One example was removing health packs and placing 'healing poles' that heal nearby places. This has actually been done a decade ago, but we won't tell him that... He thinks he's clever.;)
I've found that there are no %100 new ideas in gaming, only ideas that are new to someone.
Perhaps Putin is afraid of what the US might do if Mutually Assured Destruction was no longer mutually assured? After all, while a good shield can help save lives, it can also cost a lot more if the bearer of the shield no longer has to worry about the consequences of drawing his sword.
I think grandparent poster meant the Compaq/HanGo Jukebox, not the Archos, Creative, Dell, Polaroid, RCA, or Tatung Jukeboxs (all of which came out after the iPod).
Also, grandparent forgot to point out that up until that point all portable MP3 players used 2.5" laptop drives, which meant they only fit into very large pockets. Apple, going with smaller 1.8" Toshiba special-use drives, offered something at a much higher price per MB, which everyone thought would be a failure. Who knew so many people had tight pants?
We admitted the Russians in the hope that, although Russia was still highly non-Western (in, for example, its treatment of sexual-orientation or ethnic minorities), being lenient on Russia would encourage the Russians to modernize their society along Western lines. Well, we were wrong. Just last week, the Russian police smiled in approval as ordinary Russians [nytimes.com] violently beat up participants in a demonstration calling for rights for homosexuals.
You mean like denying marriage rights to homosexuals, forcefully kicking them out of the military, and outlawing sodomy? Or perhaps hidden prison camps on foreign soil where brown-skinned "suspects" can be detained indefinitely without a trial and with no right to a lawyer? Assaulting any peaceful protesters who venture forth from designated "free speech" holding pens?
We perhaps shouldn't be so quick to condemn the Russians on these grounds, or we may find ourselves with a G-6.
It's too bad you will probably get modded down for having an opinion that runs against the tide of apple love, because it is a totally valid one to have.
You ask what the point is? Apple doesn't create devices with the most features or best specs out there. Apple makes devices that makes those features and specs accessible to swaths of humanity who wouldn't otherwise have time or inclination to figure it out.
To play MP3's on my phone, I have to unplug it from the charger, take out the battery, take out the MicroSD card (sold separately), pick some MP3's, copy them over manually, re-assemble it all, powercycle the phone, press the dedicated "Play MP3" button on the outside of the phone, then scroll through a flat list of every MP3 file on the device. I suspect the moment you drop in the iPhone phone to charge, iTunes will kick in and sync your music selection automatically. 7 steps reduced to 0. There is no way in heck I could get my mother to play music on my phone, but an iPod is totally within her reach.
And that's pretty much what all of Apple's stuff is like. They cut out the dumb stuff so that you can get on with the business of doing whatever it is that you were going to do. For the iPod, it was giving the user a scrollable wheel and a Database backend, so that instead of a million up / down button presses the user could quickly scroll around an intelligent (and automatically created) heiarchy. iChat is great because you literally don't need to set anything up to have a household chat network, and setting up AV chatting was far, far easier than in any other client of the time.
Apple thinks about their designs so that you don't have to. It is a wonderful feeling to be able to pick up a device the first time and be able to use it as if you've been using it for years. Even to an inquisitive technophile like myself, I love that I don't have to know what's going on behind the scenes if I don't want to... it just all works the way I expect.
Phone UI's are horrible. To send a video message on my phone, I need to press a little button with a horizontal line (not the button in the middle with the big cingular guy), go to camera, record video, Press the other little horizontal line again, Flip Vertically, Press the little horizontal line again, record, Save it as a file with a hideously random name, go back out to the main menu, go into the SMS application, write out an appropriate SMS, attach the file, find the appropriate e-mail recipient, send the file, get a message back saying that the message couldn't be sent but we deleted the draft anyway, go back in and recreate the message with the file again, send it out again, and get a message back from the recipient in an hour asking what weird format the video file was in.
Oh, and a phone is not a laptop. You can stick a phone in your pocket and carry it with you to a resturant. You can pull out your phone on the road and google maps just where the heck Vacaville is and how to get back to Santa Cruz. Your xv6700 should have shown you that a 2" phone in your pocket is a lot more practical than a 15" laptop in your bag.
All they have to do is explain that getting Office to output ot odf is not part of office but requires a downloaded addon, follow that with a breakdown of the man-hours required to get it installed on everyones machines,
Your client management suite should be able to do this in about an hour, including testing time. What, you don't push your software? Compared to the cost of 100 seat licenses for Office, a software push / update is trivial.
then top it off with a mention that there is no real way to regulate attachments coming from outside and this is DOA in any local govt.
