Google vs Microsoft, who will win?

High-tech companies are very exciting. Just like watching a game of baseball, where not much could happen for 7 innings, and then all of a sudden, a bad pitch, a good hit, and a stroke of luck could change the game immediately. Even big companies that's been winning game after game, could suddenly be toppled because of something as small as an obnoxious fan trying to catch a ball. IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Intel, AMD, Sun, all big name companies at one time or another, all went through phases of drastic change even within the few decades of operation. No company is immune, and they all need to stay vigilant to changes in the fickle market. And now two of the biggest tech companies have up'd the ante, and you better be at the edge of your seats because a homerun could change the game at any time. How does Windows 7 change things? Here's how it could play out:

How Microsoft could kill Google: 
Bing Bling
Google does a lot of things, email, maps, web hosting, documents, but they really only make money from two things -- adwords and adsense, both of which are tied to their search engine. The billions of dollars they are paying their engineers to have fun and develop cool web apps come from the bidding of keywords that is displayed on the search results page. If Google lose the search engine market or even just a chunk of it, they would suddenly have too many engineers with not enough money to support them. If this were to happen, say goodbye to all the Google benefits, people would start losing their jobs, and the culture would have to be drastically changed to defend their core business. The company would not be able to sustain the heavy investments they have in R&D, and would have to resort to being like Microsoft, where they would only enter a market after someone else have proven its worth. Microsoft can then deal the final blow because, you know, Microsoft is better at being Microsoft than Google is.

So, how would they pull it off?
To put it simply, create a beachhead. Some may hear that Bing search offers pretty good search results, but still not use it. Why change to bing when Google works great?

What they need to do is to give a reason to start using Bing. It doesn't have to give better results for everything, or try to replace Google immediately, but it needs to have a "wow, this is awesome" feature to use Bing for. If Microsoft developed Google Scholar, Google Images, or Google News before Google did, they would have a very strong starting point. From there, after users get used to typing in www.bing.com to do those specific searches, users would seriously consider replacing Google since they both solve the need for search. What they need is a means of attracting a core audience, and then find ways of spreading that audience to use their service for all other purposes. Specific and useful searches, but simple and easy to switch to their main service.

Will it happen?
Microsoft picked real-time search for their first beachhead. It certainly has potential to be big. However, I don't know about you, but I'm still confused about the whole twitter and update things in facebook. I'm not sure what circumstances I would need to be in for me to think in my head, "hmmm, what should I use to help me solve this problem? Oh, I know, real-time search with Bing!" But I would keep an eye out for any developments along this front.

I personally wouldn't have signed both Twitter and Facebook at the same time, since they are pretty fierce competitors. Rather, I'd probably try to sign an exclusive deal with Twitter, just because Facebook doesn't seem to like Google a lot. Still, though, props to the big MS for seeing this market and getting the deals through.

So... maybe. It could happen. It depends on whether people are right about the importance of web 2.0 for search and how Google will respond to this threat.

side note: 

How about make a 2d search result page, that offer the top results from each type of search, and the user can move through the results depending on which direction seems to match what the user is looking for the most? You can even eliminate the pagination delay with Ajax and make it like cool like iPhone.

How Google could kill Microsoft: 
Cloud OS Online Office
Microsoft, even though they have significantly diversified, their core business and most of their innovation still comes from their operating system, Windows. Without it, their relationship with computer manufacturers couldn't be leveraged, and their dominance would fade when they don't have enough money to throw at new markets to compete with the leaders there.

So, how would they pull it off?
Well, Google is one of only a few companies in the world that can pull off the creation of a real cloud operating system, as I described here. But honestly, that's still a few years away from coming to market.

An alternative is to make operating systems a sort of commodity, making people care for operating systems as much as they care about the type of tissue they have in the bathroom. Once that happens, it would no longer make sense to pay $200 for an operating system when you can get one for free, or another one that gives you a personality.

