There are only 144 right people in all of Verizon. The other 10,000 reps are wrong and they put you through to each other. I was on the phone for THREE HOURS trying to set up a dry loop DSL that doesn't have voice.
Can we also get visual maps without actually dialing? Verizon frisbees you all over their phone tree with their legendary "I'll get someone who can help you" (either dumps customer back into one of the queues or gets a department that doesn't actually handle your question.)
With a visual map it might show you what to say to the next wrong rep in the chain.
I got this one. I've studied this area as a fan for about six years now. Here we go.
Take all your nouns and stick them on a NASA gyro and spin them all sideways into the other sentences.
You said:
From wireless watches to LCD goggles
Can someone tell me when we ever had wired watches?
And since I had an LCD wristwatch about 20 years ago, I'm not sure what this business about "wearable technology" is talking about.
I walk the dog with a radio clipped to my belt listening to the Sox game, and I've been doing that since about 1965 (though with a different dog and mono earphones).
So what, now we're going to have another round of LCD glasses that suck?...Why are LCD glasses and watches with WiFi considered "wearable technology" but 3G smartphones you can put in a pocket or wear on your belt and media players that clip to your shirt pocket are not wearable technology.
If it's in your pocket, it's not "wearable" because it's just one more thing crammed into your pocket. Unless you have a few tricks enabled, to use it you... pull it out of your pocket. Then it's not being worn. Clipping it to your belt is an odd hybrid I'll pass on. Belts are like the Switzerland of style - we expect large objects to be clipped there that don't look right anywhere else.
That leads into what is in fact a profound part of the field that hasn't quite made the discussion. Wearable tech has to be stylish. All those jokes about bad style are the court jester telling us the way it is. Now, those bluetooth earbuds - that's your first clue we're starting to do things right, combined with the social change needed in tandem. Tell me those don't look like the first small piece of the Borg ensemble! I wouldn't have predicted those would cross the rubicon of cool, but someone made it work so here they are. Right. Next!
There are about four signature types of wearable tech that are the science fiction holy grails, and apparently there's room for a few more wildcards like those bluetooth earpieces. Let's start with watches! I had one of these mp3 watches (though lower capacity at the time.) (Ps. the USB cord tucks into the watch out of sight.)
Would you have pegged that as a Music Player!!? (I think wearable tech is Matrix-Urban, so I liked that design. But for the dinners & ties crowd there was another one that looks like one of those "you made salesman of the week" company bonuses.)
Elsewhere in that story about the Best Buy - iTunes Required disaster, people were starting to chime in that they missed the simple mounted mp3 players. Who needs this cloud junk? Wear your music collection on your arm! And for the icecream on top - remember that mp3 players are flash drives with extra hardware? So 1GB can also contain your entire mobile data collection! Wired Watch. Check.
LCD Glasses are the next one, but also one of the hardest! Look, there's the court jester reminding us about style again. Turns out that you need the components to be brutally small to hide in the glasses form factor. The Smart Phone is getting close - it's packing the beginnings of usable computing power into Hand Size form factor. So you can't quite get the whole computer into the glasses yet. But you don't need to! THAT's the use case of the pocket! You can get away with clunky stuff in your pocket. So the glasses are... wait for it... the ulimate in privacy! A monitor that no one can peek at! No more furtive switching tabs between your manly sports feed and Lady Gaga!
The good news is that they are almost here! The article is once again the court jester grudgingly admitting that we're close enough on the style front that it's "safe for the masses to talk about." It's not a great article. (Quoting articles from 2008?! Really?!)
"Hi Amazon! Here's a 42 wheel truck. All your servers are belong to us in one click. You have no chance to survive. Ha Ha Ha. Ha Ha. (Duet between Zero Wing and Nelson.)
It depends how much time we waste with phantom terrorists.
We wasted an entire DECADE on a false crusade with a disastrously mismanaged run against Osama. "Let's go raid Afghanistan! Where has he been for four years? Pakistan!"
