Tesco was the first company to really do this right - there's a book called Scoring Points[1] that outlines this in details. By using the detailed profiles of customers, they learned that giving discounts on products customers cared about was much more valuable than just giving discounts based on vendor preference. A fan of Coca-Cola will come in to buy a Coke, but won't buy Pepsi, no matter if it's on sale or not.
Success comes in many flavors. The author's version of personal success is way more angled towards professional and business success, where I may put more emphasis on an amazing relationship with my children as a bigger factor of personal success. You can be successful by many measures, and have a growing, profitable, healthy business, without 70-80 hours a week. Are you not successful because it doesn't hit 1B in revenues?
These kind of articles frustrate me, as someone who already has a tendency to work too much at the expense of all other aspects of my life. Everyone has tradeoffs to make. The business tradeoff that Treehouse makes means that people have a higher likelihood of personal success in ventures outside of work, at what Mr. Carson sees is a minimal impact to the likelihood of business/professional success.
Can a company of people working 70-80 hour weeks be more successful than Treehouse's model? Sure. But I'd argue they're just as likely to be less successful. More code doesn't always mean more success, whatever the measure may be.
I don't work 70-80 hours per week and never advocated it. I leave the office at 6 pm. i see my kids, eat dinner with my wife and then put in a few hours rather than sit on the couch watching sitcoms.
I'd say it is entirely Apple's Execution. Someone used this machine before they pushed it out the door. Someone had to have gone, "this trackpad is just awful!" And yet, nothing changed about it, and they released it. It's hard for me to see another brand capturing such equity and such positive reputation when this happens over and over again. If there's a will, there's a way around the patents, etc.
Great point. Consumers are also heavily biased towards what they already know or see in similar devices - "oh, if it had a removable battery, I need that" or "I need it to vibrate when I type on it," and so on. They might all be valid desires by the consumer, but it doesn't mean it has to be there. Establishing the correct prioritization of features is the principle goal of these product development teams, and Apple seems to be winning there.
An unintended consequence would be limiting education based on financial ability - a school would not admit a lower income student as opposed to a higher income student. While this does occur in loans, and also in property taxes feeding school districts... to say someone can't go to college here because they don't have the money now is a tough argument. The great equalizer will have taken the final plunge into a wealth-based advantage.
Plenty of rather poor people were going to college 50+ years ago. They worked during the summers, or took a year or more off first to earn money and then went off to school.
The graph in the article show college costs up 300% in the last 21 years.
The economist[1] reports an 11x increase in college tuition from 1978-2011.
The problem is definitely _not_ that people can't get loans but rather that college is so expensive that it requires loans in the first place.
It might exclude the middle, but the truly needy tend to get scholarships to cover college costs. Scholarship programs might have to be rethought out to compensate for the lack of loans.
Also, from a design standpoint, the idea of using LEDs is being challenged - while the designer mentions a lack of snow build-up, the traditional lights do a good job of emitting enough heat to melt snow drift:
Well, last year not an inch of snow dropped in city. That short periods of snow times had long passed since the population of the city doubled in last 20 years.
True, but previously it has snowed quite heavily when I've been there in the winter, and the effect it has on traffic is quite big, mainly due to the steep hills and people not using decent chains on their tyres.
In Soviet^w Russia in recent years nearly all the traffic lights were replaced by LED ones. And they perform really well, and there is no such problem like snow obscuring them.
In most of them bottom wall is absent or tilted in such direction that snow or dust does not build-up there.
This doesn't seem immediately obvious to me. Care to explain? Incandescent lightbulbs are a time-proven technology with economies of scale behind them. They generate heat and light, which is what's required here. Seems ideal for the application.
Really? Even assuming that we absolutely need to heat up the lights to solve this problem, we only need to do it when there is enough snow on the light to be a problem, which means at most only during snowfall, realistically much less frequently than that. Even in New England during winter, you've gotta be talking under 10% of the time that this has to happen.
You seriously can't come up with a better way to solve this problem than replacing a very efficient, very robust light source with a very inefficient, very delicate one, secure in the knowledge that as it runs all year round, some tiny fraction of the huge amount of waste heat it generates will go towards melting snow?
Although I'll note in your defense that "incandescent lightbulbs" are more accurately described as "heat lamps", and one potential solution might well involve a specialized heat lamp which only activates when the light itself is obstructed.
A traffic light is already half of a snow sensor by virtue of being a light. If it's covered with snow, the snow will reflect light back. Add a few photoresistors and you're in business. It'd be the cheapest part of the whole project.
You can use a regular resistive heating coil. You can design a heating coil that will never burn out. LEDs themselves can last over 10 years. Thus the combination of led plus heating coil will last you more than ten years. Incadescents on the other hand burn out all the time especially when they need to be turned on and off very often, as in traffic lights. For an American city the upkeep of traffic lights is more expensive than the hardware. Also traffic lights that burn out will cause dangerous co fictions and may cause accidents.
How do cars defrost the rear windshield? Embedded heating elements in the glass. That's pretty proven, and easy to manufacture. The exact same thing could be used here.
That works for frost, but I still need to clear the windshield after it snows. I dunno how hot those defrosters will go if you really crank 'em, though...
Apropos of nothing, but this just made me look up "defroster" on Wikipedia... "For primary defogging, heat is generally provided by the vehicle's engine coolant via the heater core; fresh air is blown through the heater core and then ducted to and distributed over the interior surface of the windshield by a blower. This air is in many cases first dehumidified by passing it through the vehicle's operating air conditioning evaporator." Wikipedia makes everything so cool.
