It seems all the negative publicity over the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads has led to them being called to an end after only two weeks. According to officials from Microsoft this campaign was always planned to move to a second phase fairly quickly, but it still seems a tad odd.
I think my personal problem with the ads wasn’t so much they were about nothing as it seemed insane for them to be spending $300 million on an ad campaign tha tnever once mentioned a product name. To each their own, I am just hoping phase two isn’t even more annoying.
While it’s safe to assume this mini-movie will be chopped down into bits for television airings, it has to be said again that this seems like the most pointless thing ever. It is trying to so hard to be hip and anytime you force that, it comes off as just sad.
With little to no mention of the products, or what this commercial is trying to convey, is Microsoft trying to sell more of their current products? Getting you excited about future products? Who knows, all I know is that I and about 99% of the blogosphere would like to see them give up already.
It seems the German government has some problems with Google Chrome, and they are suggesting that their citizens do not use it.
The Federal Office for Information Security in Germany is warning the citizens of the country that between Chrome, GMail, the Google search engine and so on, by using their browser you are putting too much data in one company’s hands. Google Blogoscoped has a translation of a news report on the announcement.
The Federal Office for Information Security warned internet users of the new browser Chrome. The application by the company Google should not be used for surfing the internet, as a spokesperson for the office told the Berliner Zeitung. It was said to be problematic that Chrome was distributed as an unfinished advance version. Furthermore it was said to be risky that user data is hoarded with a single vendor. With its search engine, email program and the new browser, Google now covers all important areas on the internet.
While they do have some valid points about trusting all of your information to one company, they are being a little overzealous in saying that it was “problematic that Chrome was distributed as an unfinished advance version.” This is a common practice in software development and hence why the browser carries the label of being in “beta”. One would have to ask what excuse Internet Explorer offers for all of its problems as it is coming up on its eigth iteration.
It is up to each individual how they choose to handle their online lives, but we do not see a real problem with this. Is it any worse to trust everything to Microsoft?
While discussing ad campaigns isn’t the normal subject matter for StarterTech, this new one from Microsoft is just too odd to pass up.
While this new campaign is apparently designed to try to steal some of the thunder from the popular Mac/PC ads, but at least those ads remember to mention what exactly the product is that their advertising. Microsoft is only mentioned once in this ad towards the end, and it’s in relation to computers made dome cake… ooookay.
The spot first aired Thursday night, and according to the SFGate, by Friday Microsoft was calling journaliss to explain the ad. Never a good sign in an ad campaign. Perhaps Microsoft would do better to have spent that $300 million on making Vista more user friendly to the masses.
If you travel internationally for business, and you have an iPhone, you can expect to be paying quite a bit for the right.
AT&T, the lone carrier of the popular phone in the United States, announced new plans this week for those users who travel internationally. The new plans run $120 a month for 100 megabytes of international data use or $200 for 200 megabytes. AT&T sees this is a bargain as under the old plans, a 3-minute video on YouTube, approximately 2 mb, would have run a customer $40, so this should seem like a bargain to some. Mind you, these amounts are on top of your normal fees, so this could get quite expensive very quickly.
If you are only traveling for one month, there is another small hitch in that you can not pre-arrange a cut off date for the service, so you have to contact them as soon as you are done traveling so that they will turn off the service and stop charging you for it. If you forget to inform them, or are a day late (they have said they won’t prorate), then you pay for another month.
This is one of those situations where it shows how lack of competition is a bad thing. The locked in exclusivity to AT&T through 2010 keeps people such as myself away from it, no matter how much I desire having one of these devices.
The ISP is going to cap bandwidth for their residential customers at 250 gb a month. This would be the equivalent of 125 standard definition movies, or 50 million emails. In other words, about 99% of their customers will never come close to that amount of bandwidth in a month. For those that do use that much, if you go over for one month they will call and warn you, if you go over twice in six month period, you will be banned for 1 year from the provider.
They say this new policy has been enacted to make sure all customers have a pleasant Internet surfing experience, but the truth is that they just don’t want to build more infrastucture to handle additional Internet demands. More and more devices in our home are demanding Internet usage, and by Comcast capping the bandwidth, they are essentially saying that all that has to stop. Well, welcome to the 21st century, it’s only going to get worse.
Pretty much everywhere in the world offers faster Internet speeds than we do, with unlimited usage and at a lower price than we charge in the USA. Something is not right here, and it’s time to tell the ISPs how wrong they are getting this and they are essentially going backwards.
