People of both sexes lose it and stalk their bosses, their co-workers, family members, classmates and teachers, the clerk working at the local store... makes no difference what gender or sex the stalker or stalkee are - the stalker is an idiot. Anyone who buys this crap is an idiot. And no, being a "helicopter parent" isn't an exception.
The article was about the trend to not owning stuff, that can be obsoleted by the "real owners" at a whim, because you no longer own it. I made a comparison to cars (because everyone likes car analogies). But it's just an analogy. Push any analogy too far and it breaks. Does that mean we should stop making analogies? No. They're useful for looking at similar situations.
Even consumer car loans, where you own the vehicle but it secures the lien, can have all sorts of restrictions on what you do with the car because they make the security of the loan less secure. Some say you can't use it for commercial service, some say you can't leave the state or country without prior notification, etc.
Would you rather own or lease the OS that came on your computer? "Oh, we no longer support that version, so we upgraded it remotely as per the lease contract. Oh, and the upgrade won't run SimCity, SimCity2K, SimCity300 Unlimited, etc."
But the reality is the same - even if you lose the phone, you're still stuck with the contract payments. You can pay the early termination fee, or pay the full price for a new phone. What are you going to do? If you owned the phone outright, you don't have to pay the "rest of the phone" and you'd be on a cheaper month-by-month plan, with no "early termination fee." Losing your phone sucks, Losing while you still owe on the contract sucks even more.
The Volt isn't an electric car. It's maximum range on batteries is 38 miles. So, as an electric vehicle, it's 19 miles going, 19 miles return, and if you need headlights and wipers be prepared to get out and push it at the end.
What's the benefit of baking all these apps into the system partition? I've found that even after an OTA update, most have been replaced by newer versions in the data partition within a few weeks.
... because you won't receive a notification that you can update a non-existent app. As long as I can remove what I don't want and install what I want, what's the big deal? For example, I don't use Google Music, but it's only taking up 14 meg, so I'll just leave it installed. If you're worried about space issues, take the plunge and delete something useless like the Facebook apps. Unless, of course, you like Facebook.
My point is that most phones come with a decent amount of storage, and one 20-second cat video can eat up more than a lot of apps do. Critics (esp. Apple fanbois) have been going "Android fragmentation yadda yadda yadda" and now Google is addressing the issue. Minimum specs for the latest and greatest makes sense, and once consumers get used to it, they'll know that a device that comes with a certain version of the OS meets at least the minimum specs for that OS.
In the beginning an OS was the least expensive part of the equation - anything under $100 was no big deal when the basic box, monochrome monitor, 4k, 16k, or even 64k of ram, keyboard, and one 5-1/4" floppy would set you back thousands of dollars. 640k? Dream on. These were not PCs.
Before the PC, there was no shortage of operating systems. For example, CP/M ran on over 3,000 types of machine and those machines were already on a downward spiral in terms of price/features. Other OSes were available as well. The ability to switch computer manufacturers and "maintain software compatibility" wasn't a big deal when you had all sorts of computers being used in homes and offices. Home users were using pretty much everything under the sun, businesses were using Xenix, custom systems written in BASIC, whatever worked. The lack of a common OS didn't stop these machines from proliferating.
Even after the intro of the PC, people kept buying other systems. McDonalds used TRS-80 model 100s in their franchise kitchens, TV stations used Microware OS9 for various stuff, Amigas were favoured by people looking to print up fliers and stuff because, when Apple finally released a GUI, the computer (the Lisa) was just too darned expensive at $9,999.00. The same problem with the Mac when it came out at "only" $1,995 (quickly raised to $2,495). Or you could buy a Color Computer Model 1 for even less - and people did. The CoCo 2 and 3 were both able to run Microware OS9, a very memory-efficient multi-tasking environment with multiple terminals on each text screen in 64k, (and multiple graphic screens, on the Coco 3 in 128k). And you could even run Microsoft Flight Simulator on the Coco3.
People really didn't give a damn about the OS. It was "whatever ran what I wanted to run," and there was plenty of software available for all these different systems. It was the declining price of hardware that put a computer in every home. The original PC, adjusted for inflation, would cost more than a small car. Simply too expensive to put in every home.
It seems like the sales team in question is letting the other side describe the product and set the tone for how it is viewed in the market rather than they themselves doing that. That seems to me like a major sales force failure.
Exactly this!
So, I think there should be an effort to educate the sales and marketing staff and to convince them to sell the product with the open tracking of defects as a huge asset, rather than liability. Challenge competitors to have the balls to do the same or call them on not doing it and cast aspersions on their product based on their fear of exposing their actual issues.
But don't be surprised if the sales and marketing force or the management behind them aren't willing to expend the effort. Many companies work hard at managing themselves in a race towards the bottom. Then they wonder why things get worse as they make changes....
How much you want to bet that some of the people who are against the whole thing haven't even looked at the bug tracker in question? Ignorance leaves people prone to FUD, even that generated in their own minds.
