Well like I said a logo is important for creating a brand and a simple image that people immediately identify with your company/product. A mascot is typically a shallow marketing gimmick which only works in certain areas of marketing.
Imagine if BP started using Slick, the anthopomorphic oil drum in a new marketing campaign*. Do you think people would think better of the company or BP products because of that? I don't. The logo on other hand is instantly recognisable and there's a certain degree of trust (for lack of a better word) associated with the BP brand which that logo represents.
*: Just in case anyone feels the need to point this out, I know BP is trying to distance itself from being just a petroleum supplier. It's just a hypothetical situation.
Do you honestly think anyone decided to buy Microsoft Office because of Clippy? If anything it was a negative association. If you remember Clippy you probably only remember how much you wanted him to be real so you could kill him.
Do you think anyone uses BSD or Linux because of the daemon and Tux mascots? Or that anyone remembers the products any better because of them?
What works in one area doesn't necessarily work in another. As I said, strong branding and recognition are important. Mascots don't do that in the software industry. Maybe they would work if software was advertised on TV more, which is a medium better suited to having something living and dynamic such as a mascot on-screen and showing off a product. On the web and the printed page that's not relevant - a logo or emblem works just as well, better even, for the reasons I mentioned in my previous post.
Can you name a single computer-related product that has benefited from a mascot? Have you ever thought better of a piece of software because of a mascot? I know I haven't.
...which is that all computing mascots suck. The whole concept sucks. Unless the target audience of your software is young children, cutesy mascots are just stupid and annoying. A decent logo is useful for branding and recognition of your software, that's fine. But some stupid character to try and create some bizzare link in people's heads between your office software/OS/web browser and some "loveable" creature strikes me as incredibly pointless and just a little bit desperate.
"Sure, on the outside we're a multi-national billion-dollar corporation but, as this green koala clearly shows, on the inside we live in a playful world of whimsy with chocolate hills and marshmallow clouds." Give me a break
but the protest would have been the same - it was more of a moral outrage than a legal outrage. The moral outrage might have been greater, but it was the legal outrage - or at least the potential for one - that really made Sony do a 180. Moral outrages typically go completely unheeded by major corporations. I guess pretty soon we'll find out precisely to what extent a company can bend it's customers over before their objections become too loud for them to take. I'm betting it's pretty damn loud.
True, XP and Vista both lost their own share of hardware support. However there's two points I'd make about that:
1) Even if XP and Vista didn't/don't deserve their user-base, they had it as the natural successors to the existing Windows user-base (not to mention being pre-installed on just about every new PC manufactured). Ubuntu/AnyOtherOS doesn't have that luxury. Again that may not be Ubuntu's fault, but that's the way things are and there's nothing to be done about it but to accept that it's an uphill struggle and that for Ubuntu to make the gains it will have to meet or exceed Windows for each and every requirement any given user may need.
2) XP and Vista aren't contiguous upgrades in the way that Ubuntu 6.06 -> 6.10 -> 7.04 are. They're essentially different OSes that are simply marketed under the same name and share common APIs. Let's face it, the vast majority of people who "upgraded" Windows didn't really upgrade, they just bought a new PC with a new Windows which naturally fully supported the hardware it was pre-installed on. Microsoft gets by on it's own market dominance rather than maintaining hardware support, but again this is not something Ubuntu has and with Ubuntu versions being true upgrades there's no reason it shouldn't maintain hardware support (at least for current hardware).
Bear in mind this isn't me just shitting all over Ubuntu. My XP box was recently diagnosed with severe schizophrenia presenting as random BSODs and repeated filesystem corruption, so I'm trying hard to like Ubuntu. And I do like it overall. But right now I'm typing this from a Windows laptop while I'm in the middle of compiling a legacy rt73 driver on my Ubuntu box so I can hopefully get my wireless adapter up and running again. I can't help but feel I shouldn't need to be doing this.
You might want to turn down your sense of outrage. It seems to be set to hyper-fucking-sensitive.
My post was nothing more than an off-the-cuff remark. A joke, if you want. Not too sure how it got +2 Insightful within 5 minutes but whatever, don't blame me for what mods do with my post.
accepting jury duty 99 times out of 100 will mean sitting in a trial about some punk who held up a liquor store, or some domestic dispute, or some DUI case......how exactly would this involuntary servitude have any bearing on affirming or defending our rights? You get to defend the basic American right to bear arms in the face of a liqour store attendant while demanding money.
