If the product is broken because it's inadequately packaged, then it's something that other users might experience and I agree they should be warned. If your local driver drop-kicks all the packages he delivers onto your porch, that's not something which would affect anyone else, and shouldn't be included in the product rating. Sometimes it's a grey area, I realize.
Yeah, I'm always confused when the product is fine, but people rate it low because of delivery problems. What does the delivery have to do with the quality of the product? Should be separate ratings, especially for some place like Amazon, where you know what the delivery process is like.
Exactly. I'm shocked at all the "nobody ever gets equity if they're not on board at the first meeting" comments. I know plenty of people at larger companies that still get stock options as part of their raise, as their entire raise, as a bonus, as part of signing/promotion, and the like. It's not a crazy concept. Though I agree asking nicely, and in the picture of "doing more for the company," makes more sense than saying "I'm indispensable and want equity."
Simple answer: start small, and move up when you need to.
Don't pay for anticipated needs, because you'll just be throwing money away. Only pay for what you need now, or maybe assuming a few percent growth. It's easy enough to upgrade later. Ideally you pick someplace where they'll help you expand as you go, but I've found a lot of places that cater to small don't do large well, and those that do large sites are too expensive or aren't interested in small ones.
My credentials: I run an online game. It spent 9 months in development, with at most a dozen active testers, on a $2/month cheapo shared hosting plan. I had no income and needed the minimal cost, and lack of performance wasn't an issue. At some point my testers tripped the processor total usage limit, and I was forced to upgrade. It was not at all a coincidence that this happened toward the end of development, when I was gaining more users and had a more complete game to play. I had to upgrade to a more powerful $100/month plan, and there were a few months were I was paying out of pocket, taking a chance that this would be worthwhile, but it wasn't a big risk. After launch I quickly made enough profits to cover those expenses, and the package served me well until I hit a big spike in subscriptions. At that point, same story: I've got the demand (and corresponding income), and it was an affordable necessity to upgrade to a couple of dedicated servers to handle the traffic and database demands.
Note that all of that was based on necessity, and the facts of actual usage -- and that usage correlated pretty well with the income required to pay for the upgrades without wasting money out of pocket. None of this was based on projected growth or anticipated millions of users or anything like that.
I once got an email with the subject line and body consisting entirely of the word "help." When I replied asking, "How can I help you?" the follow up was a simple "I can't send email."
At that point, trying not to sound too snarky, I replied, "It looks like you just did," and never heard anything else about the matter.
Actually, the + button is directly next to the word 'alarm" -- just like you'd want it. On an otherwise blank page, with nothing else to click. The summary makes this out much worse than it is.
That may be true for some people, but as the son of a farmer and the grandson of a farmer, I can assure you that there are a lot of people from those generations for whom this argument is completely non-applicable. Farm equipment that's broken needs to be fixed, often immediately, and there's nobody else to fix it by you. "I can't touch that, I might lose a finger" doesn't factor in. The only answer is "I've got to poke it until I get it working again."
Yep, the description from the summary was confusing, and from what it said I thought I'd have issues with the interface. Then I opened the iPhone, looked at the blank screen with exactly one button to push anywhere in the window (that + button, directly next to the word 'alarms') and it seemed obvious that's the only thing you'd click.
This may have been a bad example, though, as other iPhone screens have really confused me, despite my being pretty technical. For instance, trying to figure out how to remove unwanted contacts from the Messages screen is downright unintuitive. (Hint: if you click on the contact, it takes you to a page where all you can do is contact them. You have to be at the main messages page and then click edit, which you'd think might have something to do with editing a message, at which point all the contacts are given delete icons. I'd call this astoundingly confusing.) Or the camera settings, where many options are hidden by default (zoom) or disappear quickly (next/back/trash options in the photo roll) until you start tapping the main screen. I find that unintuitive, because I know tapping things is generally a select/point/act motion, and not a "pull up the menu" option. The zoom is particularly tough, because tapping the screen actually does change the camera's focus, while also turning on the zoom slider. If I don't want to change the focal point, I resist clicking, and I have to override that logic (or tell myself to tap again on what's already the focal point) to pull up the zoom slider.
Those things are genuinely confusing to me. The clock alarm, though? It's the only button on the screen, and not confusing.
Well, somehow the summary indicated that 6 cups a day is "relatively normal" while also claiming only the guys who drink the most coffee get to those levels. Seems like it contradicts itself - they can't be the guys who are drinking the most and also the guys who are drinking normal levels.
