May, 2007



Home Theater Hawtness by Joel Santo Domingo

This post has been viewed 125 times since Tuesday 29 May 2007 @ 11:34 pm

The popularity of media streaming devices such as Apple TV and the Xbox 360 has given a great boost to home theater. It begs the question of whether or not you can equip the vaunted “connected home” yet. We’re close, but I think there’s still some room for improvement, particularly with the various incompatible flavors of DRM out there. That said, there’s a plethora of premium content out there for your viewing pleasure, and a growing number of devices to stream it and watch it on.

There are two ways to acquire content: record your own or download it. Each has its pluses and minuses, which I hope to discuss more over the next few months. Suffice to say that if you buy your TV commercial-free from the Apple iTunes store (we won’t get into illicit downloads for now), you’ll need Apple TV. If you record your own, you’ll need a Media Center Edition (MCE) PC and an Xbox 360 with Media Center Extender . You can also buy and download content directly to the Xbox, but the selection on Xbox Live Marketplace is fairly sparse at this time.

As Windows Vista (Premium and Ultimate versions) has incorporated MCE, many new PCs will let you stream video to an Xbox 360 with Media Center Extender support. All-in-one PCs such as the HP TouchSmart IQ770 provide a wealth of media features, and rigs such as the Velocity Micro CineMagix Grand Theater are specially tailored to home theater.

Both the Xbox and the Apple TV sit on your network. They let you watch your TV, home videos, and photos on your TV in your living room. Xbox 360 supports 720p HDTV content, while Apple TV is limited to 480p. Apple TV works with both Windows and Macs. Predictably, Xbox 360 with Media Center Extender support is Windows-only.

With SlingBox Pro hooked into your home network, you’re not just restricted to streaming content around the house. In fact, you can stream TV content around the world when you travel. You can receive it on a PC that has SlingPlayer software installed or to a Windows Mobile handheld running SlingPlayer Mobile .

Title: Home Theater Hawtness
Author: Joel Santo Domingo
Date: 30 May 2007
Source: PC Magazine

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Hands On With Milan: Geekiest Coffee Table Ever by Dan Costa

This post has been viewed 127 times since Tuesday 29 May 2007 @ 11:25 pm

Hands On With Milan: Geekiest Coffee Table Ever by Dan Costa

True enough, we just had a geeky coffee table post yesterday, but with due respect to the Andre “The Giant” Bermudez I think Microsoft’s Milan is way cooler. I saw this demoed a few weeks back and was pretty impressed by Microsoft’s new surface computing system. And this is no flaky, proof-of-concept system–not only was it stable, but it is shipping by the end of the year. It is just for commercial buyers, not end users, right now. Still, I really want one.

Milan is essentially a custom-built a closed Windows Vista PC, but instead of a mouse and keyboard, you navigate the interface using the 30-inch touch sensitive display and your fingers. Each vendor will bring their own applications to the party. And the display is also object aware, recognizing objects that are placed on the surface and responding accordingly. In a demo, I watched it taking the images off a WiFi-enabled camera in seconds. And T-Mobile will offer a Milan-based Kiosk that lets you place a phone down on the surface and call up all sorts of spec data. It will even let you add service options juts by dragging them onto the device.

Milan is pretty hard to explain, but trust me, it is a pleasure to use. It will be a while before we see this making a major inroad into the home and it will be even longer before some really useful business apps come out. Still, I think it is the shape of things to come.

Title: Hands On With Milan: Geekiest Coffee Table Ever
Author: Dan Costa
Date: 30 May 2007
Source: Gearlog

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Microsoft shows off Surface touchscreen computer by AP Digital

This post has been viewed 139 times since Tuesday 29 May 2007 @ 11:17 pm

Microsoft Corp. has taken the wraps off “Surface,” a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects.

The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah’s Entertainment Inc.

Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.

Unlike most touchscreens, Surface can respond to more than one touch at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter last week, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group’s marketing director, “dipped” his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.

With a price tag between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, Microsoft isn’t immediately aiming for the finger painting set. (The company said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in three to five years.)

Some of the first Surface models are planned to help customers pick out new cell phones at T-Mobile stores. When customers plop a phone down on the screen, Surface will read its bar code and display information about the handset. Customers can also select calling plans and ringtones by dragging icons toward the phone.

Guests sitting in some Starwood Hotel lobbies will be able to cluster around the Surface to play music, then buy songs using a credit card or rewards card tagged with a bar code. In some hotel restaurants, customers will be able to order food and drinks, then split the bill by setting down a card or a room key and dragging their menu items “onto” the card.

