273 karma · joined July 27, 2012
Nowadays, by volume most of the spam I see seems to be trying to get people to sign up for trading "secrets" or algorithms or free pips, largely focused on Forex markets.
I wonder what changed in the world of weird spam scams to make the content shift in that way.
I feel like I noticed the existence of this sector of finance primarily a few years ago because my spam folder stopped being about "v1agra" and Nigerian Prince scams and suddenly 90% the email scams there were about Pips and Forex algorithms.
I wonder if there's a difference based on how many of those companies were selling mostly actual hardware infrastructure, which has just gotten cheaper and more commoditized over time, versus those which had actual differentiated software.
Both still got hit hard of course, a bubble's a bubble, but I wonder who did substantially worse?
On the other hand, in the current startup economy the pickaxe bubble is almost as big as the gold mining bubble, but I think it still probably applies more than it doesn't.
I get it as a pure branding exercise if you just think about what Microsoft brands have equity and history, but it still strikes me as funny in terms of what the words actually mean.
When you don't know that many people who would even ever be on Secret, which is true right now about anybody who doesn't work in Silicon Valley, then it becomes almost completely transparent just because you know who your friends are. The anonymity model is a joke outside of the tech bubble.
Seems rich coming from the guy who founded Paypal, which was widely loathed and seen as pretty stagnant in the payments space after it achieved dominance over that market.
iCloud requires the App Store, so that’s out. But we have great news. We never want to short-change our paying customers, so we’ve spent many months working on Panic Sync, our own super-easy, super-secure syncing solution that gives you power over your data. And Panic Sync will work between Panic apps—Coda and Diet Coda to start. And Panic Sync is free. In short, we’ll trade you iCloud for something great."
That said, I am not an expert on CPU virtualization but I did notice that the new plans are differently phrased than the old ones here. The old plans all talked about 8 CPU cores with various 1x, 2x priority levels (https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/09/linode-nextgen-ram-upgrad... for examples), while the new plans all talk about 1, 2, etc. core counts.
Could anyone with more expertise here tell me whether this is a sneaky reduction in CPU power for the lower tiered plans, or just a simpler way of saying the same thing as the old plans?
Comixology, whether due to temperament or just due to size and leverage, was playing fairly nice with the existing comics ecosystem. Now, they're owned by a middleman that makes Diamond look positively cute by comparison, and one with a fairly explicit goal of crushing all local shops of all types.
Am I correct in my history that it's really with the touchscreen version that Microsoft fell on it's face? That's when I recall hearing super toxic reviews.
The earliest De La Soul albums were jam packed with samples that wound up getting them hit with a few lawsuits/out-of court settlements that severely hampered their ability to release this music in various new media/formats. They're definitely an artifact of the more wild-west times of hip-hop sampling.
The value proposition vs. the thermostadt seems less "smart vs. dumb" or "ugly vs. pretty" than "comprehensible vs. incomprehensible", or "infuriating vs. not infuriating".
Otherwise, it's just faking it.
If she has been fired because they're being DDoSed, that's a miserable precedent for anyone who works at a tech company.
My experience with this kind of thing is that these tools are flexible enough that people can stretch them beyond their intended purposes, but it's usually rougher than just finding the appropriate tool.
Specifically designed blogging engines become general purpose CMSes when people stretch and tweak them enough, and likewise people stretch CMSes into crude app frameworks, but you generally wind up fighting the tool about as much as building with it.
Anyhow, back to our regular discussions of what Fondleslabs are going to conquer the market in 2013.
I could not concentrate on any points made in this article because the repeated use of that term was wildly offputting.
"In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck helped repopularize jazz at a time when younger listeners had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single. His quartet’s 1959 recording of “Take Five” was the first jazz single to sell a million copies."
He got a jazz record up the pop charts at a time when that was not really something that was happening.
1) Awareness raising. A lot of people are partially or completely unaware of what laws are on the ballot, what initiatives actually mean and what the stakes are.
2) Driving turnout. This is actually probably much more important than #1. If you look at the statistics, the percentages of eligible voters who actually vote in elections is not incredibly high. Money can be used to ensure that people who are sympathetic to your cause are properly registered to vote, know where their polling places are, even literally give them transportation if they don't have it. For this issue, to take an example, it is extremely likely that college students are overwhelmingly for gay marriage, but a lot of them are not yet registered to vote, or are from out of state and haven't re-registered in Washington, so this kind of money lets pro-Marriage organizations have a heavy presence on campuses getting kids registered in the state, telling them where they need to go and when to vote, possibly even renting busses or vans if polling places are inconvenient for campuses.