I’m going to say up front: I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy. That aside, I totally understand when people are incensed by their holier-than-thou fan club. The cult of Jobs is real, people: Having a conversation with one of company’s supporters can sometimes feel like a debate with a brick wall… or a Scientologist. In honor of these horrifyingly stuck up Apple fans and the people who have to put with them, here’s a compilation of crazy/stupid/ridiculous things you may hear while talking with someone who’s may or may not be in a committed relationship with their iPad.
If you’re still angry after watching that video, the second chapter of Shit Apple Fanatics Saygets even more snooty.
A number of Facebook pages are about to get less popular. The social network is cracking down on “Likes” that come from spambots, which are not known for their discerning tastes in entertainment or products. Despite this lack of refinement, bots have proven plenty capable of espousing positive opinions about…well, pretty much anything programmers tell them to. Concerned about the effect these fraudulent recommendations may have on the accuracy of their data, Facebook is bringing down the hammer in an attempt to ensure that only actual people are liking things their pages.
Overly liked pages are a concern for the company because it calls into question the worth of their database of people and their tastes. Being that this is the one and only product Facebook — and a number of other companies on the web — has to sell advertisers, maintaining the integrity of that data is a paramount concern for Zuckerberg and company. If their data about what people like and dislike isn’t reliable, the company quickly runs out of things to offer its base of advertisers. After all, while a spambot is perfectly capable of liking things, the purchasing power of those programs is notoriously limited… for now.
In addition to going after likes from spambots, which are pretty rare on the site, Facebook will also be deleting likes that come from compromised user accounts, from misleading ads that cause users to accidentally like a page, and to likes that were purchased in bulk, a practice the company has never endorsed.
All said and done, the company expects less than 1% of “Likes” to be affected by this latest swing of the banhammer. You can read the full statement from Facebook’s security team here.
(via MacWorld)
Should Mark Zuckerberg slowly phase advertising out of Facebook’s ecosystem?
It’s an inflammatory piece, so I didn’t include ‘fire’ or ‘Sandberg’ in the question title. http://pdobson.com/post/30179453… .
The crux of the author’s argument is delineated in the concluding paragraph: “Zuckerberg’s move should be to fire Sandberg, and give her a generous severance package. Thereafter, he should slowly phase in an incredibly developer-friendly API to access to the social graph. Then, as the revenue from the API grows, he should slowly phase advertising out of Facebook’s ecosystem.
9 Answers
I mean, it’s currently only about 90% of Facebook’s revenue. And that revenue is only going to be about $5 billion this year. And it was zero just a few years ago. So, I mean clearly this whole advertising thing isn’t working out for Facebook.
Also, the company only has something like a billion users and only half of them log on daily. And when it rolled out its newest ad product, Sponsored Stories, it only found that was worth about $1 million per day. To make matters worse, only half that revenue was coming from mobile — and lots of people use Facebook on mobile.
Finally, it’s crystal clear that for Facebook to exploit new monetization schemes it has to stop making money from advertising because clearly those are mutually exclusive. There is obviously no way to begin charging for some kind of API access while also running ads. It’s not like, for example, Twitter could even conceive of anything along those lines.
The best part about a plan like this is that with Facebook’s share price already down by half since the IPO, signaling a move to phase out the revenue stream from which the company makes all of its money should cause large numbers of employees to quit due to worthless RSUs, should limit the company’s ability to acquire interesting startups going forward, and might even make it takeover bait.
Wait… What? You were serious with this question? To quote a character made famous by the late Gilda Radner: “Never mind.”
Disclaimer: For the sarcasm challenged, very little in the above, except for the factual data and my admonition to otherwise ignore my facetious argument was meant to be taken seriously. It’s beyond absurd that this question is even being asked. Facebook is worth $41.5 billion as I write this. It launched at Harvard 8 1/2 years ago. Leaving aside the recent downturn in its stock post-IPO, any rational analysis would see this as one of the all-time great business success stories. The fact that nearly 1 in 7 people uses the site in spite of it not really being available to the people of China is all the more remarkable. I am a huge fan of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (who — disclaimer — I have met). I can certainly critique certain things Facebook has done and, I believe, offer some strategic thinking about how they could be more successful in the future. But the notions espoused in this question are really abjectly ridiculous and, I felt, deserved a response in kind.
Double really does look like an impressive piece of technology. What the website’s blurb doesn’t mention is that the device can be charged in two hours using an AC wall adapter and doesn’t need to be plugged back in for another eight. Double is also only 15 pounds and works with every iPad that features a camera. Both the iPad attached to Double and the user’s iPad must be running the same app in order for the device to function. Double’s movement can be controlled remotely via iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, or even a laptop.
