As I understand it, these are being aimed at execs who dont want to learn to type, or some crap like that. In other words, handwriting recognition and quick scribbled diagrams, not artwork requiring much sensitivity. Blech.
Hopefully the manufacturers will recognize that there are a substantial number of people out there who would be willing to pay more for the necessary level of sensitivity; artists who want the sort of functionality we're talking about currently have to pony up for the Wacom graphics tablet / LCD screen (15" for $2000, 18" for $3,500) and a separate computer to plug it into. What are we talking about in total here, minimum $4000, $5,000+ if you want to go high-end (and most artists do)?
If you could have the same functionality/sensitivity in just one highly portable device, that would be worth considerably more to me than the $2000 they're talking about for tablet PCs. If they could get a tablet suitable for digital artists out the door for, say, $3000 I think they'd actually be looking at a far larger market than just artists. Hell, I'd bet that most executives, even the ones who will never use it for art, could be persuaded to pay extra for the "added value" of a more sensitive screen.
As I said in the original story submission, I'm hoping that this functionality can be dragged down to commodity-level pricing so that, eventually, everyone can enjoy it.
Not quite. The article mentions that Fujitsu is having a go at it, and implies that they'll be using Microsoft's new "Tablet-aware" Windows XP.
But the article doesn't claim that sales are up, or that anyone is making any money on these things. The only pundits seem to be those who are marketing product.
The word "momentum" suggests a gathering of force. The article also mentions designs that have been prototyped by Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Toshiba and Sony. Forget about the cost of advancing ideas to the prototype stage, making them public represents a substantial credibility wager on the part of these corporations, and credibility is everything when you're essentially selling commodity products.
This does indicate a gathering of force behind the tablet PC concept, regardless of whether or not that concept is a worthwhile or whether it will ever find a substantial market. In submitting this story to Slashdot, I wanted to suggest that a certain niche of the market, digital artists, would actually find tablet PCs extremely attractive but only if the touch screens are as sensitive as Wacom's existing graphics tablets.
In other words, you admit that you can't think?:) Seriously though, given that you are handing over your money, shouldn't you be paying attention to what you're doing?
That's exactly my point: I want to devote my attention to the transaction, not to making sure I'm accidently handing over a fifty instead of a twenty.
Everyday, each of us has a continual flow of details we try to keep track of. Sometimes we miss a few and that's when we make mistakes. Good design is about making things so effortless to use, so intuitive, that we can concentrate on a wider range of elements.
In the case of money, it's very useful if you're able to flip quickly through what's in your pocket , recognizing each note's value by glimpsing any part of it.
Money is used everyday by almost everyone. Even a few seconds lost per transaction mounts up to a lot of wasted time and energy. I would suggest that Americans don't realize how much time they waste on this because they've never become accustomed to a better system.
Apparently, with both size and color the same, foreigners have a hard time differenciating between the bills.
I realize how strange that must seem to Americans but it really is true; I travel all over the world and the U.S. is the only place where I have to really think about what I'm doing, it's insanely easy to make mistakes.
Given that money is meant to be representational, and given that the different bills represent entirely different amounts, it only makes sense to distinguish them from one another as much as possible.
I once met someone working within the US treasury and took the opportunity to ask him why they didn't take advantage of color printing. He reckoned that it was politics more than anything else; no politician wanted to be the one to suggest changing something with which Americans identify so strongly. I guess it's a bit like the British being sentimental about the pound despite all the jobs and markets they're losing to Ireland and the other countries who've adopted the Euro.
Re:God's Notation Sucks
on
Wolframania
·
· Score: 2
You're not a programmer, are you? Code gets commented, not notated.
Internationally either word can be used, with "notation" considered more professional.
Apologies for not thinking American, I usually catch those mistakes.
It was just so obvious, and has been done SO many times in the 4 years that I've been here, it's just old.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Sure, fair point, but a lot of people aren't such/. veterans and, while that particular joke is, admittedly, obvious even to newbies, I reckon that a smattering of well-meaning jibes adds a certain flow to the discussion. More than anything, it's a way to encourage the poster, letting him know that his contribution is generating some sort of response.
Hell, it's the weekend, there's hardly anyone on here, but us sad nerds can still have fun.
