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Digital Convergence Bites the Dust
An anonymous reader writes "On Friday Digital Convergence (DC) 'restructured' and got rid of just about everyone without severance pay.
They are still trying to sell the 'paper' company, the problem will be to find someone stupid enough to buy it!
Some interesting quotes from The Dallas Morning News:
DC speak "some employees in NY were let go"
English: about two remain.
Radio Shack: "We have stock in the stores, and we're continuing to distribute"
English: The CueCats are taking up valuable room in the warehouse, we need to get rid of them.
DC: "The staff has been significantly reduced,"
English: You don't have to take off your shoes to count the people left.
DC: "a number of employees throughout the company have decided to stay on as unpaid consultants."
English: The senior people who have millions of shares are still coming in for a few days.
DC: "Quite frankly, we're even going after new business"
English: Are there any suckers out there who want to buy the company?
" But it looks like those CueCats out there are now definitely freely hackable without threat of a cease and desist. If only the MPAA would go under.
Great ... that means I can open up my CueCat and use it without fearing of someone beating down my door? oh wait ... i didn't fear that before either..
Thanks for interjecting the MPAA or RIAA into every fucking discussion that goes on here. This place wasn't nearly annoying enough until you started that practice.
Yeah... proves /. Is a formidable opponent, we killed I-Opener and now DC, whenever a company releases a product they will consider this "Slashdot Factor", such as the Xbox will it be /.-proof?
Maybe MS would of left it wideopen if it weren't for us killing NetAppliance and DC (fair enough their businesses models were but crazyness, so is the Xbox thinking about it). Thinking about it, MS is just the same, selling useless crap to million by monopolistic licensing... how the crap did that ever work?
"There ought to be a law" they'll say against reverse engineering applied to IP.
DC do some pen-sized scanners like that expansion pack, however you have to pay for them, still pretty nifty.
So do they have eight more lives now?
...Office Depot now distributes CueCats as well via the Copy and Print center. Theyr using them for custom printing.
It's good to see alternatives.
Dammit, Scott Adams, Curt Cobain, and Paul McCartney are going to be so upset when the mailing list is sold, since those were the names I used so I could get a cat to hack up... or rolling in graves for two of them...
Mark Edwards
Proof of Sanity forged upon request
If you put your list of books on a web page, your friends will be less likely to buy duplicates for your birthday or christmas. Same with DVDs. Of corse it also means if I want a out of print DVD or book badly enough I might stop by in the middle of the night....
A friend has a list on his PDA, so when we are out at dinner and trying to decide if we should go to a theater for a movie or off to someone's house he can offer specific movies...
A good catalogue is useful for insurance though, if the catalogue doesn't get destroyed in the fire at least.
Now, now.
- ----------------
You all know that it is not becoming to have fun at the expense of other peoples distress.
Why don't you all donate your cuecats to the homeless shelter?
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
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UNIX isn't dead, it just sme
Book inventory? Why? Was I running a library?
Do you have so few books that you actually know everything you own? Have you never purchased an interesting book twice by mistake? Do you never loan books to friends?
If ever there was an idea promoted through mendacity, audacity and testicles made of cheap amalgam, CueCat: was IT!
I threw away Wired magazine, canceled my subscription and vowed to do the same to anyone who would be so callous as to treat my and my privacy that way.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Well, here's what *I* always planned on trying to do with my CueCat:
Add a plugin to AbiWord/KWord/KSpread/Gnumeric that would put a barcode on the bottom of each printout. Then arrange that scanning that barcode with my cat would auto-launch said office application with the relevant document.
Sounded useful to me, especially if you work for a company that prints all sorts of things out without including the filename in the footer. And even with the filename in the footer it would be quicker and easier just to scan it...
Stuart.
PS You could do the same thing with a web browser to launch at a URL based on a printout of the page.
