Heh. Give them time, they'll find you:) They won't sue you for liking their stuff (hey, to each his own, eh?), after all -- millions upon millions of the teeming America pop culture crowd love the stuff. Once they read your post though and realize you must be downloading it (since you don't buy their stuff and you still love their stuff, surely you can't possibly resist the temptation to get it all for free?), you'll be hearing from one of their "settlement centers."
I'm not exactly "chomping at the bit" to get my hands on a 360 or a PS3 (and not just for political reasons). The beasts are too pricey. They yet again promise nothing new over the current generation except for whizzier-bangier graphics and high-definition output.
Have you priced a high-definition television lately? Aiming a game at HDTV targets just isn't worth it yet.
It just ain't worth it to me yet to upgrade. I still buy (used) Gamecube games because they're fun and because they look and sound great. I love my wireless controllers (go Wavebird), and I find the Gamecube controller design to be very comfortable in my hands (Katamari Damacy, on the PS2, wears my hands out after an hour or so, but I can play Eternal Darkness or Super Monkey Ball for hours with no discomfort).
On the specs front, I don't think we're getting a "Gamecube 1.5" here anyway. Not that specs are incredibly important, but I'm certain we can expect upgrades in CPU, GPU, sound, and memory. It will probably hold its own very well against the PS3 and 360, especially if Nintendo can provide an easy, fast, high-quality development environment for Revolution. If Nintendo's console is cheaper, too, they're going to wipe the walls with Microsoft and Sony.
You may not be so quick to judge the games so harshly once you watch some women bouncing around on those dance pads. Heh. Lovely plumage. Very bouncy, lovely plumage.
And actually, now that I'm on the subject of DDR anyway, it is not what's killing arcades. The insane prices and lack of good games is what's killing arcades. Where's a good Mortal Kombat-style fighter these days? A sci-fi racer like Stun Runner? How about some good pinball tables? There don't seem to be any good adventure games anymore in the arcades either.
It ain't the DDR. It's the (lack of) games, silly! And the "$1 per credit" thing doesn't help either.
Okay, then:) Ignoring for the moment that nobody held a gun to your head and made 'ya read the "fanboy flame wars," let's talk about those other CPUs. Feel free to link to reviews or benchmarks of these CPUs, doing useful stuff like hosting lots of dynamic web sites, acting as file servers for big-ass files, running huge databases, or other things such machines are used for. Be sure to include price tags, please. I am actually pretty curious how these other chips and architectures stand up against Intel and AMD. Obviously the UltraSparcs aren't going to be running many games, but they can encode video like the others, so that'd be an interesting benchmark.
It should already be clear that the 64-bit CPUs (the AMD ones at least) aren't glorified 486 upgrades. Last I checked amd64 doesn't even have that obnoxious x86 legacy memory model crap (640k, then 384k, then 1MB-900(ish)MB, then high-memory to 2GB, then spiffy-uber-high-memory to 4GB or higher), and just has flat memory access. Other improvements supposedly include a wider, faster bus between CPU, memory, and peripherals, and better/faster memory access.
Obviously with dual-core any SMP-capable OS (even good ol' Windows) picks up major performance gains since, well, there's two CPUs. Even with non-multithreaded apps, you get performance gains since the OS starts new processes (and migrates them as needed) to the most-idle CPU.
What do these other non-Intel/non-AMD CPUs bring to the table for spiffy performance?
For what it's worth, I'm not flaming; I'm actually curious:)
It doesn't exactly "dominate" that one category, either; the Intel CPUs barely edge ahead of the AMD CPUs on that benchmark; the difference is negligible.
Remind me again how AMD is scrambling? Seems to me they're holding onto their dominance in the performance market to me...
Re:I don't recieve less spam
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Oh, believe me, you still receive them, you just don't see them. Somebody's still paying for all that cruft to be transported safely to your filters.
Having said that, spam filters do make e-mail more pleasant these days:) My gmail account gobbles up thousands of spams per week.
Er, so she didn't like the place, but she bought stuff from them anyway? Ugh. Guess we know why the retailer is as big as it is — even people who dislike them shop there.
Yeah, and tack on that the guy needs a spellchecker and some help with grammar, too; he's an editor and he writes like that? "Then" instead of "than?" ARGH! Stop butchering my language!:)
Not exactly someone I'm going to spend any effort reading again.
Look at gamefaqs' main page. Sometimes the whole color scheme is changed to display a commercial.
That'd actually be IGN who's the worst offender -- anybody remember the day they went McIGN on us? The day I visited and saw the McDonald's logos and color schemes all over the place was the last day I ever browsed their site.
GameFAQs' ad presentation doesn't impact the content: written and contributed by unpaid users. You can try to astroturf there, but if you're posting a glowing review about a game people generally hate, you stick out like a sore thumb there. Many reviews are also written by idiots (though those are easy to pick out, though; just look for rantings and poor spelling/grammar), but it's very easy to get a finger on the pulse of public opinion about a game there.
