Category Archives: General

Another Reason not to Use Carbonite

Posted on by
Reply

In case you needed another reason to choose Crashplan over Carbonite for your online computer backups:  Carbonite sponsors that low-life bully, Rush Limbaugh. (see the update below)

Carbonite addressed the controversy over their sponsorship of Limbaugh today in a blog post by their CEO, David Friend. It’s clear that El Rushbo has offended more people than usual this time. I hope Carbonite goes beyond merely “impress[ing] upon him that his comments were offensive to many of our customers and employees alike.” and actually pulls sponsorship. Rush, like Newt Gingrich, has been a standard bearer for the disfunction, uglyness, and extremism that have marred our national politics for the better part of two decades.

Update:

It looks like Carbonite’s CEO let thinks sink in a bit and realized what a wretch Limbaugh is.  The updated the blog post I mentioned above with the following:

“No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. Mr. Limbaugh, with his highly personal attacks on Miss Fluke, overstepped any reasonable bounds of decency. Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”

Intel’s Foundry Business

Posted on by
Reply

Intel is starting to offer 3rd parties the opportunity to build chips on their cutting-edge “fabs.”  I’m not surprised to see this happening. With each new generation of fab, Intel has more transistors they have to sell in order to recoup their costs and get an ROI. Intel themselves haven’t been that great at creating products to sell those additional transistors. If they are going to keep investing in their process leadership, they have to find a way to pay for it. If they don’t keep investing in their process leadership, they are going to be disrupted by ARM and its licensees.

Intel is opening up its manufacturing facilities to third parties, as it takes the further tentative steps toward building a chip-to-order foundry business. The microprocessor giant announced last year that it would build FPGAs for Achronix Semiconductor, and on Tuesday a second FPGA designer, Tabula, said that it would have its chips built by Intel.

In its announcement, Tabula emphasized that it would be using Intels cutting-edge 22nm process with 3D trigate transistors. Intels manufacturing capabilities are world-leading, with none of the established microprocessor foundries—including TSMC, UMC, and AMD spin-off GlobalFoundries—able to match the companys process.

Compared to the 28 and 32nm processes offered by the competition, Intels 22nm process should offer higher speeds with lower power usage, at lower cost. The company will start shipping its first 22nm x86 processors, codenamed Ivy Bridge, in the coming months.

via Ars Technica.

Whether they can actually sell enough of their capacity without opening their fabs to competitors remains to be seen. At some level FPGAs already compete with Intel’s products, in that they take a different approach to creating general-purpose chips that can be used for a variety of applications.

Why I blog on Geekfun.com

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been blogging on Geekfun for a little over a decade, and from time to time I question the whole enterprise. Actually, that isn’t entirely true, sometimes it seems I spend more time questioning the whole enterprise than I actually spend blogging. Other times, I manage to do both at the same time. This post is an example of the latter.

I was again thinking about why I have this blog, and what I should do with it, and I thought I’d try and put those thoughts in writing. That is the essence of this blog. This blog is me writing down what I’m thinking about. Doing so helps me focus and clarify my thoughts.

Often, that is all it is, but sometimes, it is an opportunity to share my thinking, or what I’ve learned, with other people. This blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic, so it is a stretch to use “popular” to describe anything I post here, but the most popular posts on this blog tend to be those where I’ve shared some little practical tip.

But getting back to the role of this blog as part of my thought process, it could be even more useful in that regard if it was also a way to solicit other people’s comments. Occasionally a post will provide fertile ground for discussion, but more often than that, they are sterile islands of thought. My thinking benefits from writing them, but that is as far as it goes. I could start to remedy that by posting links to places where friends and acquaintances will find them, like Facebook, Google + and Twitter.

iPod Touch and the Kindle Fire

Posted on by
Reply

When Amazon first announced the Kindle Fire, many people heralded it as the first tablet with a chance in the market against Apple’s iPad by virtue of the fact that it was less than half the price, and more portable, with a 7″ screen.

Those predictions were recently validated, with Amazon selling an estimated 5.5M in the first quarter of release. Not bad, but we learned today that Apple sold 15.43 Million iPads, a 111% increase over the same period last year. It is an interesting contrast, but I wondered how the Kindle Fire’s sales compared to those of the iPod Touch.

My reasoning in comparing the two is that the Kindle Fire competes more directly with the Touch than the iPad. The iPad has a 10″ screen. When the first 7″ Android tablets hit the market, Steve Jobs said that Apple had considered smaller tablets, but found that the iPad was the smallest device they could make that allowed a significantly broader range of interactions than the iPhone. You can type on an iPad, as well as create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The Kindle Fire, on the other hand, is a lot like a big iPod Touch. The bigger screen is better for reading and browsing the web, and perhaps a little better for viewing movies. On the other hand, the iPod Touch is significantly more portable; it fits in a pocket, the Fire, in a purse.

I wondered how Kindle Fire sales compared to iPod Touch sales. Apple reported that iPod sales were down 21% to 15.4 million, but over 10 million of those were iPod touches. With a little digging, I found that Apple sold about that many iPod Touches during the same period a year prior. So, even without an update, the iPod touch is selling about twice as well as the similarly priced Kindle fire. Of course, the Fire seems to be on an upswing, while the Touch is just holding steady.

