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Walmart Tries to Emulate MySpace
mattsucks writes to tell us that according to AdAge, retail behemoth WalMart is trying desperately to target the MySpace demographic with a new, and highly sanitized, site designed to appeal to teens. From the article: "It's a quasi-social-networking site for teens designed to allow them to 'express their individuality,' yet it screens all content, tells parents their kids have joined and forbids users to e-mail one another. Oh, and it calls users 'hubsters' -- a twist on hipsters that proves just how painfully uncool it is to try to be cool."
I didn't think it was humanly possible, but I think I like Myspace better.
This is, after all, emulating a culture that coined the term "hopster" to mean anyone who's trying to be like them, they might actually take to it.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Oh, and it calls users 'hubsters' -- a twist on hipsters
Actually I don't think of "hip" when I hear that name. If you ask me they got the name from "hub" as in a center point for many connections and a way for directing connections out in other directions. Which makes sense for a social networking site, but the fact that Wal-Mart isn't allowing users to contact each other pretty much just means theres no "outgoing" really. How is this social networking again, if you can't talk to other people?
Screened content? Check
Parents notified? Check
Oooh, no email? Check
Yep, hits all my buttons.
Unfortunately, I'm a parent, with teenagers. I'd have as much success leading them to this site as I have getting them to tidy their rooms, speak respectfully to their elders and cook dinner occasionally.
TRIES. T-R-I-E-S. The only acceptable time for "trys" is when you're on the way to "tryst". I've never really gotten heated about grammar in articles, but it's IN BOLD PRINT!! C'mon!
/late
//drunk
///please don't hurt my karma
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
A much better idea would have been to create a subsidiary and do it through them. The association with a company that works on a "mass" basis somewhat works against the desire to "express one's individuality".
Actually, if I did want to express my individuality (which I don't, because I don't have low self-esteem), I would prefer to make my own site. That's a lot more individualistic than being part of a large mass of people on a big site.
see a Text Widget
If that site were any more out of touch it would download via Senator Ted Stevens' tube based internet.
I think Walmart's been taking marketing advise from Steven Colbert:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PbJJUy1KD8
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Of course, the level of discourse was much less sophisticated than /.; hell, no one made so much as one Soviet Russia joke!
Oh.... My... Gawd....
I have finally seen it: The Worst Idea On The Internet.
I always thought it would come from Bush, Ballmer, or Bin Laden, but congratulations, Wal-Mart, you've won! Yes, because we all know that teens are clamoring to be associated with that haven of cool, the Wal-Mart Supercenter! They'll hang out all day in chat rooms monitored by a giant smiley face that threatens to "Roll back trolls"! They want clever, yet unoffensive nicknames like 'The gr33tr' and 'mop_guy_99'! They'll argue all day over whether they should get the 80-pack of Charmin or the 120-pack of generic brand toilet paper!
What teen wouldn't mind saying in the halls of their school, "I'll see ya on The HUB, dude!" "ya, see ya later, HUBSTER"?! (tragically these two kids were beaten to death with Abercrombie & Fitch merchandise a few moments later)
Seriously, I can imagine the Gap or Abercrombie, maybe even Starbucks doing this, but.... Wal-mart?!?!
I can only imagine that the kind of teen that would use Wal-mart for a social networking service are the ones who go there barefoot and pregnant because they thought Saran Wrap was a contraceptive. That and the guys who argue over Coors Lite vs. Miller Lite.
May Cthulu help us all.
I can't believe how naive these failed-meme-launching marketing execs keep proving themselves to be.
There are 95 million myspace users and every week another million sign up. There aren't enough additional people in the Internet-using public in america to even come close to competing with myspace. They'd be lucky to pick up a couple hundred thousand users. And why would you use this instead of myspace?
This isn't intended to compete with myspace. It's just another marketing disaster.
"You've just become a member of one of the coolest cliques on the net. Be sure to spam your friends...
Wait for the goatse... Meanwhile I'll be uploading random copyright infringing content via tor... This must be good for something.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I've looked at MySpace but I just don't get it. It just full of crap. Perhaps I'm too old.
Can anyone point out a page that's actually worth looking at?
