Not to be too much of a jerk, but don't completely blame the site for the user's problems. I have a facebook and a myspace account, which I use to keep in touch with some people that I otherwise wouldn't, but I don't find that they take up an inordinate amount of my time, energy, or attention. I never felt the need to respond to pointless messages. I generally just ignore them until they stop coming. I don't "friend" anyone who asks, I turn down requests for various things (even from my friends and family), and I don't feel the need to explain myself when I do so.
It's entirely possible to use social networking sites to achieve quality communication. Just because teenagers like to kill time by filling their profiles up with cruft doesn't mean that you have to do the same.
While they're both kinda dupes of many stories we've seen over the years, I think this story isn't quite the same as the one you linked. The data flood drowning the internet piece was more about the amount of bandwidth being more than the fiber/routers/switches/etc. could handle, basically the physical parts of the internet not being able to keep up. Today's article is more about the human element, how even if all the information makes it to its destination safely, there's going to be so much of it that an individual won't be able to cope with it all. Basically they're saying that since the internet makes it so easy for people to bug you, we'll all be way too distracted to get any real work done. And if we manage to focus and try and get work done, we'll spend all of our time trying to find old files because dammit there's just so many of them and google can't keep up and god why didn't I file my email better and and *bang* just shoot yourself in the head.
While the previous thread answered some of the concerns about the resilience of the physical internet, I'll address this personal information overload issue. Most people are plenty good at completely ignoring things that they don't feel like dealing with, whether it's important or not. Those who do not possess that skill have likely already had at least a few nervous breakdowns already. So basically, all the email in the world isn't going to change anything.
I'd modify your floor plan in a flowcharting program to be a bit more basic. Draw out the floor plan to scale (on a piece of graph paper if that helps). Then draw out to scale all the pieces of furniture/equipment that you're going to need/want. Then cut out those pieces, and spend some time playing around with different layouts. Be sure to be conservative when you're cramming a bunch of stuff up against a wall or whatever, leave some wiggle room between objects, just in case there's not as much room as you expected or the walls aren't completely square/plumb/whatever.
When I'm designing a room in my house with my wife I generally do the cut out thing so that we can more easily try different things. It's a very visual way to quickly try lots of ideas and strategies. Good design is almost always iterative, and 90% of the ideas you have end up not working as soon as you try to map them out. Being able to go through all those ideas quickly and eliminate the bad ones is really helpful.
I'm not a believer that Google is some sort of saint of a company that is trying to save the world, but I do think as a whole they see the value in creating business plans where they prosper by making choices that benefit not only their bottom line, but that also benefit their consumer as much as possible. This, in and of itself, isn't such a remarkable thing. After all, most people won't give away their money unless they feel they're getting a worthwhile benefit in return.
What's sort of unusual though, is that a lot of these big powerful corporations have decided that they weren't just happy with that, and in their undying need to create profits and "growth" have adopted plans that basically involve putting the screws to their customers, trying to trap them and squeeze out as much cash as is possible. This is particularly the case these days in the telecommunications industry, due to historically government created monopolies managing to talk their way out of the regulation that they should be subject to.
I guess the point is, Google's "do no evil" philosophy isn't really that much different than the way thousands and thousands of small businesses function every day all over the country/world. It's just a sorry situation we're everyone makes a big deal about it when a big wealthy company manages to keep some of that attitude, and how that seemingly straightforward approach to ones customers is seen as having such potential to redefine such an important industry.
Correct. As far as the rendering engine is concerned, whether you're moving the camera with your head or a mouse, it's all pretty much the same. This guy is probably using a PC instead of the Wii because it's much easier to get code running on a PC than a Wii (you don't need Nintendo's SDK), which makes it cheaper and more useful to share the code with others.
I'd guess that by now we're at the point where you can't safely buy something on Ebay and expect it to be delivered before christmas. Probably less buying happening as a result. That's just a thought though, I have done no research to prove/disprove that theory. But it maybe makes sense?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, because a discussion about how a company develops products is pretty much exactly the same as a discussion about opening presents on christmas morning.
I can't remember the website off the top of my head, but a few months back, I ordered a green laser pointer for about 20 bucks. It was the least powerful of the green lasers they had (5mW), it can't cut through anything. It's a normal pen size, similar to the one you linked on think geek. They had increasingly powerful ones, but the price differences were very small.