What do you think of when you're thinking about changing operating systems? Usually, two things -- programs and files. Right now, there are a bunch of web tools that can do what have been traditionally done only on the computer. But out of all of those, the most important ones are the productive tools that you use to make the presentations to the boss. He doesn't care which program you use or which operating system you have, just that you get it done. If you can just upload your presentation to Google docs in an easy manner (like dropbox), and be able to make it show up when you're ready to present, it wouldn't matter that you made the slides on your Linux box, and you're presenting it on a computer in the conference room with a mac.

Will it happen?
No. As much as I like Google, and as much as I don't like Microsoft, I really don't they are positioned well enough to take on Microsoft. Honestly, it feels like they've given up on Google docs. They haven't updated it in ages. For the longest time, I tried to like it, but it's a lost cause. Now that more and more people are creating pptx files that Google docs can't naturally convert, they've lost the window of opportunity.

Google creates a lot of mediocre products, sprinkled with neat-o features, but that is really not going to make a dent in the Microsoft kingdom. Luckily for Google, Microsoft also has to worry about Apple. They just might distract Microsoft enough that Google comes out with something that makes even more money than search. yaa.. I won't count on it though.

Conclusion
To me, it seems like Microsoft is playing it very smart in an Armani-suit-businessy-way, whereas Google is just playing around with promising platforms and cool applications without a focused strategy. They would seriously be in a bad position if they suddenly find Microsoft with a significant portion of search and their newest gizmo's like Android, Wave, and App Engine turn out not to be the money-makers they expected. Microsoft have played defense and offense pretty well, and they are poised to keep their position as the top player. Let's hope the Google engineers have been using their 20 percent time well.

And no, Facebook won't be able to replace either of them.

resume business cards

one liner: a business card that also has your resume on it

Especially in this economic environment, there are a lot of people looking for jobs. Sometimes you're at a gathering, and you find someone that would be interested in who you are, possibly a person from HR, or a manager, or an investor. It would be great if you could give him a business card, especially if it has your resume or your sales pitch or your business plan on it.

some options for how to do it. 1. put a detachable flash drive or sd card on it, but it might be expensive. 2. turn your resume into a qr code but the amount of stuff you put in is limited 3. print really really small, and offer a magnifying glass =P 4. link to your website, but the user has to type it in.

Any more ideas?

Detecting DNA with nanomachines

DNA is small. Despite being the code that spells out how to make each of the billions upon billions of proteins that make up who you are, each base, or letter of DNA, is 2 nano meters wide, and 0.3 nanometers long. Even stretched out, 800,000 letters of DNA can fit around a single strand of hair. One difference in a million separates you from smelly Bob, and only a few changes in key places would give you cancer. So how would you read something so small, yet so important? Well, how about with tiny diving board?

In 2000, a significant work [1] from J. Fritz and the team at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory presented a method that have been commonly used to create CPUs to sense biomolecules, including DNA, RNA, and proteins. They used semiconductor fabrication technology to create silicon cantilevers, which are tiny diving boards measuring 1 x 500 x 100 microns to create a platform where the materials would be detected. These cantilevers are still much larger than biomolecules, but they are small enough that they would be affected by them.

So to detect a specific sequence of DNA, they put complementary sequences stacked vertically on the cantilever. When a sample is placed on the device, the DNA from the sample would pair up and bind with those on the platform. The surface that was already crowded would now be even more packed, and the stress that is only on only one side of the cantilever causes it to bend, which can then be detected with high accuracy by a laser.

To test out their device, they created two such cantilevers, one with a 12 letter DNA sequence and the other with a 16 letter sequence and then they put two samples with the complementary sequence one after the other on the device. Of course, we cannot perfectly predict the reactions between the things in the sample and the DNA molecules on the platform, but with two such platforms, any difference would be significant. If the things in the samples bound to one platform stronger than the other, we can assume it was caused by the very specific DNA pairing. Sure enough, the laser signal showed the cantilever wobble and then stabilize with one cantilever bent lower after the first sample was added, and then wobble and stabilize with the other cantilever bent lower after the second sample was added. Even DNA sequences that differed by only one base pair caused a noticeable difference. Other than just attaching DNA sequences to the platform, they also tried proteins -- to see whether it interacted with another protein, and antibodies -- which can be made to bind to just about anything.

