Grandpa Ryan, tell us again how stuff on the Net used to be free.

In an attempt to become exactly as popular and socially relevant as Napster is, Hulu is going to start charging you for video content next year.

Damn that graphic is bigger than I thought

It seems News Corp's (which owns Hulu) Deputy Chairmen Chase Carey has decided that his company gots to get paid for broadcast content online. Here's what the typical greedy fuck with the Geraldo Rivera moustache had to say:
"I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of our content. I think what we need to do is deliver that content to the consumers in a way where they will appreciate that value."

Wasn't lying about the mustache was I?

Translation, "You don't appreciate that fact that stuff we spent no money making is free so we're going to teach you a lesson... plus I need a new yacht."

Bet they wish that little slogan wasn't all over the web site

I have no real comment on the monetization of Hulu because I watch very little on it. However, I like the idea that it's free and it's there. But get ready to watch all you want before they throw up the pay wall. The word on the street is that Hulu has no plan on how to start charging yet and it may leave current offerings untouched while adding another level of paid "premium" content that you have to shell out cash for.

Either way, it's got to help boost News Corp's falling profits which I sure are not hurt at all by Carey's $10 million signing bonus and $8.3 million per year salary that he got when he returned to the company earlier this year. Business as usual in the corporate world.

So as Hulu is poised to enter the realm of "I like it but I ain't paying for it" in the same way that Napster and The Real World did, the anarchist in me considering burning down the HQ of another media conglomerate and operating a pirate television station like one of my heroes from the 1980s.

(Clever title describing my hatred of Apple here)

So Windows 7 is out and I love it. I will give a full list of reasons why later this weekend but it took no time at all for Apple to do what they do best, use a slick image to crap all over every PC out there. Take a look.

Gee wiz! Mac is so young and hip and cool! Awesome! God Almighty I hate these fracking ads! But I digress from the point. I'm not about to begrudge Apple (or whoever they have in advertising) for coming up with a great marketing campaign. The commercials are funny and before the righteous indignation boils up inside of me, I do chuckle a bit because Windows and PCs do have their share of problems. The Vista era Mac vs PC ads were great because Vista was/is a piece of crap. So much so that I stayed away from it until I replaced my XP laptop a few weeks ago and the new one came preinstalled with Vista. In the month I suffered Vista, I experienced more problems with it than I care to recall and I quickly and quietly took it out back and shot it in the head with Windows 7 as soon as I could.

Here's my real problem with this new set of ads. First, they obviously had to be made months in advance of Windows 7's release so Apple didn't even have time to get specific with any flaws in the new OS. If there are problems, point them out and we'll all have a really good laugh. I'm fine with that. Second, are they really focusing on the "hassle" of importing all your shit onto a new OS? That's the best they got? Ohhh ZING.... I guess. Hate to break it to you, but when I upgrade to 7, all my stuff was saved on my hard drive and it was just a matter of rearranging the directories on a few files to make everything hunky dory. Oh no! That's sooooo much harder than switching to an entirely different OS that is set up in no way like the platform you've used your whole life and is so damned simple and restrictive a trained monkey can use it.

If you're going to crap on Windows 7 at least come up with something good. Before I go I will give Apple points for this one though, 80s Miami Vice PC cracks me up for some reason (even though it's supposed to be the mid 90s).

But to be fair, Apple should have appropriately aged back Mac also until he was a just a long flannel shirt wearing, Starbucks guzzling, Kurt Cobain wannabe rocking out to Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Windows fanboy in me aside, here's what everyone needs to remember when they claim their OS is perfect and I'm talking to companies and fanboys alike.
Oh and fret not Windows fans... I have it on good authority that PC totally banged that chick in the second video! BOOM! In your face Justin Long! Where is Bruce Willis to help you now!?

Go Bill Go!

Hate on Bill Gates all you want (that picture is a little creepy), but he is a good guy. As the richest man in the world and head of Microsoft, he has taken a lot of hate over the years. Anyone with as much money as he has is always vilified by the masses since they don’t have all that money too. Usually the cry is for those rich people to do something good with their money, not just fly around in private jets, while ruling the world as part of the secret government.

Well then Bill Gates is the man, basically he has been using his massive wealth to help humanitarian causes all over the world. Just take a look at the webpage for the Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation; they have paid out almost $3 billion since 2008. That’s a lot of dough but granted that is like what the US government spends on stamps for a year. I love to see people spending their wealth on worthwhile things, especially when that money is not coming directly from the tax payers.

Now Gates is donating $100,000 to help fight malaria. The money will go to creating a gum and chocolate that will help fight malaria in children. That's good since the old way to fight it was the tonic in a gin and tonic and we don’t want kids walking around all wasted. I don’t really have anything super snarky to say, i just wanted to post this because really cool. Go Bill!

This is not the Driod Your Looking For...

I have been pretty lax in posting recently and I apologize for that, but there has not really been anything in tech news that I have found all that interesting recently. Even this post is about a topic that I don’t find all that interesting, but since it falls into the domain of mobile phones - which is something I post about a lot - I figured I would do a post.

What I want to talk about is all the Android scuttlebutt (not sure if this word usage is correct, but I don’t really care). In case you are not aware or live under a rock, Android is Google’s mobile phone OS. The big deal about this OS is that is supposed to be for open development (which Google seems to be a bit two headed about).



