Google Maps Pac-Man and other April Foolishness


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Yes - I'm not sure how many people realise that VS Community isn't available for everyone.

    For "large" companies (over 250 people IIRC) it's not allowed so they have to buy VS. So that really comes back to

    @blakeyrat said:

    you have to pay money for software that doesn't suck ass.



  • @Yamikuronue said:

    Giving away the main product, then holding essential features for ransom leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

    Would you prefer not being able to demo the software at all?

    I'm not sure what your argument is here (or what alternative you propose), and I definitely question your use of the word "ransom".



  • If the key features aren't there then it's not a demo.

    A demo should be (almost) fully featured, just time-limited or similar.

    "Give us money, we promise it doesn't suck" is the same premise whether it applies to the whole thing or half of it.


  • FoxDev

    Unless it's a game, in which case the first level or two is acceptable ;)



  • I'd call that similar to time-limited.

    Assuming a selection of levels from the beginning, middle and end, not just the beginning.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @lightsoff said:

    A demo should be (almost) fully featured, just time-limited or similar.

    For some of the software we deal with, it would be appropriate to have demos be almost fully featured but hosted at the vendor's site and with the access control features largely disabled (so anyone can see what we're doing). We'd be able to try it with some of our test data, but no way would we put anything deeply interesting in it. That'd be good for testing stuff like the UI, particularly with some real users; I'm just not a biochemist. 😄

    Some of the customisations we want would be impossible to trial in a demo though. (“Can we connect this to some of our internal SANs and databases?” isn't something we want to test externally…)


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @dkf said:

    For some of the software we deal with, it would be appropriate to have demos be almost fully featured but hosted at the vendor's site and with the access control features largely disabled (so anyone can see what we're doing).

    Couldn't you demo something like that with either a VM, or a heavy duty laptop with an SSD running your software? I don't know how extensive the implementation of your software is, or just how much hardware you would need in order to give a satisfactory demo for the client, but it should be possible.

    Getting your management to buy in to such a program might be the biggest hurdle...



  • And tamper tape on the battery.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Polygeekery said:

    Couldn't you demo something like that with either a VM, or a heavy duty laptop with an SSD running your software?

    You've misread (and maybe I was unclear). We're the potential customer; we'd be happy with a VM for testing (and we're doing this for some of the options) but the vendors aren't always happy with that. Their choice.

    Protip: If you're looking for an ELN, be prepared for a world of pain. Sturgeon's Law applies. There's only one sane alternative for Open Source implementations (and that's in PHP, so we're hesitant), and the commercial space is largely dodgy too (since we need to have the data inside available for long-term storage by us, need to support multiple platforms, and need to do customisations to adapt to our other systems (data stores, compute clusters, lab instruments)). About the only thing we'll say is that the candidate list — systems that stand a chance of participating in the final bake-off — is non-empty; we'll manage to pick something for sure.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    OK, so a week late (just came across it today). I chuckled at this. This guy's normal videos are pretty good, and this was a fun poke at nonsense (gets extra silly at the end):

    https://youtu.be/90cFP_DRI4Y


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