Alex Kidman23 May 2008, 5:00 PM
Bluescreen | What a week. Microsoft's CEO got egged, Vista gave users a bum steer, and Google, well it just wants to know about your bum.
Bluescreen: Alex Kidman satirises the IT industry, making no exceptions, even for kernels.
There are some things in IT that you can count on as constants, and this week's news has been one of big companies playing to their strengths. Microsoft of course, knows what it's good at. Being a target, for one thing, and in the absence of pie-lovin' Bill, we instead got
Ballmer being egged on -- but probably not in the way that he'd like. Yup, once again a leading Microsoft person has been presented with free food, as though the poor multi-billionaire couldn't afford it himself. And it's not as though Ballmer's merry marchers haven't been busy enough besides.
For a start, they've been throwing up a smokescreen, by allowing you to view the rest of the universe from your PC via the
worldwide telescope project. Bluescreen says "smokescreen" because it distracts your attention from the fact that
your PC probably isn't updating Vista to Service Pack 1 like it's meant to. Unless, of course, it is without telling you, (and presuming Vista hasn't crashed in the meantime) but you might not know regardless (and that much convolution might leave you bewildered) depending on what hardware your notebook vendor bothered to put in your notebook. You know, that nice notebook with the "
Made for Windows Vista" sticker on it? Well, Bluescreen hates to have to tell you this, but the sticker lied.
Google's dependable and constant, as well. It would very much like to control and index every last bit of your data, as evidenced this week by the
launch of Google Health. Yes, that's right -- Google not only wants to know about all the unsavoury searches you indulge in when you think nobody's looking, it's also interested in unsavoury results of your latest prostate exam. Bluescreen, for one, could do without the phrase "targeted advertising" when it comes to prostates. Although in that context, it might be easier to tell Google where to stick its ads.
Telstra, meanwhile, remains constant in its approach -- specifically, that it would like your money. Quite a bit of it, in fact - Sol's beach Villa isn't going to build itself, you know -- but as always, it's prepared to be rather sneaky about it, launching this week a promotion in which you can get a free laptop if you sign up for a Next G business wireless account. That all sounds pretty kosher, until you realise that the $700 laptop you're getting will set you back three and half grand -- more if you go over your download limit without being adequately warned. If you were, to, theoretically speaking, get a bit keen on US TV shows not yet broadcast in Australia, and go 10GB over your limit? That'd be another three grand in Telstra's pocket, thankyouverymuch. But of course, Telstra would never fail to warn you about going over the limit? Right, Telstra? Hello? Funny... the phone line's gone dead.
That could be because Bluescreen's been investigating Optus' latest deal, which allows you to
snip the home phone line entirely in favour of a mobile solution. Having recently had a run-in with Optus in a matter of mobile telephony (a complicated matter involving random SMS messages to China, DHL tracking numbers and idiotic call centre staff who must be being jabbed with cattle prods lest they stray from the script*) , Bluescreen will tread carefully here** and simply point out the unbridled joy that SMS spam could bring your home phone line, as well as congratulating Optus on somehow managing to reinvent the mobile phone -- but with a fixed physical location and line rental when no physical line exists at all. Bluescreen would like to say that spending money on a product that doesn't exist is innovative, but then Bluescreen remembers how an awful lot of the IT industry operates, and hastily retracts the statement.
While we're in the land of interesting statements and products that some people might not wish existed, it's also been a week of ups and downs for component makers. Intel is no doubt secretly
drawing up plans for processors with more cores than Tasmania***, while ATI drew the ire of Steam users for, well,
being as popular as Creative, apparently. Who gets to wear the disgruntled face in that relationship?
Meanwhile, NVidia wanted to show it could play with the big boys by
making claims about its GPUs that may be true -- but only if you want to spend roughly 15x the cost of a CPU on one of its highest-end graphics processors. Of course, eBay is there to "help" you get over your GPU costs by
giving with one hand by reducing listing fees, while taking with the other with mandatory PayPal fees. It's such a caring company, you see. Well, it cares about its bottom line, at the very least. That's almost like actually caring -- isn't it?
* Bluescreen is guessing here about the cattle prods. Bluescreen feels that this may be an exceptionally accurate guess. The bit about DHL tracking numbers and random Chinese SMSes is sadly, all too true...
** for once...
*** Regional jokes sponsored by the Tasmanian tourist board.