the(new)mediaslut

The voice in the YouTube below is not, I repeat not, from a human.

It is from a computer software using voice synthesis technology developed by Yamaha.

The voice is worth 16,275 yen or about SGD210.

Remember the angry mother who got her Microsoft Live Spaces taken out for posting photos of her baby in her birthday suit?

Angry mother got her blog back, but Microsoft still risk losing one Live Spacers.

From Angry Mother:

Hello dear – just checked – it’s all fine. I got another email from MS saying which picture was the ‘issue’ – seems the one of her on the weighing scale so I cropped it and put it back up. Thanks so much for your help and support – am so happy to have the info back though still thinking of changing to another site. Any options?

One blog and the 117 of your votes helped in a small way to get Microsoft to return Angry Mother her baby blog.

Thank you!

Another angry mother post.

The very very very angry mother in Singapore emailed to me that her Windows Live Spaces of her proud new born has been made unavailable to her just like that.

Photos and history of her baby’s first six months, gone!

The angry mother highlighted that it could be due a photo of her massaging her baby and the people at Windows Live Spaces emailed her about the photo.

Unfortunately the email address was one that was just used to sign up for the account and she checked it very rarely.

Curious, why doesn’t Windows Live Spaces just censor the photo instead of deleting the whole blog? Or turn the blog into a private blog where the mother is the only one that can access the blog.

If somebody in Microsoft Singapore is reading the blog, please write to your Windows Live Space team to return Angry Mother access to her blog at lilyaraiven.spaces.live.com.

Vote here to help Angry Mother get her baby blog back!

Hello lilyaraivenstamp,

We have found images involving a child’s/children’s exposure of genitalia/buttocks on your Space, lilyaraiven.

Please note that in order to protect minors from exploitation by unscrupulous individuals, we are now restricting our users from posting fully and partially nude pictures of babies and children, whether the nature of the photo is pornographic or not. In accordance with this, we request that you remove images of the said nature from your space within 48 hours.

If these images are not removed within the said timeframe, we will be forced to close down your Space.

To delete photos from your Space, please follow these steps:

1. Log into your Space

2. Click on the “Edit Your Space” link (upper right portion of the page)

3. Click “Options”

4. Click on the “Storage” link in the Options pane

5. Select the images to be removed

6. Click on “Delete selected items”

We also encourage you to regularly review our Code of Conduct, to ensure that your Space does not violate any of its provisions. Violations include, but are not limited to, nudity, partial nudity, pornography, harassment, and illegal or offensive behavior. For a complete description of content that is not allowed on Windows Live Spaces, please visit our Code of Conduct at: http://Spaces.live.com/coc.aspx

Thank you for helping Windows Live Spaces provide a friendly and safe experience for all of our customers.

Sincerely,

Windows Live Spaces Customer Support

Her daughter might have loved Windows Vista Gadgets, but her mother, a Gartner analyst, had to re-install her desktop to Vista because of all the problems encountered.

It so happened that this mother was one of the interviewer at a Gartner conference with Steve Ballmer as the interviewee.

From PC World:

She went on to explain that she installed Vista for her daughter — and two days later went right back to using the XP operating system. “It’s safe, it works, all the hardware is fine, and everything is great,” she said of XP.

Genovese also argued that her experience with Vista is broadly shared: “What we’re seeing and what we’re hearing from users is a very similar thing. It’s difficult to implement. What should we be seeing that we’re not seeing?”

Steve Ballmer defended Windows Vista as much as he could till the mother aka Gartner analysis ended it with a clincher.

“Good, I’ll let you come in and install it for me,” said Genovese.

Would Steve get his hands dirty to install Windows Vista?

I wonder if Barney Chew, Managing Director for Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd., would offer to help a Singapore user who switched from Vista to XP to install Vista for that user…

Dear Mr Barney Chew, how about a “Help me install Vista” charity drive?

For SMBs looking to create their own intranet but can’t afford the cash, why don’t you consider Facebook?

Create a group and make it a secret group.

As  a secret group, only admin can invite people to it and it will not appear in the search option.

So if the admins want to send a internal note, they can do it in the group under “Discussion Board” and the staff internally can discuss about the issue.

Or a group photo or share a link only for internal.

Nice idea, right?

Out of the five presentations at PopOut! Singapore, Bookjetty.com’s Herryanto Siatono was the one that was highly recommended by Mozilla’s Gen Kenai.

Herryanto also shared his solution on how to make online sms to mobile phones affordable to other web2.0 startups looking at offering sms services.

“The presentation I enjoyed the most was Bookjetty,” said Gen.

“I felt that Herry had a niche and create this service which extract that niche.

“This service provides a significant benefit not only to the people of Singapore, but now to everybody who like books all over the world.”

Bookjetty.com is designed as “a social network for book lovers, where users can catalog, rate, and review their books, and check the books availability in the libraries seamlessly”.

Too much backdoor entrance to Singapore National Library Board
made the board let Heeryanta accessed their system from the front.

