Charbax

Blockbuster: Backwards, Again

The difference is that little Archos player holds 200 DVD quality movies or 60 HD quality movies. This download kiosk synchronizes your Wish List at 480mbit/s and can have hundreds of terrabytes of movies and TV shows to choose from. All of the 80-thousand films and TV shows will be free and included with this $10 or $20 Blockbuster total access subscription, which by the way provides the 160GB Archos and TV-output docking station for free to the customer.

DivX: Shut Down of Stage6 Portal Is for the Best

You are so wrong. Stage6 had huge traffic, over 400 million hits per month, over 1 million dollars per month in bandwidth costs, Stage6 had the same bandwidth cost as Youtube had when they were bought by Google.

I just expect DivX will keep a safe backup of all the DVD and HD quality content that Stage6 users have uploaded during the past years, cause I am sure that content can be monetized.

And DivX should have implemented analogic fingerprinting filtering mechanism to filter out pirated content.

Intel vs. Negroponte: Debating Implementation Of The One Laptop Per Child Project

Intel does not like the idea at all of cheap laptops, that's the whole point.

Intel and Microsoft's whole business plan is to keep prices of computers and software high, that's how they make huge profits for each PC that is sold, and so do the resellers, thus resellers also prefer Intel and Microsoft's business plan.

What OLPC is doing is to discard all marketing and distribution costs, open up the software with Linux, optimize the software OS to work on cheapest possible hardware available today, this OLPC XO-1 computer has got nothing at all to do with the Intel Classmate computer. Intel's "low cost" computer is nothing else than a normal laptop, made smaller so it looks like the OLPC XO-1, uses a conventionnal expoensive 7" LCD screen, nothing revolutionary about power managment since the Intel Classmate needs a cooler, has a normal laptop battery life of about 2 hours with heavy use. The only effort Intel did was to use a 2GB flash memory instead of a 20GB hard disk drive, which only takes down the price with about 30$ and only slightly reduces the power consumption.

OLPC XO-1 on the other hand turns off the main AMD Geode processor 99% of the time when users are using applications where the processor is not needed, that is a revolution called the DCON chip, reduces power consumption immensely, also the screen of the XO-1 is revolutionary, consume 1/6th of the power of Intel's Classmate LCD in full backlight mode even though XO-1's screen is larger and has a much better resolution, and consumes about 50 times less power than Intel's LCD when in black and white reflective mode, which you should just try and see for yourself, black and white reflective mode is incredibly readable especially for e-books, it's nearly as good as e-paper. OLPC XO-1 has 12 hours battery life when in backlight mode with heavy use, 24 hour battery life in e-book black and white high resolution mode and 6 days battery life in suspended mode with faster than 1-second resume into Linux and with the Wi-Fi Mesh turned on all of those 6 days forwarding packets for the surrounding OLPC XO-1s in use!

The BOM Bill Of Material for the Intel Classmate is closer to $400 than it is of $200. Intel is simply lying about their cost. The way Intel proceeds is they send their lobbyists at the same governments where Nicholas Negroponte has been talking, when Intel says is they shouldn't buy a million laptops with Negroponte at $176 each, they should buy 10 thousand units from Intel at $180 each. What Intel is suggesting is that the countries shouldn't mass produce any low cost laptop, they should first spend a few years testing those crappy Intel ones to see if low cost laptops are of any use for the children in developping countries. Since Intel ones are so crappy, Intel's Classmate project will thus fail and Intel and Microsoft can continue basing their whole business model and income through expensive, bloated, steaming power consuming, uselessly powerfull for 95% of consumers use which is just using a Browser, a few videos, music and word processing.

Basically Intel is not doing fair competition, what they are doing is dumping the price of their crappy laptop, trying to convince governments not to order large amounts (which would cost Intel too much if the price is dumped), basically Intel is desperate to stop whatever computing revolution that OLPC XO-1 will initiate once more than 3 million units will be deployed all over the world starting in September.