Notice how the media posted five stories then shut up?
X trillion dollars later we're whining about budget crises.
If we had spent that time and money on tech, we'd BE in Kurzweils's land.
For that to happen for free you need to declare the contents of your game system Creative Commons BY-SA which is Attribution-ShareAlike, and avoids the weird tangles regarding ad revenue vs "non commercial".
Then you have to develop the Literacy Pyramid, which is what every single copyright-clueless entity always falls into, proving that they are about the lawyers instead of the writers. The Literacy Pyramid says that you need a base of some 100 Lurkers to get about 7 Enthusiasts. But the output of Enthusiasts may not be to the standards of the Creator or the Skilled Amateur! So then you need to let 100 Enthusiasts stomp around leaving muddy tracks everywhere to get your 7 Skilled Amateurs. So every time Eric Flint whines on the Baen Free Library that "it's too expensive to digitize old works therefore they will never be republished" he's full of...jellyBaens because it's somehow magically worth paying the lawyers afterward to sue the Enthusiasts as they stomp around.
So are you ready to do a little carpet cleaning to get your game out there?
I managed to get my iPhone to work on it, so it's all the "Apple Goodness" of the iPhone but without the nasty contract. I'll skate by your rules and say that the point of the $100 level is that the minutes last for a whole year. Very roughly converting "per call" rates vs your "half hour per month", it's a dead heat that the plan will last you exactly one year.
Plus you can relive the cheesetastic Meatloaf commercial.
I meant that it was RPG's that introduced me to the problem of what happens when the GM *is* unskilled, as in a classic pitfall to be avoided each and every campaign.
Then later, musing on it, I saw some IRL connections at the symbolic level. Monty Haul caught up with the car companies in the form of the SUV craze. SUV's are "leveled up cars". Why own some stinkin' compact when you can have your own civillian tank? Except... other factors sent gas to $4 a gallon, and then those 35 gallon tanks weren't so much fun anymore.
Heh damnit sir, you made me forego my Powers of Moderation to apply.
What Gary Gygax showed was the Monty Haul effect, spelling variances intended. That terms mean that once you reach the sane limits of stimulation, you have nowhere to go but "boring".
Deadly lesson, worth its weight if you can really get it.
You missed the words "generation" and "century". I'll keep my hardbound library for another 20 years. Then the next generation of miscreats who gets it as an estate are the ones who will ditch it, maybe ebay.
A century is a long time. However Print On Demand will be a household / mall thing by then so it could get complcated.
What if they were still lost in the hall of mirrors and bought sun to KILL the open innovations?
They couldn't legally nuke forking options so they made the OSS community do extra work to re-spread mindshare etc. I'll leave it to my betters to decide where Java and friends stand.
What if they bought Sun to kill a threat to the entire Proprietary model?
But is it the right thing? Slightly at odds to my remarks about Microsoft in a sibling post, let's try this Microsoft example from Wikipedia.
Any comments?
