I think on a commodity product like an automobile, customer retention will be dictated far more by the average wealth of the consumer and less so on brand. Brand makes a difference when price is comparable.
No, its not as simple as comparable. The brand can make a difference when the price is affordable to a particular consumer, even when more expensive.
Using your numbers, fewer potential Volt buyers will settle for a Volt if the Tesla is $855 a month rather then $1,187 a month. GM would experience some loss in customer retention in the scenario you describe.
So what you're saying is that a Tesla is something to aspire to, that it is, gasp, kind of on the fringe? Non-story here folks.
The point is that Tesla is working on more affordable cars. That "fringe" you refer to is known as walking a new technology down the willingness to pay curve using supply constraints, capturing the maximum value from each buyer, maximizing profits. Its a beautiful fit when your new tech starts out expensive and limited in numbers due to various constraints.
That first high priced iPhone was once "fringe". However once Apple had several generations of phones and could offer them a high, medium and low price points the iPhone became a much more significant part of the market. Tesla is on a similar track. GM is, and should be, afraid.
The Volt outsells Teslas. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Go ask those Volt owners if they aspired to own the Volt, if they preferred the Volt or if they settled for the Volt?
i'm sure GM is perfectly happy to have people settle for the volt.
You mean GM is perfectly happy that people don't have an affordable option. The point is once those people have an affordable option the meaningfulness of past sales becomes apparent, i.e. not very meaningful at all.
Flowcharts are documentation. And they can be pretty concise and more importantly visual.
The visualization aspect is sometimes important. It can literally be the big picture that helps one understand a process. Also visualization can help with debugging something missing at the design level.
Now I haven't used my plastic templates or some software package to generate flowcharts since undergrad days decades ago, but I still on occasion grab a yellow pad of paper and a pencil to informally (ok that was generous, crudely would be more accurate) sketch out some algorithm, data flow, logic, etc. To me its helpful when thinking about some things, planning some things, etc.
"Storyboards" are Apple's name for a user interface layout tool, its not a logic flow tool so it is not really like flowcharts. A storyboard is basically a view pane where you layout the visual elements and controls, and define some constraints involved in repositioning and resizing for different resolutions. There is very limited flow control. Things like clicking on this button brings up a different storyboard.
In short storyboards let you mock up a user interface, including one view launching a different view. If you are nostalgic for the 90s think back to Microsoft's Visual Studio GUI layout and glue code generation tools. Its pretty much the same sort of stuff.
GM wishes it could keep its Volt customers. My two Volt owning friends lover their Volts, their spouses too, however they all really wish they could afford a Tesla. When Teslas become more affordable, GM is in trouble. Well, more trouble than they are normally in.
Write the core of your application in C/C++, or asm if you like:-), however use objective-c for platform specific calls on iOS. Objective-C is the native language of the Cocoa API. Don't fight the platform. Use whatever is the native language for the platform, objective-c for iOS, java for Android, etc.
Keep the core C code separate from the platform specific code. Write the core code as if it will be a library, define an interface to its functionality. Have the platform specific code, like your UI code, use this interface. Depending on the language you do the platform specific stuff in you may in fact need to put this core code in a library.
Objective C is more convenient than Swift since it integrates much more easily with C code. Mix objective-c files and C/C++ files in your project and they all just compile down to native code into a single binary. You don't need a library, although a library is a nice way to organize things.
Now that you have the core code in this nice portable "library" you can move it to Android or whatever platform you might be interested in.
For UI code I tend to just do a native implementation on each platform, use platform specific technologies, etc. Basically give the user the look and functionality they expect. To fail to do so may result in poorer reviews.
Swift is interesting, but personally its a little too new for my tastes. I don't want to be an early adopter of a development language. Objective-c is the native API for Cocoa, I'll stick with that until the bugs/quirks of Swift are worked out and examples of how to do things are plentiful like they are in objective-c.
so many middlemen, so much percent... so much commission for so little work, its almost free money
In this particular case the middle provide a valuable service, they keep a merchant's accounting simple and the middlemen take all the risk.
