Least worthy tech-world cliches / buzzwords?
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 3745 votes
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 28 comments
Some other option (Score:5, Funny)
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Could Be Worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Still better than 'Webinar'.
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"All of the above, and then some"
It's really hard to rank these. They're all retarded in their own way.
Re:Some other option (Score:5, Funny)
"All of the above, and then some"
It's really hard to rank these. They're all retarded in their own way.
It's like Sophie's Choice except you want them all to die,.
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One of these things is not like the others (Score:2)
What's wrong with the term "solution"? If people have a problem, a company tries to offer a solution to that problem in the form of a product or line of products. Seems like a pretty standard use of the word to me. Certainly not even in the same ballpark as "The Cloud" or *shudder* "The God Particle".
Re:One of these things is not like the others (Score:5, Insightful)
A solution is what you should get by using a product, which is what the company sells. This goes for the service industry as much as the manufacturing industry.
A tech company saying they sell solutions is like a travel agency saying they sell dreams - both are greasy marketing abuses of the language.
Re:One of these things is not like the others (Score:5, Informative)
As it's used in marketing, it means nothing more than "thing". Every product is a solution. If it doesn't solve something, why would you buy it? A packet of washing powder is a solution to your dirty clothes. A Mars bar is a solution to your chocolate craving. A game is a solution to your boredom.
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A packet of washing powder is a solution to your dirty clothes.
Only when you put it in water.
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the clothes or the solution?
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There is no solution to craving chocolate - just stop-gaps :-)
Re:One of these things is not like the others (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a matter of perspective. Of course the buyer is usually looking for solutions (although often, they're looking for something else, like buzzword compliance); but the seller has a strong natural tendency to only look at their product. How can we sell more of product X? Add feature Y? Remove feature Z? Make the interface "simpler" (but making common tasks require 3x more clicks than before)? The result is that there's a mismatch between what the product actually does and what users actually need. The point of having the seller talk about "solutions" is to get the eyes of the designers, engineers, managers, and sales people off the product, and onto the customer and how they use it.
When I was finishing up my PhD, I took a class called "Entrepreneurship for Engineers", taught by a guy who had worked as a ChemE for several years before going into business. He told a story about an advanced research group he'd worked with where a very intelligent and driven researcher pushed to get his team to develop a composite material that was like Kevlar, but 5x stronger. They spent several years and tens of millions of dollars testing and perfecting the engineering and production of it. But when they went to existing Kevlar customers and said, "Hey, we have this new product -- 5 TIMES stronger than Kevlar!" The customers generally said, "Actually, Kevlar is already plenty strong enough; we don't really need something much stronger. But we do have this other problem -- Kevlar tends to degrade when exposed to sunlight. Does your product handle sunlight better?" Unfortunately, because their team had focused entirely on the strength factor at the expense of others, their product was actually more sensitive to sunlight than Kevlar. So the product was a complete loss.
That's an example of a product group selling a product and not a solution. The guy in charge of the research group was focused exclusively on his technology -- the new technique that was 5x stronger than Kevlar. But he didn't actually investigate to find out what problems needed to be solved, and if his new technology would actually be a solution that anyone would need, and ignored people trying to tell him that strength was probably not a major factor.
So of course, people can use buzzwords and terminology that have no meaning. It only takes a simple search and replace for the sales / marketing department of a company to say they're selling "solutions" rather than "products", with no change to the actual development process. Talk is cheap, after all. But that doesn't mean there's never any merit to the idea talking about solutions instead of products.
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A "solution" nowadays means something half-assed that works at most half as well compared to a real product and costs at least twice as much...
Re:One of these things is not like the others (Score:5, Funny)
A "solution" nowadays means something half-assed that works at most half as well compared to a real product and costs at least twice as much...
You can increase that by an additional factor of ten if you call it an "enterprise solution".
Re:One of these things is not like the others (Score:4, Funny)
Re:One of these things is not like the others (Score:5, Funny)
To be successful, which part should I increase by a factor of ten? Does an "enterprise solution" cost twenty times as much? Does it work one twentieth as well? Or, is it one twentieth-assed?
Yes, exactly. ;-)
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The same thing as widget. It meant something worthwhile. Now it is so abused it means stop reading/listening here.
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But what if it's only a 7% solution?
Then you should evaporate some of the solvent, obviously.
