Disqus - Latest Comments for qdub

Re: On Bandwidth and Net Neutrality

qdub — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:05:55 -0000

While a 5 mbps HD stream is only 1/3 of your 15 mbps Verizon connection, ALL residential broadband resources are provisioned on the basis that only a few connections are active simultaneously. What broadband providers want to protect is their ability to over-provision at the multiples they've always enjoyed. Even 30x over-provisioning is not uncommon!

This has little to do with net neutrality, but I wanted to point out that bandwidth scarcity is in fact a problem if you factor over-provisioning into your back-of-the envelope math.

The part where I'm a bit fuzzy about is VOIP: while 100kbps is not bad, 100kbps perfectly QOS'd may be harder than you think. I don't know the math here, so many another expert can comment =)

Re: New Halo game is heavy on action and story, but just a snack for hardcore fans

qdub — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:46:40 -0000

On the super soldier point: Oddly, I felt the ODST play still very similarly to the Chief. Besides the loss of regenerating health, you're still able to eat up roughly equal amounts of damage, face against equally numerous Covenant foes in equally open and direct confrontations. I was hoping for a stealthier style of play =\

Re: How Google’s Chrome OS has deep roots in Eric Schimdt’s past

qdub — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:59:07 -0000

Thank you, for writing the most interesting, non-echo-chamber article about Chrome OS today.

Re: How Verizon and AT&T may use “wireless neutrality” to drive Sprint and T-Mobile into the ground

qdub — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:15:21 -0000

I think the metered broadband vs metered utility is a very relevant analogy, however does not reflect the biggest reason why carriers want to fight net neutrality.

Bandwidth can be managed with caps, but neutrality means the end of price discrimination: the ability to charge different prices per unit of traffic based on different usage. That is the underlying driver of insane SMS margins and paltry data margins if you compare them dollars for bit. There is no analogy to the utility world: it'd be like paying a higher price for drinking water and a lower one for shower water out of the same pipe; just because drinking water delivers more value per liter.

Re: New iPhone pricing even more annoying and confusing than before

qdub — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:50:02 -0000

If a high end iPod touch costs $400, then a $600 "true cost" for the iPhone seems pretty reasonable. So AT&T basically prorated the subsidy for 1-year customers...seems pretty simple to me.

Re: SoundCtrl Speech: Change in Music Industry

qdub — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:37:18 -0000

I find that a lot of technological innovation is about doing away with outdated physical metaphors. Google is trying to kill the snail mail metaphor with Wave, and hopefully somebody (like Lala) killing the disk/tape metaphor for streaming services.

Re: Give Me An Intelligent Mobile Command Line

qdub — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:04:01 -0000

I think an SMS command line will likely be the easiest way to offer up internet content in the developing world. You can have a separate application which offers a menu structure to help people construct the SMS queries. That'll be your super-lightweight system delivering mission critical information (weather, traffic, personal calendar, commodity prices) to the next billion netizens.

Re: Instant On Secret

qdub — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:54:15 -0000

I find one of the biggest improvements in Vista and OS X 10.5 is the speed of entering and exiting sleep states. Sleep, I believe, is the real kick in the shin for all these instant-on projects. As we move to a world of less installed junk (more activities moving into the browser) we can expect the average consumer PC to be much cleaner, and thus rely only on sleep for weeks without a restart.

Re: A Little Birdy Shares Video of Twitterrific 2.0

qdub — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:10:52 -0000

Word! Neither Twitterberry nor TinyTwitter make the cut.

Re: The Venture Capital Math Problem

qdub — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:24:10 -0000

There is yet another input besides money and entrepreneurs. Isn't there a structural limit to the supply of opportunities that capable of delivering out-sized returns? The kind of returns VCs expect can only come from new businesses that exploit deep structural and technological changes in industry, and that constraint does not scale with the amount of money or quality+quantity of entrepreneurs pumped into the system.

They way I see it is, there are only so many problems at any given period that are ready to be solved, and prove lucrative while doing so. Some ideas are simply too early (http://bit.ly/avc-too-early) and others face overwhelmingly powerful gatekeepers (digital music), and other times, the technology simply isn't there.

Re: Open Spectrum is Good Policy

qdub — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:36:02 -0000

Unlicensed spectrum doesn't support the kind of "command-and-control" infrastructure that is our cellular networks today. The best you can do with unlicensed is WiFI, and the reason WiFI only covers one home at a time instead of entire cities isn't so much because of the underlying physics as it is the inability to manage radiation points due to its unlicensed nature.

Re: Economics of Abundance

qdub — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:52:39 -0000

The thing about digital goods is that today, they are non-substitutes of each other, so every virtual item can be its own monopoly. What I mean is, even Mafia Wars godfather points is sufficiently distinct from Mob Wars (you can't just pack-up your 100-person mafia and switch games) that you shouldn't expect prices to hit marginal cost ($0). Same could be said for music and movies.

