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| The BlackBerry as black sheep |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-10-16 22:11:20 |
| "Rachel Crosby speaks about her BlackBerry phone the way someone might speak of an embarrassing relative. 'I’m ashamed of it,' said Ms. Crosby, a Los Angeles sales representative who said she had stopped pulling out her BlackBerry at cocktail parties and conferences. In meetings, she says she hides her BlackBerry beneath her iPad for fear clients will see it and judge her." Other products many people own but feel ashamed about: sex toys. So essentially, the BlackBerry is now the equivalent of a vibrator. In all seriousness though - why feel ashamed because of a phone? Are people really that shallow? I'm really getting too old for this stuff. |
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| Hop on the bandwagon... |
| By r_a_trip on 2012-10-17 10:07:59 |
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It's a sign of the times. You better speak "cool smartphone" or else you are a thing of the past. Join or be left behind. I do speak "cool smartphone", but I'm a dinosaur when it comes to twitter, facebook, instagram. At a certain age you stop making sense of new phenomenons. I miss Instant Messaging. It was quick, personal and far better than self-publishing every boring minutiae of your life on a site where others leave feedback by telling you if they like it. Sadly, in my nook of the world IM seems completely dead. |
 - Score: 2 |
| RE[4]: Seriously? |
| By mojmir on 2012-10-17 13:38:32 |
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... and on the other corner of the street you see three young twats bragging about who's completely equivalent eyephone is better :] sadly shallow is the monkey creature... |
| - Score: 1 |
| Peer Pressure |
| By franksands on 2012-10-17 14:09:18 |
| I remember a friend telling me a story that he worked at an advertising company and that he "had" to have an iPhone or his clients would not take him seriously, or think that he was not "creative" enough. So he 2 phones: the work iPhone and a regular dumb phone for personal use. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Ring Tones |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-10-17 15:07:25 |
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When it comes to shame and embarrassment I think nothing can beat ring tones. Especially the "funny" ones. It doesn't matter what type of phone plays them. Often they are not funny or only slightly funny, but after you heard them a number of times they become very annoying. I do think you always need to change the default ring tone to something else, otherwise it seems you haven't read the manual or just not plain smart enough to figure it out yourself. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: Seriously? |
| By Chrispynutt on 2012-10-17 15:53:18 |
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Yeah it is really sad. Especially for women, all you get are messages about how your entire self worth should be based on how you look and are seen. It is one of the worst degradations in society I have seen in the past 30 years. You can see it even in things like Gundam. First series it was an equal opportunity fest for the oddly shaped and ugly. Now it is just a parade of pretty boys and girls. Everything is twisting this way. We don't even accept oddly shaped fruit or veg these days. It is so perverse. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: Hop on the bandwagon... |
| By StephenBeDoper on 2012-10-17 17:19:16 |
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> I miss Instant Messaging. It was quick, personal and far better than self-publishing every boring minutiae of your life on a site where others leave feedback by telling you if they like it. Sadly, in my nook of the world IM seems completely dead. I couldn't agree more. In the past year or two, I've done a few installations of a PHP/MySQL app called AjaxChat - it's essentially a clone of the basic functionality of IRC. And it's always amusing to see the first reactions from people who are more accustomed/only accustomed to "modern" social media. There's almost always someone who comments "oh wow, it's like twitter, but instant!" And occasionally, there will be someone who's slightly more tech-savvy and will instead compare it to MSN Messenger, "but with multiple people". As they say, "everything old is new again" - at least if the majority of the audience has forgotten the "old" (or was unaware of it to begin with). |
| - Score: 3 |
| Using what you got |
| By Earl C Pottinger on 2012-10-17 17:49:31 |
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One thing I often get is why I don't have the latest in laptop/computers. My response is "Show how you will solve this problem on your up-to-date super computer" then point out one of the weird problems I work on for fun. Of-course they can't since people who do ask such questions are usually the people who know the least about computer. |
| - Score: 2 |
| Not just about superficial value |
| By pooo on 2012-10-17 18:19:00 |
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Seriously when you use a blackberry it does say something meaningful about you, your technical acumen and how in touch you are with technology trends. Blackberry fell because blackberry sucks and because their phones from a year ago might as well be from the 90s compared to a Galaxy S3 or Iphone 5. If your job has nothing to do with tech, who cares. However if it does, I think you are right to be embarrassed and other people are right to judge you as "out of it". Not as a bad person but probably someone I would wonder about in a work scenario. It's like all the jokes about how people with @aol email addresses are perceived. It is *totally* valid. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: Using what you got |
| By pooo on 2012-10-17 18:22:58 |
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I can answer that question wrt phones 1000 times over. A series of examples from this very morning: I take banjo lessons. My instructor lost his tuner so he used a tuner on his iphone that worked great. I then made a recording using a free app on my S3 and instantly uploaded it to dropbox so he could listen to it also. On my way home I listened to the mp3 I'd made by streaming via bluetooth to my car stereo. None of that would be possible with a crappy phone from a few years ago. Having said all that, I totally agree wrt to laptops. I think real computers are stuck in a timewarp circa 1999. Hardware improves but nothing of importance really changes. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: le sigh.... |
| By lucas_maximus on 2012-10-17 19:16:29 |
| this, a thousand times! |
| - Score: 2 |
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