Agreed. If you take a look at your screen right now, you will find few, if any, all-caps words. So those that are attract a bit more attention, and not too much more. (You don't want them screaming in different colors.) Just enough to shave off a few milliseconds in navigation every time you need a menu command.
Sociologist Considers Own Behavior Indicative Of Larger Trends... "My observations indicate that the typical married American man has had increasing difficulty relating to his spouse over the last two and a half years, ever since she started taking those yoga classes," wrote Piers, 56, in his Interpersonal Connections Within The Marriage Paradigm: A Study In Causality.
that's fine, I personally wouldn't expect ultratight code to work on platforms that deviate from strict specs. you guys put in amazing work, nevertheless. that level of control over a computer I had only for a 1000 times less complex machine, ZX Spectrum, 1000 years ago.:-)
isn't life funny, you know you did an incredible work and you actually won, by the vote of your peers, and then some random guy (me) comes along and says how he likes the other one, and disappointment kicks in.:-) I downloaded gaia first but it crashed. I have downloaded a few demos in the last few years and every single one crashed, except for Felix. I believe, but I need to see the code running for humbleness to rise.
Btw I liked Felix Workshop in particular b/c I'm partial to music visualization.
Just downloaded the Felix demo and ran it on my PC. Even if it were 64MB I'd still be very moved by the skills and heart put into the artistic side of the demo. At 64KB I've been sitting in silence for 15 minutes now.
Best post on the topic. The real question is what the goal is of his attending the conference. It's the few things that he can take away -- some key concepts and ideas to research further on his own, and the people to do it with.
Back at my old company, we recorded audio and even videos of "important" meetings and never looked at those. That was just too much info for something already experienced, and the world has moved on with new demands. Exception would be litigation etc. where you may need to prove that someone said this or that.
I think it's the translation -- she's Dutch. Sounds like she meant "fake drugs can kill people, and this is very different from the societal cost of online piracy, so these two things don't compare and shouldn't have been lumped together" meaning the fake drugs things should have been separate.
Which I sympathize with, but I'm glad the IP idiots tried to bundle their profit-keeping concerts with some responsible people's live-saving concerns so the former failed. The latter is important in itself so it will probably be covered in a separate agreement.
To be more precise, you *imagine* that having a FB account adds no value to you at all. You ran a quick simulation in your head in which the experience felt awful and without value, and you decided that such would be the reality if you were on FB.
But humans are notoriously bad about mentally simulating the future in order to find out how they'd feel, for nontrivial things. (Lots of good research on that one.) So if lots of your friends and peers tell you the experience is not bad, there's a good chance you're wrong.
Obama being pro-war is a consequence of reality -- he inherited a pro-war situation in America and he has no choice but to continue. Ron Paul can talk about being anti-war but if he became president he would have to deal with the same momentum. If I remember Obama did the same thing.
But otherwise you're right, there's too many nuances among people or special interests the politicians represent to just say Republicans believe X and Democrats believe Y.
Yes but you are assuming users will bother to read what they get this way. But when they go to FB they are not in the mood to read this kind of boring crap. The "FaceBook personality" that people assume when on FB doesn't want to hear about dishwashers and toilet paper brands, or renting cars, or Mitt Romney. Vacation travels maybe, I'll agree, that's fun and stimulating. Most other things, no. Even FB admits that much.
There is this youtube video of a mini robot mowing the lawn and he's very robotic looking, but you can't help feeling sympathy for him as he struggles with the task: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv61MzF1n7k
So even though he physically looks nothing like a human, your ability to project your feelings on him makes him likeable. Perhaps Romney's likeability problem is that people cannot project feelings onto him. He's just some strange, clear-cut, very functional being in a domain we have little experience with.
Science *is* failing us at aspects of existence that involve life and human body/mind. It approaches those subjects as if phenomena there were objectively measurable as in physical sciences.
In the physical domains however I agree, the progress of science is pretty sweet.
