Ignore the advice to switch to Adblock Edge (though that's better than regular ABP). Switch instead to uBlock. Not only is there no "acceptable ads" (="paid us a lot of money") BS, it uses a lot less CPU and memory on your machine because it's not implemented in JavaScript like ABP.
Take away ad blocking and that will be the end of the internet for me
How are they going to "take away" ad blocking? It's not particularly complicated technology (it just blocks certain parts of webpages from loading and/or displaying). Browsers (the good ones at least) are open-source, and it's pretty impossible to prevent people from downloading software (though it might need to be hosted offshore if it runs into too many legal problems).
I stopped listening to radio because it was all ads.
Not because the music was total crap? However, it's not that bad: there's always classical radio stations, which usually have very few ads, and only become unlistenable during the pledge drives and the days they only play opera. Some classic rock stations aren't too awful, but they get tired because they play the same few popular classic rock songs over and over, and they've been playing those same few songs for decades now. "Stairway to Heaven" is great and all, but why don't they ever play "When the Levee Breaks" from the same album?
I stopped watching television because more than 60% of the content was ads.
Um, this is an exaggeration. It might be about 25% (45 minutes of an episode + 15 minutes of ads = 1 hour program). Of course, the problem is that the ads are annoying (esp. when they fuck with the volume), and you can't easily block them except by having your thumb ready on the mute button with hair-trigger reflexes, which isn't very relaxing. Or you could get a TiVo, except those are all gone now and replaced by stupid cableco DVRs that you have to pay a monthly fee for (and a cable subscription for $$$). And there really isn't much content on TV worth watching anyway; it's easier to just get Game of Thrones off BitTorrent, maybe watch some other series after they come on Netflix, and ignore the rest.
*The internet that was funded by a collaboration between federal and academic institutions for public--not commercial--enrichment.
If you visit any sites besides.gov and.edu, then this is rather hypocritical. The site you're posting this on is a commercial site, so if you're against commercial sites, what are you doing here?
There is a such thing as an acceptable ad on the internet, just like there's a such thing as an acceptable ad on PBS, to pay for the programming there. Unobtrusive, text-only ads with no tracking are acceptable IMO, and a small price to pay for the content and services available. Unfortunately, no one wants to do those any more, they want obnoxious ads that take over your computer and spy on you, so it's turned into an all-out war. Personally, I think the blame lies 100% with the advertisers; they wore out their welcome long ago with their complete lack of ethics and decency, and it's too bad that the handful of "good apples" in that bunch are being hurt by the collateral damage from the war with the thousands of "bad apples" in their bunch. I just object to the notion that there's no such thing as an "acceptable ad"; there is, we just don't see them any more (and they were never all that numerous or popular to begin with, but Google did use them for a while).
Hobby sites survive by being unknown. I run one. I won't ever post the link on slashdot because the sudden influx of traffic would net me a stupendous bill from my host.
Really? Who's your hosting service? I have a cheap ($5/month) hosting service plan as well, and I don't remember anything in there about extra costs if there's a lot of traffic. My site is pre-paid 3 years at a time, and it's a flat rate. I imagine that if I got a sudden influx of traffic, it would simply cause the site to toss up errors (probably 503 Service Unavailable).
Well what do you propose? You have 3 options it seems: support the site with ads, support it with donations, or have wealthy patronage or ownership. #2 is the most egalitarian, but it rarely seems to work in practice because 1) people are frequently cheap, esp. with things where they aren't getting some physical thing in return, and 2) with the crappy economy and the destruction of the middle class, people have less and less money to spend on non-essentials, including donations. #1 is the most annoying and everyone's bitching about it. So that leaves #3. It's not egalitarian, but it's preferable to ads in my opinion.
Finally, it's not like lower-income people are completely prevented from having mass communication. You can go set up your own website at many places now for $3/month. That's $36/year. If you can't afford $50/year to have your own personal website, you have some serious financial problems. This doesn't mean that everyone should have their own website, I'm just pointing out that if you want to have your own personal soapbox where you don't have to worry about some site owner or Zuckerberg restricting your speech or displaying it in a fashion you don't agree with or whatever, and you want absolute freedom in how your site looks, you can have it quite cheaply. Obviously, if it has a lot of traffic and needs a big database, that's probably not going to work, but for something small these shared-hosting services are fine.
