Watch nine inches

Last week I posted (on Core77) about Virgin America’s new on-board entertainment system.

Here’s a run-through of the system by Charles Ogilvie of the airline.

The information is good, the capabilities are good, but the video is filled with corporate/tech jargon. I’m always amazed at how unable some business folks are to talk to (or about) people in plain ol’ English.

Some of the scary phrases to listen for

  • globally available
  • primary navigation areas
  • list construct
  • watch-related options
  • toolbar will return but in a reconfigured state
  • a cache-format
  • hardware platform
  • running application over Linux
  • stock-out situation

Good marks, however, when a TLA is introduced and defined, and then explained, which is nice,

Much of the lingo is pretty far from how we might want to talk with Virgin (although they mention the dialog back and forth with us they are interested in).

Oh, and did you see the arrow cursor flipping around whenever they showed the on-screen display? Is that real, or an artifact of the demo actually being filmed on a desktop computer and not the seatback? A detail, for sure, but if you’re going to talk about open source, Linux, multi-stream, file servers and the like, expect that same audience to notice things like faked-out demos.

A quicker and more polished on-board tour is here.

Series

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