My list of games for the PS3 I'm interested in is Metal Gear Solid 4 (a big one), God of War 3, and the rumored Twisted Metal game. I'm sure I'd find more if I went looking (especially into the list of already released PS3 games).
There have been one or two games I'd like to play that are on the PS3 only, but they are some coming that I'd really like to play (God of War 3, possibly FF XIII, I know there are others). I didn't want to spend $400 for a game or two. Having the price down to $300 helps.
Of course I'm not going to jump at it yet. I'll wait for the inevitable God of War III bundle.
I'm not surprised that little walkie-talkies might not work over long distances. FRS radios (which may not be legal for commercial purposes) are limited to 1/2 watt.
Amateur Radio would certainly work, with handhelds easily available that do 5W (such as the Yaesu VX-7R) or you could get models designed for cars that do much more.
The only problem with ham radio is you aren't allowed to use it for business purposes, so for anything other than chatting between farm hands you couldn't use it.
The only real problem I've seen with little radios like the VX-7R tend to be that the interfaces are horrible. They come from the "here is 20 buttons and 3 function keys, plus holding means something" school of interface design. I don't know if there are any with better interfaces.
Ooh! I know what you need. GMRS radios can be up to 50 watts and used for commercial purposes (I'm pretty sure). You need a license, but there is no test, just a fee (according to Wikipedia).
I can't say that surprises me. I'm watching "Tesla: Master of Lighting" through YouTube on my TiVo right now, but it looks like a slightly over-compressed Digital Cable channel. No slowdown or other problems, it works fine.
The box wasn't really designed for this, they added the feature 2+ years after release. I'm not really surprised that it has trouble displaying HD video that's not in it's ideal format.
It may just be the software. The Netflix integration works perfectly, even in HD.
I understand your frustration, and the microwave thing would be pretty ridiculous.
But as long as manufacturers insist and making their TVs do more and more (Yahoo! widgets and other software), why not let me install my own software?
My company just moved and we've put up an LCD in our entrance to show a simple video and slideshow of photos and other information. Terribly simple stuff that a DS or most cell phones could do (if they had a video decoder chip). Yet we'll have to hook it up to a computer to drive the screen (since we want to be able to update stuff on it throughout the day, not just run a loop from a DVD).
If you make a TV that has an internet connection and has the power to run Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Unbox, etc... why not let me run what I want? Let me make a little display program to show what I want (for example, server monitoring, or the aforementioned video/introduction thing).
At this point, I'm happy with my TV just being a TV. I can easily use other boxes to do everything else. I expect many of these things to fail (the widget idea, for example).
But if the TV I want already includes that functionality, or you want me to upgrade to a better TV that includes it, I'd like a little control over it.
I can tell you from experience, using YouTube on my TiVo, that can really be the case. Good looking videos look like SD content. Bad looking videos look like nothing but JPEG artifacts.
I haven't tried any YouTube HD videos, but they should look great.
It's so hard to find any non-throwaway content on YouTube, that I haven't found the feature very useful.
I know Sony makes at least a couple of TVs that use Linux to run the OSDs. That said, I doubt you'll find any manufacturers willing to let you put new software on the TV. Your best bet there is probably some 3rd party box (can you replace the kernel on a RoKu?).
In non-hackability, my TiVo lets me watch YouTube and Netflix as well as some other things, I it probably is the future of TV. YouTube is... gimmicky. It's YouTube, so mostly little videos. There are some documentaries and other things worth watching, but not a lot.
Being able to watch Netflix stuff is fantastic, and looks better than DVD since much of it is real HD. The content isn't there yet (it's rather limited, especially with new releases) but it's very nice. The biggest problem is that you have to have a "queue" which you update on your computers, so you can't add new movies from your TV. This is fixable, but that's how it operates now. I really love using it, it works very well.
I would love to have Netflix on my TV if I didn't have my TiVo to do the job. My TiVo also supports Amazon Unbox which I don't use (due to prices, where I already pay for NetFlix). There are some other video casts available for free on my TiVo (like David Pogue's from the NYT), and they recently added support to automatically get video from an RSS feed if it's in the right format.