It was an OK peice I thought. Maybe not hilariously funny in and of itself but I've encountered enough overzealous Mac fanboys to be amused by it. Not sure if the Quicktime-iTunes link is actually true though, definitely isn't for the only version of iTunes I ever used.
A release of an OS distro that is supposedly the great hope of Linux for the consumer desktop, knowing full-well that it's default setup will break wireless networking for anyone using RALink chipsets is a great big fucking mistake on Canonical's part. It may not be a bug in the OS per se, but the second the "average user" that Ubuntu is supposedly trying to win over upgrades and finds that their wireless stops working is an immediate black mark on the desktop Linux concept. This is especially true since we're talking about networking here. If support for some random peripheral like a printer or a camera failed then that's one thing, but with Linux's absolute reliance on net access to solve problems a broken wireless setup could well have just removed the user's only hope of solving the problem. Leaving the user looking for that Windows CD they were led to believe they'd never need again.
You can go on and on about how this isn't the OS's fault, but you'll be missing the point. The end user doesn't care whether it was the OS proper that's responsible or "merely" a driver that was provided with it. The bottom line is that what worked in 6.06 and 6.10 works no more and as long as things like this continue and worse, are defended with irrelevant arguments like yours, the further Linux looks from ever becoming a legitimate OS for the average computer user.
Heh, you know I wasn't actually expecting a sensible response. Just wanted to make a point. Thanks anyway though.
I'd kinda figured that I wasn't gonna get the two to work together. It just sucks that Ubuntu has shipped in a configuration in which the drivers for a pretty large amount of wireless devices won't work. If it was some random peripheral maybe it could be forgiven but when the problem will break potentially a user's only means to a solution that's pretty damn bad. It's things like this which could ultimately hurt the market for consumer Linux more than leaving it in obscurity for a few more years until it's totally ready. A shame because overall Linux -Ubuntu in particular- is really starting to get close to a place where it could take on Windows in certain areas of the consumer desktop market.
So my wireless USB dongle stopped working when I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04. It seems Network Manager doesn't like the rt73usb driver, or just about any RALink driver judging by the Ubuntu Forums. Help, anyone?
What, you mean/. isn't the place to post bug reports? Could've fooled me...
The fact that it crashed was probably Apple's "bad", but the fact that it resulted in a BSOD is obviously Vista.
Maybe this has to do with the added layer of complexity (presumably for DRM) between the kernel and video-utilizing programs... or is that just for DirectX programs? Or maybe it's sunspots or mobile phones. Or maybe it's a deliberate Microsoft plot to make Apple look bad.
I wonder who has the contract for patching bullet holes in these things? Or, given that Venezuela's adjacent to some places with significant political instability, ground-to-air missiles? I don't even think it'd have to be for cause: just, hey, look, I wonder what will happen if we shoot at that? I just hope they fill these ones with helium.
Yeah, I wasn't commenting on this product specifically. For one thing I haven't used it so I can't comment.
My post was just a general counter-point to the GP's idea that manufacturers should hold off on making products in new areas until there's a price-to-performance ratio suitable for the average user.
What's (somewhat) progressive about MovieLink isn't that they're allowing IETab... but that they're recommending it. It's not all that progressive though is it? That just means the website isn't from a time where for most people there really was no known alternative to IE. They're obviously well aware of Firefox and yet they have chosen to jam a proverbial fork in the user's eye by suggesting they change their software to fit the website. If anything that's regression in my book. They're aware of other browsers, they explicitly just don't care.
Kinda cool but for the most part useless. These companies shout put tablet computers on the side line for a decade or so. Perhaps by then they can have enough power/size/smarts to be useful. Rightnow it is an expensive toy to play with for a few weeks then just get put aside. On the contary. I say let them keep selling overpriced and under-powered products to people with more money than sense. Then in 5 years when it's possible to make these things affordable and practical to regular people the technology will have matured and there'll be 5 years of extra experience in how to get things right, design/interface-wise.
The bleeding edge guys get their bragging rights for a few years, the manufacturers get their R&D funding, and everyone else gets a better product in the end. Everybody wins.
