Amazing how much stories there are comparing Zynga and EA while Zynga is in the quiet period just before their IPO and are unable to comment. Judging from the number of ex-EA employees on the current Zynga roster, I expect that this is a EA sponsored hit piece.
AllThingsD has a series of articles on this where they talk about the multiple attempts of a Facebook phone. They investigated creating a phone from scratch (hardware/software/distribution/carriers/etc.) and eventually gave up. The newest attempt is the one that's leaking out now with HTML5 Facebook layer on top of Android with HTC building the hardware.
I just don't see this working out for well for Facebook. History is littered with examples of successful software companies that thought their brilliance extended to hardware. It almost never works out; they inevitably rediscover not only that hardware is an order of magnitude more challenging to get to market than software, but customers are much less forgiving about flaws and bugs when they can't be fixed with a simple update.
It's not just software to hardware transition that is hard, but web app to consumer device. Right now, Facebook controls all updates and can make all changes completely under their control. With a Facebook phone, any update will need to go through the phone manufacturer and the carrier to get it out. And we have seen how hard it is for Google to get phones up to the latest release.
Judging from my Google+ feed, everyone else has already jumped. They had a golden window of opportunity with great press and they not only blew it, but they intentionally blew it. No API, the real name idiocy, it's almost as if they wanted to have a social network without having to actually understand how people use a social network.
Shouldn't Google+ worry more about getting people communicating with each other before they start throwing businesses on to the platform? Where is the API?
You are right. The Droid Eris is unusual for an HTC. It came out 2 versions behind and only got one update (though it was a big one). Possibly HTC figures if you bought a 1.5 phone in late 2009 (after 2.0 was out) you just don't care about the version. Their reputation comes from the MyTouch and the EVO. The HTC Hero also is pretty tragic.
You're right those are great commercials. HTC also does a wonderful job of keeping their phones up to data and has a great reputation. Had Verizon not signed Apple I would have gotten an HTC.
I just wish they did battery life.
My wife has an HTC (the Droid Eris) and she would disagree about HTC keeping their phones up to date. She is stuck on Android 2.1 which means she can't even move her apps to the SD card. I rooted her phone and put Cyanogen mod on it, but it's not one of the main phones supported by Cyanogen mod, so it takes awhile for new releases of that to get to her. And after seeing that the iPhone 3GS (which was released before her phone) is still being supported and getting new releases, she decided that her new phone would be the iPhone 4S.
“One thing we must be absolutely clear on is that our analysis does not find any inherent fault with the Android platform,” WDS vice president of Marketing Tim Deluca-Smith said.
Only 2x? that is actually pretty good (cheap). The margins there have to be pretty tight. I am a pretty well paid IT worker at around $37 an hour (80K a year). When I contract it is for $125 an hour, $100 on the low end. The overhead on taxes and administrative costs is so friggin high that we break even on the $100/hr jobs.
What you get with contractors is freedom from salaries, benefits, leave, and liability. Depends on what you are wanting. As someone who has worked for the state, I can say the contractors we hired were worth 3-4 internal employees. The contractors have incentive, the in-house never did, they got paid the same no matter how hard they worked, just as long as they kept that seat warm between 8-5.
This is the biggest reason why they have contractors. At the end of a project, you say bye to the contractors. You can't easily do that to employees.
My company has a lot of contractors (at least 2-1 contractors to employees). The reason why is that when the economy goes down and money dries up, we cut the contractors. It has to be a really long dry spell before we start cutting employees.
Parent-Teacher Conferences only let the parents talk to the teacher about how the child is doing in school. There is no way for the parent to know if issues in the classroom are from poor learning on the child's side or poor teaching on the teacher's side. I've dealt with both sides where I've had to complain to the teacher about how they were teaching my child and also make sure the child knows what's expected of them in the teacher's classroom. And it is hard to tell at times.
The corporate standard version for Crystal Reports was so old, the version wasn't even listed on their website.
They were creating classic ASP (not.Net) applications as recently as 2005.
The most recently approved version of Visual Studio is... 2005.
There are still active VB6 programmers in the company.
Most of my department uses VSS 5 (yes 5, not 6).
The main corporate Java web app servers were Java 1.4 until last year.
On the other hand, if you come work for my sub-group, we've recently decided to screw corporate standards. We use mercurial, continuous integration with Hudson, Glassfish, latest version of Eclipse IDE, Java 6 and jQuery. None of this is corporate "approved", but we get high marks from our users!;-)
I think you work at my company. We just moved to Java 5 last year and are starting to decomission the VB6 apps. Just a couple years ago we finally moved to subversion from CVS (I got a lot of strange looks when I brought up DCVS systems). But my group keeps pushing the envelope and slowly changing the standards.
