Lots of preparation going on behind the Provincial building in Zwolle today, for one of the 14 Liberation Festivals coming Saturday, to celebrate liberation day and freedom on May 5th.
It’s always healthy, I think, to have a considered look at what it is I’m taking in. This is what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to and thinking about lately.
First and last
I’ve spent a truly inordinate amount of time reading the MetaFilter megathreads documenting the ongoing Trump travesty in real time. In all honesty, these threads have been far and away my primary intake of content by volume since the time of the Brexit referendum just about two years ago now (!), and my inability to tear myself away from this transatlantic (shitshow, trainwreck, dumpster fire, act of civilizational suicide — choose your metaphor, they all amount to the same thing) over this entire period has put a major dent in my ability to think, write or get any meaningful work done.
Fiction
– Anna Kavan: Ice
– Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Sympathizer
– Kim Stanley Robinson: New York 2140 (Contains an incidental, paragraph-length ode to the place of “Heroin” in the consciousness of true New Yorkers that no lie brought me to tears, though I was admittedly at 38,000 feet at the time.)
– (hush) Black Panther
– Funeral Parade of Roses
– Homo Sapiens
– (cheating a little bit, actually saw it toward the end of last year) Gulistan, Land of Roses
– A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
– The usual, compulsive rewatches of, like, 8½, Bande à part, Day of the Jackal, The Italian Job, etc.
– I’m sure there are other films I’ve gone to see in the cinema, but they’re slipping my mind. I’ll make another cup of coffee (see below) and see if I can’t remember.
TV
Oh, OK…I watch Westworld, I Love Dick, The Handmaid’s Tale and Love. Don’t @ me. (The casting for Westworld, in particular, is dialed in. Gorgeous Thandie Newton, Tessa Thompson, Jeffrey Wright, Jimmi Simpson, Giancarlo Esposito, Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris and Peter Fucken Mullan? Sold American. I even like those dudes what play the bickering nerdling technicians. And the costuming, set design, etc., is [smacks fingers].)
Music
Listening to a lot of Bong, Eluvium, Dopelord, Windhand, Electric Wizard, and so on, in addition to the usualcrew in permanent heavy rotation (Nancy & Lee, Staple Singers, Magazine, Minutemen, Velvets, James Cleveland, etc.); the best live acts I’ve caught in the past six months were Nadja and Taman Shud. Suuuuper looking forward to Zeal & Ardor in just a few weeks. [UPDATE: Zeal & Ardor was exceptionally good, with the new material off Stranger Fruit just tearing jagged little holes in me. Also, I finally got around to the new Sleep, The Sciences, and it is in every last way a stone motherfucker.]
…remains caffeine, delivered in the form of high-test black coffee, brewed in a Chemex. (Yeah. All it took was a single cup of pourover brewed for me at the Reserve counter in the Starbucks above Gangnam Station — instant conversion experience. I went down to longtime favorite D&Department in Itaewon and picked up a three-cup version and some filters to take home with me. When I got back to London, of course, I had to futz around with acquiring the various pieces of twee hipster kit you need to rock pourover in the Chemex — the precision grinder, the Hario scale, the gooseneck kettle and so on, all in matte black, as well as a little shibari-inspired black leather thong to customize the Chemex itself, ’cause it was like two quid and I’m a total dork. Thank god Nurri already had the digital kitchen thermometer. You can see why Buy Nothing 2018 was dead before it left the table.)
Unshakable lust object
I keep slinking back to Velorution to gaze slackly upon this exquisite Moulton AM GT Mk III, and thereupon to dream and plot — first how to afford such a recockulous expenditure on a bike, then how to justify it. (NB: I understand full well that even should I sell a kidney to gin up the necessary dosh/consign myself to penury for some extended term thereafter, it is almost certainly beyond any conceivable justification. Nevertheless, there are worse midlife crises.)
You’ve probably heard of the wisdom of crowds. The general idea, popularized by James Surowiecki’s book, is that a large group of non-experts can solve problems collectively better than a single expert. As you can imagine, there are a lot of subtleties and complexities to this idea. Nicky Case helps you understand with a game.
Draw networks, run simulations, and learn in the process. The game takes about a half an hour, so set aside some time to play it through.
Via a comment, Ger Tielemans alerted me to the SageCell filter for Moodle that lets you embed an executable code cell powered by Sage Cell Server, which was also new to me, in a Moodle content page.
From what I can tell, Sage Cell Server provides a stateless was of executing SageMath, R or Python code.
It also strikes me that ScriptedForms provide another possible way of accessing Jupyter/python executable code from a frame embed.
So now I’m wondering – might the SageCell filter for Moodle provide a basis for a Thebelab filter for Moodle?
The comment also prompted me to look around for other Moodle’n’Jupyter integrations.
We have an auth hack for running temporary notebooks via Jupyterhub in which students who are logged in to the Moodle VLE are presented with a URL containing a secret than can be used to log them in to a notebook launching Jupyterhub server running on Azure/Kubernetes. This uses some sort of Moodle plugin for adding the secret token, I think? (Note to self: find out how this works and what the Moodle plugin is! Rod….????!)
I was reminded of another weak integration we have with OU learning environments and Jupyter notebooks in a reply posting to the Moodle forums by Mark Johnson on Moodle integration with Jupyter notebooks. OpenDesign Studio, which allows students to upload and comment on media objects, has a plugin that allows students to upload and view Jupyter notebooks as a media asset. As I replied to the thread:
The OpenStudio plugin requires users to upload a zip file with an `.nbk` suffix that contains the notebook `.ipynb` file and an HTML export view of it; (the html view can be a bit ropey eg if the notebook has run output cells that originally contained IFrames). A crude notebook extension provides a toolbar button to create the `.nbk` package that uses `nbconvert html_embed` filter to generate the html.
The original proposal was for an OpenStudio plugin architecture that would allow .ipynb to be uploaded and then rendered back to users of OpenStudio using nbviewer. That was blocked, presumably on grounds of complexity, available project time/resource and maybe also security…
One other code related thing we have running in Moodle is Moodle CodeRunner. I think I’d originally hassled for this to be installed in a demo server when Tim Hunt had originally mentioned it to me, though part of me wishes I hadn’t! The plugin adds simple code testing to Moodle quizzes, so students can enter code which is then executed and checked against a test.
As to why I don’t like it: I think that because we have Moodle CodeRunner installed, it will act as a blocker to exploring any ways in which we might look at code runners that run using Jupyter protocols against Jupyter kernels. I don’t know if CodeRunner can be tweaked to run against such kernels, or otherwise patched to become a Jupyter client?
One of the things that concerns me about CodeRunner is what happens if we want to assess students on code that requires packages (either python packages, or operating system packages they call on) that are preinstalled as part of the computing environment we give students?
