Global Nerdy

In true slacker fashion, I’ve held off announcing that I’m on vacation until its second-last weekday. I’ve been on holiday in the San Francisco Bay Area since Monday evening and won’t be back to work until Tuesday. Still, you can’t keep a nerd from checking his email and his blogs every now and again, even during some personal downtime.

Here’s something from Reddit that shoud make you snicker: it’s a thread from the comp.is.ms-windows.misc newsgroup from February 1997 in which the posters discuss whether or not computers will someday need gigabytes of RAM.

The most notable comments come from one Scott Nudds, who had a reputation for being one of the less-pleasant denizens of Usenet (quite a distinction, as he was up against a lot of pretty stiff competition). In the thread, he made several arguments to support his belief that most computers will never have more than hundreds of megabytes of RAM, ranging from the practical limits of exponential growth:

And how many more years before the count of bits is equivalent to the
number of silicon atoms in earths crust?

To the law of diminishing returns:

Storing a digital video library in RAM for instant access would require
tetrabytes of RAM. Just because you can invision some lame use for
gigabytes of RAM does not make it practical or even desirable to use
memory in such a way.
Past a few megabytes, the only thing more RAM gives you is faster random access to code and data than would otherwise be obtained with virtual memory.

As I said earlier, once you get past 50-100 megabytes of RAM, virtual memory makes more sense. I expect 200 megabytes will be the limit for most users. People who like to fake photographs will probably want several times this amount. The rest will be virtual.

Nudds had a rep for being a troll, loving argument for its own sake, but it actually does sound like he believed his assertions in this thread.

Ten years later, I’m the owner of two machines with over a gig of RAM. There’s “The Taint”, the Acer Ferrari laptop running Vista with just shy of 2 gigs of RAM, and my main axe, my trusty old 12″ G4 Powerbook with just slightly less…

Links

• The discussion thread, as seen in Google Groups
• Discussion about this thread on Reddit

Things are getting hot around OpenID. First Microsoft announces that CardSpace will “interoperate” with OpenID (I only airquote because the commitment is pretty vague right now, but it seems like goodness), and now AOL has given all their screen name users an OpenID URI.

Every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI, http://openid.aol.com/<sn>.

Where <sn> is your AOL screen name.

That’s 60MM or so newly-active OpenIDs in one fell swoop. Granted, most AOL and AIM users wouldn’t know what to do with their newly-minted OpenIDs, but it’s nice to see the infrastructure there for when the concept’s mature enough to start to take popular root.

Source: AOL and OpenID: Where we are

Robin Bloor seems pretty convinced that Omnifone’s MusicStation service and software for mobile devices has got Apple’s number in the digital music market.

He relies on two main arguments to make his case. First, Omnifone’s software is flexible enough to work on hundreds of millions of existing handsets. Given that the company is striking deals with many carriers around the world, it will have a built-in potential market many times the size of Apple’s iPod and iPhone user base put together.

Fine. I buy that as a potential edge for Omnifone. Where Bloor and I part company, though, is on his second argument:

A big reason why the Music industry is backing Omnifone is the music by subscription model it operates. The idea is that you pay a regular subscription charge as part of your phone bill and you can have “all you can eat” in terms of music. (The initial roll out will offer 1.2 million songs). The music companies tend to think like this: With iTunes the average user buys around 20 tracks a year—equivalent to maybe 2 or 3 CDs and generating $20 in revenue. With a subscription model at, say, $3.50 per month, the revenues per person will above $40 (twice as much).

All Omnifone has to do now, to establish itself as the other player in the music market, is to roll out the service (rollouts have already taken place in South Africa and Norway).

This assumes that the people paying the money (ie, you and me) are interested in an OTA subscription service for music. I have my doubts. If subscription was such a winner, surely we’d see some pretty impressive numbers for the Windows Media-based subscription services that already exist, and target the much more mature digital audio player market? Yes, I know subscription has its fans, but the dollars don’t lie—people prefer iPods, downloads, and ripping.

Source: IT-Analysis.com – Robin Bloor – Is Apple’s iTunes Monopoly About To Die?

