WSJ.com - AOL Mulls Giving Away Service

In what would mark a dramatic shift in strategy, Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit is considering offering its entire menu of services, including email, free of charge to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection, people familiar with the matter said.

Under the proposal, which AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller presented to top Time Warner executives in New York last week, AOL would stop charging a subscription fee for users who already have a high-speed Internet service or dial-up service from another provider. Subscribers who have traditional “dial-up” Internet access through AOL would still have to pay their monthly fee of as much as $25.90. Nearly one third of AOL’s customer base of 18.6 million already has high-speed access — but the company expects that 8 million of its existing dial-up customers would cancel their subscription to take advantage of the new offer.

Yeah, I’d definitely call that dramatic. Problem is, I can’t fathom the need for another advertising-driven portal. I particularly can’t fathom that anyone who has switched from AOL dial-up to broadband wanting to come back to the relative joys of AOL. The only thing I can see is an inertial retention of their admittedly massive subscriber base. If you apply the 80/20 rule, they hang on to 80% of those people through ‘good enough’ unknowingness. That gives about 15MM. And they plan to lose 8MM paying subscribers, so that leaves 7MM paying $25 per month, or $2.1 Billion. And that means you need to sell, let’s see here, 12MM x $25 x 12 months = $3.6 billion dollars in ad revenue per year???

I have no earthly idea about generalized advertising dollars spent today. There could easily be enough of a pie to make those numbers work. But I’ll just say that I wouldn’t want my performance bonuses tied to it. To me, it looks like a loser.

Well, I didn’t go back to Dallas — couldn’t face the traffic. As the years spool out, I find I’m less, um, enrageable in traffic than I used to be, but I still don’t like it, and the next month is going to be a major patience-tester, anyway.

No, I re-upped some of my Web Hippie credentials, and started fooling around with Yahoo’s My Web2.0. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what that is, except for this: it seems to be a bookmark manager that is an amorphous cloud of tags. What are tags? Looks like they’re categories, to me. And each bookmark can have multiple tags, so I guess that’s an improvement over the old directory tree structure of most bookmark managers. And for my money, Yahoo’s Toolbar and the built-in bookmark manager is still the best ever. The tag cloud thingy, though, looks like it might be easier to manage for those one-shot pages. Now I just need to convince Yahoo to cache the Add to MyWeb code here on my laptop so it doesn’t take 30-60 seconds to tag a page. Right now, that’s what kills it as a usable, useful tool.

As a Blog Hippie, I’ve been less than awe-struck by the launch of the OSM/Pajamas Media bunch. One good editorial is here at Reid Stott’s place, and Arguing With Signposts has been the most intellectual coverage of the silly thing. In a nutshell, the original intent was to build an ad-serving engine that would compete with BlogAds (won’t you consider buying one from me today?) and gain some level of, hell, I don’t know, something that legitimizes blogs for or to somebody. At this point, I still don’t know what it is, except perhaps a backwater debate club of 70-someodd (down from 300-some0dd) high-traffic political blogs of, by and for eggheads. Needless to say, ***I*** was not invited to join, so, honestly, it’s legitimacy should be in question from the git-go. I mean, really.

As far as monetizing this vanity website phenomenon goes, the best luck I’ve had so far is because of my writing about my crappy poker playing. And, because I love playing cards and chattering about it, I’ve met more people that I would genuinely call friends from the poker community than I ever have from any other online web-hippie endeavour. I’ve even travelled to meet them, and I didn’t walk away from that weekend thinking “God, I will never want to do that again!”, which is the typical response to meat-space meetings of onine personas. And, because of poker, The Wife is involved, on the ground floor, with one of the most exciting New Media dealios that the rest of those clowns like PJM and Jeff Jarvis* are always typing and conferencing and panelling about.

All of which means probably nothing to any of you, right? That’s why I typed all this on Sunday, since nobody reads the interweb on Sunday. Unless you’re a Web Hippie or Blog Hippie.

* Who, by the way, still hasn’t bothered to re-publish his blogroll. Not that I got a lot of hits from Jarvis, but I got a few. No, it’s more the Jarvis Standardized Hypocrisy that ticks me off — all his non-stop blatherings of how the New Media is supposed to act, yet he can’t even get a blogroll going. Yes, it’s pure jealousy, as well — he gets big jobs and big money and big business for his alleged insight into how the blog-world works, but he doesn’t post a blogroll. Which, if you’re the cynical sort like me, should be an insight into how well the Old Media world will continue to take care of their own while flapping their gums over us’ns here at the Kiddie Table.

