Category: Commentary

I’m just going to point you at a comment I made on Jame’s Eirepreneur blog about the differences between Serviced Offices, Virtual Offices and Bedouin workspaces. Apparently it was good enough to deserve it’s own post.

This is an area I’m really excited about.

In this post I’m kinda defining the difference between Bedouin and Hobo. See, Bedouin to me kinda of assumes that the worker is running around with his “tribe” (sometimes called a ‘posse’). this can just be one other guy or it can be a bevy of workers, assistants and anyone else your company needs to function. The Hobo is the lone worker. Not quite as fun I imagine but then in cubicle workspaces in a big company you may as well be a hobo worker.

Back in 1999, with the development of a new office building, I pleaded with my employer to put in wireless and hot-desking. I saw it as being a real opportunity. They ignored me at their peril. Heh! Blindness was only one of their faults. It took a 1:10 reverse stock split to bring that price back into respectability.

We’re still looking for funding for some stuff before we open the doors…..but after we do, I fully expect to move in full time 🙂

I’ve been so busy that I’ve not had a chance to blog in a wee while. Or so it seems.

I find myself presented with not only a dentist appointment (*groan*) but also three exams. Sure, they’re just multiple choice exams but they’re for a certification – one that means something. So it’s not really like the others I’ve done in the past which were as much “for fun” as anything else.

Anyway – the big hoopla at the moment is the rumour that Adobe intends to release a public beta of CS3 on the 15th. It’s unlikely because when has Adobe ever released anything 2 quarters earlier than their announcement date, but there you have it. They must be hurting from the reports of Universal Quark Xpress.

As a bloke on the Nutters mailing list put it –
“it won’t be just a beta, it’ll be in production the very next day. I can just hear the sounds of a million Mac techs screaming!”

and that’s a very valid point. I know quite a few designers who have migrated to Intel Macs already and are just waiting for the release of CS3 and taking plenty of opportunity to have a wee moan about the state of Rosetta on the Intel Macs. Rosetta is fabulous but some of these guys are expecting it to be native. Unrealistic I know – but there’s no telling some people!

So the moment this beta hits the streets there will be plagues of print bureaus (most of them still with Mac OS 9 remember?) complaining that they can’t open these new file formats. Or something. Or if there are unsupported features? Where do you get support for a beta? Answer: you don’t!

Beta seems to be the fashion now. Beta has always meant “unfinished” but these days it’s seen as a “bonus”, a “marketing flash”, a “corporate gift”.

Michael Kanellos has the dirt.

He tells us that Apple will come out with a new phone and tells us that it will fail.

This has got to be some sort of record. A product, that a company has not acknowledged it is developing, will fail, based on projections from a journalist on properties the company has not claimed, actions from Apple that have not been revealed and just sheer conjecture. This is headline-grabbing at it’s best.

“So when consumers get to that counter at CompUSA, they will debate buying the Apple phone, and even hold it up for a look. But when they whip out the credit card, they’ll probably opt for a Motorola.”

This is why technology journalists should probably be tagged with some sort of indelible dye. And a radio transmitter. So that the rest of us can acknowledge they are living in their little Walter Mitty lives.

He’s not alone of course. There was an article last week claiming that the iPhone had run into trademark troubles because the name “iPhone” is owned by a Canadian company. Are these people shrinkwrapped?

It hasn’t been named, hinted, announced, press released and doesn’t exist so far outside of the fevered imaginations of headline writers in the technology industry.

Fucking idiots.

Nicholas Carr asks what is the ecological cost of Second Life.

“…the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.”

Of course, this isn’t the whole story. The average human in the developed countries consumes about 6 times as much energy.

Yes, James, I’m ragging on Second Life. I’m being extremist on my views. I do see some point in it – but more from the point of view of replacing MySpace and Bebo rather than replacing the web.

I see the value in it being a persistent virtual world. Why not have an entire island dedicated to “Halo” for example. Complete with Banshees and Ghosts. And ready-made suits. And of course guns.

Why not have an entire island dedicated to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Complete with Elf and Halfling suits? Swords and rings.

And yes, why not a Hogwarts?