--- From Wikipedia Impact of the changes
Opponents of H.R. 1249 assert that the impact of the changes to the current law will be to effectively neuter the U.S. patent system. Patents owned by startup companies, research institutions, and independent inventors ("startups") will be unenforceable against large corporations. Avistar Communications Corporation's encounter with Microsoft illustrates how this plays out. In 2007 Avistar was a startup developing desktop videoconferencing and online collaboration tools. Avistar had 29 U.S. patents, a number of pending U.S. patent applications, and numerous foreign patents and applications. Avistar approached Microsoft to negotiate a license to Avistar's patented technology. Microsoft wanted a license on terms Avistar would not agree to, and decided to use post-grant opposition in the PTO to litigate Avistar into submission. After six months of licensing negotiations, Microsoft, in February and March 2008, requested reexamination of each of Avistar's 29 U.S. patents.[66] Defending a single patent in a reexamination proceeding "routinely costs a patent owner hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees."[67] To pay the legal expenses associated with the reexaminations, Avistar, in April 2008, announced that it would cut its work force by about 25 percent.[68] This was not enough. With legal costs piling up, Avistar was forced to sell substantially all of its U.S. patents and patent applications, and related foreign patents and patent applications to Intellectual Ventures ("IV"). IV, originally called the Patent Defense Fund, was founded in 2000 by two-ex Microsoft employees. The idea was that IV would provide a way for Microsoft and other large technology companies to protect themselves against patented inventions. "Initially, each company... was asked to pony up $50 million. The plan was that IV would then go out and buy patents that were knocking dangerously around the marketplace, and investors would get a license to the entire portfolioâ"effectively immunizing them from the danger of intellectual property litigation." [69]. IV has raised over $5 billion.[70] Avistar sold its patent portolio to IV in January 2010, taking a grant-back license so it could continue to sell its patented products.[71]
Avistarâ(TM)s encounter with Microsoft reduced the price of Avistar stock 61%,[72] and Avistar no longer owned the intellectual property it spent years developing. Microsoft imposed unbearable costs on Avistar using the reexamination procedure available under current law, i.e. without the benefit of the even costlier post-grant opposition procedures created by H.R. 1249. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Invents_Act
"Write letters, call, visit". Really?! You tried hard to write a good story so it's like that Dr. Who episode that double-pulls what the other guy thinks for a combined result of Bad.
It's all Intellectual Property. (Cashew gallery, please hold the comments.) Why are patents so thunderously different from Copyright when we're just starting to see the crossovers such as "WantToPatent Methods" stuff being rendered as Art/Math/Other.
Let's work with your comment above. "How will a Senator or Representative know what are the important topics their constituents need addressed?" You mean by tweeting it with a pair of pantyhose attached? One tweet (plus maybe dupes) *ended a congressman's career*. What constituents demanded that? Yet to get their attention to vote the way we hope, we have to go LITERALLY Get On Their Lawn? (Visit). I'll leave it my betters in the Philosophy & Science departments to state what brand of bias that is. (I'm taking your story absolutely face up - this is just what appears to be the chilling results of the national mood.) So if I make non-commercial copies of songs I get to have a nice visit from $10,000 of SWAT but to get patent reform we have to write - call - visit? Why not just post a killer meme song on YouTube? (Hang on tight, this is gonna scare a couple of you.) Has anyone asked Steve Ballmer if he has released the rights to "Developer"? MS wanted this reform too right? Get Steve Ballmer to sign on with his signature meme and it's a lock!!
Please try to follow your own instincts. Energize your local community. Parody the worst parts of culture so it can be improved. Share your ideas with others. It is important that you stay independent.
Forgive the giddy Friday phrasing, but you made me think of the famous phrase from the courts. Truth, Whole Truth, Nothing But Truth.
So apparently MS's comment isn't a total fabrication. I think you're saying it isn't laced with fud if in fact it is tricky to implement. So the new hotness in marketing must be skipping Nothing But Truth.
I'll state it another way. $Category has a problem such as difficult to implement. $Company complains that $CompetingSolution has a problem, but they carefully phrase it to make it sound like the problem *does not* belong to the $Category, implying that their solution escapes the flaw by Fallacy of Omission.
Slashdot Mirror
Shutting down a two person operation = massive dent in the problem? How many hundreds of people were raided by copyright SWATs?
The Cake is a Weapon!
There are only 144 right people in all of Verizon. The other 10,000 reps are wrong and they put you through to each other. I was on the phone for THREE HOURS trying to set up a dry loop DSL that doesn't have voice.
Can we also get visual maps without actually dialing? Verizon frisbees you all over their phone tree with their legendary "I'll get someone who can help you" (either dumps customer back into one of the queues or gets a department that doesn't actually handle your question.)