Using something like coinbase, a merchant never sees or touches a bitcoin. The merchant does all their pricing and accounting in fiat currency (dollars, euro, etc). If a customer wants to use bitcoins the merchant sends the fiat price to the exchange, the exchange returns an equivalent bitcoin amount and a bitcoin payment address (the exchange's), when the coins are received the exchange informs the merchant and most importantly credit the merchant's account for the exact fiat amount originally specified. regardless of the coin's current exchange rate. The merchant's accounting is not complicated by new IRS rules regarding bitcoins (its an asset not a currency) since they never touch a coin, nor do they care about coin price fluctuations.
Upload the file(s) as a single encrypted image file. Break that image into stripes. Store each stripe and the decryption key in a different legal jurisdiction? Not foolproof but it does make it more difficult for a single entity.
If you do that, how is the site supposed to publish your documents in the event of your death? They're going to have to get access to the data so they can do the job.
You only do the uploading of the image. The service does the striping and jurisdictionally diverse storage.
But then stopping any of the stripes will stop the entire revelation.
OK. That's not the problem I was trying to address, but I think striping can help here too.
Rather than an additive approach use a subtractive approach. For instance instead of each site having only 1 of 3 pieces, it has 2 of 3 pieces - 1 piece missing. Each site is missing some number of stripes, so a single entity can not read on its own. However there would be redundancy in that any particular stripe is in more than one jurisdiction. So coordination between jurisdictions is need for both release and denial. Again, not foolproof.
Upload the file(s) as a single encrypted image file. Break that image into stripes. Store each stripe and the decryption key in a different legal jurisdiction? Not foolproof but it does make it more difficult for a single entity.
Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE: BABA) is a publicly traded Hangzhou-based group of Internet-based e-commerce businesses, including business-to-business online web portals, online retail and payment services, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services.
That business is **not** what is traded on the NYSE under BABA. What is actually traded is a Cayman Islands "variable-interest entity". It seems that foreigners are not allowed to own shares in the business you describe. http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
You seem to be speaking of Alibaba the Chinese retailer, so you are off on a tangent since that is not what US investors are putting their money into.
What US investors are buying is interest in a Cayman Island “variable-interest entity”. Stockholders won't have the usual influence on corporate governance or management, such as it is. My understanding is that Chinese law doesn't allow foreigners to own a Chinese strategic asset. So this Cayman Island entity was created.
On the other hand who owns Alibaba's 120 billion? Americans now.
US investors don't own Alibaba, the Chinese retail giant. Chinese law doesn't allow foreigners to own a Chinese strategic asset. What US investors are buying is interest in a Cayman Island “variable-interest entity”. Stockholders won't have the usual influence on corporate governance or management. http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
No, a "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO fan. Its a great show, the guests/debate often interesting, but fact filled when Bill is speaking -- not quite.
Wolves will kill members of other packs that trespass on their pack's hunting range. Within a pack killing is extremely rare. The fighting within a pack is dominance and discipline related, it will almost always stop short of serious injury or death.
Blackberry used to be secure until they wanted to sell phones in India and the Indian government demanded a backdoor in order for them to sell phones there.
Was Blackberry ever secure? I thought that they always had the user's encryption key. No backdoors or changes necessary. It was simply that the government demanded that they turn over the user keys that they already possessed.
Slashdot Mirror
Price of 2015 Chevy Volt - $34,345, 60 month loan price per month $587
Price of a Model S - $69,900 , 60 month loan price per month $1,187
Anticpated Price of a Model 3 - $50,000, 60 month loan price per month $855 http://www.ibtimes.com/2017-te...
I think on a commodity product like an automobile, customer retention will be dictated far more by the average wealth of the consumer and less so on brand. Brand makes a difference when price is comparable.
No, its not as simple as comparable. The brand can make a difference when the price is affordable to a particular consumer, even when more expensive.
Using your numbers, fewer potential Volt buyers will settle for a Volt if the Tesla is $855 a month rather then $1,187 a month. GM would experience some loss in customer retention in the scenario you describe.
