But this isn't about your attitude, this is about far more serious things: Beer. Leaving Germany for good end of this month and - well.. Israel's beers are f...ing (well, it's kind of on topic with your app, isn't it?) baaad. So my choice in the future, after being spoiled in a country of beer drinkers, is
* Local brand starts with G (Ugh...)
* Local brand starts with M (Really. Life's too short to drink that)
* Weihenstephan (which seems to be from Germany, but the fact that I never heard about it here gives away how decent it is. Seems like an export-only product)
* Stella
So - rest assured: You're not alone. If you remove all the better alternatives, Stella is really okay. Kind of.
* Norma Jeane - you can find anything there
* Beit Ha'bira ("house of beer")
* James' Beer Factory - this one in Petach Tikva, kosher (opening times wise as well, so no drinking on Friday night) and actually doesn't have much choice. But they serve self brewed beer which is decent.
There are others I can't recall now, but I can ask friends.
If you want to go out for a spree with me and other hackers, make sure to drop me a line here or at maayan@maayank.com! :)
EDIT: Googling for it, Beit Ha'Bira might have closed shop. I suggest as an alternative Norman. I don't recall visiting it, but I've heard (and after googling, read) only good things. For exact addresses google for the names of the pubs with "Tel Aviv".
[1] it's very late here so I'll leave it at that.
Do yourself a favor: try different types of beer, not just brands.
Seriously, beer is a working-class beverage: find something else to be a snob about ;)
Also, plenty of pubs have decent beers these days in Israel.
I live in Israel and it took me a while to guess Macabi, but maybe that's because I don't like lagers (stouts are the real beer anyway :)).
Seriously, try it.
In other words, it isn't beer.
(Especially here in Vancouver where there are so many outstanding small breweries that everyone should recognize good beer)
That's not completely true, that would be the 1667 ("the kro") and other similar french non-beers. Stella is simply the base beer in Flanders (the base beer in Wallonia being Jupiler). Not good by any means, but still drinkable.
There are few topics as polarizing and annoyingly superficial as which beer is "piss-water" and which beer is "good beer."
I currently live in Cologne [1] (~1.000.000 people, west Germany) ~40km away from Dusseldorf [2] (~600.000 people, but capital of the state). These cities are the prime examples for rivalry between cities all over Germany. Both are cities that heavily rely on tourism, both are very much into carnival (one of the topics that are discussed to death) and both are _the_ place to be for (different types of..) beer.
Here you get 0.2l (i.e. tiny) glasses of rather light beer, brewed in a way that is even (as far as I know a first!) a protected regional trademark akin to Champagne. You can create it somewhere else, but you cannot use the name (a derivation of the name of the city, Koelsch [3, contains a reference to the rivalry as well]).
Dusseldorf is famous for (larger glasses, 0,3l or 0,5l) stronger (in taste), sweeter and dark beers. Not protected by law, but they are more or less _the_ city for these types of beer.
This leads to a lot of (mostly friendly) discussions like the one you used. In fact, since the local beer here is very light and served in these tiny glasses, ~most~ of Germany compares the 14 different brands of beer here to a kind of 'diluted water'.
It always amuses me (moved here, so I'm kind of an outsider) to see these kinds of discussions and I think like to be reminded (thank you!) that this is a global phenomenon..
1: http://maps.google.de/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=de&...
2: http://maps.google.de/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=de&...
3: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/K%C3%B6lsch_%...
How undrinkable is Fosters? We had a '70s theme party once (Foster's is iconic of the 70s here) and I bought a six-pack of Fosters for the humour value (and copped some abuse, too). In the morning, every drop of alcohol in the house had been consumed, even left-overs in the back of cupboards. It was a hell of a party, with empty cans and bottle everywhere, and the punch bowl would have been bone dry were in not for fruit remnants. The six-pack of Fosters remained untouched, pristine in it's carrier in the dregs of the ice tub...
I think his attitude is fantastic for someone who is having their apps ripped off, I find it strangely odd that in the comments people think this is the attitude that developers are meant to take when their work is ripped off, humbled.
I purchase all apps from the app store, I had Cydia but I took the jail break off my phone. I think the 59p - £3 for an app is nothing for all the hard work that has gone in and I am more than happy to make the purchase.
I think the whole episode has been strangely rewarding for him but again I think it makes people think that all developers should have this attitude. I think it's funny that in the comments that someone said that developers should treat all consumers with positive and constructive humbleness. I'm sorry but the meaning of "Consumer" is "A person who purchases goods and services for personal use". There is a keyword here, "Purchase".
Kudos to the guy for some great PR but I really hope that all "consumers" don't get this mentality when trying to rip off apps
The Cydia founder talked about app piracy in a talk a while ago: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/04/13/360idev-saurik-on-the-mobile-... - it fits in:
"Saurik said that many of the pirates he's dealt with are just kids, no more than teenagers, very smart but with not much solid life experience to speak of. And he said that like children, they were both vengeful (they will give bad reviews and attack developers who attack them), and easily won over -- sometimes, by just sending a nice email, he was able to get a former pirate to cooperate with him or even '...come over to the light side.'"
"The best solution to piracy, he said, was to convert the pirates -- don't disable their app or attack them (because likely, they will simply blame the app rather than learn a lesson), but instead inform them that they're breaking the rules, and give them an easy way to do things right. One app Saurik described simply put a one-time notice in the app that the user was using a pirated version, and saw sales spike when the notice went out."
I don't believe you should be tied into your phones "terms" of operation but in my situation I found the hack pointless and unnecessary. Not to say that it doesn't suit everyone though!
