You mean bundling IE did not kill Netscape, which at the time, was the dominant browser? Yes, it assuredly did.
That simply isn't true. Feel free to reference consent decrees and DOJ findings to demonstrate otherwise, but as someone who was paying attention when this all went down, I would say that bundling was a marginal reason why Netscape was killed by IE.
If you want to find the real killer of Netscape Navigator, look no further than Netscape themselves (maybe because they made their loot on their server product).
After a flurry of innovation, during a period when the browser was effectively "free" (though you had to click on the "educational" edition because they pretended that they could charge for it. It should be noted that Netscape effectively killed a burgeoning commercial market for browsers, and before it's ascent you could find vendors like SpyGlass actually selling a browser at the local electronics store), Netscape absolutely came to a standstill.
I would go further and say that Netscape's product actually became worse with each new version, all focus having left browsing, instead moving to HTML composition (remember when that was the big in-thing -- HTML WYSIWYG editors in your browser), email, and other non-browsing tasks.
Internet Explorer just kept getting better, and better, and better, while Netscape got worse and worse and worse, or at least not any better.
So consumers had no incentive to use another browser, because what they already had was arguably a better browser to begin with (early on several hardware vendors would preinstall Netscape, sometimes even hiding IE, though Microsoft -- which had way more pull in the time, would threaten their supplies of Windows if they didn't stop).
If IE only came as an install you could find on AOL discs, I would bet that the outcome would have been very similar.
A better backup solution needn't cost much, or even anything. Simply FTPing to your own home machine on occasion would have been a millionfold improvement (given the popularity metrics, I don't think this was like a staffed operation or anything. Just a guy or two)
Unfortunately this is the kind of thing you tend to learn from experience
Even a moment of thought would have made it abundantly clear that this was not a backup situation, and it certainly should not require loss to pound it into someone's head.
They were clearly way over their heads if they thought this protected them from anything other than a single drive failure. More likely they were entirely aware of the risk, but decided to wing it anyways.
A focused MS can produce like nothing else. Prepare to see gobs of features added to IE. It will be comparable to making Emacs look like Notepad when the dust settles.
There's this mythology that Microsoft is some all-powerful lumbering giant that, when it focuses, can conquer any market.
Haven't the advocates of this mythology been paying attention?
Microsoft has tried to conquer a number of markets, only to fail absolutely miserably, again retreating to the domains where they comfortably got the lead back when there was little competition, and have been coasting since.
And Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall, and they have been trying damn hard with IE 7 and now IE 8, but it's quite clear that the great minds who brought us IE 4 and 5 (yeah they were great at the time) died in a car crash or something, or they got dulled and their enthusiasm waxed, because it definitely isn't the same people making the turds of IE 7 and 8.
So seriously, when people do the "Oooh, it's like when Andreeson challenged Microsoft and Gates issues the internet memo!" thing, I just have to chuckle a bit. Yeah, that's just after Microsoft conquers the home theater, the game market, the portable audio market, the broadcast media market, the internet appliance market, the internet mail market, the search market, and on and on and on and on.
Let me guess, you're one of those fat chicks whose saggy tits no-one wants to look at anyway.
A lot of the anti breastfeeding nonsense does seem to come from a particular strata of women who seem to consider it...unfair competition?
I saw one unbelievable letter to the editor once decrying public breastfeeding under the guise that it "made children grow up too quickly" (meaning the children who were "forced" to witness a child being fed). There is so much so fundamentally wrong with that argument that it's hard to know where to start.
Still pre-beta, but I don't think that optical media will be the hard or the interesting part of HD video delivery much longer.
Agreed with you (just blogged about this today), however like the other poster I have to ask -- is that supposed to be HD? It almost looks like sub-YouTube. Is it scaling back the quality based upon demand?
I have given you my experience, which judging from other comments and talking to friends of have used CFL's share. Why is your single anecdote more powerful than the multiple anecdotes posted here? Why should your success completely obliterate any less successful result?
It isn't and it doesn't. Which is exactly the point.
