Sing it loud.
Archive for the 'Technology' Category
So, I subscribe to MacLife magazine and I got the most recent issue in the mail today. I just opened it up and started flipping towards the table of contents where smack dab on page three is a two-page advertisment from Sony. At first glance I assumed it was for one of their home electronics products but then I looked closer.
Yes, folks, Sony bought a two page spread in MacLife magazine advertising the Sony Vaio Laptop. In big letters it says “Sony recommends Windows Home Vista Premium”. Is there any way they could waste their money any more than burning it?
This isn’t said as an Apple fanboy but at someone practically interested in advertising and marketing. You don’t advertise the Dallas Cowboys Fan Club in the pages of Washington Redskins Monthly, do you? How many people who have already made the commitment to read MacLife magazine are going to see this ad and say “You know, I’m clearly an Apple fan, and I have this spiffy Macbook laptop but I’m going to junk it and buy this overpriced Sony laptop with the widely panned Windows Vista on it”? None!
Also, even in the world of PCs, does anyone actually fall for Sony’s marketing spin on their machines? I’ve looked at them lots of times (there’s a Sony Store in the Pentagon City mall) but for the life of me I can’t figure why you would pay Sony so much more for a laptop when right across the street there’s a Best Buy with machines that are just as good for less.
My main home machine nowadays is mostly a Macbook. I haven’t looked up the info very strongly, but is there really a compelling reason to upgrade to OS X Leopard? I tooled around for it a bit at the Apple Store today, but I couldn’t see anything cosmetic worth $100+ dollars. No, universal “cover flow” doesn’t do it for me. I’m really wary of unnecessary OS updates that slow down your system that’s working just fine (Microsoft I’m looking right at you) and I don’t have the high-end Macbook with all the RAM and horsepower of the Pro.
So anyone think it’s a worthy upgrade?
(I’m planning in the next 6-8 months to replace my HP desktop with one of the new tricked-out iMacs, though if anyone wants to gimme a Mac Pro with a gigantic cinema display for free I’m down with that as well)
Talk about your social hacking.
Fake emails claiming to offer nude photographs of Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Milla Jovovich and pixelated videogame babe Lara Croft are behind 80 per cent of computer viruses last month, according to experts.
For, though claiming to contain shocking pictures of female celebrities, the emails, once opened, install a malicious rootkit.
“These emails are masquerading as pornographic content, tempting the unwary into opening a file on their Windows computer which will install a rootkit and download further malicious code from the internet,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.
Jolie, Kidman, etc. I kinda get - but are people really so desperate for cheesecake shots of the not real Lara Croft? Sheesh.
On TechCrunch, Web 2.0 guru Michael Arrington discusses analyst Henry Blodget:
The problem is that Blodget, like all analysts, build authoritative sounding but essentially bullshit predictive models to back up whatever prediction they’ve just pulled out of their ass.
Which leads me to wonder if Arrington has ever read his own site, Techcrunch, in which every day some Web 2.0 app is going to be the nail in the coffin of Microsoft, Adobe, or some other tech giant. I don’t dispute the very real, very true value of a lot of the stuff coming out nowadays, but the fact of the matter is a lot of it is unmitigated crap that smells like Web 1.0 and is being cheerleaded by sites like Techcrunch just like The Industry Standard, Business 2.0 and Wired did back in the old days of 10 years ago.
AT&T has brought down new Terms of Service for its network customers. From now on, AT&T can terminate your connection for conduct that “tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.”
Microsoft is apparently offering a tool to downgrade PCs to XP from Vista. From my quick experience with Vista, that seems like a feature, not a bug.
Matt Haughey bought a PS3 and had serious problems with the system’s UI and how it handles various things, and yet the PS3 fanboys descended on his comments to proceed to tell him that what he saw did not in fact happen and that he had yet to see the glory of the PS3. It’s like a cult. I’ve heard those complaints about the PS3 elsewhere and even though my personal experience with the XBox’s three red rings of death was trying, my overall experience with the system has been beyond positive - especially the online component.
I must confess that my only experience with Halo was about 30 minutes on the original XBox and I didn’t like it. But apparently the buzz is in for this Halo 3. Anybody buying it?
Microsoft tries to prove that they’re not clueless about search by continuing to be clueless on search. Make a good search engine, make it easy to use. Microsoft has been trying for years to do this and with all their big brains, they still fail at it miserably.