Nobody told you that YOU had to use the CueCat for your library. Those of us normal human beings, who also read our books, like having a way to catalog them. www.readerware.com happens to be an easy way to do that, among others I'm sure.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The whole company brought on their own doom from the very start. Whine and threaten the technically savvy... Now that's gotta be the stupidest thing to ever do, espically when they can't legally tell me what to do with an object given to me freely.. (sorry, but I recieved one in the mail without asking for it also, US mail laws clearly state that it is MINE and only MINE... for those IP law protectors out there) Next they have a business that is based on the hopes that people are super lazy. "ohh I can scan this barcode and it will take me magically to the website" How about typing the url? anyone that is interested in looking at more information on the internet about a device they plan on purchasing will look at the manufacturers site last, and start looking for complaints or other bad things said about it first. (User reviews)
This was one of the last "boneheaded ideas"(tm) companies that are in the start of their death throws. I do have one thing to thank them for..
I was able to make over 20 keyboard port barcode scanners available free to customers of mine (mod to remove encryption and voila it works for P.O.S. (that's point of sale) software!) saving them hundreds of dollars.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
IMHO, that is very clever and I'm going to steal your idea.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Maybe other companies can learn from this: 1.) If someone comes up with a new and ingenious way to use your product that you never thought about -- you should encourage them (not threaten them with lawsuits). 2.) Don't ever, ever, EVER, listen to the schmucks in the marketing department. They wouldn't know a good idea if it bit them in the ass.
I agree. Why the hell would I wanna scan in the barcode on a book I've already bought?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Perhaps, except that's not how DC worked. You'd scan an ad or a product and it would take you to Amazon or to the manufacturer's website or something. Which goes back to my question: If I've already bought $PRODUCT, why do I care about the reviews or the ads or whatever?
FP
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I have thousands of books - I even used to sell books at SF Conventions. I have shelves all over my house, and cardboard boxes packed with books. And yes, I know exactly what I own.
There's no way I could sit and recite them all, but if you give me a title, author and maybe a bit of the plot, I can tell you if I have it or have owned it. How? Very simple - I read every one of them. I spent a few hours inside the cover of each and every one of them. Even most reference books I can nail each and every time. This is coming from somebody who has a hard time quoting accurately from a movie he has seen at least once a week since 1987 (Rocky Horror). I have lousy memory... but I never forget a book.
Do you never loan books to friends?
Sure. But I never record that I do, and I never *demand* that they come back. I just expect it. That's why I call them friends.
Have you never purchased an interesting book twice by mistake?
Only in one field - I own a seriously large chunk of every RPG book published by White Wolf (World of Darkness, aka Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changling and Wraith). The local comic shop waits a few months and then gets in all the books published in the previous months. As a result, I drop a several hundred dollars and pick 'em all up, and slowly go through them. As a result, I occasionally buy another copy before I've had a chance to read the first. In other cases, they've repackaged a few books into one volume, and I grab it (new title, thicker, etc) without realizing I own all three or so volumes reprinted inside.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I think the primary motivation behind it's hackability is the cost - since it's free, you don't feel bad if you break it. It was also a challange to find something *useful* to do with the thing. Other than my concept of "King of UPC", which I couldn't muster interest in, I don't think anybody came up with anything useful at all.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Umm, I kinda thought their free-to-me barcode scanner was handy. THAT's value, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, you mean their business model didn't work? Poor them.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Try AirClic. Nifty little laser scanners made by Symbol.
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I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
and more hilarious stuff.
I know I just saw ads trumpeting NBC's CueTV rollout--of course pushing it through that spectactular flop of an un-spinoff, NBCi. Tell the truth...who hasn't become completely dependent on their "ANY word...ANYWHERE on your computer...CLICK it...GET INFORMATION!" breakthrough?
If bankruptcy is declared, feel free to make them an offer to buy whatever asset you want to control. If you buy it, you can declare it open.
More than likely, they'll dump them on an electronics surplus place like Weird Stuff Warehouse. Remember "Interactive Network", the gadget that was going to let you play along with TV game shows like Jeopardy? When they went under, Weird Stuff liquidated their stock of the remotes, coffee cups, gym bags, t-shirts, and all sorts of other trade-show goodies. That was 5 years ago or so... I think they STILL have some of the gym bags. I've still got a couple T-shirts.
I was looking for a web site for Interactive Network, and came across This... History is repeating itself. They're trying to make something back from their patents too.
eBay them in a year. Be sure to mark them as 'R4R3!' and 'L@@K". Set the 'buyitnow' for $25.
Somewhere up there, another reader puzzled over what consumer use there would be for a barcode reader. I think the answer is obvious. But it is so pro-consumer that you'll be hard pressed to find a major company to push it. (And its real advantages only come into play with a wireless handheld web device.)
