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I was oplaying devil's advocate. But if you must know, I'd rather have something that's closed source with 95% market penetration than open with 1%. Once you have a disparity like that, openness is simply academic.

If you'd really like to know a bit more about why DirectX is the gaming monolith that it is, I'd suggest starting with a book called Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft . It chronicles how three guys in MS worked on the DX project secretly and without approval. They did so, because if you'll recall, back in the earlier Windows days (Pre 9x and early Win95) all PC gaming was done in DOS. Windows was considered a terrible platform for gaming. Then when 95 came around, it had native OpenGL support. You may recall it shipped with a few OpenGL based screen savers that were in various versions of Windows for years. As far as I can tell, this is about as far as OpenGL was utilized when 95 came out. Windows 95 was STILL considered a bad choice for a gaming platform because of all the overhead, etc. So games still ran in DOS. I remember games of the era. Wing Commander 3 for instance. A 9x version didn't ship until years later...

Then these three "renegades" decided that they needed to make Windows a platform which would be attractive for game developers. DirectX was their answer. Ease of development. Develop once for DX, and don't worry if the user has a Soundblaster, or Rolland, or AdLib or Herculees sound card. Let developers focus on a common interface. They did it in secret and by the time they let it loose upon the world, the executives at MS couldn't stop it. It was either embrace this thing that can only help Windows, or crush it and look bad in the process.

Obviously they chose to embrace it. Years later we're ten versions into it, and elements (such as audio) have changed a lot.

The point of this little story though is that developers were not embracing OpenGL. It was available to them. It was fully open. But they chose to ignore it, and developed games for DOS instead. Each game using it's own proprietary system for addressing memory, video, sound, etc.

DirectX may be a closed standard, but it is a standard. Almost every PC game that ships uses it. It works as long as your hardware is fast enough. I don't care that I can't see the code that runs it. I can develop for it. Right now if I choose. A hobiest with almost no programming experience. I can pick up an SDK and get going.

In every meaningful way, it's as good or better than the comparable open technologies that exist.

You could play Tux racer and Doom 3. Or you could have FEAR, Half-Life Half-Life 2, Max Payne, Starcraft, WoW, Flight Simulator, SWAT 4, Black & White, Company of Heros, and dozens of other games that come out for DirectX, and hence, for Windows.

If I want to play games (Among other things...) I choose Windows. I *do* want to play games, so I do choose Windows.

You're not missing a thing; it's one of the big reasons the FairTax makes sense: corporations don't really pay taxes, they pass them along to people. There's a whole chapter on this in the FairTax book, I really suggest you read it; it's at least interesting even if you don't end up agreeing (but I think you will).

That's a non-referring link, but I don't know what I can chop out and have it still work, so I left it all in.

Weird this question should come up. I'm just sort of starting to learn about how electronics work, and picked up this thing at Fry's for $12.99. It's for kids, and I'm in my 30s. But what the hell.

It comes with a 76 page illustrated book that takes you through building circuits of greater and greater complexity. I'm only up to page 22 or so (capacitors). The illustrated book is fairly clear, uses a water/pipe analogy to explain what's happening..

This, along with this free book, has provided hours of fun and an interesting intro to how these electric devices we see all the time actually work...

I haven't used a 500-in-1 kit yet, but considering how cheap this was, I feel like I've already gotten my moneys worth in watching a capacitor charge at different rates depending on the resistance I throw in front/behind it.

I know, I know. I'm easily entertained. Can't wait to make the transistor radio. That'll be cool. I mean, when it's done... I'll know how a radio works!

For anyone who's ever been interested in electronic machines and how they operate, I highly recommend the book ("Lessons In Electronic Circuits"), which is easy to read, and getting one of these little kits. Good times.

To be honest, I think your best bet is to get the kit and the "manual" separately.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to tutor an absolutely prodigal young kid, who happened to be 'into' electricity that season. I couldn't find any electricial kits that seemed up to snuff in both the hardware and manuals departments, so instead I ended up taking one of the bigger Radioshack kits, and then using some of the Forrest M. Mims III books as project guides. Why they don't have that guy do the manuals for the kits I have no idea, because he's really quite good.

For the few projects we wanted to do where the board didn't have the right parts, I just hacked them on, either in place of parts that I thought were trivial (resistors, etc.), or just by drilling a new hole in the board surface and adding it in.

