Seems to me we need a new Godwin's Law that states that any discussion on the internet will sooner or later degenerate into someone blaming the current issue on Democrats/Republicans/liberals/conservatives.
(Although I have to admit I found the above comments very funny. Bad me!)
Yes, I instantly thought of that song. So the commercials were successful in planting the idea of Oscar Meyer wieners in my head.
However, did that make we want to go out and buy some hot dogs? I don't seek out Oscar Meyer brand hot dogs in particular, and I'm not going to run out and get any right now.
So I'm not sure if you could necessarily call that ad campaign successful, unless it had a benefit on Oscar Meyer's sales. Who knows, maybe it did.
Another example of this is the Taco Bell dog. Taco Bell pulled the dog as its spokespooch in 2000, because it wasn't helping their sales at all. I'd say Taco Bell's current commercials are more successful since - they just show the food and say how good it is.
"In July 2000 fast food giant Taco Bell (a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc.) did the ostensibly unthinkable: it abruptly ended what appeared to be a highly successful ad campaign that had worked to establish this memorable brand identity. Seemingly out of the blue, the corporation announced it would no longer feature the wise-cracking Chihuahua in its ads. Though the Taco Bell dog might make cameo appearances in subsequent commercials, he was being retired as company spokespooch."
"The reason behind the move was simple enough: the dog, though beloved of consumers, wasn't working magic on the company's bottom line. Though Taco Bell had succeeded in creating a cultural icon, the resultant symbol wasn't inspiring a great enough segment of the fast food-buying public to make a run for the border. Same-store sales were down 6 percent in the second quarter of 2000, a result the company could only regard as alarming and a certain sign that changes had to be made."
Seriously, this is a major pain. I watched most of a season of Stargate on Hulu, and they showed me the same commercial for every single commercial break, for every single episode.
Even if I might have been interested in your product after seeing a commercial or two, when you annoy me by playing the same commercial over and over ad nauseam, I will actively avoid your products. I'm sure I'm not the only one that feels this way.
I honestly don't mind an advertisement or two in exchange for free streaming video. But keep it to a minimum guys. There's very good reasons DVR's are so popular, and the fact that there's 8 minutes of commercials for every 30 minutes of show is one of the main ones.
My wife and I have had a shopping method for over a decade - it's simple and obvious but I'm surprised at how many people have never thought of it this way:
When looking for a certain product, don't buy the cheapest one, that's usually crap quality and you get what you pay for.
Don't buy the most expensive one, they're usually great quality, but I'm not made of money, and a 5% improvement in quality and features is not worth doubling the price.
Buy at the middle of the road or one step up towards the most expensive. That's where the best quality vs. price ratio is.
I suppose you could call this the Goldilocks method.;) You end up saving money in the long run, since you don't have to re-purchase the item when it breaks or wears out in a year.
Which means of course, don't shop at Walmart. Walmart specifically encourages its vendors to create lower quality versions of its products, so what you're buying there is even worse quality than normal. You save so much money shopping there! Yes, and it's all junk.
Try to buy American, or better yet made in your own state, as much as possible. You'd be surprised how affordable American made products are when you shop by the above method. I bought two lawn mowers this year, both American made, and they're very well built and were reasonably priced.
When my Motorola Droid received the 2.2 Froyo update, it gained the ability for Exchange to remote wipe, enforce pin numbers for login, etc., using the stock email app. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe all Android phones that have 2.2 have this ability now.
Or extend your ship's shields around the asteroid, and use your ship's hyperdrive to fly the asteroid through the earth and harmlessly out the other side.
MS went one better in Vista and 7. Audio volume can be adjusted individually per application, so for example you can set system sounds to a very low volume, but still have your media player app or web browser as loud as you want them. One of the nicest features of Vista, IMO, and especially nice on a living room media center PC. Of course, because of this and many other changes to audio, it broke a lot of audio drivers so you couldn't use the XP versions in Vista, but small price to pay IMO.
