Well, another generation of gaming consoles is underway, so let's have a quick rundown of the available options.
Option A: Nintendo Wii U.
Having decided the one thing gaming needed was an irritating motion controller system that shattered any form of immersion and turned even the most simple game into an exhausting flail that leaves you feeling like the Hf'ra'rkc'tal after his mating dance ends, Nintendo has now decided the primary problem with the Wii is that it has a controller one can physically use. You'll be pleased to know they have rectified this problem by redesigning the controller to weigh fourteen stone and need to be plugged in every two minutes. Thankfully, this isn't much of a handicap to the console's ability to play games, since there aren't any released.
Option B: Xbox One.
Don't ask me how the naming system works. Considering this prequel of a console hasn't been released yet, we're basically limited to what Microsoft has told us, which is that (1) it will require a constant internet connection, (2) it will spontaneously delete your games whenever Microsoft or your ISP have any downtime, (3) it will sometimes charge you money for games you've already bought, (4) it has no backwards compatibility with older Xbox games or hardware, (5) It comes with a mandatory camera and microphone that will monitor you at all times and cannot be turned off. Literally. As I've noted before, Microsoft has fantasies of taking on Google, but their offerings in the area are rather pathetic; Bing is clearly inferior despite the lies they post about it. However, Google developed a patent some time ago for a software program that would hijack users' computers' webcams and microphones to record their activities and conversations to sell to advertisers only to find themselves unable to actually deploy this software lest people descend on Mountain View with burning chromebooks and flay them alive. Thus, the Xbox One represents the first real attempt Microsoft has made into edging in on Google's territory and may be the one invention that finally allows them to get sued by Google because Google has already patented the concept of spyware and American intellectual property laws are outright ridiculous.
Option C: Playstation 4.
Sony has not released a lot of information about this theoretical future console, but given what I know about Sony it presumably consists of nothing but a box containing a court summons because Sony is now suing you.
Option D: PowerMac G4, which may or may not have a playstation emulator.
Now that I have a new(er) computer, the old Power Mac is now going to be repurposed as Games Console. It's got all the games I like, and no one suing me for playing them, installing Linux, or anything! Plus, I already own it (and I mean really own, not that I paid a bunch of dollars for the privilege of borrowing it from Sony or Microsoft for an indeterminate period of time).
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Little Things That BUG Me #7
Websites that hijack well-known keyboard shortcuts to do things they aren't supposed to.
Notable examples: On a website, pressing delete takes you back a page. That's what the key does and it's often more convenient than clicking the "back" button. However, in Yahoo Mail, pressing delete deletes the message you're currently reading— and just to add insult to injury, it doesn't even return you to the message list as a result, choosing instead to open the next message automatically. Meanwhile, in any page of Google search results, pressing delete will automatically select the search query box and delete the last letter of your search query, automatically updating the results accordingly.
This wasn't always the case, but apparently Google's corporate charter requires them to replace every user interface every few months with one that's just a little more shit.
Meanwhile, anyone who has ever had to use a Mac knows that command-C is "copy" when using FruitOS. Except Microsoft (which is fitting enough), because in Hotmail, pressing command-C opens some obscure menu that no one ever needs and the only way to copy text is to select "copy" from the edit menu which no one ever does because it's stupid.
I'd give Microsoft a pass except they're a massive developer of Mac software so they should know better.
Apparently, the Hotmail command-C problem has now been rectified but only because Microsoft decided to rip off Google (in ways other than Bing) and has replaced Hotmail outright with "Outlook" which is exactly the same except that the user interface is pants.
Notable examples: On a website, pressing delete takes you back a page. That's what the key does and it's often more convenient than clicking the "back" button. However, in Yahoo Mail, pressing delete deletes the message you're currently reading— and just to add insult to injury, it doesn't even return you to the message list as a result, choosing instead to open the next message automatically. Meanwhile, in any page of Google search results, pressing delete will automatically select the search query box and delete the last letter of your search query, automatically updating the results accordingly.
This wasn't always the case, but apparently Google's corporate charter requires them to replace every user interface every few months with one that's just a little more shit.
Meanwhile, anyone who has ever had to use a Mac knows that command-C is "copy" when using FruitOS. Except Microsoft (which is fitting enough), because in Hotmail, pressing command-C opens some obscure menu that no one ever needs and the only way to copy text is to select "copy" from the edit menu which no one ever does because it's stupid.
