At this point Skype for Linux is being offered without the SkypeOut service that allows calls to go to any telephone, not just other Skype users. Still, it's great to bring new platforms and more users onto this system. Bring on the OS X version!
One serious danger in consoles is that if the product doesn't match up well against rivals then the manufacturer is stuck with it until the next generation. This isn't the case in the software world where Microsoft lives. Software is often rushed to market and then patched and upgraded "in place" while the consumer is using it. The early adopters suffer but that hasn't cooled the purchase of fresh new products, thus the practice continues. Microsoft could emulate this approach in the game console space by building a system that can be upgraded via software. If an Xbox 2 can be converted to an Xbox 2.1 with a CD that flash-upgrades the OS, then we have a new paradigm in game consoles. They become more like software and a much more familiar competitive environment for Microsoft.
"My plate number may not be private, but where I park, how fast I travel, the frequency in which I use certain roads, and so on, is."
No they are not. You do all those things in public view so they are not private. Anyone can observe you doing those things and not violate your privacy. The only difference between a computer tracking your driving with RFID and being observed by a private investigator, jealous spouse, deranged fan, etc., is that it is trivially easy for the computer so there is little barrier to just doing it to everyone. That's the danger. Not that your "privacy" is being invaded, but that your heretofore anonymous public actions will be observed.
"A considerably large amount of the brain is specifically dedicated to recognizing facial expressions."
As an example think of how you can tell when a person across a crowded room is looking at you and not at the person next to you. The difference in the perceptible angle of their eyes is such that it would be exceedingly hard to draw/paint/animate. The human mind is so tuned to reading human faces that it may not be possible to completely fool it with computer graphics. At some point it is no longer about rendering power and resolution and more about things we don't fully understand that our brain is noticing. A fascinating subject that might become the holy grail for animators.
"remember the 19th century railroads building tracks parallel to one another?"
Dude, I barely remember the '70s! But I'll take your word for it, Pops.:)
"We need some more innovations in how to properly regulate last mile providers, be it phone companies or cable companies to provide more competition."
Innovation and regulation are nearly mutually exclusive, so I disagree with your premise.
"It may just be that data lines might better be owned publicly, like the roads..."
It might be but I doubt it. Burdensome regulation is a large part of why incumbent telecoms like the RBOCs are not investing in more innovative technologies. With the unbundled network element provisions of the Telecom Act of 1996 they had to give access away below cost, so why develop anything new that competitors can take and resell for less. We're going to find out if that's true since that portion of the act was just struck down by a court decision. Now let's see if less regulation can lead to better product offerings.
Phones with TV reception are far more likely to receive mass acceptance than these wrist monstrosities. Toshiba and NEC have working models in Japan, check this WSJ review, and SprintPCS is brining MobiTV to some of its models in the U.S.
This "rather detailed breakdown" is a nice comparison of features, but hardly answers the question of which package is the best. The chart itself says that it "displays attributes of different user-installed blog software packages side-by-side for comparison." There's nothing about usability or other subjective criteria. It is a comprehensive collection of information though. I guess that's good for some people but I bet plenty want a comparison of how easy/flexible they are to use and maintain. Personally I would also like to see a comparison to the hosted services like Blogger.
As I've said before, if accumulation of features were all that mattered, we'd all love Microsoft Office.
Mossberg's columns, which include Thursday's influential "Personal Technology" plus a couple others, can be read for free at ptech.wsj.com. The rest of the Wall Street Journal online is a paid subscription site.
I'm not a black box expert, but I am guessing that the device stops recording at impact, perhaps triggered by an airbag deployment. The last five seconds before that are what is relevant.
"You can't stop a car at full throttle with just brakes."
Huh? That's some unusual engine you are running if it is more powerful than your brakes. According to this helpful page from Advance Auto parts, "All modern braking systems are many times more powerful than the vehicle's engine, so at full throttle, even a very powerful vehicle can be easily stopped with the brakes."
"Your observation that 'runaway' cars are usually caused by inept drivers pushing the wrong pedal is spot on."
