kbeegle · HackerTrans

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Also available as an ebook: Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Str... iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/business-adventures/id89031... Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/business-adventures-john-bro... and Google, mentioned above.

kbeegle

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

I've been a Mac user going back to a Lombard Macbook and I remember when Apple used to really go on the attack against PC's before they switched to Intel. Examples are: Toasting the Pentium II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE6aKeK61A4 and Pentium II Snail: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ExNQ3iFhXc

During the Keynotes when Steve Jobs would show off the computers they'd run their Photoshop or really large Excel file tests to show just powerful their chips were. If I remember right, all of those tests were highly selective. For most regular computing tasks, I felt like PC's were faster.

In marketing, if you're in second place it doesn't hurt many times to attack first place. In the consumers minds, you're putting yourself on similar footing to the first place contender and then getting to highlight specific differences that make whatever case you want.

It many not be elegant but Amazon's promotions and Samsung's recent phone ads do illustrate differences between the products. They may not be the most important differences to a lot of people but the burden is on Apple to show that, not on competitors to follow a vague sense of fairness.

kbeegle

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

I also had similar results. On the searches where I chose something I knew about to search for, I always chose Google's results. On the one example where I chose a suggested example (Halloween Costumes) I chose Bing. My other searches were for a specific camera, the type of a battery used in an old film camera, a historic sail boat designer and a Rails method.

The two thoughts I had were: 1) Have the suggested examples been prescreened to favor Bing? 2) Do the Bing results favor a shallower explorations of topics while Google's favor more in depth ones?

kbeegle

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

I had forgotten about Canada's oil supplies. If I remember right, most of it's located in oil sands in Alberta. Extracting it and transporting it used to be more expensive than it was worth but they're doing more with chemical extraction techniques to pull out the oil. From what I've read, it left some pretty serious scars on the environment.

Also, looking back at the original article, I really wonder whether there's any production or efficiency benefit to what these 3rd party companies are doing to monitor levels. I kind of have the impression that they're feeding the real time demand of commodity markets and traders. Maybe there's something with pricing efficiency, but does that really make a difference outside of the commodity markets?

kbeegle

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Goldman Sachs statement isn't that surprising when you think about it from the perspective of countries and country size. Of the major oil producing countries, the only one larger than the U.S. is Russia (Canada's reserves are mostly natural gas). In addition to this midwest boom, the U.S. also has large reserves in Alaska and in Gulf Coast and it makes sense to deploy newer more expensive technologies to extract new oil reserves because the consumption is happening so close to the source and a stable political environment makes it worthwhile to make long term investments. Also, the difference is not as big as I first thought it was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produc....

On the pricing, I'm speculating a bit but I don't think the refineries issue is that major an issue for gas pricing. If you remember, during Hurricane Katrina, a number of refineries were shut down or damaged and prices did bump up a bit, but not dramatically so. I think the biggest factor is there's a lot more demand for oil on the world market. We typically hear about the growing number of cars in China and India as people's income rises and car costs drop but the same is happening all over the world. This week the BBC had a good article on the 180km traffic jams in Sao Paulo, Brazil. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19660765.

Oil is a global commodity and is fairly mobile so a demand increase in one part of the world raises prices everywhere. A sustained increase in demand all over the world raises prices a lot more.

kbeegle

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Before touch was a major major interface, Nik Software had developed an editing interface that was surprisingly good on touch devices. You essentially click a point on a photo and set the size of the area for edits to be applied to. The software will figure out regions in the photo similar to what you clicked on and then apply the edits. Creating SnapSeed on iOS really proved that the interface was perfectly suited to touch.

In Nik Software's case, it feels like the acquisition was a good balance between acquiring a team and acquiring patented technologies (http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&...).

You can see the interface in action on their website. Load the following link (http://www.niksoftware.com/colorefexpro/usa/index.php?view=h...) and then click on "Working with control points". It's in an embedded flash player so I can't give a direct link.

kbeegle

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Absolutely. I'm a non-programmer that had been working on picking up Rails a number of times without a good background in Ruby. Each time I'd run into one issue or another and not have enough knowledge to push past it.

I've put in a bit of time in Ruby and it's opened up Rails (and programming in general) for me more than I thought it would. The biggest advantage, besides just general programming, is reading other people's code and documentation. Recently, I've been exploring i18n (internationalization) in Rails. By going into time_ago_in_words helper, I was led to the distance_of_time_in_words helper and it's source code (https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/bd8a9701c27b4261e9d8dd84...). By understanding enough ruby, the Rails code became a wonderful source of documentation.

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