Google Glass Is Dead, Long Live Google Glass 141
DumbSwede writes BBC reports on the demise of Google Glass as we know it:
Google Glass sales halted but firm says kit is not dead. One can only assume there will be dissatisfied early adopters and developers given Google's decision. Here is to hoping Google Glass 2.0 (assuming there is one) will be better received. The Verge expands a bit on the re-org that the linked BBC article mentions, as a result of which Google Glass moves from the Google X incubator to its own division: Google's announcing today Glass is "graduating" from the Google X experimental projects incubator to become its own independent division — a division that will report into Nest's Tony Fadell. Current Glass head Ivy Ross will retain day-to-day authority, but she'll report to Fadell. Nest itself will remain separate and independent, and Tony will still be in charge there as well.
the Edsels keep on coming (Score:2)
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Is it just me or is the "Such-and-such is dead, long live such-and-such" headline being overused recently on Slashdot?
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" "Such-and-such is dead, long live such-and-such" is dead, long live "Such-and-such is dead, long live such-and-such""
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I'm crazy 'bout a Mercury.
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lol @ anyone who wasted $1500 to be a guinea pig for a now utterly worthless piece of vapourware
Re:the Edsels keep on coming (Score:5, Interesting)
They wanted bragging rights to be the early adopters. I was interested enough to say "I'll get them when the price is about $50 to $100."
There's one up for bidding on eBay, currently at $105.50. I didn't put my bid in, because that's beyond what I'm willing to pay for a toy that I'll stop using in a few days. I'll check back in a year, and see what's selling at $50.
Re:the Edsels keep on coming (Score:4, Informative)
sigh, please use computer terminology correctly. this is slashdot.
"vapourware" is software which has been advertised and marketed, or demonstrated with a prototype, and yet never fully completed or released.
Google Glass is real, completed, and released.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean you can use incorrect terms to describe it. Why not also call it a pizza, since it's not a pizza?
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Google Glass is real, completed, and released.
It's none of those things. If it was, Google certainly would not have stopped selling the developer prototype. They'd have ramped it up into full production.
Google Glass is dead in the the form demoed. There's a chance they might come up with some different concept. But there's a bigger chance that this removal of the Glass team from the Google incubator is a first step to selling it off or closing it down.
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It says that it's in Beta, but isn't google notorious for just leaving things in beta? Wasn't GMail in beta for like, a decade or so?
just like slashdot beta (Score:2, Funny)
I hope this still comes to the industrial sector (Score:5, Interesting)
I was hoping to see some of these devices replace specialized fork lift pc's and inventory management systems. I know that a lot of things like the Honeywell hand helds and LXE's are tried and true but the idea of leaving an inventory listing in the corner of someones eye and allow verbal updates sounded like a game changer for replacing some of our existing systems.
Re:I hope this still comes to the industrial secto (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly think we'll see the kind of jobs requiring that being automated before we see better tools for those jobs. The days of people going around warehouses gathering stuff on a list are coming to an end.
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Only for sufficiently big companies, and even then it's not going to happen overnight. If you can build a solid product to fill that transition gap for a ~10 year period, you can make a lot of money.
Re:I hope this still comes to the industrial secto (Score:5, Interesting)
All evidence from Google over the past few months (the Glass for Work initiative, their filing of design patents for Glass that are clearly dependent on an external power source such as a belt-worn battery pack, their partnership with Intel whose chipsets are not suitable to any form of Glass that does not depend on an external battery pack - note that Intel chips are suitable only to tablets/Chrombooks due to their excessively high power consumption) is that Google is targeting industrial/business uses.
They have done nothing to address Glass' biggest flaw as a consumer device - battery life/power consumption.
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There are already several smartglasses for warehouse management, for example from Vuzix and Epson.
Good riddance to these creepy spy glasses (Score:1, Funny)
I won't miss them, and hopefully nobody else will either.
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Sadly, something like Glass will eventually become popular.
People do want wearables, and at the very least, a device that could eventually give you a huge amount of screen real estate without a monitor.
