seems like you want to diminish Google's achievement, for no real reason. Yeah, it's not registered users, but even if it was 25 million registered users, you'd still be able to claim "it's not much of a surprise that a new site by a popular brand would have a lot of [registered users] in the first month." Google can still claim to be the fastest growing social network that ever was, so it's still impressive.
Is it really the power "we" have or is it the power someone else has to rally the troops into a common outrage? If you didn't care about the scandal before hearing about it day after day after day, while the media just didn't want to let it go, made people more outraged as time went on. Of course, it could have swung the opposite way if MSM ignored it, swept it under the rug like they do lots of stories, and everybody would go about their day and everything for Murdoch would be business as usual.
So, I don't believe it was just general public outrage. I think someone at the top wanted this scandal to explode and made it so.
I think you're reading too much into it. Your knee-jerk reaction to how Linux is portrayed in this video is exactly why big companies can't do anything creative or interesting without people coming out of the woodwork to feign being offended.
I work in the commercial animation industry and there's a high likelihood that this video was thought of by an ad exec who has Microsoft as a client. The ad agency hired an outside commercial house to do the production work. I doubt anyone high enough at Microsoft even cared about this production to be in the development phase for it and just signed off on it after all was said and done.
There wasn't a large psychological study created to find the best way to get their message of Linux subversion out through this Trojan horse. It was just a couple of designers and creatives going "let's make the penguin cuter... Give him an igloo."
Big clients like Microsoft are the worst because the ad agency and the client are so scared of upsetting anybody that they end up with really generic concepts much like this video. Even then it's obviously not enough to keep people like you from being offended.
The reason MySpace became so unpopular was that it was too easy to make it look and run like crap. It was too customizable. Crappy gifs, obtrusive backgrounds, it was like Geocities all over again. People flocked to Facebook because it was fast, responsive, and clean. Now Facebook is in the same situation where it's just bogged down with a bunch of crap. Nonstop requests for crappy games, unintuitive interface, confusing privacy settings. As long as G+ keeps it clean and intuitive, is there a reason for people to switch?
People haven't been flocking away from GMail because some new hot service came out. Same with Google search. People don't WANT to move to a different service. They put time and energy into adding friends, uploading pictures, updating statuses, etc to just up and move unless there's a compelling reason to do so.
Are we fast becoming a race of needing a specific tool to do a specific job...?
I imagine if you give the key fob to a caveman, a medieval man, or a renaissance man, they would probably run into the same issue. Or they would just call you an evil wizard and try and murder you. Caveman would probably grunt as he tried to smash your head in with a stone.
I think people find it "creepy" because they've never done it. If it was implemented well on most computers, people would get so accustomed and welcome to it that it would be a huge step back for them to go back to manual input.
Word of mouth is probably the worst way to find out about a product.
I liked the Watchmen, so I probably won't be listening to your advice on games or movies.
Maybe you just have very different tastes from everybody else in this community. I usually like movies that are recommended to me by my friends, and often movies that other people on Slashdot like.
Yeah, it is the same situation. I was responding to the parent poster who said that this system will create a resurgence of indie developers taking risks and it will do no such thing. It will just be more of the same but on a different medium.
Yep, that's where a lot of money is at... and that's who iPhone games will be targeting. The grandparent poster was claiming that this would be a resurgence of indie, risk taking content and it's no such thing. It's just the creation of it's own mobile genre of games with their pros and cons.
I don't know if you've seen what's on the app store, but it's not games which take risks. There's a 1000 variations on Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and Bejeweled. I wouldn't call something like Fruit Ninja a risky proposition in terms of game design. Fact is, you need a fairly decent budget in order to make some really compelling content. iPhone games are fun for anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours, but I've played a lot of iPhone games and none have come close to being a truly great gaming experience. Low budgets and really low priced games just mean that people will be making short arcade games that can be played for 30 seconds at a time and will have a limited number of characters, backgrounds and animations because that looks to be the golden ratio of where it's worth it for a developer to make a $.99 game and for it to sell enough copies to people who want a game to play on the toilet.
I completely agree with you. I went to decent public schools in NY and I still didn't understand evolution until I took it upon myself to read more about it after college. The only thing that the teachers mentioned about evolution being true was the fossil record but that's only 1 of the many pieces of evidence that we have supporting evolutionary theory. They didn't teach us about the predictive nature of evolutionary theory or about many of the defects in existing animal species that are remnants of our biological history - such as the circuitous route that the laryngeal nerve takes in humans and especially so in giraffes. To hear it taught in school, you'd think only paleontologists are responsible for evolutionary theory.
