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First Impressions of the Sony Reader
I managed to get my hands on a Sony Reader yesterday as I've been itching to get one for awhile now. The digital ink technology is very intriguing and I wanted to see and use it for myself. First off, the price tag of $350 is a bit steep to make it a generally accepted consumer gadget, but I'm a technology person so I added it to my collection.
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Software registration schemes; the good, the bad, the ugly
I've worked on a number of consumer products in my career, some with registration schemes, some without. What is the purpose of a registration scheme? Are people trying to prevent piracy? Are they trying to keep the honest people honest? Or is there some other motivation? For me, it is about motivating people to purchase the software when the demo has expired (in my shareware world). With some of my products, people use it, like it, and forget that the software is even working, so they forget to register. A registration scheme here has proven to be quite effective on my NotifyMail program. I had another program called PhotoCapture that had no registration scheme (I was young and dumb) and asked people to send me a postcard if they used it. I know it was used on various websites back in the day, but only got a handful of cards. That method clearly didn't work.
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512MB of RAM is ridiculous
Years ago (when Bill Gates said that 640 K is all that is needed or something like that), 512 MB of RAM would have seemed like overkill. Unfortunately (I guess depending on how you look at it), this is no longer the case. I had to send my MacBook Pro in for repairs as it had an annoying whine when running on battery which forced me to use on of my Mac Minis with only 512 MB of RAM for a few days. It clearly wasn't the speed causing things to slow down (1.66 MHz Core Duo on the Mini and 2.16 GHz Core Duo on the MacBook Pro). The OS kept having to swap things in and out of RAM, everything I did took ages. I was tempted to go buy 2GB of RAM, but couldn't justify the cost for a test machine. I can't believe that Apple (and other computer manufacturers) ship machines with this little RAM knowing that it won't be enough. That's how they keep the cost down; pay $600 for the machine, spend another $300 in RAM.
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Scared waterless
Yesterday I replaced our reverse osmosis system as the one we had was costing me something like $200 per year to replace the filters. The previous owners of our house installed probably one of the most expensive systems they could find and to top it off, the replacements filters had to be ordered. So I picked up a GE Profile Smart Water system from Home Depot where the replacement filters are about $40 every six months so not only is it half the price per year, I can get the filters right from the local store.