"For a site that makes almost all its money from advertising, and which claims 96 of the top 100 US advertisers as customers, Facebook harbors a dirty little secret: Marketing on Facebook doesn’t work very well. In fact, user engagement rates on branded pages are declining rather than increasing, and most large marketers tell us they simply haven’t gotten much value from their Facebook investments. (The biggest difference between the Google IPO in 2004 and the Facebook IPO? In 2004, even the least sophisticated marketers were generating enormous ROI on Google; today, even the savviest marketers often struggle to do likewise on Facebook.) Facebook can – and must – domuch more to turn the data it has on users into effective ad targeting."
The problem Facebook must solve is not just technical -- it's psychological. What can you show the user to alter his mindset so he becomes receptive to doing business?
It's the reverse challenge that Google faces: how to alter goal-oriented mindset into one that's all about social and party. Google is failing in theirs, and I predict FB will fail in theirs too. Except that Google doesn't need the new goal for money to keep flowing, and FB does.
No question that it's all true -- you may well be interested in the ad, but most likely *not at the moment* when you're on FB and looking for social stimulation. (Unless it's more games, music etc.) Imagine if a porn site knew everything about a user and served a highly targeted ad for Nike Air that it knew the user needed at the moment -- he wouldn't even notice.
TV advertising works because the user is already there and has to look at it. Google advertising works and works great because the user is in the mindset of searching for those running shoes for which the ad is shown. If all FB does is shows targeted ads on the side of the stream of fun fun fun the user is looking for, I predict those ads won't be clicked on by many.
And I bet FB knows it and are hoping will think of something later.
The $75bn valuation is based on the *idea* that FB will become a better advertising platform than Google. Because so many people from all walks of life spend time on FB, the logic goes, it will make a perfect platform for advertising and selling anything.
But in reality when people are FB they are drug addicts looking to score. The drug is stimulation -- in the form of their friends' gossip, funny photos, maybe even a post from a fan page if it's really super interesting, anything to break the boredom or make you forget about hard stuff. I'm speaking from own experience and that of close friends. Anything that is not stimulating is not welcome -- and that includes ads for the majority of products and services out there. By contrast, when you want to buy bicycle tires you go to Google with the intention of buying them, so it's a different mindset, one where good ads are actually welcome. Drug addicts do spend money on drugs though, so FB will be a great platform to sell Zynga games, music, digital goods that offer instant gratification and the like. But that is all.
They are pressured by the US (mostly). In Serbia (where I'm from) for example, Biden attempted to force Serbia to allow importing of GMO food, currently forbidden by the Serbian law. Here's a statement made by the American ambassador in Serbia during a speech to the Serbian Chamber of Commerce: (http://serbia.usembassy.gov/g100302.html) (emphasis mine)
"Our Foreign Agricultural Service, for example, facilitates a U.S. Department of Agriculture Technical Assistance Program to assist Serbia in its WTO accession process. This support aims to help Serbia establish a trade regime consistent with the WTO and other international standards-setting. Our Foreign Agricultural Service office is currently assisting the Serbian Ministry of Agriculture to amend the new Law on Genetically Modified Organisms – or GMO’s -- to bring Serbia's GMO regime into WTO compliance and advance Serbia's WTO negotiations."
They are doing their job -- pushing interests of big corporations, we have to do ours -- defend against it.
I think what made him more cowardly than he would have been otherwise is that he knew it was his fault for running the ship aground. Reports say he broke the rules (common practice, maybe) and sailed dangerously close to the island in order to greet the previous captain who lived there. So when the ship hit the ground he first underreported how serious it was, and -- this is my guess -- when he saw people were getting hurt and maybe dying because of his fuckup his mind just wanted out. Had the ship got wrecked for other reasons, he'd probably have shown to be a better man, but this way, whatever he had done wouldn't make him a hero but only an idiot who caused damage, injuries, and deaths. Of course that's a selfish view, a good captain would work to save lives regardless, but that's a personality trait that can hardly be controlled under panic.
