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SujeetA smile is easy. Grin and bare it! ™
April 11 Location, location, location...Ever notice that little crosshair-like icon at the top of your cellphone display? Most cellphones have this, and if you're one among the tribe that actually flips through the manual that accompanies a cellphone, you'll recognize icons like this to be the "location" icon - an indicator of your cellphone having turned on its GPS-like beaconing feature.
My last two cellphones have had this "location" beacon feature. When the feaure / function was "new", it was advertised as a twofold "benefit". Apparently, this "location" feature would comprise of two parts:
So...did the service fail to catch on with vendors and stores in the mall? I wonder. As my overstuffed mailbox often indicates, local (and global) businesses have not really eased up on the discount coupons and the unsolicited advertising. Walking through the mall still gets you the food freebies, and signing up via email at stores does indeed get you a 10% off coupon every once in a while. Add to this the "fact" that most stores are almost perenially in a state of having a sale of some sort, and one would wonder why all this discount coupon brouhaha would stay away from the big cellphone wave that's all over the world right now.
It seems like the most obvious way to sell. Kids have cellphones. They're glued to cellphones all the time. Cellphone vendors cater to kids with products and services. Kids gather in malls. Ditto young adults. Ditto their parents and friends. Ergo, if there was a technology to beam ads straight to these cellphones, why would it not have immense commercial benefits? I mean, having my cellphone buzz with a discount coupon from a store I was about to walk past would probably be a lot better than one of those signboard-wearing people thrusting a flyer in my face when I least expected it.
All in all, I don't see why the advertised function of the location service on most cellphones is still glaringly absent from our over-cellphoned society. If the service failed, don't have it on new phones. If it didn't fail, use it. Its current state of stagnation is eyebrow-raising interesting, at best.
Unless, and here comes the conspiracy theory...its in place because it offers other benefits that the cellphone companies do not like to talk about. Perhaps for their demographics. Perhaps for local, federal and global law enforcement.
It gets better. While most cellphones allow individual (non-commercial) application / software authors to create a plethora of applications for their onboard operating systems, this location feature is strangely locked away from prying eyes. Meaning, I, if I were an application developer for mobile phones, could develop an application for a cellphone that could access the Internet and get directions from an online mapping service, but I couldn't use the onboard location data that the cellphone already claims to have, in order to provide the cellphone's current location to my mapping application.
Alright, yes - doing this would mean that the current surge in portable GPS navigation devices would suffer a significant hit. If so, turn the location feature off from cellphone completely. Make it go away from cellphone chips. Most don't know what it does, and at this rate, most don't care. What they don't know can't hurt them, and in this case, they won't know what they lost because they never knew they had it in the first place.
So...with enough reasons to have it NOT be in cellphones, one still wonders - why is it still IN there? April 07 More interesting changes at Spaces..Not too long ago, someone made an interesting comment to me. One of those sarcastoric wonders that make you question things. It went something like...
"Who uses MSN Spaces anyway, really?"
Strip away the obvious "If its Microsoft, it must be bad" sentiment harbored by a good chunk of the digerati and there are a few gems of wisdom in there. Here's the ones I see:
So...why isn't MSN Spaces good enough to join the blogger brat pack leading the crowd? Well, for starters, the ubiquitous - "Because its made by Microsoft".
Secondly, over the last few months, an interesting set of features has crept into the proverbial mix. A few that caught my eye were:
Some good, some bad. All in all, I'd sorta agree that the package deal doesn't really look and feel as appealing as the rest of the big guns in the blogosphere. However, I'm sticking to this. My experience with Microsoft's other offering tells me so.
April 06 Whatever happened to the "WIntel"?!!The gray hair I now sport let me make unnecessarily grand statements about time and technology, or so I think.
Here goes the first of many upcoming ones on this blog: "Before these kids started blogging..."
..and before all cellphones took pictures and before the word "pod" became an ubercool prefix, there existed a time where there was a singular distinction in the computer community. You were either a Wintel, or not. Translated into yesterday's young-person vernacular, it was either PC or Mac. The rest were a closet gaggle. Linux, Unix and the rest were the "What's that? Oh, yeah - our system adminisrator mumbles about that sometime" references that most didn't pay much attention to.
PCs ran Windows on Intel hardware. Then came the AMD behemoth...er..."behemoth" and the likes of Transmeta and the rest who tried to make their way into people's motherboards. Some made it. Some made for bad memories. At the end of the day, "Wintel" meant "PC". It also meant "a computer that the computer guy could open without his eyes glazing over". It also meant "an upgrade-friendly computer whose upgrades were reasonably affordable, and wouldn't require putting the family farm up on the auction block".
And then there were the "Mac" people. Often relegated to justifying their existence by saying "Have you seen the graphics on a Macintosh?!!" as an exercise in expertise rhetoric. On average, one could spot a Macintosh tucked into the graphics gurus' nest in a corner of a publishing house, or perhaps the home of someone who had done "fairly well on the stock market".
And what was with the single-button mouse, anyway?!!
Anyway, that was the PC and the Mac. The Mac people defended their corner and the PC people took the occasional moments for a few jabs at them. Life was good.