I still have mine, with lots of good games for it. I think initially its price and its abysmal battery life killed it (though with today's NiMH rechargables, you can squeeze quite a few hours out of the "Lynx II" redesigned unit), but damn there were some great games on that platform.
Slime World was spectacular, and it was neat having an in-game help system that actually named an enemy "boogers." Heh.
Dude. You just totally snarfed most (if not all) of the ideas from Scott Adams' Tell Me Why I'm Stupid experiment. Either I owe you congratulations for the good troll, or condolences for how your brain turned out.
People who do this are jackasses. You do realize (and I have worked in telemarketing), that the people making the calls are rarely personally interested in the product or service they're selling right?
"Duh, no, I never thought of that." People who make assumptions like you did are also jackasses. Telemarketers who pester me don't get an "earful" of insults and rants; they are interrogated, squeezed for information that is useful to legally stop the telemarketing company from bothering me further. I worked as a telemarketer for three days as a result of a temp agency telling me (and a friend) that we were going to be doing "phone support." Two of the days were training. The first day I actually placed a call, I quit, and I found a better job.
I do complain to the right places. I do ask nicely to placed on "don't call" lists. Of course, I'm already on a don't call list that doesn't do much thanks to the damned legal maneuvering the telemarketing industry has managed.
My ex-wife was far better at torturing you telemarketing "jackasses." She had a knack for keeping them on the line for fifteen to twenty minutes. You claim the telemarketers don't care, don't listen, and put people on speakerphones for entertainment. She's gotten telemarketers to scream at her, call her names, and hang up on her. Sort of shatters that "smooth, cool, uncaring, invincible phone monkeys" image you portray.
I continue to believe if you work in an industry everyone hates, you deserve no sympathy or respect for doing so. Society dislikes this shit for a reason, and you deserve its wrath if you willfully participate in it.
You're delusional.
Nope. Read what I said until you understand it. Read harder, c'mon, I know you can do it. I don't spend money on hyped things because of the hype. In fact I'm pretty sure I haven't bought an Xbox 360, for instance. I'll double-check my room just to make sure, I am a "jackass" after all, but, eh, nope, I don't see one hiding here. There's no receipts for a pre-order. There's no burning urge inside me to go fight hordes of gamers for the prized system.
Do I buy stuff I need? Sure. I make informed decisions on what to buy, based on my actual needs, not marketing bullshit. You may think the market is defined solely by its advertising, but you're an ijit.
A product did not hit the shelves solely because of marketing and advertising. I do believe there was some production and research involved, too.
Well, it works on most people for those two reasons (and you're spot on about those).
Regarding point 1... I've somehow managed to train myself to use "generic" terms for common products when I ask for or talk about them; I ask for a "tissue" or a "napkin" instead of a "Kleenex." I offer people "soda" when they visit, instead of a "Coke" (I don't like carbonated stuff, so all the soda branding in the world will never squeeze a dime out of me). My lifestyle already limits what advertising I'm exposed to (never watch television or listen to the radio; running Firefox with AdBlock and the filterset.G auto-updater), so although I don't live under a rock and am "aware" of brands, a product having a specific vendor's name on it rarely influences my purchasing decisions.
Your second point is more interesting. I feel like I'm the exact opposite of that person you describe -- repetition seriously irritates me. A telemarketer who calls me once to sell me something gets an earful. One who calls back a second time (a day, week, or month later) earns my wrath (I politely squeeze as much information as I can from the caller, then go after the company who paid him to bother me again). I've made conscious decisions in the past to avoid buying stuff from companies whose ads I've encountered more than a few times.
I find it very convenient that in many cases, the vendor who advertises most is doing so because his products need the most help. Seek out the quieter vendor selling a similar product for a lower price, and you'll likely find a better product anyway.
Anyway, I never spend money on something everybody's getting hyped up about "just to see what the fuss is about." I've taken free samples or let others buy stuff for me (if it's that important to you that I try some spiffy brand of something, whip out that wallet then!), but never spent my own cash on such things. I believe many people do, I'm just not one of 'em. I think I understand why it's powerful -- because I haven't watched all the latest hit TV shows and reality series, people look at me like I'm an alien sometimes when they ask "so, what'd you think about last week's [bleh]?" and I reply "uh, what's [bleh]?" Fortunately that kind of "peer pressure" to fit in and watch what others watch just so they'll accept me stopped working on me back in grade school.
That's your choice, and you are welcome to continue to live in the 1990's for as long as you can. However given that every argueement other than the "Valve can take their ball and go home" one has been shot down, the only real reason you could have is that you just don't want to buy games online.