How would you fund a site like Slashdot? Or are you implying that sites like Slashdot should go away?
Yes, absolutely. If they can't find a way to have it support itself financially, and the users aren't willing to pay enough to keep it going, then yes, it should go away. It's really little more than mindless entertainment anyway, filled with trolls and shills.
There used to be. Google used to have nice, simple, short, text-only ads that would be shown next to the search results, in response to your search terms. So if you searched for "house paint", for instance, you might see some ads off to the right for Sherwin-Williams and Behr. These ads were separate from the search results, so you knew they were ads, and they were text-only, so they didn't use any significant bandwidth and weren't distracting, and were easily ignored.
Unfortunately, it seems those days are gone now; now everything is all about tracking and spying.
That's not my problem. It's not my responsibility to provide a living for someone who chooses to work for a company that is ad-supported. The MBA should have done a better job in selecting ad providers or finding some other way to support the business. If they can't keep the business going without resorting to obnoxious ads, causing everyone to use ad-blockers which then kill their revenue, then maybe they should just find a new line of work.
No, "we" are not all "mostly capped". Some people are capped, many are not.
Almost everyone in the US on a cellular connection is capped in one way or another.
If the ads are more than half your traffic, or even close to half, then you're not even remotely close to hitting any caps unless you're browsing on a mobile phone.
Are you not paying attention to the article? This is about iOS devices allowing ad-blocking. We're all talking about mobile phones here.
Until then, quit being a dickhead. Use a script blocker and you'll avoid most ads while eliminating potential attack vectors, but quit blocking ads just because you don't "feel" like seeing them.
Agreed! We gave the advertisers a chance, and they blew it, over and over and over with ever-more obnoxious ads.
I really wouldn't mind seeing ads which are tasteful, non-obtrusive (e.g. not pop-ups, pop-unders, flashing colors, etc.), and are targeted to me. This is why I had no problem with Google's simple search ads; if I'm having a problem and type in some terms about that, and one of the results off to the side is an ad for a product which solves my problem, that's great. (Unfortunately this is the way it used to be, these days it seems like they just integrate the ads into the search results so you can't tell if they're genuine search results or paid ads.)
Their saliva contains the Lyssa virus (a mild and usually fatal form of rabies).
Surely they've come up with a vaccination for this?
Australians have an urbanized lifestyle, contrary to the tourist brochures
Any idiot should know that the vast majority of the population there lives in one of a handful of cities (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth). That's really not too different from most industrialized nations. Most Americans live in cities too. We don't have quite the concentration though, or a giant area of completely uninhabited land in the middle, but the American West does have some pretty barren parts in Nevada, Utah, etc.
so the likelihood of facing a dangerous animal is low.
It's no different here. We don't have deadly grizzly bears running around east-coast cities; they're all in rural places like Yellowstone National Park (in Wyoming, a western state with only 500k inhabitants despite a rather large geographical size).
That's a rather stupid comment. Because yes, mainframes generally could do everything PCs could do, only more reliably. The problem was cost. PCs brought those capabilities to where far more people and companies could afford them. And then they extended the capabilities, as PCs had big advantages with graphics (I've worked with graphical mainframe terminals; they were sssslllloooowwww).
I guess you're missing the point entirely. Go back and re-read my post and try to understand.
Also, laptops technically can't do everything a smartphone can; they can't connect to cellular voice networks so that someone can dial your number and talk to you on one. Theoretically, it could be made to work somehow with custom hardware, or you could just ask people to do Skype instead. But even if you could, it's so clumsy that almost no one would want to bother.
This is very different from comparing PCs to pens and paper.
According to Edmunds, the Aztek killed Pontiac. It's one thing to make a niche product, but to make it an important part of a large, mass-market company's product line is asking for trouble. There's lots of other products out there which are really niche product, but they're usually sold by small, niche companies--look at Lotus for example, or any other high-end automobile.
