I say it survives by providing the same benefit that Amazon does: a reduction in cognitive overhead.
With Amazon, the reduction comes from the streamlined buying process - you provide your name, address, billing info, shipping info up front, thereby eliminating the overhead of that task from future purchases. It's also a one-stop shop, you don't have to think if they will have an item you want, as 9 times out of 10 they carry a version of what you are looking for.
With Hammacher Schlemmer, the reduction comes from not having to do really any research about products before purchasing. They offer a limited selection of tested products, so you do not have to consider alternative products, sellers, shipping methods, reviews, and are not susceptible to accidentally ordering a counterfeit product. The catalog format is also approachable, you can pick it up and read it and "window shop" without knowing exactly what you want or need.
So I would say not really laziness, just a shift in cognitive overhead from the product purchasing process to the product research process.
I have done a few flash to HTML5 conversions without source code, and the method I've gone with is just to use the flash as a guide and write the HTML5 app from scratch. You end up with cleaner, more maintainable code that way than if you were to throw it into a converter and try to sort out what comes out, and it can end up taking the same amount of time as trying to fix whatever the converter came up with in the end. Do you have any links to the flash products? Might be worth putting what you have in a GitHub repo and see who can contribute. Maybe try https://www.codetriage.com/ as well. If you end up doing either, let me know and I'll try to help :)
The exact same thing happened to Alex Blumberg in this episode of Reply All: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/91-the-russian-passenger/. They investigate and try to find out how his account could have possibly been hijacked with 2FA enabled.
I'm in agreement with the parent comment - I was interested, but the examples were a little off-putting. I'd consider removing the baby one or posting a different angle.
It's quite obviously fake -- given that we are 11 days from April Fools, it's probably either an April Fools joke discovered prematurely, or set-up for a bigger one. Maybe something similar to the tale of icarus.
Disagree completely -- the world has plenty of office workers scared to try something so bold, we need better filtering tools and more people trying rather than believing that the current system works to capture, foster, and utilize talent properly.
I think we do way too much stifling as a society as it is, and a lot of that has to do with people who gave up on their dreams for a safe existence justifying their decision by ridiculing others who dare to take risks.
I thought he did a good job too, but I think that lying at all, even about little details in order to have a more coherent, compelling story about an important topic poisons the whole thing, because it brings into question the author's credibility. You have to decide for yourself when he's finished lying and is now telling the truth.
In this particular case, I think it's safe to just take his story as fiction (even though some of it is true), since there are plenty of other journalists covering the same topic. It's just a shame that he felt he couldn't just tell Ira from the beginning what was storytelling and what was reporting, since his piece was so well done, and he really did not need to mislead or lie in order to be compelling.
I remember hearing in the excellent pixar documentary that one of the intentions behind this layout was to facilitate random interactions among employees, all sharing a common, open walkway.
I noticed that the bubbles had a unique-looking arrangement in the march 7 announcement photo, so I (crudely) compared it to an iPad 2 with that wallpaper in both landscape and portrait modes. Doing so seems to indicate that it is indeed oriented in portait mode: http://imgur.com/a/gbjyr
These (apparent) e-mails between an owner with the dead battery issue and Tesla seem to indicate that there is a a 'built-in notification system' for this, but it wasn't added for the first 500 cars : http://jalopnik.com/5887504/tesla-emails-gallery/gallery/1
A problem like this really needs advance warning, not just a notification when the problem is about to develop, since the owner may not be in a position to get the car plugged in if they don't know it could occur beforehand.
Which is why there are warnings in the manuals. Which puts it on par with changing the oil in a regular car, if less culturally-obvious. Reading a manual for something you spent $100k on seems a reasonable prerequisite, especially if you have any interest in keeping it running.
With Amazon, the reduction comes from the streamlined buying process - you provide your name, address, billing info, shipping info up front, thereby eliminating the overhead of that task from future purchases. It's also a one-stop shop, you don't have to think if they will have an item you want, as 9 times out of 10 they carry a version of what you are looking for.
With Hammacher Schlemmer, the reduction comes from not having to do really any research about products before purchasing. They offer a limited selection of tested products, so you do not have to consider alternative products, sellers, shipping methods, reviews, and are not susceptible to accidentally ordering a counterfeit product. The catalog format is also approachable, you can pick it up and read it and "window shop" without knowing exactly what you want or need.
So I would say not really laziness, just a shift in cognitive overhead from the product purchasing process to the product research process.