The only thing funny about China is if I tried to pull one tenth of the stunts they do, over here in Canada/US, I'd spend the rest of my days in court and/or jail for fraud.
If it were just about copyright, I'd turn a blind eye, because I'm all for copyright reform, but this mentality extends far beyond the conscious disobedience of extortionary legislation. At least US corps put SOME effort into being sneaky, whereas the standard Chinese go-to is to do it all over someone's face and then state "I don't know". Struggling grocery store burns to the ground, owner says "I don't know" as he cashes the insurance cheque. Noodle house has a sudden and absurdly dramatic roach infestation, rival next door says "I don't know". Computer is brought to a shop with a virus, comes back with two more and a downgraded video card, techie says "I don't know".
I shit you not, I've been working with asian business owners for well over a decade, and with all these stories they tell me, I can't help but distrust them because after each anecdote they say "I would do the same thing if I saw an opportunity". Sometimes I think my size and lack of morals is the only reason they haven't try to pull that bullshit on me... yet.
The only reason people consider Android performance "good" is because they have shit PCs that are just as slow. Those dumb phones are so sluggish I want to smash them, every time I have to test my apps:P
Ten... no, fifteen years ago, I got a Java book. I went through a few chapters, then gave up, because I figured it would never catch on and I didn't give two shits about plastering stupid wavy animations on a web page. I was mostly coding in assembler back then, so to me this Java nonsense was 100 times too slow, plus it took a good 20 seconds to start the JVM on my 486. How that trainwreck became the de-facto standard for large-scale development, to me that's proof that 99% of all programmers are brain-damaged posers, just like the used-car-salesman I had for a C prof back in the 90s.
Say what you will about JIT, Java and.Net are still a zillion times slower than native code. We have machines nearing the 4ghz mark, so why don't they feel a thousand times faster than a 286 ? Do we really need all this bloat ? Does it allow us to build the apps more quickly ? I don't believe so.
Obligatory bullying: The original XBox controllers were PERFECT! You just have wussy little hands.
I could never get used to the smaller controller, nor anything from the Playstation camp. My fingers just aren't made to clamp down on such tiny things.
Seriously though, it's exactly as you said: I enjoyed it for a little while, played Raving Rabbids with the wife for laughs, then started lending it to friends for months at a time, and eventually it came back to me. It has sat in a small carrying bag for the two or three years. The last game I remember playing was Metroid Prime 3. I've always loved Metroid, but the idea of a standard-def shooter really turned me off, especially with Crysis running on the monitor next to it.
Meanwhile the X360 has seen almost daily abuse since I bought it a year ago, and mostly on Modern Warfare 2 with my RL friends and workmates. There just wasn't any "killer game" on the Wii for me.
I'm fine with the idea of a dumbed-down, user-friendly interface; perfectly fine. Call it something else because it has nothing in common with its predecessor. Like you say, these fisher-price UIs restrict power users and force us into a tiny little box. Well, UI developers, fuck your dumb faces! Linux wouldn't even exist today if it weren't for us power users wanting more out of our computing experience.
The one thing I absolutely loved about KDE was not its interface, but the concept of KIOslaves that worked with a generous number of applications, which allowed me to work very smoothly and efficiently with heterogenous networks. No need for a half-dozen file transfer apps, KIO could handle them all. Need to edit a web page on an FTP ? ftp://somebox/somefile.xml , I can open it right in Kate and save back to the server. Pulling down an ISO from the file server ? Copy/paste DONE! I value that feature a million times more than any pretentious UI tweaks, because we live in a networked world. There is very little I do on my PC that doesn't involve either the internet or my LAN. Local storage is for the operating system and video games.
So last month, when I upgraded the SSD in my main rig, I "accidentally" blew away my Gentoo partition. Oops! Well you know what ? Screw it. I never bothered to reinstall it, because frankly it had become even more frustrating than Windows, with KDE's feature set changing drastically with every point release, it seemed. I'd get complete X crashes at least 2-3 times daily. If that is the best work the KDE devs have to offer, then they sorely need to find a new hobby. I don't need more broken functionality, I just want an overlapping-window manager with some degree of network awareness. Leave the crappy widget development to those crappy widget developers.
Why is it that the leading GUIs have to suck so damn much ? Either provide fantastic functionality, or get the fuck out of my way. This is why XFCE and Fluxbox have so many proponents, they do little, but they do it well.
