Archive for May, 2013

Xbox one and always on

Thursday, May 23rd, 2013

So disappointing that the vendors want to press in activation and always on into their next gen consoles like the Xbox one. Fast forward a decade and you can certainly not play your then old games anymore when the DRM servers are gone away. I personally find this less than acceptable. All the investment in games go to the next landfill then, … While you still can play your most favorite legacy NES, Sega, Playstation and even Amiga et al. games with your kids and such, …

Guess I can start a “Brave New World” category here for things like that :-/

Another note on the Yahoo Tumblr purchase

Monday, May 20th, 2013

Tumblr. A micro blogging site. Like Posterous (sold for $5m to $10m? to Twitter), Wordpress, and many others.

How should that business work in the future? We should Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, and what not? Should there be any time left for private, real life? Not to mention actually getting work done?

And these “companies” are profitable how? Ah right. The only viable business model currently appears to be advertising. Very innovative. So we will all be living from selling advertising to each other then? Oh right, Twitter sells our tweets in blocks per million to analytics, … Thanks.

Somehow this does not look like an adorable brave new world to live in, … Does it?

And –by the way– this is not what the web was intended to be. The world wide web was meant to be exactly that: a world wide web. Not a point to point infrastructure for a few big content providers to push content down the pipe ala cable tv. In the earlier days people run their own website, their own weblog. Fault tolerant. Independent of big cooperations controlling your data.

Now we have massive single point of failures. When Facebook is down many people’s photos and communications are down. If a service closed (for bankruptcy, purchase, etc.) like Posterous, Google Reader, Google Video, Photovine, GeoCities, … often all your data is in jeopardy.

Back to the future.

The bubble waiting to burst :-/

Monday, May 20th, 2013

At this day of age you have to wonder what those multi million dollar CEO’s like Mark Zuckerberg or Marissa Mayer are thinking. After the purchase of highly over-rated web services at an even higher, over the top price, Instragram for a whooping billion (1.000.000.000, or 10^9 just to make sure you get a “feeling” for the number of zeros) by Facebook; and now Tumblr for an even higher 1.1 billion US dollars (in cash nonetheless!1!) one has to wonder where that leads to. Unfortunately I have to side those seeing a second .com bubble waiting to burst.

One billion dollar … think about how long it takes to get that investment back, … from a photo sharing App and a micro blogging site, … We do not talk about a HIV or cancer cure, nor an solution for hunger or world energy, nor an artificial intelligence company, …

Keeping my fingers cross, …

Using Google services, less and less

Monday, May 20th, 2013

I historically never really used much of Google’s web cloud services. Mostly only some tertiary @google email address for all the non-VIP account registrations, you know, forums and tradeshow registrations and such, …

But I try to avoid them more and more, I like to be customer, not advertising target, … :-/