gamble

46 ms·

451.
by gamble 16y ago
Not sure about bing, but DuckDuckGo is basically Yahoo with the search spam filtered out. On heavily spammed searches DDG has become noticeably better, IMO.
452.
by gamble 16y ago
Spot-on. Google used to talk a good game about combatting search spam, but once Demand Media and the ilk called their bluff Google chose to fold and opened the doors to an industrial-scale search spam industry. They may have stumbled into i
453.
by gamble 16y ago
Absolutely. It's extremely tough to build a customer base in education, but once you've signed them they're just as reluctant to move on to a competitor. Standard practice is for the larger companies like Blackboard and Pearson to gobble up
454.
by gamble 16y ago
You're absolutely correct, and the answer to the second 'why' is that the sales process in education is unbelievably long and expensive relative to what the customers are willing to pay for software. I worked for an education startup betwee
455.
by gamble 16y ago
Digikey's shipping is amazing . (and cheap!) Plus, as you say, they have an enormous inventory - and a solid in-house search engine for filtering through it. It's great to hear that Octopart will be indexing them. I've always liked Octopar
456.
by gamble 16y ago
I think they're overstating how many casinos use RFID. The last time I looked into it, only the Wynn did - and then only to track denomination, not as a unique identifier. (Perhaps someone can correct me if things have changed) The goal is
457.
by gamble 16y ago
The Wikileaks hysteria is proof that an entire country can suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.
458.
by gamble 16y ago
I once took a job that involved picking up the pieces after a team of Thoughtworks programmers were fired for incompetence. They pair-programmed some of the worst code I've ever seen.
459.
by gamble 16y ago
Not sure how I feel about this anecdote - the SO is unusually accommodating, and it may be tempting to interpret this story as inspiration not to worry about relationships when you're working on a startup. (Or any bursty, time-demanding job
460.
by gamble 16y ago
Number 1 is so, so true. After being burned a couple of times on this, the first thought that comes to mind when someone claims to be a subject-matter expert is that they're really an expert in the business processes used by one particular
461.
by gamble 16y ago
Dozens of other companies followed Amazon's strategy and went bankrupt. Plus Amazon had an easy way to monetize traffic. Traffic alone isn't worth anything unless you can wring more money out of your visitors than it costs to service their
462.
by gamble 16y ago
That's a bit pat considering that 95% of workplaces use Windows.
463.
by gamble 16y ago
It's the crowds that attract merchants to deal with Groupon. I think they tweak the mental association between bodies through the door and success that many small business owners have. Without the promise of traffic (and hope that some of t
464.
by gamble 16y ago
Is Groupon actually scalable? Their business model depends on being able to drive huge crowds to a merchant. That might work with one deal per day per market, but it might not work if they start pushing more deals.
465.
by gamble 16y ago
If I started handing out dollar bills on a street corner, I'd have plenty of customers too. Why is YouTube so valuable? If there's a way to make real money on YouTube-style video, Google sure hasn't found it. This profitless 'strategic' exp
466.
by gamble 16y ago
BS. MS cared very, very much about what software you ran. Remember Netscape? Borland? Microsoft J++? They put pressure on OEMs not to ship Netscape that make anything Apple's done with iOS pale in comparison. It may be hard to appreciate to
467.
by gamble 16y ago
> Microsoft's control was superficial, and that's how they like it. They don't want to control what you put on your computer, they just want you to pay them the same reasonable price. Oh, how a decade of stagnation can change perception
468.
by gamble 16y ago
The problem for the legacy airlines is that they started in the pre-deregulation era with excellent pay and benefits for their employees. Deregulation eliminated the financial basis for those salaries, and as a result the legacies have been
469.
by gamble 16y ago
Why indeed? Especially when the company has grown so large and sclerotic that developing new products has become a struggle against entrenched corporate bureaucracy. I'm sure it's a very tempting and logical proposition, in the short term.
470.
by gamble 16y ago
The most interesting aspect of this deal is that even though Google is today's most engineering-focused major corporation and the biggest advertising company in the world, a consensus is emerging that they're incapable of successfully devel
471.
by gamble 16y ago
I'm not sure I'd agree. It's a continuum, certainly, but even compared to other western nations contemporary Americans are unusually individualistic and disinclined to see people as primarily defined by group affiliations like ethnicity, na
472.
by gamble 16y ago
I can't reply to your more deeply threaded comment, so I'll reply here. There has been many stories about the CoC this year; here's an example: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/us/politics/22chamber.html... The CoC is the largest lobbyin
473.
by gamble 16y ago
A reference for my opinion?
474.
by gamble 16y ago
With the Chamber of Commerce's lurch toward operating as an outright wing of the Republican party this year, I suspect it's only a matter of time before we'll start to see CoC boycott campaigns.
475.
by gamble 16y ago
Anyone who wants to take on the US government would be better off if they didn't have a visible figurehead. Americans need to personalize the enemy. It's one reason China is so confounding - Americans simply have no idea who's in charge the
476.
by gamble 16y ago
I get shivers imagining a single company that combines the integrity of Groupon with the customer service of Google.
477.
by gamble 16y ago
Or it might cause a political shit-storm and undermine American credibility, while giving a moral imprimatur to future leaks. Wikileaks is more powerful as an idea than an organization. They've legitimized the idea of web-based distribution
478.
by gamble 16y ago
Blackberries are surprisingly popular with younger people, but I think that's largely a function of how cheap they are compared to other full-keyboard phones that aren't a pain to text with. You can easily get a BB free on contract, and the
479.
by gamble 16y ago
I know it's a significant chunk of MtG revenue, but they're hobbled by antagonism from paper-card dealers. Promoting MtGO too heavily makes the paper dealers fearful of cannibalization. So far they've maintained the peace by focusing MtGO s
480.
by gamble 16y ago
The claim that professors neglect their teaching is always phrased as an econ-101 style argument about incentives, but I've never seen much evidence for it in practice. Quite the contrary - the social pressure of interacting with a class pr

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