It's too late now though. The damage has been done and the apparent intent to keep people in the dark about major changes which could have a negative impact on their use of the software will no doubt see a lot of users lose faith and switch to an alternative.
I'm afraid I can't agree with it being the browser developers fault. Can you have a monopoly based on 3 entirely separate and competing companies anyway? Besides, the Gecko renderer is open source so it's not like Mozilla have some vested interest in any kind of lock-down. Someone could always fork the Gecko project at any time if they didn't like where Mozilla were going with it.
Sure, as things are getting more complex then it becomes harder to create accurate renderers. However I do not believe it is the browser developers who are the primary reason for the push, they are simply trying to provide what people want. Consumers (by which I mean web surfers, website developers, and more recently web-based application developers) want more features. The important thing is that new developments are properly standardised and documented openly so that even if new standards are harder to render, they can at least be developed without having to be "in the club". Which thankfully both the W3C and WHATWG are doing. Also I'd say that HTML5 is a lot less complex than the W3C's proposed developments for XHTML.
Life was happy when pages were small and simple. The Internet was also small and simple, relatively speaking. Unfortunately now it's a huge mess of information, some useful, some not. In order to helpfully and meaningfully wade through all this fluff we need to more tags and more specificty in our markup to aid search engines and the like in finding what we really want. We may be a way off from the "Semantic Web" as Berners-Lee envisions it, but these are the first steps towards making that happen and preventing the web from being collapsing under it's own ever-increasing mass.
I'm very put-off by the way HTML now can do things formerly reserved for javascript Yeah, that never happened in the past <blink>Remember me?</blink>. Seriously though, I agree on this in principal although I'm not sure specifically what features in HTML you're referring to. Ultimately any attempt to dynamicise (I know, I know, not a word) HTML will fail as it will always be three steps behind what people want from dynamic web pages since we're now moving into the whole "Web 2.0" thing.
Further, people no longer appear interested in the size of the footprint their pages make and the bandwidth necessary to download them. I'm not sure I agree with this. Relatively modern developments allow far more efficient web pages. Firstly by using CSS you can do a lot more with simple markup while allowing the stylesheet itself to be cached for a reasonable amount of time (whereas many webpages have content which prevents long-term caching). XmlHttpRequest obviously allows for only the relevant portions of a website to be updated. Javascript allows for less data to be sent and for the code to do the work of constructing an elaborate webpage (only applies to certain types of webpages obviously).
We rail away at Microsoft and anyone else who adds bloat to software, but the web is now plagued by page bloat and overly clever designs which render poorly at times, take over the browser and sometimes crash it.
...
Don't even get me started on people whose home page is some massive flash object. Sure, some people use poor designs which drain resources unnecesarily, I don't think that's necessarily an issue of new standards or technologies being poor though, just that the flexibility we demand from our new web technologies inevitably allows for misuse. You can't blame Javascript, XHTML, or even Flash simply because some people will misuse it any more than you can blame HTML 3.2 because someone decides to use 24 levels of <table><tr><td> tags to make their layout the way they want. As far as crashing goes, that's a software issue and nothing more.
Depends on the type of throwing star I guess. I immediately envisaged a six-pointed hira shuriken where the thin "necks" would be highly vulnerable. I guess with four-points it probably wouldn't be an issue.
Oh God am I really having a serious conversation about the structural integrity of throwing-star shaped CDs?
6-7 years ago I used to get dozens of ISP CDs from companies every week, especially AOL and CompuServe. I haven't had any in the last 3-4 years. Maybe it's because of recycling laws here in the UK. In which case you could soon be living a life free of AOL CDs soon too.
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Well like I said a logo is important for creating a brand and a simple image that people immediately identify with your company/product. A mascot is typically a shallow marketing gimmick which only works in certain areas of marketing.
Imagine if BP started using Slick, the anthopomorphic oil drum in a new marketing campaign*. Do you think people would think better of the company or BP products because of that? I don't. The logo on other hand is instantly recognisable and there's a certain degree of trust (for lack of a better word) associated with the BP brand which that logo represents.
*: Just in case anyone feels the need to point this out, I know BP is trying to distance itself from being just a petroleum supplier. It's just a hypothetical situation.
