Oatmeal Fundraiser a Success; Non-Profit Buys Land For Tesla Museum 67
Ars Technica reports that The Oatmeal's successful fund-raiser has borne fruit; on Friday the non-profit to which Oatmeal founder Matthew Inman's Indiegogo campaign's money was directed completed part of its goal to purchase and turn into a museum Nikola Tesla's former estate Wardenclyffe. There's plenty of work before the land can be a proper museum, but now it is in the hands of the non-profit organization Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe.
Oatmeally goodness (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Truly looking forward to this (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets raise money for an Oatmeal museum (Score:3, Insightful)
The Oatmeal is now my hero. This is friggin sweet!
Remember, this is not his first act of Geek heroism. http://theoatmeal.com/sopa [theoatmeal.com]
Oatmeal,
I suspect you are a slashdotter and are reading this now. you have a special gift my friend, and I do not mean mitichlorians. You have the power to affect real nerd-wizard change in the world of muggles.
Peace out, bro
Re:Truly looking forward to this (Score:5, Insightful)
"We would have not had personal computers as we know them today. We probably would be using 3270 terminals and paying time per hour to dial into a nearby mainframe."
Biggest myth ever spelled about Apple and Jobs. Again, as Gates, he was very successful creating commercial product, BUT ideas was out there already. Xerox labs has been working on prototypes and ideas, there were lot of commercants interested in such kind of thing. Accorn was on the rise in UK, with it's RISC based computing platform. It was everywhere.
So no, Jobs didn't bring us PC as we know them today. But he and Gates made sure that we remember them doing so. Again, this is what I am against. They have their place in history. But they didn't kickstarted this.
"We would still be using CDs instead of MP3 players. Before the iPod, MP3 players were regarded as geek chic if best."
Wow, this is actually Apple fanboism at it's best. iPod was nice step into mass market, but clearly there were better alternatives - they just didn't had that massive marketing machine behind Apple products. And this is in fact ignoring progress - if Apple wouldn't haven't done it, someone else would. Loss compression algorithms were already a reality for very long time at that moment.
"We would still be buying music, for $19.00 an album, for that one good song, from crowded CD stores, as opposed to just tapping/clicking twice on iTMS."
False, again. There were many shops already who has possibility to buy music online - Apple just used his muscle to get permissions from majority of main labels to sell them at one place. In fact, for very long time, ultra monopoly of online sales of iTMS slowed down improvements in this area. So no, haven't been there iTunes and iPod, there would be something in their places. Just cashing in on obvious.
"We would still be using Motorola RAZR clones and saying that a phone that calls and texts is good enough. Apple invented the smartphone as we know it."
Only American could said that, because well rest of the world were more lucky. Nokia had smartphones, even Linux had smartphones when Apple came and again cashed in.
"We would still be using Motorola RAZR clones and saying that a phone that calls and texts is good enough. Apple invented the smartphone as we know it."
Nevermind Nokia already had Internet tablet as experimental hardware, and they were working on useful commercial product when iPad came along.
What can I give to Jobs and Apple that they know how to cash in. They were very convinced in what they were doing. But that's all. In the end, I think world would be better without current Apple strategy.
Re:Truly looking forward to this (Score:2, Insightful)
Xerox Parc invented the mouse-based point-click-drag GUI. Jobs adapted it for personal computers after getting a demo of it from Xerox (http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=fJX8NiK2NZM), but it would have become the dominant GUI eventually even if he hadn't. It was simply too efficient as an O/S user interface not to. A number of your other statements similarly overreach. Jobs was indeed a visionary and deserves a great deal of credit for revolutionizing personal computing. Overstating his contributions, however, only serves to diminish his memory--not burnish it.
Re:Truly looking forward to this (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs was an Edison, not a Tesla. As with Edison, the truth will catch up to the legend.
Re:Truly looking forward to this (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire jist of this rant is that a lot of people had prototypes and pre-Apple products that were on the market but the market never took off until someone with taste showed up and made the thing not suck.
Seriously, I used pre-iPod MP3 players, I used pre-iPhone smart phones and i used pre-iOS tablets.
They REALLY sucked. The OSes were difficult to use, the interfaces were unfriendly and for the price you paid, it was a goddamned joke.
We can all give Nokia or Archos or whoever came before all the credit in the world for having stuff that looked promising but in the end it's Apple who's able to actually execute. Given how many years these devices were on the market before Apple strolled in, except say, the MP3 player market, the notion of what if apple wasn't there is actually inconceivable.
Hell, USB was around for years and several of my motherboards from around 95-97 had USB headers but no one used them. It wasn't until the iMac came around that all changed.
Am I not happy that Apple's being a litigious bully? Sure. Am I even more unhappy that there's a culture in the tech sector that good ideas are just merely a commodity? Damn right I am. A good lawyer and a judge can smack down Apple but no one's willing to fight against tastelessness in the tech industry. Except Apple. And now maybe Vizio? But the reviews of Vizio's gear isn't exactly promising, but it's progress.
Re:Truly looking forward to this (Score:2, Insightful)
"Seriously, I used pre-iPod MP3 players, I used pre-iPhone smart phones and i used pre-iOS tablets.
They REALLY sucked. The OSes were difficult to use, the interfaces were unfriendly and for the price you paid, it was a goddamned joke."
you know why? because the executives of those companies were complete and utter morons. They would have had a brilliant UI and OS if they made them opena nd invited the OSS community to work with them. But no. Diamond wanted to be raging assholes with their RIO and refused to share with the community. they COULD have owned the market if they did so.
Re:Truly looking forward to this (Score:2, Insightful)
So Woz would be Tesla then?