12663240
submission
gjt writes:
I awoke this morning to see TechCrunch's MG Siegler post what appeared to be the first news of Froyo's availability. I frantically went to my phone's settings and tried to check for an update -oe but no luck. Then I went to xda-developers.com and sure enough there was a very long thread (now over 132 pages) of fellow eager beavers waiting for release (and trying to figure out how to get it). Several hours went by waiting for a semi-technical user to get the update and check the Android logs for the download location. It turns out you can get it straight from Google. With the information scattered around in different places I decided to consolidate the How-To into a single post over here.
10727382
submission
gjt writes:
When Intel and OCZ recently announced new "affordable" Solid State Disk drives — offering a meager 32-40GB — we initially yawned. But, then we took a closer look at the press releases and the in-progress research and development in SSD technology and opened our eyes. While the new drives aren't affordable on a cost per gigabyte basis for everyone, it does set a precedent — and most importantly a barometer price of $100. And it really does start the death clock for hard drive technology.
9947614
submission
gjt writes:
For the couch potato geek, one name typically comes to mind: TiVo — the company that invented the DVR, and with it, timeshifting. TiVo's been around for more than 10 years now. And TiVo fans (like myself) tend to love TiVO. Yet, despite being loved and around longer than the Apple iPod, it comes no where close to the iPod/iPhone's success. Apple sells more iPod and iPhone products in a single quarter than TiVo has sole in the entire lifetime of the company. At it's peak, TiVo had only 4.4 million active users — that was over three years ago. Now TiVo only has about 2.7 million active users. So I wanted to find out why TiVo hasn't been more successful. What are the issues that prevent them from being more popular — especially with a seeming lack of competition on store shelves? So I did some research and posted my finding about TiVo's past, present, and future up on my blog.
The key takeaways seem to show that TiVo is a victim of cable industry collusion, loopholes in FCC regulations, and, of course, plenty of their own mistakes.
9301390
submission
gjt writes:
I initially posted a story ragging on the Nexus One. But then a commenter pointed out a problem with my initial logic. I investigated the commenter's thoughts. After doing some math, I concluded that the $529 unlocked/unsubsidized Google Nexus One gPhone is much cheaper than it appears to be. In fact it's only $49 when you do the math — and that's unlocked! Google likes to say that the Nexus One represents "Our new approach to buying a mobile phone". But it actually seems as though T-Mobile deserves most of the credit by providing a $20/month discount to customers who purchase an unsubsidized phone — which for some reason didn't seem to get much attention when T-Mobile created the new plan back in October 2009.