In this blog entry discussing Walter Mossberg’s negative review of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, is this comment that is a perfect encapsulation of what’s wrong with a lot of the guys (and gals) that keep pushing systems like Ubuntu:
For video codecs it’s simple
open terminal and type
sudo apt-get install vlc
Excuse me? WTF? How do you expect the average user to do something like that? I’ve used PCs for almost 20 years now (I remember when DOS was all we had, when you had to change switches manually to install a hard drive, and when soundcards were an exotic accessory you had to install and hack your win.ini file to get working) and that makes no logical sense. Especially after having switched my main machine from XP to a Macbook in the last six months, it makes even less sense. Make it easy, please. It’s 2007 and computers shouldn’t be that hard anymore.
Dear Entire Video Game Industry,
I just recently rented Spider-Man 3 for XBox 360. I like the game. It’s fun. I enjoy swinging around like Spider-Man. But, the damn game is too hard. I simply do not have the coordination to do what the game wants me to do. I went into the settings to see if I could make it “Easy”. But I don’t see any difficulty settings, so now I think I’m stuck in the game. Come on, game developers.
I understand a lot of the kids playing these games, while ignorant of basic math and science, are great at these games. In contrast to them I am an old man whose first game system was Intellivision. I remember when the original NES represented a great leap forward in technology. But I still like playing games, and I’d like to be able to win at them.
A few years ago I bought James Bond: Everything Or Nothing. The odds of me beating that game with the default settings were a million to one. But, it had an easy setting and though I struggled mightily even with that, I actually won a video game that wasn’t Madden for the first time in years. I enjoyed the heck out of the experience, and not just because they had a 3D Shannon Elizabeth.
So, in closing, make the damn games easier for us idiots.
Love,
Oliver
Gamertag: owillis1977
Why does Microsoft have to mess up a good thing? I’ve loved my 360 since I bought it, had nothing but praise for it. So much so that I got my best friend to buy one and now we play Madden via the internet like we used to back in high school. And then I got the three red lights of doom and had to mail my unit to them last week, and am currently waiting to receive a replacement machine. And I’m clearly not alone. The 360, until this, was probably the best product Microsoft had ever made - for it to just die like this is kind of ridiculous and on such a huge scale is crazy.
The first DOS-based computer I owned (my first machine was a Commodore 64) had a whopping 40mb hard drive. Now there’s a one-terabyte hard drive you can buy. Yet, as folks pointed out, no freaking flying cars.
From Techcrunch:
I’m excited to announce the next three experts for the TechCrunch20 Conference in San Francisco this September. Caterina Fake, MC Hammer and Rajeev Motwani join the previously announced experts.
M.C. Hammer. LOL. I worked at a early-00s dotcom whose claim to fame was that we had Dan Akroyd and Jim Belushi on our board of directors (the press release survives, at least). This can only end badly.
I’m a veteran of the console wars (I picked NES over the Master System, Genesis over Turbografx-16 and Super Nintendo) so imagine my surprise as an owner of the Sexybox 360 (shout out to Gears of War, Madden ‘07) that I’m actually cheering on Microsoft and hoping for Sony to fail. This is a totally irrational, immaterial thing. But its fun.
Back in my day (aka NES, Genesis, Playstation) the whole idea of a video game system was for you to sit on your butt and play a game (in my case, Madden). The controller for the Nintendo Wii looks like work. Also, what is the point of a video game system name that sounds like something you should be doing in the bathroom?
The low-end version of the Playstation 3 is going to cost $500. Um, exactly how much money are kids getting for allowance nowadays? I should call up my mom and get back on that program. (BTW: Am I the only nerd who realizes the logo type of the Playstation 3 is the same as what Sony uses for the Spider-Man movie?)
I currently have an XBox. At best I may purchase an XBox 360. The only thing I really play is Madden, though I bought Call of Duty 1 the other day but it is way too much pressure. I’m used to games where you just shoot everything (Quake), not games where THE LIVES OF YOUR BRAVE FELLOW SOLDIERS DEPENDS ON YOU. It’s honestly too much pressure because the games are too realistic now.
A while back I linked to Ms. Dewey which I crowned the sexiest search engine ever in the way that only I can. Turns out the actress involved (wait, acting?) is one Janina Gavankar who’s previous claim to fame was apparently a spot on Showtime’s “The L Word”. Here’s hoping that fame has more than 15 minutes in store. Sez I.
This is by far the sexiest search engine in history, that’s for sure.
I just sort of off-handed put this video up on Youtube. It’s now been played almost 71,000 times and is the #2 video on the site - and of course people are now saying I edited it. If I were ever to doctor footage of Bush I would have done a much better job than that.
It’s unusual for them, but at least in this recent beta, IE7 does not suck. Don’t know if I would switch to it from Firefox, but its not a horrible browser either.
Recent Comments