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Phil's Blogservations
Wednesday, October 31, 2001
Posted by philgomes 1:54 PM
Our Favorite PR Hero Featured in PR Week: I can't post it, due to copyright restrictions, but I can tell you that I'm featured in the "My Big Break" section in PR Week. It's the Oct. 29, 2001, issue on page 35. Thanks go out to Deborah Roth at The Lending Tree, who was the first to notice!
Posted by philgomes 12:30 PM
Cries of "Oh, Shit" Heard from Pacific Northwest: c|net and ZDNet reporters have discovered that struggling, cash-hungry Amazon.Com was able to shave tens of millions of bucks off its technology budget by choosing the free, open-source Linux operating system over Microsoft's proprietary offerings. Seperately and further down the Left Coast, Intel used Linux and Napster-like peer-to-peer technology to reap a savings of $200 million.
What Micro$oft representatives have described as a "cancer" and "un-American" is obviously making strong inroads at two companies that serve as the pre-emptive metaphors for their respective industries: Amazon in e-commerce and Intel in chips. This has to worry Microsoft, which treated Linux dismissively in the very beginning, then quickly changed its tune when it needed to show the Department of Justice that significant competition to their operating system monopoly did exist.
Monday, October 29, 2001
Posted by philgomes 3:25 PM
East Bay: "We Want Ours": As a lifelong East Bay resident and frequent attendee of EastBayTechNet events, last week's "BioScope" column by The SF Chronicle's Tom Abate (on Hayward's courting of biotech firms) very much struck a chord with me. I've long felt that the East Bay offered an amazing opportunity for tech firms to plant roots but, for some reason, the corridor between Oakland and Hayward has never been able to shake off the image of a bedroom community with a rough-and-tumble blue collar industrial base.
I've heard (apocryphal?) tales of East Bay companies that have used Mailboxes, Etc. locations in Palo Alto or Menlo Park as mailstops in order to be able to give out a more conventionally prestigious address to customers and investors. Such companies reportedly dispatched an administrator across the Dumbarton Bridge to pick up the mail. Even during the tech boom, Oakland had a metro-area fiber optic loop around the city that was mostly dark. That's a huge amount of bandwidth that could be tapped for any number of rich media projects worth funding in these uncertain times.
Thursday, October 25, 2001
Posted by philgomes 4:25 PM
An XP Tale of Woe: So, Microsoft has launched another OS that, sooner or later, you'll be forced to purchase. After spending a bit of Tuesday morning hooking up my girlfriend's brand-spaking new XP-loaded PC with software and hardware drivers, I have the following tale to tell.
I'd have to start by saying that I'm less irritated with MS than I am with the hardware guys who haven't developed/posted XP drivers to their respective support sites. My girlfriend has a Xerox XJ6C color inkjet printer. When I went to "Add A Printer," XP dutifully told me that it saw and recognized the XJ6C. "Nice," I thought. Did I have a driver installation disk? No, but I did have an Internet connection. Xerox's site offered XJ6C drivers for 9x, NT, and ME. No XP. So, I tried the NT driver, figuring there was something to the architectural similarity between XP and NT. Installation got 95% there when the computer told me that the driver software had not been submitted for XP logo certification and that my system would become increasingly unstable if I continued. I continued anyway, and the installation simply aborted. No changes to XP occured. The computer otherwise works fine now or, at the very least, I'm back where I started. I tried the other driver options in vain. I then decided to call Xerox tech support. I reached a live person in under 30 seconds. (!) I figured this meant one of several things: That 1) Xerox products are so good that they don't require support, and that I was just some ape brandishing mastodon bones at the foot of the Xerox Monolith, 2) a phalanx of knowledgable support professionals was there to help me, or 3) no one is buying their stuff anyway. I was told that the XJ6C was *gasp* a four-year-old device and that the company had opted not to develop an XP driver and pursue the necessary certification for that product. "You can try the driver for the Hewlett-Packard 550c," the support tech said. Shame on Xerox for all-too-quickly end-of-lifing support for some of its products and not properly supporting its customers? Shame on Microsoft for not putting in some kind of 98/NT driver-level emulation? Who knows?
Wednesday, October 24, 2001
Posted by philgomes 7:46 PM
But, over a wireless data connection, do big silicone boobs effect download time at all?: Those saucy Europeans just can't get enough...Now they want to take it with them! Yes, indeed, we are talking about the age of wireless porn!
