Slashdot Mirror

This Kickstarter project: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr..., which has just announce that it's shipping (with the usual delays hopefully over), seems like it's already solved the major issues, and just needs a hardware refactoring to produce the USB connection you're looking for.

I'd recommend getting in-touch with the creators and see if they'd be interested in developing this. This is their second Kickstarter project (at least), so they've already learned a lot, so could be positioned well to run with it.

Some are successful
http://www.explodingkittens.co...

Some are not
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... this would be nice to see get off the ground.

A canceled HDMI stick named Matchstick (site currently offline) was successfully funded on Kickstarter.

Fees can vary by country: https://www.kickstarter.com/he...

For the US 8% to 10% comes off the top. It pays to be a middle man. Especially a middle man with a good reputation who brings in eyeballs.

If your project is successfully funded, the following fees will be collected from your funding total: Kickstarter's 5% fee, and payment processing fees (between 3% and 5%). If funding isn't successful, there are no fees.

Just some observational evidence, but big companies do not seem to buy ideas or technologies. . . they do seem to buy customers, though. Of course, you probably are wanting to sell the idea so that you do not have to worry about the annoying customer part of product development. . . Interested to see what stories of such an elusive thing will pop up here. . .

However, if I were you, I would just go ahead and hit up kickstarter at this point. . .

This a new lock:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's on kickstarter now:
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

You'd think Master Lock with all their cash would come up with clever ideas like this lock's mechanism.

To come up with a new mechanism would imply that the old mechanisms aren't all that good, and they will never admit that. It could lead to a major class action suite. In the US, the only option for any corporation is to just pretend that there's no issue, and continue to sell the same old shit. Until someone comes along and forces the issue, like this guy.

This a new lock:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's on kickstarter now:
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

You'd think Master Lock with all their cash would come up with clever ideas like this lock's mechanism.

One of these little fellows would probably do the job.

It's nice that the MST3K Kickstarter is a success, but yesterday we were already pointed to it (again, we already had this on Nov 11st and this on Nov 21st), and yesterday the Kickstarter page already had the update that mentioned Patton Oswalt and his photo was already the video thumbnail.

Stop it already. Three times last month and already one this month, one day after the previous article. We don't need to know all the developments, if we actually care then we'll occasionally check the Kickstarter page ourselves. At this point we are aware that there is a MST3K Kickstarter. You could've simply waited until 10 days from now when you're going to publish yet another article about how much money it made in total. (And then another one when the first episode(s) are being released.) Patton Oswalt isn't exactly jaw-dropping either. It's not like they got Robert Downey Jr. or Tom Cruise or something.

As much as I love the old seasons, we're not just trying to make an "MST3K reunion episode." Even if we do get our entire old cast and staff to come help out, I think it's important – essential– that we bring in new talent to keep the show fresh, and to help it evolve.

I was hesitant about having a new cast as well, but his answers sold me on the idea.

Joel covered this in one of the updates. You're failing to account for the campaign fees collected by Kickstarter, credit card processing fees, and the cost of the rewards being offered.

See here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mst3k/bringbackmst3k/posts/1413188

"At the end of the day, our goal is to make each feature-length episode of MST3K for around $250,000... And remember: that $250K isn't just to hire our writers, cast and crew, or rent equipment and space. It also includes the cost of LICENSING MOVIE RIGHTS, and that can get pretty expensive."

So I'm being reasonable in saying $500k. It's a very large sum of money for the show format.

Actually, as they reported in an update, they are targeting $250,000 per episode:
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

But it turns out the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero costs significantly more to operate than the Next Thing Co. C.H.I.P. [my bold]

Well, yes - if you add the cost of the mini-HDMI-to-HDMI dongle to the Pi and conveniently ignore the fact that the CHIP needs a $15 daughterboard for HDMI. I gave up on fuzzy composite video connections sometime in the 80s. The CHIPs main advantage seems to be bluetooth & wifi - but many applications of the Pi Zero won't need it: just load up the SD card on a PC or another Pi, plug it in and go. Its all swings and roundabouts, and which is best is going to depend on your application. If you actually want a general-purpose computer you'd probably do better to push the boat out on something like a Pi 2 model B.

The USP of all of these devices is that they are sufficiently cheap that (a) if you make something you want to keep, you just buy another one and (b) if, in your tinkering, you let the magic smoke out, there's no great drama.