The default for AdBlock Plus is to allow some of the well-behaved ads through, so that users who like to support their favourite sites can do so in an unobtrusive way.
It's easy to change - there's a checkbox on the dialog when you click on Filter Preferences to allow / disallow this. It's a reasonable compromise, and if everyone used this to only allow ads that don't behave badly, advertisers and their ad distribution networks would have to make their ads behave better.
Blocking all ads, on the other hand, gives them no incentive to change.
Your saying it doesn't make it so. The "bashing" I originally did on car leases was on car leases specifically, not on financing in general. That I started with leasing (one form of financing) doesn't mean what you claim - that I somehow lied when I said leasing was the problem, and not financing in general. Leasing is a subset of financing, same as mortgages. The problem isn't leases, the problem isn't financing in general - it's that people don't want to pay full price for their phone up front, so instead of buying a $200 android outright, they buy a $600 iphone with a contract and pay it out over several years. And they're shocked when it's going to cost them the full price to replace the phone if they lose or break it ("but I only paid $100 for it with this contract. Why can't I have another one for $100?).
I compared car leases to the phone contracts, and both have restrictions that limit what you can do with them - one such restriction being (depending on the lease) the ability to move it out of the country, so it's not just "My only obligation is to restore any mods I did." Just google for it. The same applies to restrictions on some type of private vehicle loans. You can't always do "anything you want" until the vehicle is paid in full.
For another example of how you don't get it, look at how you said that "If you own the car you are likely as much or more upside down than if you have leased it." How stupid. If you either leased or otherwise financed the car, you don't own it outright (which is another way of saying you don't own it, period).
And bringing in the government's ability to seize a TV for back taxes - if you owe money, anyone can seize your TV, subject to limitations of the law. There's nothing special about a debt owed to government that gives only them the power to seize.
Really, why all the bad arguments? Taking lessons from APK?
"Google should personalize the privacy policy to show users only the data processing it is performing on their data."
13. Shared data. The subscriber agrees by uploading personal data to Google cloud that any dick pics are both hackable and for sale to the highest bidder.
And guys will want to show that theirs is "bigger and better", so they'll bid on their own pics rather than having them sit there for one tenth of a cent. Google can make a fortune by having shill bids bump the price up. I'm sure they'd be able to develop algorithms that would bring the biggest yields.
Or they can go the "social media" route. "George, your friend Harry just received a bid of $50.00. Your current high is ten cents. Would you like to put a reserve bid on your pic? Suggested amounts are $50, $100, or [ENTER AMOUNT HERE].
Unfortunately, Kickstarter doesn't issue stats about how many projects have failed to deliver. This is a problematic area because a project can just linger on in limbo without having been declared dead for who knows how long?
You yourself admit that one project you funded was late by a year. Where do we set the deadline? 1 year? 2 years, 5 years?
No, I brought up the practices of businesses who have open bug trackers as opposed to those who don't. That the vast majority of open bug trackers are related to open source projects is a natural fit, but even closed source projects can have public trackers. This one does, and they're still in business. The question is, should they stay open? It's up to the people who want to wall it off to make their case. If they can't then the status quo should remain. After all:
1. Even businesses that don't have a public bug tracker, you can be sure your competition knows your weaknesses and "bugs". After all, they talk to the same client pool as you, including your current and former customers; hiding it is as stupid as hiding a zero-day exploit. The bad guys already know, and you're keeping the people who should be told in the dark, giving them zero opportunity to take any sort of mitigating measures, or any decision at all. A huge breech of trust.
2. Closing of an open bug tracker will give your competition something to really hammer you with. "Why the change, unless there's something really buggered up?"
3. Keeping the bug tracker open is a feature, not a "bug", and should be promoted as such in building the element of trust. Maybe sales and marketing people should be walked through it to see the features that have been added due to customer requests, and the bugs that have been fixed, again due to customer requests. How much would you bet that they (or their competition sitting in a potential client's office) even know how to use a bug tracker?
4. If the competition DID show a potential client the bug tracker, how long before that client asks "can I see yours?" "No." "Why not?" "Company policy." "What are you hiding from me?" And when the competition walks out of the door, who do you think the potential client is going to want to talk to?
Sales is first and foremost a question of building up a relationship based on trust. The more open you are, the more people trust you. A public bug tracker is a feature, not a bug.
It depends - if some customers are running the devel version, you want those customers to see the bugs. As for showing outsiders, what harm is there? It's not like they'll be likely to run the devel version, so they'll be looking at the release version.
Besides, the competition already has this information (bugs in your products), whether you post it for the world to see or not, just as you have a list of bugs that their customers complain about to your sales people when they come a-calling.
Besides, knowing that the whole world is going to see your dirty underwear tends to make you change it every day, just in case you get run over by the bus... keeping stuff hidden just adds to the atmosphere of complacency.
