This is exactly why I do all my typing with my mouse on an on-screen virtual keyboard. It's much faster too.
On a serious note, it is ironic that literally broadcasting a bluetooth signal over-the-air between a wireless keyboard and computer is apparently more secure than a hardwired keyboard.
Alright, it's time to shut up with the frigging questions already. Does this look like an AskSlashdot or Ask So-And-So story? No. So ixnay with the on-topic banter already, so the funny yet completely irrelevant posts can get some well deserved mod points. If Taco sees the completely skewed ratio of Funny to Interesting posts for this story he'll have to start deleting crap, and then all your typing will be for naught. I'm already starting to have dirty voyeur feelings like I've hacked into NewYorkCountryLawyer's gmail account. So enough already.
Use an invitation system like Google did for GMail. Each existing user would have a dozen or so invites. They enter the recipient's email address in a form on your site, and it sends a welcome email with an invite code. Those codes could only be used one time each. Locally you could spread invite codes far and wide on your hardcopy flyers, business cards, etc, with another set of codes that allowed multiple use - say 500-1000 uses per code. When that bulk code starts running low, create a new code and post new flyers. Eventually you'll get the local saturation you desire, and those public codes could be reduced so they can only be used 50-100 times before expiring. The idea is if they get into the hands of a spambot there will only be a limited number of accounts they can create.
When a public code runs out, your website can say something like "This code has expired. You will find the latest code posted at the community bulletin board at the local post office."
Basically your advertising will be word of mouth (where the invite codes come in), or via local hardcopy posters, flyers and business cards (bulk codes). I believe the invite system would serve as a form of viral advertising in and of itself (which is probably a major reason why Google went that route).
There would likely be very significant problems from filtering by IP address. In our rural town, the local DSL usually shows up as a major city over 100 miles from here. We have significant usage by several other ISPs of varying types - cable, dial-up, multiple ad-hoc WiFi providers, satellite, etc. Because of our poor rural internet coverage we have a number of people resorting to satellite and cellular providers (even though the cell service is only around 200 Mbps).
So I don't know about that town, but it would be impossible to restrict access by IP address in these parts. Or at least you would have to allow potential access to many millions of people (including HughesNet users) to allow unfettered access for just a few thousand locals.
Wow, a color matching game. How incredibly groundbreaking. And it's only selling for five times the minimum application price. Sorry, but the value isn't there for a game of this simplicity. I've got two games under development, both immensely more complex than this, that I will sell for at most half the price.
So my appraisal: 1) Clone of a clone of a clone of the color matching / bubble popping games that can be written in less than a week. No surprise people aren't jumping up and down with excitement, or going out and buying iPhones so they can play this game.
2) Price is way, way too high for this game.
I do thank the author for his concise summary of sales though.
Poor reasons
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Wow, reasons 3 & 4 really miss the mark.
3. Piracy taught a new generation of users it's more convenient to watch shows on a computer screen.
How is it more convenient to watch video on a computer screen, than in a living room designed specifically around a television set with a large screen? This is why I own a DivX DVD player with a USB port, and why things like MythTV and Media PCs exist - so people can watch video in the optimum environment, which is not a computer or laptop sitting on a desk.
4. Social applications made everybody from grandmas to 14-year-old girls want computers â" in a three-word-nutshell, Facebook killed TV.
I don't know of a single person that bought a computer or got internet connectivity because of Facebook - or any single site for that matter. Claiming that the internet is popular because of Facebook is patently absurd. Not even Google can make such a claim.
I've done a very significant amount of reading on devices as small or smaller than the iPhone. Originally it was all Pocket PCs, and more recently my Blackberry Pearl and iPod Touch. I end up doing most reading on my Blackberry (recently Moby Dick, The Stand and the Lord of the Rings trilogy) simply because I've always got it with me, and it's convenient to pull it out and fill in little downtime here and there.
I've contemplated actual dedicated ebook reader hardware, like the Kindle, but most of my reading is done when I don't have anything better to do, regardless of where I'm at. The spontaneity of always having the ebook with me without having to consciously bring it along or keep track of extra hardware is what allows me to do much reading in the first place.
"The rest use foul-smelling kerosene lamps to light their huts, which pollute, provide little light and are major fire hazards."
In other words, the exact same type of lighting my grandfather's household relied on when he was a child. It's easy to forget that there are many people alive today that only had access to very primitive technology when they were young. And it wasn't because they couldn't afford it, but because it didn't exist anywhere on earth.
