> Its latest composite bat, the Avenge L140B, has special construction that allows the hitting side to flex like a spring.
I'm not familiar with baseball (Belgian here) and was wondering how these things are regulated? Does each player have its own bat? So one team can already be at a technological disadvantage when the game starts?
Regarding the bat itself, the regulations say it must be "round" (1.10), which probably rules out this particular handle. Other than round, the maximum weight, length, and diameter are specified. While bats close to these maximums were once widely used, almost all modern bats are well shy of those figures. Presumably the lighter, smaller bats of today more than make up in control and speed what they lack in mass.
The big market for these wont be with MLB players. It's going to be amateur softball and baseball leagues. They have rules about bats but they are much more generous and not as rigorously enforced. Though what you say about the bat being round must not apply to the handle as the article says these bats are already in use by at least one MLB player.
I saw them for the first time this summer. We were in the US for a bit and I had the chance to get my son some batting instruction. (We live in Hungary and he plays little league here but it's harder to find coaches and such.) We did it with a friend and his son uses these bats. They are expensive. The wooden Axe bat he was using is around $100. And those only last so long. But anyway - when you have people dropping $300 - $500 on softball bats it's not hard to see how a company can do well selling to recreational players.
Sure enough, it's been MLB-approved! One thing in particular that might be useful for non-pros is that the handle is CNC-cut to orient the grain in the correct way.
This will help in soooo many ways. This will reduce the following dangers: 1)broken and splintered bat shards 2)bats flying out of a hitter's hand and endangering fans, player, and coaches 3)potential to reduce hammett bone injuries.
If the power and accuracy claims hold up then it could also help level out the current status of the game being tilted in favor of pitching since the end of the steroid era. There had been talk of lowering the mound in the MLB to help level the playing field, mind the pun :)
It is definitely an interesting concept. I'm not sure how well the bat will hold up over time vs a traditional bat since you are hitting the ball the on the same side every time. This is going to slightly flatten the face of the bat over time and it will be interesting to see how that plays out.
Dead reckoning of phone trajectory using inertial sensor (of the phone) + gps corrections ?
I don't see a dedicated camera on the drone (using gopro for machine vision is not ideal), nor a beefy cpu to handle person tracking onboard, but I could be mistaken.
You can get centimeter accuracy with gps. http://swift-nav.com/piksi.html
Even with cheaper modules and phones that dont carrier phase rtk, you can get meter which would be plenty for this application.
As I understand it there are 6 peers with the following situation:
- Between 1 to 20 ports between Level3 and that peer
- 1 of those ports is congested
- They are handling the upgrade together, which is business as usual.
Then there are 6 other peers with the following situation:
- Between 1 to 20 ports between Level3 and that peer
- Almost all of those ports are congested
- The peer refuses to augment capacity
"Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content."
I'm wondering if the A/B testing score was skewed due to it being the first non-working link in the menu. Someone going through the menu to see what's possible will probably take a look at the top item first.
A random order for the menu items might have been better. Or maybe not.
The "Scroll down" hint wasn't obvious enough for me. I'd also show both screens as soon as you land on the page, as that is the unique feature of this phone and it took me quite some time before I actually found it.
(If you don't scroll but just click on the links you just see 1 screen at a time. If you aren't really paying attention you don't notice that there are 2 different ones)
It drives me nuts this new fashion of braking the scrolling, it's completely uncalibrated on chrome, I scrolled down the equivalent of a freaking book to get to the end.
For starters, the links on the left never show that there are two screens (even with scrolling that is harder to see than in should be). Why not just make a site that works?
Even if it was perfectly calibrated, it's still wrong thing to do. Scrolling is for scrolling. As in, position. On the page. People shouldn't use it for flipping between slides or animation states for the same reasons they shouldn't use links for buttons, buttons for links, or implement fake radio buttons using checkboxes.
This would be less of a problem if browsers/HTML had something built-in to manage pagination and page states. But hey, we got WebGL and sound APIs instead. Clearly, pagination (which is implemented in pretty much every single website on the web) is less important than rendering 3d objects.
I am. Using a rMBP. No scrollbar on latest Chrome, and worse yet, two-finger scroll is broken. I have to attempt to two-finger scroll, mouse over the scrollbar quickly before it disappears (this took two tries because it goes away that quickly) and then click/drag to scroll (which I'm embarrassed to say is amazingly cumbersome now that I'm trained for the multitouch gestures).
I'm on Windows at work and the scroll bar was visible (when I went there the 2nd time) but either I didn't notice it or I ignored it. In any case I think the content itself just didn't look like it required scrolling. Instead I clicked on the features on the left.
I got a scrollbar too but the page is neatly arranged to fit the browser's window so I didn't pay attention to it. It's the first time I've seen a footer from the top of a scrollpage.
Yeah, I was calling bullshit several times when the text was going on and on about the e-ink screen right next to a picture of a beautiful, vibrant, full-color display. I was clicking each section rather than scrolling, so I never saw the back until I clicked "tech specs".
Yes, that is exactly what happened with me. I was thinking they had somehow make a fast color e-ink display, but the main screen looked like a regular LCD. Then I finally concluded that they were putting the e-ink on the back (which makes a heck of a lot more sense) and was able to confirm it by looking at the tech specs. Then I come to HN, and see I should have been scrolling down all along.
