Welcome to GuruNews
Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.
You can interact with the PC Guru team via our Web site, located at http://www.thepcgurus.com. On our site you can post your computer questions, comments and rants on the forums, e-mail the PC Guru
team members and chat one on one in our nightly IRC chat beginning around 8:00 PM EST. You can also subscribe to our RSS feeds so you can get the latest news and forum updates from the PC Guru Web site directly on your computer.
If you're new to the Newsletter you can read back issues at Team member JP Durbin's website at http://www.jpdurbin.net. There are links to all the old 84 Online issues as well as the new GuruNews missives.
The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region. Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.
USS Rover’s list of streaming computer shows is now available for download in Excel, Open Office and Linux ready formats from http://ussrover.googlepages.com/ussrover%26%2339%3Bscomputershowlist
To subscribe to this newsletter just drop by www.thepcgurus.com and sign up!
Vol. 7, No. 8
2-22-07
1 Viral Marketing Part 1
2 When email marketing works
3 Cisco hacks, Dr. Crusher’s PADD, death of a legend, your tax dollars at work
4 Magnificent magnification
5 The wrath of DST
6 More AVG questions
Unorthodox marketing schemes are nothing new. They’ve been around for years, pushing the envelope to find new ways to entertain and push a product simultaneously.
The first example of such a scheme, now more commonly called viral or guerilla marketing, got its start in the 1920s with an advertising campaign for Burma Shave. If you’re of an age to have grown up in the 50s or even early 60s you’ll remember these.
A series of signs along rural highways (this was before the Interstate system) that contained the pieces of a simple little poem that was either entertaining or informative, often both and always ending with “Burma Shave”.
A good example is:
“On curves ahead
Remember, sonny
That rabbit’s foot
Didn’t save
The bunny
Burma-Shave”
The campaign was so popular, and is such an important part of pop culture history, that the Smithsonian Institution supposedly features one series:
“Shaving brushes
You’ll soon see ‘em
On a shelf
In some museum
Burma-Shave”
The next significant phase of unorthodox marketing came at the hometown movie theater.
In the 40s and 50s, before television became widely available, the local movie house was the place to gather. Films were released at a furious pace and the various studios tried everything to differentiate their offerings from the pack, including salacious (for the time) posters and gimmicks like the requirement to sign a release form in case you were actually scared to death.
Looking back those maneuvers were so innocent as to seem cute, but director William Castle went all out for his film “The Tingler”. Not only did he have hired “doctors and nurses” wheeling “patrons” out on stretchers in view of people waiting in line for the film, he went so far as to install a few surplus de-icing units from WWII bombers under a few theater seats in selected venues.
During the climactic scene, the film would “break” and an announcer would bellow through the loudspeakers “A Tingler has broken loose in the theater!” and the de-icers would be triggered, which were basically industrial strength vibrators.
More than a few patrons ran screaming from the theaters I’m sure.
Marketing gimmicks like that died out in the early 60s and advertising stayed with the status quo until 1982 and the premiere of Spielberg’s “ET the Extra-Terrestrial”.
Making the feature for only $10 million, director Steven Spielberg opted to try some product placement to raise money. He offered the spot to Mars Inc. for the use of M&Ms to lure ET out of hiding in the film but they turned him down. Hershey jumped at the chance and sales of Reese’s Pieces jumped 65% after the movie’s debut.
At that point the genie was out of the bottle and product placement became the norm, probably reaching apogee with 1997’s “Tomorrow Never Dies”. The Bond films had always been a staple for flashy cars but this installment was out of control, featuring products from multiple companies including BMW, Visa, Heineken, Smirnoff and even L’Oreal, to name a few.
Next week we’ll look at TV, console games and finally descend on the itchy trigger finger of Boston.
Bet you were wondering how this could get tech related ;)
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
Cisco Systems Inc. is warning
users that nearly 80 of its routers are
vulnerable to a hack tactic that got play last week:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129205-c,hubsswitchesrouters/article.html
Nurses at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center
will be among the first health care workers to use a tablet-like PC
developed specifically for medical professionals by Intel and Motion
Computing:
http://news.com.com/UCSF+nurses+test+medical+tablet+PCs/2100-1041_3-6160820.html
Robert Adler, who died Thursday at 93, denied that his most famous
invention, the television remote control, was his most important, and
he denied that it was a menace to society because it sprouted couch
potatoes:
http://www.nysun.com/article/48949
THE SWEDISH FUZZ has scored itself some free training in fighting P2P
piracy from none other than the MPAA and the FBI (because, you know,
all the terrorists have been captured):
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37746
Copy us on the good stuff ;-)
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.mattstodayinhistory.com
Download of the Week
Believe it or not, I am one of the oldest
members of the PCGurus Team. I've noticed
over the years, that I may have lost some of the visual acuity that as a callow
youth I took for granted. Some web pages
can be difficult to read in their original size.