This kind of video on demand seems to be the future to me. I already use recording on my TiVo sort of like VOD (since I can watch what I want when I want). These things seem like clear winners to me.
As for widgets, they seem of limited use. Pressing a button to call up a little weather forecast would be OK. Maybe having a little baseball diamond/score block up while I'm watching some other channel would be good. I used to like it when I had a set-top box that would display caller ID info.
Mostly though, widgets seem like a "but we're more than a generic TV" thing, trying to turn a commodity (an LCD panel in a case) into something more. My guess is that mostly no one will care soon.
If you want these features, you can use your TV if it supports them. But you can use a RoKu box to do the same thing, for only $100. Many higher end DVD/Blu-Ray players are starting to offer some of these features. TiVos support them. The XBox 360 supports them.
Basically, you don't need to get them in your TV. Every other box under the sun will soon have them. I wouldn't use this as a deciding factor.
I went through basically the same thing, although cell phones were getting more common (I graduated in '01). I agree with banning them. They have no use.
That said, the uniforms had the opposite effect on me. I've never particularly cared what I look like, but I followed the rules too. These days, I look pretty good in business casual because what I wear is basically my old uniform, it's always appropriate (short of suit & tie stuff).
Other than occasionally being lightly teased by the company owner (who went to the same high school and recognizes it as a uniform), it works perfectly.
It's simple. When a patent is overturned, the patent office must refund the price of the patent, plus interest, to the person/company who proved it shouldn't have been granted.
That way the patent office has a financial incentive not only to not grant bad patents, but also to fix their problems fast, not 20 years later.
After some fixed point (say 10 years) this obligation would end, so people couldn't go around striking down 40 year old patents people don't use just to make money.
If they didn't offer the source, it was a violation.
They took the driver and wanted to port it to something else. In looking at that, they saw binary blobs that were being linked in. Since the source for those blobs wasn't available, but they were being linked with GPL code, MS violated the GPL.
Code was "already" GPL would mean they didn't offer to distribute, that's a violation. If they code wasn't GPL that means they linked it in with GPL code, making them bound by the license, so they needed to give up the source. That would be a violation too.
If they had an offer somewhere, "Send us an email to bob@msn.com to get the source for our blobs, which are GPLed" that would have been OK. But if that was the case, no one would be discussing this because it wouldn't have been a violation.
One of the reasons for that is thought to be that it was hard to come up with a good interface for managing multiple open applications on a handheld device. The Pre seems to have a good idea there.
The other reason, and probably the bigger, is battery life. Ars Technica seems to agree with me.
I don't really find it to be a problem, it's been rare it annoyed me. Still, I'd rather have this limitation than the problem that Blackberry / WinMo / Palm users can face and have to constantly think about if I want to quit an application or switch out of it for battery life purposes.
It's a trade off, and right now I think Apple is on the right side of it.
I know they are documented, and well documented. I was able to use Help to find out everything I needed (unlike on a Blackberry where the help wasn't very useful). But people can pick up an iPhone and start using it. Want to switch apps? Press the only button. Need to dismiss an app on the Palm? You have to use a gesture. It makes sense, but you have to discover it. Want to get to the app list on an iPhone? Use the one button. Want to do it on the Pre? Again, a gesture.
Once you know a few little gestures, it works very well. Still miles ahead of Blackberries. I can't want to see people expand/improve on the card metaphor.
As for build quality, it was pretty good but the ability to rotate the screen a few degrees relative to the keyboard made it feel less solid that it probably is.
I mention demanding games because games seems to be one of the things on the iPhone that has REALLY taken off. Slower games should work (SuDoKu, crosswords, possibly even something like Trism). I just have trouble understanding how, after seeing Apple's success in games and apps, they release a phone trumpeting an app store that won't have apps for 3-6 months. It's odd.
A nice phone though. If I was still on Sprint, I would use one in a heartbeat over everything else. If the iPhone didn't exist, I would almost certainly switch to Sprint to get one.
Various Mac programmers/bloggers have got it right. It's a great phone, and very strong competition to the 2007 iPhone situation. Unfortunately, it's competing with the 2009 iPhone situation. It will be interesting to see how far they've taken it by this time next year.