Meh. "Valve can take their ball and go home" hasn't been shot down; it's been (and is being) practiced by lots of folks. The "average" gamer will take the spoonful they're handed; people drove Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, and N-Sync to the top of the charts because that's what they were forcefed. Good sheeple:)
I have plenty of reason not to choose Steam for my games. Don't want their stuff snooping around on my system. Don't want their permission to play a game I've paid for.
It ain't "1990's." It's called "consumer choice." No subscriber-model apps for me, thanks. I like to own what I buy.
Do you know what would happen if Valve suddenly just upped and turned everyone off? The next day they'd be buried under class action suits and the week later they'd have turned the servers back on and potentially permentantly unlocked the software.
Heh! Wrong. First, their license agreement protects them from harm anyway -- they really can just shut you (and anyone else they want) off for any reason they choose. Read it again until you understand this. Second, you don't get buried under class action suits -- the whole point of a class action is to take a mountain of lawsuits (you do get buried under those) and combine the complainants into one big action. Third, such action would take years to resolve, not a week. They ain't gonna unlock all the software permanently because a lawsuit gets filed if they actually do shut things down overnight.
Do you know what would happen if Valve suddenly just fell off the surface of the Earth? The next day people would have posted the work arounds to setting up your clients to work permentantly without the servers.
...and they'd be criminally liable for violation of the DMCA. Sigh. Oh, and those workarounds already exist today anyway.
And you know what, neither of those things are ever going to happen. So worrying about them is about as productive as wondering what will become of the world when Bill Gates wakes up and realizes that the true path to happiness and heaven is in humility and a life of public service.
*chortle* Okay, that was funny. Still, they very well could happen. Companies are motivated by profit. The moment Steam becomes unprofitable and its products stop being profitable, they will vanish in lieu of something that is profitable. Corporate America's history is liberally peppered with instances of the consumer getting fucked when a company decided it wasn't profitable to keep a product alive anymore.
Welcome to 2005. Orwell was wrong.
Nah, he was just a few years off. Looks like we know which side you'll be on when the day finally comes, though...
It's funny you should mention that; I recall Pleasantville being a pretty good take on just that very notion -- two people introduce change into a culture that's entirely content to exist exactly as it is. People are afraid of color (not as in "black people," but actual colors, like "blue," "green," "orange," or any color that isn't black, white, or a shade of gray). People are afraid of roads that actually go somewhere instead of just running in a big circle around town. A guy gets really freaked out when coming home and calling "honey, I'm home!" doesn't trigger the events he's used to (wife comes in from kitchen, dinner's almost ready, etc.).
Your point is spot-on, though. People seem to thumb their noses these days at anything that isn't from the cookie-cutter game vendors. I'm an avid Microsoft-avoiding citizen (not consumer, bleh); I don't like their business practices and many of their products are junk. I will give the Xbox 360 its proper nod -- it looks like a competent piece of hardware. The games being demoed for it at the local Walmart are very impressive visually (Kameo impressed me a lot in more than just the visuals), but for the most part the games look to be yet more sports franchise updates and sequels. I still won't buy a 360 for assorted reasons:
It's too expensive. $400 for a console with a hard disk? C'mon, guys, for $320 I built a damned fast general-purpose PC (complete with wireless keyboard/mouse) for my parents a few weeks ago. Sure, a nice video card will drive up the price, but not much.
There ain't enough games I like. Kameo looks fun. The rest don't. Where are the RPGs? Where are the adventure titles? Where's a fighter title in the bunch (after all, a boobies fix is always good; I must admit I was always more, um, "tittilated" by Soul Calibur's Taki and Sophitia than by the DOA girls though;)? Give me a Castlevania game I can be sucked into for 40+ hours by its huge world and myriad secrets to unlock. Give me a compelling sci-fi story that lets me command a massive battle fleet from the command deck of a capital ship, that doesn't involve aliens (unless you've got a better reason than "we need an enemy to fight" to include them). Give me a world to make my own as I follow your story (Animal Crossing was a spiffy idea, for instance).
It's a Microsoft product. Yup, I'm one of those. Money-where-my-mouth-is and that sort of thing. I despise the company's strongarm tactics, anti-competitive practices, and monopolistic behavior. I think most of their products are worthless and buggy, and a few of them (Windows, anyone?) are actively destructive to the world of information technology (they've produced at least two generations of "average people" with very poor computing "habits" and expectations). One good piece of technology doesn't make up for a lifetime of bad products. If the Xbox 360's ultimate goal was to make Microsoft lots of money by being the best game system out there, it might get more consideration from me. But instead, their goal with it is to make lots of money with it while they crush their competition with marketing and FUD. And yeah, I'm annoyed with Sony right now, too, which makes me sad given how interested I am in Cell and what they can coax out of it for the PS3. I'd have bought a PS3 if they weren't MPAA/RIAA members, putting out DRMed crap, or putting out rootkits.
