Month: July 2020

I’m preparing an article on “10 things I would change in SAP Commerce to make it better,” and during my research, I stumbled upon a very interesting collection of technologies that failed to take off for various reasons.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research/corporate-innovation-product-fails/

For instance, it starts with a water-filled bra, an innovation from Evian (oh my God, and this was in 2005!). Turns out, Colgate tried launching frozen food (I can only imagine what it was like at the board meeting – someone stands up and suggests pairing vegetables with the same brand as their toothpaste). BIC, known for their pens, decided to release disposable underwear. Cosmopolitan launched a yogurt under their own brand. An interesting case with Kanoa Wireless Headphones – Kanoa – how a single review by a blogger (Cody Crouch) buried an entire product. It turned out that Twitter tried to release a special device for posting tweets in 2009. With a little screen! Turns out Apple tried to release a phone even before the iPhone, and it was the Rokr E1, in partnership with Motorola. It failed!

I also heard that Zippo tried to launch a perfume, and our sports bars, Hooters, ventured into the niche of air transport, but these two facts are oddly missing from the list.

By the way, if you’ve managed to read up to this point, are there examples of software where the vendor released a new version that turned out so bad that it lost half of its market or even all of it?

I remember learning about the game “Life” in my early childhood from Martin Gardner’s book “Mathematical Games” published in 1979. John Conway, the inventor of the game, recently died from coronavirus at the age of 82.

Speaking of the game. Conway’s “Life” is a cellular automaton defined on a grid of squares.

Each cell on the grid at each moment in discrete time is considered alive or dead. In the next time step, its state is determined by rules depending on the state of the eight neighboring cells. Specifically: 1) in an empty (dead) cell, if there are exactly three live cells adjacent to it, life is born; if a live cell has two or three live neighbors, the cell continues to live; otherwise, if there are fewer than two or more than three neighbors, the cell dies (from “loneliness” or “overpopulation”). The essence of the game lies in selecting an initial configuration of cells and observing their development.

Such simple rules allow for the creation of moving objects (such as the “glider”), or objects with a long but finite life (for example, the Diehard pattern, which lives for 130 generations and then dies). There is a figure, the pentadecathlon, capable of “absorbing” a colliding glider or reflecting it by 180 degrees. Placing two pentadecathlons against each other, one can have a “tennis match”: they will toss the glider back and forth like a ball. There’s the “Cheshire Cat”: after six moves, only the “smile” remains from the cat, and the “face” completely disappears. There’s even a “virus,” which if placed correctly on a field of figures, can create beautiful chaos. See the link from the comments, there’s something at the very end of the article, you won’t regret it.

A wonderful video showing how it all works on a huge field with complex initial configurations. In the middle of it, there’s Gosper’s glider gun – a pattern that shoots gliders 🙂

P.S. If you search for “conway’s game of life” on Google, there will be a simulation of this game running in the background. Just a little Easter egg from Google.

In the initial edition earlier today, this news included “Evita” and “Midnight Express”. Apparently, someone came to Meduza and explained the difference between Evita and “The Wall”.

How wonderful that they thought to simply capture “how they lived” for history. It’s interesting to watch in 2020.

Question for Android and iOS developers. Why can’t we create a server-side mobile app web-emulator capable of functioning in mobile browsers through a javascript UI? That is, a developer of a simple tic-tac-toe game uploads the app (apk/ipa) to a service, and this service provides a public URL, which, when entered in any mobile browser, displays a fully interactive version of tic-tac-toe.

What color is the traffic light here? We’re taking a stroll

There’s an opinion that some series is going on there

Four months ago, we ordered two masks with 💕 on AliExpress. The masks arrived today. Only now, the mask is too small for me. But for Nadya — just right!

Walking past this building now. It’s nicknamed “the toilet bowl” here. Rumor has it, it’s the letter O from Olivetti, in the building were the headquarters of this once great company. It gained fame as “the ugliest building in Virginia (here’s the full list by state https://www.businessinsider.com/ugliest-buildings-in-the-us-2018-1)

A very interesting channel. They do reviews of very interesting scientific papers (usually something mind-blowing) in 2 minutes. Highly recommended. Be careful, it’s quite addictive.

Mouth simulator. Warning – it’s addictive, and it makes people look around. Tip: Multitouch