Pretty much the only reason the world is "safe" is because we have the bomb. "The Bomb" is the final word in warfare because basically, everybody loses.
Now, the "trick" to "The Bomb" making us safe is nobody actually plans to use it. Anybody who uses it will get nuked to hell in return... everybody loses. Mutually Assured Destruction - MAD.
This theory breaks when the person who uses the bomb doesn't care about their own destruction. Once you stop caring about retaliation, all bets are off.
Warfare has now "evolved" to the point where I don't think all the players who could potentially have nukes care if their side gets nuked to hell in retaliation. In addition, warfare is no longer country-to-country. It is "one dude in a subway with with a bomb in a pizza box".
All the fighter jets in the world can't help you against a pizza-box-bomb. Nukes don't help either. The things that really help are surveillance devices hooked up to massive computers running statistics software. Unfortunately (er, fortunately) such things are really not tolerated by our culture here in the US.
Dont forget the endangered owl who built a nest on one of those poles. Dont forget the NIMBY assholes who are worried one the trucks who install the fiber will lower their home value**. Dont forget the fact that the fiber will cause somehow cause cancer and so we better do a 3 year study to find out. Dont forget we will need to conduct a neighborhood meeting first.
Lots of red tape. Remember when we could just say "fuck it all" and blow shit up whenever we wanted? Neither Hover Dam nor the Panama Canal could be built now days. Truthfully though, I could argue a lot of our red tape is a good thing, but it sure has a high cost.
** Parking my truck along the curb isn't gonna decrease your resale value, jackass. Painting my house a color you don't like isn't gonna fuck with your property value, jerkwad. You buy a home to live in, not to be used as an investment, asshole. Hopefully these asshats got shafted by our current economic woes.
Now I've seen the gas company install a gas line to your home. They don't dig a trench. They dig a small hole in front of your house and then put one of those tiny and shoot one of those mechanical moles from the hole to your new gas meter. In fact, they don't usually even dig a trench to go down the street--the just dig small holes every couple hundred yards and shove that mole thing through.
Dunno how that impacts the cost, I just picked up on "do they have to dig a trench?". The answer is "nope"
Bingo. Even though I'd argue you really shouldn't roll your own widget set unless you've got a good reason. WMP can do it cause they have a ton of developers who can take the time to make sure it works right (scroll wheel, tab keys, clipboard, all the edge cases). Firefox--same thing. But you look at all the flash apps out there with their own scrollbars and stuff and none of them behave like a native one--no scroll wheel, might not respond to the arrow key, might not grow or shrink that little scroller widget on the bar, might scroll at a very different rate than normal, that kind of thing...
It is being consistent in the details that matter. WPF will let you create an interface that looks very little like a traditional winforms app, but since every control you create for a WPF application is inherited from a set of base widgets, it is hard to make something that doesn't act "normal".
but it doesn't sound like you want an open source phone
Most people don't--that's the problem. Instead of saying "open source", maybe say "easy to modify" and I might get interested.
You can have a phone that is easy to modify, but doesn't expose you to tinkering with the widget set or dealing with "low-level" protocols like X11. X11 isn't low-level per-se, but for a phone that is easy to modify, it is pretty damn close to the bare metal--far too close.
Apple, Microsoft, and Google are happy to restrict what goes on their phones
Yes. And that is a problem and I promise you there is a market of people with money who would buy a phone that removes those restrictions. However, I seriously doubt the following:
1) They care it is "open source" 2) They want to design their own custom widget sets or use a different window manager (seriously, on a phone?)
What they do want is the ability to install unsigned software. The ability to reorder and re-assign their buttons. The ability to play any format of media they want. The ability to use all of Bluetooth (cough, Verizon / iPhone). These kinds of mods are what people want.
Letting people talk X11, create widget sets, install crazy operating systems (look ma! I'm running hurd!), ssh in**... It is too low level of an abstraction to be useful to the people who would be interested in the phone. Think about the level of abstraction Firefox provides--they don't really want to to rework the guts of it. They expose a really extensible plugin architecture and people have ran with it. By providing just the right level of abstraction to developers, Firefox was able to create a loyal userbase that helped it expand into the general population.
If you focus on that tiny niche, all you do is make it way harder for your real market to use your phone. Only a tiny set of people care enough to pay $200 or $300 for the privilege of using Enchantment over GNOME on their phone. Your initial market, like the Howard Forums guys know just enough programming to be dangerous. Give them a sandbox where the scripts they copy & paste don't brick the phone and give them the forums and docs to get them going. Give the more skilled folk a stable plugin architecture that exposes just the phone at just the right level of abstraction.
