Random website on the internet competing with megacorps on the internet
versus
Random shop down the street competing with megacorps 5 miles away.
Existing physical presence is invaluable when you're small. It's usually not worth it to buy a physical shop if you don't already have one, but if you already exist, keeping your physical shop open is vital.
Starting a website instead is a terrible idea. You could surf the internet for years without coming across their site. Existing customers can't drive around town without seeing their physical shop.
Starting a website in addition is a great idea, and is typically what is done.
As always, location is key. If you have a viable physical presence, keep it. If you don't have a viable web presence, you're not gonna get one now. Try again in 1995.
A grocery store with products people want subsidised by Google for data mining to sell ads.
You can't subsidize product cost with ads. Haven't people learned this? Ad-supported shit never works long term - you're advertising to the people who already buy your shit. The advertising gets you nothing in terms of extra sales.
The reason people buy the ad-supported products is the reduced price. The advertisements for the products do not influence purchasing decisions any more than simply informing someone that a gallon of milk costs $X. The ads are worse than useless - they (and the amount they subsidize) cost more to make and serve up than what they bring in.
Serving up adds for GoogleGrocery in GoogleGrocery or on products from GoogleGrocery is pointless. They only ones seeing those ads are people already at GoogleGrocery buying products from GoogleGrocery.
There will be an initial period of success as people become aware of GoogleGrocery, but once awareness peaks, the ad-subsidized model costs more than it brings in.
You're better off simply having a grand opening period where everything is cheaper than usual.
Microsoft approached everything as a predator, and tried to control and subvert the web.
You know nothing of the history of Microsoft. Microsoft was ALL about free, good tools to developers. Then Microsoft was all about user experience, office productivity, and hardware compatibility. MS didn't try to control or subvert the web anymore than Netscape, AOL, etc. did. In fact, MS was a key player in creating the web as you know it today - the good and the bad.
Apple are HCI experts and make great hardware, but their protectionist, control-freak tendencies make you start to wonder if their 1984 advert was really a documentary.
Apple doesn't make hardware - they make plastic (and now, ALUMINUM!) cases for other companies' hardware. They aren't "HCI experts" - they've been dumbing down the interface for the plebes ever since they've existed. They fought tooth and fucking nail against a 2-button mouse for fuck's sake.
Google haven't been perfect (no megacorp can be), but I think they have been pretty good citizens in the FOSS world, and powerful advocates of net neutrality. They give away useful stuff in exchange for fairly unobtrusive advertising.
"The FOSS world"? Where is this world that you speak of? "Net neutrality"? Yeah, have you seen the proposed bills and the loopholes that LEGALIZE the kind of shit that net neutrality is supposed to stop? It's a repeat of when Google was going to be the savior of the airwaves by buying up broadcast spectrum. Google shilled the auction and got a meaningless stipulation attached to the spectrum.
I'll be quick to call foul if there's evidence of them misusing their vast datastore, but IMHO the resulting distrust would be suicidal for their business model.
So are you crying foul over Buzz? You know they're being sued to all hell and back for that one right? People were opted in by default with auto following. Tons of personal information was revealed to the public. Employers found out people were seeing mental health professionals, spouses found out about affairs, etc..
I think their biggest mistake was that damn motto, which people take up as some sort of challenge.
Mushkin is shit. Corsair is shit. OCZ is shit. Your favorite brand is shit. etc.
"Is that memory shit?" flowchart:
Does it have a rebate? | - Yes - Shit. | | Does it have a 1337 heat spreader, cooling fans, or LEDs? | - Yes - Shit. | | Do the specs indicate non-standard voltages? | - Yes - Shit. | | It may be okay.
The open "secret" in the (system) memory world is that the expensive RAM is the defective RAM. If a batch is slightly defective, crank up the voltages, add a sharp looking heat spreader, sell it as super awesome fast whiz bang RAM, and hope it's stable enough for Johnny Ubersauce to game on. Throw cherry-picked samples at review sites, and offer rebates as you get more batches in. Reserve 5% of your stock for the few users who have a clue and insist you enforce your lifetime warranty.
If I was developing an app that should be in either portrait or landscape (but not the other), rotating it would just produce a black screen with the following text:
Because protocols are profitable. Once you sell a swiss army knife, the dude can use it whenever, however. License a protocol, and you've got gold, Jerry, gold!