Now they'll be able to fix 1) and 2) there in the next few years. I'm sure at least some very compelling games (compelling to me, that is) will be produced for the Xbox 360 in the coming years. I know it won't cling to its $400 price tag for more than a year, and by year four of its life I'm sure I'll find them on the shelves at Target and Walmart for $200 or less. Item 3) won't ever be fixed, but that just means that I'll have to wait for the Xbox 360 to reach the end of its lifecycle, where I can go snarf a used cons
A valid judgment from a court is among the easiest things in the world to sell to a debt collection agency. Sell it for 80% or so of its face value, walk away with much of your money, and let the agency deal with collecting the judgment. Way easier to deal with than a bounced check.
Yeah, winning the popularity contest is always superior to having a valid position.
I've developed software, both GPL'd stuff I gave away and commercial software people paid for. I don't care how obnoxious someone is behaving; if they've got a complaint, I deal with it politely and professionally. Frustrated or not, I don't call my customers or users names.
I dunno, I seem to be doing pretty well running very popular karaoke shows on weeknights and weekends in a college town using an all-digital system entirely based on free software running on a notebook.
64-bit Ubuntu Linux starts things off, Enlightenment manages (very effectively) the desktop I run during the shows (part of the screen is shown on a big-screen TV so folks know who's singing and who's next; Firefox (!) does that display work), XMMS does a beautiful job (moving to amaroK for this purpose though; it's even nicer) playing both filler and karaoke music, crossfading smoothly between tracks and managing all the audio bits for me, SingIt runs the CDG karaoke lyrics, and my own home-grown Python code manages the singer rotations for me. Sure seems like more than Word and Excel to me.
Sure, I'm a "geek" and I know what I'm doing. No need for Windows on this machine.
Essentially out of the blue, two weeks ago my mother called and asked me if I could bring a Linux Live CD by next time I visit. She's sick of how slow her machine's getting. She's sick of constant root-level vulnerabilities being discovered and needing patching on her workstation. She knows all about not running spyware, about keeping the antivirus software updated, etc., but otherwise she's a polar opposite from me — she doesn't program, she just uses her computer for assorted "computery" tasks.
She's what you'd call a member of "the masses," and even she's ready to switch. It's not a question of "getting by" without Microsoft's software. It's a matter of people saying "holy shit this thing is so much faster / more stable / more useful without that Windows crap on it!" and realizing they've been fooled for years. I don't "get by" without Microsoft; I prosper without them.
And as an aside, plenty of specialized industrial software is still developed for and supported on platforms other than Windows. Show me a heart/vitals monitor in a hospital that runs anything from Microsoft on it. Visit HP's hardware testing labs and witness the Unix-driven measurement and control systems.
Back in the 2000-2001 timeframe, when I was the senior systems administrator for an office of over a hundred people (in four distinct groups if memory serves), my team (the IT group) decided to start using Bugzilla to track support issues for the deskside support of things and for our own internal issues and tasks. I spent a few days setting things up, getting my director's support for the project, and even preparing a presentation on the benefits of using it along with a quick "howto" for the office staff.
Big mistake. The other three groups' directors, without exception, started complaining loudly about the sudden appearance of an issue tracking system they hadn't been consulted about. It became a parade of the rediculous -- they actually brought in Peoplesoft, with a $100,000+ quote, to offer up their portal+issue tracking system. My solution was already in place and was already working (we showed how much it improved things in our team) but the other directors *still* wanted to "review other offerings" even if rolling one out meant disrupting productivity. Very Dilbert-like.
I had support from all the "users" (the "little people") in the office -- absolutely universal; people either liked it, or didn't care but liked *me* enough to support my solution. I participated in all the presentations by competing vendors, asking intelligent (but embarrassing for them) questions. I shot down every argument the directors offered up (because they were rediculous -- typical open-source bashing like "the name is stupid" and "well it's free so it must suck").
I'm convinced that to this day half the problem was the name. The other half of the problem was one director in particular, who always hated it when her group became more productive because of something *I* did versus something *she* came up with.
After a month of dealing with the bullshit, I finally got fed up and hatched a different idea. I briefly went over it with the boss, who cackled with glee at the idea, and went to work. This was all before Bugzilla was easily skinnable and themable; it took a few days to do it, but when I was done, it was successful:
I went through Bugzilla's code and removed all instances of the word "Bugzilla" and of the word "Bug," replacing the name with something more "in-house" sounding and replacing "bug" with "issue." I redesigned the main query page (because it was fugly back then), and gave the whole damned thing a nice, pleasant blue-ish theme with our company logo prominently featured on every page.
The directors never seemed to notice it was odd that I mysteriously and very suddenly quit backing Bugzilla, seemingly caving to their campaign to make "my" choice politically impossible to implement. When I said "you know what? You're right, let's forget about Bugzilla. I put up something different anyway for my team; you can use that to submit issues to us now, and you can use it for your own purposes if you want," they all smiled smugly and immediately started using... my re-skinned Bugzilla installation.
