[HN Gopher] It was all downhill after the Cuecat
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It was all downhill after the Cuecat
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 78 points
Date : 2022-10-20 19:10 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pluralistic.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (pluralistic.net)
| adolph wrote:
| Joel on Software's chuckle-worthy contemporaneous :CueCat
| commentary:
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/09/12/wasting-money-on-c...
|
| Good previous thread here (including the :CC founder's link to
| Oak Island!):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11328093
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The CueCat read normal barcodes. It read them better than it read
| the weird slanted ones that were associated with it.
|
| Like all cheap 1-d barcode readers it did a terrible job of
| reading either kind of barcode.
|
| What's really remarkable about QR codes is that they read
| reliably with a cheap camera, which just isn't true about UPC
| barcodes either using a camera or using a wedge reader. You need
| a really expensive reader with a laser and a spinning mirror if
| you want reading UPC bar codes to be less than several times
| slower than typing in the numbers.
| Vrondi wrote:
| This just isn't true. Goodreads and similar apps have been
| pretty good and pretty fast at reading barcodes from books for
| years now, on a smartphone.
| mbreese wrote:
| I believe the parent is talking about dedicated barcode
| readers (wands, scanners, etc...). Some of them are camera
| based.
|
| Smartphone based barcode reading software/SDKs made any
| dedicated reader for consumer use largely obsolete.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Before smartphones it was the case that most non-PC devices
| had terrible price performance, for instance a router might
| have a USB port and run Linux and Samba to serve files off
| a USB stick but the file server was unspeakably slow. It
| was like the cost was 1/5 but the performance was like
| 1/500.
|
| Since smartphones came out, now it is smartphone and PC
| that beat everything else. That's why game consoles today
| are made from either PC or Smartphone parts.
|
| QR codes are remarkable though because they were designed
| in 1994 to be read from robots moving at 30 mph so from a
| UX perspective QR codes are great because they scan fast.
| In my county there is a 'reuse center' that has a custom
| POS system that reads QR stickers with cheap readers that I
| think would struggle with UPC.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > The CueCat read normal barcodes. It read them better than it
| read the weird slanted ones that were associated with it.
|
| My recollection (and I may still have one of those things in
| the basement somewhere) was that you plugged it in inline with
| your PS2 keyboard and when you scanned a normal barcode it just
| spit it out as if you had typed the number on your keyboard.
| Like if you were typing a term paper in MSWord and your
| annoying roommate snuck in and started scanning things, you'd
| have a whole lot of random pieces of barcodes in between words.
| A cuecat was a second keyboard, as far as your computer was
| concerned.
|
| No software needed, no firmware updates, nothing. No need to do
| anything at all with the provided CD. And _that_ was the
| problem, as people who wanted a barcode scanner could just go
| grab a free one from Radio Shack. Some people were visiting
| every single Radio Shack within driving distance grabbing as
| many as the hapless employees were willing to give them.
| RulerOf wrote:
| >A cuecat was a second keyboard, as far as your computer was
| concerned.
|
| That's how every USB barcode reader I've used worked too.
|
| While the approach is certainly very compatible, it left
| configuration of the device's behavior to be very esoteric.
| If I wanted to change the key sequence that followed, I had
| to scan these special programming barcodes[1] to alter its
| behavior... which is something I never got to work.
|
| 1: https://help.eyefinity.com/omew/Barcodes/Programming_Your_
| Ba...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I have one that can be configured to either pretend to be a
| keyboard or pretend to be a serial device. In terms of
| reading barcodes though it is absolute rubbish.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yep. The cuecat worked by making keystrokes.
|
| The trouble with your analysis is I think few people wanted a
| barcode scanner back then and the ones that did wanted a
| _reliable_ barcode scanner. A $40 barcode scanner you buy off
| ebay from a chinese manufacturer is not going to save you any
| time or hassle by scanning UPC codes although it might do OK
| with QR codes. A Cuecat was much worse.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| I didn't send the number. It sent a (base64, IIRC) encoded
| version of the barcode, along with a serial number for
| tracking purposes. It was fairly quickly reverse engineered,
| but never quite as simple as some of the contemporary barcode
| scanners that just entered raw numbers.
| morelisp wrote:
| IIRC there was a trivial short to disable the b64 and ID.
| That and installing a power switch was my first ever real
| soldering project.