Calculating retirement without interest? That's silly. And money market accounts and CDs are not investment vehicles -- not for the first 30 years, at least. Those are awful examples if you're talking about retirement investing.
Waitaminute. As a child I also found the taste of peppers repulsive, or the spice of hot sauce unbearable. Then one day I tried a pepper and found it utterly delicious, out of the blue, without expecting it. Likewise at some point I had something spicy and found it enjoyable.
Just because a child found it horrible and an adult likes it, it doesn't mean the only option is the child is telling the truth and the adult has deluded themselves. Tastes can and do change for other reasons. There are a lot of things I loved as a child that I find pretty repulsive now as an adult, too. Have I somehow managed to delude myself into thinking those things are no longer tasty, when my honest child self knew it was good?
And what about friends of mine who once got distracted for a moment, and then turned around to find their child eating dog poop? Since their child wasn't naturally repulsed by the poop, does that mean it must actually be tasty?
What I took from it was that while Earth has quite a few of what look like close calls on the video, Mars is practically living within the edge of the green ring by the time we're done. However many times we've gotten smacked over the years, it seems like Mars should have been clobbered hundreds or thousands of times more than we have.
Also makes me curious about other solar systems, if it's possible we might find some with multiple asteroid belts.
I wised up and stopped putting all the blame on the average person long ago. When you have bankers committing fraud to get your loan through, lying to your face about how much you can afford, your only mistake is not being bright enough to comprehend everything in the hundreds of pages of legalese to spot the lies.
Pointing out the banker is lying is one thing, but ultimately every person has to be responsible for their own choices. You have to be able to evaluate the merits of what your banker is telling you as much as the car salesman or the door-to-door vacuum salesman -- they're all up to you.
There may be border cases where it's a tough call, but it doesn't take hundreds of pages of legalese to figure out when you're not even close. When my wife and I went looking to buy a house, it was trivial to look at our monthly budget and see what we could afford, and just as trivial to plug that into a payment calculator and see how much house we could afford. When we talked to the mortgage broker and he told us we were pre-approved for a number twice that big, I laughed and flat-out told him, "No, we can't," and that was the end of the story. When we actually bought we did stretch on the house price just a tiny bit (about 2%), but it was a conscious choice to adjust by 2%, not spend 100% more because some guy getting a commission told us it was okay.
Stealing? I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that anything was stolen. There's a big difference between changing a username and stealing content. If you can't see it, then I don't know what to tell you.
Heh. I was ticked when I had to walk to the next building to check the printer with one end unplugged. I can't imagine 7 hours of travel for that.
Other gems:
* After spending 10 minutes determining a "computer" won't turn on because the user is pushing the power button on the monitor, she asks, "Well, Greg took his laptop with him. Does that mean I can't use his computer?"
* The director who begged me to go to her house and set up her home computer to be able to check work email, only for me to discover it was a laptop she could have brought in to the office.
* The professor who sent me an email saying, "Help, I can't send email."
* The ISP who followed up on a "we can't receive email" ticket by emailing us the instructions for the fix.
It's definitely not that simple. I agree this one was an example where the user was mistreated, and I do agree there's a moral obligation not to mess with user accounts without some strong reason, but it would also be illogical to come to any other conclusion than, in the end, user accounts really are the property of and under the control of the service provider. I run an online game, and even though people pay money to get in-game items, that stuff still clearly isn't really their property. If they continually break the rules of their game, I'm within my rights to (eventually) disable their account, despite the fact they've contributed cash. Or in an extreme case if I went out of business, they certainly wouldn't have any rights to "get their stuff back" or force me to keep the game online to avoid my pulling the rug out from under them.
Heh. I've got an Australian evil twin, too. In my case it's a music venue called Qirkz -- like my handle, but without the U. Unfortunately, English speakers are downright incapable of typing a Q without following it with a U, apparently, so a couple of times a week I get email intended for Qirkz, asking about gigs and show times and prices and other social and political goings-on in some place called Marrickville. It's pretty obnoxious, really, because I don't want to leave the poor people hanging and feel compelled to reply, but I also don't feel like doing a bunch of work for some company that picked a name too similar to my own.
Slashdot Mirror
If the product is broken because it's inadequately packaged, then it's something that other users might experience and I agree they should be warned. If your local driver drop-kicks all the packages he delivers onto your porch, that's not something which would affect anyone else, and shouldn't be included in the product rating. Sometimes it's a grey area, I realize.