Microarrays and high throughput sequencing also offer scientists information on the microscopic world, yet both require probes and a complex procedure to perform the experiment. These micro cantilevers offer an unique advantage in its simplicity. Since the publication of the paper, people have proposed microfluidic devices that pump samples into a chamber with many cantilevers for detection, incredibly complex, but completely automated and miniaturized to fit just about anywhere.

We now know a lot about DNA, proteins, and other tiny molecules that makes a big difference in a living organism, but so far we haven't been able to detect these molecules cheaply and reliably to help with medical diagnosis. The devices that we do have are large and clunky. Soon, however, we will have laboratories on a chip that will be able to put all this knowledge to good use for everyone. And it is all thanks to a very tiny diving board.

[1] Fritz, J. et al., “Translating Biomolecular Recognition into Nanomechanics,” Science 288, 316, 2000.

material design?

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/phone-book-friction-unlocking-inter-connected-phone-books

could this be used to design new types of fabrics?

Online salesmen

One liner: provide an easy, low pressure mechanism for online shoppers to get assistance online.

There are many things that websites do well. But one thing that is hard to replace is the human interaction that are vital to any physical shop. Going to a car lot, few people go there to just look at cars and their brochures by themselves, they usually do that with the assistance of a car salesman, who knows the product, and can talk you though what you are looking for to find you the best match for the car. They answer questions, offer suggestions, make sales pitches, and create a pleasant atmosphere for shopping. To see how it makes a difference, go to any restaurant in Japan, where at the moment you walk in the door, they greet you with a hearty welcome, "Irashaimasae!", and knowing that the store is ready to serve you makes you want to patronize at the store even more.

Many online stores have good search functions, helpful faqs, or useful descriptions that go unused and unread. When a user doesn't find something before their patience runs out (which is really fast), they just leave the site to look for it elsewhere. Of course, this is bad for the site.

This idea is to allow instant messenging integrated with websites and the use of online salesmen to promote shopping on your site. Users coming to the site would be drawn to see an initial greeting from the salesmen, after which, the messenging window would put in an inconspicuous place that would not distract the user from normal website navigation, but still be in view and available for questions.

On the backend, each salesperson would be able to customize their own greetings, and chat windows would appear only when users reply to the greeting. Once in a chat, the salesperson would be able to see information relating to the user, such as the webpages that the user has been to, and the username along with the shopping history if the person has logged in. More likely than not, the user will ask about things that are already on the site. Therefore, it would be helpful to have a prediction system that will offer answers to the questions, where the salesperson would be able to use for their responses, such as pressing ctrl-1 to insert the first canned response suggestion. It should be made in such a way that maximizes the ability of salespeople to serve as many people as possible without compromizing quality.

One great thing about selling stuff online is the metrics that measure the activity on your site, and this would be no exception. Information about how much this system has helped your store can be clearly logged. Neat charts and pretty graphs can be made for users that have used the feature, and the additional revenue that came from the salespeople. The sales ability of the salespeople would also be measured, and commissions and bonuses can be given fairly. Depending on the measurements, the site owner would be able to fine tune any of these things, such as only offer the feature for customers that have already purchased X amount, make the chat window visible for only certain parts of the site where the margin is much higher, or assign different salespeople to different parts of the site. This feature would also help the site become more user-friendly, where the salespeople would be able to offer specific suggestions on where users gets confused or what most people are interested in.

Another great thing about web technology is that it can be done anywhere. These online sales people would be able to work at home, and probably at all kinds of different hours. This would be a position opened to anyone that would want to apply. Given a little training, it wouldn't be too hard to work in such a position.

[edit] just found out that this is currently being done (well) by olark.com

request for articles

one liner: in news aggregation sites, provide a voted request for for a certain topic

This one is simple, sometimes people are interested in certain things that no one wrote about, sometimes blog writers don't know what to write about. Make a way for readers to request information about a topic.

