longhorn news

M$

Yes, I know they call it Vista now. It’s just fun to mess with branding campaigns by ignoring them.

No more reboots sounds like a great concept.
No, I mean that. Especially if it comes from a company that used to require a reboot for a change of the IP address. I am _that_ old: Windows 95 was my last -and actually only- Windows machine. Side by side with an SGI O2. I cloned that machine yesterday: It’s a funny feeling to suddenly see yor desktop again after five years.

Back to ‘no more reboots’: I liked the concept, until I read “… Restart Manager will work with Microsoft Update, Windows Update, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Microsoft Software Installer, and Microsoft Systems Management Server … ”
Reading monster word heaps like this I am so glad that I don’t need to undertstand what it means. I spend 80% of my waking times with my computer during those weeks away from the my family. And I am so god damn glad that I don’t have to deal with any of this junk. The names alone make me cringe. I would hate my job if I would need to deal with stuff like that.

In other news Microsoft released SNARF today.
Bill should hire The Word Company.

ajax where to and where not to

internet

for what it’s worth

internet where are you?

media

What I really want is something that I can copy paste this list for instance into, and that gets me those songs. All of them and without further ado and at no cost. Into my iTunes. I don’t mind if it takes ten minutes, as long I can start browsing the tracks as they come in. As they say “We have the technology”

Do I really have to write it myself?
No I am not the biggest Disco fan on earth. It’s just that it would be nice to operate on culture in an approiate way.

generation @

communication internet marketing media

Business Week writes about MySpace and the likes. The article is better than the usual hype-treadmill-word-boilups that you can read when people from traditional media try to get a handle on yet another internet base phenomen. They write that 15 to 18 year olds spend six and a half hours a day with any form of visual media on CRT/LCD sccreens: the big 3 TV, games and internet. When I was that age, we spend that much time having sex. Probably only on three or four of the 1424 days that you have between fifteen and eighteen. The rest of time we tried to get there. I have never looked at mySpace but I suspect that the basic motivations in the lifes of teenagers have not changed that much. They are so basic that they are not worth mentioning I guess. Or, maybe, times really have changed?

Well Murdoch payed almost half a billion dollars for MySpace. Better than twenty bugs on friendster. Which one of the things I liked about this article: It does not only cite events that supports one underlying current. Friendster tanked. They still mention it, even though this would not fit into the rosy ‘social networking’ boom picture that they paint otherwise.

p&g allegdedly started a social network around a scent or spray. No, really. They spent some money on that. The really sad part about that is, that those responsible probably still occupy their corner office, despite the fact that they burned millions on a project that was as viable as, well, hm. I really tried to come up with something that would be as stupid. Couldn’t find anything.

apple media

Apple internet media

Thinksecret has a wet media dream involving Apple (of course) and the download of media. Whenever somebody starts raving about ‘intel technology’ and how enabling it is I have to roll my eyes: Intel makes great CPUs and other things that other people make as well. I might be uttterly ignorant but I never saw that any of those Intel plans where either new innovative or sucessful for that matter.

Reading Apple’s media delivery ambitions it should be pretty clear that OS X 10.5 aka Lepard will be available for non Apple hardware also commonly known as ‘PCs’. If Apple makes money with media distribution they might as well give the OS away. They might charge for support.

When the OS X on Intel was announced people usually said that Apple would want to protect it’s hardware business. I think that is /bs/. I think it is entirely strategic, that Apple pretends to let OS X only run on Apple hardware. First of all it is a bargaining chip. Apple, flush with cash from the ongoing iPod sucess, can sit at the sidelines of the PC-market of 2006. Apple will close see how Longhorn is doing. Technically and in the market place. If they feel that Microsoft’s position is vulnerable enough then they make a move. Or they get a deal from Bill for not moving. One thing they don’t want to do though is to openly declare that they are going into the PC operating system market. But technically they can. Not they that would or need to, but they would have OS X running on 70% of all machines that Dell sells within a week. I am sure that Dell would like this as well: Competition changes the price. Lepard might be in a good position to take a big chunk out of the Longhorn market: The latest Redmond OS has significant hardware requirements. If people perceive the upgrade from whatever Windows they run now as a ‘switch’, then they might as well switch to another brand.

vsftpd is great …

linux

… just don’t expect it to listen to a killall -HUP vsftpd. At least under Fedora Core 4 you need to do a /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart if you would like to see changes in /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf to take effect.
Which is no problem if you know. Now you do …

crowds

communication marketing technology

Don’t tell George, but you can create masses of people in the computer. Pretty easy:

Massive is a software that will generate crowds for you.

Of those commecial I really only like the this PSA . Otherwise it appears as if digital crowd duplication is this years ‘frozen moment’. A visual effect that is nice at first, but if not backed up with content or meaning it becomes a yawning experience as long as it serves a replacement for an original idea.

In a supportive role it certainly can save some money by replacin lots of people.

The Carlton ad is alright as well. Carmina Burana. Like in the late eighties. But that one I have seen too often. It’s made it’s rounds.

The Aids PSA reminded me of another PSA. That one did not use Massive.

animated favioncs

internet marketing technology

If you use Firefox then try this site. Nothing special, just that the pink cross will start spinning. Firefox can display animated gifs as favicons. Yes, there is no point to this. Now, the good news is, that once more people start cluttering a simple information system like a favicon, there will be an extension for Firefox to make them stop twitching if you so desire.

A favicon is a one-look information confirmation. It helps you to get very very quickly where you are. When it starts moving it does not at to this functionality. It actually breaks the purpose of those sixteen by sixteen pixels: First of all it’s distracting. Something moving is a visual cue. We are evelotunary trained to look at moving things: If it moves then we might want to eat or fuck it, or it might want to do the same to us. No, favicons probably don’t. But our visual perception system does not know that. So we look at it.

But there is nothing to see. Which is the second problem of this juvenile Firefox feature: What’s the point? You can not really make a meaningful animation at this size. Animation can help the meaning of signs. An arrow symbol can be suported if it moves. An animated favicon is like a moving letter. There is a reason why animated type is not the default setting, even though computers could jiggle letters around at ease. It’s annoying, distracting and simply pointless.

Which is the third and final problem of those 256 pixels playing quick chameleon: if you need eye candy like this, then you might be a little bit insecure if the actual content and your site is worth remembering. It’s the equivalent of a loud dress. It’s fad, and it will come and go. Dancing Baby, moving icon. Seen that. Ignored that.

moved the server

BlogsNow internet this weblog

Just moved the server to it’s new location. Things should be better now. More bandwidth and better reliability.
That would be the the theory. The next days we will see how that really will pan out.

Andreas

linux user about OS X

Apple linux

I can only agree with most of this lenghtly text.
That’s how I felt when I switched much from SGI to OS X for parts of what I do.