July 2009

The Internet Explorer 8 Ad Campaign Gives Me Pimples

July 7, 2009

in Web

Aye-aye!

Usually, my nightmares are about flamingly red-eyed minotaurs and axe-wielding aye-aye’s, or a bastard combination of the two. Right now, they’re about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 ad campaign.

“Why?”, you ask — “That’s most peculiar. Surely, no marketing can be that troubling!”. Please, humor me, and take a brief look at this empirical comparison of today’s most popular browsers:

Internet Explorer 8 Comparison ChartChart Copyright © 2009 Microsoft Corporation. Original page.

Even though the check marks are oddly reassuring, I’m sorry Microsoft; the cake you are taking is a lie. That comparison is a grave offense to anyone who has ever used one of the listed alternatives to Internet Explorer, even if only for a few minutes. It’s perfectly okay for a sales pitch to exaggerate a little for greater impact — most people expect it. However, when your points of argument are this abstract and you’re still unable to present a single, true fact, something is off.

But okay — let’s be reasonable. This isn’t the only way Microsoft is winning back Firefox, Chrome and Safari converts, and convincing its existing user base to stay. Here are some other compelling reasons to run Microsoft’s latest and greatest browser:

  • Download IE8, Feed The Hungry — Microsoft donates 8 meals to the hungry per download. The small print states that each download constitutes $1.15. All I want to know is where the guys at Microsoft get their cheeseburgers and curly fries.
  • Use IE8, Find Ten Grand — Guess what. Microsoft buried $10,000 somewhere on the internet, and only Internet Explorer 8 is impressive enough to find them!
  • Download IE8, Get a Nickelback MP3 — This one confuses me a little. I’m not a marketing wiz, but I’m pretty sure that “download X, get Y” campaigns are supposed to be rewarding to the user, too.

I was going to write a small paragraph here, questioning the thinking behind this, but then it occured to me that as long as the target isn’t the computer-savvy demographic (which it clearly isn’t), this probably works — perhaps even pretty well.

A lot of cool things have come out of Microsoft lately, like the ECMA C# and CLI standards and Microsoft Surface. I respect Bing for managing to stand up against Google, too. This ad campaign, however, goes in the proverbial basket with Vista and Millenium.

Subscribe to my RSS feed immediately and:

  • put an end to all suffering in the world ✓
  • score yourself a spot in my will ✓
  • make food obsolete ✓

It’s no wonder this website is one of the world’s highest ranked and supremely most visited. It simply secures the cake ✓

The check mark symbol makes for an excellent replacement of the period ✓

Update: For a slightly more constructive breakdown of the comparison chart, see Busting IE8′s Mythbusting.

String Theory Finally Proven?

July 7, 2009

in Science & Nature

Theoretical physicists from Leiden in the Netherlands have successfully used string theory to describe a real, physical phenomenon: the quantum critical state, a factor in high-temperature super-conductivity.

Although the mystery of high temperature super-conductivity isn’t fully resolved, the findings do show that major problems in physics can be addressed using string theory. And this is just the start, Zaanen believes. ‘AdS/CFT correspondence now explains things that colleagues who have been beavering away for ages were unable to resolve, in spite of their enormous efforts. There are a lot of things that can be done with it. We don’t fully understand it yet, but I see it as a gateway to much more.’ The fact that Science was keen to publish this discovery early confirms this.

Now, if I had any idea what this means, I would probably be a lot more excited.

Here’s a short introduction to string theory:

If that fascinates you, I can strongly recommend the BBC documentary Parallel Universes, which gives a great introduction to M-theory, the so-called theory of everything.

Something to Consider Before Travelling in Time

July 6, 2009

in Fun,Science & Nature

Time Machine Problem

Maybe Isaac Asimov can calm you down. An excerpt from his book, The End of Eternity:

He had not doubted precision pin-pointing in Time-travel since his Cubhood days. He remembered himself then, facing Educator Yarrow seriously, saying, “But Earth moves about the Sun, and the Sun moves about the Galactic Center and the Galaxy moves too. If you started from some point on Earth, and move downwhen a hundred years, you’ll be in empty space, because it will take a hundred years for Earth to reach that point.” (Those were the days when he still referred to a Century as a “hundred years.”)
And Educator Yarrow had snapped back, “You don’t separate Time from space. Moving through Time, you share Earth’s motions. Or do you believe that a bird flying through the air whiffs out into space because the Earth is hurrying around the Sun at eighteen miles a second and vanishes from under the creature?”

Image credit: Unknown