Sony BMG’s rootkit for November Boner of the Month!

(I’m starting a new category “Boner Of The Month”, to list down those wonderfully unique incidents in the tech world that you juuust can’t put into words – without thinking of the word ‘boner’ that is. My first one should’ve been the recent Microsoft Windows update that crashed PCs and opened them up to viruses, a real humdinger, but I couldn’t Google a link to the specific one I wanted because there are just so many and they happen so often! I was also afraid I might not even find one every month, but hey, the timely one below just goes to prove when it comes to committing acts of stupidity on a regular basis, you can never underestimate your fellow man.

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Gadgets Galore

Me and Digital Exchange finally got our collective acts together to have all the gadgets I’m supposed to review over the following weeks delivered in one go. Not an easy task granted time and distance (they’re in Makati and I’m in Antipolo), the reported difficulty in dealing with the stores involved, occasional deadline issues and other nitty gritty details. Again, this is part of a 9 gadget writeup-fest to promote Digital Exchange (Glorietta 3), and so far I’ve finished with the Samsung SGH-e730, the Fujifilm F-810, and the iPod Nano 2gb, which should come out next week.

So anyway, enough talk! Here are they are!

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Microsoft ain’t #1 no more

I’m fairly sure that Microsoft missed the ‘software as a service’ boat not for any reason other than, as stated in this Fortune article, the fact that it was afraid that pursuing it back in 2001/2002 meant it had to go up against its centralized ‘software for desktop’ approach, where it is no doubt king.

It just makes sense. See, MS Office has been Microsoft’s big money making monster for years, a collection of bloated elephantine over-featured over-done software which everybody used or had to use. Microsoft therefore has to support the concept of individual installations (and licenses) of software on individual machines – the foundation of their business.

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