I use mine primarily to point things out while documenting buildings, and went with the weakest green laser just for a little bit more safety. It's still significantly brighter than any red laser pointer I've ever seen, plus human eyes are much more sensitive to green light than red, so it's really easy to see. I can see the beam itself at night, but not during the day. If I have just put fresh batteries in it, and shine it at a white projection screen, the spot is bright enough that it's unpleasant to look at.
Sure, Apple is an example of a company running that way, but as you said, they're in a unique position of having a bazillion dollars laying around. They're a large enough company with enough resources that they can do almost everything in-house. There are dozens of other factors that make their business style more appropriate for them than for other companies.
One person/company being successful doing one thing does not mean that all people/companies would work best operating the same way.
Be fair. Will Wright has successfully produced plenty of excellent games. That's not to say that Spore will necessarily be the earth shattering game experience that same people are saying it will, but I think someone like Mr. Wright has at least earned the benefit of the doubt that he'll release a game, and that it'll likely be at least halfway decent.
For better or worse, you can't just secretly develop a product in a basement somewhere and then suddenly have them lining store shelves the next day. One company that tries really hard to do that is Apple, and they're constantly getting bashed from many directions due to their obsession with secrecy.
While I'm not making any judgements about you personally, the reality is that consumers as a whole seem to enjoy the hype just as much as the marketing departments do. There are piles of websites dedicated to finding and sharing advanced info, future product hints, and scheming up potential company directions. Any time there's a demand for such information, someone's going to provide it. The fact that that creates an opportunity for cranks and charlatans to scam a few bucks is just a side effect.
It's probably more along the lines of all this extra scrutiny has scared his sources away from providing him insider information, so at that point he just becomes another speculative website, of which there are already a bazillion. Even if the lawsuit had just gone away, losing your exclusive sources probably would've taken some of the fun out of it.
I think Apple tries pretty hard to keep that from happening. You can speculate all you want, the case that Apple really went after Think Secret for involved very specific information about an unannounced product. It wasn't just a lucky guess by a well informed guy, it was obvious that he had received information from someone "on the inside."
I have no doubt that Apple has all sorts of restrictions on what their employees are allowed to discuss, and you surely sign all sorts of agreements when you go to work there. But people being people, sometimes an individual or two just can't keep secrets to themselves, and feel the need to share it. I'm not sure what else you expect Apple to do to prevent it, maybe replace all their employees with robots?
Sadly in most game stores you can't turn the volume of the game up all that much. I'm not one of those people who drives down the street with his car stereo shaking all the vehicles around him, but when you get into the game and you're having fun pretending you're a rock star, you pretty much feel the need to crank the volume. And then you don't hear the plastic at all.
And if you take it in a different direction, and are trying to play the game 100% technically perfect, the clicking is a good indication that helps you improve your timing and such.
Exactly. If there was ever a real need to be able to do natural language searches, that time is basically over. People have been learning how to search the internet effectively, it's not really that hard to do it successfully. As the general populace gets more and more computer and internet savvy, a lot of this sort of thing becomes almost intuitive.
I learned to play guitar hero reasonably competently in about an hour. After that hour, I was good enough that I could enjoy playing some of the harder songs, and pretend for just a moment that I was a rock star. That's what the game is about, and it serves its purpose very well. And if you give Rock Band a try with some friends, you'll see even more potential there.
Comparing playing GH to learning a real instrument is missing the point.
What a perfectly geeky solution. There's a coherent logic to it, and the potential for some math to really optimize it. But it conveniently leaves out the fact that it deals with people, and as soon as you factor the human element into the idea, there are dozens of plainly obvious reasons why it would never ever work.
There's no doubt that plenty of signal leaks out into space, but it's important to realize how big space is, and how quickly the power of radio signals drop off. Imagine radio waves expanding in a sphere from an antenna. A certain amount of energy is used to create that signal. Right at that antenna, the signal takes up a small amount of space, all that energy is crammed into a small area, the signal strength is strong. That sphere of the broadcast expands out from the antenna at the speed of light. Assuming that nothing absorbs or reflects or otherwise interrupts any of the signal, that sphere of radio waves continues to grow but overall only has the same amount of energy as when it was first released. You can see how very quickly the amount of energy available at any one point on that sphere drops as the sphere expands. Now imagine a sphere with a radius of light-years. That's a whole lot of area to be spreading a set amount of energy over. It's certainly possible to focus radio signals and the like. You don't have to spread all your energy out in all directions, you can aim it somewhat. But you're not going to get a perfectly tight beam, there's going to be some spread, and over interstellar differences, what seems like a minor loss of energy will really start to become significant. And don't forget that focusing your energy into a tight beam means that it will pass by far fewer planets than a signal sent in all directions, and the chances of anyone being there to listen get much smaller.
