That's funny, because the Sonic is a heavily treated global redux of the original Daewoo (South Korean) platform. It's worlds better than the crappy Aveo it replaces.
The recession has done LOADS to kick Detroit in the ass and make serious improvements to their product overall. I wouldn't have touched an Aveo with a ten-foot pole, no matter how foreign its heritage, but I wouldn't say that about the Sonic, even though the Fiesta is superior indeed.
No matter how middling the GMs are each in their respective category, none of them are the pungent duds of yesteryear. TFA is still spot on, IMO.
You're clearly not from the Motor City. Badges have little meaning - nearly no meaning, really - as it's the *platforms* that are designed by the automakers, with the badges shared among them.
Pontiac was put to pasture because its offerings were redundant to those from Chevy, Buick and Saturn. Even then, Saturn got the axe for the same reason. The end result was a healthier portfolio of platforms upon which various GM makes could be engineered, tuned and packaged.
This, however, is the insight few folks realize: The automakers each have a cache of core engineers with talent and capabilities that vary wildly. The executives move their most talented engineers to the platforms that need success most, and their lesser engineers to the platforms that need it least. So, Ford F-150 and Chrysler minivan engineers are the best of their respective companies for a time, and fleet car platforms get the chaff. When the fleet car platforms suffer to the degree they need triage (Chrysler 200, Dodge Durango, Ford Focus), the best engineers are shifted here to perform some one-off miracles.
From here, it sounds like the trim engineers assigned to the aging GMs you had were running in "maintenance" or "cost reduction" mode. Shame for them to lose you, as it's clear to me the star teams were on call for the recent launch of the Cruze and Sonic.
Hard as it was for GM to eliminate and consolidate (trust me, I know, I lived off Pontiac's teat for the last decade), it was the right thing to do.
The new farts know what the old farts don't: Follow the star engineers' platforms for great reliability success!
Freemium doesn't work? Better tell the music industry.
Joking aside...
No one has figured out yet that the viability of the freemium model is dependent on the "size" and "slope" of the "wall" between free and paid customers. That wall, folks, is *price*.
If you put up a simple, tall "wall" - an entry price point that is unusually high with no graduated options for consumer buy-in, then you will absolutely keep free users on their side of that "wall".
Zynga has shown that with small, repeated purchase opportunities - basically a *series* of tiny *walls* to step over - you can convert a freeloader into a paying customer (and in some cases the customer won't even realize what they've done).
Paying attention to my own behavior, I've noticed that the more reliable conversions to paid come from a low-grade but high-unit-cost pay-as-you-go option among a menu of options. See SimpleGEO and Zencoder for examples that apply to me specifically over this last month. Both have pricing plans that fit what I've described here.
Maybe if we leverage all our 404, 405, 403 and 500 pages to "blame SOPA for the problem with this page", then maybe John Clueless will be enticed to call his congressman.
Stop allowing Apple to cloud up the argument by making you think that the form factor and interface is bound by definition to the UI design and feature list of the OS it runs.
Argument 1: What if the iPad could run, say, Win7 or Linux or some other OS? It adds wide-open capability, and gives way to content creation. But the form factor and UI frustrate. Argument 2: What if there were a PC out there with a huge 32" touchscreen display and gesture UI, and it ran iOS. Could a stockbroker be happy with it? Argument 3: What if the same PC with touchscreen display and gesture UI, and it ran Win7 or Win8 or WebOS or Cyanogenmod? How would that stockbroker feel then? Argument 4: What would be gained by mouse-enabling an iPad? Who uses an iPad with mouse to access a PC via Remote Desktop? How is that working out for you?
Point is, if the platform were open, we would readily consider these questions, and make inroads on the answers. But Apple packages the UI, OS and form factor so well, we don't budge. Pity.
While all you process-laden geeks with your SCRUM teams and unit tests are getting the life sucked out of you in the Valley, we here in Automation Alley live by the seat of our pants, Montgomery-Scott-style, delivering barely-passable code on time, with the enhancements and 80/20 fixes to be pushed ahead of next year's model refresh, and a keen eye on the Bugzilla board, waiting for our user community to serve up the bug list. Thrilling, I tell ya.
Didn't yo mama ever tell you not to buy a first-year model?