Meanwhile, the hero of airline pilots Captain "Sully" Sullenberger testified before Congress that he doesn't get paid enough as a pilot to make a living and had to get a side job to pay the rent. I'd say that the union workers are the lucky ones, and I don't begrudge people that want to get honest pay for honest work. The unions are not the problem here. Over-paid executives I have a problem with - over-paid pilots I have no problem with, since my life is in their hands every time I fly and I'd rather they're happy and well-paid rather than poor and worrying about how they're going to pay their bills when they should be concentrating on flying the plane.
I absolutely agree with you though, about growth being the only important metric in business today. There's another name for uncontrolled growth: cancer.
"Hero pilot Capt. "Sully" Sullenberger, who landed the US Airways airbus on the Hudson, has a tough message for Congress: Pilots are getting so shafted by their employers that the good ones are leaving to do something else."
"Sully, for one, is paid 40% less than he was a few years ago and is maintaining a middle-class existence only because he started a consulting company on the side. Folks on the Hudson flight are no doubt glad he didn't decide to start consulting full time."
Took me 5 minutes to find this. Googled "oregon vs arizona streaming"
Yes, you need a PC hooked up to your TV. Which I think every geek should do, it's not that hard. My wife and I are canceling our cable TV, landline, and internet package from Comcast, and getting 25/25 FIOS from Frontier (formerly Verizon) hooked up tomorrow. It's going to be all streaming for us - if you do a web search like the one I performed above (i.e. "[show you want to watch] streaming") you can find just about every show these days available somewhere for streaming. We also have a Netflix subscription, and watch streaming shows and movies all the time. We also have an antenna on our roof that looks like it's 30 years old, and I get 26 crystal clear digital channels for free, most of them HD. I just hooked it up directly to my HDTV - and once I get an ATSC tuner for my Media Center, we'll be able to record HD live TV shows for free. See ya overpriced cable TV!
Re: Facebook Is Down
on
Facebook Is Down
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My wife just posted a bunch of new beaded jewelry she made this week (real stones, very pretty stuff, but inexpensive) and already has 3 orders from friends. So it's good for making money at least.
Apparently the programmers at Google have read slashdot before. Type "goats" and it gives you instant results. Once you type the "e" though instant search shuts off.
If it was in Phoenix, Arizona, in July/August, I'd choose option two every time. And yes, I did live in Phoenix for 5 years, and I did drive a car in the summer with no A/C several times.
Agreed. I was able to watch the Flash video from TFA with no issues at all on my Droid. It was probably recorded with fairly low resolution - therefore it plays just fine on a smartphone. Try to watch HD video, and your smartphone will crap, unless it's optimized specifically for smartphones.
Speaking of that - when I've watched a few Flash videos mentioned by other posters in this thread, Android has generally given me a little message "This video has not been optimized for mobile". Little warning that no, it's not going to play perfectly.
Good example! That site is completely unusable without flash. With flash, you can click on the links, navigate around and see the floor plans, etc. Works just fine on my Droid.
Would that site be better written in HTML5? Probably. But the fact is that today, I can view that site with my Droid. An iPhone user would be simply out of luck.
And I tried out another example given above - The Daily Show. Watched part of an episode I just heard about on the radio. The video was a little choppy, and took a while to load, but the audio was perfect, and I was able to enjoy and laugh at John Stewart. And that was over 3G. I wouldn't even be able to view that on an iPhone.
Brita Pitcher FTW! The water coming out of my kitchen tap is pretty nasty - old galvanized steel pipes, the water is a little yellow from the rust if you don't let it run for a minute. But put it through a Brita pitcher and it tastes great. I'm pretty picky about the taste of water, and I drink a lot of it, but cold filtered tap water from the pitcher in the fridge tastes just as good as bottled water to me. You just need to replace the filter every 2-3 months when it starts tasting funny.