But wait, it gets worse. There's a lot of electromagnetic noise floating out there in the universe. There's even a big source of it close nearby, we call it the sun. With all that static going on, a weak signal can get very hard to find, especially if you aren't exactly sure what sort of signal you're looking for.
Basically, it's not very realistic to expect people on other planets to be listening in on our TV broadcasts. Even if enough time has passed for the signals to reach them, they're not likely to get enough of a signal to be able to work with, even if they happen to be looking for exactly the right thing at exactly the right time.
Doesn't that seem a little short-sighted though? Ok, so they hear a message from Earth, they figure out that it was sent around 50,000 years ago, who knows how dangerous we are now, so they immediately relativistic weapons that eventually blow up the earth. By the time these weapons reach the Earth and obliterate it, another 50,000+ years have past.
If humans have advanced to the point where they're a danger to aliens living 50,000 light years away, wouldn't it be a pretty safe assumption that humanity has spread beyond well beyond the confines of the Earth? So you aren't really wiping out the threat, you're just taking out one of their outposts. Oh, and it happens to be their home planet, and it will likely piss them right the hell off. It seems a little counter-productive in the long-run.
At an even more basic level, even if an alien race was able to read the radio signal and construct it into an audio/video feed, would they really be able to understand it enough to form a useful opinion on what it meant? The idea of a universal translator is nice for sci-fi shows, but it doesn't seem very likely that a short speech meant for native speakers would enable someone(particularly someone with no previous knowledge of any human language)unfamiliar with the language to make any real sense of it. There just wouldn't be enough context to figure out the meanings of all those sounds. It's probably not even reasonable to expect an alien race to be able to make assumptions based on the speaker's tone and attitude like a human could.
There is a decent history and many good arguments for treating a company that holds a monopoly differently than others in its field.
Monopolies are not good for consumers and not good for an industry as a whole. Government regulation probably won't be perfect, but I'd at least prefer that they try.
I see where you're coming from, but to be useful in a FPS, that trackball would have to be insanely sensitive. Your thumb can do an incredibly complex mix of movements, but the total range that it can travel across any one axis is pretty small.
It'd probably be great for a hardcore player that's spent a lot of time with it, but I think it'd be very frustrating and difficult to start with. But still, I'm surprised too that I haven't seen a product like that before. Maybe it does exist somewhere.
Yeah, but is it really fair to say that the mental ability wasn't accelerated at all just based on an arbitrary test like counting numbers? Reading numbers and interpreting them is a fairly high-level activity. It's much more involved than say, trying to move your head really quick to avoid a brick flying towards your face.
Beyond the obvious example of a life threatening experience, I've also experienced this sort of feeling while playing sports. When you're "in the zone", things just seem to happen slower. I can anticipate better, I can see the spin on the ball better, and I just feel like I'm able to react and move a split second faster than usual.
It's an interesting test these guys have done, but it hardly seems definitive.
I remember having a 20 minute or so argument with a high school math teacher about why we divide a circle into 360 degrees. He insisted that it was originally selected because of some coincidental ancient cultural tradition (although he couldn't name the civilization that it came from), while it seemed obvious to me that 360 is a great number because it can be evenly divided by so many other numbers.
The crux of his argument, as far as I could tell, was that people hundreds or thousands of years ago couldn't have been smart enough to make a decision with that sort of reasoning. I don't know what his problem was.
Re:Darwin Awards
on
Flying Humans
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually, doesn't the term "the best" by definition sort of mean there can't be that many? The best means superior to all others, and unless you're talking about something that has an absolute and measurable limit to "perfection", then "the best" is a pretty exclusive club.