You don't need to. You can keep going with Word for the time being for recieving attachments, but the agencies would be required to internally communicate and send out communications in a format that anyone could read.
The idea is not to kill microsoft. The idea is to push government agencies and the software suppliers that support them to use and create document formats that we have a hope of reading in 10 or 20 years (let alone 200). Can you imagine if the US constitution was written in Symantec Greatworks? Or if key data from 50 years in the past was written in GobeProductive on BeOS? If Microsoft adopts a truly open format that satisfies this need for transparency and readability, then that's great! But if not, we shouldn't be tying ourselves to them to fill a need they don't want to fill.
Not only that, but the first five notes of Stairway to Heaven were only played in the theatrical release. Due to the sorts of copyright rulings that drove guitartabs.com off the internet, the producers of Waynes World were forced to change the riff for all subsequent releases.
You forget: Most kids games aren't made for kids to have fun with. They're made to sell to parents who foolishly buy them for their kids. Parents are paying to reinforce their own ideallic perceptions of what their youth was like, rather than any sort of actual entertainment value to the kid. Plus, parents are out of time and out of touch, and dive for the movie license.
This is a bit of an oversimplification. Kid's games also suffer from smaller budgets and crunched development periods. But overall, the kid is not the target of the kid game. The parent is.
He states that the more expensive and professional your gear is, the easier it is to spot low quality music.
Shouldn't it be that the more money you spend on your equipment, the better your music sounds in general?
I've been privy to some equipment much nicer than I've deserved over the years, and I have to say that the professional-grade equipment that I've used have made crappy recordings sound much better than they should have. I've had to drop back to the built-in speakers on TV's to see if things will sound right in a natural habitat, as they sound pretty darned good on professional monitors. Perhaps then the question isn't "Will a better speaker make the differences in sound more pronounced?" but "Will a better recorded audio track degrade more elegantly on bad speakers?"
To our subjects ears, there wasnt a tremendous distinction between the tracks encoded at 128Kb/s and those encoded at 256Kb/s. None of them were absolutely sure about their choices with either set of earphones, even after an average of five back-to-back A/B listening tests... We'd be more excited if Apple increased the bit rate even further, or--even better--if they used a lossless format.
Ok, so by DOUBLING the bitrate, there was only a marginal increase in quality... to the point where on a good set of headphones, detection was only 10% above random and even then people weren't sure. And from this, it is determined that a higher bitrate or (Holy Grail!) lossless compression is needed.
Talk about ignoring your data for the desired conclusion.
Maybe, but you might also be liable for the acres around your land which burn down too. Your neighbors would be none-too-happy, and highly litigenous.
You're also paying for police and military protection on that land. It won't do you any good in 50 years if Canada invades, or if a gang of squatters has firmly entrenched themselves with casinos, brothels, and guns.
You're paying for the wildlife service that ensure the animals on your land don't go and eat people in the developed regions nearby. The assessor's offices and other local administrations which are keeping track of who owns what, and will back up your claims in 50 years.
On a higher level, you're paying for the kinds of exploratory and political actions which made your having that land possible in the first place. You're paying for upkeep and maintenence on the monetary system which made your current and future transactions possible.
Everything has upkeep costs associated with it. Everything. Government is the way we consolidate those costs and reap significant savings.
The uncanny valley is best used as a broadly-viewed cautionary tale for anyone who wants to have "the most real characters ever." Which is to say, you can have stylized characters, or you can invest a ton of money in realistic characters, but you can't just have mostly realistic characters. If you're going to do realism, you have to spend a ton of money and be in it for the long haul, or else it's going to be held to a higher standard and (usually) fail.
It also means that if you're having problems with your art, sometimes you can make it better by stepping back and making things less realistic.
It's not a scientific fact... just a useful tool for convincing people not to shoot their own feet off.
One of the things which people don't mention about the uncanny valley, is that the valley moves. What seems uncannily human to our parents, was normal to us. What's uncanny to us, will look artificial to our kids.
As our technology improves to create better and better artificial representations, our ability to detect them does as well.
Why is a 'freedom' for me to copy someone else's product and sell it?
Do you think the people who start fast food resturants invented the concept? Do you think people who sell t-shirts are responsible for clothing? That the food vendors in New York City all independently came up with the idea of a hot dog?