Well, at least they acknowledge where in their customers' psyches the deep-rooted need to own one of these things stems by naming one of their top models Malestrom as opposed to Maelstrom. I wonder if any of their customers notice this subtle dig?
More worringly, I wonder what a Femalestrom would look like?
...in an email sent out to Shake users, Apple has declared that Irix and Linux versions will be developed at least through 2003.
No doubt they'll apply the same sort of schedule to Rayz and then stick both packages into some sort of suite, available on Windows and Linux in the same way that QuickTime is.
Or am I being ridiculously optimistic? Do I need to Think Different to understand Apple's financial decisions?
but how do other/.ers feel about a company profiting from data emitted by the cellphone that they paid for?
My instinct is that this is fine but, obviously, if some, even a handful, of the drivers involved feel concerns, that has to be taken seriously in this and whatever similiar situations the future throws at us.
What we need is corporate transparency, just like the governmental transparency the people of the world have slowly been winning, but in this case we need it from the people who now have the real power; it's not enough for them to tell us that they're trustworthy.
Transparency is great, transparency is one of the things that makes Open Source such a powerful concept. Find out why we now need Open Source corporations here.
Indeed. I have a computer with DSL, but downloading 650MB off of Kazaa takes like 3 days or so.
Christ, that's terrible! You should change your DSL provider immediately. Or have you thought about dial-up?
I'm on a 512MB cable connection and I tend to net about 6 films over an eight hour period via Kazaa. Sometimes, if it's a popular film with a lot of people uploaded it to me, I can get a 700MB film in about 2 hours, pretty much real-time.
I thought that DSL was meant to be faster, or at least more "dedicated" than cable. I guess what it really comes down to isn't the technology but the willingness of the specific companies to screw us around.
promoting a culture of anarchy and lawlessness by saying "it happens, so we should just allow it to continue" is likewise not a good idea.
I have never promoted piracy, I simply understand how and why it happens. I also don't allow the content industry to whip me into a frenzy about content "theft" because I understand stand that, throughout the ages, piracy has always played an important part in building the mass audiences upon which markets are later built.
Sometimes I worry about the way in which analysis of certain trends is mistaken for advocacy.
I have visited the webpages listed in your profile, and read your other posts. You seem to be intelligent and not a troll; and I appreciate you replying to these posts thoughtfully.
Well, I also appreciate the consideration you've put into your comments, but I'm flabberghasted that anyone would even vaguely think I was trolling; the parameters of acceptable discussion on/. seem to be narrowing quite rapidly, something that I've noticed quite a bit over the last year or so.
I just don't agree that because you can hack, we should "ebrace" the idea of creating a black market and series of gray markets to fulfill a niche based on the wants of a few selfish people, based on the notion that it's "what the masses have been waiting for."
I'm not saying that we should embrace this, I'm just going out on a limb and predicting that this is what will happen. I could be wrong but I think that, by thinking in a detailed way about how the various elements (a substantial amount of people in every community interested in shiny new content for as little money as possible, a lesser but sufficient number of technically-inclined computer owners willing to maked money from that desire and, now, the introduction of a low-cost, brand-name unit that brings together music, games and films) it's possible to see the direction in which things are going. All that I've said today and in my original post which inspired the article submission is that, over the next year, there's going to be an explosion of piracy that will thrust the question of Intellectual Property very much to the fore of mainstream political debate.
Let's just wait and see if I'm right. If I am, you can all call me Nostrodamus. If I'm wrong and the introduction of Divx capability doesn't make any real impact, well, I'm sure you'll all be too polite to mention my flawed reasoning.
Modding won't hurt game sales. It may not help them, but there won't be any negative affect.
At present, the primary motivation of most modders is the ability to play pirated games. For most of them, Divx will be a nice side-benefit, but not the main point. You could argue that these people would never have shelled out the money to actually buy the games they play but, while this is not doubt true in most cases i.e. no-one with a collection of 100 pirated games would actually have bought 100 games, the truth is that they would have bought some games and, therefore, modding does hurt games sales.
And as for greatly accelerating market penetration, I doubt that. It's gonna be a pretty damn small minority of people that will want to buy these things just to mod, as quite a few people have already mentioned. Geeks (to use a term loosely) tend to forget that just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean the general public or even appreciable numbers of folks will actually do it.