Shame on you, CTRC. You ruined the most popular radio station in Windsor & Detroit, CKLW. We have never forgiven you. And we'll remain deeply suspicious of anything you plan to do on the Intertubes or elsewhere.
I don't disagree. I ran MythTV 0.17 for a rock-solid 1.5 years before switching to GBPVR. And I am sometimes frustrated by what GBPVR does *not* offer.
At the moment, the MythTV dealbreaker is that the GBPVR community released a Netflix Watch Now plugin, a highly ironic indictment of DRM's influence on this Linux advocate's PVR choices. (The spouse really digs this feature.)
MythMusic was also a dealbreaker for me - what a complete and total PITA to use! Surely there's been improvements to this awful interface over the last 2 years. GBPVR does this much better.
I might go back to MythTV if someone can crack Netflix's DRM...
We have a low-impact version of this technology at the local Meijer store in West Ann Arbor / Dexter, Michigan.
Frankly, it's both cool and disturbing. Cool because it works - stand only 2 inches out of the field and the audio simply disappears. But it's no less or more disturbing than any other advertising that gets so good at targeting its message that it is focused directly and solely at YOU.
At a firm I work for, we received calendars where elements of the picture formed the first name of the recipient - think your name being written in the snow, or ants lined up on a picnic table showing your name. The surprise comes when you notice that the ad is targeted solely at you - that the elements of the picture eventually *reveal* themselves to be aimed at you. And then suddenly - suddenly - you feel just a little bit violated... as if the magician had figured out the card you selected.
Is *this* your card??!!;-)
The problem with this advertising is that we all will eventually - and likely sooner rather than later - become immune to it. We will all be Tom Cruises blowing past ads like this in a Minority Report future.
Too simplistic - quite agreed. And agreed on your other counts as well. Consider my diatribe dumbed down for time's sake. Slashdot is what it is, and sometimes I wonder (a) why I bother to post, and (b) who the fuck reads what I post?
Jean-Luc Picard: Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives, but I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived. After all, Number One, we're only mortal.
Speak for yourselves, folks. The only purpose of religion in *this* liberal intellectual's life is to thank the Greater Spirit, whoever and whatever He/She/It may be, for my time here; and to make this world a better place while I am here. The rest is just fettered blather.
There is but one reliable reason why GWB chose to invade Iraq. It's because his father chose not to.
GHWB knew what kind of quagmire would result in the taking of Iraq after having beat back Saddam out of Kuwait in the 90s. From his foreign policy experience came the wisdom that to push forward to Baghdad would have been more costly (in terms of stature, political maneuverability, dollars and lives) than to keep Saddam a proverbial "tempest in a teapot". The "known quantity" of Saddam in place would always be more predictable, and cheaper, than the "unknown quantity" of the situation we sadly now face.
With no foreign policy experience, though, GWB, wanted to one-up his father, and he saw dollar signs upon the thought of having unfettered access to Iraq's oil resources and the inevitable war profiteering to be had. He had to sell is vision of a "liberated" Iraq at all costs. It was his only real goal. September 11 gave him exactly what he wanted, and he leveraged it as best he could.
So, yes, now we know, Dubya's dick is bigger than his dad's, and now the entire country - the entire world - is covered in postwar spew.
Oh, how I wish I could peer deep into HW's psyche right about now.
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny, because the Sonic is a heavily treated global redux of the original Daewoo (South Korean) platform. It's worlds better than the crappy Aveo it replaces.
The recession has done LOADS to kick Detroit in the ass and make serious improvements to their product overall. I wouldn't have touched an Aveo with a ten-foot pole, no matter how foreign its heritage, but I wouldn't say that about the Sonic, even though the Fiesta is superior indeed.
No matter how middling the GMs are each in their respective category, none of them are the pungent duds of yesteryear. TFA is still spot on, IMO.
You're clearly not from the Motor City. Badges have little meaning - nearly no meaning, really - as it's the *platforms* that are designed by the automakers, with the badges shared among them.
Pontiac was put to pasture because its offerings were redundant to those from Chevy, Buick and Saturn. Even then, Saturn got the axe for the same reason. The end result was a healthier portfolio of platforms upon which various GM makes could be engineered, tuned and packaged.