Lets get real here, though, the Pi Zero is a single-run "special edition" mainly created for the publicity stunt of giving one away 'free' on a magazine cover and is already pretty much sold out (reference here) and the CHIP is only available by pledging to the kickstarter campaign (3rd FAQ here). While its quite likely that either or both of them will be popular enough to go into full production, who knows what the actual prices and specs will be?

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
If you're looking for an embedded device, the Oak is Arduino with WiFi and very low power so much better.

It is a good deal if whatever the Kickstarter is about doesn't exist at the moment. A perfect example is The Link, a quick-release arcade joystick shaft.

Backing a sub $300 3D printer, that's stupid for example. Just in raw materials you need $150 for any printer (electronics, hotend, motion parts). Add production, shipping, R&D, and you'll go over that.

Depends on the 3D printer. If you assume the "standard" parts then yes, I might agree with your $150 for the parts alone. But the Tiko 3D bypasses a lot of those standard parts and even has one member of their team in China to oversee the manufacturing.

Yup. I've funded just one Kickstarter campaign. The project had working prototypes, demonstration videos, and a cost breakdown outlining exactly how much of the money would be spent on which step of the manufacturing process. And most importantly, I thought it was a cool device which needed to be on the market (in fact I had thought of ways of making something similar myself). I had high confidence I would receive the promised goods, but I wouldn't be upset if I lost the money since I felt this was something that deserved to be made.

I agree that we are closing in on a time when perhaps people can make stuff for themselves...and in the case of software projects, we're don't have "manufacturing costs" anyway - once your software is "developed" and "tested" - you're done.

But we somehow need to pay people who are smarter (or more persistent) than we are to design those things...to slog through the 43 failed prototypes...to write the code, to promote the idea...and a Kickstarter is as good a way as any to make that happen. I've paid for several Kickstarter projects where the results of the projects are given away for free whether you pledged or not...but without the pledges, the work can't happen - so in a sense that doesn't matter.

      https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... - is a great example of that.

Earning money in an environment where people make their own physical objects demands a system like Kickstarter to pay for detailed design to get done.

Even though places like Kickstarter really try to make it look like some sort of store the projects are all gambles. There are a few areas that seem to have it down right (books, comics, etc) and I have had success, but tech stuff? *low whistle* You have to approach those different.

Neal Stephenson's 'Clang' comes to mind. https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... http://www.polygon.com/2014/9/...

Kickstarter has a reputation to maintain as well. While they may not promise anything in the fine print, if enough people get screwed and request a chargeback form the credit card company then the card issuers may decide to stop serving KS; even if no money gets refunded. In auditor, at some point a court may rule that despite KS' declaiming any responsibility they indeed do have some and order them to refund money.

Even though places like Kickstarter really try to make it look like some sort of store the projects are all gambles. There are a few areas that seem to have it down right (books, comics, etc) and I have had success, but tech stuff? *low whistle* You have to approach those different.

Neal Stephenson's 'Clang' comes to mind.
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
http://www.polygon.com/2014/9/...

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

I enjoy fried mealworms as replacements for salty snacks, like any other pop-and-crunch food covered in chili powder.

This is freaking awesome. The machine is ingenious.

I bet my son would love to take these to school for snacks!

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

I enjoy fried mealworms as replacements for salty snacks, like any other pop-and-crunch food covered in chili powder.

You can play it for free in your browser.

A remake was attempted in 2012 but the Kickstarter campaign didn't reach its goal.

Yea this is a constant disappointment to me. I'd love a Pi competitor with a draw low enough to work off of common monitors/TVs.

C.H.I.P.

Don't forget the imminent $9 C.H.I.P computer, which has 4GB flash storage, pre-installed O/S, wifi and bluetooth built in for the price. Crazy cheap.

I don't know about the accuracy, but MetaWare seems to be a fairly good alternative. You'd need to develop a wearable to put the hardware in, but it looks pretty good to me. Add in a good bluetooth heart rate monitor and your smartphone and you can duplicate the functionality of any fitness tracker out there while also being less expensive.

there's hope in the form of the Mykroft project ( https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... )

Thanks for the link, that looks really cool!

Good point. I'm contributing money to the development of services and software that give me the features I want to use without tracking me. But my contributions are not proportionate - if I spent $600 on a traditional Android phone and donated $20 to Replicant, and most of the world doesn't even do that, then obviously Replicant won't take off.

I bought a subscription to the https://sandstorm.io/ service, because it's an attempt at making host-your-own web services more secure and more simple for non-technical people. I plan to use their own Sandstorm hosting for services I'm comfortable with making public, and host my own Sandstorm instance out of my house for services I want to (try to) protect from surveillance.

