Now if it wasn't $57,000 US and I was sure the frame wouldn't rot out and have to be replaced every 5 years I would pick one of these up.
Then where I'm going I wouldn't need roads...
Robyn Beck / Getty Images
The DeLorean was featured in all three "Back to the Future" films starring Christopher Lloyd. See full image
Source: New DeLorean company to revive car
Too bad John De Lorean isn't around to see this.
Stephen King defaces his own books at an Aussie bookstore.
He was lovely, very nice, charming," she said. "He introduced me to his friends and we had a talk and then I said 'Well, I'll leave you to the tomatoes.'
"I don't think he wanted people to know he was here but I told him that if I knew he was coming I would have baked him a cake."
Of the six books that King signed, five would be given to community groups for fund-raising auctions, she said.
The sixth was bought by the customer who mistook King for a vandal.
Source: Horror author Stephen King mistaken for vandal in Aussie outback - Yahoo! News
Try selling your app for $3 million to TripAdvisor.
Not bad for a map that you click on.
Just for the sake of argument, what would some of you pay to acquire an app like this?
$1000?
$5000?
$10000?
Currently, the model seems to be $1000 in expenses with little revenue.
Social network motivating factors...
The nine motivations are:
* Financial. Immediate or future financial rewards
* Contribution. Feeling of contributing to something socially worthwhile.
* Outcome. Benefiting by using or applying the outcomes created by the network.
* Learning. Learning from leading thinkers or peers or through the participation itself.
* Community. Feeling of belonging to and participating in a group with shared values or interests.
* Reputation. Enhanced reputation and esteem from others.
* Coolness. Being involved in interesting, exciting, and novel domains with broad appeal.
* Fun. Enjoying play, exploration, and social interaction.
* Fairness. Feeling there is equitable share of rewards (this is in fact most often a demotivator, if people believe that reward sharing in the network is inequitable).
Source: Trends in the Living Networks
Are you targeting the Nintendo Wii when building your web applications? I think no!
Operating System
Total Market Share
Windows XP
81.40%
5.41%
3.74%
3.36%
2.61%
1.05%
0.75%
0.64%
0.56%
0.14%
0.08%
0.06%
0.04%
0.03%
0.03%Report generated Tuesday, August 14, 2007 6:41:26 PM
Source: Market share for browsers, operating systems and search engines
Could this be the non-touchscreen version of Microsoft Surface, created way back in 2004?
Will have to try this one out....
CPNMouse : Multiple Mice in Windows
Windows XP SP2
This is a temporary workaround:
- All your input devices must be working under Windows (i.e. the device should not be disabled and a driver should be installed etc. -- basically you should be able to controll the mouse cursor by moving all your input devices).)
- You must be Administrator.
- Copy cpnmouse.inf to c:\windows\inf
- Copy cpnmouse.sys to c:\windows\system32
- Select "System" from the control panel. If "System" is not visible, click "Select classic view" at the left of the window.
- Select the "Hardware" tab.
- Click "Device Manager".
- Expand the "Mice and other pointing devices"-tree.
- Double-click on the desired input device.
- Select the "Driver" tab.
- Click "Update Driver".
- Select "No, not at this time"
- Make sure "Install from a list or specific location" is checked.
- Click "Next"
- Make sure "Don't search. I will choose the driver to install" is checked.
- Click "Next".
- "CPN Tools mouse filter driver" should be available. Select it.
- Click "Next".
- Click "Yes".
- Click "Continue Anyway".
- Windows will ask for a CD. Simply point it to the location of cpnmouse.sys.
Source: CPNMouse : Multiple Mice in Windows
Or this one is a bit newer and direct from Microsoft...
The Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Software Development Kit (SDK) helps developers create programs that enable the use of multiple mice on a single computer.
http://www.ardentdev.com/blog/index.php/2007/06/04/multiple-mouse-pointers-in-windows/
MBA on a page, the largest list of management theories ever published on the Internet?
Link to Management Methods | Management Models | Management Theories
Toronto libraries get piledrived.
A sign of the times. I went to BMV books next to the World's Biggest Bookstore last Sunday and they were very busy, with a huge backlog of boxes of books, magazines, and movies they were purchasing & pricing, and lots of browsers.
They have compressed their Sundays into shorter hours to save costs too.
I can see that stores like Chapters & BMV will see some increases in sales after library cuts, though the people who will suffer most are the fixed income, new immigrants, and students who can't afford the $20-$40 average price for a book.