There are people nostalgic about anything, but this is a very good move. Who knows how much paper and other resources is wasted printing those damn things every year.
They probably used aggregate data from the relationship status as opposed to wall status. You can't really misconstrue the message between "Joe is in a relationship with Jane" to "Joe set his relationship status to single"
you're getting this stuff for free. You watch YouTube videos for free. This stuff costs Google money to provide you this free service and it has been subsidizing it for you with it's vast amounts of money for years. Is it really that much to ask for you to either watch the commercial that it plays or if you don't want to then pay a couple bucks to continue watching it for free? Online consumers are some seriously spoiled people.
Exactly right. I'm currently learning linear algebra from Khan Academy because I never needed to take the classes in school, and the instruction and explanation is a lot better than in 95% of my high school and college courses. For one guy to go to the trouble of making hundreds of videos to teach people this stuff for free is incredible and people should be throwing more than 2 million bucks at him.
Your analogy isn't the same because poker is a game you're playing against other players, whereas most of the free-to-play games like farmville and over MMORPGs don't require you to compete directly with others for enjoyment in the game. Even so, pretty much every game has a system where you could buy better stuff to get ahead of the competition. With basketball, you couple spend a couple hundred bucks on shoes to gain some advantage. In paintball, billiards, golf, tennis, bowling, skateboarding, etc, you could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on premium equipment that is a lot better than the stuff you rent if you're just a weekend player instead of having a serious hobby or playing professionally. Same goes with farmville. If you want to just play for fun, go for it... if you want to take it seriously (although I don't know why you would), you could pay a bit more money.
I click on a lot of shortened links and I've never had it redirect to goatse.cx or worse, so I don't know what type of internet sites you're hanging around on.
If only my friends and relatives can be as creative with the remains of my corpse...
I'm planning on using your beach house, putting sunglasses on your face, and carrying your corpse around for the weekend, so people don't know I'm squatting.
Slashdot Mirror
seems like you want to diminish Google's achievement, for no real reason. Yeah, it's not registered users, but even if it was 25 million registered users, you'd still be able to claim "it's not much of a surprise that a new site by a popular brand would have a lot of [registered users] in the first month." Google can still claim to be the fastest growing social network that ever was, so it's still impressive.
Is it really the power "we" have or is it the power someone else has to rally the troops into a common outrage? If you didn't care about the scandal before hearing about it day after day after day, while the media just didn't want to let it go, made people more outraged as time went on. Of course, it could have swung the opposite way if MSM ignored it, swept it under the rug like they do lots of stories, and everybody would go about their day and everything for Murdoch would be business as usual.
So, I don't believe it was just general public outrage. I think someone at the top wanted this scandal to explode and made it so.
I think you're reading too much into it. Your knee-jerk reaction to how Linux is portrayed in this video is exactly why big companies can't do anything creative or interesting without people coming out of the woodwork to feign being offended.
I work in the commercial animation industry and there's a high likelihood that this video was thought of by an ad exec who has Microsoft as a client. The ad agency hired an outside commercial house to do the production work. I doubt anyone high enough at Microsoft even cared about this production to be in the development phase for it and just signed off on it after all was said and done.
There wasn't a large psychological study created to find the best way to get their message of Linux subversion out through this Trojan horse. It was just a couple of designers and creatives going "let's make the penguin cuter... Give him an igloo."
Big clients like Microsoft are the worst because the ad agency and the client are so scared of upsetting anybody that they end up with really generic concepts much like this video. Even then it's obviously not enough to keep people like you from being offended.
The reason MySpace became so unpopular was that it was too easy to make it look and run like crap. It was too customizable. Crappy gifs, obtrusive backgrounds, it was like Geocities all over again. People flocked to Facebook because it was fast, responsive, and clean. Now Facebook is in the same situation where it's just bogged down with a bunch of crap. Nonstop requests for crappy games, unintuitive interface, confusing privacy settings. As long as G+ keeps it clean and intuitive, is there a reason for people to switch?
People haven't been flocking away from GMail because some new hot service came out. Same with Google search. People don't WANT to move to a different service. They put time and energy into adding friends, uploading pictures, updating statuses, etc to just up and move unless there's a compelling reason to do so.
That was a fairly round-about way of saying "We don't negotiate with terrorists."
Are we fast becoming a race of needing a specific tool to do a specific job...?
