Monday, October 29, 2007
Hamilton moving out
In an recent interview Lewis Hamilton said that he is tired of all the paparazzi in UK so he is going to move to Switzerland... So this brings up a huge question for me and should for you as well. Is he really going there to escape paparazzi or he is going there for same reason M. Schumacher is living there? Simple fact that for foreigner income tax is set to only 2% - might have changed since last I looked into this but hey... Switzerland!!
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Harlem Gangstas...
So we just got... or about to get American Gangster which tell supposedly true story of a Harlem gangster and also there will be Mr. Untouchable that takes a look on roughly similar time period, yet I believe slightly later... but still the same story... seems like Hollywood is moving from Bronx mob to Harlem gangsters...
Thursday, October 25, 2007
next year seems to be good year for portable gaming...
Seems that in coming year laptop gaming is gonna heat up!
And Things might come sooner than expected. While ATI says that they are working on some great cards that will see the light in near future - mostly next year, the Inquirer reports that Nvidia is planing to bring out 8800M GTX before December. Article says that it will launch when Clevo will have notebooks ready, and as it is MXM module I sort of fell the pain for all those who bought new Dell 1730...
And Things might come sooner than expected. While ATI says that they are working on some great cards that will see the light in near future - mostly next year, the Inquirer reports that Nvidia is planing to bring out 8800M GTX before December. Article says that it will launch when Clevo will have notebooks ready, and as it is MXM module I sort of fell the pain for all those who bought new Dell 1730...
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Menace to ad revenue
Some time ago there were some reports such as one here, that called for blocking Firefox due to its adblock extension which leads to lost revenues.
While I do not intend to say anything about the adblock extension as such and argue why blocking Firefox is just stupid, I do intend to look at why the decision was irrational and nowhere near the solution to the problem.
It is important to distinguish that problem is not the adblock and that people use it to ignore ads but that ad generated revenues are going down. It would be natural to seek answers if you would see that your user base is growing however you revenue is not. This is exactly what has happened and I believe that adblock got all the blame for no reason - well... undeserved blame at least.
To see the true reason one has to look past browsers and into internet usage trends.
I should say that I read my fair share of blogs and news sites every day and more there are, harder it is to keep up whith which ones you have read already and which you still need to read. sometimes I just forgot about some and later had too many things to go through and I believe this in a way is a problem for many readers out there. One of the best solutions for this is using a feed reader. Most of the sites nowadays support some for of feeds so it is easy to switch to them and many people do so. I would not say that I personally have signed of for incredible amount of them but enough of then to see a connection prior mentioned problem.
I have not seen a single ad on a feed.
When I looked at my trends on in Google reader, I look at about 13% stories and I go the page even less - mostly for feeds that only give headlines as rest of the stories I read on the feed. So here we are - the ultimate threat to ad supported sites is its readers best friend - feed!
Another important aspect to look at is that even you have headline only feed (maybe with first paragraph) you still loose on people not opening main page and spending time on site to browse it rather than just read the story.
I was also weary impressed with Google reader as I have not seen any ads on it so far... impressive knowing that that is how they make money!!
While I do not intend to say anything about the adblock extension as such and argue why blocking Firefox is just stupid, I do intend to look at why the decision was irrational and nowhere near the solution to the problem.
It is important to distinguish that problem is not the adblock and that people use it to ignore ads but that ad generated revenues are going down. It would be natural to seek answers if you would see that your user base is growing however you revenue is not. This is exactly what has happened and I believe that adblock got all the blame for no reason - well... undeserved blame at least.
To see the true reason one has to look past browsers and into internet usage trends.
I should say that I read my fair share of blogs and news sites every day and more there are, harder it is to keep up whith which ones you have read already and which you still need to read. sometimes I just forgot about some and later had too many things to go through and I believe this in a way is a problem for many readers out there. One of the best solutions for this is using a feed reader. Most of the sites nowadays support some for of feeds so it is easy to switch to them and many people do so. I would not say that I personally have signed of for incredible amount of them but enough of then to see a connection prior mentioned problem.
I have not seen a single ad on a feed.
