In honor of last week’s launch of Windows 7 we have the “bleeped” version of the lame instructional video. Amazing how much better it is with a few strategic beeps. And as if that weren’t enough, I’ve also included the CNET deconstructed version below and one of the latest PC/Mac ads. Enjoy!

        

In an ongoing effort to prove that they have no clue about how dorky they come off Microsoft has put out another in an endless series of embarrassing commercials. When Bill Gates confessed to Steve Jobs that he wishes that he had the same sense of style at a conference a few years ago he wasn’t kidding and his products are suffering for it. To be fair this isn’t Gates or Ballmer’s fault, but you’d think with all of their brain power and bankroll they’d find someone with a clue on how to market their stuff. Embarrassing. For a complete list of embarrassing Microsoft commercials check out an article, “The worst Microsoft promo videos ever!” from CNET’s Crave blog. You can also catch my previous comments on their “I’m cool too” video here.

Sources:
* Youtube video: HostingYourParty by LaunchParties, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ, retrieved on 9/29/2009

* “The worst Microsoft promo videos ever!” by Rich Trenholm, from CNET’s Crave blog, http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10361440-1.html?tag=nl.e404, retrieved on 9/29/2009

        

Very funny video, but did you notice he said that his district dropped a macbook on him so that he could support a school-site that runs macs only and he didn’t know what to do with the thing. It’s all meant to be fun and games, but his “tech answer looking for problems” set-up brought up a whole host of memories from my thirteen-years as a public school teacher who at times was the site tech coordinator and sat on endless tech committees. I mean, who drops a foreign OS on a support technician and then says, okay you’re in charge of supporting this school site (plus all of the other sites he’s already supporting)? It’s been my observation that unless you begin with adequate tech support (as in training the tech support to handle the machines and potential volume of support requests), then you’re wasting your money in the initial technology investment. Not too many businesses could get away with that for very long.

The old t-cxr switch room

TCO (total cost of operation) is a black art, but a frightful percentage of tech roll-outs from my public school teaching days factored in little to no funding for end-user training and somewhere around 5% for tech support. The expectation for teacher or technicians to train themselves is a guaranteed failure and no business expecting success would begin there. You roll it out, you support it and that includes training. Funny video, but not a funny situation. jbb

Sources:
YouTube video: “Creative Ways to Use The MacBook” by WilsonTech1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXFoyOOxmr8 retrieved on 06/07/2009

Image: pacbell01.jpg by Joe Bustillos

        

Come on, Microsoft. Clearly you’ve forgotten one of the first tenets of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, To not attack the enemy where they’re strongest, but where they are weakest. You had a good foothold emphasizing that a Windows PC tends to be cheaper, has more applications, and more video games… but NOT video editing, at least not out of the box. No one who has used the product is going to suggest Microsoft’s MovieMaker. A recent PC Magazine article lists MovieMaker as among the free crapware loaded on PCs that no one wants. I know there are folks who are happy with their video editing experience on Windows PCs, using Adobe’s Premiere Elements 7 (list $140) or Sony’s Vegas editing program(s), but that’s a bit like saying that there are people who are perfectly happy living in Siberia. I mean, they’re happy mostly because that’s all they’ve ever known. I’ve owned PCs far longer than Macs and made videos with PCs, but whenever a video project came up I’d try to do it on a Mac first because it was a far less kludgy experience. Getting a laptop for video editing for less than $2,000, definitely doable, depending on how many times you want to reboot under Windows and/or restart the whole project when the under-powered machine crashes in the middle of your project. How valuable is your time?

Here’s a video blast from the past that kind’a sums it all up:

        

Around this time last year I was very excited to receive my OLPC (One Laptop per Child), called the XO-1. Having drunk the Negroponte gatorade I was endlessly frustrated with Dvorak and other tech journalists who kept their criticism of the XO-1 focused on either Negroponte’s eccentricities or the fact that the creators made it specifically to not be a Windows PC. The concept, begun at MIT’s Media Lab, that technology in education is not about training students to be little MS Office drones but to use computers to teach programming in order to teach thinking and communication seemed to waft past the XO-1′s dissenters. Leo Laporte and David Pogue got that the little green XO-1 wasn’t about attacking an untapped technology market, but was an humanitarian cause to bring the gift of technology to Third World classrooms.

