Come on! This is one of the most remarkably run companies around today. They never do anything halfway. If you balk at $350, you either aren't their target market or you don't think very highly of Dropbox.
$350 is about an hour and a half of work, at $215 per hour. That's chump change. Most significant conferences are about $300, such as ConvergeSE which happened just a couple weeks ago.
Dropbox knows that people will buy tickets because they believe in Dropbox, and then Dropbox will make it awesome. Then everyone will know that when you've got a company that does things right, you can trust them with a tiny percentage of a typical webshop's daily paycheck, which they already knew anyway. And if $350 seems like a lot per person, when you add up all the costs involved it's really not that much. Money adds up quickly when a conference is done right. Most conferences pay a full-time employee for months just to make sure that the wifi won't melt under the load of hundreds of conference goers. There are a huge number of things to think about and make sure that everything goes right.
I'm shocked at this thread. Utterly shocked. Someone else actually complained that the three letters DBX are already taken. Come on! Every possible three or four letter acronym is taken. This thread is crazy. There is nothing of value here, at all, period. Not sure what happened to HN here.
Yeah, in high school in the early 00s I was a big Oberon fan. I had booted the system from diskette on my windows computer. I also had Blackbox and built some really basic things. Overall it was a huge amount of fun, and I have fond memories of the Object Inspector and connecting references together on forms and stuff. It was really Brett Victor's "tangled" before Brett Victor came along with these ideas. Actually, it was a lot like hypercard, based on what I've read of hypercard. LayLa was a cool layout system kind of like flexbox. They had a lot of cool applications. The flat filesystem was weird (no directories), but it was certainly simple.
Over time it was so disappointing, though, that the system never went anywhere. My biggest takeaway was to not be such a programming language purist. Now I'm a javascript fan. It's not pure or perfect, but it's simple and it nails the important things. Plus for the foreseeable future it's the most widely supported computer language in existence. Simplicity and pragmatism are really key.
They don't want to report daily revenue because it would average out to a lot less than $900 million a year, I think. Two weeks ago they were making over 1 million a day, now it's over 2 million a day.[1] To me, that growth rate at this kind of scale is more meaningful than a yearly figure (or a daily figure, to be honest).
Of course, the reason they use "2.5 million per day" is to give you a classic Scrooge McDuck kind of visual, with a big semi trailer packed with money entering your palace every day.
Valve doesn't have a CEO. It's an undifferentiated mass of people, at least as far as power structure goes -- sort of like a slime mold. I think that's a lot different than having a CEO who prides himself on being an inspirer instead of a controller (if I'm reading the article correctly). In other words, it sounds like he is a constitutional monarch. (Of course, that bursts the whole "American miracle" thing about him being like the president.)
However, is there an underlying truth at Valve, that if he wanted to, Newell could fire everyone on the spot? I have no idea if that is true, and if so, don't necessary think such an arrangement is bad. But if that is the case, it needs to be acknowledged that authority, even if unstated and unexercised, still has an effect.
The "American miracle" thing bursts if one spends more than a few afternoons noting that the combination of lax IP laws and WW I and II were a great deal more influential than structural detail.
Seivan, I apologize deeply for getting your comment off track, and I hope others will not follow this further from your main point.
However, I would just offer a quick point of advice. Don't spend keystrokes saying you might be down-voted for something. It's actually bolder to just say what you're going to say. When you reference downvoting, you stigmatize it and influence people not to do so. I would rather know if people are going to have a downvote reaction to my comment than shame them into not downvoting me. I've had the exact same tendency to observe "well I might get downvoted for this," but I think it's a tendency that should be resisted.
Or just don't write it at all since expected to be down voted is often a sign of unfounded opinions. In this case there's no indication at this point of this being done by jihadists, which makes the previous comment ignorant at best.
Fair enough, appreciate the input. I'll remember it till next time, and you're kinda on to something, it sounds defeatist and quite frankly just tacky.
Installing a new Android home launcher, setting up llama, etc on Android is NOTHING like trying to work through an automanual and make changes to your car. This analogy is utterly wrong..
...or you could get an Android for much cheaper and install some home screen widgets.
Apple fanboys insist that Android features, such as widgets, are unnecessary. Then they go crazy over iPad dashboard apps that weakly simulate Android functionality.
How do you know that those who insist widgets are unnecessary are the same people who go crazy over iPad dashboard apps?
Really though: as an Android and iOS user, widgets are almost always sub-par compared to a regular app. I highly doubt that you could get as good an experience with widgets as you could with a dedicated app by Panic.
This sort of status board would actually fit Android's Daydream concept quite well. Daydreams are sort of screensaver-ish system that apps can use to draw stuff on the screen whenever a device is docked or charging.
Hmmm, could someone build a text "scrambler" that would intentionally create broken English? I have also noticed that "broken English" is more effective by some measures than ordinary English.
Note also that the broken English here is not the author, but it's Google Translate. The text has been machine translated from Russian. Also interesting that Google Translate is much more effective translating the mathematical portions than the other portions of the text. Another case of what people find hard computers find easy, and vice versa.
The fact that broken English is effective for recall, at least in some circumstances, totally fascinates me.
I'd love to capitalise on the idea somehow, just because its so counter intuitive I think. Although i fully appreciate it's not effective enough to replace spaced repetition or other formal techniques.
