Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

According to this article, banner ads distributed from heavy-weight online advertising company DoubleClick have been inadvertantly spreading malware. The code was wrapped up cunningly into the adverts themselves, actually buried in the Flash. Once loaded it diverts the user away from the site they were looking at to tell them it’s doing a virus check and you need to install software. If you hit the ‘cancel’ button, it simply restarts the process and asks you to install it again. ⇥ Continue reading

Well my contract ran out this month so it’s time to ring around and find a new deal…and today is the day that the Apple iPhone launched in the UK….at 6:02pm. So I think that deserves a Woo Hoo for the launch and an ‘eh?’ for the 6:02 launch time. Anyway I’ve written before about the Apple iPhone and now we get a chance to see just how much it costs you to own one of these little beauties…

So, using Carphone Warehouse as the provider of choice and then comparing the Apple iPhone with the Nokia N95 on O2 (it’s actually cheaper on Orange in case you were wondering) on an 18 month contract we get – ⇥ Continue reading

I mentioned before about I was less impressed by Apple’s technology than their marketing, although they seem to have shot themselves in the foot a bit with their sudden drop in price of the Apple iPhone….and it’s not even out in most places yet! The problem is that it is a 1.0, which as we know are rarely the ones people want in the long term. In addition you’ve got better spec’d phones from the likes of Nokia, Motorola etc that can actually get a signal. So the only thing you were ever buying with an Apple iPhone was a bit of exclusivity and that was never going to last now was it? Although a bit harsh, I have to agree with this post on the whole subject……

I am not a fan of Hybrid cars, quite simply they were a botched together marketing exercise/technical experiment, that somehow has been taken on as the solution to all our problems, when in fact driving around in a Prius is really just paying for a bit of a conscience spring clean. I have always been much more a fan of bio-diesel as they can be made to run on locally made produce (generally) and will run in the cars that currently exist with little modification. In Brazil, and other sugar producing nations, they have made a good attempt at keeping themselves self-sufficient by converting their cars to run on ethanol. Admittedly this has some impact on the global price of sugar by increasing the demand for it, but that can’t be a bad thing – I mean you have seen the spiralling diabetes rates right? ⇥ Continue reading

Not content to scare the US government agencies by giving all of us non-military types access to satellite photos of, well pretty much everywhere with Google Earth, they are now taking us to the Final Frontier (they may take us to another frontier, but not as we know it….) Yep, download the new version of Google Earth and you get the Heavens thrown in for free – 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies ⇥ Continue reading

After my previous Apple-bashing, this post is really not going to make me popular. This Microsoft Silverlight thingy looks very cool indeed. For those of you that don’t care about the geeky side of things, it’s a small widget that you load into your browser and it lets the clever people out there create some amazing things to go on in your browser. To show it off, Microsoft have put out Tafiti. Currently it doesn’t do that much, but with the added ‘ooomph’ this thing will provide it shouldn’t be long before folk are pushing out proper Hi-Def imagery (rather than the browser max, expanded as it currently does) and since it will run Javascript immensely fast it should allow some incredible things to be done with that imagery. The rumour mill even suggests that long-term Microsoft sceptics are even impressed with this little bit of gadgetry……

So, when you see Bill Gates announcing the latest service pack for Vista, does a little shiver run up and down your spine? How about when Steve Jobs gets all technical about the iPhone? Well don’t worry, there is the place just for you its called Sweet on Geeks. ⇥ Continue reading

Have you ever wondered where the internet came from? No, thought not. Still that doesn’t stop me posting this….

As you have probably guessed by now I am not the biggest Apple fan you’ve ever met. It’s not the products, generally they are prety good, but they are so over priced and over hyped, but the wonders of their marketing department and blind loyalty of Apple-ites eveywhere means they can seemingly do no wrong. However, this is not always the case, believe it or not they have dropped a few clangers in their past. ⇥ Continue reading

Apple, what a fantastic marketing machine. People go on about their technology, but really how much better is it than the opposition? The iPod still outsells everything else by a mile, yet you can buy others for much less with more memory, similarly good OS and you aren’t tied into one compression format and made to overpay at iTunes. Even with the bad press around the batteries that cannot be replaced economically so you had to buy another one every few years, people are still more than happy to pay way more for them.
This enviable ability of Apple’s marketeers to turn a launch into an event ⇥ Continue reading