This is not the market you are looking for. I think that others can take heart in some of the things they did:
There was an HDMI cable that we were using in the kit and it was working fine but we cracked it open to see what was inside and we found that the number of cables inside the HDMI cable was like half what it should of been. So we switched that,” said Alex.
“The other one was to do with the Kano keyboard, which has an integrated touchpad and click and the Bluetooth connectivity and USB RS as well. Pretty complicated product. And we have one main supplier for it, who was relying on a couple of sub suppliers for a few components inside. And we did a full factory audit, just before shipping — to gauge social and environmental standards, working conditions. And everyone passed with flying colors But there was one component in the keyboard, the battery, when we went to the factory of the sub supplier it wasn’t up to our ethical standards of how we’d like to manufacture.
“This supplier was very much like China five years ago, so we ditched that supplier.”
Attention to detail - rejecting something that works because it isn't good enough, is impressive. Would I have thought to strip the cable to see if the wire count was up to standard provided it worked? Would I have forced the sub to change battery suppliers? I don't know.
They were two months late due to this, but this is a reasonable time/quality trade-off - especially on a launch product. This is the sort of thing that makes me want to see what they have up next, and the sort of thinking we need more of.
The summary makes it clear that no decision has been made yet:
I've yielded to the sales and marketing demands such that we no longer display the links next to each build for fixes and enhancements, and now publish "Development Stream (Experimental / Unstable" as simply "Development Stream") but I know what is coming next — a request to no longer make our Bugzilla database publicly accessible. I still have the Bugzilla database publicly exposed, but there is now only no longer the "click this link to see what we did in this build".
That's why the OP posted the story - they're looking for input on the next step.
Food is also regulated by the FDA. You can search the same FDA database for "food bugs." Has that harmed the food industry? Has having a publicly-searchable database of adverse reactions harmed the drug industry? In both cases, it keeps them on their toes, and helps with credibility because anyone can post a complaint about drugs, foods, cosmetics, etc. And these are all "closed-source" industries.
We all benefit from everybody - including competitors - being able to complain / look at the FDA bugs list.
Whether an open bugs list helps this business is what this story is about - NOT "open source vs closed source". People for some reason don't seem to be able to make the separation, because it's just not the usual problem we're confronted with.
Toyota is very open about their processes - they give guided tours of their plants to their competitors. And where did you think those "TPS" reports came from in "Office Space?" "Toyota Production System." They also share methodologies with everyone, including their competitors, but that didn't stop them from becoming the #1 car manufacturer in the world.
If you've "sold" someone a product that is ultimately not the best fit for them, you have only temporarily gained a customer.
What a stupid, naive, pollyanna comment.
Still doesn't make it untrue.
no, it just makes it ridiculously impractical to implement in any real world scenario.
Really? Want a real-world scenario? There was a report on one investigative tv show last night documenting the mutual fund industry's habit of selling high-commission high-risk products that were inappropriate for the customer. The feds confirmed they are taking action. And there are class action settlements in similar cases.
But attacking the messenger as being "stupid, naive, pollyanna" doesn't change the truth of the message - you've only temporarily gained a customer.
Check the transcript, friend. I called your COMMENT naive, stupid, and pollyanna-ish... I never once addressed you directly, or engaged in anything like "attacking the messenger." In fact, I addressed your point, and ONLY your point in each one of my comments.
A "distinction without a difference" given the context. So, if I were to say your responses are cowardly, scurrilous, moronic, totally braindead, etc., you have no irhgt to take offense? After all, I'm not talking about you, just your comment:-) Heck, according to that logic, someone could characterize everything you say as being the worst type of crap and you would have not right to be offended. Doesn't work that way in the real world.
The truth of it is undermined by the simple fact that, as I pointed out in point 1 - what you've sold them is not STATIC. You've sold them an evolving piece of software under active development - if it doesn't fit their needs perfectly today, it sure might tomorrow, or 6 months from now. In the meantime, refusing to engage in a negotiation with them in which you present your solution and argue that yours is better than your competitors' products just means you should pack up shop and stop trying.
Again, not in the real world. People are sick and tired of "it will be in the next release." More and more, they're from Missouri. At least with the current process, you can show them that past requests have been met in a timely manner, while the competitors can only promise, without a single data point from real-world customers.
No customer is going to call you if there's a piece of software that already solves their problem perfectly - they've already bought it, they're not shopping around and taking calls from sales guys to find out "what this software does that could help me."
Right - every business in the world has the time to stay on top of every product that might conceivable benefit them. Besides, if they already bought, here's a chance for your sales guys to do a bit of market research - find out why that product was best for that customer. Maybe even come up with a feature everyone's overlooked, and get that customer, and others like them. Instead of being lazy, as others have noted.
Competitors who aren't open can't do that.
Really? I can't provide prospective customers a list of current customers and phone numbers of references to make some calls to unless I fit your arbitrary definition of "open"? That's funny, I could swear I work for a firm that does that already, and my company is in no way "open." You're somehow conflating "sharing data with customers" and "sharing data with the whole fucking world on a public link." The first is entirely possible without being "open." The second is just fucking dumb if you ever expect to survive in a competitive industry.