So what you're saying is that a Tesla is something to aspire to, that it is, gasp, kind of on the fringe? Non-story here folks.
The point is that Tesla is working on more affordable cars. That "fringe" you refer to is known as walking a new technology down the willingness to pay curve using supply constraints, capturing the maximum value from each buyer, maximizing profits. Its a beautiful fit when your new tech starts out expensive and limited in numbers due to various constraints.
That first high priced iPhone was once "fringe". However once Apple had several generations of phones and could offer them a high, medium and low price points the iPhone became a much more significant part of the market. Tesla is on a similar track. GM is, and should be, afraid.
The Volt outsells Teslas. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Go ask those Volt owners if they aspired to own the Volt, if they preferred the Volt or if they settled for the Volt?
i'm sure GM is perfectly happy to have people settle for the volt.
You mean GM is perfectly happy that people don't have an affordable option. The point is once those people have an affordable option the meaningfulness of past sales becomes apparent, i.e. not very meaningful at all.
That affects the color of their money how?
It affects customer retention, future money. It Tesla comes out with affordable cars GM is in for serious competition.
Flowcharts are documentation. And they can be pretty concise and more importantly visual.
The visualization aspect is sometimes important. It can literally be the big picture that helps one understand a process. Also visualization can help with debugging something missing at the design level.
Now I haven't used my plastic templates or some software package to generate flowcharts since undergrad days decades ago, but I still on occasion grab a yellow pad of paper and a pencil to informally (ok that was generous, crudely would be more accurate) sketch out some algorithm, data flow, logic, etc. To me its helpful when thinking about some things, planning some things, etc.
"Storyboards" are Apple's name for a user interface layout tool, its not a logic flow tool so it is not really like flowcharts. A storyboard is basically a view pane where you layout the visual elements and controls, and define some constraints involved in repositioning and resizing for different resolutions. There is very limited flow control. Things like clicking on this button brings up a different storyboard.
In short storyboards let you mock up a user interface, including one view launching a different view. If you are nostalgic for the 90s think back to Microsoft's Visual Studio GUI layout and glue code generation tools. Its pretty much the same sort of stuff.
The Volt outsells Teslas. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Go ask those Volt owners if they aspired to own the Volt, if they preferred the Volt or if they settled for the Volt?
GM wishes it could get Tesla's customers...
GM wishes it could keep its Volt customers. My two Volt owning friends lover their Volts, their spouses too, however they all really wish they could afford a Tesla. When Teslas become more affordable, GM is in trouble. Well, more trouble than they are normally in.
Write the core of your application in C/C++, or asm if you like :-), however use objective-c for platform specific calls on iOS. Objective-C is the native language of the Cocoa API. Don't fight the platform. Use whatever is the native language for the platform, objective-c for iOS, java for Android, etc.
Keep the core C code separate from the platform specific code. Write the core code as if it will be a library, define an interface to its functionality. Have the platform specific code, like your UI code, use this interface. Depending on the language you do the platform specific stuff in you may in fact need to put this core code in a library.
Objective C is more convenient than Swift since it integrates much more easily with C code. Mix objective-c files and C/C++ files in your project and they all just compile down to native code into a single binary. You don't need a library, although a library is a nice way to organize things.
Now that you have the core code in this nice portable "library" you can move it to Android or whatever platform you might be interested in.
For UI code I tend to just do a native implementation on each platform, use platform specific technologies, etc. Basically give the user the look and functionality they expect. To fail to do so may result in poorer reviews.
Swift is interesting, but personally its a little too new for my tastes. I don't want to be an early adopter of a development language. Objective-c is the native API for Cocoa, I'll stick with that until the bugs/quirks of Swift are worked out and examples of how to do things are plentiful like they are in objective-c.
so many middlemen, so much percent ... so much commission for so little work, its almost free money
In this particular case the middle provide a valuable service, they keep a merchant's accounting simple and the middlemen take all the risk.
