Courtesy of Lee Adler of the Wall Street Examiner
Old Mister Softee is truly pathetic if this is true.
Without any organic excitement for today’s Surface tablet debut, Microsoft has resorted to faking it. Take the lines outside its 60 retail locations. The Seattle store had a bona-fide-gathering, found GeekWire’s Todd Bishop, who describes the group as “stretching around the building.” That sounds promising, but looking into it more he also found “a significant portion of those in line are somehow affiliated with Microsoft, either as employees, vendors, or contractors.” Many of the others awaiting the new gadget, like the dozen people outside of the Times Square location yesterday, might have come for the $100 XBox Music Pass Microsoft offered the first 100 liner-uppers, in order to generate buzz. Unlike Apple, which can attract a well-attended union of Fanboys there more for the sport than the gadget, Microsoft doesn’t have that power. So, instead, it’s making it up.
I felt the same forced rah-rah-ing at Surface tablet event yesterday, during which there was a lot of clapping and hollering going on from the three people my right, in an otherwise clap-light crowd.
via Microsoft Faked Excitement for Its Surface Tablet Launch – Technology – The Atlantic Wire.
Meanwhile, on a somewhat related note, I got tired of paying AT&T for 5 zillion channels I never watched and am now watching over the air HDTV broadcasts of all the major networks, provided by the old folks condo commando association where I live in Palm Beach County, Florida (I’m so excited! Our local holiday, Hanging Chad Day, is almost here).
But there’s a problem. Nobody manufactures DVRs any more. If you want to record a show and you don’t have cable, or satellite, or fiber optic from the phone company, and you don’t want to pay a monthly fee to TiVo for the privilege of using the machine you bought from them, you are screwed. Now why is that? Of course, I don’t believe in conspiracies. I guess nobody wants to record TV shows any more. Why would you when you can send 400 text messages a day on your smartphone, and it will even talk back to you. This is just the free market at work. If you don’t have cable, it obviously means that you just don’t want to record stuff.
But if you’re like me, and you’re not a big fan of cable or satellite, but you do like to record shows, there are options. You can buy a video tuner for your computer and use it as a VCR. There are actually three or four (count ‘em!) companies that manufacture these video tuners for your PC. I didn’t have a spare computer for that purpose, so went hunting around on the web and found that I could buy a 2 year old PC with a 3 GHz dual core processor, high end graphics and enough ram and hard drive space to store a few hundred TV shows if I wanted. Total cost including shipping -$94 after rebate for signing up for the vendor’s credit card.
I have the tuner card and tested it on my laptop and it works great. I ordered the PC last night.
Once I get it and set it up, I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m such a great technology customer. Only the latest and the greatest! That’s right, if it’s not at least two years old and fully price depreciated, I don’t want it. I’m sure that companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Mister Softee love customers like me. Surface? Schmurface!
And yes, my wife thinks I’m out of my mind. She’s probably right.
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