Maybe instead of being a snide jackass, you could actually read my whole comment. I addressed this exactly: it's entirely possible to do the same thing with a laptop computer, but it's clumsier so the tablet's smaller/lighter (and not-clamshell) form factor is a significant advantage here, and the task doesn't benefit from the improved input device capabilities of the laptop because it's simple and doesn't require high-precision pointing, so tablets are a natural fit here.
A laptop could also do everything a little Raspberry Pi can do too, but the RPi is much smaller and cheaper so it's used instead for many things.
It's not the koalas and kangaroos which want to kill you (though the kangaroos can punch you in the face and knock you out).
It's the giant spiders, poisonous snakes, and crocodiles. I believe, however, that the really dangerous stuff like this is mostly in the northeastern part of the country.
I remember the days before the iPhone. Maybe you don't, but I sure do. Back then, there were two kinds of smartphones: Blackberries and WinMo phones. BBs were expensive and highly tied to BB infrastructure (which if you worked for some big company or the government, you'd have, but if you were just Joe Blow, you didn't), and really were meant for doing email on the run more than anything else. The other choice was Windows Mobile.... which just sucked. There's a reason that thing never went anywhere; no one wanted a crappy copy of Windows XP on their phone, which they needed to use a stylus to do the simplest things. The UI was all wrong for mobile usage.
Somehow Apple figured this out, that what people wanted was a big screen with icons large enough to just press them with fat fingers, not tiny desktop-esque icons that needed high-precision aiming with a stylus.
You'd think this should be blindingly obvious, but apparently not. I think part of the reason we never saw anyone else do it before was because of the market-distorting effect of having Microsoft dominating the software industry so much. With very little diversity in OSes and UIs (unlike the 80s where we had tons of microcomputer vendors like Acorn, Amiga, Commodore, Tandy, etc.), and really the only choices for desktop work being Windows (95+%) and Apple Mac (5%), there just wasn't any other company around with the financial and engineering resources to pull off making a smartphone that wasn't yet another WinMo device. And even then Apple was only able to do it because they had such wild (and rather unexpected) success with their iPods. It's not like it's much better now: BB is barely hanging on now, WinMo is still here with a different look and name (and still no one wants it), iPhone is still here, and the other big player is Android, which of course also had a humongous and wealthy company pushing it. This is a market that simply isn't one which some new startup can penetrate. Apple was really lucky (and also really skillful) in doing so well in it.
Now if you're wondering why MS couldn't do it if it's so "blindingly obvious" as I put it, that's easy: MS as an organization is completely incompetent when it comes to UIs. Whoever they had working there and managing the UI stuff back in the early/mid 90s when they invented Windows 95 obviously is long gone, because everything they've done since XP has either just been a re-skin or tweak of Win95, or a total disaster (the Metro/Modern UI). Why they couldn't realize this and put someone better in charge, I dunno, but it's not just them. Look at GM; what kind of incompetent automaker would produce the Pontiac Aztek? There's countless examples of big companies making products which the general public absolutely hated. Much of this can probably be blamed on the top executives, since they either approve this stuff themselves or have close, hand-picked subordinates who do. Steve Jobs obviously had a gift in understanding what consumers would want, whereas other executives just didn't/don't (like Steve Ballmer), and of course are too disconnected to realize this about themselves. It'll be interesting to see how Apple does without him; so far it seems like they're just riding on past successes.
That is odd, because the opposite dynamic is at work:
PCs are far, far more capable than what came before (pens, paper, filing cabinets, typewriters, dictation machines, etc.). It's completely mind-boggling how much more capability PCs have than older methods of information manipulation, storage, and retrieval when you think about it.
Tablets, on the other hand, are less capable than PCs. They can do many of the same things, but more poorly because their input interfaces are much more limited. Their only advantages over PCs are mobility and size/weight. Otherwise, they're just less-capable replacements for laptops and desktops: smaller screens, no keyboards (or really crappy ones), no mice, less CPU power and memory and storage, no wired networking, etc. There's literally nothing you can do on a tablet that you can't do on a PC, usually better (unless it involves walking around while you do it). Tablets have obvious utility in things such walking around a warehouse and doing inventory or whatever, or being used for a customer-facing order-placing system (as many Panera Bread locations have done; instead of placing your order with a person, you go use a tablet that's bolted to a table and punch it in yourself; it's great because you'll find out about all kinds of selections (esp. order modifications) that there simply isn't any time for some cashier to read off to you). But it's really just convenience; these things could be done with PCs as well, tablets just have a more convenient form factor for it.