What leaves are being torn from the Toronto Public Library? To start with, the Toronto Reference Library, the Lillian H. Smith Library (affecting both the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books and the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculative and Fantasy literature), and fourteen other branches (including North York Central, Albert Campbell, Bloor/Gladstone, Brentwood, Don Mills, Downsview, Eatonville, Fairview, Goldhawk Park, New Toronto, Northern District, Pape/Danforth, Parkdale, and Parliament) will be closed on Sundays beginning in September. Furthermore, a seventeenth branch (Jane/Dundas, currently undergoing renovations) will be mothballed until further notice. On top of this, the TPL has reportedly cancelled the purchase of 14,000 items, mostly books and periodicals. These are cuts that library users will see.
Source: Imagining Toronto
Over 14,000 items. My collection has only 500-600 books and still fills over 7 bookshelves and a bunch of boxes.
Why didn't they close libraries on Wednesdays or Thursdays, or open to private events on Fridays?
Sunday is considered a day of rest and relaxation, so wouldn't it make sense to close then?
Hopefully the $100 laptop will be released soon, as impoverished Toronto councillors and residents may need them to read books on. Mayor Miller only makes $144K/year, compared to his Vaugan counterpart Mayor Di Biase at $164K.
$20k can buy a lot of books. Perhaps Mr. Miller could convince Mr. Di Biase to give him a loan. Just one weekend of yard saling collecting $1 books for our libraries could get us 20,000 books.
Perhaps this kind of money would be better spent and more appreciated overseas. A library in Cambodia costs $5-$15k.
But they're still cool designers.
The market value for any digitally reproducible product that is not specific to anyone’s needs is close to zero, as there is always another similar thing around that goes out for free. Why free? Because the free product gets a lot of high value attention and makes up for its actual sales loss with Google ad words or some nice contract…
Source: Information Architects Japan » iA Notebook » Realitycheck: What Works on the Web
DISCOVERY
Life is a journey, and you take the time to smell every single rose along the way. Your brain is a sponge, soaking up every detail of life around you, and you constantly look inward to figure out the ties that bind you to the universe. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's what makes you tick. You might like hobbies like participating in archaeological digs, botany, assembling models, playing the stock market, meditation or even parapsychology.
They're right on the stock market... but I was never into models and parapsychology sounds too much like Bill Murray zapping somebody in Ghostbusters.
Discover your hobby: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/leisure/quiz/index.html
Apparently there is a magic box in the UK that can be attached to the back of a car and trap emissions for recycling as biodiesel.
The three estimate that 10 facilities could be built across the UK to handle the carbon dioxide from the nearly 30 million cars on British roads.
The inventors say they have spent nearly 170,000 pounds ($348,500) over two years developing the "three distinct technologies" involved and are hoping to secure more funding for health and safety testing.
Not surprisingly, the trio won't show anyone -- not even their wives -- what's inside the box.
After every demonstration they hide its individual components in various locations across North Wales and the technology is divided into three parts, with each inventor being custodian of one section.
"Our three minds hold the three keys and we can only unlock it together," said Houston.
Source: From Wales, a box to make biofuel from car fumes | Science | Reuters
Someone finally found a use for the lightning generator known as the Tesla Coil:
This is a solid-state Tesla coil. The primary runs at its resonant frequency in the 41 KHz range, and is modulated from the control unit in order to generate the tones you hear.
So just to explain a little further, yes, it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a "long" piece of fiber optics.
Singularity is an O/S from Microsoft currently being written on top of C#.NET. To me it looks a bit like the concept of Windows as an O/S, with DOS in the background, except Windows is written in C# instead of C++. It seems a bit redundant, like when MS should have done away with DOS altogether and stuck with strictly Windows as the O/S. Although I did spend a few years writing DOS command scripts, so I am glad they didn't or I would still be driving my Ford Escort with the holes in the floor. And it's tough to write an O/S, so kudos for the effort.
Singularity offers a unique opportunity to quantify the costs of
hardware and software isolation in an apples-to-apples
comparison. Once the costs are understood, individual systems
can choose to use hardware isolation when its benefits outweigh the costs.
I'm not sure whether that means it's going to run on a Macbook or not. I think what it means is that it will allow you to virtualize the O/S a bit more and run multiple O/S'es on the same box.
I think I would rather have my computer startup into Facebook as an O/S, with Word & Excel somewhere in my profile. Sounds a bit more fun. The blue screen of death could be a photo of one of your friends drunk at a party a couple of years ago wearing a lampshade hat.