Unwired world:
Start with a mildly populated database. Consumer goes to grocery store. Scans in each item purchased. Enters name, if necessary. Enters price (and marks if it is a regular price or a sale). Repeat with various grocery stores. Finds the best store to buy all items at, or the best two stores to get certain items from in order to save money.
Wired world:
Same. But check against the entries of other users in the area. Possible alerts to bargins on things that are regularly bought (Pepsi 2 liter, 69 cents, Albertsons, on sale). Also, being able to real-time scan an item in a store to see how good of a deal it is. (Especially good on impulse buying.)
Mind you, of course, it isn't as simple as I just described, and there are the usual disclaimers. But we're not using a barcode scanner for its full potential. It could be a real win for the consumer.
This is the result of consumer control in a free market. A company has two choices: either make consumers happy, or go under. DC didn't manage to do the first, so to deserves the second.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
And there was much rejoicing.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Sheesh.
The return of Holy Grail is announced just three days prior, and ONE PERSON gets the bloody reference! What is this world coming to?
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Didn't you know? DC was running their rinky-dink operation out of a Japanese employee's house. You see, not having to take your shoes off to count the employees left signifies that there's nobody left, so who cares if you go stomping around their office/home, looking for employees to count, with your shoes on.
At least, that's what I've heard. And you?
< tofuhead >
--
It is still the dark of night.
No I know this... except Slashdot posts these stories like they're FuckedCompany, except that everyone around here only does the dance of joy when a competitor dies. When a Linux company bites the dust, it's like "Oh we lost something important and it's terrible", even though 95% of the crowd is probably divided amongst three not-about-to-fade-away distros.
I dunno. I suppose I don't care about Digital Convergance at all, let em bite the dust. But everyone around here feels the same way about Microsoft, and I guess I'm more concerned about that attitude more than anything... cause for the time being, I guess we all kinda need MS in the economy and in the computer world. When they screw up, then I'll be indifferent about their passing, as well. (However, I get the feeling Slashdot won't be outliving MS... and there will be no one here to do the dance of joy then...)
So they passed on as a company. Big deal.
Now are *you* gonna feed their kids and pay their rent?
I mean, not that they didn't do some assinine things as a company, but I'd like to see a company like that reform, rather than bite the dust and leave even more people unemployed. Besides, it's not like CueCat was an entirely USELESS technology... apparently you people thought it was good enough to try and hack.
I'm not necessarily mourning their death, but I think it's a bit tasteless and uncouth to be dancing on their ashes, eh?
Why lug around a desktop system for inventory when you can plug the scanner into a notebook or a Palm? When we do store inventory, the barcodes get scanned into Notepad running on a notebook. The file is then saved and read into the POS system to update inventory and check for discrepancies.
(It'd be easier still if the scan guns could be plugged into a Palm instead...those are much smaller. Of course, there are also the Symbol SPT 1500 and CSM 150 if you plan on doing lots of Palm scanning...)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
After that, the people responsible for sacking the webmaster were themselves sacked.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Other than my concept of "King of UPC", which I couldn't muster interest in, I don't think anybody came up with anything useful at all.
I was under the impression that people were using it to inventory their books and CDs...? I never did myself, but the idea is appealing. Perhaps that's how DC can rise from the ashes: Inventory Cat!
Is "King of the UPC" anything like Barcode Battler?
...or people like myself will be blamed for the company's demise, and they'll use their last remaining dollars to try to sue. To tell you the truth, I wouldn't doubt if this idea's crossed the minds of their "outstanding" legal team.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid - I have a growing history of angering stupid people and large companies - perhaps I should start a gallery of C&D letters I've received..
*shakes his head* Only in America...
EOM
Although they've had it coming for some time, and I can't think of any other dotcom outfit that deserves to bite it as spectacularly as DC, I have to admit that I'm going to miss those crazy bastards.
.(who else at this scale has yet to bite it?)
DC is the archetypical dotbomb. A privately held company valued most recently at well over $500,000,000.00, which reported revenues in 1999 of only $1,500,000 (and a loss of $4,000,000).
I really thought if anyone had a shot at revolutionizing the way that advertisers and media exploit consumer data, it was DigitalConvergence.
