Heh, as pointed out at the bottom of that article someone in Dell marketing needs to eat some serious humble pie:
http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-1... "Dell is serious about your privacy Worried about Superfish? Dell limits its pre-loaded software to a small number of high-value applications on all of our computers. Each application we pre-load undergoes security, privacy and usability testing to ensure that our customers experience the best possible computing performance, faster set-up and reduced privacy and security concerns."
Slashdot: "Let's talk about something important. Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only. You think I'm fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. I'm here from downtown. I'm here from Dice.com. And I'm here on a mission of mercy. Your name's Timothy? You call yourself a salesman you son of a bitch?"
Timothy: "I don't gotta sit here and listen to this shit."
Slashdot: "You certainly don't pal, 'cause the good news is - you're fired. The bad news is - you've got, all of you've got just one week to regain your jobs starting with tonight. Starting with tonight's submissions. Oh? Have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this month's sales contest.
As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. Get the picture? You laughing now? You got Black Friday deals. Brad's Deals paid good money, get their deals to sell them, you can't close the deals you're given you can't close shit. You ARE shit. Hit the bricks, pal, and beat it 'cause you are going OUT."
Timothy: "Brad's Deals are weak."
Slashdot: "Brad's Deals are weak? Fucking deals are weak. You're weak. I've been in this business 15 years..."
Very interesting, sounds like your sample was a group of mini-whales;) It would be insightful to see what portion of the upper percentile on that player/spend chart are actually high disposable income folks (probably like your coworkers) vs. just highly-addictive personalities. Those two groups are obviously non-orthogonal but the question is whether affordability enters the equation, and thereby where do you spend your marketing dollars to target them if you're a game developer.
Btw, also anecdotally, that chart was strikingly similar to what I think I saw in the Ashley Madison data. When I grep'd through the surrounding zip codes here, there were two distinct whales out of a population of around 150k. They were buying the upsells at the rate of $250-$1k per week for months on end.
But upon further research, both lived in very modest houses. So one could speculate they were either burning through an inheritance/had a rich spouse, or fell into the reckless credit card spender category.
The rest of the data "felt" like it matched the gaming percentiles. Definitely repeat customers but their purchases died off after a short period of time. So out of curiousity I would love to know for sure what portion of AM's revenues was due to a small set of whales.
Continuing with that thought, and maybe I'm reading it wrong, but the following article seems to say that a large portion of players aren't impatient enough to part with that $1. But the ones who do, they'll keep feeding the machine, to the point where "whales" actually exist in mobile gaming just like with casinos. The result is that revenue is highly dependent on a very thin sliver of game players:
Well said but note that may not be valid anymore given their emphasis (and success) with Azure. Seems like these days cheap Windows and hardware is perfectly fine as long as the data is being locked into their cloud (stack). In that case, the more devices, the merrier.
The bigger point of course is that we're reliving the 90's again. Whereas it used to be file formats that locked folks into proprietary dungeons, now it's the service that it's being stored in that will ensnare the victims.
First, some background. Dvorak is a well-known blowhard tech pundit. His blowhardness is so great that meteorologists unanimously decided to adopt the scale to measure the strength of hurricanes.
To put this in perspective, imagine being in the same room with one Dvorak. Then imagine the same room filled with eight point three Dvoraks. That's how strong this hurricane is.
The name change was initiated by Republican strategist Frank Luntz over a decade ago in a memo to the Bush administration:
"It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming and “conservation” instead of preservation.
'Climate change' is less frightening than 'global warming'. As one focus group participant noted, climate change 'sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.' While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge."
(Btw, apologies in advance. Although your comment was clearly tongue-in-cheek I figured it was worth posting in case others didn't know the background.)
Lol did that post really come off like I was an Apple fanboy? Makes sense though...the hallmark of complete absorption into the reality distortion field is that you don't even know you're in it.
FWIW, I went through the exact same thing two months ago. Non-technical wife (accountant), never used anything but Windows on the desktop/laptop. I didn't want to go balls deep with a brand new MBP in case she hated it so I picked up a 2010 version for a few hundred off Ebay.