But more importantly - read the label on a bottle of water next time. A lot of them say "from a municipal water source" which means: filtered tap water. Only it was bottled in a distant city, and shipped to you, wasting energy and causing pollution. And it's many, many times more expensive than tap water. And the plastic bottles are made from oil.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was the Showtime show "Weeds". The gangbanger character notices how quiet Nancy Botwin's Prius is, so he orders a bunch for his gang so they can perform drive-by shootings easier - no car noise to warn the rival gang.:)
Lucas told the New York Times that only the special editions will be included, since restoring the original versions in high enough quality would cost too much.
Bullshit. He's gotta know that restoring and releasing the original unmolested versions would net him another several hundred million in profit. He just doesn't like the original versions.
I agree about the target, most of us saw the movies as kids and loved them. If they had been targeted at adults, they likely wouldn't have been as popular.
But I think the real problem with the newer three was 1) dialogue and 2) story (although you're right, they could have been a lot shorter and not missed much.) And what else do you have if you don't have good dialogue and story? A big special-effects fest. Honestly, the dialogue in #2 was so god-awful for most of the first half, my wife left and never finished watching it. Bummer really, because some of the action in end third of the movie were actually pretty good. The third movie was pretty good though, I thought.
I've come to a realization recently - as much as the temptation is to show people new to any series the "best" version, the extended version that tells the whole story, etc. - just show them the shorter version. If they get bored, you'll lose them forever.
I thought my Moto Droid had hard-to-scratch glass - until I put it and a small metal LED flashlight into my shirt pocket for 5 minutes. Now I have a couple little permanent scratches in the glass. I have a screen protector on it now, but the damage is done.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the internet!
Seems to me we need a new Godwin's Law that states that any discussion on the internet will sooner or later degenerate into someone blaming the current issue on Democrats/Republicans/liberals/conservatives.
(Although I have to admit I found the above comments very funny. Bad me!)
Yes, I instantly thought of that song. So the commercials were successful in planting the idea of Oscar Meyer wieners in my head.
However, did that make we want to go out and buy some hot dogs? I don't seek out Oscar Meyer brand hot dogs in particular, and I'm not going to run out and get any right now.
So I'm not sure if you could necessarily call that ad campaign successful, unless it had a benefit on Oscar Meyer's sales. Who knows, maybe it did.
Another example of this is the Taco Bell dog. Taco Bell pulled the dog as its spokespooch in 2000, because it wasn't helping their sales at all. I'd say Taco Bell's current commercials are more successful since - they just show the food and say how good it is.
"In July 2000 fast food giant Taco Bell (a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc.) did the ostensibly unthinkable: it abruptly ended what appeared to be a highly successful ad campaign that had worked to establish this memorable brand identity. Seemingly out of the blue, the corporation announced it would no longer feature the wise-cracking Chihuahua in its ads. Though the Taco Bell dog might make cameo appearances in subsequent commercials, he was being retired as company spokespooch."
"The reason behind the move was simple enough: the dog, though beloved of consumers, wasn't working magic on the company's bottom line. Though Taco Bell had succeeded in creating a cultural icon, the resultant symbol wasn't inspiring a great enough segment of the fast food-buying public to make a run for the border. Same-store sales were down 6 percent in the second quarter of 2000, a result the company could only regard as alarming and a certain sign that changes had to be made."
http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/tacobell.asp
Seriously, this is a major pain. I watched most of a season of Stargate on Hulu, and they showed me the same commercial for every single commercial break, for every single episode.
Even if I might have been interested in your product after seeing a commercial or two, when you annoy me by playing the same commercial over and over ad nauseam, I will actively avoid your products. I'm sure I'm not the only one that feels this way.
I honestly don't mind an advertisement or two in exchange for free streaming video. But keep it to a minimum guys. There's very good reasons DVR's are so popular, and the fact that there's 8 minutes of commercials for every 30 minutes of show is one of the main ones.
Go back 200-300 years, and yes, coyotes were probably there in that area before European settlers.
