It's called almost every Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens and CVS in the United States. They have little kiosks where you can print from your phone or Facebook or Flickr or SD card or whatever.
And they don't have to support the infrastructure of a whole store by themselves. In fact they don't even have to be particularly profitable since part of the deal is you'll wander the rest of the store and buy stuff while waiting for your prints.
If you want to be properly pedantic it's pronounced "nihonshu". Sake pretty much means "alcohol" in Japanese. Walking into a Japanese bar and ordering sake is like walking into an american bar and saying "One alcohol, please!"
Oh god, the last thing you want is someone who writes crap code working by himself. He'll create his or her own little empire of code madness that no one else can maintain.
The answer is simple: If you don't have the power to fire them you bring the problem to the attention of those who do.
We don't have to keep employing people who don't ear their keep.
Game companies like this because it takes traded in games off the market and so they'll sell more new games. This only serves as an inducement to make more violent games.
So, giant failure.
Even bigger failure is that there is no correlation between video games and violence. There are countless studies, but I like this fact: Japan has 0.6% as many gun deaths as the US.* I wonder if they play video games over there?
* 10.2 per 100,000 per year in the US vs 0.07 for Japan according to Wikipedia.
If citizens of Mother England are going to act like assholes like that then yes, the colonies are going to do everything they can do distance themselves from such pointless snobbery.
My experience says differently. I had given Google Docs a chance years ago, but it outright stank. I couldn't image why someone would want to use it.
Then a few months ago I started writing for a major tech publisher. When I asked what file format they wanted they responded "Word if you must but we love Google Docs". So Google Docs it was. And I was very pleasantly surprised. It worked slickly, speedily and no unexpected surprises. (This is with Chrome on OS X.) Compared to the OS X version of Word, which reminds me that the The Spinning Beach Ball of Death is still a real thing, I almost overwhelmingly preferred Goog.
There are a few things it won't let me do that I'm used to. Captioning images is one. Which doesn't work well in Word either, but is apparently not possible in Docs. I also use tables a lot and the table formatting options stink. But otherwise I found it met all my needs and worked better and faster than Word.
Well, your commend didn't add a damn thing to this discussion, so it seems like you're brining the rage to this party. Good luck with that.
Getting a site destroyed by/. is a lot more rare mostly because servers are vastly more robust than they were in the past. I have a Wordpress blog hosted on a $10 a month shared server that was linked on Slashdot last year. Brought in tens of thousand of hits in an hour if I remember correctly. Site stayed up, though a little slow. And that's just a single shared server, No AWS. 5-10 years ago that would have cost serious money for a site that could handle that. Now it's the cost of three cups of coffee.
I think Twitter is worth it because there are very few privacy concerns. Twitter is 98% public, and everyone who participates knows it. (I hope.)
Facebook is a privacy nightmare, and is crap for driving business to your web site. It does everything it can to keep all information on Facebook, including jerking everyone around. And that will only increase.
Once you post something on either service it's out of y our control. With Twitter it's pretty minor, 140 characters, and it will be gone eventually. (I believe they only archive the last 2000 Tweets or so.) Facebook is trying to make a timeline of people's entire lives and won't stop trying to make money off your content until well after you're dead.
... It's for the ability to east the separation of me from my money. I constantly think about it, every time I use a computer. "The one thing lacking in this OS, the one fault of the developer, is that not once did they think about my pocketbook and how it's too full. They really should divert development time from other features to make it easier to spend money. I really don't do enough of that, and there are so few ways for me to do it."
Dammit, and I was just getting to like Ubuntu as a mature competitor to the commercial offerings. I had even convinced a few friends to try it. Now I'll look like a fucking shill.
Because those are the only ones where he'll be marginally safe.
I wish they'd catch this guy so he'd shut the hell up. He's not Jason Bourne or James Bond, he's just another rich eccentric, and an attention whore.The world doesn't need more of either of those.
Not trying to sound like a troll here, but what is the point?
Sure, for hobbyists, it might have a place[...]