You're right there. A "60 Minutes" report on so-called unintended acceleration nearly drove Audi out of business back in the 80's. No one wanted to dispute the claims of people who run over their own children in their garage from a pedal mistake so the car company was demonized. I seem to recall that an Audi exec demonstrated to the press how much more powerful the brakes on the Audi 5000 were than its engine. He revved a car to the red-line and shifted into drive with the brake depressed and the car did not move. He also stopped quickly from 60 mph with the accelerator floored. (Anyone else remember this? It seems so long ago.)
"Real won't be missed, it hasn't done anything of value to the marketplace or userbase for years now."
I'm not a historian on this issue, but didn't Real pioneer bringing TV and radio content to the masses through its subscription service? I have no desire to defend them, but I also don't vilify them as much as many here do. I thought they were first to bring things like streaming broadcasts of MLB games as well as prurient interests like the Big Brother feeds from the CBS "reality" show. You can argue that none of that was particularly valuable, sure, but didn't Real nonetheless accomplish something by leading and developing the streaming content market?
At the risk of being labeled a fanboy, I disagree with part of your assertion. Apple does indeed lock hardware owners into an upgrade cycle of buying a new computer for new technology instead of easy upgrading. That's the Faustian bargain of being a Mac owner. I accept it but understand why many don't. Part of the equation is that the hardware is tightly controlled to maintain the usability standards. Would you really want the platform open to the point that you could slap any old hardware in there and pray for no driver conflicts? If so then there is a platform already that works that way. But that's another topic....
Where I differ in opinion is with your complaint about Apple locking their software to their own expensive hardware and services.
"2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up [...] keep people subscribing to the overpriced.Mac program.
3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work [...] with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)"
It's Apple's sales strategy to develop free, or low cost, software to sell additional hardware and services. I hardly see anything wrong with that. In fact it's a great strategy since the software is excellent and there are alternatives available so you are not locked in. You can use AIM or Yahoo messenger instead of iChat if you choose. Yes, I wish my Logitech camera worked with iChat AV because I don't want to buy the expensive iSight camera. But I think it's fair that they give me a great IM program and offer advanced video features if I choose to use the supported hardware. Again, I can choose otherwise and am not locked in. Same with iSync, it's free and works with a lot of things out of the box. But you get more if you buy their.Mac service. It would be nice to have great software for free that does everything we want it to, but it's perfectly legitimate for Apple to recoup their development costs for those programs by using them to sell more stuff.
"You could use a WI-FI adapter and make free calls from hot-spots or at home."
Sure this is interesting but strikes me as almost completely useless to the vast majority of people. It's sort of like discovering that a payphone near your house is broken and allows free calls. Wow, that's cool for a while then you realize that you want to be able to make phone calls from wherever you are at the moment and not have to first travel to a specific location. That's why we have mobile phones. And anyone with a wireless-equipped PDA is also very likely to have a wireless phone. If you are at home you might like the technology to make long-distance calls cheaply/freely but you can already do this with your computer. Bringing Skype to the PDA world is clever but targets an almost nonexistent market.
"OK fine. So you don't have a GMail account, but what if you send mail to one?"
Additionally, it won't actually be that easy to tell if you are sending to a gmail.com domain. For example I own my own domain and simply redirect email to my ISP email account rather than pay for email hosting. So if you send email to any of my email addresses (something @ mydomain.com) you have no idea where it is actually going. Not currently to any webmail service, but in the future, who knows?
"April 1, 2004 a great day to avoid Slashdot completely [...]"
Against my better judgement I loaded Slashdot this morning. Fears confirmed. I knew I bought a venti Starbucks latte this morning for a reason... glug, glug, glug...
"It might allow you to keep many more e-mails than possible with yahoo or hotmail, but how will this allow me to never change my e-mail again?"
The idea being that you would get advanced searching features which would make it the most useful email account you've ever had. And it wouldn't suffer the main limitation of other webmail services - miniscule storage space. Saying you'll never have to change your email address is a spin on the strategy of every ISP, locking you into the service as your email address becomes too entrenched to change easily. Only this time Google might be eliminating the reasons to switch from their service and offering a huge enticement to join it.
"So what does television need to do? Experiment. I want to see stuff on television I haven't seen before, not some dumbass sitcom that's revolutionary because it has a gay person."