Since when is Wal*Mart good for getting laid?
Help us build a better map!
The website, content and contest are just a marketing campaign and a pathetic one at that. Kids "customize" their page and upload pictures and video (pending approval from the Walmart mandarins, of course). The entire exercise is directed at getting kids to shop for their fall back to school wardrobe at Wally World as opposed to Target, who apparently have the budget teen fashion market pretty much buttoned up (no pun intended). It's not a blog or even a blog with training wheels, but just a way for kids to yap to their friends about this "cool new web site" and act as shills for Walmart.
from the FAQ:
WHO'S BEHIND THIS GENIUS WEB DESTINATION?
The guys from Wal-Mart and Sony® teamed up to bring you all the sweet stuff you'll find on the HUB!
'nuff said.
This is embarrassing. This is like the federal government starting a myspace rival.
Just wait. Walmart will realize their mistake and allow kids to do things like add hot pink text on top of bright orange, move the text boxes all over the fucking page and feature looping, inane, impossible to shut off Walmart-friendly music that highlights all the best boy bands Walmart has to offer.
Has Newscorp figured out a way to actually make money with MySpace yet? I recall reading about hair brained ideas like making movies, bands and other products into "friends". I just can't wait to add next month's big budget flick or label promoted band to my friends list.
Then again, I think I'm too old for MySpace.
'nuff said.
Heres a link http://schoolyourway.walmart.com/index.php/
I think this internet thing sounds like a good idea
... aren't we all using layer 3 switches these days?
This is a really bad advertising ploy and a source of future labor for anyone who signs up. It is an interesting idea though, it would have worked better if they just created a seperate deparment/company to accomplish roughly the same goal, kind of what disney did with miramax. They could have just set up the site with all walmart advertisments. or just go buy the advertisments on myspace...or myspace itself. Corporate takeovers on the internet...
On the other hand, it could be worse.
They could have called the users: "Associates"
& the site: "The Wall"
Ok, maybe this is just me, but I see this as a way for Walmart to try to reach out to the most sought after demographic, which just so happens to be the same demographic that Myspace caters to.
This demographic traditionally sees Walmart as an uncool place, but by setting up this website, they can, at best, change that image, and, at worst, get a ton of free focus group-like situations on which to base future brand ideas.
As much as I think this will tank horribly, it's a fantastic idea.
If this does become successful, however, watch for anti-hubster, anti-Walmart viral backlash on Myspace. Subversive, networked anti-advertisements are the wave of future.
Aside from the entertainment of the mockery Wally World so richly deserves, this is a pretty clear example of the level of desperation the idiot mainstream marketers are experiencing. They, like the failed entertainment retailers, are coming to realize that they can't control the world anymore.
So, they are trying to take on this runaway train we call the web. Trouble is, they have been stuck in their little castles for so long, they no longer get the new world that is. Because they do not get it, they attempt a cheesy imitation of such.
The stunning irony here is that they actually believed this rip off would be found credible and there was no one within their ranks who was able to tell them how idiotic they looked.
This isn't the loss of a battle -- this is a total loss of the war.
Mod me up, mod me down, flame me, praise me -- whatever you do, you help prove I exist...
Thinking there is anything worth looking at on myspace.
Great Intellect...
Baloo, I'm sending you a walmart friend invite. Keep in mind that we're should all register underage. Use a real secondary email address to be your "parent's address. Etc.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Did you know Walmart buys 10% of the entire output of China? 90% of Walmarts products come from China? Good for the balance of trade defecit, not.
Back on track, one wonders what the management structures must be like if a project gets this far without someone, somewhere in the Walmart behomoth saying 'umm, this is a really, really cheesy and embarassingly bad idea'.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Of the founder of a space opera ufo nut cult, alas Hubbard is written with a double 'b'.
Maybe Walmart just didn't want to get sued..
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Speaking of MySpace, are we picking up on dogshit for education? 81 comments as of this post and the headline is still an eyesore.
Fix, editors, fix! Edit, editors, edit!
Well, I've been out of the country and away from my friends for a few months.
I can't go egging houses, but tonight, yeeeess tonight we see what we can get past the censors at WalMart.
Will post updates here.