Your anecdote, like mine, is entirely meaningless. Yet the fact that industry, environmental groups, and governments are all, around the world, very, very strongly behind CFLs might give you just a bit of a hint that maybe you might be an outlier. I suspect that they draw from just a few more samples than "angry people posting about their problems with CFL".
Yet you didn't present your case as a sample size of 1 -- you outright claimed that the average lifespan for CFLs is contrary to every single metric, all because you've had a poor experience with them.
and in that case the problem will be common in most homes and communities as power is just not a stable element.
Most homes? Sorry that you live in the third world, but no this isn't common in "most" homes. In fact the same problems that would cause short CFL life would also cause short electronics and fridge life.
You label me a hater but all I see from you is blind devotion to CFL's with zero acknowledgment there can every be any real world drawbacks
Blind devotion? Completely laughable, and clearly you're just kicking an illusion now.
Your logic in dismissing what is a valid question is surprisingly vitriolic, and equally incorrect.
It's "vitriolic" because it's replying to made-up bullshit that a certain subset of contrarians think is a-okay. These people intentionally spread misinformation, doing virtually everyone and everything a disservice in doing so, all to troll a little.
Yet, it deserves vitriol. And lots of it.
Simple economics (one of the truest metrics around) discounts the nonsense without any mental effort expended at all. Consider that it costs about $8000 to ship a 40 foot container if you're some guy and you want to ship a container (obviously things are quite a bit different if you're a big manufacturer, but let's work within the worst case). One of these has about 2300 cubic feet of space inside of it. Let's pretend that these are huge mofo lights, taking a whole cubic foot each (lots of packaging). So you've amortized the shipping cost to $3.47 per bulb (of course about 24 bulbs would fit in a cubic foot...but just play along). The $3.47 obviously pays not only for the fuel, but for a portion of the massive ship, insurance (those Somali pirates an all these days), the crew, the port fees, a little thing called profit...
But let's just pretend it's purely for fuel, and that the competitive light (incandescent) just HAPPENS to be made in a factory right beside your house, going to a distribution center on the other side of your house, and a retailer across from your house.
Assuming energy equivalency (which is a pretty fair assumption), if the bulb saves $3.47 then it has almost certainly offset that much energy already. Now let's give the submitter the benefit of the doubt and assume they were talking purely about fossil fuels in the energy grid -- in the US that accounts for over 66% of your energy supply, so let's say that it has to save at least $5.30.
Of course we know that the energy savings from a CFL is at least 10x that. And this is for a ridiculous scenario where I absurdly made the worst case (actually at least 50x worse than the worst case) for everything, and the ridiculous best case for the alternatives (which in reality probably didn't transit much less once it's in your hands, even if it were made in the US, which it isn't).
They *just work*, save a *lot* of power and hardly ever burn out.
Same experience here. Anyone who has reliability issues with CFL really needs to consult an electrician, because something is obviously wrong with their wiring.
In real world usage CFL's do not last as long as incandencents. From a number of years of using them for both indoor and outdoor lighting, I'd agree with a general figure of 2/3 the lifespan of incandencents (though in some specific fixtures I'm seeing lifespans of CFL's much lower than that, like 1/5 the lifespan).
There we have it, everyone: SuperKendall has schooled us on the real lifespan of CFLs.
Give me a break. Really. What the hell motivates you weirdo CFL haters? Just trying to be different or something?
My household has been entirely CFL -- aside from the fridge and stove lights and a flood light over the garage -- since the things started appearing at Ikea back around 2000. The reliability of them has been startling, and I can count on one hand the number I replaced because they burnt out. Actually I can count on ONE FINGER the number I have replaced because they burnt out. To be fair a couple of the really early 1st generation ones I replaced because the slow turn on time got to seem kind of silly as the technology progressed, so maybe it averaged up inaccurately given that I didn't give them a chance to die (being the oldest), but basically your claim is full of shit.
Of course, my anecdote doesn't prove anything. Maybe I'm just some crazed plant by the CFL emporium. Industry metrics, though, do, because you know they're all scientific-like created and all (and florescents aren't a new technology), and they quite soundly kick your stupid claim to the ground and pummel it repeatedly.