Installed Yosemite and bought an old copy of Office for Mac 2008 for $25 so she can run Excel. Then set up Virtualbox with Windows XP just to run her ancient version of Quicken until she can transition to a native Mac version at the start of next year (hopefully finding something she can use besides Intuit). Just told her to click on the cube.
Bottom line is she loves it. I was really afraid that Finder and the apps bar would be too different for comfort but that turned out not to be the case. She knows her documents are in the Documents folder and which icons to click for apps (mail, pictures, browser), and that manipulating files involves the apple key. Time Machine is intuitive enough where she can manage file recovery herself, and I get the benefit of brainless automatic backups to the NAS.
So credit needs to be given where's it's due; there's something about Apple that just fits perfectly with average users. And at this point I honestly do feel that Apple is the least of all evils for privacy now. So the time was right.
Well said. How about cutting right to the core and simply teaching logic to younger kids? As a EE major I begrudgingly took a formal logic class from the Philosophy dep't in college (straightforward proofs w/ standard symbology and sentence analysis, not mushy ponderings). Turned out to be one of the most enjoyable classes I ever took.
In retrospect it wasn't that "heady" and could definitely be taught to first graders if wrapped as an ongoing game or some other expression that would allow them to keep building on the previous lessons. Latin could be formulated in an equally imaginative way.
I can't help but think that the phrase "computers are taught in school" will always be limited to teaching syntax. Bridging the gap between typing stuff in and recognizing the logical basis is too roundabout. If presented correctly logic is something both kids and teachers can concretely piece together. "Computers" will follow naturally after that, as will the bigger issue of critical thinking.
But the fat guy was promised all you can eat for a certain price (which he paid). Is he not then entitled to what was agreed upon?
Put another way, are you asking for sympathy for the restaurant that advertises a potentially money-losing offer, regrets it, but continues to offer it to new customers anyway?
To be safe, you should never show ads if your domain name is close to an existing trademark. Especially if it's a reasonably valuable name that is worthwhile going after, whether generic or brandable.
If you own apples.com and a Mac ad showed up in the ad feed, you'd significantly hurt your defense in the UDRP process if Apple submitted screenshots of it. The panel lawyers are notoriously inconsistent and this would just give ammo for them to approve the transfer. Even if your registration was earlier than the date when the trademark was granted.
Having said that, there are attorneys like John Berryhill that could still successfully defend the UDRP. But if we're talking about a defensive posture then ad feeds should be watched closely or not used at all.
Imo, if you're an average-use household it's at least worth looking into the refill kits. I've had a Brother HL2280DW for over 4 years (?) and have never bought a new cartridge (or drum unit). As opposed to just popping a new cartridge in, it does take some time to reset the gear and refill from the bottle. But it solves both problems of recycling and high cost of a new unit/cartridge.
One of the keys to success may be blowing out the old toner before refilling (the refill vendor mentions this). So each refill I'll grab my compressor and head outside, give it a few good blasts then refill with fresh toner. Of course canned air would probably be fine too. Realize though that the low toner light on the printer lies. You don't want to be blowing out a ton of perfectly good toner so I always wait until the print is actually degraded before doing the refill.
All told, it takes about 15 minutes and the printer is up and running just fine again. We've never noticed any quality differences.
As far as finding a vendor, when you find one you like, be sure to bookmark them or save the receipt because their names all sound the same (i.e. I finally remembered mine is printer ink warehouse...and that's after placing more than 5 orders;)
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a decent article that explains the difference: http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
Live coverage: https://youtu.be/SuRLZUXupCk
But closer to "juouluokuoukuo" according to this European to American translator.
Heh, as pointed out at the bottom of that article someone in Dell marketing needs to eat some serious humble pie:
http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-1...
"Dell is serious about your privacy
Worried about Superfish? Dell limits its pre-loaded software to a small number of high-value applications on all of our computers. Each application we pre-load undergoes security, privacy and usability testing to ensure that our customers experience the best possible computing performance, faster set-up and reduced privacy and security concerns."
