A colleague of mine alerted me to this bizarre Office promotion from Microsoft. For all intents and purposes it looks like a spam site, so much so that they’ve added a link at the bottom to here “proving” that it’s real.
The domain appears to be owned by an “AMNESIA CREATIVE PTY LIMITED”. Perhaps they want us to forget that this goofy mock-spam site exists?
My favourite is the top 5 it’s not cheating lines:
I wonder if this is a change in policy on Microsoft’s part. Perhaps pirating Office isn’t cheating if you don’t get caught.
With so many different phone operating systems out there it seems that the standards war in the web browser space pales in comparison to presentation of content on the mobile phone. Take MMS SMIL for example. SMIL has been a W3C standard for quite some time now and a tiny subset of this, MMS SMIL, being a 3GPP specification.
An example of incompatibilities between phones is the hyperlink element. A modern Nokia series 40 phone doesn’t support linking to an HTTP URL, yet a Nokia series 60 phone does. My N73 opens up it’s WAP browser as expected and browses to the linked URL. It looks like you can click on the link on the 6233 but nothing happens. Even amongst the same manufacturer the behaviour is different (maybe the series 40 team doesn’t like Symbian that much). Because of this we often see SMIL guides specific to phone OS.
I was searching for such a guide for Windows Mobile phones when I came across these articles. I made a comment at the time wondering if there was any method you can’t use to get viruses onto Windows.
The interesting thing is that it appears that the SMIL interpreter is completely removed from Windows Mobile 5, at least in the case of my iPAQ HW6945 (is it possible to find an HP product page that doesn’t try and sell you the item?). Older iPAQs I’ve tried seem to work fine with basic SMIL elements but the newer ones don’t. I haven’t tried other Windows mobile devices so perhaps HP removed the interpreter as a precaution?
Hopefully these issues have been fixed in version 6. By the way, how do I update my existing device?
I noticed this outside the local computer store today.
Microsoft have come a long way since “Welcome to the Social”. Top stuff guys.
Peter went into this store a few days ago and asked the sales assistant what the difference between all the versions of Vista were. He didn’t know. Seeing this from Joy of Tech reminded me of the encounter.