Posts by Paul:
“It’s only $349″
I’ve become a pretty big fan of Leo LaPorte’s various podcasts. They’re funny and informative and make me feel like I’m not surrounded by people for whom light bulbs are a sinful decadence.
But when it comes time for their recommendations, I feel like a country bumpkin. Recent Leo and Steve Gibson were talking about the new Sony Reader and Leo said that it only costs $349. Only $349? That’s half my weekly salary!
I think that a lot of the folks out in Silicon Valley and, to a lesser extent, New York City have a distorted perspective as to what is affordable. In a place where a house like mine can cost five times what I paid for it, the idea that $349 for a version 1.0 eBook reader is a good deal is probably correct. If you’re paying $2500 a month or more for your mortgage, that probably is a good deal. (And if you’re making, as you should be, four times your mortgage payment every month, it’s definitely a good deal.) And judging by what the folks on MacBreak Weekly or TWiT are saying, they’ve got tons of money to throw around, buying Quad Core Mac Pros with dual 30″ monitors and $600 BluRay players and $400 gaming systems to go with their $2,000 HDTVs. (And if it sounds like I’m jealous, you’re right. You wouldn’t like to be able to afford things like that?)
But for most of the rest of the country, where the cost of living is significantly lower, $349 is a pretty big chunk of change. I’d have to spend a few months saving to be able to afford a Sony eBook reader, so I don’t want to buy one until it’s compelling enough to make it worth it. And before that, there’s a bunch of other things I’d rather buy. I still haven’t picked up a 250GB hard drive to do backups, and my Powerbook is starting to feel its age. (And it also doesn’t stay closed.) So I don’t think I’ll ever have an eBook reader, at least not Sony’s.
So to any tech columnist who might read this; I understand that you’ve got tons of money because you’re a super duper tech writer. But realize that not everybody is a super duper tech writer or a Web 2.0 millionaire. Some of us are still poor schlubs pounding keyboards and paying mortgages.
(Hey, maybe there’s a niche out there for a “Penniless Geek” column. I’m not going to say that would make a good domain name, because I want to avoid the quantum domain name effect.)
Twitter^W Twittr
I signed up for Twitter, cause I’m totally Web 2.0 and because I didn’t want anyone to take my handle. As I was adding all the celebrities that are on Twitter, I got a couple errors. They. Use. Cat. Pictures. Nothing makes an error better than a little kitty feeling bad for losing my files. [...]
Data Centers: Moving to Iceland
According to Treehugger, companies like Cisco and Microsoft are, get this, moving their data to Iceland! I’m totally ahead of the curve. Who knows, maybe I’ll get to sell my domain name for a couple thousand bucks.
Power Generation
I’m not an anti-nuke freak. In fact, I think they’re necessary for human expansion into space. Out past Jupiter, there’s really no other way to generate power economically. And on a kW/kg basis, nuclear is the densest power source we’ve got. This isn’t to say, however, that we should be using nuclear power here on [...]
The AppleTV’s Potential
Merlin Mann says: The problem, as many folks have discussed at length, is that the file size for HD movies, in particular, may be prohibitively large for the garden-variety home broadband user. Storage isn’t a problem anymore. I just saw a 500GB USB drive for $140. Since the AppleTV isn’t meant to store this stuff [...]
Spring as Speaker
I just came across this hard drive/spring speaker on the Make: blog. What it apparently does is use a hard drive controller to wiggle a spring to make sounds. It’s deceptively simple, but incredibly useful. In places like stadiums and airports, loudspeaker systems don’t really work well. Depending on your location they can be either [...]
Seen on the Internets #6
via Slashdot: I don’t live in California for a reason (not the least of which their four seasons are Wildfire, Mudslide, Earthquake, and Smog). I guess JC was wrong when he says the weather doesn’t change!
MySpace as Wal*Mart
In the latest episode of The Merlin Show, Peter Hughes from the band The Mountain Goats said something I thought was pretty accurate: MySpace is the Wal*Mart of social networking sites. Anybody who knows anything about web apps can appreciate that.
Seen on the Internets #5
There was a discussion on Slashdot about Vista and how it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. I replied: And what I’ve found with Windows is that people take that pig and say “Well, it works well enough, and all the clothes I bought for it fit, so I don’t think I should switch over [...]