Basically... look at what Firefox is doing and why they are successful.
** SSH out though.. boy howdy if I could get an SSH client on my RAZR... Or an RDP client so I can log into my windows boxes.
X11? Seriously? You think all they should offer is what is basically a low-level wire protocol that doesn't even have its own widget set? Why? Do you need to have remote access to your mobile phone?
X11 has no place on the desktop and needs to be brought out back and shot. Putting it on a mobile only prolongs the agony.
If you want a successful platform, you need to remove the ability to have a bazillion widget sets and weird ways of doing something the OS should do. No mainstream operating system doesn't come with a plethora of standarized behaviours and components. X11 has none of that--does it even have a standard way of doing sound?
X11 is part of the problem, not a solution to one.
But now we are talking tech... which is a bit too low level for "what is important in a phone".
It isn't style points, it is fundamentally unintuitive. The first time somebody told me to drag the floppy drive into the trash to eject it, it asked them twice if they were serious and it wasn't going to somehow erase my data. Even after they reassured me, I felt a bit worried it would nuke my data.
You put stuff into a trash can to throw it away. On a computer, that means deleting the file. Once you start assigning magical properties to your trash can (which represents something rather serious and potentially destructive), the metaphor breaks down. I'm not sure what metaphor you could use for ejecting a disk, but dragging it into the trash isn't one of them.
"Style Points". Style points would have been "they used brown as a color scheme instead of hot pink". No sir. This isn't style points--it is flawed design.
i can make any mods i like (well, im not the only one)
If it was me running that company, I'd be pimping it to theseguys. Give them a phone you can mod the shit out of, you'll get sales.
Now, in order to do so, you'd have to realize those guys aren't developers. They know just enough programming to get into trouble. Therefore, "open source" isn't what they want. They just want an easy way to bling their phone or run some program their cell phone company won't let them. That is their pain, and something like OpenMoko could have cured it.
Granted, if you ever wanted to expand outside that niche market, you'd have to cure pain felt by a lot of people. Most people don't mod their phone. However, I'd bet a lot of people are dissatisfied with how restricted their service seems. You'd have to do something to lessen that pain.
its open. (read it again)
This is a means to an end. You don't sell people on the fact it is "open", you sell them on the fact you can use any wallpaper you want. You sell them on the fact they can install games the mobile provider doesn't want them to.
Open Source's inability to deliver any sort of consumer-level device that isn't an expensive
Firefox. While not a physical device, is probably the most successful open source project out there. Why? Because of a few things:
Broadly put: 1) The only real browser on the market sucked. They realized this and created a product that removed the pain normal people had. 2) They shipped a high quality, good looking product that worked out of the box.
Specifically: 1) You could install their software with a real installer that installed *everything* required to run. 2) They did not focus on the fact it was open source. I would imagine only 5% of the people using Firefox even realize you can get the source. In fact, they hide it so well I don't even know where to go to browse the source code. 3) They had a professional looking logo and fairly professional appearance. 3) It runs on Windows as a native program.
Wow, I had to read your post like 3 times before I realized you were actually making the distinction between "Fast Ethernet" and "Ethernet". I mean, yeah, technically Ethernet is 10mbit, but I'm pretty sure the person meant "your ISP is the bottleneck, not your LAN".
I'd amend his post only to say these days gigabit ethernet is about as cheap as 100mbit used to be and these days you might as well go with it. 100mbit is awfully slow when your files are 4 gigs each.
There is nothing wrong with initially aiming for developers. In fact, I'd say if you are a startup company doing anything tech, targeting developers is a great way to get started. You want your product to generate buzz with blogging nerds like that Schobel guy (aka tech evangelists). It would be a huge mistake to try to cast your net to large and target "everybody". Gotta start somewhere, and nerds, even a specific type of nerd, is a safe bet.
Remember how many bloggers were hyping the Razr when it came out? Flickr targeted developers by offering an API. Google got its roots targeting nerds. Digg, same thing. Hell, Firefox was able to start by marketing to nerds like us and the buzz we generated pushed it into the mainstream. If you can't sell your warez to developers and nerds, you'll never sell it with the public at large.