What he could have controlled -- and that's what I see as the moral of the story -- is not doing stupid things to please people, especially when others' property and lives are at stake. He wanted to please the previous captain and island residents and did a stupid show-off. But that was an urge he could have resisted when he was just contemplating it in his mind, unlike what he experienced during the panic of the crash.
So maybe now other boat captains, airplane pilots, bus drivers and so on -- and all of us, really -- will think of this guy when we get the urge to do something "cool" endangering us and others just to be seen as cool.
I wish each tab had a flag "this tab is important -- don't release memory allocated with this tab if not visited for a while." Most of my browser memory is wasted on tabs that I didn't bother to close even though I'm not coming back to them.
No, he brought his son into it: "Your sites amateur at best my son could put together a better site than yours and you run PAX ??"
I think everyone should keep hammering at him. His arrogance is there because all his life he thought he could get away with it, it's time he and others like him learn that they can't. And my impression of the guy is that he has no redeeming values -- nothing to say one can stand his a-holeness because he has something else to give. (E.g. Jobs.) So he deserves all the lack of sleep he's going to get.
Same reviewing style, for a $20K hand-made tank listed on Amazon back in 2005: (http://www.amazon.com/JL421-Badonkadonk-Land-Cruiser-Tank/dp/B00067F1CE)
411 of 469 people found the following review helpful:
5 out of 5 stars Hummer Destroyer., January 22, 2005
Reviewer: Badonkadonker (NYC) - See all my reviews SO there I was stopped at the red light on 67th and Lexington in my Mini Cooper when this yellow Hummer rear-ended me. Before I could jump out and confront the moron driver, he backed up and drove off!! I was able to get his license plate number before he disappeared. I had seen the Badonkadonk on Amazon a few weeks prior and had thought that it was awesome, but the high shipping costs made me hesitant to buy it. However, with the Hummer incident fresh in my mind, I rushed home and placed an order for the Badonkadonk on the spot! Since I used my Amazon.com visa, I received 19,999 points which was cool -- I am going to use the points to buy an U2 edition Ipod which will go well in my Badonkadonk. But I digress! With FedEx overnight delivery, I had the Badonkadonk in my posession the next morning. I obtained the address of the Hummer driver from my contacts at the DMV and drove over to his crib and smoked his hummer using the built in Argon-freon-fusion laser. All that was left of the Hummer was a smoking hunk of metal. As I drove off, I could see the owner of the Hummer run out of house in his underwear and throw himself on the ground in front of the charred ruin in despair. It caused a tremendous sense of elation in me.
The Badonkadonk is well worth the investment; the built in Alpine 1200 Watt stereo system means that you can listen to your tunes and travel in style. And the Recaro racing seats and Momo shift knobs are cool. Run, don't walk, to your computer and order the Badonkadonk now -- you won't be sorry!
I'm rarely disheartened by what I read, but this got me. Stratfor is not only far more insightful than regular news outlets (for example, they called Mubarak's resignation a military coup just as CNN et al were declaring victory), they also teach their readers the patterns that exist in human societies (e.g. why Americans will fight to keep the US whole and why Europeans won't do the same for EU). And they give tons of it away for free. And what's ironic, they recently had an analysis concluding that Anonymous actually do have a chance of success in their fight against the drug cartels.
The disheartening part is this unwillingness to learn -- to hear what someone who is not a bozo in a certain domain has to say on the topic and then to judge for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. If you take a look at your screen right now, you will find few, if any, all-caps words. So those that are attract a bit more attention, and not too much more. (You don't want them screaming in different colors.) Just enough to shave off a few milliseconds in navigation every time you need a menu command.
They got 7b of funds, not 16b. :-) 9b went to early investors' pockets.
True of other social sciences also:
Sociologist Considers Own Behavior Indicative Of Larger Trends ...