It would also save my wife some time opening Internet Explorer and typing www.facebook.com.
The Facebook Platform reminds many of us of Windows; and people are calling it "the social operating system" on which you can develop your Internet apps.
Source: The Impact of Facebook's Platform
Why just Internet Apps?
I wonder if this guy got his Soundwave MP3 Player going in time for the movie. He could have made a killing.
The premise is simple. Someone needs to purchase the rights to use the image of Soundwave, the evil Decepticon Transformer, from Hasbro. Then make a hard disk-based MP3 player out of Soundwave (slightly smaller than the original Transformer toy, though, for portability) that actually transforms. Then sell the individual transforming cassette Transformers (Casseticons, was it?) as individual USB flash-based MP3 players that can be placed inside the larger Soundwave unit to extend its library.
Question: What the toughest challenge that an innovator faces?
Answer: It’s different for every innovator, but the one that crushes many is how bored the rest of the world was by their ideas. Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That’s a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don’t have the skills or emotional endurance for it.
Source: How to Change the World: Ten Questions with Scott Berkun, Author of "The Myths of Innovation"
So that night, I went out and I bought a premade pie crust. And a tub of Cool Whip. And then I stopped by a Korean grocery store and purchased a whole, frozen squid. And sprinkles.
I got back to the barracks, and started the preparations for the morning. Which pretty much just means I started thawing the squid in a shower stall. My roommate was a bit surprised when he got back.
“Is that a squid in our shower?”
“Yep.”
“What’s it doing in there.”
“Thawing.”
“Goodnight.”
Source: The 213 Things Skippy Is No Longer Allowed To Do In The U.S. Army
Russia has announced that the North Pole, Santa and all, are really a part of Russia.
It just so happens that the North Pole contains oil, diamonds, gold, and all kinds of valuable stuff that it will give up once Global Warming really kicks in.
However, there is a catch. Using their logic (an undersea shelf connects the land masses) would actually turn Russia into the 10th Province of Canada.
Canada "could say that the Lomonosov ridge is part of the Canadian shelf, which means Russia should in fact belong to Canada, together with the whole of Eurasia", he observed drily.
Santa may soon be announcing "Pozdrevlyayu s prazdnikom Rozhdestva i s Novim Godom" and to all a good night...
Hopefully the U.S. will give them North Pole, N.Y. instead and that expensive theme park that comes with it, or maybe send in the Snow Job.
Here are a couple of my royalty-based ideas to go along with this post. If anyone decides to make any money off of these, please give me a share or two in the new company, or some used hardware after it fries from all the traffic, or maybe an all-expenses paid trip for two to Tahiti.
The opportunity to monetize applications was a result of Facebook’s decision to allow developers to display unlimited advertisements. On par with advertising as a source of income, some developers, like myself, have come to prefer the use of affiliate links (finding leads for eBay, Amazon, etc) instead. Part of the reason is that Facebook does not allow developers to embed JavaScript within their code; hence making it difficult to enable Google Adsense for the content. Moreover, as is the case with MySpace, contextual advertising is not targeted enough to earn sizable revenues.
My own application is a mashup between Facebook and Amazon API’s to recommend, share, and comment on books. The “My Favorite Books” application is designed to earn through the 4% profit earned off every successful referral to Amazon. Combine this with Facebook’s 24 million active users and a business model instantly emerges.
Source: » Monetizing Facebook applications | The Social Web | ZDNet.com
Somehow I doubt that people will be buying books through Facebook. Though Amazon & Facebook should really consider changing names.
My top 10 Facebook money-making ideas:
1. Face-scam - Top of the pyramid. Every friend dumps $5 into a paypal account. The 100th friend gets $400. The person who started gets $100. The cycle rotates until everyone gets paid. (sounds a bit shady to me, and probably illegal in most states, but hey!)
2. Face-buster - Hit and Miss Blackjack - A round-robin game of blackjack among friends, similar to poking but with cards instead of pokes. (Online gambling is illegal in the States too, so this one probably will only work for us Canucks.)
3. Face-Am-Away - Purchase products and services at a "discount" and refer your friends. (See #1)
4. Face-Pizza - Somehow figure out how to distribute pizza through Facebook, at $1/slice. (I see a lot of fake pizza orders getting sent to your friends. Who ordered extra anchovies?)
