It was funny, but nothing special. Bob could do better I think. I don’t see anything more offensive about the rejected commercial.

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The first Super Bowl Commercial to picque my interest is the Olympus m:robe, a music/camera combo. The score of the game is 0 to 0, but lets put up a point for Olympus. I want to know more about the product. I’ll decide later whether to wade through the flash pages to actually find out about it.

Much to the chagrin of head honchos at Microsoft, it seems employees there like Mac’s Ipod just as much as the rest of the world, and there are internal memos to address this faux paus.

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Stick around htmlfixit for any length of time, and you’ll soon find we like and endorse web standards around here. Yet, that’s such an ambiguous statement to make, as many people, including web designers, are still in the dark as to what standards are and why they matter.
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The RIAA has dropped to a new low. Apparently death and taxes are not the only things that are definite, if you’re on the Internet, the chances are good that you’ll get sued by the RIAA at some stage. They once sued a 12 year old girl and if you are a uni student, and your uni didn’t go for one of their “class licenses” then you’re a major target (thousands have already been hit), and now they have sued an 83 year old dead woman who hated computers. Well, you have to love their persistence right? See TheRegister for more.

The ever expanding offering at Google expanded … sort of … with the addition of the local search feature. A regular search would give local results at the top already if you included a city or other geographic information. This is just a further enhancement of that so far, but the blog entry at google promises more to come. Feel free to donate one or a hundred shares of google stock to us here at htmlfixit.com

Earthlink, a huge Internet Service Provider (ISP) has done a spyware audit of their users. Trojan’s have increased by 114%, a Trojan (named after the Trojan Horse) is a program that looks harmless, but opens a back-door to your PC that any nasty type can use to take over your machine to use for anything they like. The average machine has 25 spyware items installed, some are relatively harmless, many are not. This is a sobering report and it is this sort of thing that has forced me to install Firefox onto all my clients computers. Whenever I am questioned about why, I do a little test for them. First I make a list of 2o websites, and I send them to those sites in Internet Explorer. After that I have them run Adaware and look for spyware. Usually at least half a dozen are found. Then I have them visit the same sites in Firefox, and likewise scan for spyware again. The number of found items is nearly always zero. They require no more convincing.

Recently, a client of mine bought a new home computer and asked if I did home jobs. I went over to set up his PC/UPS/Scanner etc, and while setting it all up, I was given his old machine which I was told was so slow it was useless (a PII 266/64MB machine). After setting up his new PC, (and installing Firefox and Thunderbird, Adaware and a few other programs) I took his old machine home to have a look at it. This machine was Win98SE, and it had a staggering 453 spyware items installed on it. Not only that but it had 3 Viruses and a Trojan running. No wonder this thing took 10 minutes to boot, it had to start a ton of processes that did nothing for the user at all. I spent an hour cleaning the machine out, tidying up the registry, un-installing anything unnecessary and generally giving it the once over. Now I have a machine that is perfectly capable of handling E-mail, web browsing and Office documents. And for those tasks it is not slow at all. Best of all it now boots in about a minute. Before you buy a new system, make sure your old one isn’t doing a heap of stuff in the background that you don’t know about. If you are worried about Viruses and spyware, head over to http://tips.littlehosting.com/ for a detailed look at the problem and a heap of free software to get your machine clean.

Read the full Earthlink report here.