Now onto price discrimination: Name-your-price is actually the hardest kind of price discrimination (first degree)...but you don't have to strive for that degree of perfection. I think a lot of the action we'll see is in second degree--playing with volumes and service tiers. Like a song? Buy the song. Love it? Buy the song and a few live versions. Can't live without it? Buy the song, live performances, and a couple remixes. Like this game? Play for free. Love it? buy a few virtual goods and enhance your experience even more. That doesn't seem so un-scalable to me!

Re: The Coming Resource Glut: Doing More with Less

qdub — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:16:35 -0000

If you look at how people manage corporate and personal finances, you'll often find that the biggest philosophical gap is the lack of the concept of capex in personal finance (everything is an expense!). If you suddenly view your car, or your designer handbags as capex, then all of a sudden you start thinking about issues like utilization and scale, and begin thinking about creating economic value through sharing of capital-intensive resources.

Re: Reblogs and Comments in Peace and Harmony

qdub — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:09:49 -0000

I'm a much bigger fan of comments than reblogs. Mainly because comments can have a more complex structure (threading, immediate tie-in to the original post) which can then be collapsed into a reblog page (e.g., if you view my Backtype profile its essentially a blog of reblogs), but the reverse is not as easy.

Re: Hey Dopplr, make me pay.

qdub — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:35:26 -0000

Dopplr doesn't have nearly enough adoption amongst my friends for me to derive any real value from it. At the most basic level you can use it to chart your own course, but what I'd be willing to pay for is an app that helps me bump into old friends as I travel for business--and that is a critical mass functionality. It doesn't do that today, and if it charges, it most likely won't pick up enough users to ever accomplish that .

Re: Would You Spend the Next 20-30 Years of Your Career in Silicon Valley?

qdub — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:33:54 -0000

There's also been a change in the central asset that silicon valley startups generate. Intel's asset is its technology, but Facebook's central asset is its social graph. These assets are harder to measure and value. Whether or not you've made a faster chip or a smarter router is a matter of science, but whether a social graph or real-time chatter can be a monetizable asset is a far more difficult thing to asses.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

qdub — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 13:01:34 -0000

Apple is most certainly not betting on an open standard such as HTML/CSS/AJAX, instead it wants all apps to be native iPhone. They've built up a considerable lead in application ecosystem that will not be forwards compatible with any competing ecosystem that enters in the near future, which to me is a huge deal. Imagine if big hits like YouTube or Facebook were actually applications written in native Mac code and didn't work on Windows without a substantial port, that is the state of mobile applications today.

If Flash or another open standard wins on mobile, then all of those iPhone apps which enrich the competitiveness of the device are likely to go cross-platform, thus commoditizing the hardware and advancing the smartphone market structure closer towards the PC.

Re: NY Times Last Man Standing Strategy Is Flawed

qdub — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:34:29 -0000

Same point on the decoupling of aggregation with distribution crossed my mind the other day. This is also apparent in the video world where content creation must shack up with major networks in order to secure air time. Now days, once a niche webcast draws a big enough audience, they're basically their own distributor

Re: RocketOn launches parallel virtual worlds with six partners

qdub — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:13:13 -0000

I love the idea of transposing "physical presence" onto our surfing activities, but this seems like a very very niche interpretation. What would have more mass appeal would be a Meebo-esque Facebook IM implementation that lets you "bump into" friends who happen to be on the same page/domain.

Re: Big Switch Update

qdub — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:42:56 -0000

Thinking about a switch too, but realized how expensive it'll be to actually have to buy a copy of Windows. Which leads me to think...the piracy rate for virtual machines must be exceptionally high since buying two OS's is extra painful, and is probably why MS tried to rule out VMs in their consumer licenses....

Re: Adobe and Apple working to bring Flash to the iPhone? We’ve heard that before.

qdub — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:42:46 -0000

Part of it is wanting to control what apps go on the iPhone, but also consider this: many of the iPhone apps today are not far from flash apps and easily could have been built with Flash. But since they were built in Cocoa instead, that means iPhone's substantial lead in app count cannot be easily ported over to another platform.

Re: Latest release of Internet Explorer 8 Accelerates browsing

qdub — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:32:58 -0000

Accelerators look conceptually a lot like Ubiquity but not built after a command line, which I actually think is the better solution for mainstream users.

Re: OS X Snow Leopard going for all the “marbles”?

qdub — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:13:05 -0000

Seems like they are converging a bit with the Adobe look

Re: Admin

qdub — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:47:26 -0000

Found you through the Friendfeed room invite. I fell in love with BackType instantly. Hope you guys become the hub of conversation of the future!

Re: Live blogging the Apple keynote: Phil vs. Steve…it’s no contest

qdub — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:09:58 -0000

iTunes over 3G is a straight-up concession from AT&T unless they are scoring some pretty sweet commission per-sale...