5. Face-off - Create a mirror site that you can access from behind those pesky work firewalls, for only $4.99 for the first month ($29.95 afterwards)
6. Face-squatter - Register all the good names for yourself and auction them off to their rightful owners. (William H. Gates taken yet? How about Mie Cro Soft?)
7. Face-sitter - Get bonded individuals to manage your Facebook account for you, to keep on the ball with pokes and your wall, and to scan your friends walls for juicy gossip.
8. Face-mask - Build an app that blacks out all those pesky tagged pictures of you all hammered in compromising positions.
9. Face-bookie - Bet on the horses or when Paris Hilton will be released from prison.
10. Face-it - Let's you buy printed photos of you and your friends.
I know this is supposed to be 10, but I had to include
11. Face-mail - See #10 + mail the photos to your friends with standard blackmail letter cut out of newspaper letters, maybe with a slice of pizza.
Not any time soon. There is some writing on the wall that may affect its future though. The graffiti wall, that is.
Wang word processors -- the application, in this case -- were highly evolved, fantastically successful dedicated word processing systems that owned their market, until the general-purpose PC came along. While the PC at first was inferior at word processing, within a few years of its launch the fact that outside developers had built thousands of applications for it -- like spreadsheets -- that closed Wang word processors could not match, coupled with steadily improving PC-based word processing software like Wordstar, had all but killed the Wang word processor. Wang -- one of the most succcessful technology companies of the 1970's -- went bankrupt not long after.
Source: blog.pmarca.com: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in
When I saw Stephen King two weeks ago, his comment was that he was most productive when he had his word processor. He said his productivity actually dropped when he started using his computer to write stories. It must be something to do with his line-based style of writing vs. the block-based style.
With his line-based style, every sentence counts. Going back and changing it was a tedious and time-consuming task for editors or something you did late at night. The green display did not leave much to the imagination, or perhaps it left everything. There weren't many distractions. Ever seen a game of Solitaire on your old Wang word processor?
Then the computer comes along. Games. The first Social software comes along with bulletin board systems (BBS) discussion boards and user to user contact. Email. Newsgroups. Compuserve. The Well. Prodigy. Realtime Chat. Then the real internet opens the floodgates to the masses. MUDs. IRC. Frontpage web sites. Fly-by-night ISPs. Fly-by-day dot com companies. A stock market bubble. Dave Gorman. After a while, the internet and a slightly eccentric college student produced Facebook.
When Facebook opened its platform for developer apps a few weeks ago, the adoption rate on some of them were staggering. In 3 weeks iLike has over 2 million new users. (5% of Facebook population). Facebook supposedly adds a million users a day. There are over 1 billion people who may be using the internet in some way.
This pond is really deep.
I have met one person who is basing their entire business model on social applications and developing around this platform. For a venture capitalist, it probably cries out for funding. Taking the top down approach (as I scribble some figures on a napkin) it has the potential for.... $2,000,000 per day! That's if you can get 5% of their users to buy something for a dollar a day. Heck, I would sell "it" for $0.50 and settle for my million bucks a day.
How about the bottom-up approach? If I have 150 "friends" and promote my application to them, perhaps 7 1/2 may try it, and maybe 5 more from their network. Even if I'm Robert Scoble, my friends list is only 489. Guy Kawasaki even has 464.
That might explain the low turnout on my Bring Richard Cheese to Toronto group. (12 members at last count... no wait, 11 members now.) Or maybe it's because Richard, you SUCK for not adding me as a friend on Facebook. :) (Just kidding, get the band to Toronto.)
So how did iLike get so many users in so little time? The answer was being the first, and being able to promote the application virally within the Facebook community. You are more likely to adopt something if your best friend sends it to you rather than some guy from Nigeria, though the 5% rule works for them too.
When I first joined Facebook a few months ago, I was surprised at how empty it looked. There was not a whole lot of room for customization. This was not my little sister's MySpace. When a little 'edit application' sidebar appeared, it seemed like it opened up a portal to another world. Okay, so that's a bit melodramatic...
Stephen King wrote a short story called Word Processor of the Gods. In it, a man changes reality with a few sentences on the green screen of a device his recently deceased genius teenage nephew cobbled out of a Wang word processor. In the story the result happens immediately, with comical and horrifying repercussions.
"I will build the most successful Facebook application ever."
The Robot Chicken Star Wars episode is finally out.
The funniest part has got to be the Ponda Baba bit, where Walrus Man gets his arm chopped off due to some misconstrued actions.... but I'm ambidextrous!
