dieterrams

> He's not really pitching a new piece of technology at all. He's pitching an ad campaign, which in turn is about introducing consumers to a new piece of technology.

You seem to be getting hung up on the fact that Draper isn't actually a startup founder pitching his own product to investors. That's almost completely irrelevant. He is definitely pitching the product. In this case, he simply happens to be pitching the product back to the company who made it.

Pitching and advertising, while they have their differences, are fundamentally about the same thing: getting people to believe a product can make their lives better. If, in addition to tossing out numbers, you can make your potential investors believe you know how to connect with your market and truly understand their needs, so much the better. It doesn't have to be in tear-jerker form like Draper's presentation: it's about knowing how to frame the product.

And sure, it's a TV show, but it happens to be a fairly exceptional TV show built on a great deal of wisdom about what makes people tick. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Keep updating the game.

Edit: What kristofferR said, and prioritize players who aren't self-entitled. Persistence will pay off, either in sales for this game, or lessons learned for the next.

> But if I up vote, that doesn't let the person know I up voted it. Aren't we supposed to let people know that I care?

I can appreciate where you're coming from, but it's a tad egocentric: 99% of the time, knowing the username of someone who upvoted you just won't matter that much, and would just be a distraction. Suppose a comment with 60 upvotes also got 60 replies saying nothing but "I like" or some variation. That page is now flooded with what is effectively spam, making it harder for people who are trying to contribute to and/or read the discussion.

If you want to stand out, just telling someone that you liked what they wrote isn't going to do that. You've got to write something worthy of notice.

Funny sense of desert you've got there. Being good at marketing doesn't mean you deserve a shitstorm of FUD and anger, the vast majority of which isn't even coming from iPhone 4 owners. And while you've decided to focus on how Steve Jobs benefits, you've neglected to mention how those of us who actually use Apple products benefit. There's a reason their stuff constantly gets the highest consumer satisfaction ratings and accolades from all over. No other computer company even comes close.

And if you actually knew anything about Jobs, you'd know he spends most of his time agonizing over design, not scheming over ways to build hype.

Ugh. We know it's easy to intentionally reproduce the problem. But the only data anyone has suggests that, in practice, it doesn't seem to be affecting people much, just like I'm sure deathgrips aren't affecting BB users much. Can we move on from Antennagate now? Maybe talk about Erlang instead?

No, it's an incredibly ridiculous word to use. It's insane anybody here takes the idea seriously. Use Occam's Razor much?

If anyone else "dares"? What, like Apple's whole plan was to make competitors look bad if they publicize their facilities, as opposed to just doing damage control for the ass-whupping they've been getting in the press?

Does Steve Jobs have a curly mustache and monocle I don't know about?

I said what they were doing in the part you quoted. By dominating a field, they establish ample precedent that others like them can do so as well. This is not an intentional thing that they're doing. It's a byproduct. This phenomenon occurs all the time, for groups of all kinds.

To flip it around, think about nurses before male nurses became commonplace. What would run through your head, thinking about being a nurse? There are probably a lot of things that would stop you from taking the idea seriously, just because the profession was dominated by women and had hardly any men.

Hey, neat. An Apple comment by ergo98 that I agree with.

What they're doing is awesome, but it's not an excuse for the anti-competitive crap MS pulled, unless that was something they did for philanthropy's sake. But it does make up for it, I think.

> But what if it's true?

And what if it's not? What's wrong with resisting the idea until we actually know?

Yeah, there are deep biological differences, no doubt. But the idea that women were fundamentally incapable of X for biological reasons has been the norm in history, and the history of women has been repeatedly proving that they can, in fact, do X.

You've got this wrong. kaens did not claim that men and women are "fundamentally the same". He's saying, don't assume there are fundamental (crippling) differences.

All you've pointed out is that there are indeed fundamental differences of some kinds, but not of the sort kaens was talking about. The inconclusiveness you raise supports his point.

Edit: Wow. Downvoted. What on earth for?

Yeah, if that's an accommodation worth making for women with families, it surely is for men, too, given that they're increasingly sharing parenting responsibilities.

Of course it hurts them to have a huge sector of the economy seem like it's not a viable option.

People here seem to be using the fact that girls/women frequently "decide" against or don't "want" a career in tech to obscure the question of what determines why they decided that way or didn't want to pursue it, and whether those determinants are fair or beneficial.

A more extreme example that demonstrates what's wrong with how you guys are using "free", "decided", "wanted", etc. would be something like a minority "deciding" against running for president in a country where the majority is racist against his kind, even if he is free to attempt it. Note that I'm not claiming any moral equivalence here, or that the problem of females self-selecting themselves away from tech is primarily the result of discrimination. But there's a real sense in which the decisions being made, and the ideas of what someone wants for themselves, are being generated in less than optimal conditions.

That's just PhDs, though. What are the percentages for new profs?

There is no shortage of men demonstrating to younger males that they can make it in technology. This is what we get to take for granted, and as a result, aren't really aware of. Girls trying to figure out what they want, out of the set of options that they think are viable/promising, don't have this benefit, and needlessly self-select themselves out.

Really? Downvoted? I'd love to know what for. Is what I'm saying making people angry?

The protocol hasn't solidified yet. FaceTime calling via email addresses are still on the way.