Like I stated, our combined income is a bit lower than the average white-collar household, since we each work about 30 hours a week (varies). I have no desire to be filthy rich, I only need to enough money to not have to worry about it. That watermark is about 25% of our combined income, everything beyond that is gravy. Even on minimum wage we could still afford our accomodations, but we'd have to ditch our night life in favour of popcorn and TV. We skated by on just one income for several years and still lived quite respectably. We do live in Canada, so medical bills don't apply for most things, just prescriptions, and we have insurance for that.
The people I know who are broke all the time are either paying a mortgage, raising children, or drowning in credit card debt. It's funny how much easier budgeting can be, when you're not paying $500 in interest to various creditors every month.
I just switched to TekSavvy Cable, which is being rolled out in a few metro areas. No throttling, no spurious RST packets. For the first time in years, I can download torrents reliably and play on Xbox Live without timeouts... This is like old-school broadband, before the telcos started filtering everything to shit.
I agree that it's abusive to require Gold for just Netflix, that's just ridiculous, but the Gold service itself is fine. I don't mind paying $5 for their extensive online service, and I find it helps cut down (somewhat) on raging preteens. Many still get mommy and daddy to pay up, but on PSN it seems I'm the only adult around, while every other player is a team-killing imbecile whose vocabulary consists exclusively of the words "nigger" and "faggot". I would gladly pay $20 a month just to keep those missed abortions out of my headset...
But yeah, the Netflix app should be free to access for anyone. The way it is now, it kind of looks like M$ is trying to force Netflix users to stare at the Zune marketplace... Conflict of interest ?
Yep. One would hope that most/.ers have the intellectual mobility to find and secure a job they actually like doing, or move around within the organisation when boredom starts setting in. Sometimes you can turn a hobby into a business too. Feeling trapped in a career is the result of one's own decisions (or lack thereof).
I stopped reading when they stated that a sloppy investor might be eating ramen noodles later in life, while a good investor could be eating sushi. That is such a moronic, consumption-based bullshit example that works so well on mindless US tweens, who are bombarded with the idea that wealth = happiness. Fuck that shit, man, I like ramen noodles!
If you're worried about being broke in your late years, lifestyle decisions will have a much more profound impact than any typical investment strategy some banker will shove down your throat. Want to live like a king ? Don't have kids, and don't spend money you don't have. Better yet: choose a career where you'll still be valuable in your old age and retirement becomes a non-issue. A skilled consultant with 45 years experience will beat your retirement fund, since he won't be competing with inflation, he rolls it into his hourly rate.
Ultimately, we are very adaptive creatures. I'm not saving up for retirement, though once the wife is settled in her career, and her student debt is paid off, we'll be earning more than we can reasonably spend, since we already live quite indulgently on our sub-average income. If we set a goal to retire by a certain age, we'll make the lifestyle adjustments to attain that goal. Right now, we're living for today and life is grand.
Thunderbolt is extreme overkill for a hard drive. Even though the interface is 10 Gbit/sec in each direction, even a pretty fast SATA hard drive barely cracks 1 Gbit on the outer cylinders. Even the best single SSDs come close to 2.5 Gbit, so to really justify Thunderbolt, you'd have to do RAID.
For comparison, USB2's data rate is only 480 Mbit... less than half the average speed of a typical 3.5" hard drive. USB3 is 10 times faster, shifting the bottleneck back to the media.
Goddamned slashvertisements... of COURSE if something has a soft landing it's not going to explode into a million pieces. Terminal velocity and stopping distance are the deciding factors. There are numerous documented cases of aircraft pilots and gunners surviving 15000+ foot drops onto snow or foliage with little more than a sprain or minor fractures, which can happen just the same from a 10 foot fall onto a hard surface.
Like the saying goes, it's not the fall that kills you, it's how you stop.
That only means the copyright troll will "sell" 50 copies to their subsidiary company... it's certainly cheaper than the current system of hiring an attorney to file bullshit papers every 3/4 of a century.
There's not much I can tell you, other than "I was once like you". There is a whole world of audio beyond the five brands you'll find in most car-audio and big-box stores. They frown on 3-way speakers for the same reasons I do: off-axis positioning, space-constrained 2nd order crossovers and unfixable group delay. The result is muddy mid-bass and very uneven tweeter response. Some people don't notice or care, especially if they stick to popular music where those specific weaknesses may be harder to detect.
