Ah, nostalgia. Or at least that’s what people in my line of work would call this. Take a look at what a “cutting edge” web site looked like for multi-billion dollar companies just 12 short years ago.
3 comments »
So on my way into work this morning I heard two interesting commercials on the radio (yes, I still occasionally listen to radio).
The first was for the automotive Phaser II radar/laser/whatever speed trap detector. The commercial began in that typical loud, excited announcer voice, and immediately said this:
“The Phaser II! The only detector you’ll ever need! Banned in eight states!”
They were clearly excited about how it was so good it was — literally — illegal in some places. Oh, and they repeatedly offered:
“If you do get a ticket, we’ll pay for it!”
OK, so…I’m just going to go ahead and speed, as long as I don’t have too many points on my license. Great, thanks.
The second commercial was less amusing and more offensive. It began with that old recording of Neil Armstrong’s famous words from the moon:
“That’s one small step for man…one giant leap–”
Which gets cut off by something along the lines of:
“We interrupt this broadcast for some important news you can really get excited about…”, etc, said in a very condescending way. You want to know what this “important” and “exciting” news is? That Staples now carries Dell print toner and ink cartridges. How…exciting. It then ends with “And now, back to that other thing…”
Talk about insulting. I understand the whole “interrupt this broadcast” ad premise — it’s been done many times before. But Staples picked the moon landing, a monumental scientific and technological achievement for which thousands of people worked incredibly hard and sacrificed much…in some cases — and here’s what really rubs me the wrong way about Staples using this — they sacrificed their lives. As if there isn’t too little appreciation for the space program already, Staples just trivialized one of the greatest human success stories of all time and made it the punchline of a stupid commercial.
It’s incredibly poor taste. I’ll never buy from Staples again; from a cursory search on Google I found, to my relief, that I’m far from the only one with this reaction to the ad.
8 comments »
Allow me to perform one of my common services, and explain a tech issue to the lay person who probably would (and should) care about this if only it wasn’t such a complicated mess. I get a lot of questions about this from people who (understandably) don’t follow any of this stuff.
I’ve been holding this post in for awhile, but I think we just hit an important milestone in the next-generation high-definition disc format war. Blu-Ray (henceforth “BRD”, or Blu-Ray Disc) and HD-DVD are two formats both vying to be the replacement for regular old DVDs. Why do we need to replace DVDs? It seems a lot of casual consumers don’t know this, but DVDs are not high definition. They’re really good looking standard-definition (SD), but they’re not HD; BRD and HD-DVD are HD, and once you see them you’ll immediately notice the difference.
BRD was developed primarily by Sony, while Toshiba did HD-DVD. They are both physically the same size as CDs and DVDs, and they both are capable of displaying the same quality HD video. The difference is that BRDs have a higher capacity, but are more expensive to produce. Their players are more expensive to make as well, requiring a blue (imagine that) laser. HD-DVD has a lower initial storage capacity — meaning long movies or movies with lots of special features will need a second disc — but is supposedly going to be upgraded in the future with higher storage densities. HD-DVDs are much cheaper to make, since they can be stamped with the same equipment that makes regular DVDs with only minor changes, and HD-DVD players are much cheaper as well. In fact, Toshiba HD-DVD players were on sale for as low as $99 this past holiday season — the cheapest Blu-Ray players are still over $400 even on their best day; a year ago, all this stuff was about $1000 a pop.
So why is there a war and why should you care?
9 comments »
I don’t use the dashboard in OS X much, to be honest, but certain utilities have a place there — this is one of them. This dashboard widget for OS X allows you to monitor what your TiVo is up to and download recorded shows to your Mac. I love it…it’s simple, easy to use, and now that I have a TiVo HD and might actually want to save some of the recordings, I’m finding this extremely convenient. It includes the TiVo File Decoder binary, which converts the video files to standard MPEGs as it downloads them so you can play them with pretty much anything — QuickTime, VLC, Frontrow, etc. If you’ve got a TiVo and a Mac, you have to check this out — it’s definitely one of my top Mac Apps!
Subscribe to Blog