And don't get any ideas. I've already patented the bodily fluid transfer protocol.
(Slashdot's collective mom is lined up to be the BFTP server in our first trials. Yes, anonymous logins will be available.)
"The human ability to focus attention on just one person in the midst of other people, voices and background noise."
But the title says "advanced social skills".
Is your robot going to sit there sipping a drink, nodding and smiling? I can make a retard do that.
If your robot going to sit there, chugging a brewski, yelling "WHAT? WHAT? YEAH THAT SOUNDS COOL!"? I can make a drunk frat boy do that.
Here's a tip, researchers: HUMANS don't have the ability* to focus on one person at a cocktail party. Humans focus on the booze, the snacks, and the sex. We don't give a fucking shit about whatever mindless story some guy is telling (for the 20th time).
*In cases where we are able (not loud, person talking is coherent, available food is too shitty to be distracting), we are smart enough to choose not to.
Make a robot that picks up chicks, then we'll talk.
While I think there is a bit of merit to this, it certainly doesn't hurt to have more eyes possible - especially when you don't have to pay for them.
It sure as fuck DOES hurt to have too many eyes.
Too many cooks spoil the broth. Too many coders will fork your project.
And fuck no, not all bugs are "shallow". Most bugs you get in open source development are, sure, because you've got tons of people contributing, for free, in their spare time. Those minor mistakes get through initial submission and eventually get caught.
Many bugs are the exact opposite of shallow - extremely difficult to replicate, isolate, understand, and resolve. These bugs are typically hardware-related. There's a reason we pay the big boys the big bucks to make drivers and firmware - they need to know what's going on with the bare metal. Running software on top of that isn't necessarily less complex, but debugging it sure as fuck it.
Consider for example the sheer breadth of hardware support offered by MS - both third party drivers, first party drivers, and generic first party drivers for when the third parties can't get their shit together. This is where most bugs a user will ever see come from.
When a bug in your Linux distro pops up, it's not a bug, it's because your hardware isn't fully supported yet. When a bug in Windows pops up, Bill Gates is a fucking tool and should kneel before Linus.
This mentality is ridiculous, and calling bugs "shallow" is an obvious slight at MS and other companies - "WOW MS couldn't fix this simple bug? Their billions of dollars is no match for the power of OSS! Now how are things going on copying the new Windows 7 interface?"
That's way too many Kevins! But I guess it's better than having none at all.
My home town nearly went to zero Kevins back in 1978.
It was a particularly cold winter, and we were already down to 3 Kevins (due to their low popularity at the time).
Kevin Thomas had flown out to be with his son's family for a wedding and got stuck in Boston for a whole week due to the weather. 2 Kevins left.
Kevin Lemmer was rushed to the hospital during my shift. I still remember the call from the EMTs as the ambulance was rushing toward us. "It's Lemmer. He's in bad shape. Drove right into the fucking ditch." We called the time of death at 6:15 PM.
At 6:16, all eyes turned to room 2217. Kevin Spencer was 82 and on his death bed with leukemia. His family being Catholic, he had already been given his last writes. If he couldn't hold out until Kevin Thomas returned, we would be at zero Kevins. Sure, we had 4 perfectly healthy Calvins, but they're just not the same.
It was 7:15 when Carla Brooks and her husband James burst through the main entrance. "She's not due for 2 weeks!", James exclaimed. As the staff bustled around getting the Brookses settled, they exchanged darting glances with each other. This was their first child, and they wanted to keep the baby's sex a secret. Of course, in a small town, secrets don't get kept. Nearly all of the hospital staff new that the child about to rip open Mrs. Brooks was indeed a boy.
The delivery was routine, and Kevin Brooks was born healthy, if a tad underweight, at 10:52 PM. Kevin Spencer was pronounced dead at 10:54.
It was, as they say, a close one. Kevin Thomas arrived two days later, the weather having finally cleared up. To this day, we still rib him about it.
Tom's Hardware got a tour of WD? I expect good reviews for WD gear on TH in the near future. TH is the most horrendously money-hatted review site in existence.
Everyone knows WD's gear is shit. Hell, a few years ago they dropped their standard warranty from 5 years to 3 years, Now there is absolutely zero reason to pick WD over Seagate.