Well, I did it. I bought an iPod. I’m officially 20° cooler than you. Next up - I begin wearing woolen watch caps, getting tattoos, and putting metal in my face.

Typical CompUSA, too — “Wanna buy AppleCare?” “No.” Wanna buy AppleCare?” “No.” Wanna buy AppleCare?” click “Is that, like, a real gun or does it shoot pellets?” “Ask me again about that AppleCare and see.” No less than three people asked me to buy AppleCare. The comps must be out of this world for that.

Have a laptop hard-drive go semi-bad…just enough to keep you in desperate recovery mode for about six hours, until you throw in the towel and go buy a new one and start from scratch. Well, it’s bigger and it’s faster, so WTHeck?

As BlogLines continues to de-impress me, I get antsy to read about other server-side aggregators. Here’s one based on Ajax.

This would be a fun project: HOW-TO: Portable car pc

It’s got me thinking of ways to hack out a road-trip Tablet PC. I’ve got the laptop and OS already. The trick would be an external display that was Tablet-capable. Combined with the Verizon EV-DO card, I’d really be always-on.

Hang on. What am I thinking here? All I need is a power-supply and a secure ‘holder’ bracket (vibration-dampened) for the laptop itself. No, wait. Laptop LCD screens aren’t near bright enough to be used outdoors.

Yep, an external screen. Hack it into the stereo system, and you’ve got an iPod Super-Deluxe. Hack it into your VoIP provider and you’ve got instantaneous voice-mail (gawd, I hate voice mail) delivery.

Well, anyway…it’s a fun way to waste a few minutes, thinking about doing cool stuff like this. I think adding the EV-DO is the shizzle, though. To heck with having to find WiFi. Although, a seamless switcher app would be nice to have for those times when you do have it. Hmm…

NB: You have to love the Youth of America, too:

The “trunk”, which is a very short space between the back seat and the rear of the car, is just enough room for an 1800 watt car amp and dual 12” speaker box.

Gotta have priorities, you know…

Did it?

However, several enterprising hackers have figured out ways to bypass the security chip and run the developer’s version of MacOS for x86 on any x86-based PC, according to a posting on the Web site of the OSx86 Project. Posters on that site as well as other sites within the Mac community claim to have used the instructions to run Mac OS X on their Intel or AMD PCs, with some posting pictures and videos of x86 PCs booting Mac OS X.

I will have my FrankenMac.

Make Your Own Flame Thrower

Like any red-blooded, masculine man of the male gender, I love PVC weaponry. You should too. If the concept of heading on down to the local Home Depot and transforming $100 worth of random pipe bits into a killing machine doesn’t appeal to you, you’re a frikkin’ pansy. Also, you’re probably sane and will live significantly longer than I will. Nonetheless you disgust me, and I take comfort in the knowledge that your obituary will be nowhere near as humorous as mine. For those of you who laugh in the face of hypersonic shards of plastic puncturing your spleen, here’s an intimate look at how I’ve kept myself busy for the past week: building a PVC flamethrower.
If you’re not interested in the building process, skip to the bottom of the post for the fire.

Recommend that we all print this out and get busy, then have a flame-off in a couple of weeks. I didn’t buy this dumb scrubby-ass ranch just to harvest pecans and run a campground, you know.

Of particular interest is the “checking for leaks” photo — on the couch, inside the house, with the cat. Heh heh.

From Ace.

The dirt-stupid “free” municipal wi-fi cheerleaders are getting a charge from a Nicolas Kristoff column.

Now stop and think about this for a minute — they can’t fix the potholes, but they’re going to run hotspots?

Bottom line here: would you do anything more than post cat pictures over a network “owned” and operated by the government? You tell me what private information you want to flow over an infrastructure “owned” and operated by the high sheriffs. You tell me how much business you would conduct thru the Pipes of the People. You tell me if you’d ever even allow your laptop to connect to what will by necessity be a completely unsecured network.

Here’s another thought: free wi-fi is available at any number of businesses. Just this last week, I went into an Einstein Bros* and logged in to check mail. I bought a coffee and my podnah bought a sandwich. Where would that money go if it were free everywhere? Freaking commies…

From Kevin, who also points out the idiocy of asking taxpayers to fund this, which goes without saying to me.