At Harrah’s locations, visitors will be able to learn about nearby Harrah’s venues on an interactive map, then book show tickets or make dinner reservations.

Microsoft is working on a limited number of programs to ship with Surface, including one for sharing digital photographs.

Bolger placed a card with a bar code onto Surface’s surface; digital photographs appeared to spill out of the card into piles on the screen. Several people gathered around the table pulled photos across the screen using their fingertips, rotated them in circles and even dragged out the corners to enlarge the images _ behaviour made possible by the advanced graphics support deep inside Windows Vista.

“It’s not a touch screen, it’s a grab screen,” Bolger said.

Historically, Microsoft has focused on creating new software, giving computer programmers tools to build applications on its platforms, and left hardware manufacturing to others. (Some recent exceptions include the Xbox 360 and the Zune music player, made by the same Microsoft division that developed Surface.)

For now, Microsoft is making the Surface hardware itself, and has only given six outside software development firms the tools they need to make Surface applications.

Matt Rosoff, an analyst at the independent research group Directions on Microsoft, said in an interview that keeping the technology’s inner workings under wraps will limit what early customers _ the businesses Microsoft is targeting first with the machine _ will be able to do with it.

But overall, analysts who cover the PC industry were wowed by Surface.

Surface is “important for Microsoft as a promising new business, as well as demonstrating very concretely to the market that Microsoft still knows how to innovate, and innovate in a big way,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

 

Title: Microsoft shows off Surface touchscreen computer
Author: AP Digital
Date: 30 May 2007
Source: The Age

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Microsoft exec: Future versions of Windows to be “fundamentally redesigned” by Jeremy Reimer

This post has been viewed 108 times since Tuesday 29 May 2007 @ 11:11 pm

Microsoft executive Ty Carlson spoke about the future of Windows recently during a panel discussion at the Future in Review 2007 conference held in San Diego, California. Carlson said that future versions of Windows would have to be “fundamentally different” in order to take full advantage of future CPUs that will contain many processing cores.

“You’re going to see in excess of eight, 16, 64 and beyond processors on your client computer,” said Carlson, whose job title is director of technical strategy at Microsoft. Windows Vista, he said, was “designed to run on one, two, maybe four processors.”

Carlson is tipping his hat to the fact that little growth is expected from straight MHz scaling of single CPU cores over the coming years. Multi-core is the only way to go (for now), but Microsoft isn’t exactly behind the times. The Windows kernel has supported multiple processors since the first release of NT (which for marketing reasons was called version 3.1) back in 1993. The NT kernel can allocate various processes and threads to different CPUs, and the maximum number of CPUs that it supports is generally an issue of licensing, not technical capability. (There is a hard limit, however, on NT systems: 32-bit Windows can have only 32 total processor cores, and 64-bit Windows has a 64-core limit, no matter how many physical processors are in the system).
It only makes sense that as the multi-core scene matures, so will Microsoft’s embrace of it. Whether or not this embrace will result in something “fundamentally different” is not particularly clear, and given that Carlson is more of a marketing person than a technical one (he previously held the position of manager of the rapid deployment program), there’s always the possibility that “fundamentally different” means nothing more than “different.” Still, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

Carlson might be talking about features that exist in specialty versions of its operating systems, such as Windows DataCenter Server, trickling down to the consumer level. Alternatively, Carlson might be implying that the layers of software, including the user interface, that run on top of the Windows kernel may need to receive an overhaul.

Currently, Windows already spawns many different processes and threads as it goes about its business, but there are still areas where it could be improved. Back in 1991 when ex-Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée was starting development of a new operating system called BeOS, its designers tried to make the entire operating system “pervasively multithreaded” in anticipation that multiple CPUs would be much more common in the future. This ensured that any one window that became unresponsive would not interfere with any other windows, although the forced multithreaded programming model increased the risk of programming errors such as race conditions and deadlocks. It does seem highly unlikely, however, that Microsoft would make major changes to the GUI model, given that they just rewrote the 20 year-old GDI/GDI+ model for Windows Vista.

It will still take some time before many applications take full advantage of multithreading and thus full advantage of multiple CPU cores. Even game developers, who by necessity need to stay on the cutting edge of performance, have only recently started taking advantage of multiple threads.

