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Researchers Study "Harbingers of Failure," Consumers Who Habitually Pick Losers
AmiMoJo writes: Is your favorite TV show always getting cancelled? Did you love Crystal Pepsi? Were you an early adopter of the Zune? If you answered yes to these questions, researchers say you might be a "Harbinger of Failure." In a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, researchers identified a group of consumers whose preferences can predict products that will fail. “Certain customers systematically purchase new products that prove unsuccessful,” wrote the study authors. “Their early adoption of a new product is a strong signal that a product will fail.”
Do I make the list?
I thought we just called those people Browncoats.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Is this just another term for hipsters? People who seek out things that everyone else has dismissed for (usually) good reasons.
An online summary of a newspaper pay-walled newspaper reporting on an article... quoting the original with sentences like "At least, according to a group of researchers ..." and "n a study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, researchers ...".
Anyone have an actual link to the actual paper? I have a nagging suspicion that this may actually be an artifact of how the analysis is done.
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
My Zune still works fine and I'm typing this on a first gen SurfacePro, some products that do their job well just don't sell (in this case because of the worlds worst marketing).
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Here
This,
because fucking TV companies are retarded for canceling Heroes and Forever, I'm not a harbinwhatever
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
Maybe those "harbingers of failure" are just people who are a bit more persistent in their choices and less fickle, or they are the normal ones: people who pick stuff because they like it, not because their friends do. If a large majority of the population are dedicated followers of fashion, then the remaining group will be over-repesented amongst the buyers of unfashionable items. Watching that group is a great way to predict failure after the fact: if you see a large portions of "harbingers" buying your stuff, then you are probably already looking at slumping sales. That group does not flock to failing products, they are simply the ones left over after the rest has moved on.
A better way to predict success is to do what some companies are already doing: watch who sets the trend, and follow them.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I don't want to live in a world where I can't watch DVDs out of the box through Media Center.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Game Gear was huge in the UK, M:TG is still going after what, twenty years?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I'm installing Windows 10 right now, just so that we can watch Microsoft's empire crumble ...
If you had read better, you would've noticed that it says "CCGs that tried to make it LIKE M:TG" :D
The point of the article is that the same people constantly prove to be early adopters of products that don't succeed in the market.
consumer goods can "come back": Febreeze, for example. http://www.forbes.com/sites/pe...
Family Guy and Firefly were more or less sabotaged by politics. The reason Family Guy came back was Fox executives looked at the sales numbers of the DVDs and basically said "WHO THE FUCK CANCELED THIS?" With Firefly, they wouldn't license it to the Sci Fi channel under any terms, even though they had a commercial success with the Stargate franchise. Even when they pitched a home run with Battlestar Galactica, they wouldn't reconsider.
Not long ago, Longmire was canceled by A&E for bizarre reasons. It had good ratings and was pulling in a few million viewers. They said "the demographic is too old." Uh, ok, anyone in your marketing department notice that young viewers (ie millennials mainly) are the poorest generation in the market right now?
A show getting canceled is not necessarily indicative of anything about its quality or marketability. A large part of the problem is just the delivery mechanism. If all TV were content on demand, you'd probably see a lot more quality shows and many shows currently on getting canceled.
What it tells me is that no matter how bad your product is, SOMEBODY (evidently a large percentage) will buy it.
Hmm....there's a money making lesson here somewhere (if not for my morals..)
I am just kidding, I only have Serenity on HD-DVD. Strangely, I could not find any of my favorite series on HD-DVD, e.g. Firefly, Futurama, Odyssey 5, Space: Above & Beyond, Twin Peaks...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
The people who like Timothy's editing of stories on the weekends & the changes that Dice has been bringing to /.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I was too lazy to finish the sentence, You insensitive clod
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
The actual report is in the Chicago tribune, behind a paywall. Fuck that and fuck the idiot who submitted this non-story.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If we need to pick a 'celebrity' to represent this crowd Bill Gates would be the perfect shoe-in
Other than his first venture - Microsoft - none of his other investments make sense
Furthermore, when Bill Gates stepped down from MS he picked an absolute loser, Steve Ballmer, as his replacement
My zune still works as well. I use it every day.
Maybe you do but if so you are a good approximation of the entire user base. I'm not sure I've ever actually even seen a Zune in the wild.
Good battery life, large amount of storage.
That's not exactly a compelling argument to buy one over the competing products. Nobody cared about the Zune because there was nothing special or compelling about it. It was a me-too product introduced several years too late to matter. It's most compelling selling point (and compelling is a stretch) was that it wasn't made by Apple. Since people mostly like Apple better than Microsoft that is an argument without very wide appeal. The only way Zune would have had a chance would have been to be technically WAY better than the iPod and it simply wasn't.
Only downside is that you have to use the stupid zune software.
That's a pretty huge downside considering it's basically abandon-ware at this point.
