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Cell Phone Sommeliers on the Way?
Japan is reportedly toying with the idea of educating and licensing "sommeliers" to help potential buyers wade through the vast sea of options available for a new cellphone purchase. "Japan's communication ministry is looking to the private sector to manage the potential nightmare exam and certification process, with children's online safety highlighted as an important part of the plan. Mobile sommelier sounds like a pretty sweet title, we can totally feel how an HTC TyTN II might be paired with an earthy unlimited plan followed by the soft nutty finish of a 200-minute a month daytime calling package."
Here.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
TFA would be here.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Contrary to my siblings, I think the article that was quoted in the summary can be found at Engadget
I had to look it up:
"sommelier
A restaurant employee who orders and maintains the wines sold in the restaurant and usually has extensive knowledge about wine and food pairings."
Why don't they use something that is related, in English, or at least a bit more understandable, do the Japanese speak French? Probably some English lit major justifying his/her degree/salary. These are probably the same people who make up all that management speak, like instead of chart or table they use 'matrix'
Any of these would have been much more understandable: specialist, expert, buff, genius, nerd, advocate, certified authority, professional.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Well, if we trust the results of a google search, it comes from a coarser latin a very long time ago. No idea if it's true, but here's a link. From the linked article:
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
To be fair, sommelier != "wine guru".
Sommeliers train for a long time to understand the entire wine-making process from beginning to end, and all the factors that contribute to a good wine.
A true sommelier isn't someone who nitpicks about whether it is "sweet" or "honeydew" favour in the wine. A true sommelier can tell you how much rain fell in 1968 in a particular region of Western France and how it affected the acidity of the soil in which the grapes grew.
That being said, I agree with the parent that such things will not help "joe average" in the cell phone market and likely have no place.
We have to remember a couple things:
1. Japan is very far ahead of us as far as cell-phone technology is concerned. They've had fully-functional video phones for at least a year or two, for example (as in, you can communicate via real-time video).
2. Japanese retail is much more about service than most US retail. We just want to get in and get the product, but the Japanese are all about greeting you at the door, pleasant smiles, and all of that.
Therefore, a sommelier isn't all that strange in the context of Japanese retail. It's strange to Americans, but to the Japanese, it must make sense, otherwise they wouldn't bother.
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It's mocking the high end wine & beer culture, as well as probably mocking the phone geek culture too. "nutty" and "earthy" are adjectives used to describe the tastes of some alcoholic beverages.
In practice this rarely happens though, at least to me. If some nutjob seriously was harassing you with lots of texts, your probably could get a refund if you called customer service and explained the situation. It's rare enough that i think they'd be okay with that. Besides, yes, we have to pay for incoming texts, but that's factored into most plans so most of the time they're all still "free" within the bounds of the plan. Assuming we don't go over our limit, it doesn't matter which party gets a text deducted from that limit, does it? We all pay to support the network in the end... -Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?