During the Q&A session, Herryanto was asked on how he could afford to provide users with the SMS service.

The SMS service on Bookjetty.com allows users to receive SMS about details of the book, especially that of the index number of the book in the Library. The previous Web1.0 way was to either print out the details or write it on a piece of paper.

“Do you all know Twitter?” replied Herryanto.

“Twitter actually offer SMS notification free of charge.

“When Twitter released its API, the first thing I saw was a free SMS gateway. I wouldn’t be able to afford the SMS service on my own, but thanks to Twitter, Bookjetty.com now offer SMS service.”

Necessity is the mother of all of invention. In Herryanto’s Bookjetty.com, it was his ability to adapt other web services to meet the needs of his users that well appreciated by the PopOut! audience.

Mozilla Japan director of marketing and partner relations, Gen Kanai, revealed yesterday the earnings of Mozilla from the search box alone and how the funds were also re-distributed to fellow Mozilla developers for projects.

Visitors to PopOut! Singapore, organised by The Digital Movement, was also treated to a preview of Firefox3.0.

“In 2005, we published an earnings for Mozilla about USD60million,” said Gen.

“That earnings are primary driven by the search box with our relationships from Google and Yahoo worldwide, and with local search engines, like Amazon Japan, etc.”

“We donate earnings to our community members helping us and to other open-source projects.”

Gen demonstrated new features of Firefox3.0 which grew a huge applause and “wows” from the audience.

“We will be providing off-site features for Firefox3.0, more malware protection and be adding new features around SSL,” said Gen.

Demo of SVG in Firefox3.0

“Future versions of Firefox will include have a scalable vector graphics for both images and videos which will allow users to move and resize them on the browser without a need for a plugin.”

A question was thrown to Gen about what motivates him to work for Mozilla which he answered that innovation was his biggest muse.

“The motivation is the chance to work on projects that affects over 100million users worldwide ,” said Gen.

” I really believe Firefox and other Mozilla projects are a benefit to everybody in the Internet.

“When IE was only the dominant player for 6 years, a lot of those innovation stopped for that period of time.

“But now that there is competition in the browser space, all of us are now innovating and this will benefit all of us, the Internet users.”

www.flickr.com More of The Media Slut’s photos tagged with Gen Kanai

This was a question Eileen Yu, for ZDNET Asia, asked a week ago.

“Should we, or shouldn’t we allow ourselves to blog in our capacity as journalists?” wrote Eileen.

“Do we need to differentiate blogs from news articles, and if we do, how should we go about doing that?”

Eileen answered her own questions here.

Of course journalists should blog.

Besides being able to write something that a journalist wouldn’t put as news, it also helps readers to understand the persona of the journalist.

Who is the journalist? Why is he/she interested in this particular technology? etc..

Journalists should be celebrities, especially those in the tech publications. An example would be John C Dvorak. Look at his group of followers from PC Mag, Cranky Geeks and Twit.tv.

A blog entry itself need not be long and the journalist can use it to his/her advantage by putting short posts on the latest technology.

Using the blog to share their favourite technology links, it helps to portray the tech journalist as somebody who is especially interested and up to date with the latest in tech.

Should journalists blog? Yes they should and their publishers should also encourage them.

Examples of journalists’ blogs include Loosewire , Iantan.org and budiputra.com .

(Update 17082007 10:00am: Skype log-in is ok now. Updates can be found here. 30 mins later, Skype went down again.)

Skype has been down since afternoon and it is still down.

It seems there is a software bug in the P2P software.

"Some of you may be having problems logging in to Skype," wrote the Skype blog .

"Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in."

How much of a SMS, talk time on a mobile phone and 3G data would a dead man need to use in order to have a bill totaling a few TRILLION Ringgit?

USA Today picked up the news from the New Straits Times that a Malaysian "received a USD$218 trillion phone bill and was ordered to pay up within 10 days or face prosecution ".

The report also reported that the bill belongs to the Malaysian’s late father who passed away in January 2007 and the account was closed since.

The bill total? 806,400,000,000,000.01 ringgit!

If the bill was already in the trillion of ringgit, one would have thought that with good customer service Telekom Malaysia would do away with the 0.01 ringgit.

(The intention of this post is not to give those who infringe copyrights an excuse to defend themselves, but to draw parallel between a similar issue in the US.) 

According to The Straits Times in Singapore, Odex, "the Singapore distributor of popular Japanese animated cartoons called anime has won the right to track down fans who download the programmes illegally using their Starhub Internet accounts".

Is Odex is going to identify Starhub Internet accounts based on IP addresses.

This is interesting because in the US, it seems that the RIAA (Recording Industry Associations of America) have came under flak for their "IP address can uniquely identifies someone " legal approach.

Does Starhub Cable Internet give its users a static or dynamic IP address to their users?

If it is static, then the account holder can easily identified.

