Where’s my Jelly Bean update for the Galaxy Nexus LTE for VZW, Verizon Wireless? If Sprint can put it out already… You really need to get rid of whoever is in charge of your devices and hire someone who gets it. It’s a silly thing in retrospect, but I’m about this close to jump ship with my carrier next upgrade cycle.
Category Archives: Ranting
Penny Arcade’s Ad-free Kickstarter
I have my 2c on this, just scribbling it down here.
First off, I do write and work part-time for this organization that makes its living posting news and articles on the internet and getting money from ads. I also haven’t gotten paid in a while, partly because I know they’re just not making money this way, but also my contribution is pretty small that the intangible benefits of writing for them keeps me happy enough. And even if they paid me we’re looking at no more than $40/month.
Penny Arcade used to be a simple web comic. It expanded to sell merch and then it did other content production stuff like their Report and PATV stuff, plus the two large cons. It also sold ads. So I kind of know how it goes, especially if they keep 14 people on full-time.
The breaking news today is that they’re trying to get a year’s worth of funding so they will not have to rely on advertising on parts of their operation in order to pay the bills. What readers get is more open participation of the PA team as they won’t have to deal with advertisers as much, they won’t see as much ads on their site, and maybe some other intangible benefits.
As they have pointed out in their own spiel on the matter, a lot of it is motivated by their desire to stay away from the marketing money, and its influences. I can say for sure that is a real thing and I appreciate that notion as someone who just had to talk to a bunch of people who want to pitch products and services so I can write about them.
The rest is just posturing. I can see the act, when stripped all emotional appeals and boiled down to a list of positives and negatives, as one that simply asks for its readership money to provide a service, versus asking the reader to read ads and get the money from the advertisers.
I believe the way PA is headed, getting money as a form of donation makes sense. But it’s clearly because they can make money from ads that they are spurning them in order to detach themselves from the downsides of having to rely on ad money. That is the rub–how does that translate to tangible benefit for the readership? I don’t think it is a simple question with simple answers.
For one, entire agencies and systems were set up to disguise this relationship–the one between press and advertisers–as neutral. As something we can ignore. Would we have faith in our newspapers and news sites and news programs if they would provide a significantly better service if they didn’t have to do any advertising? The reality is that the gap is not as big as we posit it to be. Or else everyone would only watch NPR. A collective $250k to a -million dollars among all of PA’s readership, maybe, maybe not. I don’t know if that’s a lot of money given their relatively large readership. Does NPR do a significantly better job of reporting the news than, say, NYT? Or CNN? Maybe, maybe not.
And I think news is the most troublesome category. Game review and game culture web comic artists are way down the list from there.
Then there’s the matter of Kickstarter. It’s not cool to beg for money on Kickstarter even if everyone does this. And essentially taking a donation on KS is not allowed, it’s in their guideline. Of course you can also just turn it around and say that they’re not exactly taking a donation but setting up a project where they can get off of ad money. The term is 1 year at a time and the tangible benefits are the things listed on their KS page. Some of these benefits are lame, but others are pretty cool as far as pledge goals go. $2000 for a 5-year all PAX pass is almost worth it. Dedicated comic strip or drawing are par for the course. Lunch dates with these guys are like, the opposite of enjo kosai or whatever. I mean, really? It’s what AX auctioneers would call “bragging rights” and is not of notable value in the raw. Unless they take you to some hardcore awesome Seattle place for foods.
I guess the rub is ultimately: how hard are they selling themselves out? I think it’s one of those weird cases where while it is way beneficial to have a free, ad-supported service, that in order to go back to the patronage model they need to sell way harder than they are now. Does Tycho and Gabe et al., realizes this? Because their readership and most people certainly do not.
Further reading:
Tycho on patronage (scroll down, or see what I’ve written)
PS. More details about the Kickstarter side of the issue can be found at Kotaku. Basically KS has already given Robert their blessing before the project went public, so yeah. We know Kickstarter doesn’t strictly play by their own guidelines anyway.