The other thing to remember is that these guys are former sports stars. They're not the brightest tools in the shed, and tech stuff is definitely not their strong suit.
On top of that, I don't see that much productivity in the tech sector from the immigrants either. Sure, the Indian immigrants and their kids are highly productive, but they're a tiny fraction of the immigrant population (plus, a fair number of them go back to India at some point; it doesn't help that a lot of them are stuck with H1-B status which isn't exactly an incentive to stick around, plus it's exploitative, and they aren't counted as immigrants either). The Hispanics, OTOH, just aren't going into tech jobs for various reasons. We only need so many landscapers and roofers and other service-sector jobs.
By getting NFL commentators to mention your product casually by name? No. It's stupid and fake.
If you want to advertise by having an actual commercial that you produce, and then pay to have aired during the NFL game, that's fine. For those 30 seconds, you can tell people whatever you want about your crappy product, and there's no deception going on (besides whatever lies or distortions you may be saying in the ad itself), because it's obvious that the ad is from your company, and has the goal of getting viewers interested in buying your product. You pay $$$M for those 30 seconds to say what you want, and that's it.
But paying some former sports stars to mention your crappy product and make it sound real? No. That's not advertising, it's marketing, and one of the worst kinds of marketing.
Yeah, I understand that. But I think it'd be interesting to see a movie showing the present day, but where WWII and the Cold War never happened (or did it? But between different countries perhaps? After all Stalin's still in the picture even with a more peaceful Germany which perhaps is placated by the Allies realizing their punitive treaty was stupid and amending it before Hitler takes over.)
Not everything has to be dystopian; just look at 2001: A Space Odyssey for instance. Or Star Trek.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignore the advice to switch to Adblock Edge (though that's better than regular ABP). Switch instead to uBlock. Not only is there no "acceptable ads" (="paid us a lot of money") BS, it uses a lot less CPU and memory on your machine because it's not implemented in JavaScript like ABP.
Take away ad blocking and that will be the end of the internet for me
How are they going to "take away" ad blocking? It's not particularly complicated technology (it just blocks certain parts of webpages from loading and/or displaying). Browsers (the good ones at least) are open-source, and it's pretty impossible to prevent people from downloading software (though it might need to be hosted offshore if it runs into too many legal problems).
I stopped listening to radio because it was all ads.
Not because the music was total crap? However, it's not that bad: there's always classical radio stations, which usually have very few ads, and only become unlistenable during the pledge drives and the days they only play opera. Some classic rock stations aren't too awful, but they get tired because they play the same few popular classic rock songs over and over, and they've been playing those same few songs for decades now. "Stairway to Heaven" is great and all, but why don't they ever play "When the Levee Breaks" from the same album?
I stopped watching television because more than 60% of the content was ads.
Um, this is an exaggeration. It might be about 25% (45 minutes of an episode + 15 minutes of ads = 1 hour program). Of course, the problem is that the ads are annoying (esp. when they fuck with the volume), and you can't easily block them except by having your thumb ready on the mute button with hair-trigger reflexes, which isn't very relaxing. Or you could get a TiVo, except those are all gone now and replaced by stupid cableco DVRs that you have to pay a monthly fee for (and a cable subscription for $$$). And there really isn't much content on TV worth watching anyway; it's easier to just get Game of Thrones off BitTorrent, maybe watch some other series after they come on Netflix, and ignore the rest.
*The internet that was funded by a collaboration between federal and academic institutions for public--not commercial--enrichment.
If you visit any sites besides .gov and .edu, then this is rather hypocritical. The site you're posting this on is a commercial site, so if you're against commercial sites, what are you doing here?
