Marketing ≠ Advertising ≠ Sales
As a tech guy, it took me a lot longer than I like to admit to fully understand this. There is tons of money in advertising, but most of it is wasted: As the old saying goes, "I know half my advertising budget is wasted - the problem is I don't know which half!"
And for the record, the last one (sales) is what really matters. As another old saying goes, "Nothing happens until you get a purchase order."
Really aligning sales incentives with the company's goals is surprisingly rare, and seems much rarer now than it was 20 years ago becasue of digital media.
I did a search (not on Google) for an unusual sensor the other day. I found a candidate and went to their web site and looked at some data sheets. All of a sudden, I see ads for this company on every page with Google ads (and ther are a LOT of those!)
I feel sorry for the company - obviously, Google hasn't been able to place those ads because its such a niche product and need. So once they "got a live one", they started serving me this company's ads *everywhere* (and I research and browse a *lot*).
I'm pretty sure I was perhaps the only target of their entire ad budget for the month - I was literally served ads for this tiny company *thousands* of times.
Note that only Google gained here - the ads didn't make me any more likely to buy a product I already knew about (and won't need for months in any case), and they did nothing to actually help the company reach more potential buyers. But the ad inventory was placed, and no doubt, each superfluous impression dutifully billed for...
EVERY well-designed IoT device works this way. It's absolutely required for any kind of safe OTA firmware updates, especially fro any kind of infrastructure equipment, where physical access to the hardware is not at all guaranteed.
Yeah, I am not sure if they use the same standards for consumer electronics though. In our case it was for trucks that could be in very remote locations.
It's the 21st century: All computers should do Base10 math by default. We have cycles to burn, and some ARM and IBM CPUs even have decimal math instructions.
Only true propellerheaded programmers should ever see or care about binary floating point issues. NB: I do massively scalable wireless data collection networks for IoT (using variously, floats, doubles, and half-precision, as called for by their use case), so I'm one of those people, but ordinary folks and users should never, ever, be impacted by binary imprecision.
Mee, too. And that's why I've made my peace with the idea of never again buying a new car. They're all garbage quality, outrageously expensive, and effectively unrepairable, anyway, so it's not a big loss. Probably most cars and trucks older than about 2018 are safe, I figure...
In many places in Europe, older cars are not viable on account of emissions legislation. So, if you want to drive with an older car, you will have to pay a pretty large daily fee to do so. This is done in the name of pollution.
I would expect this legislative approach will be rolled everywhere.
> Drive a non-compliant vehicle anywhere in London and you pay £12.50 for the day. Check your vehicle first — most newer cars pay nothing — then pay for the day or set up Auto Pay with TfL.
I get it - I'm just telling you what the cost in London is. Most people can't stick paying that amount just to drive their old car. Most people upgrade.
For me, this is another example of how corporations + governments work together to artificially create new markets with the consumer picking up the tab. In this case, car maker sales are boosted by legislation that punishes ownership of perfectly viable cars.
I long for a future in which we can do what we did 20 years ago, when we just had double-DIN radio sockets in the dash so we could just choose, buy, and upgrade the car's stereo and touchscreen/phone interface at will.
I used to be an architect with a bag of pro certifications for the world's largest AWS services provider/developer/reseller (we even did a lot of work for Amazon.com themselves). I gave it up a few years ago when it became clear that for most people, moving OUT of the cloud was a far better move than moving IN.
In a lot of ways, I really love AWS, but most of the high-value services are increasingly flaky and questionably supported, and nearly all of them have (often not very obvious) lock-in barbs.
For a while, cloud native development actually made sense. But as Cloud services have converged to become just big Kubernetes providers with API sprinkles (whose syntax is often more vinegary than sugary), there is less and less value there.
Add to that that almost no companies really need a huge cloud-based system to run their businesses, and that $500-2500 computers literally outstrip the performance of supercomputers from around the turn of the century in every respect, and there is less and less real need for cloud services...