With a visual map it might show you what to say to the next wrong rep in the chain.
Are you sure?
Didn't Apple just get the broadest patent ever for "making finger gestures that mean stuff"?
I got this one. I've studied this area as a fan for about six years now. Here we go.
Take all your nouns and stick them on a NASA gyro and spin them all sideways into the other sentences.
You said:
Can someone tell me when we ever had wired watches?
And since I had an LCD wristwatch about 20 years ago, I'm not sure what this business about "wearable technology" is talking about.
I walk the dog with a radio clipped to my belt listening to the Sox game, and I've been doing that since about 1965 (though with a different dog and mono earphones).
So what, now we're going to have another round of LCD glasses that suck? ...Why are LCD glasses and watches with WiFi considered "wearable technology" but 3G smartphones you can put in a pocket or wear on your belt and media players that clip to your shirt pocket are not wearable technology.
If it's in your pocket, it's not "wearable" because it's just one more thing crammed into your pocket. Unless you have a few tricks enabled, to use it you ... pull it out of your pocket. Then it's not being worn. Clipping it to your belt is an odd hybrid I'll pass on. Belts are like the Switzerland of style - we expect large objects to be clipped there that don't look right anywhere else.
That leads into what is in fact a profound part of the field that hasn't quite made the discussion. Wearable tech has to be stylish. All those jokes about bad style are the court jester telling us the way it is. Now, those bluetooth earbuds - that's your first clue we're starting to do things right, combined with the social change needed in tandem. Tell me those don't look like the first small piece of the Borg ensemble! I wouldn't have predicted those would cross the rubicon of cool, but someone made it work so here they are. Right. Next!
There are about four signature types of wearable tech that are the science fiction holy grails, and apparently there's room for a few more wildcards like those bluetooth earpieces. Let's start with watches! I had one of these mp3 watches (though lower capacity at the time.) (Ps. the USB cord tucks into the watch out of sight.)
http://store.usbwatches.net/xonix-1gb-mp3.html
Would you have pegged that as a Music Player!!? (I think wearable tech is Matrix-Urban, so I liked that design. But for the dinners & ties crowd there was another one that looks like one of those "you made salesman of the week" company bonuses.)
Elsewhere in that story about the Best Buy - iTunes Required disaster, people were starting to chime in that they missed the simple mounted mp3 players. Who needs this cloud junk? Wear your music collection on your arm! And for the icecream on top - remember that mp3 players are flash drives with extra hardware? So 1GB can also contain your entire mobile data collection! Wired Watch. Check.
LCD Glasses are the next one, but also one of the hardest! Look, there's the court jester reminding us about style again. Turns out that you need the components to be brutally small to hide in the glasses form factor. The Smart Phone is getting close - it's packing the beginnings of usable computing power into Hand Size form factor. So you can't quite get the whole computer into the glasses yet. But you don't need to! THAT's the use case of the pocket! You can get away with clunky stuff in your pocket. So the glasses are ... wait for it ... the ulimate in privacy! A monitor that no one can peek at! No more furtive switching tabs between your manly sports feed and Lady Gaga!
The good news is that they are almost here! The article is once again the court jester grudgingly admitting that we're close enough on the style front that it's "safe for the masses to talk about." It's not a great article. (Quoting articles from 2008?! Really?!)
"Hi Amazon! Here's a 42 wheel truck. All your servers are belong to us in one click. You have no chance to survive. Ha Ha Ha. Ha Ha. (Duet between Zero Wing and Nelson.)
This is worse.
Conventional disasters don't give you jail sentences for owning a copyrighted pic of a terrorist engaging in Pr0n.
Veni Sharks Vici.
Came for the Sharks. Left satisfied.
It depends how much time we waste with phantom terrorists.
We wasted an entire DECADE on a false crusade with a disastrously mismanaged run against Osama. "Let's go raid Afghanistan! Where has he been for four years? Pakistan!"
