IMO iPod isn't a very bad name at all. But at any rate, the product obviously has some very marketable merits. So what's in a name?
The real point of my post isn't about names specifically, but about being overwhelmed by overzealous marketing. From my point of view, far-out wacky names or "impressive" acronyms or whatever just distract people - and spawn pointless Internet flamewars;) - so just why not just present the customer with a product in an interesting way and call it done?
In other words, I'm saying that the fanfare for a product eventually becomes a whole three-ring circus of its own... are you really succeeding when people are thinking about the name instead of thinking about the product itself? It's an interesting question.
Heh, I half expected "Wii" to be on the list, alongside all the other unmarketable names like iSmell and Flooz. Of course, lets hope that these ventures failed not because of their silly names, but because they didn't offer a suitable product to the market.
Once upon a time, "marketing" just meant letting people know your product existed, while telling them why they might want to buy it. Nowadays (and also during the dot-com "boom") a lot of the marketing just seems to be more and more distracting and counterproductive... a very, very lost art.
I suspect to credit people for uploading content for them, Apple would set up their own official BitTorrent tracker(s), which would also probably enforce some sort of DRM (possibly in the same vein as those trackers that require you to log in before they will connect you to other peers.)
In regards to the child posts pointing out that MacOS and Linux won't magically solve these problems... no argument there! In my parent post I said "less stupid", not "magic bullet for all problems". Not to mention the problem of stupid users.
However, I think we can all agree that Microsoft's track record is terrible in regards to solving these problems (problems that they played a part in causing to begin with, with their low-quality software.) Their response over the previous 6 or 7 years to the spam/zombie problem has been slow and clumsy and buried in a deluge of mindless marketing.
The F/OSS world has its own practical shortcomings, but I think we certainly could have a better chance of reducing the spam/worm/zombie problems, if we somehow managed to oust the stagnant monopolist power that controls 90% of the world's computers... and essentially 100% of the software responsible for allowing PC's to be zombified.
As much as I would like to see everyone drop all the Windows, Outlook, Internet Explorer crap so we can all move on from things such as spam and worms, I doubt that this is going to happen to any good degree in the next 5 years. But who knows?
What I'm sure will happen, sadly, is that Microsoft will push Vista, and it will contain some half-assed attempts at curbing these horrible, large-scale problems of zombies, worms, etc, etc. How effective these attempts will be (if at all) remains to be seen.
So, the next 5 years will be... interesting. Will Vista do anything to curb the problems which are likely to be exacerbating as described in TFA? (Doubtful.) Will less stupid technologies like Linux and OSX start moving in to actually do something about the sorry state of things? (Also doubtful.)
On the bright side, what I can see in the next 5 years or so, is the older PC's that are sitting in a den somewhere pumping out viruses and spam, dying off as their cheap Dell consumer-grade components go kaput. What these zombie computers are replaced with is what will make the difference. We can always cross our fingers and hope that these computers will be replaced with Linux or OSX. And hope, and hope.
At any rate, I for one do not welcome our outer space spam zombie overlords.
I was referring to EA in general. They are a huge corp. and push a lot of titles besides those speculated about in TFA (which I did read.) I don't really have anything to say about the article itself. It doesn't exactly reveal anything outside of the author's speculation.
Sure, the games-that-might-be mentioned in TFA could turn out to be awesome, genre-reinventing, "innovative" titles (especially Spore, we all have high hopes!) but I doubt it (see all the other "won't live up to hype" posts) and there is a good chance that EA as a whole will keep doing the business-as-usual crap mentioned in my grandparent post.
If this had been an informative article about Spore at E3 instead of marketing for EA, then I wouldn't question whether or not it was News-for-Nerds worthy.
To me, EA is just a company that sells sports games to Joe Sixpack that come out yearly with the "24 more polygons than the last version!" selling point, while the company clothes itself in the empty husks of other once-glorious companies that it purchased and ravaged to the bone long ago.
Aside from the space-warping anomaly of Will Wright's Spore (that might collapse under the gravity of its own hype at any moment,) is anything to do with EA actually News for Nerds or Stuff That Matters?
I remember reading that "Socket 939 will be around for a long time, its planned for it to last longer than Socket A." So I built a S939 rig and thought I was being cleverly future-proof. And now they're phasing it out? Not to mention, I got my current motherboard just before PCI-Express came out. I had a helluva time upgrading my video card while being forced to stick with AGP.
You can't win when it comes to computer hardware. Hopefully, in a few months, I'll still be able to stick an older (much lower-priced) dual-core in my S939 motherboard and have a bit more power. However, so much for a box that was more upgradeable than not.
The parent post sounds like it was written by one of those people hired by companies to use fake online personas to promote products and generate "hype" in public Web discussion areas. I mean, its okay to be a fan of something, but the parent just sounds so amazingly artificial to me...