 The answer, apparently, is “yes,” at least according to this post by an attendee at New Zealand Foo Camp (aka Baa Camp):

Firefox3 is going to deliver support for offline applications.

Why is this important? Because when you go offline you will still be able to interact with your applications. So in a webmail scenario, read your mail, write drafts. Web Calendars would work.

More importantly imagine the opportunity for Line of Business Applications. The Browser really does become the Operating System – with persistent storage.

This will allows richer SaaS applications and goes some what towards eliminating the offline scenario issue of web based applications. This makes Web apps even more compelling.

Plenty of people have pointed out that this kind of thing is already possible using the Dojo offline toolkit (for example). That just highlights the power of Firefox as the client-side platform of choice for developers.

Plugins and third-party toolkits are fine, but until it’s built into Firefox, it won’t be broadly adopted.

Source: Rod Drury > Firefox3: Web Apps Game changer (via R/WW)

A company appropriately named “Wizmark” is taking urinal cakes into the 21st century. They’ve gone beyond “your logo here” paradichlorobenzene blocks and have ones that feature lenticular images (images that change depending on the angle at which you look at them) and ones that play sound files or animations whenever the motions or actions of a “user” are detected.

Wizmark has signed a “first of its kind” deal with the cable channel CMT (Country Music Telelvision) to place their cakes in urinals at bars, concert halls and universities to promote its Outlaws TV series.

There’s more in this Register article. My favourite parts of the article are the quotes, such as this one from James Hitchcock, CMT’s Vice President of Marketing, who seems a bit too enthusiastic about marketing via urinal cake:

The new interactive urinal communicator from Wizmark enables CMT to target a very captive and vulnerable audience . . .,” said James Hitchcock, vice president of marketing at CMT.

The social protocols of the use of a urinal — the unwritten rule not to look left or right — guarantees undivided and undistracted visual attention along with the concurrent audio delivery of the ‘Don’t miss OUTLAWS on CMT’ tune-in message. This new marketing tool is unexpected, unapologetic and good humored.

Another gem comes from Dr. Richard Deutsch, holder of patent 6,640,350, the patent for Wizmark’s interactive urinal cakes. He may be the first person to wax philosophical about urinal cakes (or at least the first person to do so on the record):

Beginning with early attempts at writing one’s name in the snow, there has already been an element of recreation associated with urination for men.

If Wizmark’s marketing team plays their cards right, they could probably make a mint from the upcoming 2008 presidential elections. Or perhaps the Nintendo Wii.

Link

What with the current state of Web 2.0 design, the upcoming release of the documentary film Helvetica and this soon-to-be-available timeline poster below, I’m ready to declare 2007 “The year of Helvetica”.

Then again, I’m pretty sure George would say that it’s always the year of Helvetica…

You might remember my difficulties with the Acer Ferrari 1000’s Bluetooth mouse from this posting. I reported that the mouse was invisible to the computer, even though I had confirmed that there were fresh batteries in the mouse and that its red light was glowing. The “Add Bluetooth Device” wizard kept showing me this:

I have since discovered the secret to making Bluetooth work! One day, which checking the audio jacks along the front edge of the laptop, I saw a switch with the Bluetooth logo on it. Pushing this spring-loaded switch to the right and then letting go caused a little blue indicator shaped like the Bluetooth logo to glow. I immediately opened the Bluetooth control panel, and seconds later, I had a working Bluetooth mouse!

The Magic Dance you must perform in order to get Bluetooth to work on the Acer Ferrari 1000.

So there it is — in order to activate Bluetooth on the Acer Ferrari 1000, you have to activate it both in the control panel and using the little tucked-out-of-the-way switch on the front edge. It’s an annoying and unnecessary magic dance.

Notes:

• Don’t bother generating a Bluetooth passkey for the mouse — if you don’t select the “no passkey” option, the computer will not connect to the mouse.
• I took the photo of the front edge of the laptop from Craig Pringle’s blog entry — check it out for his review of the Acer Ferrari 1000 that Microsoft sent him.