We often equate "television" with the four or five major broadcast networks. The thing they can least afford to do is experiment. They have to consistantly hit the broadest possible audience to maintain their advertiser-desired demographics. That's why we have crap like Yes Dear and Still Standing. The real experimentation is happening on cable channels - both standard package and subscription. So in a sense television is experimenting, but the channels everyone is watching are not. A lot of stuff with potential will never survive because it will not have a large enough audience to sustain it. The major networks can deliver bigger audiences through force of viewing habits and can keep a show like King of Queens around long past its useful life. They recoup that investment with syndication fees. Some shows from cable channels like the Shield and Queer Eye will break out and become mainstream, but most will remain niche offerings or die quietly.
Television's relevance seems to have declined to only a rallying point during national tragedy (9/11, Columbia, etc.), and an outlet for major sporting events. It produces very few culturally significant moments. It used to be that you just knew everyone watched Seinfeld. It was a very funny show but what really made it great was that everyone was talking about it the next day. You could say "Yada, yada, yada," or "Giddyup" and everyone would get the reference. Nowadays, other people are unlikely to have seen the same thing you thought was interesting/relevant/humorous online, but since you are probably talking to them via IM you can just send the link.
- Extremely cpu intensive - huge 5 GB Database per year archived - extremely slow with frequent system crashes, at least 50 minutes per search and the search program gets set to the highest priority so nothing else can function
Wow, I developed something very similar for email. It's called Outlook and I am hoping it catches on and becomes really popular. Check it out and let all of your friends know about it.
"The obvious problem is that what incentive is there for someone to open a music store with encrypted songs that are only playable on the iPod?"
There are various reasons for having an online music store other than selling music-playing hardware. Walmart just opened their online music store, complete with everyday low prices, for the purpose of bringing traffic to their website. Coca-cola has some online music presence for brand building. Everyone is getting into the game and it's for a wide variety of reasons.
"One of AOL's greatest strengths at the moment is the fact that it has easy access to the TV, movie, music, and magazine content empire that is Time Warner. Microsoft just doesn't have as large of a content machine."
I haven't ranted about this for a while but AOL/TW is really missing the boat with their inability to leverage Time-Warner content online. Sure the magazines and CNN have heavily trafficked websites, but those are in the give-it-away news category and do little other than leverage the brand. The real crown jewel is HBO. It has some of the most compelling and critically acclaimed programming on television and it is already a subscription service. They have content and paying users. But because of corporate infighting and no upper management mandate to make online synergy work, their 30 million online service users do not get access to content they might well pay additional money for.
I bet that if AOL had downloadable/streaming episodes of the Sopranos and Sex in the City it would have its most profitable premium service yet. Offer last season's shows to get people hooked and compel them to subscribe to HBO. Or stream the current original programming to broadband users for the same monthly fee as HBO and avoid fighting with cable systems. It's foolish to try to develop original online content that anyone will pay for. In fact Microsoft tried it (to get back on topic) with the first version of MSN. They had "channels" of programming that cost them a ton of money to develop but did not work to build a user base. AOL has really missed an opportunity IMHO.
I'm no fan of HTML in email, but I don't object on bandwidth issues. HTML formatting tags are just text. Doing a little text formatting with HTML adds a trvial amount to the size of the message. (At least it should, making some text bold doesn't require the ridiculous amount of HTML that some mail clients add to messages.) What is most insidious about HTML in email actually is its ability to retrieve content from the Internet. Images and other objects can be embedded in the text of the email in the sense that the HTML rendering engine will fetch them as it reads the email. Unless your email client allows for the option of expressly forbidding this you will have no choice about what is being transmitted as the HTML-encoded message is rendered.
Slashdot Mirror
At this point Skype for Linux is being offered without the SkypeOut service that allows calls to go to any telephone, not just other Skype users. Still, it's great to bring new platforms and more users onto this system. Bring on the OS X version!
