Volume Pricing has its snag in how you handle customer Support. I didn't see that addressed (other than lightly under Tech Support),
the higher the volume of sales the more need for customer support. Only so much can be down with a website FAQ. (Personally, I'm wary of products which don't come with
printed manuals or a pdf with only a light treatment of the subject matter, back in the day manuals were your saviours, now they're some kind of afterthought that vendors
seem uninterested in putting effort into.)
With inexpensive
stuff you may lose all your profit on customer support, with
pricing of support and/or a higher price nd lower volume there's less need for a large customer support team, or it grows as needed.
Granted, I've worked for people whe shelled big really big zorkmids on stuff and when it turned out to be crap, it wasn't the vendor to blame
but headcount.
There's some discomforting truth to many of those Dilbert strips.
If you clicked on the last link in the story submission you'd know that it's not potted in plastic
Couldn't get it, was/.ed already.
I still have a CueCat, but boxed it away after the lawsuit of Digital Convergence vs. the guy who had the cool site. Forgot to check up again, seeing all these nice informative sites, what with DC being consigned to the dustbin of the dotbombs, I should dig it out and resume playing =)
I really hope it is hackable. I mean, a 2 megapixel digital camera with LCD for $19.99 would be a pretty good deal, even if it takes a day or two, and even 1 or two broken cameras first. I hope someone comes up with a hack!
Perfect also as a low cost camera for attaching to radio controlled plains and kites. All that's required is figuring how to trigger the exposures.
I wonder if the guts are dipped in epoxy to discourage what happened to the CueCat, i.e. they sell/give out several thousand but only half ever come back or are used as intended.
Of course, they can just provide you with an 800 number instead. No way to stop that short of stopping the initial spam. Then again. providing an 800 number is nice clue for spam filters that it IS SPAM.
Not just websites, like you say, 800 or worse toll numbers. For lack of a known term for such -- foll this scenario:
Bob's computer gets 0wn3d while he's making tea, or he simply never turns it off.
Colin 0wns Bob's computer and sets up a quick webpage on it and sends out spam, directing readers to the current ip address for Bob's computer.
All that's needed is maybe 20 minutes... people follow the link in the email, come up on a page on Bob's computer and submit a CC or other vital personal/financial info.
Colin's app running on Bob's computer forwards to a mailbox elsewhere in the world.
Bob may find his computer's been 0wn3d and cleans it up, but wtf, banning the ip address, unless it's fixed (which is unlikely these days) is pointless.
There's undoubtably tens of thousands like Bob to do this to and they don't necessaryly reside in the UK
The point of this is, enough spam and enough fish caught in the trap in a short time presents a problem and is a possible direction for spammers and scammers to go.
Was anyone else hoping it would look more like a bee or a dragonfly?
Why, so you could terrorize coworkers with it? (not really a bad idea until it comes back as a thimble-full of smushed electronics) I liked what I saw and could probably remain entertained for several days with one of these, assuming it recharges like those BitCharG cars. I wouldn't simply wannit, but UltraWannit!
Though there is a certain grace and beauty to a dragon or damsel fly, but we've a ways to go to get there.
Well you may have meant something else by using ROC but it is an actual word. Defined by Merriam-Webster:
...
: a legendary bird of great size and strength believed to inhabit the Indian Ocean area
I used ROC in games (I remembered this from and old D&D computer game;-) and surprised an honors professor by using it, I was challenged, they looked it up and he got the same def. as webster, except added: "Capable of carrying away Scrabble players."
I wouldn't have let him get away with misspelling "adze". But that's just me. : )
Well, I challenged, but they had a Scrabble dictionary and, for the record, had already verified it was in there. He or his wife had pulled it on some other unsuspecting schnook prior.
It's their game, Selchow and Richter once, now Hasbro. Whatchagonnado?
For the record, I to have an OED and it's among my prized posessions.
I for one am quite glad to see the geeky, simpler games getting a bit of attention.
I'm pretty much at the other end of video games. All that interests me is strategy games now, FPS and stuff is in my past. I find I have a lot more fun playing board games, like Settlers of Cataan, Empire Builder (Russian Rails for 2-6 comrades, ETA late fall) and so on are much more rewarding. I never foresaw the day I would actually be playing games with bits of wood on cardboard, after all those scintillating colors and 5.1 sounds and stuff. Funny how that happened.
