People mostly buy products so they can feel a certain way about themselves, or else to demand that others feel about them the way the product should dictate. The guy buying the iPhone wants people to just shit at how cool and totally ahead of everyone he is.
Very little of consumer decisions are based on analyzing costs and benefits.
Sorry, but I didn't see a lot to this list besides bashing the big guys.
Two Apple entries? I'll kinda give Leopard, because it has made a mockery of Apple's long-standing claims about not needing to be constantly patched. But, the iPhone? Who bought an iPhone and was pissed about it?
Vista, at the top, I concede, but I think we all saw that coming after they ditched WinFS.
Social networking? Couldn't we have joined the chorus when everyone else said it sucked, instead of two years too late?
Besides, the most disappointing product of each year is some kid's Ajax-driven killer CMS that never makes it past a week of coding.
I don't mean just in terms of the rational/irrational market. Also I mean in terms of the fact that stocks aren't dissimilar from MMORPGs in that a core of people recruit new buyers, and once the success gives out they fall apart along similar lines.
Watch highly touted stocks when they hit a wall. A lot of stocks are bouyed by the push to love them and nothing else. Once the push stops, the bottom falls out.
from inception to a point where the client runs out of funding
Isn't taking every penny they have the entire point? Please, no lectures about sustainability -- we all know that most businesses run themselves into the ground pretty fast anyhow. It's better to get their money from them while they have it than during the 20 years they spend settling their debts for pennies on the dollar.
Curtailing civil liberties is the hallmark of reactionary conservativism -- a brand of conservative America never gave power to before Nixon decide the GOP should adopt the KKK once the Democrats fumbled the racist vote in the south. That was an overt choice by the Republican Party machine, and one that was reinforced by Reagan and Bush 2. The religious right hasn't helped the cause either (Schaivo, anyone?)
"spends tax money like crazy" = Reagan, also.
In fact, Bush's father tried to torpedo the deficit spending of Reaganomics when he called it "voodoo economics" during the GOP debates. Obviously Bush 2 learned a critical lesson that his father missed: Americans prefer childish spending and childish tax cutting.
Dude, if you want a real conservative government, vote Democrat. Bill Clinton and Jack Kennedy did more for the conservative cause than any of the jokers the GOP has pimped since they got blown off the map in 1932.
Why is the stuff from 2001-2007 off the board? It is reasonable to include it if I think it was deliberate and reflects the ongoing purpose of the GOP.
Most of the current GOP fun traces back to Reagan. Especially the absolutely criminal idea of systematic deficit spending. The current alignment of the GOP with southern racists goes back to Nixon. And the fealty of the GOP to big business goes back to the robber barons.
In the entire history of the US there have only been two Republican presidents who weren't a net loss for America: Teddy Roosevelt and Ike. And even there, TR got us way too deep into the international system and Ike wanted to kill the civil rights movement.
And the GOP will get worse, because it is now more reactionary than conservative. The idea that a guy like Ron Paul can save the GOP from itself ignores what the GOP has become since Nixon. The GOP has incorporated too many nativists, too many expansionists and too many activist Christians. And the old TR expansionist wing of the GOP never went away.
In the past the GOP wanted to limit government. But, Nixon brought in the southern wing of the Dems in the late 60s and now the GOP is reactionary, not conservative because that group of people never was true conservative -- they're just assholes. They pick on brain dead people (Terry Schaivo?), they hate on all non-whites, they've run the government itself into the dirt and they want to bomb the world with no real plan.
And once Reagan taught the GOP to be financially irresponsible, the GOP ceased to serve any useful purpose.
Dude, seriously, haven't you ever considered why any group of sane, intelligent people would do the things the GOP has done lately?
Look at Hurricane Katrina. Only a batshit crazy zealot would cripple FEMA with small government ideology. Yet, that's what the Bushies did.
Look at the current mortgage crisis, which requires something along the lines of a broad buy-out of loans by the government, accompanied with relentless and thorough prosecutions of the people who defrauded investors by repackaging all this bad debt as investment-grade vehicles.
And keep in mind all of this was made many times worse when the Fed finally gave in to the big babies on Wall Street and cut interest rates. That sent the dollar into a nose dive, and will make life a lot harder for all of us (consider than gas would be $1.20 a gallon cheaper if the dollar were as strong as it was under Clinton).
The Republican Party is systematically gutting the usefulness of the government.
The only useful reason for the GOP to even keep the government alive is giving military cover to corporate actions in foreign countries. It's a joke.
Have some dignity and at least register independent.