Re-reading it, you're right. It looks like a simple affiliate program like the ones at Amazon or Dreamhost (both of which I use). I jumped the gun on that one.
Still, any affiliate program that requires a $40 monthly fee should really make someone's hair stand on end. The $70 initial fee is insane too.
I agree MLM is a scam. Anyone who can make money doing it could make money being a real sales/management person at a normal company. I just find it slimy.
But any product where, as a part of the initial pitch, they tell you "... and sell to your friends for money!" really sets off warning bells. "Refer a friend and get $10" is one thing, "Sell us a ex-friend and get $10/month" is another.
That's your phone provider's fault. I've got an iPhone and I love it. I have wasted so much time with it. Trism, Peggle (great control!), and Flight Control have taken large chunks of my life.
Both my siblings have Palm Pres. I've played with them, and they're quite nice. My only complains were the build quality (would like it a little tighter) and navigation (you have to know the gestures, they're not discoverable). The card metaphor is very good.
But the app store is empty. There are three games, one of which is... connect 4.
The SDK was just released to the public, in beta. It's not meant for games, it's barely more advanced than the first way to develop for the iPhone (which was so roundly criticized). You can't get accelerometer data faster than 4 samples/sec. Palm is supposed to be making a gaming framework, but who knows how long that will be.
So right now Palm is taking submissions for their app store, which will only be able to handle non-demanding games (no Katamari Damacy there), for it's fall opening. Even if your game is done, no one will be able to buy it for months.
Basically, the Pre will be devoid of good apps for at least the next 6 months. The situation is really sad. They messed it up, big time. The SDK, even in alpha, should have been available months ago, so there would be apps at launch.
Windows Mobile has tons of apps, and a tradition of tiny little utilities costing $20. Combine that with the fragmentation of device capabilities and the market is... rough for a consumer.
Blackberries? I've heard that to develop anything on them that doesn't look like a 1996 Java applet requires you to basically do the painting for every widget on screen. There is device fragmentation here too. The app store it's self is a joke, it's very difficult to use. There is no way to browse it from a computer, which makes using it a nightmare.
Apple proved good apps were a "killer app". No one really "got" the importance of them before the iPhone's native SDK came out. Unfortunately, after more than a year, no one else is even close to being able to foster any kind of app ecosystem. Palm should have, but botched it.
I'm not really sure about the G1. I'm guessing it's sales are just too small for it to reach any kind of critical mass soon (where the Pre has a chance and Blackberries are there).
Sign up to sell the same service to other people and get $10 a month for each person you sell to.
That makes it multi-level-marketing (read: "legal pyramid scheme"), which should be an instant clue to anyone to avoid it.
Also, reading the article, it's a $70 initial fee to do the MLM part, and $40 monthly fee, which means if you sign up 5 people, it will take 7 months to break even.
You can probably make money faster by picking up loose change.
Before we all jump on the OLPC/Sugar hater bandwagon, let's read the actual quote:
"Sugar should have been an application [residing] on a normal operating system," he told ZDNet Asia in an interview. "But what we did... was we had Sugar do the power management, we had Sugar do the wireless management--it became sort of an omelet. The Bios talked directly with Sugar, so Sugar became a bit of a mess." Negroponte added: "It should have been much cleaner, like the way they offer [it] on a stick now."
So it sounds like the problem, as Negroponte see it, was the Sugar was written as a pseudo OS/large chunk of user space when it should be acted more like a kiosk application on top of more traditional software to run things like power management.
Sugar it's self, as an interface, still seems like a good idea to me. It's a good idea to give people a simplified user interface for basic tasks. Why should kids in Nigeria or Malaysia have to learn a "traditional" interface? Remember our "traditional" interface exists because of historical storage limits (which for OLPC don't matter, you don't need everything on a 50kb disk, you have hundreds of megabytes free) and user training (they were familiar with CP/M, DOS should do files the same way. They were familiar with DOS, Windows should do files the same way...).
It's very hard for us to switch off of 20-30 years of average people being used to files onto something more like a journal or database, but something like the OLPC was the perfect chance to get computer users who weren't saddled with all that (at least initially).
Sugar: Good idea, implemented in a way which broke the layers of abstractions it should have been built on.