Ideas and Startups

Something just clicked for me today while reading posts about bootstrapping startups (starting from here), that startups are businesses and businesses are supposed to make money. Ideas are like ammunition. You need to execute the ideas to get value, where each one can provide you with a slice of the market. However, having more ammunition doesn't mean you win the war. These ideas are supposed to be like resources that a company has to go from one profitable business to another. This sounds blindingly obvious, but there has always been this misconception in the back of my mind that startups are there to prove whether an idea is good or not. This post is just a self-reminder that the business comes first, ideas have no value on their own.
[of course... we'll see about all this when I actually start my first startup]

Rated Reading Lists of Blog Posts

one liner: provide a web 2.0 reading list for websites

There are lots of news/recommendation sites out there: digg, reddit, hacker news, stumble upon, slashdot, fark not to mention all the copy cats in various languages and they all provide interesting new stories aggregated from around the web. One particular property of the links provided is that they are usually self-sufficient/self-contained -- each post has a particular point to make, and it's pretty short. These work well for many types of stories, such as current events, interesting stories, or opinions. However there are other types of information that do not fit into those categories. In particular are things that take a long time to learn, like programming, playing an instrument, controversial issues, which are way too complex to be explained through one blog post or webpage.

Taking a step back, to learn these things you can just grab a book (okay you technophiles can buy the ebook online), why learn about these things in blog posts? I think there are two reasons why I prefer learning about things online, rather than getting a book. One is attention span, mine's not that long. Blame it on the information overload or whatever, but I just can't sit down and finish a book unless every page is interesting. Blog posts are just the right size to keep a person interested in a subject long enough to finish reading through it, but not go overboard to cover stuff you don't care about. Second is "peer review," the whole idea of the web 2.0. Many many blogs are submitted to these sites every second, but only a few are rated by the community to be interesting enough for me to see them. Since blog posts are short and to the point, each idea is validated by the community. The filtered posts are what the community deems worth knowing.

However there are stuff that are too complex to learn in one post. Some things do have a learning curve, which are a bit frustrating to overcome with the web. If you do a google search, you will find all the information for a subject, but it will not be organized. Same with information from these aggregation sites. You can dig into the archives and read articles that may or may not be suitable for your level, but that would be too time consuming for the web.

What I would like to see is an organized list of stuff to read for these topics that span multiple posts. For example, if I want to learn how to make a website, I want to know html first, css, javascript, php/language of choice, sql, ajax, then a web framework. It doesn't make much sense to learn django if you don't know python, or sql, or html.

To build it, I would start with a news aggregator, and add a functionality for popular posts to be in the "hall of fame" or in web forums -- "stickied," then these post that are stickied that are good enough to represent a topic would be organized chronologically into the order in which they should be read in, this organization could also take other forms, such as a tree. Posts may be replaced by other posts, or even removed if they are outdated.

On the client side there needs to be a mechanism for the user to keep track of what the user has read so far, which subjects the user was interested in, and suggest the next entry to read. On a side note, this could be an independent feature for browsers -- marking a website as one to be read later.

The business plan for this idea would be advertisement on those organized lists. They should be the finest quality that the community behind the website has to offer, and would attract a significant amount of traffic from very specific people.

Crime reporting online

One Liner: offer a service to streamline the reporting of crimes online and also offer rewards for doing so.

Okay, even though I only use this blog to write down ideas, here's something personal: I live in Taiwan; and here's something political: the government sucks at managing the police. For those who have not visited an Asian country, you do not know the frustration at being stuck on the road because someone double parked on both sides of a narrow street, just because the driver didn't want to parallel park just a few meters away. Bad drivers, crazy motorists really drive me crazy, because they make it dangerous for so many other people to gain just a little bit of convenience for themselves.

But now that almost all cell phones have camera on them, and it is really easy to connect to websites, people should be able to report crimes easily. A streamlined service would accept pictures and other relevant information (speed, time, date, location) and try to automatically process the infraction (read the license plate) and send it to a police officer for review before sending the ticket. Reporters should be able to get a portion of the ticket as reward to encourage people reporting crimes. The tools that are used to report crimes should probably be certified for the obvious reasons, which the crime reporters would probably willingly pay as an investment for the reward money.