Exactly how Windows in particular will adapt to the reality of dozens of cores on a single chip is still not yet known, although I bet that Ars readers can come up with all sorts of interesting and unusual ideas. When contacted for clarification of Carlson’s statements, a Microsoft spokesperson would only say “We are not giving official guidance to the public yet about the next version of Windows, other than that we’re working on it. When we are ready, we will provide updates.”

Title: Microsoft exec: Future versions of Windows to be “fundamentally redesigned”
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Date: 29 May 2007
Source: ARS Technica

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Vista betas near termination date by Gregg Keizer

This post has been viewed 126 times since Tuesday 29 May 2007 @ 11:06 pm

Microsoft is warning users of early versions of Windows Vista that the operating system will be crippled starting Friday.

In pop-up messages, Microsoft has told users to: “Back up important data from Windows now. The Windows licence will expire in X days. Back up your files, and then install any edition of Windows Vista.”

Unless Vista Ultimate Beta 2, Release Candidate 1 (RC1) and RC2 are upgraded to a legal copy by Friday, machines running those editions will automatically reboot every two hours. This crippled state will continue until Aug. 28, at which point the operating system will refuse to boot.

Microsoft began urging prerelease users to update last month, when the company announced that only Vista RC1 could be upgraded without requiring a clean install that would delete all data from the PC’s hard drive, and that only the US$259 Ultimate Upgrade edition could be used for an in-place upgrade of RC1. Vista Beta 2 and RC2, meanwhile, can be upgraded in a clean install using any Vista Upgrade edition.

Alternately, users can revert back to their previous version of Windows, assuming that they have the original installation CD or OEM-provided restore disc. These people must also resort to a clean install.

Users can migrate from a Vista preview by downloading an upgrade from the online Windows Marketplace .

Title: Vista betas near termination date
Author: Gregg Keizer
Date: 30 May 2007
Source: New Zealand Reseller News

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How to sync an HP IPAQ 4150 with Windows Vista by Rockford Lhotka

This post has been viewed 174 times since Tuesday 29 May 2007 @ 10:58 pm

I post this in the hopes that it will help prevent someone else’s pain. And because the search engines (live and google) never did give me any of these answers – they are totally clogged up with content from pre-release versions of Vista and with sites trying to sell or review mobile devices…

My wife has an HP 4150 – a wonderful little PDA. And a while back I put Vista on her laptop. Yesterday she tried to get it to sync, but Vista wouldn’t recognize the device. So she asked me for help, and there begins my tale of woe.

She was right, Vista would see the device through Explorer, so you could copy files back and forth, but the Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) wouldn’t see it at all.

After much time googling (see above) I gave up and went directly to the WMDC site – their home page never did show up in google (or live.com)… They say clearly that Windows Mobile 2003 is supported, and the HP 4150 clearly runs WM2003.

So now I’m perplexed. What could be wrong? Ahh! Perhaps there’s an update to the device from HP.

Go to hp.com and sure enough, there’s a ROM upgrade, which I downloaded.

By this point it was a little late, and I was a little frustrated that something so simple and obvious could be so hard. And the Microsoft page made no mention of any difficulties or challenges. No help with troubleshooting – or even any indication that troubleshooting would be required.

So I ran the ROM upgrade utility. On the Vista box. Stupid me. It started, and then failed. Leaving the IPAQ in a totally locked state. As long as the battery was in the device (I took the batter out a few times trying to reset things), the device was on a white logo screen showing a couple numbers (which I assume are hardware revision numbers or something).

At this point I appear to have a battery-powered paperweight, where once I had a PDA. Damn!

That was last night. Fortunately I have some awesome colleagues, and a couple of them replied to my email rant (I wasn’t happy).

Overnight I had left the battery out of the device. It apparently takes a few hours for some capacitors to discharge, and so at a colleague’s suggestion I put the battery back in this morning. Much to my relief the device rebooted with factory settings. Whew!

Then, following the suggestion from a Microsoft colleague, I ran the ROM upgrade from an XP machine. While the ROM upgrade utility will try to run on Vista, it won’t succeed – bad HP for not including an OS version check in such a critical utility!! One simple check like that would have saved me substantial trouble!

The upgrade works great from XP. Which is a lesson: if you decide to upgrade to Vista, make sure to keep at least one XP machine around for the next year or so, until these issues get ironed out. (A corollary to this is that if you only have one machine, you probably won’t want to go to Vista…)

It turns out however, that the ROM upgrade didn’t fix the sync issue. This is because Vista didn’t ship with the release version of WMDC. To get the release version of WMDC 6, you need to go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/devicecenter.mspx and download the current version.

