It wasn't a bug. Please, just say it. Give me closure. It'll be good for your karma.
The adverts have been running all month and the 1* reviews on the app store and your forums would have made you aware of this 'defect'. Forum responses were initially to tell us to upgrade - and then they went silent. I presume you had some internal meetings.
The Verge story came out on the 24th, and on the 25th suddenly the adverts vanished (on both beta and production channels simultaneously). Imagine me raising my eyebrow.
Unlike some of my fellow previously-paid users, I'd said I was OK with paying you more money. The app's lasted longer than most, I've used it nearly every day, and I want to make sure the maintainers get paid and you can keep the lights on.
I think it's still the only app where I've raised a ticket to ask how to donate more money.
What's sent us all the the barricades though, is the tone-deaf way this was done - and it's continuing to happen. The adverts are gone, but I'm not feeling happy. This feels like remission at best. I'm suspecting you're not feeling deliriously cheerful over what the last month has achieved either.
My constructive thoughts are:
1) £40 is too much to pay each year for a podcast app. Nothing will work at this price.
Look at Antennapod and justify anything you're charging for - it's what any your new users will be doing.
2) For people who paid to turn off the adverts forever, they need to have a way to have their adverts turned off turned off - so they'll need to be differentiated from the new users.
3) This doesn't mean I (and I assume others) don't want to pay you money though. Give me a way. Maybe every month, or 1000 minutes of playback just pop-up a "I hope your enjoying us, have you got a spare $10" message"? And if I click the little X, that message should instantly vanish/snooze.
Annoyingly, this might have worked better before you'd torched the goodwill.
What the article seems to miss is that for every delusional high-performer who's about to be short-changed on reward and recognition, there's an order-of-magnitude more potential high-performers who aware of the lack of reward and recognition, are having a nice relaxing life. Possibly knocking out their work in a couple of hours in the morning and spending the afternoon studying micro-biology to perfect their sourdough pizza crust.
i.e. retaining your 10x superstar is important, but are the rest of the team really only capable of 1x? Really? What's the benefit to them of giving 2x?
There seems to be some myth that everybody gives every ounce of their potential, out of the goodness of their heart as an employee. I think the reality is that most of us do whatever the role requires, plus anything we happen to enjoy/fixing frustrations.
You also have the effect where the perception of being a 'high performer' might be gamed.
E.g. it might be rather trivial to churn out code and be perceived like a high performer, but you are essentially just creating alot more job for everyone else and drag them down.
Also, it is easy to do so much stuff that you will be blocked and waiting on other, who seem slow etc.
Unless the manager is working along side you he likely wont notice. And these points also happen automatically by itself. But I guess adversial collegues use the concept to game the workplace.
I suspect the easiest thing would be a "return to base and shutdown" button that the Secret Service could trigger at short notice - would cause problems for everything wanting to use a Waymo, but I suspect the SS are quite OK with causing disruption already.
Sounds like fake movie spy shit to me. It turns out, the Secret Service is an organization of humans with ordinary lives and a relatively modest budget.
That's got to be a reason why the attacks are staggered.
Separating them definitely increased the chances that somebody would check their radios - but taking out the pagers drove people to the radios. Now taking out the radios is making people worry what else might be compromised. Your enemy refusing to use their communication equipment is a definite win.
The pagers and radios were supposedly due to the worry that the phone system was compromised - but I'm guessing more people will be using it tomorrow.
But if you wanted to put 30g of explosive into a device, you wouldn't just want it sat there looking out of place to any curious person with a screw-driver. My guess is that you'd want to put it inside a component like say a LiPo pouch that looks like it belongs there. Half-battery, half-explosive - and maybe hijack the BMS components to also allow it to be triggered.
Anyone care to appreciate how effectively the new CT X-ray machines used by the TSA could have picked up the explosive materials in these electronic devices?
That might be one way to restore faith in one’s supply chain.
>My understanding is that they were extremely well concealed
Source? I'm not sure how you can concealed any meaningful amount of PCB/explosive in a pager/radio, unless you're hoping that your target never opens the plastic casing, or doesn't know what the internals are supposed to look like.
I'd guess the explosives were inside the "VCO can": the metal shielding around the VCO circuit. The picture of the radio shows the radio's metal casing bent away from the PCB, suggesting the blast came from that direction rather than the battery. The VCO can would have air-space inside it and is unlikely to be opened, even by a service tech. There will be an SPI serial bus running from the CPU into the VCO can, to allow programming of the VCO, which could be used as a conduit for a trigger command.
From the picture it looked to me like it was more aligned with the DAC, although I double checked and I don't think that any DACs of that size would be in the order of 20-30 grams. Could a discharge be angled like that within the confines of the can?
The most plausible theory seems, that the batteries were manipulated/replaced with smaller ones, from the outside still looking like normal batteries, but with explosive inside.
So a shorter battery life, but usually no one cuts open batteries.
the amount of explosives would be about the size of a pencil eraser, easily concealable imo. Reports are that they could have modified the existing batteries and put them inside there.