I backed the own-mailbox kickstarter ( https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... ) because if it works it will dramatically simplify hosting my own secure mail with PGP for communication with other PGP users and messages guarded by https links and passwords for communication with non-PGP users.

I think the real long term solution, besides Replicant, is true peer to peer networks that are harder to snoop like ZeroNet, mesh networks like Hyperborea, and peer to peer networks that run on distributed digital currency like MaidSafe and Ethereum.

I think one convenience that sucks people into proprietary ecosystems is voice recognition software like OK Google, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa, but there's hope in the form of the Mykroft project ( https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... ) and Qt 5.6 beta will be getting speech recognition features.

The last nut to crack is search, and that's a tough one. I tried the distributed search engine Yacy for a while, but it didn't work well enough to be usable. I use the DuckDuckGo search engine, which at least has the benefit of being tiny next to the search giants. But DDG tends to not reference recent information or weigh it poorly against older information, so if I need to see something that happened in the last year most of the time I'm forced to go directly to Google.

Good point. I'm contributing money to the development of services and software that give me the features I want to use without tracking me. But my contributions are not proportionate - if I spent $600 on a traditional Android phone and donated $20 to Replicant, and most of the world doesn't even do that, then obviously Replicant won't take off.

I bought a subscription to the https://sandstorm.io/ service, because it's an attempt at making host-your-own web services more secure and more simple for non-technical people. I plan to use their own Sandstorm hosting for services I'm comfortable with making public, and host my own Sandstorm instance out of my house for services I want to (try to) protect from surveillance.

I backed the own-mailbox kickstarter ( https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... ) because if it works it will dramatically simplify hosting my own secure mail with PGP for communication with other PGP users and messages guarded by https links and passwords for communication with non-PGP users.

I think the real long term solution, besides Replicant, is true peer to peer networks that are harder to snoop like ZeroNet, mesh networks like Hyperborea, and peer to peer networks that run on distributed digital currency like MaidSafe and Ethereum.

I think one convenience that sucks people into proprietary ecosystems is voice recognition software like OK Google, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa, but there's hope in the form of the Mykroft project ( https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... ) and Qt 5.6 beta will be getting speech recognition features.

The last nut to crack is search, and that's a tough one. I tried the distributed search engine Yacy for a while, but it didn't work well enough to be usable. I use the DuckDuckGo search engine, which at least has the benefit of being tiny next to the search giants. But DDG tends to not reference recent information or weigh it poorly against older information, so if I need to see something that happened in the last year most of the time I'm forced to go directly to Google.

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

Failing that, why not "ubid.com?" after all, their TV commercials claim you can buy a Macbook there for twenty bucks!

Then, when you can't, sue them for false advertising, and use your windfall to purchase all the kids some laptops.

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

I think that these kind of wearable devices would really benefits from the Firefox OS. First, the Firefox OS is from Mozilla, and Mozilla is known for making the best softwares. Second, the Firefox OS embrace open web technologies like JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, which are the best there are. Third, the Firefox OS is open because it's from Mozilla and because it uses open web technologies. Fourth, the Firefox OS uses Linux kernel. Fifth, the Firefox OS can be used for the embedded softwares and hardwares. Sixth, the Firefox OS is big show in India, the country of softwares. Seventh, the Firefox OS is use important w3c standards. Seven points make me thinking that the Firefox OS is good choice! It is be best choice even!

Why isn't this post modded up?? This is the most hilarious post I've seen on Slashdot all year. And that includes Bennetts drivel.

I think that these kind of wearable devices would really benefits from the Firefox OS. First, the Firefox OS is from Mozilla, and Mozilla is known for making the best softwares. Second, the Firefox OS embrace open web technologies like JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, which are the best there are. Third, the Firefox OS is open because it's from Mozilla and because it uses open web technologies. Fourth, the Firefox OS uses Linux kernel. Fifth, the Firefox OS can be used for the embedded softwares and hardwares. Sixth, the Firefox OS is big show in India, the country of softwares. Seventh, the Firefox OS is use important w3c standards. Seven points make me thinking that the Firefox OS is good choice! It is be best choice even!

There was a kickstarter campaign some time back for Kraft fuel cells

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

All you need is camping gas. You can work on this idea to get something which can work with your laptop or something.

I just looked at the page, and yes, I was wrong, it was April 2013.