I am glad that the someone referred to the scrabble competition as the "geek-fest"
I was taught some kid version of checkers, back in the day, and went on a family vacation to the Keewenau Peninsula (Eagle River, MI) where this whitehaired old hotel owner (The Swank Hotel -- his last name was Swank) was the county checkers champion. He schooled me and gave me no breaks. Never underestimate old men with board games, like checkers, chess, dominos or Scrabble, especially where they have months to pass (between tourist seasons) to hone their l33t sk1llz.
Re:Unix Program For Scrabble?
on
Word Up
·
· Score: 1
Unix Program to play scrabble? That seems like overkill. Plus it would really make the game pointless for other players.
Ah, but with a fixed random number sequence, so the gameplay is the same each time, this could be the Holy Grail of Yet-Another-Benchmarks someone could specifically tailor processors to excell at.;-)
Word To You, Bro
on
Word Up
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Scrabble is getting newfound attention thanks to the publication of Word Freak and release of Word Wars."
I like Scrabble so much, I keep running down the battery on my PDA playing the scrabble-like game on it. It gave me the low battery warning this morning so I had to read during lunch.
I'll give these a look though, particularly Word Wars as even AVP wasn't as exciting as most alternative film is. Truth has a habit of being far more interesting than fiction, what with
the boring repetitiveness of formula cinema.
To Scrabble beginners, here's some advice: Make the best of the least letters. High scores can be achieved with 2 and 3 letter words and leave fewer openings for opponents. Study the Scrabble dictionary between games. RE, LA, NU are words;-)
When I heard that the end of wooden tiles was coming, I dashed down to the local game shop and scored one of those sets. I can't imagine playing this with plastic bits, not after my dad taught me the game ages ago. Call me tradition bound.
Dork certainly is a fitting description of someone who turns to a computer to help them with words. It's a game of pitting intellect vs intellect, not intellect vs 'Fred'*.
* Fred is a cycling term for wannabe, but with a strongly negative connotation
I'd love to build some of my own (but who has the time?)
Why, start your own business building battle bots and sports bots! I thought it was funny in the Jetsons when the two sides of a 'football' match were robots, back in the 60's, but think about how soon you could be watching robotic competition in individual and team activites.
When and where will the first Robolympics be held?
"In today's news, George Steinbrenner IV replaced his last human player with ZY8941-85 of the Western Adro League."
"Wired Magazine... ", according to Wired
the other day it's not 'Internet', but 'internet'.
"Fiber-optic networks capable of sending information at 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps are being rolled out around the world and under the oceans to connect everyone to everything."
The downside to all this is that loafing on the internet will require significantly less of your time. Maybe this could help deliver Eurosport video broadcast over the internet:-)
"The new technology, described in a paper published Aug. 11 in the scientific journal Nano Letters, uses buckyballs glued together by a custom polymer, providing a way to create an optical switch."
Good ol' Bucky! There's a cool new stamp out for you Buckminster Fuller fans out there.
More speed, more stuff, you can almost hear the groan from Langley, "gawd, more crap to sift, better get a few more petabytes..."
And it doesn't help that the Mozilla project has changed the name of it's products several times now.
I'm still using Firebird, because I've been too preoccupied to keep up. Wasn't there some issue with one of the names conflicting with the database system? Is it Phoenix, or has that been confused a BIOS of the same name and they're moving on to another?
Here's a thought! They just found a a previously undiscovered bird species in the Philippines, they could name it after that and beat every other software product!
Large amounts are found in every cancer victim. It must be dangerous.
There was a rather amusing cartoon at one of the Dow labs (when I was in Explorers) showing a pop-eyed rat with a pipe going in its mouth and another connected to its rear end. One labcoated guy says to another, "Bad news, water causes cancer"
Of course, it took a few years to laugh at that again -- after my cancer experience.
Seriously, I didn't even run across these things in Sci-Fi until reading some of the old BattleTech novels (in many cases these 'sails' were actually for capturing solar energy and recharging some fusion hyper space thingamajig.
