Ken Burnside emailed me an interesting tip about a boring financial fact that I think is absolutely fundamental to understanding the smartphone wars. Turns out there’s no gold in them thar hills; the return on investment of wireless networks is negative.
The smartphone wars: Fortune catches up with me
Fortune magazine says 2011 will be the year Android explodes and makes a number of predictions that track what I’ve been writing on Armed & Dangerous for the last year so closely that I have to wonder if their correspondents have been reading this blog. Nice work, guys, even if you are a bit late… Continue reading The smartphone wars: Fortune catches up with me
Dr. William Short’s “Icelanders in the Viking Age”: A Review
A little over a year ago I reviewed Dr. Wlliam Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat on this blog, finding it excellent on all levels. Now Dr. Short has given us a quasi-sequel, a sort of reader’s companion to Icelandic saga literature. While not quite as exciting as the earlier book, it is in many ways… Continue reading Dr. William Short’s “Icelanders in the Viking Age”: A Review
Taxonomy of the haterboy
Human beings being what they are, famous people attract fans. Human beings being what they are, famous people also attract haters, the dark obverse of fans. If you are famous, normally your fans are going to be more visible to you than your haters because your fans will have more tendency to seek you out;… Continue reading Taxonomy of the haterboy
NMEA 2000 and the Obverse of Open Source
In discussion of the GPSD project, a commenter suggested that its role might be going away in part because the NMEA 0183 protocol historically used in GPS sensors is being replaced by NMEA2000. So far, this is not true, and the reasons it’s not true are worth a look because they illustrate a sort of… Continue reading NMEA 2000 and the Obverse of Open Source
The smartphone wars: Yes, I can call them!
The newest comScore report contains some fascinating statistics on the state of the U.S. smartphone market. And this is where I get to intone “All is proceeding as I have foreseen”, because the prediction I made and was duly calumniated for early in the year has come true right on schedule.
Examples and consequences
SF author and civil-rights activist Joel Rosenberg has been unjustly arrested. Good coverage at PopeHat; essentially this is harassment following a Nov 5th assault on Joel by a cop while he was pursuing a FOIA request related to his first arrest, on bogus charges that prosecutors subsequently dropped. I have very mixed feelings about this… Continue reading Examples and consequences
Blog outage for upgrade
Hey ho, another day, another mandatory WordPress security update. There will be a brief outage. Possibly there might be a prolonged one. The management regrets any inconvenience. UPDATE: That’s done. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled flamage.
The smartphone wars: Google changes aim
I just got a look at the promotional video for the Nexus S. What it reveals about Google’s Android strategy is fascinating, and suggests that the pressure on Apple and the telcos is about to ratchet up another notch.
The uses of tribal cohesion
One of my regulars has expressed mildly disgruntlement about the degree to which a feeling of mutual tribal solidarity has taken hold among hackers, and become an increasingly defining characteristic of them. He finds it creepy – he didn’t use the phrase “disquieting groupthink”, but I’m pretty sure he was thinking something like it. “You… Continue reading The uses of tribal cohesion
Culture and certification
I had an IRC chat with one of my semi-regular commenters a few nights ago in which she reported giving a talk on hacker culture that went extremely well. [00:12] <HedgeMage> It was one of those situations, though, where I felt *very* odd being treated like a subject-matter expert. I certainly don’t consider myself one… Continue reading Culture and certification
Off with their header files!
I released a new software tool today. The surprise about this one is that it turns out to be consistently more useful than I expected. And thereby hangs a tale.
Other peoples’ money
“The trouble with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money. This observation is the key to understanding the wave of government bankruptcies that has already begun to break over us.
The smartphone wars: Symbian Foundation folds its hand
Some drastic change of direction is about to take place in Nokia’s smartphone strategy. We can predict this because Nokia has shut down the Symbian Foundation. What we can’t tell yet is what direction they’ll jump, and there are at least four somewhat plausible scenarios. I’m going to list them in what I think are… Continue reading The smartphone wars: Symbian Foundation folds its hand
If RCS can stand it, why can’t your system?
I’ve written software for a lot of different reasons besides pure utility in the past. Sometimes I’ve been making an aesthetic statement, sometimes I’ve hacked to perpetuate a tribal in-joke, and at least once I have written a substantial piece of code exactly because the domain experts solemnly swore that job was impossible to automate… Continue reading If RCS can stand it, why can’t your system?
It’s good to be ubiquitous
So, while trying to discover the minor version of the Android 2.2 running on my G-2, I touched the tab labeled “Open source licenses”. Scrolled down, and “Eric S. Raymond” popped out at me.
First impressions of the G-2
As a very happy user of the G-1 back when it was the only Android phone available, I was keenly looking forward to what HTC and T-Mobile would do for an encore in the G-2. Especially when T-Mobile promised it would run stock Android with no skin and no unremovable crapware. I was seriously planning… Continue reading First impressions of the G-2
I join the not-flying list
Count me with those who will not be flying until the TSA procedures requiring either a full-body X-ray scan or a grope are rescinded. This is meaningless security theater taken to a Kafkaesque extreme, and I won’t consent to it even passively. When the airlines feel enough pain from refuseniks, they’ll push back faster than… Continue reading I join the not-flying list
Bleg for info – Linux backup tools and services
One of the comments that got lost in the recent database restore was a pointer to a backup program I can’t offhand remember the name of. I remember that it’s a command-line tool written in Perl (alas) and meant to be done by a cron job; what it does underneath is rsync with hardlinks to… Continue reading Bleg for info – Linux backup tools and services
Why spamrape happens
One of my regulars writes, re the recent spam-raping of the blog >I’m still trying to figure out what the attack was. All the comments were replaced by spam? No. What happened was that on Sunday night I caught a bot in the act of replacing real comments with spam, oldest first. It was working… Continue reading Why spamrape happens