I'd give Microsoft a pass except they're a massive developer of Mac software so they should know better.
Apparently, the Hotmail command-C problem has now been rectified but only because Microsoft decided to rip off Google (in ways other than Bing) and has replaced Hotmail outright with "Outlook" which is exactly the same except that the user interface is pants.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Lactose-Free Milk Is Not Horrible
So I may have mentioned previously that I was particularly miffed at the dearth of decent lactose-free dairy products despite all the effort the food industry has put into "gluten-free" cake, pasta, etc.
I must now update that position slightly: Lactose-free milk is not horrible. According to the lactose-tolerant milk-chugging people I know, it's much sweeter than regular milk, but I can't taste any appreciable difference between the hot chocolate or egg creams I can drink and the ones that will make me miserable, and if my experience is anything, the lactose-free milk has a much longer shelf life than the unmodified equivalent.
Also, while I know hard cheese (gruyere) is lactose-free, it turns out even softer cheeses (mozzarella) are also pretty much fine. (And I never liked brie anyway.)
That just leaves ice cream. I need my lactose-free ice cream! No one makes lactose-free ice cream. And that the food industry is ignoring the majority of us who are lactose intolerant but require ice cream while making sure to accommodate the <1% of the population with gluten allergies/coeliac disease/etc just bugs me, so that entry can stay up.
Vital stats:
Retraction: Partial
Date: Today
Current Mood: Tasty
Sleep Status: Too much!
Word of the Day: Suzerainty
Egg Cream: Milk, chocolate syrup, soda water. (Not disgusting.)
Sugars: Glucose and galactose. Probably sucrose too from the syrup.
Trans Fat: Yes; preferred gender pronoun = "she"
Gluten: Plant protein
Nation: Obsolete as a social construct.
Rapture: Obsolete as a constructed society.
Bioshock: Apparently it's decent. Doesn't run on my computer. I prefer older games.
Marathon: I play that.
ShadowWraith: That too.
Halo: Revoked due to banishment from Celestial Realm.
WOW: I know! Totally unfair! I didn't even do it.
I must now update that position slightly: Lactose-free milk is not horrible. According to the lactose-tolerant milk-chugging people I know, it's much sweeter than regular milk, but I can't taste any appreciable difference between the hot chocolate or egg creams I can drink and the ones that will make me miserable, and if my experience is anything, the lactose-free milk has a much longer shelf life than the unmodified equivalent.
Also, while I know hard cheese (gruyere) is lactose-free, it turns out even softer cheeses (mozzarella) are also pretty much fine. (And I never liked brie anyway.)
That just leaves ice cream. I need my lactose-free ice cream! No one makes lactose-free ice cream. And that the food industry is ignoring the majority of us who are lactose intolerant but require ice cream while making sure to accommodate the <1% of the population with gluten allergies/coeliac disease/etc just bugs me, so that entry can stay up.
Vital stats:
Retraction: Partial
Date: Today
Current Mood: Tasty
Sleep Status: Too much!
Word of the Day: Suzerainty
Egg Cream: Milk, chocolate syrup, soda water. (Not disgusting.)
Sugars: Glucose and galactose. Probably sucrose too from the syrup.
Trans Fat: Yes; preferred gender pronoun = "she"
Gluten: Plant protein
Nation: Obsolete as a social construct.
Rapture: Obsolete as a constructed society.
Bioshock: Apparently it's decent. Doesn't run on my computer. I prefer older games.
Marathon: I play that.
ShadowWraith: That too.
Halo: Revoked due to banishment from Celestial Realm.
WOW: I know! Totally unfair! I didn't even do it.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Features That Need To Happen
So I hit command-A, command-O (select all, open) only to discover a millisecond too late that I wasn't in the window I thought I was and had accidentally opened over 500 diverse documents in a dozen-odd apps between them all at once.
Obviously not the end of the world, but definitely annoying.
Way back when Macs were actually Macs instead of PC clones running a Unix-based OS, typing command-period immediately after making such a dumb mistake would nullify said mistake and make everything right again by canceling the app openings before they started fighting over RAM and clock cycles. It was a very useful feature that fixed a lot of boneheaded mistakes in the past.