Well, it's true when it became possible to produce, say, combustion engines, it took a process of years to figure how to make cars practical, to suggest various ways in which people might find them useful, to integrate them into our towns and cities - all this stuff takes time.
In this case, however, there is an existing, widespread desire for films, games and music. There are also several existing infrastructures for the distribution of illegitimate goods. Now, with an extremely cost effective way of A) setting people up with a game, film and music playing machine and B) reproducing those games, film and music on the cheapest medium pirates have ever known, CDRs, everything is actually in place in the same way that it was for cars when the first Model T came rolling of the production line.
Buying a modded Xbox is going to cheap and easy. The reasons for doing so are compelling (the existing, unmodded product being a not altogether shabby deal in itself). And for anyone who can't afford to buy DVDs and games at full price or, at least, not very many of them, this is going to be a particulary attractive option.
Can I just stress, once again, that I am not advocating piracy, if you can afford the luxury of buying your informational products legitimately you should absolutely do so. But I am realistic about how the world market for content is built and you can bet that Microsoft are too.
There's no mass market for pirated content nowadays.
Have you ever been to South East Asia? Or Europe? Or the Russian Federation? Or South America? Or anywhere outside the US?
And, in any case, we're not talking about a mass market in the traditional sense; the whole point is that the ease with which hundreds of thousands of individuals, even in America, will be able, individually, to use their $500 low-spec computers to make money by churning out 20 CDs an hour at a cost of 25c each, and sell them on to their friends for a couple of bucks each.
Most (or even a significant number of) people will not base their purchasing decisions on whether or not their DVD player can handle pirated content. They do not do this now, either.
Rubbish. The majority of the world's DVD owners will NEVER, not even ONCE, buy a legitimate, licensed CD. The majority of DVD owners now reside in 2nd World countries like China, India and S. E. Asia. Part of their decision to commit to a major, circa $50 purchase (local as opposed to US prices) is the guaranteed availability of cheap, pirated content.
Please, stop smoking crack.
You'll have to pry my pipe from my cold, dead fingers!
That's great, but you're very wrong...(I can get it on VHS or, perhaps, even VCD.)
Regardless of format, illegal supply chains, both formal and informal, exist for content, whether that be games, music or films.
I am suggesting that the chains that currently make it possible for you to buy videos and VCDs will increasingly gear their customers towards Divx, both in the interests of simplifying and speeding their production process, lowering their costs, expanding their market and introducing a wider range of products to the same customers (games and music).
I also have no doubt that $100 DVD players with Divx capability will soon start entering the market and that many people will choose to buy a Divx of, say, Spiderman at the "disposable" cost of $3 rather than buy a higher-quality pirate DVD for $8. Divx pirates will also be more widely available, as CD burners will remain considerably cheaper that DVD burners for quite some time.
You should learn the difference between, "Hey, this is exactly what I was looking for!" and "Wow! Everyone is going to want one of these!"
Excellent distinction but, all the same, I really do think that from a price / utility / necessary skill point of view, this trend has all the elements necessary to cause a fundamental shift in content piracy, especially in the majority of the world where most people don't already own DVD players.
Ordinary people don't think, "Hey, I'll go out and spend $300 so I can watch piles of the second-rate bootleg videos you can buy from that creepy kid who never goes outside!"
Again, well put, but I think that if Creepy Kid offers them a modded Xbox for $250 and promises to supply them with films, games and 6-hour CDs of the lastest music, all at $3 a piece, most people are going to say, "Creepy Kid, you've got yourself a sale!".
My reaction on hearing about this was, "So what?" And I even know what Divx is, which is more than you can say for the general population.
The general population don't need to know what Divx is, all they'll know is that there local pirate, whether he be Creepy Kid or part of a large-scale operation, is pushing it as better quality than video. The pirates will do this because copying and distributing via CDR is a great deal cheaper, quicker and easier than video and far less expensive than blank DVDs.
Slashdot Mirror
If you could have the same functionality/sensitivity in just one highly portable device, that would be worth considerably more to me than the $2000 they're talking about for tablet PCs. If they could get a tablet suitable for digital artists out the door for, say, $3000 I think they'd actually be looking at a far larger market than just artists. Hell, I'd bet that most executives, even the ones who will never use it for art, could be persuaded to pay extra for the "added value" of a more sensitive screen.
