naming
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The next generation of wireless networking will be called WiFi 6
Not all WiFi is created equal, and determining which generation of WiFi technology your devices use can be pretty complicated. Did you know that 802.11n predates 802.11ac, for example? For those that don't, the Wi-Fi Alliance is about to make things easier, introducing the next version of WiFi -- 802.11ax -- simply as "WiFi 6."
RuneScape naming system opens up to more frequent changes
RuneScape is tweaking the way character names work, and players will now have the opportunity to change names more often. There's also a revised system for inactive character names to expire. Through the use of a bond, characters can now change their names as many times as they'd like without waiting a month as was required previously. Character names will also expire for inactive accounts that haven't logged in for two years or more as well as those accounts that have never become a member and haven't logged in for six months. These expired names are up for grabs, but their original owners will be notified via email before losing the name. If you haven't played in a while, simply log in within the next seven days to keep your name.
The Daily Grind: What naming restrictions do you approve of?
A recent beta patch in WildStar included several changes to its naming rules. Numbers in names are out but special characters are in. I'm really not a huge fan of most special characters because they're used to circumvent the fact that your desired name was chosen and so you're going to create a similar-looking name that will be all but impossible for your friends and guildies to type. Of course, in some games this isn't a problem because players can pick any name they like as long as it's attached to their permanent handle. But that's got its pros and cons too. What naming restrictions do you approve of? Personally, I wish all MMOs allowed for first and last names, since this usually solves the problem of taken names while increasing variety. I also don't know how prevalent "leet-speak" is these days to necessitate the removal of numbers. Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Tattered Notebook Extra: EQ Next Landmark livestream talks tools, demonstrates mining
Any time you mention EverQuest Next Landmark, you get a score of people saying that they just don't quite get it. To help alleviate that, devs hosted another EQN Landmark livestream and dished up more details about the upcoming sandbox and treated viewers to their first look at actual mining gameplay footage. While a large part of the stream focused on harvesting and mining, that was not the only topic touched upon. Senior Producer Terry Michaels teamed up with Producer Emily "Domino" Taylor and Community Manager Colette "Dexella" Murphy to answer various questions and share information about naming, beta news for SOE Live 2013 attendees, and more. If you missed the stream, we've compiled some of the key points right here for you. And since seeing is believing, we've got the entire livestream as well!
Decoding Apple's naming rules
Apple's naming style for its products may seem silly at times -- the iPhone 5, for example, if it is even called that, will actually only be the second iPhone granted a numerical moniker, after the iPhone 4. Now there's actually a way to put a real, concrete formula on Apple's naming schemes, and blogger Marko Savic has figured it out. Essentially, Apple names its products around three different ideas: Premium vs Regular differentiation, Form Factor naming, and Generational naming. Premium vs Regular differentiation is probably best seen in the MacBook/MacBook Pro names -- Apple's got two similar products for different audiences, and it uses those names to show consumers which one is which. The Mac and the Power Mac (or Mac Pro) is another example. Second, form factor is another big element in Apple's naming conventions -- this is how it delineates the various products in the iPod or iMac line. And then there's generational naming, which has been most confusing so far: The iPhone 3G meant that consumers started expecting the "numbers" to get bigger, which leads us to next week's expected iPhone 5 announcement. Savic suggests that with a brand new product like the rumored iPad mini, Apple will simply just add yet another marker to the existing brand, signifying that this is a completely new product, and spreading the line out. I think, however, that regardless of any "rules" in naming, Apple will just do what it has always done: Pick a name that consumers will most identify with (not to mention desire). No matter the reasons behind Apple's naming schemes, the company always seems to land on something that clearly shows where the product exists in Apple's lineup, and it will no doubt continue to keep trying to pick names along those lines going forward.
AMD announces 900MHz version of the Radeon HD 7750, calls it 'the other 7750'
The original Radeon HD 7750 won plaudits for its low-wattage performance and $109 price tag, but now AMD's decided to put out an additional version with 100MHz more clock whizz. The new card also happens to be called the Radeon HD 7750, and it'll sit alongside its doppelganger on the shelves of the world's computer stores just daring you spot the difference. How will you do that? By checking if it requires a separate power supply: the original 7750 was powered entirely through the PCIe slot, limiting its power to 75W and hence its clock speed to 800MHz, while the new one accepts additional power to deliver slightly more grunt and stay ahead of looming competition from NVIDIA. XFX has already jumped aboard with the 7750 Black Edition Double Dissipation priced at $115 after a rebate, and AnandTech says other vendors will follow suit. So, unless you're totally out of power jacks, you know what to look for. Image courtesy of Newegg.