If I take Cydia out the equation there, I stand by my point that I prefer to pay for the goods. Jail breaking and Cydia were used just to get my point across.
People would expect and probably would understand, that he'd choose to adopt a more antagonist position when encountering someone wanting to crack his software. That's what makes his reaction a class act. He decides not to take it in the first degree and opts to rather approach the whole thing with empathy, as a result a more interesting situation unfolds.
This isn't to tell you that you need to be understanding of people stealing your stuff, but it's just a reminder that sometimes we don't have all the facts and that during a situation perceived as a conflict, it could be worth it for adverse parties to take a bit of time to walk just a few steps in one another's shoes. It might clear up lots of misunderstandings.
I hate to point out the obvious here as well but what if the original poster was simply just lying? What if he was back tracking as he felt guilty and was just showing some empathy to the developer?
As he did, he gifted the app to him. Why didn't the guy get a friend to do that? Why didn't he get a voucher?
I must admit, if my true intentions were to crack the app because I had no means of paying for it officially, I would have stated that in the first post as I would have felt a moral guilt to do so.
It has turned out well for the developer and I really wish him the best of luck. I hope he does make a lot of cash out of this.
The biggest thing to come out of all of this is not that it's best to take the moral high road or karma is rewarding him etc etc. Its the unexpected power of a viral news article. Not to say that this was scripted conversation, I truly believe that this is authentic but I bet you find a lot of similar stories erupting with this type of behaviour now.
One one hand you are supposed to be paying for a scarcity: someone expending time and resources to produce something. On the other hand you are supposed to be paying by buying a copy: something that is an abundance with a natural price of zero.
Buying is not just setting a price according to the seller being a nice guy or having indirectly done something else. Buying is a market interaction: you aim to pay the lowest price available (Don't we want functioning markets?). Well, that is zero, because copies are infinitely available.
No matter how much the law tells us copies are restricted, they are not in fact, and we know it. The market will always drive toward making things available at the real physical cost of their production. As long as IP tries to force prices so far away from their real level, people will respond in odd ways.
Brits and Americans will drink it because they have a HUGE advertising budget.
The Japanese won't drink it because imported beer is hellishly expensive and Asahi isn't that bad.
The French won't drink it, because wine is much cheaper and much better almost everywhere.
Germans won't drink it, because if you want something better then there's umpteen different domestic beers that are fresher, tastier or sharper. Especially Flensburger.
The Czechs won't drink it because they more or less invented clean, refreshing beers and their domestic beers are the only foreign beers that Germans will admit to being fantastic. Especially Pilsner Urquell.
Belgians won't drink it, because they only like beer that's made from raspberries, blueberries or pansies. I don't know why.
Americans or Brits who don't drink it suffer from 'intensely educated beer drinker' syndrome - sort of a "now you've seen how big the world is, how can you make do with this?" aspect. American and British small breweries are fantastic, alas no huge marketing budget...
This leaves the vast majority of the beer-drinking market to make Stella Artois money hand-over-fist and puzzled at the rest of the world's intolerance. Truth is, it's not that bad - it's just that there are things that taste so much better without the stigma of a huge multi-national faceless corporation ;-)
TL;DR - Something like Windows vs. the rest of the world. The popular choice will always be sneered at by connoisseurs eager to distinguish themselves as educated.
Ouch! ;) With about 150 breweries and over 450 different beer varieties, Belgium has way more than just the fruit based ones. Please find somewhere near you that has Kasteelbier (preferably on tap, but that could be hard to find anywhere outside of Belgium as bottles aren't that easy to locate here in NY) - you won't regret it.
I think your point is wrong in the general case, and that it is hated for its quality rather than its popularity. But there are two important issues:
1) If you are not a discerning consumer of beer, you will follow the path of least resistance. Stella is well-advertised, easy to buy and widespread, so you're more likely to choose it over other (probably unknown) beers. That's what makes it popular.
2) More people are aware of the popular choice (by definition), more will have tried it than a less-popular beer, it will be mentioned more often, and will be sneered at more often. The frequency at which it is sneered at is a consequence of its popularity rather than caused by it.
Also, that neck wrapper is really annoying.
Note: original forum post at http://xsellize.com/topic/137904-the-f-ing-word-of-the-day/
But this guy dug deep and figured what the heck! Lost a bit of money and made someone happy. And it's not even Christmas
Note that this certainly would not work for a large company - it only works for a (very) small-scale outfit.
It works so well that we take a lot of it for granted. Look around you, do you know of any big company that came along, offered something with such seemingly good intentions that their offering made the competition look like crooks? I'm sure we could come up with a few examples. Off the top of my head:
- I'm reminded of the days when hotmail would delete my emails without my consent, because I was going beyond the 2mb they were giving me. While they were trying to get me to pay for 200mb, gmail appeared out of nowhere with a red cape and saved me with a free 1Gig that quickly turned into 2Gigs. How could I not look at Google like a superhero and at Microsoft like the villain?
- Similarly, while I visited France a few years ago, I saw that they had this system called the Freebox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_(ISP), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox), that literally revolutionized telecom in a country otherwise very conservative when it comes to technology. Free's offering was so compelling that it created a real disturbance that dramatically affected market pricing (tv, telephone, internet). Even now, in North America we have to look hard to find equivalent pricing and I'm not even sure we can come close. At the time it started the Freebox, Free came like a liberator and in the process racked up subscribers and made billions.
Potential service idea: hook these people up with gifted apps that they can pay for some other way? Maybe payment in kind?
His "Sausage Status" pitch was hilarious. He started off by running and jumping onto the stage. A very spontaneous individual.
And don't knock Stella, it's one of the best of the "mainstream" lagers.