Notice how the media posted five stories then shut up?
X trillion dollars later we're whining about budget crises.
If we had spent that time and money on tech, we'd BE in Kurzweils's land.
Calling your bluff. What state are you in?
For that to happen for free you need to declare the contents of your game system Creative Commons BY-SA which is Attribution-ShareAlike, and avoids the weird tangles regarding ad revenue vs "non commercial".
Then you have to develop the Literacy Pyramid, which is what every single copyright-clueless entity always falls into, proving that they are about the lawyers instead of the writers. The Literacy Pyramid says that you need a base of some 100 Lurkers to get about 7 Enthusiasts. But the output of Enthusiasts may not be to the standards of the Creator or the Skilled Amateur! So then you need to let 100 Enthusiasts stomp around leaving muddy tracks everywhere to get your 7 Skilled Amateurs. So every time Eric Flint whines on the Baen Free Library that "it's too expensive to digitize old works therefore they will never be republished" he's full of ...jellyBaens because it's somehow magically worth paying the lawyers afterward to sue the Enthusiasts as they stomp around.
So are you ready to do a little carpet cleaning to get your game out there?
$100 GoPhone.
I managed to get my iPhone to work on it, so it's all the "Apple Goodness" of the iPhone but without the nasty contract. I'll skate by your rules and say that the point of the $100 level is that the minutes last for a whole year. Very roughly converting "per call" rates vs your "half hour per month", it's a dead heat that the plan will last you exactly one year.
Plus you can relive the cheesetastic Meatloaf commercial.
What are the #3 4 5 languages? Aka count counting Java, not C++.
Let's say Google squashes this and everyone boycotts Oracle and Java. Anyone have thoughts on what the dark horse language is?
I keep hearing Python mentioned. Aside from the "whiter syntax" apparently it might let me write non-OO programs more like BASIC but more modern.
Hmm, maybe I scrambled my words a little.
I meant that it was RPG's that introduced me to the problem of what happens when the GM *is* unskilled, as in a classic pitfall to be avoided each and every campaign.
Then later, musing on it, I saw some IRL connections at the symbolic level. Monty Haul caught up with the car companies in the form of the SUV craze. SUV's are "leveled up cars". Why own some stinkin' compact when you can have your own civillian tank? Except ... other factors sent gas to $4 a gallon, and then those 35 gallon tanks weren't so much fun anymore.
Heh damnit sir, you made me forego my Powers of Moderation to apply.
What Gary Gygax showed was the Monty Haul effect, spelling variances intended. That terms mean that once you reach the sane limits of stimulation, you have nowhere to go but "boring".
Deadly lesson, worth its weight if you can really get it.
Hiya.
You missed the words "generation" and "century". I'll keep my hardbound library for another 20 years. Then the next generation of miscreats who gets it as an estate are the ones who will ditch it, maybe ebay.
A century is a long time. However Print On Demand will be a household / mall thing by then so it could get complcated.
Wow, Note to self to save $100 aside to buy some five of them sometime.
What if they were still lost in the hall of mirrors and bought sun to KILL the open innovations?
They couldn't legally nuke forking options so they made the OSS community do extra work to re-spread mindshare etc. I'll leave it to my betters to decide where Java and friends stand.
What if they bought Sun to kill a threat to the entire Proprietary model?
Robert Frost Likes this.
But is it the right thing?
Slightly at odds to my remarks about Microsoft in a sibling post, let's try this Microsoft example from Wikipedia.
Any comments?