"We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. "
That manager was named Richard Earl Blee and he is now the subject of a documentary by Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, of secrecykills.org, who confirmed his identity using techniques right out of the 70s film All the President's Men.
They had an FBI Associate Director feed them information?
Better yet, why not bar all forms of golden parachute compensation. If the CEO is fired, they're FUCKING FIRED, not given a huge handjob on the way out the door.
Our corporate culture rewards failure rather than success, which is why our economy sucks so badly.
I disagree. We spend too much time rewarding success that we don't allow people (or companies) to make mistakes when they are trying new things. I want companies that take chances and try new things. Not companies that stick with the same thing over and over since then the CEO can't be blamed when the world changes and they're left behind.
I use Google Desktop Search at work. The IT people keep threatening to shut it down (but I guess Google beat them to it). It's immensely useful to help me sift through my email and files to find the one document that I need to forward to a colleague. But, due to security and privacy concerns, I can't have any of this data available online. If it's not running locally and stored locally, I can't use it.
If you go around the South Pole of the moon, you will see a giant excavation. That is where the all copies of the movie, DVD as well as the writer and director of Apollo 18 will be buried to make sure no one has to go through the burden of ever thinking about that movie ever again. Think of it as Atari ET on a larger scale.
Unfortunately, this technology probably won't get to far after people read the word 'radioactive', even though I'd hazard to guess that 8g of Thorium probably has less environmental and health impact than 7,500 gallons of gasoline. Otherwise it sounds awesome. Is there another word for 'radioactive' we can use to get rid of the negative connotation?
This is a great way to get iOS devices into Enterprises. Companies can develop their own apps and distribute them to users without having to worry the overhead and publicness of the Apple App Store.
If taxes must be collected on online retail, there is only one sensible place to lay the burden -- on shipping. The shipping companies are already well equipped to handle per-state pricing structures and already have the computer infrastructure to easily add to a new line item.
This would my suggestion as well. Tax all packages. They use physical infrastructure in the state, not Amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
I told him not to buy that app.
Amazing how much stories there are comparing Zynga and EA while Zynga is in the quiet period just before their IPO and are unable to comment. Judging from the number of ex-EA employees on the current Zynga roster, I expect that this is a EA sponsored hit piece.
AllThingsD has a series of articles on this where they talk about the multiple attempts of a Facebook phone. They investigated creating a phone from scratch (hardware/software/distribution/carriers/etc.) and eventually gave up. The newest attempt is the one that's leaking out now with HTML5 Facebook layer on top of Android with HTC building the hardware.
I just don't see this working out for well for Facebook. History is littered with examples of successful software companies that thought their brilliance extended to hardware. It almost never works out; they inevitably rediscover not only that hardware is an order of magnitude more challenging to get to market than software, but customers are much less forgiving about flaws and bugs when they can't be fixed with a simple update.
It's not just software to hardware transition that is hard, but web app to consumer device. Right now, Facebook controls all updates and can make all changes completely under their control. With a Facebook phone, any update will need to go through the phone manufacturer and the carrier to get it out. And we have seen how hard it is for Google to get phones up to the latest release.
Most studies (such as http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7910075.stm) have shown that texting actually increases skills.
It leads to poverty, unemployment, and protests in the US.
And the living expenses won't be lower for much longer when companies realize they can charge you what they want and enough consumers will pay.
So, you believe people making $4/hr will still pay whatever companies want them to pay? With what money?
The API is at https://developers.google.com/+/api/
D
From the link: "The Google+ API currently provides read-only access to public data." Or as Steve Yegge refers to it: "the Stalker API".
Judging from my Google+ feed, everyone else has already jumped. They had a golden window of opportunity with great press and they not only blew it, but they intentionally blew it. No API, the real name idiocy, it's almost as if they wanted to have a social network without having to actually understand how people use a social network.
Shouldn't Google+ worry more about getting people communicating with each other before they start throwing businesses on to the platform? Where is the API?
You are right. The Droid Eris is unusual for an HTC. It came out 2 versions behind and only got one update (though it was a big one). Possibly HTC figures if you bought a 1.5 phone in late 2009 (after 2.0 was out) you just don't care about the version. Their reputation comes from the MyTouch and the EVO. The HTC Hero also is pretty tragic.
I stand corrected.
The Eris basically is the HTC Hero.
You're right those are great commercials. HTC also does a wonderful job of keeping their phones up to data and has a great reputation. Had Verizon not signed Apple I would have gotten an HTC.
I just wish they did battery life.
