Throwaway823

Is no one listening here? I said I care about performance, and build quality. Why can't I ask for both? Perhaps the Dyson performs well. I said I don't have experience with it, but the quality looks cheap. When a product advertises itself as being premium and top of the line, and asks for a high price, I expect both of the above.

Likewise, when I spend money on a phone or laptop, I expect it to feel solid. Don't sell me a $1,500 laptop that's built like a $300 Dell Inspiron.

Based on all the hype Dyson tries to generate, their product renders, commercials, sales lingo, etc, I expected this to be the iPhone of vacuums, where it was priced high, because it functions well, and has a great build quality.

Instead, it just looked overpriced, and the quality appeared no better than the vacuums a third of the price. I was disappointed, that's all, it looks like they spent their budget on marketing and the quality of the product came second.

I was at the store one day, and saw vacuum cleaners. Now, I have no interest in a vacuum at the moment, but they had a Dyson Ball, and I've seen countless videos of it, and had to take a look to see this high-end vacuum. I was disappointed from the first second, it just looked like a bunch of cheap plastic parts, and similar to something I'd find from a yard sale ten years ago. Photo below of my expectation from all the marketing, and a photo someone took of the actual vacuum.

http://i.imgur.com/bs1ygfM.jpg

I played around with it for a bit, and it just felt cheap, in every way possible. I was expecting the best vacuum in the world, and I was holding something that was entirely different. Now, I don't own one, it might work great for vacuuming, but it had no sense of luxury in person.

Another example, is the handheld vacuum, I'd see commercials on television, and then I saw one in the wild at a friends house. Comparison below is using slightly different models, but just look at the materials. In the promo image, it looks like glass and metal, and then in reality, it's some cheap stamped plastic that you'd expect from a bottom of the barrel vacuum.

http://i.imgur.com/RZ8sFxq.jpg

As for the hand dryers, I find they work well and fast. It's a creative idea, and I think they're a success. I imagine they're more difficult to clean though, and get dirty with all the water dripping on them.

I guess if you only need support for adding/removing/toggling classes, and you have no plans of using jQuery, this could be useful. It's 1kb of Javascript, compared to jQuery, which is over 80kb minified. Now, everyone and their dog likely has jQuery cached from a CDN, but it's a good way to reduce unnecessary bloat. If they added one or two common features from jQuery, and used a normal syntax instead of this written non-sense, I could see some people using it as a light version of jQuery.

If that doesn't work, or they're based in Egypt which is going to make legal action difficult, you might be best off to ignore them completely. They're looking for a response. They want to see you upset, they want to see you in a panic, they want to see you begging them to stop, etc. If you ignore them, and never respond or talk again, they'll likely move on with their life. They're not going to maintain a blog on you forever, that takes time, and if they're getting nothing in return, they'll stop, although it might take weeks or months.

Now, work on preventing this in the first place. I had my community hosted on the same servers as my personal projects (small startup, didn't realize it was going to grow to the current size), and this allowed people to connect the dots to my name by looking up the server IP and related sites. I'm in the process of trying to separate my personal identity from my community, and to reduce the trail leading back to me. I can't recall how many people are banned from my community, but it's in the area of 5,000. I'm surprised I haven't had more personal attacks, but it's only a matter of time, so I'm trying to separate things before it occurs again. You might want to do the same if possible.

Click the photos of the individuals, and they show examples on products or posters, and they look quite nice, original, and have character. They should really place these images on the homepage, instead of the written alphabet.

We keep building from what we assume is the best. If a popular site goes with flat design, it leads us to believe flat design might be attributing to their success. So, we try to follow suit with trial and error. If flat design is working for them, maybe taking it to an even more extreme and reducing all images and gradients will leave us even more successful. Or, maybe only some aspects of their flat design are contributing to their success, and it's a balance between flat and non-flat elements.

Which is best? No one knows. We'll try all the possible combinations, and gravitate towards what's successful with profits, and with users. You can't expect these changes over night. Right now designers are quite sure the future involves more minimal design. The only way to test this is to experiment with different combinations.

So, don't piss on someone because they try an extremely flat design and it fails. The only reason we know it fails is because they went out on a limb to try it out. Instead, thank them for trying, look towards any aspects of their design that did work, and improve on their failure. I can guarantee we're going to have an even better experience browsing the internet 10 years from now. It's going to happen because of many designers and developers failing, and few standing on them and succeeding.

