I saw no posts modded "5, Informative", so I thought I'd take a crack at it.
http://www.alice.org/ - software designed to disguise programming as storytelling. Aimed at young children and women, not really suitable for the 14-year-old-boy types.
He likes games, so start him onto games. Most first year computer science students at my university think they want to develop games. They figure out differently by about year 3. Start with Unreal Engine 2, or something like that, and let him build small levels for Quake/Doom/etc. There is a fair amount of programming-like scripting that goes into level generation.
I have played hundreds of games of WC3 dota, a thousand games of heroes of newerth, and I have to say your perspective resembles that of other noobs who misunderstand the game. Particularly, this statement is just plain wrong:
HoN and DotA on high levels means standing around behind your opponents reach and shooting your own minions, games just drag on and on since no one dares make a move or they will lose what little cash they have scrambled together.
The more you play the hon, the more aggressive it gets.
I received my heroes of newerth beta key last July, and have been playing regularly ever since. I have played hundreds of games on both the windows and linux clients.
The linux client works great and I suggest you try this game out:-).
Yes, daily active users is a proxy for revenue. Furthermore, 11% decline in revenue is >= 11% decline in profit, right? This certainly has Zynga's attention.
This is an interesting example of a company pissing off their customers in an extremely lubricated market.
I didn't read TFA too closely, and I appreciate all of the political hilarity above, but isn't the real lesson here back up your data? The guy was wailing about how he almost lost years of work.
The summary paints 'publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links' in a negative light, but this is actually a feature of su.pr.
'Su.pr is the only URL shortener that also helps your content get discovered! Every Su.pr URL exposes your content to StumbleUpon's nearly 8 million users!'. Yes well now it isn't the only one:p.
Google does some bad shit, but I'm getting a little tired of people pretending they are clever because they 'out' google for doing some nefarious value-adding or reasonable activity.
Article on hacker news yesterday:
'If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google never been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable.'
Was using the term "rapped" in the summary of the article necessary? It gets rather old watching the word used so flippantly. Good Job bhagwad, you just surpassed Kdawson as the worse/. editor.
CS-
yeah! good editors should detect spelling mistakes, but I still may have been unnecessary to say microsoft was raped by a judge;)
You're modded Insightful, but your comment is unfortunately off topic. The Japanese were a credible threat, Pearl Harbor was a preliminary strike, to be followed by like, a real war, and the WW2 and modern day political climates are completely different. For one thing, the Axis really was the biggest threat to the quality of life of the average citizen, hardly a claim any terrorist can back up with data. Although I guess these days there is data to suggest that a single terrorist attack really can affect average quality of life:/.
I think that's a great term. I opened up Wikipedia to start an article on it, and meant to quote you, however it seems one needs an account to create articles these days:P. You should put it in Wikipedia; you probably stumbled on something big. There's a huge money in software that could ruin a Senator's career. Just think... Frameware, a term first coined by Monoman in 2009,.... go write the article =D
Be cognizant of the fact that while the executives can translate actionable data into... action... they are often unable to figure out the information the data is conveying.
Remember your audience. Instead of a latency chart, you might explain that 99% of customers (devices, etc) wait no longer than 10 seconds.
Other great points above are: ask the executives, and agree on a mission statement. Is your job just to keep the computers running, or to lower capital costs? Do you take ownership of investigating possible hardware upgrades and new technologies?
Slashdot is pathetic sometimes. I scrolled through a few hundred posts, and not one of them read something like, "That Turing guy, he was a cool dude. Sucks he got owned."
I'd like some evidence that cloud computing is a fad. Tens of thousands of companies, in dozens of industries, do not list "computing hardware, availability, and capacity management" as a core competency, making them prime cloud customers.
I worked in the games industry, at a company that transitioned from desktop to console games. I believe wholeheartedly that graphics get so much love because, relative to other features, they have extremely high financial ROI.
Get your existing customers to bring in new ones by focusing on your Net Promoter Score. This is the % of customers that, when asked "would you refer this to a friend or colleague?", rate you 9 or 10, minus the % that rate you 6 or less. There's a lot of data showing that this metric correlates with growth.
Work on your Search Engine Optimization, i.e. appearing on the first page/first few hits, and buy key adwords.
Lastly, if you believe your app would be valuable to enterprise customers, hire an offshore concierge at $3/hour to do research on potential buyers. They work damn hard for their $3/hr.
But most of all, focus on your Net Promoter Score. You're literally investing in viral marketing probability. Traditionally marketing cannot fight the exponential growth of referrals.
This thread contains lots of great perspectives on Ahmandinejad, election fraud, and the Iranian presidency. Unfortunately most of the world is missing the point.
I'd like to point that Ali Khamenei has been the supreme leader (dictator) of Iran for 20 years. During an EconTalk podcast on August 11 2008, expert Bruce Bueno de Mesquita comments that after interviewing over a dozen Iranian political specialists, his research concludes that Ahmandinejad is the 18th most powerful person in Iran.
The Iranian president is an important and powerful person in absolute terms. In relative terms it's a public relations office. So yes, election fraud was committed. Yes, their disinterest in concealing the fraud conveys the extent to which they believe it makes a difference.
However, everyone just take a deep breath, and understand that the electoral system and eligibility of candidates is up to the complete discretion of Ali Khamenei.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw no posts modded "5, Informative", so I thought I'd take a crack at it.
http://www.alice.org/ - software designed to disguise programming as storytelling. Aimed at young children and women, not really suitable for the 14-year-old-boy types.