I'm sure the apple fanbois will be shocked that I don't buy a new mp3 player every year when this one still works fine.
Since standalone mp3 player sales are falling like a rock I doubt the apple fanbois you seem to want to sneer at will be shocked or even care. Basically everyone listens to music on their smartphones now. Why carry two devices when one will do the job just fine?
because I bought PC's with Windows ME, Windows Vista and Windows 8 pre-installed.
"Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
If all TV were content on demand, you'd probably see a lot more quality shows and many shows currently on getting canceled.
Judging by the popularity of the Kardashians I very, very, very much doubt that.
In my locale there is a chain of stores specializing in clothes and food. Often they were also slightly more expensive on identical items than other stores and thus known as a "premium" store. Although that was not always true in practice - their fresh produce is usually of a better quality (and keeping fresh for longer) than from other stores, and oftentimes at the same price or lower. As a single person that does not use up a package that fast, this mostly translated to money being saved (not being thrown out halfway through).
For non-produce groceries, they also often carried options that I preferred: organic and/or without all sorts of preservatives and other additives (yes, I'm snobbish that way).
A few years ago I started noticing that if I found an item there that I liked, and bought regularly, a few months down the line the item would either be discontinued, or its makeup would have been changed (additives added) to something that is similar to what I could buy for cheaper at the "normal" supermarket.
Much the same thing happened in their clothing lineup. I would be able to buy clothing with longer sleeves/legs (that fit me better), 100% cotton (preferred by me due to body odor generation by plastic blend clothing in warm climate), and quite sturdy and well-made - I still have some items somewhere a decade old. Not any more.
I guess this was due to economizing - selling stuff made cheaper somewhere in China for the same "premium" price, and banking on the large client base that is attached to the status of buying at the "premium" store, regardless of the items sold.
Now I hear I'm a "harbinger of failure".... Should warn those stores I buy from now. Although I don't have any favourites any more, and I've moved to a lifestyle where I buy even less packaged groceries - I even make cheese and yogurt from scratch (raw milk) these days. As for clothing, seems one can buy much more decent and still cheap stuff over the Internet, shipped all the way from the USA after it was made in some Eastern country/island.... go figure.
and if you'd read better, you'd see that I utterly refuted that claim, as Magic: The Gathering has been going strong for two decades averaging four new expansions per year and the trade in individual cards is doing better than ever.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
The date of the publication of the original article ( http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2420600 ) was April 4, 2014
Date of today - July 6. 2015
Has Slashdot become a museum of obsolete news?
The study, available in MS-Word format in a link posted by a kindly slashdotter, contains this gem. 67% is 75th percentile? People who trust the findings of such articles are the harbingers of onslaught of stupidity.
Careful complaining about stupidity.
Less than 25% bought more than 67% flops, and 75% didn't. That makes people picking 67% flops or more the 75% percentile.
I have anti-charisma and whenever I zig, everyone else in the universe zags. If I like something, that means that 99.99% of the rest of the world doesn't. If I hate something, it's probably going to be a big hit.
Mind you, this isn't just contrarianism. I usually don't even pay much attention to what the rest of the world thinks about something. I only find out after-the-fact that every other human being on planet earth else disagrees with me--on EVERYTHING.
Want to win a political campaign? Hire me to campaign for your opponent.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Man. What the guy is trying to say is that he chose other games that are NOT M:TG. And these games FAILED, unlike M:TG. He is an adopter of failed projects, like those M:TG wannabes.
NetworkManager, PulseAudio and systemd were internal Red Hat projects run by a guy called Lennart who will tell you that they are all far better than linux itself, which he would apparently have done himself only far better if he was only a little bit older. Red Hat didn't pick them from a list, they did them and were stuck with them.
The others were surrounded by the most noise.
If only we could apply this to candidates in federal elections...
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Maybe you should avoid it.
love is just extroverted narcissism
For awhile, I refused to become interested in any new TV shows. I had some shows I loved and they kept getting cancelled one after another (Futurama, Pushing Daises, etc). Meanwhile, reality shows like Survivor kept getting season after season. The one reality show that I liked - The Mole - was cancelled as well. That was the only show where using your brain was rewarded more than physical challenges and backstabbing. I've been slowly getting interested in shows again, but now that we've cut cable it's on my terms. I'll find a show on Netflix/Amazon/Hulu and will watch a bunch of the episodes back-to-back. I've found some really good shows this way and I know in advance how many episodes there are (at least) so there's no "oops, that was the last one" surprise.