Don't know if that's a troll, but you did answer your own question. There are only 315 preorders for this thing. Sounds like a hobbyist device to me.
Yeah, for most people it's stupid, but that's the definition for every piece of equipment that every hobbyist buys, regardless of the hobby.
Now the actual project feels a bit dicey to me. First of all the Fixed Funding campaign. That means that he takes all the money regardless of if it reaches its funding goal. That's very suspect in a hardware project. Hardware projects need an economy of scale to get decent volume pricing. The fact that he apparently doesn't care how many he sells tells me he's either a) clueless, b) a scammer, or c) making a not-insignificant profit on each and every one. Which means this is a rebadged $50 tablet, which means it's shit.
The January ship date means it's obviously an OEM tablet. So the "building" part of "building a powerful tablet" is obviously BS. If he was actually building a table the startup costs would be 100x and the delivery date would be at least 18 months out.
He also says "Given the busy holiday manufacturing and shipping schedules we will not have the devices before Christmas." which makes it seem like he's getting the things specially built. Except he's not, he simply can't at that volume and price. The real reason it's not a good Christmas gift is that the software won't be done. In fact I doubt if he'll hit a January ship date, just looking at the updates on the site, there is a ton of work left to do to clean this project up.
Yes, he's doing some software development, putting together the free work that others have contributed. And he's not selling software, he's selling hardware, which feels like a bait and switch.
He doesn't need to sell the hardware. As mentioned elsewhere up-thread, there are tablets out there that can do what this does. He's just looking for a way to get paid for free software.
DRM. I love to keep installs as simple as possible. Every program should be able to be run on removable media. But back when I had a little less control over the software I develop, clients were horrified by such an idea. They wanted applications locked to a specific machine, permanently, if possible. If they would have known the lingo they would have asked for rootkits and BIOS viruses to keep their app from running anywhere it wasn't supposed to. (They would have gone with hardware dongles, but they were far too cheep for that.)
And to do that (Without hardware dongles) you have to get stupid. Insinuate files into places they're not supposed to be and generally just dick with a person's computer in a way that would make them unhappy if it wasn't hidden by a shiny graphic on the installer's splash screen.
You can understand why I don't do that work anymore, but I guarantee that someone does.
Except if the MPAA gets wind of this they'll close you down and slap you with a lawsuit. It's pretty explicitly prohibited in the draconian license the make you watch infront of every film.
I think they have two options: 1) Go for the old people market. Stock movies and TV shows from the 50's - 70's that old people like, advertise to them. Work up delivery deals with local care facilities.
2) The other option would be focusing on foreign films and TV. They are rarely available for streaming in the US. I'd also get a few region-free DVD players and rent them out. I know several DVD rental places that make good money by doing this for local immigrant communities.
Engineering, as it's practiced in other fields, is applying existing models (often created by scientists) to make something new or modify something old. Bridge building applies a lot of science but doesn't do any science.
Scientists postulate new theorems, perform and evaluate studies, publish papers on those studies.
The vast majority of CS grads go into jobs where they use existing languages, algorithms, APIs and libraries to create something new or modify something old. Thus Engineers, not scientists. How many CS grads have even submitted papers to peer review?
Yes, there are the CS people doing actual science, performing studies, creating the new stuff for all the future SE's to use, but they're the vast minority. If you want to see more than 2 in the same room go to SIGGRAPH.
Great idea... but that's just not going to work either.
Very few projects can simply open up their code without getting into all kinds of legal trouble. Third party libraries, distribution agreements, confidentiality agreements, licenses, employment contracts, etc ad infinitum. Some of this can be negotiated around, some can't. None of it can happen without people willing to put in the time and energy (and money) to do it.*
And I don't believe the government should be intervening in business to place them in a Catch-22. (The Catch-22 here is being forced to either support a money-losing product or pay to provide a public version.) This would have a deeply chilling effect on business and innovation. Who would go into a business they knew they could never get out of no matter how bad it got? Answer: Assholes looking for a government bailout.
The correct solution is that the market (ie: you and I) should punish the companies that favor lock-in and don't make fault-tolerant equipment, and reward those who don't create dead-end products.