Other issues arise if we want to test students more widely, for example if we wanted to test students’ ability to use python to query, or even update, a linked database such as the one we install in the TM351 VM?
What would be nice if we could containerise a student computing environment and then use that as the back end to an automated tester eg running something like Thebelab or perhaps better, a variant of something like the stateless Sage Cell Server.
One thing that is still on my to do list is to explore nbgrader as a tool for annotating assessment notebooks and providing a means for ALs to manually mark and comment on them. (I note that as well as supporting automated tests with nbgrader, Jess Hamrick also started to look at tools to support the automated marking of matplotlib charts: jhamrick/plotchecker. I guess another way would be to use automated testing tools like Selenium to render charts and then test them, but this would presumably on work for exact image / hash matches only?
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get nbgrader to work with my standalone notebook server – the formgrader isn’t found. I need to return to this when I get a chance (unless some has working babystep instructions for getting nbgrader running with a standalone Jupyter notebook server?)
PS as far as integrations with other learning environemnts go, I note the Open edX Jupyter Notebook Viewer that lets you “fetch and display part of, or an entire Jupyter Notebook in an XBlock“.
There are a couple of links under each post. Here is what they do:
The date links to the individual page, just like the headline does.
email creates a new email and populates the subject and body of that new mail. Just add an addressee and you are good to go.
twitter creates a new Twitter post with title and link
facebook creates a new Facebook post with title and link
google+ creates a new Google+ post with title and link
None of those links contains any active elements from Twitter, Facebook or Google. Only if you click them, you will be sent to their respective sites. Nothing is spying on you, nothing is tracking you. And that is why I am keeping them. They cost next to nothing and they may be useful.
No, I don't use Facebook. I no longer use Google+. That does not mean I need you to stop using them.
Rather than focusing on the specific blunders of certain technology products, this week, I have come up with 7 more common design patterns that just plain suck. There is never any excuse for any of them.The thing is, if someone’s design includes one or more of these patterns, they’re probably not cut out for UX anyway, and this article will probably not reach them, or if it does, it won’t sink in. But I might as well try, right?
If your inbox is anything like mine, it’s recently been full of emails from all sorts of different sites and services you use. These emails are coming as a result of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, a new regulation coming into effect on May 25th that’s aimed at protecting privacy and data for individuals in Europe.
Only time will tell if the GDPR has the desired effect, but it’s already led companies around the globe to update their privacy polices. With this renewed attention to privacy, we also took a moment to review our own privacy policy. Fortunately, no substantive changes were necessary at this time. We encourage you to read the entire page, but the meat is right up top. That section is worth reprinting here:
We believe strongly in your right to privacy, and do all we can to protect the privacy of our users. Our business earns its money by selling software, never by monetizing your private data. Our privacy policy can be easily summarized in one line:
We don’t sell or rent any of your data to third parties, ever, period.
In addition, we collect and keep as little data from you as we reasonably can. Collecting the bare minimum of data for our needs means there’s little incentive for a malicious actor to attempt access to our databases, as well as minimal consequences were such a breach to occur.
We simply don’t traffic in data. In fact, given the liability that possessing data imposes on any responsible company, we want as little of your data as possible. We make software tools for you to purchase and use, and you should feel confident and comfortable doing so.
Die Bose QC25 sind ziemlich perfekte Kopfhörer für Flugreisen. Aber sie sind nur per Kabel anzuschließen. Mit dem Airmod kann man nun Bluetooth nachrüsten. Tolle Idee.
Wenn man noch keinen QC25 hat, dann kauft man natürlich gleich den QC35 mit Bluetooth.
After spending 80 hours researching dozens of home weather stations and testing four of the most promising models, we think the Netatmo Weather Station, combined with its add-on Wind Gauge and Rain Gauge, is the best solution for most people who want to monitor their local meteorological conditions and trends easily and reliably. A simple setup, the most intuitive mobile app we used, and a compact, modular design make the Netatmo stand out. It’s great if you’re most interested in big-picture weather trends like local rainfall totals, temperature, humidity, and wind speed and direction.
The New York Times takes on the top reason cited by Americans for not biking or walking to work, from a recent survey on active commuting.
That issue? Time.
But, as the Times suggests, the 97 per cent of Americans who don’t use active transportation for commuting may want to rethink their reasoning.
As the Times reports, “a new study published in a journal called Transportmetrica A: Transport Science shows that people often overestimate the time required to commute actively, a miscalculation especially common when someone has secured a parking permit near the office.”
The study of 500 university faculty, staff and students found that estimates of commuting time on foot or by bike were generally poor, with 90 per cent of respondents overestimating the length of their journey to work by over ten minutes when compared to Google maps.
“The few assessments close to Google’s were almost always made by riders or walkers. Parking availability and distances affected the estimates. Those with parking permits, a fiercely sought-after campus amenity, tended to overestimate active-commuting times significantly; the closer someone lived to the workplace, the better the guesses. Confidence had an outsize effect, too. The people surveyed, especially women, who had little bicycling experience or who did not feel physically fit thought that active commuting would require considerably more time than the Google calculations.”
Other commuting concerns such as bicycle lockers and accessibility to showers and places to change clothes were not discussed in this study, but time itself appears to be “less of a barrier to active community than many might anticipate” according to Melissa Bopp, a Kinesiology professor who was also the study’s senior author.
“I’d urge anyone who is considering biking or walking to work to do a test run,” she says, perhaps on a weekend (although the traffic patterns will be different from those during the week). Ask colleagues for route suggestions. “Google is good at finding bike paths, but it emphasizes brevity and directness over scenery for walkers.”
Buckle up, as editorials are already coming out about this rocky ride and the completely expected push-back from realtors that have engaged in some property transaction flips and profited very handsomely from it.
By looking at the purchases within six Vancouver-area condominium developments, Ms. Tomlinson found that in the three finished developments, “at least 32 per cent of 173 condos flipped at or near completion were resold by buyers who were also real estate agents, along with other speculators with inside access who had bought in early…On average, those players each reaped a gross profit of $145,359. Their collective windfall was $10.6-million.”
And here’s what else is fascinating about all this: “Several additional resales by insiders couldn’t be added up, because they were done through contract assignment, also known as “shadow flipping.” Assignment deals such as that — where an initial buyer sells their contract to another buyer pre-construction — aren’t registered as sales with the land-titles registry.”
The Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason is using the term “shadow flipping” which was used for the “flipping” at higher costs of sales agreements for single family homes in advance of the registered sale of the house. No established terminology has yet been developed for the “shady” markup and transfer of condo assignments prior to occupancy.
The only person who knows how much money has changed hands in these “shady” flipping practices is the developer…but now Canada Revenue Agency has a concept of how much speculator profit is not being reported as income on taxes.
This is a clear example of why condo prices are escalating, and why the Province of British Columbia now wants to force developers to offer pre-construction condo units to all potential buyers at the same time and at the same price.