"My observations indicate that the typical married American man has had increasing difficulty relating to his spouse over the last two and a half years, ever since she started taking those yoga classes," wrote Piers, 56, in his Interpersonal Connections Within The Marriage Paradigm: A Study In Causality.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-behavior-indicative-of-l,421/
http://www.theonion.com/audio/wind-reserves-to-run-out-by-2036,13448/
that's fine, I personally wouldn't expect ultratight code to work on platforms that deviate from strict specs. you guys put in amazing work, nevertheless. that level of control over a computer I had only for a 1000 times less complex machine, ZX Spectrum, 1000 years ago. :-)
isn't life funny, you know you did an incredible work and you actually won, by the vote of your peers, and then some random guy (me) comes along and says how he likes the other one, and disappointment kicks in. :-) I downloaded gaia first but it crashed. I have downloaded a few demos in the last few years and every single one crashed, except for Felix. I believe, but I need to see the code running for humbleness to rise.
Btw I liked Felix Workshop in particular b/c I'm partial to music visualization.
Just downloaded the Felix demo and ran it on my PC. Even if it were 64MB I'd still be very moved by the skills and heart put into the artistic side of the demo. At 64KB I've been sitting in silence for 15 minutes now.
Best post on the topic. The real question is what the goal is of his attending the conference. It's the few things that he can take away -- some key concepts and ideas to research further on his own, and the people to do it with.
Back at my old company, we recorded audio and even videos of "important" meetings and never looked at those. That was just too much info for something already experienced, and the world has moved on with new demands. Exception would be litigation etc. where you may need to prove that someone said this or that.
I think it's the translation -- she's Dutch. Sounds like she meant "fake drugs can kill people, and this is very different from the societal cost of online piracy, so these two things don't compare and shouldn't have been lumped together" meaning the fake drugs things should have been separate.
Which I sympathize with, but I'm glad the IP idiots tried to bundle their profit-keeping concerts with some responsible people's live-saving concerns so the former failed. The latter is important in itself so it will probably be covered in a separate agreement.
To be more precise, you *imagine* that having a FB account adds no value to you at all. You ran a quick simulation in your head in which the experience felt awful and without value, and you decided that such would be the reality if you were on FB.
But humans are notoriously bad about mentally simulating the future in order to find out how they'd feel, for nontrivial things. (Lots of good research on that one.) So if lots of your friends and peers tell you the experience is not bad, there's a good chance you're wrong.
Obama being pro-war is a consequence of reality -- he inherited a pro-war situation in America and he has no choice but to continue. Ron Paul can talk about being anti-war but if he became president he would have to deal with the same momentum. If I remember Obama did the same thing.
But otherwise you're right, there's too many nuances among people or special interests the politicians represent to just say Republicans believe X and Democrats believe Y.
Yes but you are assuming users will bother to read what they get this way. But when they go to FB they are not in the mood to read this kind of boring crap. The "FaceBook personality" that people assume when on FB doesn't want to hear about dishwashers and toilet paper brands, or renting cars, or Mitt Romney. Vacation travels maybe, I'll agree, that's fun and stimulating. Most other things, no. Even FB admits that much.
There is this youtube video of a mini robot mowing the lawn and he's very robotic looking, but you can't help feeling sympathy for him as he struggles with the task: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv61MzF1n7k
So even though he physically looks nothing like a human, your ability to project your feelings on him makes him likeable. Perhaps Romney's likeability problem is that people cannot project feelings onto him. He's just some strange, clear-cut, very functional being in a domain we have little experience with.
Subject is a headline news blurb from TheOnion.
Science *is* failing us at aspects of existence that involve life and human body/mind. It approaches those subjects as if phenomena there were objectively measurable as in physical sciences.
In the physical domains however I agree, the progress of science is pretty sweet.