Those lights look like they have been specifically designed for catching snow. Move the glass in front of the lights to the end of the tubes, problem solved.
This is a really good point. To be fair though, Istanbul gets heavy snow maybe a week or two every year. I do agree with the grandparent on the wood veneer though. I guess they tried to make it look more ancient for the old city area.
People are worried about the cloud-killing PR mistake or security breach that will cripple the efforts to get data into these controlled data centers, so this makes perfect sense. Start the focus with something everyone will know: Music. If someone breaks into your music collection... oh no? I was keeping my Duran Duran passion a secret.
Once this catches on, any mistake won't be a crippling one or a business-critical error, just a little frustrating. Gradually promote the other cloud offerings afterward, even if they have been there the whole time. Tied in with Lion's auto-versioning options, this just means everything naturally goes to the cloud, and no one will ever think of it again.
As stated, this isn't to kill Windows, this is to kill the pain of buying more devices. This is the first step to build that confidence and show it off in something people will have fun with.
Indeed. To make your point more explicit: My girlfriend has my old iPhone 3G. Given that iCloud will not be supported on the 3G, she will have to buy a new phone once the MobileMe subscription runs out, to continue to use the handy synchronization features of MobileMe.
Now, it's just calendars and contacts, but as documents, "App state", etc. moves into iCloud, people will feel necessary to update to the latest device more often to be able to use iCloud in its fullest.
Every year you do not upgrade your device, you will miss out on more and more improvements, until your device becomes unsupported (the iPhone 3G was obsoleted well within 2.5 years).
iCloud and comparable offerings will make digital life easier for many people. But it will also be a lot harder to get out of the vendor grip. People will dislike these companies as much as they disliked Microsoft, but will be equally tied to their products.
MobileMe accounts are being extended to a year from now for free, before the service is shut off.
If the phone no longer meets her needs at that time, she can sell it to help fund a new one (or perhaps you will have yet another leftover from another upgrade of yours).
Even an old iPhone can still be used as an iPod, to play games on, and for some WiFi net activities. Old Apple phones have better resale value than any others I've seen.
It sounds like you're complaining about problems that are more hypothetical than real. If you really think that many users are being placed in a bad position, think of it as an opportunity to rescue them with some kind of great app / service that you create. Also, Steve said something yesterday about some open iCloud APIs.
We couldn't possibly help those users, because the MobileMe is built deeply into the system apps. On Android (and I don't want to sound like a fanboy too much here, although I'm sure I do), we could drop in a replacement calendar and email app to replace the system ones. On iPhone, that's a no go.
I can't find the article that originally referenced this... but the idea that Apple would buy a phone company was made obsolete with the AT&T service issues that were present in the United States. By commercially separating the Network from the Phone - a new concept for the carrier-lock in situation in the states - it removed a large segment of risk from the user experience. How many times have you heard "the iPhone is great, but AT&T has terrible service" or something else along those lines? It's a common argument.
People don't understand the difficulties of having lots of data on a large-scale network across thousands of miles of cities, countrysides, and elevation differences. They do understand if a computer or phone is slow, though. This way, there are problems, but it's not because of Apple and their immaculate product. Why tarnish your brand with something people won't understand?
If we look at the rise of easier and easier to use graphic design programs - Photoshop, Illustrator, and so on - we don't see a decreased relevance of experienced or quality graphic design professionals. Instead, the ability to get something, anything done that looks OK is much easier. The highest quality products are still produced by the highest quality individuals. The tool is an enabling device.
We can mirror this to programming, and IDEs. Visual Studio, for instance, takes a ton of the nitty-gritty details of programming out of the picture for a vast population of people looking to write software. The need for quality and very skilled programmers isn't any less relevant - they're just not needed for every piece of development like they used to be. This is how we're able to get way more software than before. The very skilled programmers are almost more important in order to facilitate more software to get pushed out, as there will require an increased expectation of quality from software and only a limited group who can produce or lead such a development effort.
None of this is a bad thing, but it's just a change in how things used to be done. As it used to be in the automotive world, not everyone has to be a full fledged mechanic to keep the car running - but for the big jobs, there is a definite demand for the higher skill. (Of course, computerization of the automobile is bringing this back around!)
I agree. Technical challenges are not always deal with issues of processing and memory. In case of web the real problem is scalability and communicating processes and system components. May be we will soon come up with some formalism and technologies that will make scalability a dumb problem but then we will have a new set of technical challenges to be solved. So the demand for highly skilled people who care about their work will only increase with time.
In my opinion it is wrong to assume that a language like Python is better than C. They are all independent of each other. Python is simply useless when it comes to real-time processing where hard deadlines are required, you cant chose anything except Ada or some flavor of C. They each have their strengths and that is why they are still alive.
That's not the point - it may be the easiest for the users, but it's not the easiest for the entire system. The system is primarily made up of the hosts of the data, which would be these private companies who would rather not deal with any potential ramifications for helping out a political movement that is, by its nature, revolutionary. It's the right idea for the activists to use these mediums, but it should not be expected to work long-term.
With all due respect, you're not thinking like an activist. Facebook certainly discourages this kind of behavior: they don't allow pseudonymous accounts, and there have been repeated problems with them shutting down human rights pages and groups. But it's the easiest way to reach people. So activism strategies adapt accordingly.
Back in 2009, for example, the key Mousavi Facebook page is run by somebody outside of Iran. Supporters who want to expose themselves publically can 'friend' the page and easily share information publically; but people who don't want to can view it without being on a list. Similar things are happening in Tunisia.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Scoring-Points-Winning-Customer-Loyalt...