We get a lot of press releases talking about research in PC Pro, and studies have shown that 83% of them are entirely made up (boom boom).
But recently the NPD group, a market research company based in the States, published a study that showed only 58% of consumers who “bought a netbook instead of a notebook” (my italics) were happy with their purchase. That compares to 70% of buyers being happy if they intended to buy netbooks from the start.
The study then went on to say that 60% of buyers “never even took their netbooks out of their house”, which kind of suggests they shouldn’t have bought netbooks in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »
Whatever the Microsoft marketing department is on over at its Redmond HQ, long may it continue. The company’s just released its latest ads for Internet Explorer 8 and while I’m not a big fan of the browser, I’m a massive fan of these web-only ads.
Obviously inspired by the television series Mad Men the campaign features a wonderfully terrible Dean Cain hamming it up as he eulogises on the browser’s best features. Surreal doesn’t even cover the humour, which is well … odd and clearly straight out of the same camp as those Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld ads which I loved and everybody else hated because the world is wrong. If anything though, it’s seems clear there’s a renewed confidence within Redmond following those Laptop hunter ads which did so much to sting the cool Apple exterior.
The videos are posted below for your gratification, though we’ll warn you in advance that the O.M.G.I.G.P features projectile vomit. On the bright side, the G.R.I.P.E.S video will teach you where Dean Cain lives. Really. We know… Microsoft, what’s the world coming to.
You really do have to be careful when you sign up to one of those bandwidth-limited ISP accounts. It might be cheap, especially in these financially tough times, but you must ensure you don’t bust your way out of your monthly limit and run up some huge bills.
Fortunately, I’m with an ISP that doesn’t seem to mind how much data I pull through the network each month. That’s within reason of course.
But at the end of the day, he knows I am limited by having two ADSL lines and that I am a fair distance from the exchange. Think 1Mb per line and you’d be about right.
So you will doubtless be as amused as I was to see this usage log from my trusty TZ190 Sonicwall firewall. Apparently my main desktop computer had managed to download 16,777,215 Terabytes of data. And it seemingly did that in just 5 days 9 hours.
Yah boo sucks to the Acceptable Usage Policy - I think I have a backup of the entire internet now.
I recently posted an item highlighting how the nature of search engine optimization (SEO) has changed out of all recognition over recent years. Once SEO was a questionable practice largely conducted in secret and actively discouraged by Google who would ban your site if it thought you were trying to game the system. Nowadays SEO, or rather an amended version of it (SEO 2.0), has come out into the open and is even actively encouraged by Google.
This change from SEO 1.0 to SEO 2.0 is perhaps most apparent when it comes to the use of meta tags…
If you’ve ever wondered why it’s the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Scott McNealy and Eric Schmidt who are the successful ones who end up creating and running a hugely successful technology company and not you then I have excellent news – it’s not your fault. In fact, it’s an accident of birth.
I was reminded of this while browsing through Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink and generally considered to be a very clever bloke) as part of my research, such that it was, for next month’s Prolog – that is, the editor’s column in PC Pro. Read the rest of this entry »
The EU is in self-congratulatory mood today, declaring that its clampdown on mobile roaming charges means “the roaming rip-off is now coming to an end”.
While the EU has indeed made progress, we’re a long way from popping the champagne corks and declaring a famous consumer victory.
Look, for example, at the data rates. The EU’s new rules still allow mobile networks to charge up to 1 Euro (86p) per MB for data downloads when roaming. That’s £880 per GB! To put that in perspective, BT charges £15.65 per month for a 10GB data download allowance on its Option 1 package; mobile networks can theoretically charge £8,806 for the same amount of data! And I’ve yet to see any compelling evidence that the costs associated with mobile data are an order of magnitude higher than they are for fixed line providers.
Radio nerds celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings this week by bouncing radio waves off the moon. It’s a five second round-trip, even for a radio wave, so the conversations were rather stilted. But what an interesting tribute it was.
Will other technological milestones be celebrated in similar ways, I wonder?
Will the 40th anniversary of the internet’s creation be honoured by people bouncing emails off of Tim Berners-Lee’s laptop? Will we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the GSM network by routing SMS messages through Friedhelm Hillebrand’s mobile?
Firefox 3.5 - the browser that’s suffered more delays than an NHS IT project - has finally arrived. You can download a copy from the Get Firefox site.
As Matthew Sparkes noted in his preview of Firefox 3.5, not much has changed on the surface, with the exception of a rather clumsily implemented Private Browsing mode.
However, one issue I’ve noticed after installing the browser this afternoon is that my Google Gears Add-on has been disabled, because it isn’t compatible with this latest build. That’s a significant issue for anyone who uses Firefox to access services such as GMail and Google Reader offline.
Why hasn’t Google got its Gears Add-on ready for the launch of 3.5? Is this the first sign that cracks are beginning to appear in the once harmonious Google/Mozilla relationship, now that Google has its own browser to worry about?
Nvidia has talked up its PhysX system incessantly since it bought Ageia Technologies, creator of the engine, in February 2008, but it’s struggled to make a significant impact on the PC gaming landscape. So, despite the impressive tech demos and endless optimism, is PhysX looking more like a white elephant with every passing GPU and game release?
David Rhode is a double Pulitzer-winning journalist with the New York Times who just escaped seven months as a captive of the Taliban - yet you won’t have heard about it.
It’s extremely newsworthy, but coverage of the kidnapping would have made Rhode a more valuable hostage. The higher profile the captive, the more attention the captors and their demands get - and the lower the chance of a happy ending.
In situations like this, news organisations often agree to hold off on reporting certain events. They lose a story in the short term, but a reporter gets a better chance at coming home.
In any case, for better or worse, everyone gets their story eventually.
This mutual cooperation used to be relatively straightforward to organise - journalists, especially war correspondents, are a pretty cliquey bunch - but it is one of the long list of things that have received a thorough shaking-up in the internet revolution.
We get a lot of press releases talking about research in PC Pro, and studies have shown that 83% of them are entirely made up (boom boom).
