Dunno what the hubbub is about over this device - I was downsizing my laptop and got an Inspiron 700m subnotebook. Threw on Ubuntu to run with XP and I'm good to go.
A little heavier but this one runs virtually everything and has an optical drive. To me it seems like the sacrifice of Windows is a little forward at this moment - if something is going to be deployed in a business environment it's a neccesary evil. I use it for maybe 10% of my tasks but that 10% is what keeps me from having two computers.
Great point. Considering how crucial movie-ticket pricing and movie ticket experience is to the box office in general, it actually might be a good move for the studios to own and run the movie theaters. That way they wouldn't "race to the bottom", they'd probably have better geographical control of releases, they could prevent other movie theater chains from getting movies (creating a local monopoly) and they could also downsize their theater network to eliminate unprofitable theaters.
I'm interested in this Google payments thing, but I suspect that they may bite off more than they can chew. Organizing information is much different from handing irate customers who got scammed - for all we hate eBay, they do make an effort to deal with these people. I had a very poor experience with death threats and violence after I posted a negative review for an item that did not conform.
While Google *may* have neat algorithms to eliminate people like this from their service, there's no substitute for a large staff of people constantly checking and kicking the asses of scammers.
Not too enthusiastic about aesthetics - the most useful feature I've found on watches is a compass, which I wear on my Timex Expedition watch. As long as you're not doing surveying, you can definitely solve a lot of problems in unfamiliar cities with it.
Sirens and evacuation routes are such a 20th century way of warning people about tsunamis. How often does a car alarm go off that you automatically tune out?
It would seem like a better idea to have a sort of public-safety warning system integrated with the mobile phone network. This way, the authorities could simply send SMS messages (or even graphic messages) to people within a specific geographical area, giving them the nature of the incident in question.
I think we had something like this that put messsages on your radar detector, but it died in the womb a while back.
This would work for virtually everything - if a train derailed and spilled hazardous chemicals, the fire department could use the public safety system to get people out of their houses. If a hurricane was going, they could use the system to coordinate evacuation so that people wouldn't get trapped in giant traffic jams. And if an escaped killer got out of jail, they could send everyone in the immediate area his picture.
In my defense I will say that mentioning Barcode Magic implied (in my mind) that the thief was doing something a bit more sophisticated than essentially Xeroxing barcodes from other products.
I'm surprised that the UPC systems involved aren't directly tied into the store's inventory systems. A UPC shouldn't directly tie to a price readout - it should tie back to the store database which returns the price from its own table.
In other words, the label shouldn't convey the information "Charge this customer $X.XX", it should convey "Check for item XYZ... Return price."
and it seems that this machine is kind of like a *very* consumer-level Phraselator, a Windows Mobile program that the military has been using to some success in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much better to have a $1,000 device than pay somebody $500 a day for dubious results.
I'd say that the Phraselator folks have little to be worried about because the PDA-type interface - although clunky for games - seems well suited to finding what you desire to communicate. The talking duck seems like it's both inflexible to new modules and could get annoying really, really fast.
The greater issue is that while these devices smooth your ability to *communicate your desires*, I've found in my experience that an ability to *understand others* is more sorely needed. It's easy to make the appropriate expression/point to what you want.
It would be best if someone could develop a device you could hold up or take a picture of text. Then you would push the "Translate" button and get results. A neat feature would be the "literal translation" or "nouns/verbs only mode". That way you would be able to get the gist of what someone is yelling at you instead of allowing the machine to go down crazy logic paths.
I have to confess - I actually trade options and entered a fairly large "short" position in Google lately based on the two likely outcomes:
1) Google holds on to AOL, but overpays and/or issues stock to pay. This causes the stock price to go down because of dilution.
2) Microsoft buys AOL and denies Google the eyeballs. This also causes Google's stock price to go down.
My read on the situation is that closer ties between MSFT and Time-Warner can only benefit both of them - it creates a diversified media/technology conglomerate which not only has the content but the technology to deliver it with all sorts of DRM. A nightmare for the Slashdot crowd, but a dream come true for RIAA-types.
Google's only advantage here is that they're the incumbent player - it's significant, and there are obstacles in front of Microsoft. However it's hard for AOL to turn away from the green stuff.
Even companies like Wal-Mart can come up with a financial case for conserving resources, which in any case cost the shareholders money. What's exciting is that they're throwing their weight around to do things like change the level of packaging in their products and even leaning on truck manufacturers to make more efficient trucks.
Exciting stuff - if they're going to be oppressing their suppliers they might as well achieve some environmental gains while they're at it.
