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Facebook had $2.02 billion in revenue this past quarter, the bulk of which is advertising, up from $1.59 billion a year ago, and generating $621 million in quarterly profits..

They have a good chunk of the worldwide digital advertising market and seek to expand further, especially through mobile. That's their plan.

Which is just the same as carrying a BRCA mutation that increases your likelihood of breast cancer. Yet almost every medical authority would agree you should only get BRCA testing done alongside counseling from an appropriately trained genetic counselor.

Are members of the public equipped to interpret a 55% or greater chance of their child developing Alzheimer's Disease?

It's not about withholding the test. It's about making sure the test results are accurate, that the recipient understands what the test may uncover, and that they are equipped to rationally process the result.

Here's a fact. If you're female, you're at greater risk to develop AD, even accounting for age.

And, another thing, most impacts of AD are highly linked to other things - which these tests won't show you.

Yes, Apolipoprotein-E is a significant risk allele, but it's not the whole story. You'd be far better off getting enough sleep and moderate exercise and laying off the typical American diet.

Which is just the same as carrying a BRCA mutation that increases your likelihood of breast cancer. Yet almost every medical authority would agree you should only get BRCA testing done alongside counseling from an appropriately trained genetic counselor.

Are members of the public equipped to interpret a 55% or greater chance of their child developing Alzheimer's Disease?

It's not about withholding the test. It's about making sure the test results are accurate, that the recipient understands what the test may uncover, and that they are equipped to rationally process the result.

put a real computer in the thing

No. A correctly designed and implemented system does not need an excess of power because the amount of computing power necessary is a precisely known quantity.

Safety critical code correctly deals with problems the typical business software programmer has never ever pondered. Recovering from corrupt memory, for example.

The answer isn't a huge CPU and gobs of github best-effort-ware The correct answer is competent design coupled with quality engineering. Hard, expensive work in other words. This actually happens. One can not say it is not possible.

The only real question is; why doesn't it happen at Toyota and other manufacturers? The answer is indifference. The effort is not made, the resources are not spent.

Lack of resources is not the problem. Toyota, for instance, is arguably the largest auto manufacturer on Earth. They certainly have the resources. Whereas NASA was dealing with ~$10e9 annual budgets when they developed STS software, Toyota earned ~$224e9 billion in FY2013. They could to the job right and the cost would be a rounding error.

Hammer them with a big enough judgement and perhaps they'll have the motivation.

There's nothing in the linked articles to suggest that these "lock-ins" are any different than what many other companies do, especially start-ups, when there is a crucial problem at hand. (To me this 'necessity' sometimes indicates poor management and planning, other times perhaps it's needed). I notice that the first Google result I found isn't mentioned in the summary. It clarifies a bit what the lockdown means, apparently doesn't mean no one is allowed to leave the office or other such nonsense. The link to the Bangladeshi factory story appears to be an absurd comparison.

- Great Firewall of the UK, China, Iran and Russia
- Undersea cables cut in the Mediterranean knocking entire continents off the network
- Copyright collection agencies deciding what is allowed on the internet and what isn't with no public input or control whatsoever (HADOPI, GEMA, the list goes on for quite a while)
- Several nations' network speeds are so slow as to make the internet unusable for doing anything more than reading text
- Several nations don't have internet connectivity whatsoever (largely island nations, Southeast Asia and Africa)
- ICANN's support of non-English URIs and country-specific TLDs
- US laws like COPPA, CFAA, and the planned CISPA/SOPA, and a USTR hostile to internet freedom
- And this one has been important since the dawn of the internet: ICANN and IANA have always been based in the US and controlled by its government
- The top three biggest TLDs in the entire world (.com, .net, .org) are all administered in the US, and this has been used to establish jurisdiction over servers physically located in foreign countries. (See Megaupload, Rojadirecta, TVShack, and the Pirate Bay) -- frequently at the behest of private industry without due process of law

http://www.fastcompany.com/3014675/fast-feed/how-the-cia-can-send-a-drone-after-any-mobile-phone

CIA/NSA/US.mil can track phones even if they are powered off... and this article supposes even if the battery is removed.

