You can get better results IMO with a combination of funding before and after - enough before to make the project not a loss, enough after to reward excellence in execution. Of course, removing the distributor from the funding equation solves most of the problems.
Crowd funding changes everything IMO. How silly would it be to combine crowd funding with DRM? With crowd funding, you get a social deterrent replacing a technical deterrent. When it's your buddy who paid for the software/movie/whatever, he's not going to be impressed that you copied it without paying, and your buddy is well placed to judge whether your copy was actually a lost sale, and give you shit if you should really have paid.
Especially for music, where the tchotchkes from the crowd funding become the proof that you're really a fan, crowdfunding + tip jar could really work, where tip jar alone just can't for a lot of stuff.
If you can do this with a special build of your software, so much the better. Quantitative measures such as total time to complete a task or total distance of mouse movement to complete a task can be quite interesting, as long as you don't get carried away.
Heck, just tracking how often each feature gets used in the field (why a lot of software now has some "customer experience" program to opt-into) can be shocking. Discovering the truth behind the 20% of features that get used 80% of the time can really be an eye-opener.
Another is iterative testing of your design. Get some representative users, ask them to perform the same scenario with your design, one-on-one. Observe and listen. Change the design. And again, by "design" I mean paper sketches or possibly low-fidelity mockups in some mildly interactive form, like a slideshow or hypertext application.
I find that low-fidelity approach just goofy - hire some professionals. The last good UX designer I worked with could produce pixel-perfect mock-ups of changes to screens while sitting in a design meeting, about as fast as I could sketch them on the whiteboard, and as a result would sometimes point out why an idea that seemed right in a sketch would mislead the user in practice.
A previous UI coder I worked with could crank out actual UI changes (not wired to the backend but otherwise a clickable UI) almost that fast.
I've always found paper sketches or some of the "UI mock-up tools" get used when you have the PM trying to own the UI design instead of someone skilled in the technical art of usability.
He wasn't a badass in either Thor or Avengers, but a weasel, a very low-rent villian not given to being much of a cosmic threat.
I've long thought that actually captured the point of Loki quite well. He's not supposed to be a mustache-twirling melodramatic villain, but a mischief-maker who by trying to cause trouble in some limited, practical-joke way ends up imperiling the universe when things spiral out of control. If anything, he's been too much of an "epic boss" in the movies, though I thought the way Avengers played out was fine.
Wait, a chemistry-free love sequence with Portman reciting awkward lines getting in the way of the action? Are you sure you're reviewing the right movie? I've seen that before somewhere...
Did does the "Thor" series pretend to obey real world physics, or is it as cartoony as I assume it is (and its name implies)? I haven't seen anything but a minor clip of some dude jumping an impossible distance and dropping a hammer that creates a massive crater in the ground.
If you've ever wondered "wait, why is Thor lumped in with superheroes?" the answer is pretty much the answer to the physics question: Thor uses "superhero physics", where it's supposed to exist in the real world (well, the parts not set on Asgard or Jotunheim are) except for the powers the superheroes have, and the sci-fi elements in the setting itself.
Some people attribute unlikely properties to raw milk ("it cured me of lactose intolerance"). I suspect that for anything the government outlaws there will be some group who figures it must be great, because that's how the government works: the outlaw everything you actually want. Credibility is just one more casualty of the drug war.
My apologies to McCarty and Stroustrup. Gosling deserves it - I had to code in Java, and you don't heal from that, man! (Of course, now C# has the same problem in reverse, with people using properties instead of members for everything and capitalizing property names - you just can't win!).
If it was intentional, the choice of "Dread Pirate Roberts" for a handle was truly inspired. There will always be a black market underlying any economy, and I'm betting there will be an internet version of one going forward. While I wouldn't try to predict what it will look like, I have a suspicion that it will be called Silk Road for quite some time, one way or another.
I've actually seen a team that worked that way, no magic needed: they just had good auto-formatting tools. Everything was canonicalized on check-in and auto-formatted however you wanted on check-out. Each dev worked with his own favorite style, and just had to tolerate the canonical style for looking at diffs (I just realized that one of the team went on to be a VP I think at Canonical, by a strange coincidence).
you still have to use the shift key for stupid_case, plus you have to type an extra character.
The One True Way of settling style holy wars is "go with the shorter option", and by that measure CamelCase wins.