While I am sympathetic to the plight of countries that cannot afford modern technology for their entire population, and the massive infrastructure required to support it, I do keep in mind that we are talking about a gap of only a few generations - not centuries or millenia.
From the specs: Operating System: Genuine Windows Vista Business 64
It's a good thing the put "Genuine" in there to clarify things. Otherwise people might assume IBM was shipping this $6,000 notebook with a pirated copy of Windows to keep the price down.
Can it be Flash based? I've got some cool ideas involving fancy animated text effects and transitions that would be really useful for a router interface.
Conflicker B++ should not be confused with Objective Conflicker B. Fortunately, they can easily be distinguished from one another - Objective Conflicker B has many more square brackets.
"On 10 January, Derham logged -12 ÂC, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 ÂC on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days."
For the imperialists among us, -15 C is 5 F. That's really not that cold, and I don't know about the whole "exploding trees" and "combs falling off of chickens" stuff supposedly going on at that temp. I live in Virginia, which is considered the South. We're at a significantly lower latitude than France, and we've had at least 5 days of single digit F temps just this winter alone, and that is typical. Of course our cold temps pale in comparison to Canada, and the northern New England states Maine, New Hampshire, etc.
So maybe those temps are atypical for parts Europe, but trees, and chickens and many types of livestock endure temps that low regularly every single year, which makes me wonder if there was some hyperbole going on back in 1709.
How can you feel sorry for the Chinese, when they have been manipulating their currency to keep the value artificially low? That's the whole point. If the value of their currency is low, they can't afford to buy stuff from foreign countries, thus they keep a massive export to import ratio.
Maybe if more enforcement was done to prevent such rampant copyright violation then they would have a little incentive to achieve a better trade / currency balance.
Wait a second. So these things went extinct just 10 years ago. Wouldn't it have been a lot easier (and cheaper) to, um, keep some of them alive instead of waiting until they died off? So if they do clone them and they live, how are they supposed to survive now when they couldn't survive just a decade ago?
I've been using my Blackberry as a modem for a long time, both with Windows and OSX, and both over Bluetooth and USB.
So this appears to be a purely Linux thing. This shouldn't just pertain to Blackberry, but pretty much any phone that can act as a modem. The Razr makes a decent modem, again over Bluetooth or USB.
The number one seller is iFart, which was raking in over $10,000 per day for a while. It's still #1, so it's obviously continuing to pull in massive amounts of money.
We are nearing a point where technology - both hardware and software - are going to reach a plateau. Let me use Microsoft Word as an example. Twenty years ago the software available to do desktop publishing was pretty poor. The interfaces were primitive, there were severe limitations of what could achieved, and the integration of intelligence to aid humans (spell checking, thesaurus, grammar checking, language translation, etc) was non-existent. There was a massive amount of room for improvement, and thus Word was created and has steadily grown in features and capability ever since. Because there was so much improvement to be made in that market, there was room for Word to progress, perhaps ahead of the curve, to set itself apart from similar products. So what is left to be implemented in modern word processors? What groundbreaking feature remains to be invented that can really set one product far above the others? There's not much. GUIs can be tweaked and redesigned. File formats can be updated and made more portable. But the simple fact of the matter is competition, like Open Office, can chug along in development at a leisurely pace, and before anyone realizes it, Open Office is suddenly completely on-par with Microsoft Office.
We're heading towards the same end with operating systems, web browsers, and even hardware. Every now and then something new will come along (multitouch iPod / iPhone comes to mind - Microsoft was idiotic not to encourage that simple and logical progression with the Windows Mobile OEMs) that will set a product far apart. However, eventually we will have, for the most part, equivalency throughout.
So what will dictate what companies or products are popular and which are not? Take a look at the fashion industry. The whole skirt-length, tie-thickness phenomenon will occur in the technology arena. Fads will come and go. Specific products will become popular because of subtle differences between them and competing products that the masses somehow identify as "modern" or "cool". Eventually the recycling process will begin, probably on a 15-20 year cycle, but perhaps even faster in the technology market. Some company will dredge up a GUI or method of doing something that was popular a couple product generations back, and it will make a resurgence for a while. Speech driven interfaces will become popular, then eventually be perceived as stupid and primitive. Gesture driven interfaces will become popular, then people using them will eventually be seen as old-fashioned and out of vogue. Direct interfacing to the human neurological system will become practical and popular, then later will be seen as too unnatural and invasive, leading full circle back to some other method of interfacing.
