bcRIPster

Everything you know about the first AI winter is wrong. It was a hit job. Minsky learned from Pitts and McCulloch. Then he buried their field for twenty years. The same institutional pattern that shaped the first AI winter is running again today.

Nice rebuttal though. He has a point. Either show your proof refuting the claim or stfu. I get so tired of armchair experts discounting everything because they just know it can't be true, that it would be nice if someone put people like this in their place once in a while.

High-five. I like your thinking!

No, it wouldn't, there's more than enough stuff like this that goes around that taking one slice off the stack isn't really going to change the stack. ;)

The thing is these solutions all sounds great on paper, but in practice for the common person? Not so much. For those people that know what their doing it really doesn't matter because they know what they are doing and update as they scale.

It's the 99% of the rest of the people who see "how easy that was" and suddenly they're over their head. And they are the same people who tell you that you can't change anything about the broken ass interface bolted onto the spreadsheet while you're fixing it.

"Can't you just fix it so it will stop crashing? Why do you want to change all of this? We don't have approvals to change this, the spreadsheet is what was approved by change control. Just make it work."

IT WILL NEVER WORK. Go away. =D

I understand, but every time I get handed one of these it's because someone who didn't know what they were doing was rapid prototyping something and woops they have 200 hundred users and it's crashing, it's corrupting data, etc...

At one job I'm like "people, just use Access, it's installed on your computer" and they look at me like I'm talking dark wizardry shit with their fingers itching on their pitchforks because they don't know if I'm going to eat their babies.

Arrrrgh!

A spreadsheet is NOT a database! Argh!

As a person who gets asked to fix these kinds of projects once they hit a wall (performance/concurrency/etc) and then have to migrate them to a proper DB platform, just stop it! Put it on in a DB up front and save some poor developer their sanity.

Please.

Well, she did prove one point though. She's not a customer for these things and doesn't have first hand understanding of that market. So she's got that going... :P

Apple makes a tech tool? Uh, no. They make fashion tech and have for over a decade now. Yes it's functional for techies but it's fashion plane and simple, and yes people will shell out for it. I know people that were already planning out the buy on the $10K model the day it was introduced before it even had a solid price because the price doesn't matter.

I'm going to disagree. I do SEO work and this format is dying. Readers are put off by it as it lacks sincerity, it's also soon to get penalized in upcoming indexing activities.

If she was doing this right she would leave the pitch off the end of the article and provide a simple hint over to her services that exist on a non-sensationalized pitch page.

The change would add a level of sincerity to her article and leave it conveying the sense of authority she's trying to project while showing a level or respect to the reader by making them the target or the piece. Ultimately this piece is clearly targeted to bots, not people and that is why it is poorly executed. At the end of the page when I realized I had been successfully bated to read the article there was zero percent chance of me clicking any other page on that site.

I enjoyed the article at first but she invalidated the positive experience with the pitch for her seminar at the end of the piece which just led me to discount the entire article as nothing but SEO bait for Google. Frankly it was irritating enough that I felt compelled to bitch about it in a comment...

Take this as an example of how not to do a sales pitch blog post in 2015.

Sooo... what we're really saying here is that we really don't know.

I think you're presuming too much. As long as your code is documented and you're willing to release all potential IP claims as part of the sale I can imagine there would be someone interested in buying this straight out. You might even be able to sell them some kind of limited support/consultation agreement where you don't do code but can answer questions for a fixed period of time. It's not like you're doing some kind of business exit strategy. You're just selling off an asset from your portfolio.

Given that we've seemed to reach a stage where most US politicians seem to match the profile of what one would clinically call a sociopath, I'm going to hazard a guess that they will not really care.

I'm not sure of what the divergence you're indicating is. I agree that an app with no monitization is worthless for sure. A bloated app user base where you aren't monetizing your users is a money sink.

Granted there are other cases of revenue models that we may not even be aware of that are in play. For instance Twitter initially was making money off SMS bulk transactions. They would buy SMS network blocks in volume and sale broadcasting blocks to marketers at a markup which was lower than outbound texting rates. There was good money in the margins here for a time. They don't like to talk about it publicly but they still admit that the service was built around a focus on SMS... https://blog.twitter.com/2010/introducing-fast-follow-and-ot...