It's a good example of a system that can be analyzed as a "tragedy of the commons." Basically, somewhere along the line, one company started advertising to get ahead of its competitors. So all the competitors started advertising as well. At the end of the day, the advertising benefits balances out across the industry to nothing, except that each company is spending extra money to maintain that status quo. Kind of silly when you think about it, but it's great for people in the advertising business I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be too much of a jerk, but don't completely blame the site for the user's problems. I have a facebook and a myspace account, which I use to keep in touch with some people that I otherwise wouldn't, but I don't find that they take up an inordinate amount of my time, energy, or attention. I never felt the need to respond to pointless messages. I generally just ignore them until they stop coming. I don't "friend" anyone who asks, I turn down requests for various things (even from my friends and family), and I don't feel the need to explain myself when I do so.
It's entirely possible to use social networking sites to achieve quality communication. Just because teenagers like to kill time by filling their profiles up with cruft doesn't mean that you have to do the same.
While they're both kinda dupes of many stories we've seen over the years, I think this story isn't quite the same as the one you linked. The data flood drowning the internet piece was more about the amount of bandwidth being more than the fiber/routers/switches/etc. could handle, basically the physical parts of the internet not being able to keep up. Today's article is more about the human element, how even if all the information makes it to its destination safely, there's going to be so much of it that an individual won't be able to cope with it all. Basically they're saying that since the internet makes it so easy for people to bug you, we'll all be way too distracted to get any real work done. And if we manage to focus and try and get work done, we'll spend all of our time trying to find old files because dammit there's just so many of them and google can't keep up and god why didn't I file my email better and and *bang* just shoot yourself in the head.
While the previous thread answered some of the concerns about the resilience of the physical internet, I'll address this personal information overload issue. Most people are plenty good at completely ignoring things that they don't feel like dealing with, whether it's important or not. Those who do not possess that skill have likely already had at least a few nervous breakdowns already. So basically, all the email in the world isn't going to change anything.
I'd modify your floor plan in a flowcharting program to be a bit more basic. Draw out the floor plan to scale (on a piece of graph paper if that helps). Then draw out to scale all the pieces of furniture/equipment that you're going to need/want. Then cut out those pieces, and spend some time playing around with different layouts. Be sure to be conservative when you're cramming a bunch of stuff up against a wall or whatever, leave some wiggle room between objects, just in case there's not as much room as you expected or the walls aren't completely square/plumb/whatever.
When I'm designing a room in my house with my wife I generally do the cut out thing so that we can more easily try different things. It's a very visual way to quickly try lots of ideas and strategies. Good design is almost always iterative, and 90% of the ideas you have end up not working as soon as you try to map them out. Being able to go through all those ideas quickly and eliminate the bad ones is really helpful.
I'm not a believer that Google is some sort of saint of a company that is trying to save the world, but I do think as a whole they see the value in creating business plans where they prosper by making choices that benefit not only their bottom line, but that also benefit their consumer as much as possible. This, in and of itself, isn't such a remarkable thing. After all, most people won't give away their money unless they feel they're getting a worthwhile benefit in return.
What's sort of unusual though, is that a lot of these big powerful corporations have decided that they weren't just happy with that, and in their undying need to create profits and "growth" have adopted plans that basically involve putting the screws to their customers, trying to trap them and squeeze out as much cash as is possible. This is particularly the case these days in the telecommunications industry, due to historically government created monopolies managing to talk their way out of the regulation that they should be subject to.
I guess the point is, Google's "do no evil" philosophy isn't really that much different than the way thousands and thousands of small businesses function every day all over the country/world. It's just a sorry situation we're everyone makes a big deal about it when a big wealthy company manages to keep some of that attitude, and how that seemingly straightforward approach to ones customers is seen as having such potential to redefine such an important industry.
Correct. As far as the rendering engine is concerned, whether you're moving the camera with your head or a mouse, it's all pretty much the same. This guy is probably using a PC instead of the Wii because it's much easier to get code running on a PC than a Wii (you don't need Nintendo's SDK), which makes it cheaper and more useful to share the code with others.
I'd guess that by now we're at the point where you can't safely buy something on Ebay and expect it to be delivered before christmas. Probably less buying happening as a result. That's just a thought though, I have done no research to prove/disprove that theory. But it maybe makes sense?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, because a discussion about how a company develops products is pretty much exactly the same as a discussion about opening presents on christmas morning.
I can't remember the website off the top of my head, but a few months back, I ordered a green laser pointer for about 20 bucks. It was the least powerful of the green lasers they had (5mW), it can't cut through anything. It's a normal pen size, similar to the one you linked on think geek. They had increasingly powerful ones, but the price differences were very small.