Unfortunately, that feature is no longer in place. And it needs to come back.
Obviously not the end of the world, but definitely annoying.
Way back when Macs were actually Macs instead of PC clones running a Unix-based OS, typing command-period immediately after making such a dumb mistake would nullify said mistake and make everything right again by canceling the app openings before they started fighting over RAM and clock cycles. It was a very useful feature that fixed a lot of boneheaded mistakes in the past.
Unfortunately, that feature is no longer in place. And it needs to come back.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Way Too Tired
I haven't gotten enough sleep and I'm way too tired as evidenced by:
The fact that I saw an odd flickery shadow and had to get up and chase the dog around to monitor the effects on said shadow, just to make sure I didn't have a vashta nerada infestation.
The fact that I saw an odd flickery shadow and had to get up and chase the dog around to monitor the effects on said shadow, just to make sure I didn't have a vashta nerada infestation.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Dispatches from Marketer World: Part 2— Brands
What better way to emphasise the regularness of this feature than to include two in a row?
If I'm to make a habit of highlighting how marketers think (as gleaned from the types of questions they ask or fail to ask in market research surveys), I suppose it's best to start by addressing the biggest concern: Brands.
What is a brand? I'm sure you already know that. A brand is a name, a logo, a design, a slogan; a bit of intellectual property too small or simple to be eligible for copyright protection (usually), but protected by trademark instead, and used by its owner to mark a product as having come from them.
Marketers, however, use the term "brand" to refer not only to the trademark, but to the product emblazoned with it, the company that owns it, and (in most cases), anything that can be identified as a cohesive entity. To us regular people, this is a brand. To a marketer, however, the physical can of sodypop with that logo upon it is also a brand, as is the Moxie Beverage Company that made it, and Cornucopia Beverages, the company that owns them. To a marketer, even a non-profit entity such as Oxfam or a semi-organised social movement such as Occupy Wall Street is also a brand.
This oddly expansive definition of the word "brand" means that most market research surveys are written in a comprehensible-but-awkward creole where I'm asked to evaluate a brand, provide opinions on a potential new brand, all so that an existing brand can better make decisions about which brands it should create in the future.
The over-reliance on the slightly misused word "brand" makes it a little bit difficult to comment on this next topic, but I'm fairly certain that marketers are overly concerned with brands above and beyond their obsession with the word itself.
Nearly every market research survey either assumes that which brand is emblazoned in a product must necessarily factor into my purchase decisions to a much greater extent than it actually does. It makes sense that they would think this way; they've almost certainly invested a lot of time and money in the idea that the key to success is to advertise a brand and assume people will buy products based on their resulting familiarity with the sight of the logo. Unfortunately, this just isn't the case.
Not all products are created equal, and because a brand connects a product to its manufacturer, a brand can serve as a proxy for distinguishing quality manufacturers from those best avoided. However, brands are a limited and flawed proxy at best, for several reasons.
First, the vast majority of our purchases are for small everyday things like toothpaste and napkins. These items are called parity products, meaning that all the choices on offer are the same in every respect (except, potentially, price). Many of the market research surveys I've taken asked me to evaluate a new sales pitch or piece of ad copy for one of these products, and then asked me to what extent it made me more likely to purchase the product made by the advertising manufacturer; those marketers were fooling themselves because price is the only consideration on these products.
Second, even when there are distinct differences between manufacturers, brands don't correlate to manufacturers directly. In many cases, a heavily advertised brand and a less advertised brand will both be placed on the same product; the former will be more expensive than the latter despite being exactly the same thing. It's generally a safe bet that any product endorsed by a celebrity can be found much cheaper by looking for one without the celebrity-endorsed brand slapped on it; unless you want to pay money to a celebrity who doesn't need it or deserve it, you can probably find a non-endorsed version of the same product cheaper.
Third, even when a brand directly correlates to a specific manufacturer, brands can be bought, sold, traded, and licensed like any other form of intellectual property. Many years back, my family would make a point of obtaining Stella D'oro cookies whenever we could find them. The Stella D'oro brand was owned by the Stella D'oro Biscuit Company, so any product with that brand was made by that company. The Stella D'oro Biscuit Company produced all of its delicious biscuits at a plant on West 237th Street in the Bronx, employed union workers and paid fair wages, and used high quality ingredients. If you saw the Stella D'oro brand on the package, you knew it was quality stuff.
