Before I landed on CS as a major, I was in a liberal-arts major that made me take intro macroeconomics.
In that college class we learned that if demand exceeds supply, the price for the good or service is supposed to go up (because higher price will reduce demand and increase availability of supply).
But it hasn't. In fact, it's done the opposite. And that's the problem.
On the other hand, Firefox itself does not appear in these commercials in any way.
The product is missing from its own commercial. That's a pretty classic failure.
Couple the mystery of "what is this thing?" and the trepidatious "what will it do to me" and I think you have a pretty bad formula for selling something, about as bad as it gets.
Classic problem with bad advertising
on
Firefox Promo Videos
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
These guys clearly either haven't really done much work in advertising... or else they have, and failed miserably.
What must be the number one problem with a lot of advertisements over the past couple of years, especially for new products, is that the advertisers spend too much time being weird, funky, shocking, and funny, and COMPLETELY FORGET ABOUT THE FRICKIN' PRODUCT.
At any given moment I can rattle off a commercial I've seen whose content really stuck with me, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what the hell they were advertising.
Like that Dodge Ram commercial where the middle aged guy is making the two salespeople turn the truck back and forth.
Wait a minute, that's not a Dodge Ram commercial at all, it's a Vehix commercial. Well, at least we were close with this one, it's car related somehow.
Or what about those commercials about the company with the tech support department that is so good it can tell you if something is funny? Wait, that's for TBS. Who doesn't actually provide that service at all.
And these ones are for that website thats so crazy and shocking that it makes your head explode. Right?
These ads don't say anything - I mean, nothing at all - about what's good about Firefox. All they say is that it'll make you scream, or decapitate you. A little balance with some message of benefit might help.
For those not from Massachusetts, that should be DMV.
(And for Washingtonians, that should be either DOL, with a different office depending on whether you need driver licensing or vehicle Licensing.)
Y'know, that brings up an interesting counterpoint: At least in the UK, you always know who to talk to. In the US, the names can change wildly even for public agencies depending on where you are.
Ever have to change long distance carriers? Aside from the cashing-an-anonymous-check way. And is that interstate long distance you're changing, or local long distance? Did you check the inter-LATA interstate rates versus the inter-LATA intrastate rates? And did you make sure the city immediately bordering your town is local or long distance?
It's just like the same thing I say to everyone who insists that Canada's national health care is a huge neglectful clusterfuck by bringing up isolated anecdotes of people who were waiting too many weeks for treatment of some non-life-threatening ailment. I direct them to any of hundreds of stories of people in the US who found out that their life-saving surgical procedure was rejected for coverage by their PPO.
...I've had to try to manually clean the system. However, the files re-write themselves, making the malware grow back as fast as you can remove it.
Files don't suddenly become sentient and rewrite themselves, so the "manual clean" you did clearly didn't actually clean it. Probably, a running or startup process stuck around to restore them.
Ideas: 1. Reboot in safe mode, and do your manual cleanup. See if it recurs in normal mode. 2. Kill as many processes as possible before running a malware cleaner. 3. Instead of deleting identified malware files, replace them with blank read-only files, and reboot.
You can't actually write complete tests until after the code is complete, if you have no functional or design documentation. You can come up with use cases, but those aren't necessarily tests until the product/component is in final form. Then you determine how to turn use cases into test procedures.
This goes for unit testing as much as it does for integration testing. If the design hasn't be (entirely) proscribed, then it's going to be pretty much (at least partially) invented at coding time -- meaning interfaces and process won't be completed. So you can't hope to have fully usable tests until after those aspects have been determined.
Dude, you just pretty much defined all QA everywhere. The only thing you missed was the part about being crammed in at the end of the release schedule after development was days late on their end and being expected not to let the date slip.
Well then your question is completely misstated. You're not upset at your bank not being Linux-friendly, you're upset at it not being friendly to the offbeat platforms you choose to run on.
Did you call them and ask if they had alternate methods, or did you come straight to/. to make a hyperbolic statement about your bank's evil anti-RISC ways?
Presumably since these components are all built, they have some idea of what they are supposed to do, and some sense of parameters.
Make stubs or some other kind of testing tools, hammer data into them, examine the data coming out.
I guess I don't quite follow the question. You're actually in a better position with already-developed code, for the simple reason that if these things are already developed, they already have a defined purpose (whether that was defined before or after the fact). Your only problem will be to figure out how to separate the components and find ways to interface with them.
Except when you're expected to have a test plan. You can't come up with a test plan without a functional spec. A design doc helps even more.