Once someone has perfected glasses that look like glasses but are monitors, you're going to end up with people taking their computers with them everywhere. If they can do it with contacts, it will be 100x worse. It'll be like having an FPS HUD in real life.
It's a short step from there to having people integ
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As long as they use it while driving to text - It'll be a spectacular dump of chlorine in the gene pool as they kill themselves off.
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Just let the rest of us know where and when so we can stay off the roads.
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If everybody wants to use that technology, why would it be sad?
My company bought a Google Glass (Score:2, Insightful)
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By your company and their failure to integrate it, or by Google?
I guess I can pick up a pain on eBay soon for cheap...
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I guess I can pick up a pain on eBay soon for cheap...
What's in the glass?
Pain.
Stop! I hold at your neck the Gom Jabbar, the high-handed enemy. This one tracks and monetizes only humans.
Re:My company bought a Google Glass (Score:4, Funny)
Or you can wait a year for Apple to release theirs. It'll be designed for hipsters. That means that it looks like an ordinary pair of mirrored shades, and can overlay either eye, or both if you want 3D without "shutters LCD glasses".
You'll even be able to wear your sunglasses at night [youtube.com] ...
And it will be "only" $799".
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Or you can wait a year for Apple to release theirs. It'll be designed for hipsters. That means that it looks like an ordinary pair of mirrored shades, and can overlay either eye, or both if you want 3D without "shutters LCD glasses".
Or we can wait for 5 years for Microsoft to release theirs, a monocle. and you'll be talking about the revolution in the markeplace, and the best thing ever.
Mick Jagger will be coaxed out of his rest home to sing Paint it black as Microsoft Mono's spokesoldster.
Version two will be one of those Groucho glasses, complete with nose and mustachio.
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Glass was doomed from the start (Score:5, Insightful)
Glass never had a chance, not because of the privacy issues but because it just didn't actually have the processing power or battery life to do anything useful. Considering the guy who designed it has worn wearable computers for more than a decade, I expected better.
Re:Glass was doomed from the start (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm seriously bad at remembering names and faces, and having a HUD showing people's names would be some help in overcoming this social handicap.
Think about this. You're using it to find the person's name. THEY think you're looking up the name, address, phone number, Facebook page and other personal bits.
So, you've changed from a mildly socially clumsy human to a scary gargoyle. I'm not sure this is going to get you further along the social chain.
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Smartwatches have the same problem as Glass. Pathetic battery life and useless functionality. Until someone makes a low cost E Ink smartwatch, they will never become common devices.
It depends on what you define as a smartwatch. I'm very happy with my Pebble because it's exactly what I see as the limit of usefulness; a notifier. It's not a web browser or Google Maps screen. It doesn't have GPS and I can't make phone calls on it. It has no speaker, so it's not an audio player. All it does (for me) is put my phone's notifications somewhere I can see them without fumbling for the phone itself.
Oh. Five to seven day battery life. Because... low-cost e-ink smartwatch.
But you poste
Re:Glass was doomed from the start (Score:5, Informative)
The Pebble does not use E Ink, it uses Sharp's Memory LCD crap. An E Ink display uses no power unless the display is refreshed. Memory LCD uses power constantly. I would have thought you'd know that as someone who "owns" a Pebble.
Five days of battery is terrible for a watch. A smartwatch with an E Ink display could last a lot longer.
I wrote some stuff responding to your attempt to rile me up, and it amused me intensely, at your expense, then I deleted it so you can't even reply to it. So thank you.
But I'm not going to stop trying to be helpful.
As it happens, the screen on the Pebble is a form of e-ink. It isn't the same oil-cell bubble technology used in many e-readers (including the one I "own") but it's marketed as e-paper because it's got many of the benefits of traditional e-ink while simultaneously not having most of the shortcomings of straight LCD. What, specifically, does that mean? Well, for instance it's fully transflective, meaning that it's perfectly viewable in daylight conditions (atypical for most LCDs).