Yeah, I'm always confused when the product is fine, but people rate it low because of delivery problems. What does the delivery have to do with the quality of the product? Should be separate ratings, especially for some place like Amazon, where you know what the delivery process is like.
Exactly. I'm shocked at all the "nobody ever gets equity if they're not on board at the first meeting" comments. I know plenty of people at larger companies that still get stock options as part of their raise, as their entire raise, as a bonus, as part of signing/promotion, and the like. It's not a crazy concept. Though I agree asking nicely, and in the picture of "doing more for the company," makes more sense than saying "I'm indispensable and want equity."
+1 informative.
Simple answer: start small, and move up when you need to.
Don't pay for anticipated needs, because you'll just be throwing money away. Only pay for what you need now, or maybe assuming a few percent growth. It's easy enough to upgrade later. Ideally you pick someplace where they'll help you expand as you go, but I've found a lot of places that cater to small don't do large well, and those that do large sites are too expensive or aren't interested in small ones.
My credentials: I run an online game. It spent 9 months in development, with at most a dozen active testers, on a $2/month cheapo shared hosting plan. I had no income and needed the minimal cost, and lack of performance wasn't an issue. At some point my testers tripped the processor total usage limit, and I was forced to upgrade. It was not at all a coincidence that this happened toward the end of development, when I was gaining more users and had a more complete game to play. I had to upgrade to a more powerful $100/month plan, and there were a few months were I was paying out of pocket, taking a chance that this would be worthwhile, but it wasn't a big risk. After launch I quickly made enough profits to cover those expenses, and the package served me well until I hit a big spike in subscriptions. At that point, same story: I've got the demand (and corresponding income), and it was an affordable necessity to upgrade to a couple of dedicated servers to handle the traffic and database demands.
Note that all of that was based on necessity, and the facts of actual usage -- and that usage correlated pretty well with the income required to pay for the upgrades without wasting money out of pocket. None of this was based on projected growth or anticipated millions of users or anything like that.
I once got an email with the subject line and body consisting entirely of the word "help." When I replied asking, "How can I help you?" the follow up was a simple "I can't send email."
At that point, trying not to sound too snarky, I replied, "It looks like you just did," and never heard anything else about the matter.
Actually, the + button is directly next to the word 'alarm" -- just like you'd want it. On an otherwise blank page, with nothing else to click. The summary makes this out much worse than it is.
That may be true for some people, but as the son of a farmer and the grandson of a farmer, I can assure you that there are a lot of people from those generations for whom this argument is completely non-applicable. Farm equipment that's broken needs to be fixed, often immediately, and there's nobody else to fix it by you. "I can't touch that, I might lose a finger" doesn't factor in. The only answer is "I've got to poke it until I get it working again."
This may have been a bad example, though, as other iPhone screens have really confused me, despite my being pretty technical. For instance, trying to figure out how to remove unwanted contacts from the Messages screen is downright unintuitive. (Hint: if you click on the contact, it takes you to a page where all you can do is contact them. You have to be at the main messages page and then click edit, which you'd think might have something to do with editing a message, at which point all the contacts are given delete icons. I'd call this astoundingly confusing.) Or the camera settings, where many options are hidden by default (zoom) or disappear quickly (next/back/trash options in the photo roll) until you start tapping the main screen. I find that unintuitive, because I know tapping things is generally a select/point/act motion, and not a "pull up the menu" option. The zoom is particularly tough, because tapping the screen actually does change the camera's focus, while also turning on the zoom slider. If I don't want to change the focal point, I resist clicking, and I have to override that logic (or tell myself to tap again on what's already the focal point) to pull up the zoom slider.
Those things are genuinely confusing to me. The clock alarm, though? It's the only button on the screen, and not confusing.
Clearly you've never seen how much the average soccer mom spends.
Well, somehow the summary indicated that 6 cups a day is "relatively normal" while also claiming only the guys who drink the most coffee get to those levels. Seems like it contradicts itself - they can't be the guys who are drinking the most and also the guys who are drinking normal levels.
Calculating retirement without interest? That's silly. And money market accounts and CDs are not investment vehicles -- not for the first 30 years, at least. Those are awful examples if you're talking about retirement investing.
It may be perfectly harmless--natural even--but I tend to prefer other people not do it in my presence. Is that so much to ask?