In the political sphere, my mother used to be a Presidential race harbinger of doom. Everyone she voted for for President lost. She voted against Carter and he won. Then she voted FOR Carter and he lost. She voted against Reagan in his re-election and he won. I believe her streak was broken in the Bush-Gore race. She voted for Bush which I felt meant that Gore was assured victory. We all know how that turned out. Since then, she's voted for Bush again in his re-election and against Obama twice so it looks like Bush might have been the only anomaly in her voting streak.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There will inevitably be a group of people who seem to always pick things that don't work, it's the nature of huge numbers. If you get a hundred million quarters, you'll find that there are probably close to a million of them that flip tails a dozen times in a row. Human nature would skew this somewhat, but I doubt this demonstrates people who are attracted to trends that fail - more like they're simply not following the mainstream trends.
Tab Cola had several problems, one it tasted like cola unlike Coke and Pepsi, much more like RC Cola, it was purchased to compete with RC's Diet Rite cola, It used sodium saccharin, which has been the target of several attempts to be listed as a health hazard, but those commercials killed them, https://youtu.be/DJL4yQn_7qQ, everybody remembers the commercial, few remembered the product.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Opps, so I am stupid. What a way to start the week.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You may not like the choices made by Red Hat but all the technologies you cited except maybe GTK+/GNOME are widely successful in term of market adoption.
Wrong definition of "like". I read that as CCG that are similar to Magic:The Gathering, but not M:tG itself, while you seem to have interpreted it to mean CCG, one of which is M:tG.
Certainly some early adopters pick products that don't take off, and mathematically some of these will have done it multiple times.
But the article claims that some people are actually predictors-- that their product choices have predictive value for product failure.
Is this actually true? It's easy to select out a set of people who have bought failed products, and then cull out of that set the ones who have not also sometimes bought successful products. But is this group statistically able to make future predictions?
I'm doubtful. Clearly, the way to not select products that don't grab a market niche... is to not be an early adopter. Lots of products fail; if you're an early adoptor, you're likely to be adopting failed products. If you instead wait to see where a product is going before buying-- you never buy products that fail a month after launch.
FWIW, the original article is here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I've been running Redhatty distros for 13 years and I haven't had too much trouble with any of those. Well, not until Gnome 3 anyway.
RPM: If you're using RPM to install your RPM's instead of yum or dnf, you're doing it wrong.
PulseAudio: Was a bit quirky a few versions ago, now it just works. It can do things that Alsa/OSS can't
NetworkManager: It's always just worked for me, but I have heard that it had issues with wifi in it's early days. I didn't have that trouble since I used wired with it.
.
If I really like a TV show there is a great chance it will be canceled. I'm not sure if this applies to consumer goods though. But I think it just because I've got vastly different interests than the average American (just like many of you do as well).
RPM: If you're using RPM to install your RPM's instead of yum or dnf, you're doing it wrong.
Mandriva/Mageia's URPMI is an excellent RPM wrapper.
A distro update is as simple as adding the new repositories and performing an update.
http://maximumhoyt.blogspot.co...
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I don't know if its my perception or not, but it seems to me that very few products anymore have any persistence. It's not just a question of picking a loser -- it seems like so many products have an initial run and then disappear to be replaced by something else.
I suspect it's a byproduct of easier product design using computer aided design and the heavy use of contract manufacturing overseas. CAD makes it easy to tweak a design to create the new-car-model kinds of changes or just something different. Contract manufacturing lets vendors shop designs around for the best production cost and it wouldn't surprise me if the tooling/setup costs get eaten by the manufacturer.
# of flops chosen (position in set)
Group 1: Between 0% and 25% flops (25th percentile) in the classification set
Group 2: Between 25% and 50% flops (50th percentile) in the classification set
Group 3: Between 50% and 67% flops (75th percentile) in the classification set
Group 4: Over 67% flops in the classification set
Those particular numbers (one in four, two in four, two in three, >2/3) are indicative: the study set consists of people who made only three or four choices. (If it were larger numbers, the cut points wouldn't be such even numbers)
This is not significant.
And, more significantly, that's way too few to tell if membership in a set is predictive.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Something about this study sounds vaguely phony to me - 130,000 consumers at a national convenience store chain, and 13 per cent would persistently buy doomed products... Something about that 13 thing...
Pay me to use your competitors' products.
Have gnu, will travel.
It was clear. There was a "clear soda" trend running around that time that didn't even last as long as the "dry beer" craze.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
While Crystal Pepsi would be fun to bring back for the 90s college years nostalgia, it's really Vault Zero I miss. That stuff was killer. I liked the strawberry Pepsi Jazz too. I guess I'm good at picking losers in soft drinks, at least.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If this also applies to elections I have an awesome talent for picking losers. In 22 years of voting I have yet to have one of my picks win.
I think you have the concept of hipster exactly backwards.
Not really. I'm just querying whether this is a particular subset of the use of the term, particularly with respect to those who intentionally pick products slightly outside the mainstream. If someone bought a Zune in a (lame) attempt to be trendy that would seem to be "hipster" behavior. Buy the unusual product which is likely doomed to failure and look down your nose at people who buy the more mainstream products. More of a social tactic than a demographic.
