Journal gateman9's Journal: Can we get rid of the pander-, er, marketing department
You know, I sometimes wonder what life would be like without marketing. Or more specifically, if we didn't need to sell the technology to Joe Sixpack.
We wouldn't have a bloated and wasteful processor named the Pentium 4 (yes, Virginia, its wasteful, it does all this ridiculous forward computation, with hundreds of steps, and chucks most of it out the window, but because it does this, it can have clock speeds of GHz+). We would have good processors that may be slower in clock-speed but do fewer wasted computations (well, AMD is kinda like this).
We wouldn't have cell-phones with cameras in them. Frankly, when the cell-phone people still can't give me wire-line signal quality, why should I care about crappy, low-res digital photos. Isn't the ether cluttered with enough of these things already? And on top of this, especially with LG's supposed 7 MP camera, how about a phone with reasonably written firmware? My own LG phone will fail to give me audio if it doesn't recieve the signal from the carrier within x-many milliseconds (I'll call someone, I'll hear nothing, then hang up only to get a call from that someone asking if I called).
Who gives a rip about what Joe Sixpack wants? The fact fo the matter is if you have enough of a marketing juggernaut (M$ comes to mind) you can convince Joe Sixpack to buy whatever you want him to buy. Joe and Jane Sixpack are very gullible idiots.
Honestly, its this kind of pandering/marketing that has taken what was a branch of mathematics (every CS prof I've had with, one exception, has had at least a BS/BA in mathematics) and dragged it through the mud. CS used to be about doing something interesting with those chips the physicists, chemists and electrical engineers came up with. Now its about 'enterprise' and use-cases and formalized diagrams through UML. If this crap had existed 30 years ago, UNIX would never have been, we'd still be waiting on Multics. All to please management, which wants to please the investors, which is essentialy a group of John Champagnes. And guess what? John Champagne may have money, but he's every bit as much of an idiot as his cousin Sixpack.
Maybe I'm being a bit harsh here, there are some intelligent, non-computer people out there, but they seem to be few and far between.
We wouldn't have a bloated and wasteful processor named the Pentium 4 (yes, Virginia, its wasteful, it does all this ridiculous forward computation, with hundreds of steps, and chucks most of it out the window, but because it does this, it can have clock speeds of GHz+). We would have good processors that may be slower in clock-speed but do fewer wasted computations (well, AMD is kinda like this).
We wouldn't have cell-phones with cameras in them. Frankly, when the cell-phone people still can't give me wire-line signal quality, why should I care about crappy, low-res digital photos. Isn't the ether cluttered with enough of these things already? And on top of this, especially with LG's supposed 7 MP camera, how about a phone with reasonably written firmware? My own LG phone will fail to give me audio if it doesn't recieve the signal from the carrier within x-many milliseconds (I'll call someone, I'll hear nothing, then hang up only to get a call from that someone asking if I called).
Who gives a rip about what Joe Sixpack wants? The fact fo the matter is if you have enough of a marketing juggernaut (M$ comes to mind) you can convince Joe Sixpack to buy whatever you want him to buy. Joe and Jane Sixpack are very gullible idiots.
Honestly, its this kind of pandering/marketing that has taken what was a branch of mathematics (every CS prof I've had with, one exception, has had at least a BS/BA in mathematics) and dragged it through the mud. CS used to be about doing something interesting with those chips the physicists, chemists and electrical engineers came up with. Now its about 'enterprise' and use-cases and formalized diagrams through UML. If this crap had existed 30 years ago, UNIX would never have been, we'd still be waiting on Multics. All to please management, which wants to please the investors, which is essentialy a group of John Champagnes. And guess what? John Champagne may have money, but he's every bit as much of an idiot as his cousin Sixpack.
Maybe I'm being a bit harsh here, there are some intelligent, non-computer people out there, but they seem to be few and far between.
Can we get rid of the pander-, er, marketing department More Login
Can we get rid of the pander-, er, marketing department
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