You can provide a cherry-picked list in both cases. The importance of the bug list is that it shows you're (hopefully)
So you were lying when you were bashing "leases". The problem isn't "leases" it's "financing."
Now you're down to name calling. Don't like the message, attack the messanger, which you do several times.
Leasing is just another way of financing something, rather than purchasing it. Whether you borrowed the money to pay for something and the lender has a lien, or you leased it and the leasing entity has a lien, it's not yours until it's paid for. You can't dispose of it and keep the proceeds, for example. You can't give it in guarantee for something else. You can't gift it to someone else. The lien still has to be satisfied. Whereas if you sell something you own, YOU keep the money. You trade it, you don't need anyone else's consent. You give it away, it's your business. Simple, really.
And when you borrow for your car, you are allowed to do absolute anything you want with it.
An absolute lie. Lenders will want to know if it's for high-wear-and-tear use, as this affects the value of their security. A loan for a taxi is going to cost you more points (if they grant the loan - many places will not, considering it a commercial, rather than consumer, loan) than a loan for a vehicle used only to go to the store. But if you want to engage in loan fraud, that's your business.
Why not point out that things you own outright are still not owned outright? The IRS can take your TV.
ANYONE can take your TV if you owe money to them for any reason at all and they get a writ of seizure. So what? Does that mean you didn't ever really own the TV? How does throwing "the goobermint" into the argument change anything? It doesn't.
And yes, there are car leases that prohibit you from moving the vehicle to another state, and have use clauses. So where do you get off saying I made false statements about car leases? Just because the same is true of all financing schemes doesn't mean that "leasing" a cell phone doesn't have the same down side as "leasing" a car, or even "borrowing" to buy a car. If there's a lien, it simply ain't yours free and clear, and all the hand-waving in the world won't change that.
So owning outright doesn't give any more protection than borrowed against.
On the contrary, there is a certain base amount that is exempt from seizure. The exception is if you OWE on the item(s) that you are trying to say is exempt - the lien-holder has the right to seize it (them) anyway. So if your sole asset is that TV, and you own it outright, it probably falls under the base amount. However, if you owe money on it, even if the value of the TV is less than the base exemption, the lender can seize it. Owning outright gives you more protection when Bad Things Happen. Plus you have less pressure to keep up with monthly bills.
So until there's proof, there's no valid reason to change current practice.
Yes there is, the people you pay to make these decisions have made their decision.
First, if you bothered to read the summary, the decision has NOT been made. The bug tracker is still open to everyone.
hat one took only seconds to debunk [google.com]. The number one smartphone software in the world in terms of sales has a public searchable bug list., including open bugs. FreeBSD, which is the base of OSX and which Apple contributes heavily to, lets anyone browse all bug reports or just open ones [freebsd.org].
FDA is continuing to evaluate this issue to determine the need for any regulatory action.
Drug companies are notoriously closed-lipped - they're the furthest you can get from open source. Is the information on their "bugs" available to everyone? Yep. And occasionally, it makes the evening news, when a manufacturer has to stop production because of quality control issues, etc.
Lose your job? If you own the car, you can sell it. A lease? You're probably upside-down.
If you own the car you are likely as much or more upside down than if you have it leased. Selling a leased car is allowed, as is turning it in early. You have *more* options with a lease, not fewer. You can sell it by transferring the lease, or by buying out the lease then selling the 100% owned car, options you don't get if you buy it.
If you own your car, you own it. Debt-free. If you owe the bank, you don't own it outright - there's a lien on it. It's the same as the cell phone contracts - you don't own the phone outright - you've financed it via the phone company, and will always be upside down on it.
Financing something means you don't own it. Ask all those people who "bought" houses that were then repo'd.
No kidding it hasn't come out yet. And the whole "RTM" is total BS. No carrier is ever going to offer these phones with Ubuntu - they'll be expensive just with Android. So what you'll see is the manufacturer producing a batch of the Pro version but with Ubuntu as the OS instead of linux/Android. And that will cost you, the consumer, more. And you'll be dependent on Canonical for service and updates. Given Canonical's slightly-shorter-than-a-squirrel's attention span for any one product, you're paying iPhone6+ prices for a brick.
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Men shall be punished, for existing!
No idiot they are punished for stalking.
Let me fix that for you:
No, idiots are punished for stalking.
People of both sexes lose it and stalk their bosses, their co-workers, family members, classmates and teachers, the clerk working at the local store ... makes no difference what gender or sex the stalker or stalkee are - the stalker is an idiot. Anyone who buys this crap is an idiot. And no, being a "helicopter parent" isn't an exception.
That's why there's a difference between 20 years experience and 1 yar experience repeated 20 times. Too bad that escapes too many (hr in particular)
You can train a skill, but you cannot learn talent.