Usually hipsters seem to cluster around emerging trends and often seem to be influential enough that an ironic embrace of vintage/past products often produces a resurgence of that product.
Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product. I've seen some legitimate attempts to bring back old products or aspects of them but the successful ones are pretty much never ironic.
It's debatable whether hipsters even exist, or whether it's a group that identifies products before they become popular or whether it's a group that's defined as clustering around products that became popular.
I think aspects of what we call "hipsters" exist in society though I think you'll have a hard time finding a canonical example of one. People who are seriously into fashion sort of fit the bill. They're always looking for the next trend to jump on. You can find corollary examples with other products - movies, technology, etc. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone who adopts that worldview for everything they do.
I hope this pattern does not hold...I really hate being the kiss of death.
:-(
My last four car purchases were a Pontiac, an Oldmobile, a Mercury and a Tesla.
The Pontiac Grand Am and Old Alero were good cars. I still have the Mercury Mariner and Tesla Model S.
And yes, all my favorite TV shows usually bite the dust
Greed is the root of all evil.
Unfortunately IMO, from what I can tell, GTK+ is easily much more popular in the Linux market than Qt, mainly because most distros use it (either with Gnome or with one of its forks). Qt is very popular in certain markets (especially embedded Linux devices), but if you're looking at the Linux desktop market it's all GTK+. Of course, there's probably a lot more embedded Linux devices out there than there are desktops running Linux...
As a programmer, Qt is far and away a much nicer toolkit to work with if you need to do GUIs with C++ (or even if you're just using C++, GUI or not). Why anyone bothers with GTK+, I have no idea.
But doesn't that mean that 'failing' product can capture a potential 13% market share? iPhone market share is somewhere around there worldwide?
The Zune as a product was solid. It played MP3's as intended, offered all of the correct features, and the UI wasn't unpleasant. Battery life was good.
That's the problem though. Nobody ever really claimed that Zune was terrible. But there were very few reasons to buy one instead of an iPod. It wasn't better value for money for most people. It didn't have meaningfully better features, didn't cost a lot less, and by the time it came out many people who really wanted an MP3 player were already locked into Apple's ecosystem. Microsoft didn't make a horrible product but being solid isn't good enough when you are that late to the party. You have to be substantially better or substantially cheaper and Zune was neither.
Thinking about this as a larger point, I at least look at a product to fill a need. generally I do a lot more research than most, to find the product that checks all of the boxes without glaring reliability or quality issues. I rarely buy crap, but it's not always popular.
I do the same thing but I do consider whether the popularity of the device or feature will matter in time. For example I could get a cordless drill from a no-name manufacturer but then 5 years later I won't be able to get replacement batteries most likely. Sometimes popularity and the network effects it generates matter as much or more than the more tangible aspects of the product design. Sometimes it doesn't matter but you have to consider whether it will.
Except for a couple of defensive posts, it's interesting that few of the posters seem to recognize that they are part of the 13%. I'd wager that where 13% might be the share of the general population, here at /. the share - based on comments on all topics - seem to be about 70%. The year of the Linux desktop. Symbian was sooooo great. Gnome versus KDE. Zune. Apple is doomed. Google is such an innovator and friend of open source. Etc.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
How about Pabst Blue Ribbon beer?
Not obviously ironic though a reasonable example if true. The evidence is ambiguous and seems mostly anecdotal. Still I'd need a LOT more evidence to start to buy the notion that ironic embrace of vintage is a meaningful way to cause old products to see a resurgence. Not saying it can't happen but I just don't really see examples of it happening in the real world.
Or the otherwise inexplicable growth of vinyl record sales?
Nothing ironic there that I can see. There are people who earnestly believe that vinyl sounds better and the audiophile crowd is willing to spend absurd amounts of money chasing even the chance of "better sound". Personally I think that the supposed superiority of vinyl wouldn't stand up to double blind testing like so much other nonsense that comes from audiophiles but that is a separate issue.
Betamax was *not* "clearly superior to [its] competition". The sound and video was supposedly better, but it had an Achilles' Heel: the first generation tapes could only hold an hour of video. So any typical movie would require two tapes, and having to change the tape in the middle. VHS had 2-hour tapes from the start. Later, Beta made a 2-hour version, but it was too late.
And again, Power Glove was a Mattel product, officially licensed by N* - like many other useless accessories released for the NES.
Mind you, this isn't just contrarianism. I usually don't even pay much attention to what the rest of the world thinks about something. I only find out after-the-fact that every other human being on planet earth else disagrees with me--on EVERYTHING.
It really depends. Are you picking stuff which is crap, and the general populace correctly realizes is crap? Or are you picking stuff which is too high-quality for the general market?
A good example of the former is the Pontiac Aztek (though admittedly, its main problem wasn't utility or even quality, but its horrendous appearance). What kind of cars have you picked?