Chances are though, no matter how well it is thought out, this will probably not happen, since governments don't really try new things, and business that want to do this would need to jump through bureaucratic hoops.

Learning partners -- social network for collaboration

one liner: offer a social network for people that would like to learn a new skill that offers suggestions for people to learn or work with.

When you are learning a new skill or learning about a new subject, it is very hard to do on your own. This is one of the advantages of being in a college environment, where you have classmates where you can form study groups with people in your dorm when an exam comes up. When you have a question, you can ask your study buddy. Studying with someone else would also help give you motivation to continue with your commitment. It is also a great way of making friends with someone... small talk only gets you so far. Matchmaking online (as far as I know) has been limited to dating, but there should be ways of extending it to other fields.

One natural area where this would help would be a language exchange, where two people that are good in two separate languages can help each other get better at each other's language. English learning makes is a very large market in asian countries. There would definitely be ways of monetising it.

For implementation, there are many considerations, but many things can be copied (or learned) from the online dating websites. It should be the easiest to integrate with facebook where people already have their information and their network of people. I think there will be a significant portion of people that will use the service as a way of meeting the opposite gender, but I'm not sure how that will affect the service.
This is still a brainstorm in progress.....

I just read an interesting piece on how to get learn things well, maybe it will be able to connect with this idea.

Activity suggesting software

one liner: make a software that would recommend activities to do (for work or entertainment)
-or the integration of scheduling software with product searches.

Before I go into the details, this idea came up when I was thinking about how else to do advertising in the future. Advertising is THE way of making money online, all other options aren't really turning out to be great business plans. In general, I do not agree with the assumption that money making businesses are inherently unconscienable. In a perfect world, money would represent the value that a business offers, and advertising offers a lot of value to the world. Annoying advertisement and false advertising do not add value in the big picture of things.

During the course of the week, there are times where I find myself wondering what to do. I have lists of TODO for home, and for work, but I don't really have a habit of going to those when I have free time. It would be nice if a schedule / daily planner would be able to suggest things to do next. For work, it would grab your todo list, and your boss's todo list, and you coworkers todo list, and combine them in a way that would maximize productivity. For entertainment, when it sees that I have some time off, it could look at my history and suggest activities for me to do. If I want to do something with my friends, it could look at their iteneraries and offer suggestions as well. Here is where the revenue would come in for this idea. Depending on who I was with, what time of day it is, or a bunch of other factors, it would be able to tell me that there is a sale at so and so place, or new movies that came out that I want to watch, or that there is a new game that came out. Companies would be able to have targeted advertisement for people that want to do certain things.

I can plan to hang out with a few friends, and the software could be able to suggest restaurants to go to, or things to do. On the advertising side, companies could develop activities for people to do, and advertise it to the people who are interested.

Since we are often defined by the things we do, I hope that such a software would help us to become who we want to be.

Origami giraffe and bird

Giraffe made from crease pattern by Noburu Miyajima

http://www.h5.dion.ne.jp/~origami/giraffe.html

bird made from diagram in Origami Design Secrets by Robert Lang

reverse textbook

one liner: offer a service that organizes all the concepts you need to know to understand a specific topic.

In our day and age, it really is impossible to understand everything in the world, it usually works much better if you only pick things up as you go. But in order to understand a high level concept, there are often prerequisites before you can understand the deeper stuff. The only good reference materials are usually textbooks and textbooks that are often pretty annoyingly big. You don't want to go through the whole physics book if you only want to understand how circuits work. It may require some knowledge about trigonometry and complex numbers, but you will probably not use differential equations. Trying to look up all these things gets quite annoying. It would be much better if you can have a customized "textbook" that isn't about a broad subject, like "physics," but all the information about a particular subject, like "microprocessor fabrication".

