HUA HIN, Thailand - With the US presidential election only three weeks away,
both candidates are turning to technology in an effort to clinch those final
few undecided voters. Cash-happy Barack Obama is ramping up his advertising
crusade by placing the first-ever presidential campaign ads in online video
games.
The ads are featured in 18 games running on Microsoft's Xbox Live platform to
promote his online voter registration and early balloting drive in ten crucial
states. Video game advertising targets young adult males, who are traditionally
difficult to reach using other campaigning methods. According to research
company Gartner Inc, the 18 to 34 age demographic does not watch a great deal
of
TV or read a lot, so video games are the ideal channel.
The ads, displaying the "Early voting has begun" slogan with a reference to his
website, are featured on billboards in Players of Burnout, an auto-racing game,
and a number of other titles of similar genres will also have players speeding
past these Barack boards.
Electronic Arts, the game's publishers, have stated that political advertising
does not reflect the opinions or policies of the company or its developers and
that they treat in-game advertising as any TV or radio station would. Earlier
this month, the Obama campaign placed ads in the user's home pages of the
social networking website Facebook.
Meanwhile, the McCain camp is battling with YouTube after the website removed
commercials for the Republican campaign. The ads in question contained bits of
televised news broadcasts and lasted no longer than 10 seconds. The news
organizations responsible for the embedded clips referred to the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and demanded the video-sharing website take
them down for copyright violation.
The McCain campaign then fired a letter to the Google-owned website asking it
to "commit to a full legal review of all takedown notices on videos posted from
accounts controlled by ... political candidates and campaigns." YouTube general
counsel Zahavah Levine countered with her own letter stating that the site
controllers do not play favorites.
The irony is that McCain voted for the DMCA, which forces website owners to
remove material once it has been notified by the owners of the material's
copyright. This system, however, is open to abuse and YouTube gets more than
its fair share of it. Also in accordance with the act is a 10- to 14-day
counterclaim by YouTube users, but time is of the essence in a presidential
campaign and the McCain camp is less than amused.
The Internet is playing a far bigger role in mass communication these days as
more people have access to it. Politicians now need to carefully select their
chosen medium to attract their target demographic. It's technological
revolution so it would be folly for even the likes of Obama and McCain to
ignore it.
Software
Open source advocates finally got their hands on the latest iteration of Open
Office this week after nearly three years of waiting. Open Office 3 is a free
office productivity software suite that does pretty much everything that
Microsoft's expensive equivalent does. Its four primary functions are word
processing, spreadsheets, databases and presentations. The launch did not go
quite as smoothly as expected, with the website being overwhelmed with requests
for the free download.
The new version contains a number of file and document compatibility fixes and
several advancements to its performance and reliability. There is also a new
Mac version. According to some reviews, Open Office 3 has some compatibility
problems with Microsoft's Office 2007, especially the Word docx and Excel xlsx
formats. However, hiccups such as this pale into insignificance when you
consider that Microsoft's Office 2003 edition can't even open these files. It
appears that backwards compatibility isn't a phrase often used at the Microsoft
labs.
When compared with Microsoft on price you can't beat this product, as it
doesn't have a price, but with online document management such as Google Docs
gaining popularity, the days of PC-based software applications could be coming
to an end. Open Office 3 can be downloaded from www.openoffice.org.
The
official name for the next version of Microsoft's dominating Windows operating
system was announced this week. It will adopt the inspiring moniker of Windows
7, which will be the first iteration based name since Windows 3.11 - all
versions since then have been based on the year, a combination of letters, or
just an "aspirational" term. "Simply put, this is the seventh release of
Windows, so 'Windows 7' just makes sense," stated Mike Nash, corporate vice
president, Windows Product Management.
This may lead to some confusion regarding previous versions following version
3. If Windows 98 was release 4, XP was 5 and Vista was 6, where do Windows 95,
NT, ME, and 2000 fit in? Maybe the geeks at Microsoft also need to upgrade
their calculators!
Hardware Apple unveiled a new MacBook this week with a number of hardware
upgrades and a sleeker aluminum enclosure. Inside the metallic shell is a 250
gigabyte hard disk, 2 gigabytes of memory, Nvidia hybrid graphics, an Intel
dual core CPU and all the regular mobile computing gadgets. Pretty run of the
mill when compared with any PC laptop at half the price for the same
specification, but Mac machines have always sold for the software so no
surprise there.
MacBook prices range from US$1,000 to $2,000, depending on spec level, so there
has been no effort by the company to offer a budget level sub-$800 product and
compete with the majority of the current laptop market share.
Science There maybe a financial crisis for some but it doesn't seem to have
affected video-game designer Richard Garriott (he was involved with the Ultima
series in the early 1980s) who forked out a reported $30 million to fulfill his
childhood dream and take a space flight. A Russian Soyuz spacecraft docked on
Tuesday with the International Space Station, where the crew met the space
tourist along with US astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yury
Lonchakov. Garriott, whose astronaut father circled the Earth on Skylab 35
years ago, will return to Earth from his zero-g jaunt after around 10 days and
the two other astronauts will remain in orbit for their six-month mission.
An
enterprising UK-based website is offering plots of land for sale for around
$30. There isn't anything enterprising about selling land until you find out
that it is on the moon. In 1980, a man named Dennis Hope filed claims to the
moon with the US and Russian governments. Since neither government has
contested the claim, Hope says - and hopes - that his scheme will be fruitful.
Not only do buyers get an acre of rock and regolith lunar surface for their
$30, but also a lunar title deed, a statement of ownership to all mineral and
mining rights, and copy of the Lunar Constitution and Bill of Rights. Also
included is a map to so buyers can find their lots from an Earth observatory or
if give a wave if passing through on the way to Mars. Competing websites are
already featuring beach-front plots fringing the Sea of Tranquility, which are
expected to sell for up to $50 an acre.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in
Thailand.
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