Re:In a capitalist society... A lottery is better
on
Space Tourism?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"Not enough rich morons" is an understatement. One other example I think is relevant is how Apollo 13 was tanking in the TV ratings - apparently after people had visited the moon only twice the public got jaded and moon missions were considered routine.
This in a world with only three TV stations and way fewer alternative modes of entertainment.
No freaking way space tourism can payback. Now if we're talking fractional-orbital flights to get you from New York to Tokyo in 15 minutes than space tourism becomes interesting, with the zero-G being a nice side benefit.
You've got to watch out for professionals who like to meddle with your art as if it was the usual overexposed party picture. I can't count the number of times I've seen the people at Ritz Camera (Wolf Camera out west) mess around with brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.
I'm sure it helps careless photographers but occasionally the results can piss you off extremely. The worst part is that these people think they're doing you a favor when they're not. They're ruining your effort and creating a disincentive for people who suck at taking pictures to get better at it.
Ironically, the cheaper photoshops like Sam's Club barely glance at your stuff. For a reliable print it's often better to go with the bulk operator rather than risk your picture getting mangled.
Seems to me like VoIP is a technology that makes phone service more competitive, not less. The best investments are in companies that have defensible positions within a marketplace. Companies that rope their customers in with long-term contracts (like real estate) or high switching costs (Microsoft and Verizon) and especially high cost of entry (Airlines) have fewer risks involved for the investor.
VoIP makes every company vulnerable because switching is so easy. Think of it - once you've got a $VOIP_BOX, how much difficulty is there in reconfiguring? Just upload some firmware, bada-bing-bada-bam, you've got a new phone number!
The only way Vonage will be able to hold on to its customers will be to
(1) offer better service, which will be quickly matched by your competitors.
(2) lower the price. Again - competitors can respond easily. Costs money.
(3) Market heavily. This could work, but phone service isn't sexy like mobile phones are. And marketing costs money anyway.
I predict that investors will think "Vonage! I saw them on TV, which means that it must be good" kind of like AOL was and Google is getting to be. A lot of dumb money will follow them and I'll short the stock and cash in when the bubble bursts.
I honestly think that going faster has its limits - it's no use going faster if you get stovepiped into taking a train to a secondary airport, doing security, then flying to a major airport, then switching to an SST. It just doesn't work.
Point-to-point travel is the future - we may not realize it, but there's a lot of economic activity that goes on in places that aren't well served by the airlines. That's why Southwest is eating everyone's lunch. I'd think it would save more time in the long run to develop "free flight" systems so that air taxis and passenger services could fly people from smaller airports. Now that avionics manufacturers are really getting onto ease of use, flying a plane could become not that much harder than driving a car.
Potentially, "free flight" could be as disruptive as the Internet.
And I for one would like to welcome our Mach 2 Japanese overlords...
Hey. That one actually seemed plausible. Oh well...
OK, seriously. Yes it's all well and good to go Mach 2 but this sounds like another pork barrel (rice basket?) project on the part of the Chinese. Aircraft speed is increasingly becoming less relevant to total travel time. Traveling to Asia will always take the better part of a day. There will always be an hour's drive to the airport, a two hour security buffer time, then 1 hour of customs on the other side. It gets even worse when you consider that Japan might not be your final destination.
8 hours is optimistic because the developers don't seem to have a plan for getting rid of the sonic boom, which means the airliner will have to fly overwater instead of over Canada. That might make supersonic flight to Asia only possible from the West Coast, not the East Coast.
When enough processes have been revamped to make traveling to Japan like going to New York for a day then maybe a supersonic transport might be worthwhile.
How does copying someone else's VoIP fit in with Yahoo's business model? The way I see it, Yahoo is not in the business of person-to-person communication, it's in the business of making it easy to access knowledge of all sorts.
I can see how the IM client helps them, but software VoIP is different from IM - it's more computationally intensive, it depends heavily on the presence of broadband, and it's (in my opinion) a lot less versatile for those in a computer environment. You couldn't use this stuff in a cube environment. You can't be anonymous with voice. You can't enclose pictures or multitask easily.
For that reason it's really hard to distinguish yourself with VoIP - there's really only one thing a provider needs to do, which is get two people talking with reasonable voice quality. Once you're there, how does Yahoo! differ from anyone else?
Most importantly, how does getting people to use the Yahoo! client get people to do something that makes Yahoo! richer? Again - banner advertising won't work because people using the client aren't really looking at their computer screens.
It's hard to conceptually connect Yahoo! and any sort of VoIP client. I'm open to any suggestions of how it might work, though...