Problem is, then the company got sold, first to Nabisco, then to Kraft Foods, then to Brynwood Partners, then to Snyder's-Lance, Inc. Snyder's-Lance and the various intermediate owners closed the Bronx facility and demolished it, fired the union workers and moved production to a state that banned unions so that they could pay insufficient wages to their employees, and cut back on manufacturing costs by switching to lower-quality ingredients. Any product with the Stella D'oro brand on it today is low-quality garbage churned out by a conglomerate, made by underpaid workers in a state you'd normally fly over.
But the brand hasn't changed. Snyder's-Lance, Inc, may be the antithesis of the family business which made the stuff I used to love and their products may be poor imitations of my beloved biscuits, but the brand is exactly the same, because they bought the rights to use it. This isn't the only case where a company bought the rights to a brand associated with quality goods in order to use that association to peddle crap but it's the one case I always think of because of how thorough the reversal was.
Maybe I'm unique in this respect - an extreme outlier on a chart of the advertising-molded opinions of sheep - but I refuse to believe that the advertising industry's obsession with brands actually has any meaningful effect on consumers' purchase decisions.
As far as I've always been able to figure, advertising is what corporations do because they're not physically capable of masturbating.
If I'm to make a habit of highlighting how marketers think (as gleaned from the types of questions they ask or fail to ask in market research surveys), I suppose it's best to start by addressing the biggest concern: Brands.
What is a brand? I'm sure you already know that. A brand is a name, a logo, a design, a slogan; a bit of intellectual property too small or simple to be eligible for copyright protection (usually), but protected by trademark instead, and used by its owner to mark a product as having come from them.
Marketers, however, use the term "brand" to refer not only to the trademark, but to the product emblazoned with it, the company that owns it, and (in most cases), anything that can be identified as a cohesive entity. To us regular people, this is a brand. To a marketer, however, the physical can of sodypop with that logo upon it is also a brand, as is the Moxie Beverage Company that made it, and Cornucopia Beverages, the company that owns them. To a marketer, even a non-profit entity such as Oxfam or a semi-organised social movement such as Occupy Wall Street is also a brand.
This oddly expansive definition of the word "brand" means that most market research surveys are written in a comprehensible-but-awkward creole where I'm asked to evaluate a brand, provide opinions on a potential new brand, all so that an existing brand can better make decisions about which brands it should create in the future.
The over-reliance on the slightly misused word "brand" makes it a little bit difficult to comment on this next topic, but I'm fairly certain that marketers are overly concerned with brands above and beyond their obsession with the word itself.
Nearly every market research survey either assumes that which brand is emblazoned in a product must necessarily factor into my purchase decisions to a much greater extent than it actually does. It makes sense that they would think this way; they've almost certainly invested a lot of time and money in the idea that the key to success is to advertise a brand and assume people will buy products based on their resulting familiarity with the sight of the logo. Unfortunately, this just isn't the case.
Not all products are created equal, and because a brand connects a product to its manufacturer, a brand can serve as a proxy for distinguishing quality manufacturers from those best avoided. However, brands are a limited and flawed proxy at best, for several reasons.
First, the vast majority of our purchases are for small everyday things like toothpaste and napkins. These items are called parity products, meaning that all the choices on offer are the same in every respect (except, potentially, price). Many of the market research surveys I've taken asked me to evaluate a new sales pitch or piece of ad copy for one of these products, and then asked me to what extent it made me more likely to purchase the product made by the advertising manufacturer; those marketers were fooling themselves because price is the only consideration on these products.
Second, even when there are distinct differences between manufacturers, brands don't correlate to manufacturers directly. In many cases, a heavily advertised brand and a less advertised brand will both be placed on the same product; the former will be more expensive than the latter despite being exactly the same thing. It's generally a safe bet that any product endorsed by a celebrity can be found much cheaper by looking for one without the celebrity-endorsed brand slapped on it; unless you want to pay money to a celebrity who doesn't need it or deserve it, you can probably find a non-endorsed version of the same product cheaper.
