Oh my God, how could I forget: "I'm a PC" whilst panning across those big plasma displays at the airport, counting how many have "Something has caused an error and must now close" popups.
A much *much* better idea than the Sienfeld commercials. Although I see an obvious subversion possibility. Run a commercial that looks just like it (fair's fair) and have people saying "I'm a PC" while trying to recover from various PC-related issues. Like "I'm a PC" CRASH "I'm a PC" in chinese with subtitles, bluescreen on the Olympic dome "I'm a PC" push the button BONK sound -- error push button BONK push button repeatedly BONK BONK BONK "I'm a PC" Fred and Ethel looking at the TV, it's a black screen, Fred asks Ethel "What the heck is HDCP?" Ethel says "I dunno, Fred." "I'm a PC" a geek for hire babbling incomprehensibly while he's swapping cards around. "I'm a PC" a bored kid repeatedly pressing "Yes" to security popups. "I'm a PC" an elderly woman plugs in a USB scanner, gets BoDeep BeDoop "hardware not recognized". Pulls cable out, plugs it in BoDeep BeDoop. Cable out, cable in BoDeep BeDoop. "I'm a PC" Mom opens IE and suddenly the screen is covered with porn popups.
The possibilities are endless. You could make a whole series of commercials.
Caveat: Mac geeks embarrass me, and I think Macs are way overpriced. I have an elderly G4 so my daughter can do her art school homework. But I have to admit, it's never crashed. Not once. Ever.
> My Windows Mobile smart phone runs quite a few programs that you'd desire.
My Windows Mobile smartphone crashed and hung more often than my Windows XP desktop, required frequent reboots, and would not reliably make a noise at an incoming call. My expectation of a solid state laptop-like device is to be more reliable than my PC, not less.
For example, Windows Mobile seems to want to keep your applications persistent after you've dismissed them, apparently for faster starting when you go back to them later. This tends to cause the device to run slower and slower over time, requiring the user to periodically go into the task manager and kill apps, or, if they're not a total geek, just punch the reset button and wait through yet another reboot. It's design decisions like this (and many others) which makes Windows Mobile such a miserable experience if you try to use it for anything other than the built-in applets that are fed by Activesync.
Parenthetically, I don't understand the vendors who are trying to paste an iPhone-like interface on top of Mobile 6. Like that's going to fix it. Mind you, having to punch Start... wait for the GUI to catch up... navigate... wait... navigate again... choose application... can get tedious, but it is not, by far, the only issue.
Because Microsoft has nothing that plays in this space, and because of past design decisions, there's no way they can reduce the requirements on their current products to function on these devices.
The Microsoft development model has for many years depended heavily on computers getting faster, disk getting denser, memory getting memoryer. The low-power solid-state PC market came on the scene faster than an OS design cycle -- no time to prepare, nothing to do except concede that you're not a player, or blow the dust off off WinCE and try to make it work. Or convince manufacturers to increase hardware specs until they're like, you know, real laptops. At the expense of the very factors that make them so appealing in the first place -- price, size, weight, heat, battery life, carbon footprint.
To be fair, the hardware requirements for Linux has gotten steeper with time too, but at a much slower place, and for that and other reasons, Linux is much better positioned to compete in this space.
There's a couple ways I see this playing out. The majority of people who actually try the devices with Linux will be pleasantly surprised that the "experience" is not that much different from Winders for what they do, and will appreciate the long battery life, low heat, and low heft.
The people who get WinCE-powered devices with the expectation that they're running Windows, will rapidly run into issues and will blame it on the device. WinCE then becomes almost a disruptive technology, setting people's expectations that the devices are not usable unless they have enough guts to run "real" Windows.
What amazes me is that a vendor would allow this to happen. Putting WinCE on these devices is at best a short-term strategy. When people figure out that their applications won't run, they're going to be upset. Which would you rather have, a user who buys a device with OpenOffice already installed and figures out he can edit his existing documents just fine, or a user who buys a device and then discovers that Office XP won't install? Which one is going to be clogging up the support lines and leaving venomous reviews on Amazon?