Gotta love the chest-beating that police agencies love to do over their speed-measurement technology. Got cited for 88.3 mph (that's right, they got it down to the 10th of a mile, more precise than the rental car's speedometer) in Philly by an officer using a "Tracker", which is basically a really sophisticated odometer they use to pace you (also known as VASCAR). As such, to intimidate the public during our mass trial, we were all informed by the police prosecutor that "Tracker" was apparently 99.7% accurate and that we'd better come in with scientific evidence to disprove them.
Guess those cops have laser rangefinders in their bumpers - because I was ready to argue that a police officer who tracked a car for.3574 mile and closed the distance by merely 200 feet (something that a police car could do in a second), my actual speed would be only 78 mph.
The biggest argument against "Tracker" and other VASCAR systems is that the chief of the Pennsylvania association of chiefs of police put out an impassioned plea on the Internet for radar guns to be legalized for non-State Trooper LEOs.
Unbelievable the racket these guys pull. Fortunately the assembly-line justice of Philadelphia manifested itself in a $6 fine with no points. I was so ashamed of myself that I sent the extra $109 that I should have been fined for to Doctors without Borders.
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Dunno what the hubbub is about over this device - I was downsizing my laptop and got an Inspiron 700m subnotebook. Threw on Ubuntu to run with XP and I'm good to go.
A little heavier but this one runs virtually everything and has an optical drive. To me it seems like the sacrifice of Windows is a little forward at this moment - if something is going to be deployed in a business environment it's a neccesary evil. I use it for maybe 10% of my tasks but that 10% is what keeps me from having two computers.
Great point. Considering how crucial movie-ticket pricing and movie ticket experience is to the box office in general, it actually might be a good move for the studios to own and run the movie theaters. That way they wouldn't "race to the bottom", they'd probably have better geographical control of releases, they could prevent other movie theater chains from getting movies (creating a local monopoly) and they could also downsize their theater network to eliminate unprofitable theaters.
While Google *may* have neat algorithms to eliminate people like this from their service, there's no substitute for a large staff of people constantly checking and kicking the asses of scammers.
Not too enthusiastic about aesthetics - the most useful feature I've found on watches is a compass, which I wear on my Timex Expedition watch. As long as you're not doing surveying, you can definitely solve a lot of problems in unfamiliar cities with it.
It would seem like a better idea to have a sort of public-safety warning system integrated with the mobile phone network. This way, the authorities could simply send SMS messages (or even graphic messages) to people within a specific geographical area, giving them the nature of the incident in question.
I think we had something like this that put messsages on your radar detector, but it died in the womb a while back.
This would work for virtually everything - if a train derailed and spilled hazardous chemicals, the fire department could use the public safety system to get people out of their houses. If a hurricane was going, they could use the system to coordinate evacuation so that people wouldn't get trapped in giant traffic jams. And if an escaped killer got out of jail, they could send everyone in the immediate area his picture.
In my defense I will say that mentioning Barcode Magic implied (in my mind) that the thief was doing something a bit more sophisticated than essentially Xeroxing barcodes from other products.
In other words, the label shouldn't convey the information "Charge this customer $X.XX", it should convey "Check for item XYZ... Return price."
I'd say that the Phraselator folks have little to be worried about because the PDA-type interface - although clunky for games - seems well suited to finding what you desire to communicate. The talking duck seems like it's both inflexible to new modules and could get annoying really, really fast.
The greater issue is that while these devices smooth your ability to *communicate your desires*, I've found in my experience that an ability to *understand others* is more sorely needed. It's easy to make the appropriate expression/point to what you want.
It would be best if someone could develop a device you could hold up or take a picture of text. Then you would push the "Translate" button and get results. A neat feature would be the "literal translation" or "nouns/verbs only mode". That way you would be able to get the gist of what someone is yelling at you instead of allowing the machine to go down crazy logic paths.
1) Google holds on to AOL, but overpays and/or issues stock to pay. This causes the stock price to go down because of dilution.
2) Microsoft buys AOL and denies Google the eyeballs. This also causes Google's stock price to go down.
My read on the situation is that closer ties between MSFT and Time-Warner can only benefit both of them - it creates a diversified media/technology conglomerate which not only has the content but the technology to deliver it with all sorts of DRM. A nightmare for the Slashdot crowd, but a dream come true for RIAA-types.
Google's only advantage here is that they're the incumbent player - it's significant, and there are obstacles in front of Microsoft. However it's hard for AOL to turn away from the green stuff.
Exciting stuff - if they're going to be oppressing their suppliers they might as well achieve some environmental gains while they're at it.
This in a world with only three TV stations and way fewer alternative modes of entertainment.
No freaking way space tourism can payback. Now if we're talking fractional-orbital flights to get you from New York to Tokyo in 15 minutes than space tourism becomes interesting, with the zero-G being a nice side benefit.
