FlishFun.com

These are my daily “Good to Know” links for 07/30/08 … please enjoy:

Attack Canada! | The Beacon

War Plan Red envisioned primarily U.S. attacks on and occupation of various Canadian cities, including Halifax (to be subjected to a poison-gas first strike), Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria.

Who Built the Pyramids? | Harvard Magazine

Egyptologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, is beginning to fashion an answer. He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves.

Burger King uses Spider-man ad for Dark Knight burger | Den of Geek

Burger King's got a new burger out, inspired by The Dark Knight. Except last summer, it was inspired by Spider-man 3. What's going on? Marketing is just getting lazy now.

Baby?s First Internet | The Morning News

The best "book" out there on how to teach your children how to use the internet!

Canada Defiles an Astronomical Treasure | Fanboy

That man you see in the photograph above is an international treasure. Under that rejected humble facade is none other than Charles Thomas Bolton who will one day be seen as one of the great astronomers of all time.

Come back for more links tomorrow!!

Meet Windows Mojave:

The “Mojave Experiment”

It’s fast, it’s sleek, it’s cool, it’s hip, it’s… really Windows Vista?

This is the best marketing idea Microsoft has come up with in a long time.  Dealing, as I do, with many novice computer users, getting them to switch to Vista has been an uphill fight.  Most of them haven’t tried the OS or even seen it.  They’re getting all their info from word of mouth and aren’t sitting down to try it.  In this “experiment,” Microsoft has taken many different users and after listening to them bash Windows Vista, ask them to try the newest OS, Windows Mojave.  Upon trying it, everyone is loving it and wanting it, and then comes the reveal… it’s actually Windows Vista.

It’s a great watch… I love the responses some of the people give (for real hilarity, click the link that says “You can’t please everyone.”) and how honest they are.

Seriously people, give Vista a try.  Yes, it had issues… but so did XP… and 2000… and ME… and 98… and 95… ad infinitum.  It’s not like Microsoft is the only company to have issues with new products (let us not forget the MobileMe mess) and if you never try anything new, you’ll be left behind.

Some information about the experiment via the Windows Vista Blog:

• The focus group took place over three days in San Francisco and was conducted earlier this month.
• All participants were either Mac, Linux, or users of versions of Windows that came before Windows Vista. Respondents were chosen from the focus group organizer’s database, called at random, but then selected based on having a low perception of Vista (<5 rating on a scale of 1-10).
• The participants were given a demo by a trained retail salesperson – geared towards the experiences they seemed most interested in following a series of interviews. While the retail salesperson drove the demo, it was geared by the interests and direction of the participant.
• We did not use some geeked out or custom built PC. We used an HP Pavilion DV2500. It had 2GB of RAM and was running an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz. The OS was a 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate.
• Of the 120 respondents polled, on a scale of 1:10 where 10 was the highest rating, the average pre-rating for Windows Vista was 4.4. After they saw the demo, respondents rated Mojave an average of 8.5.

There you have it.  If you’re using an older version of Windows… go give Vista a chance!