Andreas Wacker

people don’t know how fast their Internet is

I hope that it takes a while before the couple of last mile vendors adopt their upgrade plans accordingly.

This summer the east coast, mostly New York, Boston and Florida will witness an invasion of Germans that might make people wonder who actually won the second world war. Germans are obsessed with effiency. And they have 6 weeks vacation a year. And they like to safe money. Well, that’s efficiency again. Right now they pay 65 Euro cents for each dollar. While making as much or more than their US colleagues. So everything is really really cheap for them in the US. Which is only a short flight away. Let’s say you are planning to get a MacBook Pro. You get that 732 dollars cheaper in the US than it would cost you in Germany. That pays for your airfaire. And so it does continue.

I think that there will a certain amount of trouble around this new wave of Aldi-Ami invasion. You see, many Germans are not so keen on the american way. Well. At least many of them are not. This has many complex reasons, and a couple of simple ones. As simple as having an Idiot President. Mrs Merkel for instance was a physicist by profession. Now stupid people exist in all countries alike. And your average obnoxious american tourist is probably as obnoxious as your average german obnoxious tourist. The difference is that American are blissfully unaware just why everybody seems to hate them. Germans expect that to be the case. Some might even consider this wave of lifted eyebrows that they face a part of their perks when they travel abroad.

In any respect it will not be fun, and I should try to get a dialect coach to get an italian accent or something, should I have to go to the east coast this summer.

If there would be a god, then studio bosses would need to remove the packaging from all the DVDs that were pressed under their reign before they could go to hell.

Hard not to predict anything right now. Here what I think that will happen tomorrow. Is it actually tomorrow that Uncle Jobs comes down from the Mountain? Anyhow.

New Laptops: Third Generation for what is called the “ProLine” now. First was Titanium, second Aluminum (that stuff that bends when you look at it, keeps AppleCare so profitable). Now there will be a third one. It’s about time. The 12″ not making into into the brave new Intel feature left a gap in the revenue potential field for a suspicously long time. Not sure if the 17″ has such a bright future. Depends what how easy it is to squeeze out a new flavor of laptop.

There will be Blu-Ray. One could speculate that the MacPro bumps last week were announced after Warners killed HD-DVD. In other words: takes Blu-Ray now more Steve time, and the Pro upgrades fell of the key-note schedule because of that?

Those new laptops might have built in high speed internet connection. I would appreciate EVDO. It’s nice. And the Amazon showed that you can built it in, and that Sprint is willing to make deals. Imagine you buy a new laptop and get free non bullshit (t-online / starbucks I am looking at you) internet whereever you are. I use EVDO since roughly a year and it’s just great. Nothing short of that. Technically you get GPS with EVDO for free, I wish that Apples puts GPS where it should be: in every freaking machine. Yes, I like to Google for something and get results that are optimised for my current whereabouts. But GPS would
put the iPhone on the spot for not having it. Something to spin. (Apple likes has a pathological history of lying around battery life).

One could dream that Apple becomes an ISP. The iPhone worked great for them. But AT&T? They get their money, but nobody started to like AT&T. They are still considered the necessary evil. Who loves his ISP? Which ISP is known for being awesome? Nobody. Interesting. There is a market. People are not paying their landline or even cable bills anymore, but they keep their cellphones going, and probably also their Internet connections. That’s money that still is out there. And Apple is known to show a strong desire for that kind of thing. Sucessfully.

Speaking of Money, AAPL trades at 176. I think it will touch 190 after the keynote.

One of the reasons will be that there will be something that let’s people imagine that profits that used be over at Blockbuster Netflix will now also flow to Cupertino. iTunes is a money making machine.

The Laptop prices will look like the current ones. But by the time you have added the things you would like to have those new machines will be pretty expensive. I think a company that managed to get 1,000 US$ for each phone (!) they sell, is looking at money differently after that.

Finally there will be some iPhone news that will keep the sales going. Probably some (3rd party) Application(s) that can be downloaded. I doubt a hardware version 2 of the device. If so, then it would need to be in stores in a very few weeks, so that there would be no gap in the sales.

While the rest of the country sobbers up from the stupid real estate bubble fueled growth delusions, Apple will go on very strongly. So will Google btw. And not many more.

The perfect gift for those two.

Sorry. This is the probably the most superflous (sp?) post I ever made. I just couldn’t resist.

innovation has no limits

Over here everything is high tech. Pointless or not. Of course there are ads on the paper towels. Not real time printed blog content (yet). Missing urinal feature: real time analysis of blood alcohol. Bonus for womens restrooms: instant pregnancy test. Imagine the possibilities: Google could place ads for abortion options and/or pregnancy products on the paper towels. Right now health insurance companies could track your lifestyle a little bit via your credit card trace. Technically they could. Not sure if that is legal, and if they are smart enough to do so. But with personalised mini lab in every toilet you would get an interesting trace of activities. Of course lab technology does not follow the trend of hard drives of other micro electronics and computer related stuff. So this brave new world option will remain scifi for quiet some time. Possibly forever, since we just might run out of cheap energy -that is the basis for all of your lifestyle after all- before high tech might become that sophisticated.

Update:
Like with any sci-fi story there is a google angle popping up minutes after I ramble about it. Coincidency? Of course. Almost everything is. Actually. Get used to it.