If I visit a restaurant, and they only serve chicken, that's kind of limited. Now, they give me the option of beef or chicken. Ok, this is a decision I can make, and be confident in selecting. Now, what happens if they ask whether I would like northwestern chicken, southern chicken, grain fed chicken, or korean chicken? Huh? I'm not a master of chicken, just give me the best one.

We hit a point where I no longer have a strong opinion, and this is where my confidence drops, and I start to question myself. This means they've given me too much choice.

This isn't the same for everyone, someone out there knows their chicken inside and out, and they have a preference for one specific type. If you want to cater your restaurant towards those people then give them that choice. However, you'll be scaring away the average person at the same time.

For the same reason it's difficult to make an application for casual and advanced users. Pick your audience, and that'll give you some guidance on the appropriate amount of choice to include.

For example, I visit the store to buy toothpaste. I might see 25 different kinds of Colgate, and 1 kind of Crest. Personally, I'd likely buy the Crest, because I can't decide between all the Colgate options of Ultrabrite, Optic White, Sparkling White, Sensitive, Sensitive Pro-Relief, Max Fresh, 2in1, Cavity Protection, Total, Total Advanced, Total Action, and Triple Action (these are all real names, and they have more).

You're saying I should see 26 individual options to compare and be overwhelmed with choice. However, if I buy Crest, I'm happy. This is because I trust their knowledge of toothpaste over my own, and pass the decision making to them. I assume their single option has the best formula. If I choose between Ultrabrite, Sparkling White and Optic White from Colgate, I'm less satisfied, because I'm unsure if I made the right choice, because I don't have a PhD in toothpaste.

This is no different than software. If Bing releases 100 new options to customize your experience with the search engine, does this make you less satisfied with using Google? Does it make you feel overwhelmed in choice? Not at all, if anything, you're even more happy with Google now. We just assume when someone gives us less choice, they're making the right choices for us.

However, to survive as a species in the long term, we need to leave this planet. To do that, we need a number of advancements in technology.

So, if we can agree the survival of the species is in our benefit, then we can agree development is considered a good thing, even if it doesn't equate to an increase in happiness for the individual.

I never said any of this technology enhances our level of happiness. I just said as a species, being constantly unhappy could be one of our greatest strengths. Otherwise, we might be sitting in a cave, smiling at each other until an asteroid removed us from existence.

Being unhappy and unsatisfied is the main reason we have the technology that currently exists. If people were satisfied traveling by horse, the automobile wouldn't exist. If people were satisfied with 480p, the HD television would never have been a worthwhile venture. Being continually unsatisfied is what causes us to strive higher.

It doesn't matter if the cereal I bought tastes good or bad, I'll always wonder if the other option would have been better. Until I taste the other cereal, I'm left questioning my decision, and being unhappy.

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...

It's something to keep in mind with your development work as well. Let's say you create an application to minify javascript. Your app has an input field, and a button that says 'Go', and that's it. Very simple, no confusion, people love it.

However, you notice 5% of people don't use the app, because they want to keep comments in their minified code, and you don't include that option. A lot of developers decide they'll add a checkbox to include comments, because now everyone can be happy. It doesn't quite work that way, because now the 95% of people that don't want comments see this checkbox, and start to question themselves. Wait, why do people want comments included in their minified code, should I be checking this box? Is there something I'm doing wrong? Do most people check the box or not, I'd like to know to validate my decision, otherwise I feel uneasy. The more options you add, the more this has an effect.

In the end, maybe the 95% are feeling so uneasy, 10% of them leave to another app, that just has a 'Go' button again, so they feel confident, and more happy. So, by adding the checkbox to include comments, the 5% of people that were asking for the feature now start using the app, but you lose 10% of the original audience because of the additional choice.

It's a difficult balance, and you really need to focus on the majority, and be careful about building out features the minority are requesting. If you look at apps like Twitter or Snapchat (or Yo, on the extreme side, and not yet proven), they succeed by limiting the amount of choice available to users. Many developers would have added more options, or in the case of Twitter given users the ability to write longer tweets because it seems harmless, but at the same time, it would have caused the businesses to fail.

That's much easier than trying to locate these items on a handful of different websites, signing up for new accounts and payment systems. It's also easier than going shopping downtown, finding a few items, but not the others, which means I need to place an order online either way. And if I need to place an order online, I might as well get everything on Amazon, so I qualify for free shipping.