The bit that kills you is if you don't realize that the developer crowd is a small part of market and you are only using them to gain enough street cred to expand into larger market segments. Sure, you can avoid "selling out", but if you want to be truly successful, you gotta cross that chasm and move into the meaty part of the bell curve.
That said, I don't know if OpenMoko failed because they didn't successfully cross the chasm, or because they weren't able to successfully sell to nerds at all. Or probably something completely different.
Ironic because they were exercising their freedoms. They, under their own free will, examined all the mobile phone options, and freely choose *not* to buy an OpenMoko phone.
Since when did Joe Public ever do a good job of looking after his own interests?
Everybody has their own pet-interests. There are groups of people bitching about how Joe Public doesn't seem to care much about religion and use it as a sign that everybody but them sucks. Others wonder why everybody still uses Animal products--and uses said finding as "proof" that everybody sucks but them.
Freedom? Who needs that? Ooh, look, something shiny and new!
Jesus? Who needs that? Oh look! Moneys becoming humans! How novel!!
(ps: no offense to the religious.. just makin' an example)
The sad story is that if you do what other people also do you can make a living, but you can't make it big.
Flickr did what everybody else was doing--they created a photo album on the internet. Only they learned what all the other ones were doing wrong and made it better.
Very little is a wholly unique, novel idea. 98% of everything out there is a refinement of what everybody else is doing.
There is a technical term for things that are unique--disruptive technologies. And creating a successful plan to implement said ideas are far harder than usually. A lot of people with really good disruptive tech. fail to create an implementation that lets them succeed. See also: Crossing the Chasm.
Wouldn't you be rather concerned if you were gonna try starting your hypothetical lawn-mower service and couldn't find a single example of anybody doing anything even remotely similar? I know I would be!
That said, pretty much everything in existence is a refinement of the stuff before it. Most TV shows are refinements of older ones--Family Guy was influenced by Simpsons. Aqua Teen Hunger Force was influenced by Family Guy and Simpsons (and Robot Chicken).
Beck influenced a ton of people out there. Beck himself has a strong resemblance to folk music.
Digg was a derivative of Slashdot. Slashdot was a derivative of the BBS.
I'm using "value" in economic terms, not monetary terms. When economists talk about value, reward and gain, they aren't just talking about cash in your pocket. You can produce value in society and *not* get money.
You can be rewarded for your work without getting money. People who do volunteer do it because they are getting a different kind of reward... they feel good about themselves. The technical term for this is "psychic income". Your artists and philosophers wouldn't do what they did unless they enjoyed it--that enjoyment is enough of a reward for them that they continue.
I'm trying to think of some examples of artists with great ideas who fail to implement them. I think there are probably scientists with great ideas that never produce value because they never implement their idea.
I'll give this a shot: If I was an artist, I think it would be a great idea to fly a airplane over the city and draw shapes using colored smoke. I have this great idea of doing something with the water too--like turn it into colored jello or something. Great idea... but I'll never implement it.
q: How do you know when there is a new floppy drive in the system. a: When the BIOS says so.
q: How do you know when the user replaced the floppy drive with a different one? a: You dont.
In other words, "auto detection" doesn't exist for floppy drives. Not even the BIOS knew if you really had a floppy drive--you had to tell it you had one in the BIOS setup.
Except you need a floppy disk in the drive to do the test. If you did it every time windows started, you'd have to ask the user to insert a floppy disk.
Right, but did most BIOS's out there let you change the boot order? I don't remember, honestly. About the only time I can really remember is once CD's became mainstream.
So yeah, you are right from a security perspective. I just dont know if what you want existed back then.
If you do not see the simplicity of that, it is because you don't want to
No, everything begins as an "idea", that part is obvious. But ideas in and of themselves are worthless until you implement them.
It takes money to do that and no one wants to invest money into an operation that fails.
There are a lot of great ideas that never get implemented because it turns out the implementation is too hard to make it worthwhile. For example, I think it would be a great idea if you could have a lawn-mower sharing service. A neighborhood could share one lawnmower and not have to all buy their own. Since you dont usually use it more than once or twice a month, it would be a great idea, right? Well, I doubt you could ever successfully implement it.
By the way, in most cases, a good test of your idea is if others are doing similar things as you. If you are trying to create a business or product and nobody else is doing anything even close, odds are pretty good something is wrong with your idea. Not always, but usually...
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much the only reason the world is "safe" is because we have the bomb. "The Bomb" is the final word in warfare because basically, everybody loses.
