope. Even if you get a plan for 1500 messages ($15/month), you still lose out big time. All 1500 would use only about 240kB of data, that's less than a quarter of a megabyte. To recap, 1MB of data costs $5/month. However, if that data is a text message (and it's really all the same to the carrier network), you pay way, way more.
On my iPhone last month, I used about 200MB of unlimited cell data (I use wifi at home). If AT&T charged the same rate for cell data as they charged for text message data, I'd owe them $262,144. I know... people have complained about this before. But it doesn't get any less annoying with time.
There are a lot of iPhones, and that's a lot of people that might pay extra for a tethering plan. A tethering application showed up briefly on the app store, only to be taken down at the request of AT&T. See, they'd much rather charge an extra $60/month for the tethering service. Apple has pulled their fair share of douchebag moves, but this one is all AT&T.
Why should it matter to AT&T where the data is coming from? If you pay for unlimited cell data on your phone, it should be none of their business how you use it. Oh, and the tethering plan will have a 5GB/month cap on it. It seems like an outrageous price to me, but when you think about it, there are worse offenses.
Do you know how much a single text message costs on AT&T? If you don't have a plan (or you go over) they cost you $0.20 each. That's sent and received. That's plain ridiculous to charge so much for a few bytes of data. That's all it is. There's nothing special involved. All the data that goes out over the wireless antenna is the same to a carrier. They'll basically let you download and upload all the data you want for $30/month, unless that data happens to be in the form of a text message. But there's money to be had.
Lets put this another way. If you want 1 megabyte (MB/1 million bytes) of data for your phone, you pay $5/month. Frankly, a little steep. But if all you do is check sports scores or the weather, that's fine. A text message is a maximum of 160 bytes of data. At $0.20 per message, that runs a little over $1300 for 1MB of data. Does that make even a LITTLE sense? Nope. Even if you get a plan for 1500 messages ($15/month), you still lose out big time. All 1500 would use only about 240kB of data, that's less than a quarter of a megabyte. To recap, 1MB of data costs $5/month. However, if that data is a text message (and it's really all the same to the carrier network), you pay way, way more.
On my iPhone last month, I used about 200MB of unlimited cell data (I use wifi at home). If AT&T charged the same rate for cell data as they charged for text message data, I'd owe them $262,144. I know... people have complained about this before. But it doesn't get any less annoying with time.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Using iTunes on Windows is awful.
Seriously Apple... why do this? Are you just trying to torture Windows users? Is this part of a scheme to make people feel like their Windows PCs are too slow? Well, I'm not falling for it. This software is incredibly aggravating to use, and I'd wager it's like that because Apple just doesn't want to waste time making Windows versions of iTunes work properly.
Why use it then? As it turns out, you sort of have to if you have an iPhone and want to avoid a big headache. I will give Apple this, they make a really, really cool phone. But does the software have to be so terrible? Maybe I'm just more conscious of it because I abandoned it long ago, only returning recently when I got the phone. Why is it that the program freezes for like 3 seconds whenever I want to view my phone info? And why does the store have to take forever to open a page (this may actually be a universal issue)? This pile of poorly coded refuse must take 5 seconds to start up; about 4 seconds longer than it should. I mean, Google Earth launches in less time.
When iTunes was fresh and new, it wasn't bad. It was light-weight and ran okay. Version 4.1 was a 19MB download. The new version 8.1? Oh, just 80MB. It has gotten bloated and slow. Of course, the bundling with Quicktime has something to do with that. Installing iTunes seems to give Apple the right to bug you with all manner of prompts asking about installing their other shit. No thanks Apple, I don't want the MobileMe control panel. Fix MobileMe first, then we'll talk.
And about the store... it is not a browser, despite its repeated attempts to trick me into thinking it is. The tiny little forward and back buttons are stupid for this application. There must be a better way to navigate a store within a program. And why the hell can I not highlight ANYTHING? All I want to do is copy a URL. What is Apple's problem with copy an paste? First on the iPhone, now they don't even want my computer to do it.
It's just goddamn awful.
Why use it then? As it turns out, you sort of have to if you have an iPhone and want to avoid a big headache. I will give Apple this, they make a really, really cool phone. But does the software have to be so terrible? Maybe I'm just more conscious of it because I abandoned it long ago, only returning recently when I got the phone. Why is it that the program freezes for like 3 seconds whenever I want to view my phone info? And why does the store have to take forever to open a page (this may actually be a universal issue)? This pile of poorly coded refuse must take 5 seconds to start up; about 4 seconds longer than it should. I mean, Google Earth launches in less time.
When iTunes was fresh and new, it wasn't bad. It was light-weight and ran okay. Version 4.1 was a 19MB download. The new version 8.1? Oh, just 80MB. It has gotten bloated and slow. Of course, the bundling with Quicktime has something to do with that. Installing iTunes seems to give Apple the right to bug you with all manner of prompts asking about installing their other shit. No thanks Apple, I don't want the MobileMe control panel. Fix MobileMe first, then we'll talk.
And about the store... it is not a browser, despite its repeated attempts to trick me into thinking it is. The tiny little forward and back buttons are stupid for this application. There must be a better way to navigate a store within a program. And why the hell can I not highlight ANYTHING? All I want to do is copy a URL. What is Apple's problem with copy an paste? First on the iPhone, now they don't even want my computer to do it.
It's just goddamn awful.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Something I'm sick of.
What, you may ask? The "armchair economist". This creature is similar to the Internet Libertarian in general weirdness. However, it seems to be much more widespread these days. Look, I'm as guilty as the next in stating my economic opinions during political campaigns. Like many of you, I get carried away. Just look back a few months and you'll see. But here we are taking a course of action, and still everyone is the expert. I always hear on MPR people claiming to have the answer. By people, I mean random callers, not guest experts. What are the experts saying? All the fancy words seem to amount to a shoulder shrug.
No one knows what's going to happen; least of all, some bumpkin from Alabama. Obama is taking a particular course of action, and no amount of complaining is going to change it. I guess I'd just prefer we gave it some time before we judge one way or the other. It might not be the best way to go, but it's the way we're going.
Many wanted to bury Keynesian economic theory in the last few decades. And they may have even had a point, until a few months back when the Federal Reserve lowered the funds rate to basically 0%. Nowhere else to go there. So here we are... no one can lay out the immediate economic future in a neat bullet-point list, but at least something's happening. So how about we all stop being so self-righteous, and see how things go for a bit?
No one knows what's going to happen; least of all, some bumpkin from Alabama. Obama is taking a particular course of action, and no amount of complaining is going to change it. I guess I'd just prefer we gave it some time before we judge one way or the other. It might not be the best way to go, but it's the way we're going.
Many wanted to bury Keynesian economic theory in the last few decades. And they may have even had a point, until a few months back when the Federal Reserve lowered the funds rate to basically 0%. Nowhere else to go there. So here we are... no one can lay out the immediate economic future in a neat bullet-point list, but at least something's happening. So how about we all stop being so self-righteous, and see how things go for a bit?
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