Youch.
Slashdot: "Let's talk about something important. Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only. You think I'm fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. I'm here from downtown. I'm here from Dice.com. And I'm here on a mission of mercy. Your name's Timothy? You call yourself a salesman you son of a bitch?"
Timothy: "I don't gotta sit here and listen to this shit."
Slashdot: "You certainly don't pal, 'cause the good news is - you're fired. The bad news is - you've got, all of you've got just one week to regain your jobs starting with tonight. Starting with tonight's submissions. Oh? Have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this month's sales contest.
As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. Get the picture? You laughing now? You got Black Friday deals. Brad's Deals paid good money, get their deals to sell them, you can't close the deals you're given you can't close shit. You ARE shit. Hit the bricks, pal, and beat it 'cause you are going OUT."
Timothy: "Brad's Deals are weak."
Slashdot: "Brad's Deals are weak? Fucking deals are weak. You're weak. I've been in this business 15 years..."
Timothy: "What's your name?"
Slashdot: "Fuck you. That's my name."
Don't know, but their new motto should be "We Fahrvergnügened Up!"
Very interesting, sounds like your sample was a group of mini-whales ;) It would be insightful to see what portion of the upper percentile on that player/spend chart are actually high disposable income folks (probably like your coworkers) vs. just highly-addictive personalities. Those two groups are obviously non-orthogonal but the question is whether affordability enters the equation, and thereby where do you spend your marketing dollars to target them if you're a game developer.
Btw, also anecdotally, that chart was strikingly similar to what I think I saw in the Ashley Madison data. When I grep'd through the surrounding zip codes here, there were two distinct whales out of a population of around 150k. They were buying the upsells at the rate of $250-$1k per week for months on end.
But upon further research, both lived in very modest houses. So one could speculate they were either burning through an inheritance/had a rich spouse, or fell into the reckless credit card spender category.
The rest of the data "felt" like it matched the gaming percentiles. Definitely repeat customers but their purchases died off after a short period of time. So out of curiousity I would love to know for sure what portion of AM's revenues was due to a small set of whales.
Continuing with that thought, and maybe I'm reading it wrong, but the following article seems to say that a large portion of players aren't impatient enough to part with that $1. But the ones who do, they'll keep feeding the machine, to the point where "whales" actually exist in mobile gaming just like with casinos. The result is that revenue is highly dependent on a very thin sliver of game players:
https://recode.net/2014/02/26/...
Looked fine fine fine fine to me.
Well said but note that may not be valid anymore given their emphasis (and success) with Azure. Seems like these days cheap Windows and hardware is perfectly fine as long as the data is being locked into their cloud (stack). In that case, the more devices, the merrier.
The bigger point of course is that we're reliving the 90's again. Whereas it used to be file formats that locked folks into proprietary dungeons, now it's the service that it's being stored in that will ensnare the victims.
First, some background. Dvorak is a well-known blowhard tech pundit. His blowhardness is so great that meteorologists unanimously decided to adopt the scale to measure the strength of hurricanes.
To put this in perspective, imagine being in the same room with one Dvorak. Then imagine the same room filled with eight point three Dvoraks. That's how strong this hurricane is.
The name change was initiated by Republican strategist Frank Luntz over a decade ago in a memo to the Bush administration:
"It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming and “conservation” instead of preservation.
'Climate change' is less frightening than 'global warming'. As one focus group participant noted, climate change 'sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.' While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge."
Background link:
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
Direct link to memo pdf:
http://www.motherjones.com/fil...
(Btw, apologies in advance. Although your comment was clearly tongue-in-cheek I figured it was worth posting in case others didn't know the background.)
Actually it was worse. One and a half tea-bags.
Useful, cool and funny.
Thanks, iBank and Moneydance were the first two I was going to have her evaluate.
Lol did that post really come off like I was an Apple fanboy? Makes sense though...the hallmark of complete absorption into the reality distortion field is that you don't even know you're in it.