Were they anyone besides Jerry and Bill, these commercials would have disappeared without fuss after America collectively went "Huh?"
I heard a comic the other night say that humor was pain + time. Bill and Jerry probably have the necessary pain, Bill with the botched Vista release (regardless of what you think of the product) and Jerry, well, he lives in New York. But I think a better equation is that humor = pain + time + learning, and I think learning might be the key missing component, and the real reason the commercials fall flat.
I'm having a hard time believing that this ad campaign was just a misstep or a failed experiment. Microsoft has the best marketing talent money can buy, surely they could have done something better with this, had they anything to work with. Could we be seeing the sunset of two institutions? Microsoft, well, we already know that story, but I'm thinking that the world may be growing tired of Jerry as well. (I mean, "the bee movie"??)
> A worse railroad drive off a bridge than was "Sherlock Holmes' Final Case" with the the deaths at Reichenbach Falls. It only succeeded in poisoning the previous novels of the series in retrospect. It probably should have been retitled "I'll Show You All Why You Shouldn't Ask For Sequels!!!"
Agree completely. When I read the novels to my daughter, I told her ahead of time that we're going to stop at Fish because it had a nice ending and I don't consider the last novel to be part of the story. She liked the way Fish ended and has never asked about Mostly Harmless.
Sorry, ADD moment: Had we not had Holmes' Final Case, we would never have had Mayer's The Seven Percent Solution, however you might think of that. (I enjoyed it.)
Second ADD moment: Similarly, anyone else feel like the third X-Men movie should have been titled "I never want to make an X-Men movie ever again"?
I believe this goes against Douglas Adams' wishes. "Mostly Harmless" seemed a deliberate effort by Adams to kill the series. (Spoiler: Everyone dies. The end.) I had an amazing opportunity to talk to Adams shortly before his death, and it seemed like he was deathly tired of the whole Hitchhiker thing.
As far as I'm concerned, the series ended with So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. It's a good ending. No other novels were or are necessary.
What I would much rather have seen is a third Dirk Gently novel. Although I have mixed feelings about someone else attempting it. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul was a work of art. I don't see another author producing anything near as good that adhered to the spirit of the original.
> Title should read, "Rent Once, Play Certain Places Until Obscure Format is No Longer Supported"
Yep. Or, "Rent once, play certain places until we decide the service is no longer profitable, and your device can't phone home anymore because we've turned off the servers.
But I'm being foolish. This has never happened before.
> I will give you points for "If it works" statement, but if you own a linux geek hat, I'd have to wonder how often you get frustrated with the hoops you have to jump through with a M$ MCE system.
The only real frustration is that it won't time-shift programs in 1080. (The resulting video is not watchable.) Other than that, and it periodically having to pause and think, it works for the things I use it for. If it was more annoying, I might be able to talk the wife and daughter into trying something else.
> Just upgrade to Knoppmyth and free yourself from the shackles completely.
Good point. Were it just me, I'd do that, but my wife and daughter are the heaviest users of the media center (I don't watch much tv) so any migration to mythtv would need to be fast and work the first time, or I descend into the hell of TV-deprived women.
So every month or so, I check into myth, and installation is still iffy, would have to buy new capture hardware, would have to swap out my SATA disks for ATA disks, and so forth. Maybe some day, but on such an important (he says dryly) appliance, I can't afford to dink with it and be down several days. As someone else said, if it works, why mess with it?
I can't help notice that one of the most common replies is something along the lines of "wait until those *@#&$ Creationists get ahold of this". To point out that only a small, vocal, somewhat silly fraction of Christians truly believes the Earth is only 4000 (or was it 6000?) years old is probably pointless, but I would like to point out that 150 million years is still several orders of magnitude too large to fit that particular belief, so it doesn't really change anything for them.
