Maybe the Radiohead fans were just more appreciative... if you lowered your price or allowed people to pay an arbitrary amount (while offering a support price for $25) you might find more people willing to pay.
You should set up an A B test page that randomly picks between two options... $25 or $10 and see if you get more buyers at $10... and of course see if it's statistically enough that you make more money at the lower price due to volume of sales.
Sorry i was responding to an article submission which clearly was talking about a majority of average people, by average I mean typical and by typical I mean what they do on a daily basis as individuals (as opposed to employees of a company).
What you describe is already happening.... it's called niche marketing... and has been for decades. In fact you support my statement that typical users don't need a generalized solution. They need several niche targeted appliances.
My first niche target was inclusive of the largest group (which you won't find in an online demographic... as hey are mostly offline), whom need to do electronic-connected versions of the things they've always done. There are other niches out there of course, I'll leave it to marketers to find them and cater to their needs.
Average people don't need PCs
on
The Dying PC Market
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They need applications.
People need something to do personal finances, write up school homework, manage their photos and music and to send emails and surf the web.
Average people need a nice powerful PDA in a sub-notebook form factor that can hook up to a large screen and they need a PDA/Phone that fits in their pocket that can sync up with their full size PDA.
AVerage people don't care about writing their own software or customizing their experience (beyond wallpaper and ringtones)....
Well, when there isn't much you can afford to lose.. every little bug is critical.... if Vista had offered some serious new value to users, it would have gotten off a lot easier on the small things. WinFS anyone?
The best way to ensure privacy is actually to charge for the use of said data.... ie: for the person whose data is being used to get a check in the mail.
When companies have to pay for this they will be more circumspect about what data they collect and how much.
This would work for spam as well.... opt in and get paid. Currently someone else is getting paid to collect your data, leaving you out of the equation except as the victim/volunteer.
Advertisers and market researchers should be paying us for the opportunity to sell us something that is hopefully targeted at our interests, in hopes that we will pay them back many times by purchasing that item/service.
Little Snitch only covers outgoing requests from your system... ie: if you've downloaded some malware and it suddenly decides to send all your addressbook entries an email... Little Snitch will block it and ask you if you want to let it through. It does nothing for incoming requests.
Seriously what was [***] thinking? That young lady was going to have to go out and buy some sort of external, strapped on, interface.... talk about awkward.
While I agree with you in principle/theory (about president IQ), in practice it doesn't seem to work out (see Bush administration). I voted for the current president both times under the same philosophy, that his platform ran in parallel to my own interests but the reality of how he went about pursuing the goals of that platform has left me somewhat disappointed. Certainly his less than stellar IQ has something to do with this, his choice of VP (which could not be realized as the problem it was until too late), selection of other advisors and appointments to various positions (Gonzales) leads me to believe that even an earnest and vision driven leader can not lead effectively without a clear understanding of the issues himself - as those he appoints to do the understanding for him may and most likely will subvert his vision for their own and he will not understand enough about what they are doing to be the leader and will end up being lead instead.
A President whom has abdicated power through ignorance and willfully so (to add insult to that injury). We end up with no accountability within the administration and the various goals become subverted and weakened and yes even corrupted.
Let them, "Ask the audience", "phone a friend/lifeline" and "ask an expert"
would make for good TV if nothing else... hell, just get them all to go on a special episode of Who wants to be a millionaire or jeopardy... in fact that gives me an idea.... instead of allowing candidates to use their own money or donations for campaigning, they should have to 'win' the money in various contests of skill and knowledge;-p They could even bring in their proposed cabinet members and do it Survivor style with teams!!!!!
Don't worry, the EFF rebels will mobilize their T-47 Snowspeeders with a couple of opensource tow-cables and those AT&ATs will be toasted... old school.
Check out the Ext library if you ARE looking for user interface PLUS data constructs. It has a JQuery adapter that let's them work in tandem and I've had lots of luck integrating the two in mixed code, cross-browser clean.
