Covered in Joel Spolsky's article Sins of Commissions. He went to a shoe store where they "sold" him a $12 can of show spray for free by giving him a discount on the shoes to cover the price.
"I can picture the M.B.A. who worked at corporate headquarters. I bet he reaped a big bonus for coming up with an incentive program that dramatically increased the sales of the high-profit silicone spray. Meanwhile, did anybody notice that the sales of shoes fell by about the same amount?... incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always. What you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want, and even though you may think that all you have to do is tweak the incentives to boost sales, you can't. It's not going to work. Because people have brains and are endlessly creative when it comes to improving their personal well-being at everyone else's expense."
(Dear Slashdot, why can't I use <i> or <em> tags inslide <blockquote>? Or is my system just not showing it right?)
I'm in Florida and was able to walk into the street to see the launch. Absolutely gorgeous. It happened at sunset so the plume was colored just like clouds would be during a sunset - white, yellow, pink, and orange. Here's a pic of how it looked (not shot by me, but that's how it looked where I was. Search Flickr for STS 119 for more.) Also, it was a perfectly clear day and you could easily see the boosters for a long time after separation. Thanks for the great show NASA, and good luck spacemen!
Yeah. When I saw the article, I was like "BFD! Dreaming Mac fans have been doing this since time immaterial--whenever a new PowerMac/MacPro comes out, go to the store, tick every box, and see what it comes out to."
Mac Pro, two quad-core Xeons at 2.93 GHz, 32 GB RAM ($6100 right there), RAID card, four 1 TB drives, 3 NVIDIA cards (since the RAID card takes a slot), a second SuperDrive, wireless KB & M, a warranty, and AirPort brings it to $14,488. I could have gotten that higher by adding a fibrechannel card instead of one of the video cards, or adding displays, or a ton of software--everything from iWork to OS X Server.
WHO is the large target audience for these small screened, underpowered computers? Is it for people that ONLY do a little websurfing and email? Even with that...why not pony up just a few more $$ and get a real laptop?
What I really want is a really good second computer. Something as thin and light as a MacBook Air, but with an 8-10" screen and a price around $800-$1000.* (I tried my friend's Eee but it's too small.) There are times I don't want to lug around a "real" laptop. It's got nothing to do with not having enough $$. (Though if it's small and feature-less (i.e., no optical drive, few ports, mediocre video performance, etc.) of course it shouldn't have the same price as a larger model.) For those times when an iPhone isn't enough but you don't want your full five-pound laptop.
* Though I must admit, the currently-available refurbished first-gen Airs at $999 (the original, 1.6 GHz model) are very tempting. I'm this close to selling my 13" MacBook and getting one. Just don't have the cash at the moment to cover the difference between what that one costs and what my old one would go for. Plus that's the one my wife uses for capturing video and the lack of FireWire on the Air is an issue.
... because, unlike the Nokia, you probably know someone who owns a touch or an iPhone and you can test it before buying! Or, if the online resources are web-accessible (as opposed to only available in the library) you can just go to an Apple store (if there's one nearby) and check one out there. Not that I have anything against the Nokia, but there's no reason to buy something sight-unseen if you don't have to. If it looks like the iPod won't work for you, you can consider alternatives. The Nokia tablets have larger screens but the iPod's pan-and-zoom system works pretty well and its small size is great.
The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them...
Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours and yours alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based on how tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle playing basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately. So the system kind of fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people who walk kind of like you.
There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it's easy not to walk kind of like you -- just take one shoe off. Of course, you'll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the cameras will eventually figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put a handful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. Plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process (I kid. Reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gait-recognition).
The cost to run an advertising campaign can be from a few hundred dollars to ten million dollars, depending on medium, placement, demographic, etc. And almost always, the revenue stream does grow from a well-done marketing campaign. But there is never a way to prove causation. That is to say, an external factor could have accounted for all the extra business that cannot be accounted for. There is not, and never has been, a direct link between advertising and improved revenue.
Someone once said "I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half."
And for those who want teh snappy without tabs-on-top and other changes, go here to learn how to revert back to the old ways. I hope these still work once it's out of beta! I like my title bar on the top and a progress meter that actually shows progress, thankyouverymuch.
No Slashdot, no Facebook... all we did was work!;-)
I know some people complain about Google having been taken over by spammers, but it still works for me and what I search for. Anyone else remember doing every search twice--once at Yahoo! and getting too few matches, and then AltaVista and getting too many?
Both are about equally valuable to me. You can give me DRM'd media for free as long as I can have multiple free copies: one for each computer, iPod, one I can burn to a DVD, etc. Or, just give me one unencumbered source and I'll take care of moving it around to different formats. That's why I've bought music from the iTunes store but not a single video: because the DRM they put on video is ridiculous. It requires a computer, authorized by Apple, to play. Therefore, I can't possibly "own" it, so I won't pay as much as a DVD for it. If it were a buck or two, sure, I'd take it and enjoy it for a while, knowing that someday it might not be available. Free would be even better. But full price for something that restricted? No way.
