But here's the deal, and this might be directly aimed at you, since you say you're in the field. As a home-user who works in the industry and with some interest for tech, I generally only get access to the free-tiers of services offered by players working at world-magnitude. Based on my experience with those services I may or may not advertise them to my friends, colleagues, employers. Especially to employers, because there's a good chance that if there's bad-blood between me and the service provider personally, I might be impaired in my professional activity.
This word-of-mouth type of adversiting is crucial to "2.0" companies, that function based on things such as scale, transparency, growth, reach, efficiency. There's also the different type of provider, the "old business" world, with more business-y and less tech-y practices, such as "call us for a quote" deals, "license per year per seat pe server core", etc. Dealing with them often times involves whole departments (legal + technical) with specific training and paid-for support channels.
If you release and roll perpetuum-beta services and software ("2.0" practice), build your brand on word-of-mouth advertising, on try-for-free honeypots for hobbyists (also "2.0"), don't act "old business" if it comes down to support for a puny user and don't push the "well, it was free, what would you expect?" button. The whole deal of your "we are awesome and scale as opposed to <brand that existed for more than 20 years and sucks just because of that>" is the fact that your machinery doesn't do politics and doesn't discriminate between your users based on estimated pocket girth. It's useless if your solution elegantly "scales" to billions of users, if your business can't secure and treat with dignity the first, lonely user.
The national security adviser to the president of the United States is the one, who would have to deal with this publicly, if such information was confirmed by some of largest companies in the US. And he might as well prefer to deal with it privately, if it was true.
Except for some corporate environment, I don't see how it's not their fault. It's easier than ever to make an informed decision before using one's wallet and it's every living, functioning human's duty to improve, grow and learn.
Totally tired of apps that are nothing else than options-less and incontrolable browsers.
You make a valuable point about personal responsibility that I agree with, so I may have to reconsider my original position. (I upvoted you.) But, I would also point out that while there is much more available information to make such decisions, that info is much less comprehensible to the average consumer, who is almost certainly much less savvy about technology than you are.
Not irony. The stuff is not on Google, it's on the Internet and directly accessible via links. It's in fact what any company wants, the holy grail: for people to mix its brand with the category of business. It will pass and be replaced by some other fad.
That's true and, to me, has been brought on the spotlight from Microsoft practices around VSCode. On the other hand, for an OSS project, building the binary is not that hard.
ANECDOTE TIME! And actually a career related question:
I'm an absolute nerd for sports stats, and have a friend that moved out of the finance/BI world in the hospitality sector and landed herself an impressive gig at ESPN-of all things, as a stats editor.
It seems a relevant jaunt (because all I know of her profession is that she's an incredible mathematician) but the gap seems wide just from a perspective of domain knowledge; she openly states not caring at all for sports but the new job location puts her close to family.
My question is: is Data Science so applied that one can make that kind of jump domains easily? This gal is one of the smartest people I know but the more I look into what it is you folks do, the more I am simultaneously intimidated yet interested in the field.
Domain knowledge is always useful. But can also introduce biases in one's analysis.
For these types of professional roles you generally see specialized teams in three broad groups: data engineers, modelers/analysts, domain experts. Unicorns sometimes exist, but usually you see T-type experience with depth in one of the three.
- ability, willingness, etc to tweak and upgrade your infrastructure
- how competition-friendly and pro-consumer your market is
- the type of grants, contracts and industry ties your environment has (think special, prototype, maybe even government subsidized hardware, for example)
- reflects the amount of mastery over geography or nature itself - this is what successful countries pull
- is the economy market-driven or just a pocket bubble?
There might be others, but this is already quite damning imo. Also I need gigabit because that determines the size of my erection and i'd go to lengths such as paying FAIR prices for it.
Is it strange that I'm worried why the fuck they have these stats in the first place? I don't remember being asked whether I'd like my data submitted or not upon playing games powered by Unity. Do they also have my IMEI, phone contacts, emails and twitter accounts?
> "Do they also have my IMEI, phone contacts, emails and twitter accounts?"
No, that would be impossible without the app getting permission from you first.
> "why the fuck they have these stats in the first place?"
Because they need the stats to build the app. Knowing that a large percentage of their users are on Android 2.x prevents them from making breaking changes that won't work on older phones. Knowing the graphical and CPU performance of their demographics helps inform them of the limitations they need to place on their games to make them run properly on every device.
Or would you like to go back to the days where developers built completely blind to their target user base and simply published a set of System Requirements and leaves end users to decipher it and make sure they're compliant with it just to play your game?
This is no different than websites counting the number of page views and the browser market share of their visitors. This is purely aggregate work.
Do you have similar reaction when games do analytics (99% of them do)? Or when websites ping google analytics?
"do they also have my IMEI,contacts,..." - no we don't. We don't have your actual hardware stats either; all we have is "this quarter, this many Android 4.1s" and "that quarter, that many Tegra 3s".
The games can turn off hardware stats reporting if they wish to.
As a Unity developer, I had no idea my games were phoning home to Unity HQ. This definitely seems like something that should be opt-in.
Also, maybe I'm being dense, but I can't find any information on how to turn it off or find it in the editor - could you share exactly what the option is called?
And people tell me I'm being paranoid for keeping my firewall on "block outbound", running as non-admin (windows), running the browser with noscript, adblock and no external cookies...
But here's the deal, and this might be directly aimed at you, since you say you're in the field. As a home-user who works in the industry and with some interest for tech, I generally only get access to the free-tiers of services offered by players working at world-magnitude. Based on my experience with those services I may or may not advertise them to my friends, colleagues, employers. Especially to employers, because there's a good chance that if there's bad-blood between me and the service provider personally, I might be impaired in my professional activity.
This word-of-mouth type of adversiting is crucial to "2.0" companies, that function based on things such as scale, transparency, growth, reach, efficiency. There's also the different type of provider, the "old business" world, with more business-y and less tech-y practices, such as "call us for a quote" deals, "license per year per seat pe server core", etc. Dealing with them often times involves whole departments (legal + technical) with specific training and paid-for support channels.
If you release and roll perpetuum-beta services and software ("2.0" practice), build your brand on word-of-mouth advertising, on try-for-free honeypots for hobbyists (also "2.0"), don't act "old business" if it comes down to support for a puny user and don't push the "well, it was free, what would you expect?" button. The whole deal of your "we are awesome and scale as opposed to <brand that existed for more than 20 years and sucks just because of that>" is the fact that your machinery doesn't do politics and doesn't discriminate between your users based on estimated pocket girth. It's useless if your solution elegantly "scales" to billions of users, if your business can't secure and treat with dignity the first, lonely user.