One serious danger in consoles is that if the product doesn't match up well against rivals then the manufacturer is stuck with it until the next generation. This isn't the case in the software world where Microsoft lives. Software is often rushed to market and then patched and upgraded "in place" while the consumer is using it. The early adopters suffer but that hasn't cooled the purchase of fresh new products, thus the practice continues. Microsoft could emulate this approach in the game console space by building a system that can be upgraded via software. If an Xbox 2 can be converted to an Xbox 2.1 with a CD that flash-upgrades the OS, then we have a new paradigm in game consoles. They become more like software and a much more familiar competitive environment for Microsoft.
"My plate number may not be private, but where I park, how fast I travel, the frequency in which I use certain roads, and so on, is."
No they are not. You do all those things in public view so they are not private. Anyone can observe you doing those things and not violate your privacy. The only difference between a computer tracking your driving with RFID and being observed by a private investigator, jealous spouse, deranged fan, etc., is that it is trivially easy for the computer so there is little barrier to just doing it to everyone. That's the danger. Not that your "privacy" is being invaded, but that your heretofore anonymous public actions will be observed.
"A considerably large amount of the brain is specifically dedicated to recognizing facial expressions."
As an example think of how you can tell when a person across a crowded room is looking at you and not at the person next to you. The difference in the perceptible angle of their eyes is such that it would be exceedingly hard to draw/paint/animate. The human mind is so tuned to reading human faces that it may not be possible to completely fool it with computer graphics. At some point it is no longer about rendering power and resolution and more about things we don't fully understand that our brain is noticing. A fascinating subject that might become the holy grail for animators.
"remember the 19th century railroads building tracks parallel to one another?"
:)
Dude, I barely remember the '70s! But I'll take your word for it, Pops.
"We need some more innovations in how to properly regulate last mile providers, be it phone companies or cable companies to provide more competition."
Innovation and regulation are nearly mutually exclusive, so I disagree with your premise.
"It may just be that data lines might better be owned publicly, like the roads..."
It might be but I doubt it. Burdensome regulation is a large part of why incumbent telecoms like the RBOCs are not investing in more innovative technologies. With the unbundled network element provisions of the Telecom Act of 1996 they had to give access away below cost, so why develop anything new that competitors can take and resell for less. We're going to find out if that's true since that portion of the act was just struck down by a court decision. Now let's see if less regulation can lead to better product offerings.
Phones with TV reception are far more likely to receive mass acceptance than these wrist monstrosities. Toshiba and NEC have working models in Japan, check this WSJ review, and SprintPCS is brining MobiTV to some of its models in the U.S.
This "rather detailed breakdown" is a nice comparison of features, but hardly answers the question of which package is the best. The chart itself says that it "displays attributes of different user-installed blog software packages side-by-side for comparison." There's nothing about usability or other subjective criteria. It is a comprehensive collection of information though. I guess that's good for some people but I bet plenty want a comparison of how easy/flexible they are to use and maintain. Personally I would also like to see a comparison to the hosted services like Blogger.
As I've said before, if accumulation of features were all that mattered, we'd all love Microsoft Office.
Mossberg's columns, which include Thursday's influential "Personal Technology" plus a couple others, can be read for free at ptech.wsj.com. The rest of the Wall Street Journal online is a paid subscription site.
I'm not a black box expert, but I am guessing that the device stops recording at impact, perhaps triggered by an airbag deployment. The last five seconds before that are what is relevant.
"You can't stop a car at full throttle with just brakes."
Huh? That's some unusual engine you are running if it is more powerful than your brakes. According to this helpful page from Advance Auto parts, "All modern braking systems are many times more powerful than the vehicle's engine, so at full throttle, even a very powerful vehicle can be easily stopped with the brakes."
"Your observation that 'runaway' cars are usually caused by inept drivers pushing the wrong pedal is spot on."
You're right there. A "60 Minutes" report on so-called unintended acceleration nearly drove Audi out of business back in the 80's. No one wanted to dispute the claims of people who run over their own children in their garage from a pedal mistake so the car company was demonized. I seem to recall that an Audi exec demonstrated to the press how much more powerful the brakes on the Audi 5000 were than its engine. He revved a car to the red-line and shifted into drive with the brake depressed and the car did not move. He also stopped quickly from 60 mph with the accelerator floored. (Anyone else remember this? It seems so long ago.)
"Real won't be missed, it hasn't done anything of value to the marketplace or userbase for years now."