I love technology and all (this is Slashdot) but I, for one, am totally not interested in these newfangled media formats, and I'm yet to hear of anyone in my circles who is. The current DVD resolution works just fine, thanks, and I'd rather the folk pushing these new formats take their DRM-encumbered junk and shove it where the sun don't shine (and I'm not talking the inside of a disk drive here.)
I sincerely hope that most consumers think that this HD-DVD stuff is not worth dropping the cash, and stick with DVD (which has only been mainstream for a small number of years anyways.)
This has been done and does work, its called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS separates the text content from the presentation, the visual look from the actual semantics. See my unparented post above!
Note that not a lot of sites, even on the "modern" Web, take advantage of CSS. Using CSS requires a little bit of skill and attention, is based on Open Standards, and helps both 'bots and the disabled to understand Web content. So, naturally, most web designers don't use it properly.:P
to get around this difference in presentation / semantics using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)?
For example, when I use image-based text for nicer fonts on websites I make, I can use CSS to give the tag an image, and shift the plain-text version of the content off to the side so it doesn't appear on graphical browsers. Slashdot itself uses these techniques in its HTML.
There are, in fact, lots of methods CSS provides to get around this problem, most of which are even supported by junky browsers like MSIE.
I am not arguing against this being, most likely, a Good Thing, I am just noting what thoughts should come to mind when dealing with an entity like Intel.
Provided only the source is changed a bit, the fear of Linux being subverted by Intel (or any other hardware vendor wanting Linux to support their "features") is largely baseless, albeit still a possibility.
But keep in mind there are lots of sneaky tricks that Intel can try, because sneaky tricks are the name of such a corp.'s game. For example, imagine trying a certain distro, distributed in binary (say, RedHat, or even a "downstream" one like CentOS) and finding strange problems when using it on AMD hardware...
Most of the people using Linux are users, not kernel hackers. And Intel is all about screwing the user, aka. the consumer, to further its own ends.
The first thought that comes to mind is that Intel would like nothing more than to subvert Linux so that it runs best on Intel architecture. Keep in mind that it's indeed very easy for an OS to become permanently tied to a certain platform.
This hasn't been the first Slashdot article that brings fears to mind about Linux being pulled too far in the direction of corporate interests. Don't get me wrong, though, some attention from big companies can be very beneficial to projects like Linux. But still, here's hoping that the Linux community is diligent enough to stop Intel from fulfilling, within the Linux world, its agenda of domination...
"storing only the changes between similar byte streams"
"as far as I can tell from a quick gleaning, they achieve these impossible compression ratios across multiple versions of the same data set."
Right, so, this claim is no big deal. This is called delta compression and it has been around for a long time. Online games use this method to compress updates sent to clients based on the previous updates received. So instead of sending kilobytes of info each update, the server sends, oh, about 25x less data. I believe it was Quake III that first used general delta compression for online games.
This is not a novel technique... which means they will get awarded a US patent and start suing willy-nilly.
Let me get this straight... this laptop is $100, can be manufactured, distributed, and purchased by huge numbers of impressionable, ingenious young people, can form a mesh network with its peers, and comes with a variety of useful F/OSS software.
So when the kid grows up, and maybe due to his computer fluency perhaps starts living in a "higher" society that uses MS software, overpriced "Extreme Edition" hardware, and ISP's that want to rape their customers and extort service providers while providing service an order of magnitude poorer than can be found in places like Japan... well, perhaps this person will be less inclined to even think of putting up with this crap?
FTA: "To be fair, VMware has a free version of its mid-market product in beta and this software stacks up well against Virtual Server."
So VMware is giving a version away for free as well, so its not all that one-sided. However, the 800-pound Microsoft is looking directly in VMware's direction. VMware should indeed be scared, and customers should definitely worry that in a few years there might not be as much choice in the virtualization marketplace.
On the other hand, we could get VMwarezilla in the end. And, eventually, VMwarefox?
Funny, most F/OSS software is given away for free, should that be illegal too? To answer my own question: of course not! The situation is quite different. However, I'm willing to bet the situations arising from Microsoft's "free" offerings and the "Free" Software movement look the same in the minds of certain lawmakers/enforcers (and if this were true, this would not be a Good Thing).
Let's hope we keep our freedom to give things away for free!
Slashdot Mirror
IMO iPod isn't a very bad name at all. But at any rate, the product obviously has some very marketable merits. So what's in a name?
;) - so just why not just present the customer with a product in an interesting way and call it done?
The real point of my post isn't about names specifically, but about being overwhelmed by overzealous marketing. From my point of view, far-out wacky names or "impressive" acronyms or whatever just distract people - and spawn pointless Internet flamewars
In other words, I'm saying that the fanfare for a product eventually becomes a whole three-ring circus of its own... are you really succeeding when people are thinking about the name instead of thinking about the product itself? It's an interesting question.