So, yeah, I'm officially done with fancy scroll effects.
No, I'm not trolling. No indication that scrolling does anything, there's even a footer at the bottom of the page. Then _when_ i scroll nothing happens for a while until i scroll far enough.
It's interesting how often people talk about looking for the scrolling hint. Until (sort-of-)recently, the presence of the _scroll bar_ was the hint, and it worked well for the multiple decades it had been in use.
I had mostly gotten used to the new super scrolly pages, but this site breaks it by looking like a one-screen site with a footer and sidebar.
I'd disagree - the hint was normally that content was disappearing off the bottom of the screen.
I had entirely missed that you were meant to scroll. And even when I found out it was irritating - I'm on a desktop with a mouse with a scrollwheel, and the distance I had to scroll was enormous.
> the hint was normally that content was disappearing off the bottom of the screen.
Which is another reason all those great looking but horrible to use single page sites that make it look like what you land on is all there is are an atrocity.
At least on OS X there aren't scrollbars visible until you need them (start scrolling).
There is that small hint on the top right, but if the page is scrolled any amount--even an amount that doesn't move the page at all--the hint goes away and there are no visible scrollbars. It's a terrible UX.
As I understand it customers were informed about the change in plans before they had to hand over their money, so it's definitely not as bad as you put it.
The roadmap was actually changed because of those customers, so presumably the end result should align better with what they really were looking for.
(disclaimer: I'm a initial customer who asked for a refund!).
Opt-in would have been the minimum to my taste. Here is how I lived the experiment from here:
- the billing info was captured by making me believe the content was completely available (it's actually still advertised here http://publicbeta.co/library/)
- I wrote to Adii who asked back for my trust etc, I said: ok let's wait until this guy is able to bootstrap his stuff, let's give him a chance
- later, I received a mail which I didn't fully read ("Announcing our new launch", I just assumed that everything was going on as planned - I didn't receive "We change everything, are you ok with that?" as the subject or similar)
- then I got charged for something different from what my billing info was captured for
EDIT: I then realized what was happening by actually attending the MicroConf Europe where Adii made a presentation.
- I tried to cancel but could not find a link to cancel from inside the app
- I asked for a refund + cancellation by email and got it
Note that I'm in no way angry (personally) against Adii!
I'm just analyzing this from a customer perspective.
The problem is that trust is basically broken at step one, and then later one can only wonder if the long email then the charge without clear notice then the lack of link to cancel etc aren't just other tactics to keep the game going on.
I wouldn't recommend using these techniques to friends!
I'm pretty sure this is illegal and risky to do (at least in some countries) and could actually break the TOS of Recurly or payment gateways.
Again, nothing personal, I'm just sharing my experience in case someone wants to mimic the technique here.
Personally I wouldn't mind about leaving my CC details if I was told the entire truth afterwards and then had the opportunity to opt-in again. Any reason why you didn't take the "second opt-in" approach, Adii?
Getting the customer to say "Yes" repeatedly [1], and relying on their own internal consistency to make them less likely to change their mind [2], is a well known sales technique.
So this would still be a dark pattern even with an opt-in, since people will mentally start rationalising ("It's a good service for smart entrepreneurs like me to learn from each other") instead of assessing it from scratch ("It's an online startup community I pay to belong to. Is that worth $30 a month? Hacker News is free...").
It's a shame, because if the thing people had paid for had been delivered this would have probably been okay, but as it is, it seems pretty unethical.
He didn't actually charge people before the product was finished and they were able to opt-out after they knew what happened. Would have been a whole different story if the cards had actually been charged.
While the author did not charge the credit cards, he did not communicate to his site visitors about the situation either. It was only after the fact once they essentially gave out their information did he reveal the truth. Sure, you can argue that he did not charge for those that wanted to opt out. But from the get go, his visitors were not provided with the correct information to make an informed decision.
Communicating about it would defeat the entire purpose of the idea.
The way he did it allowed him to validate the idea in the exact same situation he would end up after building it, so it's a great way to take the (huge!) risk out of building a product.
Personally I wouldn't mind as a customer as you did know all the facts before you were actually spending the money.
I don't care. It's not my role as a customer to make it easy for you to experiment. You either tell me the truth, front up, or you don't try to make the sale.
"He didn't actually charge people before the product was finished and they were able to opt-out after they knew what happened. Would have been a whole different story if the cards had actually been charged."
He does note that he had to "authorize a $0 transaction" in order to store the details for each credit card.
But leaving that aside, not only was his conduct misleading, query whether legally enforceable contracts were entered into as soon as mutual promises were exchanged (promise to pay made by proffering means of payment in exchange for promise to deliver product).
If that is the proper analysis, a distinction based on whether the credit cards were ultimately charged does no more than draw the line between civil and criminal liability.
He should be glad that no one actually relied on what he said. Those who deal with him in the future might now do so with a degree of caution. He has probably copped enough flak in these comments to bring the message home to him - or at least I hope he has. I like the premise for PublicBeta, and it would be a shame if that service were tarred with the same brush.
The app itself looks nice and clean as well, with some great animations (the pull-to-refresh one, for example).