Not really. Context is important. Check out this Forbes article:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/forrester/2012/01/31/how-facebooks-ipo-could-transform-marketing/
"For a site that makes almost all its money from advertising, and which claims 96 of the top 100 US advertisers as customers, Facebook harbors a dirty little secret: Marketing on Facebook doesn’t work very well. In fact, user engagement rates on branded pages are declining rather than increasing, and most large marketers tell us they simply haven’t gotten much value from their Facebook investments. (The biggest difference between the Google IPO in 2004 and the Facebook IPO? In 2004, even the least sophisticated marketers were generating enormous ROI on Google; today, even the savviest marketers often struggle to do likewise on Facebook.) Facebook can – and must – domuch more to turn the data it has on users into effective ad targeting."
The problem Facebook must solve is not just technical -- it's psychological. What can you show the user to alter his mindset so he becomes receptive to doing business?
It's the reverse challenge that Google faces: how to alter goal-oriented mindset into one that's all about social and party. Google is failing in theirs, and I predict FB will fail in theirs too. Except that Google doesn't need the new goal for money to keep flowing, and FB does.
No question that it's all true -- you may well be interested in the ad, but most likely *not at the moment* when you're on FB and looking for social stimulation. (Unless it's more games, music etc.) Imagine if a porn site knew everything about a user and served a highly targeted ad for Nike Air that it knew the user needed at the moment -- he wouldn't even notice.
TV advertising works because the user is already there and has to look at it. Google advertising works and works great because the user is in the mindset of searching for those running shoes for which the ad is shown. If all FB does is shows targeted ads on the side of the stream of fun fun fun the user is looking for, I predict those ads won't be clicked on by many.
And I bet FB knows it and are hoping will think of something later.
The $75bn valuation is based on the *idea* that FB will become a better advertising platform than Google. Because so many people from all walks of life spend time on FB, the logic goes, it will make a perfect platform for advertising and selling anything.
But in reality when people are FB they are drug addicts looking to score. The drug is stimulation -- in the form of their friends' gossip, funny photos, maybe even a post from a fan page if it's really super interesting, anything to break the boredom or make you forget about hard stuff. I'm speaking from own experience and that of close friends. Anything that is not stimulating is not welcome -- and that includes ads for the majority of products and services out there. By contrast, when you want to buy bicycle tires you go to Google with the intention of buying them, so it's a different mindset, one where good ads are actually welcome. Drug addicts do spend money on drugs though, so FB will be a great platform to sell Zynga games, music, digital goods that offer instant gratification and the like. But that is all.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/02/01/four-keys-to-facebooks-valuation/
Is the market for selling digital crack worth $75bn? I hope not.
They are pressured by the US (mostly). In Serbia (where I'm from) for example, Biden attempted to force Serbia to allow importing of GMO food, currently forbidden by the Serbian law. Here's a statement made by the American ambassador in Serbia during a speech to the Serbian Chamber of Commerce: (http://serbia.usembassy.gov/g100302.html) (emphasis mine)
"Our Foreign Agricultural Service, for example, facilitates a U.S. Department of Agriculture Technical Assistance Program to assist Serbia in its WTO accession process. This support aims to help Serbia establish a trade regime consistent with the WTO and other international standards-setting. Our Foreign Agricultural Service office is currently assisting the Serbian Ministry of Agriculture to amend the new Law on Genetically Modified Organisms – or GMO’s -- to bring Serbia's GMO regime into WTO compliance and advance Serbia's WTO negotiations."
They are doing their job -- pushing interests of big corporations, we have to do ours -- defend against it.
I think what made him more cowardly than he would have been otherwise is that he knew it was his fault for running the ship aground. Reports say he broke the rules (common practice, maybe) and sailed dangerously close to the island in order to greet the previous captain who lived there. So when the ship hit the ground he first underreported how serious it was, and -- this is my guess -- when he saw people were getting hurt and maybe dying because of his fuckup his mind just wanted out. Had the ship got wrecked for other reasons, he'd probably have shown to be a better man, but this way, whatever he had done wouldn't make him a hero but only an idiot who caused damage, injuries, and deaths. Of course that's a selfish view, a good captain would work to save lives regardless, but that's a personality trait that can hardly be controlled under panic.