Heh, I half expected "Wii" to be on the list, alongside all the other unmarketable names like iSmell and Flooz. Of course, lets hope that these ventures failed not because of their silly names, but because they didn't offer a suitable product to the market.
Once upon a time, "marketing" just meant letting people know your product existed, while telling them why they might want to buy it. Nowadays (and also during the dot-com "boom") a lot of the marketing just seems to be more and more distracting and counterproductive... a very, very lost art.
I suspect to credit people for uploading content for them, Apple would set up their own official BitTorrent tracker(s), which would also probably enforce some sort of DRM (possibly in the same vein as those trackers that require you to log in before they will connect you to other peers.)
In regards to the child posts pointing out that MacOS and Linux won't magically solve these problems... no argument there! In my parent post I said "less stupid", not "magic bullet for all problems". Not to mention the problem of stupid users.
However, I think we can all agree that Microsoft's track record is terrible in regards to solving these problems (problems that they played a part in causing to begin with, with their low-quality software.) Their response over the previous 6 or 7 years to the spam/zombie problem has been slow and clumsy and buried in a deluge of mindless marketing.
The F/OSS world has its own practical shortcomings, but I think we certainly could have a better chance of reducing the spam/worm/zombie problems, if we somehow managed to oust the stagnant monopolist power that controls 90% of the world's computers... and essentially 100% of the software responsible for allowing PC's to be zombified.
As much as I would like to see everyone drop all the Windows, Outlook, Internet Explorer crap so we can all move on from things such as spam and worms, I doubt that this is going to happen to any good degree in the next 5 years. But who knows?
What I'm sure will happen, sadly, is that Microsoft will push Vista, and it will contain some half-assed attempts at curbing these horrible, large-scale problems of zombies, worms, etc, etc. How effective these attempts will be (if at all) remains to be seen.
So, the next 5 years will be... interesting. Will Vista do anything to curb the problems which are likely to be exacerbating as described in TFA? (Doubtful.) Will less stupid technologies like Linux and OSX start moving in to actually do something about the sorry state of things? (Also doubtful.)
On the bright side, what I can see in the next 5 years or so, is the older PC's that are sitting in a den somewhere pumping out viruses and spam, dying off as their cheap Dell consumer-grade components go kaput. What these zombie computers are replaced with is what will make the difference. We can always cross our fingers and hope that these computers will be replaced with Linux or OSX. And hope, and hope.
At any rate, I for one do not welcome our outer space spam zombie overlords.
I'm depressed because I'm worried that Net Neutrality will be destroyed and the Internet will--
*BRZZZZT*
Ooooh. Everything's fine! Nothing to worry about...
Except it's a little depressing that the Bush Administration is--
*BRZZZZT*
Huh. I forgot what I was worried about... now I just feel kind of warm and fuzzy and content...
I agree with the parent.
EA is all about the corportate shenanigans, a hardly does anything positive for computer-game culture these days.
I was referring to EA in general. They are a huge corp. and push a lot of titles besides those speculated about in TFA (which I did read.) I don't really have anything to say about the article itself. It doesn't exactly reveal anything outside of the author's speculation.
Sure, the games-that-might-be mentioned in TFA could turn out to be awesome, genre-reinventing, "innovative" titles (especially Spore, we all have high hopes!) but I doubt it (see all the other "won't live up to hype" posts) and there is a good chance that EA as a whole will keep doing the business-as-usual crap mentioned in my grandparent post.
If this had been an informative article about Spore at E3 instead of marketing for EA, then I wouldn't question whether or not it was News-for-Nerds worthy.
To me, EA is just a company that sells sports games to Joe Sixpack that come out yearly with the "24 more polygons than the last version!" selling point, while the company clothes itself in the empty husks of other once-glorious companies that it purchased and ravaged to the bone long ago.
Aside from the space-warping anomaly of Will Wright's Spore (that might collapse under the gravity of its own hype at any moment,) is anything to do with EA actually News for Nerds or Stuff That Matters?
I remember reading that "Socket 939 will be around for a long time, its planned for it to last longer than Socket A." So I built a S939 rig and thought I was being cleverly future-proof. And now they're phasing it out? Not to mention, I got my current motherboard just before PCI-Express came out. I had a helluva time upgrading my video card while being forced to stick with AGP.
You can't win when it comes to computer hardware. Hopefully, in a few months, I'll still be able to stick an older (much lower-priced) dual-core in my S939 motherboard and have a bit more power. However, so much for a box that was more upgradeable than not.
The parent post sounds like it was written by one of those people hired by companies to use fake online personas to promote products and generate "hype" in public Web discussion areas. I mean, its okay to be a fan of something, but the parent just sounds so amazingly artificial to me...
