“Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring at you like some imbecile. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. […] Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, disheartening, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily.”
I agree with your premise that the spirit of a law shouldn't be violated to send a message but I don't see that it applies here.
For me this doesn't pass the sense test: should a person be able to knowingly, intentionally fake the results of a scientific experiment in order to secure a grant of taxpayer money? No. No more than you should be able to fake the 'results' of your yearly income, say, for the purpose of receiving welfare.
I don't believe the comment was to not charge the guy with anything, it was not to charge him with more than necessary to punish him for the crime he actually did commit.
Possibly there could be a meta tag describing which share buttons should be shown on the page--even what the particular share link should be when they're clicked.
Just curious--how or where did you hear about Braintree coming to Australia? And do you know if it's available publicly? It's something I'd love to look at (even with the Westpac account requirement) I can't seem to find anything on it.
Unless my math is off, or I'm misreading the article... that's about 1% of his total shareholding he's sold. How is this a scramble to offload shares? It seems more like a pretty minor (and sensible) liquidity transaction.
Unfortunately, "Dustin Moskovitz executes a pretty minor (and sensible) liquidity transaction" doesn't inspire people to click the link and view their ads...
Quite. If one has all (or most) of their personal wealth tied up in one venture, it's only prudent to release a proportion. Of course, where he stops selling will be the interesting part...
Thankyou for the feedback, I'm really sorry about this--I'll go back and check everything. It may be that you were playing songs that are a bit uncommon and it was taking some time to load them, or plain just couldn't find them.
I'll work on the side-bar music queue--you're totally right that clicking the song name and it adding itself to the queue is ridiculous--not at all expected behaviour--more an unforeseen consequence of re-using the same template for all track displays.
Just curious, what was your particular expected behaviour? To jump to that song in the queue and start playing, or to remove the song?
Thanks again for letting me know, I'll triple check this--I was stupid enough to only bother testing Chrome and FireFox on a Mac and just IE9 on Windows. Sorry!!
Sometimes, unfortunately it gets the music wrong--I think what may have happened with Hump De Bump is that it takes the MP3 from the official video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxEZVM84J28) which takes about 40 seconds for the music to start playing.
I'll play around with the code that strips out bad search results and maybe get this to change.
Thanks for the feedback / taking the time. As for the legal complications, I'm genuinely not sure--it's available on YouTube and downloading from YouTube is fairly trivial, but it's not like it's a functionality placed front-and-centre on this site. You'd have to be more tech-savvy to download music via this site than from any of the many YouTube to MP3 services on the web.
Cool concept... I think there's definitely a sweet spot for guys who have no idea what to buy their girlfriend or whatever...
Couple of thoughts, though they're not specifically about the landing page, more general things that popped into my head (bear with me!)
- I'm not sure if many guys will be that into giving a gift every single month just because, but to keep in line with the subscription model you could give an option to send more expensive gifts for just specific months (say their birthday / christmas) and then maybe just one or two other random occasions throughout the year as the "just because" gift.
- I didn't get the gift brother name straight away. I guess what you're going for is "gift BROTHA" cool spelling and all, which is actually a great concept, I'd play on that as soon as you can--hire a designer to create a really cool looking cartoon guy, or something, who is like this suave guy who just gets girls/partners/signficiant-others and is the ultimate wingman for gifts--it's a really great idea to play off, because I think people will really get the concept from that, as well.
- To start have a DEAD-SIMPLE explanation with maybe three steps...maybe just three big images and descriptions like:
1. Tell us about your partner and subscribe
2. We do all the shopping / thinking / work
3. You get all the credit!
And you can be really funny/creative with that last one, so go nuts. I think people would dig a quirkier approach, cause it's a great concept.