Others here have said this more succinctly, but I thought an example would help illustrate the point. No matter what your position (I had a lot of responsibility and decision-making power in that position), when you begin to encounter resistance from someone else in a position of greater power (or multiple someones), if you can convince them that your idea was really *their* idea, suddenly you'll find them supporting it and even helping to smack down others who resist the change. Enemies are helpful sometimes:)
Slashdot Mirror
"Big fucking deal. Sue me."
Heh. Give them time, they'll find you :) They won't sue you for liking their stuff (hey, to each his own, eh?), after all -- millions upon millions of the teeming America pop culture crowd love the stuff. Once they read your post though and realize you must be downloading it (since you don't buy their stuff and you still love their stuff, surely you can't possibly resist the temptation to get it all for free?), you'll be hearing from one of their "settlement centers."
Meh. I dunno about that.
I'm not exactly "chomping at the bit" to get my hands on a 360 or a PS3 (and not just for political reasons). The beasts are too pricey. They yet again promise nothing new over the current generation except for whizzier-bangier graphics and high-definition output.
Have you priced a high-definition television lately? Aiming a game at HDTV targets just isn't worth it yet.
It just ain't worth it to me yet to upgrade. I still buy (used) Gamecube games because they're fun and because they look and sound great. I love my wireless controllers (go Wavebird), and I find the Gamecube controller design to be very comfortable in my hands (Katamari Damacy, on the PS2, wears my hands out after an hour or so, but I can play Eternal Darkness or Super Monkey Ball for hours with no discomfort).
On the specs front, I don't think we're getting a "Gamecube 1.5" here anyway. Not that specs are incredibly important, but I'm certain we can expect upgrades in CPU, GPU, sound, and memory. It will probably hold its own very well against the PS3 and 360, especially if Nintendo can provide an easy, fast, high-quality development environment for Revolution. If Nintendo's console is cheaper, too, they're going to wipe the walls with Microsoft and Sony.
You may not be so quick to judge the games so harshly once you watch some women bouncing around on those dance pads. Heh. Lovely plumage. Very bouncy, lovely plumage.
And actually, now that I'm on the subject of DDR anyway, it is not what's killing arcades. The insane prices and lack of good games is what's killing arcades. Where's a good Mortal Kombat-style fighter these days? A sci-fi racer like Stun Runner? How about some good pinball tables? There don't seem to be any good adventure games anymore in the arcades either.
It ain't the DDR. It's the (lack of) games, silly! And the "$1 per credit" thing doesn't help either.
Okay, then :) Ignoring for the moment that nobody held a gun to your head and made 'ya read the "fanboy flame wars," let's talk about those other CPUs. Feel free to link to reviews or benchmarks of these CPUs, doing useful stuff like hosting lots of dynamic web sites, acting as file servers for big-ass files, running huge databases, or other things such machines are used for. Be sure to include price tags, please. I am actually pretty curious how these other chips and architectures stand up against Intel and AMD. Obviously the UltraSparcs aren't going to be running many games, but they can encode video like the others, so that'd be an interesting benchmark.
It should already be clear that the 64-bit CPUs (the AMD ones at least) aren't glorified 486 upgrades. Last I checked amd64 doesn't even have that obnoxious x86 legacy memory model crap (640k, then 384k, then 1MB-900(ish)MB, then high-memory to 2GB, then spiffy-uber-high-memory to 4GB or higher), and just has flat memory access. Other improvements supposedly include a wider, faster bus between CPU, memory, and peripherals, and better/faster memory access.
Obviously with dual-core any SMP-capable OS (even good ol' Windows) picks up major performance gains since, well, there's two CPUs. Even with non-multithreaded apps, you get performance gains since the OS starts new processes (and migrates them as needed) to the most-idle CPU.
What do these other non-Intel/non-AMD CPUs bring to the table for spiffy performance?
For what it's worth, I'm not flaming; I'm actually curious :)
It doesn't exactly "dominate" that one category, either; the Intel CPUs barely edge ahead of the AMD CPUs on that benchmark; the difference is negligible.
Remind me again how AMD is scrambling? Seems to me they're holding onto their dominance in the performance market to me...
Oh, believe me, you still receive them, you just don't see them. Somebody's still paying for all that cruft to be transported safely to your filters.
Having said that, spam filters do make e-mail more pleasant these days :) My gmail account gobbles up thousands of spams per week.
Er, so she didn't like the place, but she bought stuff from them anyway? Ugh. Guess we know why the retailer is as big as it is — even people who dislike them shop there.
...or maybe it was moderated "overrated" first, then someone identified it as flamebait?
:)
Occam's razor is a bitch sometimes, especially when it shoots down a conspiracy theory.