I'm not too impressed with JQuery UI Interface library OTOH. seems bloated and buggy last time I tried it out.
i think you're being overly optimistic about being a pessimist.... if you expect the worst you are more likely to hesitate when an opportunity arises... often until it's too late, therefore fulfilling your own prophecy of failure reinforcing your pessimistic POV, whereas someone less risk averse will jump on the opportunity and benefit while looking for the next one to come along.
It's not about being happy, it's about being successful. Some of the happiest people are also the most deprived and most destitute. They have manufactured their happiness to compensate for lack of actual accomplishment... meaning that they aren't really happy, merely content with their 'lot in life'.
Any website that allows user content submission could create such a tag... there is a lovely JQuery script as an example of doing so which only requires a class name be applied to a link tag with the src pointing to any type of media. It is has default mediaplayer plugins for all types (Silverlight too), including an swf player for MP3, FLV and MPEG4. It even includes lightbox style viewing (modal window technique).
It's super simple to implement and would be an easy addition to any pseudo-markup language. FB could be using that or any number of unobtrusive techniques.
Iraq is a whole different beast of a situation. I don't agree with everything that has happened with Iraq, I don't agree with the official reason we invaded, I do agree that Saddam was due to be deposed regardless of WMD status... he was arbitrarily oppressing 75% of the population there and something needed to be done about it. The resulting power struggle over whom would be in charge and the infiltration by Al Quaeda troublemakers was handled poorly.
The US and allies should have pre-negotiated various agreements from the entire range of public leaders there before moving in and somehow guaranteed their continued participation in said treatise - probably a cut of oil profits would have worked in addition to guaranteed supply rationing an various public works assignments.
SO you are correct in this even though you probably didn't think it through past the point where the US used violence. I don't think anyone expected there would be such a division of power in the absence of Saddam, that it would turn into a tribal power struggle.. though the experts should have been able to surmise as much from the history of the region it's just not what modern political leaders are trained to deal with.
BUT just because the US failed in Iraq does not mean the rest of our foreign policy is also a failure. Hezbollah has just one situation to handle.... and they are failing... they should learn from the mistakes of others like the US if nothing else. If a super power like the US can't get a military based strategy to work then why do they think they can? Especially against a larger and better equipped opponent.
No. there is more to it than that. Hezbollah wants to be in power after the resolution of any conflict... therefore they want to have the most support of the populace and the easiest way to do that is to create an enemy for their potential supporters to fear... and then claim to be the only group that can oppose them.
The US does do that, we're doing it right now with Turkey, the Kurdish group and Iraq. We're doing it with North Korea. We've been doing it with Russia, China the whole European Union, with Canada with Mexico, with the entire rest of the world.... for the last 50 years. Imagine if the US didn't use treaty and negotiation. The entire world would be a freakin warzone.
I'll take the bait. Once a group has been classified as a terror group, due to active hostile activities, they get the treatment warranted by that classification, regardless of any other activities they may want to pursue. If Hezbollah wants to be a political group that gets respect by other political entities, they need to act as one and stop funding violence, stop passing out munitions to their members.
If their goals were to raise up their people and gain them the respect from the world they deserve, they would do so by treaty and negotiation not violence.
What they prove through the use of violence is that they are not interested in peaceful resolutions but in maintaining a culture of violence and strife. In the minds of the western world at least, they are nothing but a gang. We hear nothing of their ideology, their philosophy or their goals because all we can see are explosions, gunfire and chanting while waving guns in the air. We wouldn't accept this kind of behavior in our own countries from any group of people and that is the litmus test for any group around the world.
If we can't invite you to our house for dinner and trust you to behave yourself, then you don't get any respect.
Uhh... it's not that hard to do.... I've been doing it on sites I build by using a custom 404 page that grabs the url string and explodes it into parts (whether it's a single string or a / delimited url) and passes it to the site search with the end result being a page that says, Sorry we couldn't find what you're looking for, here are some possible matching pages." Then a list of search results with the string components as keywords.
This is certainly a useful thing to provide to your users as an error page but from a usability POV, you shouldn't be directing people to search this way. It's unintuitive and confusing to have multiple paths to do a search.
