Chrome OS: Imminent?

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is reporting that Google plans to release an early version of its Chrome OS netbook operating system next week. It’s presumably a very early version, since Google says that machines running Chrome OS won’t arrive until the second half of next year.

Google says that Chrome OS will be Linux-based, Web-centric, and designed to eliminate installation and security headaches. Other than that, though, it hasn’t had much to say about the OS. (Among the major remaining questions: Just how useful will a Chrome OS netbook be when it’s not connected to the Internet?) Consequently, it’s been hard to have much of an opinion at all about the product other than that it should be fun to see what happens as Google launches yet another salvo at Microsoft. Stay tuned for some answers, I hope…

Internet Explorer’s New Spokesperson

Now, this is an IE ad that’s entertaining rather than repulsive–and probably a smart choice of an endorser of interest to the sort of folks who IE8 and its Web Slices feature will appeal to the most.

Kinda reminds me of when Microsoft dragged out Queen Latifah to pal around with Bill Gates at a Windows Media Center event and neither of them seemed to have a clue what she was doing there–except this time, Dolly seems to be in on the fun.

(Via ReadWriteWeb)

Lies, Damned Lies, and Coverage Maps

Oddly enough, Verizon Wireless’s latest round of AT&T/iPhone-bashing ads–one of which relegates the iPhone to the Island of Misfit Toys–haven’t made AT&T any happier than the earlier spots did. It’s updated its legal complaint against Verizon to gripe about the new ads, and wants the court to force Verizon to pull them off the air. It’s also published a statement on its Web site which it says “sets the record straight” about Verizon’s commercials.

I like the idea of AT&T responding to Verizon’s ads in a straightforward and factual manner, but the statement is kind of disappointing–it says that Verizon’s ads are “false and misleading” and then points out that almost all AT&T customers have access to the slower EDGE network, and enumerates various virtues of AT&T’s network and devices (the speed of its 3G network, the popularity of its phones, the quantity of apps, the fact you can talk and do data at the same time). But it doesn’t ever make clear what Verizon said that AT&T considers to be untrue, and it brings up various points that Verizon never mentioned one way or another. Basically, it’s less of a response to Verizon’s ad and more of a laundry list of reasons to like AT&T.

Continue reading this story…

GameStop Will Sell Digital Downloads. Writing on Wall Spotted?

GameStop’s tentacles are wrapped pretty tightly around most of the games industry, the exception being downloadable content that’s sold after a game is released.

That’ll change early next year, when the retailer will begin selling digital game downloads through its stores. A report from Reuters doesn’t explain in detail how this will work, but my understanding is that you pay at the store and supply GameStop with your Xbox Live Gamertag or your Playstation Network user name, and the content will be ready for download when you get home.

Boxed retail games aren’t dead yet, so you’ll still have reason to visit GameStop in the first place. The retailer hopes that by visiting the store, you’ll learn about new content that might’ve flown under your radar — say, additional multiplayer maps for Modern Warfare 2 — and instead of reminding yourself to buy it once you’re home, you can just make the transaction right there.

The problem is that GameStop’s plan doesn’t add value for the buyer. It’s nice to be reminded that map packs are available, but that doesn’t make the store any less of a middleman. This is an issue the retailer will increasingly have to deal with as more people get their gaming content online instead of at the store.

For now, I’d suggest that GameStop get creative with how it sells downloadable content. Maybe it can work with publishers on selling all-you-can-eat passes, entitling you to all a game’s extra content in exchange for one up-front payment. Everyone wins: GameStop gets the extra revenue, the publishers feel safe knowing you won’t immediately trade the game back, and you get a discount. Or maybe the retailer can simply lure people into the store by with launch parties for the new content. That’s at least a service that isn’t being duplicated at home, and avoiding redundancy is GameStop’s best bet, now and in the long haul.

Clicker’s TV Guide For the Web Opens Up

Clicker, the search engine for TV shows on the Web that was announced a couple of months ago at TechCrunch50, is now open to the public. I like the idea, the interface, and many of the features, although it’s still rough around the edges in places.

The site’s mission is simple enough: It wants to help you find and watch the video content that’s scattered all over the Web. (It focuses on professional stuff–much of it repurposed from TV, but also original Web programs such as the ones from Revision3.) You can search for shows, stars, and genres, and get results that include individual episodes and where to watch them online. In some cases, you can watch shows right within Clicker; in others, you need to click away to the originating site.