I should probably shave first.
(What, you thought they think with their heads? Hah!)
I just went to Wal-Mart's main site to look at this train-wreck of a marketing idea myself, and I couldn't see how to get to it.
Oh, incidentally, Amazon called--they want their page layout back. Wal-Mart's gettin' it ugly.
It's not at thehub.com; that site looks almost cool from a business perspective. (Any meeting space that serves sandwiches gets a nod from me.)
Finally, I had to fall back on Google (!!!) to find what subdomain they tucked it into, and ...ack. Unlike most train-wrecks, I could take my eyes off of it. I suppose it's a mercy that the "Hub" is buried that way; it won't suck in the gullible and stupid.
Mind you, this has given me a wonderful idea...
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Tentacles == Spaghetti?
You may have just unmasked the true identity of the Great and Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster!
Wikileaks, no DNS
Wal*Mart is simply doing this to gain valuable insight into the "popular" things teenagers think about. To do so is to "know your market," which in the ends gains them dollars. They don't give a damn about competing with MySpace - this is simply free focus group fodder. If they even get a few hundred users to post a few blog posts with useful marketing information, they'll be happy.
Marketing data is what they are looking for.
I counted the number of times the girls said "cute" and "like" in that front page video. Here's the rough numbers:
cute: 11111111
like: 111111111111
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
They can't find you online? That's probably only because they aren't computer literate. (Not to diss your parents, I'm sure they are very fine people) Once I get kids, I'm pretty sure that I'll find them online. If only because I handle the firewall/router here and can log exactly what they visit. Even if I didn't, it very feasible to simple get on their computer and check their browser history. (Kids don't get Admin - Fuck I don't give Admin to myself for mundane tasks)
You see, the problem is not that parents don't want to know, it is because they do not know how to. For the future generation of kids this is going to change, because we grew up with computers. Actually, with the dumbing down of computers these days, it is very well possible that we will know more about computers than our kids will.
It's a bit like cellphones: I know people that pay the cellphone bills for their -13year olds. They complain that they call too much and don't know what to do. They still want the kids to have a cellphone in "case of an emergency". What most people don't know is that you can lock the numbers you want to the SIM card (or cellphone) and it won't allow other numbers to be called. People don't know. I do, my kids are going to have a hell of a time to beat me in technology. (Same way I did with my dad, because he was well informed too. I beat him, but it took its time)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Emulate myspace?!?!? Slashdot is really missing a story-click headline opportunity here. Walmart is launching a mySpace-KILLER!
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
but I manage to get him to tidy his room (and even other rooms in the house) and to speak respectfully to his elders.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I'm not a big MySpace user, but a lot of my (adult) friends use it quite a lot for the "Music" section. By being attached to a big media company they've managed to get an official presence for almost every major label and band on that site, and they also allow unsigned/smaller bands to register themselves. My friends trawl around the music section looking for new bands, and the group of my friends that are in a band of their own use it to promote said band to fans of similar bands.
The pure social networking bit is mostly for the kids, but the music section seems to attract young adults a lot more.
Walmart may be cheap, but I find a LOT of the time I shop there, I get what I pay for...sorry, but am I the only one here scared about the prospect of "friends half off"?
From the Article: The Columbus teen doubts she'll submit a video or enter the contests because "it, like, takes a lot of time, and it's not very likely you'll win."
That's the smartest thing I've heard in a while. Take out the slang "like" and this 14 year old girl analyzed, prioritized and made an executive-level decision.
"Trys"?
Fata viam invenient.
I've never actually been compelled to write anything using expressions which I haven't tested here at /. So here goes...
How much more freakin' gay can you be?!? It might be cool if it were, say, for my 70 year old grandpa! Hotlist? I don't think that has been used since... Ok. Maybe he 80's. I was going for something like the 30's to follow with the 70 year old grandpa comment. Regardless, my respet for Wal-mart as the great pillar of American business it is has been flushed.
One day the toilets of the world will rise up... And I'm going to nuke them.
It MUST be a raging success!
I can see the flames from it from here already!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Echoing SNL's insight that WalMart reversed its decision to sell birth control pills when it throught about who shops at WalMart, do we _really_ want people who would join this site uncensored and emailing each other?