I love technology and all (this is Slashdot) but I, for one, am totally not interested in these newfangled media formats, and I'm yet to hear of anyone in my circles who is. The current DVD resolution works just fine, thanks, and I'd rather the folk pushing these new formats take their DRM-encumbered junk and shove it where the sun don't shine (and I'm not talking the inside of a disk drive here.)
I sincerely hope that most consumers think that this HD-DVD stuff is not worth dropping the cash, and stick with DVD (which has only been mainstream for a small number of years anyways.)
A site that uses Flash animation and cheesy sound clips for a good reason: To amuse 6-year-old children!
This has been done and does work, its called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS separates the text content from the presentation, the visual look from the actual semantics. See my unparented post above!
:P
Note that not a lot of sites, even on the "modern" Web, take advantage of CSS. Using CSS requires a little bit of skill and attention, is based on Open Standards, and helps both 'bots and the disabled to understand Web content. So, naturally, most web designers don't use it properly.
to get around this difference in presentation / semantics using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)?
For example, when I use image-based text for nicer fonts on websites I make, I can use CSS to give the tag an image, and shift the plain-text version of the content off to the side so it doesn't appear on graphical browsers. Slashdot itself uses these techniques in its HTML.
There are, in fact, lots of methods CSS provides to get around this problem, most of which are even supported by junky browsers like MSIE.
I am not arguing against this being, most likely, a Good Thing, I am just noting what thoughts should come to mind when dealing with an entity like Intel.
Also, see my reply to this post.
Provided only the source is changed a bit, the fear of Linux being subverted by Intel (or any other hardware vendor wanting Linux to support their "features") is largely baseless, albeit still a possibility.
But keep in mind there are lots of sneaky tricks that Intel can try, because sneaky tricks are the name of such a corp.'s game. For example, imagine trying a certain distro, distributed in binary (say, RedHat, or even a "downstream" one like CentOS) and finding strange problems when using it on AMD hardware...
Most of the people using Linux are users, not kernel hackers. And Intel is all about screwing the user, aka. the consumer, to further its own ends.
The first thought that comes to mind is that Intel would like nothing more than to subvert Linux so that it runs best on Intel architecture. Keep in mind that it's indeed very easy for an OS to become permanently tied to a certain platform.
This hasn't been the first Slashdot article that brings fears to mind about Linux being pulled too far in the direction of corporate interests. Don't get me wrong, though, some attention from big companies can be very beneficial to projects like Linux. But still, here's hoping that the Linux community is diligent enough to stop Intel from fulfilling, within the Linux world, its agenda of domination...
"storing only the changes between similar byte streams"
"as far as I can tell from a quick gleaning, they achieve these impossible compression ratios across multiple versions of the same data set."
Right, so, this claim is no big deal. This is called delta compression and it has been around for a long time. Online games use this method to compress updates sent to clients based on the previous updates received. So instead of sending kilobytes of info each update, the server sends, oh, about 25x less data. I believe it was Quake III that first used general delta compression for online games.
This is not a novel technique... which means they will get awarded a US patent and start suing willy-nilly.
Let me get this straight... this laptop is $100, can be manufactured, distributed, and purchased by huge numbers of impressionable, ingenious young people, can form a mesh network with its peers, and comes with a variety of useful F/OSS software.
...I think this laptop idea is brilliant.
So when the kid grows up, and maybe due to his computer fluency perhaps starts living in a "higher" society that uses MS software, overpriced "Extreme Edition" hardware, and ISP's that want to rape their customers and extort service providers while providing service an order of magnitude poorer than can be found in places like Japan... well, perhaps this person will be less inclined to even think of putting up with this crap?
I've heard THAT one before.
"No, you can't install Opera because I don't know what it does."
"No, you can't install ClamAV because I don't know what it does."
"No, you can't use 'a computer' because I don't know what it does." (Well... you get the idea.)
And of course, any (calm, polite) attempts to explain exactly what the software in question does is seen as blatant insubordination...
welcome the idea that our overlords will have a harder time censoring and surveilling us.
FTA: "To be fair, VMware has a free version of its mid-market product in beta and this software stacks up well against Virtual Server."
So VMware is giving a version away for free as well, so its not all that one-sided. However, the 800-pound Microsoft is looking directly in VMware's direction. VMware should indeed be scared, and customers should definitely worry that in a few years there might not be as much choice in the virtualization marketplace.
On the other hand, we could get VMwarezilla in the end. And, eventually, VMwarefox?
And, unless I'm mistaken, this should be illegal.
Funny, most F/OSS software is given away for free, should that be illegal too? To answer my own question: of course not! The situation is quite different. However, I'm willing to bet the situations arising from Microsoft's "free" offerings and the "Free" Software movement look the same in the minds of certain lawmakers/enforcers (and if this were true, this would not be a Good Thing).
Let's hope we keep our freedom to give things away for free!