But hey -- you're real smart going against the grain. Good for you Superkendall. You tell em.
You're seriously trying to claim that the savings of CFLs are offset by shipment? Really?
I would go into the obvious math or the economics, but honestly this is just simply too stupid to even deserve further comment, except that it is a completely asinine, baseless statement that I'm sure will be picked up and repeated by a lot of ignorant contrarians.
Please, someone burn this fuckers house down. What an asshole.
As satisfying as this must have been to write, it was very poorly considered (unless you are outside of the reach of US law enforcement). Free speech doesn't include declaring a target and asking people to burn their house down.
And seriously, the whole internet witch hunt thing is seriously lame. I've seen too many of these moronic quests with a bunch of intertards chasing after often wrongly targeted people because they think it's giving them some mission in life.
The guy wrote a patent. Big shit. He was probably some working stiff working for the man filling out his TPS patent submission, and the company was only working within the idiotic allowances provided to them by the completely retarded patent system. As the old saying goes, don't hate the player, hate the game. It is entirely true.
Though this whole story has given me great joy remembering spending a couple of night trolling Worlds Apart or whatever they called it. It was remarkable how much you could piss people off standing between their virtual avatar and some crud avatar they are conversing with. I guess they really needed the eye contact.
A viral marketing campaign based upon a rage filled argument between two people ignorant of their respective fields and situations?
The first post got him a load of attention (basically every tech focuses meme type site out there was funneling to him), largely by people for whom this validated their fears / prejudices / biases.
It then devolved into a lynch mob mentality, as these things tend to do, with people virtually assaulting the school board and anyone named "Karen" at that school. The author had to create the conciliatory "I was wrong" backtrack article to cool things down.
A win for him anyways, because it's then attention x2!
Yeah, people get themselves attention through tactics like this (not saying that this guy did, but it's the feeling I do get). It's the Violent Acres tactic for attention whoring, with people amazingly in remarkable situations with the edge-cases of society with incredible frequency.
Apparently some folks won't believe a word the man says until they poke their own goddamn fingers into his open wounds.
I had no idea who he was when I read this latest article, and went in with zero preconceived notions (and I only read the article because I thought it was going to be about the usage costs in time).
I very quickly got the sense that someone was spinning some fiction by the completely over-the-top nature to it. I could be absolutely wrong, but it was the distinct feeling I got from it, like when a friend tells you an over the top story that exaggerates all of their biases and fears to epic levels, and while you know there's a nugget of truth in there someone, what you're hearing has little relation to it.
The story seemed to be perfectly set up for a knock down. The donate a computer to a "retard" thing gave me the same feeling for the same reason: That someone "well intentioned" thought they could setup a strawman (probably justifying the lies to themselves based upon the idea that somewhere out there is an ignorant asshole, so why not just adopt them into your own fiction because it's "for good") to get a little attention. Maybe the author of this piece is nothing like that, but you always have to be weary of it because they're usually the ones who spin the stories fantastical enough to get the big attention.
no net shyster is gonna pull the wool over their eyes
The whole medium has been destroyed by liars who always have some mediocre, self-serving justification for their lies. No, I despise liars in any form.
A flawed but well-meaning individual trying to get hardware to kids in his area who can use it, and spread the word about free software in the process.
So if he completely made up this entire story, is that okay with you? (Allowing that it could be entirely true, but I'm just curious) Do the ends justify the means?
I'm not a religious person, but the old saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" conveys a lot of truth. The world is full of people justifying what they do based upon the idea that it's for some greater good.
Found it, and it's the SAME GUY. Honestly when the correlation clicked in my mind I had no idea at all that it was the same guy, but somehow the hashing algorithm was colliding the two articles.
As one aside -- this story reminds me, somehow, of the guy who took donated computers and prepped them for needy kids or something, and some purported donor complained when he found out his donation was going to a "retard". My fiction senses are giving me the same vibrations.
But I can't find that computer donation one. Anyone have a link to it if you remember?
This guy is getting a tonne of publicity for this (and apparently he is well versed in the art of getting attention for his projects in this manner), based upon nothing verifiable.