For my lacking education I blame my main educators.
Or the ever dangerous hydrogen hydroxide, which is corrosive and excessive amounts in the lungs may cause breathing dificulties and even death.
We keep several crystals in a freezer, but don't know why as nobody ever seems to need them and they sublimate into the air, which is quite worrying.
A week or two back I posted on a different topic about the broadcasting power which once was used for AM/MW broadcast in the USA, exceeding in some cases 300,000 watts. The radiant energy, picked up by wiring could make streetlamps glow. I rather expected there could be something undesireable about being that close to high power RF transmitters, aside from maybe the possible fringe benefit being you could rig up some coil so your food cooked on a perpetual stove...
the goal of a just, modern society is workers who work less for more. The idea that we should all be furious worker bees is crap pushed on us by staggeringly greedy bastards who have been living like kings off other people's backs for as long as human society existed.
Future view: Did you ever watch the old Jetsons show? Ok, it was a cartoon, but there were certain attitudes present in it of a world in the future. Robots to do menial labor (Rosie did house work, Mack did building maintenance) The woman (Jane, George's wife) is still a homemaker (shops a lot, lousy driver, easily flustered - old female stereotypes) and George, who works at Spacely Sprockets. George comes home from work on day and says, "I'm beat. I had a hard day at the button." That was his job, he sat at a desk and pressed a button (I don't recall ever hearing what the button actually did, but pressing it was his only work.)
Yeah. A lot of people had real jobs then too, and could afford a house before they started applying for Medicare. Funny how that works, isn't it?
You don't know the half of it. Kids would drop out of highschool at 16 and go work for one of the autobuilders. They didn't need math, science, french or anything but a pair of hands and could do the job. It was called 'skilled labor' which really translated to someone who could do a repetitive task once it was demonstrated to them, no thinking involved. One income, with overtime (which funded much of the development of cabins, boating, etc.) could buy a house, put kids (those who didn't follow in dad's footsteps) through university and afford a cabin, boat and so on up north. It really was the good life on very little education. Quite the culture shock when they found other people in the world could do the same job and would do it for a fraction without making lots of demands of their employers. It created a lot of resentment, too, but not enough introspection.
I remember Owen Bieber making a speech, broadcast over WJR, where he refused to give the companies what they demanded and made lots of promises to the workers in the UAW. Probably 1 in 10 of those jobs exists today. Not only did mexicans and japanese take a lot of work, but many jobs moved to more centrally located areas, like Kentucky and Tennessee, where organized labor wasn't as strong and couldn't insist upon re-hiring workers who couldn't operate robotics or anything which required tradeschool classes or such.
Slashdot Mirror
Volume Pricing has its snag in how you handle customer Support. I didn't see that addressed (other than lightly under Tech Support), the higher the volume of sales the more need for customer support. Only so much can be down with a website FAQ. (Personally, I'm wary of products which don't come with printed manuals or a pdf with only a light treatment of the subject matter, back in the day manuals were your saviours, now they're some kind of afterthought that vendors seem uninterested in putting effort into.)
With inexpensive stuff you may lose all your profit on customer support, with pricing of support and/or a higher price nd lower volume there's less need for a large customer support team, or it grows as needed.
Granted, I've worked for people whe shelled big really big zorkmids on stuff and when it turned out to be crap, it wasn't the vendor to blame but headcount.
There's some discomforting truth to many of those Dilbert strips.
I wonder how Cray computers are in milk...
Couldn't get it, was /.ed already.
I still have a CueCat, but boxed it away after the lawsuit of Digital Convergence vs. the guy who had the cool site. Forgot to check up again, seeing all these nice informative sites, what with DC being consigned to the dustbin of the dotbombs, I should dig it out and resume playing =)
Perfect also as a low cost camera for attaching to radio controlled plains and kites. All that's required is figuring how to trigger the exposures.
I wonder if the guts are dipped in epoxy to discourage what happened to the CueCat, i.e. they sell/give out several thousand but only half ever come back or are used as intended.
