Carl T. Holscher fights for the customers.

Category: Briefs

Short posts. Longer than a tweet.

coffee and receipts

Crowdfunding is a lottery

A project can go off the rails and fail even after its funding succeeds for a number of reasons. There can be unforeseen costs, or design problems, or a team member quits or fails to deliver their part of the project. Often, when a project skids to a halt, the final updates are obscured from the public and sent only to backers, which may be part of the reason failures are often not well-publicized. Occasionally, backers who receive them pass them on or post them publicly on forums, which is as good as it gets in terms of letting the outside world know a project did not ultimately pan out.

The ugly afterlife of crowdfunding projects that never ship and never end | Ars Technica

This sums up my views on Kickstarter nicely. I’ve only backed three projects. One failed to be get funded, one involved someone I knew online and trusted, the last one was a fantastic 8-bit Nine Inch Nails album.

None of them were big risks. I spent $40 across both successful projects and would have given $20 to the one that failed.

Overall, my investment of $60 is not outrageous and I knew going into them it was money I could afford to lose. Even if successful, there is no guarantee the thing I’ve helped fund will materialize. There’s no guarantee I will ever see anything for my investment.

And I, as the little fish in the investment pond, have no recourse. If the project’s creator runs out of money, I will not get a refund. I understand that.

Which is why I’m skeptical about crowd-funding much of anything. I’m much happier to buy the thing when it comes out than back its creation.

Read the Docs

My brother has been working on documenting the world through his Read the Docs project. Recently, he presented his project as part of the Portland Incubator Experiment.

His talk is below. It’s worth a watch. And not just because he’s my brother. He’s a smart guy who has done some cool things at cool places.

Better living through technology

As I was returning from my lunch-time walk, I saw a woman walking towards me gesturing strangely at me. I was confused at first as she was far away.

She continued gesturing as she got closer. Still confused, I continued to watch her, and as she drew near, I realized she wasn’t gesturing at me at all.

She was talking to someone on the phone in sign language using video chat.

There it was, the promise of technology, being used to actually make someone’s life better. A deaf person able to hold a conversation over the phone, in her native language.

Mac OS Ten Ten Ten

When I see anyone mention Mac OS X 10.10 all I can think about are those long distance deals from the late 90s.

A friend shared this tweet today:

Immediately, I thought about all of those cheap long distance ads from the late 90s. Do you remember when calling long distance was a thing to be scheduled? What about having a different company for long distance calling and local calling? Are you even old enough to remember landline phones and pre-modem society?

I’ve found a few of those ads if you don’t remember them. They were all over the place and were all 10-10-something. I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane. And every time Mac OS X 10.10 is mentioned, you immediately think of long distance calling and Christopher Lloyd in a taxi.

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