I don't know about your cellphone, but my little 64x64 display probably wouldn't do much in terms of rendering the latest blue-film starlet. Is this solution "hands-free," I wonder? The Financial Times is carrying the story as well.
Posted by philgomes 7:39 PM
"Engineer Terrorism Out Of The Skies": This editorial (PDF format) by Electronic Design Editor-in-Chief David Bursky is a call to engineers to use the technologies available today to combat terrorism. Most of these technologies, he points out, are not in use for reasons of complacency or economics. He also indicates, quite rightly, that the main problem with current airport security technologies is that it relies on the 100% attentiveness of a human being. This, of course, has never been 100% reliable in any circumstance.
Posted by philgomes 12:32 PM
"Yeah, honey. Tap a little to the left, willya?": It seems that Handspring has come out with what is quite possibly the most useful Springboard add-on module yet for the Visor handheld: a massager! Not something that people will necessarily pass around, I'm sure.
Tuesday, October 23, 2001
Posted by philgomes 12:20 PM
Science Brings Us Heretofore Unattained Furby Knowledge: See what happens when the humble Furby is subjected to 20,000 volts. It's just a little disturbing, and makes you wonder what they put in the damned things.
Friday, October 19, 2001
Posted by philgomes 12:27 PM
"Megahertz Marketing" Killed By Its Creator: I had been saying this for years as a PR guy for Hitachi Semiconductor, but now even Intel is saying that simply counting the spins of a computers' clock isn't enough. In a world where the PC market is trying to stay above water, the big guys now have to market to a world that's moving towards increasingly portable and pervasive computing. The ratio of computing speed to power consumption will be the new measure of computing in the post-PC age. Low-power, incidentally, has never been the strong suit of the x86 crowd. I'll be watching this with continued interest.
Monday, October 15, 2001
Posted by philgomes 4:20 PM
One Man's MP3 Fiend Is Another Man's Terrorist: According to Declan McCullough of Wired News, the schizophrenic and maniacal Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) tried to grant itself extraordinary rights as part of an anti-terrorist bill. The article states that the RIAA wants the right to hack into your PC if it has "reasonable" evidence that you might have pirated MP3's in there. The bill, as originally written, would obsolve the copyright holder of any damage claims should other data (such as your personal finance spreadsheets) be destroyed in the process.
I don't know what's worse: The invasion of privacy or the fact that the RIAA wanted to get away with this as part of an anti-terrorism bill. Dan Gillmor has some particularly salient commentary: "The entertainment industry just can't help itself. It sees every piece of personal technology that it doesn't control as a piracy device, nothing more or less."
Thursday, October 04, 2001
Posted by philgomes 3:57 PM
A lot of researchers are talking these days about biology becoming an information science, as scientists continue to map the human genome. But biology contributing to social science and, more specifically, the war against terrorism?
Well, here's a great essay about what the human immune system can teach us about counterterrorist efforts. The piece is called Immune Response: What biology can teach us about appropriate responses to terrorism and it's very much worth a read.
Wednesday, October 03, 2001
Posted by philgomes 1:04 PM
Bad Press Release Idea Masquerades as Shallow Publicity Attempt: Now I've heard everything...
I was forwarded this press release this morning from a colleague. It's probably one of the most bizarre Sept. 11-related press releases I've read yet. First...What on God's green earth is SF 49'ers legend Roger Craig doing hawking integration software as TIBCO's "business affairs director?" What's next? Jerry Rice "going long for Oracle's seamlessly integrated, feature-rich solutions delivered on the ASP model?" *sigh* Second...While the football is going to eBay's "Auction for America" charity online auction, this really amounts to little more than a fairly shallow publicity attempt. I would think that, if the company were truly sincere about the charity, it would modestly keep this under its hat. This was the kind of marketing "wire detritus" that might've been big before Sept. 11. Now it just seems silly to be trumpeting this kind of thing.
Tuesday, October 02, 2001
Posted by philgomes 5:54 PM
Congresswoman Happier Barefoot and Pregnant: According to this article in the Seattle Times, Senator Kay O'Connor sees women's sufferage as a symptom of "a society that does tear families apart." The woman actually had enough gumption to tell this to a chapter of the League of Women Voters that she does not choose to celebrate the 19th Amendment (1920) for these reasons.
Huh? I wonder what she'd say if she saw detailed voter returns, broken out by gender. I mean, she had to get into office somehow. What would happen if she had to rely solely on the male vote?
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