Tablet (Score:4, Informative)
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I don't think you understand this poll. They've always been called tablet computers as far as I know. Do you have a less buzzwordy option (not that tablet is a buzzword)?
Ultrabook == "Apple Macbook Air Clone" (Score:4, Insightful)
At least all of the other options somehow refer to what they mean. Even the "cloud" (if you take it to describe the level of understanding of the people who use the term).
Ultrabook, on the other hand, is just a thinly-veiled reference to "Apple Macbook Air Clone". That word will have absolutely no meaning to anyone after another 5 years or so, whereas all the rest we'll probably have to continue living with, for better or for worse.
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Ultrabook, on the other hand, is just a thinly-veiled reference to "Apple Macbook Air Clone". That word will have absolutely no meaning to anyone after another 5 years or so, whereas all the rest we'll probably have to continue living with, for better or for worse.
Yeah, that's a funny term created out of desperation. First it was netbooks, but demand for those is being eaten by tablets. Apparently, Apple was one of they few companies who could figure out that people wanted a laptop that was both lightweight, small and powerful. Now they created a term to hide their embarrassment. At least we already had the term "smartphone" before the iPhone, although many people couldn't list an example of one before the iPhone.
But, indeed, a useless term even for marketing.
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Not entirely (Score:3, Informative)
"Retina Display". Seriously its a meaningless word that gets thrown around stupidly much.
No, it's not. It has more than some basis in fact, at least as used by Apple. [utah.edu].
But the way the term is used by people on the street certainly distorts its meaning.
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and fucking over the customer with propitiatory formats since before then!
Strange... (Score:3, Interesting)
A cliché or cliche (pronounced UK: /klie/, US: /kle/) is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel.
So, inside Slashdot we can find many... "Obligatory XKCD reference" comes to my mind.
Wi-Fi (Score:4, Interesting)
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Does it mean the zeroes are more smoothly rounded while the ones are straighter?
No, that's only for gold-plated HDMI cables.
Re:Wi-Fi (Score:5, Informative)
This is a good point, I've never gotten this either. According to the Wi-Fi page on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org],
"Wi-Fi" is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance and the brand name for products using the IEEE 802.11 family of standards.".
The article goes on to explain that,,
"The term Wi-Fi, first used commercially in August 1999,[31] was coined by a brand-consulting firm called Interbrand Corporation that the Alliance had hired to determine a name that was "a little catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'"
So there you go, it makes no sense technically because marketing people were involved.
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In otehr words, it is a fantasy name.
That's ok. Nealy all products have one, and they are usefull because they have a specific meaning.
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Re:Wi-Fi (Score:4, Funny)
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In particular if they worked for GPT (GEC Plessey Telecom, yes, I know this dates me). When receptionists there answered the phone they said /zhe pe tei/ "j'ai pete", or "I have farted".
After Cutler Hammer and Eaton merged, they would answer the phones at their Beaver, PA office with "Cutler Hammer Eaton Beaver".
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I agree. In my area it's called WLAN, which is short for "wireless local area network". That's much more appropriate IMO.
Cyber (Score:5, Insightful)
As in "cyberwar" or "cybersecurity" or "We need to rethink our cyber strategy".
It demonstrates a stunning lack of recognition over the subject matter. No-one who knows what they're doing would use it: which makes its prevalance among certain circles... troubling.
Pick a card, any card ... (Score:2)
The Use of "Architect" as a Verb (Score:2)
I'd say that even trumps out the use of "Green" to describe "initiatives" and other previously colorless things.
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I'd say that even trumps out the use of "Green" to describe "initiatives" and other previously colorless things.
I realize it wasn't your point - but "Green" is a great one that deserved to be in the poll.
Most of the "Going Green" discussions I've heard end up being mainly about the color of the dollars they're trying to save - nothing to do with saving energy or having less environmental impact. Heck, some of the ideas seem likely to increase the impact on the environment.
Web 2.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Not used much anymore, but I despise it.
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Where's ITIL? (Score:5, Interesting)
No really.
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ITIL v3, even.
I asked a colleague who had just finished an ITIL training what did the acronym mean, he didn't know, so yeah. ITIL it is.
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Or, from their site:
Notice what is missing there: Approach for what? (Oh, yes, to "IT service management", how dumb of me...) Best practices for what? Drawn from what kind of entities? (No, it can't be "everybody".)