But what if the account holder uses a wireless router and let friends access the Internet when they at his place. Let’s say the friends’ book boots up and by default opens up the bittorrent program and start downloading the animation in question.

Is the account holder still responsible for his friend’s auto boot up sequence? 

If Starhub offers dynamic IP addresses to its account holder, how do one then identify the account holder?

Today account holder A might be using IP Address A. The next day, IP Address A could be used by account holder B.

The question here is did Starhub use this argument to protect its users? 

… i find amazing about this photo…

1. Boo’s crappy compact captures the screen clearly

2. Flickr is viewable on the BlackBerry device

3. Boo’s photo composition is NOT BAD and manages to strategically place Yahoo! right in middle… only Yahoo!’s David Riemer partly blocks it.. cant help that.

This photo was taken during last years 3GSM Asia in Singapore during a Bento set lunch while Riemer was talking abt the "Sushi" platform……

… then grumpy is the new happy?

A HP spokesperson at a HP media event last week turning :( into the new :).

Anonymous sources have highlighted that the spokesperson is Michelle Dorn, director for Business Information at HP Software for APJ.

Also, there are emails asking themediaslut why HP is turning I.T. by its head. It is actually their new marketing tagline and themediaslut is trying to get a copy of their ad scanned to explain the headline.

A picture is worth a thousand words…  

It is going to be an historical meeting as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will be meeting in person in a public chat at annual Wall Street Journal-hosted ‘D: All Things Digital’ event on 30 May 2007.

From www.macworld.com.uk :

Apple CEO Steve Jobs will face Microsoft’s Bill Gates in public conversation next week at the annual Wall Street Journal-hosted ‘D: All Things Digital’ event.

This will be the first time the two men have met face-to-face in public for an in-depth discussion concerning the technology industry that both have become legends within.

An insider told themediaslut that the background of the set will be white. 

Steve Jobs will appear first and say, "Hi. I am a Mac."

Bill Gates will then appear and screaming, "And I am a PC!"

Image from www.myextralife.com

You sure bring a shine to themediaslut…

 themediaslut was at the Thai launch of the LG Shine KE970.

According to the spokesperson, the phone will hit the Thai market first before it comes to Singapore.  

In fact, the LG Shine KE970 will be available at MBK as early as this weekend. The recommended retail price is 13,900 Baht (about SGD650) with a free 1Gig Micro SD card.

The spokesperson also highlighted that the LG market is the second biggest in the region, just behind Korea.  

For a review of the phone, you can find it at http://www.yourmobilephonereviews.co.uk/lg_shine_reviews.htm 

themediaslut has an insider at the Intel Development Forum in China right now and that insider journalist isn’t really happy about the lunch arrangement.

"Lunch was a logistics nightmare… one queue and over 200 journalists, doesn’t compute… people were reduced to cutting in the queue in order," said the journalist.

"To survive while others were seen having roast beef with strawberry mousse- the carvery and dessert consoles had separate queues.

"The emcees were telling people to come back for the next session when half the people were still in queues with empty plates!"

The journalist is also complaining about the WiFi access at the forum.

"WiFi is intermittent too, not working more often than it is working at the Crowne Plaza hotel where the press session is being held,"  said the insider journalist. 

"Seems to work when there’s a lull in activity, but when people want to use it…

"Well, good luck!"

(Update: Some tech journalists who spoke to themediaslut about this said 75% of them are smart enough to delete the images, 25% of them usually don’t have the time for sex. Though 1 Aussie journalist did highlight that he had portable hard disks with very "exposing" data send for review.)

This month’s Marketing’s Guess Who Don’t Sue column highlighted why it is important that all tech journalists remember to format their review mobile phones or other video recording device.

From Marketing Magazine :

Who was the tech magazine journalist who is now a tad more over exposed these days after leaving what could only be described as pornographic photos of himself and a "friend" on a promo camera phone?

Alas, the scribe forgot that PR firms hand out products for journos to review, collect them, then pass them along to other journos… who always look at the stored photos.

The agents of public relations should also take the additional step to "help" the journos format these devices before passing it on to other journos. Or they could just keep the recordings and use it as incentives for the exposed journo for more features for the next year.

By the way, whoever says geeks do not make great lovers should be !@#@! … 

themediaslut wonders, "Is this tech journalist’s friend a member of the opposite sex or ….. "

themediaslut found an advertisement for the Windows 386 which for a long long time ago.

If you fast forward it to the last part, the Microsoft team had already tried to make Windows stand for Wow! with the accountant screaming in delight with that three letter word.

Remember, the guy’s an accountant. Nothing looks hot for him!

"Cho..ice.. ses…. is what I got…"

Here is Windows’ latest Vista ad that appeared in New York..

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Bangkok Post tech section, Database.

Here’s wishing the tech editorial team a happy 20th birthday!

While going through some sites, themediaslut come across this site which featured anti-virus news has fallen victim to comment spam.

Clickings on links found in comment spam could lead to compromise the your PC security!

The irony…