Why I did not upgrade to Windows 10

Posted on August 8, 2016 by duanetilden

I am so happy to see those nag messages disappear from my computer, you know the ones reminding you that your period of time to upgrade to Windows 10 will expire on July 31? Now that we are in August one less thing popping up that bothers me.

The question being do I upgrade or not? And friends and family who look to me for advice on such issues want to know what I am doing and why. Intuitively I felt that upgrading was unwise likely do to past experiences with O/S upgrades and backward compatibility of existing hardware and external devices.

For example, I own an older Nikon digital camera, Coolpix 995, which is a newer version of my first digital camera, a Coolpix 990. Getting software that works for this camera for versions of Windows newer than XP has currently been a challenge. Driver’s are not available for Windows Vista, 7 and definitely not for Window’s 10. So such is likely for any devices I currently own.

Also, I like to buy used equipment at bargain prices. I have learned through my own experience that electronic equipment has a short shelf life and prices drop quickly as newer versions of equipment enter the market. By creating obsolescence in software, hardware becomes prematurely unusable due to compatibility issues. When this occurs the current solution is usually to discard the item and buy a new replacement.

Another thing besides compatibility and premature obsolescence is extra work and other unknown issues which will inevitably arise from the upgrade. I have an ‘Elitebook’ HP 8530 W laptop computer with Window’s 7 for my business and personal use, which I purchased for a bargain on Ebay. I have spent a lot of time setting it up to work properly, I have no need to upgrade the software.

Let someone else figure it all out, then maybe in a couple of years I will buy a more powerful model at a lower price with Windows 10 or the current version already installed. So I did not upgrade, and I am okay with that.

Facebook Traffic and Influence Jumps on Mobile Devices

Posted on February 6, 2015 by duanetilden

Thanks to its efforts to slash ‘dark social’ links, Facebook’s measurable influence, especially on mobile, has skyrocketed.

Source: venturebeat.com

>”We all know Facebook is huge, and drives incredible amounts of traffic. But thanks to its recent efforts to uncloak the sources of content with no known referrer, we now know that the numbers are bigger than anyone believed.

According to a report issued today by Bitly, the world’s leading link shortener, Facebook has largely solved the problem of so-called “dark social” links — those that have no referrer data and can’t be measured by web analytics tools — and as a result, the social network’s influence skyrocketed during the fourth quarter.

In the report, Bitly wrote that Facebook’s influence jumped 8.6 percent during the fourth quarter overall and 30.2 percent on mobile. That doesn’t mean Facebook’s influence actually grew that much — it means that clicks formerly attributed to “dark social” are now being correctly counted as Facebook’s clicks. Given that Facebook’s major push in recent quarters has been to expand its reach on mobile and give its marketing partners more ways to monetize their content, this is solid evidence that strategy is working.

“Everybody knows Facebook is big, and everyone knows Facebook is driving a significant volume of traffic,” Bitly CEO Mark Josephson told VentureBeat. “But in Q4, they solved a significant part of dark social — traffic or referrers that marketers or publishers don’t know where it’s coming from. … Facebook is bigger than people think they are.”

Bitly’s in a position to know of what it speaks. The company shortens 600 million links a month that generate 8 billion clicks from a billion users worldwide. […]

But those radical drops in dark social links are reflected in Bitly’s latest data showing the strength of Facebook’s overall influence — and that its users are quickly moving from the desktop to mobile. While its influence on mobile exploded 30.2 percent, links coming from the Facebook on the desktop were down 19.8 percent in the fourth quarter.

Others have noticed similar drops in dark social links. Last month, Chartbeat, a service that measures web sites’ traffic, noted a substantial drop in links with no referrers, especially on mobile.

Last week, Facebook reported its fourth quarter earnings, and said that of its 1.39 billion monthly active users, 1.19 billion used the company’s mobile tools, up 26 percent from the same time a year ago. […]”<

More informati

See on Scoop.it – Social Media, Bitcoin & Finance

Data Scientists: Explore Game Theory to Boost Customer Engagement | The Big Data Hub

Posted on November 12, 2013 by duanetilden

See on Scoop.it – Twitter & Social Media

Data scientists may consider themselves fish out of water when it comes to applying game-theoretic approaches to customer engagement. Nevertheless, it provides a valuable set of approaches for behavioral analytics.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Customer engagement is a bit of a game, because, deep down, it’s a form of haggling and bargaining. Let’s be blunt: everybody has an ulterior purpose and is manipulating the other party in that direction. The customer is trying to get the best deal from you, and you’re trying to hold onto them and sell them more stuff at a healthy profit.

Customer engagement is not solitaire, and, unlike many online games, it always has very real stakes. By its very nature, customer engagement is an interactive decision process involving individuals and organizations, entailing varying degrees of cooperation and conflict in the course (hopefully) of a stable and mutually beneficial outcome.

Game theory is a modeling discipline that focuses on strategic decision-making scenarios. It leverages a substantial body of applied mathematics and has been used successfully in many disciplines, including economics, politics, management and biology. There has even been some recent discussion of its possible application in modeling customer-engagement scenarios to improve loyalty, upsell and the like.

Customer engagement modeling is a largely unexplored frontier for game theory. The literature on this is relatively sparse right now, compared to other domains where game theory’s principles have been applied. […]<

See on www.ibmbigdatahub.com

Proliferation of wireless devices and networks detrimental to environment

Posted on August 30, 2013 by duanetilden

See on Scoop.it – Green & Sustainable News

Cloud computing should be driving sustainable development, but its turning us into energy consuming monsters, write Stuart Newstead and Howard Williams

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>There is a familiarity and comfort in our almost-everywhere connection to always-on communications networks and to the ever-increasing array of services they deliver us. We don’t just consume these network services directly, they give us what economists call “options” – options to connect, options to seek out new services, options to find new information. Clearly we don’t use this network services 24/7, but we value highly the options for instantaneous and simultaneous access at any time.

Cloud-based applications – those stored and managed by massive data centres run by the likes of Amazon, Google, Facebook or Apple – are providing step changes in the financial and environmental efficiency of delivering these services. But the centralising power of the cloud has its corollary in the dispersing effect of wireless networks and devices.

In wireless networks and devices we see fragmentation, duplication and a fundamental shift from mains power and green sources of energy to battery powered always-on devices. In environmental terms here lies the rub. Rather than the “aggregation of marginal gains” (the Sir Dave Brailsford strategy that has propelled success in British cycling), in which lots of tiny improvements add up to a large visible improvement, we are witnessing the aggregation of environmental disadvantages from billions of low-powered but fundamentally energy-inefficient antennas and devices providing the ‘last metre’ connectivity to global networks.

Wireless networks and devices, technologies that should drive sustainable development, are turning into energy-consuming monsters.<

See on www.theguardian.com

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