> Hate this argument so much. You lose people in your sales funnel because they didn't actually care all that much about the product to justify the extra effort.
On more than one occasion I've been the primary decision maker for a technology choice that was going to be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more per year.
For reasons that aren't relevant here, didn't have a ton of time to do the evaluation... extreme prejudice was exercised against anything that didn't have a 'download now and get started button'.
Even if I wanted to jump on a sales call, I didn't have 2 and 1/2 days to wait for you to get back to me.
Maybe a sales funnel is the right tool for certain industries but when your primary user is technical, don't make them jump on a phone call. Get out of their way and make sure the documentation is good. If they like what they see and they have questions, they will chase you down. That is when you should do the pitch call...
> It's just a jumble of poorly formatted text that isn't really contextually aware and is largely useless for the volume of textual documents.
I did a quick spot check and the lack of _clear_ date field is going to make contextualizing a bit trickier. It looks like most of the `email` have them but other types like `report` may have an unknown "first, created/circulated internally" date and a broader "the public can see it" date.
Nevertheless, it's only a matter of time before this gets loaded into a graph DB so the context becomes more apparent similar to what the journalists did for the panama papers.
As far as I can tell these are all the same hardware just different enclosures. I'm not sure why Nvidia went this route given that they have a first party device. Usually you only see this when the original manufacturer doesn't want to be in the distribution or support game.
If this is anything like their consumer graphics cards, the first-party version will only be available in the dozen or so countries where Nvidia has established direct distribution channels and they'll defer to the third parties everywhere else.
> I am afraid that making it too easy to install anything you want on modern smartphones is going to be a problem. Imagine how many are going to end up in botnets.
Android _already_ has this problem. It takes a few extra taps / coaching to get somebody to install an arbitrary and malicious APK but it's doable now. Moving towards a "if google didn't sign it and distribute it, you shall not run it" future won't really prevent the ignorant laity from installing malware regardless. The rest of us, however, are going to get screwed.
> Are they good options for cloud-freeish thermostats?
There are connected thermostats that do not feature a WiFi radio. I don't like zwave (I would really prefer WiFi with a HTTP or MQTT interface) but there is no thermostat that a) has a modern/working WiFi radio and b) a documented API.
Venstar is the only company that makes WiFi with an API but they seem to use the cheapest possible WiFi radios and I could never get mine to stay connected to my network for more than an hour or two. They also had a _really unusual_ firmware architecture: it was linux with a stripped down web browser; the UI was a SPA and it used some lua or js (don't recall, sorry) to communicate to the hardware driving GPIOs. They did expect firmware updates to be signed and that's where I stopped looking and moved on to a zwave thermostat.
I've got two of the Venstar Colortouch thermostats running locally with Home Assistant. They were spendy and their interface feels dated and clunky, but they've been totally reliable for me.
The OP addressed this: `adb` works ... *for now*. Other than google's pinky promise, what assurance do we have that adb will continue to work in a year or five?
The settings app lets you disable package verifiers for adb installs. The settings app is part of the operating system and can not be updated via the play store. This means that Google can not update the settings app.
On more than one occasion I've been the primary decision maker for a technology choice that was going to be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more per year.
For reasons that aren't relevant here, didn't have a ton of time to do the evaluation... extreme prejudice was exercised against anything that didn't have a 'download now and get started button'.
Even if I wanted to jump on a sales call, I didn't have 2 and 1/2 days to wait for you to get back to me.
Maybe a sales funnel is the right tool for certain industries but when your primary user is technical, don't make them jump on a phone call. Get out of their way and make sure the documentation is good. If they like what they see and they have questions, they will chase you down. That is when you should do the pitch call...