Yeah, and tack on that the guy needs a spellchecker and some help with grammar, too; he's an editor and he writes like that? "Then" instead of "than?" ARGH! Stop butchering my language! :)
Not exactly someone I'm going to spend any effort reading again.
Ungh! It makes my head hurt! :)
Look at gamefaqs' main page. Sometimes the whole color scheme is changed to display a commercial.
That'd actually be IGN who's the worst offender -- anybody remember the day they went McIGN on us? The day I visited and saw the McDonald's logos and color schemes all over the place was the last day I ever browsed their site.
GameFAQs' ad presentation doesn't impact the content: written and contributed by unpaid users. You can try to astroturf there, but if you're posting a glowing review about a game people generally hate, you stick out like a sore thumb there. Many reviews are also written by idiots (though those are easy to pick out, though; just look for rantings and poor spelling/grammar), but it's very easy to get a finger on the pulse of public opinion about a game there.
I still have mine, with lots of good games for it. I think initially its price and its abysmal battery life killed it (though with today's NiMH rechargables, you can squeeze quite a few hours out of the "Lynx II" redesigned unit), but damn there were some great games on that platform.
Slime World was spectacular, and it was neat having an in-game help system that actually named an enemy "boogers." Heh.
Oh, dear gawd, if only it were this easy to get rid of all the trolling AC's :)
And yeah, this article sucks. Hope the submitter at least paid the moderator a handsome sum for the ad.
Dude. You just totally snarfed most (if not all) of the ideas from Scott Adams' Tell Me Why I'm Stupid experiment. Either I owe you congratulations for the good troll, or condolences for how your brain turned out.
People who do this are jackasses. You do realize (and I have worked in telemarketing), that the people making the calls are rarely personally interested in the product or service they're selling right?
"Duh, no, I never thought of that." People who make assumptions like you did are also jackasses. Telemarketers who pester me don't get an "earful" of insults and rants; they are interrogated, squeezed for information that is useful to legally stop the telemarketing company from bothering me further. I worked as a telemarketer for three days as a result of a temp agency telling me (and a friend) that we were going to be doing "phone support." Two of the days were training. The first day I actually placed a call, I quit, and I found a better job.
I do complain to the right places. I do ask nicely to placed on "don't call" lists. Of course, I'm already on a don't call list that doesn't do much thanks to the damned legal maneuvering the telemarketing industry has managed.
My ex-wife was far better at torturing you telemarketing "jackasses." She had a knack for keeping them on the line for fifteen to twenty minutes. You claim the telemarketers don't care, don't listen, and put people on speakerphones for entertainment. She's gotten telemarketers to scream at her, call her names, and hang up on her. Sort of shatters that "smooth, cool, uncaring, invincible phone monkeys" image you portray.
I continue to believe if you work in an industry everyone hates, you deserve no sympathy or respect for doing so. Society dislikes this shit for a reason, and you deserve its wrath if you willfully participate in it.
You're delusional.
Nope. Read what I said until you understand it. Read harder, c'mon, I know you can do it. I don't spend money on hyped things because of the hype. In fact I'm pretty sure I haven't bought an Xbox 360, for instance. I'll double-check my room just to make sure, I am a "jackass" after all, but, eh, nope, I don't see one hiding here. There's no receipts for a pre-order. There's no burning urge inside me to go fight hordes of gamers for the prized system.
Do I buy stuff I need? Sure. I make informed decisions on what to buy, based on my actual needs, not marketing bullshit. You may think the market is defined solely by its advertising, but you're an ijit.
A product did not hit the shelves solely because of marketing and advertising. I do believe there was some production and research involved, too.
Meh. You ain't lookin' at the right people then :)
Well, it works on most people for those two reasons (and you're spot on about those).
Regarding point 1 ... I've somehow managed to train myself to use "generic" terms for common products when I ask for or talk about them; I ask for a "tissue" or a "napkin" instead of a "Kleenex." I offer people "soda" when they visit, instead of a "Coke" (I don't like carbonated stuff, so all the soda branding in the world will never squeeze a dime out of me). My lifestyle already limits what advertising I'm exposed to (never watch television or listen to the radio; running Firefox with AdBlock and the filterset.G auto-updater), so although I don't live under a rock and am "aware" of brands, a product having a specific vendor's name on it rarely influences my purchasing decisions.
Your second point is more interesting. I feel like I'm the exact opposite of that person you describe -- repetition seriously irritates me. A telemarketer who calls me once to sell me something gets an earful. One who calls back a second time (a day, week, or month later) earns my wrath (I politely squeeze as much information as I can from the caller, then go after the company who paid him to bother me again). I've made conscious decisions in the past to avoid buying stuff from companies whose ads I've encountered more than a few times.
I find it very convenient that in many cases, the vendor who advertises most is doing so because his products need the most help. Seek out the quieter vendor selling a similar product for a lower price, and you'll likely find a better product anyway.
