I wonder if the incentive actually is to "produce as good a product for their customers as possible," or if it's to find the optimal place on the "price to produce" vs. sale price*popularity curve.
I would also posit that in spite of the fact that, while perhaps "For profit operations produce most good things in this world" (for some very specific definition of "good"), news media is in fact a niche where not-for-profit organizations do have a history of being superior to for-profit counterparts (e.g. BBC, NPR, AP, etc)
It is the second and it is a good thing one is for availability and the second is for making desired products and implies at least novelty to keep the willing to pay high.
Just focusing on quality pure would result in a comically overluxury white elephant of a product as optimizing it would result in more and more cost and overwroughtness.
Would you happen to have some suggestions on where to start further reading of radical economics? I'm halfway through "Doughnut Economics" right now, but it's a bit simple -- I was looking for something more challenging.
J.E. Roemer's classic 1982 book[0] on exploitation from a game-theoretic standpoint is generally the beginning of the post-Marxian era of radical economics. However, his is not the only approach, now there are theories which attempt to reformulate the Marxist concept into a theory of unequal exchange of labour. Roberto Veneziani[1] has a great many papers on this theory of exploitation, expressed mathematically, in particular, two principles: profit-exploitation correspondance principle, and the class-exploitation correspondance principle. Andrew Kliman[2] and Fred Moseley[3] are two economists with very contrasting approaches to Marx's labour theory of value and its application today, as well as other "problems" in Marx (such as the transformation problem). Moseley also criticizes some of Piketty's methods[4]. Kliman and Patrick Murray agree that, providing the labour theory of value is true, then we can deduce Marxian exploitation - however their approach is less economic and more philosophical. This is because Murray objects to the use of neoclassical models and methods, with good reason[5]. Vrousalis[6] takes a non-Marxian approach to dominatiton and exploitation under capitalism.
For the latest stuff in the field, check out the main journals[7][8] and Brill's Historical Materialism book series, and this one[9] in particular.
"page-break-inside: avoid" and "page-break-after" seem to work fairly reliably, as long as you aren't doing too much weird stuff with positioning, floats, etc.
Three major problems I've had with printing from HTML is
1) It seems that the different browsers have different default margins, and the outside margins aren't controllable from CSS
2) The javascript print dialog doesn't give any sort of feedback...it just blocks JS execution. There's no way to no if the user cancelled the print, etc.
3) Different browsers don't reliably resize things to fit on the page. Using percentages for anything (while maybe not recommended anyway) just doesn't work for printed CSS
I fought with those and eventually gave up, because their implementations were either broken or missing in the browsers I was supporting. But that probably 18 months ago now. Maybe they have improved.
Ah, at the title I thought this was going to be about WebRTC, something I'm pretty excited about, even though it has a quite a ways to mature yet (http://caniuse.com/rtcpeerconnection).
Interesting that they left out websockets. At this point Websockets seem to be reasonably mature, and with Socket.io/Primus/etc are dead easy to use, and allow for near-real-time 2 way communication. There do appear to be some scaling issues past a certain level with websockets though, a topic I haven't been able to find too much literature about.
As for webhooks, are these more geared towards Server-to-server communication, like consuming an API on the back end? Is there any chance that in the future browsers will begin listening on our ports too?
I don't think it's absurd at all. As other commenters have mentioned, seeing the coupon code box and not having a coupon gives me (personally) a feeling of remorse before I've even bought what I was shopping for. This should concern you, as a merchant, because ideally you'd like your users to associate good feelings with shopping on your site.
Beyond the "feelings" aspect, I suspect that, as is argued in the article, the coupon code box does lead in some cases to cart abandonment. I've certainly seen the box, gone on a hunt for a coupon, and ended up buying the same item at a different vendor during my hunt many times before.
Personally, I think the best solution for this is either special urls (i.e. www.shop.com/summercoupon), or a "Where did you hear about us" box, which could double as a coupon box, and just an interesting way to gather data about your users. Sure, you'd probably get a lot of garbage, and you'd have to put more effort into parsing the values, but, in addition to not alienating users, you might find some valuable insights as well.
What people say and what people pay are not strongly correlated. :-)
Coupons can give a 100-10,000% lift very easily, enabling web merchants to be less dependent on black Friday/cyber Monday/etc. They can shift demand earlier in the year to even out fulfillment stress and reduce the uncertainty in sales projections.
In the face of realized revenue vs. some perception of unhappiness, sales and marketing will take the buck eleven times out of ten.
Maybe you could make it detect when the device is turned upside down, and display a 180º rotated interface in the conversation partner's language? So the interaction would be input phrase->turn phone upside down->partner enters phrase?
I'm not so sure about the argument that most people would forgo the $4 cup of Starbucks, given a free alternative. Every office that I've ever worked in provided free coffee, and half of the office would still regularly pick up coffee from the nearest Starbucks daily. I think there's something to be said for
1) Crafting the "image" of superiority that people get from purchasing Starbucks (having that nice branded Starbucks cup, rather than the crappy styrofoam one your office provides, allowing people to order ridiculously tailored drinks -- soy half caff with a dollop of creme...etc) and
2) Providing an ecosystem to encourage the purchase over free alternatives (I've noticed that I'll stop at Starbucks for a snack because I'm hungry in the morning, and pick up coffee/tea as well, just because I'm there)
Yours is a good point (and I can't fully refute it), but I'd like to point out that the article's argument is that Starbucks doesn't offer a free alternative. Surely if Starbucks offered a free alternative, people would choose it instead, as long as it provided a reasonable number of the benefits the paid version does.
To bring the analogy back around to apps, let's say there was an Instagram app that costs $9 and a notJimstagram app that does something similar for free. Instagram = Starbucks, notJimstagram = your office coffee. Most people would buy Instagram, because Instagram is well known, has a strong brand, etc.
On the other hand, suppose there was the $9 Instagram and the free Instagram. In that case, most people would probably choose, or at least start with the free Instagram.
I've always wondered, what happens to the actual programmer[s] responsible for a bug like this? Assuming they find the exact issue, and then go back through the version control logs to the exact commit, how responsible, if at all, is the individual programmer? Or the QA team, for that matter.
Incidents like this make me think that I'd have a panic attack with every commit, if I worked in the financial industry.
But, given that many of the larger ISPs (at least those available to residential customers in my area -- Comcast and Verizon) are owned by companies that also provide cable (and telephone) services, what's to stop them from simply bundling cable service with your internet service and charging a bunch extra? I realize that not everyone has this problem, but in many areas there's almost an "information monopoly" with regards to web service.
I would also posit that in spite of the fact that, while perhaps "For profit operations produce most good things in this world" (for some very specific definition of "good"), news media is in fact a niche where not-for-profit organizations do have a history of being superior to for-profit counterparts (e.g. BBC, NPR, AP, etc)