* Yes, I was terrified that I was going to get hacked…I always am. The dweebs with laptops wearing toboggans who are generally skulking around those places could so easily be running packet sniffers. And so could the Generic Docker-bedecked White BusinessMan, like me. Look, I know this stuff inside and out. It’s one of the reasons I went with the EV-DO option. At the very least, I can sue the pants off of Verizon if my data gets into the wild because of a breach. Check the Terms of Services at those free wi-fi joints next time you login and see what your recourse is.

I now grok the whole RSS & BlogLines thing. The interface is so butt-ugly. you don’t want to spend your time surfing blogs. Yes, I’m back to trying out RSS, mainly to shut down the time-wasting. I’ve got a bad habit of wandering around and wasting valuable time.

I guess I’m one of the last guys on earth to appreciate good web design and how it’s applied to blogs, but I sure do. One of the enjoyable aspects of blogging, besides having the chance to tell everybody exactly how & why the cow eats the cabbage, is seeing how people fancy up their joints. RSS reduces all of that back to the old yellow-on-black TTY terminal look for every single thing on the internets (except it’s black-on-white, like an old Mac, but you dig what I mean if you’re old enough.)

Well, one good thing: it surely does lessen the desire to surf for a couple of hours.

Blech. iTunes on Windows really hoses up your wireless connection if you’re trying to access songs on a network server. And I mean, knocks it right for a loop, ass over teakettle. Two re-boots into this mess, and I think I’m just going to copy la musica over to a secondary hard drive that’s USB-attached. Wonder how iTunes will manage with that.

Perhaps I should just goat head and put them back on my laptop drive, eh? Sure, I’ve got time for all this. I’m just sitting here constructing fake-ass legalese (at practically 2100 CT) for a quote to a reseller that I’m wooing with all the fervor and delicacy of a bus station pimp…IANAL, but I play one occasionally to get the job done. My head of the first part hurts like an mule of the second part kicked it with a tightly-associated bodily appendage (hereinafter referred to as “a hoof.”)

MEATHEAD UPDATE: Turns out that I had already migrated everything over from the server to the lap top at some point for some reason. Don’t remember doing that. When are the lab-coated eggheads going to get my memory pills out the door? Scratch that — it makes life more interesting, having a mind like a colander. I feel sorry for everybody around me, though.

I can no longer call myself a programmer…not after seeing this — Pong, written in Ajax. Which, I believe is basically naught but javascript.

OK, go waste some hours of your life. And, Scotty boy…make the ball a little bigger for the old eyes out here.

ROFLMAO Line of the Day of the Week:
Yes Scott Chaffin, I know YOU can build a 5-buck PC in a cigar box, with parts scavenged from broken garage door-openers. But I mean, for the ordinary Joe who just needs a machine that works.

My machines do work, by the way…almost as well as that Macintosh, too.

I’ve got three or four websites I need to knock out and I’m looking for a host. Not a single one of the sites will have more than five pages, and will all probably be under 10mb per. It’s a very light network load for each, too, quite specialized and mainly being genned up to have a minimal web presence for the requestor. Again, nothing spectacular…no DBs, no e-commerce, no whoopdie-do Flash. Just info.

So, I’m not too hip on adding a fourth bidness (web hosting reseller + super-crappy designer) to the TFG empire, although I could go that way. No, what I’m mainly looking for is a place that will host MANY domains (10? 20?) for low-volume, nichey stuff for people who, and I quote, “haven’t even turned on the computer in six months.” As of now, GoDaddy’s $3.95 per month is the best bet, but even that seems high for what I’m talking about.

Step-by-step directions for fancy-pants redirection, with domain name propogation, to one of my already-existing domains would be fine, too. Hell, I’m a cheapskate.

Everybody reading this, stop and make an appropriate gesture of genuflection and mega-thanks towards Texas. The inventor of the microchip has passed:

DALLAS — Jack St. Clair Kilby died of cancer Monday at his home in Dallas almost 50 years after his idea for what is commonly known as the microchip revolutionized the way the world computes, calculates and communicates, ushering in the Information Age. He was 81.

His 1958 invention of the semiconductor shrank tons of complex circuitry to the size of a fingernail and enabled the development of personal computers, automated sprinklers, cellphones, microwave ovens and other staples of modern life.

What an amazing man. 60 patents, but he never bought a microwave (smart) and he still used a slide rule (genius). The whole article is under the Read the Rest button. I especially like this quote:

Unlike Noyce and Moore, Mr. Kilby never shared in the phenomenal wealth created by the microchip.
But, he said, “I don’t feel mistreated in any way. It’s not possible for one person to create a success like the integrated circuit. Many people are involved in that. Today, tens of thousands of people are still contributing to it.”

Hell of a guy, huh?

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