And Justin Bieber is proof that a lack of both doesn't correlate with success.
Today's list is here. Just look for all lines starting with an exclamation mark - they'll tell you the intent of the following lines.
Of course, you're free to edit it to your preferences and restart the browser.
The article was about the trend to not owning stuff, that can be obsoleted by the "real owners" at a whim, because you no longer own it. I made a comparison to cars (because everyone likes car analogies). But it's just an analogy. Push any analogy too far and it breaks. Does that mean we should stop making analogies? No. They're useful for looking at similar situations.
Even consumer car loans, where you own the vehicle but it secures the lien, can have all sorts of restrictions on what you do with the car because they make the security of the loan less secure. Some say you can't use it for commercial service, some say you can't leave the state or country without prior notification, etc.
Would you rather own or lease the OS that came on your computer? "Oh, we no longer support that version, so we upgraded it remotely as per the lease contract. Oh, and the upgrade won't run SimCity, SimCity2K, SimCity300 Unlimited, etc."
But the reality is the same - even if you lose the phone, you're still stuck with the contract payments. You can pay the early termination fee, or pay the full price for a new phone. What are you going to do? If you owned the phone outright, you don't have to pay the "rest of the phone" and you'd be on a cheaper month-by-month plan, with no "early termination fee." Losing your phone sucks, Losing while you still owe on the contract sucks even more.
The Volt isn't an electric car. It's maximum range on batteries is 38 miles. So, as an electric vehicle, it's 19 miles going, 19 miles return, and if you need headlights and wipers be prepared to get out and push it at the end.
Apples and Oranges ...
Think of them as shortcuts to just the section you want - though of course the real reason is marketing Google Plays' various sections.
What's the benefit of baking all these apps into the system partition? I've found that even after an OTA update, most have been replaced by newer versions in the data partition within a few weeks.
... because you won't receive a notification that you can update a non-existent app. As long as I can remove what I don't want and install what I want, what's the big deal? For example, I don't use Google Music, but it's only taking up 14 meg, so I'll just leave it installed. If you're worried about space issues, take the plunge and delete something useless like the Facebook apps. Unless, of course, you like Facebook.
My point is that most phones come with a decent amount of storage, and one 20-second cat video can eat up more than a lot of apps do. Critics (esp. Apple fanbois) have been going "Android fragmentation yadda yadda yadda" and now Google is addressing the issue. Minimum specs for the latest and greatest makes sense, and once consumers get used to it, they'll know that a device that comes with a certain version of the OS meets at least the minimum specs for that OS.
In the beginning an OS was the least expensive part of the equation - anything under $100 was no big deal when the basic box, monochrome monitor, 4k, 16k, or even 64k of ram, keyboard, and one 5-1/4" floppy would set you back thousands of dollars. 640k? Dream on. These were not PCs.
Before the PC, there was no shortage of operating systems. For example, CP/M ran on over 3,000 types of machine and those machines were already on a downward spiral in terms of price/features. Other OSes were available as well. The ability to switch computer manufacturers and "maintain software compatibility" wasn't a big deal when you had all sorts of computers being used in homes and offices. Home users were using pretty much everything under the sun, businesses were using Xenix, custom systems written in BASIC, whatever worked. The lack of a common OS didn't stop these machines from proliferating.
Even after the intro of the PC, people kept buying other systems. McDonalds used TRS-80 model 100s in their franchise kitchens, TV stations used Microware OS9 for various stuff, Amigas were favoured by people looking to print up fliers and stuff because, when Apple finally released a GUI, the computer (the Lisa) was just too darned expensive at $9,999.00. The same problem with the Mac when it came out at "only" $1,995 (quickly raised to $2,495). Or you could buy a Color Computer Model 1 for even less - and people did. The CoCo 2 and 3 were both able to run Microware OS9, a very memory-efficient multi-tasking environment with multiple terminals on each text screen in 64k, (and multiple graphic screens, on the Coco 3 in 128k). And you could even run Microsoft Flight Simulator on the Coco3.
People really didn't give a damn about the OS. It was "whatever ran what I wanted to run," and there was plenty of software available for all these different systems. It was the declining price of hardware that put a computer in every home. The original PC, adjusted for inflation, would cost more than a small car. Simply too expensive to put in every home.
It seems like the sales team in question is letting the other side describe the product and set the tone for how it is viewed in the market rather than they themselves doing that. That seems to me like a major sales force failure.
Exactly this!
So, I think there should be an effort to educate the sales and marketing staff and to convince them to sell the product with the open tracking of defects as a huge asset, rather than liability. Challenge competitors to have the balls to do the same or call them on not doing it and cast aspersions on their product based on their fear of exposing their actual issues.
But don't be surprised if the sales and marketing force or the management behind them aren't willing to expend the effort. Many companies work hard at managing themselves in a race towards the bottom. Then they wonder why things get worse as they make changes....