--- From Wikipedia
Impact of the changes
Opponents of H.R. 1249 assert that the impact of the changes to the current law will be to effectively neuter the U.S. patent system. Patents owned by startup companies, research institutions, and independent inventors ("startups") will be unenforceable against large corporations. Avistar Communications Corporation's encounter with Microsoft illustrates how this plays out. In 2007 Avistar was a startup developing desktop videoconferencing and online collaboration tools. Avistar had 29 U.S. patents, a number of pending U.S. patent applications, and numerous foreign patents and applications. Avistar approached Microsoft to negotiate a license to Avistar's patented technology. Microsoft wanted a license on terms Avistar would not agree to, and decided to use post-grant opposition in the PTO to litigate Avistar into submission. After six months of licensing negotiations, Microsoft, in February and March 2008, requested reexamination of each of Avistar's 29 U.S. patents.[66] Defending a single patent in a reexamination proceeding "routinely costs a patent owner hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees."[67] To pay the legal expenses associated with the reexaminations, Avistar, in April 2008, announced that it would cut its work force by about 25 percent.[68] This was not enough. With legal costs piling up, Avistar was forced to sell substantially all of its U.S. patents and patent applications, and related foreign patents and patent applications to Intellectual Ventures ("IV"). IV, originally called the Patent Defense Fund, was founded in 2000 by two-ex Microsoft employees. The idea was that IV would provide a way for Microsoft and other large technology companies to protect themselves against patented inventions. "Initially, each company ... was asked to pony up $50 million. The plan was that IV would then go out and buy patents that were knocking dangerously around the marketplace, and investors would get a license to the entire portfolioâ"effectively immunizing them from the danger of intellectual property litigation." [69]. IV has raised over $5 billion.[70] Avistar sold its patent portolio to IV in January 2010, taking a grant-back license so it could continue to sell its patented products.[71]
Avistarâ(TM)s encounter with Microsoft reduced the price of Avistar stock 61%,[72] and Avistar no longer owned the intellectual property it spent years developing. Microsoft imposed unbearable costs on Avistar using the reexamination procedure available under current law, i.e. without the benefit of the even costlier post-grant opposition procedures created by H.R. 1249.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Invents_Act
Forgive the bitterness below.
"Write letters, call, visit". Really?! You tried hard to write a good story so it's like that Dr. Who episode that double-pulls what the other guy thinks for a combined result of Bad.
It's all Intellectual Property. (Cashew gallery, please hold the comments.) Why are patents so thunderously different from Copyright when we're just starting to see the crossovers such as "WantToPatent Methods" stuff being rendered as Art/Math/Other.
Let's work with your comment above. "How will a Senator or Representative know what are the important topics their constituents need addressed?" You mean by tweeting it with a pair of pantyhose attached? One tweet (plus maybe dupes) *ended a congressman's career*. What constituents demanded that? Yet to get their attention to vote the way we hope, we have to go LITERALLY Get On Their Lawn? (Visit). I'll leave it my betters in the Philosophy & Science departments to state what brand of bias that is. (I'm taking your story absolutely face up - this is just what appears to be the chilling results of the national mood.) So if I make non-commercial copies of songs I get to have a nice visit from $10,000 of SWAT but to get patent reform we have to write - call - visit? Why not just post a killer meme song on YouTube? (Hang on tight, this is gonna scare a couple of you.) Has anyone asked Steve Ballmer if he has released the rights to "Developer"? MS wanted this reform too right? Get Steve Ballmer to sign on with his signature meme and it's a lock!!
Please try to follow your own instincts.
Energize your local community.
Parody the worst parts of culture so it can be improved.
Share your ideas with others.
It is important that you stay independent.
Fermat Likes this.
Forgive the giddy Friday phrasing, but you made me think of the famous phrase from the courts. Truth, Whole Truth, Nothing But Truth.
So apparently MS's comment isn't a total fabrication. I think you're saying it isn't laced with fud if in fact it is tricky to implement. So the new hotness in marketing must be skipping Nothing But Truth.
I'll state it another way. $Category has a problem such as difficult to implement. $Company complains that $CompetingSolution has a problem, but they carefully phrase it to make it sound like the problem *does not* belong to the $Category, implying that their solution escapes the flaw by Fallacy of Omission.
Mu.
(It's a Buddhist joke Mods.)