Meh, I just want functions to start with capital letters, and variables not to, but some languages don't even get that right! (Technically, it's constants that start with a capital, and function/member names are just constant pointers so capitalize em.)
It's a polite way of saying "governments" because we used to pretend that out own government wouldn't be doing this to us, so "governments" seemed too broad.
You seem to have a very narrow definition of socialism - do you expect each person to have an equal share of the means of production? That sounds like straight-up communism to me - equality of outcomes. I'd define socialism as "the people own the means of production", where you seem to insist that's the opposite of socialism.
There is no difference between 'the means of production' and any other 'good'. If you restrict trade in means of production you certainly don't have a free market.
They are very different indeed: one is wealth, the other bling (what people ignorant of economics mistake for wealth). They just both (under capitalism) happen to be valued in currency. Capitalism requires only that the control of the means of production be gained or lost through success at controlling them. That's the feedback loop that makes it the least-bad system.
I'm sure there's a better system than anything anyone has tried. After all, capitalism has so many flaws and all it really has going for it is that it's better than everything else that has been tried. I don't have much clue what a better system would look like, since clearly it doesn't look anything like feudalism or communism, but I'm pretty sure the next evolutionary step comes when most people own voting stock either directly or through values-themed funds. How much regulation would we need given powerful shareholders with values other than "maximum profits at any cost"?
Really, even business owner I've ever know well enough to chat with is happy to pay taxes to get basic infrastructure. As it happens, basic infrastructure isn't really all that expensive, and no one sane would complain about the spending required for it (it's maybe 20% of the federal budget, unless you include defense, perhaps a larger slice of state and local budgets).
This stupid meme that business owners don't want to pay any taxes (or don't understand the value of infrastructure) is pure political spin, and people need to get better BS filters in place around it.
More than half of Americans own stock. The point of capitalism is that stock ownership is control of the means of production. I'd argue that we're well on our way to 'the people control the means of production' in America - but it really needs to be more direct. Defined benefit pension plans decouple people from control.
I don't know why it's so hard to explain that capitalism is basically orthogonal to "free markets" (except that stock is bought and sold for money), and thanks for pitching in, but more education in basic economics would go a long way.
Well, add the current politics and I agree! Despite being lambasted as horrible extreme right-wingers, the conservatives' position of basically "OK, we'll spend 100% of revenue on social programs but no more than 100%" is wisdom we need down here. We're going to have such a hangover the next day when the punch bowl finally runs dry!
Sure, it has happened, but at least spin a crazy conspiracy theory that makes some kind of damn sense! Was the war supposed to raise or lower oil prices - which would oil companies like? If the war benefitted some specific corporation, at least pick one that had amazing profits during or after the war. At least tell a story that fits!
Sheesh, at least if I claim that Obama couldn't produce a long-form birth certificate because he's a shape-shifting reptoid from Mars, it's at least consistent with available facts (you'd have to wonder why advanced aliens couldn't just hack the records, but at least it's a start of a funny story, not just outright contradictory).
Oh, geez, another asshole who will dredge up any reason to hate Bill Gates. When you save 100000 children, you get to criticize.
Why should "US foreign aid" even matter? Don't you give significantly to charities which no such restrictions? Far more that the government gives on your behalf? I mean, I assume you donate a lot since you have such strong opinions on how the money should be used, right? You're not just trying to enslave random strangers to your personal values?
The presidency IMO is mostly a distraction. Can the GOP extend or reform it's coalition such that it backs away from the social conservatives that scare off voters, brings the fiscal conservatives to the front, and adds some new group to make up for the reduced enthusiasm of the socons? Probably not, but in desperate times who knows.
More likely the GOP will exit the political stage, to be replaced eventually by some sort of austerity party once we get to the point where austerity is inescapable (i.e., after the federal government and/or the dollar collapses).
Yep - in many areas it's self correcting. There are only a few places where local government is so crazy that no one's building despite shortages and high rental rates.
You'll just believe anything, won't you? Yes, it's unfortunate that we prop up the Middle East to ensure reasonably low oil prices, but that's no excuse for crazy conspiracy theories (my favorite being: we went to war to ensure low oil prices so that oil companies could make higher profits - how it that I don't even?)
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You can get better results IMO with a combination of funding before and after - enough before to make the project not a loss, enough after to reward excellence in execution. Of course, removing the distributor from the funding equation solves most of the problems.