ArenaNet talks about naming Guild Wars 2's world
While it's easy to get caught up in the big picture side of the development process, we risk overlooking the smaller but crucial work that goes into gluing the game together. One of these tasks is the naming of the world and all that lies within it. Content Designer Annie VanderMeer Mitsoda wrote an ArenaNet blog post about the challenges and decisions that went with labeling everything under the sun in Guild Wars 2. Mitsoda said that the team has established a system for nailing down names. After coming up with the name, the team sends the moniker through a "sanity check" that makes sure it's not too hard to spell or say. The team also tries to weed out the more obscure or overt pop culture references, then passes along the names to the team's "loremasters," who check it against an internal wiki for consistency. She goes on to share a few anecdotes about the naming process, such as the evolution of Charr names, the difficulty of putting a label on an animal that has no Earth equivalent, and how the creepy rat-dog Murellow got its name. It's an interesting read into a different side of the development process that often goes unnoticed, so check it out!
You're the Pundit: Reverting the iPad name
When it comes to forecasting the next big thing, we turn to our secret weapon: the TUAW braintrust. We put the question to you and let you have your go at it. Today's topic is the new iPad -- specifically, its name. Macs and iPods have traditionally gone nameless. There's no Mac mini 3 or iMac 2S. You might have purchased a late 2010 MacBook Air or a 4th generation iPod touch, but other than generation and manufacturing date, there haven't been product differentiations in the names. You go to an Apple store, and you say, "I'd like to buy an iMac." Now, Apple seems to have stepped away from the iPad naming game. There was the iPad, the iPad 2, and now the new iPad (3rd generation, early 2012). If this trend continues, it looks like there will never be an iPhone 5 -- which, ironically, would have been a 6th generation product. So is Apple going to pull the trigger on its iPhone line as well as the iPad? Are they moving back to dates and generations? You tell us. Place your vote in this poll and then join in the comments with all your predictions. %Poll-73900%
Engadget Interview: Richard Yu, Huawei chairman of devices
Countless smartphones were announced at last week's Mobile World Congress, but Huawei's showing was one of the more intriguing at the event. The company has some incredibly lofty goals, intending to ditch its past reputation as an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) focused on budget devices and embracing an exciting future as an industry leader. Since such a thing doesn't happen overnight, what's the vendor's strategy to come out on top in the coming years? We briefly caught up with Richard Yu, Huawei's chair of devices, and picked his brain on some of his company's ambitions.
Editorial: The problem with bad product names and what we can learn from it
Product names generally fall into one of four different categories: good, safe, meaningless and bad. There may be better categories to group them in, but we'll use these for the purpose of this editorial. In the first category I'd put something like Kindle, arguably one of the best new product names of the last ten years. iPhone and iPad, and their subsequent suffixed versions, are in the safe category. They're perfectly fine names for a cellphone and a tablet, but they're not as original or distinct as iMac or iPod were, which I'd consider good (iPod nano, shuffle and touch, on the other hand, are all safe names). In the meaningless category are things like the MSI GT683DXR or ASUS XU6280, one of which I just made up. Some meaningless names can also be good in their simplicity -- like the Nokia N9 or Nikon D3S -- but they are still basically nothing more than differentiators. This is an acceptable option. The names aren't just bad -- they're noise. In the bad category are the majority of smartphones released in the past few years. Rezound. Rhyme. Vivid. Epic. Sensation. Thrill. Skyrocket. Conquer. Triumph. Enlighten. Infuse. Prevail. Arrive. Can you name the company behind each phone? And those are just a few examples from this year. The names aren't just bad -- they're noise. Some names might fall into a fifth, slightly murkier okay category, but there are certainly more phones (and, increasingly, tablets) in the bad category than any other, and I'd argue that's a sign of a larger problem.