People sell things they see other people selling all the time. Without that, the free market just wouldn't work.
So Bill Best invented the grill, patented it and used his temporary monopoly to sell the grill for a high price and (presumably) made lots of money from his invention. Why shouldn't he be allowed to do this?
The question is not why he should be "allowed" to do this, but why other people's freedoms should be restricted to facilitate this. Remember, a patent doesn't give the inventor rights, it takes away rights from everyone but the inventor.
And in this case, it might not have been a bad call. However, the fact still remains that, instead of spurring on the invention of consumer-level infra-red grills, this patent held back development until such a time that the patent was no longer an issue.
Nice idea. I just did some poking around, and found a place that does 40 free photos and what appears to be flat-rate shipping upon sign-up. I sent off a batch to my mother, but does anyone have any experience with York?
Real-estate is generally bought, developed, and sold at a profit. Net good happens there. Some real estate developers buy land they think will be profitable, and sell it months later once it is in demand. No net good, but the land usually flips within a reasonable amount of time and, hey, other landowners nearby are usually willing to sell.
Web squatters buy up huge swathes of land, then sit on them. They earn ad revenue from other people's mistypes, then a huge chunk of change when they finally decide to flip it. And during this time they've done NOTHING of net good for anyone. They've simply prevented anyone else from using the site name, usually for a long period of time, which causes an overall net loss.
The profit margins are atrocious. The site name that sold for 400,000 dollars? Yeah, they registered that for 20 bucks. The behaviors of squatters is equally atrocious. They frequently register typo domain names (slshdot.com, for example) to try to drive clicks. They automatically swoop in to register domain names that people forget to renew, then sell it back to them at extortive prices.
The domain name resolution service is a series of agreements amongst a group of dedicated nerds in an attempt to facilitate easy information distribution on the internet. By gaming the system, squatters are profiting while creating nothing, at the expense of people with real jobs and real work to do. It's taking a good-faith agreement and exploiting every loophole it can find. It's like spamming... it's legal, and it works, but it is a PITA for basically everyone. Unlike spamming, domain squatting and parking could be stopped, but nobody has moved to outlaw the practice yet.
Actually, MS's games division are really nice guys. At some point, MS basically decided to open a console division, and did so by throwing money at the most passionate game dorks they could find, then giving them space to do what they wanted to do. Because the division is reasonably young, and the older executives largely keep their hands off of it, it's not plagued by the infighting that the rest of MS is.
I originally wanted the Xbox to fail miserably in the market, lest the beast from redmond do to consoles what they did to operating systems. But, by and large, the games division has been run by a bunch of stand-up guys doing good stuff. And I'm not just saying that because I've met them, but also from what they've done. You have to admit, the Xbox 360 is no MSN.
1. Google announces that ISP's will be able to release a google-apps branded for their users. This includes domain management, docs, spreadsheets, calendar, web page creator, gmail, and 24 hour phone support.
2. MSN Austrailia points out that the ISP's will have to pay for the service. MSN Austrailia also points out that Google will tie users to their ISP account / domain instead of a more generic Google account. And they point out that Google's smallest ISP size bracket, 0 - 200,000 users, covers nearly all of the ISPs in Austrailia.
MSN Austrailia also takes pains to poke jabs at competing ISP's, specifically leaves out information, and otherwise sounds a lot like FUD.
The Wacom Cintiq is a 2.5 thousand dollar monitor with built-in pen input. It's far, far more expensive than just a monitor or just a pen input. But the combination of the two raises productivity and art quality to such a degree that it is worth buying for your employees. People time is thankfully still far more expensive than computer time.
If this ridiculously expensive keyboard makes a 50k dollar a year employee just 2% faster, it will have paid for itself in the first year. They'll need to do a lot of application switching to justify that price, but it is definitely possible. And maybe it functions best in a kiosk situation, or with your least-well trained employees, or what have you. Maybe for your corporate training applications?
It seems like there should be a perfect niche out there for the optimus to fill. So long as they don't flood every circuit city across the world with them, they should be poised to take over that niche.
Slashdot Mirror
One example was removing health packs and placing 'healing poles' that heal nearby places. This has actually been done a decade ago, but we won't tell him that... He thinks he's clever. ;)
I've found that there are no %100 new ideas in gaming, only ideas that are new to someone.