I'm not a historian on this issue, but didn't Real pioneer bringing TV and radio content to the masses through its subscription service? I have no desire to defend them, but I also don't vilify them as much as many here do. I thought they were first to bring things like streaming broadcasts of MLB games as well as prurient interests like the Big Brother feeds from the CBS "reality" show. You can argue that none of that was particularly valuable, sure, but didn't Real nonetheless accomplish something by leading and developing the streaming content market?
"Stevie, plz let me use it. omg i will give u lots of $$. U R sooooo kewl n i wnt 2 be like u!!!!11"
You forgot liberal use of "lol."
At the risk of being labeled a fanboy, I disagree with part of your assertion. Apple does indeed lock hardware owners into an upgrade cycle of buying a new computer for new technology instead of easy upgrading. That's the Faustian bargain of being a Mac owner. I accept it but understand why many don't. Part of the equation is that the hardware is tightly controlled to maintain the usability standards. Would you really want the platform open to the point that you could slap any old hardware in there and pray for no driver conflicts? If so then there is a platform already that works that way. But that's another topic....
.Mac program.
.Mac service. It would be nice to have great software for free that does everything we want it to, but it's perfectly legitimate for Apple to recoup their development costs for those programs by using them to sell more stuff.
Where I differ in opinion is with your complaint about Apple locking their software to their own expensive hardware and services.
"2. Apple keeps its iSync API locked up [...] keep people subscribing to the overpriced
3. USB video cameras, like the ubiquitous Logitech QuickCam, just don't work [...] with anything but their iSight hardware product. (I exaggerate a little bit here, but not much.)"
It's Apple's sales strategy to develop free, or low cost, software to sell additional hardware and services. I hardly see anything wrong with that. In fact it's a great strategy since the software is excellent and there are alternatives available so you are not locked in. You can use AIM or Yahoo messenger instead of iChat if you choose. Yes, I wish my Logitech camera worked with iChat AV because I don't want to buy the expensive iSight camera. But I think it's fair that they give me a great IM program and offer advanced video features if I choose to use the supported hardware. Again, I can choose otherwise and am not locked in. Same with iSync, it's free and works with a lot of things out of the box. But you get more if you buy their
"You could use a WI-FI adapter and make free calls from hot-spots or at home."
Sure this is interesting but strikes me as almost completely useless to the vast majority of people. It's sort of like discovering that a payphone near your house is broken and allows free calls. Wow, that's cool for a while then you realize that you want to be able to make phone calls from wherever you are at the moment and not have to first travel to a specific location. That's why we have mobile phones. And anyone with a wireless-equipped PDA is also very likely to have a wireless phone. If you are at home you might like the technology to make long-distance calls cheaply/freely but you can already do this with your computer. Bringing Skype to the PDA world is clever but targets an almost nonexistent market.
"OK fine. So you don't have a GMail account, but what if you send mail to one?"
Additionally, it won't actually be that easy to tell if you are sending to a gmail.com domain. For example I own my own domain and simply redirect email to my ISP email account rather than pay for email hosting. So if you send email to any of my email addresses (something @ mydomain.com) you have no idea where it is actually going. Not currently to any webmail service, but in the future, who knows?
"April 1, 2004 a great day to avoid Slashdot completely [...]"
... glug, glug, glug ...
Against my better judgement I loaded Slashdot this morning. Fears confirmed. I knew I bought a venti Starbucks latte this morning for a reason
"It might allow you to keep many more e-mails than possible with yahoo or hotmail, but how will this allow me to never change my e-mail again?"
The idea being that you would get advanced searching features which would make it the most useful email account you've ever had. And it wouldn't suffer the main limitation of other webmail services - miniscule storage space. Saying you'll never have to change your email address is a spin on the strategy of every ISP, locking you into the service as your email address becomes too entrenched to change easily. Only this time Google might be eliminating the reasons to switch from their service and offering a huge enticement to join it.
"So what does television need to do? Experiment. I want to see stuff on television I haven't seen before, not some dumbass sitcom that's revolutionary because it has a gay person."