Add in the fact that they're one of the shitty sites that breaks a single article into 20 fucking pages and you've got a guaranteed recipe for me not clicking that shit.
But I guaranfuckingtee you that TH will be handing out stellar reviews for some WD products in the near future.
Why does every fucking tech company insist on having their headquarters / office be called a "campus"? It's not a fucking campus - it's not there as some ivory-tower education factory, it's a fucking corporation.
And even if it results in a mentally challenged individual, that doesn't mean his life will be terrible. You know, disabled human beings exist here and now...
I don't think giant squids were meant to live in captivity. Seems kind of cruel. But, oh well.
I don't think humans were meant to live in captivity, but here we fucking are. Wake up in a box, go to work in a different box, come home to the first box, repeat.
On weekends we to stay in the first box; Sometimes we come out, but typically our weekends are spent maintaining the box.
A captive squid is no more cruel than a captive cow or a captive cat or the fly buzzing around trying to go through your window.
Slashdot Mirror
You really don't know how they work, do you?
They're sold to specific manufacturers and the keys are logged.
If devices are sold that don't comply, they can look up who is responsible for those keys and fuck them over hard.
It remains that HDCP has not been cracked.
ALL of the converters are legal - they are using valid keys. If these rules go into place, no more keys go to those manufacturers. No more supply.
Wrong. HDFury is legal and sanctioned.
It's downgrading the digital connection to an analog connection. It has legit HDCP keys.
It does NOT give you a digital output, and does not crack HDCP.
If the new rules get adopted, then the manufacturer of HDFury will be unable to manufacture any more of them.
Random website on the internet competing with megacorps on the internet
versus
Random shop down the street competing with megacorps 5 miles away.
Existing physical presence is invaluable when you're small. It's usually not worth it to buy a physical shop if you don't already have one, but if you already exist, keeping your physical shop open is vital.
Starting a website instead is a terrible idea.
You could surf the internet for years without coming across their site.
Existing customers can't drive around town without seeing their physical shop.
Starting a website in addition is a great idea, and is typically what is done.
As always, location is key. If you have a viable physical presence, keep it. If you don't have a viable web presence, you're not gonna get one now. Try again in 1995.
It seems that lately every manufacturer is trying to impose new standard in order to maximize their future sales.
It seems that since the first standard every manufacturer has been trying to impose new standards in order to maximize their future sales.
They don't work for HDCPd streams, duh.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
It turns into a journey of 100 thousand miles if you keep changing the destination.
Or if there's a body of water in the way and you're using Google Maps.
A grocery store with products people want subsidised by Google for data mining to sell ads.
You can't subsidize product cost with ads.
Haven't people learned this? Ad-supported shit never works long term - you're advertising to the people who already buy your shit. The advertising gets you nothing in terms of extra sales.
The reason people buy the ad-supported products is the reduced price. The advertisements for the products do not influence purchasing decisions any more than simply informing someone that a gallon of milk costs $X. The ads are worse than useless - they (and the amount they subsidize) cost more to make and serve up than what they bring in.
Serving up adds for GoogleGrocery in GoogleGrocery or on products from GoogleGrocery is pointless. They only ones seeing those ads are people already at GoogleGrocery buying products from GoogleGrocery.
There will be an initial period of success as people become aware of GoogleGrocery, but once awareness peaks, the ad-subsidized model costs more than it brings in.
You're better off simply having a grand opening period where everything is cheaper than usual.
Microsoft approached everything as a predator, and tried to control and subvert the web.
You know nothing of the history of Microsoft.
Microsoft was ALL about free, good tools to developers. Then Microsoft was all about user experience, office productivity, and hardware compatibility. MS didn't try to control or subvert the web anymore than Netscape, AOL, etc. did. In fact, MS was a key player in creating the web as you know it today - the good and the bad.
Apple are HCI experts and make great hardware, but their protectionist, control-freak tendencies make you start to wonder if their 1984 advert was really a documentary.
Apple doesn't make hardware - they make plastic (and now, ALUMINUM!) cases for other companies' hardware. They aren't "HCI experts" - they've been dumbing down the interface for the plebes ever since they've existed. They fought tooth and fucking nail against a 2-button mouse for fuck's sake.