Weather would be easier to predict if it weren't for all those pesky people and their unpredictable behavior. Put a crap load of heat producing engines in a big long line somewhere for say 30 minutes every morning and there's got to be a net effect on the atmosphere, not to mention the carbon and other particles in the air, changing it's density.
I wonder if our weather prediction system could be impressively enhanced by integrating our traffic patterns into the equations.
There are a lot of comments about the method of energizing the lifter-robots... why not energize the tether itself, run current through it and let the lifter use Electromagnetic Induction and a capacitor as a battery to leach energy off as it goes?
4 months eh? How many months are there between Shuttle launches or even regular launches? 4 months would actually be reasonable if they were carrying a big enough payload, say 10 satellites that could be 'launched' from the end point by simply detaching from the carrier and using their own thrusters to navigate to their own unique positions, maybe delaying each detachment by a few hours so they could deploy to different points in the orbit path.
Back in 1995 AOL hit the net... it was an internally connected set of pages that covered everything you might want...with buddies, chat rooms, 'social networking', exclusive content (not public on the 'internet') and more.... I just don't see the difference between that experience and Facebook or MySpace or what have you. Their system is proprietary, your 'networks' only apply while on the site, logged in, consuming their advertising selection, logging your interests to their tracking systems and any content YOU create, actually belongs to them.
Tell me again why the public and the corporations didn't learn from the beast called AOL which has been dying a slow death for the last 10 years? Why aren't the press, the blogs and what have you calling them what they are... AOL 2.0 or Closed networks after AOL...
I don't get it. As far as I can tell it's just a big reservoir of virtual Kool Aid... it's not even real Kool Aid... just a big waste of time and energy that all goes to pay a few people mega salaries and a bunch of other people mediocre salaries. It also accomplishes nothing for the greater good, it's worse than a sitcom or American Idol.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the Radiohead fans were just more appreciative... if you lowered your price or allowed people to pay an arbitrary amount (while offering a support price for $25) you might find more people willing to pay.
You should set up an A B test page that randomly picks between two options... $25 or $10 and see if you get more buyers at $10... and of course see if it's statistically enough that you make more money at the lower price due to volume of sales.
Sorry i was responding to an article submission which clearly was talking about a majority of average people, by average I mean typical and by typical I mean what they do on a daily basis as individuals (as opposed to employees of a company).
What you describe is already happening.... it's called niche marketing... and has been for decades. In fact you support my statement that typical users don't need a generalized solution. They need several niche targeted appliances.
My first niche target was inclusive of the largest group (which you won't find in an online demographic... as hey are mostly offline), whom need to do electronic-connected versions of the things they've always done. There are other niches out there of course, I'll leave it to marketers to find them and cater to their needs.
They need applications.
People need something to do personal finances, write up school homework, manage their photos and music and to send emails and surf the web.
Average people need a nice powerful PDA in a sub-notebook form factor that can hook up to a large screen and they need a PDA/Phone that fits in their pocket that can sync up with their full size PDA.
AVerage people don't care about writing their own software or customizing their experience (beyond wallpaper and ringtones)....
Well, when there isn't much you can afford to lose.. every little bug is critical.... if Vista had offered some serious new value to users, it would have gotten off a lot easier on the small things. WinFS anyone?
The best way to ensure privacy is actually to charge for the use of said data.... ie: for the person whose data is being used to get a check in the mail.
When companies have to pay for this they will be more circumspect about what data they collect and how much.
This would work for spam as well.... opt in and get paid. Currently someone else is getting paid to collect your data, leaving you out of the equation except as the victim/volunteer.
Advertisers and market researchers should be paying us for the opportunity to sell us something that is hopefully targeted at our interests, in hopes that we will pay them back many times by purchasing that item/service.
Little Snitch only covers outgoing requests from your system... ie: if you've downloaded some malware and it suddenly decides to send all your addressbook entries an email... Little Snitch will block it and ask you if you want to let it through. It does nothing for incoming requests.