My wife has an HTC (the Droid Eris) and she would disagree about HTC keeping their phones up to date. She is stuck on Android 2.1 which means she can't even move her apps to the SD card. I rooted her phone and put Cyanogen mod on it, but it's not one of the main phones supported by Cyanogen mod, so it takes awhile for new releases of that to get to her. And after seeing that the iPhone 3GS (which was released before her phone) is still being supported and getting new releases, she decided that her new phone would be the iPhone 4S.
Maybe if he hadn't eaten meat, he wouldn't have been so selfish as to fake data.
Only 2x? that is actually pretty good (cheap). The margins there have to be pretty tight. I am a pretty well paid IT worker at around $37 an hour (80K a year). When I contract it is for $125 an hour, $100 on the low end. The overhead on taxes and administrative costs is so friggin high that we break even on the $100/hr jobs.
What you get with contractors is freedom from salaries, benefits, leave, and liability. Depends on what you are wanting. As someone who has worked for the state, I can say the contractors we hired were worth 3-4 internal employees. The contractors have incentive, the in-house never did, they got paid the same no matter how hard they worked, just as long as they kept that seat warm between 8-5.
This is the biggest reason why they have contractors. At the end of a project, you say bye to the contractors. You can't easily do that to employees.
My company has a lot of contractors (at least 2-1 contractors to employees). The reason why is that when the economy goes down and money dries up, we cut the contractors. It has to be a really long dry spell before we start cutting employees.
Parent-Teacher Conferences only let the parents talk to the teacher about how the child is doing in school. There is no way for the parent to know if issues in the classroom are from poor learning on the child's side or poor teaching on the teacher's side. I've dealt with both sides where I've had to complain to the teacher about how they were teaching my child and also make sure the child knows what's expected of them in the teacher's classroom. And it is hard to tell at times.
I've been in corporate IT for over 10 years now.
The corporate standard version for Crystal Reports was so old, the version wasn't even listed on their website.
They were creating classic ASP (not .Net) applications as recently as 2005.
The most recently approved version of Visual Studio is... 2005.
There are still active VB6 programmers in the company.
Most of my department uses VSS 5 (yes 5, not 6).
The main corporate Java web app servers were Java 1.4 until last year.
On the other hand, if you come work for my sub-group, we've recently decided to screw corporate standards. We use mercurial, continuous integration with Hudson, Glassfish, latest version of Eclipse IDE, Java 6 and jQuery. None of this is corporate "approved", but we get high marks from our users! ;-)
I think you work at my company. We just moved to Java 5 last year and are starting to decomission the VB6 apps. Just a couple years ago we finally moved to subversion from CVS (I got a lot of strange looks when I brought up DCVS systems). But my group keeps pushing the envelope and slowly changing the standards.
"We're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. "
That manager was named Richard Earl Blee and he is now the subject of a documentary by Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, of secrecykills.org, who confirmed his identity using techniques right out of the 70s film All the President's Men.
They had an FBI Associate Director feed them information?
Better yet, why not bar all forms of golden parachute compensation. If the CEO is fired, they're FUCKING FIRED, not given a huge handjob on the way out the door.
Our corporate culture rewards failure rather than success, which is why our economy sucks so badly.
I disagree. We spend too much time rewarding success that we don't allow people (or companies) to make mistakes when they are trying new things. I want companies that take chances and try new things. Not companies that stick with the same thing over and over since then the CEO can't be blamed when the world changes and they're left behind.
I use Google Desktop Search at work. The IT people keep threatening to shut it down (but I guess Google beat them to it). It's immensely useful to help me sift through my email and files to find the one document that I need to forward to a colleague. But, due to security and privacy concerns, I can't have any of this data available online. If it's not running locally and stored locally, I can't use it.
If you go around the South Pole of the moon, you will see a giant excavation. That is where the all copies of the movie, DVD as well as the writer and director of Apollo 18 will be buried to make sure no one has to go through the burden of ever thinking about that movie ever again. Think of it as Atari ET on a larger scale.
Unfortunately, this technology probably won't get to far after people read the word 'radioactive', even though I'd hazard to guess that 8g of Thorium probably has less environmental and health impact than 7,500 gallons of gasoline. Otherwise it sounds awesome. Is there another word for 'radioactive' we can use to get rid of the negative connotation?
How about "glowing"?
Is it that slow of a news day that a car crash makes it to the front page?
This is a great way to get iOS devices into Enterprises. Companies can develop their own apps and distribute them to users without having to worry the overhead and publicness of the Apple App Store.
If taxes must be collected on online retail, there is only one sensible place to lay the burden -- on shipping. The shipping companies are already well equipped to handle per-state pricing structures and already have the computer infrastructure to easily add to a new line item.
This would my suggestion as well. Tax all packages. They use physical infrastructure in the state, not Amazon.