Cutting out the speculative flipping should provide more stable real estate prices, and some commentators like journalist Gary Mason are suggesting that a house of cards has been made with the current system and it will not take much for it to come crashing down.
“Get ready for all the excuses, and the condescending talk about how we don’t understand how the business really works and how developers need to be able to sell to speculators. Don’t buy it – any of it. It will be self-interested nonsense from people who once filled the financial coffers of the political party previously in power in B.C., likely banking on that government to not change the rules of the game.”
And this just in from the Union of British Columbia Municipalities:
Rumors are circulating that Apple plans to merge iOS and macOS in some mysterious way. Michael Tsai, whose weblog has become necessary reading, has a good rundown of the major players’ opinions. Brent Simmons, now at Omni Group, wrote a very sensible piece on the possibly-mythical merger, which he names “Godot.framework”. Dave Winer (to whom great birthday greetings!) wrote a fine reply.
That reply, titled “Dependent Developers,” begins:
Reading Brent's piece about Mac development made me think about the ideal, what I really want from being a developer for as long as I've been a developer. The thing that got me started was the independence of it. I could have taken a job at Bell Labs or some big mainframe or minicomputer company, and had a nice career being pushed around by bosses at big companies. But I went for PC development because it was something I controlled. I could do what I wanted. Make my own art. The things I wanted to do were things no company would approve of, they had no way of understanding it. And at first it was lovely. Then the corporate bosses at the PC companies started pushing us around and it turned to shit.
Now, of course this is going to catch my eye, with its insistence that what we do is art. Dave was coding when I was a graduate student and he’s coding now, long after the people who didn’t think this was art have left for management or hedge funds. But there’s another note that runs through the entire developer discussion that Dave makes really clear:
…it turned to shit.
I don’t think it’s quite that bad. But then again, I’m the guy who wrote that
We software creators woke up one day to find ourselves living in the software factory. The floor is hard, from time to time it gets very cold at night, and they say the factory is going to close and move somewhere else. We are unhappy with our modern computing and alienated from our work, we experience constant, inexorable guilt.
So it’s not a cakewalk. What changed? What went wrong, and when did it go wrong?
When personal computing got started, you could make pretty serious money by creating a good tool that people needed. Dave did that with MORE. Dan Bricklin did it with VisiCalc. Mitch Kapor with Agenda. There were lots more. No guarantees, certainly, and some good and smart people never got the big payday, but it was a real possibility.
That’s gone. The real money in iOS software comes from writing frauds and manipulating sad psychological quirks; it turns out that just about nobody makes a living, much less a killing, designing great iOS software. The economics are better on the desktop, but not much better.
The big fear from the iOS-macOS rumor is that Apple will destroy that, that they’ll cripple the Macintosh so badly that we’ll be left with a complete wasteland of 99¢ junk apps. There’s no place to run, no other viable desktop with a future.
Worse, it’s not clear what we can do. This reflects our current political emergency. Ignorant and wicked people control the government, propped up by chortling billionaires, corrupt evangelical hucksters, and resentful wing nuts; we can work to end the nightmare but the road is long and uncertain. The future of computing now seems to depend on the whims of a few businessmen, none of whom appears to care very much about computing.
Then again, Tinderbox 7.5 is coming. Tinderbox had its best year ever in 2017. We have wonderful tools; the new iMac Pro isn’t the Mac Pro we need and Xcode crashes an awful lot, but the two together are fast. I remember when you had to wait overnight to find out about a syntax error, when you edited with punched cards. (Dave remembers, too.) I read the entire History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, all 15 volumes, while waiting for Metrowerks to compile Fontina and Storyspace, and now I compile Tinderbox and run all 1317 unit tests in something like 3 minutes. We write stuff that we’d never have been able to write back then, stuff we couldn't imagine.
Hard times may be coming. Pogroms may be coming. We’ll bear the burden and pay the price if we must. Meanwhile, back to making some more art.
The worst seven minutes of a presentation are the seven minutes before you present.
Writing a deck, editing it, getting feedback, rewriting it, practicing it over and over again, final touches, one more practice, ok two more practices and now you’re standing stage left waiting those last seven minutes with absolutely nothing to do except waiting to begin.
Finally.
“Please welcome… This… amazing… speaker!”
All of your hard work, weeks of work, hours and hours of practice, and finally those last seven intolerable minutes are over. You walk on stage into the lights and…
… there are no speaker notes. And you need speaker notes.
To be an effective speaker, you must be able to handle this unfortunate situation. Your ability to elegantly react to the unexpected is part of your job as a speaker because the unexpected is a guarantee. You must turn the expected into an advantage. Whether it’s a technical malfunction or a strange audience reaction, your ability absorb, adapt, and continue amongst presentation discord is a required skill. I should write an article on managing presentation discord, but that is not this article. This article is about the perfect presentation audio-video set-up. It exists.
Brad …
I’m talking to you now, Brad1. You’re the hypothetical AV guy at a hypothetical conference, and your job is hard.
You’ve got 18 speakers each with different requirements and different temperaments. Keynote, Powerpoint, confident, nervous, Mac, PC, insistent, and opinionated. The entire situation is amplified by the fact that most humans are terrified by the prospects of public speaking which means, Brad, you’ve got humans coming at you who are not their best selves.
You and I aligned in that we want this each talk at this conference be a success. However, we not aligned with the topic of the AV set-up. To reduce the chaos, you’ve chosen a sub-optimal AV set-up. You’ve told yourself, “I’m reducing variables.” Brad, what you’ve done is only made it harder to present by removing presentation tools that you may perceive as inessential that are actually critical to an excellent presentation.
Speaking is Story Telling
I’ve already mentioned one aspect of a good talk above: improvisation. Handling the unexpected is one of my favorite speaking moves and often the source of my most significant audience reactions. Why? Because I don’t let the unexpected interrupt the story.
Speaking is storytelling. You’re not up there reading your slides; you’re up there telling a story. There’s an intriguing beginning, a complex middle, and a satisfying end. It is clear that you love this story because your enthusiasm spills off the stage. Everyone, including you, are unaware there is a presentation going on because we’re all in the middle of a great story.
95% of the work of building a great story is on you. I’ve already written about this a bunch. The other 5% is entirely controllable via the AV set-up which I’ll describe now:
Insist on your computer. Like Brad, you are looking to eliminate variables. When Brad asks for your slides, when they leave the safety of your computer, you are inviting unexpected change. Missing fonts, incorrect versions of Keynote, and missing audio/video are just a few examples of how your presentation mutates when it leaves your computer.2
Insisting on your computer means you have to meet Brad halfway. Bring every dongle possible in your backpack to make sure you can connect with his set-up. That reminds me…
Insist on an AV check. Not only do you want to see the room and get a feel for the space, but you want to make sure everything works. My preference is several hours before the talk to avoid the annoying ticking clock of You’re on in 5, RANDS.