Seriously what was [***] thinking? That young lady was going to have to go out and buy some sort of external, strapped on, interface.... talk about awkward.
While I agree with you in principle/theory (about president IQ), in practice it doesn't seem to work out (see Bush administration). I voted for the current president both times under the same philosophy, that his platform ran in parallel to my own interests but the reality of how he went about pursuing the goals of that platform has left me somewhat disappointed. Certainly his less than stellar IQ has something to do with this, his choice of VP (which could not be realized as the problem it was until too late), selection of other advisors and appointments to various positions (Gonzales) leads me to believe that even an earnest and vision driven leader can not lead effectively without a clear understanding of the issues himself - as those he appoints to do the understanding for him may and most likely will subvert his vision for their own and he will not understand enough about what they are doing to be the leader and will end up being lead instead.
A President whom has abdicated power through ignorance and willfully so (to add insult to that injury). We end up with no accountability within the administration and the various goals become subverted and weakened and yes even corrupted.
Let them, "Ask the audience", "phone a friend/lifeline" and "ask an expert"
;-p They could even bring in their proposed cabinet members and do it Survivor style with teams!!!!!
would make for good TV if nothing else... hell, just get them all to go on a special episode of Who wants to be a millionaire or jeopardy... in fact that gives me an idea.... instead of allowing candidates to use their own money or donations for campaigning, they should have to 'win' the money in various contests of skill and knowledge
seriously, is it such a bad idea?
Don't worry, the EFF rebels will mobilize their T-47 Snowspeeders with a couple of opensource tow-cables and those AT&ATs will be toasted... old school.
Cartman? is that you?
Check out the Ext library if you ARE looking for user interface PLUS data constructs. It has a JQuery adapter that let's them work in tandem and I've had lots of luck integrating the two in mixed code, cross-browser clean.
I'm not too impressed with JQuery UI Interface library OTOH. seems bloated and buggy last time I tried it out.
i think you're being overly optimistic about being a pessimist.... if you expect the worst you are more likely to hesitate when an opportunity arises... often until it's too late, therefore fulfilling your own prophecy of failure reinforcing your pessimistic POV, whereas someone less risk averse will jump on the opportunity and benefit while looking for the next one to come along.
It's not about being happy, it's about being successful. Some of the happiest people are also the most deprived and most destitute. They have manufactured their happiness to compensate for lack of actual accomplishment... meaning that they aren't really happy, merely content with their 'lot in life'.
Any website that allows user content submission could create such a tag... there is a lovely JQuery script as an example of doing so which only requires a class name be applied to a link tag with the src pointing to any type of media. It is has default mediaplayer plugins for all types (Silverlight too), including an swf player for MP3, FLV and MPEG4. It even includes lightbox style viewing (modal window technique).
It's super simple to implement and would be an easy addition to any pseudo-markup language. FB could be using that or any number of unobtrusive techniques.
One string to rule them all, One string to find them, One string to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Iraq is a whole different beast of a situation. I don't agree with everything that has happened with Iraq, I don't agree with the official reason we invaded, I do agree that Saddam was due to be deposed regardless of WMD status... he was arbitrarily oppressing 75% of the population there and something needed to be done about it. The resulting power struggle over whom would be in charge and the infiltration by Al Quaeda troublemakers was handled poorly.
The US and allies should have pre-negotiated various agreements from the entire range of public leaders there before moving in and somehow guaranteed their continued participation in said treatise - probably a cut of oil profits would have worked in addition to guaranteed supply rationing an various public works assignments.
SO you are correct in this even though you probably didn't think it through past the point where the US used violence. I don't think anyone expected there would be such a division of power in the absence of Saddam, that it would turn into a tribal power struggle.. though the experts should have been able to surmise as much from the history of the region it's just not what modern political leaders are trained to deal with.
BUT just because the US failed in Iraq does not mean the rest of our foreign policy is also a failure. Hezbollah has just one situation to handle.... and they are failing... they should learn from the mistakes of others like the US if nothing else. If a super power like the US can't get a military based strategy to work then why do they think they can? Especially against a larger and better equipped opponent.