Google haven't been perfect (no megacorp can be), but I think they have been pretty good citizens in the FOSS world, and powerful advocates of net neutrality. They give away useful stuff in exchange for fairly unobtrusive advertising.
"The FOSS world"? Where is this world that you speak of? "Net neutrality"? Yeah, have you seen the proposed bills and the loopholes that LEGALIZE the kind of shit that net neutrality is supposed to stop? It's a repeat of when Google was going to be the savior of the airwaves by buying up broadcast spectrum. Google shilled the auction and got a meaningless stipulation attached to the spectrum.
I'll be quick to call foul if there's evidence of them misusing their vast datastore, but IMHO the resulting distrust would be suicidal for their business model.
So are you crying foul over Buzz?
You know they're being sued to all hell and back for that one right? People were opted in by default with auto following. Tons of personal information was revealed to the public. Employers found out people were seeing mental health professionals, spouses found out about affairs, etc..
I think their biggest mistake was that damn motto, which people take up as some sort of challenge.
Mistake? That's their biggest inside joke.
No, they will print the toilet paper roll with targetted ads for stuff like haemorrhoid ointment and bengay .
No, they will bypass all middlemen and print the lotion onto the toilet paper and charge you more for it.
Every time a politician lies, I buy another gun.
Muskin
Mushkin is shit.
Corsair is shit.
OCZ is shit.
Your favorite brand is shit.
etc.
"Is that memory shit?" flowchart:
Does it have a rebate?
| - Yes - Shit.
|
|
Does it have a 1337 heat spreader, cooling fans, or LEDs?
| - Yes - Shit.
|
|
Do the specs indicate non-standard voltages?
| - Yes - Shit.
|
|
It may be okay.
The open "secret" in the (system) memory world is that the expensive RAM is the defective RAM. If a batch is slightly defective, crank up the voltages, add a sharp looking heat spreader, sell it as super awesome fast whiz bang RAM, and hope it's stable enough for Johnny Ubersauce to game on. Throw cherry-picked samples at review sites, and offer rebates as you get more batches in. Reserve 5% of your stock for the few users who have a clue and insist you enforce your lifetime warranty.
"Significantly, Kingston is revealed as simply a vendor that re-marks other people's chips in its own packaging"
And that is a surprise because? Of course that's what Kingston does - they don't own any fabs.
Oh please.
Next you're gonna tell my my DVD drive isn't made by Sony, or that my Apple RAM isn't made by Apple!
Won't happen.
When it comes down to it, we've made (and continue to make) the wisest investment of all - weapons.
If I was developing an app that should be in either portrait or landscape (but not the other), rotating it would just produce a black screen with the following text:
You're doing it wrong.
Because protocols are profitable.
Once you sell a swiss army knife, the dude can use it whenever, however.
License a protocol, and you've got gold, Jerry, gold!
And don't get any ideas.
I've already patented the bodily fluid transfer protocol.
(Slashdot's collective mom is lined up to be the BFTP server in our first trials. Yes, anonymous logins will be available.)
"The human ability to focus attention on just one person in the midst of other people, voices and background noise."
But the title says "advanced social skills".
Is your robot going to sit there sipping a drink, nodding and smiling? I can make a retard do that.
If your robot going to sit there, chugging a brewski, yelling "WHAT? WHAT? YEAH THAT SOUNDS COOL!"? I can make a drunk frat boy do that.
Here's a tip, researchers: HUMANS don't have the ability* to focus on one person at a cocktail party. Humans focus on the booze, the snacks, and the sex. We don't give a fucking shit about whatever mindless story some guy is telling (for the 20th time).
*In cases where we are able (not loud, person talking is coherent, available food is too shitty to be distracting), we are smart enough to choose not to.
Make a robot that picks up chicks, then we'll talk.
It's really really really tiny, but it would hurt like crazy if you touched it.
Simplistic enough for you ?
Insert penis reference here.
Heh.
Insert penis.
Reference here.
"Running software on top of that isn't necessarily less complex, but debugging it sure as fuck it."
Should be
"Running software on top of that isn't necessarily less complex, but debugging it [software] sure as fuck is [less complex].
While I think there is a bit of merit to this, it certainly doesn't hurt to have more eyes possible - especially when you don't have to pay for them.