Maybe I'm just too internet shellshocked to believe anything any more, but it reeks of being a complete fabrication, in an era when Lying on the Internet is considered perfectly okay so long as you know to say "Ha ha! All a joke!" if caught, or perhaps the classic "This was just an example composite of various situations!".
I could be entirely wrong, but it all seems like a terribly thin ruse to me, with a ridiculous, one dimensional strawman (or women in this case) put up and then viciously knocked down. On the resulting torrent of perhaps gullible internet vigilantes, a hastily written cool-down appeared to, perhaps, try to divert them before they uncover the fiction of this (if it is fiction. My bets are that it is, but that's an uninformed opinion).
10x size and 5x speed are objective measures. Your satisfaction is subjective and personally defined.
Absolutely. The ad was saying that the iPhone is "really fast", in some completely unstated, ambiguous way, while showing someone doing some stuff. Do I expect to do what the person in the ad could do? Well firstly they'd have to put disclaimers saying "transfer rates depend upon your carrier/WiFi, network congestion, and the speed of the serving party", whether content is cached, the size of the PDF, the number and type of images, and so on and so forth. There was zero objective anything provided by that Apple ad, and instead it's people extrapolating out.
Sometimes you're in a hurry, and you know what you want. I hate wasting my time waiting for my computer and other devices.
You'll get no disagreement. I wish everything was instant. But I appreciate that it isn't, and in ads it is sadly the norm to gloss over....reality.
Correct as you are, I can't help but giggle at the irony:P
I wrote it with the complete awareness that it made me look like an asshole, but I'm willing to take that insult. I am also quite the dink in many of my comments, so I'm not claiming to be above it -- my constructive criticism was meant to stand on its own.
"Uh" just always starts off a message on the wrong foot. It is generally used as compacted, less obvious replacement for "OMG! You are so stupid and you don't even see it. [Looks around] Is everyone with me here?" Simply removing that single word has an amazing ability to turn a combative , derisive reply into actual debate.
Imagine this reply if it were started with "Uh".
"Uh I wrote it with the complete awareness that it made me look like an asshole"
The really rich thing is that people are defending Apple's advertising by comparing it to ads from a Hamburger Stand.
I'm not defending Apple's ad. I'm also curious what makes it "really rich" comparing it with a "hamburger stand" (if a worldwide network of food retailers can be called that...) -- false or overstated advertising is the *norm*.
Show me a resort ad that doesn't show a couple with seemingly kilometers of empty beach to themselves (versus the reality that it's a tourist trap full of thousands upon thousands of people just like you).
Ads *should* be honest and real. But they aren't, and people somewaht get use to that.
Slashdot Mirror
That simply isn't true. Feel free to reference consent decrees and DOJ findings to demonstrate otherwise, but as someone who was paying attention when this all went down, I would say that bundling was a marginal reason why Netscape was killed by IE.
If you want to find the real killer of Netscape Navigator, look no further than Netscape themselves (maybe because they made their loot on their server product).
After a flurry of innovation, during a period when the browser was effectively "free" (though you had to click on the "educational" edition because they pretended that they could charge for it. It should be noted that Netscape effectively killed a burgeoning commercial market for browsers, and before it's ascent you could find vendors like SpyGlass actually selling a browser at the local electronics store), Netscape absolutely came to a standstill.
I would go further and say that Netscape's product actually became worse with each new version, all focus having left browsing, instead moving to HTML composition (remember when that was the big in-thing -- HTML WYSIWYG editors in your browser), email, and other non-browsing tasks.
Internet Explorer just kept getting better, and better, and better, while Netscape got worse and worse and worse, or at least not any better.
So consumers had no incentive to use another browser, because what they already had was arguably a better browser to begin with (early on several hardware vendors would preinstall Netscape, sometimes even hiding IE, though Microsoft -- which had way more pull in the time, would threaten their supplies of Windows if they didn't stop).
If IE only came as an install you could find on AOL discs, I would bet that the outcome would have been very similar.