It's only a helicopter because it has a spinning thing who's axel is perpendicular to the ground. And it wouldn't actually work. Even if it could achieve lift by turning the screw, without a tail rotor (or counter-rotating screw) it would simply spin and go nowhere. Then there is the problem of the tremendous power it takes to power a helicopter rotor.
istartedi is right that any decent craftsman could have made a phonograph. Even with the correct information to design a good wing/blade, a helicopter wouldn't have been possible 150+ years ago. A very high quality phonograph could have been made by any watchmaker.
I'm arguing on the theory that it's causes more waste (i.e. CO2, nuclear waste, coal ash, etc.) than if the computer was idle.
I don't think it's neccessarily a waste. In this comment I mention that this "waste" may mean scientists can get more research done for the same money and in less time, which may be a net benefit to society.
I don't really think it's that wasteful. I used to run SETI@Home on all my computers. But if someone complains about the excess CO2 released due to software like this, I figure they consider it a waste, so I used that word when replying to them... ironically to prevent them from complaining that it was a waste and I should just use that word:)
Will this allow them to improve their tracking system?
UPS has had an amazing tracking system for years. FedEx has improve theirs, to the point they have good estimated delivery dates and can show you what's going on with your package pretty well, like UPS.
When dealing with the post office, their system works but is... antiquated. When paying for any kind of fast shipping (overnight, two day) I can receive my package before the tracking number pulls up a package. It's not every time, but it's enough to make me not care much. What I really care about is estimated delivery dates. I want to know when I'll get my package. I usually don't care if my package is in NYC, Duluth, or San Antonio. It will get where it needs to go. I would rather have the step-by-step tracking information show up later and have things like estimated TOA show up fast.
I remember as a kid (I'm 26) you could order something from a catalog and you had basically no idea when it would show up from UPS, etc. Today I can find out where my UPS package was last scanned, nearly up to the minute. Very cool.
That would make a neat visualization. They should put that on their site, little packages moving along their correct routes around the country.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. And I own a 360.
My list of games for the PS3 I'm interested in is Metal Gear Solid 4 (a big one), God of War 3, and the rumored Twisted Metal game. I'm sure I'd find more if I went looking (especially into the list of already released PS3 games).
Crud. That way me, MBCook. Accidentally checked the wrong box.
There have been one or two games I'd like to play that are on the PS3 only, but they are some coming that I'd really like to play (God of War 3, possibly FF XIII, I know there are others). I didn't want to spend $400 for a game or two. Having the price down to $300 helps.
Of course I'm not going to jump at it yet. I'll wait for the inevitable God of War III bundle.
I'm not surprised that little walkie-talkies might not work over long distances. FRS radios (which may not be legal for commercial purposes) are limited to 1/2 watt.
Amateur Radio would certainly work, with handhelds easily available that do 5W (such as the Yaesu VX-7R) or you could get models designed for cars that do much more.
The only problem with ham radio is you aren't allowed to use it for business purposes, so for anything other than chatting between farm hands you couldn't use it.
The only real problem I've seen with little radios like the VX-7R tend to be that the interfaces are horrible. They come from the "here is 20 buttons and 3 function keys, plus holding means something" school of interface design. I don't know if there are any with better interfaces.
Ooh! I know what you need. GMRS radios can be up to 50 watts and used for commercial purposes (I'm pretty sure). You need a license, but there is no test, just a fee (according to Wikipedia).
I can't say that surprises me. I'm watching "Tesla: Master of Lighting" through YouTube on my TiVo right now, but it looks like a slightly over-compressed Digital Cable channel. No slowdown or other problems, it works fine.
The box wasn't really designed for this, they added the feature 2+ years after release. I'm not really surprised that it has trouble displaying HD video that's not in it's ideal format.
It may just be the software. The Netflix integration works perfectly, even in HD.
I understand your frustration, and the microwave thing would be pretty ridiculous.
But as long as manufacturers insist and making their TVs do more and more (Yahoo! widgets and other software), why not let me install my own software?
My company just moved and we've put up an LCD in our entrance to show a simple video and slideshow of photos and other information. Terribly simple stuff that a DS or most cell phones could do (if they had a video decoder chip). Yet we'll have to hook it up to a computer to drive the screen (since we want to be able to update stuff on it throughout the day, not just run a loop from a DVD).