Crowd funding changes everything IMO. How silly would it be to combine crowd funding with DRM? With crowd funding, you get a social deterrent replacing a technical deterrent. When it's your buddy who paid for the software/movie/whatever, he's not going to be impressed that you copied it without paying, and your buddy is well placed to judge whether your copy was actually a lost sale, and give you shit if you should really have paid.
Especially for music, where the tchotchkes from the crowd funding become the proof that you're really a fan, crowdfunding + tip jar could really work, where tip jar alone just can't for a lot of stuff.
2) Observe them while they work
If you can do this with a special build of your software, so much the better. Quantitative measures such as total time to complete a task or total distance of mouse movement to complete a task can be quite interesting, as long as you don't get carried away.
Heck, just tracking how often each feature gets used in the field (why a lot of software now has some "customer experience" program to opt-into) can be shocking. Discovering the truth behind the 20% of features that get used 80% of the time can really be an eye-opener.
Another is iterative testing of your design. Get some representative users, ask them to perform the same scenario with your design, one-on-one. Observe and listen. Change the design. And again, by "design" I mean paper sketches or possibly low-fidelity mockups in some mildly interactive form, like a slideshow or hypertext application.
I find that low-fidelity approach just goofy - hire some professionals. The last good UX designer I worked with could produce pixel-perfect mock-ups of changes to screens while sitting in a design meeting, about as fast as I could sketch them on the whiteboard, and as a result would sometimes point out why an idea that seemed right in a sketch would mislead the user in practice.
A previous UI coder I worked with could crank out actual UI changes (not wired to the backend but otherwise a clickable UI) almost that fast.
I've always found paper sketches or some of the "UI mock-up tools" get used when you have the PM trying to own the UI design instead of someone skilled in the technical art of usability.
He wasn't a badass in either Thor or Avengers, but a weasel, a very low-rent villian not given to being much of a cosmic threat.
I've long thought that actually captured the point of Loki quite well. He's not supposed to be a mustache-twirling melodramatic villain, but a mischief-maker who by trying to cause trouble in some limited, practical-joke way ends up imperiling the universe when things spiral out of control. If anything, he's been too much of an "epic boss" in the movies, though I thought the way Avengers played out was fine.
Wait, a chemistry-free love sequence with Portman reciting awkward lines getting in the way of the action? Are you sure you're reviewing the right movie? I've seen that before somewhere ...
Did does the "Thor" series pretend to obey real world physics, or is it as cartoony as I assume it is (and its name implies)? I haven't seen anything but a minor clip of some dude jumping an impossible distance and dropping a hammer that creates a massive crater in the ground.
If you've ever wondered "wait, why is Thor lumped in with superheroes?" the answer is pretty much the answer to the physics question: Thor uses "superhero physics", where it's supposed to exist in the real world (well, the parts not set on Asgard or Jotunheim are) except for the powers the superheroes have, and the sci-fi elements in the setting itself.
Some people attribute unlikely properties to raw milk ("it cured me of lactose intolerance"). I suspect that for anything the government outlaws there will be some group who figures it must be great, because that's how the government works: the outlaw everything you actually want. Credibility is just one more casualty of the drug war.
My apologies to McCarty and Stroustrup. Gosling deserves it - I had to code in Java, and you don't heal from that, man! (Of course, now C# has the same problem in reverse, with people using properties instead of members for everything and capitalizing property names - you just can't win!).
How many people run IE as admin these days? You'd have to be on XP, right?
If it was intentional, the choice of "Dread Pirate Roberts" for a handle was truly inspired. There will always be a black market underlying any economy, and I'm betting there will be an internet version of one going forward. While I wouldn't try to predict what it will look like, I have a suspicion that it will be called Silk Road for quite some time, one way or another.
I've actually seen a team that worked that way, no magic needed: they just had good auto-formatting tools. Everything was canonicalized on check-in and auto-formatted however you wanted on check-out. Each dev worked with his own favorite style, and just had to tolerate the canonical style for looking at diffs (I just realized that one of the team went on to be a VP I think at Canonical, by a strange coincidence).
you still have to use the shift key for stupid_case, plus you have to type an extra character.
The One True Way of settling style holy wars is "go with the shorter option", and by that measure CamelCase wins.
Meh, I just want functions to start with capital letters, and variables not to, but some languages don't even get that right! (Technically, it's constants that start with a capital, and function/member names are just constant pointers so capitalize em.)