For example, I run a forum with a million daily page views. If I wanted to use Gotham, I need to pay $150 for the font, and then subscribe to their cloud service and pay $450 per month for that amount of page views.

I might be willing to pay a one-time $100 fee to use one of their fonts, or a $100 per year subscription to use any of their fonts. However, $5,500 a year for my site? That's almost as much as my servers. It's a laugh, I'll stick with the well respected free web fonts.

For example, let's say I'm trying to gain 15 lbs this year. That's 0.28 lbs per week, or 1.25 lbs per month. My weight might go up and down a couple of pounds throughout the day, depending on the amount of water in my system, when I use the washroom, etc.

So, I weigh myself today, and let's say I had a little extra water in my system. Now, I weigh myself in a month, and I'm slightly dehydrated that day without realizing it. I might have reached my goal and gained 1.25 lbs that month, but the scale is showing I weigh 1 lbs less than when I started.

That's a problem, because I stuck to my goals, my routine, and I get slapped in the face with results that say I'm going in the opposite direction. I might incorrectly make changes to my calorie count, that don't need to be made.

This is why tracking is useful. You step on the scale on a regular basis, and you can see the overall trend over time. In the above scenario, I can see although the scale shows 1 lbs less, it's an off day, and looking at the forecast, I'm on target and did average a gain 1.25 lbs that month.

Now, I don't even have a scale, but that's why I'd like to get one, so I can step on it throughout the day, and see a graph to better summarize what's happening.

This was submitted through their form to contact them about click fraud, and I never heard back. Those advertisers paid for thousands of fake clicks, and I ended up with a decent chunk of change.

I can't understand how they missed it. My clicks are level for years, and then during a couple of days, they increase 50-100x normal levels. This should have been a huge red flag.

As for suicide bombers, a lot of them appear to have other options for achieving the same goal, yet they choose the method that takes their life. They can buy a grenade for $10, and toss it into a crowd, yet they choose to strap a bomb to their chest. I don't think they're doing so because it's the only option, and because autonomous vehicles are not available, I think they're doing it because they want to give their life to their cause.

What about quadcopters? Couldn't anyone just strap a bomb to a quadcopter, fly it over a stadium, and down into the crowd? I think that's even more scary than autonomous vehicles, because they can fly over barriers.

People have countless ways they can cause damage or mass casualties available to them. However, I can walk around a city surrounded by millions of people, and feel completely safe. Most people are quite nice, they're not sitting at home unable to achieve their terrorist goals because Google autonomous vehicles are not available to them.

Nothing will change. Sure, someone will toss explosives in an autonomous vehicle, instead of putting them in a parked car. It's unfortunate, but not a reason to hold back technology that would positively benefit the other 99.99999% of the population.

I make the first call to Australia, and the apartment was suppose to be owned by a woman looking for a roommate. Anyway, a man picks up the line and says hello. I can hear a woman in the background talking, and dogs barking. I ask for the woman by name, and the man says to hold on one second. Then he starts arguing with the woman for a minute, returns to the line and asks if I'm still there, and then says to hold one moment, and now you hear the dogs barking louder, and it sounds like he's taking them outside because the woman is complaining. There's also a TV or radio in the background. I think he returns again a couple of minutes later, apologizes and asks me to wait longer, but I can't be certain. I remember after about 5 or 10 minutes I decided to hang up because I'm calling long distance, the man sounded rude, and it didn't seem like a place I'd like to live any way.

Now, I call a few other places throughout the week, and get a few people on the line, and others with weird connection errors saying the numbers can't be reached.

Then, I'm making a call to a number in a completely different city a few thousand kilometers away, and the same man from before answers. He asks me to hold one second, and I don't recognize the voice at first. Suddenly, I hear the TV, radio and the dogs barking again, and get this weird sense of deja vu as things start to repeat. I hang up. I now realize it's a recording, and I never talked to a real person the first time around. But... I'm calling a completely unrelated number, so how did I get this message again? I call the number back, and now it goes through to the actual person I was trying to reach.

This would continue to happen on future calls, but by then I knew the routine and would hang up and redial.

Any idea what was happening here? I used these calling cards all the time and never had an issue. Somehow my calls were getting sent to this recorded message when calling Australia, regardless of the number I was dialing. The recording was trying to keep me on the line for an extended period of time.

My only conclusion is that these cards are getting rerouted through another country or less than trustworthy business. They then forward a certain percentage of calls to this message in order to get longer call times, and higher profits.