Also, as designed, the display pulls very little power to maintain a given display. What pulls power is altering the display - as with traditional e-ink - but this too is addressed with admirable cleverness; it's designed so it doesn't refresh the entire screen, only horizontal lines that contain altering content. So with a watchface that isn't wasteful, you may only be redrawing a fraction of the screen at a time, leaving most of the display at maintenance pull. Traditional e-ink redraws the entire display each draw, and usually does so a total of three times; once to solid black, once to solid white, and once to draw the desired content, all to deal with the memory effect that traditional e-ink has. It's not actually a given than traditional oil-cell-based e-ink would actually net longer battery life.
Finally, the Pebble's screen is capable of a much higher refresh rate than traditional e-ink, so that non-watch applications can have smooth display. Admittedly, the vast majority of the time a user only redraws a portion of the screen once per second, but the capacity is there.
As for battery life, yes, five days is excrementally poor for a watch. Strangely, for a smartwatch it's not at all poor. I - an admittedly small sample of exactly one - find it no chore to find one night a week that I don't sleep with the Pebble on, so it can charge. Every other night of the week I wear it as usual, allowing it to wake me in the morning as my traditional digital watches have for the last... oh... nearly four decades. It also bears mentioning that the method the Pebble uses to get attention is vibration, not audible sound. At first I didn't know if I would like that, but in the end I've come to prefer it. Of course, physical movement is also battery-expensive, so that's another factor to keep in mind when comparing battery life to traditional watches; they just beep.
Dismiss the product if you will. Not everything is for everyone, but the Pebble is in a completely different category from every other smartwatch on the market in pretty much every way. Not expensive, not huge, waterproof, doesn't have a silly battery-intensive colour display. It's a very capable companion product that augments an existing device instead of trying to weirdly replace it.
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This was always the killer app for me as well.
The other thing I would have wanted different was the display to have been a translucent overlay, rather than an opaque box in the top right.
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... and that is why I go with Apple products. At least I know that Apple goes 100% behind the devices they release and they will be around in 5 years and supported. Otherwise you end up with Zune or Google Glass or some other of the plethora of wanna be products from wanna be device companies.
Apple is a horrible counterexample (Score:2)
... and that is why I go with Apple products. At least I know that Apple goes 100% behind the devices they release and they will be around in 5 years and supported.
Apple is a horrible counterexample.
Pippin. Newton. Macintosh TV. Lisa. Macintosh Portable. eMate. You could argue for both the Apple III, AppleLink, and eWorld to have places on this list as well. And that's not even mentioning the unreleased products that were killed internally, such as Copeland and project Star Trek (well known), and the less well known ones I probably can't mention without violating NDA.
Also, the 5 years has shortened to about 3 years, or even less; the flip on requiring 64 bit EF
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All your counter examples are from before 1998, also known as the "Second Coming of Steve Jobs". It was a different company back then.
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All your counter examples are from before 1998, also known as the "Second Coming of Steve Jobs". It was a different company back then.
Let me know when there's a third coming of Steve Jobs; until then, the bean counters are in control of Apple now, and have been for several years.
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Sorry, but the other poster is right. 1997/8 was essentially a reverse takeover of Apple by NeXT. Not just Jobs, but the rest of the XeXT management team also. And Jobs had plenty of time when he knew he was dying to put the company into a state where it would continue in a good direction. None of your examples come from the last 16 years, and there's no reason to think that current Apple would ever become anything like the mismanaged company of the late 80s early 90s.
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Sorry, but the other poster is right. 1997/8 was essentially a reverse takeover of Apple by NeXT. Not just Jobs, but the rest of the XeXT management team also. And Jobs had plenty of time when he knew he was dying to put the company into a state where it would continue in a good direction. None of your examples come from the last 16 years, and there's no reason to think that current Apple would ever become anything like the mismanaged company of the late 80s early 90s.
First of all, I went to work for Apple in 2003, at which point in time I signed an NDA, and can therefore not give examples subsequent to that which are not based on public knowledge, no matter how much you bait me in your desire to have me do so.
