I think the key difference is in how truthful the marketing stories are. Apple/microsoft sell you a hypothetical future, while these watch "brands" sell a made-up past. Neither are 100% facts but one is clearly less savory than the other.
> Apple/microsoft sell you a hypothetical future, while these watch "brands" sell a made-up past.
You must be in marketing as that made absolutely no sense.
Do you think Apple's usb-c charging cable, which is currently listed on their site[1] for $19.99 costs them anywhere close to that to source? and at the same time tries to sell you a hypothetical future? wow, they do have good marketing.
If anything these watch brands, and I don't know why you put it in quotes as if to take legitimacy away from them but whatever, have more things in common with Apple than with someone selling the same watches such as "Walmart", as they are both trying to decouple the object from the sale and make it about the experience.
They all make stuff up, and when they don't they hide the information so you don't find out. That is why Apple will never say the price they pay for the leather Macbook sleeve they are currently charging $199 for[2]. I suspect very few people will buy it if they advertise right next to the price the 12 dollars it is actually costing them.
To be clear, I am not against any of this, anyone can charge whatever they want. Apple is certainly doing very well charging the prices they do. I am just impressed that people, most of all here, where people that actually build and sell products, actually price and order components and actually manage a supply chain, hang act so surprised to the fact that markup exists and that marketing is used to justify it.
And I am not defending this crappy watches or this shady company; I wouldn't buy a needle from them. All I am saying is that they are not any more shady than 95% of the "brands" out there that are actually owned by a mega conglomerate and never disclose it anywhere when trying to sell purified water to hipster college students on their way to protests against capitalism or whatever.
There are already companies that offer short term business loans where you borrow against your receivables. This helps companies make regular payments for mortgages and payroll when their receivables are unpredictable. Without these sorts of loans businesses would not be able to function.
The Patek Phillipe that the article opens with yes, but they go on later to talk about the /computus/ which is a purely mechanical Easter calculation accurate w/o modification to year 10,000 AD.
I think it's more advertising for Patek in general. The handful of people who have both the means and desire to purchase such an object likely got informed by their personal networks long ago. But Patek wants to sell $20k Calatravas to merely affluent people who want "the best watch" and this piece helps position the brand. I'd not be surprised if there was significant PR effort from Patek behind the scenes on this one.
For something that's expected to sell for over $10m, I doubt they figured one internet article would surely help sell it. I'm fairly confident anyone who seriously wants to buy one of these already knows it's up for auction.
Well not entirely, it doesn't take into account sidereal adjustments due to tidal shifts or the perturbations of the three body problem (the other planets / moons in the Solar system). But outside of those issues it is accurate to 10,000 years.
How are you making over 300k in the Midwest? Surely it's not a purely software engineering role, from my (admittedly limited) experience those roles top out at 180-200k base in Chicago.
StudyCloud is an online learning management system for University courses currently serving several thousand users across 6 major institutions in the US. We are trying to build the most seamless and elegant course management system that students and teachers will love to use.
As CTO and lead developer, I am currently looking to hire another full-time software developer to work alongside me. Our current tech stack includes Python/Tornado on the backend and Angular.js on the frontend.
Please reach out to me at andrew@mystudycloud.com if you are interested in this job. We currently work out of the 1871 co-working space in Merchandise Mart. Remote work may be possible depending on your qualifications.
I've noticed that the layout of the site is uncannily similar to flask's documentation (http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/), down to the "Fork me on Github" in the top right corner. Is there some sort of software producing this kind of documentation?
Requests is hosted on a site called Read the Docs, which does documentation hosting for Sphinx projects: http://readthedocs.org/
Sphinx has become the defacto documentation tool for Python projects, and a lot of other projets as well. Notably a number of PHP projects, and Varnish the web cache use it also.
The "Fork me on Github" is pretty common on a lot of sites (Github made those graphics), but that aside I agree -- I was thinking it was another Pocoo project until I saw the author.
Looks like he just co-opted the theme (Pocoo might have it available somewhere, but I couldn't find it). Nothing wrong with that, it's a great theme.
I don't have much more info than this, but it looks like they're both generated with Sphinx (http://sphinx.pocoo.org/), going by the footer from flask, and the common source (both have `<div class="sphinxsidebar">`).
Hi guys-- this is my first blog post, any constructive criticism would be much appreciated! If submitting your own blog posts is frowned upon in this community, please let me know I will delete this straight away.
A regression analysis was made of age at first reproduction in female mammals, as a function of body weight, using the data of Wootton. Data on maximal life span, also expressed as a function of body weight, were used to calculate “adult” life span, wherever possible, by subtracting the cognate value for age at first reproduction. Then a regression analysis of adult life span as a function of age at first reproduction was made. In both cases global regression lines (i.e., for whole data sets) were computed by standard least squares and by a robust method, as well as local regression lines for subgroups classified by taxonomic and ecological criteria. The slopes of the various regression lines were found to vary widely as a function of the method of classification. This result argues against the notion that the ratio of life history variables is a constant, or that one life history variable is likely to be a simple function of another. The results for bats are anomalous, in that age at first reproduction appears to be independent of body weight (over about two orders of magnitude). It is concluded that a full understanding of life history variables, such as maximal life span and age at maturity, is likely to depend on combined physiological, ecological, and evolutionary insights.
Keywords: maximal life span; age at maturity; regression analysis; mammals
I think the majority of people in the 10-20 year old age group get their iOS devices "for free" from their parents, and don't want to negotiate with said parents every time they want to buy an app.
That's an interesting angle, and a market opportunity I guess :)
99 cents might not sound like much, but I guess they might want to try out hundreds of such games (well, I suppose there are free ones - I don't own an iPhone and they aren't even available by the main carrier in my country).