Bring Your Clicker. Since you’re insisting on your computer and bringing your dongles, let’s stick that clicker in your heretofore named “Speaker Bag.” Your clicker (my favorite) like your computer is a familiar thing and familiar means you’re going spend your precious mental resources on telling a great story and not how to advance your slides.
Right. You’re at your AV check, you’ve plugged your computer in. What do you want to be seeing as you are pacing around the stage? You need three screens:
Screen #1: In front of you, it’s a big old screen that shows your current slide. This is the same slide the audience seeing. Why the duplication? You never ever look at their screen, just yours. Why? You staring at their screen breaks their immersion. You are no longer the storyteller, you’re them… staring at the slides. Focus.
Screen #2: Right next to Screen 1 is the most important screen. There are four essential pieces of information on this slide:
Current slide. Duplication of Slide 1, but important because of the next item…
Next slide. The ability to see your next slide is key to compelling storytelling. Each slide has a micro-story on it, and an essential part of that micro-story is figuring out how to get the audience to the next slide. These segues, in my opinion, are the largest contributor to a presentation that flows versus one that awkwardly stumbles through seemingly unrelated thoughts. Next slide is also handy for those times you intentionally (or unintentionally) go off script and need to quickly answer the question, “What the hell was I talking about?”
Time. A simple elapsed timer that answers the question, “Do I need to slow down or speed up?”
Speaker notes. These notes are very similar to the Next Slide. They are there to remind you what you are talking about. They are not a crutch to allow you to hid behind the podium and read words from Screen #2. I rarely have complete sentences on my speaker notes. I have a bulleted list of reminders of things I need to talk about on this slide. Speaker notes are especially handy on complex or information dense slides where you have many topics to cover.
Screen #3: This is your computer and if Brad is doing his job, it’s a duplicate of Screen #2. Same exact set-up. This is not critical, but as a human who likes to move around the stage, it gives me another base of operations for story-telling.
Confidence Monitors
Those monitors on the floor that Brad set up for you? They are called confidence monitors. True facts: the audience doesn’t usually even know they are there which means you have yet another storytelling challenge. How quickly can you glance at one and get the information you need to continue to effortless and elegantly tell your story?
It takes practice.
It takes confidence.
The perfect AV set-up will not make an instantly better speaker, but the ideal AV set-up eliminates variables so that you can focus on the important work ahead: telling a great story.
While I am blaming hypothetical Brad here, it equally probable that hypothetical conference organizers and their budget are a source of a crappy AV set-up. ↩
True story. One conference converted my Keynote to Powerpoint without telling me. It was an unmitigated presentation disaster. ↩
As captain of the Conservative hockey team, Ontario MP Gordon Brown relished the chance to play his favourite sport while getting to know his colleagues away from Parliament Hill. He’d often show MPs – whether they were from his party or not – videos of his young son playing the game. It was the kind of personal touch Mr. Brown brought to politics for the past 14 years.
And he was remembered for it on Wednesday as the House of Commons paid tribute to the popular MP who died unexpectedly at the age of 57, leaving MPs of all parties in shock.
Mr. Brown, who was good-natured even in political battle, died in his Parliament Hill office on Wednesday after returning from an early morning game of hockey. A source close to the family says he died of an apparent heart attack.
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Mr. Brown’s blue jersey with the number 27 was draped over his chair in the Commons as Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, fighting back tears, lauded his former colleague for his collegiality and sense of humour.
“This whole House is in mourning,” Mr. Scheer said. “He was an eternal optimist who was always quick with a compliment or a supportive word.”
Mr. Scheer also praised Mr. Brown for his recent work in helping a small group of thalidomide survivors gain compensation from the Liberal government. “He was moved by their suffering, and he was moved to do something about it,” Mr. Scheer said.
First elected to Parliament in 2004, Mr. Brown got his start decades earlier in the youth wing of the party, working on numerous campaigns at both the municipal and provincial level. After the Conservatives lost the 2015 election, he was opposition whip for almost two years, and also served as vice-chair of the Canadian-United States Inter-Parliamentary Group.
Speaking in the House for the Liberals, veteran PEI MP Wayne Easter said his old friend had many accomplishments, from naming a new park in the Thousands Islands to promoting stronger relations with the U.S., even playing on the Republican hockey team.
“Gord was always respectful of everyone and thoughtfully considered the viewpoints of others even though he might not agree. That was the tenor of the man,” he said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Mr. Brown a “thoughtful, engaging” man who brought out the best in everyone he worked and interacted with.
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“Gord was particularly good at transcending the partisanship here and really emphasizing the service not just to our constituents but to all Canadians,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters outside the Commons.
New Democrat MP Brian Masse said Mr. Brown was particularly effective as vice-chair of the Canada-U.S. group, which plays a key role in bringing U.S. and Canadian politicians together.
“Gord had an ability to be effective for Canada in a statesmanship way that should not be underestimated,” Mr. Masse said.
On Mr. Brown’s desk were fresh flowers and a framed photo of him in his hockey jersey. MPs from all sides stood in standing ovation after each tribute to Mr. Brown. Liberal and NDP MPs lined up to shake hands and hug their Conservative colleagues after the tributes.
Out of respect for Mr. Brown, the Commons adjourned for the day after the statements from party leaders and a moment of silence. The Ontario Legislature also had a moment of silence for Mr. Brown. Flags on government buildings will fly at half-mast until Mr. Brown’s funeral is held.
Mr. Brown leaves his wife, Claudine Courtois, who works for Conservative Senator David Wells, and sons Tristan, 6, and Chance, 17.
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Conservative MP Tony Clement, who has known Mr. Brown since 1981, could not hold back his tears as he left the caucus room on Wednesday.
“He was always there for all of us,” Mr. Clement said.
He recalled how Mr. Brown used to show off old photos of himself, Mr. Clement and Peter Van Loan when they were young Conservatives. “We changed a little bit since 1981. He took good delight in people trying to figure out where we were in the photo.”
Mr. Clement said the tragedy is another lesson about the job of politics.
“I’m not trying to be morbid, but it’s a death trap for people sometimes,” he said. “It takes years off your life. I know we do it willingly, but sometimes the price is very high.”
Mr. Brown is the third MP to die of a heart attack in Ottawa in four years. Ontario MP Jim Flaherty died in April, 2014, at the age of 64, and Alberta MP Jim Hillyer died in March, 2016, at the age of 41.
Mr. Brown was recently appointed to the new national security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians, which is responsible for overseeing the country’s national security agencies. The new committee meets in secret and members are sworn into the Privy Council because they have access to classified material.
Mr. Brown was first elected to the House of Commons in 2004 for the Eastern Ontario riding of Leeds-Grenville-Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes.