They just want teens to express their individuality, uh, as long as that individuality conforms to Walmart's ideas
http://neverendinglists.blogspot.com/2006/07/five- oddities-from-wal-marts-hub.html
1. This site brought to you by Exxon Mobil
This one weirded me out, I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation: all images are hosted at exxonmobil.download.akamai.com. Paranoid meter now officially ON.
I think it's becoming increasingly clear to just about every that myspace is an awful, awful thing (from just about every point of view.....)
If people are going to start moving away from myspace to other sites and services, which ones will people flock to?
Right now, my money's on Vox.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Right. As presumably educated people, the /. crowd - especially moderators, the buffer between the Great Unwashed Masses Who Submit and the Creme de la Audience - should be on the lookout for common errors like this.
A hubster doofus Jerry!
This is going to fail and fail badly. For one simple reason anyone who still remembers there childhood knows: Nothing specifically designed to appeal to teens ever does.
Teens are way, way, way more interested in stuff made for adults.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Your bank uses flash? I wouldn't touch that with a 50' pole.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Man these people laid an egg. Even Slashdot feels comfortable calling it uncool :)
omg...i just watched that little girl ashley's video. i want to shoot myself in the face now. i love walmart, but this idea is beyond awful.
Painful, but I watched all four little videos. Did anyone notice that not one of them (remember slogan is "School My Way") mentioned, um ... school? Except that singer said something along the lines of "I sing instead of doing my homework". Does the word 'school' have some strange usage that I wasn't previously aware of?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Walmart is already just like myspace.
They both suck, and their claim to fame are a bunch of teenagers, and losers.
move along, nothing to see here...except for a wal-mart commercial that looks like a web site. nice try, but now the site is right under myspace on the blocked domains list in my router.
Ah, if I had the mod points, I'd do it myself.
How to use coral cache: http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/~oscartheduck
Every major company in the world wants to target teens. Who woudn't, it's the biggest market out there. PS. I wan kick the little rascal in the skate video, sell outs.
RUPERT! I TOLD YOU TO WATCH THE BAGS! You were looking at the boys again, WEREN'T YOU.
summon greater vortex of infinite suck
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
In many areas, WalMart IS a "social networking" place. Take, for instance, my small town in Missouri. We have nothing - no Starbucks, no Panera, no other "cool to hang out" places. We have a movie theater, but it's too expensive to go all the time.
We have a mall (and those other cool places) in a nearby town, but it's a 30-minute drive, and it's just not convenient to do that all the time. Plus, the mall isn't even that good.
The result: a lot of people honestly hang out at WalMart. Groups of kids go just because it's somewhere to go. Sometimes kids will wreak havoc, but not always.
Not that I think this Hub will be successful (or that it should be), but don't underestimate the power of "nothing to do"-ness.
Now all they have to do is fix their product search on the main page. If it's not the right term for something, you get a list of completely unrelated books & music.
Try searching for "light bulb." It should be a common thing, right? Nope... you get "Snow" by Curt Kirkwood and books about the historical effect of the light bulb.
Other than that, I'm perfectly willing to give my soul over to the beast of retailing.
If they wanted to find out what 'MySpace' users think in regards to say possible marketing they could just as easly mine the MySpace pages. All the data is already there.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I respect myspace, and you should !
;-)
As someone said on fark.com (I'm sorry, I can't find a link to the comment), the people at myspace
created a site where all the teenagers can create their stupid unreadable and ugly web pages, with
all the background music they want. And you know what ? Its all in the same place. Myspace.
At least, you only need to know where *not* to browse, and the rest of the internet is still... well
not that bad, after all.
Cute young marketing girl: "I think we should make something like MySpace that's loosely associated with WalMart to improve our brand's image with youth."
PHB level 1: "Great idea. Write up a proposal."
Cute young marketing girl: (thinking: this is gonna be GREAT) "I already did: here it is."
PHB level 1 "Awesome! Let me shop this around. Oh, since MySpace is getting all this bad press with stalkers and all, we can't let the kids talk to each other."
PHB level 2 "Great idea! But we better make sure that kids have their parents' permission to be on there."