What he could have controlled -- and that's what I see as the moral of the story -- is not doing stupid things to please people, especially when others' property and lives are at stake. He wanted to please the previous captain and island residents and did a stupid show-off. But that was an urge he could have resisted when he was just contemplating it in his mind, unlike what he experienced during the panic of the crash.
So maybe now other boat captains, airplane pilots, bus drivers and so on -- and all of us, really -- will think of this guy when we get the urge to do something "cool" endangering us and others just to be seen as cool.
I wish each tab had a flag "this tab is important -- don't release memory allocated with this tab if not visited for a while." Most of my browser memory is wasted on tabs that I didn't bother to close even though I'm not coming back to them.
Maybe as the poster below said: SOPA will make YouTube and all fun and interesting sites disappear.
Which, to a large extent, is true.
No, he brought his son into it: "Your sites amateur at best my son could put together a better site than yours and you run PAX ??"
I think everyone should keep hammering at him. His arrogance is there because all his life he thought he could get away with it, it's time he and others like him learn that they can't. And my impression of the guy is that he has no redeeming values -- nothing to say one can stand his a-holeness because he has something else to give. (E.g. Jobs.) So he deserves all the lack of sleep he's going to get.
I have to agree with that. In my mind, the magic of the first
10 INPUT "What's your name? " ; A$
20 PRINT "Hello "; A$
is still fresh almost 30 years later.
Same reviewing style, for a $20K hand-made tank listed on Amazon back in 2005: (http://www.amazon.com/JL421-Badonkadonk-Land-Cruiser-Tank/dp/B00067F1CE)
411 of 469 people found the following review helpful:
5 out of 5 stars Hummer Destroyer., January 22, 2005
Reviewer: Badonkadonker (NYC) - See all my reviews
SO there I was stopped at the red light on 67th and Lexington in my Mini Cooper when this yellow Hummer rear-ended me. Before I could jump out and confront the moron driver, he backed up and drove off!! I was able to get his license plate number before he disappeared. I had seen the Badonkadonk on Amazon a few weeks prior and had thought that it was awesome, but the high shipping costs made me hesitant to buy it. However, with the Hummer incident fresh in my mind, I rushed home and placed an order for the Badonkadonk on the spot! Since I used my Amazon.com visa, I received 19,999 points which was cool -- I am going to use the points to buy an U2 edition Ipod which will go well in my Badonkadonk. But I digress! With FedEx overnight delivery, I had the Badonkadonk in my posession the next morning. I obtained the address of the Hummer driver from my contacts at the DMV and drove over to his crib and smoked his hummer using the built in Argon-freon-fusion laser. All that was left of the Hummer was a smoking hunk of metal. As I drove off, I could see the owner of the Hummer run out of house in his underwear and throw himself on the ground in front of the charred ruin in despair. It caused a tremendous sense of elation in me.
The Badonkadonk is well worth the investment; the built in Alpine 1200 Watt stereo system means that you can listen to your tunes and travel in style. And the Recaro racing seats and Momo shift knobs are cool. Run, don't walk, to your computer and order the Badonkadonk now -- you won't be sorry!
I'm rarely disheartened by what I read, but this got me. Stratfor is not only far more insightful than regular news outlets (for example, they called Mubarak's resignation a military coup just as CNN et al were declaring victory), they also teach their readers the patterns that exist in human societies (e.g. why Americans will fight to keep the US whole and why Europeans won't do the same for EU). And they give tons of it away for free. And what's ironic, they recently had an analysis concluding that Anonymous actually do have a chance of success in their fight against the drug cartels.
The disheartening part is this unwillingness to learn -- to hear what someone who is not a bozo in a certain domain has to say on the topic and then to judge for themselves.