So I don't think any one company is going to dominate for any duration, because they will not be able to make their product different enough (for better or worse) to make it stand up against the alternatives. This is where open source will really make a huge impact. The odds of a company like Microsoft managing not just to survive, but to dominate these kinds of drastic changes in technology paradigms is very, very unlikely.
If Google felt that a browser with Chrome's security / capability needed to exist, then they should have opened a dialog with Mozilla to discuss how FireFox could be enhanced to that end. Google could have provided funding or coders to help make that possible.
Internet Explorer has lost ground, but that is primarily because there has been a single, well-defined alternative - Firefox. Segmentation of the alternative-to-IE market at this point could be disastrous. The sleeping giant has already been awakened, and Microsoft has turned IE from a piece of crap that had languished for years into a modern, legitimate browser. Microsoft won't make the same mistake twice, and they are aggressively working to regain their browser market share.
I can only think of three logical explanations for Google to release their own browser: It is really just an experiment, and Google will just pull the plug on it out of the blue. They've done this before with other experimental projects.
They want Chrome to replace Firefox as the alternative to IE, so they will have complete control over the market. This makes sense, because the web browser is the total point of interface to their multi-billion dollar industry. It is logical that they would want direct control over that component.
They did try to get Mozilla to make changes to Firefox, but their requests were ignored.
Already people are discussing Apple's time-line, and how poorly they did without Jobs. The real point is the product that turned Apple around was not a computer, but a music player. The reason the iPod did not exist sooner was because the technology did not exist. Hard drives could not be made that small, color LCD panels were too expensive for consumer use, battery life was too short, etc. So did Steve Jobs merely come back to Apple when the iPod was simply an inevitability? Was he responsible for that inevitability ending up under Apple's control instead of Sony or Pioneer, etc?
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly why I do all my typing with my mouse on an on-screen virtual keyboard. It's much faster too.
On a serious note, it is ironic that literally broadcasting a bluetooth signal over-the-air between a wireless keyboard and computer is apparently more secure than a hardwired keyboard.
Alright, it's time to shut up with the frigging questions already. Does this look like an AskSlashdot or Ask So-And-So story? No. So ixnay with the on-topic banter already, so the funny yet completely irrelevant posts can get some well deserved mod points. If Taco sees the completely skewed ratio of Funny to Interesting posts for this story he'll have to start deleting crap, and then all your typing will be for naught. I'm already starting to have dirty voyeur feelings like I've hacked into NewYorkCountryLawyer's gmail account. So enough already.
"They've got to get rid of Data's emotion chip. That's when Data lost his charm, I feel."
Without his emotion chip he would fail to grasp the full irony of your statement.
Use an invitation system like Google did for GMail. Each existing user would have a dozen or so invites. They enter the recipient's email address in a form on your site, and it sends a welcome email with an invite code. Those codes could only be used one time each. Locally you could spread invite codes far and wide on your hardcopy flyers, business cards, etc, with another set of codes that allowed multiple use - say 500-1000 uses per code. When that bulk code starts running low, create a new code and post new flyers. Eventually you'll get the local saturation you desire, and those public codes could be reduced so they can only be used 50-100 times before expiring. The idea is if they get into the hands of a spambot there will only be a limited number of accounts they can create.
When a public code runs out, your website can say something like "This code has expired. You will find the latest code posted at the community bulletin board at the local post office."
Basically your advertising will be word of mouth (where the invite codes come in), or via local hardcopy posters, flyers and business cards (bulk codes). I believe the invite system would serve as a form of viral advertising in and of itself (which is probably a major reason why Google went that route).
Anyway, that's how I'd do it.
There would likely be very significant problems from filtering by IP address. In our rural town, the local DSL usually shows up as a major city over 100 miles from here. We have significant usage by several other ISPs of varying types - cable, dial-up, multiple ad-hoc WiFi providers, satellite, etc. Because of our poor rural internet coverage we have a number of people resorting to satellite and cellular providers (even though the cell service is only around 200 Mbps).
So I don't know about that town, but it would be impossible to restrict access by IP address in these parts. Or at least you would have to allow potential access to many millions of people (including HughesNet users) to allow unfettered access for just a few thousand locals.
Wow, a color matching game. How incredibly groundbreaking. And it's only selling for five times the minimum application price. Sorry, but the value isn't there for a game of this simplicity. I've got two games under development, both immensely more complex than this, that I will sell for at most half the price.