You can't possibly ensure that the application does what it's supposed to if no one can communicate to you what that entails. Imagine testing a house by spraying it with water, banging on the windows, and tromping on the lawn. Those all sound like good things, until the future owner tries to open the front door, and can't.
To be fair, the term "tri-band" is a marketing simplification. Most phones can ultimately fall back on AMPS, and thats much more than a band difference, but that doesn't mean they go into the details when they point that out when advertising a phone.
I think Sprint and Verizon are incompatible both in band and protocol, but that doesn't mean most phones sold by/for either carrier aren't capable of roaming on the other.
I dunno that any of this is particularly special or sinister. I mean, all the things you are complaining about seem to be the norm everywhere else.
Fake tree cell towers haven't caught on out here in Seattle's Eastside area (where Craig McCaw made his millions in Western Wireless and where T-Mobile's US HQ is located), the most nonimposing antennas are on top of office buildings, but the "3x as tall as a house" poles are also quite common. There are three such poles just outside my office.
I can't help but wonder if you can serve more customers from further distances per tower now than you could 5 years ago.
Generally utility installations do not come with mass mailings; the provider leases land from a city, local utility, or private owner (or buys land outright) and either puts up a pole or piggybacks on an existing one. This will kick off a PSA about as likely as would a new OC48 being lain in your street or a new thousand yards of cable TV lines.
You may have gotten 75% signal then, but there is such a thing as capacity planning. Wireless providers do a lot of traffic pattern trending to try and forecast where they will need to expand service.
Now, I have no idea why Sprint wouldn't be able to benefit from a good Verizon signal (I have Verizon, and used to have to roam on Sprint's towers in a certain region).
I think their service is on different bands.
Not everyone has multi-band phones. Well, they might now... but they don't *have* to.
My subject line is ambiguous. I mean it both ways.
A lot of people here have managed to exist in environments where they can manage to surround themselves with intelligent, rational people. As a result, they presume that this is the norm.
It is not. America is largely a nation of hicks, and those that aren't hicks at heart are largely paranoid and easily manipulated with fear.
Us secular minded folk? I figure, nationwide, we number around 10-15%. Rationally minded folk, I give us 25-30%. The remainder of left-of-center sentiment appearing in polls and election results I attribute to team mentality.
Urban centers, and in turn the polls which focus inordinately on them ignore middle America. Unfortunately middle America is expanding, and its mentality spills into the suburbs within the metro areas of the urban centers. Drive a few short miles out of any urban center and you will run into dense suburban areas that have a political polarity that drifts away from that of the center.
We associate urbanity with progressivism and intellectualism, and look at the thriving metropolitan areas that are sprawling around them and assume it is the growth of progressivism, but it is not. It is the growth of complacency, narrow-minded self-assuredness, and Rockwellian presumption, feeding off those urban centers.
There isn't some silent progressive majority. We're fooling ourselves, and actually insulting ourselves, to think that. Unless we can convince the complacent that they are less safe in their obedience and servitude of God and Country (i.e. President and Congress, not any principled notion of what our country stands for -- principles are so 90s!), the dominant paradigm holds pretty much all the cards.
What the hell is an "IT Major"? Is there a college I missed that has an IT academic department? In my day (say 5 yrs ago) it was one in the same. In CS, depending on track, you mainly went into programming, DBA, or IT.
Generally, people don't add nearly as much operationally detrimental crap to their cars as they do their computers. If they did, cars would probably have as many problems as the average or power user's PC.
And cars certainly don't get something additional forcefully installed into them via a backdoor every time they visit some company's parking lot.
That would be novel, wouldn't it -- free parking, as long as we can secretly install a tracker that lets us know which drive-thrus and coffee shops you go to the most.
Slashdot Mirror
I just called BoA, and they told me that the incident was "mostly contained to accounts in the Northeast".
Anyone receive conflicting information from them on this?
Before I landed on CS as a major, I was in a liberal-arts major that made me take intro macroeconomics.
In that college class we learned that if demand exceeds supply, the price for the good or service is supposed to go up (because higher price will reduce demand and increase availability of supply).
But it hasn't. In fact, it's done the opposite. And that's the problem.
This was a fun hunt...
0 .jpg
6 2&spn=0.029655,0.029697&t=k&hl=en
8 .jpg with http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=35.600982,-84.77750 3&spn=0.029655,0.029697&t=k&hl=en
Compare:
http://sunsite.utk.edu/~mcoffey/ux-1/ballooncam/2
with:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=35.621495,-84.7365
Also
http://sunsite.utk.edu/~mcoffey/ux-1/ballooncam/1
Any time anyone hypes a new technology/service with the words:
...they are always either wrong or deliberately full of shit.