We often equate "television" with the four or five major broadcast networks. The thing they can least afford to do is experiment. They have to consistantly hit the broadest possible audience to maintain their advertiser-desired demographics. That's why we have crap like Yes Dear and Still Standing. The real experimentation is happening on cable channels - both standard package and subscription. So in a sense television is experimenting, but the channels everyone is watching are not. A lot of stuff with potential will never survive because it will not have a large enough audience to sustain it. The major networks can deliver bigger audiences through force of viewing habits and can keep a show like King of Queens around long past its useful life. They recoup that investment with syndication fees. Some shows from cable channels like the Shield and Queer Eye will break out and become mainstream, but most will remain niche offerings or die quietly.
Television's relevance seems to have declined to only a rallying point during national tragedy (9/11, Columbia, etc.), and an outlet for major sporting events. It produces very few culturally significant moments. It used to be that you just knew everyone watched Seinfeld. It was a very funny show but what really made it great was that everyone was talking about it the next day. You could say "Yada, yada, yada," or "Giddyup" and everyone would get the reference. Nowadays, other people are unlikely to have seen the same thing you thought was interesting/relevant/humorous online, but since you are probably talking to them via IM you can just send the link.
"They were already selling them at a loss! Let's all go out and buy one of these, that will be striking a great blow for open source!!"
Then let's take vengeance on RFID by buying every Gillette Mach III we can get our hands on. Victory will be ours!!
- Extremely cpu intensive
- huge 5 GB Database per year archived
- extremely slow with frequent system crashes, at least 50 minutes per search and the search program gets set to the highest priority so nothing else can function
Wow, I developed something very similar for email. It's called Outlook and I am hoping it catches on and becomes really popular. Check it out and let all of your friends know about it.
-bill
"The obvious problem is that what incentive is there for someone to open a music store with encrypted songs that are only playable on the iPod?"
There are various reasons for having an online music store other than selling music-playing hardware. Walmart just opened their online music store, complete with everyday low prices, for the purpose of bringing traffic to their website. Coca-cola has some online music presence for brand building. Everyone is getting into the game and it's for a wide variety of reasons.
"One of AOL's greatest strengths at the moment is the fact that it has easy access to the TV, movie, music, and magazine content empire that is Time Warner. Microsoft just doesn't have as large of a content machine."
I haven't ranted about this for a while but AOL/TW is really missing the boat with their inability to leverage Time-Warner content online. Sure the magazines and CNN have heavily trafficked websites, but those are in the give-it-away news category and do little other than leverage the brand. The real crown jewel is HBO. It has some of the most compelling and critically acclaimed programming on television and it is already a subscription service. They have content and paying users. But because of corporate infighting and no upper management mandate to make online synergy work, their 30 million online service users do not get access to content they might well pay additional money for.
I bet that if AOL had downloadable/streaming episodes of the Sopranos and Sex in the City it would have its most profitable premium service yet. Offer last season's shows to get people hooked and compel them to subscribe to HBO. Or stream the current original programming to broadband users for the same monthly fee as HBO and avoid fighting with cable systems. It's foolish to try to develop original online content that anyone will pay for. In fact Microsoft tried it (to get back on topic) with the first version of MSN. They had "channels" of programming that cost them a ton of money to develop but did not work to build a user base. AOL has really missed an opportunity IMHO.
"I know if something goes down, my blackberry will vibrate, and I will immediatly make my way to a computer. Its all about minimizing downtime."
Minimizing both technical and personal downtime, unfortunately.
From a consumer "I want something to listen to while I'm jogging" point of view, 4GB is how many hours of ogg audio??
There's a target demographic for you. Someone who listens to ogg formatted audio and jogs. Gotta be at least three or four people in that group.
I'm no fan of HTML in email, but I don't object on bandwidth issues. HTML formatting tags are just text. Doing a little text formatting with HTML adds a trvial amount to the size of the message. (At least it should, making some text bold doesn't require the ridiculous amount of HTML that some mail clients add to messages.) What is most insidious about HTML in email actually is its ability to retrieve content from the Internet. Images and other objects can be embedded in the text of the email in the sense that the HTML rendering engine will fetch them as it reads the email. Unless your email client allows for the option of expressly forbidding this you will have no choice about what is being transmitted as the HTML-encoded message is rendered.