It's a polite way of saying "governments" because we used to pretend that out own government wouldn't be doing this to us, so "governments" seemed too broad.
You seem to have a very narrow definition of socialism - do you expect each person to have an equal share of the means of production? That sounds like straight-up communism to me - equality of outcomes. I'd define socialism as "the people own the means of production", where you seem to insist that's the opposite of socialism.
There is no difference between 'the means of production' and any other 'good'. If you restrict trade in means of production you certainly don't have a free market.
They are very different indeed: one is wealth, the other bling (what people ignorant of economics mistake for wealth). They just both (under capitalism) happen to be valued in currency. Capitalism requires only that the control of the means of production be gained or lost through success at controlling them. That's the feedback loop that makes it the least-bad system.
I'm sure there's a better system than anything anyone has tried. After all, capitalism has so many flaws and all it really has going for it is that it's better than everything else that has been tried. I don't have much clue what a better system would look like, since clearly it doesn't look anything like feudalism or communism, but I'm pretty sure the next evolutionary step comes when most people own voting stock either directly or through values-themed funds. How much regulation would we need given powerful shareholders with values other than "maximum profits at any cost"?
Really, even business owner I've ever know well enough to chat with is happy to pay taxes to get basic infrastructure. As it happens, basic infrastructure isn't really all that expensive, and no one sane would complain about the spending required for it (it's maybe 20% of the federal budget, unless you include defense, perhaps a larger slice of state and local budgets).
This stupid meme that business owners don't want to pay any taxes (or don't understand the value of infrastructure) is pure political spin, and people need to get better BS filters in place around it.
It begs the question, "can we just stop using that expression altogether?" It sounds queer.
I see what you did there, twice. How easily we forget the origins of words. You make a fair point, and I bid you goodbye.
More than half of Americans own stock. The point of capitalism is that stock ownership is control of the means of production. I'd argue that we're well on our way to 'the people control the means of production' in America - but it really needs to be more direct. Defined benefit pension plans decouple people from control.
I don't know why it's so hard to explain that capitalism is basically orthogonal to "free markets" (except that stock is bought and sold for money), and thanks for pitching in, but more education in basic economics would go a long way.
Well, add the current politics and I agree! Despite being lambasted as horrible extreme right-wingers, the conservatives' position of basically "OK, we'll spend 100% of revenue on social programs but no more than 100%" is wisdom we need down here. We're going to have such a hangover the next day when the punch bowl finally runs dry!
Sure, it has happened, but at least spin a crazy conspiracy theory that makes some kind of damn sense! Was the war supposed to raise or lower oil prices - which would oil companies like? If the war benefitted some specific corporation, at least pick one that had amazing profits during or after the war. At least tell a story that fits!
Sheesh, at least if I claim that Obama couldn't produce a long-form birth certificate because he's a shape-shifting reptoid from Mars, it's at least consistent with available facts (you'd have to wonder why advanced aliens couldn't just hack the records, but at least it's a start of a funny story, not just outright contradictory).
Oh, geez, another asshole who will dredge up any reason to hate Bill Gates. When you save 100000 children, you get to criticize.
Why should "US foreign aid" even matter? Don't you give significantly to charities which no such restrictions? Far more that the government gives on your behalf? I mean, I assume you donate a lot since you have such strong opinions on how the money should be used, right? You're not just trying to enslave random strangers to your personal values?
The presidency IMO is mostly a distraction. Can the GOP extend or reform it's coalition such that it backs away from the social conservatives that scare off voters, brings the fiscal conservatives to the front, and adds some new group to make up for the reduced enthusiasm of the socons? Probably not, but in desperate times who knows.
More likely the GOP will exit the political stage, to be replaced eventually by some sort of austerity party once we get to the point where austerity is inescapable (i.e., after the federal government and/or the dollar collapses).
Yep - in many areas it's self correcting. There are only a few places where local government is so crazy that no one's building despite shortages and high rental rates.
You'll just believe anything, won't you? Yes, it's unfortunate that we prop up the Middle East to ensure reasonably low oil prices, but that's no excuse for crazy conspiracy theories (my favorite being: we went to war to ensure low oil prices so that oil companies could make higher profits - how it that I don't even?)
Hey, if you ever win the lottery, you'll know what to do. But to each his own.