That’s one heck of an iPad strapped to a Segway! Double is now available for preorder for $1,999, not including the cost of the iPad. That sounds like a lot, yes, but consider this: You’re buying a robotic body double that you can control from halfway around the world.
Double really does look like an impressive piece of technology. What the website’s blurb doesn’t mention is that the device can be charged in two hours using an AC wall adapter and doesn’t need to be plugged back in for another eight. Double is also only 15 pounds and works with every iPad that features a camera. Both the iPad attached to Double and the user’s iPad must be running the same app in order for the device to function. Double’s movement can be controlled remotely via iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, or even a laptop.
So it turns out The Karate Kid director John Avildsen hung onto a lot of old rehearsal footage from the early days of filming the best coming-of-age martial arts film of all time. Now, courtesy of Avildsen’s YouTube channel, you can get a peek at more than an hour of behind-the-scenes, never meant for primetime Ralph Macchio goodness. The result is a treasure trove of shaky footage that puts most other special features to shame. Above, you can check out the early, raw version of the Cobra Kai assault that gets the film’s narrative chugging along. In the interest of fair warning, the dialogue is more foul-mouthed than the final cut, and may be NSFW if your W is particularly uptight about that sort of thing.
Sanford
You have to go during the week, but the Chef’s Surprise never disappoints.
El Tondero
Named after Peru’s traditional dance, and the food dances in your belly. The Saltado de pollo is amazing!
Blink Bonnie’s
Not local to where I live, but been going there for years. It has the best steak on the planet.
In a world where social media is progressively becoming more important to the mainstream,researchers have now used Twitter to determine whether a user is a psychopath. A group of folks from the Online Privacy Foundation and Florida Atlantic University, with some help from data-competition website Kaggle, have come up with a way to mathematically determine if a Twitter user tends toward the more psychopathic. Cue the mass protection of Twitter accounts.
Some of the indicative markers include the following: use of periods, cursing, the word “we,” filler words, and the obvious “hate.” These, of course, aren’t causation or something that inherently makes one a psychopath. They could just be a very opinionated group of grammarians. Plus, filler words serve a, um, function, so yeah.
Chris Sumner, from the Online Privacy Foundation, notes that the research could help the FBI or similar offices flag psychopaths but finds the potential use for analyzing large groups of people psychologically more compelling. In theory, traits could be compared country by country or state by state. And the majority of the data is sitting out there in the wild for the taking. An incredible number of potential data points ripe for the picking.
To jump from this to a potential Minority Report situation is alarmist at best but isn’t entirely far-fetched. After all, we already know social media is being monitored for potential threats. Why wouldn’t governments mine it for psychological data too?
Love it or hate it, the Windows 8 Metro interface sure is something, and it’s something Microsoft seems pretty willing to bet the whole company on. If you’re in the “love it” camp like I am, I’ve got good news: You can get the Windows 8 Metro interface on your iPhone. Yes, you read that right. Obviously, it’s unofficial, and a bit stripped down, but it’s still pretty striking, and it’s bound to perplex your friends.
In case it wasn’t obvious, you’re going to need a jailbroken iPhone to pull this off. The Metro interaface is actually a Dreamboard theme called Metroon; interested users can purchase from the ModMyi repository for $1.50. When you see it in action, it looks pretty freakin’ sleek, but before you get too excited, there’s a few things worth noting.
First, given that this is running inside iOS, you get a horizontal scroll instead of a vertical one, which looks super weird if you are at all familiar with Windows Phone. Second, because the tiles are actually just stylized icons, they aren’t going to be functionally identical to the “live tiles” Windows 8 is so crazy about. That said, the Message, Calendar, and Now Playing tiles in the Metroon UI style will display some live information like your latest message, next appointment, and currently playing song respectively.
In any event, if you think Metro UI looks cool, and you have an iPhone that you’d like to hang on to, Metroon might be right for you. If nothing else, it’s a crazy little parlor trick.
Now, dubstep might not be your cup of tea and — if that’s the case — you’re certainly not alone. But Mike Tompkins might be able to change your mind. He’s remixed Santigold’s Disparate Youth with Skrillex’s Cinema using only his voice, live looping, and creative mixing. If it doesn’t sound impressive, take a peek at the video and then see if that helps. Add in some projectors that fire whenever he hits certain buttons and suddenly it’s a light show as well.
