Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Listening to an NPR podcast. Normally I flip past the ads, but I was in traffic and wasn't able to at the moment, and I heard an ad for ADP business services. ADP used to be just a payroll processing company, but they've expanded their offerings.

The ad started with 'What if a solar flare added an extra hour to the day?' It was an ad promoting their business planning services.

WHAT THE EVER-LOVING EFF ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT?

Seems to me the only way for the earth to gain an extra hour a day would be for it to slow down approximately 1/24th of its rotational speed. And for this magical solar flare to do this instantaneously, the results would be kinda catastrophic, I would think!

Now, the earth's rotational speed IS slowing down, just like the moon IS slowly moving out of its orbit with the earth and will eventually leave entirely and go cruising through space all on its own until it's captured by another orbital body.

But for the earth's rotation to slow by 4%? That would be bad, mmmmkay? At least international and trans-oceanic air travel would be a bit quicker.

Classic/vintage Cleese, very amusing stuff. Though, having worked with Compaq on a network, they were a royal PITB to work with in my ever so humble opinion.

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/tech-time-warp-week-watch-john-cleese-compare-compaq-dead-fish/

I'm not saying they're good things, but they are interesting and could be coming to a city near you.

First, Apple has patented something called iBeacon. You walk in to a grocery store, and you phone now has a map of the store, possibly with an interactive shopping list showing you a good path through the store. Or walking up to an advert on a kiosk for a concert and you can point your phone at it and order tickets. Now, the latter one seems to be a solution in search of a problem: a QR code could set you up to order your tickets, but whatever.

Geofencing is interesting tech. It requires an accurate logging of the latitude and longitude of a location, then defining a perimeter around that point. So a department store would have either multiple points or a big perimeter, a small store in a mall would have a comparatively small perimeter. The problem that I see is a lot of malls have iffy cell phone signals, which means the phone's GPS isn't going to be very accurate. Also, I'm not sure that geofencing logs the Z access: altitude. Do geofenced stores know if I'm on the first or second floor?

You can do iBeacon-type stuff with something called Near-Field Communications, the problem is that not all smartphones have this tech, though it's becoming a more common standard feature. iBeacon uses a lower-powered standard of Bluetooth that allows the creation of a low-powered Bluetooth transmitter, or beacon, that sits there transmitting a code that can be looked up by compatible software when the receiving phone comes in to range. The cool thing about the beacon is that it's inexpensive and the battery can last a year, so it's set-up and forget it. I'm not sure if it requires the phone to use the same low-powered Bluetooth tech, if so, they're going to have the same adoption rate problem that NFC has.

One thing that they talk about in the article is having a few iBeacons in a museum and they can triangulate your location and know that you're standing in front of painting A and not painting B.

I can't imagine me installing such an app, for that matter, Bluetooth on my phone is normally turned off.

http://www.wired.com/design/2013/12/4-use-cases-for-ibeacon-the-most-exciting-tech-you-havent-heard-of/


Next up, FourSquare. It's a web site/something to do that I don't mess with, they're working on something like a Minority Report advertising methodology where you walk in to a store and your phone receives an offer for $20 off on a $100 purchase if you use your X credit card. There's really nothing to this, you only need geofencing and a compatible app, so it really isn't all that revolutionary since FourSquare is predicated upon geofencing. Still, it's getting some advertising.

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/12/futuristic-advertising-at-foursquare/