In theory I guess Windows Update is supposed to update WMDC for you, but in my experience that’s not true. I had to do force the upgrade manually.

Also, I still don’t know how to find out the version of WMDC you have installed on a machine. So I guess you could argue that everyone should go run that update just in case.

So let me recap. I did the following:

  • Tried to sync a WM2003 device with Vista (a supported activity, with no indication that there are issues from Microsoft’s web site) – this failed
  • Tried to do a ROM upgrade of the HP 4150 from Vista – this failed horribly
  • Found out that the device would reboot after a few hours without power (thankfully!)
  • Did the ROM upgrade from XP – successfully
  • Manually upgraded WMDC on Vista
  • Got the device to sync with Vista

Now my wife has a PDA again, which makes her happy. And that, of course, makes me happy.

 

Title: How to sync an HP IPAQ 4150 with Windows Vista
Author: Rockford Lhotka
Date: 29 May 2007
Source: Rockford Lhotka

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The Windows we never got: users get to work programming “Longhorn Reloaded” by David Flynn

This post has been viewed 100 times since Tuesday 29 May 2007 @ 8:47 am

A handful of programmers and tech-savvy Windows users are attempting to do what Microsoft’s legion of coders could not, by turning the ‘Longhorn’ beta builds of Windows Vista into a full-featured operating system.

The Longhorn Reloaded project is a daring attempt to roll back the clock from Vista and resurrect the OS in its original form using the seeds of its first iteration — specifically, the ‘4074 build’ shown and distributed during the WinHEC geekfest in Seattle in May 2004.

At that time, Microsoft was still spruiking Longhorn as a radically re-engineered OS that would forever change the Windows roadmap.

However just three months later, frustrated by delays and with the feeling that Microsoft may have bitten off more than even the mighty software colossus could chew, then Windows chief Jim Allchin persuaded Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to flick the reset switch on Longhorn and settle for a far less ambitious but more ‘do-able’ OS.

This involved pushing back the delivery date to 2006 and, more significantly, removing several of the more ambition features which were until then considered the cornerstones of Longhorn (including a storage system based on a relational database and codenamed WinFS, along with the special WinFX communications and graphics technologies for developers).

By the time the first beta shipped in July 2005, the OS had a new name — Vista — and had undergone the first of several overhauls, each of which took it further away from the Longhorn days in look, feel and features.

It was a little too far for the likes of Jean-Marie Houvenaghel, who oversees the Longhorn Reloaded project. Houvenaghel also skipped the much-criticised build 5048 from WinHEC 2005 and settled on the penultimate public release of Longhorn (build 4074) as the basis for Longhorn Reloaded.

(Ironically, Microsoft itself was the first to flirt with the ‘Reloaded’ tag as a mid-2005 refresh edition of XP to bridge the gap between the release of Service Pack 2 in August 2004 and the arrival of Longhorn sometime in 2006).

Houvenaghel’s half-dozen code hackers have already released a technical refresh of the Longhorn Reloaded M1 (Milestone 1) edition, which is available for download via a BitTorrent seed on their site. Now the team is steadily working towards an M2 release.

This isn’t the first attempt to fiddle with the inner working of Microsoft’s favourite child. Melbourne programmer Shane Brooks developed a series of Windows ‘lite’ programs such as 98lite, 2000lite and XPlite which stripped out standard Windows components including Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and Windows Media Player, along with other flotsam files, to create a streamlined OS with a footprint claimed to be less than 350MB in the case of XPlite.

(Brooks also offers a Embedded Windows 98 OS which can shrink down to 11MB including network support and the Windows Explorer UI).

Stand-alone tools like nLite and vLite can also be used to create customised installers for bespoke builds of XP, 2000 and Vista. But such roll-your-own Windows install aids are nothing compared to the task of tackling the monolithic OS from the ground up, using an unfinished pre-beta build of what is in effect an abandoned project.

While the Longhorn Reloaded team don’t have access to the source code, it could turn into a fascinating meld of an established closed-source OS at the base, mixed with some recent updates and mashed together with an array of open-source add-ons.

And even if resurrecting Longhorn proves to be technically possible, will Microsoft let it live? The company has yet to let the dogs of law loose on the “Lite” Brigade, perhaps reasoning that it’s better to turn a blind eye and allow customers to use a pared-down version of Windows than lose them to Linux.