So my appraisal:
1) Clone of a clone of a clone of the color matching / bubble popping games that can be written in less than a week. No surprise people aren't jumping up and down with excitement, or going out and buying iPhones so they can play this game.
2) Price is way, way too high for this game.
I do thank the author for his concise summary of sales though.
Wow, reasons 3 & 4 really miss the mark.
3. Piracy taught a new generation of users it's more convenient to watch shows on a computer screen.
How is it more convenient to watch video on a computer screen, than in a living room designed specifically around a television set with a large screen? This is why I own a DivX DVD player with a USB port, and why things like MythTV and Media PCs exist - so people can watch video in the optimum environment, which is not a computer or laptop sitting on a desk.
4. Social applications made everybody from grandmas to 14-year-old girls want computers â" in a three-word-nutshell, Facebook killed TV.
I don't know of a single person that bought a computer or got internet connectivity because of Facebook - or any single site for that matter. Claiming that the internet is popular because of Facebook is patently absurd. Not even Google can make such a claim.
"He explained that the files associated with those applications and features are not actually deleted from the hard drive."
Wow, they have a switch to remove shortcuts. Out of sight out of mind?
I've done a very significant amount of reading on devices as small or smaller than the iPhone. Originally it was all Pocket PCs, and more recently my Blackberry Pearl and iPod Touch. I end up doing most reading on my Blackberry (recently Moby Dick, The Stand and the Lord of the Rings trilogy) simply because I've always got it with me, and it's convenient to pull it out and fill in little downtime here and there.
I've contemplated actual dedicated ebook reader hardware, like the Kindle, but most of my reading is done when I don't have anything better to do, regardless of where I'm at. The spontaneity of always having the ebook with me without having to consciously bring it along or keep track of extra hardware is what allows me to do much reading in the first place.
"The rest use foul-smelling kerosene lamps to light their huts, which pollute, provide little light and are major fire hazards."
In other words, the exact same type of lighting my grandfather's household relied on when he was a child. It's easy to forget that there are many people alive today that only had access to very primitive technology when they were young. And it wasn't because they couldn't afford it, but because it didn't exist anywhere on earth.
While I am sympathetic to the plight of countries that cannot afford modern technology for their entire population, and the massive infrastructure required to support it, I do keep in mind that we are talking about a gap of only a few generations - not centuries or millenia.
Do Games With Real Endings Fail?
From the specs:
Operating System: Genuine Windows Vista Business 64
It's a good thing the put "Genuine" in there to clarify things. Otherwise people might assume IBM was shipping this $6,000 notebook with a pirated copy of Windows to keep the price down.
Can it be Flash based? I've got some cool ideas involving fancy animated text effects and transitions that would be really useful for a router interface.
Conflicker B++ should not be confused with Objective Conflicker B. Fortunately, they can easily be distinguished from one another - Objective Conflicker B has many more square brackets.
"Replicas of two cannon recovered from the Alderney wreck were recreated in a modern foundry,"
So they made a working replica of a replica? I think "recreated" should just be "created".
That is the best analogy using kitchen appliances and Mexican frozen food that I've heard so far this week.
And "access from the home office" would allow them to do what exactly?!?
Guaranteed first posts.
"On 10 January, Derham logged -12 ÂC, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 ÂC on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days."
For the imperialists among us, -15 C is 5 F. That's really not that cold, and I don't know about the whole "exploding trees" and "combs falling off of chickens" stuff supposedly going on at that temp. I live in Virginia, which is considered the South. We're at a significantly lower latitude than France, and we've had at least 5 days of single digit F temps just this winter alone, and that is typical. Of course our cold temps pale in comparison to Canada, and the northern New England states Maine, New Hampshire, etc.
So maybe those temps are atypical for parts Europe, but trees, and chickens and many types of livestock endure temps that low regularly every single year, which makes me wonder if there was some hyperbole going on back in 1709.
How can you feel sorry for the Chinese, when they have been manipulating their currency to keep the value artificially low? That's the whole point. If the value of their currency is low, they can't afford to buy stuff from foreign countries, thus they keep a massive export to import ratio.
Maybe if more enforcement was done to prevent such rampant copyright violation then they would have a little incentive to achieve a better trade / currency balance.