What continues to amaze me about DigitalConvergence is the sheer enormity of it. The scale of the undertaking, the breadth and scope of it all, it dwarfs some of the larger dotbombs of record. If/when it actually completely explodes, it seems like it would signal the definitive end-of-the-dotbomb-era...
A company which continues to incur enormous costs in the manufacturing and distribution of their devices (what might 10,000,000+ CueCats cost to build and ship to retailers? who can imagine?) and seems to have no hope of profitability, ever...
A management team populated by players from Time Warner, AT&T, GE, Disney, Barings, etc.
A CEO (who owns 50% of the company) who seems pathologically given to making unfathomably exaggerated marketing claims, including, "We think we're the fourth evolution of computing. A cat can do everything a mouse can't!" , and "It's a torrid love affair I'm having with the power to mold not only an industry, but also the mind-set of America's consumers..." (As an aside, this man should be forced to eat his every press release and media clipping as punishment for this sort of hubris...).
In his prior career hosting a tv show called "NetTalkLive", he claimed, "Our show reaches into 802,000,000 million homes each week..." - Yes, roughly 1/6th of the world population is tuning in to watch an informercial (although conveniently, the Nielsen ratings system didn't track shows like NetTalkLive that run during the dead-zone of infomercial hours on d-grade & public television channels...)
Other gestures of indulgence include spending a ton of money in decorating the offices of DigitalConvergence to be "feng-shui" compliant ("...the building should face in a direction that is positive for the company's owner or chief executive...", plants and water are added to the environs because "....plants represent growth and water represents money..." (well I guess they've been smoking the plants and lighting the water on fire...).
I look forward to the case studies on this corporation. I suspect that we'll see lots of people conclude, "It probably doesn't make good business sense to entrust hundreds of millions of dollars to people who claim to be marketing-geniuses, and yet somehow fail to focus on that most basic of marketing fundamentals, determining the needs of the consumer."
Other interesting reading material, for those concerned....
a funny "Dallas Observer" article and a not quite as funny but still very interesting article from "Editor and Publisher" online.
"If you build it, they will laugh."
Would anyone in the US mind shipping any of these cue:felines to Australia?
We haven't seen any of these nice electronic freebies. Is that a good thing?
The :CueCat has been the only really affordable barcode scanner I've seen in some time, and many people managed to put the thing to industrial use (most often by doing something that D:C didn't approve of). The only upcoming replacement I see is the new expansion pack for Wizcom scanner pens to allow them to recognize barcodes. However, although Wizcomtech told me about 6 months ago they'd be opening specs so Linux drivers could be writen, nothing's come of that, so that solution won't work for me. Seems like hardware to do this type of stuff ought to be really cheap. Does anyone know of low-cost alternatives?
The only thing it was ever going to be useful for to the general public was so they didn't have to *gasp* type in a URL printed on a product.
Sure, scanning the barcode is dumb if there's an URL on the package. What I found intriguing was the fact that could scan all sorts of CDs and books I bought before everything had an URL on it, and find a website. Barcode scanners are backwards-compatible with my entire CD collection. I think that was the only really clever part of the whole CueCat concept.
Still, the concept was more "interesting" than "useful", it's not enough to drive a sucessful business, and DC blew the implementation anyway. DC's implosion is no great loss.
Proud to be / Smiley-free / Since Nineteen / Ninety-Three
The only way the MPAA is gonna go under is if people stop paying for music. Since now the only thing Napster is 'napping is your money, that ain't gonna help. And if that three-legged elephant up in Redmond has its way, you can expect the demise of the MP3 also.
Meditation anyone?
Hmmmmmmmmmm Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. . . . . .
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Did DC ever release the USB CueCat they had supposedly planned?
Who are we going to tormet now? It was kind of fun peeing in their petunias on a regular basis. The RIAA and MPAA are not nearly as inept as they were and it was kind of fun to sit back and chuckle at their lame-brained attempts to defend their "IP." They served a vital role as an open source whipping boy and now that they're gone, we'll have to find another.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Just yesterday, I saw my first (and last?) tv ad that had the little C:) in the bottom corner and a little chirp at the beginning of the ad. MMM please let my tv decide where I go on the internet!