Not sure where you get August 22nd at, but I am looking at the updates tab of the kickstarter. And that was talking about stuff from the cancelled FPS mode. The entire last page of comments was from people asking if this is a scam.

From reading the Kickstarter page, the device itself is just a blank pressure-sensitive surface. The configuration software defines areas on that surface that produce specific responses when touched, in the same way that the HTML 'map' tag does for an image. The overlays just provide a visual and tactile feedback so that the user can readily see what the programmed response will be, rather than fumbling across a featureless surface trying to find the right spot (and, with the 'stock' templates, have a pattern of embedded magnets to allow the unit to configure itself automatically for the template).

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1152958674/the-sensel-morph-interaction-evolved

If Sarkeesian can get almost seven thousand people to donate almost $160,000 to help her create a series of videos I'm not even sure she finished, then yes it's definetely within the realms of possibility.

Almost sounds like the CST-01, which hasn't yet shipped one model, I think:

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

Now, hopefully the prices of decent smartphones will come down to a reasonable level. Why the hell pay $600-$700 got the latest from Samsung or LG when there are things like Ubik?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ubik1/ubik-uno-solid-performance-smartphone-at-unbeatabl

If you're asking if people will decide to take the easy life, the answer is the obvious yes. People chose to steal, to prostitute, and to knowingly market pseudoscientific bullshit to con people out of their money.

All of these problems, while annoying, are minimal. Unemployment is currently 5.3%; while of course 3% deciding simply to not work will have severe economic effects, a sufficiently small number will be less likely to cause dearth of employment in whole markets. That is to say: were we faced with 5.3% unemployment, 0.3% of which is just people who are satisfied with next to nothing but survival, we wouldn't find New York, Baltimore, or San Francisco completely devoid of hirable labor, and so would only transfer jobs to people who are seeking work. If we faced 5.3% unemployment and 4% had decided that jobs are for chumps... well, we may have some trouble in the labor market.

Predictably, people want more. I made, under unemployment income, a wage of equivalently $10.50/hr--$420 per month. Were I to take a wage of $10.75/hr working for Federal Express, I would essentially work for 40 hours per week at a wage of 25 cents--not working, I had made $10.50, and now, working, I make $10.75. While I do want more than unemployment ... I'm not working for a quarter an hour.

By the same token, my Citizen's Dividend--not simply a guaranteed minimum income, which may draw away when you cross that minimum on your own means (e.g. if unemployment, above, would continue to pay me $2.50/hr if I got an $8/hr job at McDonalds)--keeps paying when you're Warren Buffet, with no increase or reduction. If someone were willing to pay $5/hr, well, that's $5/hr more than I have now, isn't it? Capsules and glorified hotel rooms are spartan living quarters, after all; and we all wish to live as kings, vacationing in our mountain retreats for the three-day memorial weekend once per year to demonstrate how rugged we are without actually having to live like the cretins at Sparta... or was it the Spartans at Crete?

As to your question, then, I see people refusing to work if you try to compensate them $2/hr for hard labor. They may accept $4/hr or $6/hr or whatever to lounge around in an air conditioned room operating a cash register and smiling at idiots; they probably won't take $6/hr to do grunt labor shoveling heavy gravel across an open field in the burning hot sun for 10 hours per day, because fuck you, pay me. I see them commanding more negotiating power, but not foregoing work; thus I see the repeal of minimum wage as a way to avoid published standards of fairness (shoveling rocks is a minimum-wage job, after all... isn't minimum wage "fair"? This is one of the most powerful negotiating tactics available), driving wages closer to fair--down in many cases of light, low-stress, comfortable tasks, up in cases of strenuous and dangerous labor.

To go further, into secondary effects, statistics claim 92% of female prostitutes protest they would get out of prostitution if only they had enough money to live and work. I don't believe this for a second; I do believe they got into prostitution due to desperate need for survival. I entreat you imagine the next generation of women without that driving need, and how it would impact their likelihood to sell themselves as a commodity. The statistics claim 40% of New York prostitutes start as children, with the average age of prostitution beginning at 14--which means a lot of 12-year-old hookers on the streets somewhere.

The blacks need as much food as whites and asians; I'm not sure about Mexicans, since they're so small. In any case, you can't very well point at blacks and claim welfare abuse and shit when they get exactly the same monthly deposit a middle-class white man gets. Someone, once, asked me what specific steps I took to address racial inequality in my plan; I spent several long seconds confused at the

I was there last week, is that recent enough for you?
I visited 6 different factories / suppliers during my stay.

Mike, is that you?

