The CC is on file in order to streamline the purchase process when you decide to buy something. For OUYA to be a success there needs to be an appealing app ecosystem. That won't happen unless it gains developer interest and developers often invest in markets with a profit motive.
Having a credit card on file is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition to have a better app ecosystem. But if you had two app ecosystems that were identical aside from the fact that one stored credit cards and the other did not, you would certainly expect a better app ecosystem with the stored cards. Having to enter your credit card is a source of additional friction that decreases people's purchase rates of apps, even if by a small amount (although my opinion is that it's by a large amount). Having an app ecosystem where people spend money and spend it more freely certainly seems to improve the ecosystem, if you take comparisons between the iPhone and Android app stores into account, especially in the earlier days.
Tell that to Apple. One of the reasons for App Store success was that people could buy apps without doing the complex credit card confirmation step for each purchase.
This leads to impulse purchases, and higher sales as the friction on purchase is reduced to a click/tap.
Feature Request: The ability to save and re-load tabs as a labeled set. An array of open tabs is often the result of an intentional workspace. If I could label a saved OneTab as "iOS Development" and have it launch iOS Dev Center, JIRA, bitbucket, and various API/documentation, it would make switching from casual browsing to work mode a breeze.
You're looking for "Session Buddy"[0] available on the Chrome store. This is a more complex OneTab, I've been using it for quite some time as I'm a tab abuser (60+ open tabs). It's great for storing and managing sets of tabs.
You can Ctrl or Cmd click a set of tabs, and it will restore them without removing them from the OneTab list. Thus you will be able to use OneTab to open sets of frequently accessed tabs.
"And yet, he was getting his work done on those days off, so no one fired him."
He may very well have been a poor worker, but it strikes me as odd how superficial our idea of a good worker is. Productivity being equal (at home or work), what does it matter if he seems to be having it easy? The illusion of looking busy still carries a lot of weight apparently.
I admit I wasn't aware of the quality of his work or his actual productivity. I had heard from others that he was good but not special, and when he finally left we didn't feel like we lost a critical player.
The things that made us think he wasn't productive were: 1.) when he emailed the company saying he was sick and then show up at the company party later that day (more than once); 2.) his solicitation of others to watch non-work-related videos with him during business hours; 3.) his inability to face up to the fact he was soliciting others to watch non-work-related videos with him during business hours.
It matters if the psychological effect on other employees causes them to become less productive or increases the likelihood that they'll look for another job.
Imagine what we might not have if everyone followed this misguided advice. The flip side: if you're breezing through your work, maybe you're not challenging yourself enough? You don't think searching for the Higgs boson can grow weary? Or training for an Olympic medal? Great things require great effort.
I really appreciate hearing about the very paced/zen schedule you seem to keep. I'm a firm believer that productivity is an easily exhaustible resource and you can't simply extract more of it per week with additional desk hours. You can have all the money and time in the world, but true freedom is the ability to bask in every small moment of the day, revel in the experience and reflect on life as it happens. Don't wait for the big payoff.
This got me wondering how many people have built successful products and businesses with the sole intent of making it big? In other words, if your end game is cashing out 1 billion, are you crippling your full potential? Are the real successes born out of greater passions? Happenstance plays its part for sure, but that’s part of my point. Not barring ones drive to hack and tinker, what might you be doing if money wasn’t the goal? What would you build and what road would that take you down?
I don't think there is any one rule that applies to everybody. Some people are just very skilled at making money. Warren Buffett has said that he always wanted to be rich. Others came into extreme wealth out of dumb luck and great timing (this seems more in line with Facebook and Google). The only common thread that I see is that to be successful you have to be doing something that you are very good at. That is a lot harder than it sounds because a lot of people feel pressured to do things that they really suck at but convince themselves that they are good at.
I mean - the only difference between FB and many other social networks is that everybody happened to be on FB. Of course it takes enormous amount of skill to operate on this scale, but if all those people weren't on FB, they would be on one of those other social networks doing more or less the same thing.
But Google is different. I mean - do you even remember how people used internet before Google? Google was not just "marginally better, more popular AltaVista", it dramatically changed the way we do things online. And then it did it again with GMail. Not to forget Android (though it's not in the same league as search & email). Anyway, Google had a good deal of luck and good timing, but it was by no way "dumb".
You're way out past the point that Google became Google. Two PhD CS students worked on a research project that became a multibillion dollar company. The project was not dumb luck, but the outcome was. It is not dumb luck when a hedge fund manager raises capital and makes billions of dollars. See the difference?