How much you want to bet that some of the people who are against the whole thing haven't even looked at the bug tracker in question? Ignorance leaves people prone to FUD, even that generated in their own minds.
BTW, you were logged in :-)
The default for AdBlock Plus is to allow some of the well-behaved ads through, so that users who like to support their favourite sites can do so in an unobtrusive way. It's easy to change - there's a checkbox on the dialog when you click on Filter Preferences to allow / disallow this. It's a reasonable compromise, and if everyone used this to only allow ads that don't behave badly, advertisers and their ad distribution networks would have to make their ads behave better.
Blocking all ads, on the other hand, gives them no incentive to change.
Your saying it doesn't make it so. The "bashing" I originally did on car leases was on car leases specifically, not on financing in general. That I started with leasing (one form of financing) doesn't mean what you claim - that I somehow lied when I said leasing was the problem, and not financing in general. Leasing is a subset of financing, same as mortgages. The problem isn't leases, the problem isn't financing in general - it's that people don't want to pay full price for their phone up front, so instead of buying a $200 android outright, they buy a $600 iphone with a contract and pay it out over several years. And they're shocked when it's going to cost them the full price to replace the phone if they lose or break it ("but I only paid $100 for it with this contract. Why can't I have another one for $100?).
I compared car leases to the phone contracts, and both have restrictions that limit what you can do with them - one such restriction being (depending on the lease) the ability to move it out of the country, so it's not just "My only obligation is to restore any mods I did." Just google for it. The same applies to restrictions on some type of private vehicle loans. You can't always do "anything you want" until the vehicle is paid in full.
For another example of how you don't get it, look at how you said that "If you own the car you are likely as much or more upside down than if you have leased it." How stupid. If you either leased or otherwise financed the car, you don't own it outright (which is another way of saying you don't own it, period).
And bringing in the government's ability to seize a TV for back taxes - if you owe money, anyone can seize your TV, subject to limitations of the law. There's nothing special about a debt owed to government that gives only them the power to seize.
Really, why all the bad arguments? Taking lessons from APK?
"Google should personalize the privacy policy to show users only the data processing it is performing on their data."
13. Shared data. The subscriber agrees by uploading personal data to Google cloud that any dick pics are both hackable and for sale to the highest bidder.
And guys will want to show that theirs is "bigger and better", so they'll bid on their own pics rather than having them sit there for one tenth of a cent. Google can make a fortune by having shill bids bump the price up. I'm sure they'd be able to develop algorithms that would bring the biggest yields.
Or they can go the "social media" route. "George, your friend Harry just received a bid of $50.00. Your current high is ten cents. Would you like to put a reserve bid on your pic? Suggested amounts are $50, $100, or [ENTER AMOUNT HERE].
Unfortunately, Kickstarter doesn't issue stats about how many projects have failed to deliver. This is a problematic area because a project can just linger on in limbo without having been declared dead for who knows how long?
You yourself admit that one project you funded was late by a year. Where do we set the deadline? 1 year? 2 years, 5 years?
No, I brought up the practices of businesses who have open bug trackers as opposed to those who don't. That the vast majority of open bug trackers are related to open source projects is a natural fit, but even closed source projects can have public trackers. This one does, and they're still in business. The question is, should they stay open? It's up to the people who want to wall it off to make their case. If they can't then the status quo should remain. After all:
1. Even businesses that don't have a public bug tracker, you can be sure your competition knows your weaknesses and "bugs". After all, they talk to the same client pool as you, including your current and former customers; hiding it is as stupid as hiding a zero-day exploit. The bad guys already know, and you're keeping the people who should be told in the dark, giving them zero opportunity to take any sort of mitigating measures, or any decision at all. A huge breech of trust.
2. Closing of an open bug tracker will give your competition something to really hammer you with. "Why the change, unless there's something really buggered up?"
3. Keeping the bug tracker open is a feature, not a "bug", and should be promoted as such in building the element of trust. Maybe sales and marketing people should be walked through it to see the features that have been added due to customer requests, and the bugs that have been fixed, again due to customer requests. How much would you bet that they (or their competition sitting in a potential client's office) even know how to use a bug tracker?
4. If the competition DID show a potential client the bug tracker, how long before that client asks "can I see yours?" "No." "Why not?" "Company policy." "What are you hiding from me?" And when the competition walks out of the door, who do you think the potential client is going to want to talk to?
Sales is first and foremost a question of building up a relationship based on trust. The more open you are, the more people trust you. A public bug tracker is a feature, not a bug.
It depends - if some customers are running the devel version, you want those customers to see the bugs. As for showing outsiders, what harm is there? It's not like they'll be likely to run the devel version, so they'll be looking at the release version.
Besides, the competition already has this information (bugs in your products), whether you post it for the world to see or not, just as you have a list of bugs that their customers complain about to your sales people when they come a-calling.
Besides, knowing that the whole world is going to see your dirty underwear tends to make you change it every day, just in case you get run over by the bus ... keeping stuff hidden just adds to the atmosphere of complacency.