I imagine if you give the key fob to a caveman, a medieval man, or a renaissance man, they would probably run into the same issue. Or they would just call you an evil wizard and try and murder you. Caveman would probably grunt as he tried to smash your head in with a stone.
As my userid # shows, I've been around /. for quite awhile... and people weren't reading TFA since the beginning.
I was working there last year. Why couldn't you visit then?!
I think people find it "creepy" because they've never done it. If it was implemented well on most computers, people would get so accustomed and welcome to it that it would be a huge step back for them to go back to manual input.
Yes, but would it be cheaper to print a page with a skin cartridge or with an ink cartridge?
As you said,
Word of mouth is probably the worst way to find out about a product.
I liked the Watchmen, so I probably won't be listening to your advice on games or movies.
Maybe you just have very different tastes from everybody else in this community. I usually like movies that are recommended to me by my friends, and often movies that other people on Slashdot like.
Yeah, it is the same situation. I was responding to the parent poster who said that this system will create a resurgence of indie developers taking risks and it will do no such thing. It will just be more of the same but on a different medium.
Yep, that's where a lot of money is at... and that's who iPhone games will be targeting. The grandparent poster was claiming that this would be a resurgence of indie, risk taking content and it's no such thing. It's just the creation of it's own mobile genre of games with their pros and cons.
I don't know if you've seen what's on the app store, but it's not games which take risks. There's a 1000 variations on Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and Bejeweled. I wouldn't call something like Fruit Ninja a risky proposition in terms of game design. Fact is, you need a fairly decent budget in order to make some really compelling content. iPhone games are fun for anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours, but I've played a lot of iPhone games and none have come close to being a truly great gaming experience. Low budgets and really low priced games just mean that people will be making short arcade games that can be played for 30 seconds at a time and will have a limited number of characters, backgrounds and animations because that looks to be the golden ratio of where it's worth it for a developer to make a $.99 game and for it to sell enough copies to people who want a game to play on the toilet.
I completely agree with you. I went to decent public schools in NY and I still didn't understand evolution until I took it upon myself to read more about it after college. The only thing that the teachers mentioned about evolution being true was the fossil record but that's only 1 of the many pieces of evidence that we have supporting evolutionary theory. They didn't teach us about the predictive nature of evolutionary theory or about many of the defects in existing animal species that are remnants of our biological history - such as the circuitous route that the laryngeal nerve takes in humans and especially so in giraffes. To hear it taught in school, you'd think only paleontologists are responsible for evolutionary theory.
I'm sure they could come up with better patents than some humans have.
There are people nostalgic about anything, but this is a very good move. Who knows how much paper and other resources is wasted printing those damn things every year.
They probably used aggregate data from the relationship status as opposed to wall status. You can't really misconstrue the message between "Joe is in a relationship with Jane" to "Joe set his relationship status to single"
you're getting this stuff for free. You watch YouTube videos for free. This stuff costs Google money to provide you this free service and it has been subsidizing it for you with it's vast amounts of money for years. Is it really that much to ask for you to either watch the commercial that it plays or if you don't want to then pay a couple bucks to continue watching it for free? Online consumers are some seriously spoiled people.
Exactly right. I'm currently learning linear algebra from Khan Academy because I never needed to take the classes in school, and the instruction and explanation is a lot better than in 95% of my high school and college courses. For one guy to go to the trouble of making hundreds of videos to teach people this stuff for free is incredible and people should be throwing more than 2 million bucks at him.
Your analogy isn't the same because poker is a game you're playing against other players, whereas most of the free-to-play games like farmville and over MMORPGs don't require you to compete directly with others for enjoyment in the game. Even so, pretty much every game has a system where you could buy better stuff to get ahead of the competition. With basketball, you couple spend a couple hundred bucks on shoes to gain some advantage. In paintball, billiards, golf, tennis, bowling, skateboarding, etc, you could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on premium equipment that is a lot better than the stuff you rent if you're just a weekend player instead of having a serious hobby or playing professionally. Same goes with farmville. If you want to just play for fun, go for it... if you want to take it seriously (although I don't know why you would), you could pay a bit more money.
I click on a lot of shortened links and I've never had it redirect to goatse.cx or worse, so I don't know what type of internet sites you're hanging around on.
I'm also disappointed that guns have almost completely crippled our skill of bashing things in the head with blunt objects.
Happiness is 10% more money than the guy next to you is getting.
If only my friends and relatives can be as creative with the remains of my corpse...
I'm planning on using your beach house, putting sunglasses on your face, and carrying your corpse around for the weekend, so people don't know I'm squatting.