After that, though there needs to be some more details, like where you get the gifts from, what kinds of gifts you can get and the prices point(s) available... whether you ship to obscure countries like mine (Australia) and ways to put the service on hold (or stop it?) for when you fall out of love... maybe you could switch to getting manly gifts for yourself when you don't have a significant other, just to ease the pain of the heartbreak (or something)
"Microsoft has positions in all the right places."
This.
Microsoft today is still one of the world's biggest companies, with a lot of talented people and considerable inlets into practically every home and office in the developed world. Apple of yesterday grew to eclipse Microsoft in a matter of years--there's no reason Microsoft can't pull off a similar reversal with the right maneuvering of its own considerable resources.
One of the reasons Microsoft is unlikely to pull it off is precisely that they are one of the world's biggest companies.
When Apple bought NeXT, Steve Jobs had a tight cadre of very talented people who he trusted greatly. It was basically his invasion force. Apple at that point was in crisis, and wasn't particularly big. Market cap: $2 billion. Revenue $7 billion, down from $11 billion two years before. Employees, 9,300. They were doing basically one thing, selling computers, and they were obviously fucking it up.
Microsoft is much larger ($250 billion market cap, 92,000 employees), and they're still fat and sassy on their monopoly rents from Windows and Office. Few there feel any reason to change. The company is so much larger than Apple was that just getting a handle on it is a massive task. Actually turning it around is a very tall order.
Even though Apple was much smaller, it was something like 7 years before things really started to take off. Even if somebody could turn Microsoft around as quickly, how will they get the board and the investors to sit still for such a long period? Jobs could do it because Apple was his baby and Jobs was Jobs. But who has the mojo to do it with Microsoft?
A much more likely path is the one Yahoo is on: slow decline plus musical CEOs as a variety of highly paid people rearrange deck chairs over and over.
Methinks you both might be missing the economic meaning of "lost decade". It essentially refers to a gradual decline. There can be no doubt that, from its shares, it _has_ been a lost decade. Even breaking even would be considered a decline in comparison to other similar investment options.
Also, talking about what Microsoft might do in the future, doesn't magically erase the financial and business criticism of the past. If anything, past performance is a better indicator than "if XYZ can turn around, so can we". Momentum is huge.
As for Microsoft having "positions in all the right places". They have an amazingly strong position in two massive markets. Again, lost decade refers to growth and decline, and unfortunately for Microsoft, neither of these markets is seeing nearly as much growth as other markets. No one is saying that Microsoft isn't making a fortune on desktop and enterprise sales, they are saying that they are failing to capture key markets, such as mobile and tablets. In some markets, like internet or entertainment, their market share isn't horrible, but it's costing them a fortune.
In short, Microsoft's stock price is horrible. If Microsoft thinks the stock is undervalued, they should be buying it back. They are insignificant in a number of important markets, and in those markets where they are a player (but not a leader), they tend to be losing massive amounts of money.
I do think that last statement depends on how you're looking at each company's products. As often as the debate is set up as "Microsoft v. Apple", they are two different companies that aren't always directly competing. When Apple released the iPod, it didn't directly hurt Microsoft but built up Apple. Even the iPhone, while taking away from Windows Mobile, didn't do much to really stop Microsoft, but once again built a major market in an area that was typically focused in on as specialized. Apple wasn't competing directly with Microsoft at this time, it was competing around them. It wasn't until the iPad that Apple really hit a market where Microsoft was investing resources into with little return, and took potential growth from them.
I think that to say that Microsoft has the chance to retake Apple with the direction they're taking misses the core reason why Apple has become so big. Apple didn't build their company back up through competition, but through creation. That's not a statement saying that Apple was in their own bubble and not taking massive amounts of inspiration from others. It is saying that they as a company defined the market, leaving companies like Microsoft at a step behind no matter what. It's like Apple joining the gaming console market. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony would have way too much of a lead to make it easy, and if they focus on developed markets they are going to be constantly fighting to keep up instead of pushing the fight forward.
> "If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced."
(ofc: Replace PAINT with anything you like!)