This is why for a while they also tried like hell to push people to take Tweets over SMS instead of having pulling them from the web via a web browser or other web based client. Smartphones unexpectedly gimped this business model for them.

There are boutique companies today that still are trying to eep out business around this model such as this one... http://www.fabit.com/products/mobile/sms/websms/overview.asp...

...now I'm just rambling...

I now understand about how the system works after someone else explained. But, thank-you for the feedback.

Thanks and no worries. It's just been one of those days. :)

What you say makes sense when you're selling a product. With most of these applications, their potential money making product though is the back-office data they collect on the users themselves which they then sell to brokers or data warehousing services, or provide to targeting advertisement firms. From that stand point you simply want the largest installed user base you can get.

A successful smart phone app based on these metrics is the one with the largest user base. You get that user base by providing a simple to use product that quickly addresses a need for the largest number of people, rich, poor, white, black, etc...

Now, if you're talking about targeted applications like certain types of gaming apps. Or apps that provide an extended retail experience? This is when you talk about focused demographics.

I don't know. Every Texan I've ever known likes to name drop Austin to defend their state to the point where it's like saying they've got a black friend so they can't be racists. Or, they let a gay guy hug them so they're not homophobic.

At some point it starts to make you cross-eyed :P

I'm sorry, I'm know I'm poking this subject with a stick. I hope everyone understands the satire and frustration of my statement.

Thank-you... beyond that I just learned from another user that even though I've been using this site for years I have never seen a down vote option, so I always suspected it was a mod activity. Now that I know it's just other users doing it I don't feel so bad. Thanks for the kind words :)

Thank-you, I did not realize that. I feel a bit better now about the down votes in that light.

As for you last comment though... are you sure you meant ethnicity? Maybe you meant demographic?

All that proves is that his Journalism instructor told him to be sure to include boilerplate CYA to deflect criticism of his article. If he really felt this way he wouldn't be so declarative of his opinions.

And I'm still not seeing it. All he's done is equated privacy with things like social security numbers. He's also indicated that he's taking privacy statements from these companies at face value. Privacy is way more than that. Him and his friends just haven't been burned yet by mismanaging their online personas.

Honestly, I expect it's exactly as you say. It's just got me in a bit of a mood this morning.

If you look at the end of the article there is a short bio and his photo. He's a blond, white boy who's the spitting image of a young Mark Zuckerberg. To the "separated at birth" level of looking like him. Kinda freaky. :)

I'm feeling like we read different articles. I never once got that concept that he was somehow protecting his privacy. He just stated that his perceptions were that some sites were more private than others. I get the feeling that his friends are still posting compromising content online, they just don't think they're be accountable for it.

Good! Good! Then I wholly expect to see every comment that is stating an obvious concept to now be down modded off of this site. That's really healthy for discussion.

No. Honestly I haven't been to Austin and I have heard good things about it but I did spend a few years living in the DFW Metroplex area (Arlington and then later in Plano). I have on the other hand have had bad personal experiences with UT graduates being rather full of themselves clueless about the real world. As well as white middle-class 19 year olds thinking they're social media experts because they posted a blog post.

Texas in general has always left a bad taste in my mind and their political and religious exports don't do much to change my opinion.

I always love how Austin get's thrown out as some amazing counter to excuse the rest of the state.

And just how did you come to that conclusion when he specifically said he doesn't care if someone like Snapchat keeps his photos forever?!? Will he care when his photos start showing up in advertisements? Will he care when a prospective employer with a data sharing agreement with Snapchat's future owner accesses his document/activity history and he can't get a job?

Sigh.

And seriously? WTF!

Ok mods, I'm concerned that I have made some valid criticisms on this article as have others in their comments, yet mine is being down modded into negatives.

I'm left feeling this is immature and punitive for a joke I made on a prior news posting where I complained about the down modding.

Would someone like to explain just how my criticism is so much more severe as to warrant attack over the other criticisms?