15 years out there
yuck

rumor-1: Fox swapping myspace ofr 1/3 of Yahoo how to get 11billion out of 580. And suggested there: Yahoo giving up and giving search to google

rumor-2: Google buying Apple. The Steve not liking to come to work anymore.

rumor-3: [And I made this up]: Microsoft giving up and going open source. Nobody wanted to play with the gray elephant in the room that used to be a store.

back to 1&2: that could mean that google is the only remaining search engine. It was in a way anyway. But now it gets real tricky. Getting the enire email market could be quick second: Just funnel enough millions into the spam engine to keep the volume up, so that only people with very vast computing resources can survice in the email market. Already in todays brave new world Google could control vast amounts of spam: Just a slight tweak of a specific search quality parameter and somebody gets allot of money somewhere. Much of those funds would be reinvested in measures that come quiet expensive to counter for wannabe Google competitors.

animals on the underground

via strangemaps via BlogsNow (of course)

Some days I like the internet. Does it not only have sites for strange maps but also for the history of the button
and -I am sure- all sorts of other ones.

It’s been 50 years since Mao said “Let 100 flowers blossom”.

Of course there are all sorts of flowers.

So, you would think that calling something testDontShare would be kind of a strong hint what not to do with it. And of course, since I am typing this here, that’s exactly what happened. Funny, since I caught it before it really got shared. But should be a lesson for me: there will always be a bigger idiot. Always design things so that even the President of the USA could use it. I know, it’s hard. But that’s how foolproof things need to be.

it used to be the bible that saved peoples lives.

With four seasons you would think that they are equally long.
Not so:

Winter
88.994 days

Spring
92.758 days

Summer
93.651 days

Autumn
89.842 days

Source: space.com

A billion dollar submarine that missed the Dailight Savings patch?
Emerging one hour off would do it.

If I would be in charge of tourism for a city I would spend as much money as possible to make the restrooms of the local airport as nice as possible. Sitting in a A330 waiting to take off to Amsterdam, the restroom is pretty much all I remember from Memphis. Those 15 minutes I had on the ground could have been better used to the advantage of the town.

Speaking of travel restrooms: On the first leg the flight attendants had put a bag of coffee on the coat hanger in the bath room. The smell of the room was better than usual. Funny how those bags are usually not more than 5 feet away from the bath room. But it took years before some smart flight attendant had that idea. It was probably that cute deadhead sitting one row behind me.

Ah those billionaires

“… to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. ”

Yeah, that’s gonna work, Steve! Probably works with him. Reality distortion field of a billionaire on a park bench.

It really is old news
And nothing special. Just a guy. That got shot. 68 times.

But hey he allegdly had shot a police officer and a police dog.

Movies and realities blend into one for some people. Which is an academic excersice. As long you have the right skin color and social contacts and drug habits. Once you cross that line things don’t look pretty. Not at all.

The Saturday stroll through those internets. Things I found along the way:

Spinach is bad for you while booze isn’t

Men are smarter than women and coding in Basic is awesome

In politics that are not occupied with an impromptu re-enactment of mideval ages there is Herman Munster (again!) and a President that will fix everything, with, well: Torture if his own Party would only let him

But there are also more substantial things to find, like the Stormtrooper Effect

the sudo command

wikipedia’s entry for sudo

Mr Strandbeest is back
I usually like my job allot. Sometimes, rarely, but sometimes I would like to do something else.

Maybe the people
that got canned from AOL for the “Data Valdez” mishap found a new job to promote movies. While other AOLers dig for spammer gold. Calacanis is probably orderer to lead the shovel pack for obvious reasons.
While youTube hopes that Paris Hilton will save them it turns out that Osama was/is a Whitney Houston fan. Probably just a stunt by the CIA to get him out of his cave. The best one sofar.
not only Dell has problems with Batteries catching fire. The first Maglev trains hoverd in 1971 in Germany. But nobody wanted to buy them. Then the Chinese did. Now they are not so sure if that was such a good idea. Munich will get one eventually to connect Airport and City Center. If it should get build.

update: it seems as if the snakes in a cinema story is one of these things that wrote itself.

somewhere in America

some IT workers in Sheffield, UK
Aeron chairs are everywhere, it seems.

we could convert them to disco’s

The cold war was over. Just that too bad that certain people then got us into ‘perma-war’.
Good money for them, bad for ours

while I was looking for images of ‘bullet trains’ on google images I came accross this odd ‘gallery’ [Mildly NSFW].

Sometimes I really have a hard time understanding other peoples fetishes. Of course I don’t have to.

15 year old creates 15 minutes of fame and Microsoft has a sense of humor

right now the rank number seems to indicate that right now. I hope I go back an update this once the number has changed.

somebody is trying to give up memetrackers altogether

I sometimes I wish I could do that too. Tricky to check if the spam filters need a tweak by looking at the results and then not to click on something that people blog about right now.

“Maybach” is the luxury brand of Mercedes. In Beverly Hills you see them once in a while, but most of them are been paid for with Petro-Dollars I suppose.

A Crowbar is a rather simple device, apparently en vogue with middle aged hands on millionaires in what Rummy would call ‘new Europe’.