"Other companies will pop up to complement [this] and offer great business opportunities"
I can't help but say that, if you have to ask, you're just a wannabe geek.
On the other hand, Firefox itself does not appear in these commercials in any way.
The product is missing from its own commercial. That's a pretty classic failure.
Couple the mystery of "what is this thing?" and the trepidatious "what will it do to me" and I think you have a pretty bad formula for selling something, about as bad as it gets.
These guys clearly either haven't really done much work in advertising... or else they have, and failed miserably.
What must be the number one problem with a lot of advertisements over the past couple of years, especially for new products, is that the advertisers spend too much time being weird, funky, shocking, and funny, and COMPLETELY FORGET ABOUT THE FRICKIN' PRODUCT.
At any given moment I can rattle off a commercial I've seen whose content really stuck with me, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what the hell they were advertising.
Like that Dodge Ram commercial where the middle aged guy is making the two salespeople turn the truck back and forth.
Wait a minute, that's not a Dodge Ram commercial at all, it's a Vehix commercial. Well, at least we were close with this one, it's car related somehow.
Or what about those commercials about the company with the tech support department that is so good it can tell you if something is funny? Wait, that's for TBS. Who doesn't actually provide that service at all.
And these ones are for that website thats so crazy and shocking that it makes your head explode. Right?
These ads don't say anything - I mean, nothing at all - about what's good about Firefox. All they say is that it'll make you scream, or decapitate you. A little balance with some message of benefit might help.
If it's at all recent, I can almost guarantee that stuff'd get snatched up on Freecycle. Go there and quit asking silly questions on Slashdot.
Has he ever been to the RMV
For those not from Massachusetts, that should be DMV.
(And for Washingtonians, that should be either DOL, with a different office depending on whether you need driver licensing or vehicle Licensing.)
Y'know, that brings up an interesting counterpoint: At least in the UK, you always know who to talk to. In the US, the names can change wildly even for public agencies depending on where you are.
Ever have to change long distance carriers? Aside from the cashing-an-anonymous-check way. And is that interstate long distance you're changing, or local long distance? Did you check the inter-LATA interstate rates versus the inter-LATA intrastate rates? And did you make sure the city immediately bordering your town is local or long distance?
It's just like the same thing I say to everyone who insists that Canada's national health care is a huge neglectful clusterfuck by bringing up isolated anecdotes of people who were waiting too many weeks for treatment of some non-life-threatening ailment. I direct them to any of hundreds of stories of people in the US who found out that their life-saving surgical procedure was rejected for coverage by their PPO.
...I've had to try to manually clean the system. However, the files re-write themselves, making the malware grow back as fast as you can remove it.
Files don't suddenly become sentient and rewrite themselves, so the "manual clean" you did clearly didn't actually clean it. Probably, a running or startup process stuck around to restore them.
Ideas:
1. Reboot in safe mode, and do your manual cleanup. See if it recurs in normal mode.
2. Kill as many processes as possible before running a malware cleaner.
3. Instead of deleting identified malware files, replace them with blank read-only files, and reboot.
Well, developers don't know how to test, or else we wouldn't fucking have TESTERS.
("We don't tell you guys how to code, do we?" -- well, actually, I make coding/fix suggestions once in a while, but I have some RW coding experience.)
Sorry to hear you had to face the developer-tester impasse in front of your boss before you'd had it explained to h{im|er} beforehand.
Developers' job is to understand how to make the product, testers' job is to understand how it will be used.
You can't actually write complete tests until after the code is complete, if you have no functional or design documentation. You can come up with use cases, but those aren't necessarily tests until the product/component is in final form. Then you determine how to turn use cases into test procedures.
This goes for unit testing as much as it does for integration testing. If the design hasn't be (entirely) proscribed, then it's going to be pretty much (at least partially) invented at coding time -- meaning interfaces and process won't be completed. So you can't hope to have fully usable tests until after those aspects have been determined.
Dude, you just pretty much defined all QA everywhere. The only thing you missed was the part about being crammed in at the end of the release schedule after development was days late on their end and being expected not to let the date slip.
Well then your question is completely misstated. You're not upset at your bank not being Linux-friendly, you're upset at it not being friendly to the offbeat platforms you choose to run on.
/. to make a hyperbolic statement about your bank's evil anti-RISC ways?
Did you call them and ask if they had alternate methods, or did you come straight to
Presumably since these components are all built, they have some idea of what they are supposed to do, and some sense of parameters.
Make stubs or some other kind of testing tools, hammer data into them, examine the data coming out.
I guess I don't quite follow the question. You're actually in a better position with already-developed code, for the simple reason that if these things are already developed, they already have a defined purpose (whether that was defined before or after the fact). Your only problem will be to figure out how to separate the components and find ways to interface with them.