What's in a name? Nokia's new Lumia and Asha line explained
What rhymes with Nokia? Why, Lumia, of course. And there, fellow gadget freaks, lies the poetic branding key to Espoo's first, great Windows Phone. Alright, it's not that simple, but the company's marketing team did make a concerted effort to find a moniker ending with a vowel sound. Of course, before this catchy, albeit odd, name could be settled upon, a list of potential winners had to be cross-checked with over 300,000 tech trademarks. After broaching that hurdle, "only a handful" survived and were then parsed by linguistic experts to avoid any embarrassing malapropisms and pronunciation difficulties across 84 dialects. Despite finding "lumi" to be an out-of-date Spanish slang term, resulting surveys found most Spaniards associated the term with "'light' and 'style'," and thus it was saved. We know how this genesis story ends, so we'll spare you the obvious marketplace conclusion. And as for that new Asha range? Well, the thinking there is quite simple. It's the word for hope in Hindi, and as the line is intended for emerging markets, that just seemed apropos. Click through to the source for a more detailed walk through this mobile origin story.
Nokia goes with a numbers-only naming scheme, thinks the alphabet is hard
There had been rumblings that Nokia was going to switch up its naming scheme and ditch the letter prefixes. Today, with the launch of the Nokia 500 (previously known as the Fate) that shift in convention has finally taken effect. The all-number nomenclature is brilliantly simple -- the higher the number, the higher-end the handset, and the higher the price. So, if and when Nokia unveils the 790 (which the Finnish company denies exists with a wink), you'll immediately know it will be costlier and more powerful than the 500 or the 670. Now we can all stop wondering what the "C" and "X" in C7 and X7 are supposed to tell us about our choice in Symbian handset and, by extension, ourselves.
Alter-Ego: What's in a name?
While it is incredibly tempting to go off on a tear about the major decision announced this week to reboot the entire DC Comics universe, starting 52 new comics at issue #1 and essentially retconning every hero and villain we've known to date, this week's column isn't about that. After all, this isn't a comics site, and we've already heard from the DC Universe Online developers that the continuity in the game is separate from that of the overall DC Universe. (Considering how much we heard that noted in the recent chats, we wonder whether Sony Online Entertainment didn't know this major shake-up was on the way.) As such, I suspect we will see the game's storyline remain essentially intact, at least until the point at which we finally take down Brainiac once and for all. After that, it's anyone's guess. Depending on how the reboot works, it might well shake up the game's direction if the new comics are doing well with readers. No, instead our superpowered game is getting its own different version of a restart in the promised upcoming MegaServer merges. While before we had multiple servers, each side will now have two -- one PvP and PvE for both PC and PS3 players -- giving us a total of four. Over this mad-scientist server-mashup, the issue of collisions looms. This week, we also found out that the merges will not only affect player names but league names as well, ensuring that there is plenty of confusion and concern on the part of the playerbase. Will MegaServers be the bane or balm of DC Universe Online's population issues? What precisely are the facts and fallacies? Whom will this affect? Join me behind the break as I take a look at the overall situation!
Samsung Galaxy S II US carrier names revealed: AT&T Attain, Verizon Function, and Sprint Within
Anticipation, thy name is Galaxy S II. Or is it Galaxy S 2 Attain? Perhaps it's Galaxy S 2 Function or Within, it all depends on what carrier you prefer, really. You see, the sleuths at Pocketnow have unearthed a silicone case for sale that lists those three names as the particular branding Samsung's new flagship smartphone will enjoy with AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, respectively. That, combined with earlier trademark filings by Sammy asking for Galaxy Attain, Function and Within registrations, would lead us to believe that we are indeed looking at the final product monikers. T-Mobile is notably missing from the list, but we suspect that may be because its variant of the Galaxy S II is materially different in design to the original GSII. The good news for everyone else is that the same silicone case will be interchangeable among AT&T, Verizon and Sprint devices, leaving very little room for those guys to screw things up.
RIFT team updates RP server naming policy
The fine folks at Trion Worlds have finally answered a pressing question that's been on the tongues of RIFT roleplayers since launch: What are the roleplaying server naming rules, and how are they being enforced? Scott Hartsman stepped into the forums recently to offer clarification on the topic, something for which RIFT roleplayers are certainly grateful. Hartsman says that the team's goal with naming rules is to "apply sanity and reason, as best as we can, to this inherently subjective topic that's as much about opinions as it is about facts." In light of this, the rules that will be imposed are fairly standard for the genre -- no partial or complete sentences (sorry, Ipwnyouhard!), no pop-culture references, no leetspeak, and no titles that are "obviously out of place in Telara" -- but even so, it's great to see them explicitly spelled out so players know what to expect. Hopefully this will lead to a more enjoyable roleplaying experience for anyone on RIFT's RP servers. For the full post, which also includes some tidbits on customer service feedback, skip on over to the official forum post.