In fact there is some content on it. But a booklet amount of content, not several books.
Web 2.0 (Score:2)
Has anyone discovered what that meant exactly? How is it different from the web we all know?
AJAX : has existed for ages, and frankly, users don't care and don't even know what it is.
User-provided content: as if the web had ever been something other than that.
Re:Web 2.0 (Score:5, Informative)
Web 2.0 is the transition from the web as static media source (where there are publishers, creators, and consumers) and moving towards a more decentralized and abstract source of information. With Web 2.0, the line between creator and consumer is blurred, since consumers create content just as much as they consume other data.
It really has more to do with the content delivery system. The first incarnation of the internet had content delivered much like newspapers, where only specified editors and journalists would write content and stories, and people would access these stories via some publisher like Yahoo or AOL. The idea of Web 2.0 is that anybody can have their own blog, twitter feed, or other sources like flickr or youtube to create content for others.
With the web today, you don't have to go to any specific provider to get access to certain content (I don't need to subscribe to AOL to download their news), or work for a certain publisher to ensure I can get my article posted (I don't need to work for AOL to publish content for their site).
There is an actual meaning for Web 2.0, but most people just think it means "Facebook-esque," which is false. They assume it's how you style the website, when in reality it is how the content is delivered.
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With Web 2.0, the line between creator and consumer is blurred, since consumers create content just as much as they consume other data.
So, you mean it's exactly like Web 1.0, where one of the very first web browsers actually embedded an HTML authoring tool and http server?
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Everybody, and I mean everybody, had a web page when I got online. To say nothing of other parts of the net (newsgroups, mailinglists, whatnot).
So, essentially, the 2.0 thing is something the marketing folks use to label the reversal the damage they caused when they were mistakenly allowed online in the late nineties?
EPIC FAIL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:EPIC FAIL (Score:4, Insightful)
^ EPIC troll FAIL.
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The excuse is that the word was used that way to coin the neologism "Fail Safe" - "Fail" is functioning to limit the considered cases for the other word, "safe", so when written in that form it certainly isn't a verb or a noun. Since it was English grammarians who insisted the term be written as "fail-safe", with the hyphen, they're the ones who made it (part of) a (compound) noun and technically not constructed correctly to serve as an adjective. Dictionary sources, however, mostly indicate it is usually a
Least worthy vs. most overhyped. (Score:5, Interesting)
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No kidding. Do we really need another euphemism for "network"?
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However, IMHO, the gap between what is (presumed to be) promised and what will be delivered for "Cloud computing" will be greatest.
The main feature of cloud computing is the ability to almost instantly increase your capabilites and capacities.
i.e. plug in more servers/storage/RAM and (supposedly) have your application scale up without any fiddling.
This wasn't something that was easy to do in the past.
You still have to pay extra for fault tolerance and geographic distribution.
What do you think is being over promised and under delivered?
Smartphone (Score:3)
It's just a phone with a more capable OS. It's certainly not "smart". Software accessories like Siri might help it get there, but we have a long way to go before phones become intelligent devices.
Dyslexic Journalists (Score:4, Interesting)
The ____-Killer (Score:3)
x64 (Score:3)
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It's actually called amd64 or ie32e depending on which companies implementation it is. The term x86 implies it's running on a 386, or at the very least on the last chip referred to as 686, which would be the Pentium3 I guess. The term x86 makes no sense, without referring to those museum pieces.
Re:x64 (Score:4, Informative)
It's actually called amd64 or ie32e
No, it's actually called x86-64. That was the name that AMD gave it when they created it, in recognition that a large subset of it was identical to x86. I don't like calling it amd64, because Intel deserves at least as much of the blame for it as AMD - Intel created the turd, AMD just polished it a bit. AMD64 only refers to AMD's implementation.
EM64T is the name for Intel's version, which is even more meaningless than IA32e (surely everything after the 386 is IA32 'extended').
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UGH!!! Good Poll... (Score:3)
Cloud?!?! Oh, you mean a server, on the network, that you can interact with or get stuff from when you're not on the *same* network. Cloud, my ass. The one before that for me was AJAX. You mean the abrasive cleanser? What does that have to do with computing? Oh, you mean Javascript, XML, CSS and HTML. Ajax is a CLEANSER to me [colgate.com] and always will be. I refuse to use AJAX when talking about web applications development. I will NEVER use cloud in reference to computing, except in reference to its previous meaning in networking, colloquially referring to the Internet as a nebulous thing, the cloud.