There was an HDMI cable that we were using in the kit and it was working fine but we cracked it open to see what was inside and we found that the number of cables inside the HDMI cable was like half what it should of been. So we switched that,” said Alex.
“The other one was to do with the Kano keyboard, which has an integrated touchpad and click and the Bluetooth connectivity and USB RS as well. Pretty complicated product. And we have one main supplier for it, who was relying on a couple of sub suppliers for a few components inside. And we did a full factory audit, just before shipping — to gauge social and environmental standards, working conditions. And everyone passed with flying colors But there was one component in the keyboard, the battery, when we went to the factory of the sub supplier it wasn’t up to our ethical standards of how we’d like to manufacture.
“This supplier was very much like China five years ago, so we ditched that supplier.”
Attention to detail - rejecting something that works because it isn't good enough, is impressive. Would I have thought to strip the cable to see if the wire count was up to standard provided it worked? Would I have forced the sub to change battery suppliers? I don't know.
They were two months late due to this, but this is a reasonable time/quality trade-off - especially on a launch product. This is the sort of thing that makes me want to see what they have up next, and the sort of thinking we need more of.
Come to think of it; it's good to hear about any crowdsourcing project that delivered.
The summary makes it clear that no decision has been made yet:
I've yielded to the sales and marketing demands such that we no longer display the links next to each build for fixes and enhancements, and now publish "Development Stream (Experimental / Unstable" as simply "Development Stream") but I know what is coming next — a request to no longer make our Bugzilla database publicly accessible. I still have the Bugzilla database publicly exposed, but there is now only no longer the "click this link to see what we did in this build".
That's why the OP posted the story - they're looking for input on the next step.
Food is also regulated by the FDA. You can search the same FDA database for "food bugs." Has that harmed the food industry? Has having a publicly-searchable database of adverse reactions harmed the drug industry? In both cases, it keeps them on their toes, and helps with credibility because anyone can post a complaint about drugs, foods, cosmetics, etc. And these are all "closed-source" industries.
We all benefit from everybody - including competitors - being able to complain / look at the FDA bugs list.
Whether an open bugs list helps this business is what this story is about - NOT "open source vs closed source". People for some reason don't seem to be able to make the separation, because it's just not the usual problem we're confronted with.
Toyota is very open about their processes - they give guided tours of their plants to their competitors. And where did you think those "TPS" reports came from in "Office Space?" "Toyota Production System." They also share methodologies with everyone, including their competitors, but that didn't stop them from becoming the #1 car manufacturer in the world.
If you've "sold" someone a product that is ultimately not the best fit for them, you have only temporarily gained a customer.
What a stupid, naive, pollyanna comment.
Still doesn't make it untrue.
no, it just makes it ridiculously impractical to implement in any real world scenario.
Really? Want a real-world scenario? There was a report on one investigative tv show last night documenting the mutual fund industry's habit of selling high-commission high-risk products that were inappropriate for the customer. The feds confirmed they are taking action. And there are class action settlements in similar cases.
But attacking the messenger as being "stupid, naive, pollyanna" doesn't change the truth of the message - you've only temporarily gained a customer.
Check the transcript, friend. I called your COMMENT naive, stupid, and pollyanna-ish... I never once addressed you directly, or engaged in anything like "attacking the messenger." In fact, I addressed your point, and ONLY your point in each one of my comments.
A "distinction without a difference" given the context. So, if I were to say your responses are cowardly, scurrilous, moronic, totally braindead, etc., you have no irhgt to take offense? After all, I'm not talking about you, just your comment :-) Heck, according to that logic, someone could characterize everything you say as being the worst type of crap and you would have not right to be offended. Doesn't work that way in the real world.
The truth of it is undermined by the simple fact that, as I pointed out in point 1 - what you've sold them is not STATIC. You've sold them an evolving piece of software under active development - if it doesn't fit their needs perfectly today, it sure might tomorrow, or 6 months from now. In the meantime, refusing to engage in a negotiation with them in which you present your solution and argue that yours is better than your competitors' products just means you should pack up shop and stop trying.
Again, not in the real world. People are sick and tired of "it will be in the next release." More and more, they're from Missouri. At least with the current process, you can show them that past requests have been met in a timely manner, while the competitors can only promise, without a single data point from real-world customers.
No customer is going to call you if there's a piece of software that already solves their problem perfectly - they've already bought it, they're not shopping around and taking calls from sales guys to find out "what this software does that could help me."
Right - every business in the world has the time to stay on top of every product that might conceivable benefit them. Besides, if they already bought, here's a chance for your sales guys to do a bit of market research - find out why that product was best for that customer. Maybe even come up with a feature everyone's overlooked, and get that customer, and others like them. Instead of being lazy, as others have noted.
Competitors who aren't open can't do that.