Typical 3-way car speakers are built for practicality, not performance. A car is about the farthest thing from an ideal listening room: it's small and noisy, with lots of obstructions that wreak havoc with mid-high frequencies. There is nothing optimal about cramming three drivers in front of each other, in a metallic door that acts as a highly reactive, highly compliant half-baffle. Anyone with basic knowledge of speaker design can tell you that is one very compromised setup, and it can partly be explained with pure common sense: we have two ears and two channels of audio, so ideally we should have two speakers. In practice, it's impossible to build such a perfect speaker that will flawlessly reproduce the entire audible frequency range, so the nearest approximation is two drivers per side.
All that to say: if you think 3-way speakers are so great, you should try a 2-way setup, preferably round 6.5" woofers with separate 1" tweeters. You mount these in custom kick panels so the drivers are farther away and aimed directly at the listeners, for greatly improved stereo balance and imaging. Infinity Kappa is a good option under $200, or Polk in the $600-800 range if your ears can justify the expense (shop around!). And if you don't want to spend $200 per pair, try Pioneer. They will trounce your 3-way speakers, sounding a lot more like a properly positioned and toed-in home stereo with great stereo detail and less reflections.
Things like factory-installed 9 speaker systems work very hard to ignore all this acoustic science, instead taking the Bose approach: trash the soundstage so thoroughly that everything sounds "live". Some people like this effect, but to my ears it's absolute hogwash. I'd rather take what they spent on 9 speakers, and buy 2 really good ones instead.
Most of us remember the horrors of hardware-specific APIs. Some of us had to code against them. Remember when a game would be released with different builds for 3Dfx, PowerVR and Riva ? If that's what AMD wants to go back to, well I cordially invite them to do so, and subsequently fuck themselves once there.
It is no secret that DX saps a chunk of performance out of the system, always has been. We just don't notice it as much anymore with today's powerful GPUs, and to be fair to Microsoft, they did improve performance significantly with DX7.
Now I'll be frank: I haven't written any DX code in about six years, but the API overhead is easily circumvented through batching, like any other repetitive task, and the true enemy is task scheduling. The impression I get is that consoles "feel" faster due to real-time scheduling. It routinely frustrates me to have my balls-out gaming PC stutter on simple games, because some Windows maintenance process decided to hog a CPU for 20 msec too long. Back in the DOS days, we (game programmers) approximated real-time scheduling via timer interrupts - fuck VSync, we'd sync once and start a perfect 60hz loop during initialization, shove the screen flip or blit into said loop (and little else), so we could spend 99% of the CPU on rendering and gamestate, rather than waste cycles waiting for the display to become ready. So then, why can't DX do the same ? On said balls-out rig, if I don't enable VSync, I inevitably get mid-screen tearing, because $3000 worth of hardware apparently can't be bothered to line up once every 16.6 msec.
There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the graphics world, but all AMD's graphics subsidiary cares to do is point fingers and whine about it. Heck, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in their own graphics drivers, but they'd much rather crash the hardware directly, than fix their notoriously shoddy code, right ?
Dude... I'm french (well I used to be), and I think LibreOffice is a shit name. It's a word 99% of the world can't properly speak or spell, and all because of that dumb FLOSS acronym that came about because the english word "Free" lacks specificity. English is the Visual Basic of human languages: easy, popular, but man does it ever suck for all but the most basic tasks.
They are often called "American-style lager" or "American adjunct lager", due to their reliance on rice and corn grains and barely-perceptible malting. The problem is that only these awful, mass-produced tasteless products have any advertising budget, so that's all most people have ever heard of. After all, to afford those absurd TV spots, sponsorships, contests and protective exclusivity rebates, they have to cut costs somewhere, right ?
Slashdot Mirror
Son, if you're looking for news, you need to find a new teat to suckle. Slashdot is dead, has been for a very long time.
The only thing funny about China is if I tried to pull one tenth of the stunts they do, over here in Canada/US, I'd spend the rest of my days in court and/or jail for fraud.