The service should be able to start with the topic that you do want to understand, and figure out all the necessary information that you would need to understand the topic completely. To implement it, it will be written like any textbook (probably like wikipedia) but with extra information about dependencies. When a user finds a topic to understand, the service will start with a common knowledge assumed that the user has, and build up lessons to work up to the topic. If the assumptions are wrong, the user can skip a topic or go into more fundamental topics.

I really think this is necessary, because there are a lot of smart educated people that want to learn about certain topics but get frustrated when they realize how hard it is to find a reliable source that you can understand. People shouldn't feel embarassed that they do not understand any given topic -- science is wayy to complicated for any one person to understand. Besides, a need based education will show people the practicality of the skills they are learning, rather than memorizing millions of equations that they will never use.

finance management software on your cell phone

one liner: record receipts with a cell phone camera and use location, time information to make a record of spendings.

I think financial management could be improved significantly with portable electronics. Finance is all about planning -- I'm going to put x amount into the bank to save up for y, I'm going to use z dollars in groceries this month. With any plan, there's always the review to see if you met the goals that you set out for -- Last month, I spent too much on eating out, so this month I'm going to have to try extra hard to cook for myself. When you are reviewing habits, it would help a great deal if you can have as much information as possible, organized as well as possible. It would be great to see how much money you have spent on weekends as opposed to weekdays, or how much you spend on entertainment compared to food.

With a cell phone, you can figure out a lot of things about what a person is doing, and deduce what the person is spending the money on. If a person is at a clothing store, chances are the person is spending money on clothes, and not on food. There can be many ways of getting the financial information all in one location -- you could take a picture of all the receipts that you spent money on, or match up the time on the credit card bill.

One of the benefits is that when you have all this information in one place, you can get instant feedback on your spending. Did you pay more money than you planned on a suit? Well, you will have to either have to take that money from the money you were going to use to buy a present for your friend or from money to buy video games.

mobile taxi service

one liner: offer a one-touch app to call for a taxi

The basic service will provide an application where pressing a button will send the gps location of the user to the local taxi service and call for a cab. Preferably taxi companies would be able to respond to the particular phone with an update for the amount of time it would take for the taxi to arrive.

There can be a lot of incentives that could go along with it. It can offer 1/2 off discounts to certain partnership malls or other services. It can offer to sync up with your schedule, so the taxi would be outside waiting for you when you are done with your meting and such.

drum where you go

one liner: make a portable drum kit by using accelerometers and sensors connected to a portable device

so I was doing air drumming today cuz I was bored. and I realized that most of the motions can be detected by a device you wear... nike already have sensors in shoes, and they wirelessly transmit the info to a handheld device. Hand motions can be sensed by acclerometers put in watches or cell phones attached to the arm. It really wouldn't be too hard to have a portable device that combines all these information to produce real sound (either on the device or on a better speaker).

I am a huge fan of being able to play music everywhere you go. With a portable computing device like a cell phone, you can do stuff like having an autotune microphone, karaoke machine, or portable musical devices right on your cell phone.

Karaoke never got big in the states for some reason, but in asian countries, going to karaoke is just as common as going to the movies for entertainment. I'd think that these types of music games/activities would have a huge market that could use some more innovation.

cell phone, where are thou?

one liner: have the cell phone email you its gps location when it's running short of juice.

I just got woken up by my obnoxious cell phone cuz it was running low of power. It's like ridiculous how long it can keep beeping loudly when it claims it's low on power.

Anyways, so to tell me that it's low on power without being obnoxious is to email me when it's low on power. And just in case I forgot where the cell phone is, turn on the gps and tell me where you are exactly, then go to low power mode. I can still call the phone if I reallly need it to ring.

printer for cellphones

one liner: make a printer for cell phones by exposing polaroid pictures to the cellphone display

I think I saw like a tiny version of polaroid cameras where the polaroid is like a little sticker that you can just stick anywhere. It'll be really useful if you can just find and print out figures from google and stick it on stuff.

typically other methods of printing require a lot of moving parts and possibly heat to finalize the printed material. This method would allow printing with the minimum amount of extra parts.

not sure if the contrast on the cell phone display is good enough for this though, it may take some experimenting to see how it works

web 2.0 top 10 list

one liner: web 2.0 creation of top 10 list

A list will have a name and the categories it belongs to.
Each item in the list will have a name, multiple descritions and rating.
The discriptions of the items on the list will have ratings.

