Buzz Out Loud 767: Announcing: Snobble

Sad news for CNET: Rafe and I are about to quit and go start our new search engine, which filters results by snobbery. There's a market for everything out there. Also, Sony decides it wants to sell some consoles, and maybe some videos and TV shows, too. Good idea! iPhone's enterprise capabilities are under fire, the Dev Team claims to have unlocked it, but Google's blowing it bigger with some secret Android SDKs. D'oh.
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Episode 767

BOL Episode 767

With a $100 price cut, the Sony PlayStation 3 finally joins the console war
http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/15/with-a-100-price-cut-the-sony-playstation-3-joins-the-console-war/

Sony finally launches PlayStation 3 video download service
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/07/sony-finally-un.html

Apple apologizes for MobileMe launch, extends subscriptions
http://www.macworld.com/article/134530/2008/07/mobileme.html

iPhone 3G: Sold out in 23 states
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/07/15/iphone-3g-sold-out-in-21-states/?section=money_topstories

Apple’s iPhone configuration utility disappoints
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Apples-iPhone-Configuration-Utility-Disappoints/

Dev Team claims unlock
http://www.iphoneatlas.com/2008/07/15/dev-team-claims-iphone-3g-jailbreak-success-public-this-week/

Google’s Android platform: not so open after all
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080715-googles-android-platform-not-so-open-after-all.html

Delver launches open alpha of its social search engine
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9991378-2.html

San Francisco’s ‘rogue’ sysadmin still being paid while in jail
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/16/sf_sysadmin/

Apple demands recall of Psystar Mac clones
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/mac/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209100376

Bagel brownin’ Cylon toaster now frakkin’ available (Thanks, Joseph!)
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/07/15/frakkin_cylon_toaster/

Voice mail:
Shane in Vegas
App store shocker!

E-mail

Hello, Buzz crew

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080715/tc_afp/lifestyleittelecomcompanyapplebrazil

I am proud to announce that the Brazilians have unblocked the iPhone.
Unfortunately, they charge you more than 250 dollars to unlock, so it
would be better to buy the “non carrier iPhone” from the stores. This
price is just as ridiculous as the iPhone’s price will be here; we are
by far the country with the highest iPod prices.

greetings from the funny prices land
Alexandre from Brazil

*****

So, as a Canadian, and an owner of all three gaming consoles (360 Elite,
PS3 and Wii), should I get more excited about the US-only 360 Netflix
add-on, or the US-only PlayStation video store? The PlayStation store is
particularly annoying, because they have a blank button where you COULD
press if I were ALLOWED to buy movies. And heck, it’s SONY, don’t you
OWN a movie company??

I’m an honest person, and would LOVE to buy digital content legally, but
there is virtually nowhere that will let me, as a Canadian, watch
streaming video, or buy digital movies. I currently have over 200 ripped
DVDs THAT I OWN on my HP Home Server, and watch them through my 360 via
Vista Media Centre. I would like to be able to buy current digital
movies and TV shows, is that too much to ask for? No Netflix or
Blockbuster Online, no Hulu, no ABC, NBC, CBS Web sites, and iTunes has
a very limited amount of TV shows, mainly crappy Canadian stuff that I
don’t watch for free anyways. Tivo up here is only the crappy version 2,
with no HD. ARGHHHH!!!!

Even NBC’s online Olympic coverage will be US-only, leaving Canadians in
the dark. Then the content providers have the nerve to complain that
Canada has high piracy rates? Though I do not do any illegal torrenting
(and my Internet is throttled if I wanted to anyways), I can understand
why basically honest people are turning to this. If there’s no legal way
to get what you want, short of waiting for a DVD to be released, what
alternative do you have?

And there endeth my latest “Molly Rant.”

Take care, love the show;

Paul

******

Heya, Buzz Crew,

I got this e-mail from the MobileMe people today:

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe.
Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.

Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and
Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had
lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those
problems and the Web apps are now up and running.

Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in
describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all e-mail,
contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are
immediately synced to and from the MobileMe “cloud,” changes made on a
PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other
devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from
your iPhone and the Web apps today, we are going to stop using the word
“push” until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.

We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation
for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day
extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension
will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.

We hope you enjoy your new suite of web applications at me.com, in
addition to keeping your iPhone and iPod touch wirelessly in sync with
these new web applications and your Mac or PC.

Thank you,

The MobileMe Team

So the MobileMe subscribers are getting 30 free days, and they won’t
advertise the Push anymore until ‘until it is near-instant on PCs and
Macs, too.’ What the hell? So what they're saying is, "Yeah we know it’s no
push, but we will call it Push when it's nearly instant sync, which isn’t
Push, but our users are too stupid to figure out that it isn’t push."

Have a nice day

Tales from the IRC

*****

Hi, Molly, Tom, and Jason,

This whole issue with Psystar and Apple isn’t being just about IP but
its also about customer image.

Let's just say I buy a Psystar and OSX crashes for no apparent reason.
The assumption is to call Psystar right? Not so...most people first
assume its the software giving them problems and not the hardware at
first. So they call Apple customer support. Which Apple will ask them
what machine they are running it on or a serial number, etc. The customer
would feel cheated by the fact that Apple will give them no support for
operating system issues on unsupported hardware. The same happened when
all the Mac clones came out in the time Steve Jobs left, which left a bad
taste in a lot of people's mouths after that, and also the reason why
that was stopped when Steve Jobs came back.

Just my 2 cents' worth
- Edward

*****

In Show 766 with the marvellous title of ‘Punch me in the face, Apple’,
one of your callers was lamenting the fact that she had to wait a whole
3 hours for iPhone activation. Oh, if only I were that lucky. I have
been waiting, along with many fellow UK iPhone fanboys, for over 120
hours and still have no activation. O2 (the UK cell
operator) says they are working on it.

Funny how they always manage to take your money right on time.

love the show

Ben

*****

Hi, it’s Kieran from Sydney, Australia.

I’ve been waiting over a year for the iPhone; I paid the online deposit
through the carrier I selected here (Optus) and waited in line from 6:30
a.m. for the 7 a.m. release.
Finally at around 9 a.m. after waiting in line for what seemed like hours I
got my beautiful shiny white iPhone….got it home and what’s what? IT’S
A DUD!…sooooo I take it back to Optus and instead of doing a simple
exchange due to lack of stock they had to send it back to
headquarters……6 days have passed and I only found out today it will
be approximately another 6 days before I get a working phone.
So I am paying handset repayments on a phone I don’t bloody have! (here
you just pay the plan you select a month and then a few extra bucks to
pay for the iPhone instead of having to pay a large amount upfront…so
I got a $59 plan, which includes enough data and calls and SMS for
me and then didn’t have to pay anything to get the phone itself)

It's Optus that I am angry with because obviously any manufacturer has a
small amount of products that are just faulty or DOA…but Optus should
have set some aside to account for this.

So yeah…12 hours? Stop whinging, lady

Oh, and to make matters worse, my boyfriend got one on a whim and his is
perfect…….grr.

*****