If it were just about copyright, I'd turn a blind eye, because I'm all for copyright reform, but this mentality extends far beyond the conscious disobedience of extortionary legislation. At least US corps put SOME effort into being sneaky, whereas the standard Chinese go-to is to do it all over someone's face and then state "I don't know". Struggling grocery store burns to the ground, owner says "I don't know" as he cashes the insurance cheque. Noodle house has a sudden and absurdly dramatic roach infestation, rival next door says "I don't know". Computer is brought to a shop with a virus, comes back with two more and a downgraded video card, techie says "I don't know".
I shit you not, I've been working with asian business owners for well over a decade, and with all these stories they tell me, I can't help but distrust them because after each anecdote they say "I would do the same thing if I saw an opportunity". Sometimes I think my size and lack of morals is the only reason they haven't try to pull that bullshit on me... yet.
Java is only "another layer of the art" if you're a bullshit artist.
The only reason people consider Android performance "good" is because they have shit PCs that are just as slow. Those dumb phones are so sluggish I want to smash them, every time I have to test my apps :P
Ten... no, fifteen years ago, I got a Java book. I went through a few chapters, then gave up, because I figured it would never catch on and I didn't give two shits about plastering stupid wavy animations on a web page. I was mostly coding in assembler back then, so to me this Java nonsense was 100 times too slow, plus it took a good 20 seconds to start the JVM on my 486. How that trainwreck became the de-facto standard for large-scale development, to me that's proof that 99% of all programmers are brain-damaged posers, just like the used-car-salesman I had for a C prof back in the 90s.
Say what you will about JIT, Java and .Net are still a zillion times slower than native code. We have machines nearing the 4ghz mark, so why don't they feel a thousand times faster than a 286 ? Do we really need all this bloat ? Does it allow us to build the apps more quickly ? I don't believe so.
Obligatory bullying: The original XBox controllers were PERFECT! You just have wussy little hands.
I could never get used to the smaller controller, nor anything from the Playstation camp. My fingers just aren't made to clamp down on such tiny things.
*dons pun-proof hat*
No one's used my Wii in years! *ducks*
Seriously though, it's exactly as you said: I enjoyed it for a little while, played Raving Rabbids with the wife for laughs, then started lending it to friends for months at a time, and eventually it came back to me. It has sat in a small carrying bag for the two or three years. The last game I remember playing was Metroid Prime 3. I've always loved Metroid, but the idea of a standard-def shooter really turned me off, especially with Crysis running on the monitor next to it.
Meanwhile the X360 has seen almost daily abuse since I bought it a year ago, and mostly on Modern Warfare 2 with my RL friends and workmates. There just wasn't any "killer game" on the Wii for me.
Uphill, both ways, in a blizzard, covered in petrol, on FIRE ?
I'm fine with the idea of a dumbed-down, user-friendly interface; perfectly fine. Call it something else because it has nothing in common with its predecessor. Like you say, these fisher-price UIs restrict power users and force us into a tiny little box. Well, UI developers, fuck your dumb faces! Linux wouldn't even exist today if it weren't for us power users wanting more out of our computing experience.
The one thing I absolutely loved about KDE was not its interface, but the concept of KIOslaves that worked with a generous number of applications, which allowed me to work very smoothly and efficiently with heterogenous networks. No need for a half-dozen file transfer apps, KIO could handle them all. Need to edit a web page on an FTP ? ftp://somebox/somefile.xml , I can open it right in Kate and save back to the server. Pulling down an ISO from the file server ? Copy/paste DONE! I value that feature a million times more than any pretentious UI tweaks, because we live in a networked world. There is very little I do on my PC that doesn't involve either the internet or my LAN. Local storage is for the operating system and video games.
So last month, when I upgraded the SSD in my main rig, I "accidentally" blew away my Gentoo partition. Oops! Well you know what ? Screw it. I never bothered to reinstall it, because frankly it had become even more frustrating than Windows, with KDE's feature set changing drastically with every point release, it seemed. I'd get complete X crashes at least 2-3 times daily. If that is the best work the KDE devs have to offer, then they sorely need to find a new hobby. I don't need more broken functionality, I just want an overlapping-window manager with some degree of network awareness. Leave the crappy widget development to those crappy widget developers.
KDE4 is a joke. Now Gnome has become a joke.
Why is it that the leading GUIs have to suck so damn much ? Either provide fantastic functionality, or get the fuck out of my way. This is why XFCE and Fluxbox have so many proponents, they do little, but they do it well.
