| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Saturday 12 October 2002: |
| Grarh! Light years faster is not an appropriate description of anything, Comcast advertisers, and it's even less appropriate for describing an internet connection. A light year is a measure of distance. You wouldn't say "gosh, that person runs metres faster than me", would you? Regardless, even if it were a measure of speed, it would be a measure of speed, and internet connections are not measured in speed. Cable modem does not allow me to communicate at 15 miles per hour. And I'm pretty sure a light year is not a number of bits per second, no matter how informal. I recommend changing the advertisement to say "shitloads faster".
[06:15] |
| Khandi |
| I've heard products described as light years AHEAD of their competition, maybe that's what Comcast was trying to say. Ironically, the ad exec who coined the term 'light years ahead' probably thought it was a measure of time. |
| Khandi |
| Does anyone remember the Super Nintendo being advertised as 'a quantum leap in video game technology' ? Apparently Nintendo's ad men didn't know that a quantum leap is the smallest amount that a thing can change. |
| Tom |
| It could be that the problem lies in the discarding of 'per second'. When you say that somebody runs miles faster than you, you are essentially saying that they run miles per second faster than you. Unless it's a matter of acceleration, you'd need another per second on the end to cover that. In a similar way, Comcast could be advertising that their connections run light years per second faster than their competitors. Which would mean something horrendously funny if I had the mathematics to render it into a suitable equation. |
| Kevan |
| "Let us provide your Internet! Shit loads faster!" I suspect that light years and miles are actually used a hypothetical, extremely-vague graph axis thing ("miles better", etc.) |