A few years into the (last) decade, Apple Computer exploded onto "the scene". Some would even say that it made "the scene". The OS got all fluid-swooshy and the filesystem got a really good backbone and then some. Also, given that it was still the "underdog" in the OS wars, of sorts, there weren't many in the virus-creator world that were paying attention to the Mac. Translated, lesser (almost zero) viruses for the Mac that (unnecessarily) earned it an undeserved title of "a secure system". (Its not!).
Roll the time slider a few more years ahead, and the iPod was / is everywhere. This drove up Macintosh sales and somehow, people seem to have stopped caring about the single-button mouse.
And then the headlines in the paper today - "Apple Macs can run Windows on Intel hardware".
So...er..what's the real "draw" anymore? The ability to, er, buy expensive hardware?
Perhaps I missed it in their disclaimer?There are those who refer to me as a self-styled paparazzi ("who has waay too much free time"). I deny nothing. I find that works to my advantage a lot better than debating the apparent logic, or lack thereof, in their assessment. However, I do plead guilty to carrying a camera lens, in one avatar or another, on my person at most times. The way I see it, life's short and one keeps getting older. One's gotta capture all those memories before age and time make one lose one's mind..or, um...memory.
The reasonably bulky camera that one of my hands often sported a few years ago has undergone various transformations since. Form factors got smaller, feature sets got larger. Video clips are no longer time-limited, storage cards are large enough to accomodate almost everything one could think of doing in front of a camera lens, and form factors have gone from evoking decscriptions
like "Hm..that's small, but do you really carry that everywhere?", to "Wow..that is small! You must carry that around everywhere!". Technology is a great thing, ain't it? And then came the cameraphone. It took a while for me to warm up to a CMOS lens (the power-and-space friendly lens that most cameraphones sport) after having spent all my time with a good glass-covered CCD, but after cameraphone resolutions crept past the 1 megapixel count, I figured I was missing out on something good.
'Course, with a cameraphone, all bets are off. Taking pictures and posting them online goes from being an activity that spans a few hours (end to end), to a matter of seconds. Thanks to the likes of TextAmerica, and now Flickr, the average time spent between taking a picture and making it available in all its glory on the Internet, has been whittled down to about 10 seconds if one is a good cell zone.
Good? Yes. Bad? Yes. Here's the in-between. I've been a fan of the TextAmerica brigade for a long while now. Its fast, its free, its functional and it works great. They take almost anything you can throw at 'em, and they do things pretty well. Their site has just been redesigned, too.
All was well till about the seventh page of my photo gallery. Once past the learning curve with a fixed-focus CMOS lens and after accepting / acclimatizing myself to its limitations and advantages, I began to wonder if there really could be such a difference between the image I saw on the cameraphone viewfinder and the TextAmerica post. TextAmerica posts often seemed blurry and made the aforementioned "viewers" (the one who've blessed me with the distinction of being a self-styled paparazzi) remark about cameraphone images being "ages away" from being as good as a "real camera lens". As much as I hated to admit it, they were right. I assumed that either my hand was getting shakier, or my eyesight was weakening, or both, or worse.
Till the day I decided to give Flickr's upload-by-email feature a whirl. Here's the skinny:
Anyway, when sent singularly, i.e. one picture to one email address per SMS / email "envelope", things work fine. Based on your settings, Flickr will allow users to view and download the full-size version as well.
After I had things working with Flickr, I opted for the most obvious test. Sending the same picture via the same SMS message to both Flickr and TextAmerica to see which one "looks better", posts faster, etc. Here are the results:
So, my layman summary is: Flickr's better. It offers the same upload-by-email functionality, the "tagging" functionality and the image download functionality. It offers comments (not to "everyone" like TextAmerica, though), and it offers EXIF data display - something that TextAmerica does not.
One could theoretically argue that cameraphones don't really require EXIF data dumps. And you would be partially correct. They certainly don't "require" them. However, it doesn't hurt to see 'em anyway, if your cameraphone does have an EXIF data blob associated with every image it takes. For example, I just discovered that my cameraphone shoots at a certain interesting exposure value everytime and that the make of the "camera" visible in the EXIF dump doesn't match the vendor name on the cellphone.
Back to the paparazzi-ing... March 27 Still blogging?Its almost Tax Day in the year 2006, and my question is - are you still blogging? With the same motivation and dedication as you probably did a few years ago? Or have you moved to alternatives like:
I've seen a significant trend that says:
Ergo, cameras with beefier specs in smaller form factors. Ditto computers and cameraphones. "Blog services", like this one - MSN Spaces - pushing better features into the mix in order to wade out a marketplace awash with a gazillion others like it. And the final "ergo" - the user. The user today is becoming smarter, both from a sense of global information awareness to being informed about specifics about specifics. A lot have complained that Google's done away with the need for people to have textbooks. While I don't hold Google in the highest regard (have you checked out Ask.Com yet?!), I don't necessarily agree with search engines making teachers obsolete. Think of it this way - if anything is free and functional and fast, one usually ends up using it. Faced with a free and fast way to find stuff, one could only be driven to find more stuff quick. And that can only make one better informed than before. Couple that with RSS and the sort, and you're faced with a user who's well-educated in the means to be well-educated. And that's one of the few good man-made recursive cycles in nature. Yes, that has its obvious shortcomings and dark sides. What doesn't?
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