Interesting Links for 05-09-2013

[andrewducker]

• Does pressing the pedestrian crossing button actually do anything?
  (tags: technology roads )
• The top code comment here is a classic
  (tags: programming funny )
• Fascinating discussion of accents, how people change them, and the effect they have.
  (tags: speech accents language )
• Using harsh verbal discipline with teens is counterproductive and harmful
  (tags: behaviour language )
• 2013 bedroom poll explores sleep differences among six countries
  (tags: sleep )
• Architect behind the deathray building had previously built a different deathray building.
  (tags: epicfail architecture light )
• WTF Is This Weird Web-Tower Thing? We Asked Around. No One Knows
  (tags: mysteries web science )
• A _fascinating_ theory about music and human evolution
  (tags: music humanity evolution )
• What can you tell about changing demographics by looking at the NY Times wedding section?
  (tags: demographics analysis usa )
• A concise list of everything in the universe
  (tags: funny list universe )
• Didn't Get Enough Sleep? You Might As Well Be Drunk
  (tags: sleep )
• What's it like to eat nothing by Soylent for a week?
  (tags: food )
• Report shows UK's infrastructure is rubbish. Politicians use it to score points. *sigh*
  (tags: politics uk infrastructure )
• You cannot offer upgrade pricing for Mac App Store purchases
  (tags: pricing software apple business )

Comments

[dalglir]

I often slip into accents depending on where I am.

It started at school. I grew up with a fairly harsh 'sarf east Kint' accent which is a weird kind of mixture that occasionally sounds like bits of Devonshire and a lot like Cockney. Then I went to grammar school where I was suddenly surrounded by middle class kids with 'Middle England' accents and eventually got to a point where I was switching between these two accents depending on company.

I picked up a fair bit of Stirlingshire accent and colloquialisms (still obviously English, though) when I studied there and fell into an even more Middle England accent when we moved to Cambridge.

I do it without thinking and sometimes it feels awkward.

---

'Upgrade Pricing' article: Have they explored the possibility of offering incremental feature upgrades via IAP or explored scope for a subscription model (like Evernote)? If they have, it may be that the work required to make that work could be too much to reasonably support that but other app developers seem to manage so...

[andrewducker]

I'm fairly sure my accent has remained stuck at "South of England" for a very long time now :->

[matgb]

Reading between the lines on the upgrade pricing thing. Apple think that if you've bought a product and it needs improving that existing customers should get the necessary upgrade automatically, whereas the software devs feel the need to fleece existing customers who paid for now outdated and substandard product instead of being nice to their existing customers in order to build more goodwill and get new customers through good reputation?

I may be misreading what they're saying there, but that's what it looks like to me.

[andrewducker]

So you believe that customers should pay once for a product and then get infinite improvements for nothing?

[matgb]

Why not? It's how a lot of appstore purchases work for phones, on android and iphone (and symbian but that's not important), and it's how a lot of software has been sold for a fair time (Terrapin FTP for example).

I don't, TBH, actually know, but it's certainly the way Apple seem to want to push it, and a lot of companies do run that way-of course as a model it's perhaps more problematic if the account really is perpetual, if I wanted Terrapin again now I'd need to repay as I no longer have that email address, for example, but some companies really do try to fleece customers with upgrades.

[andrewducker]

Pretty much all business software does New versions on a regular basis.

Many games do likewise.


You don't get Office 2012 because you bought Office 2010, and I can't see a good reason why you should. If the new features are worth it to you, pay for them. If not, stick to the old version.