| [deleted]
| aidenn0 wrote:
| After setting my webcam to a fixed focus distance, I can scan
| UPC (well EAN-13) barcodes incredibly quickly and reliably.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| What was notable about CueCat is evident by the fact we're all
| here able to talk about it twenty years later: they sent those
| things to _everyone._ There haven 't been too many modern
| iterations of this idea on such a grand scale, but there have
| been some, like the original Square card reader. They gave that
| away for free (later $20) and it could piggyback on any phone
| with a 3.5mm headphone jack.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _> They gave that away for free (later $20) and it could
| piggyback on any phone with a 3.5mm headphone jack._
|
| The fact that we had such a robust, simple, and universal
| interface which was taken away from us, effectively increasing
| the cost of the equivalent peripherals by 2 or 3X, while
| decreasing their potential usefulness and lifespan by a similar
| factor is yet more evidence of a new technocratic corporate
| disdain for users.
|
| Big companies would rather control their users through
| marketing, branding, and technological lock in, than genuinely
| benefiting their users at the deepest level.
|
| Another example: The Lightning cable.
| RulerOf wrote:
| This really hits home with me:
|
| >But in a world of Felony Contempt of Business Model, that
| discussion changes to "Given that we can literally imprison
| anyone who helps our users get more out of this product, how can
| we punish users who are disloyal enough to simply quit our
| service or switch away from our product?"
|
| >That is, "how can we raise the switching costs of our products
| so that users who are angry at us keep using our products?"
|
| I keep telling myself that the reason interoperability
| disappeared is because software updates and platforms are just
| fast-moving targets, and we don't have the relative stability
| computers had 25 years ago. But I know that's not true, and it's
| really the other way around.
| version_five wrote:
| I summarize this behaviour as "hating your customers" and it
| seems to be a growing trend. I think it's a corruption of just
| being opinionated and looking for people who are on board with
| your product vision (common advice that I agree with), that
| comes with too much market power, or consumers that are so used
| to being treated like shit they don't even notice anymore. But
| you see it now in most corporate interactions, how much they
| hate their customers
| stcredzero wrote:
| _> how much they hate their customers_
|
| We programmers are among the _worst_ when it comes to this.
| The natural reaction so many of us have when getting a bug
| report, is anger and blaming the messenger. (The user)
|
| Perhaps now in 2022, the most successful app purveyors have
| gotten so good at network effects, while treating their users
| as the product, the economics/game theory has started to
| breed contempt for users?
| amatecha wrote:
| I love this quote in the article, something I've been feeling for
| a long time:
|
| > There's no longer anything being promised to us by tech
| companies that we actually need or asked for.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| The claims made in the article are developed into very
| exaggerated forms and thus make it really difficult to take
| seriously.
|
| It would have been better if the author stuck strictly to tenable
| claims, since veering into amateur political agitation is usually
| the last resort of writers without substantial prospects
| elsewhere.
|
| e.g.
|
| >" The problem is when you can't choose someone else - when
| leaving a platform involves high switching costs, whether that's
| having to replace hardware, buy new media, or say goodbye to your
| friends, customers, community or family."
|
| Here the author tries to turns a mundane observation, that
| switching costs are high when you put your entire life on a
| single platform, into an emotive and attention grabbing claim.
|
| > "That's why plans to impose interoperability on tech giants are
| so exciting - because the problem with Facebook isn't "the people
| I want to speak to are all gathered in one convenient place," no
| more than the problem with app stores is "these companies
| generally have good judgment about which apps I want to use. The
| problem is that when those companies don't have your back, you
| have to pay a blisteringly high price to leave their walled
| gardens. That's where interop comes in. Think of how an
| interoperable Facebook could let you leave behind Zuckerberg's
| dominion without forswearing access to the people who matter to
| you"
|
| Here the author alleges Zuck to be ruling a vast dominion of
| billions of Facebook users. And the fabled 'interop' shall grant
| users the magic key for passage through the most expedient gates
| into the land of unbounded freedom outside.
|
| In reality Facebook usage is already declining in North America,
| and no magic keys are necessary for people to just leave and
| delete their accounts.
|
| The idea of interop may be valuable yet this phrasing and casting
| of the folks at Facebook as arch-demons and feudal lords will
| more likely retard rather than promote the prospects of its
| integration.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The feudal lord metaphor is entirely accurate, but for the
| wrong reasons. While FAANG companies do talk a good game about
| "stickiness" and "switching costs", the reality is that most of
| the time, they aren't the ones holding users in. It's actually
| fairly difficult to do that. Users piled into FAANG because
| they had things the users wanted and were able to keep out the
| deluge of spam and malware that is the heat death of any global
| communications network.
|
| i.e. anti-spam is difficult, but if we move our business over
| to Google Workspace, we get that for very cheap. Gmail now has
| a moat around it because the bar for proving you aren't a
| spammer gets worse every year - but everyone trusts Google's
| MX.
