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Gartner Sees Virtual Interaction as the Future of IT
jerrymander writes "We're moving into "Generation Virtual", says Gartner analyst Adam Sarner in a Baseline article. With an emphasis on the opportunities that virtual personas represent now and in the future, Sarner details the traits of being a part of Generation V. Sarner outlines in his assessment that: 'Traditional ways of selling to customers using demographic information will become irrelevant in the online world, which has its own merit-based system using personas that conduct transactions and spread influence anonymously.' And, by extension, Sarner says that 'business intelligence (BI) and analytic tools will shift toward consumer applications, eventually arming companies with automated, artificial intelligence, self-learning 'persona bots' to seek customers' needs and desires.'"
Inhale.
... better. Intentional at least. The regular kind of sad teen suicide.
Take in as much air as you can. This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.
A friend of mine, when he was 13 years old he heard about "pegging." This is when a guy gets banged up the butt with a dildo. Stimulate the prostate gland hard enough, and the rumor is you can have explosive hands-free orgasms. At that age, this friend's a little sex maniac. He's always jonesing for a better way to get his rocks off. He goes out to buy a carrot and some petroleum jelly. To conduct a little private research. Then he pictures how it's going to look at the supermarket checkout counter, the lonely carrot and petroleum jelly rolling down the conveyer belt toward the grocery store cashier. All the shoppers waiting in line, watching. Everyone seeing the big evening he has planned.
So my friend, he buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline.
Like he's going home to stick a carrot cake up his butt.
At home, he whittles the carrot into a blunt tool. He slathers it with grease and grinds his ass down on it. Then, nothing. No orgasm. Nothing happens except it hurts.
Then, this kid, his mom yells it's supper time. She says to come down, right now.
He works the carrot out and stashes the slippery, filthy thing in the dirty clothes under his bed.
After dinner, he goes to find the carrot, and it's gone. All his dirty clothes, while he ate dinner, his mom grabbed them all to do laundry. No way could she not find the carrot, carefully shaped with a paring knife from her kitchen, still shiny with lube and stinky.
This friend of mine, he waits months under a black cloud, waiting for his folks to confront him. And they never do. Ever. Even now that he's grown up, that invisible carrot hangs over every Christmas dinner, every birthday party. Every Easter egg hunt with his kids, his parents' grandkids, that ghost carrot is hovering over all of them. That something too awful to name.
People in France have a phrase: "staircase wit." In French: esprit de l'escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer, but it's too late. Say you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party....
As you start down the stairway, then-magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put-down.
That's the spirit of the stairway.
The trouble is, even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do.
Some deeds are too low to even get a name. Too low to even get talked about.
Looking back, kid-psych experts, school counselors now say that most of the last peak in teen suicide was kids trying to choke while they beat off. Their folks would find them, a towel twisted around their kid's neck, the towel tied to the rod in their bedroom closet, the kid dead. Dead sperm everywhere. Of course the folks cleaned up. They put some pants on their kid. They made it look
Another friend of mine, a kid from school, his older brother in the Navy said how guys in the Middle East jack off different than we do here. This brother was stationed in some camel country where the public market sells what could be fancy letter openers. Each fancy tool is just a thin rod of polished brass or silver, maybe as long as your hand, with a big tip at one end, either a big metal ball or the kind of fancy carved handle you'd see on a sword. This Navy brother says how Arab guys get their dick hard and then insert this metal rod inside the whole length of their boner. They jack off with the rod inside, and it makes getting off so much better. More intense.
It's this big brother who travels around the world,
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Except for the guy you get weed from
I've come the the conclusion that Gartner are pop-analysts, since the more coverage of their predictions I see on Slashdot, the more the turn out to be fundamentally wrong but engaging to talk about nonetheless. Ignore Gartner. Embrace Wired Magazine predictions :)
Matt
I guess if you wanted to try this software it'd make you BI-curious? *rimshot*
as clueless in regards to technology but somehow having completely mastered the art of suckering management into paying up decent amounts of cash for their "insight".
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I've wanted to be able to delete users from the database with a shotgun.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I saw Project Wonderland at a JavaOne conference a while ago and it looked very promising. I'll be watching its development.
Dunno how many long-time internet users are left on /., but some of you might still remember net kook Timothy Rue and his Virtual Interaction Configuration, which as far as anyone could tell was a bunch of idiosyncratic homespun amigashell/arexx scripts that did... not very much.
But to Tim, oh boy, they were TEH FUTURE!http://threeseas.net/mind/index.html (beware, timecube-like schizo insanity. Only not as funny).
that Gartner is full of shit.
My first thought on this story was to an old article on how someone hooked up an early FPS, either "Wolfenstein 3D" or "Doom", to the Unix 'kill' command. Each mob was a pid, and you could send signals to the processes with your various weapon choices. Anyone else remember this?
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...for the first time.
News at 11.
-S
Sick and tired of seeing Gartner "previsions". Either they "foretell" the what we already have in the present, or add to present conditions some mumbo-jumbo for management consumption. Nothing to see here, move along...