microsoft

It's another planned sporadic Windows 7 celebration!  Wow, seems so natural and unrehearsed.  Let's look at the description by the person who "caught" this and posted it:

The Blackeyed Peas compel the employees at the Microsoft Store in Mission Viejo, California to break out in dance, let their hair down and have some fun. This is an amazing store, the employees seem really excited and engaged, almost happy to be at work. My favorite parts are when people walking in the mall come inside the store, join in the dancing and have some fun. The amazing thing is that people are in the store for hours, they love interacting with the software and learning about new technology.

Sure, sounds just as natural as your Windows 7 party video.   People really ARE excited about computer operating systems!

[via Engadget]

Here I was, thinking that Microsoft's attempt at a viral video marketing campaign for Windows 7 a couple weeks ago was the worst thing I'd ever seen, but ah! Not true!

THIS is Microsoft's worst marketing video I've ever seen.

Someone actually wrote this! If you don't feel like listening to crappy mid-90's sitcom dialogue combined with a Windows '95 tutorial for ten minutes, here's my favorite snippet:

Lady: Now let's load up the task bar; I'll show you what it does.
Jennifer Aniston: Task bar? Is that anything like a Snicker's bar? Does that have nougat?
(beat)
Matthew Perry: What is nougat, does anybody know that?
[insert Seinfeld bass riff]

Matthew Perry is really at the height of his Chandler-ness in this video– it's intense.

And Jennifer Aniston too!? I'm so excited I'm going to go get "The Rachel" and avoid buying anything Microsoft makes for the rest of my life.

Thanks Bill Gates!

[via Reddit]

Earlier in the year, Microsoft came out with a program called SongSmithwhich automatically adds background music to human singing. So, a solo singer in the elementary school play needn?t have the lame-o accompaniment of the music teacher on a piano anymore. Computers can automate that menial task with MIDI sounds instead! A stable version of the software came out this month.

Screw auto-tuning your voice ? just auto-tune the music in the background to match whatever horrible pitch you happen to spew out. I can?t wait till the day I see text at the beginning of a music video that credits Microsoft as a producer.

I was recently turned on to SongSmith because it made this Soulja Boy song tolerable. Another truly staggering application ?- SongSmith can take great music and make it even better. Check out a few more mash-ups after the jump.

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Ever wonder why, for about 30 seconds when you were typing in a CAPTCHA ? while signing up for that e-mail account, posting a comment or whatever ? you weren't being bombarded with advertisements?  

You probably didn't wonder because you were too busy trying to figure out what the CAPTCHA said, but that shouldn't be a problem anymore  if Microsoft has anything to say about it.

News this week says that Microsoft wants to come out with a new kind of CAPTCHA that serves ads rather than weird twisted words you can't read.  They'd  replace them with ad related images, slogans, and musical jingles about a product, so to pass through it, the user will have to enter that product's name.  I'm going to take a wild guess and say they'll be Microsoft based?

Personally, I have no problem with this.  I've sat in front of CAPTCHAs for hours trying to guess what the warped text says.  I'll be absolutely brainwashed by advertisements if I don't have to figure out what some made up word and number combo says before posting a link on Facebook to a video of a kid falling off a skateboard.  I will however, miss the unintentionally funny CAPTCHAs.

[via Maximum PC]

Before:

After:

This observation by Engadget surged on Digg last evening. See that guy in front of the white MacBook? His skin color is different on the Polish version of Microsoft's Business Productivity site. Well — all except for his hand. This is proof that MS Paint isn't exactly the best image editor.

[Engadget via Digg]

Congrats, America. We did it! The first internet addiction center opened up this week near Seattle, Washington.
For a mere $14,500 you can ween yourself off the world wide web, your phone, and online games while meeting other internet freaks just like you with the same freakish problems!

Surprisingly, insurance doesn't cover their twelve step program, but the good news is that I, too, have an internet addiction program you can enter that's much cheaper.  It only costs $3,0046.87 (about the cost of the new MacBook Air I want) and it's simple:

STEP ONE: Get off the computer
STEP TWO: Get a life!

You can PayPal me the money as soon as you?re cured.  I promise it works.

In the meantime,or if you have a cool 14 grand to burn, check out all the details on their website.   You would think a place who's goal is to get people off the net would not have a fully functioning website, but anyone stupid enough to pay that much for an internet addiction is probably not going to notice that.

Enjoying the WayBackMachine (which saves old versions of almost every site) takes too much effort. Luckily, Smashing Apps threw together some images of popular homepages from back in the 90s.

For instance, above is Google's logo back in 1998. I think the only form of graphic design back then was Microsoft WordArt.

Google was indexing 25 million pages?! That's like the whole population of California!

[via Digg]

Soapboxwas supposed to be another user-submitted video community — Microsoft's opposition to YouTube. The service has one major flaw: Nobody has ever heard of Soapbox. Today, Microsoft said it would scale back the service.In honor of this dying internet relic that doesn't even have its own domain name, we give you the three most-viewed videos on this YouTube-wannabe: a Microsoft commercial, a French Microsoft commercial, and a Taiwanese gaming/ asian poseswebsite commercial.

Number 1: A Microsoft Commercial

<br /> <a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>
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Microsoft just launched Bing, a new search engine that directly takes on Google's domination of the space. Sunday's New York Post discussed the new service. Buzzblog pointed out the Post's sensational headline for the article: "Fear Grips Google."

The only parts of Bing that Google has to fear are Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's fits of rage:

Recommending links to funny pics is one of the staples of the Reddit community.

If users find something particularly exciting, commenters occasionally try to one up each other with their additional witticisms.

So when the above screen grab from a FOX Business report with a chyron reading "Firefox: Most popular search engine after Microsoft and Apple" hit the site, net nerds were sent into a tizzy publishing over 500 comments as of this post.  One user called a FOX News mistake involving computer lingo the "Reddit perfect storm."

Some of the comments are actually quite funny.  It's Friday, let's have them do all the work.  Here are our top 5:

1. Fox News: Most popular news channel after TV and Blu-Ray.
2. Computers: Most useful program after IBM and Dell.
3. Homosexuality: Most popular form of terrorism after Islam and Judaism.
4. Firefox: Most purple time-machine after rygar and shoelaces.
5. Bottle: Most popular ketchup after tomato & hamburger

Ah, inane comments.  [via Reddit]