Walt's Corner

Just upgraded my WordPress installation to 2.7 Everything looks smooth. The new Dashboard will take a bit of getting used to, but it appears more organized.

Say it aint so! CNET is reporting that Microsoft has released an application called Seadragon Mobile for the iPhone; before they even release it for their own mobile operating system for their favorite smartphones. Weird huh? I’d give an iTunes link, but why would you want to install something Microsoft on a platform that is refreshingly Microsoft free? No thanks.

So why did they release this for iPhone before a Windows Mobile device? Glad you asked. Moneyquote from Microsoft: “Most phones out today don’t have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do.”

‘nuff said.

Credit: thanks Andy.

You read about it all over the news. We need to bail out the big three. GM, Ford, and Chrysler. Ford and Chrysler were asking for the least amounts, in the single digits. GM, however, says they need some double digit giveaways to bail them out of their current predicament.

Do you know how many car companies we have here today? I knew it was many, just not as much as 30. 30! And that’s really not all either, I took out a few for my purpose here. I don’t include companies like Mercedes-Benz USA. I’m talking regular drive-your-car-to-Walmart type cars. With GM companies accounting for 25% of the total number of these companies, it’s no wonder GM has been hit the hardest.

What does this mean for GM? They’ve recently started to do something about it by cutting the competition. Notice any more Oldsmobiles on the road lately? No. Notice when Geo was reabsorbed back into Chevrolet? There is too much competition among the same company. Buick. Cadillac. Chevrolet. GMC. Hummer. Pontiac. Saturn. All vying for our hard-earned cash. All in direct competition with each other. All willing to cut to the lowest price they possibly can to get my sale. That’s fine and dandy at the dealer level. But what does that mean when you rise up the food chain? That’s when you find out they are all attached to the same head. Fighting amongst themselves is killing the entire organism.

GM is not the only one with in-house competition, but by far the largest. Infiniti and Nissan, for example, also have some in-house competition, but a proverbial drop in the bucket when compared to the monster that is GM. Honda and Acura. Toyota and Lexus. These guys all share a sibling company, but only one.

Ford has a trifecta of in-house competition: Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln. Chrysler used to. Chrysler and Dodge. Remember Plymouth? Recently deceased. That’s why Chrysler “only” needs $7 billion in comparison to Ford’s (still using 3 branches) $9 billion and GM’s $12+ billion.

So how do the numbers play out? When someone buys a Toyota, there’s only a 3.4% chance that buyer could have bought another car that was price-cut to match another car ultimately owned by the same company. General Motors, on the other hand, garners a whopping 20.6% chance that the undercutting seller will ultimately belong to the same seller.

These are just the problems stemming from in-house competition. There are many other problems that have lead to the current crises; not properly reading consumer demand and outlandish salaries/benefit packages to name a couple more.

I got this email from Apple enticing me to pay a visit to the online store. “Lots of gifts. 1 day not to miss. Get the season’s best prices on Mac, iPod, and iPhone gifts.”

I headed over to the online store this morning to see what all the hype was about. Nothing. $10 here. $50 there. No big deal. Especially for someone already accustomed to getting his U.S. Government discount. That’s when it hit me – these prices are similar to what I would normally get with my discount. Maybe a couple dollars more or less. I recently bought an iPod touch via the U.S. Government store for $215, and here it was for $208. $6 difference.

So I proceeded to check out my government online store. Ahhh… there it is. I can get the iPod touch for $194 right now on Black Friday. That is a really good deal. I then began to wonder how much of a difference other items might be.

The high end MacBook: normally $1599, today only $1498. However, in my online U.S. Government store: normally $1503 ($5 more than today’s Black Friday price), now $1402 – a whopping $197 off original pricing. Not too shabby Apple. Not too shabby.

Next item on the block: tricked out iMac. Normally $2199, today’s price $2098. $101 savings. Now let’s take a look at my discount. With my every day U.S. Government discount it can be had for $2067 (still cheaper than the regular Black Friday’s customer), but today it can be mine for the low price of $1966. That’s 233 bones in my pocket. Well done Apple.

Finally, my favorite hobby hardware, the Apple TV. This is where savings are minimal. Normal pricing for the low end model is $229. Today’s shoppers can snag it for $208, which is what happens to be my Black Friday price. Regular price with my discount is $215.

My advice? Don’t go straight for the Black Friday prices. Check any of the discount stores you might be entitled to shop in and see if you get an even deeper cut.

I upgraded my iPhone’s OS to version 2.2. I’ve noticed some pretty decent improvements. Little things mainly that bugged. Not enough to make me complain, but little things that I wondered why it didn’t work right, and was probably a pretty easy fix to begin with.

Scrolling through contacts for example. Ever since our iPhones inherited the capability to update via MobileMe, there has been a small lag from the time Contacts was opened until the time Contacts was able to be used in any meaningful manner. This issue has, at least for now, been resolved.

Another little bug was the time-stamp that email was last checked. This is displayed at the bottom of the email screen where the contents of the inbox is displayed. Email could have been last checked at 5PM, but the time that is displayed will be the time prior to the last time – at least until you navigate out of the inbox and back into it; then it will be correct. That appears to have been fixed.

The final bug that I have noticed is, and this probably wasn’t a bug so much as a personal preference in design, that whenever updates to 3rd party applications were happening, iPhone took you out of the App Store and moved your screen over to the final one to display your update downloading, then deleted that “phantom” application, and left you at that last screen. Even that was an update to a previous version where the application being upgraded was relocated to that final screen. Now updating an application will take you to the screen where that application is already located and replaces it.

General fluidity between application and home has increased. Usually, jumping from any app into home will shrink current application while bringing in the home screen. After a while, this transition didn’t appear so fluid. So far today it has maintained its smoothness. Time will show how permanent this is.

There are other major (Safari UI has changed a bit) and seemingly minor (security updates) improvements, but these are features I hadn’t heard about and thought deserved a shout-out.

On a related note, the iPod touch, Apple TV, and iTunes all upgraded without any hitches.