Why can't the Ron Paul supporters... all 3,000 of them apparently... just accept that the GOP isn't broken and doesn't need saving? The GOP is doing exactly what it was built to do.
PDF as an idea isn't bad. Sure, a lot of forms need to be preserved as close to the original as possible.
But, PDFs are heavily overused for information that can be better transmitted in more compact forms. For example, how many websites have documents that ought to be in a wiki format (not necessarily editable by the public) and instead are just saved as a series of gigantic PDF files? Some companies are absolutely addicted to putting everything in PDF.
The majority of people I know are not fond of PDF.
To the issue of your anonymity being shattered, puh-lease. If you post information in a public forum such as IMDB and it can be correlated to information from MySpace, it wasn't a giant leap into your privacy. It was just gathering already public information. What's the big deal?
You choose to post that stuff where it could be publicly viewed. The fact that it lines up with data from Netflix only proves that NF did in fact provide a quality dataset. Big deal.
The problem with Anakin is that you never have a moment where you think he ever could be a good guy. Even at his very best he is a brash and overbearing attention whore.
Little kid version of Annie was so brash and such a jerk that putting his mackin' on a girl in her late teens when he was nine struck him as within his reach. Use the Force... to get laid, in three easy steps. Just read Little Annie's Guide to Pickin' Up Chicks (With Your Newfound Psychic Powers).
It really took three films to figure out that Anakin was a douchebag?
"it's just another version of the reworked cantina scene from Episode IV where he decided he didn't like Han Solo being ruthless enough to kill Greedo."
Which, BTW, can be argued as another point where Star Wars jumped the shark.
I don't feel as bad about Han being ruined as I do Vader, because Han Solo was much better repackaged and renamed "Malcolm Reynolds", who shoots an impressive tally of three unarmed men, including one surrendering and another begging for help, in a single film. Also, I find Mal's wookie (Gina Torres) much more appealing than Han's wookie. Not that I haven't fantasized -- obviously both flavors are good, just not on the same day.
I dunno. It almost strikes me that Lucas was ashamed of his original creation. That he didn't like its rough edges and flawed heroes. So, instead, he made the prequels in a pristine universe where no more than one character (Anakin) is flawed.
And there's where Lucas really screwed up. What made Ep 4,5,6 so great was that the heroes were flawed. Luke struggled with the Dark Side. Anakin just read the brochure for the Light Side, shrugged, and then waltzed over to the Dark Side without much conflict.
Han was a lovable rogue who placed no value on anyone beyond his circle of close friends (a flaw he pays dearly for when he visits Lando).
Leia is a friggin ice queen who can only be tamed by the rogue.
Even Obi-Wan is an old coot who won't give on his daffy prophecy -- even at the price of further strengthening the Dark Side beyond the mess he already created with Anakin.
Those are all very human flaws. Compare this to Ep 1,2,3 where the worst flaws are what? Padme loves too much. Quigon believes in a boy's right to have a chance to fulfill his potential (evil, vile). Yoda wants to defend his order against the encroachment of the inevitable. How horrid! Ah!
Lucas lost what made the stories work. And worse, he seemed proud of losing it.
Lucas almost redeemed himself. Until the entire dumb Anakin kills Padme sequence -- which by itself was probably survivable -- followed by Vader howling in girlish pain over a murder he knew he was going to commit. Also, it is hard to figure, especially after watching Ep 3, just how stoopid Vader had to be to not blame the Emperor and seek revenge for what was obvious: the Emperor pushed Anakin into killing Padme in order to bring him over to the Dark Side.
Lucas took a painfully simple view of human nature. Anakin would have had to have been dumber than a bag of hammers to not get the hustle that was played on him.
Until you actually see the Emperor toying with Vader in Ep 3, it remains believable that Vader would be willing to be the Emperor's lieutenant. When you see how obvious and clumsy the Emperor's actions were, it just makes Anakin/Vader look even more gullible and childish and simple than he already was portrayed in Ep 1 and Ep 2.
Maybe it was painted with lead in China? Man, if kids can't figure this shit out themselves, then fuck 'em -- thin the herd. That's a valuable lesson right there.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, anyone dumb enough to sink cash into a newspaper deserves to lose their money. Newspapers are irrelevant.
People mostly buy products so they can feel a certain way about themselves, or else to demand that others feel about them the way the product should dictate. The guy buying the iPhone wants people to just shit at how cool and totally ahead of everyone he is.
Very little of consumer decisions are based on analyzing costs and benefits.
Which, compared to the complaints many other first-gen products face is pretty marginal.