My wife and I have had a shopping method for over a decade - it's simple and obvious but I'm surprised at how many people have never thought of it this way:
;) You end up saving money in the long run, since you don't have to re-purchase the item when it breaks or wears out in a year.
When looking for a certain product, don't buy the cheapest one, that's usually crap quality and you get what you pay for.
Don't buy the most expensive one, they're usually great quality, but I'm not made of money, and a 5% improvement in quality and features is not worth doubling the price.
Buy at the middle of the road or one step up towards the most expensive. That's where the best quality vs. price ratio is.
I suppose you could call this the Goldilocks method.
Which means of course, don't shop at Walmart. Walmart specifically encourages its vendors to create lower quality versions of its products, so what you're buying there is even worse quality than normal. You save so much money shopping there! Yes, and it's all junk.
Try to buy American, or better yet made in your own state, as much as possible. You'd be surprised how affordable American made products are when you shop by the above method. I bought two lawn mowers this year, both American made, and they're very well built and were reasonably priced.
When my Motorola Droid received the 2.2 Froyo update, it gained the ability for Exchange to remote wipe, enforce pin numbers for login, etc., using the stock email app. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe all Android phones that have 2.2 have this ability now.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!
Or extend your ship's shields around the asteroid, and use your ship's hyperdrive to fly the asteroid through the earth and harmlessly out the other side.
MS went one better in Vista and 7. Audio volume can be adjusted individually per application, so for example you can set system sounds to a very low volume, but still have your media player app or web browser as loud as you want them. One of the nicest features of Vista, IMO, and especially nice on a living room media center PC. Of course, because of this and many other changes to audio, it broke a lot of audio drivers so you couldn't use the XP versions in Vista, but small price to pay IMO.
Meanwhile, the hero of airline pilots Captain "Sully" Sullenberger testified before Congress that he doesn't get paid enough as a pilot to make a living and had to get a side job to pay the rent. I'd say that the union workers are the lucky ones, and I don't begrudge people that want to get honest pay for honest work. The unions are not the problem here. Over-paid executives I have a problem with - over-paid pilots I have no problem with, since my life is in their hands every time I fly and I'd rather they're happy and well-paid rather than poor and worrying about how they're going to pay their bills when they should be concentrating on flying the plane.
I absolutely agree with you though, about growth being the only important metric in business today. There's another name for uncontrolled growth: cancer.
"Hero pilot Capt. "Sully" Sullenberger, who landed the US Airways airbus on the Hudson, has a tough message for Congress: Pilots are getting so shafted by their employers that the good ones are leaving to do something else."
"Sully, for one, is paid 40% less than he was a few years ago and is maintaining a middle-class existence only because he started a consulting company on the side. Folks on the Hudson flight are no doubt glad he didn't decide to start consulting full time."
http://www.businessinsider.com/capt-sullenberger-stop-cutting-pilot-pay-or-next-time-plane-will-crash-in-river-2009-2
http://collegefootballlivestream.com/
Took me 5 minutes to find this. Googled "oregon vs arizona streaming"
Yes, you need a PC hooked up to your TV. Which I think every geek should do, it's not that hard. My wife and I are canceling our cable TV, landline, and internet package from Comcast, and getting 25/25 FIOS from Frontier (formerly Verizon) hooked up tomorrow. It's going to be all streaming for us - if you do a web search like the one I performed above (i.e. "[show you want to watch] streaming") you can find just about every show these days available somewhere for streaming. We also have a Netflix subscription, and watch streaming shows and movies all the time. We also have an antenna on our roof that looks like it's 30 years old, and I get 26 crystal clear digital channels for free, most of them HD. I just hooked it up directly to my HDTV - and once I get an ATSC tuner for my Media Center, we'll be able to record HD live TV shows for free. See ya overpriced cable TV!
My wife just posted a bunch of new beaded jewelry she made this week (real stones, very pretty stuff, but inexpensive) and already has 3 orders from friends. So it's good for making money at least.