You know what a LiPo pouch looks like right? silvery bag, some yellow tape at the end with some wires sticking out.
Less likely you know what they look like inside, as it's been drilled into us not to pierce the things. Also if your laptop battery only lasts a couple of hours you might suspect something is wrong. If your pager needs recharging every month instead of every 2 months... well nobody has a clue how often a pager should need recharging.
I've no idea if it was the battery, but just feels like the right approach.
Exponential revenue is easy - you just need exponential inflation and it comes for free.
Increased productivity is maybe the goal - but how it's measured is up for discussion. If you do it in dollars, then do you adjust for inflation? If you do, what inflation? (inflation on the price of bread or super-yachts etc).
Or do you do it in value? What can you get for your work? In the 1990s a "machine in your pocket that can play any music ever recorded" would have been near-impossible/priceless. 25 years later it costs maybe a dollar a day and we can all have it.
If we can always get the same stuff for an ever-decreasing amount of effort, then that could be seen as exponential growth. You could argue that you could measure growth by technological advancement.
Conversely if your rent is going up 10% a year, then who cares that you're 5% more productive and making 5% more money every year. That doesn't feel like growth.
Unless you're not renting and you're the landlord and then you're experiencing sweet sweet growth.
3M VHB (Very High Bond) is awesome double-sided foam tape, that comes in a variety of thicknesses and bond types. I last used some to re-attach a piece of rubber seal around a car door.
"Gorilla Tape Crystal Clear", which I think is a "repair tape". Size of Duct tape, looks like regular clear tape - but much thicker and much stickier and waterproof. Ideal for say repairing a tear in a paddling pool. Or a crack in a roof-box, where Duct tape would look bad.
3M Super 33+ It looks like standard black vinyl insulating tape - but is a pleasure to use. I don't think the existence of insulating tape is going to blow minds, but I'm just mentioning it for those who "thought it's all the same" and are "annoyed by it".
Self-Amalgamating Tape. Black, thick, rubbery tape with a pull off backing. Not very sticky, so doesn't immediately feel useful. What it does do though, is bond with itself. Not 'stick', but as the name says 'amalgamates'.
If you've ever wrapped a load of tape around something to keep water out, this is what you should have used.
I wouldn't normally inflict this list on anybody, but 'tape' is this wonderful area of technology where everybody knows what it is - but there's seemingly endless specialization for every conceivable use case. Finding/collecting these tapes feels like I'm assembling a box of solutions - and a tape-suitable problem is an opportunity for happiness.
Oxy is a pretty good example of the pros and cons of legalizing it.
Deaths from prescriptions were relatively rare - but it created a huge number of addicts with escalating tolerances.
Then as progressive efforts were made to reduce distribution, pill-mills and secondary markets appeared (i.e. crime). Then with further restrictions, addicts moved off oxy entirely, onto heroin, and then fentanyl flooded in - and bodies piled up.
Just "legalizing" might reduce the harm, but would increase number of addicts.
Prescriptions for existing addicts is good for them - but dealers aren't just going to give up, they'll focus on creating new users.
I don't think I've ever seen a perfect solution - but things like distributing naloxone or creating supervised places to self-administer seem like no-brainers in the meantime. Resistance seems to come from a somewhat ugly place where people see users dying as the problem being solved.
It wasn't a bug. Please, just say it. Give me closure. It'll be good for your karma. The adverts have been running all month and the 1* reviews on the app store and your forums would have made you aware of this 'defect'. Forum responses were initially to tell us to upgrade - and then they went silent. I presume you had some internal meetings.
Resolving this wouldn't have been hard, as due to it being open-sourced, we can see there's a debug flag to turn the adverts on and off: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/podcasts-you-altered-the-de...
The Verge story came out on the 24th, and on the 25th suddenly the adverts vanished (on both beta and production channels simultaneously). Imagine me raising my eyebrow.
Unlike some of my fellow previously-paid users, I'd said I was OK with paying you more money. The app's lasted longer than most, I've used it nearly every day, and I want to make sure the maintainers get paid and you can keep the lights on. I think it's still the only app where I've raised a ticket to ask how to donate more money.
What's sent us all the the barricades though, is the tone-deaf way this was done - and it's continuing to happen. The adverts are gone, but I'm not feeling happy. This feels like remission at best. I'm suspecting you're not feeling deliriously cheerful over what the last month has achieved either.
My constructive thoughts are: 1) £40 is too much to pay each year for a podcast app. Nothing will work at this price. Look at Antennapod and justify anything you're charging for - it's what any your new users will be doing. 2) For people who paid to turn off the adverts forever, they need to have a way to have their adverts turned off turned off - so they'll need to be differentiated from the new users. 3) This doesn't mean I (and I assume others) don't want to pay you money though. Give me a way. Maybe every month, or 1000 minutes of playback just pop-up a "I hope your enjoying us, have you got a spare $10" message"? And if I click the little X, that message should instantly vanish/snooze. Annoyingly, this might have worked better before you'd torched the goodwill.