Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Friday, March 26th, 2010
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I’m not quite sure what this was important to someone, but Todd Bishop of TechFlash sat down with Microsoft to discuss those crazy Seinfeld ads from way back in ought-8. He essentially asked Microsoft “What were you thinking?” and got some interesting replies. Essentially, Microsoft wanted to introduce Windows 7 in a big way but they weren’t sure how to go about it. Their marketing execs wanted an icebreaker to invite the world back into the mind of Microsoft. The result? Some of the craziest commercials the company ever released. But the truth is, we actually hadn’t been doing that for a while. So we were a little worried about just having a cold start into that process, just jumping in with some Windows ads around features, and speeds and feeds. We thought we needed an icebreaker. Because at that moment, our biggest fear — and this is the part that I would say you would be right to say was laughable — would be that we would run ads and nobody would notice. That somehow, we would have a party and nobody would come. Now, knowing the level of scrutiny that every slight twitch that we have gets at this point, that was an incorrect assumption, certainly on my part, that anybody would fail to notice that we had started running a new ad campaign. So the idea that we came up with was, what if we sort of eased into this, not with a hard sales pitch on one of our products, but with something that said, hey, I’m getting back in touch with consumers, I’m going on this journey as a company to get back into having a consumer conversation with people. Let’s try to find an icebreaker. Ultimately, these commercials were the precursor to the humanizing “I’m a PC” and “Laptop Hunter” ads that came later. So think of Jerry and Bill as sort of a nice sherbet before the real meat.
Posted by 010081
Tech
Friday, March 26th, 2010
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Apple has submitted a rather mysterious patent application, which appears to be a set of methods for lighting a display with external light sources — among which the sun seems to have the most… prominence. We all know how little patent illustrations actually resemble the devices which proceed from them, so I wouldn’t take these weird-looking line drawings as accurate representations of future apple products. Instead, try to wrap your mind around what they’re supposed to do . It seems that Apple is looking at ways of leveraging existing light sources to make its displays visible. Not by internal reflectance, which is how e-ink is visible in sunlight, but by piping and reflecting the light to the edges or back of the display. The applications of the technology are enumerated in the patent : …these electronic devices may not be used effectively in certain physical settings, such as, for example, where the external or ambient light is brighter than the illumination of the display screen. As a result, a user may not be able to view the information on the display screen sufficiently. For example, a user may have difficulty viewing the information presented on a display screen of a laptop computer while outdoors on a sunny day. Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide apparatus and methods for collecting external light to help illuminate a display screen of an electronic device. As for the actual device, they give a few options. One would have a reflector that shines light toward the back of the screen, another would have a “light harness” which I suspect would be a way of gathering light in one area and releasing it in another, and the third method I can’t seem to figure out. Would it work? Who knows? Chances are someone thought of something cool and their manager at Apple said “patent that sucker.” At least Apple admits that their stupid glossy screens suck in the daylight. [via The Register - "Apple display patent enslaves sun," lol]
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
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The beauty of the Internet is that it demands instant analysis of every single development to come out of Peoria. The Nintendo 3DS —out of Kyoto, which is not Peoria, I’m afraid—was announced overnight, time zone permitting. It will debut at E3 in June, and it will forever change the way you and I… do something . Something video game-related, methinks. If one thing’s certain, it does mean that 3D is here to stay. I’m sorry. Say what you will about Avatar , but it made quite a bit of scratch. Then CES came around, in January, and every single TV manufacturer held presentation after presentation, laser light show after laser light show, trumpeting their fancy 3D TVs. None of the TVs are compatible with each other, so if you buy Company A’s TV and your neighbor buys Company B’s, y’all can’t get together to watch the World Cup in 3D—the glasses won’t allow it. The GameCube barely displaced any water—what did it have, those Metroid games, Resident Evil 4 , a couple of Mario games? It did well enough, but compared to the PS2 (and Xbox , I guess) the GameCube was sorta a disappointment. Granted, comparing any other video game system to the PS2 is like comparing a light bulb to the sun, but you can only beat what’s put in front of you. Wii ! Yup, Nintendo got tired of the hardware race, so it slapped a Bluetooth sensor bar to white shelled GameCube, called it Wii, then sat back and let the money a-roll in. It completely changed gaming. Now, rather than relying upon the “hardcores” to buy the latest Earthbound , Nintendo could convince Grandma and Grandpa, and your girlfriend, to play Wii Sports till their arms fall off. You’ll note that it took Sony and Microsoft a few years before they realized, “Hey, this motion control business is quite nifty. Maybe we should get in on it?” And they have! I have no time for motion control—you can pry my mouse and keyboard from my cold, dead hands~!—but clearly there’s money to be made here. If Sony and Microsoft can’t make money selling Fling Paint , then there’s no money to publish things like God of War and Fable . So this 3DS thing (here’s the full English press release )… Nintendo describes it as letting you play games “with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.” As someone who wears glasses—I’m blind as a bat, and nowhere near as cuddly—, let me be the nine millionth to say “Obrigado!” The 3D TVs at CES were largely pants, but I did get to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2 in 3D (thanks to some sort of Nvidia trickery ) a few weeks ago. It didn’t blow my mind or anything, but if given the option, provided it’s affordable—I’m not buying a $1,000 monitor and glasses and a new video card!—then why not? Nothing wrong, per se, with a little added depth as I try to left-click over a Bad Guy’s face. The 3DS, which should come out around this time next year, will be backwards compatible with your current DS library. My DS library is quite small ( Chrono Trigger and those Final Fantasy remakes), so I could give a toss about backwards compatibility, but I’m sure there’s those of you who have more than a few games, games that you wouldn’t want to “lose” when upgrading to the 3DS. Upgrading may not even be the right word, since the 3DS is totally new hardware. It’s not like going from the DS Lite to the DSi , or from the DSi to the DSi XL . The point is, this is Nintendo saying, “Hi guys! Remember how we made motion control cool, bringing it to the masses? We’re going to do the same thing with 3D now. Kthxbye!” And now we wait for Sony to announce a 3D PSP of some sort…
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Friday, March 19th, 2010
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You hear that sound? That’s the sound of my mind being blown. When the folks over in Cupertino strapped a little speaker to the bottom of the iPhone and released an SDK, do you think that any of them thought “Oh, people are totally going to use this to make apps that can push little Styrofoam balls around a fake soccer field.” Yeah, probably not. But sure enough, people have. Read the rest at MobileCrunch > >
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Friday, March 12th, 2010
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Researchers would be wasting their time, and their patrons’ money, scanning my brain. They’d quickly find nothing but World of Warcraft Auction House strategies and an incredible amount of space devoted to translation Marca, A Bola, La Gazzetta Dello Sport, and France Football every morning. Maybe if they’d scan, say, the brains of Fez Whatley or Vince McMahon, then they’d find something interesting. The deal is that researchers now believe that a simple brain scan reveal far more than what was previously thought, including thought patterns. “Man, this guy thinks about sandwiches an awful lot.” It’s not so much reading your mind, Psycho Mantis -style, but rather observing how your brain works when it’s recalling memories. Like, “oh, activity increases in this region, then increases in that region.” That will not stop the Drudge-linked readers from freaking out, and somehow blaming the liberal media for the scientific development. Says the author of the study responsible for the findings: We’ve been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory—to look at actual memory traces. We found that our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus . Now that we’ve seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time. Maybe science can next tell us why Techmeme is so important.