You're correct that this doesn't change the legal situation proper. However, the legal position proper was never the problem. Legally the little felines are and have always been freely hackable. The problem was simply the threat of big bad company with presumably deep pockets sicking the landsharks on individual hackers that couldn't afford to defend themselves, merits (or lack thereof) of the case be damned. The troubles at DC mean that threat just lost all credibility - they obviously are not in a position to engage in such tactics.
Sure, it's possible some other big bad company with deep pockets and no ethics could come along and buy the property and turn around and start in on the same route, but it surely is very unlikely. The "property" is obviously not worth the trouble, and even stuffed shirts that didn't understand that before will now when they see how much good it did DC.
As another poster pointed out, there are already at least two such databases. Your objection that they don't include the elements of DCs intended setup that most of us found objectionable in the first place doesn't seem like any big deal to me. There's no need to buy anything from DC. Their copyright on the windows only spyware they distributed with the cuecats is not needed or even desireable, as cross platform Free Software programs that perform as desired and don't spy on the user are available.
It'll most likely be auctioned off to the highest bidder, before or after the bankruptcy declaration. They can expect to be spammed and junk mailed and telemarketed out of their minds. It sucks, but really, wtf did they expect when they happily traded off their privacy to DC in exchange for a little promised convenience?
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Actually I cancelled my subscription as well. I used to love Wired, even when they were way off base, however the CueCat was too much. Its ok they have been downhill majorly since the Y2K issue anyway.
The employees at radioshack will probably like you doing that. Here's some names to give them if you dont want to give them yours: O'Shack, Ray D. Roberts, Len (Radioshack CEO)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
As for the workers, yeah, it sucks to have lost a job, but they should've seen this coming the minute they found out what sort of company they got hired by, and started looking for a job right then. If they had even the slightest illusion of job security at a company that advertisers didn't give a damn about and whose only business was giving away hardware that appealed to a crowd of hackers, then... well, I suppose numbnuts like them made the company the great big hunk o' crap that it was.
Plus, I hate'em for never offering the cuecats in Canada :)
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I found a use for my CueCats. I ripped my CD collection and wrote a script that takes a barcode as its argument. The script then plays the MP3s from the CD I associated with the barcode. I mostly use the barcodes from the CD cases, but I've got a pack of unchewed gum that I use the barcode from, since I can't find the case for one of my CDs.
. . . how will they be distributed? Are they going to ship them out in huge crates to the RadioShacks around the country? Are they going to talk IBM into distributing more of them? Are they going to have a big box in front of their former corporate headquarters, trying to pawn them off for a few coins to buy a cup of coffee with?
.
Their whole distribution scheme hinged on the idea that they would maintain a database of peoples' scanning habits, gain revenue from that, and then be able to pay their distributors with that money. Now there is not income. There will soon be no database. Are they going to sell the user info database outright (highly likely), or are they going to sell the whole company, or perhaps both?
They (literally) can't afford to have piles of CueCats lying around. You have to have some place to put them. Storage is expensive. Even if you own the building, you still have to pay property taxes. I think we'll be seeing some desperate attempts to get rid of them . .
BTW, does anyone else have one of the USB models? If so, does it scan more slowly for you, too, than the PS/2 model?
This is one way I used to have fun with big companies, and see who sold what. I would sign up for different things with different variations of my name, and watch the name space on the resulting junk (snail) mail.
For instance, Conde Nast Publishing(I had a subscription to Details back when they had great feature journalism) will sell your name to porno junk mailers -- *after* you let your subscription lapse. I thought that was cute. It was really disturbing pr0n, too, rape fantasies and such. And I knew it was Conde Nast, since I subscribed to Details as Skippy E-------, which was a high school nickname I had.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
--
Free Mac Mini
Who's going to maintain the database? Cough* www.upcdatabase.com *cough Cough* www.rnrcomputing.com/upc/ *Cough Yeah what a waste... a perfectly good google search unused....
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
"Who's going to maintain the database of translations of UPC codes, ISBN codes, There are sites that do this already, CueDog for example had a feature like this built in IIRC. Just don't have the url handy and specially paid-for :CueCat codes into URLs?"