Perhaps Putin is afraid of what the US might do if Mutually Assured Destruction was no longer mutually assured? After all, while a good shield can help save lives, it can also cost a lot more if the bearer of the shield no longer has to worry about the consequences of drawing his sword.
I think grandparent poster meant the Compaq/HanGo Jukebox, not the Archos, Creative, Dell, Polaroid, RCA, or Tatung Jukeboxs (all of which came out after the iPod).
Also, grandparent forgot to point out that up until that point all portable MP3 players used 2.5" laptop drives, which meant they only fit into very large pockets. Apple, going with smaller 1.8" Toshiba special-use drives, offered something at a much higher price per MB, which everyone thought would be a failure. Who knew so many people had tight pants?
We admitted the Russians in the hope that, although Russia was still highly non-Western (in, for example, its treatment of sexual-orientation or ethnic minorities), being lenient on Russia would encourage the Russians to modernize their society along Western lines. Well, we were wrong. Just last week, the Russian police smiled in approval as ordinary Russians [nytimes.com] violently beat up participants in a demonstration calling for rights for homosexuals.
You mean like denying marriage rights to homosexuals, forcefully kicking them out of the military, and outlawing sodomy? Or perhaps hidden prison camps on foreign soil where brown-skinned "suspects" can be detained indefinitely without a trial and with no right to a lawyer? Assaulting any peaceful protesters who venture forth from designated "free speech" holding pens?
We perhaps shouldn't be so quick to condemn the Russians on these grounds, or we may find ourselves with a G-6.
It's too bad you will probably get modded down for having an opinion that runs against the tide of apple love, because it is a totally valid one to have.
You ask what the point is? Apple doesn't create devices with the most features or best specs out there. Apple makes devices that makes those features and specs accessible to swaths of humanity who wouldn't otherwise have time or inclination to figure it out.
To play MP3's on my phone, I have to unplug it from the charger, take out the battery, take out the MicroSD card (sold separately), pick some MP3's, copy them over manually, re-assemble it all, powercycle the phone, press the dedicated "Play MP3" button on the outside of the phone, then scroll through a flat list of every MP3 file on the device. I suspect the moment you drop in the iPhone phone to charge, iTunes will kick in and sync your music selection automatically. 7 steps reduced to 0. There is no way in heck I could get my mother to play music on my phone, but an iPod is totally within her reach.
And that's pretty much what all of Apple's stuff is like. They cut out the dumb stuff so that you can get on with the business of doing whatever it is that you were going to do. For the iPod, it was giving the user a scrollable wheel and a Database backend, so that instead of a million up / down button presses the user could quickly scroll around an intelligent (and automatically created) heiarchy. iChat is great because you literally don't need to set anything up to have a household chat network, and setting up AV chatting was far, far easier than in any other client of the time.
Apple thinks about their designs so that you don't have to. It is a wonderful feeling to be able to pick up a device the first time and be able to use it as if you've been using it for years. Even to an inquisitive technophile like myself, I love that I don't have to know what's going on behind the scenes if I don't want to... it just all works the way I expect.
Phone UI's are horrible. To send a video message on my phone, I need to press a little button with a horizontal line (not the button in the middle with the big cingular guy), go to camera, record video, Press the other little horizontal line again, Flip Vertically, Press the little horizontal line again, record, Save it as a file with a hideously random name, go back out to the main menu, go into the SMS application, write out an appropriate SMS, attach the file, find the appropriate e-mail recipient, send the file, get a message back saying that the message couldn't be sent but we deleted the draft anyway, go back in and recreate the message with the file again, send it out again, and get a message back from the recipient in an hour asking what weird format the video file was in.
Oh, and a phone is not a laptop. You can stick a phone in your pocket and carry it with you to a resturant. You can pull out your phone on the road and google maps just where the heck Vacaville is and how to get back to Santa Cruz. Your xv6700 should have shown you that a 2" phone in your pocket is a lot more practical than a 15" laptop in your bag.
All they have to do is explain that getting Office to output ot odf is not part of office but requires a downloaded addon, follow that with a breakdown of the man-hours required to get it installed on everyones machines,
Your client management suite should be able to do this in about an hour, including testing time. What, you don't push your software? Compared to the cost of 100 seat licenses for Office, a software push / update is trivial.
then top it off with a mention that there is no real way to regulate attachments coming from outside and this is DOA in any local govt.
You don't need to. You can keep going with Word for the time being for recieving attachments, but the agencies would be required to internally communicate and send out communications in a format that anyone could read.