Look at it this way: It's another opportunity to prove that scientific inquiry is not just another belief system, being self-correcting when new data comes to light. Whereas clinging to old theories in the face of contradicting evidence *would* suggest a belief system.
Wow, and here I was thinking it's time to upgrade the media center from that elderly, barely supported (but solid) XP Media Center Edition, to Vista. 26 gigs of music, and no way to get it on our ipods... Yeesh. Oh, I know it'll be fixed, but stories like this give me chills.
Upon re-reading that, it sounded like I'm dissing Microsoft. Not really, just prudently waiting for these kinds of issues to settle -- no matter who's fault they are -- before thinking about upgrading. By then, the CPU upgrade necessary to run Vista should be really cheap.:-)
This is off topic, but I have to say it: I may have to turn in my Linux geek hat for saying this, but I've been running XP Media Center Edition 2005 since it came out, under heavy daily use, and have not had a single bluescreen of death. Not one. (Nobody is more surprised than me.:-))
Well, you know how it is; QA labs are always underfunded... Maybe their budget wouldn't stretch to a Vista license. Or they couldn't figure out which version to buy.
> Let's see how well you do with 2 kids and a week's worth of groceries.
No no, c'mon, consider it this way: He rides a bike, so that's one less car on the road to get in your way. Similar to the other guy who supports mass transit but refuses to use it. We encourage others to use alternative transport, so that they free up space on the roads for us. It's all good.
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> at least using windows I get the same functionality for free,
Oh, don't be naive. The cost is bundled into the OS. Unless you're stealing Windows?
> ...right next to the Windows Vista boxes (on sale for JUST $199!)
Isn't that the upgrade price?
Oh my God, how could I forget: "I'm a PC" whilst panning across those big plasma displays at the airport, counting how many have "Something has caused an error and must now close" popups.
A much *much* better idea than the Sienfeld commercials. Although I see an obvious subversion possibility. Run a commercial that looks just like it (fair's fair) and have people saying "I'm a PC" while trying to recover from various PC-related issues. Like "I'm a PC" CRASH "I'm a PC" in chinese with subtitles, bluescreen on the Olympic dome "I'm a PC" push the button BONK sound -- error push button BONK push button repeatedly BONK BONK BONK "I'm a PC" Fred and Ethel looking at the TV, it's a black screen, Fred asks Ethel "What the heck is HDCP?" Ethel says "I dunno, Fred." "I'm a PC" a geek for hire babbling incomprehensibly while he's swapping cards around. "I'm a PC" a bored kid repeatedly pressing "Yes" to security popups. "I'm a PC" an elderly woman plugs in a USB scanner, gets BoDeep BeDoop "hardware not recognized". Pulls cable out, plugs it in BoDeep BeDoop. Cable out, cable in BoDeep BeDoop. "I'm a PC" Mom opens IE and suddenly the screen is covered with porn popups.
The possibilities are endless. You could make a whole series of commercials.
Caveat: Mac geeks embarrass me, and I think Macs are way overpriced. I have an elderly G4 so my daughter can do her art school homework. But I have to admit, it's never crashed. Not once. Ever.
> As such, each US state can make their own laws in how they pick their members of the Electoral College (which chooses the president).
I think California uses a ouija board.
> My Windows Mobile smart phone runs quite a few programs that you'd desire.
My Windows Mobile smartphone crashed and hung more often than my Windows XP desktop, required frequent reboots, and would not reliably make a noise at an incoming call. My expectation of a solid state laptop-like device is to be more reliable than my PC, not less.
For example, Windows Mobile seems to want to keep your applications persistent after you've dismissed them, apparently for faster starting when you go back to them later. This tends to cause the device to run slower and slower over time, requiring the user to periodically go into the task manager and kill apps, or, if they're not a total geek, just punch the reset button and wait through yet another reboot. It's design decisions like this (and many others) which makes Windows Mobile such a miserable experience if you try to use it for anything other than the built-in applets that are fed by Activesync.
