Madison Avenue: Enough already!

Real people are facing real problems in this economic climate. Your "funny bailout" ad ideas of 99 cent cheeseburgers, $5.00 pizzas, and "low financing on gas guzzling pickups" aren't helping anyone, and they aren't clever or funny.

That is all.

Thanks for the articles!

This week we officially launched our RokN generation2 802.11n wireless adapter for Macs. We would like to take a moment to thank the following publications for writing articles about our product to let Mac users everywhere know that low-cost 802.11n functionality for Macs is real and is at Rokland.com!

ubergizmo.com
electronista.com
macnn.com

Thanks for helping us spread the word!

Rokland to use TinyURL.com for some links

If you have not heard of TinyURL.com before, it is a pretty cool service. This is from their web site:

Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then you've come to the right place. By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires.

One issue our customer service department faces is when providing driver download or spec sheet links to customers, those links are often very long and become broken into many lines in the emails the customers receive, causing them to be unclickable. It can be quite annoying to try and copy and paste a four-line URL into your web browser bar.

TinyURL provides an easy way around this by creating a short redirect link to whatever page we input at TinyURL.com. It is completely safe, but if you have never heard of TinyURL.com before you might wonder why such a link might appear in an email from us.

Of course while it is a wonderful service, no doubt some unkind folks out there will attempt to use TinyURL links to redirect unsuspecting people to spoof web sites. Therefore we are only going to use this redirect service when needed, and only within the following guidelines:

1) We will only use redirect links in replies to emails from you, we will never send you a direct email with a TinyURL.com redirect link. We will only include such links in responses to emails you may send us, such as a request for a driver download link.

2) We will never use a redirect link to take you to any page where you are asked to log in or input any personal information.

If you ever receive an unsolicited email that appears to be from us that asks you to follow a TinyURL link to log in to a web page or provide any personal information, please do not follow the link, and please report the email to us.

Also remember to always use safe web browsing practices online. As more and more businesses begin to use services like TinyURL.com, remember whenever you click a link in an email (or anywhere for that matter), always check the URL in your browser bar to make sure it is a legitimate web page where you intended to go.

Somewhere Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds are smiling...

Just when it looked like Microsoft might be strongly combating the Apple and Linux onslaught, they go and do something like this, as described in BusinessWeek magazine:

Because of the smaller size of Windows 7, three versions of the program will come loaded even on lower-end machines. If a consumer on a cheaper PC running the "Standard" version tries to use a high-definition monitor or run more than three software programs at once, he'll discover that neither is possible. Then he'll be prompted to upgrade to the pricier "Home Premium" or "Ultimate" version.

Um, did we not learn anything from the "trialware" experiments?

One reason why Microsoft's competitors have been gaining market share is because Microsoft seems to think they can do anything since customers have no other options and will just have to accept it. That's not the case anymore. I am not a Microsoft-basher and agree they have accomplished amazing things in history. But over time with practices like this, they are going to relegate themselves to history.

RokMan, Rok500, & Alfa AWUS036H 500mW all plug and play in BackTrack 4 (BT4) Linux

We have several wireless adapters available that are all plug and play in BackTrack 3 Linux from remote-exploit.org. The most popular are the RokMan, the Rok500, the RokN generation2, and the Alfa AWUS036H 500mW USB adapter.

Now that Backtrack 4 is in beta, we thought we'd try out these adapters on a machine running BT4, to see how they worked. Here are the results:

RokMan

-Plug and play in BT4
-We put the device into monitor mode using airmon-ng start wlan0
-Found the device to work in Kismet

Alfa AWUS036H Adapter

-Plug and play in BT4
-We put the device into monitor mode using airmon-ng start wlan0
-Found the device to work in Kismet

Rok500

-Plug and play in BT4
-We put the device into monitor mode using airmon-ng start wlan0
-Found the device to work in Kismet

RokN generation2

-NOT plug and play in BT4 (is plug and play in BT3 though)
-we did not attempt to build drivers in order to do any additional functionality testing, but the device should work fine with the Linux drivers that ship with this unit on CD. Hopefully the next release of BT4 will support this adapter natively.

*A quick note for those who ran BT3 from a CD and are now running BT4 Beta from a CD- in BT3 WirelessAssistant loaded at startup and came up automatically. In BT4, you must launch KNetworkManager and also open a command and type service NetworkManager start. Note that's NetworkManager with no K in front, and the N & M must be capital. This will allow you to use the RokMan, Alfa, or Rok500 as a wireless adapter for Internet use on BT4.

What Billy Bob's interview teaches us about marketing

If you have not seen this interview with Billy Bob Thornton yet, take a look below (this is the full interview and some of the better stuff does not occur until several minutes in):

I have read a bunch of comments at various blog and news sites either slamming Thornton or the guy interviewing him. Thorton is very unprofessional in the interview, but in Hollywood you can get away with that.

What I took from watching it was twofold. One, I had no idea Billy Bob Thornton was in a band, and now I do. Two, had Thornton behaved normally in the interview there would have been no buzz about it, no YouTube links everywhere, and I still would have no idea Thornton was in a band and getting ready to release a new album. Take it for what it's worth.