Jan Wong

In 2006, Wong attracted attention by imitating the work of Barbara Ehrenreich and going undercover as a cleaning lady in wealthy Toronto homes. While employed by the Globe and Mail as a reporter Jan Wong impersonated a maid and then wrote about her experiences in a five-part series on low-income living.

There were many social issues discussed in this series of articles, the majority of which I didn't agree with as framed. One issue she pointed out was that these barely-literate low-income scullery-scrubs few of whom had driver's licences were expected to haul vacuum cleaners through the Toronto metro system between jobs that were not as proximal as a modern UPS delivery route.

Brown Down: UPS Drivers Vs. The UPS Algorithm

No, the scheduling algorithm employed by the scullery-scrub dispatch office involved chewing up small bits of paper and spitting them at a map, because they were getting away with NOT PAYING for the delivery of vacuum cleaners by their downtrodden and raw-fingered cleaning staff. Many of these barely-solvent workers were putting in eight hour on job sites, plus another four hours (unpaid) moving between job sites, toting equipment that wasn't even their own for less than the cost of delivering the equipment by any other business method.

Jan Wong could have gone to war over a clear violation of labour fairness, but she instead decided to do a lot of public hang-wringing over systemic issues unlikely to ever change.

It's Apple's job to politely inform their store managers that this violates accepted labour practice and to put an end to it as thoroughly as they do with unwelcome rumours about unfinished products.

I once spoke to an ex IBM employee in the early 1980s who said he left IBM because he could get anything done. His department was under such tight security that it took him an hour to get to his desk in the morning and another hour to leave it in the afternoon. I think part of that was fetching his work product from a secure area and returning it there again with an inspection. He was well paid for the whole ordeal, until it finally drove him nuts.

The rule in a democratic salary market is that time is money. Even if the money is too small to spit at from the perspective of the person writing the cheques.

An anecdote I liked from that series was the incident(s) where business owners tried to bully her out of using street parking in front of their stores (which they would prefer to see used by customers) on the presumption that she was timid and uneducated. It almost blew her cover confessing she knew how to drive in the hiring interview. I think she had to tell some huge sob story to make her desperation believable to take such a job as a person who could hold down a driver's licence.

It's really a matter of money, time, and process. I have referred to this article for years. Writing mission-critical code is about having a process in place that sets standards, guidelines, and checks and balances. These guys wrote code that had 420,000 lines and only one bug; commercial quality code of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors. They are one of four organizations in the world rated SEI Level 5.

The most important part is the constant red-teaming. Verifiers are allowed to go to town and challenge the coders. It is clear that the rest of NASA doesn't have this mentality. We have seen shuttles explode and crash and burn because some political guy told the engineers to go fuck themselves. Imagine if there were a red-team that could have went to HQ and said, "We're not launching because of blow-by on the O-rings, and it's too fucking cold for too fucking long for the O-rings to stay pliant."

There is a huge third group: the military and aerospace industries. Unfortunately, their standards are even higher, like one bug per 420000 lines of code, so they're obviously not the group we need to make this math work.

Maybe the "industry standard" is whatever buggy math it is that makes that statement make sense to the original author?

Thread closed.

And yet this is more or less the same thing they said about mobile phones in the early 80's. No more than a few k needed in the world or something similarly stupid.

Someone explain to me why you can't do the same technology on mirrored glasses in a way that nobody will notice the camera? If I look on Google for "camera sunglasses" most of the results are dorky, but some begin to look quite cool (second photo; warning there may be some flash media my browser ignored).

There also seem to be a bunch of ideas for holographic contact lenses. Google glass is more of a technology demonstrator and beginning of something bigger. I don't see why it can't take off long term if they can do something useful with it.

Now if only someone could come up with a version where we could control the privacy a bit.

I'm not saying we aren't in another tech bubble -but I don't think Yahoo!'s buying Summly says anything about the industry in general.

Fast Company probably has it right - that this was more about hiring talent/changing company culture than about the actual business value of the app.

If you want to learn from them: this is a similar article on software development by NASA: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff It is from 1996 but still very interesting and usefull.