We’ve put a call in to Microsoft’s legal eagles and will give you an update with their response

Title: The Windows we never got: users get to work programming “Longhorn Reloaded”
Author: David Flynn
Date: 29 May 2007
Source: APC Mag

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GSMA and Industry Leaders Collaborate to Show Mass Market Potential for 3G Mobile Broadband in Notebook PCs by 3G.co.uk

This post has been viewed 111 times since Tuesday 29 May 2007 @ 8:24 am

US : The GSM Association (GSMA), the global trade association for mobile operators, is to collaborate with Microsoft Corporation on a global research programme to determine consumer user trends and the mass market potential of notebook PCs with embedded mobile broadband(*) - enabling access to the Internet anywhere with mobile coverage.

Today the market for mobile broadband is rapidly growing among notebook buyers who need mobile high speed data connectivity. International business travellers, road warriors, field information workers and other high end PC buyers find it essential. The GSMA, in collaboration with Microsoft, aims to assess the opportunities to drive growth beyond business users to the majority consumer and small business notebook users who want to enjoy connected experiences and multimedia on the move.

The GSMA also points toward the tremendous potential to stimulate further connectivity for people in emerging markets, where many areas lack fixed-line access and mobile networks upgraded with 3G and HSPA provide the most cost-efficient way to provide broadband Internet access.

Through the GSMA, 13 mobile operators are participating in the research, whose sponsor Telefonica/O2 believes a better understanding of what customers want from this study and trial work should help to grow the Mobile Internet. Other networks participating in the programme include: AT&T Mobility (formerly Cingular Wireless); China Mobile; DTAC; Maxis; MTN; Orange; SingTel; Smart Communications; TeliaSonera; Turkcell; Vodafone and Wind.

“Following the success of our initial program to infuse the notebook market with mobile connectivity, we are delighted to be working with Microsoft to initially understand the scale of the opportunity for mobile broadband enabled PCs in the mass market,” said Rob Conway, CEO of the GSMA. “Understanding the market size and customers’ requirements is the first step towards developing devices to meet those requirements.”

Mobile broadband is rolling out around the world today, already 155 networks are offering 3G/ W-CDMA services in 68 countries, of which 110 have already launched commercial HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) services across 57 countries, and a further 52 operators are currently deploying the technology(**).

“Microsoft’s customers are increasingly looking for the mobility and ubiquitous connectivity that mobile broadband-HSPA networks can provide worldwide today,” said Will Poole, corporate vice president of the Market Expansion Group at Microsoft. “We are excited to be working with the GSMA’s mobile operator community to find ways to enable every Windows Vista customer to enjoy mobile broadband, whether they own the most economical entry level notebook or the highest-end model.”

The collaboration will begin with a global market research study including field trials, conducted by Pyramid Research, that aims to quantify mass market PC buyer interest in mobile broadband. This will identify the key drivers of broader adoption as well as the customer value proposition, thereby crystallising the scale of opportunities ahead for all players in the industry value chain.

Affordable notebook PCs with embedded mobile broadband that work right “out of the box” as easily as connecting a desktop PC to a DSL, cable or dial-up are on the horizon. Such turnkey offers promise to be relevant to millions of PC buyers in developed and emerging markets as HSPA mobile broadband coverage quickly expands to markets worldwide.

Title: GSMA and Industry Leaders Collaborate to Show Mass Market Potential for 3G Mobile Broadband in Notebook PCs
Author: 3G.co.uk
Date: 29 May 2007
Source: 3G.co.uk

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The Fud is Flying! (Again) by David McAmis

This post has been viewed 137 times since Tuesday 29 May 2007 @ 8:16 am

It seems like that the latest marketing technique for software vendors is to sling a little FUD and see if it sticks. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt make for some attention-grabbing headlines and are great for scaring potential customers away from a competitors offering.

While IBM is seen as the originator of FUD tactics, Microsoft is often vilified as the perpetuator of the FUD marketing phenomenon with its anti-Linux campaigns, but they are by no means the only software company engaging in this practice. In fact, Microsoft itself has been the victim of FUD in recent months, with some people claiming Windows Vista would “cripple the Internet”. (And in case you didn’t notice, it hasn’t happened yet.)

The latest round in the FUD flinging comes from database ETL tool manufacturer Informatica in regards to it’s recent court win regarding patents that Business Objects may have infringed upon in one of their products, Data Integrator. Patents are a contentious issue to begin with in the software industry and even before the case was finalised, Business Objects removed the offending feature from the product.

