Windows Vista has been “released to manufacturing” today – which means that all development work is officially over. It becomes available to the public on January 30, 2007.
Microsoft press release here.
Anti-counterfeiting Solution
Some nice Ads for EIPR (India) Ltd. – (Enforcers of intellectual property rights.)
Art Director/Copywriter: Bhavesh Kosambia
Portugese Advert
Nice public-service advert, have a look.
Rin Ad
Nice Ad for Rin by JWT, Bombay. The line is “Bring old whites back to life.”
Gmail client for Motorazr V3
Google just launched their gmail client for mobile devices. I’ve never been a fan of how Gmail looked on Opera Mini on my motorazr, so I downloaded it as soon as I saw the news. Didn’t find it here though, had to navigate to gmail/app from my mobile to find the link. Opera Mini had to exit to download the application (gmail.jar) and installation took no time at all on my crappy GPRS connection. Loaded pretty quick, here’s how a conversation looks like:
Decent. Interface is quicker with shortcut keys, layout is clean, and they’ve included a whole lot of features that make sense on a tiny mobile screen. If you use Gmail (which you should) and the client is compatible with your phone, this is a must have.
If you use Gmail hosted email, you may have a few problems – I repeatedly got Error 404 and 500 error messages.
Another great AIDS awareness ad
Brilliant. Love the repeated images of the guy on the hospital bed to show how long the suffering lasts before the everlasting peace that comes with being buried six feet under and having your intestines eaten by bacteria.
More on the bacteria later.
Was Jesus Christ black?
Does it really matter? Apparently there’s a lot of noise about the upcoming movie “Color of the Cross“. Less people less Idiots says it all here:
I’ve heard so many Christians say how tolerant we are in this country when faced with offenses towards Christianity, and how completely intolerant Muslims are when they are confronted with the same situation. Why is it then that any time a movie comes out that in some way attempts to deal with the story of Christ that such a massive ruckus occurs? Is this a case of a director calling Jesus black, or the pot calling the kettle black?
Then there’s the issue of why does this really matter to anyone, and why 2000 years later there would be such a stir over his skin color. Jesus transcended race, and his teachings were left for all people of all races to largely sit back and ignore. So as far as I am concerned, no matter which side of the argument you may fall on in this matter, an obsession regarding Christ skin color, only serves to prove that the person obsessing over it is dealing with some serious personal prejudices.
Time to redesign the keyboard?
No, redesign doesn’t mean making them “ergonomic”. Check out capsoff.org where you have a chance to win a million dollars for the best new keyboard layout. Read this inspiring bit from Pieter Hintjens’ blog:
The caps-lock key is just a convenience for an inconvenient problem from the past.
Sure, everyone hates change, but without change we’d all still be living in caves and hunting mammoths with big sticks. When Apple stopped delivering computers with floppy drives people said they couldn’t cope. Instead, those people discovered networks, email and USB sticks for moving data around. Now, no-one even considers the loss. The removal of the caps lock should be similar. If you really really REALLY can’t cope, you’ll still be able to get an “old-style” keyboard on the open market. Meanwhile, the masses will have moved on to the next step of keyboard evolution.
Exactly. Time for change. And it’s up to us to make it happen.
Google goes the Wiki way
Those crazy home movies finally pay off
Metacafe recently announced a payment system for user contributed videos.
The payment system works like this. If you have a video on Metacafe that qualifies for the program, which generally means you own all the rights to it, you can get paid $5 for every thousand views you generate. This starts after your video reaches an initial of 20,000 views at which point you automatically gain $100. Say your video does well, a whole $1000 is yours when you hit 200,000 views and, when it becomes the next Internet fad with 2 million views, you could walk away with $10,000. That’s more than what YouTube pays you, folks.
Here’s the real bit of inspiration:
The most popular video on Metacafe. It’s got more than 4 million views so far, that’s $23,000 to the owner and creator. And what has Judson Laipply got besides the fame? Well let me tell you this, if that video was on Metacafe, he’d have got more than $160,000 for the video itself.
Read more about it here.