Digital Solecism

As reported by a great many places, as well as PCWorld, Sony is now offering a service to remove bloatware from their new VAIO laptops.

For those that don’t know, or haven’t bought a computer in years, or are too clueless to see all the trial crap installed on their computers: Bloatware refers, essentially, to all the trials and junk that comes preloaded onto your personal computers. Microsoft Office trials, Antivirus trials, AOL, really lame trial games, etc.

So now.. when you buy a new laptop from Sony, you can pay them $50 and they’ll remove it all before shipping it out.

“WHAT?!” you say. “They want to charge me to take their crap off my computer?!”

Yes. And don’t complain about it - much.

No, really. Here’s why: All this crap they install is part of the reason that those PC laptops are so cheap. Sony gets paid for every little trial they install, so does Dell, Gateway, HP and all the others.

Yes, we all hate them, but no, we don’t complain when our Windows based laptop costs half as much as a similar Mac based laptop. (And please don’t turn this into a Windows vs Mac thing, it isn’t). It isn’t the entire reason it costs less, but it is definitely a part of it. Margins are painfully low on most laptops, so they make it up any way they can. Fight to get the trials removed, and expect prices to rise slightly.

You can, however, shake your finger at Sony for the price they charge. $50 seems rather high when you can just take your computer into any Geek Squad at a Best Buy and have it removed for $29. Yeah, I know. You hate the Geek Squad. But if you are lazy, or just not savvy enough, $29 is better than $50, right?

So before bashing Sony… just remember why it was that much cheaper than a Mac. It is more than just the Operating System.

I’m sure people will have some strong opinions. So feel free to leave them in a comment below.

EDIT: Looks like Sony has retracted this and is now offering it free. However this ‘feature’ was only available on two of their customizable VAIO’s. If you were planning on purchasing either one, you can now have them remove the junkware free of charge.

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DocSyncer - Synchronizes Documents

(Go figure)

I already did a post about Google Sync to sync up all of your cookies, bookmarks and open tabs to Google’s servers between all of your computers.

Now, how about all your documents? DocSyncer uploads all of your Office Documents up to your Google Docs accounts so you can always access them no matter where you are at, and it does it all automatically.
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Popularity: 10% [?]

I’m sure you folks have seen this cropping up all over the web. There’s always contests going up on blogs all over. Win this $5 gift certificate. Win that 500 credits to buy a whahoozit.

But how many of them have you seen get to over $12,000 in prizes?!

Check out  WinningTheWeb for all the details. You can win everything from cash to hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of web design. Pretty nuts.

I guess it is just another example of what people can accomplish on the ye olde series of tubes call The Intarweb.

Popularity: 5% [?]

There’s been quite a bit of news in the last week or so from Apple. Here’s some highlights to check out if your head has been buried in the sand:

Unlimited iTunes

According to various websites, iTunes is in talks with major record labels to offer an unlimited downloads plan of some sort. Now, this isn’t something new at all. Rhapsody, Napster and who knows what else have been doing this for a very long time - but none of them have the same size library as iTunes. No one is sure on the cost, or what exactly it’ll include.. But either way this is a step in the right direction.

P.S. Want a laugh? Search for Unlimited iTunes on Google and check out an April Fool’s post from last year.

Safari for Windows
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So if you’re like me, you come in from work, set your phone down (somewhere), do your stuff around the house, check your e-mail, then go to grab your phone.

The question is though… where did I leave it?

Luckily I have a few cell phones. But most people don’t. So what do they do? Look all over. If they’re smart, maybe try to send themselves a text message… but mostly just hope they can find it somehow.

Well now the search is over!

Next time you lose your cell phone, head on over to www.wheresmycellphone.com and put in your number. It will ring it until you find it and answer your phone. Pretty sweet!

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I can’t believe I never found this place before, at moonk.com you can convert pictures, videos or music into an online player to post to any blog or website.

Convert Files to Flash

Moonk takes your media files from your hard drive or online URL and converts them to an embeddable Flash object. You can choose what the player looks like as well a couple other options, but there’s not too much in the way of customization. They also limit you to a rather paltry 500MB of online storage, with no option to host the newly created Flash file yourself.

Still, though, it is a pretty nice and handy ability to have, and makes it very easy to integrate with whatever medium you like.

Check it out and create one or two to play around with. It is pretty cool, even if it still seems a bit buggy at times. Don’t try accessing the site in Firefox, definitely use IE.

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There’s been a lot of talk the last few days about the Apple iPhone SDK release and what will and won’t happen on it. There’s some odd limitations in place, like no multi-tasking.

Many people have been afraid of the limitations Apple will put on this. Luckily, however.. the dev team has already unencrypted the data and not only jailbroken the 2.0 firmware but also figured out how to unlock it.

Not too shabby, guys! Good to know we’ll be able to install whatever we want on our phones.

Head on over to modmyphone.com to check out the latest developments.

Popularity: 3% [?]