Really? I can't provide prospective customers a list of current customers and phone numbers of references to make some calls to unless I fit your arbitrary definition of "open"? That's funny, I could swear I work for a firm that does that already, and my company is in no way "open." You're somehow conflating "sharing data with customers" and "sharing data with the whole fucking world on a public link." The first is entirely possible without being "open." The second is just fucking dumb if you ever expect to survive in a competitive industry.
You can provide a cherry-picked list in both cases. The importance of the bug list is that it shows you're (hopefully)
So you were lying when you were bashing "leases". The problem isn't "leases" it's "financing."
Now you're down to name calling. Don't like the message, attack the messanger, which you do several times.
Leasing is just another way of financing something, rather than purchasing it. Whether you borrowed the money to pay for something and the lender has a lien, or you leased it and the leasing entity has a lien, it's not yours until it's paid for. You can't dispose of it and keep the proceeds, for example. You can't give it in guarantee for something else. You can't gift it to someone else. The lien still has to be satisfied. Whereas if you sell something you own, YOU keep the money. You trade it, you don't need anyone else's consent. You give it away, it's your business. Simple, really.
And when you borrow for your car, you are allowed to do absolute anything you want with it.
An absolute lie. Lenders will want to know if it's for high-wear-and-tear use, as this affects the value of their security. A loan for a taxi is going to cost you more points (if they grant the loan - many places will not, considering it a commercial, rather than consumer, loan) than a loan for a vehicle used only to go to the store. But if you want to engage in loan fraud, that's your business.
Why not point out that things you own outright are still not owned outright? The IRS can take your TV.
ANYONE can take your TV if you owe money to them for any reason at all and they get a writ of seizure. So what? Does that mean you didn't ever really own the TV? How does throwing "the goobermint" into the argument change anything? It doesn't.
And yes, there are car leases that prohibit you from moving the vehicle to another state, and have use clauses. So where do you get off saying I made false statements about car leases? Just because the same is true of all financing schemes doesn't mean that "leasing" a cell phone doesn't have the same down side as "leasing" a car, or even "borrowing" to buy a car. If there's a lien, it simply ain't yours free and clear, and all the hand-waving in the world won't change that.
So owning outright doesn't give any more protection than borrowed against.
On the contrary, there is a certain base amount that is exempt from seizure. The exception is if you OWE on the item(s) that you are trying to say is exempt - the lien-holder has the right to seize it (them) anyway. So if your sole asset is that TV, and you own it outright, it probably falls under the base amount. However, if you owe money on it, even if the value of the TV is less than the base exemption, the lender can seize it. Owning outright gives you more protection when Bad Things Happen. Plus you have less pressure to keep up with monthly bills.
So until there's proof, there's no valid reason to change current practice.
Yes there is, the people you pay to make these decisions have made their decision.
First, if you bothered to read the summary, the decision has NOT been made. The bug tracker is still open to everyone.
hat one took only seconds to debunk [google.com]. The number one smartphone software in the world in terms of sales has a public searchable bug list., including open bugs. FreeBSD, which is the base of OSX and which Apple contributes heavily to, lets anyone browse all bug reports or just open ones [freebsd.org].
Those are all open source projects
So what?
Let's take another real-world example - bugs in pharmaceuticals. The FDA Adverse Events Reporting System. Anyone can post to it, and see the quarterly summaries that, btw, name the drugs involved, by generic and brand names. Here's a recent one of a possible "bug"
Serotonin-3 (5-HT3) receptor antagonist products (Aloxi, Kytril, Zofran, Zuplenz)
Serotonin syndrome
FDA is continuing to evaluate this issue to determine the need for any regulatory action.
Drug companies are notoriously closed-lipped - they're the furthest you can get from open source. Is the information on their "bugs" available to everyone? Yep. And occasionally, it makes the evening news, when a manufacturer has to stop production because of quality control issues, etc.
Lose your job? If you own the car, you can sell it. A lease? You're probably upside-down.
If you own the car you are likely as much or more upside down than if you have it leased. Selling a leased car is allowed, as is turning it in early. You have *more* options with a lease, not fewer. You can sell it by transferring the lease, or by buying out the lease then selling the 100% owned car, options you don't get if you buy it.
If you own your car, you own it. Debt-free. If you owe the bank, you don't own it outright - there's a lien on it. It's the same as the cell phone contracts - you don't own the phone outright - you've financed it via the phone company, and will always be upside down on it.
Financing something means you don't own it. Ask all those people who "bought" houses that were then repo'd.
No kidding it hasn't come out yet. And the whole "RTM" is total BS. No carrier is ever going to offer these phones with Ubuntu - they'll be expensive just with Android. So what you'll see is the manufacturer producing a batch of the Pro version but with Ubuntu as the OS instead of linux/Android. And that will cost you, the consumer, more. And you'll be dependent on Canonical for service and updates. Given Canonical's slightly-shorter-than-a-squirrel's attention span for any one product, you're paying iPhone6+ prices for a brick.