Second Life, to me, adds a visible element to online gaming. Without the trappings of World of Warcraft, it’s more about narrative fiction than fighting for points.

I’d like to see Bladerunner done SL-style. Or maybe Brazil.

Intel has developed what it calls the “ClassMate PC” it intends to sell for $400 per unit in response to the $150 OLPC and will be evaluating it in Brazil.

The ultraportable will house:

The ultraportable will house an (unspecified) Intel Celeron M processor, 7-inch 800 x 480 LCD, 256MB of DDR2 RAM, 1GB of NAND goodness, and a 6-cell Li-ion battery.

It’ll likely run an embedded version of Windows. The OLPC will have much the same hardware but will run Linux. Steve Jobs had offered Mac OS X free of charge for use in the laptop, but according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative’s founders, the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with: “We declined because it’s not open source.” Therefore Linux was chosen.

It’s annoying though, considering Apple did this in 1997 – a decade ago!

Imagine what they could do now?

James makes me feel like less of a freak geek with this entry today about browsing habits of the general public:

“Which goes to prove that people will interrupt what they’re doing and invoke the all-seeing Google when they come across something that piques their interest. Either the PC is always-on in the background or it’s not an hindrance to boot it up. The sit back and sit forward media can and do complement each other. And the transition can happen in a flash.”

I’ll be honest, I have been ridiculed before for having my laptop beside me when watching a film. But it’s because I like to be able to look up the actors if I recognise them or just query any bit of data that comes along through the traditional media. I dont see it as wrong and the only way it could be better is if every TV had a Nintendo-DS-type screen thing going on.

Yay, I’m normal!!!!

The Seattle Times writes:“Imagine this. One of the world’s most powerful monopolies puts 10,000 people to work for five years to create one new product. And nobody is really sure if anyone wants it. How’s that for a gamble?”

And what a great effort it is. Turns out it’s still vulnerable to MyDoom and Netsky. Brilliant work there guys. Probably $10 billlion dollars spent, at least 2 years late and it’s still vulnerable to 2-year-old Windows malware!

“Ballmer says Microsoft tried to innovate too much. So the company reorganized and tried to placate impatient consumers by shipping Service Pack 2 for Windows XP then rebooted the whole Vista effort in mid-2004. It’s hard to imagine exactly how much Microsoft flushed down the toilet.”

Ballmer’s only half right. The whole shebang was developed by marketeers and executives using Flash/Director to emulate what should happen long before an engineer wrote a line of code.

They didn’t try to innovate too much. That’s doing a disservice to their legions of dedicated engineers who were told to create real magic out of smoke and mirrors.

I hope every software company takes note.

Damien’s Fluffy Links brings us 7 Viral Marketing Tips.

Now, we could digest each of these lessons individually and see how to apply them to our everyday business, or we could just enjoy the various Youtube videos and not worry about the messages involved.

Hmm, time-wastingly-good. Yummy!

On the Ogle Earth blog (about Google Earth), they write:

“3D is the next big thing for computers — even operating systems are going 3D — and I think that this trend will facilitate new ways of navigating.”

which echoes what James was saying in the comments for the last post on Virtual Virtual Offices.

The difference is that hyping Second Life as a way for consumers to get into 3D interfaces is completely unnecessary. Consumers have been investigating 3D interfaces since DOOM in 1993. The difference is:

Second Life	Doom in 1993
Flying	Running
Adverts	Flying flaming skulls
Sex	BFG 9000
eCommerce	Haha fragged you sucka!
Designer Clothing	Heavy Metal Music
Interaction	Gameplay
2006	1993

Things have come a long way since 1993 granted, but the basics are the same.

Now, I’m not saying that Second life is a complete waste of time. I was considering using it for game sessions of my main hobby where I think that the flying could really add to a story.

But it’s not going to help people experience new and exciting ways to interact with their computers. At the moment on the desktop we interact with our computers using a single virtual finger – the mouse pointer – if we had a system that used **gasp** TWO MOUSE POINTERS….we would end up with a much more realistic way to interact.

This shows heaps more potential…video embedded here

Okay, there’s heaps less sex…and no advertising…..so far…