Another good example of the former is probably the Microsoft Surface RT.
A good example of the latter is watching anything besides The Kardashians.
Have gnu, will travel.
1970s fashions? I think this got embraced by hipsters early and became very mainstream.
Where is the irony? There are all sorts of resurgences of old fashions all the time. But it isn't obviously ironic. I was alive during the 70s and trust me when I say that they haven't brought back 70s fashions in any meaningful way. Fashions cycle in and out all the time and I've seen stuff from previous decades brought back multiple times. Thin ties were in during the 80s and they are back again now. Happens all the time but it's rarely ironic.
I have a friend who was in the vintage clothing business and he can define where he could buy 1970s fashion clothes in bales by the pound one month and the next he was having to negotiate prices by the item from his suppliers. Not long after that they become unobtainable except as yard sale or Goodwill finds and new iterations of the same fashions were showing up new in department stores.
That's the way fashion works but I'm not seeing the irony here. Throwback fashion is routinely a thing. There's even old jokes about wearing something so long it comes back into fashion.
Hipster bars of the era tended to focus on "vintage" brands like PBR or Rolling Rock and this embrace of older, niche products seem to have something to do with the rise of craft alternatives (well, and quality, too..).
PBR and Rolling Rock are just cheep beers. There may be a bit of irony going on with PBR though I'm not entirely convinced.
You must be nude here.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The article offers a few speculations for why the data is skewed this way, but none of them are backed up by hard evidence, and there are numerous other possibilities that are no more or less plausible:
- Maybe these early adopters are just the *wrong kind* - if there is some correlation between their buying habits and social attitudes, maybe these early adopters are not very social? A product becomes mainstream when it has word-of-mouth viral marketing. If the people you reach initially tend not to speak to others advocating products they buy, you're not getting the "multiplier" effect, where one early adopter can lead to 50 or 100 or 1000 second or third-generation adopters who buy it because a friend told them it was good. If this virtuous cycle never gets started, you rely on much less effective external marketing, like TV ads - people are bombarded with so many ads that we treat them with a natural skepticism and disdain now, so many people actively dislike the ads.
- Maybe you determine who your market is by advertising? Some subtle cue in the advertising you're putting out, intentional or otherwise, could be attracting certain types of people while having attributes that strongly turn off the mainstream audience. If you're targeting the mainstream audience, your commercials cannot contain any feelings or opinions or even visual cues that the mainstream dislikes.
- Maybe it's just random luck.
We nerd *know* tech, and trend to pick technically superior product. Layman pick items with seemingly better benefit-to-cost ratio(cheaper), with their limited knowledge. Just think of Firewire VS USB battle if you need example.
technical superior product(Firewire) -> higher manufacturing cost -> more expensive product -> less market share -> lose out
technical inferior product(USB) -> lower manufacturing cost -> cheaper product -> larger market share -> economy of scale+ecosystem effect -> win
TLDR: we pick a product because its better, but the same reason cause the product lose out to a cheaper competitor. Thats why we just can't have nice things.
There are billions of consumers in the world. Some of them will always pick failures just by pure chance. It doesn't mean that the next thing they pick will also be a failure. This is the same fallacy that leads us to venerate mutual fund managers that outperform the market. Even if everyone picked stocks randomly, some funds would still outperform the market for 10 years straight by sheer luck. There are actually fewer funds of this kind than random chance would predict, indicating that entrusting your money to a fund manager is worse than picking stocks by random chance.
PulseAudio still can't handle USB headsets properly. I had a bitch of a time getting mine to work at all, and it still won't play volume below 20%. It also still crashes more than any other service on my machine.
NetworkManager has this ungodly habit of forgetting/losing access to all of my VPN passwords at seemingly random intervals. This has been happening for over a year with more than one distro.
They are both far more stable than they were many years ago, but in both cases they only just border on being usable.
It's not just tech products. I have a habit of picking consumer products that get pulled off the market, for some reason. Examples include:
Hefty Serve and Save Plates: http://www.amazon.com/Hefty-Ev...
Novel chemical and heat-resistant material (some kind of polypropylene composite, vastly superior to Styrofoam or coated paperboard) and large enough to boil a full meal's worth of soup or ramen in the microwave, yet cheap enough to dispose of. You can snap one plate upside down on top of another to form a lid for leftovers, too. These were perfect for eating bachelor chow out of, when they got closed out I bought a shelf-full of the things. The product kind of felt like it was an engineer's dream of what disposable plastic-ware should be like (and it functioned really great), but guess it didn't sell well to house-wives.
Zip-loc bags with pleated bottoms and a stiffer plastic material, allowing them to stand upright by themselves. I used to make bulk batches of sauces and stuff to freeze, these were great for that purpose. They still make a "marinade" bag that's kind of similar but more expensive and not as useful to me, but the model I preferred is now gone. Couldn't find a link to the product.