Son, when I was your age, we didn't have GOTO. We had a stack pointer which had to be managed by hand, and WE LIKED IT.
MOV AX,1202
PUSH AX
RETN
Then I would like to patent flipping pages... ON A BOAT!
Like I stated, our combined income is a bit lower than the average white-collar household, since we each work about 30 hours a week (varies). I have no desire to be filthy rich, I only need to enough money to not have to worry about it. That watermark is about 25% of our combined income, everything beyond that is gravy. Even on minimum wage we could still afford our accomodations, but we'd have to ditch our night life in favour of popcorn and TV. We skated by on just one income for several years and still lived quite respectably. We do live in Canada, so medical bills don't apply for most things, just prescriptions, and we have insurance for that.
The people I know who are broke all the time are either paying a mortgage, raising children, or drowning in credit card debt. It's funny how much easier budgeting can be, when you're not paying $500 in interest to various creditors every month.
No, the link is fine, it`s Gizmodo itself that's borked. Ever since that nonsensical redesign, the whole site is one giant mess of AJAX.
I just switched to TekSavvy Cable, which is being rolled out in a few metro areas. No throttling, no spurious RST packets. For the first time in years, I can download torrents reliably and play on Xbox Live without timeouts... This is like old-school broadband, before the telcos started filtering everything to shit.
I agree that it's abusive to require Gold for just Netflix, that's just ridiculous, but the Gold service itself is fine. I don't mind paying $5 for their extensive online service, and I find it helps cut down (somewhat) on raging preteens. Many still get mommy and daddy to pay up, but on PSN it seems I'm the only adult around, while every other player is a team-killing imbecile whose vocabulary consists exclusively of the words "nigger" and "faggot". I would gladly pay $20 a month just to keep those missed abortions out of my headset...
But yeah, the Netflix app should be free to access for anyone. The way it is now, it kind of looks like M$ is trying to force Netflix users to stare at the Zune marketplace... Conflict of interest ?
Yep. One would hope that most /.ers have the intellectual mobility to find and secure a job they actually like doing, or move around within the organisation when boredom starts setting in. Sometimes you can turn a hobby into a business too. Feeling trapped in a career is the result of one's own decisions (or lack thereof).
I stopped reading when they stated that a sloppy investor might be eating ramen noodles later in life, while a good investor could be eating sushi. That is such a moronic, consumption-based bullshit example that works so well on mindless US tweens, who are bombarded with the idea that wealth = happiness. Fuck that shit, man, I like ramen noodles!
If you're worried about being broke in your late years, lifestyle decisions will have a much more profound impact than any typical investment strategy some banker will shove down your throat. Want to live like a king ? Don't have kids, and don't spend money you don't have. Better yet: choose a career where you'll still be valuable in your old age and retirement becomes a non-issue. A skilled consultant with 45 years experience will beat your retirement fund, since he won't be competing with inflation, he rolls it into his hourly rate.
Ultimately, we are very adaptive creatures. I'm not saving up for retirement, though once the wife is settled in her career, and her student debt is paid off, we'll be earning more than we can reasonably spend, since we already live quite indulgently on our sub-average income. If we set a goal to retire by a certain age, we'll make the lifestyle adjustments to attain that goal. Right now, we're living for today and life is grand.
Isn't this a classic example of a CEO trolling for attention ?
1. Make baseless, provocative statement
2. Epic traffic and attention
3. ???
4. VENTURE FUNDING!
5. Cash out before the VCs realize you're an imbecile
Thunderbolt is extreme overkill for a hard drive. Even though the interface is 10 Gbit/sec in each direction, even a pretty fast SATA hard drive barely cracks 1 Gbit on the outer cylinders. Even the best single SSDs come close to 2.5 Gbit, so to really justify Thunderbolt, you'd have to do RAID.
For comparison, USB2's data rate is only 480 Mbit... less than half the average speed of a typical 3.5" hard drive. USB3 is 10 times faster, shifting the bottleneck back to the media.
Goddamned slashvertisements... of COURSE if something has a soft landing it's not going to explode into a million pieces. Terminal velocity and stopping distance are the deciding factors. There are numerous documented cases of aircraft pilots and gunners surviving 15000+ foot drops onto snow or foliage with little more than a sprain or minor fractures, which can happen just the same from a 10 foot fall onto a hard surface.