Here's what the Kickstarter page said about openness and hackability:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console

Hackers welcome. Have at it: It's easy to root (and rooting won't void your warranty). Everything opens with standard screws. Hardware hackers can create their own peripherals, and connect via USB or Bluetooth. You want our hardware design? Let us know. We might just give it to you. Surprise us!

But close to release, I decided to never buy one after I learned that the company didn't support a genuine end user recovery mode, and witnessed an Ouya employee (Al Sutton) berating and insulting the customers who insisted on one.

His attitude about custom firmware was shocking as well.

From a long-dead ouyaforum.com thread:

I'm keeping a track of how many requests we get relating custom firmware, and from what I'm seeing the user base is not as interested in custom firmware as you might think, which is echoed by this thread (we've shipped 60,000+ units, and less than 10 people have commented in the last month in this thread about getting access to recovery mode).That doesn't mean that we're shooting the idea down, you need to keep in mind that in terms of priorities this is way down the list as you'd expect from any feature where it's being requested by less than one tenth of one percent of the user-base.

After people began calling Al Sutton out over this and citing the Kickstarter page to him, he made things even worse by implying that root access was a priviledge and that Ouya was doing modders a special favor by having it, and that Ouya hadn't promised much of anything (instead attempting to compare the console's openness to that of consoles you can buy at Gamestop).

As for "Open"; Well, a year or so ago the idea of going into a gaming centric store like GameStop or Game, buying a console, taking it home, writing a game on it, and publishing it without spending big money on development kits, licensing, and the like was pretty much non-existant. That's where OUYA is open; It's open to anyone to write games and apps without having to pay dev kit and licensing fees, it's open in that once you have your console you can code for it.
The reason you can still simply get root access is that I've seen people want to tinker beyond what most users would do. OUYA could stick to what was originally put on the Kickstarter page and take away root from non-devkits, but I, for one, would be against that, because I've seen that people do use it constructively and responsibly, and not everyone bricks their device then raises a support ticket to try and get OUYA to fix it.

It really floored me to read this a week before Ouya's launch, given the kickstarter page's promises of hackability.

Anyone with a reflashable phone (or any pretty much any other Android device whatsoever capable of using custom ROMS) knows that a real recovery mode is absolutely essential, in case the OS/kernel gets borked. And a functioning non-OS-dependant recovery mode isn't just important for hackers. It could also be the difference between a faulty official update merely inconveniencing you, or outright bricking your console. Ouya's supposed "recovery mode" relies on an already-bootable OS, so it's useless.

Even worse was the principle of the thing, and the evil behaviour of promising a feature from the beginning, then trying to handwave it away at crunchtime and citing a vague low demand (which wouldn't matter even if true). It reeks of Elite:Dangerous, which announced that they disabled the offline mode right before release.

In general you only hear about people screwing up and making mistakes, so of course you think the majority of Kickstarter projects are run by thieves and crooks.

I have only participated in one Kickstarter project, but it went really well and I'm extremely pleased with the products that I received.

When 80% of a group of people tell you that they are not interested in something, THAT IS SIGNIFICANT!

Maybe they're not interested in the current workforce dominated by males with sexist attitudes and L337 approaches?

When engineering projects are made that catter to the specific differences and interests of females (such as toy construction sets that are less centered on their pure mechanical structure and more on their usage and applications,) the approval rate of girls towards is shown to increase. (The pink color seems to help in this case, BTW). This may very well a chicken-and-egg problem: women are not interested in science and tech because nowadays there's nothing interesting in it for them.

Historically, males have been the risk takers, and females have by choice taken fewer risks. Guys do outrageous shit, and girls seldom do anything terribly outrageous. That's the way it is.

If your "empirical evidence" is mindless repeating of gender stereotypes, you lose an internet. Where's the connection that STEM people must be "risk-takers" (or that women don't do outrageous things, for that matter)?

A successful crowdfunded campaign has started shipping N900-style keyboard add-ons for Jolla, so you may finally have found a decent alternative. If you are waiting for an official successor from Nokia, well, good luck with that...

I was a backer of this project that was pretty much the same:
Packed Pixels

Nice screen at 2048 x 1536, but not yet delivered. They just about hit their funding goal of £60,000 on 29th November 2014, and they're now taking pre-orders. It would probably be better to just pre-order one of these than back a whole new Kickstarter - at least these are close to production.

-- Pete.

If you're old, how about contributing to the Shenmue 3 kickstarter...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ysnet/shenmue-3