Making vague accusations about people's intelligence is intellectually equivalent to calling them idiots. The entire piece is the academic equivalent of an escalation of a "no, you're stupid" playground taunt. Frankly, he should be embarassed about the immaturity of the whole thing, and he likely will be when those who he considers to be his peers call him on it. You know you're an important troll when your trollish screeds get posted to the Slashdot front page.
Slashdotters and their technically-minded ilk will often hate these "clever" names because they don't appear to mean anything and "sound lame." But that's not the point: techno-geeks don't buy a product based on its name. If Dell were to sell PIII-500 systems called the Dell Piece-of-Sh*t for $49 we would buy them up real fast despite the name. Computer product names (and product names in general) are created for people whose purchase decisions are based at least partially on name. Names that just describe the product don't work very well for the general public either. Think about it: are you going to buy a "Chocolate, Peanut and Caramel Candy Bar" or are you going to buy a "Snickers"? These companies know that you're going to buy their technical product (if it's good) no matter what the name is. They want to inspire confidence in your mom when she's picking it out by giving it a name like "Performa" or whatever because she gets a feeling, if not the thought, that it's going to Perform.
These names aren't just chosen randomly. Their parts and their meanings and the feelings associated with them are taken into careful account. Copious market research is done. So I guess the point is all these comments about how much we hate this name or that name aren't really an indicator of anything besides individual taste: they don't really matter very much. The names are not designed for us. They're designed for PHBs and airhead shoppers. And they work.
In "Tomorrow Never Dies", when whatshisface, the bad guy, was having his worldwide conference call via a big screen display, he was clearly punching keys on the control unit completely at random. C'mon, at least make it believable.
You have to admit that watching anyone enter commands in emacs or vi can look suspiciously like punching in random keys, especially if he/she is good at it.
From what I've read about the new iMac cases, they (being whoever develops the plastics Apple uses for iMacs) have designed a plastic that performs emf shielding as well as previous iMac cases, without the need for additional metal shielding.
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It's too bad this old myth is still being perpetuated. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_and_initialis m the Wikipedia article for a full explanation.
Making vague accusations about people's intelligence is intellectually equivalent to calling them idiots. The entire piece is the academic equivalent of an escalation of a "no, you're stupid" playground taunt. Frankly, he should be embarassed about the immaturity of the whole thing, and he likely will be when those who he considers to be his peers call him on it. You know you're an important troll when your trollish screeds get posted to the Slashdot front page.
The last time I checked, the plural of corpus was corpora (or corpuses), not corpi. CORPI?! What was he thinking!
These names aren't just chosen randomly. Their parts and their meanings and the feelings associated with them are taken into careful account. Copious market research is done. So I guess the point is all these comments about how much we hate this name or that name aren't really an indicator of anything besides individual taste: they don't really matter very much. The names are not designed for us. They're designed for PHBs and airhead shoppers. And they work.
In "Tomorrow Never Dies", when whatshisface, the bad guy, was having his worldwide conference call via a big
screen display, he was clearly punching keys on the control unit completely at random. C'mon, at least make it
believable.
You have to admit that watching anyone enter commands in emacs or vi can look suspiciously like punching in random keys, especially if he/she is good at it.
From what I've read about the new iMac cases, they (being whoever develops the plastics Apple uses for iMacs) have designed a plastic that performs emf shielding as well as previous iMac cases, without the need for additional metal shielding.
What will they think of next?