Disqus - Latest Comments for qdub

Re: On Bandwidth and Net Neutrality

albert — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:44:42 -0000

That was my point about "truth in advertising" (which I now realize I didn't actually get to). I simply think that over-selling (really under-provisioning) like that simply should not be possible. My other point was that the cost of concentrating those streams up into Gigabit routers and switches isn't as bad as one might think.

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

albert — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:59:17 -0000

Agree. But old metaphors die hard.

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

albert — Thu, 28 May 2009 06:40:43 -0000

Good point - someone must already be doing this - if not seems like a good opportunity

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

albert — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:13:28 -0000

Agree completely - have not had the "pleasure" of Vista but Mac is even fast when going to sleep.

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

jbruin — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:08:19 -0000

That's a shame...I do have a few friends with blackberrys and they definitely feel left out of the Twitter app cool circle. I'm sure there's a few developers reading this that can make this happen, right?

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

albert — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:01:18 -0000

Completely agree that we will see many forms of second degree price discrimination. You are also right that points in games cannot be substituted for each other. They can also be kept artificially scarce by the folks who control the game, because they are part of a closed system. It is therefore correct that one should *not* expect their price to go to zero. But "same could be said for music and movies" does not follow because they are not part of a closed system in which artificial scarcity can be maintained.

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

albert — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:50:22 -0000

Great point! Wesabe and Mint should help people understand the difference.

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?

Eytan — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:58:47 -0000

You're dead wrong. Apple ONLY wanted to embrace that before being forced into opening up the API for apps, and has been adding much more energy to WebKit then to furthering the API of the Phone OS X. Adding features in 2.1 allowing web pages to appear without URL bar and toolbar, adding yet more CSS animation features in 2.2, many of them before the desktop, making it so as ANY app can embed flown blown WebKit browsing ability, including a full blown WebKit app development tool with Dashcode.

Re: Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash?

coleman — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:58:35 -0000

good point, but iphone "apps" are more like mobile UIs for web services. i would imagine it wouldn't take much to port them.