The worst part is their decision to make this change in the first place, combined with the big hike in pricing. They're lumping two completely different types of customers into one: transactional emails and newsletter/marketing. They are not even close to the same thing, and the vast majority of people using only Mandrill (transactional emails) will probably never use the MailChimp product. If they wanted to, they would have already signed up for MailChimp.
Mandrill used to be pretty cheap and it was free small services that didn't need to send more than 12k emails per month. Now they're forcing everyone to pay in blocks of 25,000 sent emails for $20. That means if I have a very small website and only send out 500 emails per month, I'm paying the same amount as someone who sends 25,000 emails in a month. That amounts to $0.04 and $0.0008 cents per-email respectively, so sending my 500 emails costs 50x more per-email than someone sending 25,000 emails. The pricing system just doesn't make sense and the lack of a free tier is unfortunate.
Another bad part is simply migrating to a new service. Most users can probably migrate in under an hour if they're only using Mandrill as a relay, but there are obviously users who use all of Mandrill's services (i.e. templates) and the migration will take a lot longer.
Completely agree with all of your points. I just finished migrating from Mandrill to a new Sendgrid account and it was pretty seamless (although I had a head start because I have used Sendgrid before). It took me about 45 minutes to update everything, including: creating an account, adding appropriate DNS records for whitelisting, and updating my application and server settings.
It's extremely unfortunate that we have to do this, but no way would I stay with Mandrill after this decision.
Why is that interesting? I have quite a few sites where I'd rather keep my commercial cert (which expires every 12 months), as opposed to a beta cert that expires every 3 months.
I got the same feeling reading the article, but you have to realize that it's written by a self-proclaimed "total novice." There's obviously going to be some misuse of poker concepts and terminology.
I've never taken the class, but as someone who plays semi-professionally, it sounds like the class would be a great start for someone who has played poker recreationally and is looking to understand some of the basic strategies of tournament poker. It might turn a losing recreational player into a small winner at lower stakes, but it by no means would all of a sudden make them some sort of professional.
It sounds like the course introduces concepts that would otherwise take a while to learn by yourself (M, implied odds, etc); however, understanding those concepts alone won't make you a winning player. Experience and surrounding yourself with other successful players are the two biggest factors. Most online pros have literally played millions of hands and have other poker friends to discuss strategy with. If you don't have those two things it's very difficult to succeed playing poker professionally.