There is a such thing as an acceptable ad on the internet, just like there's a such thing as an acceptable ad on PBS, to pay for the programming there. Unobtrusive, text-only ads with no tracking are acceptable IMO, and a small price to pay for the content and services available. Unfortunately, no one wants to do those any more, they want obnoxious ads that take over your computer and spy on you, so it's turned into an all-out war. Personally, I think the blame lies 100% with the advertisers; they wore out their welcome long ago with their complete lack of ethics and decency, and it's too bad that the handful of "good apples" in that bunch are being hurt by the collateral damage from the war with the thousands of "bad apples" in their bunch. I just object to the notion that there's no such thing as an "acceptable ad"; there is, we just don't see them any more (and they were never all that numerous or popular to begin with, but Google did use them for a while).
Hobby sites survive by being unknown. I run one. I won't ever post the link on slashdot because the sudden influx of traffic would net me a stupendous bill from my host.
Really? Who's your hosting service? I have a cheap ($5/month) hosting service plan as well, and I don't remember anything in there about extra costs if there's a lot of traffic. My site is pre-paid 3 years at a time, and it's a flat rate. I imagine that if I got a sudden influx of traffic, it would simply cause the site to toss up errors (probably 503 Service Unavailable).
Well what do you propose? You have 3 options it seems: support the site with ads, support it with donations, or have wealthy patronage or ownership. #2 is the most egalitarian, but it rarely seems to work in practice because 1) people are frequently cheap, esp. with things where they aren't getting some physical thing in return, and 2) with the crappy economy and the destruction of the middle class, people have less and less money to spend on non-essentials, including donations. #1 is the most annoying and everyone's bitching about it. So that leaves #3. It's not egalitarian, but it's preferable to ads in my opinion.
Finally, it's not like lower-income people are completely prevented from having mass communication. You can go set up your own website at many places now for $3/month. That's $36/year. If you can't afford $50/year to have your own personal website, you have some serious financial problems. This doesn't mean that everyone should have their own website, I'm just pointing out that if you want to have your own personal soapbox where you don't have to worry about some site owner or Zuckerberg restricting your speech or displaying it in a fashion you don't agree with or whatever, and you want absolute freedom in how your site looks, you can have it quite cheaply. Obviously, if it has a lot of traffic and needs a big database, that's probably not going to work, but for something small these shared-hosting services are fine.
How would you fund a site like Slashdot? Or are you implying that sites like Slashdot should go away?
Yes, absolutely. If they can't find a way to have it support itself financially, and the users aren't willing to pay enough to keep it going, then yes, it should go away. It's really little more than mindless entertainment anyway, filled with trolls and shills.
The same goes for any other site.
Only in America. In civilized countries, ISP service is actually pretty cheap.
There used to be. Google used to have nice, simple, short, text-only ads that would be shown next to the search results, in response to your search terms. So if you searched for "house paint", for instance, you might see some ads off to the right for Sherwin-Williams and Behr. These ads were separate from the search results, so you knew they were ads, and they were text-only, so they didn't use any significant bandwidth and weren't distracting, and were easily ignored.
Unfortunately, it seems those days are gone now; now everything is all about tracking and spying.
That's all fine, but don't complain then when everyone uses ad-blockers. The rest of us are not obligated to support your career choices.
That's not my problem. It's not my responsibility to provide a living for someone who chooses to work for a company that is ad-supported. The MBA should have done a better job in selecting ad providers or finding some other way to support the business. If they can't keep the business going without resorting to obnoxious ads, causing everyone to use ad-blockers which then kill their revenue, then maybe they should just find a new line of work.
No, "we" are not all "mostly capped". Some people are capped, many are not.
Almost everyone in the US on a cellular connection is capped in one way or another.
If the ads are more than half your traffic, or even close to half, then you're not even remotely close to hitting any caps unless you're browsing on a mobile phone.
Are you not paying attention to the article? This is about iOS devices allowing ad-blocking. We're all talking about mobile phones here.
Until then, quit being a dickhead. Use a script blocker and you'll avoid most ads while eliminating potential attack vectors, but quit blocking ads just because you don't "feel" like seeing them.
Go away, advertising shill.
Agreed! We gave the advertisers a chance, and they blew it, over and over and over with ever-more obnoxious ads.