Continue reading this story…

Boxee Inks Deal to Launch Set-top Box

Boxee has signed a deal with an unnamed manufacturer to produce a set-top box compatible with its service, the company has said. The device will have its public debut (in mockup form, at least) at a December 7 meetup in NYC. Boxee says it would also reveal more details on the set-top unit at that time.

The deal has been in the works since the 2009 CES, according to CEO Avner Ronen. Ronen disclosed in a blog post that during the show, Boxee met with several manufacturers interested in integrating the Boxee service into an existing set top box or completely new unit.

Technologizer will be at the Boxee meetup next month, so stay tuned…

Intel and AMD Declare a Truce of Sorts

One of the longest-running, fiercest battles in tech isn’t exactly ending–but it’s sure entering a new phase. Today, Intel and AMD announced that they’ve reached a settlement that ends their legal wrangling (most notably AMD’s lawsuit against Intel for monopoly abuse), establishes a patent cross-licensing agreement, sets ground rules for how Intel can compete with AMD, and puts $1.25 billion of Intel’s money in AMD’s pockets.

The agreement doesn’t end legal action against Intel by government officials, such as the EU’s $1.45 billion fine for abusive business practices (which Intel is appealing) or New York State’s recently-filed lawsuit.

For consumers, the major question about the settlement is pretty simple: Does it increase the likelihood of healthy competition between Intel and AMD, thereby driving greater chip innovation and lower prices so that we get the most PC possible for our money? We’ll see. But it’s fascinating to look at what Intel has agreed to refrain from doing, as reported by Cnet:

• Offering inducements to customers in exchange for their agreement to buy all of their microprocessor needs from Intel, whether on a geographic, market segment, or any other basis

• Offering inducements to customers in exchange for their agreement to limit or delay their purchase of microprocessors from AMD, whether on a geographic, market segment, or any other basis

• Offering inducements to customers in exchange for their agreement to limit their engagement with AMD or their promotion or distribution of products containing AMD microprocessors, whether on a geographic, channel, market segment, or any other basis

• Offering inducements to customers in exchange for their agreement to abstain from or delay their participation in AMD product launches, announcements, advertising, or other promotional activities

• Offering inducements to customers or others to delay or forebear in the development or release of computer systems or platforms containing AMD microprocessors, whether on a geographic, market segment, or any other basis

• Offering inducements to retailers or distributors to limit or delay their purchase or distribution of computer systems or platforms containing AMD microprocessors, whether on a geographic, market segment, or any other basis

• Withholding any benefit or threatening retaliation against anyone for their refusal to enter into a prohibited arrangement such as the ones listed above.

Basically, Intel’s agreeing not to take actions that would shut AMD out of dealing with major PC companies entirely, or hobble it so severely that it might as well be shut out. Sounds good to me. I wanna have the opportunity to choose between PCs based on a variety of processors from multiple companies.

Ultimately, AMD has always fared best when its portfolio of chips has been at its strongest in comparison to Intel’s offerings. Today’s agreement won’t have any immediate effect on its product lineup, of course. But if it increases the chances that a great AMD chip will get a great response from the industry, it would be…great.

Chrome for Mac, Finally Within Sight?

Over at Cnet, Steven Shankland has taken notice of some info on a mailing list for Google Chrome developers that suggests that Google’s browser may arrive in an OS X beta in early December. If so, fifteen months will have passed between Chrome’s Windows debut and its appearance on the Mac. (Developer versions of Chrome and its open-source doppelganger Chromium for Mac have been around for quite awhile, but the most recent ones I’ve tried have been almost ready for prime time–but not quite.)

I still don’t understand why Chrome for Windows has an admirably sleek two menus, and Chrome for Mac needs nine of ‘em. Other than that little mystery, I’m very much looking forward to Chrome finally becoming a cross-platform browser.

Survey: XP Users Aren’t Upgrading to Windows 7

Windows Vista users are flocking to Windows 7, but a considerable number of holdouts are resistant to upgrading from Windows XP, according to an InfoWorld survey that was taken over the past several weeks.

The survey found that Windows 7 now has approximately 4 percent market share among 20,000 systems that it monitors through the exo.performance.network. The network is administered by Devil Mountain Software, and tracks users who have chosen to opt in.

The new Windows 7 users don’t seem to be Windows XP defectors–that OS’s share is holding steady at 64 percent. And almost three years after Windows Vista’s release, its market share has barely cracked 30 percent. InfoWorld noted that Windows Vista appears to be losing market share as Windows 7 increases in popularity. However, I’m hesitant to accept whether there is any actual correlation without having seen the data.

Another recent survey by NPD Group reaffirms Windows 7′s popularity over its oft-criticized predecessor. It found that Windows 7′s initial boxed upgrades were up 234 percent over Windows Vista.