Now, the "trick" to "The Bomb" making us safe is nobody actually plans to use it. Anybody who uses it will get nuked to hell in return... everybody loses. Mutually Assured Destruction - MAD.
This theory breaks when the person who uses the bomb doesn't care about their own destruction. Once you stop caring about retaliation, all bets are off.
Warfare has now "evolved" to the point where I don't think all the players who could potentially have nukes care if their side gets nuked to hell in retaliation. In addition, warfare is no longer country-to-country. It is "one dude in a subway with with a bomb in a pizza box".
All the fighter jets in the world can't help you against a pizza-box-bomb. Nukes don't help either. The things that really help are surveillance devices hooked up to massive computers running statistics software. Unfortunately (er, fortunately) such things are really not tolerated by our culture here in the US.
Dont forget the endangered owl who built a nest on one of those poles. Dont forget the NIMBY assholes who are worried one the trucks who install the fiber will lower their home value**. Dont forget the fact that the fiber will cause somehow cause cancer and so we better do a 3 year study to find out. Dont forget we will need to conduct a neighborhood meeting first.
Lots of red tape. Remember when we could just say "fuck it all" and blow shit up whenever we wanted? Neither Hover Dam nor the Panama Canal could be built now days. Truthfully though, I could argue a lot of our red tape is a good thing, but it sure has a high cost.
** Parking my truck along the curb isn't gonna decrease your resale value, jackass. Painting my house a color you don't like isn't gonna fuck with your property value, jerkwad. You buy a home to live in, not to be used as an investment, asshole. Hopefully these asshats got shafted by our current economic woes.
Trench?
Now I've seen the gas company install a gas line to your home. They don't dig a trench. They dig a small hole in front of your house and then put one of those tiny and shoot one of those mechanical moles from the hole to your new gas meter. In fact, they don't usually even dig a trench to go down the street--the just dig small holes every couple hundred yards and shove that mole thing through.
Dunno how that impacts the cost, I just picked up on "do they have to dig a trench?". The answer is "nope"
The reciprocal is true though. There are a lot of folk who do their development on a Mac and push the code out to their Linux based servers.
Bingo. Even though I'd argue you really shouldn't roll your own widget set unless you've got a good reason. WMP can do it cause they have a ton of developers who can take the time to make sure it works right (scroll wheel, tab keys, clipboard, all the edge cases). Firefox--same thing. But you look at all the flash apps out there with their own scrollbars and stuff and none of them behave like a native one--no scroll wheel, might not respond to the arrow key, might not grow or shrink that little scroller widget on the bar, might scroll at a very different rate than normal, that kind of thing...
It is being consistent in the details that matter. WPF will let you create an interface that looks very little like a traditional winforms app, but since every control you create for a WPF application is inherited from a set of base widgets, it is hard to make something that doesn't act "normal".
I'd say RDP has more support than X11. You can get an RDP client on just about any platform--even *unix.
The fact that X11 lets you run over a network does not outweigh the fact it basically sucks at everything else.
But again, the fact a phone runs X11 doesn't matter as long as the phone provides a standard interface to develop against.
Most people don't--that's the problem. Instead of saying "open source", maybe say "easy to modify" and I might get interested.
You can have a phone that is easy to modify, but doesn't expose you to tinkering with the widget set or dealing with "low-level" protocols like X11. X11 isn't low-level per-se, but for a phone that is easy to modify, it is pretty damn close to the bare metal--far too close.
Yes. And that is a problem and I promise you there is a market of people with money who would buy a phone that removes those restrictions. However, I seriously doubt the following:
1) They care it is "open source"
2) They want to design their own custom widget sets or use a different window manager (seriously, on a phone?)
What they do want is the ability to install unsigned software. The ability to reorder and re-assign their buttons. The ability to play any format of media they want. The ability to use all of Bluetooth (cough, Verizon / iPhone). These kinds of mods are what people want.
Letting people talk X11, create widget sets, install crazy operating systems (look ma! I'm running hurd!), ssh in**... It is too low level of an abstraction to be useful to the people who would be interested in the phone. Think about the level of abstraction Firefox provides--they don't really want to to rework the guts of it. They expose a really extensible plugin architecture and people have ran with it. By providing just the right level of abstraction to developers, Firefox was able to create a loyal userbase that helped it expand into the general population.