I use mine primarily to point things out while documenting buildings, and went with the weakest green laser just for a little bit more safety. It's still significantly brighter than any red laser pointer I've ever seen, plus human eyes are much more sensitive to green light than red, so it's really easy to see. I can see the beam itself at night, but not during the day. If I have just put fresh batteries in it, and shine it at a white projection screen, the spot is bright enough that it's unpleasant to look at.
Sure, Apple is an example of a company running that way, but as you said, they're in a unique position of having a bazillion dollars laying around. They're a large enough company with enough resources that they can do almost everything in-house. There are dozens of other factors that make their business style more appropriate for them than for other companies.
One person/company being successful doing one thing does not mean that all people/companies would work best operating the same way.
Be fair. Will Wright has successfully produced plenty of excellent games. That's not to say that Spore will necessarily be the earth shattering game experience that same people are saying it will, but I think someone like Mr. Wright has at least earned the benefit of the doubt that he'll release a game, and that it'll likely be at least halfway decent.
For better or worse, you can't just secretly develop a product in a basement somewhere and then suddenly have them lining store shelves the next day. One company that tries really hard to do that is Apple, and they're constantly getting bashed from many directions due to their obsession with secrecy.
While I'm not making any judgements about you personally, the reality is that consumers as a whole seem to enjoy the hype just as much as the marketing departments do. There are piles of websites dedicated to finding and sharing advanced info, future product hints, and scheming up potential company directions. Any time there's a demand for such information, someone's going to provide it. The fact that that creates an opportunity for cranks and charlatans to scam a few bucks is just a side effect.
It's probably more along the lines of all this extra scrutiny has scared his sources away from providing him insider information, so at that point he just becomes another speculative website, of which there are already a bazillion. Even if the lawsuit had just gone away, losing your exclusive sources probably would've taken some of the fun out of it.
I think Apple tries pretty hard to keep that from happening. You can speculate all you want, the case that Apple really went after Think Secret for involved very specific information about an unannounced product. It wasn't just a lucky guess by a well informed guy, it was obvious that he had received information from someone "on the inside."
I have no doubt that Apple has all sorts of restrictions on what their employees are allowed to discuss, and you surely sign all sorts of agreements when you go to work there. But people being people, sometimes an individual or two just can't keep secrets to themselves, and feel the need to share it. I'm not sure what else you expect Apple to do to prevent it, maybe replace all their employees with robots?
Sadly in most game stores you can't turn the volume of the game up all that much. I'm not one of those people who drives down the street with his car stereo shaking all the vehicles around him, but when you get into the game and you're having fun pretending you're a rock star, you pretty much feel the need to crank the volume. And then you don't hear the plastic at all.
And if you take it in a different direction, and are trying to play the game 100% technically perfect, the clicking is a good indication that helps you improve your timing and such.
It's not a dealbreaker by any means.
Exactly. If there was ever a real need to be able to do natural language searches, that time is basically over. People have been learning how to search the internet effectively, it's not really that hard to do it successfully. As the general populace gets more and more computer and internet savvy, a lot of this sort of thing becomes almost intuitive.
I learned to play guitar hero reasonably competently in about an hour. After that hour, I was good enough that I could enjoy playing some of the harder songs, and pretend for just a moment that I was a rock star. That's what the game is about, and it serves its purpose very well. And if you give Rock Band a try with some friends, you'll see even more potential there.
Comparing playing GH to learning a real instrument is missing the point.
What a perfectly geeky solution. There's a coherent logic to it, and the potential for some math to really optimize it. But it conveniently leaves out the fact that it deals with people, and as soon as you factor the human element into the idea, there are dozens of plainly obvious reasons why it would never ever work.
But it's still an interesting thought to explore.
There's no doubt that plenty of signal leaks out into space, but it's important to realize how big space is, and how quickly the power of radio signals drop off. Imagine radio waves expanding in a sphere from an antenna. A certain amount of energy is used to create that signal. Right at that antenna, the signal takes up a small amount of space, all that energy is crammed into a small area, the signal strength is strong. That sphere of the broadcast expands out from the antenna at the speed of light. Assuming that nothing absorbs or reflects or otherwise interrupts any of the signal, that sphere of radio waves continues to grow but overall only has the same amount of energy as when it was first released. You can see how very quickly the amount of energy available at any one point on that sphere drops as the sphere expands. Now imagine a sphere with a radius of light-years. That's a whole lot of area to be spreading a set amount of energy over. It's certainly possible to focus radio signals and the like. You don't have to spread all your energy out in all directions, you can aim it somewhat. But you're not going to get a perfectly tight beam, there's going to be some spread, and over interstellar differences, what seems like a minor loss of energy will really start to become significant. And don't forget that focusing your energy into a tight beam means that it will pass by far fewer planets than a signal sent in all directions, and the chances of anyone being there to listen get much smaller.