Third, even when a brand directly correlates to a specific manufacturer, brands can be bought, sold, traded, and licensed like any other form of intellectual property. Many years back, my family would make a point of obtaining Stella D'oro cookies whenever we could find them. The Stella D'oro brand was owned by the Stella D'oro Biscuit Company, so any product with that brand was made by that company. The Stella D'oro Biscuit Company produced all of its delicious biscuits at a plant on West 237th Street in the Bronx, employed union workers and paid fair wages, and used high quality ingredients. If you saw the Stella D'oro brand on the package, you knew it was quality stuff.
Problem is, then the company got sold, first to Nabisco, then to Kraft Foods, then to Brynwood Partners, then to Snyder's-Lance, Inc. Snyder's-Lance and the various intermediate owners closed the Bronx facility and demolished it, fired the union workers and moved production to a state that banned unions so that they could pay insufficient wages to their employees, and cut back on manufacturing costs by switching to lower-quality ingredients. Any product with the Stella D'oro brand on it today is low-quality garbage churned out by a conglomerate, made by underpaid workers in a state you'd normally fly over.
But the brand hasn't changed. Snyder's-Lance, Inc, may be the antithesis of the family business which made the stuff I used to love and their products may be poor imitations of my beloved biscuits, but the brand is exactly the same, because they bought the rights to use it. This isn't the only case where a company bought the rights to a brand associated with quality goods in order to use that association to peddle crap but it's the one case I always think of because of how thorough the reversal was.
Maybe I'm unique in this respect - an extreme outlier on a chart of the advertising-molded opinions of sheep - but I refuse to believe that the advertising industry's obsession with brands actually has any meaningful effect on consumers' purchase decisions.
As far as I've always been able to figure, advertising is what corporations do because they're not physically capable of masturbating.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Dispatches from Marketer World: Part 1— Maple Syrup
I really wasn't intending to turn ITIHAB into "Why Marketers Suck" but these market research surveys contribute significantly to my disposable income and the more I take the more I become convinced that marketers just don't live on the same planet as we do. So I guess my only option is to turn this into a regular feature, in which I share the many ways product marketers just don't think the way us humans do.
Today's report comes from a recent survey I took that wanted to gauge my opinion to some new breakfast product or summat; I'm not actually sure what it was since I bounced from the survey a few questions in.
The survey asked me whether I ever ate pancakes or waffles, and upon my confirmation that I did, it asked me what I typically put on them.
Maple syrup was not one of the options.
The multiple choice question offered options for various combinations of fruits, ice cream, whipped cream, and so forth, with the top of the list offering two choices of syrup: Corn syrup with fenugreek (the typical formula for cheap knockoff imitation maple syrup) or corn syrup with other flavouring.
Seriously? I know maple syrup is a tad expensive, but it didn't even occur to them to list it? Why, when I was growing up, serving pancakes with anything that listed "glucose-fructose" on its ingredients panel was considered a faux pas on roughly the same level as screwing your sister at the table.
And the marketers didn't even think to list it. From what I could tell, they were marketing some form of pancake or waffle mix; you would think a product's marketers might have at least some knowledge as to its complementary products.
I have to confess, however, that I've discovered a fondness for putting cream and jam on pancakes, largely due to a meal I had on a train a few years ago.
Today's report comes from a recent survey I took that wanted to gauge my opinion to some new breakfast product or summat; I'm not actually sure what it was since I bounced from the survey a few questions in.
The survey asked me whether I ever ate pancakes or waffles, and upon my confirmation that I did, it asked me what I typically put on them.
Maple syrup was not one of the options.
The multiple choice question offered options for various combinations of fruits, ice cream, whipped cream, and so forth, with the top of the list offering two choices of syrup: Corn syrup with fenugreek (the typical formula for cheap knockoff imitation maple syrup) or corn syrup with other flavouring.
Seriously? I know maple syrup is a tad expensive, but it didn't even occur to them to list it? Why, when I was growing up, serving pancakes with anything that listed "glucose-fructose" on its ingredients panel was considered a faux pas on roughly the same level as screwing your sister at the table.
And the marketers didn't even think to list it. From what I could tell, they were marketing some form of pancake or waffle mix; you would think a product's marketers might have at least some knowledge as to its complementary products.
I have to confess, however, that I've discovered a fondness for putting cream and jam on pancakes, largely due to a meal I had on a train a few years ago.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)