Anyway, I never spend money on something everybody's getting hyped up about "just to see what the fuss is about." I've taken free samples or let others buy stuff for me (if it's that important to you that I try some spiffy brand of something, whip out that wallet then!), but never spent my own cash on such things. I believe many people do, I'm just not one of 'em. I think I understand why it's powerful -- because I haven't watched all the latest hit TV shows and reality series, people look at me like I'm an alien sometimes when they ask "so, what'd you think about last week's [bleh]?" and I reply "uh, what's [bleh]?" Fortunately that kind of "peer pressure" to fit in and watch what others watch just so they'll accept me stopped working on me back in grade school.
That's your choice, and you are welcome to continue to live in the 1990's for as long as you can. However given that every argueement other than the "Valve can take their ball and go home" one has been shot down, the only real reason you could have is that you just don't want to buy games online.
Meh. "Valve can take their ball and go home" hasn't been shot down; it's been (and is being) practiced by lots of folks. The "average" gamer will take the spoonful they're handed; people drove Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, and N-Sync to the top of the charts because that's what they were forcefed. Good sheeple :)
I have plenty of reason not to choose Steam for my games. Don't want their stuff snooping around on my system. Don't want their permission to play a game I've paid for.
It ain't "1990's." It's called "consumer choice." No subscriber-model apps for me, thanks. I like to own what I buy.
Do you know what would happen if Valve suddenly just upped and turned everyone off? The next day they'd be buried under class action suits and the week later they'd have turned the servers back on and potentially permentantly unlocked the software.
Heh! Wrong. First, their license agreement protects them from harm anyway -- they really can just shut you (and anyone else they want) off for any reason they choose. Read it again until you understand this. Second, you don't get buried under class action suits -- the whole point of a class action is to take a mountain of lawsuits (you do get buried under those) and combine the complainants into one big action. Third, such action would take years to resolve, not a week. They ain't gonna unlock all the software permanently because a lawsuit gets filed if they actually do shut things down overnight.
Do you know what would happen if Valve suddenly just fell off the surface of the Earth? The next day people would have posted the work arounds to setting up your clients to work permentantly without the servers.
...and they'd be criminally liable for violation of the DMCA. Sigh. Oh, and those workarounds already exist today anyway.
And you know what, neither of those things are ever going to happen. So worrying about them is about as productive as wondering what will become of the world when Bill Gates wakes up and realizes that the true path to happiness and heaven is in humility and a life of public service.
*chortle* Okay, that was funny. Still, they very well could happen. Companies are motivated by profit. The moment Steam becomes unprofitable and its products stop being profitable, they will vanish in lieu of something that is profitable. Corporate America's history is liberally peppered with instances of the consumer getting fucked when a company decided it wasn't profitable to keep a product alive anymore.
Welcome to 2005. Orwell was wrong.
Nah, he was just a few years off. Looks like we know which side you'll be on when the day finally comes, though...
It's funny you should mention that; I recall Pleasantville being a pretty good take on just that very notion -- two people introduce change into a culture that's entirely content to exist exactly as it is. People are afraid of color (not as in "black people," but actual colors, like "blue," "green," "orange," or any color that isn't black, white, or a shade of gray). People are afraid of roads that actually go somewhere instead of just running in a big circle around town. A guy gets really freaked out when coming home and calling "honey, I'm home!" doesn't trigger the events he's used to (wife comes in from kitchen, dinner's almost ready, etc.).
Your point is spot-on, though. People seem to thumb their noses these days at anything that isn't from the cookie-cutter game vendors. I'm an avid Microsoft-avoiding citizen (not consumer, bleh); I don't like their business practices and many of their products are junk. I will give the Xbox 360 its proper nod -- it looks like a competent piece of hardware. The games being demoed for it at the local Walmart are very impressive visually (Kameo impressed me a lot in more than just the visuals), but for the most part the games look to be yet more sports franchise updates and sequels. I still won't buy a 360 for assorted reasons:
Now they'll be able to fix 1) and 2) there in the next few years. I'm sure at least some very compelling games (compelling to me, that is) will be produced for the Xbox 360 in the coming years. I know it won't cling to its $400 price tag for more than a year, and by year four of its life I'm sure I'll find them on the shelves at Target and Walmart for $200 or less. Item 3) won't ever be fixed, but that just means that I'll have to wait for the Xbox 360 to reach the end of its lifecycle, where I can go snarf a used cons
A valid judgment from a court is among the easiest things in the world to sell to a debt collection agency. Sell it for 80% or so of its face value, walk away with much of your money, and let the agency deal with collecting the judgment. Way easier to deal with than a bounced check.
Probably because if you try to ban "religion" in this irritating country, bible thumpers from all over will emerge with torches and pitchforks.
Yeah, winning the popularity contest is always superior to having a valid position.