*Source: Having been on the inside of companies that try to take private software open source.
No, about the only place I could see unionizing happen is at some place like Zynga.
Zynga would simply can everyone at the first sign of unionizing. Most of their workforce is fresh, gullible, college grads, and there is always a new crop of them.
Everything you're shipping has been on a container ship or equivalent before, when it was shipped from China to you. Don't over think it.
However, having done several moves across the Pacific I would say this: Mail your valuables. You get tracking, you get insurance, and someone just might read the "FRAGILE" sticker on the outside. Better yet, travel with them. If it's truly valuable, a carry-on bag is the best way.
(Note: Depending on your country of destination you may have import especially when mailing tech. Can't help you with information on that since you didn't say where your final destination is.)
Some things, especially displays, may cost more to mail than to buy new. Consider this a chance to get a new monitor.
Moving across an ocean is a great way to reconsider how important things are. My last two moves between the US and Asia I pared my belongings down to less than a cubic meter and I was happier for it.
He found that as a hemetless woman, cars gave him the greatest amount of room, and as a helmeted man, the least amount of room.
That works great, if the car sees you. If the car sees you they're not going to hit you.
I've been hit by a car. It cracked my pelvis, took lots of skin off me. Oh, and my helmet was cracked too. But I was alert enough after the impact to hear the distraught driver saying "I didn't see you!" over and over and over.
I would almost certainly not be able to post this if I hadn't been wearing that helmet.
Don't make helmet laws mandatory. But if you don't wear a helmet and you get into an accident you have to pay 100% of your medical bills. No one else should pay for your stupid.
When I need to evaluate some new tech, be it an API, language, tool, or just about anything else, the first thing I look at is the documentation, after that I look at the community support. Because I know I'm going to get stuck at some point and I need to know that there will be a way out. Even if another tool will technically be a better fit for what I'm trying to do, I'll still give it a pass in favor of a tool that I know what it can and can't do.
Not that good docs are easy, they're not. They take lots of time, even for bad ones, but if you want to see adoption you need docs that include usage examples. This is primarily why Open Hardware companies have been growing like crazy while Radio Shack stagnates. They don't just sell a 555 timer, they provide dozens of free tutorials showing all the cool shit you can make with it.
In fact is says right on the announcement page that "Beam is no robot". So no need to be 3 laws compliant.
I'm still looking for a use case for telepresence robots. It needs to be a situation where all of these things apply:
1) I need to "freely" move around where I'm not. There are lots of situations where I would want this. However the situational awareness of these things is very poor. I drove one around and ended up rolling around the Y-Combinator offices without knowing it. For a tour of a place, office, factory, photos and handheld video would be preferable. (It's very difficult to "look around" with these thing. turning is slow.)
2) I don't need to touch anything. This is sort of the breaker. If I don't need to touch anything, why not just teleconference? Yeah, teleconferences kind of stink, but they do work. (And I can screw off during the parts that don't concern me. Try doing that in person!) If I actually need to do things then I need to be there in person with my arms and hands and fingers.
3) Movement is completely unrestricted where I need to be. Doors are all automatic. No stairs. No elevators.
4) Someone has the money to spend on these. They're expensive. People tend to abuse them, which makes them a maintenance problem.
5) No one cares about the Uncanny Valley. These things are deep in it and people react not positively to them. People hit the Emergency stop button to make the telepresence go away, people sit their drinks on them. Or push them around, pick them up. Drop them. Or just ignore them. People don't react to them like they're people. And there's really no way in the near future to get them out of this valley.
The closest I get for this is a factory tour in China. (For people who live a long distance from China.) But frankly if I need to take a factory tour I have the money to do it, and it would be worth my time to fly there and do it in person.
For anything else it seems like "Skype on a stick" is more than good enough. Does anyone have a legitimate (ie: not "it's cool!") use case for telepresence bots like this?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that word means what you think it does.
It's called almost every Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens and CVS in the United States. They have little kiosks where you can print from your phone or Facebook or Flickr or SD card or whatever.