You could do something similar to the Guess Who game to make it easier to reset. Go from 10 minutes down to seconds.....but save that for version 2....no sense trying to jump Moore's law.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B00000IWDR /ref=dp_images_1/104-9632234-2647149?ie=UTF8&s=toy s-and-games&img=1&childASIN=B00000IWDR

Layne

"Simple: they aren't available. PC's don't typically come with DSPs. "

Of course they don't.

Right? Right? Right?

http://www.amazon.com/God-Code-Gregg-Braden/dp/140 1902995 [The God Code]

Gregg Braden, a systems designer, wrote a book on this subject. He believes he has found a code in human DNA that literally translates to God's name. He uses a kabalistic technique to assign numbers to Hebrew letters. He then correlates those numbers to periodic elements that exist in DNA. I believe he does this based on the number of electrons in their outer shell, but I am not sure.

However, it's pretty much always a support service. Therefore you should expect that you'll end up on call. Personally I don't like that part, but can't deny the extra pay is nice.

It's also a field where experience is what really really matters. Which means it can be tough to break into. Certifications and degrees are nice, but it's my '5 years in the industry' which opens doors, not the other bits of paper.

However as a starting point in 'building your career', I will suggest you look at:

• ITIL - IT infrastructure library. It's something that put me off initally, as it look a bit too much like icky-yuck processes and procedures. However, I've run into a _lot_ of companies that are starting to 'buy in' to the model. That wouldn't convince me, though. What did, is it's actually a fairly good way of 'doing IT'. Not the only way by any means, but one worth looking at, if only because then you have a basis for comparison.
• SAGE Systems Administrators guild, a subdivision of Usenix.
• BCS British Computer Society
• The Practice of System and Network Administration (Paperback) - A personal favourite, this is a brilliant book, because it covers the _theory_ of systems admin.

As far as I can tell, your bits of paper serve to help you secure an interview. But the field's .... well sufficiently complicated and convoluted that your ability to learn, research and innovate are far more important. As is your ability to show you can do this.

Why go to school for four years only to work your way up a ladder for five when you could retire in seven?

Why go to school for four years only to work your way up a ladder for five when you could retire in seven?

Why go to school for four years only to work your way up a ladder for five when you could retire in seven?

I'm sorry that we haven't invented quickly enough to satisfy you. I'll email the folks at Google and tell them to be more clever.

But just in case you've forgotten, here are some novel software concepts and applications from the last few years:

• The web OS
• iTunes
• BitTorrent
• The mobile ad-hoc wireless network
• Voice over IP (as a decentralized, "no one owns the network" concept - much different from telecoms)
• Massively multiplayer gaming, with thousands of people simultaneously participating
• The Onion Router (Tor), and other anonymizing network concepts
• YouTube, as a large, free host of user-generated video
• Consumer-grade GPS
• GPS-based traffic analysis and routing

I could go on, but I think my point is manifest. These things are qualitatively different than precursors from a decade ago. Characterizing these things as tepid rehashes of age-old ideas is the height of dismissive cynicism.

For instance, the bayesian spam filtering we all know and love is patented by Microsoft.

You do realize that patents have characteristics like "scope," right? That Microsoft might have patented its particular implementation of a Bayesian filter, but that it hasn't (and can't) patent the general notion of Bayesian logic?

A hundred years ago, Samuel Morse applied for and was (rightfully) granted a patent on the telegraph. But he also tried to patent the general concept of "sending alphanumeric characters via electromagnetism." This was rejected as impossibly broad. Today we would still deny such an application on several grounds (lack of "enablement," an inadequate "written description," etc.)

Showing thumbnails in online auctions? Patented by eBay.

Yeah, it sucks that uBid can't show thumbnails for its auctions. Oh, wait - it does.

And it sucks that Amazon Auctions can't show thumbnails, either. Whoops - it does, too.

Can you at least double-check these claims before you post them?

All these companies have a huge arsenal at their disposal, and they can direct it at anyone they like. They don't usually direct it at little guys because there's no money, and they usually don't direct it at big guys because of mutually-assured destruction.

Thank you. You have just shot down many arguments against the patent system.

Many of the criticisms of patent law are completely unsupported by the realities of the system. In my experience, most doom-and-gloom forecasters are pretty unenlightened for the actual workings of the system. They just read a brief snippet about it and shoot from the hip.

Did you notice how IBM counter-sued SCO for patent infringement?

And that is a completely legitimate and well-known use of patents. It's defensive patenting. What's wrong with that? A gun can be used to commit cold-blooded murder, or it can be used for self-defense.

When you boil it down, software patents are just a tax.

STAC Electronics. Ever hear of them? No? How about Stacker? Still no? Does DoubleSpace sound familiar?

