DISQUS

It should just work if you're logged into your Wordpress account, right?

Forget free food, how about bringing in someone that isn't Eurest to handle the cafeterias first?

I suspect that Apple will still manage to sell a few million of these to the "buy two of anything with an Apple logo on it" crowd, and a couple million more people will buy one as a fashion accessory. Beyond that, it becomes a bit of a harder sell...

Picture this scenario: You are trying to use a computer in Japanese (or some other language which you are not familiar with) and need to be able to find your way around. The text is all in Kanji and Katakana, and you can't read any of it. The keyboard layout is also going to be unfamiliar most of the time, so you can't rely on that either. You need to change a setting, so you manage to find the control panel. Once you get there, instead of icons you are greeted by a bunch of different squares in assorted shades of blue, with more kanji on them. This leaves you nothing but trial and error to find what you're looking for.

I do globalization testing, and although I do know a fair bit of German (which is what I do a lot of my work in,) I also have to work a lot in Japanese, which I know basically nothing of. On an unfamiliar language, I frequently have to rely on a combination of icons and keyboard shortcuts (which, thankfully, are the same as the ENU counterparts on most Windows apps) to get around. Once you start replacing that with text, anyone in that situation is pretty much lost.

I think I'll wait to see if "doesn't crash the system on shutdown every time you run it" made the feature list...

Now where did I put my ACME credit card anyway? I knew I just had it...

Spending $5,000 on a home entertainment center is one thing. Spendng $8,000 on a $5,000 home entertainment center is another thing entirely, and that's if you're making all your payments on time. Spending money you don't have on things you don't need just sounds like asking for trouble to me.

While it would be nice if they would take the feedback from something like this and put it to good use, I doubt that such feedback will ever reach anyone who can do anything about improving the product. It is quite likely that a scheme like this is being concocted purely by marketers looking for cheap blurbs, who wouldn't know feedback if it smacked them in the face with a microphone held next to a loudspeaker. Even if they do listen in this case, it strikes me as being a particularly lousy method of getting product feedback anyway, especially when there are much better channels for such things. In a case like this, a company would be a lot better off conducting a controlled product trial, which not only allows them to get the specific feedback they're looking for, but (in the case of a pre-release product) can also be NDA'd. I actually participated in such a trial recently for Sprint (I've been a customer of theirs for over six years now) and although I don't know if my feedback made much difference (it was very close to the release of the product) it's a lot more effective and less risky way of getting the product into the hands of people who can tell them what's wrong with it.

I spent a few hours "off the grid" myself this weekend (out in a spot on the Hood Canal where I got no signal on my phone) and I think the part I noticed is just how much I actually use the Internet as a reference tool on my EVDO-enabled PPC phone if I have it there. Someone has a question about something? Google it. Want to know what the score of the ballgame was? Pull up ESPN's mobile site. Trying to figure out what the wait for the ferry to get back across is? Check the WSDOT site (when you hit a pocket of EVDO coverage, that is.) Get bored? Go catch up on some comment threads on a couple of blogs. And don't even get started on e-mail (I'm pretty sure I know where the term "Crackberry" comes from now...) A few weeks back me, my Dad and my brothers took a roadtrip down to Salt Lake for the American Le Mans race, and when I wanted to figure out what our remaining distance, I pulled up driving directions while cruising down I-84 a bit past Pendleton. Especially once you've got a high speed data connection on your phone, it gets awfully tough to get off the grid in the first place.

"God is dead."
-Nietzsche

"Nietzsche is dead."
-God

I have to agree with the comment on the signs. I do garage sales as somewhat of a hobby, and for the most part I just follow signs to get there. Make sure the arrows are visible from a reasonable distance (in most cases, that's going to be at least 1/3 of an 8.5 x 11" sign. There are a lot of signs I see where people just don't make the arrows big enough or wide enough to actually see (Sharpie works well for signs at a short distance, not so well if people are going to be looking at it from 30 yards away.)

Anyway, if I wasn't busy all day today, I might have stopped by.

Too bad ESPN2HD is not available on Comcast in Redmond (they have ESPNHD, but not ESPN2HD,) which means all of eight games will be available here in HD. Quitwe frankly, I've found Comcast's HD offerings to be pretty pathetic. I'd dump them, but I can't get satellite reception in my apartment, which leaves me no other alternative.