Tell that to Dreamworks.

Drones Go To Journalism School

http://www.fastcompany.com/3006933/innovation-agents/companys-hourly-exercise-breaks-make-it-more-fit-sure-also-more-successful It really helps me keep the energy and enthusiasm. I have powerbands and use https://play.google.com/store/search?q=sworkit+pro on my phone.

Fast Company published this article about GE's Durham, NC jet engine factory: http://www.fastcompany.com/37815/engines-democracy

The plant opened in 1993 and is still running. The factory had 1 boss and 170 employees in 1999 when the article was written.

It predates Valve but tells the same basic story: doing a very hard thing in surprisingly smart ways with extraordinary people yields success. GE Durham also delivers on schedule, but they're engineering and manufacturing, not making creative entertainment on Valve time.

Yeah, it is harder to abuse american workers in seeking profit.

I used to work for a company that produced avionics software. Obviously, we had to write solid code.

The On-Board Shuttle group is (was) even more bad-ass than that. For them, 5 9s (99.999% failure rate) was unacceptably lax.

FTFA:

But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

It's not considered acceptable in the wider world; most people barely know who he is and certainly don't know about these childish tantrums.

Slashdotters seem to be falling over themselves to make excuses for him. Imagine if this report was of Steve Ballmer shouting and yelling at a Windows developer.

There are many posts on this thread stating this is how you get quality software. No, it isn't; it's how you alienate volunteers. The way you get quality software is by being a grown-up:

That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip -- but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step -- when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough -- then it's time to grow up.

This is how the software that controls the space shuttle gets done. Linus may rule by the cult of personality, but it's not a particularly good way to ensure provably correct software in a situation where it simply MUST work.

What's going on here is the kind of nuts-and-bolts work that defines the drive for group perfection -- a drive that is aggressively intolerant of ego-driven hotshots. In the shuttle group's culture, there are no superstar programmers. The whole approach to developing software is intentionally designed not to rely on any particular person.

Read this: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

and then realize that while everything NASA seems to be luxury spending, their software development manages to have at least two orders of magnitude fewer bugs than any commercial software company.

Except that implicit in that is the idea that every bug is a disaster. SpaceX's approach is to have robust engineering rather than perfection. The idea is that small problems should not cascade into mission failures. That's how "real world" engineering works: for example, we don't use chains to hold up suspension bridges any more, because a single crack can cause a collapse. We use multi-strand cables, where cracks don't propagate from strand to strand. The fragile perfection of old-school aerospace is expensive and hazardous.

There's some truth to it. SpaceX is built like an Internet startup - failure is always an option. The "old technology" is from an age when every launch was a national news event and failure was no option.

Read this:
http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

and then realize that while everything NASA seems to be luxury spending, their software development manages to have at least two orders of magnitude fewer bugs than any commercial software company.

If your life depends on it - would you rather fly a NASA Space Shuttle or a Microsoft Rocket ?

SpaceX deserves a lot of credit, no doubt. Among other things, they have revitalized the "space exploration is cool" meme. And with it the willingness to take risks.

But how about we talk about costs when they've had their first two or three explosions and resulting fallout in costs, publicity, etc.?
I'd be mightily surprised if the learning wouldn't go two-way. Old tech learns from SpaceX how to cut costs while SpaceX learns from old tech which costs you shouldn't save on.

http://www.fastcompany.com/43497/why-cant-lego-click

Periodically this gets brought out, looks like it's time again:

http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

I no longer consider any manager to be 'professional' if they get so dogmatic and process obsessed that they underline the word 'must' before asserting the need for a given practice or methodology.

Well, your opinion would be in direct opposition to the processes employed by NASA to reach insanely high code quality. I found an article from 1996: The Write the Right Stuff. Although they do agree creativity is stifled, it does indeed result in better software.

And I, as a professional programmer, think there are certain _must_ practices. If you fail to do these things, you aren't doing a good job and you aren't acting as a professional (e.g. documentation, source code management, testing). For small trival activities these aren't necessary any more than a builder needs a blueprint or safety specifications for a dog house. But if you're building an office building you better include the necessary processes and cut out the "creativity" that might kill someone.