I really wouldn't mind seeing ads which are tasteful, non-obtrusive (e.g. not pop-ups, pop-unders, flashing colors, etc.), and are targeted to me. This is why I had no problem with Google's simple search ads; if I'm having a problem and type in some terms about that, and one of the results off to the side is an ad for a product which solves my problem, that's great. (Unfortunately this is the way it used to be, these days it seems like they just integrate the ads into the search results so you can't tell if they're genuine search results or paid ads.)
Their saliva contains the Lyssa virus (a mild and usually fatal form of rabies).
Surely they've come up with a vaccination for this?
Australians have an urbanized lifestyle, contrary to the tourist brochures
Any idiot should know that the vast majority of the population there lives in one of a handful of cities (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth). That's really not too different from most industrialized nations. Most Americans live in cities too. We don't have quite the concentration though, or a giant area of completely uninhabited land in the middle, but the American West does have some pretty barren parts in Nevada, Utah, etc.
so the likelihood of facing a dangerous animal is low.
It's no different here. We don't have deadly grizzly bears running around east-coast cities; they're all in rural places like Yellowstone National Park (in Wyoming, a western state with only 500k inhabitants despite a rather large geographical size).
That's a rather stupid comment. Because yes, mainframes generally could do everything PCs could do, only more reliably. The problem was cost. PCs brought those capabilities to where far more people and companies could afford them. And then they extended the capabilities, as PCs had big advantages with graphics (I've worked with graphical mainframe terminals; they were sssslllloooowwww).
I guess you're missing the point entirely. Go back and re-read my post and try to understand.
Also, laptops technically can't do everything a smartphone can; they can't connect to cellular voice networks so that someone can dial your number and talk to you on one. Theoretically, it could be made to work somehow with custom hardware, or you could just ask people to do Skype instead. But even if you could, it's so clumsy that almost no one would want to bother.
This is very different from comparing PCs to pens and paper.
According to Edmunds, the Aztek killed Pontiac. It's one thing to make a niche product, but to make it an important part of a large, mass-market company's product line is asking for trouble. There's lots of other products out there which are really niche product, but they're usually sold by small, niche companies--look at Lotus for example, or any other high-end automobile.
Maybe instead of being a snide jackass, you could actually read my whole comment. I addressed this exactly: it's entirely possible to do the same thing with a laptop computer, but it's clumsier so the tablet's smaller/lighter (and not-clamshell) form factor is a significant advantage here, and the task doesn't benefit from the improved input device capabilities of the laptop because it's simple and doesn't require high-precision pointing, so tablets are a natural fit here.
A laptop could also do everything a little Raspberry Pi can do too, but the RPi is much smaller and cheaper so it's used instead for many things.
It's not the koalas and kangaroos which want to kill you (though the kangaroos can punch you in the face and knock you out).
It's the giant spiders, poisonous snakes, and crocodiles. I believe, however, that the really dangerous stuff like this is mostly in the northeastern part of the country.
I remember the days before the iPhone. Maybe you don't, but I sure do. Back then, there were two kinds of smartphones: Blackberries and WinMo phones. BBs were expensive and highly tied to BB infrastructure (which if you worked for some big company or the government, you'd have, but if you were just Joe Blow, you didn't), and really were meant for doing email on the run more than anything else. The other choice was Windows Mobile.... which just sucked. There's a reason that thing never went anywhere; no one wanted a crappy copy of Windows XP on their phone, which they needed to use a stylus to do the simplest things. The UI was all wrong for mobile usage.
Somehow Apple figured this out, that what people wanted was a big screen with icons large enough to just press them with fat fingers, not tiny desktop-esque icons that needed high-precision aiming with a stylus.
You'd think this should be blindingly obvious, but apparently not. I think part of the reason we never saw anyone else do it before was because of the market-distorting effect of having Microsoft dominating the software industry so much. With very little diversity in OSes and UIs (unlike the 80s where we had tons of microcomputer vendors like Acorn, Amiga, Commodore, Tandy, etc.), and really the only choices for desktop work being Windows (95+%) and Apple Mac (5%), there just wasn't any other company around with the financial and engineering resources to pull off making a smartphone that wasn't yet another WinMo device. And even then Apple was only able to do it because they had such wild (and rather unexpected) success with their iPods. It's not like it's much better now: BB is barely hanging on now, WinMo is still here with a different look and name (and still no one wants it), iPhone is still here, and the other big player is Android, which of course also had a humongous and wealthy company pushing it. This is a market that simply isn't one which some new startup can penetrate. Apple was really lucky (and also really skillful) in doing so well in it.