Right, I wasn't denying #2. I'm just saying there can be no doubt that #1 is real, and more severe by far under the right conditions.

> If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren’t there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities?

There's no shortage of men in the humanities, nor in teaching once you get past the lower grade levels. In the US, at least.

The point of women in tech advocacy is that there are a variety of forces discouraging women into self-selecting themselves out of careers in technology. One is just the fact that there are so few women in tech to begin with. Another is that barely any can be considered high-profile. Then there are all the historical, cultural, and sociological factors.

This sort of advocacy is just an attempt to fight against those forces by establishing greater visibility and precedent for successful women in tech.

(As an aside, I think it'd be great if there were more female engineers in the dating pool.)

> It would help to distinguish between (1) antenna detuning because of bridging between the antennas and (2) attenuation because of having a lump of human body next to the antenna.

It is, without doubt, #1. Any confusion stems from the variety of ways in which it can fail to happen (variable conductivity of people, for one), or fail to have dramatic results (being in an area with strong signal).

If you're sufficiently conductive, there's a good chance you can reproduce the problem by walking into an Apple store and trying your hand. That's what I did, and there was a dramatic difference between bridging both antennas with just an inch of finger vs covering the left antenna with as much palm as possible. That wiped out any remaining skepticism I might have had.

Just return it and wait for the inevitable iPhone 4s with insulative coating.

If that's what they were really looking for, then they're really just testing whether you can figure out what they're really looking for, whether they know it or not. If you want someone to demonstrate their thought process, you give them a tricky problem and just tell them to solve it out loud. If it's a good problem, they're not going to be able to fake having an awesome thought process.

"I'd google it" is exactly the right answer, as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, it's never the answer interviewers want to hear. Regardless of whether they've asked good questions, it's invariably one of the most common responses interviewees will make when they don't know the answer. Whether or not the interviewer had a justified expectation that you should know the answer, "I'd google it" immediately gets you downranked by association with people who don't know their shit.

> If Google was seriously abusing its “gatekeepter” status, you’d expect to hear billions of complaints about anti-competitive behavior in those billions of searches.

Ah, because people are never duped. Google's done an incredible job creating a do-gooder image for itself, which shuts off people's warning systems. (For contrast, consider Microsoft's long-standing reputation for being ruthless, especially in the 90s.) To be sure, I don't think it's all image, but you'd be a fool to think do-gooder sentiments are the driving force behind that company.

Since Sullivan is so interested in pointing out cute similarities, here's a serious difference for you: Google is insanely profitable and has an extremely effective positive feedback system for acquiring power. The Gray Lady, meanwhile, is on the verge of collapse.

The problem is power, and there isn't nearly enough concern over how much of it Google has. Good on The New York Times for trying to raise it, I say. I don't know if I agree with their proposal, but this is a conversation that we need to be having.

And by the way, it's not really about Google as such. If it were Yahoo or Lycos or whoever else in Google's position, the same arguments would apply.

Nope. You're assuming that just because the search results are biased in one (useful) way, that they cannot be biased in any other way.

There's a big difference between ranking all possible results with a PageRank-style algorithm, and dedicating space at the top for results that come exclusively from you.

True. But the people making that analogy are attempting to transfer the life-threatening gravity of faulty cars onto, well, an antenna. The gross unfairness goes both ways.

That's part of it, sure. But it's not a justification. By definition, blowing something out of proportion is to exceed to the justifiably proportionate response.

Like I said, there are a variety of easy fixes. They range from being as cheap as a strip of electrical tape, to $30 for a bumper. If that's such a huge deal for you that it outweighs the merits of the phone, then return it, wait for a fix, or use another phone. I can think of hundreds of other things that deserve far more attention.

As for Apple's crappy response, by all means, call them out on it. This deserves a decent amount of attention, since it seems like a bad case of corporate denial. But at the end of the day, whether they cop to it or not isn't really going to change anyone's life.

Apple's done a crappy job dealing with the antenna fallout. At the same time, the press and other attention seekers are blowing this way out of proportion. I've seen some compare the iPhone 4's antenna issues to Toyota's accelerator disaster (which I always suspected was largely manufactured by the press and politicians), demanding a recall. That's just hilarious. At worst, they should give out free bumpers until they can fix the design.

It's still Consumer Reports' highest rated smartphone, and the antenna problem has a variety of easy fixes. I can't say I'm that impressed with the phone (for all its improvements, it's a big step back ergonomically), but most of the controversy is manufactured. I'm sure it's done wonders for pageviews, though.

If I'm not mistaken, you'll want to wait for the Game Dev version instead:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2825/game-developm...

E.g., button mashing.

That might be true, but I've gotten the impression that a lot of people who've made FU money aren't necessarily super skilled, but happened to do the right thing at the right time.

I can't give a comprehensive survey of everyone who's made FU money, but take Tim Ferris for example. He's not a whiz at building websites: he just knew to cash in on selling brain supplements online when that stuff was taking off.

Edit: I should point out that I don't think FU money is exclusively about being able to say "FU" to a jerk. I emphasized that aspect just to invert the comment I was responding to. FU money can also just be about ditching a career you're not that interested in (but may be highly skilled at, and otherwise locked into).