If you focus on that tiny niche, all you do is make it way harder for your real market to use your phone. Only a tiny set of people care enough to pay $200 or $300 for the privilege of using Enchantment over GNOME on their phone. Your initial market, like the Howard Forums guys know just enough programming to be dangerous. Give them a sandbox where the scripts they copy & paste don't brick the phone and give them the forums and docs to get them going. Give the more skilled folk a stable plugin architecture that exposes just the phone at just the right level of abstraction.
Basically... look at what Firefox is doing and why they are successful.
** SSH out though.. boy howdy if I could get an SSH client on my RAZR... Or an RDP client so I can log into my windows boxes.
You haven't lived until you've flipped a golf cart 360 degrees. Trust me.
X11? Seriously? You think all they should offer is what is basically a low-level wire protocol that doesn't even have its own widget set? Why? Do you need to have remote access to your mobile phone?
X11 has no place on the desktop and needs to be brought out back and shot. Putting it on a mobile only prolongs the agony.
If you want a successful platform, you need to remove the ability to have a bazillion widget sets and weird ways of doing something the OS should do. No mainstream operating system doesn't come with a plethora of standarized behaviours and components. X11 has none of that--does it even have a standard way of doing sound?
X11 is part of the problem, not a solution to one.
But now we are talking tech... which is a bit too low level for "what is important in a phone".
It isn't style points, it is fundamentally unintuitive. The first time somebody told me to drag the floppy drive into the trash to eject it, it asked them twice if they were serious and it wasn't going to somehow erase my data. Even after they reassured me, I felt a bit worried it would nuke my data.
You put stuff into a trash can to throw it away. On a computer, that means deleting the file. Once you start assigning magical properties to your trash can (which represents something rather serious and potentially destructive), the metaphor breaks down. I'm not sure what metaphor you could use for ejecting a disk, but dragging it into the trash isn't one of them.
"Style Points". Style points would have been "they used brown as a color scheme instead of hot pink". No sir. This isn't style points--it is flawed design.
Indeed you can. Little known to most, the floppy drive was hot-swap :-)
See,
If it was me running that company, I'd be pimping it to these guys. Give them a phone you can mod the shit out of, you'll get sales.
Now, in order to do so, you'd have to realize those guys aren't developers. They know just enough programming to get into trouble. Therefore, "open source" isn't what they want. They just want an easy way to bling their phone or run some program their cell phone company won't let them. That is their pain, and something like OpenMoko could have cured it.
Granted, if you ever wanted to expand outside that niche market, you'd have to cure pain felt by a lot of people. Most people don't mod their phone. However, I'd bet a lot of people are dissatisfied with how restricted their service seems. You'd have to do something to lessen that pain.
This is a means to an end. You don't sell people on the fact it is "open", you sell them on the fact you can use any wallpaper you want. You sell them on the fact they can install games the mobile provider doesn't want them to.
Firefox. While not a physical device, is probably the most successful open source project out there. Why? Because of a few things:
Broadly put:
1) The only real browser on the market sucked. They realized this and created a product that removed the pain normal people had.
2) They shipped a high quality, good looking product that worked out of the box.
Specifically:
1) You could install their software with a real installer that installed *everything* required to run.
2) They did not focus on the fact it was open source. I would imagine only 5% of the people using Firefox even realize you can get the source. In fact, they hide it so well I don't even know where to go to browse the source code.
3) They had a professional looking logo and fairly professional appearance.
3) It runs on Windows as a native program.
I'd list more, but i have to make dressing...
Wow, I had to read your post like 3 times before I realized you were actually making the distinction between "Fast Ethernet" and "Ethernet". I mean, yeah, technically Ethernet is 10mbit, but I'm pretty sure the person meant "your ISP is the bottleneck, not your LAN".
I'd amend his post only to say these days gigabit ethernet is about as cheap as 100mbit used to be and these days you might as well go with it. 100mbit is awfully slow when your files are 4 gigs each.
Does that mean when we bail them out, we ask RMS to step down as head of Open Source?
There is nothing wrong with initially aiming for developers. In fact, I'd say if you are a startup company doing anything tech, targeting developers is a great way to get started. You want your product to generate buzz with blogging nerds like that Schobel guy (aka tech evangelists). It would be a huge mistake to try to cast your net to large and target "everybody". Gotta start somewhere, and nerds, even a specific type of nerd, is a safe bet.