Dudes are always like "love is just a chemical in the brain". Why is it always "love"? Why not "ambition"? Or "masculinity"? Or "smugness"? Aren't those just brain chemicals too?
Posted by
existentialcoms
on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018 7:25pm
Ich habe bisher noch keine praktischen Erfahrungen mit den 2018er Nokias gemacht, aber ich bin nach einigen Gesprächen mit Leuten, denen ich vertraue, der Ansicht, dass Nokia hier genau das Richtige macht. Pure Android One, solides Design, angemessener Preis.
Das Nokia 6 mit Dual SIM kostet aktuell knapp 270 €. Das halte ich für einen fairen Preis. Mein anderer Midrange Favorit BlackBerry Motion kostet 150 € mehr ohne wirklich mehr zu bieten. Das Gerät hat immer noch kein Upgrade auf Oreo und die monatlichen Updates hängen immer wieder mal. Nokia kriegt das alles dagegen sehr geräuschlos geregelt. Selbst das besser ausgestattete Nokia 7 Plus ist günstiger.
Ich muss mal sehen, ob ich vielleicht ein Testgerät bekommen kann, das ich länger beobachten kann, am liebsten natürlich das Nokia 8 Sirocco.
As I develop and expound this theory, it may seem to be too complicated. Isn’t functional programming just programming with pure functions? Why make this more complicated than that? We talk about my reasons and my goals for the theory.
Transcript
Eric Normand: …so if you’ve been listening to the episodes where I talk about the theory I’m developing — and the book I’m writing — you might be wondering, “Is this theory too complicated? Isn’t functional programming just programming with functions? What’s the point of this theory, anyway?”
I want to address those questions, because someone did mention on Twitter that he believes — and he’s a very smart person, has done his research — that functional programming — quite simply — means programming with mathematical functions. Pure functions. If you are not doing that — you’re using some kind of effect, or something — then you’re doing imperative programming.
"Someone did mention on Twitter that he believes — and he’s a very smart person, has done his research — that functional programming — quite simply — means programming with mathematical functions."https://t.co/PFx8RjESzs
Nothing wrong with either of them. Sometimes you’ve got to do imperative programming, and sometimes you’ve got to do functional programming. It’s just as simple as that. The reason I don’t think that is good enough as an answer…I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense. It’s valid in itself. It’s self-consistent. Functional programming is pure functions, programming with effects is imperative.
It makes total sense. The reason I don’t think it works as a paradigm is that an imperative programmer — like someone who’s not familiar with functional programming — would never make those distinctions. There’s something about functional programming — or functional programmers — that they make this distinction between imperative and pure functions.
“There’s something about functional programming — or functional programmers — that they make this distinction between imperative and pure functions. Imperative programming does not.”https://t.co/3Hizj2EQLQ
You have to capture that. It’s not just that I’m using pure functions. It’s also that I’ve made this distinction, and I’ve limited the amount of imperative code that I’m going to write. Isolated it out, and identified it as such. I’m going to do as much as I can, in the purely functional stuff.
It has to be part of your understanding — of the way you’re going to code — that there is a distinction between the two. I don’t think someone who’s doing object-oriented programming makes that distinction.
I think even in the first episode of this, I talked about object-oriented programming as a paradigm. I tried to compare the functional paradigm to the object-oriented paradigm, in the sense that they’re not doing the same things. There’s no easy way to translate between the concept of object-oriented, and the concepts I laid out of functional.
This brings me to the idea that we should talk a little bit about the goals of this theory. I’m developing this theory, and the theory has to satisfy a few goals for it to be useful. One is, it has to be coherent and consistent with the way we actually do program. I hope I’m getting at something there, by dividing the world into those three domains of data, calculations, and actions.
"The theory has to satisfy a few goals for it to be useful. One is, it has to be coherent & consistent with the way we do program. I hope I’m getting at something there, by dividing the world into those 3 domains of Data, Calculations, and Actions."https://t.co/boAJMYMPsW
Another is that it has to be generative. It has to explain, but it has to justify the complications of explanation, with it providing something new. It can’t just be a good explanation that’s really complicated.
I do think there’s something nice and elegant about saying, “Functional programming is programming with pure functions,” but it leaves out all the contributions to actions to the effect — the imperative side — that something like Haskell is providing. There’s a lot of contributions there, in terms of how they compose, and interesting ones that will be easier to reason about.
“I do think there’s something nice and elegant about saying, “Functional programming is programming with pure functions,” but it leaves out all the contributions to actions that something like Haskell is providing.”https://t.co/hNMTlXFNbM
We talked a lot about that already, in a previous episode. You don’t want to leave that stuff out. You don’t want to say sometimes you’re doing functional programming in Haskell, and sometimes you’re doing imperative. You want to say this is the functional contribution to imperative. That’s what I’m trying to get at.
Some of the stuff I hope to get to in this series is the generative stuff. What new stuff does this way of explaining let us talk about? Let us think about? We’ve got to be able to have new ideas, because we’ve got this theory. Those ideas have to be good. [laughs] That’s an issue, as well.
One of those is the idea that in three domains, you’ve got actions, calculations and data. If you compose an action with any of the other two things — if you compose an action with calculation, or you compose an action with data — then you have kind of infected the whole thing.
“In three domains, you’ve got Actions, Calculations and Data. If you compose an action with any of the other two things — if you compose an action with calculation, or you compose an action with data — then you have kind of infected the whole thing.”https://t.co/xT9FTHJX4V
That thing you have built — by composing the two things — is now an action that affects — infects — everything they touch. I think this separation of stuff into domains allows you to even talk about that. The idea that there are some things called effects — that are called imperative programming — and there are some things that are pure functions. We call that functional programming.
It doesn’t talk about the fact that you can compose the two, and what happens when you do. That gives a reason for having the isolation; for having a type in Haskell called I/O, that isolates all the effects, so that they’re not infecting all your other code.
At least if you do infect your other code, you are well aware of it. Your compiler can reason that, “Yes, this has been infected. It’s now an I/O.” Another thing — I don’t know if this is quite generative, but I think it might be. It’s close — is all of the ways that actions could be decomposed, based on the time. Does it matter when it’s called, or how many times it’s called?
To talk about actions in that way is something you can imagine an imperative programmer doing. I don’t know if there’s anyone who would call themselves an imperative programmer. I’m using that as a term, just to have something to call non-functional programmers.
“Does it matter when it’s called, or how many times it’s called? To talk about actions in that way is something you can’t imagine an imperative programmer doing.”https://t.co/NCLJluKPPi
People who are doing JavaScript, or PHP. They’re calling effects, and thinking of everything in terms of this step, and this step, and this step.
They don’t have a name for themselves. I do it, too — sometimes — when that’s the mode that I’m in. But they’re not thinking about that. That’s not a thing that they’re doing, trying to break down these actions and say, “In this one, it doesn’t matter how many times, but it matters when. In this one, it matters how many times, but it doesn’t matter when.”