Sorry, but I didn't see a lot to this list besides bashing the big guys.
Two Apple entries? I'll kinda give Leopard, because it has made a mockery of Apple's long-standing claims about not needing to be constantly patched. But, the iPhone? Who bought an iPhone and was pissed about it?
Vista, at the top, I concede, but I think we all saw that coming after they ditched WinFS.
Social networking? Couldn't we have joined the chorus when everyone else said it sucked, instead of two years too late?
Besides, the most disappointing product of each year is some kid's Ajax-driven killer CMS that never makes it past a week of coding.
I don't mean just in terms of the rational/irrational market. Also I mean in terms of the fact that stocks aren't dissimilar from MMORPGs in that a core of people recruit new buyers, and once the success gives out they fall apart along similar lines.
Watch highly touted stocks when they hit a wall. A lot of stocks are bouyed by the push to love them and nothing else. Once the push stops, the bottom falls out.
Isn't taking every penny they have the entire point? Please, no lectures about sustainability -- we all know that most businesses run themselves into the ground pretty fast anyhow. It's better to get their money from them while they have it than during the 20 years they spend settling their debts for pennies on the dollar.
They finally realized that Idiocracy is a property worth mining.
Curtailing civil liberties is the hallmark of reactionary conservativism -- a brand of conservative America never gave power to before Nixon decide the GOP should adopt the KKK once the Democrats fumbled the racist vote in the south. That was an overt choice by the Republican Party machine, and one that was reinforced by Reagan and Bush 2. The religious right hasn't helped the cause either (Schaivo, anyone?) "spends tax money like crazy" = Reagan, also. In fact, Bush's father tried to torpedo the deficit spending of Reaganomics when he called it "voodoo economics" during the GOP debates. Obviously Bush 2 learned a critical lesson that his father missed: Americans prefer childish spending and childish tax cutting. Dude, if you want a real conservative government, vote Democrat. Bill Clinton and Jack Kennedy did more for the conservative cause than any of the jokers the GOP has pimped since they got blown off the map in 1932.
The reason I think we have differing views is because you think all this is a fluke.
Why is the stuff from 2001-2007 off the board? It is reasonable to include it if I think it was deliberate and reflects the ongoing purpose of the GOP.
Most of the current GOP fun traces back to Reagan. Especially the absolutely criminal idea of systematic deficit spending. The current alignment of the GOP with southern racists goes back to Nixon. And the fealty of the GOP to big business goes back to the robber barons.
In the entire history of the US there have only been two Republican presidents who weren't a net loss for America: Teddy Roosevelt and Ike. And even there, TR got us way too deep into the international system and Ike wanted to kill the civil rights movement.
And the GOP will get worse, because it is now more reactionary than conservative. The idea that a guy like Ron Paul can save the GOP from itself ignores what the GOP has become since Nixon. The GOP has incorporated too many nativists, too many expansionists and too many activist Christians. And the old TR expansionist wing of the GOP never went away.
In the past the GOP wanted to limit government. But, Nixon brought in the southern wing of the Dems in the late 60s and now the GOP is reactionary, not conservative because that group of people never was true conservative -- they're just assholes. They pick on brain dead people (Terry Schaivo?), they hate on all non-whites, they've run the government itself into the dirt and they want to bomb the world with no real plan.
And once Reagan taught the GOP to be financially irresponsible, the GOP ceased to serve any useful purpose.
I'm sorry. Would you like the discussion of everything the GOP has fucked up from Lincoln to Reagan? I was trying to not seem overbearing.
Dude, seriously, haven't you ever considered why any group of sane, intelligent people would do the things the GOP has done lately?
Look at Hurricane Katrina. Only a batshit crazy zealot would cripple FEMA with small government ideology. Yet, that's what the Bushies did.
Look at the current mortgage crisis, which requires something along the lines of a broad buy-out of loans by the government, accompanied with relentless and thorough prosecutions of the people who defrauded investors by repackaging all this bad debt as investment-grade vehicles.
And keep in mind all of this was made many times worse when the Fed finally gave in to the big babies on Wall Street and cut interest rates. That sent the dollar into a nose dive, and will make life a lot harder for all of us (consider than gas would be $1.20 a gallon cheaper if the dollar were as strong as it was under Clinton).
The Republican Party is systematically gutting the usefulness of the government.
The only useful reason for the GOP to even keep the government alive is giving military cover to corporate actions in foreign countries. It's a joke.
Have some dignity and at least register independent.