Open development is awesome in theory; if enough developers get behind it the possibilities are pretty limitless. Those developers would be able to create awesome applications and tweaks that made the mobile phone experience amazing. Any gripe with the phone or OS could be solved with some quick coding and since it is open, Google would not be QAing these apps. This is the total opposite of Apple, who reviews the apps before letting them into the app store (just Google “Apple and Google Voice”). I have mixed feelings about this, but the overall reasoning is that they don’t want apps that will detract from the user experience, and that is the name of the game!

We are quickly getting to a point where hardware is becoming far less important than the things that hardware gives you access to. This is partly because hardware has become sufficiently robust to support almost anything we as consumers need it to do. This is especially true in the desktop/ laptop market. People have basically been buying machines that are way, way more powerful than they need to be to surf the net, send email, and play Bejeweled. So unless you are a gamer and you actually need the hardware to be up to snuff, it is not all that important. Take netbooks they are basically laptops that only exist to give you access to the internet.

Ok, back to mobile phones. Mobile phones are moving in a similar direction as desktops and laptops. As more phones come out, the functionality that those phones are capable of get more and more similar. For instance, most smart phones, and some non smart phones can use GPS and Wi-Fi to access the Internet. This is on top of messaging and calling that phones have been able to do since the late 90s. The actual needs vary from consumer to consumer, but I foresee a time when almost all phones will have GPS, Wi-Fi, email, Internet browsing and music playing. They will just come standard, and the networks will support all these features. In order to differentiate themselves to the consumers, the phone companies will need to provide all the same things their competitors offer and some things that differentiates their phone from all the others: the way to do this is application functionality. They will want to tout the things their phone can do in terms of interface and ease of use, or “user experience”.

Open development is technically a great boon to the “user experience” argument, as it allows the developers to rapidly develop things to make the user experience better, and there would be no restriction on this development, hence “open”. Apple has crippled the non-jail broken iPhone from having multiple applications running in the background. It has rejected any app that in its eyes reproduces any functionality that is native to the iPhone. In a true open development environment, the consumer would get to pick and choose the experience they want from the handset.

Historically open development has not been we received by the general consumers, take Linux for instance. Tech geeks love to tout it as the best OS. It’s usually free and anyone can develop for it. In comparison to Linux, the Apple operating systems as well as the Microsoft operating systems are really, really closed down in comparison to Linux but because of the user experience those operating systems have captured massive consumer market share. Apple has recently been stealing market share from Microsoft by running ads to attract consumer to the “better” user experience, as in no viruses, spy ware, and crashes.

However the Apple operating systems are totally locked down and are only intended to be run on approved Apple hardware devices. I am solidly in the Microsoft camp when it comes to operating systems, my brain just thinks in Windows. I could do a different rant all about the MS vs Apple crap but that is not the point of this post.

Oh right... the point. The point is that user experience is the thing that attracts the consumer’s and allows companies to eat up the market share. There’s a lot of competition in the mobile market and the goal of the providers is to attract as many customers as possible and get them to pay for their service (duh!) I have hypothesized before that Verizon would kick ass and take names if they got some better phones and I still hold this to be true. Yes, they have the best network but we as consumers also need cool devices to utilize that network. If all your phone can do is make calls, I can go on any network and do that (well maybe not AT&T in the Bay Area and NYC... and half the country if you want 3G).


I need a phone that can make calls and do other things and do them well and with an awesome user experience. Well Verizon is getting Droid (did you know that Lucas owns the rights to that word?, check out the fine print in the Droid commercial) Droid is an Android phone (ooo clever marketing name). It’s one of many that are rolling out currently and I would bet that within the next year or so, the majority of carriers will all have Android phones. This will make Android more widely spread and technically it should make available all the benefits of the “open development” to all Android users.

Before I get into the problems I have with this I would like to throw out one more prediction. I am going to predict that Android will rock the iPhone, but not be for at least two years or so (just enough time for my AT&T contract to end). But it’s going to take those two years for Android to start gaining traction. Its going to take two years because as we see the market flood with Android phones, developers will have to write code that in some respects take the different hardware into consideration. Especially if the applications are going to run fast and utilize optimized hardware features that will vary from phone to phone and chip to chip. Potentially, this will mean that developers may only create applications for certain types of phones. In addition to that someone needs to push the eco-system for the phones. The iPhone has Apple pushing the app store but I find it hard to believe that the phone makers will be pushing the application environments for the Android. Rather they will talk about the cool hardware and software their individual phones will have, which is basically what they do now.

The other issue with open dev is that there is no QA process, kinda like what Apple has with the apps, the community would need to be very open, much more watch doggie, and helpful to weed out Android apps that could potentially be harmful, or just plan suck. I mean, if I was a virus writer, I would totally write something that on the surface looks like a cool app, make it free, and then when people download and install it I now have another phone on my zombie bot net. If there is no code review or QAing on the apps the Android eco-system is open to these kinds of threats. Google would be capable of performing this QA, but that would go against their open development goal with the operating system. Not that they have never lied, or changed their minds, before.

Ok, this post is getting pretty long, which is probably good since we have not had anything up on the blog recently, so I will wrap it up. We are going to see a lot of Android phones, coming out in the next few months, Verizon is going to pimp the hell out of the Droid to get people to either stay at Verizon because now they have a “kinda” cool phone, or maybe attract some people over to Verizon (this one I find somewhat less likely) but it will be about two years before we really see the impact Android will have on the market and start to see it stealing market share from the likes of the iPhone and Blackberry, which I think is still the number one smart phone on the market right now.

Then again I could be totally wrong. If you disagree with me or have a comment, or if you actually read this please leave a comment, however if you are a troll, well screw off.