Modifying the product to remove the disputed feature amounted to removing around 2000 lines of code, or less than 0.1% of the total source code. From the user interface, it was as simple as taking an option off of a right-click menu.

But last week Informatica’s Australian PR machine spun in to high gear, alleging that there were “big ticket” projects in doubt at 15 Australian companies as a result of the patent win. And when pressed for the details of these companies, Informatica back-pedaled with the Managing Director of Informatica Australia conceding he wasn’t sure if customers that had deployed Data Integrator actually would used the feature covered by the patent ruling.

The only reason that the backpedaling occured was that the issue was pressed by a journalist who just wanted to confirm the facts as they were presented to him– there were a number of news outlets who took the PR spin at face value and published it almost verbatim. So as IT journalists, we have a lot to answer for when it comes to contributing to the FUD factor.

As do the PR and marketing folk who produce press releases and spin stories to their benefit, regardless of the truth. And who doesn’t love a juicy headline? “15 Big Ticket Customer Projects in Doubt” sounds much better than “Feature Removed From Right-Click Menu”. Part of the problem is the PR and marketing communities’ reluctance to get their hands dirty and actually understand the underlying technology and the issues at hand.

This was never more evident than in the SCO/IBM stoush, where the FUD flew thick and fast with Darl McBride, President and CEO of SCO in 2003 issuing such notable quotes as “It would be within SCO Group’s rights to order every copy of AIX “destroyed”" . Obviously that hasn’t happened either, but it sounded like a great threat to those companies using or considering using IBM’s version of Unix. And for a while, SCO actually saw an increase in their stock price after an extensive FUD campaign against IBM. It was ironic that IBM, the company credited with creating FUD fell victim to it as well, but since then SCO’s fortunes have taken a down turn and customers are still deploying IBM’s AIX.

What software companies don’t see is that FUD actually reduces the credibility of the software industry as a whole and reduces the whole realm of software marketing to the level of a five year-old. “You’ve got girl cooties” shouted out on the playground was probably the first use of FUD for most marketing executives and the technique hasn’t evolved much since. It’s a desperate attempt to gain mind share and put that seed of doubt into someone’s mind about your competitor’s product.

So here is my solution to the problem of FUD marketing - take all the time and money you may spend spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about your competitor and put that into product development. Focus on being an innovator and leading the market with reliable, robust, scalable software tools that are well designed, free of defects and intuitive to use.

And when it comes time for a customer to decide between your product and a competitors, go out and buy a copy of the software or better yet, invite the other vendor to do a head-to-head comparison and spend the effort proving that your product is better.

Because when it comes right down to it, customers are not stupid. We are living in an age of intelligent, informed consumers that can research all of the offerings out there and make the best choice for themselves. You don’t need to use fear, uncertainty and doubt to sell product, you just need to make a better product

Title: The Fud is Flying! (Again)
Author: David McAmis
Date: 29 May 2007
Source: Builde AU

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USB Monitor 3ML (Device Monitoring Studio) for Windows Vista Released by Thomas Net

This post has been viewed 152 times since Tuesday 29 May 2007 @ 8:05 am

HHD Software, a pioneer in the software industry, announces the released of USB Monitor for Windows Vista. The USB Monitor product is now part of the fast growing line of device monitoring utilities offered by HHD Software.

USB Monitoring Software is a monitoring and analyzing tool with logging capabilities. This Universal Serial Bus (USB) monitoring software allows you to spy, capture, view and analyze any USB device. With a fully customizable user interface, configurable toolbars and keyboard shortcuts makes this program a snap to use.

“We are extremely excited at the response we have received with this product” said Vasiliy Vasilyev. “We are creating tools that users desperately need in this industry.”

To download a 14 day demo of the software, visit http://www.hhdsoftware.com/Download/usb-monitor.exe

USB Monitoring software is Windows XP, 2000 and Vista compatbile. Thoroughly tested on different platforms by many people around a world makes this program the most reliable USB Monitoring software in the market.

About HHD Software:
HHD Software is a fast growing young company which was founded in 2000 and works on providing the high quality monitoring solutions. Its software is used by a lot of companies and organizations all over the world, including Microsoft, Apple, NASA, Lockheed Martin, Intel, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, Adobe, Broadcom, LG Electronics, Samsung, Hitachi, Panasonic, Xerox and Sony.

Title: USB Monitor 3ML (Device Monitoring Studio) for Windows Vista Released
Author: Thomas Net
Date: 29 May 2007
Source: Thomas Net

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