Now if you're wondering why MS couldn't do it if it's so "blindingly obvious" as I put it, that's easy: MS as an organization is completely incompetent when it comes to UIs. Whoever they had working there and managing the UI stuff back in the early/mid 90s when they invented Windows 95 obviously is long gone, because everything they've done since XP has either just been a re-skin or tweak of Win95, or a total disaster (the Metro/Modern UI). Why they couldn't realize this and put someone better in charge, I dunno, but it's not just them. Look at GM; what kind of incompetent automaker would produce the Pontiac Aztek? There's countless examples of big companies making products which the general public absolutely hated. Much of this can probably be blamed on the top executives, since they either approve this stuff themselves or have close, hand-picked subordinates who do. Steve Jobs obviously had a gift in understanding what consumers would want, whereas other executives just didn't/don't (like Steve Ballmer), and of course are too disconnected to realize this about themselves. It'll be interesting to see how Apple does without him; so far it seems like they're just riding on past successes.
That is odd, because the opposite dynamic is at work:
PCs are far, far more capable than what came before (pens, paper, filing cabinets, typewriters, dictation machines, etc.). It's completely mind-boggling how much more capability PCs have than older methods of information manipulation, storage, and retrieval when you think about it.
Tablets, on the other hand, are less capable than PCs. They can do many of the same things, but more poorly because their input interfaces are much more limited. Their only advantages over PCs are mobility and size/weight. Otherwise, they're just less-capable replacements for laptops and desktops: smaller screens, no keyboards (or really crappy ones), no mice, less CPU power and memory and storage, no wired networking, etc. There's literally nothing you can do on a tablet that you can't do on a PC, usually better (unless it involves walking around while you do it). Tablets have obvious utility in things such walking around a warehouse and doing inventory or whatever, or being used for a customer-facing order-placing system (as many Panera Bread locations have done; instead of placing your order with a person, you go use a tablet that's bolted to a table and punch it in yourself; it's great because you'll find out about all kinds of selections (esp. order modifications) that there simply isn't any time for some cashier to read off to you). But it's really just convenience; these things could be done with PCs as well, tablets just have a more convenient form factor for it.
The other thing to remember is that these guys are former sports stars. They're not the brightest tools in the shed, and tech stuff is definitely not their strong suit.
On top of that, I don't see that much productivity in the tech sector from the immigrants either. Sure, the Indian immigrants and their kids are highly productive, but they're a tiny fraction of the immigrant population (plus, a fair number of them go back to India at some point; it doesn't help that a lot of them are stuck with H1-B status which isn't exactly an incentive to stick around, plus it's exploitative, and they aren't counted as immigrants either). The Hispanics, OTOH, just aren't going into tech jobs for various reasons. We only need so many landscapers and roofers and other service-sector jobs.
Are you saying companies shouldn't advertise?
By getting NFL commentators to mention your product casually by name? No. It's stupid and fake.
If you want to advertise by having an actual commercial that you produce, and then pay to have aired during the NFL game, that's fine. For those 30 seconds, you can tell people whatever you want about your crappy product, and there's no deception going on (besides whatever lies or distortions you may be saying in the ad itself), because it's obvious that the ad is from your company, and has the goal of getting viewers interested in buying your product. You pay $$$M for those 30 seconds to say what you want, and that's it.
But paying some former sports stars to mention your crappy product and make it sound real? No. That's not advertising, it's marketing, and one of the worst kinds of marketing.
I agree, that guy sounds like a jackass.
However, does he have a wife or girlfriend? What is she like? It's possible his jackassery is successful for him.
Yeah, I understand that. But I think it'd be interesting to see a movie showing the present day, but where WWII and the Cold War never happened (or did it? But between different countries perhaps? After all Stalin's still in the picture even with a more peaceful Germany which perhaps is placated by the Allies realizing their punitive treaty was stupid and amending it before Hitler takes over.)
Not everything has to be dystopian; just look at 2001: A Space Odyssey for instance. Or Star Trek.