Who says I WANT all that stuff??? I like my data raw, that way I can use those brain cells to decide where I want to go to read about the items instead of where the highest bidder wants me to go. And if DC goes down whom are they specially paying anyways??(Can I volunteer) Maybe I want walmartsucks.com to read about Wal-Mart... I like my freedom to decide
Care to rub those two brain cells together again and try to come up with another spark of enlightenment?
And I could lower myself to your level of name calling, but I got over that in middle school, most adults have...So if you don't like my answer that's your right, but at least act like a civilized adult and hold a conversation instead of a name calling contest, cause I won't play. Recently this has been my biggest problem with posts, you think a group of intelligent people could give their views and be willing to have a discussion with those who don't agree, doesn't anyone teach debate in high school anymore? I would like to thank those that do know how to have decent conversations, you are appreciated.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Apparently you're a little naive when it comes to dot-coms. Taco WAS telling the truth about the state of the company -- it's toasted. Oh sure, he could have used misleading media-speech and said "Oh yes, they're still going strong, they've just suffered a little setback and are just going through 'restructuring' and 'downsizing.' Wink wink." But DC is just another one of those useless wastes of money known as "Internet Dot-Coms," and when they have to go through a restructuring like this, it's over. They're gone. The idea of them somehow rising from the ashes better, faster, stronger is pretty laughable.
+++
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NO CARRIER
Is there some web design rule that you must have an employment page full of jobs? To me, if just fired a bunch of people and you can't afford to hire, don't advertise that you have jobs!
I could see it for retrieving the play list, if your application doesn't read the information from the CD to retrieve it.
The other use is an inventory of equiptment, for things like homeowners insurance. Or you can do inventory for a company. The only problem would be carrying around the desktop, monitor, UPS, tape drive, speakers when using the barcode scanner.
Fight Spammers!
When their little Cat device started turning up as the hardware front end for a lot of different practical applications, Digital Convergence should have embraced the opportunity, not threaten its unforseen fans.
Even those that despised the ad-oriented application loved the neato device. Taken in vacuo, the device has a lot of utility, and, well, "coolness quotient." Digital Convergence had a wonderful opportunity to access a large pool of interest, programmer support, and continued (free) innovation. For example, if they merely supported, packaged and sold an open-source do-it-yourself inventory system, they could make a mint. Maybe not something as huge as their dreams, but steady income.
well it's obviously a (stupid) toy - no tool would be that shape. Had it been a tool, maybe it would have more use... esp. if it were built into the monitor, case or Internet enabled fridge.
Seriously. DC was about as much fun and welcome as a neighborhood bully. Everything about the company -- from their business plan to attitude towards geeks to the way they tried to strongarm the UPC industry -- stunk. Not only did they prove the limitations of free-as-in-beer, they set over a dozen exampled of how not to run a business, how not to conduct PR, and how not to treat your userbase. DC was a closed minded facist group that didn't open its eyes and ears until it was far too late. It's hard, if not impossible, to feel sorry for them.
Does this mean that my name and address, which I gave to DC when I got my cue cat (yes, stupid idea) is again going to be distributed? (the first time being when their database got stolen)
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http://www.dennistighe.com
http://www.crq.com/master_templ.cfm?view=Home&CFID =507647&CFTOKEN=33609537
Now it all makes sense. It wasn't the free barcode scanners that took this half-wit company down, it was ColdFusion!
ColdFusion haiku:
It has no functions
Complex regexps crash it hard
Truly a sick joke
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
The problem with that is that the standard for http and internet stuff says typing in a number is assumed to be the 32 bit IP address. You can try your own SSN for fun.
e.g. 219863456 = 13.26.217.160
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
I would really like to know what kind of surveys they did before they released that Cat. Did they think anybody liked to bring various products to the computer to scan them in?
;)
I actually brainstormed for a while trying to come up with something I could do with one that would make it entertaining to use... Nothing.
-- Book inventory? Why? Was I running a library?
-- A quick way to enter commands: I had it hooked up to a shell and printed out bar codes so I could scan in longer commands. Problem is, the longer the command, the less often you use it. Therefore, useless.
-- Fun for a child with some kind of game? Once again, annoying since you have to rescan things slowly occasionally.
So in short, the original reason of having it was stupid, and I couldn't come up with any useful alternate ways of using it.
But on a different note, have they already had there IPO?