And they don't have to support the infrastructure of a whole store by themselves. In fact they don't even have to be particularly profitable since part of the deal is you'll wander the rest of the store and buy stuff while waiting for your prints.
If you want to be properly pedantic it's pronounced "nihonshu". Sake pretty much means "alcohol" in Japanese. Walking into a Japanese bar and ordering sake is like walking into an american bar and saying "One alcohol, please!"
Some kind of half-assed copy protection or trial use. "Dude, you totally changed the date to get around our 30 day trial! No more software for you!"
Stupid, yes. But it exists.
Oh god, the last thing you want is someone who writes crap code working by himself. He'll create his or her own little empire of code madness that no one else can maintain.
The answer is simple: If you don't have the power to fire them you bring the problem to the attention of those who do.
We don't have to keep employing people who don't ear their keep.
Game companies like this because it takes traded in games off the market and so they'll sell more new games. This only serves as an inducement to make more violent games.
So, giant failure.
Even bigger failure is that there is no correlation between video games and violence. There are countless studies, but I like this fact: Japan has 0.6% as many gun deaths as the US.* I wonder if they play video games over there?
* 10.2 per 100,000 per year in the US vs 0.07 for Japan according to Wikipedia.
If citizens of Mother England are going to act like assholes like that then yes, the colonies are going to do everything they can do distance themselves from such pointless snobbery.
My experience says differently. I had given Google Docs a chance years ago, but it outright stank. I couldn't image why someone would want to use it.
Then a few months ago I started writing for a major tech publisher. When I asked what file format they wanted they responded "Word if you must but we love Google Docs". So Google Docs it was. And I was very pleasantly surprised. It worked slickly, speedily and no unexpected surprises. (This is with Chrome on OS X.) Compared to the OS X version of Word, which reminds me that the The Spinning Beach Ball of Death is still a real thing, I almost overwhelmingly preferred Goog.
There are a few things it won't let me do that I'm used to. Captioning images is one. Which doesn't work well in Word either, but is apparently not possible in Docs. I also use tables a lot and the table formatting options stink. But otherwise I found it met all my needs and worked better and faster than Word.
Well, your commend didn't add a damn thing to this discussion, so it seems like you're brining the rage to this party. Good luck with that.
Getting a site destroyed by /. is a lot more rare mostly because servers are vastly more robust than they were in the past. I have a Wordpress blog hosted on a $10 a month shared server that was linked on Slashdot last year. Brought in tens of thousand of hits in an hour if I remember correctly. Site stayed up, though a little slow. And that's just a single shared server, No AWS. 5-10 years ago that would have cost serious money for a site that could handle that. Now it's the cost of three cups of coffee.
I think Twitter is worth it because there are very few privacy concerns. Twitter is 98% public, and everyone who participates knows it. (I hope.)
Facebook is a privacy nightmare, and is crap for driving business to your web site. It does everything it can to keep all information on Facebook, including jerking everyone around. And that will only increase.
Once you post something on either service it's out of y our control. With Twitter it's pretty minor, 140 characters, and it will be gone eventually. (I believe they only archive the last 2000 Tweets or so.) Facebook is trying to make a timeline of people's entire lives and won't stop trying to make money off your content until well after you're dead.
... It's for the ability to east the separation of me from my money. I constantly think about it, every time I use a computer. "The one thing lacking in this OS, the one fault of the developer, is that not once did they think about my pocketbook and how it's too full. They really should divert development time from other features to make it easier to spend money. I really don't do enough of that, and there are so few ways for me to do it."
Dammit, and I was just getting to like Ubuntu as a mature competitor to the commercial offerings. I had even convinced a few friends to try it. Now I'll look like a fucking shill.
And here I was always told that security by obscurity was no security at all.
Because those are the only ones where he'll be marginally safe.
I wish they'd catch this guy so he'd shut the hell up. He's not Jason Bourne or James Bond, he's just another rich eccentric, and an attention whore.The world doesn't need more of either of those.