True enough. Indeed, the page in question actually validates as XHTML Transitional which is something that is remarkably rare and shows a concern for craftsmanship.
Many, many ASP.NET sites use URL rewriting. http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/The_Best_And_Worst_of_2008/ goes to an aspx page. http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/Could_Microsoft_be_the_Patron_Saint_of_Firefox/ goes to the same aspx page, albeit with different parameters.
ASP.NET MVC brings a nice model, but it certainly wasn't first to rest-ful URL rewriting.
A better backup solution needn't cost much, or even anything. Simply FTPing to your own home machine on occasion would have been a millionfold improvement (given the popularity metrics, I don't think this was like a staffed operation or anything. Just a guy or two)
Even a moment of thought would have made it abundantly clear that this was not a backup situation, and it certainly should not require loss to pound it into someone's head.
They were clearly way over their heads if they thought this protected them from anything other than a single drive failure. More likely they were entirely aware of the risk, but decided to wing it anyways.
There's this mythology that Microsoft is some all-powerful lumbering giant that, when it focuses, can conquer any market.
Haven't the advocates of this mythology been paying attention?
Microsoft has tried to conquer a number of markets, only to fail absolutely miserably, again retreating to the domains where they comfortably got the lead back when there was little competition, and have been coasting since.
And Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall, and they have been trying damn hard with IE 7 and now IE 8, but it's quite clear that the great minds who brought us IE 4 and 5 (yeah they were great at the time) died in a car crash or something, or they got dulled and their enthusiasm waxed, because it definitely isn't the same people making the turds of IE 7 and 8.
So seriously, when people do the "Oooh, it's like when Andreeson challenged Microsoft and Gates issues the internet memo!" thing, I just have to chuckle a bit. Yeah, that's just after Microsoft conquers the home theater, the game market, the portable audio market, the broadcast media market, the internet appliance market, the internet mail market, the search market, and on and on and on and on.
A lot of the anti breastfeeding nonsense does seem to come from a particular strata of women who seem to consider it...unfair competition?
I saw one unbelievable letter to the editor once decrying public breastfeeding under the guise that it "made children grow up too quickly" (meaning the children who were "forced" to witness a child being fed). There is so much so fundamentally wrong with that argument that it's hard to know where to start.
Agreed with you (just blogged about this today), however like the other poster I have to ask -- is that supposed to be HD? It almost looks like sub-YouTube. Is it scaling back the quality based upon demand?
Too funny.
These people are beyond hope. And by these people, I mean you and morons like you.
It isn't and it doesn't. Which is exactly the point.
Your anecdote, like mine, is entirely meaningless. Yet the fact that industry, environmental groups, and governments are all, around the world, very, very strongly behind CFLs might give you just a bit of a hint that maybe you might be an outlier. I suspect that they draw from just a few more samples than "angry people posting about their problems with CFL".
Yet you didn't present your case as a sample size of 1 -- you outright claimed that the average lifespan for CFLs is contrary to every single metric, all because you've had a poor experience with them.
Most homes? Sorry that you live in the third world, but no this isn't common in "most" homes. In fact the same problems that would cause short CFL life would also cause short electronics and fridge life.
Blind devotion? Completely laughable, and clearly you're just kicking an illusion now.
It's "vitriolic" because it's replying to made-up bullshit that a certain subset of contrarians think is a-okay. These people intentionally spread misinformation, doing virtually everyone and everything a disservice in doing so, all to troll a little.
Yet, it deserves vitriol. And lots of it.
Simple economics (one of the truest metrics around) discounts the nonsense without any mental effort expended at all. Consider that it costs about $8000 to ship a 40 foot container if you're some guy and you want to ship a container (obviously things are quite a bit different if you're a big manufacturer, but let's work within the worst case). One of these has about 2300 cubic feet of space inside of it. Let's pretend that these are huge mofo lights, taking a whole cubic foot each (lots of packaging). So you've amortized the shipping cost to $3.47 per bulb (of course about 24 bulbs would fit in a cubic foot...but just play along). The $3.47 obviously pays not only for the fuel, but for a portion of the massive ship, insurance (those Somali pirates an all these days), the crew, the port fees, a little thing called profit...