No. there is more to it than that. Hezbollah wants to be in power after the resolution of any conflict... therefore they want to have the most support of the populace and the easiest way to do that is to create an enemy for their potential supporters to fear... and then claim to be the only group that can oppose them.
The US does do that, we're doing it right now with Turkey, the Kurdish group and Iraq. We're doing it with North Korea. We've been doing it with Russia, China the whole European Union, with Canada with Mexico, with the entire rest of the world.... for the last 50 years. Imagine if the US didn't use treaty and negotiation. The entire world would be a freakin warzone.
I'll take the bait. Once a group has been classified as a terror group, due to active hostile activities, they get the treatment warranted by that classification, regardless of any other activities they may want to pursue. If Hezbollah wants to be a political group that gets respect by other political entities, they need to act as one and stop funding violence, stop passing out munitions to their members.
If their goals were to raise up their people and gain them the respect from the world they deserve, they would do so by treaty and negotiation not violence.
What they prove through the use of violence is that they are not interested in peaceful resolutions but in maintaining a culture of violence and strife. In the minds of the western world at least, they are nothing but a gang. We hear nothing of their ideology, their philosophy or their goals because all we can see are explosions, gunfire and chanting while waving guns in the air. We wouldn't accept this kind of behavior in our own countries from any group of people and that is the litmus test for any group around the world.
If we can't invite you to our house for dinner and trust you to behave yourself, then you don't get any respect.
Uhh... it's not that hard to do.... I've been doing it on sites I build by using a custom 404 page that grabs the url string and explodes it into parts (whether it's a single string or a / delimited url) and passes it to the site search with the end result being a page that says, Sorry we couldn't find what you're looking for, here are some possible matching pages." Then a list of search results with the string components as keywords.
This is certainly a useful thing to provide to your users as an error page but from a usability POV, you shouldn't be directing people to search this way. It's unintuitive and confusing to have multiple paths to do a search.
Weather would be easier to predict if it weren't for all those pesky people and their unpredictable behavior. Put a crap load of heat producing engines in a big long line somewhere for say 30 minutes every morning and there's got to be a net effect on the atmosphere, not to mention the carbon and other particles in the air, changing it's density.
I wonder if our weather prediction system could be impressively enhanced by integrating our traffic patterns into the equations.
Damnit you've ruined the april fools submission I was gonna put out..
There are a lot of comments about the method of energizing the lifter-robots... why not energize the tether itself, run current through it and let the lifter use Electromagnetic Induction and a capacitor as a battery to leach energy off as it goes?
Is this not feasible for some reason?
4 months eh? How many months are there between Shuttle launches or even regular launches? 4 months would actually be reasonable if they were carrying a big enough payload, say 10 satellites that could be 'launched' from the end point by simply detaching from the carrier and using their own thrusters to navigate to their own unique positions, maybe delaying each detachment by a few hours so they could deploy to different points in the orbit path.
Back in 1995 AOL hit the net... it was an internally connected set of pages that covered everything you might want...with buddies, chat rooms, 'social networking', exclusive content (not public on the 'internet') and more.... I just don't see the difference between that experience and Facebook or MySpace or what have you. Their system is proprietary, your 'networks' only apply while on the site, logged in, consuming their advertising selection, logging your interests to their tracking systems and any content YOU create, actually belongs to them.
Tell me again why the public and the corporations didn't learn from the beast called AOL which has been dying a slow death for the last 10 years? Why aren't the press, the blogs and what have you calling them what they are... AOL 2.0 or Closed networks after AOL...
I don't get it. As far as I can tell it's just a big reservoir of virtual Kool Aid... it's not even real Kool Aid... just a big waste of time and energy that all goes to pay a few people mega salaries and a bunch of other people mediocre salaries. It also accomplishes nothing for the greater good, it's worse than a sitcom or American Idol.
huh sounds broken by design.... do Argentinians prefer it this way?