The Point to Retina Display
When someone says “I don’t see the point to Retina Display” on the internet I laugh, because they are obviously right: They are blind, which is why they can’t see.
I guess maybe I’m just nerd enough to be close enough to the PC hardware industry, but the display was one of those patented bottleneck in today’s PC computing. And let me explain why.
The chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
For the longest time, the biggest bottleneck for casual PC use was the storage–this is what the SSD revolution has freed us from. There were plenty of proponents against the SSD switch, and they have solid and factual basis to say so. But I’m not sure if they are motivated by the right reasons. A lot of people balk at the cost of it; the PC industry generally lives on the skin on its back; this is why we can score cheap laptops over the holidays at bargain prices. This is why there’s that perceived “Mac Tax” and it’s a very real thing. And until just very recently, SSDs cost a lot of money, and for fairly little space. What it trades is insanely fast read and really, really fast writes.
A decade ago I was already lamenting about both the storage and display problems, and you can see the result of that in the $2400 ultraportable I bought back in 2004 (Fujitsu P7010D, 2004). It had a very sharp and brilliant screen, and sure it was not even WXGA big, it kicked the butt of most laptop screens. I blew bigger bucks on a HDD upgrade so I get the fastest thing on the market, even if all I had was 60gb. This is in the nascent days of SATA so this laptop was still all PATA. As an concept that laptop still kicked ass; if it had a i3 and a SATA drive today it would still kick ass, but by processing standards my Galaxy Nexus is faster than that now. But it had a screen that kicked the butt off of most netbooks that came in the later parts of 2000s.
PC desktops tended not to have this problem. For decades we have big and powerful monitors. I still remember my first “good” monitor, it rocked 1600 x 1200 and weighted like a ton at only just 21 inches diagonally. Come to think of it, that’s some pretty high resolution even by last year’s standard. If that thing was in retail, it would have asked for over a thousand bucks.
A few of my friends are proud owners of those 30″ Dell Ultrasharp 2560 x 1600 displays. History-wise, this was well into the LCD era where IPS screens have matured enough for all-purpose use. Sure, it still cost roughly a thousand bucks in 2012, but it’s hard to beat on color accuracy and quality. But my friends don’t rock quad SLI mega-boosted desktop configs; just humble i7s and what not; stuff that can be put together at around the same price as the monitors. To me, and I agree with them, that as far as the human experience on personal computing goes, the display is a huge bottleneck, warranting paying this sort of price (assuming you can afford it).
The SSD story is similar to the evolution of high definition displays; for too long consumers and PC manufaturers treated storage as a size thing, and not a speed thing. Anyone with a real background in computer engineering knows otherwise. If you have powerful i7 CPUs and a ton of RAM, even if you got some massive next-gen graphics solution in SLI/Crossfire, it means nothing if you are outputting on the cheapest TN display you can find on Black Friday or running your apps on a 5000RPM platter mule. In fact, it’s kind of a waste.
[Updated: I forgot one more big obvious clue.] Back in the early 2000s the best drives you could’ve gotten were these 5yo SCSI drives (because used SCSI drives were at least priced similarly). When old PC technology (arguably SCSI drives were) were better than today’s technology, you know you’re looking at something that has fallen into a hole; an opportunity for revolution. SSDs were just that. It wasn’t because platter disks were hitting that limit (although they are now, for various reasons) but because the impetus in market was for size, not speed. Granted we did get better drives and faster, quiet, and power-efficient units, it lacks the huge jump that the rest of the silicon technology was going at. Now, think back to my 1600 x 1200 CRT monitor–how old is that thing? How come we are only coming up to that level of tech 10+ years later? I don’t know.
That is the beauty in the way Apple has designed its hardware. And by beauty I mean cunning business savvy focused on the user experience, being able to charge the big bucks on a nice experience, but offering the least expensive component possible while delivering that experience. Maybe that’s okay, but it stings my nerd-based sense of value. This is why I laugh at first-gen MBAs despite they are close to my ideal form/format, because a C2D is painfully outdated by 2009 standards, and why the MacPro will continue to lament in its state of yesteryear even after the recent refresh.