FWIW, I went through the exact same thing two months ago. Non-technical wife (accountant), never used anything but Windows on the desktop/laptop. I didn't want to go balls deep with a brand new MBP in case she hated it so I picked up a 2010 version for a few hundred off Ebay.
Installed Yosemite and bought an old copy of Office for Mac 2008 for $25 so she can run Excel. Then set up Virtualbox with Windows XP just to run her ancient version of Quicken until she can transition to a native Mac version at the start of next year (hopefully finding something she can use besides Intuit). Just told her to click on the cube.
Bottom line is she loves it. I was really afraid that Finder and the apps bar would be too different for comfort but that turned out not to be the case. She knows her documents are in the Documents folder and which icons to click for apps (mail, pictures, browser), and that manipulating files involves the apple key. Time Machine is intuitive enough where she can manage file recovery herself, and I get the benefit of brainless automatic backups to the NAS.
So credit needs to be given where's it's due; there's something about Apple that just fits perfectly with average users. And at this point I honestly do feel that Apple is the least of all evils for privacy now. So the time was right.
Hope your experience turns out to be the same!
Well said. How about cutting right to the core and simply teaching logic to younger kids? As a EE major I begrudgingly took a formal logic class from the Philosophy dep't in college (straightforward proofs w/ standard symbology and sentence analysis, not mushy ponderings). Turned out to be one of the most enjoyable classes I ever took.
In retrospect it wasn't that "heady" and could definitely be taught to first graders if wrapped as an ongoing game or some other expression that would allow them to keep building on the previous lessons. Latin could be formulated in an equally imaginative way.
I can't help but think that the phrase "computers are taught in school" will always be limited to teaching syntax. Bridging the gap between typing stuff in and recognizing the logical basis is too roundabout. If presented correctly logic is something both kids and teachers can concretely piece together. "Computers" will follow naturally after that, as will the bigger issue of critical thinking.
TSA008: Newbs. Here, stop screwing around and use my Langstrom 7 gangly wrench.
(click)
Yeah, that's why you should always "Bing it!" first.
But the fat guy was promised all you can eat for a certain price (which he paid). Is he not then entitled to what was agreed upon?
Put another way, are you asking for sympathy for the restaurant that advertises a potentially money-losing offer, regrets it, but continues to offer it to new customers anyway?
To be safe, you should never show ads if your domain name is close to an existing trademark. Especially if it's a reasonably valuable name that is worthwhile going after, whether generic or brandable.
If you own apples.com and a Mac ad showed up in the ad feed, you'd significantly hurt your defense in the UDRP process if Apple submitted screenshots of it. The panel lawyers are notoriously inconsistent and this would just give ammo for them to approve the transfer. Even if your registration was earlier than the date when the trademark was granted.
Having said that, there are attorneys like John Berryhill that could still successfully defend the UDRP. But if we're talking about a defensive posture then ad feeds should be watched closely or not used at all.
Excellent point, neglected to mention that I put on a respirator mask while blowing it out.
Imo, if you're an average-use household it's at least worth looking into the refill kits. I've had a Brother HL2280DW for over 4 years (?) and have never bought a new cartridge (or drum unit). As opposed to just popping a new cartridge in, it does take some time to reset the gear and refill from the bottle. But it solves both problems of recycling and high cost of a new unit/cartridge.
One of the keys to success may be blowing out the old toner before refilling (the refill vendor mentions this). So each refill I'll grab my compressor and head outside, give it a few good blasts then refill with fresh toner. Of course canned air would probably be fine too. Realize though that the low toner light on the printer lies. You don't want to be blowing out a ton of perfectly good toner so I always wait until the print is actually degraded before doing the refill.
All told, it takes about 15 minutes and the printer is up and running just fine again. We've never noticed any quality differences.
As far as finding a vendor, when you find one you like, be sure to bookmark them or save the receipt because their names all sound the same (i.e. I finally remembered mine is printer ink warehouse...and that's after placing more than 5 orders ;)
Spoiler: put the bird at the end. Fucking twit.