He likes games, so start him onto games. Most first year computer science students at my university think they want to develop games. They figure out differently by about year 3. Start with Unreal Engine 2, or something like that, and let him build small levels for Quake/Doom/etc. There is a fair amount of programming-like scripting that goes into level generation.
HoN and DotA on high levels means standing around behind your opponents reach and shooting your own minions, games just drag on and on since no one dares make a move or they will lose what little cash they have scrambled together.
The more you play the hon, the more aggressive it gets.
I received my heroes of newerth beta key last July, and have been playing regularly ever since. I have played hundreds of games on both the windows and linux clients. The linux client works great and I suggest you try this game out :-).
A uniform in an IT company, where business casual is the norm, is insulting. If they want you to appear distinct, issue badges, or neon lanyards, etc.
Yes, daily active users is a proxy for revenue. Furthermore, 11% decline in revenue is >= 11% decline in profit, right? This certainly has Zynga's attention. This is an interesting example of a company pissing off their customers in an extremely lubricated market.
Note that Zynga was never particularly concerned with the quality of their gameplay.
I didn't read TFA too closely, and I appreciate all of the political hilarity above, but isn't the real lesson here back up your data? The guy was wailing about how he almost lost years of work.
The summary paints 'publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links' in a negative light, but this is actually a feature of su.pr.
:p.
'Su.pr is the only URL shortener that also helps your content get discovered! Every Su.pr URL exposes your content to StumbleUpon's nearly 8 million users!'. Yes well now it isn't the only one
Google does some bad shit, but I'm getting a little tired of people pretending they are clever because they 'out' google for doing some nefarious value-adding or reasonable activity.
Article on hacker news yesterday:
'If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google never been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable.'
Was using the term "rapped" in the summary of the article necessary? It gets rather old watching the word used so flippantly. Good Job bhagwad, you just surpassed Kdawson as the worse /. editor.
CS-
yeah! good editors should detect spelling mistakes, but I still may have been unnecessary to say microsoft was raped by a judge ;)
The interesting thing about this case, to me, is that Amazon's lawful customer will receive a bill in the mail for hacker usage charges.
EC2 instances will run Windows.
You're modded Insightful, but your comment is unfortunately off topic. The Japanese were a credible threat, Pearl Harbor was a preliminary strike, to be followed by like, a real war, and the WW2 and modern day political climates are completely different. For one thing, the Axis really was the biggest threat to the quality of life of the average citizen, hardly a claim any terrorist can back up with data. Although I guess these days there is data to suggest that a single terrorist attack really can affect average quality of life :/.
very interesting point.. who knew the secret to weight loss might be a fitness drug ;)
I thought we were too. /tear
I think that's a great term. I opened up Wikipedia to start an article on it, and meant to quote you, however it seems one needs an account to create articles these days :P. You should put it in Wikipedia; you probably stumbled on something big. There's a huge money in software that could ruin a Senator's career. Just think... Frameware, a term first coined by Monoman in 2009, .... go write the article =D
Very interesting!
Be cognizant of the fact that while the executives can translate actionable data into... action... they are often unable to figure out the information the data is conveying. Remember your audience. Instead of a latency chart, you might explain that 99% of customers (devices, etc) wait no longer than 10 seconds. Other great points above are: ask the executives, and agree on a mission statement. Is your job just to keep the computers running, or to lower capital costs? Do you take ownership of investigating possible hardware upgrades and new technologies?
Slashdot is pathetic sometimes. I scrolled through a few hundred posts, and not one of them read something like, "That Turing guy, he was a cool dude. Sucks he got owned."
I remember hearing that Firefox 3.5 takes ages to load, because it reads a whole chunk of your HD. I didn't upgrade. Does 3.6 do that?
I'd like some evidence that cloud computing is a fad. Tens of thousands of companies, in dozens of industries, do not list "computing hardware, availability, and capacity management" as a core competency, making them prime cloud customers.
I worked in the games industry, at a company that transitioned from desktop to console games. I believe wholeheartedly that graphics get so much love because, relative to other features, they have extremely high financial ROI.
Get your existing customers to bring in new ones by focusing on your Net Promoter Score. This is the % of customers that, when asked "would you refer this to a friend or colleague?", rate you 9 or 10, minus the % that rate you 6 or less. There's a lot of data showing that this metric correlates with growth.
Work on your Search Engine Optimization, i.e. appearing on the first page/first few hits, and buy key adwords.
Lastly, if you believe your app would be valuable to enterprise customers, hire an offshore concierge at $3/hour to do research on potential buyers. They work damn hard for their $3/hr.
But most of all, focus on your Net Promoter Score. You're literally investing in viral marketing probability. Traditionally marketing cannot fight the exponential growth of referrals.
Clearly you've never held a Kindle.
I know I know! Three cheers for public education!!
I was trying to think of an analogy for dns-based censorship that would resonate with politicians. Got it =D
It's like paying millions of dollars to keep prostitutes out of the phone book.
This thread contains lots of great perspectives on Ahmandinejad, election fraud, and the Iranian presidency. Unfortunately most of the world is missing the point.
I'd like to point that Ali Khamenei has been the supreme leader (dictator) of Iran for 20 years. During an EconTalk podcast on August 11 2008, expert Bruce Bueno de Mesquita comments that after interviewing over a dozen Iranian political specialists, his research concludes that Ahmandinejad is the 18th most powerful person in Iran.
The Iranian president is an important and powerful person in absolute terms. In relative terms it's a public relations office. So yes, election fraud was committed. Yes, their disinterest in concealing the fraud conveys the extent to which they believe it makes a difference.
However, everyone just take a deep breath, and understand that the electoral system and eligibility of candidates is up to the complete discretion of Ali Khamenei.