But wait, it gets worse. There's a lot of electromagnetic noise floating out there in the universe. There's even a big source of it close nearby, we call it the sun. With all that static going on, a weak signal can get very hard to find, especially if you aren't exactly sure what sort of signal you're looking for.
Basically, it's not very realistic to expect people on other planets to be listening in on our TV broadcasts. Even if enough time has passed for the signals to reach them, they're not likely to get enough of a signal to be able to work with, even if they happen to be looking for exactly the right thing at exactly the right time.
Doesn't that seem a little short-sighted though? Ok, so they hear a message from Earth, they figure out that it was sent around 50,000 years ago, who knows how dangerous we are now, so they immediately relativistic weapons that eventually blow up the earth. By the time these weapons reach the Earth and obliterate it, another 50,000+ years have past.
If humans have advanced to the point where they're a danger to aliens living 50,000 light years away, wouldn't it be a pretty safe assumption that humanity has spread beyond well beyond the confines of the Earth? So you aren't really wiping out the threat, you're just taking out one of their outposts. Oh, and it happens to be their home planet, and it will likely piss them right the hell off. It seems a little counter-productive in the long-run.
At an even more basic level, even if an alien race was able to read the radio signal and construct it into an audio/video feed, would they really be able to understand it enough to form a useful opinion on what it meant? The idea of a universal translator is nice for sci-fi shows, but it doesn't seem very likely that a short speech meant for native speakers would enable someone(particularly someone with no previous knowledge of any human language)unfamiliar with the language to make any real sense of it. There just wouldn't be enough context to figure out the meanings of all those sounds. It's probably not even reasonable to expect an alien race to be able to make assumptions based on the speaker's tone and attitude like a human could.
There is a decent history and many good arguments for treating a company that holds a monopoly differently than others in its field.
Monopolies are not good for consumers and not good for an industry as a whole. Government regulation probably won't be perfect, but I'd at least prefer that they try.
I see where you're coming from, but to be useful in a FPS, that trackball would have to be insanely sensitive. Your thumb can do an incredibly complex mix of movements, but the total range that it can travel across any one axis is pretty small.
It'd probably be great for a hardcore player that's spent a lot of time with it, but I think it'd be very frustrating and difficult to start with. But still, I'm surprised too that I haven't seen a product like that before. Maybe it does exist somewhere.
Yeah, but is it really fair to say that the mental ability wasn't accelerated at all just based on an arbitrary test like counting numbers? Reading numbers and interpreting them is a fairly high-level activity. It's much more involved than say, trying to move your head really quick to avoid a brick flying towards your face.
Beyond the obvious example of a life threatening experience, I've also experienced this sort of feeling while playing sports. When you're "in the zone", things just seem to happen slower. I can anticipate better, I can see the spin on the ball better, and I just feel like I'm able to react and move a split second faster than usual.
It's an interesting test these guys have done, but it hardly seems definitive.
I remember having a 20 minute or so argument with a high school math teacher about why we divide a circle into 360 degrees. He insisted that it was originally selected because of some coincidental ancient cultural tradition (although he couldn't name the civilization that it came from), while it seemed obvious to me that 360 is a great number because it can be evenly divided by so many other numbers.
The crux of his argument, as far as I could tell, was that people hundreds or thousands of years ago couldn't have been smart enough to make a decision with that sort of reasoning. I don't know what his problem was.
Actually, doesn't the term "the best" by definition sort of mean there can't be that many? The best means superior to all others, and unless you're talking about something that has an absolute and measurable limit to "perfection", then "the best" is a pretty exclusive club.
It's a good example of a system that can be analyzed as a "tragedy of the commons." Basically, somewhere along the line, one company started advertising to get ahead of its competitors. So all the competitors started advertising as well. At the end of the day, the advertising benefits balances out across the industry to nothing, except that each company is spending extra money to maintain that status quo. Kind of silly when you think about it, but it's great for people in the advertising business I guess.