Microsoft offered significant pre-sale discounts for Windows 7. There has also been pent up demand for upgrades, because many businesses eschewed Windows Vista.

Windows 7 had a long beta cycle, and has received generally good reviews. In fact, I have not heard any real horror stories since it launched last month. That could be in part because there is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7: XP users must perform a clean install to upgrade to Windows 7, and I suspect many still have machines that are too wimpy for Windows 7, and will therefore get the new OS only when they buy new PCs.

We’d like to hear from you. Are you planning on upgrading to Windows 7, or are you sticking with what you’ve got (or looking for an alternative such as a Mac or Linux machine)?

Windows Copies the Mac? Shhh, That’s Our Little Secret!

[UPDATE: Microsoft's Windows blogger Brandon LeBlanc has disowned Aldous's comments.]

This is amusing: Simon Aldous, a “Microsoft partner group manager” in the UK, gave an interview to British tech site PCR in which he says that Microsoft wanted to give Windows 7 a “Mac look and feel”:

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

I’m guessing that Aldous is far enough removed from Redmond that he forgot you aren’t supposed to say things like that. (I mean, nobody involved with New Coke cheerfully told us that the goal with it was to make Coke taste more like Pepsi.) But the funny thing is, the only part of Windows 7 that strikes me as newly Mac-like is the Taskbar, whose bigger, unlabeled icons do indeed look more like OS X’s Dock.

On a meta-level, every version of Windows has cribbed from the Mac, and the versions released in this decade (Windows XP, Vista, and 7) all draw overall inspiration from the polished look of Apple OS X. But Windows 7 has its own perfectly pleasant aesthetic.  I ultimately prefer Snow Leopard’s–it’s more subdued and consistent–but if you told me you liked Windows 7′s flashier feel, I wouldn’t argue the point.

Oh, and a side topic: As a heavy user of both Vista and OS X, I’d love to get the details on how “the core Vista technology” is far more stable than OS X…not that both operating systems aren’t capable of crashing spectacularly in the right circumstances.

Disney World’s Space Mountain Gets Video Games, But I Miss Crazy Larry!

If you’ve ever been to Disney World or Disneyland, particularly at a young age, chances are you’ll view any news about the theme parks through a lens of nostalgia.

That was my experience at least, reading about how Disney World will add video games to the wait line for Space Mountain. According to Disney Parks’ official blog, at some point in the line you’ll get to play a 90-second game of defend-the-base, cooperating with 85 fellow parkgoers to deflect asteroids away from a runway.

It’s not clear how the game is played. From the photo, it looks like there’s a very simple controller you use, maybe to fire away at the incoming space rocks. There’s a 90-second interval between each game, allowing people to shuffle along once they’re done playing, and the game is supposedly tied into a larger story related to Space Mountain, as if you need narrative when you’re hurling down a steel track at 25 miles per hour.

I could wax nostalgic about all sorts of Disney stuff at this point, but for the sake of staying relevant to Technologizer, I just want to fondly remember Crazy Larry, the spaceship salesman who appeared on “SMTV”  from the mid 1990s until 2005. SMTV was a video, sponsored by FedEx, that played throughout the Space Mountain line, and Crazy Larry (see 1:10 in this video) was clearly a sendup of Crazy Eddie, the electronics retailer that went belly up in 1989.

Even though I couldn’t have been more than 6 years old when Jerry Carroll did his Crazy Eddie bit on TV, I immediately made the connection with Crazy Larry. The Crazy Eddie commercials left that much of an impression on my young mind. Shady business practices aside, the store’s management knew how to pitch electronics.

5Words: Wolfram|Alpha, Now on Bing

Bing and Wolfram|Alpha collaborate.

Twitter explains new retweeting feature.

Microsoft: Windows 7 imitates Mac.

Google makes SafeSearch even safer.

Dislike YouTube ads? Skip ‘em!

Microsoft disconnects Xbox game pirates.

iPhone app developers get tracking.

Tour Bill Gates’ house: $35K.

Vimeo videos, now on iPhone.

Snow Leopard update dislikes Atom.

Gizmodo loves Nikon’s projector camera.

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Google’s New Online Storage Deal: Much Cheaper, But Not a Game Changer

Google is so synonymous with free stuff that it’s easy to forget that it does indeed offer some for-pay services–such as additional online storage space for Gmail messages and Picasa photos. Yesterday, it announced that it’s slashing the fees it charges for extra elbow room.