I do think there are two pressures that negate acceptance of the sort of process that NASA uses to produce such great software. The first is that it can be boring. Most people do not like their jobs to be boring, even if told that it's important. Other industries have regulations that require engineers to do boring work. Software developers are not subject to any such requirement unless the company mandates it (e.g. ISO9001). The second is that, unlike NASA, most software companies are competing for customers at a cost of time and money. And customers generally accept "good enough" software as long as it is cheap and available. Cutting corners to meet those demands is an obvious result, just like teachers cut corners to meet test requirements or banks cut corners to meet earnings expectations.

So I expect your opinion, produced from the varied experience in the tech sector you cited, is that the process gets in the way of you shipping and generating a profit. That's a valid argument. It is also valid to argue that many agile processes will not produce better software, when employed by some people. However I do not agree that a manager is unprofessional to mandate a process and fire employees who do not comply.

Medical marijuana, anyone?

Sure, as long as it has the same testing as other drugs.

That's primarily a money-making process. But of course since no one can make money without a patent, who is supposed to pay the enormous FDA price tag for that testing? And why do I need government approval for it, unless you assume they OWN me?

And don't use the old hippy "it's natural so it can't do you any harm" routine. You could say the same about opium/morphine, but I really don't think you want that to be handed out like aspirin.

Straw man

PS stop the "FDA shill" nonsense, it just makes you sound like a paranoid crank.

But you (and the GP) SOUND like shills. If you prefer, I'll just call you obstinately ignorant, and selectively ignoring any facts that get in the way of your stated viewpoint. That better?

Most "alternative medicine" is sheer bollocks, and you know it.

Your ignorant opinion is what is bollocks. I'll say this again: If there is an proven, effective treatment for something, that should be the first try. There are MANY serious and terminal diseases with NO traditional treatment. Stop telling people to go home and die because the hospitals and drug companies can't make a profit on their illness. There are also very safe, cheap, and natural treatments for less serious conditions than the big-pharma government-approved stuff. Why should I risk liver damage and death so I can take an "approved" pill for my toe fungus where there are safer and cheaper alternatives?

Homeopathy? Crystal healing? Astrological karmic alignment chiropractcy?

More straw men and/or pure ignorance. THIS is why you get called a shill.

"Internet Freedom" sounds like a phrase designed to make being anti-Net Neutrality sounds good.

And no wonder: Verizon and AT&T are heavy contributors to Rand Paul's campaign.

Make no mistake: there's nothing "free" about the state-granted monopolies the wireless and cable industry have. Since they're monopolies, they ought to be regulated.

And if regulation is removed, you know that the telecom industry will be hitting up Google and Netflix for cash right away.

"Internet Freedom" means freedom for Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T to charge siteowners like Google and Amazon just because they feel like it.

"Internet Freedom" means every single thing you do on the Internet is going to cost more because Verizon and Comcast need to keep posting massive increases in profits.

"Internet Freedom" means freedom for the carriers to hold you hostage. ...and if you think that the 'free-market' will solve this, remember: bandwidth is scarce and already monopolized by the big carriers. You won't see landline competition either: the big carriers also have all the local governments locked up so there won't be any competition there. And you know that the Pauls won't be taking on the local governments so that there can be competition in the landline market.

A computer is more than a cpu and a screen. It's also a keyboard, and mouse. Do you plan to cart those around? If you want a projector, just buy the Air or other ultrabook, and buy a projector.

This. Also his list of "tiny projectors" are usually 1+ pound, cost about $500 and offer only SVGA (800x600) resolution or less and once he adds a computer, keyboard and mouse it's at least another 2 lbs, so he'll be at 3+ lbs.

What he needs is an older tablet like the Fujitsu p1620. For about $300 he can easily buy a used tablet weighting less than 3 lbs (including battery) running a Core 2 Duo and WXGA (1280x) screen.

Where did he get the idea that a projector would be a great idea and how did he forget netbooks and Mac Airs aren't the only lightweight laptops?