Except when you're expected to have a test plan. You can't come up with a test plan without a functional spec. A design doc helps even more.
You can't possibly ensure that the application does what it's supposed to if no one can communicate to you what that entails. Imagine testing a house by spraying it with water, banging on the windows, and tromping on the lawn. Those all sound like good things, until the future owner tries to open the front door, and can't.
Utilising a RFID tags to find products and a laser range finder to avoid obsticals.
And if you install Ispell and Grammatik, it will also improve their visually disturbing spelling and their jarringly horrendous grammar.
Are you sure its CDMA and not TDMA?
What phone model? Does it have both an IMEI and an ESN?
I know of one GSM/TDMA phone, the Nokia 6340i; they were briefly sold in the US when Cingular was migrating from TDMA to GSM.
To be fair, the term "tri-band" is a marketing simplification. Most phones can ultimately fall back on AMPS, and thats much more than a band difference, but that doesn't mean they go into the details when they point that out when advertising a phone.
I think Sprint and Verizon are incompatible both in band and protocol, but that doesn't mean most phones sold by/for either carrier aren't capable of roaming on the other.
I dunno that any of this is particularly special or sinister. I mean, all the things you are complaining about seem to be the norm everywhere else.
Fake tree cell towers haven't caught on out here in Seattle's Eastside area (where Craig McCaw made his millions in Western Wireless and where T-Mobile's US HQ is located), the most nonimposing antennas are on top of office buildings, but the "3x as tall as a house" poles are also quite common. There are three such poles just outside my office.
I can't help but wonder if you can serve more customers from further distances per tower now than you could 5 years ago.
Generally utility installations do not come with mass mailings; the provider leases land from a city, local utility, or private owner (or buys land outright) and either puts up a pole or piggybacks on an existing one. This will kick off a PSA about as likely as would a new OC48 being lain in your street or a new thousand yards of cable TV lines.
You may have gotten 75% signal then, but there is such a thing as capacity planning. Wireless providers do a lot of traffic pattern trending to try and forecast where they will need to expand service.
Now, I have no idea why Sprint wouldn't be able to benefit from a good Verizon signal (I have Verizon, and used to have to roam on Sprint's towers in a certain region).
I think their service is on different bands.
Not everyone has multi-band phones. Well, they might now... but they don't *have* to.
My subject line is ambiguous. I mean it both ways.
A lot of people here have managed to exist in environments where they can manage to surround themselves with intelligent, rational people. As a result, they presume that this is the norm.
It is not. America is largely a nation of hicks, and those that aren't hicks at heart are largely paranoid and easily manipulated with fear.
Us secular minded folk? I figure, nationwide, we number around 10-15%. Rationally minded folk, I give us 25-30%. The remainder of left-of-center sentiment appearing in polls and election results I attribute to team mentality.
Urban centers, and in turn the polls which focus inordinately on them ignore middle America. Unfortunately middle America is expanding, and its mentality spills into the suburbs within the metro areas of the urban centers. Drive a few short miles out of any urban center and you will run into dense suburban areas that have a political polarity that drifts away from that of the center.
We associate urbanity with progressivism and intellectualism, and look at the thriving metropolitan areas that are sprawling around them and assume it is the growth of progressivism, but it is not. It is the growth of complacency, narrow-minded self-assuredness, and Rockwellian presumption, feeding off those urban centers.
There isn't some silent progressive majority. We're fooling ourselves, and actually insulting ourselves, to think that. Unless we can convince the complacent that they are less safe in their obedience and servitude of God and Country (i.e. President and Congress, not any principled notion of what our country stands for -- principles are so 90s!), the dominant paradigm holds pretty much all the cards.
By the time they retire, even in a few short years from now, good cell phone coverage in the home will be a *boost* to property value.
And just think, you can then use the GPRS coverage to connect to the Internet and learn to spell.
Or research minor cellular telephone concepts like how AT&T and Verizon signal quality has no (positive) effect on Sprint signal quality.
What the hell is an "IT Major"? Is there a college I missed that has an IT academic department? In my day (say 5 yrs ago) it was one in the same. In CS, depending on track, you mainly went into programming, DBA, or IT.
Generally, people don't add nearly as much operationally detrimental crap to their cars as they do their computers. If they did, cars would probably have as many problems as the average or power user's PC.
And cars certainly don't get something additional forcefully installed into them via a backdoor every time they visit some company's parking lot.
That would be novel, wouldn't it -- free parking, as long as we can secretly install a tracker that lets us know which drive-thrus and coffee shops you go to the most.
(Shut up, don't give them any ideas!)