As I said in the original story submission, I'm hoping that this functionality can be dragged down to commodity-level pricing so that, eventually, everyone can enjoy it.
This does indicate a gathering of force behind the tablet PC concept, regardless of whether or not that concept is a worthwhile or whether it will ever find a substantial market. In submitting this story to Slashdot, I wanted to suggest that a certain niche of the market, digital artists, would actually find tablet PCs extremely attractive but only if the touch screens are as sensitive as Wacom's existing graphics tablets.
Everyday, each of us has a continual flow of details we try to keep track of. Sometimes we miss a few and that's when we make mistakes. Good design is about making things so effortless to use, so intuitive, that we can concentrate on a wider range of elements.
In the case of money, it's very useful if you're able to flip quickly through what's in your pocket , recognizing each note's value by glimpsing any part of it.
Money is used everyday by almost everyone. Even a few seconds lost per transaction mounts up to a lot of wasted time and energy. I would suggest that Americans don't realize how much time they waste on this because they've never become accustomed to a better system.
Given that money is meant to be representational, and given that the different bills represent entirely different amounts, it only makes sense to distinguish them from one another as much as possible.
I once met someone working within the US treasury and took the opportunity to ask him why they didn't take advantage of color printing. He reckoned that it was politics more than anything else; no politician wanted to be the one to suggest changing something with which Americans identify so strongly. I guess it's a bit like the British being sentimental about the pound despite all the jobs and markets they're losing to Ireland and the other countries who've adopted the Euro.
Apologies for not thinking American, I usually catch those mistakes.
Hell, it's the weekend, there's hardly anyone on here, but us sad nerds can still have fun.
Oh, c'mon, how could anyone resist should an obvious opportunity?
Mind you, the capacity to actually kill someone with your light saber would probably be considered an advanced feature by a lot of people.
Well, at least they acknowledge where in their customers' psyches the deep-rooted need to own one of these things stems by naming one of their top models Malestrom as opposed to Maelstrom. I wonder if any of their customers notice this subtle dig?
More worringly, I wonder what a Femalestrom would look like?
Well, if he is I refuse to work with his code, not until he comes back and notates it properly.
How about an "NYTimes Registration-Free Mirrors" Slashbox?
Maybe you should spend less time on NYTimes and more on /.
:)
Slashdot; who needs other sites?
Gleaned from the world's most idealogically sound domain registrar:
IsMyJobHotorNot.com
Or am I being ridiculously optimistic? Do I need to Think Different to understand Apple's financial decisions?
What we need is corporate transparency, just like the governmental transparency the people of the world have slowly been winning, but in this case we need it from the people who now have the real power; it's not enough for them to tell us that they're trustworthy.
Transparency is great, transparency is one of the things that makes Open Source such a powerful concept. Find out why we now need Open Source corporations here.
Christ, that's terrible! You should change your DSL provider immediately. Or have you thought about dial-up?
I'm on a 512MB cable connection and I tend to net about 6 films over an eight hour period via Kazaa. Sometimes, if it's a popular film with a lot of people uploaded it to me, I can get a 700MB film in about 2 hours, pretty much real-time.
I thought that DSL was meant to be faster, or at least more "dedicated" than cable. I guess what it really comes down to isn't the technology but the willingness of the specific companies to screw us around.
I have never promoted piracy, I simply understand how and why it happens. I also don't allow the content industry to whip me into a frenzy about content "theft" because I understand stand that, throughout the ages, piracy has always played an important part in building the mass audiences upon which markets are later built.
Sometimes I worry about the way in which analysis of certain trends is mistaken for advocacy.
Well, I also appreciate the consideration you've put into your comments, but I'm flabberghasted that anyone would even vaguely think I was trolling; the parameters of acceptable discussion on /. seem to be narrowing quite rapidly, something that I've noticed quite a bit over the last year or so.
I'm not saying that we should embrace this, I'm just going out on a limb and predicting that this is what will happen. I could be wrong but I think that, by thinking in a detailed way about how the various elements (a substantial amount of people in every community interested in shiny new content for as little money as possible, a lesser but sufficient number of technically-inclined computer owners willing to maked money from that desire and, now, the introduction of a low-cost, brand-name unit that brings together music, games and films) it's possible to see the direction in which things are going. All that I've said today and in my original post which inspired the article submission is that, over the next year, there's going to be an explosion of piracy that will thrust the question of Intellectual Property very much to the fore of mainstream political debate.