The very USPS page that is linked to from this summary says that batteries that are in devices are generally exempt from this. Essentially you can ship all the iPods/iPads/iPhones you want. It is external (ie not built-in) batteries that have additional restrictions, though those are not very severe.

Was the "good job not reading" a reference to yourself? Oh, the irony!

From the linked article (emphasis mine):

According to the USPS, they will prohibit shipping of lithium batteries and any device containing them effective May 16.

And on the USPS page for the restriction, the USPS anticipates that after 1 January 2013 people will be able to resume mailing devices containing lithium batteries to overseas destinations. And that shipping such devices is banned from May 16 this year.

Answer: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/145/fantasy-island.html

Well, here's the NASA approach:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html

I am sure Google is employing many many very able programmers, but if Google has to pay bounty to hackers up to $20,000 to find bugs, does that mean the programmers who are sitting in Google's offices around the world have phailed?

Not necessarily. It just means that while they're confident in their code, they believe that it's always a good idea to have things vetted in the real world. The reasoning behind this is that the developers are often so close to the code that they can't possibly see EVERY conceivable bug or vulnerability. Inviting others to poke your products with a stick on a constant basis is a good thing. It lets Google get some good press, and also a MUCH more thorough real-world trial than they could do in house.

In a way, it's somewhat remniscent of the developers who worked on the flight software for the Space Shuttle computers. Teams would actually compete to see who could find more bugs in the other team's code. This lead to some of the most robust and bug-free software ever written.

Microsoft has been "partnered" with Facebook for several years now. Nothing new here. It's also probably why MS doesn't have its own social network and such, but adds Facebook integration to many of its products (Windows Phone has it out of the box, for example, and so does Xbox).

Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.
...
Take the upgrade of the software to permit the shuttle to navigate with Global Positioning Satellites, a change that involves just 1.5% of the program, or 6,366 lines of code. The specs for that one change run 2,500 pages, a volume thicker than a phone book.

You fools, don't you realize Steve Jobs himself was the elite apple assassin?

If he was, he wasn't very good. His throwing stars were confiscated by the Japanese.

Screw the sports channels and their "expensive" content. Unlike scripted shows, their content (games, etc) will happen with or without them. Their actual operational expenses should be pretty low, no more than a regular news channel with a couple of broadcast studios, travel and accommodation for reporters and crew, broadcast equipment, etc. The bulk of their budget are the licensing fees that the sports leagues (NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, etc) are charging.

Example: ESPN pays $2 BILLION a year just for NFL media rights. That is twice as much as the entire annual budget for the CBC (Canada's public broadcaster on radio, TV and internet), which includes license fees to broadcast NHL games as well as producing original (lower-budget of course) Canadian programming.

Dedicated sports channels should not be subsidized by any other channel, period. The tens of millions of sports fans far outnumber the audience for specialty channels like Discovery, Space, History, those that produce original scripted dramas, etc. If anything, sports packages should be subsidizing *them*.

If tens of millions of dedicated sports fans can't sustain a sports channel on its own, then the leagues are charging too much. If the leagues aren't willing to charge reasonable license fees that their viewers are willing to pay for, they get dropped and stop getting coverage by the sports channels. Actually, sports fans would probably catch wind of this long before that happens, and demand the league and the sports channels come to a compromise.

I dunno, didn't we already have an article years ago about how those higher up the hierarchy tend to be more sociopathic? Well, here's the original link: Is Your Boss A Psychopath?

But anyway, if you have to ask "how much of an asshole does someone have to be to do X?" I think you'll find that there are big enough assholes to do just about anything. Especially in positions that involve money, power, or both. In fact it seems like even the drive to end up in a position with enough power to no longer have to give a damn about the peons around, is disproportionately higher in... exactly those who are sick and tired of having to fake giving a damn about those peons around them.