Don't know if that's a troll, but you did answer your own question. There are only 315 preorders for this thing. Sounds like a hobbyist device to me.
Yeah, for most people it's stupid, but that's the definition for every piece of equipment that every hobbyist buys, regardless of the hobby.
Now the actual project feels a bit dicey to me. First of all the Fixed Funding campaign. That means that he takes all the money regardless of if it reaches its funding goal. That's very suspect in a hardware project. Hardware projects need an economy of scale to get decent volume pricing. The fact that he apparently doesn't care how many he sells tells me he's either a) clueless, b) a scammer, or c) making a not-insignificant profit on each and every one. Which means this is a rebadged $50 tablet, which means it's shit.
The January ship date means it's obviously an OEM tablet. So the "building" part of "building a powerful tablet" is obviously BS. If he was actually building a table the startup costs would be 100x and the delivery date would be at least 18 months out.
He also says "Given the busy holiday manufacturing and shipping schedules we will not have the devices before Christmas." which makes it seem like he's getting the things specially built. Except he's not, he simply can't at that volume and price. The real reason it's not a good Christmas gift is that the software won't be done. In fact I doubt if he'll hit a January ship date, just looking at the updates on the site, there is a ton of work left to do to clean this project up.
Yes, he's doing some software development, putting together the free work that others have contributed. And he's not selling software, he's selling hardware, which feels like a bait and switch.
He doesn't need to sell the hardware. As mentioned elsewhere up-thread, there are tablets out there that can do what this does. He's just looking for a way to get paid for free software.
DRM. I love to keep installs as simple as possible. Every program should be able to be run on removable media. But back when I had a little less control over the software I develop, clients were horrified by such an idea. They wanted applications locked to a specific machine, permanently, if possible. If they would have known the lingo they would have asked for rootkits and BIOS viruses to keep their app from running anywhere it wasn't supposed to. (They would have gone with hardware dongles, but they were far too cheep for that.)
And to do that (Without hardware dongles) you have to get stupid. Insinuate files into places they're not supposed to be and generally just dick with a person's computer in a way that would make them unhappy if it wasn't hidden by a shiny graphic on the installer's splash screen.
You can understand why I don't do that work anymore, but I guarantee that someone does.
An alternate analogy with a completely different answer:
If you're being physically attacked, is it legal for you to use physical force to defend yourself?
(Or should you only be allowed to use purely defensive measures and call the cops, who will do nothing.)
Except if the MPAA gets wind of this they'll close you down and slap you with a lawsuit. It's pretty explicitly prohibited in the draconian license the make you watch infront of every film.
I think they have two options:
1) Go for the old people market. Stock movies and TV shows from the 50's - 70's that old people like, advertise to them. Work up delivery deals with local care facilities.
2) The other option would be focusing on foreign films and TV. They are rarely available for streaming in the US. I'd also get a few region-free DVD players and rent them out. I know several DVD rental places that make good money by doing this for local immigrant communities.
Engineering, as it's practiced in other fields, is applying existing models (often created by scientists) to make something new or modify something old. Bridge building applies a lot of science but doesn't do any science.
Scientists postulate new theorems, perform and evaluate studies, publish papers on those studies.
The vast majority of CS grads go into jobs where they use existing languages, algorithms, APIs and libraries to create something new or modify something old. Thus Engineers, not scientists. How many CS grads have even submitted papers to peer review?
Yes, there are the CS people doing actual science, performing studies, creating the new stuff for all the future SE's to use, but they're the vast minority. If you want to see more than 2 in the same room go to SIGGRAPH.
Great idea... but that's just not going to work either.
Very few projects can simply open up their code without getting into all kinds of legal trouble. Third party libraries, distribution agreements, confidentiality agreements, licenses, employment contracts, etc ad infinitum. Some of this can be negotiated around, some can't. None of it can happen without people willing to put in the time and energy (and money) to do it.*
And I don't believe the government should be intervening in business to place them in a Catch-22. (The Catch-22 here is being forced to either support a money-losing product or pay to provide a public version.) This would have a deeply chilling effect on business and innovation. Who would go into a business they knew they could never get out of no matter how bad it got? Answer: Assholes looking for a government bailout.
