[Windows 8 General] e.mote:
I think it's a good thing for all concerned. It's obviously good for C.Price bud, who'll get a pretty good payday for basically some smooth talk. It's good for Price's fans, who get to dream about some cool (imaginary) stuff, at least for a while. Two months of anticipation for 10 measly bucks--can't beat that. And after the bubble bursts, at least some will walk away a bit wiser. Definitely a good deal.

It's good for me, too. I'm a student of observing and gauging people's behavior, particularly group behavior, and this is a pretty good case study. It's a nice life skill to learn, to be able to recognize and predict how people will react in a given situation. If you ever wanted to make your message/product appeal to a wide audience, knowing people's hot buttons and how to push them is kinda important. Think of it as a wider view of Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends & Influence People."

The KS potato-salad case is another good example. Forbes has a good write-up on it,

http://forbes.com/sites/kevinharrin...salad-holds-2-big-lessons-for-business-owners

Succinctly, what resonates?

Now, far be it from me to generalize that sheisters are doing a societal service by educating the stupefied masses. I'd be the first to step in when the elderly or disadvantaged are involved. But there are no disadvantaged here; all the info is available for those who bother to look. As seen in this thread, people will simply tune out when the facts go against their belief. They rationalize. They scapegoat. This isn't an exception; it's typical human behavior. When face with it, you can only let things take their course.

Let's ignore Price's non-existent credentials and his phantom "team" for the moment. So, what resonates about Price's pitch? The ability to run Android games in Windows, what else? He is promising Droid+Win without the overhead of a VM or emu, and without the lag of dual-boot. Purportedly, it'll be done with a hypervisor that only takes 5 minutes to install, during which it will dynamically repartition your drive and relocate your existing data SAFELY and AUTOMATICALLY! It can be run from a USB drive, has all needed drivers for the 25 (and more) supported systems, and is user-friendly to boot. It supports multi-touch, multiple screens, motion controllers, etc etc. Not only that, it can further support DVRs, Macs, CableCard, custom-built PCs, smart TVs, and many, many more, but ONLY IF YOU VOTE FOR IT!

It's the usual pie-in-the-sky pitch that is eminently laughable--but not for those susceptible to the pitch, those that the pitch resonates with. You can see it in the KS comments. People want this Droid+Win thing, and they won't ask too many questions that might undo their dream. In fact, they will work themselves into believing the con, with only minimal prodding on Price's part. Note that even those with "unsupported" systems are believing that they'll get support, if they would only vote for it. Some are ponying up additional money, or doing recruitment work for Price, so he can hit the $125K stretch goal. Nobody dares to rock the boat. They all take comfort in the safety of numbers. Hey, 4000+ people can't be all wrong, right? CLIFF? WHAT CLIFF?

So, before we laugh at all the saps who got sucked into ridiculous cons like the Nigerian scam, understand why. It's not because the pitch was persuasive. People want the scam (free money) to be true--because they probably need money--so they believe it. The scam resonates with them. The pitch is only a catalyst. The people's mind does most of the work.

Anyway, I was hoping that more ConsoleOS fans would come out of the woodwork to defend their "faith" against the heathen naysayers. Alas, even the witless has a sense of self-preservation, and we are left forlorn and bereft. Deprived of low-browed entertainment, then I propose a HUNT THE WUMPUS game, wherein we catalog our good friend Price's slip-ups on the road to hucksterdom. I'll start us off with few, and you guys fill in the rest, alright?

. Videos can be easily faked, especially anything shown on a display. Any displayable sequence can be frame-captured and play back as a video clip. Want to make your demo system look more powerful? Speed up the framerate. Want to make it look crappy? Drop frames from the clip. Interactivity is not a problem; you simply sync your action to the video's, like lip-syncing. The "smooth gaming" demo shown in the main KS video pitch is most likely a video clip.

How to know? Below is Price's second video pitch for the $125K stretch goal, to "get proper support" for the Surface Pro line. At the 1:03 mark in the video, he demos the same "smooth gaming" sequence on the SP3, which has only been out a month, which Price claims to have "totally different chipset hardware" that require the additional $75K to support. To have an actual OpenGL 3.0 game (his claim) running smoothly on the SP3 would be the final step in device support, which would entirely contradict all his previous claims. Verdict: Fake.

[YOUTUBE]aAZaN7A27RM[/YOUTUBE]

. Price makes a number of references to XenGT, which is a brand-new GPU virtualization tech for Xen that was just announced last year. (1st release was 09/2013, 2nd release was 03/2014.) I'm not familiar with Xen, but from a cursory search, there is yet no known real-world implementation of XenGT. This in itself doesn't definitively prove his claim as a lie, but it is highly unlikely, and shows his penchant for name-dropping bleeding-edge buzzwords to impress the yokels. Ditto claimed OpenGL 3.1 support, et al.

. Note that MMV scrupulously replied to almost every KS comment. Supposedly, the replies are from different people in Price's "team." Price is mentioned in the 3rd person, and "engineering" purportedly made a showing. Yet the prose and the word choices are all consistent, ie they are all from the same person. When comparing these copious replies to Price's own many missives; they are the same. They are all Price's writings. There is no "team."

OK I'm leaving all the good stuff to you guys. Go crazy.

PS: I have a small confession. I said peeps should do due diligence. The truth is that I tend do mine after the fact, ie after my bullsh!t alarm is triggered. All of the above are after the fact. I knew Price was a bullsh!tter 10 seconds into his video pitch, not from any evidence, but simply by the way he talks. It's not foolproof, and I've been fooled. But our intuition is still the best first line of defense.

Wowie, another whopper post. I must be having fun.