But at any rate, let's just say that goatse was a lightweight, compared to the kind of huge assholes you see in upper management ;)

Except NASA. Maybe the shuttle team needs to be repurposed to other areas needing development?

the shuttle software group is one of just four outfits in the world to win the coveted Level 5 ranking of the federal governments Software Engineering Institute (SEI)

and Walmart is just a service provider

Walmart is "just" the owner of Vudu, providing the studios the service of access to "potentially millions" of customers. Can you say monopsony? If this digital conversion scheme isn't the movie companies' gallon of pickles (I can't imagine them ever agreeing to a discount conversion of a movie to a digital version!), then I can't wait to see what Wal-Mart does once it really does have those millions of customers and has weight to sling around.

I dunno. Whether we still have an Enterprise deployed or not, it's gonna be tough for them to win a war with weapons and armor 'made in China'. Zerg battle tactics will likely fare poorly against beam weapons...

From the article: UW researchers also created software to work with the Robot Operating System, a popular open-source robotics code, so labs can easily connect the Raven to other devices and share ideas. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of open source and I use it all the time. But this isn't desktop software, server software, or mobile device software. This isn't mission-critical software, where a bug can mean only millions of lost dollars. This is life-critical software--when it fails, someone dies. That's right up there with nuclear reactor controls, submarine life support systems, fly-by-wire, and such things. NASA knows how to do this right. See http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html for how they do it. In part, they do it by keeping the scope as small as possible and re-defining the term "anal-retentive", from requirements to testing and beyond. Their stuff runs on the bare hardware, not the operating system, because there isn't an operating system in the world that is stable enough for this. The rest of us don't know how to do this right; there are probably less than a thousand people who know how to make software of this quality. If there's an open-source interface that reads data from the machine, I'm all for that. If you can use open-source software to control this thing, I'll make sure that my surgeon _isn't_ using it the next time I go under the knife.

I don't even understand why a company would bother. Electricity is what, about 8 cents a kw? So powering a 1000w microwave for an entire hour is only 8 cents. Laptop for an hour would probably be less than 1 cent, so why would you put in an expensive outlet when you could just let people charge their devices for a penny?

If they're worried about people stealing electricity then install locking electrical boxes that fit over the outlets.

Also... I'm not sure how this Sony outlet would work.
"a new power outlet that can identify who is connecting to it, and therefore allows for an individual to be charged for use. The key to the intelligent outlet is the inclusion of an integrated circuit which communicates over the power line connection. It can check the identity of the device, and therefore the owner of that device before deciding what to do. "

Ok it communicates... with what, exactly? It's copper wire, going into a battery... what's it talking to? It's not ethernet, it's not hacking into my iphone or laptop or whatever, how is it checking the "identity of the device", unless I own a special "smart" power cord that can communicate back.....

Ah, I understand, article is BS

There's no "magic" integrated circuit that can automatically just read anything plugged in and pass on your credit card number, according to Sony you must have a special smart AC charger to communicate with the outlet.

And how many people are going to buy these special smart AC chargers? No one. So how many outlets like this will there be? Zero. Whole idea is a bust. Add this to the long list of failed proprietary Sony formats like MemoryStick, UMD, DAT, Minidisc and ATRAC Audio Compression.

Go read Facebooks' S1 filing - they generate 85% of their revunue from advertising $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year alone - and the S1 mentions that government privacy legislation can put a significant dent into that.

Manufacturer brand names count for a lot these days. Viz. Apple, Android, ThinkPad, Samsung

Not as much as you might think.

Large retailers can set pricepoints the manufacturer has to meet if they want to sell product in their store. Apple's brand name might be safe, but Android means nothing (look at the cheap Android tablets that don't have access to the Google app store) and Samsung is probably just as happy as anyone else to create a low-end product for the chain stores.

See the classic example of Snapper Mowers, the company that decided that sacrificing quality was not worth the better sales (at lower margins):

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html

And I believe it's true... you get what you pay for when you shop at Walmart - a Walmart mower is practically disposable every year or two, even if you can manage to get it to start up again after a couple seasons, you'll find that the mower deck is rusting through and the bolts that hold the engine to the deck are pulling out. I'm still using the Snapper mower that my dad gave me 10 years ago, the only work I've done is regular oil changes, cleaning the air filter, and I rejetted the carburetor the year I forgot to drain the gas before storing it. Good luck finding parts for a 5 year old Walmart mower.