Wait a second. So these things went extinct just 10 years ago. Wouldn't it have been a lot easier (and cheaper) to, um, keep some of them alive instead of waiting until they died off? So if they do clone them and they live, how are they supposed to survive now when they couldn't survive just a decade ago?
I've been using my Blackberry as a modem for a long time, both with Windows and OSX, and both over Bluetooth and USB.
So this appears to be a purely Linux thing. This shouldn't just pertain to Blackberry, but pretty much any phone that can act as a modem. The Razr makes a decent modem, again over Bluetooth or USB.
The number one seller is iFart, which was raking in over $10,000 per day for a while. It's still #1, so it's obviously continuing to pull in massive amounts of money.
We are nearing a point where technology - both hardware and software - are going to reach a plateau. Let me use Microsoft Word as an example. Twenty years ago the software available to do desktop publishing was pretty poor. The interfaces were primitive, there were severe limitations of what could achieved, and the integration of intelligence to aid humans (spell checking, thesaurus, grammar checking, language translation, etc) was non-existent. There was a massive amount of room for improvement, and thus Word was created and has steadily grown in features and capability ever since. Because there was so much improvement to be made in that market, there was room for Word to progress, perhaps ahead of the curve, to set itself apart from similar products. So what is left to be implemented in modern word processors? What groundbreaking feature remains to be invented that can really set one product far above the others? There's not much. GUIs can be tweaked and redesigned. File formats can be updated and made more portable. But the simple fact of the matter is competition, like Open Office, can chug along in development at a leisurely pace, and before anyone realizes it, Open Office is suddenly completely on-par with Microsoft Office.
We're heading towards the same end with operating systems, web browsers, and even hardware. Every now and then something new will come along (multitouch iPod / iPhone comes to mind - Microsoft was idiotic not to encourage that simple and logical progression with the Windows Mobile OEMs) that will set a product far apart. However, eventually we will have, for the most part, equivalency throughout.
So what will dictate what companies or products are popular and which are not? Take a look at the fashion industry. The whole skirt-length, tie-thickness phenomenon will occur in the technology arena. Fads will come and go. Specific products will become popular because of subtle differences between them and competing products that the masses somehow identify as "modern" or "cool". Eventually the recycling process will begin, probably on a 15-20 year cycle, but perhaps even faster in the technology market. Some company will dredge up a GUI or method of doing something that was popular a couple product generations back, and it will make a resurgence for a while. Speech driven interfaces will become popular, then eventually be perceived as stupid and primitive. Gesture driven interfaces will become popular, then people using them will eventually be seen as old-fashioned and out of vogue. Direct interfacing to the human neurological system will become practical and popular, then later will be seen as too unnatural and invasive, leading full circle back to some other method of interfacing.
So I don't think any one company is going to dominate for any duration, because they will not be able to make their product different enough (for better or worse) to make it stand up against the alternatives. This is where open source will really make a huge impact. The odds of a company like Microsoft managing not just to survive, but to dominate these kinds of drastic changes in technology paradigms is very, very unlikely.
If Google felt that a browser with Chrome's security / capability needed to exist, then they should have opened a dialog with Mozilla to discuss how FireFox could be enhanced to that end. Google could have provided funding or coders to help make that possible.
Internet Explorer has lost ground, but that is primarily because there has been a single, well-defined alternative - Firefox. Segmentation of the alternative-to-IE market at this point could be disastrous. The sleeping giant has already been awakened, and Microsoft has turned IE from a piece of crap that had languished for years into a modern, legitimate browser. Microsoft won't make the same mistake twice, and they are aggressively working to regain their browser market share.
I can only think of three logical explanations for Google to release their own browser:
It is really just an experiment, and Google will just pull the plug on it out of the blue. They've done this before with other experimental projects.
They want Chrome to replace Firefox as the alternative to IE, so they will have complete control over the market. This makes sense, because the web browser is the total point of interface to their multi-billion dollar industry. It is logical that they would want direct control over that component.
They did try to get Mozilla to make changes to Firefox, but their requests were ignored.
Already people are discussing Apple's time-line, and how poorly they did without Jobs. The real point is the product that turned Apple around was not a computer, but a music player. The reason the iPod did not exist sooner was because the technology did not exist. Hard drives could not be made that small, color LCD panels were too expensive for consumer use, battery life was too short, etc. So did Steve Jobs merely come back to Apple when the iPod was simply an inevitability? Was he responsible for that inevitability ending up under Apple's control instead of Sony or Pioneer, etc?