Not just websites, like you say, 800 or worse toll numbers. For lack of a known term for such -- foll this scenario:
Bob's computer gets 0wn3d while he's making tea, or he simply never turns it off.
Colin 0wns Bob's computer and sets up a quick webpage on it and sends out spam, directing readers to the current ip address for Bob's computer.
All that's needed is maybe 20 minutes... people follow the link in the email, come up on a page on Bob's computer and submit a CC or other vital personal/financial info.
Colin's app running on Bob's computer forwards to a mailbox elsewhere in the world.
Bob may find his computer's been 0wn3d and cleans it up, but wtf, banning the ip address, unless it's fixed (which is unlikely these days) is pointless.
There's undoubtably tens of thousands like Bob to do this to and they don't necessaryly reside in the UK
The point of this is, enough spam and enough fish caught in the trap in a short time presents a problem and is a possible direction for spammers and scammers to go.
Or
Address of 0wn3d computer
Offshore server
Doesn't do any good for those which run scripts on open or 0wn3d servers and forward email, i.e. phishing
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
Then they went on to demonstrate their superiour intellegence by holding tea and no tea at the same time.
Why, so you could terrorize coworkers with it? (not really a bad idea until it comes back as a thimble-full of smushed electronics) I liked what I saw and could probably remain entertained for several days with one of these, assuming it recharges like those BitCharG cars. I wouldn't simply wannit, but UltraWannit!
Though there is a certain grace and beauty to a dragon or damsel fly, but we've a ways to go to get there.
: a legendary bird of great size and strength believed to inhabit the Indian Ocean area
I used ROC in games (I remembered this from and old D&D computer game ;-) and surprised an honors professor by using it, I was challenged, they looked it up and he got the same def. as webster, except added: "Capable of carrying away Scrabble players."
You know you're really a geek -- when you gaze at a well played Scrabble board like it was pr0n.
Well, I challenged, but they had a Scrabble dictionary and, for the record, had already verified it was in there. He or his wife had pulled it on some other unsuspecting schnook prior.
It's their game, Selchow and Richter once, now Hasbro. Whatchagonnado?
For the record, I to have an OED and it's among my prized posessions.
Liked ROC, myself, until an architect friend pulled ADZ on me .. the bastard!
I'm pretty much at the other end of video games. All that interests me is strategy games now, FPS and stuff is in my past. I find I have a lot more fun playing board games, like Settlers of Cataan, Empire Builder (Russian Rails for 2-6 comrades, ETA late fall) and so on are much more rewarding. I never foresaw the day I would actually be playing games with bits of wood on cardboard, after all those scintillating colors and 5.1 sounds and stuff. Funny how that happened.
I was taught some kid version of checkers, back in the day, and went on a family vacation to the Keewenau Peninsula (Eagle River, MI) where this whitehaired old hotel owner (The Swank Hotel -- his last name was Swank) was the county checkers champion. He schooled me and gave me no breaks. Never underestimate old men with board games, like checkers, chess, dominos or Scrabble, especially where they have months to pass (between tourist seasons) to hone their l33t sk1llz.
Ah, but with a fixed random number sequence, so the gameplay is the same each time, this could be the Holy Grail of Yet-Another-Benchmarks someone could specifically tailor processors to excell at. ;-)
I like Scrabble so much, I keep running down the battery on my PDA playing the scrabble-like game on it. It gave me the low battery warning this morning so I had to read during lunch.
I'll give these a look though, particularly Word Wars as even AVP wasn't as exciting as most alternative film is. Truth has a habit of being far more interesting than fiction, what with the boring repetitiveness of formula cinema.
To Scrabble beginners, here's some advice: Make the best of the least letters. High scores can be achieved with 2 and 3 letter words and leave fewer openings for opponents. Study the Scrabble dictionary between games. RE, LA, NU are words ;-)
When I heard that the end of wooden tiles was coming, I dashed down to the local game shop and scored one of those sets. I can't imagine playing this with plastic bits, not after my dad taught me the game ages ago. Call me tradition bound.
Dork certainly is a fitting description of someone who turns to a computer to help them with words. It's a game of pitting intellect vs intellect, not intellect vs 'Fred'*.