Palmolive "Sponge-Fresh" dish detergent, also disappeared soon after I started using it as my favorite dish soap. It had a funny (but not unpleasant) fruity-solvent scent to it, but worked really well at suppressing microbial growth in the sponge. Discontinued within a few months, I stocked up of course:
http://www.amazon.com/Palmoliv...
Vaseline Intensive Care waterproof lotion, greatest thing ever for the laboratory or hospital (due to constant hand-washing). Some psoriasis and eczema patients swear it helps them more than anything else out there. Still a few sellers offering bottles from hoarded stockpiles at a sharp mark-up out there, I bought a case from one of those guys:
http://hard2findbeauty.blogspo...
I know someone who had an IBM PC Jr, a Coleco Adam, and a bunch of other things that died quickly.
Just like it's hard to consistently pick winners, it's hard to consistently pick losers. It's not about liking one or two bad products, it's about consistently picking products that will fail in the marketplace. And that picking is done via actual purchases, not the "talking out of your ass" picking.
I'm sure at some point he bought an Aztek as well.
So they are saying that this sub-group's purchases of new products is indeed predictive of failure.
Yes, that's what they said.
However another explanation of the data is that many products fail early, and thus many of the people who buy products early in the release cycle ("early adopters") will buy many products that will fail. Is the set of "early adopters who adopted products that then failed in the market place" a set that can predict future failure in the marketplace? Well, they didn't show that.
It's easy to predict the past.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You listed RPM, Gtk+, Gnome, systemd, PulseAudio, and NetworkManager. Aren't all of those still in active use? Aren't they all still some of the most popular solutions for what they do?
If that is failure, you didn't comprehend the story. It wasn't about things not being your personal favorite.
Then again, if you think RPM, Gtk, or systemd are "failures," you might be one of the people in the story.
I taped it on my Betamax machine.
It really depends. Are you picking stuff which is crap, and the general populace correctly realizes is crap? Or are you picking stuff which is too high-quality for the general market?
How the fuck should I know? I only know that whatever I think or like is not what everyone else does. Whatever I do is not what everyone else does. Whatever I say is not what everyone else says.
Happened again this weekend. Let me explain.
I liked Terminator Salvation and Terminator 3. T3 was a little redundant, but I liked the humor and its much darker, fatalistic take on the future. I thought Salvation was good when I first saw it. And I've come to like it more and more as I've watched it since. Christan Bale's performance is excellent (I knew it would be, since he had already done and excellent job playing basically the exact same role in Reign of Fire), as is Sam Worthington's. The series finally dispensed with that tired old time-travel cliche and moved into the very real war that had been hyped to death repeatedly by previous entries, with only teases that we might one day actually see it. The story was strong. The conclusion was powerful, and raised some interesting questions about what it really means to be a "human." And I really loved the closing shot of John Connor on the radio encouraging humans to keep fighting.
So this weekend, in wake of the new Terminator movie, I saw a whole series of videos of everyone and his brother talking about how awful T3 and Salvation were, and how T2 was so incredible. Now, I liked T2 mind you, but I wouldn't rate it nearly as good as the original. And frankly, I would rather sit down and watch Salvation again than T2. T2 has been shown so much it's become like that song on the radio that you really liked at one time, but you got sick of hearing the 1000th time it was played.
So here we are again. Everyone in the universe hates T3 and Salvation, and thinks T2's shit doesn't stink. Everyone except me, of course. And it's not like I set out to disagree, I just did--yet again.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I'm like that, too. Unfortunately, my anti-charisma (to use your nice term) spilled over into my financial investments as well - every single company I bought shares of, tanked.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Slashdot is the ultimate mecca for the "Harbingers of Doom", a site literally ripe with people who will vociferously back the worst of products that obviously have no future. In fact I use this very site myself to predict failure for some things, as there are a lot of repeat posters here that spend 24x7 backing future failed products.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Although you meant it to be funny your statement is really wrong - I'd say a good 90% of Browncoats didn't find the show until way after it was off the air. A number I know of didn't get into Firefly until well after the movie even...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would lean more towards a conclusion like: "Stores that experience low sales apparently place products on discount and there is individual price elasticity".
The figure on page 38 shows that "Avg. Profit relative to existing Products in the Category" has a strong bias against "products that flopped" already at *Week1* relative to "Products that survived". That is *right* away, there is a systematic bias that seems constant so if I were to look at data after that I would be *highly* suspicious about directions of causality.
In addition, most of the article is vast amounts of bread-text that seem to support circular reasoning.
Can anyone find a place where they actually come up a direction of causality?
Proving the direction of causality being *from* the "harbingers"-group picking loosers could be supported by
Note, Separating the two parts without interference may be hard :)
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
I loved the brown version. It was beautiful. Whether it was ahead of its time, or behind its time, or just too niche, I don't know. I just know it looked fantastic in person and literally like crap in pictures.