Using something like coinbase, a merchant never sees or touches a bitcoin. The merchant does all their pricing and accounting in fiat currency (dollars, euro, etc). If a customer wants to use bitcoins the merchant sends the fiat price to the exchange, the exchange returns an equivalent bitcoin amount and a bitcoin payment address (the exchange's), when the coins are received the exchange informs the merchant and most importantly credit the merchant's account for the exact fiat amount originally specified. regardless of the coin's current exchange rate. The merchant's accounting is not complicated by new IRS rules regarding bitcoins (its an asset not a currency) since they never touch a coin, nor do they care about coin price fluctuations.
Upload the file(s) as a single encrypted image file. Break that image into stripes. Store each stripe and the decryption key in a different legal jurisdiction? Not foolproof but it does make it more difficult for a single entity.
If you do that, how is the site supposed to publish your documents in the event of your death? They're going to have to get access to the data so they can do the job.
You only do the uploading of the image. The service does the striping and jurisdictionally diverse storage.
The USA would have the keys to all of them, since they seem to 0wnz the entire world's internet. (NSA spying on all the pipes, etc.)
Believe it or not, it is possible to move digital information (like a key) around the world without using the internet.
Drive that station wagon full of tapes to a port and have the station wagon loaded into a cargo container? :-)
But then stopping any of the stripes will stop the entire revelation.
OK. That's not the problem I was trying to address, but I think striping can help here too.
Rather than an additive approach use a subtractive approach. For instance instead of each site having only 1 of 3 pieces, it has 2 of 3 pieces - 1 piece missing. Each site is missing some number of stripes, so a single entity can not read on its own. However there would be redundancy in that any particular stripe is in more than one jurisdiction. So coordination between jurisdictions is need for both release and denial. Again, not foolproof.
Upload the file(s) as a single encrypted image file. Break that image into stripes. Store each stripe and the decryption key in a different legal jurisdiction? Not foolproof but it does make it more difficult for a single entity.
Probably a false flag operation to identify potential whistleblowers. :-)
I heard he had a dreaded assault knife with him.
So the blade was matte black rather than silver?
Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE: BABA) is a publicly traded Hangzhou-based group of Internet-based e-commerce businesses, including business-to-business online web portals, online retail and payment services, a shopping search engine and data-centric cloud computing services.
That business is **not** what is traded on the NYSE under BABA. What is actually traded is a Cayman Islands "variable-interest entity". It seems that foreigners are not allowed to own shares in the business you describe.
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
You seem to be speaking of Alibaba the Chinese retailer, so you are off on a tangent since that is not what US investors are putting their money into.
What US investors are buying is interest in a Cayman Island “variable-interest entity”. Stockholders won't have the usual influence on corporate governance or management, such as it is. My understanding is that Chinese law doesn't allow foreigners to own a Chinese strategic asset. So this Cayman Island entity was created.
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
On the other hand who owns Alibaba's 120 billion? Americans now.
US investors don't own Alibaba, the Chinese retail giant. Chinese law doesn't allow foreigners to own a Chinese strategic asset. What US investors are buying is interest in a Cayman Island “variable-interest entity”. Stockholders won't have the usual influence on corporate governance or management.
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
There speaks a Fox News fan!
No, a "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO fan. Its a great show, the guests/debate often interesting, but fact filled when Bill is speaking -- not quite.
Wolves will kill members of other packs that trespass on their pack's hunting range. Within a pack killing is extremely rare. The fighting within a pack is dominance and discipline related, it will almost always stop short of serious injury or death.
No. It's impossible to add 2+2 and get 5. It's almost impossible to convince a pedant they're wrong.
You are wrong about 2+2=5 being impossible. Any C++ programmer can accomplish that. :-)
Blackberry used to be secure until they wanted to sell phones in India and the Indian government demanded a backdoor in order for them to sell phones there.
Was Blackberry ever secure? I thought that they always had the user's encryption key. No backdoors or changes necessary. It was simply that the government demanded that they turn over the user keys that they already possessed.
So everything is protected by a 4 digit passcode?
Or your fingerprint, and where would the police get your fingerprint?
Also wouldn't download and usage be better metrics of user behavior than the developer release/update schedule?