Do you honestly think anyone decided to buy Microsoft Office because of Clippy? If anything it was a negative association. If you remember Clippy you probably only remember how much you wanted him to be real so you could kill him.
Do you think anyone uses BSD or Linux because of the daemon and Tux mascots? Or that anyone remembers the products any better because of them?
What works in one area doesn't necessarily work in another. As I said, strong branding and recognition are important. Mascots don't do that in the software industry. Maybe they would work if software was advertised on TV more, which is a medium better suited to having something living and dynamic such as a mascot on-screen and showing off a product. On the web and the printed page that's not relevant - a logo or emblem works just as well, better even, for the reasons I mentioned in my previous post.
Can you name a single computer-related product that has benefited from a mascot? Have you ever thought better of a piece of software because of a mascot? I know I haven't.
...which is that all computing mascots suck. The whole concept sucks. Unless the target audience of your software is young children, cutesy mascots are just stupid and annoying. A decent logo is useful for branding and recognition of your software, that's fine. But some stupid character to try and create some bizzare link in people's heads between your office software/OS/web browser and some "loveable" creature strikes me as incredibly pointless and just a little bit desperate.
"Sure, on the outside we're a multi-national billion-dollar corporation but, as this green koala clearly shows, on the inside we live in a playful world of whimsy with chocolate hills and marshmallow clouds."
Give me a break
True, XP and Vista both lost their own share of hardware support. However there's two points I'd make about that:
1) Even if XP and Vista didn't/don't deserve their user-base, they had it as the natural successors to the existing Windows user-base (not to mention being pre-installed on just about every new PC manufactured). Ubuntu/AnyOtherOS doesn't have that luxury. Again that may not be Ubuntu's fault, but that's the way things are and there's nothing to be done about it but to accept that it's an uphill struggle and that for Ubuntu to make the gains it will have to meet or exceed Windows for each and every requirement any given user may need.
2) XP and Vista aren't contiguous upgrades in the way that Ubuntu 6.06 -> 6.10 -> 7.04 are. They're essentially different OSes that are simply marketed under the same name and share common APIs. Let's face it, the vast majority of people who "upgraded" Windows didn't really upgrade, they just bought a new PC with a new Windows which naturally fully supported the hardware it was pre-installed on. Microsoft gets by on it's own market dominance rather than maintaining hardware support, but again this is not something Ubuntu has and with Ubuntu versions being true upgrades there's no reason it shouldn't maintain hardware support (at least for current hardware).
Bear in mind this isn't me just shitting all over Ubuntu. My XP box was recently diagnosed with severe schizophrenia presenting as random BSODs and repeated filesystem corruption, so I'm trying hard to like Ubuntu. And I do like it overall. But right now I'm typing this from a Windows laptop while I'm in the middle of compiling a legacy rt73 driver on my Ubuntu box so I can hopefully get my wireless adapter up and running again. I can't help but feel I shouldn't need to be doing this.
You might want to turn down your sense of outrage. It seems to be set to hyper-fucking-sensitive.
My post was nothing more than an off-the-cuff remark. A joke, if you want. Not too sure how it got +2 Insightful within 5 minutes but whatever, don't blame me for what mods do with my post.
I'm guessing you're a Mac user?
It was an OK peice I thought. Maybe not hilariously funny in and of itself but I've encountered enough overzealous Mac fanboys to be amused by it. Not sure if the Quicktime-iTunes link is actually true though, definitely isn't for the only version of iTunes I ever used.
A release of an OS distro that is supposedly the great hope of Linux for the consumer desktop, knowing full-well that it's default setup will break wireless networking for anyone using RALink chipsets is a great big fucking mistake on Canonical's part. It may not be a bug in the OS per se, but the second the "average user" that Ubuntu is supposedly trying to win over upgrades and finds that their wireless stops working is an immediate black mark on the desktop Linux concept. This is especially true since we're talking about networking here. If support for some random peripheral like a printer or a camera failed then that's one thing, but with Linux's absolute reliance on net access to solve problems a broken wireless setup could well have just removed the user's only hope of solving the problem. Leaving the user looking for that Windows CD they were led to believe they'd never need again.