The Zune wasn't a terrible product. It was a terrible value. The iPod rules the market at the time. For Zine to matter it either needed to be substantially better than the iPod or substantially cheaper to get people to care about it. It needed to be a better value proposition. Instead it was roughly comparable for a similar price. If your choice is between two effectively identical products, people are generally going to pick the one that is more popular and better known. People already knew the iPod worked pretty well and it already had the mind share. Microsoft hugely overestimated the value of their brand and provided nothing more than a me-too product with little to set it apart.
As for other compelling reasons: the Zune had better sound quality, better software, and a better screen than the iPod.
I think it's pretty much safe to say that almost nobody agrees with you on this. Even if all those things were technically better like you claim, they weren't enough better that it mattered. The sound from an iPod and the screen quality was more than good enough for all but the pickiest of customers. Zune did not change that. As for the software Zune being "better", I think you'll have a hard to proving that objectively even allowing for the fact that iTunes is widely regarded as rather poor quality. It certainly wasn't better enough to matter and I cannot recall any press proclaiming it to be even the slightest bit revolutionary or superior.
I wish there were a better term for it. But "anti-charisma" is the most accurate way I can think of to express it. People naturally seem to hate me, disagree with me, etc. I seem to naturally repulse people, no matter how sociable or nice I try to be. I'm not some autistic asshole with no sense of social convention, etiquette or emotional cues, mind you. I work hard to be nice to people and follow every social norm. But if I advocate for something, no matter how careful I am not to come on too strong, it actually hurts the cause I'm advocating for. The LAST thing you want is my support.
If you fill a room with people and ask them if they like chocolate, 80% will probably tell you they like it. But the second *I* step into that room and say openly that I think chocolate is great, you can bet that the next poll will show that most of those people suddenly don't like it. I wish I were exaggerating.
When I meet people, they often act like Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone when he shakes Martin Sheen's hand. They'll get this look in their eyes like they just subconsciously realized that satan is saying hello to them. I've actually had people reach out to shake my hand and suddenly jerk their hand away without consciously realizing they're even doing it. I'm the opposite of the cult of personality.
I do wish there were a way to leverage it into some kind of career, the way that charismatic people leverage that skill. But damned if I can figure out how. At least then it would be good for something besides making me feel like a fucking freak of nature, or some alien stranded on the wrong planet.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Ok, so you don't agree with most people about the Terminator movies, but we're really talking about manufactured products here, not art (which is what movies are, a form of art). Lots of people have very different opinions about artwork. Some like Picasso, some like Rembrandt, some like Dali, but I doubt this maps very well with whether you'd buy a Zune or iPod, or whether you use a PC or Mac or Linux, or whether you use Android or iPhone or Windows Phone, or what kind of car you drive ; these choice, while there is some subjective component to them, also have a significant practical component, plus a big price component. As a Dali fan, I can buy Dali prints for a couple dollars easily, but if I like Ferraris, I can't afford one of those, plus I need a vehicle with some cargo space, so I have to buy a more practical vehicle. Movies don't have a price component: they all cost the same at the theater, whether you're watching a Terminator movie (good or bad), or a stinker like Gigli.
Do you have any actual examples of things you've bought that were duds?
As a programmer, Qt is far and away a much nicer toolkit to work with if you need to do GUIs with C++ (or even if you're just using C++, GUI or not). Why anyone bothers with GTK+, I have no idea.
I write a C/C++ app that uses Qt. But people use GTK+ because its C and not C++. Sometimes that's a factor. Other than that, I prefer Qt when I don't have to make the code pure C.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
I write a C/C++ app that uses Qt. But people use GTK+ because its C and not C++.
GTK+ has C++ bindings and is used in C++ projects.
...and a whole bunch of other things. I'm pretty sure I'm one of these people.
Seriously, what's not to love about caffeinated orange soda?
Basically if the company hires this guy then they die. I am not saying that they don't do well but that they die a horrible death. If the did a proper check and asked people like me I would say something like, "Are you serious, do you want any staff that work with him to get angry and leave? Do you hate your customers because he will piss them off and they too will leave. As for his product all I can say is that it will be way over documented. Not well built but way way way over documented. So a few upper managers will be happy with the project right up until they realize that he has turned it into complete crap.
Then when they look at the project they will realize that the three stooges would have run it better by accident.
The horrible thing with this guy is that people drink his koolaid until it is way too late. Then they realize that on a simple and not mission critical project that it might not have been a good idea to have a 7 to 1 ratio of QA people to developers.
Like the other guy said, you're talking about art forms here. And if you go by the mainstream opinion on art, you'll get average stuff. It's simple really, if something has to appeal to everybody, it cannot be very special or left-field, rather it becomes repetitive and cliché.