The idea is not to kill microsoft. The idea is to push government agencies and the software suppliers that support them to use and create document formats that we have a hope of reading in 10 or 20 years (let alone 200). Can you imagine if the US constitution was written in Symantec Greatworks? Or if key data from 50 years in the past was written in GobeProductive on BeOS? If Microsoft adopts a truly open format that satisfies this need for transparency and readability, then that's great! But if not, we shouldn't be tying ourselves to them to fill a need they don't want to fill.
And how, exactly, is this any different than the deluge of bad patents we've approved and forced other countries to abide by?
Not only that, but the first five notes of Stairway to Heaven were only played in the theatrical release. Due to the sorts of copyright rulings that drove guitartabs.com off the internet, the producers of Waynes World were forced to change the riff for all subsequent releases.
That's one wreck. Worth half a billion dollars. Makes you think, doesn't it?
Makes me think it's time to short the value of gold and silver.
You forget: Most kids games aren't made for kids to have fun with. They're made to sell to parents who foolishly buy them for their kids. Parents are paying to reinforce their own ideallic perceptions of what their youth was like, rather than any sort of actual entertainment value to the kid. Plus, parents are out of time and out of touch, and dive for the movie license.
This is a bit of an oversimplification. Kid's games also suffer from smaller budgets and crunched development periods. But overall, the kid is not the target of the kid game. The parent is.
- this jaded industry vet
Yup. Cheaters never win. Poor guy had to console himself with the notoriety, the excitement of competition, a free trip to Hawaii...
He states that the more expensive and professional your gear is, the easier it is to spot low quality music.
Shouldn't it be that the more money you spend on your equipment, the better your music sounds in general?
I've been privy to some equipment much nicer than I've deserved over the years, and I have to say that the professional-grade equipment that I've used have made crappy recordings sound much better than they should have. I've had to drop back to the built-in speakers on TV's to see if things will sound right in a natural habitat, as they sound pretty darned good on professional monitors. Perhaps then the question isn't "Will a better speaker make the differences in sound more pronounced?" but "Will a better recorded audio track degrade more elegantly on bad speakers?"
To our subjects ears, there wasnt a tremendous distinction between the tracks encoded at 128Kb/s and those encoded at 256Kb/s. None of them were absolutely sure about their choices with either set of earphones, even after an average of five back-to-back A/B listening tests... We'd be more excited if Apple increased the bit rate even further, or--even better--if they used a lossless format.
Ok, so by DOUBLING the bitrate, there was only a marginal increase in quality... to the point where on a good set of headphones, detection was only 10% above random and even then people weren't sure. And from this, it is determined that a higher bitrate or (Holy Grail!) lossless compression is needed.
Talk about ignoring your data for the desired conclusion.
Maybe, but you might also be liable for the acres around your land which burn down too. Your neighbors would be none-too-happy, and highly litigenous.
You're also paying for police and military protection on that land. It won't do you any good in 50 years if Canada invades, or if a gang of squatters has firmly entrenched themselves with casinos, brothels, and guns.
You're paying for the wildlife service that ensure the animals on your land don't go and eat people in the developed regions nearby. The assessor's offices and other local administrations which are keeping track of who owns what, and will back up your claims in 50 years.
On a higher level, you're paying for the kinds of exploratory and political actions which made your having that land possible in the first place. You're paying for upkeep and maintenence on the monetary system which made your current and future transactions possible.
Everything has upkeep costs associated with it. Everything. Government is the way we consolidate those costs and reap significant savings.
The uncanny valley is best used as a broadly-viewed cautionary tale for anyone who wants to have "the most real characters ever." Which is to say, you can have stylized characters, or you can invest a ton of money in realistic characters, but you can't just have mostly realistic characters. If you're going to do realism, you have to spend a ton of money and be in it for the long haul, or else it's going to be held to a higher standard and (usually) fail.
It also means that if you're having problems with your art, sometimes you can make it better by stepping back and making things less realistic.
It's not a scientific fact... just a useful tool for convincing people not to shoot their own feet off.
One of the things which people don't mention about the uncanny valley, is that the valley moves. What seems uncannily human to our parents, was normal to us. What's uncanny to us, will look artificial to our kids.
As our technology improves to create better and better artificial representations, our ability to detect them does as well.
Why is a 'freedom' for me to copy someone else's product and sell it?
Do you think the people who start fast food resturants invented the concept? Do you think people who sell t-shirts are responsible for clothing? That the food vendors in New York City all independently came up with the idea of a hot dog?