Second of all, Apple had largely been taken over by Sun Microsystems management from 2008 onwards, as middle management was hired in to deal with the power vacuum being created by the (we all saw it) impending death of Steve Jobs. His hands were no longer firmly o
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Pippin. Newton. Macintosh TV. Lisa. Macintosh Portable. eMate. You could argue for both the Apple III, AppleLink, and eWorld to have places on this list as well. And that's not even mentioning the unreleased products that were killed internally, such as Copeland and project Star Trek (well known), and the less well known ones I probably can't mention without violating NDA.
First, who provides support for "products" that never actually become "products"? This removes all of your "unreleased products" (in engineering, we call those "canceled R&D projects"). Quite frankly, your inclusion of those non-products in your argument just makes you sound like you're grasping at straws (which you obviously are, as seen below).
As for the others, Pippin was sold to Bandai; thus Apple had no further responsibility to support it; Macintosh TV: Fairly good idea for the time, but miniscu
Re: Glass was doomed from the start (Score:3)
MacOS 9 - the first one that didn't support 68K Macs came out 10/23/1999. The first PowerMac came out in March of 1994. The last 68K Mac came out in 7/1994.
The last PP
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Google Glass is hardware -- OS 8 is software. If you bought the last 68K Mac, the last day it was available, you had OS updates for five years.
If you bought the last PPC Mac, the last day it was available, you had four years of support.
Re: Glass was doomed from the start (Score:2)
The original poster tried to draw an analogy between "680x0" Macs and PPC Macs to Google Glass.
The facts are that Apple supported 68K Macs for five years after the last one was sold - OS 9 came out in 1999. Do you think that Google will support Google Glass in 2020? The IPhone 4s introduced in September 2011 is still getting updates. Can you still get an OS update for any Nexus sold in 2011?
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Reading is fundamental....
From your link....
The last 68K based Performa was introduced 5/1/95. The rest of the Performas were based on the PPC.
From your second link, the last 68K based Duo was introduced in 1/1996
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Yes, just like they supported 680x0 CPUs for years after the switch to PowerPC and again how they gave 110% support for years and years and years for the PowerPC after they switched to x86.
I'm not sure what you mean by "supported"?
Through their JIT 68k -> PPC compiler built into MacOS, you could run 68k apps LONG after their "platform-switch" to PPC. In fact, IIRC, it was only in MacOS 9 that Apple excised all PPC code from the OS itself, because their 68k -> PPC JIT system/Fat Binaries were so successful.
The PPC -> x86 had a similarly glass-smooth transition, first with "Classic" Mode allowing a built-in virtualization of Mac OS9 under OS X, and also with CarbonLib even providin
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Considering the guy who designed it has worn wearable computers for more than a decade, I expected better.
That's because he's had over 10 years to get accustomed to and accept the limitations of the devices. It was just about making something and hoping other people could make it useful, it was half a solution looking for the other half and then for a problem to actually solve.
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On the contrary, his devices had a lot fewer limitations! Sure, they were bulkier, but he had a real input device (chording keyboard) and longer lasting batteries (not to mention the ability to change batteries).
Not to mention, the main "killer app" he used to use (IIRC, custom Emacs macros for note-taking and looking up stuff) is nowhere to be found on Glass.
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The current Glass XE hardware had potential, before they deployed KitKat on it and killed its battery life.
The hardware would've been great if refreshed with a more suitable CPU such as a Snapdragon 400 (The Cortex-A7 is a highly power efficient CPU, which is why most Snapdragon 400-based phones get great battery life, and in fact it has been used by all Android Wear devices except the Moto 360, which gets panned for poor battery life even after Moto made great improvements in that regard, it's still poor c
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Oh good... now all they need is a Twiddler2 and a software stack that doesn't upload your entire life (and the lives of everyone around you) to be data-mined and then it'll not suck.
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The privacy issues are a little exaggerated because if a Glass user went around recording everything then his battery would be dead in half an hour. However, I don't disagree with you. I should have written "regardless of the privacy issues" instead.
I wish... (Score:1)
I doubt this technology is going anywhere anytime soon. Whether Google or someone else, this tech will persist.