|
| Likewise, Apple's App Store lockout was so they could brag to
| users that "iPhones don't get viruses", because users would
| rather wear a straitjacket if it keeps them from getting
| stabbed.
|
| The underlying problem is that governments rarely actually
| fight cybercrime, so tech companies protected users by
| appointing themselves as judge, jury, and executioner. Ending
| the era of digital warlords is more than just repealing DMCA
| 1201[0] or incorporating EU DMA into local law. We need an
| actual government to take their place - because nobody actually
| wants to live in the wild west.
|
| [0] Including the equivalent laws that the US forced into a
| large number of other countries
| gernb wrote:
| The value of interop is that every company will ask "Click here
| to allow us to access all your FB data".
|
| Agree that the article is full of hyperbole that makes it hard
| to take serious
|
| > Then there was the law: how could you impose license terms on
| a gift?
|
| Sounds like most open source software. Seems like a gift but
| you hve to obey the license terms. I'm not saying anyone was
| obligated to follow Cuecat's terms. I'm only saying the
| sentence above is nonsense. Plenty of "gifts" require you to
| obey license terms.
|
| > Anger turns attention into a narrow tunnel of brittle
| movements and thinking.
|
| Um, Ok, so I guess there are zero effective activists? The
| large portion of them seem to be angry about something and
| channel that anger into action
|
| > With Emotional Design, Norman argued that aesthetics were
| functional, because aesthetics primed users to fix the
| oversights and errors and blind spots of designers. It was a
| manifesto for competence and humility.
|
| WAT? I'm not even sure what that paragraph is trying to say.
| The last sentence does not seem to follow from the first 2.
|
| That's about the point I decided the entire thing had too much
| nonsense and stopped reading, even if I tend to be worried
| about some of the issue raised.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Worked at radio shack during the Cuecat days.
|
| One day word came down that we had to destroy all remaining
| inventory. Those things were nearly indestructible. Ran one over
| with a car multiple times and it was fine. Eventually everyone
| interested just took them home.
|
| From my perspective the real decline came from canceling of the
| catalog.
|
| We had so many people coming in asking for it. Only to be told to
| use the kiosk in store or the website.
|
| That catalog was basically our training manual. We got to know
| our inventory from it. People always walked in and showed us what
| they wanted. That all dried up.
|
| Then we became just a phone shop. In my region I was the highest
| selling agent of parts , batteries and accessories. That stuff
| was pure profit. Yet, I was constantly in trouble for not selling
| enough phones.
|
| They did not care one bit about anything else.
|
| They had a glut of engineers after the dot com crash, wish is how
| I ended up their.
| a-dub wrote:
| when i was a kid one of my big ideas was to create a wattage
| normalized time/power coding scheme for microwave oven cook
| programs and to then equip them with barcode scanners for
| automatic programming based on codes that manufacturers would put
| on their frozen/heat and eat foods.
|
| i think this was like 1992 or so, long before the cuecat.
| causality0 wrote:
| God I miss the sense that a company is trying to sell me exactly
| what I want to buy. I used to get it so often in the early 2000s.
| gernb wrote:
| This just reminded me, resently I wanted to plug some things
| into a smart switch (you plug the switch into the wall, you
| plug something into the switch, you can now turn the thing
| on/off from your phone etc...)
|
| A year ago I bought a pack of 4 Meross smart switches. I was
| using one and had 4 left. The one had issues, about once every
| 2-3 months it would stop responding. I'd unplug it and plug in
| back in and it would work again.
|
| Any, last week I wanted to plug something else in so I grabbed
| one of the remaining 3 switches. I could not get it to pair
| with the iPhone Home app (the same app I was using for the
| first switch). I tried moving closer to my WiFi (right next to
| it in fact). No luck. I tried all 3 switches. No luck. Ok, go
| online, Meross has an app that might let me do the pairing
| and/or apply upgrades? Download the app. You can't use the app
| unless you make an account. F that. I took all 4 switches that
| immediately threw them in the trash.
|
| I searched and found Eve (https://www.evehome.com/) who "claim"
| they are all about privacy
|
| > 100% Privacy > No Eve cloud, no registration and no tracking
| so your data won't get exposed. Local intelligence and direct
| communication between Eve accessory and iPhone, iPad or home
| hub without bridge or cloud dependency.
|
| They cost >2x the Meross ones. Got 2. They work so far.
| Crossing my fingers they're legit, though my guess is they
| won't last. Few consumers care AFAICT.
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