Let's just wait and see if I'm right. If I am, you can all call me Nostrodamus. If I'm wrong and the introduction of Divx capability doesn't make any real impact, well, I'm sure you'll all be too polite to mention my flawed reasoning.
At present, the primary motivation of most modders is the ability to play pirated games. For most of them, Divx will be a nice side-benefit, but not the main point. You could argue that these people would never have shelled out the money to actually buy the games they play but, while this is not doubt true in most cases i.e. no-one with a collection of 100 pirated games would actually have bought 100 games, the truth is that they would have bought some games and, therefore, modding does hurt games sales.
Well, it's true when it became possible to produce, say, combustion engines, it took a process of years to figure how to make cars practical, to suggest various ways in which people might find them useful, to integrate them into our towns and cities - all this stuff takes time.
In this case, however, there is an existing, widespread desire for films, games and music. There are also several existing infrastructures for the distribution of illegitimate goods. Now, with an extremely cost effective way of A) setting people up with a game, film and music playing machine and B) reproducing those games, film and music on the cheapest medium pirates have ever known, CDRs, everything is actually in place in the same way that it was for cars when the first Model T came rolling of the production line.
Buying a modded Xbox is going to cheap and easy. The reasons for doing so are compelling (the existing, unmodded product being a not altogether shabby deal in itself). And for anyone who can't afford to buy DVDs and games at full price or, at least, not very many of them, this is going to be a particulary attractive option.
Can I just stress, once again, that I am not advocating piracy, if you can afford the luxury of buying your informational products legitimately you should absolutely do so. But I am realistic about how the world market for content is built and you can bet that Microsoft are too.
Have you ever been to South East Asia? Or Europe? Or the Russian Federation? Or South America? Or anywhere outside the US?
And, in any case, we're not talking about a mass market in the traditional sense; the whole point is that the ease with which hundreds of thousands of individuals, even in America, will be able, individually, to use their $500 low-spec computers to make money by churning out 20 CDs an hour at a cost of 25c each, and sell them on to their friends for a couple of bucks each.
Rubbish. The majority of the world's DVD owners will NEVER, not even ONCE, buy a legitimate, licensed CD. The majority of DVD owners now reside in 2nd World countries like China, India and S. E. Asia. Part of their decision to commit to a major, circa $50 purchase (local as opposed to US prices) is the guaranteed availability of cheap, pirated content.
You'll have to pry my pipe from my cold, dead fingers!
Regardless of format, illegal supply chains, both formal and informal, exist for content, whether that be games, music or films.
I am suggesting that the chains that currently make it possible for you to buy videos and VCDs will increasingly gear their customers towards Divx, both in the interests of simplifying and speeding their production process, lowering their costs, expanding their market and introducing a wider range of products to the same customers (games and music).
I also have no doubt that $100 DVD players with Divx capability will soon start entering the market and that many people will choose to buy a Divx of, say, Spiderman at the "disposable" cost of $3 rather than buy a higher-quality pirate DVD for $8. Divx pirates will also be more widely available, as CD burners will remain considerably cheaper that DVD burners for quite some time.
You should learn the difference between, "Hey, this is exactly what I was looking for!" and "Wow! Everyone is going to want one of these!"
Excellent distinction but, all the same, I really do think that from a price / utility / necessary skill point of view, this trend has all the elements necessary to cause a fundamental shift in content piracy, especially in the majority of the world where most people don't already own DVD players.
Ordinary people don't think, "Hey, I'll go out and spend $300 so I can watch piles of the second-rate bootleg videos you can buy from that creepy kid who never goes outside!"
Again, well put, but I think that if Creepy Kid offers them a modded Xbox for $250 and promises to supply them with films, games and 6-hour CDs of the lastest music, all at $3 a piece, most people are going to say, "Creepy Kid, you've got yourself a sale!".
My reaction on hearing about this was, "So what?" And I even know what Divx is, which is more than you can say for the general population.
The general population don't need to know what Divx is, all they'll know is that there local pirate, whether he be Creepy Kid or part of a large-scale operation, is pushing it as better quality than video. The pirates will do this because copying and distributing via CDR is a great deal cheaper, quicker and easier than video and far less expensive than blank DVDs.