Alan Gerow 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (522) comment rss

  • On the post: Air Force PS3 Supercomputer Screwed By Sony Killing Off Linux Support

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 14 May, 2010 @ 11:53am

    Re:

    It doesn't need to be supported ... just left alone.

  • On the post: Tipping Point? Quarter Of All Homes Have Totally Abandoned Landlines

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 13 May, 2010 @ 03:16pm

    Haven't had a landline in 7 years. Usually people want to talk to me or my fiancé, not our house, so they call one of our cell phones.

    Though Google Voice and VoIP solutions provide more than enough options should a need ever arise where we need a general purpose number or line.

    The shocker is my finance's father and my mother are both looking at ditching their landlines for cell & VoIP solutions, which says to me the trend is just starting to break out of the younger demographics and hit mainstream. The percentage of people without landlines will only grow faster.

  • On the post: Cop-Rating Website Is Protected By The First Amendment

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 06 May, 2010 @ 12:12pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Senshikaze

    "there will be many more good cops (or at the very least not-bad) that will be reported as bad."

    And you know this WILL happen how?

  • On the post: Apple Sued For Patent Infringement Over One Of The Broadest Patents You'll Ever See

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 05 May, 2010 @ 12:48pm

    Re: Re: Re: Careful

    Citation for what? Making a logically inverse statement?

  • On the post: Apple To Face Antitrust Investigation Over Its iPhone Development Policies?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 03 May, 2010 @ 03:57pm

    Re: Oy

    But, this is a question of implementation, not platform.

    You can write a crap app using Apple's tools, or you can write an awesome app that does incorporate iPhone/iPad specific interfaces & features without using Apple's toolkit.

    It's a form of discrimination to blanket say "all apps written using X platform suck, and only apps written with OUR SDK are good" ... because it's placing a value on quality without looking at the content. It's similar to saying "no immigrants should be allowed in the US because none of them speak English well and they all smell like weird food, because only people born in America speak English well and smell good."

    Essentially, if all the Adobe compiled apps are of unacceptable quality, isn't that what the insanely restrictive app reviewers are for?!? Why not allow the GOOD apps written using Adobe's products in, and deny the crap ones. Why do they just do a blanket ban?

    Oh, that's right ... Apple's SDK only runs on Macs. So, if you want to write iPhone/iPad apps, you have to pay money to Apple for one of their computers first.

  • On the post: Apple To Face Antitrust Investigation Over Its iPhone Development Policies?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 03 May, 2010 @ 03:50pm

    Re: nothing to see here...

    And can you explain why it's no different?

  • On the post: Victim Of Domestic Abuse Sues GPS Company For Helping Her Assailant

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 03 May, 2010 @ 12:05pm

    Re: Re: If you want to make something criminal...

    While I do believe in self-reliance and self-defense, I don't agree with the sentiments of the original poster to the extent he does in culpability. That aside, I think your tossing around babies (which is fun) is missing the point he was trying to make.

    Children are not legally considered adults, and are under the care & supervision of someone else. So, in essence, it's the parents that are responsible for providing safety to the child. The child is not responsible for providing its own safety in the same regard.

    Police generally aren't a reliable service to prevent crime against someone. They are a service to find those responsible and bring them to courts. So, placing your faith in the police for protection is idiotic. You are responsible first and foremost for your own safety, and a parent is responsible for the safety of their child. The police are simply clean-up, not prevention. What do you think the likelihood a police officer is going to happen to be on the dark street a woman is who is getting mugged is on, or could get there in time to stop the crime? They may help find the mugger and prevent future crimes, but to that person on that street that night, the police won't help her from become a victim ... but a gun or karate could have. She's not responsible for what happened to her, the mugger is 100%, but she also didn't take many steps to preserve her own safety other than to sign off and let someone else take care of that for her. It's better to be alive than it is to be right (that's my core driving rule ... when in doubt, yield right-of-way, it's better to be alive than right).

    A baby technically DOES have bodyguards, and they generally call them mom & dad.

  • On the post: Apple Needs To Offer More, Less Porn, Depending Who You Ask

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2010 @ 12:33pm

    Re:

    You have that backwards.

    They don't allow apps and then only let them in after they receive complaints. It's part of the Official App Store Business Plan:

    1. Develop App
    2. Get App Rejected
    3. Get Media Outrage Over Rejection
    4. Get In App Store
    5. ???
    6. Profits

    The questionable apps in there were probably approved that day they had that temp in who hadn't completed his Apple Brainwash Training Program yet. He ended up using common sense instead of following Rule Number One of the App Store Approval Guidelines Document: "1. Reject App for Questionable Material".

  • On the post: Is Yahoo's CEO Really In A Position To Tell Google What It Needs To Do?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2010 @ 10:16am

    Re: If only...

    Maybe it's because Google took all of their search money, so they HAD to find money elsewhere. I think the other half of their business income comes from selling their souls.

