Is there a general word for someone or something popular or loved by the masses but that has not been proven to be effectual (like how some would use the term "pop psychology" pejoratively)? Examples would be how things like popular psychology or holistic medicine are accepted excitedly by numerous people while not being proven to be useful to the majority.

UPDATE: Thanks for you responses. I think the word "fad" (or "hype") would come closest to what I was looking for (thank you for that).

But is there a more general or appropriate term? I'm not American so apologies in advance (this is strictly for the sake of discussion): the only example I can think of is certain voters who were initially excited about Obama, but came to be disappointed after he failed to meet their expectations. Is there a word that could be used to describe Obama in this context? Something well-loved which turns out to be a disappointment.


Question: qemu-img: error while reading sector 327680: Invalid argument
Answer: The syntax needs adjusting. Flag arguments need to come first, then the input file and then the output file.

qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw Ubuntu-12.04-LTS-Jeos-1.0-disk1.vmdk myImage.raw




If you're still getting that, it might suggest a corrupted VMDK. I just downloaded the appliance VMDK and ran:

$ qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw Ubuntu-12.04-LTS-Jeos-1.0-disk1.vmdk myImage.raw
$ ls -l myImage.raw 
-rw-r--r-- 1 oli oli 2147483648 Jan 16 13:35 myImage.raw


That seems to work fine.

Edit: This seems like it might be a side-effect of an old version of qemu. I'm using Ubuntu 13.10 with version 1.5.0 of qemu-utils. Either upgrade the version of qemu (per the question I linked to) or upgrade Ubuntu.