I think that’s enough for now. Thank you all for listening. Keep the questions coming, and I will see you later. Bye.
I’ve finished building an AppleScript for automatically creating a Suggested Reading blogpost from my Evernote bookmarks quicker than I thought.
Mostly because in my previous posting on this I, in an example of blogging as thinking out loud, had already created a list of steps I wanted to take. That made it easier to build the step by step solution in AppleScript and find online examples where needed.
Other key ingredients were the AppleScript Language Guide, the Evernote dictionary for AppleScript (which contains the objects from Evernote available to AppleScript), the Evernote query language (for retrieving material from Evernote), and the Postie plugin documentation (which I use to mail to WordPress).
In the end I spent most time on getting the syntax right of talking to the WordPress plugin Postie. By testing it multiple times I ultimately got the sequence of elements right.
The resulting script is on duty from now on. I automatically call the script every Monday afternoon. The result is automatically mailed to my WordPress installation which saves it as a posting with a publication date set for Tuesday afternoon. This allows me time to review or edit the posting if I want, but if I don’t WordPress will go ahead and post it.
There is still some room for improvement. First, I currently use Apple Mail to send the posting to WordPress. My default mail tool is Thunderbird, so I had to configure Mail for this, which I had rather not. Second, the tags from Evernote that I use in the title of the posting aren’t capitalised yet, which I would prefer. Good enough for now though.
I’ve posted the code to my GitHub account, where it is available under an open license. For my own reference I also posted it in the wiki pages of this blog.
Yesterday we’ve been pleasantly surprised to hear from Publisher of the legendary Linux Journal that we have been featured in their latest May issue focused on privacy. Shawn Powers, associate editor at Linux Journal, purchased a Librem 13 for his own use and decided to review it in depth. The result is a glowing review that warms our hearts after this particularly long winter (remember, our team is international, so most of us are not surfing the beaches of San Francisco). To break the ice, Shawn begins his review with this humorous fact: Purism’s laptops, with their modern and power-efficient chipsets and CPUs, are cool-enough to use on your lap, and so we can rightfully call them “laptops” instead of “notebooks”. Well, that’s a great way to start the barbecue season!
In fact, Shawn has been so impressed with this laptop the kind folks at Linux Journal decided to have the article publicly readable for everyone today. You can read the review here. Here are some of our favorite excerpts from the article:
“The Librem 13’s keyboard is awesome. I won’t say it’s the best keyboard I’ve ever used, but as far as laptops go, it’s right near the top of the pile. Like most (good) laptops, the Librem 13 has chicklet style keys, but the subtleties of click pressure, key travel, springiness factor and the like are very adequate.”
“The Librem 13 v2 has a trackpad that is 100% as nice as MacBook trackpads. It is large, supports “click anywhere” and has multipoint support with gestures. What does all that mean? The things that have made Apple King of Trackpad Land are available not only on another company’s hardware, but also with Linux. My favorite combination is two-finger scrolling with two-finger clicking for “right-click”. The trackpad is solid, stable and just works. I’d buy the Librem 13 for the trackpad alone, but that’s just a throwaway feature on the website.”
“This computer is lightning fast, and it’s easily the best laptop I’ve ever owned. More than anything, I’m glad this is a system I purchased and not a “review copy”, so I don’t have to send it back!”
Well, if that was not enough to make you salivate, maybe the following will.
Those who have been keeping a close watch on our social media might have noticed, in addition to our announcement about collaborating with UBPorts to facilitate Ubuntu Touch’s transition to a pure GNU+Linux stack with the Librem 5 phone hardware platform, that we quietly started a promotional sale for the Librem 15 laptop, where you could get that big screen for the same price as the Librem 13’s regular price. That is, $200 off the base price configuration! So far, it it seems people have been responding well to that promotion and spreading the word, so we’re extending it for the whole month of May.
Of course, this would make the Librem 13 onlookers hungry… so we’re adding a special sale for the Librem 13 as well, where we slice $100 off the base price. This sale will last until the end of May, too.
If you want to help out the Linux Journal, consider becoming a subscriber or spreading the word about their latest issue:
New issue is out! May 2018 features a Deep Dive into #Privacy. After working on this issue, a few of us on the Linux Journal team walked away implementing some new privacy practices– we suspect you may too after you give it a read. https://t.co/BLLMH2Ptdk#Linux#opensourcepic.twitter.com/7Wg2A7hXNw
African philosophy is depicted in this article as "the concepts of ubuntu (human interdependence) and ukama (relationality)." These were addressed in a MOOC called Teaching for Change. "At its heart," write the authors, "it is about respecting others’ rights universally, and about people being reflective and open about their own stories." These are good things, but they are hardly unique to Africa, and more to the point, Africa, as a continent of some 1.3 billion people and 58 countries, is home to multiple philosophies and approaches to learning. Still, I think the effort to move beyond traditionally Euro-centric world views is a good one.
In less than a week, developers from all across the world will descend upon the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California to attend the latest iteration of Google’s annual I/O developer conference.
While the conference is likely to deliver its share of surprises, like with most big tech events, we also have a fairly good idea of what Google is likely to announce come Wednesday afternoon. Below you’ll find what we at MobileSyrup think Google will announce at I/O 2018.
Android P
Starting with the obvious, Google will launch the second Android P developer preview at I/O. This one is a sure bet. Over the last couple of years, Google’s has released the first developer preview of a new Android operating system ahead of I/O before releasing a more polished beta at the conference.
What’s less clear is what new features the second developer preview will include.
One of the more popular theories is that DP2 will allow developers to check out Google’s take on iPhone X-style gesture-based navigation.
Speculation that Google planned to add gesture navigation to Android started when the company released a a screenshot of a completely different Android navigation bar. The screenshot showed a nav bar that was missing Android’s ‘Overview’ icon and had replaced the operating system’s circular home icon for a pill-shaped icon. In response to the screenshot, 9to5Google’s Stephen Hall tweeted, “It’s gesture navigation 100% per my source.”
Google is also likely to detail a new Android API called “Slices”. Other than the information provided by Google Android P developer documentation, which describes a Slice as “a piece of app content and actions that can be surfaced outside of the app,” we currently know very little about this feature.
That said, Google is likely to discuss and demo the API at I/O.
Material Design 2
When Google launched its Gmail redesign last week, it was the first time most of the company’s users got a chance to check out its new ‘Material Design 2’ refresh.
While Google is unlikely to devote significant time to the refresh, I/O being a developer conference, the company is likely to detail new guidelines and best practices related to its refreshed mobile design language.
Android TV
In March, Google ended support for the Nexus Player, the company’s only first-party Android TV device. As Ars Technica’s Ron Amadeo notes, that’s not a healthy setup for the Android TV ecosystem; were Google to issue a major Android TV update today, it would likely take weeks and even months for third-party OEMs like Nvidia to update their Android TV devices with the new software.
