We Are 1

Weather Channel My Yahoo Fail

weare1 — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:07:20 +0000

MyYahoo! pays to get their weather data from the weather channel. Everyday the weather sensor where I live gets hit by sprinklers causing it to say it’s raining when it isn’t. I’ve been notifying both yahoo and TWC about this issue for over four years now multiple multiple times. I’m getting really sick of being ignored by large uncaring corporations that don’t care about their own products. It’s no wonder Yahoo is failing so miserably. This isn’t rocket science, it’s weather, it would take someone five minutes to fix, but nobody wants to deal with problems and of course neither Yahoo nor TWC even have a functioning customer service dept. When these companies wonder how they squandered such a huge lead in their industries we can look back at this post and the thousands like it and wonder why they continued to do nothing. If I was a yahoo or NBC shareholder (thankfully I’m not) and read this I would be super pissed at management. After all is said and done this is a management fail.

I accidentally tweeted accuweather about this issue and I couldn’t believe how responsive they were, they got back to be within an hour, as opposed to Yahoo and TWC ignoring multiple emails and tweets over four years. Four years! Yahoo should drop TWC which obviously doesn’t care about providing accurate weather information, and hire accuweather, because getting the weather right on your landing page should be a high priority. FYI Google and Bing manage to get the weather right.

The Apple Is Rotting

weare1 — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:47:42 +0000

Steve’s not gone for five minutes before they start up with the old greedy tricks again. Apple’s done it again by charging $5 for their compiler. Do they hope to increase their bottom line $5 at a time from DEVELOPERS?! Or maybe they just want to alienate their developers. Or maybe they want to discourage the next great developer from writing the next great thing for their platform. Hello Apple, you WANT developers. Repeat until understood; Developers are not a profit center!

Those of you that are old school remember when Steve left (got kicked out) in the mid 80′s and what happened to Apple then; They produced marketing limited computers, and shoddy overpriced products. Straight up, they got lazy and greedy. Lest us not forget that it was Apple during this time that invented the mandatory operating system upgrade, now standard industry practice for revenue generation (greed.)

Maybe their success with their AppStore went to their head, and they think that now they don’t need developers, or that they can be treated poorly, or even milked for revenue. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Apple’s distribution costs are essentially zero, I just don’t understand this decision at all. I understand the people running the company now are MBA’s just like Scully was, it’s so obvious. While the street might say that you need MBA’s to run this company, it’s painfully obvious they want to run it into the ground by milking every drip of revenue from it they can. They know nothing about sustainability or innovation.

Apple you’re going in the wrong direction again. Charging for your development platform has to be the stupidest decision in the modern computer business. You should, in addition to reverting the compiler back to free, go one step further and either continue to support your older operating systems like 10.4 or offer upgrades for free. Making operating systems essentially a subscription service might apparently help your bottom line, but you risk losing customers. If your competitors weren’t lazier and more greedy then you, then you might have real competition; Rest assured at some point in time it will happen. Lets hope by then you’re not too fat, lazy, and greedy to change.

Another Massive Microsoft Fail

weare1 — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:56:05 +0000

The fact that Microsoft didn’t turn the Xbox into a media center which we proved it could be great at, was one of the largest mistakes in the history of technology which amazingly they are repeating with their 360 product. They are more concerned about making sure their box doesn’t get hacked then making sure their customers get the most out of their box. Once one of these dumb (I’m looking at you Sony who lost the complete control of the console market, but also made the same media center mistake) companies figures out that the homebrew community can improve their product, and has better software engineers then they do, and is willing to open their product will have massive success, because the people have spoken. We know what we want, the companies know what we want but for some reason are unwilling to provide it. The fact that Microsoft was greedy about their box will doom them to failure. Because our XBMC community was unable to use the 360 we switched to the Mac and Linux platforms, which we are going to use as our media centers thus depriving Microsoft of their beloved “Microsoft Tax.” They could have owned this market segment which will grow and grow, but because they chose to milk their consoles for profitability over usability they lose. Management in America is very short sighted.

The meaning of open

weare1 — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:59:46 +0000

Official Google Blog: The meaning of open.

Stress Poll

weare1 — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:51:41 +0000

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You Do Not Have Health Insurance « The Baseline Scenario

weare1 — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:42:05 +0000

You Do Not Have Health Insurance « The Baseline Scenario

United Breaks Guitars

weare1 — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:45:23 +0000

YouTube – United Breaks Guitars

Best Home Theater Accessory Ever

weare1 — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:57:30 +0000

You must get this exact version of Harmony’s fantastic universal remote control, not the fancier ones, and not the cheaper ones although you’ll be tempted. This ain’t cheap, but it has a feature called the RF extender, and what this little black box does receive the command from your remote via radio frequencies instead of infra-red (light) and then send that command to your components via infra-red which is what most components use. RF is way better then infra-red because it has longer range and does not require a line of sight, so you don’t have to “aim” your remote. Also, because the RF extender comes with IR emitters, you can put all of your components in a cabinet out of sight yet still have full remote control. Fantastic. Better still is the easy to use software (mac and PC) to set up the remote with all of your devices and even fine-tune it. The remote itself has a rechargeable battery, so there’s no concerns about running out of juice. The remote even plays a cute little slide show on its little LCD when it goes back in it’s cradle. The remote itself has an small screen on it, is fully customizable and works by activities rather then devices, what this means is that it offers things like “watch TV” or “listen to CDs”, not “CD->play”, it’s a subtle but significant difference. When in an activity the screen offers relevant choices. It took a few tries to get everything working perfectly, but each tweek made it a little bit better. I’m overjoyed with this device, it’s made my life better.

Logitech Harmony 890 Advanced Universal Remote Control

The Uninsured Subsidize The Insured

weare1 — Sun, 24 May 2009 19:06:46 +0000

In America we have two health care systems, one for the insured and one for the uninsured. They are exactly the same in every way except one, price. If an insured person goes to an emergency room and requires a bandage their insurance company is charged the insured rate, say $20. Now if an uninsured person goes to the same emergency room and got the same bandage they would be billed about 20 times more then the other’s insurance company, $400 in this case. Both people need the bandage, why should the uninsured person pay more in effect subsidizeing the insured person? Is this fair? Clearly not. Yet, this is what is happening day in and day out in hospitals throughout this country. We need change, and we need it yesterday. If you’re not outraged then you’re not paying attention.

Netflix Hits It Out Of The Park With Xbox360 HD Streaming

weare1 — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:38:53 +0000

Netflix HD on Xbox360

Netflix has apparently hit a home run with it’s new (yet to be released-Nov. 19th) High-Definition movie streaming application for Xbox360′s. HD streaming is clearly the future of media and Netflix is the first one to deliver this long awaited feature. I’ve been using the regular Netflix service for years now and have nothing but great things to say about it, but this is a game changer. Kudus to Microsoft for realizing that this will drive Xbox360 sales perhaps at some cost to their own over-priced movie downloads. Once this hits the Xbox360 will be on a lot of christmas lists, and not just kids either. Netflix has priced this right (free!) with your existing traditonal Netflix movie account and your Xbox360 gold membership. To be fair there is only a limited selection of HD movies (and TV shows) available, but expect this to increase as studios begin to realize revenues from streaming. Netflix pays the studios a very small amount every time you stream their movies, and while Netflix is currently absorbing those costs to drive membership this cannot last. Expect that there will be fees in the future, but for now this is the media delivery system that consumers want.

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