  • On the post: Is Yahoo's CEO Really In A Position To Tell Google What It Needs To Do?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2010 @ 10:13am

    Re: Re: Re:

    With butt-targeted ads. :)

  • On the post: Is Yahoo's CEO Really In A Position To Tell Google What It Needs To Do?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2010 @ 10:12am

    Re: Profit Averse Culture

    The difference is Yahoo did all these things and tried to pull it all together and force users into using Yahoo's services. I stopped using Yahoo after the one of the home page redesigns in the early '00s when it took forever to load about 300 different bits of information just so I could search for "funny pictures of cats".

    Google's search page is clean for search. And you can navigate between services. They don't try to mash everything in front of you at once to show they're trying to be everything to everyone (unless you use iGoogle, but then it's 100% customizable for how clean or cluttered you want it). Google knows you're there for search to go somewhere else ... Yahoo tried to get you to stay instead.

    Google may be overextending, and some of their experiments fail, some fail miserably, but they don't sacrifice their core features to help their failing experiments as much as Yahoo did.

    I haven't visited Yahoo in about 6-8 years, so maybe they've changed, but I will ever remember Yahoo as the one stop shop to get everything and need nothing. Whereas Google's home page is nearly as clean and easy to use as the day I did my first search.

  • On the post: Is Yahoo's CEO Really In A Position To Tell Google What It Needs To Do?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2010 @ 10:05am

    Re: Re:

    And I hear they have this web browser called Chrome that a couple people are using, and are developing a similarly named OS for disposable netbooks.

    They may even own a video site that some people use called YouTube or something. But I haven't heard much about that site in a while. Do people still use it?

    My phone has Google written across the back of it for some reason. I don't know why, maybe my phone is made of silly putty and someone put it to the computer screen.

    Google really needs to do more than just have a single search page. They're never going to be bigger than Yahoo at this rate.

  • On the post: Is Yahoo's CEO Really In A Position To Tell Google What It Needs To Do?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2010 @ 09:58am

    "As for "growing a company the size of Yahoo every year," that becomes easier and easier as Yahoo gets smaller and smaller."

    Ouch.

  • On the post: Is Yahoo's CEO Really In A Position To Tell Google What It Needs To Do?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2010 @ 09:54am

    Re:

    You're right, everyone has forgotten about it.

  • On the post: Avatar Sees Theater Attendance Bump After DVD Release

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 26 Apr, 2010 @ 11:49am

    Re: Question:

    Avatar isn't playing in 3D in theaters anymore. Most 3D theaters are now showing How To Train Your Dragon on their 3D screens, showing Avatar in 2D.

    So the 3D aspect of the film is not a contributing factor to the bump in attendance.

  • On the post: Is Hulu About To Find Out That There's Always Somewhere Else To Get Content Online?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2010 @ 04:05pm

    Re: Re: Um...

    When you're paying for Cable TV, you're really paying for the access, not the content. In other words, you aren't paying SpikeTV with your Cable subscription, you're paying Comcast/Cox/whoever. SpikeTV has to pay their bills with ads. The service & content are separate, you pay for one, and advertisers pay for the other.

    Same with Internet access. Techdirt doesn't get a cut of my Comcast Internet bill.

    But, with Hulu, you're paying for content, and as such that content should be free of ads. Either ads pay for the content, or my subscription does.

    What you should really compare it to is newspapers, where you pay for the paper and still have to flip past pages and pages of ads. But, you see how well the newspaper industry is doing these days.

  • On the post: Google: Hate Competition? Come Compete On Our Fiber Network

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2010 @ 03:56pm

    Re: CRAP - THIS WAS MY IDEA

    "let the city run the network like they do the roads"

    So broadband access will be down most nights, littered with lost packets, and customer service that would put Google's Nexus One roll out into Top Tier status.

    I hate Comcast, but I trust them to run a network more than a bunch of bureaucrats who barely show enough understanding of the Internet to send an e-mail, let alone construct a competent network IT staff.

  • On the post: Is Hulu About To Find Out That There's Always Somewhere Else To Get Content Online?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2010 @ 08:43am

    The most entertaining bit is that the $10 subscription only counts for FOX, NBC, and CBS shows. Hulu is releasing an iPad app, while CBS has already released an iPad app that gives away all of their shows for free.

    So, 1/3 of the content behind Hulu's proposed paywall is already being given away for free, legally.

    So really, you're paying $10/month to get old shows from FOX & NBC.

  • On the post: Dish Network Lies About Having 200 HD Channels, Hopes Nobody Notices

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 22 Apr, 2010 @ 01:28pm

    Re: I avoid the controversy

    Good ol' Channel Input-1. My favorite channel!

  • On the post: If Flat-Rate Mobile Data Plans Are So Bad, Why Do Operators Keep Launching New Ones?

    Alan Gerow ( profile ), 22 Apr, 2010 @ 01:25pm

    Another point to consider is that a large majority of the iPad subscribers also own iPhones. So, some logic could attribute data usage from an iPhone owner over 3G will go down being replaced by the iPad. So, they'll get the users to pay for the data usage by getting them to spread it over several devices with separate data plans hoping the data usage on any single device will go down.

    Instead of 1 $70/month iPhone data account using all 3G data ... it's 2 devices at $70+30/month (iPhone + iPad) ... with a calculated hope that it won't increase overall data usage, but transfer some from one account to another.

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