| Humour:
|
7
|
Um, I think the overall wound up in the concept section. So... individual sections...
- The product! good how it's vague, but you could make it seem more important, maybe? Might make it funnier. Might now.
- At any rate, I do not understand the codename - contradictory ubuntu thing and a google thing? Clearly I am missing something...
- Even if this time they are sure, will it, though? Will it really? I think not. (Nice one.)
- Development history - So this is saying it's specifically software... I got the impression elswhere that it was both software and hardware. Not sure where, though. Maybe I'm imagining things. (might want to check it, though) And why the abrupt hirings and rehirings? By themselves they're amusing enough, but a why might be more so. Politics or stupid committees or who know what, but something overly typical and ludicrous could do well.
- I imagine the junior member as an intern. Am I wrong? If so, though, was it really an accident?
- Features - and quite the features they are, too.
- Faster performance - You say they resorted to rigging the benchmarks... instead of linking that to lazy, why not link to some real-world examples? I'm pretty sure, for instance, that I read somewhere that that's how AMD got its processors up to 3GHz...
- The needlessly big number just seems silly, though. Perhaps I'm tired of seeing excessively large stuff elsewhere...
- This Go Ahead, Smash It Against a Wall™ feature really sounds like it could use a subsection of its own. I mean, it is, after all, a feature...
- Increased security - metaphorically, at least, this is so true... does the next version also conveniently eject the chipset when one wants to impale it, then, or does that part only work after the GASIAAW is implemented?
- Friendlier user interface - I said more about this somewhere else. I think it was in the concept section. Still, is it a 'friendlier' interface? It is simplified, yes, but that does not make it friendlier. Which I guess is probably the point, so nevermind.
- Shininess-wise, however, how exactly is blinding them a way to enslave them, necessarily? Or is this a continuation on the Paul reference? (I find religiosity confusing and only made it partway through the wikipedia article, mostly just looking at the pictures. *shifty eyes*)
- Overall betterness - I like how 'betterness' isn't actually a word... yet, somehow, it is exactly what the next version is incorporating. Quite.
- Marketing - What you have here is quite solid; this is exactly what people do. Buuut... er... perhaps more ways in which the marketing itself is operating? Like what are they doing, specifically? (if that's even possible in such a vague setting)
- And is any of this, by any chance, aimed toward making the users not notice when the next version does not live up to all of that? Or whatever I meant. I have no time left to figure it out.
- Advance reception - I'm hoping what I had to say on this really did wind up in another section (prose and formatting), because I need to run away now.
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| Concept:
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8
|
"The next version. It's going to fix everything. And that's a promise." But it's actually the same as the last one, except shinier and purple instead of blue. I think that sums up the concept rather well. Generally poking fun at software practices as well as hardware, it's a lovely idea. There are so many more specifics it could touch upon; the schemes to update formats just to force people to buy the new versions just to open files, the publishing various books and other things prior to the next version just to get up hype, the making things on menus and the like move around randomly 'according to how much it's used' like the whole 'simplifying by moving everything to other places and thus necessitating further clicking' but perhaps even more annoying...
...I'm not really a fan of next versions. Can you tell? Subsequently, I rather like this idea and what you've done with it.
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| Prose and formatting:
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6
|
I love the links, the way they link to what you mean or to specific jokes or examples. They could be more consistent, however; unlike previous sections with nearly all explanatory or whatnot links, the Overall betterness one has next to none.
And on the other hand, I only noticed when already part of the way through that the links were going specific places or whatever one might call it, when something simply didn't make sense as it was. So I looked at what one of the previous things was linking to and then understood. I suppose what I'm saying is it's either too subtle for the most part or not important enough for the most part - you might want to either make them more necessary for overall understanding and thus force people to look at them (which, frankly, seems silly to me) or make them less important. Don't directly build off of stuff mentioned only in what's linked.
Or something. (Not a major issue, but... I dunno. Consistency is nice with such things.)
Other things... I noticed a couple of typos, but as usual your grammar and flow and tone and whatnot are decent, so fixery should prove as simple as a read-through when done.
It's also the next version as... something. Reading this, it almost feels like 'the next version' should be capitalised or in italics or some such, you know? Because it's the next version. The long awaited. Etc. Saying it normal-like feels too mundane.
And the last section, as to why it comes off weakly, well... it's just quotes. The quotes themselves are fine, but the blurb introducing them is quite blah-ish. It's a valid point for the article as a whole, but just summing up what 'excerpts below from various sources show' doesn't work so well. Possibly some analysis, further ironic links, some more conclusive tie-in to the article as a whole (it is, after all, the conclusion), or even just followed by a more in general paragraph describing how these fit into the overall perception of the next version - what with the interweb and all, users and potential users'll get their voices out as well.
And I know I'm just being picky at this point, but given the absence of quotes in the rest of the thing, four seems like too many. Makes it lop-sided. (eh, maybe you could just move the quotes to the sides of sections, like the images... do out with the section entirely?)
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| Images:
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5
|
Overall, the images complement the article quite well, while their captions aren't the most witty I've ever seen, they do work. Thus my main beef comes with the quality of the images themselves - the first is absolutely lovely, but then they just go downhill from there.
- The first, the next version itself in full glow mode, well, I rather love it. But this seems as good a place as any to complain about the infobox with which it goes: it's so vague and not following the nearing cliché of prerelease marketing that you did so well in the article introduction. It actually sort of contradicts it; if it could go along with it or expand upon that or just somehow match up and aid the article proper, it might seem less out of place.
- The Chip and PIN, on the other hand, look like a surprisingly large chip and a pin that is looks to be completely ordinary in size. On a beige background. I hate beige. I mean, really. And it's not even a well composed image. While it does poke fun at the whole using a pin as a comparison, I just think you could do better. Get something prettier or something that actually does seem a giant pin or something.
- The screenshot just plain doesn't make sense, though. Before they incorporated shininess? What's with the excessive glare obfuscating the entire thing, then? And it's not pretty... I know, I know, not everything has to be pretty, but it is the next version, the current useless culmination of every previous version now with extra glow and marketing and corner-cutting.
- Actually, the only issue I can find with the advert is that possibly the fine text ain't fine enough. And there ain't enough of it. Some pretty funny fine text actually looking at it, though.
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| Miscellaneous:
|
7
|
Finish this thing off. Or this number will grow fangs and hunt you down. And as it's a biggish number due to the enormous potential of the thing, it growing fangs and hunting you down would be bad.
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| Final Score:
|
33
|
I never know what to put here. The usual I'm not sure what's going on with the numbers. The imperative (at least in this case) make this thing glorious; it's a lovely start and should not die. The probable I hope this review actually contains something useful and helps, but I'm too lazy to go back and read through it and check for myself, mostly because I lost my laptop and need to run away from this computer I hijacked, now.
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| Reviewer:
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~  *shifty eyes* (talk) (stalk) -- 20101008 - 18:58 (UTC)
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Sir MacMania GUN—[02:35 20 Aug 2010]
*shifty eyes* (talk) (stalk) -- 20101007 - 18:07 (UTC)