I've developed software, both GPL'd stuff I gave away and commercial software people paid for. I don't care how obnoxious someone is behaving; if they've got a complaint, I deal with it politely and professionally. Frustrated or not, I don't call my customers or users names.
I dunno, I seem to be doing pretty well running very popular karaoke shows on weeknights and weekends in a college town using an all-digital system entirely based on free software running on a notebook.
64-bit Ubuntu Linux starts things off, Enlightenment manages (very effectively) the desktop I run during the shows (part of the screen is shown on a big-screen TV so folks know who's singing and who's next; Firefox (!) does that display work), XMMS does a beautiful job (moving to amaroK for this purpose though; it's even nicer) playing both filler and karaoke music, crossfading smoothly between tracks and managing all the audio bits for me, SingIt runs the CDG karaoke lyrics, and my own home-grown Python code manages the singer rotations for me. Sure seems like more than Word and Excel to me.
Sure, I'm a "geek" and I know what I'm doing. No need for Windows on this machine.
Essentially out of the blue, two weeks ago my mother called and asked me if I could bring a Linux Live CD by next time I visit. She's sick of how slow her machine's getting. She's sick of constant root-level vulnerabilities being discovered and needing patching on her workstation. She knows all about not running spyware, about keeping the antivirus software updated, etc., but otherwise she's a polar opposite from me — she doesn't program, she just uses her computer for assorted "computery" tasks.
She's what you'd call a member of "the masses," and even she's ready to switch. It's not a question of "getting by" without Microsoft's software. It's a matter of people saying "holy shit this thing is so much faster / more stable / more useful without that Windows crap on it!" and realizing they've been fooled for years. I don't "get by" without Microsoft; I prosper without them.
And as an aside, plenty of specialized industrial software is still developed for and supported on platforms other than Windows. Show me a heart/vitals monitor in a hospital that runs anything from Microsoft on it. Visit HP's hardware testing labs and witness the Unix-driven measurement and control systems.
How about:
/wherever -maxdepth 1 -exec du -sm {} \; | sort -n
$ find
Replace "-sm" with "-sk" if you want kilobytes instead of megabytes. Total space consumed by the named directory appears at the bottom of the list.
Back in the 2000-2001 timeframe, when I was the senior systems administrator for an office of over a hundred people (in four distinct groups if memory serves), my team (the IT group) decided to start using Bugzilla to track support issues for the deskside support of things and for our own internal issues and tasks. I spent a few days setting things up, getting my director's support for the project, and even preparing a presentation on the benefits of using it along with a quick "howto" for the office staff.
... my re-skinned Bugzilla installation.
:)
Big mistake. The other three groups' directors, without exception, started complaining loudly about the sudden appearance of an issue tracking system they hadn't been consulted about. It became a parade of the rediculous -- they actually brought in Peoplesoft, with a $100,000+ quote, to offer up their portal+issue tracking system. My solution was already in place and was already working (we showed how much it improved things in our team) but the other directors *still* wanted to "review other offerings" even if rolling one out meant disrupting productivity. Very Dilbert-like.
I had support from all the "users" (the "little people") in the office -- absolutely universal; people either liked it, or didn't care but liked *me* enough to support my solution. I participated in all the presentations by competing vendors, asking intelligent (but embarrassing for them) questions. I shot down every argument the directors offered up (because they were rediculous -- typical open-source bashing like "the name is stupid" and "well it's free so it must suck").
I'm convinced that to this day half the problem was the name. The other half of the problem was one director in particular, who always hated it when her group became more productive because of something *I* did versus something *she* came up with.
After a month of dealing with the bullshit, I finally got fed up and hatched a different idea. I briefly went over it with the boss, who cackled with glee at the idea, and went to work. This was all before Bugzilla was easily skinnable and themable; it took a few days to do it, but when I was done, it was successful:
I went through Bugzilla's code and removed all instances of the word "Bugzilla" and of the word "Bug," replacing the name with something more "in-house" sounding and replacing "bug" with "issue." I redesigned the main query page (because it was fugly back then), and gave the whole damned thing a nice, pleasant blue-ish theme with our company logo prominently featured on every page.
The directors never seemed to notice it was odd that I mysteriously and very suddenly quit backing Bugzilla, seemingly caving to their campaign to make "my" choice politically impossible to implement. When I said "you know what? You're right, let's forget about Bugzilla. I put up something different anyway for my team; you can use that to submit issues to us now, and you can use it for your own purposes if you want," they all smiled smugly and immediately started using
Others here have said this more succinctly, but I thought an example would help illustrate the point. No matter what your position (I had a lot of responsibility and decision-making power in that position), when you begin to encounter resistance from someone else in a position of greater power (or multiple someones), if you can convince them that your idea was really *their* idea, suddenly you'll find them supporting it and even helping to smack down others who resist the change. Enemies are helpful sometimes