Nosce te ipsum

This came up on tonight's Your Mac Life show and Shawn posted a link into the IRC channel pointing over to iFilms cumulative collection of this years Super Bowl ads. The story goes that GoDaddy.com, a fantastic young company with great rates and even better customer service (the very domain that you are looking at right now was brought to life thanks to GoDaddy) - apparently bought two spots of commercial time during the superbowl. After their initial ad ran early on, the phones at Fox rang off the hook and before long Fox had informed the NFL that they would not be showing the second GoDaddy commercial during the 4th quarter.

Who knows what really happened behind the scenes but all I know is the previously un-aired commercial is a well executed commercial designed specifically to attract lots of attention by using the old advertising trick in the book: sex sells - period. Who typically uses a service like GoDaddy? Geeks. And do most geeks like to see incredibly sexy and well endowed young vixens bouncing up and down (not to mention falling out of her tight t-shirt) during prime time TV? Hell yes! I'm sure our friends in Europe and other parts of the world can't fathom why this was even the slightest bit controversial but hey, welcome to the Bush era America. It's entirely ok to kill and maim men, women and children on television (in fact, it's an almost daily occurrence) but God forbid we dare show some skin of a highly attractive woman. The not so subtle nuances of the commercial just made it better ("We don't want her to have a wardrobe malfunction!" and "Those are NOT real!" remarks on the sole other female in the commercial). Sex and satire - what a winning combination.

If you haven't seen it yet, take a trip over to iFilm and check it out (GoDaddy.com, the full hearing) along with the other commercials from the game. Michael Powell has just recently stepped down the FCC and already the programming has improved dramatically! (yes, I know he hasn't officially even left yet). This commercial will gain GoDaddy far more publicity on the net than it ever could have on TV alone. I hope they link to it from their homepage and capitalize on it from the start.

Go Daddy's founder Bob Parsons has an ongoing blog and he's talking quite openly about the whole thing. A great young company making themselves stand out from the herd with superior customer service? Sounds like someone has been reading the Clue Train. Oh yea, a little quality T&A doesn't hurt either.

Getting Started Guide : Learn C on the Macintosh : Mac OS X Edition

The Mc was quite a different beast when I read an earlier version of this book. Amazing how far the Mac has come since then. 64 bit processors, free killer development tools, a Unix based operating system - all unfathomable just 10 years ago.

Learn how to program on the Mac!

Considered a classic by an entire generation of Mac programmers, this popular guide has been completely updated for Mac OS X. Don't know anything about programming? No problem! Acclaimed author Dave Mark starts out with the basics and takes you through a complete course in programming C using Apple's free Xcode Tools. Perfect for beginners learning to program. Includes all new Mac OS X examples! Sample chapter available here.

A Classic for a reason

In the Beginning was the Command Line

About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."

Yet now the company that Gates and Allen founded is selling operating systems like Gillette sells razor blades. New releases of operating systems are launched as if they were Hollywood blockbusters, with celebrity endorsements, talk show appearances, and world tours. The market for them is vast enough that people worry about whether it has been monopolized by one company. Even the least technically-minded people in our society now have at least a hazy idea of what operating systems do; what is more, they have strong opinions about their relative merits. It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.

Reinvented Software has announced Feeder 1.0, an application for creating, editing and publishing RSS feeds. Feeder features: support for the full RSS 2.0 specification (including enclosures for podcasting, video blogging and more); auto-complete and customizable templates; automatic feed validation; HTML previews; and the ability to publish a feed to your server using FTP. Feeder is priced at US$24.95

Small is Beautiful

After cleaning out our video collection over the weekend, I spent some time Sunday night watching Cringley's classic Nerds 2.01 A Brief History of the Internet. Everyone with even a passing interest in technology or the Internet should definitely check out this film along with Robert's early film.

Compared to the Mac Mini, AMD's PIC is Half the Computer at Less Than Half the Price. What's Wrong With That? - By Robert X. Cringely

After two weeks of writing about Apple's Mac Mini, I have tiny PCs on my brain. This time, it is AMD's Personal Internet Communicator -- a $185 PC that probably ought not to exist at all, but I'm glad it does. The PIC's stated objective is bringing computing to 50 percent of the world's people by 2015, and to do that, AMD is selling the little bugger through third world phone companies and ISPs. I think, with a few modifications, they should sell it here.

I'm not sure why AMD is doing the PIC, since profit margins on this type of device are infinitesimal, but most people trace the project to AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, who supposedly wants to bring the Internet back to the Mexican village where he was born.

Virus attacks Microsoft AntiSpyware

Microsoft's AntiSpyware package has been hit by its first virus.

The BankAsh-A Trojan, as security company Sophos calls it, is designed to steal online banking passwords from unsuspecting Windows users, according to the Globe and Mail. It disables Microsoft AntiSpyware, attempting to suppress warning messages that Microsoft AntiSpyware may display and deleting all files within the program's folder.

"This particular attempt appears to be the first by any piece of malware to disable Microsoft AntiSpyware, but it may be the first of many such future attacks," Sophos analyst Gregg Matsoras said in a statement. "When Microsoft's product is officially released and adopted by the consumer market, we can likely expect to see an increase in attempts by Trojan horses, viruses and worms to try and undermine its effectiveness."

Matsoras said his company has been noting an increase in the volume of Malware that is being written by criminals, designed to steal bank account information from users.

"Internet users around the world really need to ensure that their computers are properly defended with the most up-to-date protection against viruses, spam and malicious spyware."