Let me tell you a story. Back in the early 90's, hard drive space was still pretty small - you could fill up your hard drive by writing a bunch of documents. Sure, you could compress them, but that was a pain in the ass, because you had to do it manually.

Enter STAC Electronics. They invented an automated system for compressing data on your hard drive. The files look and work the same to you (except for a small access delay), but you have a lot more hard drive space.

It was gee-whiz cool, and it helped a lot of people. The p

Isn't the way they worked very close to Free Software, though? They would show their code to anyone, and anyone who could improve it was allowed to, etc. Open Source doesn't necessarily mean you're allowed to improve it.

It was both free and open. Many would leave a copy of the code near the terminals so anyone else could look at and try to make improvements to the code. They were then expected to do the same thing. Steven Levy wrote a good book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution , on this. It goes into both the software and hardware hackers.

It's nice to see that Slashdot has finally started linking to the Amazon listing instead of the wildly overpriced Barnes & Noble as it inexplicably did for several years. Do, however, take a look at the "Used and new..." listings, since the third-party sellers usually offer new copies even cheaper than Amazon itself does.

Has anyone used Amazon's S3 service? [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261 ]

We're considering using it for yet-another offsite backup of some of our records, in an encrypted form.

The prospect of being able to use a simple API to update and download backups seems like a great idea to me, but I've yet to find any decent service reviews.

No, but he might be the Kumquat Haagen-Dazs.

In 1992 Harry Harrison (of SF fame) and Marvin Minsky (of AI fame) collaborated on The turing option, trying to merge Minsky's ideas about how an artificial mind could work with a SF story. Wasn't exactly a masterpiece, but there was an astonishing twist: In the book a brilliant scientist creates the first true AI and embeds it into a sort of fractal robot, whose arms are split into more arms like branches on a tree, ending with thousands of autonomous arms with their own vision each. And the first place this system is used (after being stolen): in agriculture, picking up bugs.

So I will predict the first mass use of Purdue's Tricorder: Japanese toilets!!!. It can already recognize "biomarkers" in urine, so someone will build a cheap version of it into a toilet and every time you take a dump it will tell you what you should not have been eating, how sick you will be tomorrow and that if you continue that way your insurance won't cover your therapy. It will save the health systems billions.

Oh, and I'm serious about the toilet part.

We could put them to work in the fields, pollinating plants. Feed them enough sugar and they'd even buzz around like bees.

Or we could just feed our sons and daughters all the royal jelly we have left and get new bees. Ever read Roald Dahl's extremely disturbing short story "Royal Jelly" (collected in Kiss Kiss )? And I for one welcome our new man-bee hybrid overlords.

The CIA's experiments in radio control of the brain are based on the development of the EEG in the 1920's. In 1934, doctor's Chaffee and Light published a pivotal monograph, "A Method for Remote Control of Electrical Stimulation of the Nervous System". Work along the same lines allowed Dr. Jose Delgado of Cordoba, Spain to climb into bull-ring and, with the push of a button, trigger an electrode in the head of a charging bull and stop the beast in it's tracks.

Further groundbreaking advances were made by L.L. Vasiliev, the famed Russian Physiologist and doyan of parapsychology, in "Critical Evaluation of the Hypnogenic Method". The article detailed the experiments of Dr. I.F. Tomashevsky in remote radio control of the brain "at a

It's only priced so high so that it doesn't cannibalize ipod sales. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't seem to realize there's no reason to purchase a phone for such a premium price when you can get these:

Creative Zen Vision 30G $284.99 + Nokia 6103 $160 = $444.99

For less than this:

iPhone $499/4gb $599/8gb

Two superior devices (the best camera phone + the best portable HD based video player) for less than an overhyped, overpriced product... hmm. I wonder what people are going to buy.

not totally offtopic but i would like to recommend this amazing book (the man who knew infinity) to anyone interested in reading his biography. its one of the best biographies i've ever read.

> then I'd strongly recommend getting a separate
> reference book just for Ruby by itself.

The Ruby Way is an excellent book for that, plus, the author, Hal Fulton, is a nice guy. And his RubyForge user account name is "hal9000", for which he gets additional points.

I'm not in a fringe area (only 10 miles from broadcast towers), but I have done nothing to improve my reception and have actually done some things that hurt reception for the purpose of aesthetics.