This, however, is the insight few folks realize: The automakers each have a cache of core engineers with talent and capabilities that vary wildly. The executives move their most talented engineers to the platforms that need success most, and their lesser engineers to the platforms that need it least. So, Ford F-150 and Chrysler minivan engineers are the best of their respective companies for a time, and fleet car platforms get the chaff. When the fleet car platforms suffer to the degree they need triage (Chrysler 200, Dodge Durango, Ford Focus), the best engineers are shifted here to perform some one-off miracles.
From here, it sounds like the trim engineers assigned to the aging GMs you had were running in "maintenance" or "cost reduction" mode. Shame for them to lose you, as it's clear to me the star teams were on call for the recent launch of the Cruze and Sonic.
Hard as it was for GM to eliminate and consolidate (trust me, I know, I lived off Pontiac's teat for the last decade), it was the right thing to do.
The new farts know what the old farts don't: Follow the star engineers' platforms for great reliability success!
Freemium doesn't work? Better tell the music industry.
Joking aside...
No one has figured out yet that the viability of the freemium model is dependent on the "size" and "slope" of the "wall" between free and paid customers. That wall, folks, is *price*.
If you put up a simple, tall "wall" - an entry price point that is unusually high with no graduated options for consumer buy-in, then you will absolutely keep free users on their side of that "wall".
Zynga has shown that with small, repeated purchase opportunities - basically a *series* of tiny *walls* to step over - you can convert a freeloader into a paying customer (and in some cases the customer won't even realize what they've done).
Paying attention to my own behavior, I've noticed that the more reliable conversions to paid come from a low-grade but high-unit-cost pay-as-you-go option among a menu of options. See SimpleGEO and Zencoder for examples that apply to me specifically over this last month. Both have pricing plans that fit what I've described here.
Maybe if we leverage all our 404, 405, 403 and 500 pages to "blame SOPA for the problem with this page", then maybe John Clueless will be enticed to call his congressman.
Stop allowing Apple to cloud up the argument by making you think that the form factor and interface is bound by definition to the UI design and feature list of the OS it runs.
Argument 1: What if the iPad could run, say, Win7 or Linux or some other OS? It adds wide-open capability, and gives way to content creation. But the form factor and UI frustrate.
Argument 2: What if there were a PC out there with a huge 32" touchscreen display and gesture UI, and it ran iOS. Could a stockbroker be happy with it?
Argument 3: What if the same PC with touchscreen display and gesture UI, and it ran Win7 or Win8 or WebOS or Cyanogenmod? How would that stockbroker feel then?
Argument 4: What would be gained by mouse-enabling an iPad? Who uses an iPad with mouse to access a PC via Remote Desktop? How is that working out for you?
Point is, if the platform were open, we would readily consider these questions, and make inroads on the answers. But Apple packages the UI, OS and form factor so well, we don't budge. Pity.
I always say: "There are no stupid questions, only stupid people."
Then I follow: "Stupid people are the ones that don't ask stupid questions."
While all you process-laden geeks with your SCRUM teams and unit tests are getting the life sucked out of you in the Valley, we here in Automation Alley live by the seat of our pants, Montgomery-Scott-style, delivering barely-passable code on time, with the enhancements and 80/20 fixes to be pushed ahead of next year's model refresh, and a keen eye on the Bugzilla board, waiting for our user community to serve up the bug list. Thrilling, I tell ya.
Didn't yo mama ever tell you not to buy a first-year model?
Sure, 2.3 really is faster and more responsive than 2.2, with better battery life and a sexier interface to boot.
But WHY does the dev team INSIST on BREAKING streaming and AAC+ audio on EVERY release?
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=13715
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9308
Neither is electricity, natural gas or running water.
Some things deserve protection, even if it's not constitutional protection.
This isn't a First Amendment issue, it's an FTC issue. But it should be a BIG FUCKING FTC issue.
(And I'm a left leaning centrist, BTW...)
So am I. That cheating whore.
Judeo-Christian nuclear abortion socialism!
I now await my Fox News story...
a caravan is a piece of shit minivan made by Chry^H^H^H^HDaimlerChr^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFiat.
it's got electrolytes!
I am someone who lost prolly 75% of his sense of smell over the 90s. Why, I do not know.
I do find favor with extra spicy foods, as they stimulate me in ways other foods cannot.