But let's just pretend it's purely for fuel, and that the competitive light (incandescent) just HAPPENS to be made in a factory right beside your house, going to a distribution center on the other side of your house, and a retailer across from your house.
Assuming energy equivalency (which is a pretty fair assumption), if the bulb saves $3.47 then it has almost certainly offset that much energy already. Now let's give the submitter the benefit of the doubt and assume they were talking purely about fossil fuels in the energy grid -- in the US that accounts for over 66% of your energy supply, so let's say that it has to save at least $5.30.
Of course we know that the energy savings from a CFL is at least 10x that. And this is for a ridiculous scenario where I absurdly made the worst case (actually at least 50x worse than the worst case) for everything, and the ridiculous best case for the alternatives (which in reality probably didn't transit much less once it's in your hands, even if it were made in the US, which it isn't).
Same experience here. Anyone who has reliability issues with CFL really needs to consult an electrician, because something is obviously wrong with their wiring.
There we have it, everyone: SuperKendall has schooled us on the real lifespan of CFLs.
Give me a break. Really. What the hell motivates you weirdo CFL haters? Just trying to be different or something?
My household has been entirely CFL -- aside from the fridge and stove lights and a flood light over the garage -- since the things started appearing at Ikea back around 2000. The reliability of them has been startling, and I can count on one hand the number I replaced because they burnt out. Actually I can count on ONE FINGER the number I have replaced because they burnt out. To be fair a couple of the really early 1st generation ones I replaced because the slow turn on time got to seem kind of silly as the technology progressed, so maybe it averaged up inaccurately given that I didn't give them a chance to die (being the oldest), but basically your claim is full of shit.
Of course, my anecdote doesn't prove anything. Maybe I'm just some crazed plant by the CFL emporium. Industry metrics, though, do, because you know they're all scientific-like created and all (and florescents aren't a new technology), and they quite soundly kick your stupid claim to the ground and pummel it repeatedly.
But hey -- you're real smart going against the grain. Good for you Superkendall. You tell em.
You're seriously trying to claim that the savings of CFLs are offset by shipment? Really?
I would go into the obvious math or the economics, but honestly this is just simply too stupid to even deserve further comment, except that it is a completely asinine, baseless statement that I'm sure will be picked up and repeated by a lot of ignorant contrarians.
As satisfying as this must have been to write, it was very poorly considered (unless you are outside of the reach of US law enforcement). Free speech doesn't include declaring a target and asking people to burn their house down.
And seriously, the whole internet witch hunt thing is seriously lame. I've seen too many of these moronic quests with a bunch of intertards chasing after often wrongly targeted people because they think it's giving them some mission in life.
The guy wrote a patent. Big shit. He was probably some working stiff working for the man filling out his TPS patent submission, and the company was only working within the idiotic allowances provided to them by the completely retarded patent system. As the old saying goes, don't hate the player, hate the game. It is entirely true.
Though this whole story has given me great joy remembering spending a couple of night trolling Worlds Apart or whatever they called it. It was remarkable how much you could piss people off standing between their virtual avatar and some crud avatar they are conversing with. I guess they really needed the eye contact.
The first post got him a load of attention (basically every tech focuses meme type site out there was funneling to him), largely by people for whom this validated their fears / prejudices / biases.
It then devolved into a lynch mob mentality, as these things tend to do, with people virtually assaulting the school board and anyone named "Karen" at that school. The author had to create the conciliatory "I was wrong" backtrack article to cool things down.
A win for him anyways, because it's then attention x2!
Yeah, people get themselves attention through tactics like this (not saying that this guy did, but it's the feeling I do get). It's the Violent Acres tactic for attention whoring, with people amazingly in remarkable situations with the edge-cases of society with incredible frequency.
I had no idea who he was when I read this latest article, and went in with zero preconceived notions (and I only read the article because I thought it was going to be about the usage costs in time).
I very quickly got the sense that someone was spinning some fiction by the completely over-the-top nature to it. I could be absolutely wrong, but it was the distinct feeling I got from it, like when a friend tells you an over the top story that exaggerates all of their biases and fears to epic levels, and while you know there's a nugget of truth in there someone, what you're hearing has little relation to it.
