Halffull.org

Deet! Doot! Deet! Doot! Deet!

The following takes place between 10:00pm and 11:00pm.

Jack Bauer is driving down a dark road in Los Angeles at nighttime in a black SUV. It is very late. Despite it being the city of Los Angeles, there are no lights. Everything is very, very dark and ominous. He picks up his cell phone and makes sure you understand that it is Motorola or AT&T or something he can kick a terrorist’s ass with. Mashing a speed dial button with extreme urgency, he slams the phone up to his ear.

The urgency of the situation causes him to scream into the phone. “Chloe! It’s Jack!”

“Jack?” Chloe asks, annoyed. “Why are you shouting? I am indoors and you are in a luxurious 2007 bulletproof SUV and it’s totally quiet inside. With my sophisticated technology I can tell that you don’t even have the radio on.”

“What technology?” Jack shouts.

“I can’t tell you that. It’s classified. Need-to-know basis only, and you don’t need to know for this mission,” she says rather snottily. “So why are you shouting at me if you can hear my snideness so clearly?”

“I don’t know,” Jack rasps, still screaming into her ear.

“Well my ears are bleeding so I’m going to transfer you to Mr. Buchanan. Thanks a lot, jerk – I mean, Jack.”

“Chloe, wait! I need a throat lozenge, and for some reason I am gasping for breath as if I’ve just run a triathlon! Of course this makes no sense because I’ve been reclining in this very comfortable SUV for the past fifteen minutes. At any rate, I need you to triangulate my position and send a team to bring me some Ricola!”

Continue Reading »

Today’s review will cover an “interesting” article from Businessweek on the so-called Wal-Mart Effect. The author’s journalistic skill will be shamelessly torn down and mocked. Enjoy.

Essentially, he says that Wal-Mart’s pricing on a single flat-panel TV in the Christmas season has fundamentally and permanently changed the landscape of the electronics market as a whole. A no-name TV, specifically a 42″ Viore, was priced at $988. A similar Panasonic was priced at $1294. Other retailers couldn’t match these prices – or didn’t want to – as their prices had been nearly double that for some time.

Cleary, this was an evil act. I mean, come on, retailers are going out of business.

The fallout is evident: After closing 70 stores in February, Circuit City Stores on Mar. 28 laid off 3,400 employees and put its 800 Canadian stores on the block. Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, the high-end home entertainment store, is shuttering 49 of its 153 stores and dismissed 650 workers. Dallas-based CompUSA is closing 126 of its 229 stores, and regional retailer Rex Stores is boarding up dozens of outlets, as well as selling 94 of its 211 stores. [...] Circuit City shares have fallen 24%, to $18.76, since the end of November, when the price war started. In the same period, Tweeter’s shares declined 32%, to $1.72, near a 52-week low, and Best Buy’s stock is down 9%, to $48.73. Shares of Rex Stores have been flat, down 0.7%, to $16.98. [...] The carnage has one phrase written all over it: the “Wal-Mart effect.”

Continue Reading »

The world is going wireless. We’ve been seeing the trend for 20 years, and it’s really gained momentum in the last five. Not only do all new laptops have wifi built in, but many new desktop computers do as well. It’s getting difficult to find someone who doesn’t own a cell phone. Portable music players, such as the Zune, are getting interesting wireless capabilities. Home entertainment equipment is going wireless to prevent the mess of cables pictured over on the right. All new cars have wireless key fobs for easier entry. I could go on all day.

Not all wireless devices are a commercial success, of course. Remember the portable TVs of the 90’s? They were in every electronics store and usually had a 2″ screen. You never see one anymore. It’s because of the popularity of cable and satellite TV, and the unwillingness to settle for three channels. It is not because of the screen, I might note – geeks go crazy for tiny screens for the portability. I predict that we’ll see a resurgence of portable televisions, though in a different form. We’ll have television streamed onto portable media players through wifi or cellular broadband. And this brings us to the topic of this post.

Cellular broadband is the only commercially viable method of sending data wirelessly to the entire country. Public wifi networks only exist in a few major cities. Satellite is available, but not feasible due to cost and receiver size. Cellular networks such as EVDO and HSDPA are virtually nationwide, the new standards are coming soon, and the older EDGE and 1xRTT standards are available as fallbacks.

Think of what we could do with the cellular data networks in an ideal world. First of all, no cables. Your computers wouldn’t need network cables, your TV wouldn’t need a cable line, your online-capable video game systems wouldn’t even need a wireless router. Your cell phone or portable media player could be fully internet capable, not crippled like most current devices. Your car, house, and appliances could send you maintenance reports. You’d never lose a device again, because they’d all have GPS-like capabilities. You’d worry a lot less about stolen goods for the same reason. And these are just the basics.

So why isn’t cellular data more widespread? Because the cellular companies like their profits. Huge profits. Text messages are marked up 7314% from the data charge, and the data charge itself is marked up by an even larger percentage. The most basic data plan for a PDA from Cingular is $19.99/month for five megabytes. For comparison, I can download five megabytes at home in about five seconds, for a cost per megabyte of 0.007 cents. The first unlimited plan, not including any text or media messaging, is $44.99/month.

Quite frankly, it’s absurd, and I think it’s holding back technological progress. It seems to be another case of short-term thinking on the part of the business, and consumers lacking the information they need to make better decisions.

Maybe if more of the consumers knew they were paying a 285,571% markup for mobile data, they would have a word with their cell phone provider.

Halffull has been bought by Yahoo! They’ve ramped up their acquisition efforts, and they recognize the potential offered by our distributed humor platform. I’ll have a lot more information for you within a day or so, but for now, I have to tell you that I’m really excited. Not only will I get paid to write, but I’ll get to develop a lot of great technology that I’ve been thinking about for years. They’re even taking the object-oriented office concept seriously. Excellent news, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Continue Reading »