Parenthetically, I don't understand the vendors who are trying to paste an iPhone-like interface on top of Mobile 6. Like that's going to fix it. Mind you, having to punch Start... wait for the GUI to catch up... navigate... wait... navigate again... choose application... can get tedious, but it is not, by far, the only issue.
> WHY?
Because Microsoft has nothing that plays in this space, and because of past design decisions, there's no way they can reduce the requirements on their current products to function on these devices.
The Microsoft development model has for many years depended heavily on computers getting faster, disk getting denser, memory getting memoryer. The low-power solid-state PC market came on the scene faster than an OS design cycle -- no time to prepare, nothing to do except concede that you're not a player, or blow the dust off off WinCE and try to make it work. Or convince manufacturers to increase hardware specs until they're like, you know, real laptops. At the expense of the very factors that make them so appealing in the first place -- price, size, weight, heat, battery life, carbon footprint.
To be fair, the hardware requirements for Linux has gotten steeper with time too, but at a much slower place, and for that and other reasons, Linux is much better positioned to compete in this space.
There's a couple ways I see this playing out. The majority of people who actually try the devices with Linux will be pleasantly surprised that the "experience" is not that much different from Winders for what they do, and will appreciate the long battery life, low heat, and low heft.
The people who get WinCE-powered devices with the expectation that they're running Windows, will rapidly run into issues and will blame it on the device. WinCE then becomes almost a disruptive technology, setting people's expectations that the devices are not usable unless they have enough guts to run "real" Windows.
What amazes me is that a vendor would allow this to happen. Putting WinCE on these devices is at best a short-term strategy. When people figure out that their applications won't run, they're going to be upset. Which would you rather have, a user who buys a device with OpenOffice already installed and figures out he can edit his existing documents just fine, or a user who buys a device and then discovers that Office XP won't install? Which one is going to be clogging up the support lines and leaving venomous reviews on Amazon?
Random, disconnected thoughts:
Were they anyone besides Jerry and Bill, these commercials would have disappeared without fuss after America collectively went "Huh?"
I heard a comic the other night say that humor was pain + time. Bill and Jerry probably have the necessary pain, Bill with the botched Vista release (regardless of what you think of the product) and Jerry, well, he lives in New York. But I think a better equation is that humor = pain + time + learning, and I think learning might be the key missing component, and the real reason the commercials fall flat.
I'm having a hard time believing that this ad campaign was just a misstep or a failed experiment. Microsoft has the best marketing talent money can buy, surely they could have done something better with this, had they anything to work with. Could we be seeing the sunset of two institutions? Microsoft, well, we already know that story, but I'm thinking that the world may be growing tired of Jerry as well. (I mean, "the bee movie"??)
> A worse railroad drive off a bridge than was "Sherlock Holmes' Final Case" with the the deaths at Reichenbach Falls. It only succeeded in poisoning the previous novels of the series in retrospect. It probably should have been retitled "I'll Show You All Why You Shouldn't Ask For Sequels!!!"
Agree completely. When I read the novels to my daughter, I told her ahead of time that we're going to stop at Fish because it had a nice ending and I don't consider the last novel to be part of the story. She liked the way Fish ended and has never asked about Mostly Harmless.
Sorry, ADD moment: Had we not had Holmes' Final Case, we would never have had Mayer's The Seven Percent Solution, however you might think of that. (I enjoyed it.)
Second ADD moment: Similarly, anyone else feel like the third X-Men movie should have been titled "I never want to make an X-Men movie ever again"?
I believe this goes against Douglas Adams' wishes. "Mostly Harmless" seemed a deliberate effort by Adams to kill the series. (Spoiler: Everyone dies. The end.) I had an amazing opportunity to talk to Adams shortly before his death, and it seemed like he was deathly tired of the whole Hitchhiker thing.
As far as I'm concerned, the series ended with So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. It's a good ending. No other novels were or are necessary.