The new pricing starts at $5 a year for 20GB of space, and go up to $4,096 (!) for 16TB (!!). These fees only matter after you’ve used up all the service’s free space–7GB+ for Gmail, and 1GB for Picasa–and there’s no discount as you buy more capacity. No matter which plan you get, you’re paying a quarter a gigabyte. Until yesterday, the company was charging $20 a year for 10GB, or $2 a gigabyte, or eight times as much.

Google had maintained the old price for two years, during which the cost of hard disks has nosedived, so to some extent the new pricing is just catching up with economic reality. The company says that the new cost is similar to what you’d pay per gigabyte for an external drive. But while it’s true that you’ll pay around a quarter a gig for something like a Seagate FreeAgent drive, you’re buying the drive and renting your Google space. Over three years, the FreeAgent’s total cost per gig remains a quarter, while you’ll have paid 75 cents a gig to Google.

(Not that I’m complaining: I remember paying $250 for a 500MB hard drive–or $500 a gigabyte–in the mid 1990s.)

How do the new prices compare with competitive Web services? It’s kind of hard to do the math. Yahoo, for instance, says that Yahoo Mail offers unlimited storage for free; unlimited free storage for Flickr is $25 a year. Online storage services such as Box.net and  SugarSync charge way more than Google does, but let you use their space for files of all sorts, and offer lots more features.

Ultimately, the target audience for Google online storage in its current form isn’t gigantic. You gotta think that the percentage of Gmail users who need more than 7GB of space is tiny, and that most Picasa users can make do with 1GB. (Picasa continues to feel like it’s aimed at newbies–the most hardcore photo shares I know tend to use Flickr or SmugMug.) What would really change everything would be Google rolling out the mythical Gdrive–a true hard drive in the sky–at the prices it’s charging for Gmail and Picasa. I’m guessing we will see Gdrive someday, but I don’t have a clue when it’ll show up or how much storage you’ll get, at what price.

(And sorry, but I’m still sitting here slackjawed at Google’s 16TB-for-$4,096 pricing plan. Wonder how big the market is for that?)

Kindle for PC: A Rough Draft at Best

[UPDATE: I tried again, and Kindle for PC is now downloading all my books swiftly and reliably. Not sure why it wasn't before...]

I’ve been playing with Amazon.com’s new Kindle for PC application over the past 24 hours, and while the idea of having access to my Kindle books on my PC remains mighty appealing, the software as it stands in beta form is a bare-bones disappointment.

Continue reading this story…

I’m on CrankyGeeks Today

What are you up to at 1pm PT today? If you’re not otherwise occupied, check out the live stream of John C. Dvorak’s CrankyGeeks at Justin.tv. I’ll be guesting on the show, which will also be available for viewing at the CrankyGeeks site and as an iTunes download.

I’ll do my best to be cranky, or at least mildly vexed…

You Didn’t Need That Modern Warfare 2 Pre-Order

So I’ve been thinking about fulfilling my duties as a game journalist and buying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, even though my plate is pretty full at the moment (I’m deep into Demon’s Souls, if you’re wondering).

One potential snag: Modern Warfare 2 is, at least according to GameStop, “the biggest entertainment launch of all time.” I wondered if all the people who pre-ordered the game or hit up a midnight launch last night hogged all the copies. Would my lack of early commitment be a problem? Not in my neck of the woods.

The three closest GameStops to my apartment in Venice, Calif., all said I could grab a copy for Playstation 3 or Xbox 360, no problem. One employee even answered the phone by saying, “Thank you for calling GameStop … where we have Modern Warfare 2 in stock.” Best Buy’s Web site also listed the game as available for in-store pickup at my three nearest locations.

So, why pre-order? Certainly, it’s useful for big hardware launches and limited edition bundles (such as Modern Warfare 2′s night vision-equipped Prestige Edition), but I don’t remember the last time I couldn’t find a game anywhere because I didn’t order in advance.

Increasingly, pre-ordering is about locking you into a purchase instead of a rental, and this is often accomplished with swag or in-game goodies. For instance, if you pre-order the upcoming Mass Effect 2, you get a special suit of armor to wear in the game. If you pre-order Left 4 Dead 2, you get to play the demo as an appetizer.

Modern Warfare 2 didn’t have any great pre-order bonuses. A reservation with GameStop, lets you get $40 back if you trade the game in by December 13, but that’s hardly enough time to play the single -player campaign and sink into the game’s multiplayer.

My point is, next time you buy something from GameStop, and the clerk offers you a pre-order on some title that’s two months away, see what incentives they’re putting on the table. If they don’t excite you, relax. You’ll still be able to get a copy on launch day.