It sure as fuck DOES hurt to have too many eyes.
Too many cooks spoil the broth.
Too many coders will fork your project.
And fuck no, not all bugs are "shallow".
Most bugs you get in open source development are, sure, because you've got tons of people contributing, for free, in their spare time.
Those minor mistakes get through initial submission and eventually get caught.
Many bugs are the exact opposite of shallow - extremely difficult to replicate, isolate, understand, and resolve.
These bugs are typically hardware-related. There's a reason we pay the big boys the big bucks to make drivers and firmware - they need to know what's going on with the bare metal. Running software on top of that isn't necessarily less complex, but debugging it sure as fuck it.
Consider for example the sheer breadth of hardware support offered by MS - both third party drivers, first party drivers, and generic first party drivers for when the third parties can't get their shit together. This is where most bugs a user will ever see come from.
When a bug in your Linux distro pops up, it's not a bug, it's because your hardware isn't fully supported yet.
When a bug in Windows pops up, Bill Gates is a fucking tool and should kneel before Linus.
This mentality is ridiculous, and calling bugs "shallow" is an obvious slight at MS and other companies - "WOW MS couldn't fix this simple bug? Their billions of dollars is no match for the power of OSS! Now how are things going on copying the new Windows 7 interface?"
That's way too many Kevins!
But I guess it's better than having none at all.
My home town nearly went to zero Kevins back in 1978.
It was a particularly cold winter, and we were already down to 3 Kevins (due to their low popularity at the time).
Kevin Thomas had flown out to be with his son's family for a wedding and got stuck in Boston for a whole week due to the weather. 2 Kevins left.
Kevin Lemmer was rushed to the hospital during my shift. I still remember the call from the EMTs as the ambulance was rushing toward us. "It's Lemmer. He's in bad shape. Drove right into the fucking ditch." We called the time of death at 6:15 PM.
At 6:16, all eyes turned to room 2217. Kevin Spencer was 82 and on his death bed with leukemia. His family being Catholic, he had already been given his last writes. If he couldn't hold out until Kevin Thomas returned, we would be at zero Kevins. Sure, we had 4 perfectly healthy Calvins, but they're just not the same.
It was 7:15 when Carla Brooks and her husband James burst through the main entrance. "She's not due for 2 weeks!", James exclaimed. As the staff bustled around getting the Brookses settled, they exchanged darting glances with each other. This was their first child, and they wanted to keep the baby's sex a secret. Of course, in a small town, secrets don't get kept. Nearly all of the hospital staff new that the child about to rip open Mrs. Brooks was indeed a boy.
The delivery was routine, and Kevin Brooks was born healthy, if a tad underweight, at 10:52 PM. Kevin Spencer was pronounced dead at 10:54.
It was, as they say, a close one. Kevin Thomas arrived two days later, the weather having finally cleared up. To this day, we still rib him about it.
Cedar Falls is currently at 5 Kevins.
Tom's Hardware got a tour of WD? I expect good reviews for WD gear on TH in the near future. TH is the most horrendously money-hatted review site in existence.
Everyone knows WD's gear is shit.
Hell, a few years ago they dropped their standard warranty from 5 years to 3 years, Now there is absolutely zero reason to pick WD over Seagate.
Add in the fact that they're one of the shitty sites that breaks a single article into 20 fucking pages and you've got a guaranteed recipe for me not clicking that shit.
But I guaranfuckingtee you that TH will be handing out stellar reviews for some WD products in the near future.
Why does every fucking tech company insist on having their headquarters / office be called a "campus"? It's not a fucking campus - it's not there as some ivory-tower education factory, it's a fucking corporation.
He managed to make the Wii larger, uglier, less portable, and less functional (no GC controller ports, etc.).
And even if it results in a mentally challenged individual, that doesn't mean his life will be terrible. You know, disabled human beings exist here and now...
But Geico already has these guys.
I don't think giant squids were meant to live in captivity. Seems kind of cruel. But, oh well.
I don't think humans were meant to live in captivity, but here we fucking are. Wake up in a box, go to work in a different box, come home to the first box, repeat.
On weekends we to stay in the first box; Sometimes we come out, but typically our weekends are spent maintaining the box.
A captive squid is no more cruel than a captive cow or a captive cat or the fly buzzing around trying to go through your window.