Remember how many bloggers were hyping the Razr when it came out? Flickr targeted developers by offering an API. Google got its roots targeting nerds. Digg, same thing. Hell, Firefox was able to start by marketing to nerds like us and the buzz we generated pushed it into the mainstream. If you can't sell your warez to developers and nerds, you'll never sell it with the public at large.
The bit that kills you is if you don't realize that the developer crowd is a small part of market and you are only using them to gain enough street cred to expand into larger market segments. Sure, you can avoid "selling out", but if you want to be truly successful, you gotta cross that chasm and move into the meaty part of the bell curve.
That said, I don't know if OpenMoko failed because they didn't successfully cross the chasm, or because they weren't able to successfully sell to nerds at all. Or probably something completely different.
Ironic because they were exercising their freedoms. They, under their own free will, examined all the mobile phone options, and freely choose *not* to buy an OpenMoko phone.
Everybody has their own pet-interests. There are groups of people bitching about how Joe Public doesn't seem to care much about religion and use it as a sign that everybody but them sucks. Others wonder why everybody still uses Animal products--and uses said finding as "proof" that everybody sucks but them.
Jesus? Who needs that? Oh look! Moneys becoming humans! How novel!!
(ps: no offense to the religious.. just makin' an example)
Flickr did what everybody else was doing--they created a photo album on the internet. Only they learned what all the other ones were doing wrong and made it better.
Very little is a wholly unique, novel idea. 98% of everything out there is a refinement of what everybody else is doing.
There is a technical term for things that are unique--disruptive technologies. And creating a successful plan to implement said ideas are far harder than usually. A lot of people with really good disruptive tech. fail to create an implementation that lets them succeed. See also: Crossing the Chasm.
I said "similar". Not duplicate.
Wouldn't you be rather concerned if you were gonna try starting your hypothetical lawn-mower service and couldn't find a single example of anybody doing anything even remotely similar? I know I would be!
That said, pretty much everything in existence is a refinement of the stuff before it. Most TV shows are refinements of older ones--Family Guy was influenced by Simpsons. Aqua Teen Hunger Force was influenced by Family Guy and Simpsons (and Robot Chicken).
Beck influenced a ton of people out there. Beck himself has a strong resemblance to folk music.
Digg was a derivative of Slashdot. Slashdot was a derivative of the BBS.
I'm using "value" in economic terms, not monetary terms. When economists talk about value, reward and gain, they aren't just talking about cash in your pocket. You can produce value in society and *not* get money.
You can be rewarded for your work without getting money. People who do volunteer do it because they are getting a different kind of reward... they feel good about themselves. The technical term for this is "psychic income". Your artists and philosophers wouldn't do what they did unless they enjoyed it--that enjoyment is enough of a reward for them that they continue.
I'm trying to think of some examples of artists with great ideas who fail to implement them. I think there are probably scientists with great ideas that never produce value because they never implement their idea.
I'll give this a shot: If I was an artist, I think it would be a great idea to fly a airplane over the city and draw shapes using colored smoke. I have this great idea of doing something with the water too--like turn it into colored jello or something. Great idea... but I'll never implement it.
q: How do you know when there is a new floppy drive in the system.
a: When the BIOS says so.
q: How do you know when the user replaced the floppy drive with a different one?
a: You dont.
In other words, "auto detection" doesn't exist for floppy drives. Not even the BIOS knew if you really had a floppy drive--you had to tell it you had one in the BIOS setup.
Until the user replaces the drive with a different one.
Except you need a floppy disk in the drive to do the test. If you did it every time windows started, you'd have to ask the user to insert a floppy disk.
Right, but did most BIOS's out there let you change the boot order? I don't remember, honestly. About the only time I can really remember is once CD's became mainstream.
So yeah, you are right from a security perspective. I just dont know if what you want existed back then.
No, everything begins as an "idea", that part is obvious. But ideas in and of themselves are worthless until you implement them.
There are a lot of great ideas that never get implemented because it turns out the implementation is too hard to make it worthwhile. For example, I think it would be a great idea if you could have a lawn-mower sharing service. A neighborhood could share one lawnmower and not have to all buy their own. Since you dont usually use it more than once or twice a month, it would be a great idea, right? Well, I doubt you could ever successfully implement it.
By the way, in most cases, a good test of your idea is if others are doing similar things as you. If you are trying to create a business or product and nobody else is doing anything even close, odds are pretty good something is wrong with your idea. Not always, but usually...