Thankfully, it appears Google plans to remedy the situation. Just last month, the FCC uploaded documentation for a Chromecast-like dongle that runs Android TV. It’s unlikely Google will announce any new hardware at I/O, but there’s a good chance the company will furnish attendees with Android TV devices to encourage their continued involvement in the platform.
Android Things
While the average consumer might not care about the Internet of Things (IoT), the unfolding tech vertical is an important source of future revenue for companies like Google.
At I/O 2015, Google announced Project Brillo, a stripped down version of Android designed for IoT devices. One year later, the company rebranded Brillo to Android Things. Since then, Google has been polishing the platform with little fanfare, but just last month the company launched the final Android Things developer preview. If there’s a better venue than I/O to launch Android Things 1.0, Google will be hard pressed to find one.
Android Auto
One of the more exciting — and likely substantial — announcements Google is likely to make at I/O will be related to Android Auto.
Earlier in the week, the company updated its iOS I/O 2018 app with more detailed demo area descriptions. One of those updated descriptions hints at “brand new [Android Auto] media experience.”
Unlike some of Google’s other session and sandbox descriptions, this one is more concrete, noting that the company will show how both first- and third-party apps can be “adapted and optimized for the new automotive interface.”
Google Photos
Google made a splash at I/O 2015 when it launched its standalone Photos app (prior to then, Photos was part of Google+). Since then, the app has become one of the company’s most popular products to date, amassing more than 500 million monthly active users in its first two years of availability.
At I/O 2018, Google is hosting a session where it promises to “preview some exciting updates to Google Photos.” Based on that fact, it’s likely the company will detail some type of third-party developer integration. What form that integration takes is unknown at this point.
Bonus: Wear OS
Lest we forget about Wear OS, nee Android Wear, Google has a dedicated Wear OS session planned for I/O 2018. At this point, it’s likely best not to expect anything substantial. Moreover, it’s hard to see Google devoting even a hot minute to the wearable operating system during its opening keynote.
However, the one Wear OS session Google has planned for I/O will feature the company detailing “the latest developments for Wear OS”, as well “new product features.” So who knows, we might see Google make another concentrated push at positioning Wear OS as a viable alternative to the Apple Watch.
Wrap-up
If you’re looking at this list and saying to yourself, “there’s not a lot of consumer-facing stuff here,” it’s important to remember I/O is a developer conference. It’s the time Google takes to bring its third-party developers, the lifeblood of so many of the company’s platforms, up to speed. The fun hardware-related annoucements will come later in the year when the company announces its new Pixel devices.
In either case, MobileSyrup will be on the ground at Google I/O to bring you the latest from the annual, so stay tuned to get all the latest announcements.
The latest line of Samsung Pro Endurance micro SD cards are built to last a lot longer than the average SD card.
For users who want a little more reassurance in their data storage, Samsung has added a line of micro SD cards that can handle around five years of continuous video.
The cards can operate with up to 100mbps read speeds for full high definition recording and 30mbps write speeds for 4K video.
The Pro Endurance cards are available in three sizes, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. The largest size is backed by a five-year warranty, the smaller sizes include three years and two years respectively.
Like many other microSD cards, the Pro Endurance cards are waterproof, temperature proof and X-ray resistant.
The cards went on sale in the U.S. today for $30 USD ($38.50 CAD) for the 32GB version, $50 USD ( $64 CAD) 64GB and $100 USD ($128 CAD)for the largest 128GB.
The cards are not currently available in Canada but, we’ve reached out to Samsung to see if they’re coming up north.
If you have a device with a USB-C port—like a MacBook or Android phone—you’re going to need some cables. Unfortunately, when it comes to USB-C, even cables that look identical can perform very differently; your MacBook’s charging cable, for example, has the exact same connectors at each end as a top-speed Thunderbolt 3 cable, but it’s very different internally, it transfers data at a snail’s pace, and it can’t send a video signal. To make sure you get the right cable for your needs, we’ve tested 36 cables and 16 adapters to find the best ones for charging, data transfer, video, and more.
It is nothing but a number, no different than 999,999,999,999 for all practical purposes, but we humans are not practical creatures: we attach importance to all kinds of silly things, round numbers chief amongst them. To that end, an increasingly popular parlor question in the stocks as entertainment business is which company will be worth $1 trillion first?
There are certainly cases to be made for Google and Microsoft and even Facebook, but most of the attention is focused on Amazon and Apple: the latter for being the closest, and the former for growing the fastest, at least recently:
It is interesting to consider these two companies in conjunction: they couldn’t be more different, but for the one thing that makes them both so valuable.
Apple Versus Amazon
I mean it when I say these companies are the complete opposite: Apple sells products it makes; Amazon sells products made by anyone and everyone. Apple brags about focus; Amazon calls itself “The Everything Store.” Apple is a product company that struggles at services; Amazon is a services company that struggles at product. Apple has the highest margins and profits in the world; Amazon brags that other’s margin is their opportunity, and until recently, barely registered any profits at all. And, underlying all of this, Apple is an extreme example of a functional organization, and Amazon an extreme example of a divisional one.
These points are all, of course, interrelated: Apple’s organizational structure, focus, and release-focused development cycle enable it to create highly differentiated products, even as the exact same structure, focus, and development cycle underly the company’s struggles in iterative services.1 Similarly, Amazon’s highly modular structure, varied businesses, and iterative approach to those businesses enable it to create services with itself as its first, best, customer, and then extend those services to developers and retailers, even as the exact same factors lead to product disasters like the Fire Phone.
Both, taken together, are a reminder that there is no one right organizational structure, product focus, or development cycle: what matters is that they all fit together, with a business model to match. That is where Apple and Amazon are arguable more alike than not: both are incredibly aligned in all aspects of their business. What makes them truly similar, though, is the end goal of that alignment: the customer experience.
The iPhone Versus Disruption
The first time Apple released two different iPhone form factors in the same year was 2013. There the new form factor was the iPhone 5C, but while the industrial design was new, the pricing wasn’t: the 5C slotted into the spot where the discontinued iPhone 5 would traditionally have gone — $100 less than the new flagship iPhone 5S. Analysts and pundits were aghast: how could Apple not produce a truly low-price iPhone? Didn’t they know this guaranteed disruption?
I argued to the contrary in a piece entitled What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong. After recounting the many predictions by the father of disruption that the iPhone would not be a success, I came up with three specific reasons why Apple seemed immune to disruptive gravity:
First, it was folly to presume that consumers were rational, at least to the extent that rationality could be reduced to easily articulable features balanced against price (or appreciating that round numbers aren’t anything special).
Second, there are many attributes of a product that can’t be easily measured, but only experienced, and that they loom large when the person using the product is the same as the person buying the product.