The story seemed to be perfectly set up for a knock down. The donate a computer to a "retard" thing gave me the same feeling for the same reason: That someone "well intentioned" thought they could setup a strawman (probably justifying the lies to themselves based upon the idea that somewhere out there is an ignorant asshole, so why not just adopt them into your own fiction because it's "for good") to get a little attention. Maybe the author of this piece is nothing like that, but you always have to be weary of it because they're usually the ones who spin the stories fantastical enough to get the big attention.
The whole medium has been destroyed by liars who always have some mediocre, self-serving justification for their lies. No, I despise liars in any form.
So if he completely made up this entire story, is that okay with you? (Allowing that it could be entirely true, but I'm just curious) Do the ends justify the means?
I'm not a religious person, but the old saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" conveys a lot of truth. The world is full of people justifying what they do based upon the idea that it's for some greater good.
Found it, and it's the SAME GUY. Honestly when the correlation clicked in my mind I had no idea at all that it was the same guy, but somehow the hashing algorithm was colliding the two articles.
http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/09/wasted-on-idiot.html
Wow.
As one aside -- this story reminds me, somehow, of the guy who took donated computers and prepped them for needy kids or something, and some purported donor complained when he found out his donation was going to a "retard". My fiction senses are giving me the same vibrations.
But I can't find that computer donation one. Anyone have a link to it if you remember?
This guy is getting a tonne of publicity for this (and apparently he is well versed in the art of getting attention for his projects in this manner), based upon nothing verifiable.
Maybe I'm just too internet shellshocked to believe anything any more, but it reeks of being a complete fabrication, in an era when Lying on the Internet is considered perfectly okay so long as you know to say "Ha ha! All a joke!" if caught, or perhaps the classic "This was just an example composite of various situations!".
I could be entirely wrong, but it all seems like a terribly thin ruse to me, with a ridiculous, one dimensional strawman (or women in this case) put up and then viciously knocked down. On the resulting torrent of perhaps gullible internet vigilantes, a hastily written cool-down appeared to, perhaps, try to divert them before they uncover the fiction of this (if it is fiction. My bets are that it is, but that's an uninformed opinion).
Then again, maybe I'm just too skeptical.
Good summary
Aw, isn't that adorable. Someone got some mod points and they decided to spend them all on me. Thanks.
Absolutely. The ad was saying that the iPhone is "really fast", in some completely unstated, ambiguous way, while showing someone doing some stuff. Do I expect to do what the person in the ad could do? Well firstly they'd have to put disclaimers saying "transfer rates depend upon your carrier/WiFi, network congestion, and the speed of the serving party", whether content is cached, the size of the PDF, the number and type of images, and so on and so forth. There was zero objective anything provided by that Apple ad, and instead it's people extrapolating out.
You'll get no disagreement. I wish everything was instant. But I appreciate that it isn't, and in ads it is sadly the norm to gloss over....reality.
I wrote it with the complete awareness that it made me look like an asshole, but I'm willing to take that insult. I am also quite the dink in many of my comments, so I'm not claiming to be above it -- my constructive criticism was meant to stand on its own.
"Uh" just always starts off a message on the wrong foot. It is generally used as compacted, less obvious replacement for "OMG! You are so stupid and you don't even see it. [Looks around] Is everyone with me here?" Simply removing that single word has an amazing ability to turn a combative , derisive reply into actual debate.
Imagine this reply if it were started with "Uh".
"Uh I wrote it with the complete awareness that it made me look like an asshole"
I'm not defending Apple's ad. I'm also curious what makes it "really rich" comparing it with a "hamburger stand" (if a worldwide network of food retailers can be called that...) -- false or overstated advertising is the *norm*.
Show me a resort ad that doesn't show a couple with seemingly kilometers of empty beach to themselves (versus the reality that it's a tourist trap full of thousands upon thousands of people just like you).
Ads *should* be honest and real. But they aren't, and people somewaht get use to that.