The average consumer faces dozens of recurring bills that they did not pay two decades ago. What was once the phone bill is now a “Triple Play” where the consumer can pay hundreds of dollars to their cable provider. Cellphone service adds another $100 per month.

I know many people who have invested hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars buying apps. Sure, we don’t have to buy CDs, but somewhere we began paying $1 a song and $15 for eBooks.

There is a whole new class of digital services that add to these bills. Storage and photo sharing are at the top of that list. Job seekers may pay for LinkedIn, which lets you maintain a digital Rolodex. Homeowners need Angie’s List memberships, which is essential, like the Yellow Pages.

A lot of these modern conveniences are “needs” not “nice-to-haves” since the old business models are going away. Sure, it’s cheap to print photographs, but how do you share these with your friends or do anything with them? How do you back them up or view them on your iPad? The cost of modern living has gone up.

I love Google because they provide me with a whole bunch of these modern services in an ad-supported way, which is the same business model we had 20 years ago with the Yellow Pages and broadcast TV. Apple does a fantastic job of providing many of these same services in a premium ad-free manner.

The proliferation of essential services, and bills to pay, makes it easier just to stick with a single provider. These companies command a portion of all the revenue for content and delivery services provided through their pipes. Consequently, a tremendous amount of consumer revenue is now going to the operators of these services.

The number of apps is growing quite quickly and there are a few sensor standards (Ant, Bluetooth, etc.) now in place. Furthermore, we’re on the brink of an explosion in fitness peripherals like the Up from Jawbone. The Ant-based bicycle sensors look awesome, and I can’t wait to get them on my bike.

Despite all this progress, we continue to lag behind when it comes to the phone. Although the apps and peripherals are here, there are no “fitness phones”. Phones are made to view videos and play games and music. I can barely fit most of the newer smartphones in my pocket because of the screen size. There’s a high likelihood that you will shatter the screen when you drop the phone.

What is needed is a fitness phone. It has to have a smaller, but usable, screen and must mount to my handlebars. It has to fit comfortably in my hand or on my shoulder when I am running. It also has to allow for a variety of apps, peripherals and sensor standards. Lastly, it has to be rugged and waterproof.

Platform owners have to solve the issue of critical mass. Developers like to see an audience or a user need before developing apps. The conventional wisdom is that users like to see apps before choosing a new platform. In the end, this is the chicken-or-the-egg problem that all new platforms face.

One way to solve this problem is to seed the platform will all the popular services (apps). Handing out cash to developers is a way to get these seed apps. Another is to build the apps yourself. Over a year and a half into Windows 7 Mobile, this revelation is a clear sign that Microsoft is struggling to get meaningful market share.

Naming is important, because it gives people a sense of ownership over the project. If you’re the person who created the name, you have more ownership. Furthermore, names tend to carry on with a product, sometimes after launch. (Ice Cream Sandwich, anyone?)

Picking non-descriptive names or difficult naming conventions adds a tax to a project for the team. Names, irregardless of their complexity, also add to the complexity of a project. If you are newly staffed on a project, it takes a while to understand and get used to the new names and naming conventions.

Names or conventions could be decided by the following, and each has its advantages/disadvantages:
1. The CEO - ultimate ownership but risky
2. Naming experts – painless but costly
3. Developer or project manager – ownership but also risky
4. Shared Responsibility (names only, within a convention) – spread ownership but high sigma (σ)
5. Marketing – good, but often non-descriptive and long cycle times
6. Other

First post, this Narangansett Cream Ale sounds delicious.

After using YUM to update my installation, I almost freaked out when I received a Kernel panic message on reboot. I noticed that there was no initrd line in the grub menu for the first (default) option using the 3.2.7-2 kernel. Looking deeper, I noticed that the intramfs file was also missing. When I tried to create the initramfs file using dracut, it errored out. I realized then that YUM was complaining about an unfinished transaction. I used yum-complete-transaction to resolve that issue.

Once that was done, I used dracut to successfully build another initramfs file. I updated the grub menu configuration file, which is impossible to find since they moved to grub2. For Fedora 16, I found it in /boot/grub2. However, even though I was able to get it to boot up with the new kernel, Gnome 3 went into fallback mode. Consequently, I decided to stick with the 3.1 kernel, which seems to be pretty stable with Gnome 3.

Overall, my laptop seems to be working just fine. I haven’t installed the binary 3d drivers though, and am making do with the native open source drivers. This setup is a lot faster than the previous Ubuntu 11.10 and Unity setup, and it is working perfectly with my brand new 23″ monitor.

tl;dr Fedora 16 works fine with my Toshiba T235d as long as I stick with the 3.1 kernel.