What I would much rather have seen is a third Dirk Gently novel. Although I have mixed feelings about someone else attempting it. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul was a work of art. I don't see another author producing anything near as good that adhered to the spirit of the original.
> Title should read, "Rent Once, Play Certain Places Until Obscure Format is No Longer Supported"
Yep. Or, "Rent once, play certain places until we decide the service is no longer profitable, and your device can't phone home anymore because we've turned off the servers.
But I'm being foolish. This has never happened before.
Rootkits on our phones.
> I will give you points for "If it works" statement, but if you own a linux geek hat, I'd have to wonder how often you get frustrated with the hoops you have to jump through with a M$ MCE system.
The only real frustration is that it won't time-shift programs in 1080. (The resulting video is not watchable.) Other than that, and it periodically having to pause and think, it works for the things I use it for. If it was more annoying, I might be able to talk the wife and daughter into trying something else.
> As in:
> "Watch out! That dog'll maul you to death!"
Bingo.
> Seriously though, that is a splitting maul. A maul is just a mallet or hammer.
I know I know, I split my own firewood. But "splitting maul" wouldn't have been funny.
> Just upgrade to Knoppmyth and free yourself from the shackles completely.
Good point. Were it just me, I'd do that, but my wife and daughter are the heaviest users of the media center (I don't watch much tv) so any migration to mythtv would need to be fast and work the first time, or I descend into the hell of TV-deprived women.
So every month or so, I check into myth, and installation is still iffy, would have to buy new capture hardware, would have to swap out my SATA disks for ATA disks, and so forth. Maybe some day, but on such an important (he says dryly) appliance, I can't afford to dink with it and be down several days. As someone else said, if it works, why mess with it?
Clippy: Would you like me to stop helping you with fires?
Yes!
It's a maul, not an axe.
> I guess they figured that at least Seinfeld would make everyone laugh [...]
And yet, even in that, they did not get their money's worth.
> These kinds of issues are always going to happen with dealing with the proprietary world of Apple.
Copy that.
I can't help notice that one of the most common replies is something along the lines of "wait until those *@#&$ Creationists get ahold of this". To point out that only a small, vocal, somewhat silly fraction of Christians truly believes the Earth is only 4000 (or was it 6000?) years old is probably pointless, but I would like to point out that 150 million years is still several orders of magnitude too large to fit that particular belief, so it doesn't really change anything for them.
Look at it this way: It's another opportunity to prove that scientific inquiry is not just another belief system, being self-correcting when new data comes to light. Whereas clinging to old theories in the face of contradicting evidence *would* suggest a belief system.
He must have forearms like Popeye...
Wow, and here I was thinking it's time to upgrade the media center from that elderly, barely supported (but solid) XP Media Center Edition, to Vista. 26 gigs of music, and no way to get it on our ipods... Yeesh. Oh, I know it'll be fixed, but stories like this give me chills.
Upon re-reading that, it sounded like I'm dissing Microsoft. Not really, just prudently waiting for these kinds of issues to settle -- no matter who's fault they are -- before thinking about upgrading. By then, the CPU upgrade necessary to run Vista should be really cheap. :-)
This is off topic, but I have to say it: I may have to turn in my Linux geek hat for saying this, but I've been running XP Media Center Edition 2005 since it came out, under heavy daily use, and have not had a single bluescreen of death. Not one. (Nobody is more surprised than me. :-))
And yet, the update demonstrably does not crash XP...
Well, you know how it is; QA labs are always underfunded... Maybe their budget wouldn't stretch to a Vista license. Or they couldn't figure out which version to buy.
> Let's see how well you do with 2 kids and a week's worth of groceries.
No no, c'mon, consider it this way: He rides a bike, so that's one less car on the road to get in your way. Similar to the other guy who supports mass transit but refuses to use it. We encourage others to use alternative transport, so that they free up space on the roads for us. It's all good.