In the ISTE Keynote address that I heard Negroponte introduce the XO-1 he quipped that they must be doing something right to have raised the ire of Intel and Bill Gates. Alas, maybe the joke in the end was on Negroponte when Intel promised to play fair but couldn’t resist the temptation to undercut Negroponte’s “humanitarian cause” and sell their competing kid-size ultra-light laptop, the Classmate, to the same countries Negroponte was trying to reach. So the Gospel according to Negroponte fell on deaf ears because the Win/Tel hegemony couldn’t hear the words for the vastness, opportunities and profits presented in possibility of harvesting the Third World educational/government technology nickel.

This holiday season the OLPC foundation is repeating their give one/get one campaign that I participated in last year to get my own XO-1, only this time they’re working with Amazon.com to get the word out and do the distribution. The commercials are very cute. My own XO-1 sits on a top shelf in my bedroom, part of my shrine to sentimental technology I’ve previously invested in (I really wish I had kept one of my old Kaypros to put in the shrine). I hate to think that Dvorak and the others might have been right after all.

The humanitarian cause and hardware rational was sound. But I was hoping to use my XO-1 as some kind of netbook or ultra-light laptop. After a year I found the Sugar interface confusing and the hardware just too underpowered. Click, wait, find a webpage, click, wait, how the hell do I switch back and forth between pages? Seriously. Right size, great battery life, indestructible, a little weak with the tiny keyboard (kid-sized, right?). I really wish Apple would come out with a netbook/ultra-portable jbb

        

I have to be a bit of a nut-case to even be spending any brain-cell activity on this one. On a recent “Your Mac Life“ a program called “CrossOver“ (by a company called CodeWeavers, was introduced that boasts of letting the user run Windows applications on a mac without having any trace of the actual Windows operating system anywhere to be seen. What does all of this mean? It’s a bit geeky but the thing is with either Apple’s Bootcamp or the program Parallels a copy of Windows is is started up (with Bootcamp on a separate partition when you start the computer up and with Parallels in a separate “memory” space). Then inside of Windows one can use whatever Windows app that’s needed. With CrossOver one launches the Windows app and CrossOver tricks the app into thinking it’s on a PC and Mac OS into thinking it’s running a Mac program. I don’t know, I’m sure that there are some performance hits and that it probably would choke on anything that tries to write directly to hardware (some high level games and video editing software comes to mind). But the makers say that they have taken a proven Open-Source technology and are putting the effort to get a lot of apps that run under Windows to run on the Mac without have to boot-up or start up a virtual copy of Windows. Friggin’ amazing! I can’t keep up! JBB

        

I fired up TurboCAD one more time, stared at the rectangular tool, made a couple attempts to get the four walls and decided that this was just not worth it. I launched Parallels (an application that opens a Windows workspace/window and lets me run windows applications on my Intel Mac while still running my mac natively and without rebooting), started up my “Interior Designer” program that I picked up at CompUSA on Sunday and built the lab layout in less than thirty minutes. It helped that they had tools to specifically make walls and windows and doors. Damn. That was a no brainer. Damn.

The janitor came in for a chat and over the course of the discussion I decided to move the teaching station from the north side to the south side… that was one of the benefits of doing a layout of the lab in the computer before moving desks and chairs. Okay, I cheated a bit in that I was sitting in the room as I was building the layout, so that I could walk over to the door and measure the real thing before making the computer rendition. That was yesterday, when I began to move the furniture, today I made a few other changes. I should have done this last month. Ack. Just as long as I don’t find myself making other changes once the school year begins. Tomorrow it’s time to lay the cables and see what works… The best part about being all analytical and technical is that I don’t forget that there is an art to arranging ones classroom that one can’t see in a floor plan. It requires a little sweat moving the actual table and chairs before one can be sure that the design is going to work. In the end, it ain’t the software, it comes down to the tables and chairs. jbb

p.s., the 3D rendering is very cool… too bad my lab doesn’t look that good.