Re:UGH!!! Good Poll... (Score:5, Insightful)
The one before that for me was AJAX. You mean the abrasive cleanser? What does that have to do with computing?
Same here. I also refuse to refer to mice, networks, Python, Apple, and computer. Words have meanings, darn it. Now get off my lawn!
Buzzword bingo (Score:4, Interesting)
App (Score:2)
n/t
all of the above (Score:2)
the obvious missing option.
Another "Other" (Score:2)
3G, 4G, nG for any "n".
Innovation (Score:2)
Innovation (as used by Microsoft)
Synergy (because we're a synergestic team)
2IC (as opposed to the legitimate I2C)
Literally (as mis-used by literally everyone. D'oh)
Oh wait, you're only after tech-world buzzwords? Never mind.
'Social Media' (Score:3, Insightful)
nearly reduces me to tears every time I hear someone (usually in management) use it as if it were this incredibly smart, promising strategic solution God Particle in the Cloud, accessed via Ultrabook so as to avoid Advanced Persistent Threats and to enhance synergy.
Social media? As opposed to what-- Antisocial media? Animal Media? Oh, of course, Plant Media.
Register (Score:2)
How about "please register for our website". No, F-you. I don't want to open another account on a site I'll probably never purchase from again, and I'll never hear about until I read you got powned and now all my info is public. Its as stupid and vapid as going thru the motions to open a vendor net30 account to buy a velvet elvis or dale earnhardt poster off the back of some rusty pickup truck at a fleamarket. I'm shopping, not looking for a lifetime commitment. Its kind of like the one night stand thi
Standards! (Score:3)
Also wins for best single-word oxymoron.
Re:an oldie but a goodie.... (Score:5, Informative)
Blogosphere?
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Solution is the joker word that 'system' was ten years ago.
Re:Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Solution doesn't really fit with the rest of the list, because it's a useful and meaningful term that has been coopted by marketing, rather than a marketing buzzword from the start. In the real world, businesses have problems that needs solutions. A package of hardware and software that addresses a specific business need is a solution. Companies like IBM make a lot of money selling solutions: they'll send analysts into a company, work out what their needs are, and then deliver a custom system that addresses these needs, possibly using some off-the-shelf components (hardware or software) and usually including some custom components.
Unfortunately, a lot of software companies in the '90s realised that the big money was in solutions, and rather than working out what this actually meant, they just put the word 'solution' in their product names.
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Unfortunately, a lot of software companies in the '90s realised that the big money was in solutions, and rather than working out what this actually meant, they just put the word 'solution' in their product names.
And eventually started preceding it with, enterprise. I've seen several companies drop the solution part and just put enterprise in front of everything now too.
Re:Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
It was e- and cyber... But to make some people with bigger budgets feel better, they were enterprise. Solutions were great. They could have their own solution to sell to someone else, or if they didn't want to go through the work, they could find someone else with a solution. Now they want to be in the cloud, with their enterprise cloud solutions. Of course, this is the logical progression to outsourcing to offshore 3rd party solutions. Too many words. "Cloud" fits them all.
Are you cloud compatible? Cloud compliant? Don't you do all your work in the cloud?
On so many occasions, I've had to decrypt what the buzzword of the day was for senior and middle management. They'd say enterprise cyber e- solution in the cloud. I'd ask "What the fuck do you mean?" Their answers are always the same. "Enterprise will give us sustainably, grow with our needs forever, and give us the perfect solution." Cyber, "e-", solution, and cloud, are usually answered with grumbles, some magic hand waiving and assurances that it's everything we've ever needed, wanted, and we can have it for just $19.95/mo. Of course, that $19.95/mo becomes $1,000/mo very quickly.
Then the deciphering come into play.
cyber? e-? Those mean that you use a computer to use them. You guys are *still* throwing that around like it's some new thing.
solution? It's a sales package. A product. A little something that will give you something. My electric toothbrush isn't a dental hygiene cyber solution. It's a fucking toothbrush.
And finally "cloud". It's a server that you don't own, don't have privileged access to, and most likely when shit hits the fan, I won't be able to help you.
