nVspeak

nVidia is playing Big Brother.

From the article:

“It doesn’t want anyone to refer to the Nforce 2 chipset as having integrated graphics. That’s because end users – you and me – tend to think of anything with integrated graphics as being low end.”

Gee, maybe people think that way because they ARE low-end compared to a mobo with a real video card and they’re built that way to save costs?

“It doesn’t want motherboards which use the integrated graphics chipset to refer to mobos as having integrated graphics but instead must call them graphics motherboards or alternatively a performance platform.”

From the misleading to the inaccurate.

Finally, best of all:

“It has ordered all of its partners to "delete integrated from your vocabulary"
when describing the chipset.”

I think George Orwell had something to say about that in 1984. Here’s my adaptation of what he had to say about those who change language to ban inconvenient thoughts (changing only the names of the guilty parties and the year):

nVspeak was the official language of nVidia, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of that company. In the year 2002, there was not as yet anyone who used nVspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading nVidia press releases were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. . . .

The purpose of nVspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of nVidia, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when nVspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak (i.e., English) forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of nVidia — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever. To give a single example, the word free still existed in nVspeak, but could only be used in such statements as “The dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free,” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.

nVspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Fits pretty well, doesn’t it?

“Integrated video” is a good, truthful honest term, with appropriate connotations. That’s nVidia’s problem with it, it’s too truthful, too honest for them, far more than their alternatives.

What Wrong With Being A Duck?

These kinds of rules are just one big bluff. The only people who can enforce these rules are the slaves, the sheep, themselves.
If all the “partners,” whether they be manufacturers or media, just laughed at nVidia, what are they going to do? Go into the mobo manufacturing business? They ought to ask Via about that.

The problem nVidia has it that the nForce2 integrated chipset is a duck. Probably will be a pretty good duck, but that doesn’t make it a swan, and anybody who calls it a swan is being deceptive about it.

We don’t think truth should be warped. When ATI ordered their servants I mean “partners” to toss up those initial warped preview benchmarks, we thought that wrong and said so, to the displeasure of many and probably the incomprehension of most.

When we see nVidia ordering its servants I mean “partners” to selectively ban the English language itself for them, to call their duck a swan, we think that just as bad, even though the objection is probably even more esoteric and incomprehensible to the average techie.

Look at it this way, when you say “integrated video” you know what that means and doesn’t. Say “graphics motherboard” or “performance motherboard” long enough, and you might start believing it’s a swan rather than a good-looking duck, never mind those who don’t know better. Just like if you kept calling a particular duck a swan all the time.

That’s what Orwell was talking about.

Politically correct speaking is bad. Corporately correct speaking is worse.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck and we’re not going to call it a swan because the duck is pretentious.

Let’s see who sucks up and calls a duck a swan on orders.

Ed