Basically, they want to not pay minimum wage or health insurance and dump unfiltered shit into the air and the rivers.

Not completely their fault, though, what with the way that corporations like Walmart put pressure on companies.

Youtube was pretty fast-and-loose with copyright in the early days before they were acquired by Google.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1588353/viacom-google-youtube-piracy-copyright-data-ip-videos-emails-lawsuit-legal

Even today, Google is certainly profiting off of advertising on displaying material uploaded by users that definitely wasn't approved by the copyright holders. No idea to what degree, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's more than, say, 20% of their page hits. Most of it is probably older stuff or from smaller companies (e.g. anime) since the major media companies seem to be diligent at issuing takedown requests and audio/video fingerprinting for stuff that they own these days.

I guess the question is, where do you draw the line? Should the founders of Youtube have been thrown in jail for knowingly hosting what was probably (just throwing out a number) in excess of 50% unauthorized material in the early days? They got sued by Viacom, unsurprisingly, but that's a far cry from a *criminal* racketeering indictment.

No, the video says "if" you're a small business or just a single person, they'll help with marketing and manufacturing.

You can be a Snapper and say, "they voted for this the way it is".

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html

Yep. Everyone should read:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html

Or look up the history of what happened to the Etch-a-Sketch:

http://www.peoplesworld.org/etch-a-sketch-and-the-wal-mart-phenomenon/

William

You missed nearly bankrupting Vlassic as well

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

The TL;DR version of all these articles is basically that Walmart demands suppliers hit a price point ("We'll pay you $x for each one"). Great if you can hit it, but if you can't, you have to do special "walmart production runs" which use lower quality materials in order to hit that price point - different accessory kits, cheaper lower end materials, maybe even a whole walmart-specific product line.

If you're not careful, this can easily lead to a tarnishing of your brand

Another tactic is the consolidation route - you get the shelf space, but walmart only pays you when someone buys it - so if it doesn't sell, it's up to you to either move it or retrieve the product.

It makes for a more interesting time shopping at walmart though. You can tell which items are high-margin because walmart offers some really good deals (e.g., toys 40-50% off regular). Which items are built to a price (e.g., tools) and which items warlmart has no pricing control over (e.g., electronics - games/dvds/etc - you'll find walmart's price is cheapest, but only by 16 cents or so).

And you can also tell what suppliers cut in order to meet the price - perhaps a smaller amount of consumables, or lower value per dollar (e.g., less pickles per jar). Or even note down part and model numbers and see which are "walmart specials".

Yep. Everyone should read:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html

Or look up the history of what happened to the Etch-a-Sketch:

http://www.peoplesworld.org/etch-a-sketch-and-the-wal-mart-phenomenon/

William

You missed nearly bankrupting Vlassic as well

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

The TL;DR version of all these articles is basically that Walmart demands suppliers hit a price point ("We'll pay you $x for each one"). Great if you can hit it, but if you can't, you have to do special "walmart production runs" which use lower quality materials in order to hit that price point - different accessory kits, cheaper lower end materials, maybe even a whole walmart-specific product line.

If you're not careful, this can easily lead to a tarnishing of your brand

Another tactic is the consolidation route - you get the shelf space, but walmart only pays you when someone buys it - so if it doesn't sell, it's up to you to either move it or retrieve the product.

It makes for a more interesting time shopping at walmart though. You can tell which items are high-margin because walmart offers some really good deals (e.g., toys 40-50% off regular). Which items are built to a price (e.g., tools) and which items warlmart has no pricing control over (e.g., electronics - games/dvds/etc - you'll find walmart's price is cheapest, but only by 16 cents or so).

And you can also tell what suppliers cut in order to meet the price - perhaps a smaller amount of consumables, or lower value per dollar (e.g., less pickles per jar). Or even note down part and model numbers and see which are "walmart specials".

Yep. Everyone should read:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html

Or look up the history of what happened to the Etch-a-Sketch:

http://www.peoplesworld.org/etch-a-sketch-and-the-wal-mart-phenomenon/

William