People sell things they see other people selling all the time. Without that, the free market just wouldn't work.
So Bill Best invented the grill, patented it and used his temporary monopoly to sell the grill for a high price and (presumably) made lots of money from his invention. Why shouldn't he be allowed to do this?
The question is not why he should be "allowed" to do this, but why other people's freedoms should be restricted to facilitate this. Remember, a patent doesn't give the inventor rights, it takes away rights from everyone but the inventor.
And in this case, it might not have been a bad call. However, the fact still remains that, instead of spurring on the invention of consumer-level infra-red grills, this patent held back development until such a time that the patent was no longer an issue.
Why do people submit stories and summaries before even understanding the target article?
Because of the 30 people who submitted that story, 29 took the time to read and understand it and 1 just rushed to submit it. Guess who was first.
Nice idea. I just did some poking around, and found a place that does 40 free photos and what appears to be flat-rate shipping upon sign-up. I sent off a batch to my mother, but does anyone have any experience with York?
Real-estate is generally bought, developed, and sold at a profit. Net good happens there. Some real estate developers buy land they think will be profitable, and sell it months later once it is in demand. No net good, but the land usually flips within a reasonable amount of time and, hey, other landowners nearby are usually willing to sell.
Web squatters buy up huge swathes of land, then sit on them. They earn ad revenue from other people's mistypes, then a huge chunk of change when they finally decide to flip it. And during this time they've done NOTHING of net good for anyone. They've simply prevented anyone else from using the site name, usually for a long period of time, which causes an overall net loss.
The profit margins are atrocious. The site name that sold for 400,000 dollars? Yeah, they registered that for 20 bucks. The behaviors of squatters is equally atrocious. They frequently register typo domain names (slshdot.com, for example) to try to drive clicks. They automatically swoop in to register domain names that people forget to renew, then sell it back to them at extortive prices.
The domain name resolution service is a series of agreements amongst a group of dedicated nerds in an attempt to facilitate easy information distribution on the internet. By gaming the system, squatters are profiting while creating nothing, at the expense of people with real jobs and real work to do. It's taking a good-faith agreement and exploiting every loophole it can find. It's like spamming... it's legal, and it works, but it is a PITA for basically everyone. Unlike spamming, domain squatting and parking could be stopped, but nobody has moved to outlaw the practice yet.
Actually, MS's games division are really nice guys. At some point, MS basically decided to open a console division, and did so by throwing money at the most passionate game dorks they could find, then giving them space to do what they wanted to do. Because the division is reasonably young, and the older executives largely keep their hands off of it, it's not plagued by the infighting that the rest of MS is.
I originally wanted the Xbox to fail miserably in the market, lest the beast from redmond do to consoles what they did to operating systems. But, by and large, the games division has been run by a bunch of stand-up guys doing good stuff. And I'm not just saying that because I've met them, but also from what they've done. You have to admit, the Xbox 360 is no MSN.
Since so few people seem to be RTFA...
1. Google announces that ISP's will be able to release a google-apps branded for their users. This includes domain management, docs, spreadsheets, calendar, web page creator, gmail, and 24 hour phone support.
2. MSN Austrailia points out that the ISP's will have to pay for the service. MSN Austrailia also points out that Google will tie users to their ISP account / domain instead of a more generic Google account. And they point out that Google's smallest ISP size bracket, 0 - 200,000 users, covers nearly all of the ISPs in Austrailia.
MSN Austrailia also takes pains to poke jabs at competing ISP's, specifically leaves out information, and otherwise sounds a lot like FUD.
The Wacom Cintiq is a 2.5 thousand dollar monitor with built-in pen input. It's far, far more expensive than just a monitor or just a pen input. But the combination of the two raises productivity and art quality to such a degree that it is worth buying for your employees. People time is thankfully still far more expensive than computer time.
If this ridiculously expensive keyboard makes a 50k dollar a year employee just 2% faster, it will have paid for itself in the first year. They'll need to do a lot of application switching to justify that price, but it is definitely possible. And maybe it functions best in a kiosk situation, or with your least-well trained employees, or what have you. Maybe for your corporate training applications?
It seems like there should be a perfect niche out there for the optimus to fill. So long as they don't flood every circuit city across the world with them, they should be poised to take over that niche.
otherwise be calling their Telco going "WTF MY PHONE DROPPED OUT".
You've got some impressive Austrailians.