Other browsers let you view Web pages at
custom sizes, why not Internet Explorer? EasyRead installs two buttons in your
IE toolbar. One looks like a plus sign, the other like a minus sign. One lets
you zoom in to make your Web pages look bigger, the other zooms out to make
them smaller. Version 1.5 introduces the ability to do this with right-clicks
as well. Whether you need things bigger for easy reading or smaller to pack in
more information, EasyRead can make your Web reading, well, easier. It's free
here:
http://www.iconico.com/easyRead/
Art Maley
Daylight
Saving Time
Keep a close eye on your computer appointment calendar. If you don’t, for three weeks starting this March 11th you may be late for every appointment. The problem surrounds the start of Daylight saving time. You may remember that back in August 2005, the United States Congress voted to pass the Energy Policy Act. The Act changes the start and end of Daylight Savings Time here in the U.S. The new rules will require that we move our clocks forward at 2 A.M. on the second Sunday in March. That’s three weeks earlier and it will now end one week later at 2 A.M. on the first Sunday in November. That gives us a total of 4 extra weeks of evening daylight.
The problem according to experts like Microsoft is that most computers and electronic devices were set to the old time changing standards. That potentially means that meeting times on many calendars could be off by one hour during March 11-31 and October 28-November 4. Affected users include Windows, Outlook, Entourage and mobile devices such as Windows Mobile, Blackberry, GoodLink, PocketPC, SmartPhone etc.
Microsoft says Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 will not be affected by the new time changing dates because the update was programmed into the software. But Microsoft does say there is an additional update for Outlook 2007 users now available.
On the surface the 1-hour adjustment may seem like simply a problem to fix. But there could be complications according to Microsoft. They say, "Calendaring environments have an interconnected system of applications, and because of that program may need to be adjusted to accommodate the new rules". To help with the problem, Microsoft has put together an update tool you can download; install and that will supposedly fix the problem.
In any case for the four weeks that are affected in 2007 it may be a good idea to verify start time to meetings. Or try this; I’ll be adding a start time to the actual calendar entry. So normally a 10am entry might read “Staff Meeting at office”. I would add “Staff Meeting at office 10am”. It’s just a low-tech way of double-checking your schedule.
Microsoft has a series of reports and update tool here.
Bob Sokoler
Email Question of the Week
Q: I received a notice from AVG that the free
version will be
discontinued on Feb. 18, 2007 and i'm curious if you know of another
free software package. If so, can you provide a link?
A: Updates for AVG 7.1 will be discontinued in
February. However, the
new free AVG 7.5 is available at this link:
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1
As for other free antivirus programs, the one I prefer is aVast. It
is available here:
http://www.avast.com
Just keep in mind that if you choose aVast, you'll need to uninstall
AVG first, reboot and then install aVast.
Good Luck,
Art Maley
Contact
info and legal stuff
If
you have tech support questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter
please submit them by visiting www.thepcgurus.com
and click on the “Email the Team” icon.
Copyright
2001-2006 The PC Gurus, all rights reserved.
Publication, rebroadcast or storage is prohibited without prior consent,
however you may freely forward this publication to friends as long as A) it is
forwarded in its entirety and B) no fee is charged.
Information
provided in this publication is provided "as is" without warranty of
any kind, either expressed or implied.
Although the information provided is known to work on most systems, it
may not work on ALL systems. Make use of
any information supplied at your own risk.
The
PC Gurus are a group of volunteers who provide support for the PC, Mac and
Linux users in the Kentuckiana region.
To unsubscribe from this newsletter visit http://thepcgurus.com/mailman/listinfo/newsletter_thepcgurus.com or send an email to microdome@seidata.com with the words “unsubscribe newsletter” (without the quotes) at the top of the body of the message.