I have an HDTV with butterfly ears (Terk TV5), and the antenna is only about 3.5 ft off the ground hidden behind the TV. Lots of trees in our line of site, and this is on the ground floor of a two story house. I've had good luck with digital compared to analog reception. In fact, digital reception is much, much better for me. Every analog channel comes in with snow, static, blur, you name it. Every corresponding digital channel comes in with perfect clarity, and rarely do they go out.

On the odd occasion when I have lost the HD signal, I've flipped over to the corresponding analog channel to compare, and it was usually so static-filled as to be unwatchable, so it wasn't a loss. Occasionally I have to tweak the antenna for a second, but that's it.

If you can find a Samsung SIR-T165, SIR-T451 or DTB-H260F, pick one up.

I have an SIR-T165 and it works great. Tunes all analog cable, OTA analog and digital, plus OTA HDTV. Supports all formats. No broadcast flag, IEEE-1394/FireWire, DVI, VGA/RGB, S-Video, component, composite. Samsung did a really great job packing in a lot of connectors, formats, and functionality. The SIR-T451 appears to add QAM for digital cable (in the clear, no doubt), and HDCP on the DVI.

This doesn't answer the question about where they've all gone, but Samsung did a good job and hopefully you can pick one of these, or something like it, up somewhere.

$2 an episode is too much

There seems to be 22 episodes per series of the Simpsons, and the current series is #18. Series #9 is retailing at $33 so that would suggest that $1.50 is a reasonable cost to own an episode. Hell, even the first series is still $30 at amazon. Series #9 (the latest available to buy) was aired 9 years ago, and series #1 was aired in 1989!!! (On a side note, UK consumers are still getting screwed by the infamous $1:£1 currency converter - #9 costs £30 (aka ~$60))

If a network put the series that weren't available up for pay-per-view on a server, they'd take a fortune and people would pay it. Whether they can make a larger fortune by buying^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbying legislation like DMCA, witholding the DVD releases and dribbling episodes to networks (foreign or domestic), is another question

Just a mention of the study by Barry Fell called "America B.C., Ancient Settlers In The New World" that folks might find interesting. Book link: http://www.amazon.com/America-B-C-Ancient-Settlers -World/dp/0671555030/sr=8-1/qid=1172451097/ref=sr_ 1_1/002-9487846-1462453?ie=UTF8&s=books

1491 is an awesome book that discusses this and lots of other evidence about the population and civilization of the Americas (N & S) before the Europeans arrived.

I've got a copy of the book on my desk between me and my monitor, but I haven't started reading it yet.

A book I recommend is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C Mann.

1491 is an awesome book that discusses this and lots of other evidence about the population and civilization of the Americas (N & S) before the Europeans arrived.

There's too much history to even attempt to paraphrase in this comment box. The Clovis controversy is just the tip of the iceberg.

Who is to say that 60000 years ago somebody from Indonesia could not possibly have seen most of the world in a lifetime, if they had so desired?

I'd refer you to Karl Bushby's book Giant Steps . Looks like it won't be out in the U.S. for another few days. Bushby started a walk back from England from southern Chile in 1998, the book covers his adventures up to the Bering Strait. Even in this day of good gear, good clothing, and and good sports nutrition, Bushby has still faced enormous odds along the way. I don't think that a man in antiquity could have seen most of the world. Even the most impressive ventures of the time, the colonization of Polynesia, was mainly done by slowly going from one island on to another over generations. Sure, you had amazing feats like getting to Madagascar, but that's far from "most of the world". And how is your random Indonesian going to cope with the frigid temperatures of areas outside the tropical zone?

(Note, that's a ref. link.)

I can recommend http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Socie ties/dp/0393317552 :

His main answer has to do with food production: North America had hardly any good domesticable crops, so the most populous and advanced North American civilization (in the Mississipi valley) could only emerge after the slow spread of Mexican corn and beans across the deserts north of the Aztec homeland, which gave them very little time to 'prepare' for the European invasion.

The thing with The Non-Designer's Design Book is that she didn't have the web in mind when she wrote it back in 1994. It's more for people doing stuff like desktop publishing. True, a lot of what it says is applicable to web design. But if your focus is web design, her more recent Non-Designer's Web Book is probably a better place to start. A very good book if you can overlook some irritating but non-essential technical errors.

I actually did publish a book that I authored in HTML. More precisely, we used HTML run through a really ugly preprocessor that one of the original authors of the book created while she was teaching herself Perl.

Fortunately, our publisher found an SGML/XML wizard who did a very good job of converting the HTML to XML, which then got converted PDF using an off-the-shelf XSL-FO processor. I was very impressed with his work, without which the conversion would have been a total nightmare. It was still very tedious, though, because HTML is not a true structured format, and you cannot completely automate its conversion.

