The Smartphone Wars: The market share scramble and Apple’s long con

Mobile phone carriers have a crappy record of strategic planning – the history of the industry is rife with massive overinvestment in services consumers didn’t actually want, partly redeemed by massive unanticipated revenue from accidents of technology (I’m looking at you, SMS!). I’ve explained elsewhere that inflation-adjusted carrier ROI is negative. Even so, the latest… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: The market share scramble and Apple’s long con

Hold on to your hats…

Hold on to your hats, I’m going to be experimenting with some theme and sidebar changes for the blog. Don’t be surprised if it looks different than you’re used to…

Does “Corporation X” follow the hacker way?

Got a query from a journalist today working on a major story about a certain large corporation that’s been much in the news lately. Seems the corporation’s founder has been talking up his organization’s allegiance to “the hacker way”, and she not unreasonably wanted my opinion as to whether or not this was complete horse-puckey.… Continue reading Does “Corporation X” follow the hacker way?

Junk science double fail

Two bits of science news appeared on my radar today with not much in common except that they’re both exceedingly bad news for the political class. That more or less guarantees that they’ll get poor or nonexistent coverage in the mainstream media and is a good enough reason for me to write about them. First,… Continue reading Junk science double fail

Power Grid: The Robots – a review

Friedmann Friese’s Power Grid is one of the acknowledged classics of the modern Eurogame genre. It embroils 2 to 6 players in a simulation of running power companies, competing to light up the most cities. Strategy involves a mix of positional play, resource management, and (most entertainingly) competition for new plants in an auction every… Continue reading Power Grid: The Robots – a review

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Categorized as Games

The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising

CyanogenMOD, the third-party, fully-open, bloatware-free port of Android, has recently passed a million installs. And there’s talk of creating an underground Market app for CyanogenMOD to distribute apps that the cell carriers and the MPAA/RIAA don’t want you to have. Set this against Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil new Eula for iBooks, and it couldn’t… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising

Site statistics are enabled

I finally got around to installing a site statistics plugin on this blog, about 20 minutes ago. There have since been 94 views. I’m mainly interested in the order of magnitude. Do I have 1K readers per day? 10K?, 100K? My wild-ass guess is on the order of 10K. Now we’ll see.

Hollywood vs. Obama

The huge groundswell of opposition to SOPA and PIPA is having some interesting ripple effects. Barack Obama announced he would veto these bills if they came to his desk, and now it seems that Hollywood is pissed off over this.

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Categorized as Politics

Calling all hackerspaces

This is a shout out to all hackerspaces and engineering schools within easy reach of Philadelphia. I’ve got a nice little design-and-build project that would do the world some good, but I don’t have the skills or facilities to do it myself. The problem: build a ruggedized special-purpose test enclosure to be mounted on a… Continue reading Calling all hackerspaces

Sugar is in ultrasound health

This is a status update for those of you among my regulars who have been following the saga of Sugar, our cat. She had her 90-day followup ultrasound today.

The Smartphone Wars: Dinosaurs mating?

Just when you thought the smartphone industry couldn’t get any more soap-operatic, everybody’s favorite pair of aging drama queens – Microsoft and Nokia – may be at it again. There’s a rumor, from a gossip with a good track record, that Microsoft intends to buy Nokia’s Smartphone division.

Through a mirror, darkly

Today the New York Times is carrying a story on Chinese fears of “cultural encirclement”. “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Mr. Hu said. “We should deeply understand the seriousness… Continue reading Through a mirror, darkly

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Categorized as Politics

The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism

One of the recurring features of American intellectual life is hand-wringing over “anti-intellectualism” by, of course, intellectuals. One of my regular commenters has pointed out that the term and concept of anti-intellectualism are used to describe several distinct phenomena that are relatively easily confused. He’s right, and I think it could bring some clarity to… Continue reading The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism

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Categorized as Politics

The Smartphone Wars: a bit of Christmas cheer

On Google+, Andy Rubin reports: “There were 3.7M Android activations on 12/24 and 12/25.” That’s a 170% spike over the 700K activations per-day Rubin announced on 20 Dec. I’ve previously observed that only about 1 in 10 of Android activations show up in the smartphone statistics for the U.S. so Android is probably looking at… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: a bit of Christmas cheer

A Christmas cat

The best Yule present my wife and I are getting this year is that our beloved cat Sugar is not dying.

Are threads still a menace?

An interesting question showed up in my mailbox today. So interesting that I think it’s worth a public answer and discussion: In chapter 7 of The Art of Unix Programming, you classified threads under the section “Problems and Methods to Avoid”. You also wrote that with the increased emphasis on thread-local storage, threads are looking… Continue reading Are threads still a menace?

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Categorized as Software

The Smartphone Wars: Andy Rubin brings the news

Over on Google+, Andy Rubin says: There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day…and for those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don’t count re-sold devices), and “activations” means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service. This does… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Andy Rubin brings the news