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Here's a novel idea I brainstormed up earlier today, while rejoicing in the probably-but-not-quite-yet dead DC. (Read the article kids, they're still in business for a while)
Say I scan in my CDs. I later (somehow) am told that band X (or author X) is on tour near me. How cool is that, I wouldn't have known otherwise! I really don't read the paper or listen to non-NPR radio, so I don't know these things. The last couple of concerts and book signings I went to were due to pure luck, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. DC got greedy, which if done incorrectly or improperly is a mortal sin for a company (M$ excluded)
There were useful uses. They just refused to see them. And like someone else said, making customers happy is one of the big rules of capitalism.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
No kidding. Not to mention that you can't freaking mention them as the bad guys every other story, but then rush to run reviews of their movies (no matter how good the movies are)-- witness the recent reviews of Atlantis (by CmdrTaco himself, does he think Disney isn't using his $7.50 ticket price to pay the lawyers at the MPAA?) and Tomb Raider (by Jon Katz). Then there are the endless promotions of DVD this or that. If you're going to excoriate the MPAA in print, I don't mind if you catch a movie once in a while, but you shouldn't talk about it.
I do not have a signature
They said they will continue to honor their contracts? But do even the people they had contracts with care? It seams like no one had any money invested in this except the cuecat people themselves. If anyone can find any partners that are going to lose money post below.
"Or maybe I'm just paranoid - I have a growing history of angering stupid people and large companies - perhaps I should start a gallery of C&D letters I've received.."
Is corporatestupidity.com taken? Really, I would love to see a website like this.....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Heh, I did the exact same thing... Took about 6 months for them to finally get the board to me, so I snagged the proper drivers and installed them the same way...
Meanwhile, I knew they were in trouble the moment I received an e-mail begging me (and others) to install their spyware drivers, and if we did, we'd be entered into a drawing for $100... Woohoo! Yay! Yowzah! My thimble runneth over!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
me thinks it apparent that yous not be one of the many effected by the market downswing?
:)
would you happen to be the CEO of DC: stating that everyone should pick up these handy devices because of your savvy understanding of a market in which we would value such garbage?
I dont know about everyone else - but I got my sue cat for free - and this guy is out paying for all 17+ of his.
Now I have never fully understood why this device should be worth installing, possibly making my Windooze even more unstable.
God forbid I should have to pumch in a url!
--------
Gee, I wonder what I'll see on Pud's page tomorrow morning...
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
how often do I have to tell people.
You NEVER give out your real name and address, unless you WANT to receive something (as if you ordered something)
By giving out your name and address, you're essentially asking for the name to get distributed around in mailing groups.
For example, I signed up once with BMG with a fake name at my house. Only a few weeks later, that imaginary person supposedly won $10 million dollars from Publisher's Clearing House.
And this was BEFORE the internet became popular.
When the members of the MPAA have millions of disks sitting around in their warehouses they they too will start pursue other lines of business.
Nothing schadenfreude here :) I know DC were a bit aloof, had a crazy businesses model and legal dept but they kept 225 techies employed for a few months... on the otherhand, `fsck em
Just for the hell of it, I went to 3 Radio Shacks today and picked up as many CueCats and CueTVs as I could. Only ended up with 17 of each. I'm gonna do the same thing every few days until all of the places I go to are out. Why? Who knows, maybe they will be worth something some day. I'll pass them on to my grandkids perhaps and have them sell them on ebay as historic relics to an age of stupidity.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
right in the middle of a CueCat contest! Grrrr!!!
All your base are belong to XO
http://mi-net.dynup.net/
http://blackmagik.dynup.net/
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I asked the 'Shack lady if I could have more than one and she refused. I guess she doesn't know about Digital Convergence's "restructuring"...
Yeah, right.
AirClic partners include Motorola, Symbol & Ericsson. A keyfob scanner, the $50 AirClicker will be available soon. Former Amex execs are chairman and CEO of AirClic. Their Scanlets are being "leased", a la domain names. High-level diagram of their tech architecture references a "switching core", probably from their acquisition of Stockholm-based Connect Things, a 1999 Ericsson spinoff.
Think DNS root server for barcode-to-URL mapping.
Rich
This would let *more* people use the service from anywhere with almost no capital outlay. The only disadvantage of this plan is that Bill Gates would 0wn you, but that's pretty much true already.