Apparently the programmers at Google have read slashdot before. Type "goats" and it gives you instant results. Once you type the "e" though instant search shuts off.
If it was in Phoenix, Arizona, in July/August, I'd choose option two every time. And yes, I did live in Phoenix for 5 years, and I did drive a car in the summer with no A/C several times.
Agreed. I was able to watch the Flash video from TFA with no issues at all on my Droid. It was probably recorded with fairly low resolution - therefore it plays just fine on a smartphone. Try to watch HD video, and your smartphone will crap, unless it's optimized specifically for smartphones.
Speaking of that - when I've watched a few Flash videos mentioned by other posters in this thread, Android has generally given me a little message "This video has not been optimized for mobile". Little warning that no, it's not going to play perfectly.
iOS devices might not be right for you.
And on that we can agree 100%.
Good example! That site is completely unusable without flash. With flash, you can click on the links, navigate around and see the floor plans, etc. Works just fine on my Droid.
Would that site be better written in HTML5? Probably. But the fact is that today, I can view that site with my Droid. An iPhone user would be simply out of luck.
And I tried out another example given above - The Daily Show. Watched part of an episode I just heard about on the radio. The video was a little choppy, and took a while to load, but the audio was perfect, and I was able to enjoy and laugh at John Stewart. And that was over 3G. I wouldn't even be able to view that on an iPhone.
Brita Pitcher FTW! The water coming out of my kitchen tap is pretty nasty - old galvanized steel pipes, the water is a little yellow from the rust if you don't let it run for a minute. But put it through a Brita pitcher and it tastes great. I'm pretty picky about the taste of water, and I drink a lot of it, but cold filtered tap water from the pitcher in the fridge tastes just as good as bottled water to me. You just need to replace the filter every 2-3 months when it starts tasting funny.
But more importantly - read the label on a bottle of water next time. A lot of them say "from a municipal water source" which means: filtered tap water. Only it was bottled in a distant city, and shipped to you, wasting energy and causing pollution. And it's many, many times more expensive than tap water. And the plastic bottles are made from oil.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was the Showtime show "Weeds". The gangbanger character notices how quiet Nancy Botwin's Prius is, so he orders a bunch for his gang so they can perform drive-by shootings easier - no car noise to warn the rival gang. :)
"1. The iPhone and iPad notwithstanding, Flash is beginning to show up on other mobile device platforms."
Yes, beginning to show up, but hardly widely adopted or even out of beta.
Adobe just released the final Flash 10.1 for Android yesterday
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/08/16/flash-10-final/
Lucas told the New York Times that only the special editions will be included, since restoring the original versions in high enough quality would cost too much.
Bullshit. He's gotta know that restoring and releasing the original unmolested versions would net him another several hundred million in profit. He just doesn't like the original versions.
I agree about the target, most of us saw the movies as kids and loved them. If they had been targeted at adults, they likely wouldn't have been as popular.
But I think the real problem with the newer three was 1) dialogue and 2) story (although you're right, they could have been a lot shorter and not missed much.) And what else do you have if you don't have good dialogue and story? A big special-effects fest. Honestly, the dialogue in #2 was so god-awful for most of the first half, my wife left and never finished watching it. Bummer really, because some of the action in end third of the movie were actually pretty good. The third movie was pretty good though, I thought.
Agreed. All of the movies have been available in HD for over 5 years now.
And if you want the original laserdisc non-special edition versions of the originals - also available for ages now.
I've come to a realization recently - as much as the temptation is to show people new to any series the "best" version, the extended version that tells the whole story, etc. - just show them the shorter version. If they get bored, you'll lose them forever.
I thought my Moto Droid had hard-to-scratch glass - until I put it and a small metal LED flashlight into my shirt pocket for 5 minutes. Now I have a couple little permanent scratches in the glass. I have a screen protector on it now, but the damage is done.