My wife has a hyper sense of smell. I take out the garbage.
I purchased a Grandstream VoIP unit and connected the POTS line to my house copper, the ethernet end to my switch.
I purchased inbound VoIP service with les.net for a mere $1.00 a month. Outbound is $0.01/min
So, for $12/yr, I still have house POTS service.
Shame on you, CTRC. You ruined the most popular radio station in Windsor & Detroit, CKLW. We have never forgiven you. And we'll remain deeply suspicious of anything you plan to do on the Intertubes or elsewhere.
http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/18382
Probably won't help with the pirates. Real pirates!
I don't disagree. I ran MythTV 0.17 for a rock-solid 1.5 years before switching to GBPVR. And I am sometimes frustrated by what GBPVR does *not* offer.
At the moment, the MythTV dealbreaker is that the GBPVR community released a Netflix Watch Now plugin, a highly ironic indictment of DRM's influence on this Linux advocate's PVR choices. (The spouse really digs this feature.)
MythMusic was also a dealbreaker for me - what a complete and total PITA to use! Surely there's been improvements to this awful interface over the last 2 years. GBPVR does this much better.
I might go back to MythTV if someone can crack Netflix's DRM...
MythTV? Pain in the arse. And I'm a Linux sysadmin.
GBPVR - download one program, install. Run the config. Done.
You have too much time on your hands, and I thank you for your contribution.
We have a low-impact version of this technology at the local Meijer store in West Ann Arbor / Dexter, Michigan.
;-)
Frankly, it's both cool and disturbing. Cool because it works - stand only 2 inches out of the field and the audio simply disappears. But it's no less or more disturbing than any other advertising that gets so good at targeting its message that it is focused directly and solely at YOU.
At a firm I work for, we received calendars where elements of the picture formed the first name of the recipient - think your name being written in the snow, or ants lined up on a picnic table showing your name. The surprise comes when you notice that the ad is targeted solely at you - that the elements of the picture eventually *reveal* themselves to be aimed at you. And then suddenly - suddenly - you feel just a little bit violated... as if the magician had figured out the card you selected.
Is *this* your card??!!
The problem with this advertising is that we all will eventually - and likely sooner rather than later - become immune to it. We will all be Tom Cruises blowing past ads like this in a Minority Report future.
Too simplistic - quite agreed. And agreed on your other counts as well. Consider my diatribe dumbed down for time's sake. Slashdot is what it is, and sometimes I wonder (a) why I bother to post, and (b) who the fuck reads what I post?
Stay smashed...
Soran: Time is the fire in which we burn...
Jean-Luc Picard: Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives, but I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived. After all, Number One, we're only mortal.
Speak for yourselves, folks. The only purpose of religion in *this* liberal intellectual's life is to thank the Greater Spirit, whoever and whatever He/She/It may be, for my time here; and to make this world a better place while I am here. The rest is just fettered blather.
There is but one reliable reason why GWB chose to invade Iraq. It's because his father chose not to.
GHWB knew what kind of quagmire would result in the taking of Iraq after having beat back Saddam out of Kuwait in the 90s. From his foreign policy experience came the wisdom that to push forward to Baghdad would have been more costly (in terms of stature, political maneuverability, dollars and lives) than to keep Saddam a proverbial "tempest in a teapot". The "known quantity" of Saddam in place would always be more predictable, and cheaper, than the "unknown quantity" of the situation we sadly now face.
With no foreign policy experience, though, GWB, wanted to one-up his father, and he saw dollar signs upon the thought of having unfettered access to Iraq's oil resources and the inevitable war profiteering to be had. He had to sell is vision of a "liberated" Iraq at all costs. It was his only real goal. September 11 gave him exactly what he wanted, and he leveraged it as best he could.
So, yes, now we know, Dubya's dick is bigger than his dad's, and now the entire country - the entire world - is covered in postwar spew.
Oh, how I wish I could peer deep into HW's psyche right about now.
Beyond the interview with the legendary Phil Ramone (think: Billy Joel 1977), this article contains all levels of FUD and other crap.
My favorite includes the *awful* definitions of various audio files/formats/technologies. No mention of MP4, either.
WTF does it matter to the average PI reader what "Red Book" means? It's not mentioned anywhere else in the article!
Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap!!!