If you make a TV that has an internet connection and has the power to run Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Unbox, etc... why not let me run what I want? Let me make a little display program to show what I want (for example, server monitoring, or the aforementioned video/introduction thing).
At this point, I'm happy with my TV just being a TV. I can easily use other boxes to do everything else. I expect many of these things to fail (the widget idea, for example).
But if the TV I want already includes that functionality, or you want me to upgrade to a better TV that includes it, I'd like a little control over it.
I can tell you from experience, using YouTube on my TiVo, that can really be the case. Good looking videos look like SD content. Bad looking videos look like nothing but JPEG artifacts.
I haven't tried any YouTube HD videos, but they should look great.
It's so hard to find any non-throwaway content on YouTube, that I haven't found the feature very useful.
I know Sony makes at least a couple of TVs that use Linux to run the OSDs. That said, I doubt you'll find any manufacturers willing to let you put new software on the TV. Your best bet there is probably some 3rd party box (can you replace the kernel on a RoKu?).
In non-hackability, my TiVo lets me watch YouTube and Netflix as well as some other things, I it probably is the future of TV. YouTube is... gimmicky. It's YouTube, so mostly little videos. There are some documentaries and other things worth watching, but not a lot.
Being able to watch Netflix stuff is fantastic, and looks better than DVD since much of it is real HD. The content isn't there yet (it's rather limited, especially with new releases) but it's very nice. The biggest problem is that you have to have a "queue" which you update on your computers, so you can't add new movies from your TV. This is fixable, but that's how it operates now. I really love using it, it works very well.
I would love to have Netflix on my TV if I didn't have my TiVo to do the job. My TiVo also supports Amazon Unbox which I don't use (due to prices, where I already pay for NetFlix). There are some other video casts available for free on my TiVo (like David Pogue's from the NYT), and they recently added support to automatically get video from an RSS feed if it's in the right format.
This kind of video on demand seems to be the future to me. I already use recording on my TiVo sort of like VOD (since I can watch what I want when I want). These things seem like clear winners to me.
As for widgets, they seem of limited use. Pressing a button to call up a little weather forecast would be OK. Maybe having a little baseball diamond/score block up while I'm watching some other channel would be good. I used to like it when I had a set-top box that would display caller ID info.
Mostly though, widgets seem like a "but we're more than a generic TV" thing, trying to turn a commodity (an LCD panel in a case) into something more. My guess is that mostly no one will care soon.
If you want these features, you can use your TV if it supports them. But you can use a RoKu box to do the same thing, for only $100. Many higher end DVD/Blu-Ray players are starting to offer some of these features. TiVos support them. The XBox 360 supports them.
Basically, you don't need to get them in your TV. Every other box under the sun will soon have them. I wouldn't use this as a deciding factor.
So you're saying the new name is a better fit?
I went through basically the same thing, although cell phones were getting more common (I graduated in '01). I agree with banning them. They have no use.
That said, the uniforms had the opposite effect on me. I've never particularly cared what I look like, but I followed the rules too. These days, I look pretty good in business casual because what I wear is basically my old uniform, it's always appropriate (short of suit & tie stuff).
Other than occasionally being lightly teased by the company owner (who went to the same high school and recognizes it as a uniform), it works perfectly.
Make that Appalachian.
Wow, spell check really failed me.
Has anyone checked to see if he's hiking in the Applicaiha?
It's simple. When a patent is overturned, the patent office must refund the price of the patent, plus interest, to the person/company who proved it shouldn't have been granted.
That way the patent office has a financial incentive not only to not grant bad patents, but also to fix their problems fast, not 20 years later.
After some fixed point (say 10 years) this obligation would end, so people couldn't go around striking down 40 year old patents people don't use just to make money.
If they didn't offer the source, it was a violation.
They took the driver and wanted to port it to something else. In looking at that, they saw binary blobs that were being linked in. Since the source for those blobs wasn't available, but they were being linked with GPL code, MS violated the GPL.
Code was "already" GPL would mean they didn't offer to distribute, that's a violation. If they code wasn't GPL that means they linked it in with GPL code, making them bound by the license, so they needed to give up the source. That would be a violation too.