So they'll go with their enterprise cyber e-cloud solution. A few months later, I hear the shreaks. "Oh my god, my mail is down!" Ya, you have someone else running it. Call them. Oh, they lost everything when their storage crashed? Well, not much I can do. I ran equipment *here*. I ran equipment in *our* datacenter. I could try to recover it, if it was on *our* equipment. Since it's not, I hope you kept a copy. Oh. You didn't. You're shit out of luck then, aren't you?
But we have the cloud solution for file storage. Their site has a message saying they just went out of business. How do I get my files? Well, you don't. You and all their customers are shit out of luck. Would it have been nice if we had the files on *our* servers, in *our* datacenter, with *our* tape backups. What would you like me to do for you?
But they made a change the the cloud accounting interface! We need some functionality that they removed! OH my god, it's a disaster! Save us!
Ya, remember all that magic hand waving, and assurances that the buzzword of the day will always save your ass? Remember I tried to be the sane one? You've spent enough with that outsourced abortion in the last year to put in a new set of servers to handle all of it, every month. You've wasted a metric fucktonne of cash, and I tried to tell you it was a mistake. It was a mistake. You see it now. I can't roll back the clock and undo the last year of managerial fuckups that you've done. You pulled executive privilege on me. There's nothing I can do to undo that. I can get you started again. It will take some time, and long hours. Remember when I said outsourcing accounting to the 3rd party was a mistake. It was. Now your accounting group will have to manually recreate all the accounts in a new system. Those emails that you just lost? Well, they're gone. Live with it. And all those files on the 3rd party server that's gone? Those are long gone. I don't care how important they were to you, your customers, your wife, or your cat. I don't, nor ever did, have access to them.
If a managerial type person ever reads this, they
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I still think someone should dissolve the word in an acidic ________.
Re:Solution (Score:4, Funny)
Back in the eighties, I remember one high tech company used to run job ads with the tag line "Solutions, not slogans".
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Especially since "moving forward" has been a feature of cars from day one - where's the sudden innovation in that?
Re:First (Score:4, Funny)
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Cowboy Neal. That is the correct action. Oh, wait...
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PIPA translates to (smoking) pipe, but it's also the word for "blowjob"
apt, isn't it?
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I prefer to call them "website replacements". Can't make (X)HTML that degrades gracefully? Replace it with an app for the affected mobile device!
(I voted "The Cloud / Cloud Computing", for pretty much the FSF's reasons [gnu.org].)
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Re:Tough one (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you do not understand the Higgs Boson, then you understand as much as any theoretical physicist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9pj3fiZGNE [youtube.com]
Re:Tough one (Score:4, Insightful)
"Cloud" is being attached to all sorts of things to make them sound hip & trendy.
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External webhosting barely qualifies. A proper cloud solution (ha!) has provisions for easy scaling (click a button / detect high load and poor response times -> throw more servers at it without needing someone to log in to those individual servers and configure them by hand), granular billing (as in CPU-hours, with the ability to throw 10
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"Price point" does have a clear and precise definition, it's just a shame no one actually knows it.
Price point is a term from microeconomics, defined as "points on the demand curve where demand is relatively high, but where a small change in price may cause a sizeable contraction in demand leading to a loss of total revenue for the producer."
For some reason that I fail to comprehend, everyone started using "price point" as a synonym for "price".
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Nay. Price point is a deal breaker.
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For some reason that I fail to comprehend, everyone started using "price point" as a synonym for "price".
You miswrote, perhaps you mean:
That begs the question of why everyone started using "price point" as a synonym for "price".
Both misuses are the same failure mode, unintelligent people trying to appear intelligent by using big words and long phrases. Typical mouthbreather logic: A "price point" sounds more formal and business like than a "price" so I'll use the longer phrase. I donno WTF "begging the question" means but some smart people use it, and everyone else uses it as filler, so I will also use it as a filler. Both the educational equivalent of the nouveau riche aka the beverly hillbillie
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yep, its kind of sad that during this pissing contest I have resorted to XFCE and ICEWM as my premium choice in desktops, and nothing I have tried will work properly with my year 2000 1280x1024 LCD screen post 2009
its really irritating me to the point that if it will run windows ... it does, if not then and only then will I sit down, waste a fucking day and get linux to resemble a useable system.
Re:Least worthy of what? (Score:4, Informative)
You sir, are from marketing.