Toshiba's Honeycomb tablet to be dubbed ANT, start at $450?
Feel free to ingest this with a healthy helping of salt for now, but if a spate of Newegg product listings are to be believed, Toshiba's heretofore unnamed Honeycomb tablet will boast a tremendously unflattering moniker: ANT. Priced at $449.99, $499.99 and $579.99, the Tegra 2-powered slate is seemingly dubbed ANT-100, ANT-102 and ANT-104. Each one includes Android 3.0, a 10.1-inch panel (1280 x 800) and NVIDIA silicon, with the extra dollars on the latter two changing that 8GB of internal storage to 16GB or 32GB. There's still no hard release date promised, but surely the shot above is proof that the day is near, right? Right?
HTC ChaCha to be known as ChaChaCha in Spain, somebody didn't do enough market research
As it turns out, the word "chacha" is used as a term of disparagement in the Spanish language. Coincidentally, perhaps after somebody hit HTC's marketing genii with a Spanish phrasebook, the HTC ChaCha will hereafter be known as the ChaChaCha in the land of sun, sand and siestas. This follows mobile search engine ChaCha suing for trademark infringement a couple of days ago and serves as an instructive example of why one should do one's market research before deciding to use one's internal codenames as retail product nomenclature.
Breakfast Topic: Do character naming schemes help you or confuse you?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. With the coming of Cataclysm, class mechanics changed, preferences changed -- and in many cases, main characters changed, leaving guildmates wondering, "What do I call him now?" Thankfully, some forward-thinking types already have naming schemes in place to ease the transition. Several members of my guild use the same three-letter prefix for every character name to eliminate confusion, while others use a full word preceded or followed by a class-specific descriptive term. We have an officer who uses some combination of the same few letters, making his characters easy to identify, and one tank even uses a food-related theme. Of course, even this does not completely eliminate the confusion, except in cases where the same prefix is used. We still have folks being called by the names of characters they have not played in a year or more. For those without the forethought to create a theme, members are often left checking guild notes to discover who they are talking to. As one of those forethought-lacking players myself, I often wish I could go back in time and find a way to connect my character names and make things a little more obvious. Do you know someone with a great naming scheme, or do you have one yourself? How did you choose? If you don't have a gimmick, how do you handling telling friends and guildies what to call you when decide to make a change?
HP files for 'HP Touchpad' trademark -- a possible name for the webOS tablet?
We can't conclusively link this to the upcoming Palm tablets, but HP just filed for a trademark on "HP Touchpad" across a wide variety of products and services ranging from memory cards to -- dun dun dun -- "tablet computers." We're liking it as a tablet name, though -- we've been getting the sense that the Palm name is on the way out, and "HP Touchpad" jibes nicely with the conspicuous lack of Palm branding on the invite for HP's February 9th webOS event. What's more, HP's already invested heavily in branding its laptop trackpads with the ClickPad name, so this seems like something else entirely. We've definitely come across headfake trademark registrations in the past, so we'll see what's going on here -- and whether this slow trickle of leaks ever turns into a flood.
The Daily Grind: Do you recycle character names?
So the next couple of months are shaping up to be rather busy here at the Massively offices (that aren't really offices). Aside from the usual news gathering, column writing, and convention prepping, there's a veritable smorgasbord of MMOs releasing in short order that are going to be demanding lots of our collective attention. Between now and March 1st, we've got DC Universe, Earthrise, RIFT, and Xsyon, and if there's ever been a swath of games that cater to a wide variety of tastes releasing one after the other like this, we'd love to hear about it. With new games comes new characters and for some of us, that represents a bit of a conundrum apart from class or skill choices. Character names are all-important, and for folks that play a lot of MMOs, it might be easier to simply pick one and use it across multiple games. Roleplayers, on the other hand, probably shudder at the thought of recycling character names (and possibly personalities) from game to game. What about you, Massively folk? Do you have an MMORPG handle that you're prone to using in each new title, or are your character names unique? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
