Posts by PushF12

Last US sat radio gang mulls bankruptcy

The iPhone will kill Sirius XM

Well, not the iPhone particularly, but services running on the cellphone network like Pandora, Slacker, LastFM, et al will kill Sirius XM.

Sirius XM has forgotten their value proposition and is becoming indistinguishable from regular terrestrial radio. Why did people buy satellite radio service?

1. To avoid commercials.

Sirius XM has been running commercials on their music channels for more than a year. The DJs read advertisements between songs and call it "banter".

2. Adult content.

A condition of the Sirius XM merger was a minimum of 100 "family friendly" channels. All of the hard rock and hip-hop channels are now playing radio edits and bleeping profanity.

Uncensored content is a big draw for the Sirius XM audience. Sirius XM is now censored at the same level as regular cable television, which means that you can get titties and dirty words while the children are asleep, but daytime content is bleached clean.

3. Deep playlists, better targeting, and rare stuff.

Most of the specialty channels have been cut. The remainder are as bland and repetitive as any Clear Channel or Jack FM station.

4. Audio Quality.

Most Sirius XM music channels are down to a bitrate of 32kbps or less, which makes the music sound worse than AM radio. Talk channels are running at 8kbps, which causes the "tin roof".

People that pay for radio generally expect higher quality. Trying to cram backseat TV service into their bandwidth license was idiotic.

5. Price

Most people would rather put the money for a $250 radio and $15 subscription into a fancy fancy cellphone with a data service, and stream exactly what they want from the Internet.

More simply, everything that Mel Karmazin turns to shit and shareholders that had enough votes to fire him fully deserve to see their investment evaporate.

Fujitsu tells WD the deal's off

2TB would be a nice place to go bankrupt

I hope that these storage media companies begin manufacturing 2TB disks before they fail financially and fire the R&D department.

The obsessive-retentive part of me thinks that 2TB is "perfect" because that is the addressing limit for computers with parallel ATA/IDE interfaces.

The 2TB hard disk could be the next 1.44MB floppy disk or the next 2GB SD card, especially for embedded systems. It would be a mature part for a stable old platform that just can't go any bigger, but doesn't really need to go bigger.

RIM sues Motorola

RIM is moving to Dallas, not Chicago

RIM is shrinking their Waterloo operations because graduates from the University Of Waterloo and University Of Toronto are under-performing, and because the business isn't sexy enough to get tax subsidies and federal grants anymore.

Between the dot-com enrollment bust, and the province saying "pass 80% of your undergraduates or lose funding", the availability of quality human resources that are willing to work burn-out hours has decreased to the point that Ontario is too expensive for this kind of business.

It is much more likely that people being hired in Chicago are being given job offers for the new RIM campus in Dallas. Many of RIM's top-performers have already moved there, or are getting ready for the transfer.

Viacom to remove Time Warner's Spongebob Squarepants

here comes the AppleTV

Comedy Central, which is being cut, carries Stewart and Colbert. These two shows are consistently top-ten in regular ratings and in iTunes sales, so they have enough pull to get people to try things like the AppleTV (or Xbox 360) if they fall off cable broadcast.

Dumb move for both Viacom and Time Warner. Apple and Microsoft are both worse partners.

Microsoft staff cuts due next month?

layoffs should kill the Microsoft dream

We're starting to see the labor dearth caused by the dot-com bust, and it would be nice if students are further discouraged by some newsworthy cuts at Microsoft.

I get annoyed by the large number of junior programmers that think they have a potential career track into Microsoft (or the video games industry), and I would enjoy posting the eventual El Reg story on the cafeteria corkboard to crush their dreams and make them less likely to leave.

Sony's Super AIT - a fall from grace

tape is more expensive than the cloud

The price of a fast Internet connection and a cloud storage service like Amazon S3 is often less than a tape silo, and altogether more convenient and scalable.

One thing that always annoyed me about DLT tape is that the drives were not backwards write-compatible. I always felt that my legacy tape inventory was wasted after a drive upgrade.

Palm store now sells catch-up

Palm's last chance is the Linux desktop market

Palm needed to release the Cobalt platform so that the Treo could run a modern web browser and a modern media player, but Apple beat them to market with the iPhone and stole their customers. Their retail revenue stream instantly dried up and the channel has too much inventory.

Palm Incorporated is finished if the Apple App Store gets a Palm Emulator before they can reposition themselves for corporate customers that have software lock-in to the Garnet platform.

Palm OS is the only platform that fully integrates and syncs with the Linux desktop, so freetards are the only kind of user that still has a reason to buy Treo hardware. Palm Incorporated could also bankcrupted by an iPhone sync conduit for Evolution, or the success of the Open Moko phone.

Microsoft rolls out online Exchange and Sharepoint for the US

Yahoo fails as the Zimbra custodian

Yahoo botched a trial hosted Zimbra deployment at our 5,000 seat company, which is the only practical Exchange substitute, and gave our Microsoft proponents an opportunity to get in on this beta program. We'll never dig our way out now.