The correct solution is that the market (ie: you and I) should punish the companies that favor lock-in and don't make fault-tolerant equipment, and reward those who don't create dead-end products.
*Source: Having been on the inside of companies that try to take private software open source.
Zynga would simply can everyone at the first sign of unionizing. Most of their workforce is fresh, gullible, college grads, and there is always a new crop of them.
Everything you're shipping has been on a container ship or equivalent before, when it was shipped from China to you. Don't over think it.
However, having done several moves across the Pacific I would say this: Mail your valuables. You get tracking, you get insurance, and someone just might read the "FRAGILE" sticker on the outside. Better yet, travel with them. If it's truly valuable, a carry-on bag is the best way.
(Note: Depending on your country of destination you may have import especially when mailing tech. Can't help you with information on that since you didn't say where your final destination is.)
Some things, especially displays, may cost more to mail than to buy new. Consider this a chance to get a new monitor.
Moving across an ocean is a great way to reconsider how important things are. My last two moves between the US and Asia I pared my belongings down to less than a cubic meter and I was happier for it.
That works great, if the car sees you. If the car sees you they're not going to hit you.
I've been hit by a car. It cracked my pelvis, took lots of skin off me. Oh, and my helmet was cracked too. But I was alert enough after the impact to hear the distraught driver saying "I didn't see you!" over and over and over.
I would almost certainly not be able to post this if I hadn't been wearing that helmet.
Don't make helmet laws mandatory. But if you don't wear a helmet and you get into an accident you have to pay 100% of your medical bills. No one else should pay for your stupid.
When I need to evaluate some new tech, be it an API, language, tool, or just about anything else, the first thing I look at is the documentation, after that I look at the community support. Because I know I'm going to get stuck at some point and I need to know that there will be a way out. Even if another tool will technically be a better fit for what I'm trying to do, I'll still give it a pass in favor of a tool that I know what it can and can't do.
Not that good docs are easy, they're not. They take lots of time, even for bad ones, but if you want to see adoption you need docs that include usage examples. This is primarily why Open Hardware companies have been growing like crazy while Radio Shack stagnates. They don't just sell a 555 timer, they provide dozens of free tutorials showing all the cool shit you can make with it.
In fact is says right on the announcement page that "Beam is no robot". So no need to be 3 laws compliant.
I'm still looking for a use case for telepresence robots. It needs to be a situation where all of these things apply:
1) I need to "freely" move around where I'm not. There are lots of situations where I would want this. However the situational awareness of these things is very poor. I drove one around and ended up rolling around the Y-Combinator offices without knowing it. For a tour of a place, office, factory, photos and handheld video would be preferable. (It's very difficult to "look around" with these thing. turning is slow.)
2) I don't need to touch anything. This is sort of the breaker. If I don't need to touch anything, why not just teleconference? Yeah, teleconferences kind of stink, but they do work. (And I can screw off during the parts that don't concern me. Try doing that in person!) If I actually need to do things then I need to be there in person with my arms and hands and fingers.
3) Movement is completely unrestricted where I need to be. Doors are all automatic. No stairs. No elevators.
4) Someone has the money to spend on these. They're expensive. People tend to abuse them, which makes them a maintenance problem.
5) No one cares about the Uncanny Valley. These things are deep in it and people react not positively to them. People hit the Emergency stop button to make the telepresence go away, people sit their drinks on them. Or push them around, pick them up. Drop them. Or just ignore them. People don't react to them like they're people. And there's really no way in the near future to get them out of this valley.
The closest I get for this is a factory tour in China. (For people who live a long distance from China.) But frankly if I need to take a factory tour I have the money to do it, and it would be worth my time to fly there and do it in person.
For anything else it seems like "Skype on a stick" is more than good enough. Does anyone have a legitimate (ie: not "it's cool!") use case for telepresence bots like this?
Becoming? They always were.
Repeat this until it sticks in your head: If you're not paying for it you're the product not the customer.