You've got to watch out for professionals who like to meddle with your art as if it was the usual overexposed party picture. I can't count the number of times I've seen the people at Ritz Camera (Wolf Camera out west) mess around with brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.
I'm sure it helps careless photographers but occasionally the results can piss you off extremely. The worst part is that these people think they're doing you a favor when they're not. They're ruining your effort and creating a disincentive for people who suck at taking pictures to get better at it.
Ironically, the cheaper photoshops like Sam's Club barely glance at your stuff. For a reliable print it's often better to go with the bulk operator rather than risk your picture getting mangled.
VoIP makes every company vulnerable because switching is so easy. Think of it - once you've got a $VOIP_BOX, how much difficulty is there in reconfiguring? Just upload some firmware, bada-bing-bada-bam, you've got a new phone number!
The only way Vonage will be able to hold on to its customers will be to
(1) offer better service, which will be quickly matched by your competitors.
(2) lower the price. Again - competitors can respond easily. Costs money.
(3) Market heavily. This could work, but phone service isn't sexy like mobile phones are. And marketing costs money anyway.
I predict that investors will think "Vonage! I saw them on TV, which means that it must be good" kind of like AOL was and Google is getting to be. A lot of dumb money will follow them and I'll short the stock and cash in when the bubble bursts.
Point-to-point travel is the future - we may not realize it, but there's a lot of economic activity that goes on in places that aren't well served by the airlines. That's why Southwest is eating everyone's lunch. I'd think it would save more time in the long run to develop "free flight" systems so that air taxis and passenger services could fly people from smaller airports. Now that avionics manufacturers are really getting onto ease of use, flying a plane could become not that much harder than driving a car.
Potentially, "free flight" could be as disruptive as the Internet.
Hey. That one actually seemed plausible. Oh well...
OK, seriously. Yes it's all well and good to go Mach 2 but this sounds like another pork barrel (rice basket?) project on the part of the Chinese. Aircraft speed is increasingly becoming less relevant to total travel time. Traveling to Asia will always take the better part of a day. There will always be an hour's drive to the airport, a two hour security buffer time, then 1 hour of customs on the other side. It gets even worse when you consider that Japan might not be your final destination.
8 hours is optimistic because the developers don't seem to have a plan for getting rid of the sonic boom, which means the airliner will have to fly overwater instead of over Canada. That might make supersonic flight to Asia only possible from the West Coast, not the East Coast.
When enough processes have been revamped to make traveling to Japan like going to New York for a day then maybe a supersonic transport might be worthwhile.
How does copying someone else's VoIP fit in with Yahoo's business model? The way I see it, Yahoo is not in the business of person-to-person communication, it's in the business of making it easy to access knowledge of all sorts.
I can see how the IM client helps them, but software VoIP is different from IM - it's more computationally intensive, it depends heavily on the presence of broadband, and it's (in my opinion) a lot less versatile for those in a computer environment. You couldn't use this stuff in a cube environment. You can't be anonymous with voice. You can't enclose pictures or multitask easily.
For that reason it's really hard to distinguish yourself with VoIP - there's really only one thing a provider needs to do, which is get two people talking with reasonable voice quality. Once you're there, how does Yahoo! differ from anyone else?
Most importantly, how does getting people to use the Yahoo! client get people to do something that makes Yahoo! richer? Again - banner advertising won't work because people using the client aren't really looking at their computer screens.
It's hard to conceptually connect Yahoo! and any sort of VoIP client. I'm open to any suggestions of how it might work, though...
And I for one would like to welcome our 19-million amp tuna can sized overlords...
Gotta love the chest-beating that police agencies love to do over their speed-measurement technology. Got cited for 88.3 mph (that's right, they got it down to the 10th of a mile, more precise than the rental car's speedometer) in Philly by an officer using a "Tracker", which is basically a really sophisticated odometer they use to pace you (also known as VASCAR). As such, to intimidate the public during our mass trial, we were all informed by the police prosecutor that "Tracker" was apparently 99.7% accurate and that we'd better come in with scientific evidence to disprove them. Guess those cops have laser rangefinders in their bumpers - because I was ready to argue that a police officer who tracked a car for .3574 mile and closed the distance by merely 200 feet (something that a police car could do in a second), my actual speed would be only 78 mph.
The biggest argument against "Tracker" and other VASCAR systems is that the chief of the Pennsylvania association of chiefs of police put out an impassioned plea on the Internet for radar guns to be legalized for non-State Trooper LEOs.
Unbelievable the racket these guys pull. Fortunately the assembly-line justice of Philadelphia manifested itself in a $6 fine with no points. I was so ashamed of myself that I sent the extra $109 that I should have been fined for to Doctors without Borders.