Will Hollywood Look to Apple to Lead them out of the Amazon?

Posted on by
Reply

After last week’s tremendous public outcry over the SOPA and PIPA bills forced the TV and movie industry and their hired hands in Washington DC to retreat, Paul Graham announced that he was interested in funding startups that might have what it takes to “kill hollywood.”

Graham is a successful software developer and entrepreneur who started YCombinator to take advantage of the mismatch between the traditional venture capital business model and the realities of post-dotcom boom Internet startups. He concluded that SOPA and PIPA were symptoms of a large but dying industry that could do “a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on [its] way down.” Hastening their demise would be both a broad public good, and a good business.

Graham stated the problem broadly, asking entrepreneurs to think about what people are going to do for fun in 20 years, instead of what they do now. Graham sees the potential for continued growth in games, and other types of sites, but also sees alternatives to the ways movies and shows are currently produced and distrubuted.

A few days later, on Hacker News, YCombinator’s social news community, someone posted a link to Amazon Studios. Amazon Studios is at least a few months old, but if I’d heard about it before, I’d forgotten it. Amazon Studios says :

We believe 21st-century technology creates ways to make and share movies and scripts more easily than ever.

  • Get noticed. Your work will be shared with a global community of filmmakers and fans, who can offer revisions and advice.
  • Get your movie made. The goal of Amazon Studios is to work with Hollywood to turn the best projects into major feature films.

They run monthly contests with cash prizes for writers and film-makers.

Amazon Studios positions itself as a partner to Hollywood, but in thinking about it, I realized that Amazon already has Hollywood pretty much surrounded. Over the last 20-30 years, the overall importance of revenue from first-run TV, and movie box office has declined as a growing number of broadcast and cable TV channels created demand for TV show reruns, and revenues from movie rentals and DVD sales grew. Lately though, DVD sales have been declining, and BlueRay sales haven’t compensated, because more and more people are turning to digital distribution and streaming through Netflx, iTunes, and Amazon.

In other words, the makers of TV shows and movies have long depended on Amazon for a significant amount of their revenue, first from DVD sales, and now, increasingly from digital downloads. The Kindle Fire was aimed squarely at enhancing Amazon’s position in this market. It’s also worth considering that Amazon uses free digital downloads as an incentive to get people to subscribe to Amazon Prime.

On the other side, we have Amazon Studios, gets Amazon involved in the creation of new movies. They may be working with Hollywood, but part of their appeal is clearly to creative people who were, in one way or another, shut out of Hollywood.

This is similar to how Amazon approached the eBook market. They did deals with publishers to get the rights to distribute books on the Kindle. To secure those deals, they surely used their position as a major sales channel for traditional books. Once the Kindle was off to a good start, they started enabling independent authors and small publishers to sell their own eBooks through Amazon. Now they are starting to do deals directly with authors, taking over the role of publishers for both vetting and editing books, and underwriting their creation with cash advances.

So, how long before Amazon starts funding some of the movies themselves?  It might take longer, because movies are more complicated to make than books. Also, theatrical release is still an important part of the movie business; box office receipts are an important revenue, and it helps generate the awareness needed to drive the sale of the digital downloads.  Its also worth keeping in mind, that Amazon owns IMDB, which helps moviemakers find the collaborators they need to get movies made, and helps consumers find out about movies worth watching.

All of this puts Amazon in a strong position vs Hollywood, but its even stronger if you step back and consider how important the book industry is to the movie industry. One of the most valuable film franchises in the last few decades has been the Harry Potter films, which, if it isn’t obvious, owes its success to the Harry Potter books. The same is true for many other films. The movie industry reduces its risk by drawing on successful books.  Doing so gives them added confidence in the underlying story, and provides them with a built in audience, and built in cultural relevance. Unfortunately for Hollywood, Amazon seems likely to gain a favorable position for the film-rights for more and more books.

This is good for Amazon, but also, I think, for Apple. Apple doesn’t encircle Hollywood in quite the same way Amazon does, but iTunes is an important distribution channel for movies and TV shows. Another thing Apple has is cash, lots of it. Movies are often financed, in part, by distribution rights. Wariness over Amazon’s position is going to drive the movie studios towards Apple (just as of fear of Apple’s power drove the record labels towards Amazon), Apple’s ability to help fund new movies and shows, in exchange for favorable distribution rights, seems like it will draw them even closer to Apple.

We shall see soon enough, I guess…

Chris Dodd Hates Competition

Posted on by
Reply

“Don’t steal!

Politicians hate competition”

I was reminded of this corny old joke when I heard that former Republican Senator, Chris Dodd, was critical of the way some technology companies were involved in a broad-based effort to defeat some odious anti-piracy legislation.

Dodd, who vowed not to become a lobbyist, before becoming the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (one of the pre-imminent entertainment industry lobbying groups), said, in an official statement:

[...] some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns [...]

In other words:  ”Corporate pawn, that’s my job!” It seems clear to me that Dodd’s concern is that it is going to be much harder for a guy like him to sell himself if, as he views it, people are just giving it away for free.

I have a different, more optimistic take, which is that it is going to be far harder for organized, entrenched, minority interests to have their way when individuals and organizations can quickly assemble large collations to represent their own, shared, interests.