PHB level 3 "Fantastic idea! And let's have the kids make videos about how great WalMart is!"
PHB level 4 "Okay. Let's build this!"
PHB (as a group): "Great idea, cute young intern girl! If this works, your career with WalMart is guaranteed!"
(cute young intern girl doesn't hear them because she's busy looking on Monster.com for her way out of the impending debacle.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
It was pretty easy to beat my dad. He was a proto-geek. He would have been a geek for sure if in his time computers would have been a tad bit more cheaper. He became an economist instead and never lost his geekness, but he was simply not specialised in our area. He encouraged me a lot to get into tech and so I did. In a sense, he let me win.
Unless we get a drastical technology shift (something that is not based on electricity and computers), it's quite probable that we as geeks will keep up. I don't have the time either, but when a new gizmo comes out it's usually not hard to get by. I'm usually even a late adopter. Besides, I can call up on my dad: he picked up cellphones quite nicely (and uses more functions than I do). If you have a certain talent in tech, you'll be fine. I'm confident in that.
Again: things these days tend to be dumbed down so much that understanding is not necessary, but only usage. Since (with relation to electronics/computers) we know what goes on, we will have an advantage.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I finally submit a story that gets accepted, and I forgot to log in when I did it. OTOH, "Trys" was my stupid tyop in the original headline, so maybe I shouldn't have posted this at all.
This is like those lame, drug & alcohol-free dances, the local Kiwanis lodge always sponsored, but no one ever went to?
-CR
"So is the BSD licence even more 'free' (than GPLv2)? Yes. Unquestionably." --Linus Torvalds (TinyURL.com/2vugzl)
http://schoolyourway.walmart.com/index.php/registe r
Holy hell, look at the required fields. They're worried about people getting EMAIL addresses of minors?
* First Name
* Last Name
* Email
* DOB
* Password
* Retype Password
* Address
* City
* State
* Zip Code
* Phone Number
*Gender: Male Female
* Security Question
* Security Answer
* I agree to the Contest Rules and Talent Release
* Parent or Guardian's Email
* Parent or Guardian's Consent
It's worse than you think. It seems to consist of posers who think that having 1145 "friends" (including famous people) and a virtually unreadable page makes them cool. Friend comments are mostly "thanks for the add", "have a nice weekend", and "U R SXY - LOL"... sigh. Many of the photos are soft-p0rn. I guess they're meant to attract, but would *you* date someone who posted that to the world?
Note to the guys: Those pictures of you and your abs aren't really going to attract your target audience. I hope you're comfortable with your sexuality :-) In addition, having a screen name of "The Hose" (yes, there are 10 of them) is NOT a good thing -- especially when you look like a moron.
Sorry. MySpace could be cool, but generally isn't. What a waste.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I worked a stint in JWT's (nee J. Walter Thompson) Interactive Division on Madison Avenue. Creative Directors would come down with retarded ideas like this all the time two weeks before launching the TV and Print components of an integrated campaign and demand we pull something the size of MySpace out of our asses, with such detailed instructions as, "we want something really hip and cool that's 'viral.'" They asked for the same thing in the same words so often that we had a canned spiel explaining that that word, 'viral,' does not mean what they think it means. Then the marketroids in the Account Department would further retard the Creative Directors' stunted concepts with their lunacy, and finally both the Agency and Client legal departments would do their review of the online component and vomit all over it, touch up the corners with their own feces, and the final product would look exactly like this opt-out message.
It's pitiful, laughable, and annoying; but on the bright side it does permanently preclude a true corporate takeover of the internet's mindspace because even though individuals at corporations understand that they don't get it, the very nature of a corporation makes it impossible that the corporation ever will.
Corporate America/World retards human progress, not promotes it.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Ha, I assumed when I read the headline that Wal*Mart had started a MySpace clone for the child labor and slave labor that makes all their crap. I was close, it's for the children that BUY their crap.
Rememeber our slogan, "Made for children by children."
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
You used the word "turd" twice...
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Hmm, looks like further proof we need to look more at the issue of telepathy. http://backslash.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07 /18/2046227/ (wouldn't it be cool?)