The order of the list will be decided through ratings. The description of each item will be the highest rated description.

Product Review Website

one liner: a website with superior product reviews and ratings by offering coupons for helpful reviews.

Reviewing a product well isn't an easy job, you need to have some kind of expertise in the area, you need to know other products in the market, and you need to be able to communicate your feelings about the product in a clear manner. Just look at movie critics, game review magazines, zagat guides, etc. There are millions of people who make their living off of reviewing different kinds of products.

Many restaurants pay bloggers to review their food and make posts of it, but when reading any of those things, you can't help but question whether they really like the restaurant or they just got paid a lot to like it. It's an inherent paradox in product review -- people base their judgment on independant reviewers, but reviewers make their money from companies that make the product they review, which makes them biased. It would be much better if the reward system is fully disclosed or controlled.

But what is interesting is that these kinds of reviews can be analyzed statistically. There are plenty of signs that would tell if the review is really accurate or not. If people who expected a 5-star hotel, but only got a 2-star service, the probability of them complaining is very high. So it is completely feasible to find out how good the rating is by product sales, amount of use of the product, amount of complaints, etc. Reviewers that have both popularity and accurate ratings are the most valuable for a product review website, and it would be profitable to the website to provide such people some kind of compensation, whether it is a free product to let the reviewer review or a monetary compensation.

Linux command line game

One thing that has turned people off about linux is the scary white-computery-text-on-black-background command line. People who actually use it knows how much easier it is to just type in the commands, instead of looking for the menu for the feature; but for those that don't, it's like opening up a mechanical clock, who knows what will happen if you make a mistake.

Even though they look the same, text-based adventure games are really fun. Way back before graphics were 3d, heck even 2d, there were the text-based games. Just type in what you want to do, and your virtual avatar will try to do it in the virtual world. It is one step up from those choose-your-own-adventure books, ya know, the one where there's a choice at the bottom of each page, and you flip to the page that corresponds to the option that you chose. Good writing and some imagination makes them better than a lot of million-dollar games that are just boring.

Anyways, so I was doing some work on the terminal and I was also thinking about making a text-based game for a friend of mine and I made the connection: a text-based game in the termainal. So, each directory that you are in is a location, files in the directory are the different things that you can interact with, and /usr/bin will contain the actions that you can perform. Since there are symbolic links, it is totally possible to create a map that is arbitarily complex. Say you're in /start/room1/ there will be two files: LOOK and useSwitch. When you first ssh'd into the terminal, it will display a quick tutorial like, "to look around a location use: cat LOOK; and to perform an action use ./useSwitch". The file "LOOK" will contain a quick description of the room: "You are currently in a room that has a switch, use it by typing ./useSwitch", and when you type ./useSwitch, it will echo the text: " you flipped the switch, and a door appears" and add a symbolic link to the current directory to the next room.

There are two goals for this game: it's coooooooooolllllllllll, and it'll be a fun way to learn how to use the terminal. Right now, I'm making up the list of commands that should be in it, and how to make it a fun game... if you have suggestions, please leave it in the comment section!

directory - location
ls - find what's at a location
cd - change location
LOOK - text file of the description of the room
./executable - do something, may add files to the directory, or display text
john.person - binary file of information
/bin/talk john.person - start the program to have a conversation with john
/bin/attack john.person - start the program to attack this person -- after you beat him, something may happen
processes - this can be your party
ps - list your current party
kill signal pid - signal your party to perform an action.. or dismiss them
~/ contains your inventory, stat information? use "cd -" to return to the adventure
/bin/save - creates a symbolic link from your home directory to the current level.

cp/rm/mkdir - these commands might mess things up.....
pipe/direct to file/grep/wc/sudo/aptitude/

ideally this will actually be done in the filesystem, but... it may have to be done outside.