Maybe they will make their database of UPC symbols open to the public... The only free project.. The internet UPC database allows you to do a mysqldump against their database, so it truely is free, although, unfortunately it only has ~30,000 entries.
Of course everything is perspective and I have deemed your message as having no lasting benift to humanity, it is there for been deemed as SPAM. Now you must DIE!
But on the otherthings, didn't anyone ever tell you that there is some cosmic rule about not being that happy? It would destroy the balance between time and space. We'd all end up in an episode of Voyager! So for the sake of the universe I hope the the RIAA doesn't go away in your like time.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
err life time. oh well atleast I can laugh at myself. And yes damn it I did use the preview button, it seems I'm just that stupid!
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
"Yaaaay..."
(sheesh, I gotta do everything myself around here...)
--
#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;
sed 's/In Soviet Russia/In NSA America/g' < yakov-smirnoff-jokes.txt
What a pity. But I guess you can't really base a business model on giving away free hardware. Which brings me to the question...how long till the people that make the Swiftboard go down? I know I got one of their free keyboards (and I think most people who signed up for one didn't get it)...and got alternate configurable drivers from the website of the people who manufacture it (Silitek). It works very nicely. You just don't give nice things like that for free.
This was my 2 cents. They just got devaluated...
If you'd like to have a civilized discourse, kindly refrain from statements such as the above, which imply that you're talking to someone who doesn't do the slightest research and has never heard of critical thinking. To suggest that you would be lowering yourself to my level by resorting to ad-hominem (not namecalling, which neither of us had done) is somewhere between disingenuous and troll-like.
Now, on with the show.
If you don't want to use the translation database, fine, don't use it. My point was, that's the only thing of real value the company ever had to offer. Your pointers to other databases that already have catalogs of UPC/ISBN codes just reinforces that.
-- Robert Bunn, gun-toting neo-Nazi anarchist redneck freak
I didn't ask, "Who's going to maintain a database of UPC codes," I asked, "Who's going to maintain the database of translations of UPC codes, ISBN codes, and specially paid-for :CueCat codes into URLs?" There's a major difference there.
Care to rub those two brain cells together again and try to come up with another spark of enlightenment?
-- Robert Bunn, gun-toting neo-Nazi anarchist redneck freak
No, even if DC goes under, its copyrights and patents may be assigned first. You'd be, ethically and legally, in the same position if you hacked the Cat now, the day after the company folds, or the day it came out. The only thing that would make it "freely hackable" would be if DC released all of its interests into the public domain.
Now, that would be an interesting thing to consider. Sure, all that tech would now be freely hackable. Who's going to maintain the database? That's the expense that probably is the biggest drain on the company aside from manufacturing, and it'd be one hell of a thing to try to open-source. It's the kind of thing that would only get done if some big company felt like paying a Linus Torvalds or Larry Wall to "do what you want with the corpse of DC."
Here's a question: what's going to happen to the user info of all the registered users who happily told DC their names and addresses and then went and scanned the barcodes of various commercial products?
-- Robert Bunn, gun-toting neo-Nazi anarchist redneck freak
I guess it took me about 5 swipes to determine that the CueCat was nothing more than a slightly-more convenient way to see ads... I HATE ads! I certainly understand their place in a capitalistic society, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go out of my way to look at them. I cleaned up my home office over the weekend and now have a pile of 3 of the little critters (1 from Wired, 2 from CompUSA which were thrust at me by the cashier). I have an urge to put them on eBay... :o)
Glenn Dixon http://vagabondians.com
Does this have any effect on Qode (www.qode.com)? I hope not, I still haven't finished hacking the Qoder (http://www.markcrocker.com/~mcrocker/Computer/Qod er.shtml).
The Qode folks have a much more sensible business model, a much more useful product, if only because you can take it with you, and a much better attitude (they're trying to get an SDK released for Qode). I hope they don't go the way of DC.
The more obviously affected product might be the Cross Convergence Pen (http://www.cross.com/cross/conv-faq.html
). It is much slicker than the Qoder and has more memory and connects to a more reasonable interface, but it costs WAY too much and uses a nasty protocol. I haven't really started hacking hacking it yet and the body of the pen is already started to crack. I hope these guys hook up with Qode or do something else with the product other than just abandon it.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)