In a truly odd move, Microsoft has arranged with Rock the Vote to allow people to register to vote via their Xbox 360 gaming units.
While I have mixed personal feelings on this, as I wrote on my personal blog today in an entry called Xbox 360 And Rock The Vote Team Up, I do think it is an interesting sign of things to come. While many have theorized we will be able to someday vote from our homes, I think that day is still a long ways off, but this is certianly a tiny step in that direction.
I see it as the first of many tiny steps to more and more parts of our life becoming automated. Imagine a world where you no longer have to go renew your license in person, pay your cable bill from your gaming console by pushign “A” and so on.
This will probably be happening more and more, but that doesn’t necessairly mean it’s a good thing. I worry about potential fraud and evil doing, but only time will tell what happens for sure. Until then, prepare yourself for many more things like this to happen in the years to come.
Last month I had to fly for the first time in four years, and I had forgotten how annoying the “take out your laptop for x-raying” could be. Luckily those rules have been relaxed some as of today.
The new Transportation Security Administration rules only apply to certain styles of bags, you can see them pictured here to the right. You can also read all of the new guidelines on the TSA site. I am currently using an accordion style bag, but I am seriously going to look into a butterfly or trifold style.
My worries about this come from in 2004 my laptop got dropped a short distance when I took it out of its bag and it killed my battery just as I was boarding a plan to fly to Japan for 2 weeks of business. That put a definite crimp in what I could do while there. Yes, it could have happened anytime, anywhere, but taking your laptop out in a hectic environment like the security line, with people breathing down your neck to hurry up, and security people giving you suspicious looks, it is bound to be a place more prone to equipment damage.
So, frequent travelers should be sure to looking into these new bags, as they should speed up your time passing through security considerably. The TSA agents still have the right to ask you to remove the laptop, but the number of instances should be reduced.
We explained the iPhone App Store to you last month when it launched, but now that it is a month old,sales numbers are out, and it looks to a raging success.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the app store has had 60 million downloads thus far, and an average of $1 million dollar in sales a day for a total of $30 million for the first month. Considering the applications that you pay for start at $9.95, that means a lot of people are trying the free applications, and we will be discussing those in more detail soon.
The reason talking about this fits in with the mission of StarterTech is that it shows that this may become a very viable mobile computing platform in short order. With this type of success, there are sure to be even more people flocking to the App Store soon to add even more useful tools for those who want a form of mini computer they can fit in their pocket. As I have mentioned before, two of us here at StarterTech carry the iPod Touch, and though that means we need Wi-Fi for it to work, we are still getting a lot of new things accomplished with them thanks to all of the new apps. The best thing is that we firmly fall in the category of people only taking advantage of the free apps.
Being able to update Twitter, check my RSS feeds, listen to streaming Internet music stations, etc while laying in bed or sitting out on the back porch is truly a wonder. I don’t have to lug out my laptop, wait for it to boot up, and then deal wtih a cumbersome computer. I just fire up whatever I want to do on the iPod Touch and then slip it in my pocket. This may truly be the hand held computer family we have all waited so many years for.
While StarterTech isn’t mainly meant for news, sometimes a story comes along that is so odd that I just can’t resist. Case in point would be the idea that Dell is trying to trademark the term “cloud computing”.
The problem with this concept is that the term has already been adopted by numerous companies such as Apple with their MobileMe application, Google with GMail, Microsoft with their Mesh service and so on. As this application for a trademark moves forward, companies will be allowed to register complaints aginast the trademark being allowed. Seeing as this term was already denied back in 1998, it is highly doubtful this one will be allowed.
This certainly belongs in the “what are they thinking?” file, but it is a good example of how computer companies don’t always seem to have the firmest grasp on reality.
It seems all the negative publicity over the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads has led to them being called to an end after only two weeks. According to officials from Microsoft this campaign was always planned to move to a second phase fairly quickly, but it still seems a tad odd.
It seems the German government has some problems with 
If you travel internationally for business, and you have an iPhone, you can expect to be paying quite a bit for the right.
The largest Internet service provider (ISP) in the USA, 
In a truly odd move, 
Last month I had to fly for the first time in four years, and I had forgotten how annoying the “take out your laptop for x-raying” could be. Luckily those rules have been relaxed some as of today.
We explained the 
While StarterTech isn’t mainly meant for news, sometimes a story comes along that is so odd that I just can’t resist. Case in point would be the idea that Dell is trying to trademark the term “cloud computing”.