Third, that modular products, by virtue of their prioritization of standardization and interconnectivity, would inevitably fall short on attributes directly connected to the experience of using the device.
The key paragraph is here:
The attribute most valued by consumers, assuming a product is at least in the general vicinity of a need, is ease-of-use. It’s not the only one — again, doing a job-that-needs-done is most important — but all things being equal, consumers prefer a superior user experience. What is interesting about this attribute is that it is impossible to overshoot.
The term “overshoot” is right out of disruption theory. Christensen writes in his seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma:
The second element of the failure framework, the observation that technologies can progress faster than market demand…means that in their efforts to provide better products than their competitors and earn higher prices and margins, suppliers often “overshoot” their market: They give customers more than they need or ultimately are willing to pay for. And more importantly, it means that disruptive technologies that may underperform today, relative to what users in the market demand, may be fully performance-competitive in that same market tomorrow.
This was the basis for insisting that the iPhone must have a low-price model: surely Apple would soon run out of new technology to justify the prices it charged for high-end iPhones, and consumers would start buying much cheaper Android phones instead!
In fact, as I discussed in after January’s earnings results, the company has gone in the other direction: more devices per customer, higher prices per device, and an increased focus on ongoing revenue from those same customers. Yesterday’s results were mostly more of the same: wearables were up a lot (more devices per customer); ASP’s were down from last quarter but still 11% higher than a year ago;2 services revenue, meanwhile, shot through the roof for reasons that are still a bit unclear, but impressive nonetheless.
Also the same was a very modest increase in the number of iPhone sold: 3% more than a year ago. Apple seems to have mostly saturated the high end, slowly adding switchers even as existing iPhone users hold on to their phones longer; what is not happening, though, is what disruption predicts: Apple isn’t losing customers to low-cost competitors for having “overshot” and overpriced its phones. It seems my thesis was right: a superior experience can never be too good — or perhaps I didn’t go far enough.
Amazon and Divine Discontent
Jeff Bezos has been writing an annual letter to shareholders since 1997, and he attaches that original letter to one he pens every year. It included this section entitled Obsess Over Customers:
From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value. We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books. We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy-to-search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We maintained a dogged focus on improving the shopping experience, and in 1997 substantially enhanced our store. We now offer customers gift certificates, 1-Click shopping, and vastly more reviews, content, browsing options, and recommendation features. We dramatically lowered prices, further increasing customer value. Word of mouth remains the most powerful customer acquisition tool we have, and we are grateful for the trust our customers have placed in us. Repeat purchases and word of mouth have combined to make Amazon.com the market leader in online bookselling.
Over the last 20 years Amazon has dramatically changed, but Bezos’ annual focus on consumers has not. This year, after highlighting just how much customers love Amazon (answer: a lot), Bezos wrote:
One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static — they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before — in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.
Critically, when it comes to Internet-based services, this customer focus does not come at the expense of a focus on infrastructure or distribution or suppliers: while those were the means to customers in the analog world, in the online world controlling the customer relationship gives a company power over its suppliers, the capital to build out infrastructure, and control over distribution. Bezos is not so much choosing to prioritize customers insomuch as he has unlocked the key to controlling value chains in an era of aggregation.
Bezos’s letter, though, reveals another advantage of focusing on customers: it makes it impossible to overshoot. When I wrote that piece five years ago, I was thinking of the opportunity provided by a focus on the user experience as if it were an asymptote: one could get ever closer to the ultimate user experience, but never achieve it:
In fact, though, consumer expectations are not static: they are, as Bezos’ memorably states, “divinely discontent”. What is amazing today is table stakes tomorrow, and, perhaps surprisingly, that makes for a tremendous business opportunity: if your company is predicated on delivering the best possible experience for consumers, then your company will never achieve its goal.
In the case of Amazon, that this unattainable and ever-changing objective is embedded in the company’s culture is, in conjunction with the company’s demonstrated ability to spin up new businesses on the profits of established ones, a sort of perpetual motion machine; I’m not sure that Amazon will beat Apple to $1 trillion, but they surely have the best shot at two.
The Disruption Antidote
This analysis applies to Facebook and Google, two of the other companies in that chart, more than you might expect. While the two companies’ revenues are based on advertising, the attractiveness to advertisers rests on consumers using both services.3 Both, though, are disadvantaged to an extent because their means of making money operate orthogonally to a great user experience; both are protected by the fact would-be competitors inevitably have the same business model.4
That is why, for all four companies, the first place to look for weaknesses is not in the supplier base or distribution or even regulation: it is with the end users. That is why it matters that Amazon is the most popular company in the United States, why Apple and Google continue to have two of the most respected brands, and why Facebook is right to be more concerned about the PR effect of its scandals than the regulatory ones. Owning the customer relationship by means of delivering a superior experience is how these companies became dominant, and, when they fall, it will be because consumers deserted them, either because the companies lost control of the user experience (a danger for Facebook and Google), or because a paradigm shift made new experiences matter more (a danger for Google and Apple).
In the meantime, though, disruption5 has its antidote.
Yes, the company is crushing it with regards to “Services” revenue; that is mostly from the App Store and also iCloud Storage, that is to say, predicated on iPhone dominance. This reference is to things like Siri and Maps
There was a lot of breathless speculation about iPhone X sales cratering, which clearly didn’t happen. That said, iPhone X sales clearly fell off a bit: iPhone ASP was down 9% sequentially, a much larger drop than the 6% drop a year ago.
Microsoft is an enterprise company, a very different beast
For a social network, the number one feature is how many of your friends are on it, which means a “free” service will always have an advantage; for a search engine, there is a weaker, but still significant, network effect that is based on data, which again augurs for a free service with the maximum number of users that entails.
Everything you know about being in London feeling sometimes like you're a sardine in a can is true. Especially at morning peak hour on public transport.
I try never to have work meetings first thing, but had to a while back. This meant a short one hop train ride to the cloying Highbury and Islington station at around 8:45am. The worst time to be there. I waited on the platform with the upright
Image: GlassDoor.com
From the “it was too good to be true” department, investigative reporter Kathy Tomlinson peels the speculative skin off the local Vancouver condo flipping practice in this Globe and Mail story.
existentialcoms on Twitter.
existentialcoms
on Tuesday, May 1st, 2018 5:28pm
The bookmarks to use as listed in Evernote..
Those who have been keeping a close watch on our social media might have noticed, in addition to our announcement about collaborating with UBPorts to facilitate Ubuntu Touch’s transition to a pure GNU+Linux stack with the Librem 5 phone hardware platform, that we quietly started a promotional sale for the Librem 15 laptop, where you could get that big screen for the same price as the Librem 13’s regular price. That is, $200 off the base price configuration! So far, it it seems people have been responding well to that promotion and spreading the word, so we’re extending it for the whole month of May.
