Technology

Steve’s Kill Your Cable Adventure

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In late 2011/early 2012 Steve decided to see if he and his household could go without cable, and documented his experiences.  The roundup is below!

Kill Your Cable and Habit – The post that started it all, as Steve speculates if he really needs cable.

  1. The Device Experience And Discussion – Steve’s initial plans to try Killing Your Cable lead him to think over the technology and issues of the post-cable world.
  2. In-Depth Psychology and Stuff – Steve looks at the psychology of planning to – and trying to – Kill Your Cable.
  3. Oh, Wait – Steve finds Killing Your Cable requires you to rethink and evaluate a few things.
  4. Into The Abyss – With his roommate out, Steve tries going without cable and shares his findings.
  5. Finding The Off Switch – Steve and his roommate make the decision to kill their cable, and he reviews his findings.
  6. Not With A Bang, But A Spare $90 – Steve finally cuts the cord and finds there’s no revolution to be had.

– Steven Savage

More Cuts At AOL

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You can get the skinny here.  It’s 100 employees being laid off.

What’s most interesting are the cuts to super-popular AIM, which an insider says is basically support staff.  Surely that will be fixed, but my guess is AOL sees AIM as a cash cow and doesn’t plan to do anything new with it.

A good deal of AOL’s activities seems to be seeking to maximize the numbers in profit, so I don’t see any actual plan so much as calculations.  Not sure where this is going to end up.

TAKEAWAYS:

  • AOL is probably going to go for some radical rebranding soon.  OK further radical rebranding – they really aren’t “anything.”
  • AIM will probably survive, but it’ll be just a service that doesn’t really grow.
  • I wouldn’t send a resume to AOL.
  • Bonnie and I?  WAY wrong on AOL in the past.  Just apologizing.

– Steven Savage

Really. Yahoo is suing Facebook

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No, I’m not kidding.  I’d heard rumors of this coming, but there you go.

It seems incredibly obvious with the timing (and past history) that this is an attempt to get a settlement out of Facebook to give them some cash.  However reactions I’ve seen across the net are mostly “what a load.”

For Facebook, well, they’ll weather this (they have other problems).  For Yahoo this looks incredibly pathetic (and a repeat of their suit against Google), and breaks a kind of unwritten rule among web companies of “don’t sue over this.”  They’re going to loose a lot of sympathy over this.

Also, frankly, the patents don’t seem to be very defendable because they’re rather general (though the linked analysis seems a bit off) and look like the kind of things Yahoo could sue enormous amounts of companies over.  Some good lawyers could probably take this thing apart fast.

This is humiliating for Yahoo, and smells of desperation to me – they’re resorting to patent trolling.  Sure they might win – or they might get smashed while everyone else looks on and applauds.  But they’re making a lot of people angry.

If they’re resorting to this level of action to raise money, I’m going to say take Yahoo OFF your to-work for list.  I think they may be in worse trouble than we thought.

– Steven Savage

– Steven Savage