That's funny, I've NEVER, not even once, encountered ANY app from any company, in any business, that is easier or more efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. (So long as the human behind the counter is not also hamstrung by dreadful Indian crapware...)
Seriously, like most people, I have dozens of apps on my phone, forced on me by various needs. The ONLY one that makes anything easier or better is my password manager, which I have to have to safely keep and lookup the logins and passwords for all the damn apps...
I dunno. It's so hard to get a plain ordinary brewed coffee at Dunkin these days, the kind of coffee I used to get there back in the 1980s. On the app I could actually pick one out, in person I'm likely to have a teenager give me something else and then have a nervous breakdown when I point out the one thing I care about on their digital signs: "If we get your order wrong we'll re-do it"
I pretty much exclusively drink black coffee or plain espresso and I’ve yet to encounter any issues getting it.
I have seen lots of complaints and memes to this effect, but never has it been my lived experience. I’ve also never had an issue with politely saying “excuse me, I actually ordered X and I got Y by mistake.” No nervous breakdown at all
I grew up in New Hampshire where it is almost as much as a religion as it in Massachusetts. We had one in Ithaca for a short time when I was in grad school which didn't last very long, I remember sitting there while a schizophrenic woman told me that the mob ran absolutely everything in New York, it was closed a long time, then a Thai restaurant moved in and then, decades later, a Dunkin moved in next door.
Early on I learned that the P&C supermarket made better donuts so when a dunkin opened across the street I wasn't so interested. And of course Dunkin used to be known for good coffee but now you can find good coffee anyhwhere except for a Starbucks and Collegetown Bagels.
The car rental desk at airports is one of the worst customer experiences I've ever seen. It's sometimes worse than what seems possible. It's sometimes bad in ways that don't even make sense.
The web browser experience in the browser is dramatically superior to that in the app, which doesn't even let you copy and paste media, for instance to text to others. X wants to force you to do that through a link back to them. Nope.
Most Apps are just emasculated and spyware-infested WebApps version of the website, anyway. Why not just use the Browser and get the real experience?
>The web browser experience in the browser is dramatically superior to that in the app, which doesn't even let you copy and paste media, for instance to text to others. X wants to force you to do that through a link back to them. Nope.
An eye-opener like this is the reddit /s/ share links, which I assume come from copying in the app. They're everywhere, and they never open correctly for me unless maybe ironically I open them up in tor to get the actual thread
I contacted him a number of years ago about his R-12 replacement for my old 1975 Ferrari, rather than converting it. It worked perfectly - better than Freon-12, even. Which is the only reason the EPA refused to allow it to be widely used. His web site (ghgcool, IIRC, I'm sure long gone by now) taught me that you can also mix butane and isopropane as a superior drop-in substitute for R-12, but he didn't pursue that approach because he knew that the EPA would kill it on safety grounds - even though it was only slightly more flammable than R-12 with the required compressor oil mixed into it.
George was a really interesting guy, a true hacker's hacker, and I truly enjoyed talking with him.
There is no grand conspiracy. Every major gaseous hydrocarbon also tend to usable as refrigerants but tend to be extremely flammable, while most every chlorofluorocarbon tends to inflammable but extremely toxic under deflagration forming nerve agents like phosgene and acid vapors like HF and HCl. Thus, the primary tradeoffs are cost, flammability safety, deflagration safety, ozone destruction potential, and global warming potential.
The problems of conversion include in/compatibly of lubricants and refrigerants with seals and the density, boiling points, and latent heat of vaporization of replacements. The R-12 to R-134a conversion process was simpler but typically included different lubricants, orifice, and o-ring seal materials. I don't see how R-12 to a hydrocarbon or admixture of R-290/600a isn't a magical tall tale without proper math, equipment, and understanding of HVAC operating principles.
And for the record, the last one (sales) is what really matters. As another old saying goes, "Nothing happens until you get a purchase order."
Really aligning sales incentives with the company's goals is surprisingly rare, and seems much rarer now than it was 20 years ago becasue of digital media.
reply