But it’s a good thing. The MBA is close to my ideal laptop, so if they stick to the line they will eventually get better. The main problem the MBA had was that it had a crap screen. The second problem was it rocked Intel’s embedded video solution, which is much better in 2012 but was woefully inadequate even just in 2011. I wanted real GPU muscle if I’m going to lay down over a grand of greenbacks, and so should you. I know how much my component is worth. And the user experience of playing Starcraft 2 on Intel HD3000 is not going to cut it. The mandatory Nvidia 650M on the Retina MBPs testify that it is the next bottleneck, after you get your phat display going. Screw this Intel nonsense (at least for now).
To cut to the chase: the Retina Display moniker is just a marketing scheme. The point is that quality display on laptops is a sorely needed thing. If you took a survey of laptops out there in Q1 2012, they’re just list of spec sheets, and DPI or image quality is not on them. (IPS is, funnily enough.) Consumers are not educated in terms of what it means on a scale of marketing quality (Intel spent $$$$ back during its Netburst days to teach people that high clock is good, just for example). The low margins mean it’ll make a hard sell to put good displays on monitors because consumers are not educated enough to realize those things are worth the extra money. These ultrabooks all rocked either terrible screens or mediocre at best. Nobody had discrete graphics (and I don’t count those Sony Z’s).
But I do count Sony. They’re the only real player in quality display on the consumer laptop market, at least until Apple hit it out of the park with its Retina MBP. Everyone else is pretty much behind. Maybe Lenovo has a corporate solution. And worse of all, other than the Z series, nobody has a quality screen below the 13.1″ line.
But that makes it easy to predict the future, here–11″ or 13″ “Retina Display” are definitely something on the horizon, and hopefully it will something Apple holds no monopoly over. Sony Z’s need to get real discrete graphics, not in the form of a dock. The 15″ MBP has only real one flaw: it’s 15″. Give me 13″ or less and it will be 99.9% perfect. Give me also built-in gigabit port then it’ll hit 100%.
Achievements
Congrats to bonnie & scott!
Congrats to joyce & jason!
Congrats to uh, me for going to a con just for a fan panel!
Perhaps one of the most busy weekend in my life, I was still able to write a blog post /3 days.
Didn’t really watch anime though. God my backlog. Skipping 4 days (thurs-sun) means basically skipping 90% of the anime airing that week, it is how bad it is this season.
Both weddings were relatively well done. I have to say joyce/jason’s wedding was strung up in merely 4 months and the end result exceeded expectations. A job well done by the girl who, at one point, wanted to manage weddings for a living.
Job well done even for Grandma, who is possibly on her last legs but still made it out in classic style to both the outdoors ceremony and the reception dinner!
Wang vs. Chen
I kind of want to catch some baseball this season for all the Asian sensation!
The newly acquired gun from Japan, Wei-Yin Chen, is pitching to a 2.4something ERA for the resurging Orioles. I’m slated to catch a day game at Camden Yards later this summer, but I want to point out the potential Taiwanese match-up during interleague play later this year, now that Chien-Ming Wang is kind of healthy, and is doing well in his rehab start.
Interleague play for Nats and Orioles conclude in the series on 6/22 to 6/24 at Camden Yards. Man, I’d hit up one of those games that weekend if this match is to happen. And wear some NYY Wang crap to the game. LOL. Anyway, it would be fitting and lightly ironic if Wang gets a win in that series, considering how it came to be when he first got hurt during that fateful interleague game back in the 2008 season.
I DVR’d the Darvish vs. Kuroda game already, that one is pretty sweet. And goes to show how rare this kind of matchup is. I think given how they are AL/NL teams, that they’re “neighboring” teams is the only blessing in an otherwise impossible-to-match situation. Well, the Rangers do play the Yankees quite a few times over the season so I guess that is unavoidable. Hopefully we’ll get to see a good Kuroda vs. Chen game as well as a Chen vs. Darvish match.
All these AZN pitchers are not letting their brothers down, at least.