Waitaminute. As a child I also found the taste of peppers repulsive, or the spice of hot sauce unbearable. Then one day I tried a pepper and found it utterly delicious, out of the blue, without expecting it. Likewise at some point I had something spicy and found it enjoyable.
Just because a child found it horrible and an adult likes it, it doesn't mean the only option is the child is telling the truth and the adult has deluded themselves. Tastes can and do change for other reasons. There are a lot of things I loved as a child that I find pretty repulsive now as an adult, too. Have I somehow managed to delude myself into thinking those things are no longer tasty, when my honest child self knew it was good?
And what about friends of mine who once got distracted for a moment, and then turned around to find their child eating dog poop? Since their child wasn't naturally repulsed by the poop, does that mean it must actually be tasty?
What I took from it was that while Earth has quite a few of what look like close calls on the video, Mars is practically living within the edge of the green ring by the time we're done. However many times we've gotten smacked over the years, it seems like Mars should have been clobbered hundreds or thousands of times more than we have.
Also makes me curious about other solar systems, if it's possible we might find some with multiple asteroid belts.
Or just tell them your price range, and if they show any signs of not listening, fire them and work with someone who will listen.
I wised up and stopped putting all the blame on the average person long ago. When you have bankers committing fraud to get your loan through, lying to your face about how much you can afford, your only mistake is not being bright enough to comprehend everything in the hundreds of pages of legalese to spot the lies.
Pointing out the banker is lying is one thing, but ultimately every person has to be responsible for their own choices. You have to be able to evaluate the merits of what your banker is telling you as much as the car salesman or the door-to-door vacuum salesman -- they're all up to you.
There may be border cases where it's a tough call, but it doesn't take hundreds of pages of legalese to figure out when you're not even close. When my wife and I went looking to buy a house, it was trivial to look at our monthly budget and see what we could afford, and just as trivial to plug that into a payment calculator and see how much house we could afford. When we talked to the mortgage broker and he told us we were pre-approved for a number twice that big, I laughed and flat-out told him, "No, we can't," and that was the end of the story. When we actually bought we did stretch on the house price just a tiny bit (about 2%), but it was a conscious choice to adjust by 2%, not spend 100% more because some guy getting a commission told us it was okay.
Yes, of course they're wrong. That's what makes the joke funny. Until I admit it, like I am now.
Usage: "Mom bought bumper stickers for Kevin's and my's cars."
Acceptable alternative: "Mom bought bumper stickers for Kevin and I's car."
Or that Colorado has become part of the United Kingdom. As I live in Colorado, I always find that suggestion both amusing and a bit unsettling.
Stealing? I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that anything was stolen. There's a big difference between changing a username and stealing content. If you can't see it, then I don't know what to tell you.
Other gems:
* After spending 10 minutes determining a "computer" won't turn on because the user is pushing the power button on the monitor, she asks, "Well, Greg took his laptop with him. Does that mean I can't use his computer?"
* The director who begged me to go to her house and set up her home computer to be able to check work email, only for me to discover it was a laptop she could have brought in to the office.
* The professor who sent me an email saying, "Help, I can't send email."
* The ISP who followed up on a "we can't receive email" ticket by emailing us the instructions for the fix.
It's definitely not that simple. I agree this one was an example where the user was mistreated, and I do agree there's a moral obligation not to mess with user accounts without some strong reason, but it would also be illogical to come to any other conclusion than, in the end, user accounts really are the property of and under the control of the service provider. I run an online game, and even though people pay money to get in-game items, that stuff still clearly isn't really their property. If they continually break the rules of their game, I'm within my rights to (eventually) disable their account, despite the fact they've contributed cash. Or in an extreme case if I went out of business, they certainly wouldn't have any rights to "get their stuff back" or force me to keep the game online to avoid my pulling the rug out from under them.
Heh. I've got an Australian evil twin, too. In my case it's a music venue called Qirkz -- like my handle, but without the U. Unfortunately, English speakers are downright incapable of typing a Q without following it with a U, apparently, so a couple of times a week I get email intended for Qirkz, asking about gigs and show times and prices and other social and political goings-on in some place called Marrickville. It's pretty obnoxious, really, because I don't want to leave the poor people hanging and feel compelled to reply, but I also don't feel like doing a bunch of work for some company that picked a name too similar to my own.
Also:
1) It is plugged in?
2) Are you sure?
3) Did you check BOTH ends of the cord?