Talk to people who are actually into a particular form of art, like movies, and you'll most likely get a different opinion than the mainstream. On the original Terminator: Great movie, and actually very well done effects for a (relatively) low budget production. It's been 31 years, and it has aged surprisingly well.
I wish there were a better term for it. But "anti-charisma" is the most accurate way I can think of to express it. People naturally seem to hate me, disagree with me, etc. I seem to naturally repulse people, no matter how sociable or nice I try to be. I'm not some autistic asshole with no sense of social convention, etiquette or emotional cues, mind you. I work hard to be nice to people and follow every social norm. But if I advocate for something, no matter how careful I am not to come on too strong, it actually hurts the cause I'm advocating for. The LAST thing you want is my support.
I think there are several possibilities happening to you, probably several at once if its as bad as you report. Either: 1) you have a habit of making people feel dumb (or at least reminding them of how truly wrong they can be) or 2) you are suffering from the Double Burden at the low end of the scale for social cues or 3) you are offering your opinion too frequently given the size of the group (the larger the group, the more you have to share the "speaking stick") Try this for awhile, don't try to persuade anyone in a specific group of anything for a predetermined period of time (you don't have to do this at work but consistently with a specific group of people). Then after a period, wait for one group decision and chime in with what you want but just say you think it will be fun or that others will enjoy it. Don't give a long winded, logically based argument, just something short and breezy. You might be surprised with the response depending on the group of people. Obviously this probably won't work with engineers but other social groups it might weirdly work.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
"Harbingers of Failure" is sure a lot of letters to say "dork".
Yes to the first, but why did we have to be subjected to them for so long when they were still alpha quality? The second, no, I took a different path so cannot compare myself to him even when he's done stuff I would have considered utterly stupid at the age he did it at despite not being so much of a professional programmer.
Pulseaudio mostly works, which is about what you can say about computer audio on most platforms so that's a shining success. NetworkManager is a good fit for laptops, servers not so much but apart from odd glitches it works, which is more than can be said for MS networking so it's a success. Systemd - still not as good as what it is meant to replace and the non-professional bits of Lennart's behaviour mean it's deployed where it shouldn't be and many valid bug reports are discarded as if they are irrelevant.
i once tried to be trendy and do the following in network-manager instead of interfaces.conf:
- 4 physical interfaces merged into an 802.3ad trunk
- put a bridge on top of that trunk
- create 3 vlan interfaces on that bridge
- give each vlan interface several IPs (both ipv4 and ipv6)
- make sure this works after a reboot and that you can shut down/start up individual vlan interfaces
HAA HAAAA laughed the computer in the voice of Nelson Muntz
They were compelling reasons to me. The market obviously judged the player a colossal failure, but I loved mine.
Nothing wrong with that. I've bought some products myself that were a bit off the beaten path. You have to buy what works for you.
The truck I drive right now is probably the slowest selling pickup on the US market but it was excellent value for money and fits my particular needs almost perfectly. I've always been mystified why people aren't more objective about their actual needs versus buying something that is popular but a bad fit for them. For example the Ford F150 is the best selling vehicle in the US but most people that buy them would actually be better served by a different vehicle based on what they actually do with it. People want bad-ass off-road trucks but only something like 5% of drivers ever leave the pavement.
But this is probably not the time to boast of being an early Linux adopter?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I don't have a smartphone (=mobile tracking and spying device), so I still use a Palm Pilot to manage my calendar and contacts (jpilot interface on Linux).
That is so old fashioned and needlessly awkward that it must make you some sort of hipster.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
When I see small businesses or other collectives start up which have a lot of heart, brains and a good products, but which are probably going to fail, I'll often throw support under them.
Most of the time it doesn't prevent ultimate failure, but sometimes it does and the result is a powerful and positive entity. -At which point I'll usually lose interest and find somebody else to help out with my support.
The chances of success for decent people is going to be lower in a system skewed toward psychopathy. I like to help out where I can because psychopathy sucks.
Also, success can be measured in ways other than mass market acceptance.
I own a lot of cool products and books and such which I wouldn't otherwise if I didn't keep an eye out for awesome people trying to add light to the world.
We've all met those people that nothing goes right. Then there are the people that as soon as they show up shit starts working.
Back in the days of Bell Labs, Dennis Ritchie recounted how these types of people were rated as "jinxes" or "healers".
During critical testing or a demonstration jinxes were told to stay away and healers were invited.
All TV shows get cancelled. Except The Simpson's, and even that may get the axe, one day. Crystal Pepsi is a stripper name I am not familiar with. I am sorry to hear she died, but I was not a fan. Microsoft is not a hardware company, so the Zune was never a good investment.
On the other hand, I did love my Betamax by Sony. Does that count?
--- Say something clever. Pretend it was me. Thanks.
How many of them are tech reporters?
------- MacOS X, WebObjects, Apple (G5) hardware triply tied