It would, of course, have been much more efficient to have authored the document in XML in the first place. I remember this actually being proposed back in 1998 for an earlier version of the book. (I was not a co-author back then, but I was working for the department that owned the content.) The manager who responsible for this had zero interest: HTML got the job done, she didn't have the resources to do a big XML conversion. Never mind the huge inefficiency of authoring that book, and a lot of other content related to the Java SE platform, in plain HTML. Only now, after this manager has left the company and it has become painfully obvious that they can no longer afford to hack such a huge mountain of HTML code, is the company getting round to making the conversion.

HTML is just not a good format. It's barely adequate for creating web pages, and totally useless for anything else.

Interesting angle. Your insight about the incompatibility between what the law dictates and what people think is fair is a *very* important consideration. I think about that often, and in much more general terms than simply copyright laws.

Legislators in any modern (or not so modern) country have created many more laws and regulations than we can imagine (see The Death of Common Sense), while libertarians took refuge in transgression of the law (e.g. speeding). However this world, thanks to information technology, is clearly becoming much easier to police -- here where I live cameras everywhere will take pictures of your license plate and automatically mail you a ticket if you speed. They can also control where your car has been (was it supposed to be there?).

But I digress. What I really wanted to add to your insight is just this: more than the size of the penalty, the probability of getting caught influences how people behave towards the law. And there is a very important "crowd mentality" phenomenon -- if more people break the law, the probability of getting caught goes down, causing yet more people to break the law, which reinforces the cycle. But technology (think spyware, think speed radar cameras, think data base mining in the IRS and, perhaps, DRM) can revert the cycle.

Thinking about law+police+technology makes one think about hackers as the white-hat cowboys: the last guardians of the libertarian spirit.

"The sole mistake Americans make is by automatically assuming that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". All other mistakes including sending the military and the CIA are a mere consequence of this one."

Actually, the major mstake we make, as a country, is assuming we have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This is usually done to protect our "interests", which in turn is code for protecting the interests of our various companies and corporations. Read "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" and you'll see the same patterns repeated again and again and again.

Most "rare" materials aren't available in DRM form. What causes the copyright infringement isn't the DRM but the fact that you can't get it at all. If they're available with DRM, then the supply is large: just go pay for it and download it.

What is DRMed and also "high-priced"? Songs are a buck on iTunes. Movies are twenty bucks on DVD. It may be more than you want to pay but it's not a vast amount of money.

I did it this was so that I could also do a print version from the same source document.

"We are the people. Individually we are weak. Together we rule the world."

Read this book and say that again.

I spent years trying to find a good overview of and reference for graphic design that I could apply to web design in particular. There are thousands of (mostly expensive) books out there, and they're all useless for this. Then I found this one. It doesn't focus on web design, though it covers it and everything in it is applicable. It's inexpensive and incredibly useful, and tech-accessible.

* Krause, Jim. Design Basics Index: A Graphic Designer's Guide to Designing Effective Compositions, Selecting Dynamic Components & Developing Creative Content. How to Design Books 2004. 359pp.

This is the only book I've seen that covers all the different aspects of graphic design. The book itself is a great example of all the demonstrated principles, which makes it a fun and informative read. Despite the great breadth and depth of what is covered here, each particular concept is presented clearly, concisely, and always in a way that inspires. Not only is this incredibly useful, but but it totally gets you going creatively. For web designers who are not artists, there is surprising little out there that will help us learn what we need to know about the graphic art side of web design. While it's not specifically about that, this book will does the trick well.

That article seems to indicate that zero had its roots in the Mayan civilization, and perhaps the Olmecs before them.

Anyway, quoting from thisi book, Babylonians used something like a placeholder zero in 600 BC, the Indians got it fully in the first few centuries AD, and Mayans used it (recorded) in 357 AD and possibly well before (no actual recorded zeros, but records of numerical systems that require zero).

You might want to read Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century Especially page 349-351. I think your stance on remittance will be different.

'Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
    but rather when there is nothing more to take away'. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

as a technical writer for ten years, i've found the best book on the subject
for people who aren't designers is: Robin William's Non-Designer's Design Book.

it covers the four basic principles of Design:

1) Proximity: Make sure than when you Poke button X, status indicator Y is PROXIMATE to X.

2) Alignment: Don't start things out on a new Arbitrary Visual Margin, reuse existing Bounding Rectangles to ALIGN things to each other.