Why can't the Ron Paul supporters ... all 3,000 of them apparently ... just accept that the GOP isn't broken and doesn't need saving? The GOP is doing exactly what it was built to do.
Good point. It's no different than the stuff about reptilians controlling the world or kids getting hit by cars while doing skateboard tricks.
If you get health and medical info off YouTube, you deserve all the malaria you can get.
Too many people have put too much crap into HTML. Too many people have a stake in each useless tag.
PDF as an idea isn't bad. Sure, a lot of forms need to be preserved as close to the original as possible.
But, PDFs are heavily overused for information that can be better transmitted in more compact forms. For example, how many websites have documents that ought to be in a wiki format (not necessarily editable by the public) and instead are just saved as a series of gigantic PDF files? Some companies are absolutely addicted to putting everything in PDF.
The majority of people I know are not fond of PDF.
The sooner people figure out that PDF is a bloated and shitty format, the better.
To the issue of your anonymity being shattered, puh-lease. If you post information in a public forum such as IMDB and it can be correlated to information from MySpace, it wasn't a giant leap into your privacy. It was just gathering already public information. What's the big deal?
You choose to post that stuff where it could be publicly viewed. The fact that it lines up with data from Netflix only proves that NF did in fact provide a quality dataset. Big deal.
OK, it has now officially been mentioned every other day for twenty weeks. We get it. There's a $200 Linux PC for sale at Wally.
The problem with Anakin is that you never have a moment where you think he ever could be a good guy. Even at his very best he is a brash and overbearing attention whore.
Little kid version of Annie was so brash and such a jerk that putting his mackin' on a girl in her late teens when he was nine struck him as within his reach. Use the Force ... to get laid, in three easy steps. Just read Little Annie's Guide to Pickin' Up Chicks (With Your Newfound Psychic Powers).
It really took three films to figure out that Anakin was a douchebag?
"it's just another version of the reworked cantina scene from Episode IV where he decided he didn't like Han Solo being ruthless enough to kill Greedo."
Which, BTW, can be argued as another point where Star Wars jumped the shark.
I don't feel as bad about Han being ruined as I do Vader, because Han Solo was much better repackaged and renamed "Malcolm Reynolds", who shoots an impressive tally of three unarmed men, including one surrendering and another begging for help, in a single film. Also, I find Mal's wookie (Gina Torres) much more appealing than Han's wookie. Not that I haven't fantasized -- obviously both flavors are good, just not on the same day.
I dunno. It almost strikes me that Lucas was ashamed of his original creation. That he didn't like its rough edges and flawed heroes. So, instead, he made the prequels in a pristine universe where no more than one character (Anakin) is flawed.
And there's where Lucas really screwed up. What made Ep 4,5,6 so great was that the heroes were flawed. Luke struggled with the Dark Side. Anakin just read the brochure for the Light Side, shrugged, and then waltzed over to the Dark Side without much conflict.
Han was a lovable rogue who placed no value on anyone beyond his circle of close friends (a flaw he pays dearly for when he visits Lando).
Leia is a friggin ice queen who can only be tamed by the rogue.
Even Obi-Wan is an old coot who won't give on his daffy prophecy -- even at the price of further strengthening the Dark Side beyond the mess he already created with Anakin.
Those are all very human flaws. Compare this to Ep 1,2,3 where the worst flaws are what? Padme loves too much. Quigon believes in a boy's right to have a chance to fulfill his potential (evil, vile). Yoda wants to defend his order against the encroachment of the inevitable. How horrid! Ah!
Lucas lost what made the stories work. And worse, he seemed proud of losing it.
Lucas almost redeemed himself. Until the entire dumb Anakin kills Padme sequence -- which by itself was probably survivable -- followed by Vader howling in girlish pain over a murder he knew he was going to commit. Also, it is hard to figure, especially after watching Ep 3, just how stoopid Vader had to be to not blame the Emperor and seek revenge for what was obvious: the Emperor pushed Anakin into killing Padme in order to bring him over to the Dark Side.
Lucas took a painfully simple view of human nature. Anakin would have had to have been dumber than a bag of hammers to not get the hustle that was played on him.
Until you actually see the Emperor toying with Vader in Ep 3, it remains believable that Vader would be willing to be the Emperor's lieutenant. When you see how obvious and clumsy the Emperor's actions were, it just makes Anakin/Vader look even more gullible and childish and simple than he already was portrayed in Ep 1 and Ep 2.
Maybe it was painted with lead in China? Man, if kids can't figure this shit out themselves, then fuck 'em -- thin the herd. That's a valuable lesson right there.