This thread idea comes from a serious beef I have with my Television provider, their equipment and, in particular, one function that is so badly executed it makes me want to kick the morons behind it. I'm talking about the "Locate Remote" function. Sounds like a great fucking idea, right? How many times, years ago, have you wished for just such a button? And, how could they have fucked it up so badly? Let me tell you how. You lose your remote, first you have to get down on your hands and knees in front of the receiver and find the little "locate remote" button. You hit the little button and wait, and listen. Sometimes it doesn't work the first time you press it, press it again, wait. Finally the beeping starts, it's only been a few seconds since the button has been successfully pressed but it was just long enough to make you wonder if it needed to be pressed again. Now your remote is beeping. You will soon find out you have a whole new problem. When you hear the first in a series of beeps, you get excited. It sounded like it was coming from the couch cushions. Great, you start to step toward the couch when the second pair of beeps come. They are a totally different tone and volume than the first. That pair of beeps sounded like it came from another piece of furniture that could have eaten your remote. You start to step toward that piece of furniture and retrieve your remote when the third pair of beeps comes. They are a totally different tone and volume than all the beeps you've heard so far, those beeps sound like they aren't even in the same fucking room. You finally find your remote after you've crawled around on the floor like a blind dog in a new house, lost and bumping into everything, looking a different direction with every beep. It may have been in the vicinity of some beeps you heard but you can't remember which ones in the series of beeps and will go through the same process again, tomorrow. It doesn't get any easier. I will admit that your chances of finding your remote are higher than without this function, but only slightly, and you have to find it before you go insane. YMMV, but I'm busy thinking of clever, non-violent revenge for the people that are responsible for this function on my TV remote. Focus: Do you have any examples of great ideas completely fucked up in their execution?
Credit cards are one of them. Most people just cant handle the idea of credit. The idea: "Here's a card that you can advance yourself some money through a micro loan and you just have to pay it back later on or at least incrementally." The implementation: "Hey look, free money. I think Ill get another. And another. What the hell, who are these guys taking my car and house away?" Bump.
That stupid, sister-fucking 1800 Tequila What a great idea, you can measure shots out in the lid and get drunk! A bottle and a shooter cup all in one! Brilliant! Yeah, it's plenty fucking brilliant if you're wired like a mongoose, because otherwise you're stuck with your stupid simian reflexes AND YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO DRINK FROM THE LID. You'll fuck it up the first time when you're sober, and you'll say "hey, I'll do better next time". No you won't, because the 1800 Tequila is a demonic carnival game invented by some seventh-circle monstrosity and sent back to earth to torment the good people who enjoy tequila. And then you realize you're wasting liquor. This does not help the mental game. And of course, OF COURSE you don't HAVE to drink from the lid... but then you have to put it down and have it taunt you all night, saying things like "HEY FUCKTARD, TOO STUPID TO DRINK LIQUOR RIGHT?" and "HEY, MAYBE YOU COULD HAVE DRUNK YOURSELF TO DEATH TO AVOID THE SHAME IF YOU HADN'T WASTED SO MUCH TEQUILA TRYING TO GET IT INTO THE STUPID SHOT TOP." Never again.
Focus: Trying to make "internet celebrities" into REAL celebrities. One of my favourites was when they gave College Humour two shows which they decided to turn into giant, circle-jerking ego strokes dedicated to themselves, the "writers". Only it turned out they are a bunch of unfunny Neo-hipster twats and were cancelled within weeks. Thankfully. That horrid movie "Miss March" is another prime example how Internet actors need to STAY internet actors.
Except those dudes were a sketch comedy group that had a TV show, they didn't have anything to do with the internet in getting "famous". But that movie was terrible.
I thought they were an Internet group, I was told that originally. Some of their skits (like the "Grape" one) were funny but I hated that movie horribly. Redux: Sketch comedy shouldn't be made into movies. Just look at 90% of the SNL movies made. Monty Python is an exception.
The Whitest Kids You Know were on the internet for years before they got the TV show. Most of their sketches from the first season were just remakes.
http://www.gibbssports.com/quadski How about a combination of an ATV and a PWC? Sounds good, right? However, I just can't imagine it would be very good on either land or water and is probably a needlessly complicated piece of junk.
I'll go one further, the internet. When the Internet because accessible to the public, the thinking was how much better informed as a populace we would become due to the almost instantaneous nature of digital communications. In a strange twist, there's so much stuff out there that you really have to sift through to find the accurate stuff - as an example - the current vaccine nonsense. The doctor that penned the original report from 1998 has been discredited and lost his license, however, due to the internet (and some celebrity idiots - which also have increased due to the internet) - this shit lives on forever, so some idiot, somewhere, will come across it and not vaccinate their kid in 2020. And 2050. Rinse and repeat.
So has it been theoretically been ruined by implementation or does it actually not work? Because we're talking about things that actually don't work right? The video looks cool as fuck. That's some batman type shit I've been wanting since I was 6.
I haven't watched the video. It is my opinion that this machine wouldn't meet my expectations of performance of each machine separately. And the price tag is outrageous. I read somewhere, it's $42,000. So it's priced like they combined two ATVs and two PWCs.
That's in the price range of an Argo, which are good for shallow ponds and water crossings but basically useless in open water.
Virtual Reality. It had the potential to be a profit monster, but ridiculous cost and heavy, cumbersome equipment sunk it. I wonder if they brought it back in this digital age how it would be now. Ryan Leaf. He was expected to be the NFL's greatest quarterback, instead turned out to be an all-out failure of a human in every aspect. He was recently arrested for burglary. Talk about a downward spiral.
Here's one. Google Glass. Great idea, and it'd be cool if they fixed it up right, but Google wanted to have people pay $1500 to beta test it. There are a ton of articles out there talking about why they "suspended sales" shows it was a failure and a few articles saying why it's failure was a success. Also, I met a guy that had one, it was fucking ugly and bulky. There weren't many developers really focusing on it, so there wasn't much to do with it. On top of that, the counter buzz of "Glassholes" got really strong. This article is pretty strong. http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/20/opinion/p ... ent-wrong/