First Nintendo Wii Commercial
November 16, 2006 | 4 Comments
Nintendo is not allowing it to be embedded, but the advertisement is on YouTube. The basic premise is that two japanese men show up at a random person’s door and say “Wii wants to play”, they then come in and break out the fun. Apparently this is one of an initial set of four that will be released.
Update: Thanks to Justin for pointing this out, the official Wii site now has all four ads and the long version merging them into one.
Tags: ad, advertisement, commercial, Nintendo, video game, video games, wii
Pet Monkey - $18.95
March 7, 2006 | 135 Comments
According to this advertisement I found in 1966’s Amazing Spider-Man #44, you could apparently buy a “darling monkey” for $18.95.
The ad goes on to say:
The Squirrel Monkey makes an adorable pet and amusing companion. Show it affection and enjoy its company. Almost human with its warm eyes, your family will love it. These YOUNG monkeys grow about 12 inches high. Eats same food as you do (even likes lollipops, simple to care for and train. FREE cage. FREE leather collar & leash, monkey toy, and instructions included. Live delivery guaranteed. Only 18.95 express collect. Mail check or money order for $18.95 to: Animal Farm, Dept. MA-25 Box 1042, Miami Beach 39, FLA.
Now I understand some strange stuff went on in the 60’s but selling baby monkeys to random comic reading kids is just plain terrible. In fact, “squirrel monkeys” are now listed on the endangered species list. Of course I’m completely ignoiring the seahorses advertised above, somehow that’s slightly less disturbing.
Tags: ad, advertisement, animal, comic book, comic books, comics, monkey, pet, seahorse, seahorses, spider-man, spiderman, squirrel monkey
Win2K3 R2 TechNet with Michael Murphy, Dig It?
March 1, 2006 | 3 Comments
Point of fact, no.
Yesterday I attended a Microsoft TechNet event with Michael Murphy. My interest in this specific TechNet was to learn what I could about Microsoft’s federated identity management plans.
The good news is that Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is now released. This package implements the WS-Federation standard for federated single sign on (SSO).
To Murphy’s credit he started the federated discussion with what I think is the perfect analogy, the drivers license. I’ll talk more about that at a later point, but I loved his quote: “Where is my drivers license for the Internet?”
It was when he started to be asked questions about their solution that his shallow knowledge and inexperience in this field became readily apparent. A gentleman asked the question, “How does this relate to the Liberty Alliance?” Murphy was not at all familiar with “Liberty” and basically dismissed the question. Unfortunately this would be like someone presenting about SQL Server and not being familiar with MySQL…
Anyway, another participant tried to get at what might allow LA and ADFS to interact, he asked: “Is this product SAML compliant?” Murphy said he’d never heard of SAML, and to him it sounded “like a camel named Sam.” Obviously this response was not useful to anyone…
At this point I piped up and asked about how ADFS exchanged authorization information with the service provider, the question was something like “how does it assert authorization and attribute information?” Murphy said it doesn’t. Unfortunately I knew this had to be untrue…
ADFS could not possibly be ONLY about authentication and completely ignore the authorization issue. I re-framed my question saying that attributes and authorizations were key to identity. He said they were not, this system addressed the authentication issue and attribute information was never communicated. Fear of sounding more like a dink led me to give up at this point…
I should have asked “What good is your drivers license without attributes for your age, sight restriction, etc.?” Maybe he would have “got it” then…
Moving on, Murphy demo’d how the interaction would occur using some virtual servers he had. The interface for managing and setting up these federated connections seemed pretty easy and intuitive.
When Murphy logged into the service provider interface in the demo, I immediately noticed that the newly created account already had a bunch of attributes. Most notably, a $500 spending limit.
I had to ask: “How does the service provider know this newly created user has a $500 spending limit?” Murphy stumbled with this, but threw out a blatantly off the cuff and incorrect response.
At this point a guy behind me asked “Can you scroll down?” This was it, clearly my fears for a half implemented federated system were really just due to a poor presenter. A pile of attributes, including custom defined ones including title were being listed in a textarea as the things being passed.
So anyway, ADFS has potential, but we’ll have to try it out for ourselves.
Stuff that intrigued me from other sections of the event:
Can we run Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) centrally to manage our authorizations for all web-based applications? ‘Cause this would rock.
Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) could be useful for PSU…
Distributed File System (DFS) and the Branch Office Management seems partially implemented, not well thought out, and overall garbage.
The Cygwin replacement, or is there more to it?
Finally, did Michael Murphy learn his presentation style from Billy Mays?
Tags: "Active Directory Application Mode", "active directory federation services", "billy mays", "distributed file system", "liberty alliance", "michael murphy", "UNIX Interoperability Components", "windows server 2003 r2", "Windows Server Update Services", active directory, ad, adam, adfs, cygwin, dfs, federated identity management, identity management, microsoft, presentation, saml, technet, unix, windows, ws-federation, wsus
World of Warcraft == Birth Control
January 6, 2006 | 6 Comments
Watching G4 X-Play TV on my new iPod, I was pointed at this great homemade World of Warcraft Ad.
My favorite part of the ad is when they flash up on the screen:
Long term use of World of Warcraft may result in bloating, rapid weight gain, and repeated use of the word “Goblin”. Also your girlfriend will probably have sex with someone else.
The ad does seem to be in direct contradiction to this take on high school girls and video games.
Tags: ad, advertisement, birth control, blizzard, funny, g4, game, games, goblin, humor, ipod, mmorpg, podcast, pregnancy, tv, video, video game, video games, videos, world of warcraft, wow, x-play, xplay