You can go on and on about how this isn't the OS's fault, but you'll be missing the point. The end user doesn't care whether it was the OS proper that's responsible or "merely" a driver that was provided with it. The bottom line is that what worked in 6.06 and 6.10 works no more and as long as things like this continue and worse, are defended with irrelevant arguments like yours, the further Linux looks from ever becoming a legitimate OS for the average computer user.
Heh, you know I wasn't actually expecting a sensible response. Just wanted to make a point. Thanks anyway though.
I'd kinda figured that I wasn't gonna get the two to work together. It just sucks that Ubuntu has shipped in a configuration in which the drivers for a pretty large amount of wireless devices won't work. If it was some random peripheral maybe it could be forgiven but when the problem will break potentially a user's only means to a solution that's pretty damn bad. It's things like this which could ultimately hurt the market for consumer Linux more than leaving it in obscurity for a few more years until it's totally ready. A shame because overall Linux -Ubuntu in particular- is really starting to get close to a place where it could take on Windows in certain areas of the consumer desktop market.
And now I really am offtopic.
So my wireless USB dongle stopped working when I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04. It seems Network Manager doesn't like the rt73usb driver, or just about any RALink driver judging by the Ubuntu Forums. Help, anyone?
/. isn't the place to post bug reports? Could've fooled me...
What, you mean
Maybe this has to do with the added layer of complexity (presumably for DRM) between the kernel and video-utilizing programs... or is that just for DirectX programs? Or maybe it's sunspots or mobile phones. Or maybe it's a deliberate Microsoft plot to make Apple look bad.
I know, let's randomly speculate some more.
Yeah, I wasn't commenting on this product specifically. For one thing I haven't used it so I can't comment.
My post was just a general counter-point to the GP's idea that manufacturers should hold off on making products in new areas until there's a price-to-performance ratio suitable for the average user.
The bleeding edge guys get their bragging rights for a few years, the manufacturers get their R&D funding, and everyone else gets a better product in the end. Everybody wins.
I can see next week's headlines now:
"Timezones get British man wrongfully extradited to US for threatening E-mail"
You'll see the same if you read the summary.
It's too late now though. The damage has been done and the apparent intent to keep people in the dark about major changes which could have a negative impact on their use of the software will no doubt see a lot of users lose faith and switch to an alternative.
Figures also show that 90% of females online are 18, horny and want to sex you up.
If they used the ones I have at work they'd still be trying to get the first one to stick for more than 3 seconds right about now.
I'm afraid I can't agree with it being the browser developers fault. Can you have a monopoly based on 3 entirely separate and competing companies anyway? Besides, the Gecko renderer is open source so it's not like Mozilla have some vested interest in any kind of lock-down. Someone could always fork the Gecko project at any time if they didn't like where Mozilla were going with it.
Sure, as things are getting more complex then it becomes harder to create accurate renderers. However I do not believe it is the browser developers who are the primary reason for the push, they are simply trying to provide what people want. Consumers (by which I mean web surfers, website developers, and more recently web-based application developers) want more features. The important thing is that new developments are properly standardised and documented openly so that even if new standards are harder to render, they can at least be developed without having to be "in the club". Which thankfully both the W3C and WHATWG are doing. Also I'd say that HTML5 is a lot less complex than the W3C's proposed developments for XHTML.
...
Don't even get me started on people whose home page is some massive flash object. Sure, some people use poor designs which drain resources unnecesarily, I don't think that's necessarily an issue of new standards or technologies being poor though, just that the flexibility we demand from our new web technologies inevitably allows for misuse. You can't blame Javascript, XHTML, or even Flash simply because some people will misuse it any more than you can blame HTML 3.2 because someone decides to use 24 levels of <table><tr><td> tags to make their layout the way they want. As far as crashing goes, that's a software issue and nothing more.
Depends on the type of throwing star I guess. I immediately envisaged a six-pointed hira shuriken where the thin "necks" would be highly vulnerable. I guess with four-points it probably wouldn't be an issue.
Oh God am I really having a serious conversation about the structural integrity of throwing-star shaped CDs?
Do AOL still do that somewhere?
6-7 years ago I used to get dozens of ISP CDs from companies every week, especially AOL and CompuServe. I haven't had any in the last 3-4 years. Maybe it's because of recycling laws here in the UK. In which case you could soon be living a life free of AOL CDs soon too.