Like the saying goes, it's not the fall that kills you, it's how you stop.
That only means the copyright troll will "sell" 50 copies to their subsidiary company... it's certainly cheaper than the current system of hiring an attorney to file bullshit papers every 3/4 of a century.
There's not much I can tell you, other than "I was once like you". There is a whole world of audio beyond the five brands you'll find in most car-audio and big-box stores. They frown on 3-way speakers for the same reasons I do: off-axis positioning, space-constrained 2nd order crossovers and unfixable group delay. The result is muddy mid-bass and very uneven tweeter response. Some people don't notice or care, especially if they stick to popular music where those specific weaknesses may be harder to detect.
Typical 3-way car speakers are built for practicality, not performance. A car is about the farthest thing from an ideal listening room: it's small and noisy, with lots of obstructions that wreak havoc with mid-high frequencies. There is nothing optimal about cramming three drivers in front of each other, in a metallic door that acts as a highly reactive, highly compliant half-baffle. Anyone with basic knowledge of speaker design can tell you that is one very compromised setup, and it can partly be explained with pure common sense: we have two ears and two channels of audio, so ideally we should have two speakers. In practice, it's impossible to build such a perfect speaker that will flawlessly reproduce the entire audible frequency range, so the nearest approximation is two drivers per side.
All that to say: if you think 3-way speakers are so great, you should try a 2-way setup, preferably round 6.5" woofers with separate 1" tweeters. You mount these in custom kick panels so the drivers are farther away and aimed directly at the listeners, for greatly improved stereo balance and imaging. Infinity Kappa is a good option under $200, or Polk in the $600-800 range if your ears can justify the expense (shop around!). And if you don't want to spend $200 per pair, try Pioneer. They will trounce your 3-way speakers, sounding a lot more like a properly positioned and toed-in home stereo with great stereo detail and less reflections.
Things like factory-installed 9 speaker systems work very hard to ignore all this acoustic science, instead taking the Bose approach: trash the soundstage so thoroughly that everything sounds "live". Some people like this effect, but to my ears it's absolute hogwash. I'd rather take what they spent on 9 speakers, and buy 2 really good ones instead.
Most of us remember the horrors of hardware-specific APIs. Some of us had to code against them. Remember when a game would be released with different builds for 3Dfx, PowerVR and Riva ? If that's what AMD wants to go back to, well I cordially invite them to do so, and subsequently fuck themselves once there.
It is no secret that DX saps a chunk of performance out of the system, always has been. We just don't notice it as much anymore with today's powerful GPUs, and to be fair to Microsoft, they did improve performance significantly with DX7.
Now I'll be frank: I haven't written any DX code in about six years, but the API overhead is easily circumvented through batching, like any other repetitive task, and the true enemy is task scheduling. The impression I get is that consoles "feel" faster due to real-time scheduling. It routinely frustrates me to have my balls-out gaming PC stutter on simple games, because some Windows maintenance process decided to hog a CPU for 20 msec too long. Back in the DOS days, we (game programmers) approximated real-time scheduling via timer interrupts - fuck VSync, we'd sync once and start a perfect 60hz loop during initialization, shove the screen flip or blit into said loop (and little else), so we could spend 99% of the CPU on rendering and gamestate, rather than waste cycles waiting for the display to become ready. So then, why can't DX do the same ? On said balls-out rig, if I don't enable VSync, I inevitably get mid-screen tearing, because $3000 worth of hardware apparently can't be bothered to line up once every 16.6 msec.
There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the graphics world, but all AMD's graphics subsidiary cares to do is point fingers and whine about it. Heck, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in their own graphics drivers, but they'd much rather crash the hardware directly, than fix their notoriously shoddy code, right ?
Dude... I'm french (well I used to be), and I think LibreOffice is a shit name. It's a word 99% of the world can't properly speak or spell, and all because of that dumb FLOSS acronym that came about because the english word "Free" lacks specificity. English is the Visual Basic of human languages: easy, popular, but man does it ever suck for all but the most basic tasks.
They are often called "American-style lager" or "American adjunct lager", due to their reliance on rice and corn grains and barely-perceptible malting. The problem is that only these awful, mass-produced tasteless products have any advertising budget, so that's all most people have ever heard of. After all, to afford those absurd TV spots, sponsorships, contests and protective exclusivity rebates, they have to cut costs somewhere, right ?