Its release has at least sparked all sort of debate about the expectations and limits of privacy, not to mention raising the warning for the ubiquitous surveillance that will soon exist.
Expect to see FISA subpoenas in the future for people's Google Glass (or successor) data so the government can keep tabs on everything.
Pair It Up (Score:3)
The best direction for Glass now would be to pair with Segway, you could call the combined company NiCHé.
Damn You Slashdot Character Encoding (Score:2)
That was SUPPOSED to be NiCHe, where the e had a pretentious accent character.
You tried to get cute and look where that got you! (Score:3)
Now you can't say "Looks right on my screen!"
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In many cases "-é" in French is like "-ed" in English.
In this case "niche" means "nest" and "niché" means "nested".
It was never really for sale (Score:5, Insightful)
Until it's on a store shelf it isn't for sale. It was never advertized as a consumer product. It wasn't even promoted. To get it you had to go out of your way to even find out where you were supposed to get the damn thing.
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Until it's on a store shelf it isn't for sale.
If I see a $1500 charge on my credit card, it's for sale.
If there is an online retail shopping site, it's for sale. Glass Explore [google.com]
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They never got it out of 'testing'. Chromecast is selling from Best Buy. Why isn't Google Glass sitting right next to it? Oh, it's because it's hardly even a beta product.
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Until it's on a store shelf it isn't for sale. It was never advertized as a consumer product. It wasn't even promoted. To get it you had to go out of your way to even find out where you were supposed to get the damn thing.
Yes, it's very well hidden, on the "devices" page in the Google Play store: https://play.google.com/store/... [google.com], right below the Nest devices and right above Chromebooks.
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But you have to 1 - already know that something called Google Glass exists. 2 - know what the hell it is. 3 - be willing to shell out a fortune for an in-development toy. Each of those is the complete opposite of how to successfully sell consumer electronics. Google always meant for this iteration of the product to be for testing only. For example, they weren't even selling it in Canada.
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But you have to 1 - already know that something called Google Glass exists.
Either that or notice it while perusing the other devices Google has for sale.
2 - know what the hell it is.
Either that or read the description on the Play site.
3 - be willing to shell out a fortune for an in-development toy.
Granted on the fortune. $1500 is expensive.
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You had to live in the US to buy one. Google is a worldwide company and if they wanted to sell a product they'd have sold it to their customers, not just a select few. It was a test product, not meant for the general public. Which is fine. I've never seen one anywhere. I'm guessing there are many other people, even in the US, that have never seen one either. It wasn't unpopular because of its characteristics, but rather because it wasn't marketed AT ALL.
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srsly not marketed? there were millions of words written about it. even coined a new phrase "glassholes"
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Beta is dead, long live beta!!! oh... wait...
Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Good idea...outside of the public eye (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the things that I always thought about Google Glass was this -- it has a billion good uses for work, but is stupid and creepy when you start walking around in public with it. It's creepy in more than one way - there's the "everyone thinks you're a stalker" thing, the weird head gestures you need to make to control it, the talking to yourself, and also the "Google now knows exactly what my eyes are tracking in any given image" kind of creepy. I'm not a millenial, so I probably sound like an old coot, but Google already knows enough about us - phones, search, Gmail, etc.
Now, that all goes out the window when you're talking about work use. With all these cloud data centers hosting thousands of racks of servers, maintenance techs would be able to get real time info. Warehouses would be able to show human forklift drivers where stuff is. Aircraft and car mechanics would be able to get manuals without having to print/read paper job cards. Stuff like that is very useful - walking around with them in public is a different story.
Maybe Google is realizing this and tailoring future devices for certain applications.
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And that creepy stuff is why I'm not going to buy an eyepiece computer from Google. Or from Apple, or from Facebook (even Oculus), or from Microsoft. I'm already concerned with how much Google knows about me. I'm not giving them any more.
That said, I would gladly buy an eyepiece computer, b
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That said, I would gladly buy an eyepiece computer, but it would have to be from a company that does not do data-mining at all. I'd actually be fine with one that doesn't even have mobile internet, and works as a self-contained computer.