When I looked at my trends on in Google reader, I look at about 13% stories and I go the page even less - mostly for feeds that only give headlines as rest of the stories I read on the feed. So here we are - the ultimate threat to ad supported sites is its readers best friend - feed!
Another important aspect to look at is that even you have headline only feed (maybe with first paragraph) you still loose on people not opening main page and spending time on site to browse it rather than just read the story.
I was also weary impressed with Google reader as I have not seen any ads on it so far... impressive knowing that that is how they make money!!
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
We are not dead yet...
So BBC reports that mafia has a turnover of $120bn. Not really sure is that worldwide or just Italy, but those are some amazing numbers...
I thought in change of career coming....
I thought in change of career coming....
Monday, October 22, 2007
is iPod killing music sales?
The Inquirer has an interesting article about iPod killing industry. Although I did own a Walkman back in a day I can not agree with with writers opinion that Walkmans were so much better devices, even though he raises some good points.
One of which is:
"Sure, you could store a zillion albums on it, but you never will. Firstly you only possess a copy of Queen's Greatest Hits, The Best of Steps and James Blunt's Bluntastic! What are you going to store on the remaining 39.5GB of space?
Well. It's going to be stolen music, isn't it?"
Even though it has nothing to do with Walkman around which most of the article is based - this I believe is the best point he makes. Going by the estimates of my music collection an average album takes 75MB on my hard drive. so on an 80GB iPod or Zune you will be able to store round 1000 albums! That is very big number and if you bought 1 album a week it would take almost 20 years to get that kind of collection... legally at least.
Yes you might argue that large storage space can now be used for movies which have even less of a legal presence in digital market, or general storage or file transfers.
And even if you plan to use it as storage, what will you store on it? Sure it will be more media of some kind.
So in the end we have large amounts of storage on these devices with an urge to fill it up as soon as possible and for most people only way to do so is by illegal downloads that are easily available that legal options will have hard time catching up and competing with price.
On a little side note, iTunes Plus songs now going at same rate as normal ones should have come long time ago, not so much for DRM - free media but for being better quality and larger file sizes to help fill up those iPods with legal music and leave less room for P2P stuff...
One of which is:
"Sure, you could store a zillion albums on it, but you never will. Firstly you only possess a copy of Queen's Greatest Hits, The Best of Steps and James Blunt's Bluntastic! What are you going to store on the remaining 39.5GB of space?
Well. It's going to be stolen music, isn't it?"
Even though it has nothing to do with Walkman around which most of the article is based - this I believe is the best point he makes. Going by the estimates of my music collection an average album takes 75MB on my hard drive. so on an 80GB iPod or Zune you will be able to store round 1000 albums! That is very big number and if you bought 1 album a week it would take almost 20 years to get that kind of collection... legally at least.
Yes you might argue that large storage space can now be used for movies which have even less of a legal presence in digital market, or general storage or file transfers.
And even if you plan to use it as storage, what will you store on it? Sure it will be more media of some kind.
So in the end we have large amounts of storage on these devices with an urge to fill it up as soon as possible and for most people only way to do so is by illegal downloads that are easily available that legal options will have hard time catching up and competing with price.
On a little side note, iTunes Plus songs now going at same rate as normal ones should have come long time ago, not so much for DRM - free media but for being better quality and larger file sizes to help fill up those iPods with legal music and leave less room for P2P stuff...
Friday, October 19, 2007
Making names easy
Seems like both ATI and nVidia are being on same page in way that both have chosen to hopefully simplify their naming schemes...
While ATI has decided to to dedicate last two digits of name to signify performance, nVidia has gone different way by drastically changing it. If I got it correct than there won't be any 4digit codes any more but letter digit combination. will start of with D or NB - desktop/notebook - following by a digit to signify generation I suppose and one last letter at the end to signify segment - E for enthusiast, P for performance, M for mainstream and might be something for value as well..
Sources here and here
While ATI has decided to to dedicate last two digits of name to signify performance, nVidia has gone different way by drastically changing it. If I got it correct than there won't be any 4digit codes any more but letter digit combination. will start of with D or NB - desktop/notebook - following by a digit to signify generation I suppose and one last letter at the end to signify segment - E for enthusiast, P for performance, M for mainstream and might be something for value as well..
Sources here and here
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