3) Repetition: Don't use a different icon for the same thing; consistently use the same Motif throughout.

4) Contrast: If two elements are not exactly the same, make them distinguishably different.

all the best,
j

Slashdot has linked to B & N here, but it seems Amazon has it cheaper, just look at the New portion of the "Used and new..." listings.

You assume that the qualities of phi are embedded in the pyramids. If you're really interested in a detailed history and understanding of phi, I'd recommend this book .

The author does a thorough review of popular citations for phi and it is very well researched. I think that you'll be surprised at where you can find phi, and where you can't.

Let me recommed the book, "How to Run a Successful Meeting in Half the Time" http://www.amazon.com/How-Successful-Meeting-Half- Time/dp/0671726013/sr=8-7/qid=1172256632/ref=sr_1_ 7/102-8911026-2154546?ie=UTF8&s=books, It's a quick read, and does have good advice.

The author gives the an example of a good meeting, the opening of the old TV show, "LA Law", where the lead attorney came in, laid his pocket watch on the table, then asked everyone to bring him up to speed with what they were doing. The pocketwatch was a device to let the audience know that he valued his time. Always, the meeting was over by the first commercial break. If real life corporate meetings could be more like this, I think we'd get a lot more done.

Perplexed as to why Amazon would launch two separate Question and Answer services, NowNow and AskVille I did some googling and thought I'd share what I came up with.

Firstly, it turns out that someone has already asked this on AskVille and the answers are fairly to the point. Also O'Reilly Radar has a post about the two services.

The gist of it is: AskVille is like Yahoo! Answers and NowNow is like 82ASK. NowNow is specifically set up for mobile users who need to find answers quickly. Questions are farmed out to Mechanical Turk where people are paid real cash money to answer questions.

However, Amazon have completely dropped the ball with NowNow:

1. The interface is mobile email! It's specifically for mobile phones and yet they've used email instead of the obvious choice of SMS.
2. Because they've chosen email instead of SMS they've also made the billing procedure more complicated. While the service is beta it is free, but I presume that in order to use it when it goes live you will have to set up some sort of Amazon account. So you have to know in advance that you might one day need to use the service, unlike with 82ASK.
3. Mechanical Turk is notoriously badly paid, and absolutely anyone can join it. So the researchers aren't vetted or trained like 82ASK's texperts are, and they're nowhere near as well paid as texperts, so they can't guarantee the same quality of answers as 82ASK.

AskVille has some interesting twists on Yahoo! Answers. Like an online game answers earn virtual money, and there is more community vetting and rating of answers and answerers then there is on Yahoo! Answers.

If they'd been really innovative they would have merged the best bits of each into on single product with both mobile and web access. If they'd done that there would be reason for 82ASK to be worried. But as it is I think they've blown it.

Perplexed as to why Amazon would launch two separate Question and Answer services, NowNow and AskVille I did some googling and thought I'd share what I came up with.

Firstly, it turns out that someone has already asked this on AskVille and the answers are fairly to the point. Also O'Reilly Radar has a post about the two services.

The gist of it is: AskVille is like Yahoo! Answers and NowNow is like 82ASK. NowNow is specifically set up for mobile users who need to find answers quickly. Questions are farmed out to Mechanical Turk where people are paid real cash money to answer questions.

However, Amazon have completely dropped the ball with NowNow:

1. The interface is mobile email! It's specifically for mobile phones and yet they've used email instead of the obvious choice of SMS.
2. Because they've chosen email instead of SMS they've also made the billing procedure more complicated. While the service is beta it is free, but I presume that in order to use it when it goes live you will have to set up some sort of Amazon account. So you have to know in advance that you might one day need to use the service, unlike with 82ASK.
3. Mechanical Turk is notoriously badly paid, and absolutely anyone can join it. So the researchers aren't vetted or trained like 82ASK's texperts are, and they're nowhere near as well paid as texperts, so they can't guarantee the same quality of answers as 82ASK.

AskVille has some interesting twists on Yahoo! Answers. Like an online game answers earn virtual money, and there is more community vetting and rating of answers and answerers then there is on Yahoo! Answers.

If they'd been really innovative they would have merged the best bits of each into on single product with both mobile and web access. If they'd done that there would be reason for 82ASK to be worried. But as it is I think they've blown it.

Hello, anonymous coward! You might try reading Descartes' Error, which includes the aforementioned case of Phineas P. Gage. I'm not really sure why you posted with such venom; is it all that unreasonable that the physiology of the brain might have something to do with behavior?