So wait a bunch of nerds are mocking Walmart? We should be grateful. It gets tiresome just mocking AOL users.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I'm not privileged to be part of the targeted demographic, so my opinion that it seems unlikely to catch on might be wrong. I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance when I read
What I really wonder is what the real IT folks at Walmart think of this scheme?
Recall that the company maintains one of the largest IT shops in the world that keeps timely up-to-date information on exactly what is selling where and how suppliers need to adjust (SCM). Non-trivial stuff that serves as casebook exercises in lessons for why Walmart is Changin the Landscape.
They've got to be trying hard not to LOL at the ludicrosity.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The Loved Ones
My little brother's band. Please mod up, he could use the exposure and he definitely needs the money!
(note--dates from when MySpace was just a Web site for bands to share their music.)
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Do you know which television personality has been known to use an instrumental version of that song on his show?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
target the MySpace demographic with a new, and highly sanitized, site designed to appeal to teens.
Nuff said, it's doomed to failure. This is Generation Porn they're trying to appeal to, after all.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
And we use words like "Slashdotter" and "Digger". Even "Hacker" is a stretch.
I'm sure it's completely, totally, and horribly lame, and it would be just as lame if it was "Clothes for nerds. Your appearance matters." Admit it, we've got about as much right to call anyone else uncool as Charlie Manson has to call anyone else insane.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Drastical? Your dad should have encouraged english skills...
More on-topic, with your "understanding is not necessary, but only usage" comment, don't you find that's true about cars? Most people have only half a clue about what goes on under the hood. They put gas in it, and if you have someone really bright, they change the oil regularly and get tires checked, etc. But it's gone from an understanding thing to where you just call the mechanic when it breaks. I think the previous poster here had it right... we'll probably know more than our kids about the actual workings of the technology because we're geeks. Just like my Dad has a much better idea about how the powertrain of my car works than I do. I have half a clue, but not nearly what he knows.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Good Lord, there has to be an end to this. Every company with an online frontend thinks they can create some kind of social-networking infrastructure to "draw the hip kids in" with.
It's their attempt at social network engineering.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
First Orkut then MySpace now Wallmart.. where is this supposed to end? Microsoft?
Friends, now buy one get 95 million free. But they were made in China, so it's best if you speak Mandarin. But then, IM-speak is almost universal.
(More seriously, I wonder if Mallwart will find some way to work cheap labor into it. Maybe the Justice Department will contact them to start creating fake under-age accounts, and Mallwart will farm the work out to China. New work for all those gold-miners: now, instead of pretending to be minotaurs, they get to pretend to be 16 year old girls from Indiana.)
no text
Oh well, I was "punished" already because I spoke about some real problem before Linux gets flash 9.
It will get that problem anyway, they will report that issue like "Adobe Sux! Flash doesn't work!" and get +5 informative instead of my "offtopic".
Quality goes lower each day...
Ever heard of "non-native english speaker"? I actually learnt most of my English because of using computers. So, indirectly he did!
If you really want to start a flamewar about that. Look at little gems I found on slashdot: "weather" instead of "whether" (when not talking about real weather of course), "here, here" instead of "hear, hear" (when not saying "here here kitty") or a new favourite of mine "in do case" instead of "in due case". Did I correct any of these people? Of course not! First, this is slashdot, spelling errors are mandatory and second: who am I to criticize their English? They might be non-native. They might only be 14 years old. What do I know about them?
True, cars fall into the category "usage" but "not knowledge". Still, I have yet to find a geek that doesn't know at least superficially how a powertrain works, how an internal combustion engine works. Other people don't even know *what* a powertrain is. Don't forget, we're talking about controlling such people, we're talking about controlling (young) teenagers here! They even don't know how to spell a word like "drastic" (Oops!). They even don't know how the battery in their cellphone works! I'm sure you do, because you actually learnt this in high school (at least in mine, we did.)
The thing is: geeks will always try to understand how things works, let it be a car, a computer, a washing machine. Sure, we couldn't build one, but having that knowlegde plus being able to actually read a manual and understand it gives us an egde over all those that do not. This includes kids up to 15-16 years. After that, as a parent, you should have taught then how to be (at least partially) responsible.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)