After we stopped paying Yahoo, it took them two months to notice, and we got a call from some junior VP who was thoroughly clueless. Their sales team didn't even know that Microsoft was already rolling out hosted services. ("Oh, it won't be ready for years.")

Everything that Yahoo touches turns to shit. I despair for Zimbra.

Microsoft retires Windows 3.11 on 18th birthday

Does anybody have a Windows 3.1 patch archive?

Does anybody have a link to a patch archive for Windows 3.1, something like an AutoPatcher collection?

This stuff will disappear if it isn't archived.

Pandora prepares to join titsup.com club

Please let me pay for Pandora, please.

Pandora may need to become a boutique service to remain in business. I hope that they just let me pay for what I use, even beyond the regular subscription.

VMware slashes ESXi price to zero

@Ramesh Dharan

You're out to lunch, Mr. Engineer. The VMware sales guys are playing fast and loose with their pricing this year, which is very annoying.

And your department completely whorked the VMware Server 2.0 product, which is causing people to look at alternatives like XenServer.

DISH Network awarded $1,050 in NDS card crack case

How long would the prison setence be for a real person?

If the card had been cracked by a private individual, then they would probably be doing prison time.

How valuable does a company need to be before its staff are exempt from criminal prosecution?

DisplayPort to do DVI to death, analyst claims

Optical plug is the next TV connector that will matter

An optical video connector, like the way you already connect audio components, is the next standard that will matter.

DVI and HDMI are already sagging with age and bad design. Banking limits are already a problem for high-end users. The physical specification is also much more expensive than a simple plastic fiber.

Better yet, make a TV with a 10 gigabit ethernet port -- the same speed as DisplayPort -- that shows up with UPNP or Bonjour as a multimedia target. You would never run out of inputs, and the cabling limit would be enough to reach almost anywhere in your house.

Amazon's cloud now less prone to failure

Service vendors are sweating, not waiting

I make it a point to tell our colo providers, who charge by the rack-unit, how completely satisfied we are with the utility computing model. Our accounting department loves it too.

EC2 now is like Linux was for us a few years ago... All new systems are planned and provisioned for this new model, and mentioning it to our legacy vendors usually gets a discount from the sales droids that recognize EC2 as competition.

I've still got pleasant tingles from the IT headcount reductions that virtualization got us a few years ago, and it makes me drool to think that I can do it again with utility computing.

Canadians go out clubbing

Ferryland Sealer

Get a feel for the Canadian Maritimes and try to find the "Ferryland Sealer" song by Great Big Sea on the tubes.

The album is folk, but otherwise quite good. It will dull your concern for the cute fuzzies that are getting whacked.

Sun invites VMware to virtual desktop dance

Sun is greasing VMware users into a Virtual Box migration

VMware users are currently loyal and satisfied and unlikely to do a rip-and-switch, so Sun's plan here is to get noticed and eventually ease people into trying their similar Virtual Box product.

Sun is taking action now because IT people are so completely disappointed and exasperated by the VMware Server 2.0 beta releases that they are considering alternatives for the first time ever. VMware was the first solution, and it was the best for a long time too, but VMware Server 2.0 just plainly sucks that hard.

EMC grafted some middling managers with a Web 2.0 fetish into the VMware team and essentially disfigured the software. Like any other big company, EMC won't back out the mistake because they cannot admit a mistake and care more about their "model" than their customers. The personality and leadership of the original Stanford development team has departed VMware.

Bill Gates goes to Washington, again

Economic Slavery leads to Corporate Feudalism

If we don't prevent malevolent people like Bill Gates from legalizing economic slavery, then Corporate Feudalism will be the next stage of our government.

It would, however, be completely worthwhile to go there if His Billness and His Steveness would try to kill each other on horseback with lances.

Canonical fires up box Landscaping business

yank tracker from Ubuntu

I hope that Canonical gets some big customers for this service, who then demand an easy way to remove the trackerd program from an entire Ubuntu Landscape installation, maybe so that tracker gets entirely removed from the regular distro.

The tracker software is a terrible failure that makes Ubuntu Gutsy and Ubuntu Hardy very slow. It is like that annoying search dog thing in Windows XP.

Rogers wraps 'unlimited' mobile browsing in small print

Rogers cramps Canadian telecom

Rogers bought Fido and was responsible for killing the last genuine unlimited GPRS data plan available in Canada. SIM cards with grandfathered Fido data contracts are selling on eBay for $1,000+ CAD.

Rogers is at least as evil as BigPond or Tiscali, and it seems that they are getting a similar ill repute internationally.

Rogers is a case study in the ineffectiveness of the CRTC, which is our telecom regulator. My various experiences with Rogers are such that my fists, my teeth, and my arse all clench simultaneously when I think about them.