If they had an offer somewhere, "Send us an email to bob@msn.com to get the source for our blobs, which are GPLed" that would have been OK. But if that was the case, no one would be discussing this because it wouldn't have been a violation.
If you read the story, it looks like they released the binaries to people, thus they distributed it, which means they broke the GPL.
"I was going to pay for the candy bars I was hiding in my jacket" is not a valid defense when caught shoplifting, this is the same thing.
The minute they linked in GPL only libraries, they needed to go GPL. Not later when they got caught.
One of the reasons for that is thought to be that it was hard to come up with a good interface for managing multiple open applications on a handheld device. The Pre seems to have a good idea there.
The other reason, and probably the bigger, is battery life. Ars Technica seems to agree with me.
I don't really find it to be a problem, it's been rare it annoyed me. Still, I'd rather have this limitation than the problem that Blackberry / WinMo / Palm users can face and have to constantly think about if I want to quit an application or switch out of it for battery life purposes.
It's a trade off, and right now I think Apple is on the right side of it.
I know they are documented, and well documented. I was able to use Help to find out everything I needed (unlike on a Blackberry where the help wasn't very useful). But people can pick up an iPhone and start using it. Want to switch apps? Press the only button. Need to dismiss an app on the Palm? You have to use a gesture. It makes sense, but you have to discover it. Want to get to the app list on an iPhone? Use the one button. Want to do it on the Pre? Again, a gesture.
Once you know a few little gestures, it works very well. Still miles ahead of Blackberries. I can't want to see people expand/improve on the card metaphor.
As for build quality, it was pretty good but the ability to rotate the screen a few degrees relative to the keyboard made it feel less solid that it probably is.
I mention demanding games because games seems to be one of the things on the iPhone that has REALLY taken off. Slower games should work (SuDoKu, crosswords, possibly even something like Trism). I just have trouble understanding how, after seeing Apple's success in games and apps, they release a phone trumpeting an app store that won't have apps for 3-6 months. It's odd.
A nice phone though. If I was still on Sprint, I would use one in a heartbeat over everything else. If the iPhone didn't exist, I would almost certainly switch to Sprint to get one.
Various Mac programmers/bloggers have got it right. It's a great phone, and very strong competition to the 2007 iPhone situation. Unfortunately, it's competing with the 2009 iPhone situation. It will be interesting to see how far they've taken it by this time next year.
Re-reading it, you're right. It looks like a simple affiliate program like the ones at Amazon or Dreamhost (both of which I use). I jumped the gun on that one.
Still, any affiliate program that requires a $40 monthly fee should really make someone's hair stand on end. The $70 initial fee is insane too.
I agree MLM is a scam. Anyone who can make money doing it could make money being a real sales/management person at a normal company. I just find it slimy.
But any product where, as a part of the initial pitch, they tell you "... and sell to your friends for money!" really sets off warning bells. "Refer a friend and get $10" is one thing, "Sell us a ex-friend and get $10/month" is another.
What percent of the 20+ million devices running iPhone OS do you think are jail broken? It's just not a reliable answer for most people.
Some people see things how they are.
That's your phone provider's fault. I've got an iPhone and I love it. I have wasted so much time with it. Trism, Peggle (great control!), and Flight Control have taken large chunks of my life.
Both my siblings have Palm Pres. I've played with them, and they're quite nice. My only complains were the build quality (would like it a little tighter) and navigation (you have to know the gestures, they're not discoverable). The card metaphor is very good.
But the app store is empty. There are three games, one of which is... connect 4.
The SDK was just released to the public, in beta. It's not meant for games, it's barely more advanced than the first way to develop for the iPhone (which was so roundly criticized). You can't get accelerometer data faster than 4 samples/sec. Palm is supposed to be making a gaming framework, but who knows how long that will be.
So right now Palm is taking submissions for their app store, which will only be able to handle non-demanding games (no Katamari Damacy there), for it's fall opening. Even if your game is done, no one will be able to buy it for months.
Basically, the Pre will be devoid of good apps for at least the next 6 months. The situation is really sad. They messed it up, big time. The SDK, even in alpha, should have been available months ago, so there would be apps at launch.