Who says they were outward-facing? (I assume by 'net' you meant 'Net' as in 'Internet.') Happens all the time: someone brings in a virus-laden laptop, connects to the network, vulnerable machines die.
Besides, despite what you think about #2, points 1 and 3 are still valid.
I've got screenshots of my Terminal window when it was 1111111111. Happened during the middle of a LUG meeting, by chance.
Also, this gives me a new default timestamp for when I manually tweak a database. I used to enter '1111111111' when I needed a timestamp in the past and it didn't matter what it was... now I can use 1234567890!:-)
In other news, I can't believe they're remaking 1234567890.
So no one is jumping on board because they want to keep selling overpriced wall-warts. What they don't realize is how many more products they'd sell overall if recharging the device weren't an issue. How many more little gadgets would be sold if every buyer didn't have to worry about charging--if everyone just knew that no matter where they went they'd be able to charge whatever they had? I've always felt this way. How many more laptops would have been sold (back when they were $3000 and a charge lasted and hour or two) if power supplies were universal and interchangeable? But nooooo, they'd rather hold back progress in the name of selling $150 replacement A/C adapters--a component that is absolutely trivial in design. (For the most part. Apple's MagSafe is pretty much the one innovation in the field in two decades. Otherwise the basics--AC comes in, DC goes out--are trivial.)
Take a look at the fast food companies--how much more food do they sell now that everywhere has free refills on soda? I know the margins on sugar water are great, but the other way to look at it is that it's practically free in the first place and it costs you almost nothing to give away. Sometimes, if you give away a little, you get a lot more back.
The one GOOD thing that has happened to me in this realm lately was discovering that I could take the little A/C-to-USB "cube" that came with my iPhone and a standard big-to-small USB cable that came with a digital camera and use that to charge my Garmin GPS. The promise of USB delivered, after just a decade!!!!!
They should replace the stack of 3 lights with a single big light made from an array of LEDs, then make the whole thing gradually shift from green to red. Awesome!:-)
The funny part is how they once upon a time just had plain 1, 2, 3 numbering, but that wasn't fancy enough, so they went to years (95, 98, 2000) but then that made them quickly become out of date, so then they went to names (XP, Vista) only to create such a horrible association with the names that they're going back to plain numbers. I bet next they'll go to an unpronounceable symbol like Prince did.
Slashdot Mirror
Covered in Joel Spolsky's article Sins of Commissions. He went to a shoe store where they "sold" him a $12 can of show spray for free by giving him a discount on the shoes to cover the price.
"I can picture the M.B.A. who worked at corporate headquarters. I bet he reaped a big bonus for coming up with an incentive program that dramatically increased the sales of the high-profit silicone spray. Meanwhile, did anybody notice that the sales of shoes fell by about the same amount?... incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always. What you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want, and even though you may think that all you have to do is tweak the incentives to boost sales, you can't. It's not going to work. Because people have brains and are endlessly creative when it comes to improving their personal well-being at everyone else's expense."
(Dear Slashdot, why can't I use <i> or <em> tags inslide <blockquote>? Or is my system just not showing it right?)
I sat with a couple of sales guys (friends at that) last weekend who bragged back and forth about how they were literally screwing associates.
My head literally exploded when I read that.
I'm in Florida and was able to walk into the street to see the launch. Absolutely gorgeous. It happened at sunset so the plume was colored just like clouds would be during a sunset - white, yellow, pink, and orange. Here's a pic of how it looked (not shot by me, but that's how it looked where I was. Search Flickr for STS 119 for more.) Also, it was a perfectly clear day and you could easily see the boosters for a long time after separation. Thanks for the great show NASA, and good luck spacemen!
Yeah. When I saw the article, I was like "BFD! Dreaming Mac fans have been doing this since time immaterial--whenever a new PowerMac/MacPro comes out, go to the store, tick every box, and see what it comes out to."
Mac Pro, two quad-core Xeons at 2.93 GHz, 32 GB RAM ($6100 right there), RAID card, four 1 TB drives, 3 NVIDIA cards (since the RAID card takes a slot), a second SuperDrive, wireless KB & M, a warranty, and AirPort brings it to $14,488. I could have gotten that higher by adding a fibrechannel card instead of one of the video cards, or adding displays, or a ton of software--everything from iWork to OS X Server.
WHO is the large target audience for these small screened, underpowered computers? Is it for people that ONLY do a little websurfing and email? Even with that...why not pony up just a few more $$ and get a real laptop?
What I really want is a really good second computer. Something as thin and light as a MacBook Air, but with an 8-10" screen and a price around $800-$1000.* (I tried my friend's Eee but it's too small.) There are times I don't want to lug around a "real" laptop. It's got nothing to do with not having enough $$. (Though if it's small and feature-less (i.e., no optical drive, few ports, mediocre video performance, etc.) of course it shouldn't have the same price as a larger model.) For those times when an iPhone isn't enough but you don't want your full five-pound laptop.
