Hubble Starts to Wake Up
Posted by on under karmic, ubuntu, koala, tires, beta, linux | 
After kicking the tires of the beta of Ubuntu Linux 9.10, I'm impressed. This may be the best version of Ubuntu to date.
Posted by on under comic film, boing boing, funny commercial, radical media, extence, proprietary os, sales messages, coue, os users, enemy of the state, jokey, office users, ad agency, grat, ad campaign, frolic, seinfeld, openoffice, ubuntu, endorsements |
Microsoft's ad agency Traffik/@radical.media produced this trailer for a godawful thriller based on Office 2010, a kind of 24 meets Enemy of the State thing. As a short comic film, it's a real success -- I laughed aloud at least twice -- but I'm not sure about its value as an advertisement. The humor is in-jokey, aimed at people who already know pretty much everything they need to know about Microsoft and its products and who tend to have their minds made up already (I haven't used Office since switching to the excellent OpenOffice.org years ago, and haven't missed it once; most of the Office users I know upgrade when they get a new version gratis with a new PC). So I suppose that this thing is meant to alert avid Office users to the existence of Office 2010, an hypothesis that is further borne out by the absence of any product info in the ad. Still, if someone produced a video this funny for the next Ubuntu release, and managed to work in a couple of actual compelling sales messages aimed at proprietary OS users, I'd applaud. Office 2010: The Movie Previously:More Griping About Advertising: Bing Edition - Boing Boing Funny commercial for Microsoft's Songsmith - Boing Boing Super-sexy Windows XP ad resurrected by Nerve - Boing Boing Seinfeld and celebrity computer endorsements - Boing Boing iMac and PC frolic peacefully in new MSFT ad campaign - Boing Boing (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...Posted by on under mths, milli, ubuntu, fedora, methodology, oem, guesstimate, belief that, vice president, linux |
darthcamaro writes "It's always a challenge to try and figure out how many users a particular Linux distro has — but Canonical is now providing a new figure for Ubuntu that is 50 percent more than what they were claiming just 18 months ago. 'We have no phone home or registration process, so it's always a guesstimate. But based on the same methodology that we came up with for the 2008 number, our present belief is that it's somewhere north of 12 million users at the moment," Chris Kenyon, vice president for OEM at Canonical, told InternetNews.com.' Just in case you were wondering, Fedora still claims more — actually almost double, at 24 million."
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