Chad's News

There’s just something magical about buying a product for 99¢. And in the digital world, where the cost of producing another copy is essentially zero, you can make serious money from a quality item that’s priced at 99¢. Steve Jobs figured this out, and it’s part of what made the iTunes Store so popular. Later, when the music labels wanted to raise the price slightly on newer songs, he fought them tooth and nail, saying that even a small price increase would ruin things. The labels won that battle, but that doesn’t have to be the case with self-published books on Amazon. The profit on a 99¢ book is 35¢, and it really adds up if you sell a few hundred thousand copies. The linked article is a bit old, but it reinforces the benefits of this sales model where you sell many, many digital copies of an item for a low price. The author of the article, for instance, saw his sales of The List go up by a factor of 20 (to 800 per day) when he dropped the price from $2.99 to 99¢. (I do find it funny, however, that the price is now back to $2.99.)

Link: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/…
(via Slashdot)

It’s a common belief: if you raise prices then income will also increase. But this isn’t always true. Earlier this year, Netflix, the DVD and streaming movie provider known for it’s affordable prices, made some changes to its pricing structure. They lost 800,000 customers as a result. Their stock price plunged, and they may be in the red for most of the next year.

Link: http://www.usatoday.com/…

Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we were the surprised recipient of an Amazon Kindle Fire—Amazon’s entry into the tablet market. After using it for a few weeks and reading some of the reviews, here are some comments:

The Kindle Fire is NOT an iPad. You won’t see all the features that you get in an iPad. But at something like 40 percent of the cost, this is to be expected.

The Kindle Fire is tightly integrated with the Amazon store. It doesn’t support the EPUB format, so forget about getting books through any venue other than Amazon. And even though it’s an Android device, you can’t purchase apps from the Android Market; instead, you have to use the Amazon App Store which contains a subset of the apps found elsewhere. (This is because the Kindle Fire, while based on Android, is not a fully-compatible Android device. So some apps won’t work on it.)

Storage space is limited, and you can’t attach an SD card to increase it. So storing videos or large music libraries on the device isn’t really an option. Most videos will need to be streamed.

All this being said, the Kindle Fire is a great device if you want an e-book reader with internet, multimedia, and apps. I’ve been having a ball with the Scrabble app. And while one reviewer thinks it will take over the entire low-end and middle of the tablet market, I think it may see some competition from the Nook Tablet.

One thing I really like is that the Denver Public Library has Kindle books that I can check out and read on my device. Way cool!

Link #1 (Review): http://online.wsj.com/…

Link #2 (Review): http://www.ubergizmo.com/…

Link #3 (Negative Stuff): http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Link #4 (Comparison to Nook Tablet): http://www.komando.com/…

Link #5 (Comparison to Nook Tablet): http://arstechnica.com/…

October 31^st, 2011 was the official day that the human population reached 7 billion. The last 2 billion of that happened in less than 25 years, and we’re on track to hit 8 billion in the next 15 years or so.

Link #1: http://en.wikipedia.org/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #2: http://en.wikipedia.org/…

Here’s a list of tech gadgets that you probably should NOT purchase during the Christmas season, many of them because smartphones and tablets already have the gadget’s functionality. The linked article does allow for exceptions, but generally recommends against purchasing these types of items:

• Feature Phones (non-smartphones)
• Standalone GPS Units
• Netbooks
• Pocket Camcorders
• Portable Gaming Consoles
• Portable Media Players (think iPod)
• Point-and-Shoot Cameras

Link: http://www.komando.com/…

NORAD is well known for its Christmas Eve tracking of Santa’s progress across the world, but this year is the first time you can use a smartphone/tablet app to track him. It’s named “NORAD Tracks Santa” and is available for the iPhone/iPad and Android devices.

Link: http://www.komando.com/…

Remember how Apple flat out refused to allow Adobe Flash on iPhones and iPads? Well it appears we are witnessing another legacy of Steve Jobs. Adobe Systems has decided to stop developing Flash for mobile devices. From their statement: “We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations…. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.” Adobe will instead focus on HTML5 technologies and Adobe AIR. The article doesn’t mention Adobe Edge, but I think that will probably play a part in this new strategy.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)

Thin nautical rope can be a nice replacement for the shoelaces on your sneakers. I got a pair of work boots a few months ago, and the laces are already starting to fray (update: one of the laces broke, just hours after I wrote this post). Nautical rope is more rugged and should last longer. Of course, this isn’t something you can pick up at any department store—you’ll probably need to go to a marine store.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Have you ever wondered why a piece of toast always seems to fall with the buttered side down? Turns out it’s not an accident. Likewise, researchers have determined that amino acids, basic building blocks of life on Earth, have a high probability of forming based solely on the laws of thermodynamics. Thus if we ever do make contact with aliens, they may share some of the basic building blocks of our biology. (And they’ll be humanoid in shape… NOT!)

Link: http://www.wired.com/…
(via Bureau 42)

There are well-defined procedures for permanently erasing data from a traditional hard drive. But for solid-state drives (SSDs), which use Flash memory instead of magnetic platters, things are quite different. The problem stems from two peculiarities of SSDs: “they can only erase data in larger chunks than they can write it, and their storage cells can only be written a certain number of times (10,000 is standard) before they start to fail.” Because of these, SSD firmware does a lot of behind-the-scenes manipulations when writing data to the drive.

Researchers at UCSD have determined the following:

1. Built-in erase commands are effective, but are sometimes implemented incorrectly.
2. Overwriting the entire visible address space of an SSD twice is usually, but not always, sufficient to sanitize the drive.
3. None of the existing techniques for individual file sanitization are effective on SSDs.

That being said, law enforcement agencies are finding that it’s hard to do forensics on SSDs because the drive automatically wipes a significant percentage of deleted data without any intervention by the user. This may seem like a direct contradiction to what the UCSD team determined, but the difficulty there was with the purposeful sanitization of data as well as with the erasure of individual files. So while it’s difficult to wipe everything, it’s also hard to prevent some amount of deleted data from being wiped automatically.

The Ars Technica article (link #3 below) briefly discusses the article in link #1, and then goes on to mention other erasure techniques that are coming down the pipeline. For right now, however, they suggest encrypting the drive as a good way to keep private data secure.

Link #1: http://www.usenix.org/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #2: http://news.techworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Link #3: http://arstechnica.com/…

Heavy flooding in Thailand is going to cause a short-term drop in the supply of hard drives, so expect prices to increase as demand goes up.

Link: http://abcnews.go.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Update: Slashdot has an article with more information.

October 25^th was the 10-year anniversary of Windows XP, yet it still remains the most popular version of Windows for desktop users. The linked article from Ars Technica provides a bit of retrospective, then explains why it’s time to move on to something newer.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…