* Though I must admit, the currently-available refurbished first-gen Airs at $999 (the original, 1.6 GHz model) are very tempting. I'm this close to selling my 13" MacBook and getting one. Just don't have the cash at the moment to cover the difference between what that one costs and what my old one would go for. Plus that's the one my wife uses for capturing video and the lack of FireWire on the Air is an issue.
With DVR's becoming more and more popular, the time that a show airs is less and less important.
But they still can't handle a show being pre-empted, which is what made it so hard for me to catch the last two seasons of Futurama. Fucking football.
... because, unlike the Nokia, you probably know someone who owns a touch or an iPhone and you can test it before buying! Or, if the online resources are web-accessible (as opposed to only available in the library) you can just go to an Apple store (if there's one nearby) and check one out there. Not that I have anything against the Nokia, but there's no reason to buy something sight-unseen if you don't have to. If it looks like the iPod won't work for you, you can consider alternatives. The Nokia tablets have larger screens but the iPod's pan-and-zoom system works pretty well and its small size is great.
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that Cory Doctorow's awesome book Little Brother is a great read and can be downloaded for free from the author's site.
"A New York Times story reveals the obstacles they face just to get the word out..."
Too bad Google doesn't run a really popular website. If they did, they could just put a note up on the front page or something.
Someone once said "I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half."
And for those who want teh snappy without tabs-on-top and other changes, go here to learn how to revert back to the old ways. I hope these still work once it's out of beta! I like my title bar on the top and a progress meter that actually shows progress, thankyouverymuch.
And here's how to do it. (Look closely at #4. Slightly NSFW.)
No Slashdot, no Facebook... all we did was work! ;-)
I know some people complain about Google having been taken over by spammers, but it still works for me and what I search for. Anyone else remember doing every search twice--once at Yahoo! and getting too few matches, and then AltaVista and getting too many?
Agreed. There are countless uses for something like this. 2009 will be the year of Linux in the outlet! ;-)
OTBS FTW
Both are about equally valuable to me. You can give me DRM'd media for free as long as I can have multiple free copies: one for each computer, iPod, one I can burn to a DVD, etc. Or, just give me one unencumbered source and I'll take care of moving it around to different formats. That's why I've bought music from the iTunes store but not a single video: because the DRM they put on video is ridiculous. It requires a computer, authorized by Apple, to play. Therefore, I can't possibly "own" it, so I won't pay as much as a DVD for it. If it were a buck or two, sure, I'd take it and enjoy it for a while, knowing that someday it might not be available. Free would be even better. But full price for something that restricted? No way.
In Soviet Russia... but does it run Linux? Russian overlords... MEME OVERLOAD*(&$*(%&*#$*(%&NO CARRIER
Who says they were outward-facing? (I assume by 'net' you meant 'Net' as in 'Internet.') Happens all the time: someone brings in a virus-laden laptop, connects to the network, vulnerable machines die.
Besides, despite what you think about #2, points 1 and 3 are still valid.
I've got screenshots of my Terminal window when it was 1111111111. Happened during the middle of a LUG meeting, by chance.
Also, this gives me a new default timestamp for when I manually tweak a database. I used to enter '1111111111' when I needed a timestamp in the past and it didn't matter what it was... now I can use 1234567890! :-)
In other news, I can't believe they're remaking 1234567890.
So no one is jumping on board because they want to keep selling overpriced wall-warts. What they don't realize is how many more products they'd sell overall if recharging the device weren't an issue. How many more little gadgets would be sold if every buyer didn't have to worry about charging--if everyone just knew that no matter where they went they'd be able to charge whatever they had? I've always felt this way. How many more laptops would have been sold (back when they were $3000 and a charge lasted and hour or two) if power supplies were universal and interchangeable? But nooooo, they'd rather hold back progress in the name of selling $150 replacement A/C adapters--a component that is absolutely trivial in design. (For the most part. Apple's MagSafe is pretty much the one innovation in the field in two decades. Otherwise the basics--AC comes in, DC goes out--are trivial.)
Take a look at the fast food companies--how much more food do they sell now that everywhere has free refills on soda? I know the margins on sugar water are great, but the other way to look at it is that it's practically free in the first place and it costs you almost nothing to give away. Sometimes, if you give away a little, you get a lot more back.
The one GOOD thing that has happened to me in this realm lately was discovering that I could take the little A/C-to-USB "cube" that came with my iPhone and a standard big-to-small USB cable that came with a digital camera and use that to charge my Garmin GPS. The promise of USB delivered, after just a decade!!!!!
They should replace the stack of 3 lights with a single big light made from an array of LEDs, then make the whole thing gradually shift from green to red. Awesome! :-)
"Monty Program"? Sounds like it'll be a circus.
"It is good technology. It solves crimes."
So do warrantless searches. Let's allow them, too!
Evidently it's not suitable for being a webserver, either.
The funny part is how they once upon a time just had plain 1, 2, 3 numbering, but that wasn't fancy enough, so they went to years (95, 98, 2000) but then that made them quickly become out of date, so then they went to names (XP, Vista) only to create such a horrible association with the names that they're going back to plain numbers. I bet next they'll go to an unpronounceable symbol like Prince did.