There is zero reason for such a device to exist with modern technology. There is no way to cram enough computing power and battery into a device that small to do anything more interesting than print "hey, aren't you cool?" on your eyeball in flashing lights. Hell, even the fictional Borg were capable in networked configuration.
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I'd actually be fine with one that doesn't even have mobile internet, and works as a self-contained computer.
It needs to be able to connect to a phone or hotspot, but it doesn't need its own cellular radio for reasons which should be obvious, but anyway the biggest one is that you want to keep using it when the cellular standards are upgraded because it will be spendy. Even small MiniPCI cards are a bit bulky for a wearable.
I'd like an eyepiece computer very much, but it needs to be an eyetap. I won't suffer parallax and look like a dork. One or t'other, thankyouverymuch.
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And that creepy stuff is why I'm not going to buy an eyepiece computer from Google. Or from Apple, or from Facebook (even Oculus), or from Microsoft. I'm already concerned with how much Google knows about me. I'm not giving them any more.
That said, I would gladly buy an eyepiece computer, but it would have to be from a company that does not do data-mining at all. I'd actually be fine with one that doesn't even have mobile internet, and works as a self-contained computer.
apple doesn't do data mining.
Screw them (Score:3, Interesting)
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You seem to have missed the fact that even with the early google search, they used javascript tricks to send every click on a link back to google. That is pretty darn close to spying, since it was not obvious that they were doing this. You don't seem to have noticed that you were being spied on.
So the model for search as well as for gmail was the user trading their privacy for a service. Thus "built on the concept of invading privacy". I think this is a much more even trade on the search side - I'm no
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You seem to have missed the fact that even with the early google search, they used javascript tricks to send every click on a link back to google. That is pretty darn close to spying, since it was not obvious that they were doing this. You don't seem to have noticed that you were being spied on.
Any search engine that doesn't keep track of what links get clicked how often would not be doing their job at all.
Glass is just too damn expensive (Score:3)
You're just not rich enough (Score:2)
Lots of people pay outrageous prices for stuff. People with lots of disposable income. If you were pulling in solid 7 figures (or higher), the cost of Google glass would be insignificant, less than the cost of a lunch out to someone with an average salary. Buying a private jet vs flying international first class seems like not that much of an upgrade, considering you get to the same place either way, and you get a comfortable ride regardless, but jet ownership and usage is increasing, even through you'll pr
adios Explorers (Score:4, Insightful)
The Good:
Display was quite good.
No visual acuity problems for far-sighted eyes
Good for hands free access to your phone
The Bad:
Terrible battery life
Poor public image
"Google vs. Apple" crappy tactics i.e., poor iPhone integration [We are trying to break new ground, why do we need that sh*t involved?]
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Interesting, I'm in the Explorers program but haven't gotten that email yet.
Surprised they even bothered to send that to you.
I agree with most of your assessment, except they've done even worse as far as iOS integration with Android Wear, and to be honest, I believe many of the iPhone integration issues were iOS limitations, not choices Google made. iOS has always been shit for "nonstandard" Bluetooth devices - for example, most Bluetooth OBD adapters don't work with iOS since iOS doesn't support Bluetooth
This headline format is dead (Score:2)
Reportedly (Score:2)
$1,500 down the drain (Score:2)
Google Steam Punk Glass (Score:2)
Obi Wan says (Score:2)
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of Glassholes suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced, and this not by the usual biweekly punch in the face by a creeped out passer-by"
They should have called it Googly Eyes (Score:3)
was never ready for prime time (Score:1)
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Yeah, except replace "broken their noses" with "posted on Slashdot"
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I've read several news reports about glassholes being publicly beaten, however, in no case I've read that the alleged aggressor has been arrested or jailed. How strange, maybe cops are more intelligent than you?
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Yup.
No cop is gonna side with a glasshole.
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I think the product is dead because of the douchebag glassholes.
I don't think all Google glass owners were obnoxious jackasses, but unfortunately it only took a minority that are to ruin the product for the rest of them.