Sunday, February 19, 2006

Atari in trouble: Story here. But the story understates Atari's effect in home computers. For a brief period in the early 1980's Atari outsold Apple. Then Atari (which had it's own version of Visicalc) concentrated on games and ignored productivity software. And then they made matters worse by concentrating on games for their game systems rather than their home computers. Eventually they were sold off by Warner to the founder of Commodore Computers who later in the 80's introduced the first mass computer with a full megabyte of ram, back when ram was $300 per megabyte.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

MovieBeam - DOA - Again? With Cable, DirecTv, Echostar, Netflix and Blockbuster; why would you pay for a set-top box that will only store the newest Disney Movies, and then charge you to see those movies. Whats wrong with Moviebeam?
1. You have to pay for a set top box.
2. You have to pay an activation fee.
3. You have to pay for each movie you wish to view. Currently $3.98 for new releases.
4. Only Disney Movies are available as current releases. Some older Warner titles also available. At present no Sony movies are available. Other studio movies
will be available later, as they are released to Pay-per-view.
5. "Upto" 10% of 100 movies stored on Moviebeam are replaced each week,
if it's one you rented POOF, you can't watch it anymore.
6. You can watch a rented movie as many times as you want, but only for 24 hours.
7. If you live out in the stix, you can't receive OTA datacasts to update the box.
Elsewhere, hopefully the antenna will work OK.
8. Will they leave you holding the bag when they shut down again?
9. Why does the 800 number on their website not work?
10. CNN panned it on their morning news show on 2/14.
11. Why does 100 movies seem like less than 50,000 of Netflix?
12. Only some of the movies are HD format, and their rental currently is $1 extra.
13. You have a 14 day trial period, during which you can opt out and return the hardware, BUT there's a $39.99 restocking charge in the fine print.

Monday, February 06, 2006

Great cell phone: I ended up with a Sony/Ericsson w600i to replace my Motorola v600 which at 20 months age started having reception issues. The Sony phone is mahlvelous.
Sony calls it a Walkman phone, but its everything an iTunes phone should have been but wasn't. Only shortcoming is you can't add memory.

w600i .......................................v600
256 Megs Memory .................5 Megs Memory
400 Hours Standby ..............175 Hours Standby
.....battery Life .............................battery Life
Infrared
18 bit color screen ...................16 bit color screen
1.3 Megapixel Camera ................VGA Camera
Flash for Camera
FM Radio
Supplied USB Cable......................USB Cable extra cost
Supplied software .......................software extra cost
for PC transfer

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Firefox minor fix out. Firefox 1.501 is now available, even in custom builds for Macintosh G4 or G5, available here. For the rest of you folks, it's here.