Windows Mobile has tons of apps, and a tradition of tiny little utilities costing $20. Combine that with the fragmentation of device capabilities and the market is... rough for a consumer.
Blackberries? I've heard that to develop anything on them that doesn't look like a 1996 Java applet requires you to basically do the painting for every widget on screen. There is device fragmentation here too. The app store it's self is a joke, it's very difficult to use. There is no way to browse it from a computer, which makes using it a nightmare.
Apple proved good apps were a "killer app". No one really "got" the importance of them before the iPhone's native SDK came out. Unfortunately, after more than a year, no one else is even close to being able to foster any kind of app ecosystem. Palm should have, but botched it.
I'm not really sure about the G1. I'm guessing it's sales are just too small for it to reach any kind of critical mass soon (where the Pre has a chance and Blackberries are there).
That makes it multi-level-marketing (read: "legal pyramid scheme"), which should be an instant clue to anyone to avoid it.
Also, reading the article, it's a $70 initial fee to do the MLM part, and $40 monthly fee, which means if you sign up 5 people, it will take 7 months to break even.
You can probably make money faster by picking up loose change.
Before we all jump on the OLPC/Sugar hater bandwagon, let's read the actual quote:
So it sounds like the problem, as Negroponte see it, was the Sugar was written as a pseudo OS/large chunk of user space when it should be acted more like a kiosk application on top of more traditional software to run things like power management.
Sugar it's self, as an interface, still seems like a good idea to me. It's a good idea to give people a simplified user interface for basic tasks. Why should kids in Nigeria or Malaysia have to learn a "traditional" interface? Remember our "traditional" interface exists because of historical storage limits (which for OLPC don't matter, you don't need everything on a 50kb disk, you have hundreds of megabytes free) and user training (they were familiar with CP/M, DOS should do files the same way. They were familiar with DOS, Windows should do files the same way...).
It's very hard for us to switch off of 20-30 years of average people being used to files onto something more like a journal or database, but something like the OLPC was the perfect chance to get computer users who weren't saddled with all that (at least initially).
Sugar: Good idea, implemented in a way which broke the layers of abstractions it should have been built on.
It's only a helicopter because it has a spinning thing who's axel is perpendicular to the ground. And it wouldn't actually work. Even if it could achieve lift by turning the screw, without a tail rotor (or counter-rotating screw) it would simply spin and go nowhere. Then there is the problem of the tremendous power it takes to power a helicopter rotor.
istartedi is right that any decent craftsman could have made a phonograph. Even with the correct information to design a good wing/blade, a helicopter wouldn't have been possible 150+ years ago. A very high quality phonograph could have been made by any watchmaker.
I'm arguing on the theory that it's causes more waste (i.e. CO2, nuclear waste, coal ash, etc.) than if the computer was idle.
I don't think it's neccessarily a waste. In this comment I mention that this "waste" may mean scientists can get more research done for the same money and in less time, which may be a net benefit to society.
I don't really think it's that wasteful. I used to run SETI@Home on all my computers. But if someone complains about the excess CO2 released due to software like this, I figure they consider it a waste, so I used that word when replying to them... ironically to prevent them from complaining that it was a waste and I should just use that word :)
Will this allow them to improve their tracking system?
UPS has had an amazing tracking system for years. FedEx has improve theirs, to the point they have good estimated delivery dates and can show you what's going on with your package pretty well, like UPS.
When dealing with the post office, their system works but is... antiquated. When paying for any kind of fast shipping (overnight, two day) I can receive my package before the tracking number pulls up a package. It's not every time, but it's enough to make me not care much. What I really care about is estimated delivery dates. I want to know when I'll get my package. I usually don't care if my package is in NYC, Duluth, or San Antonio. It will get where it needs to go. I would rather have the step-by-step tracking information show up later and have things like estimated TOA show up fast.
I remember as a kid (I'm 26) you could order something from a catalog and you had basically no idea when it would show up from UPS, etc. Today I can find out where my UPS package was last scanned, nearly up to the minute. Very cool.
That would make a neat visualization. They should put that on their site, little packages moving along their correct routes around the country.