* Fred is a cycling term for wannabe, but with a strongly negative connotation
Why, start your own business building battle bots and sports bots! I thought it was funny in the Jetsons when the two sides of a 'football' match were robots, back in the 60's, but think about how soon you could be watching robotic competition in individual and team activites.
When and where will the first Robolympics be held?
"In today's news, George Steinbrenner IV replaced his last human player with ZY8941-85 of the Western Adro League."
"Fiber-optic networks capable of sending information at 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps are being rolled out around the world and under the oceans to connect everyone to everything."
The downside to all this is that loafing on the internet will require significantly less of your time. Maybe this could help deliver Eurosport video broadcast over the internet :-)
"The new technology, described in a paper published Aug. 11 in the scientific journal Nano Letters, uses buckyballs glued together by a custom polymer, providing a way to create an optical switch."
Good ol' Bucky! There's a cool new stamp out for you Buckminster Fuller fans out there.
More speed, more stuff, you can almost hear the groan from Langley, "gawd, more crap to sift, better get a few more petabytes..."
I'm still using Firebird, because I've been too preoccupied to keep up. Wasn't there some issue with one of the names conflicting with the database system? Is it Phoenix, or has that been confused a BIOS of the same name and they're moving on to another?
Here's a thought! They just found a a previously undiscovered bird species in the Philippines, they could name it after that and beat every other software product!
There was a rather amusing cartoon at one of the Dow labs (when I was in Explorers) showing a pop-eyed rat with a pipe going in its mouth and another connected to its rear end. One labcoated guy says to another, "Bad news, water causes cancer"
Of course, it took a few years to laugh at that again -- after my cancer experience.
Bugger! All I ever saw were the movies (not the recent one, though) where the astronauts came back in Apollo era vehicles (IIRC).
Too much of the Heinlein stuff, I guess, not enough of the type of reads which got into technological exploration.
For my lacking education I blame my main educators.
Or the ever dangerous hydrogen hydroxide, which is corrosive and excessive amounts in the lungs may cause breathing dificulties and even death.
We keep several crystals in a freezer, but don't know why as nobody ever seems to need them and they sublimate into the air, which is quite worrying.
A week or two back I posted on a different topic about the broadcasting power which once was used for AM/MW broadcast in the USA, exceeding in some cases 300,000 watts. The radiant energy, picked up by wiring could make streetlamps glow. I rather expected there could be something undesireable about being that close to high power RF transmitters, aside from maybe the possible fringe benefit being you could rig up some coil so your food cooked on a perpetual stove...
Future view: Did you ever watch the old Jetsons show? Ok, it was a cartoon, but there were certain attitudes present in it of a world in the future. Robots to do menial labor (Rosie did house work, Mack did building maintenance) The woman (Jane, George's wife) is still a homemaker (shops a lot, lousy driver, easily flustered - old female stereotypes) and George, who works at Spacely Sprockets. George comes home from work on day and says, "I'm beat. I had a hard day at the button." That was his job, he sat at a desk and pressed a button (I don't recall ever hearing what the button actually did, but pressing it was his only work.)
You don't know the half of it. Kids would drop out of highschool at 16 and go work for one of the autobuilders. They didn't need math, science, french or anything but a pair of hands and could do the job. It was called 'skilled labor' which really translated to someone who could do a repetitive task once it was demonstrated to them, no thinking involved. One income, with overtime (which funded much of the development of cabins, boating, etc.) could buy a house, put kids (those who didn't follow in dad's footsteps) through university and afford a cabin, boat and so on up north. It really was the good life on very little education. Quite the culture shock when they found other people in the world could do the same job and would do it for a fraction without making lots of demands of their employers. It created a lot of resentment, too, but not enough introspection.
I remember Owen Bieber making a speech, broadcast over WJR, where he refused to give the companies what they demanded and made lots of promises to the workers in the UAW. Probably 1 in 10 of those jobs exists today. Not only did mexicans and japanese take a lot of work, but many jobs moved to more centrally located areas, like Kentucky and Tennessee, where organized labor wasn't as strong and couldn't insist upon re-hiring workers who couldn't operate robotics or anything which required tradeschool classes or such.