In case there was any doubt that the company is still stuck in the 1990s, Microsoft hired Jerry Seinfeld as the face of its $300 million USD advertising campaign to hawk Windows Vista.

Here’s the incomprehensible part: The 54-year-old washed-up has-been was chosen because Microsoft is “weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.’s advertising,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Seinfeld is most famous for his 90s-era sitcom, which always prominently displayed a Macintosh in his TV apartment. Microsoft will pay Seinfeld $10 million.

Palm accidentally uploaded a presentation about the Palm Treo 850 — aka Treo Pro — to a public Palm Web site, where it was spotted by bloggers and posted just about everywhere.

It is probably the best looking Treo ever but is that really saying all that much? It sure looks nice:

You can see additional pictures of it here and here.

Looks to have either a black or gun-metal finish to it, with nice sharp lines and clean buttons. My one issue is that it still looks chubby.

Palm Treos, even the latest 800w, are a lot thicker than the competition. Motorola, Samsung, Apple, and even RIM seem to know how to make thinner smartphones.

Other details that can be discerned from the presentation are that it will have a full 3.5mm headset jack for headphones, Wi-Fi and of course a touch screen, which all Palms have.

It also looks like it will run the Windows Mobile 6.1 platform and will have a micro-USB jack for transferring data.

When this device will launch is unknown, but it will be with a carrier such as T-Mobile or AT&T, because the first version of it will have GSM / UMTS radios.

This phone is a nice improvement for Palm in the looks department.

Since the next generation of Palm’s own operating system is not going to be available for a while, Palm needs to do its best with Windows Mobile phones if it is to remain relevant in the competitive smartphone market.

On its enterprise blog this afternoon, Google reported that it saw more infectious spam messages in July than any month so far this year.

According to data gathered by Google’s Postini corporate e-mail security service, the volume of e-mail virus attacks peaked at almost 10 million on a single day, July 24.

That kind of volume, six to seven times what’s typical, means spam messages are getting through someone’s defenses and turning recipient’s machines into zombies, said Sundar Raghavan, a product marketing manager with the Google Apps Security & Compliance team.

“The summer of spam has caught up with us this time,” said Raghavan.

Raghavan suggests that in contrast to the message protection Google delivers from the Internet cloud, anti-spam hardware appliances that don’t update fast enough may allow malicious e-mail attacks to succeed.

Much of the spam that Google is seeing aims to exploit not browser or operating system vulnerabilities but user curiosity. Thus, explained Raghavan, spam now takes the form of spoofed CNN newsletters with link descriptions designed to bait the user, such as “Microsoft Bribes Chinese Officials.” Clicking such links in spam messages, however, generally leads to malware.

Raghavan also said that Google has seen an increase in e-mail messages with viruses concealed as encrypted .RAR attachments, despite an overall decrease in malicious attachments.

Marshal, an e-mail security company, this morning issued its security report covering the first half of 2008. In the first six months of 2008, the company says that spam volume doubled.

Marshal said that because of unpatched browsers, 45% of Internet users are at risk when they visit legitimate Web sites hosting malicious code. And there are many such sites. In May, the company identified 1.5 million Web sites infected with malware as a result of a botnet attack.

It may not come as a shock that Marshal, as a maker of e-mail security hardware, has more faith in e-mail security hardware than Google.

“We are now in the situation where spam accounts for almost 90 percent of all e-mail and increasingly contains links to infected sites,” said Bradley Anstis, VP of products, in a statement. “Companies really need to employ a combination of e-mail security gateways that have anti-spam protection using multiple techniques to block malicious content and secure Web gateway products that do not just rely on URL filtering but also scan the content that end users are downloading and uploading in real-time.”

E-mail users may also want to consider in-brain message filtering (no purchase required). Just as one might be skeptical of offers of wealth from a mysterious Nigerian benefactor, one might also refrain from clicking on links to suspect news stories along the lines of “Steve Jobs Uses Windows Vista At Home” or “Google Provides NSA With Real-Time Search Data.”

I’m always on the look out for new and exciting web applications and today I was introduced to a really cool one called Fuelly.
So what is Fuelly you might be wondering? Fuelly is a site that tracks your gas mileage over time, helping you save fuel and expenses as you drive.

If you want to stalk my MPG, you can find me over at my Fuelly profile.

It’s pretty easy to use the site as well.

Basically you sign up for a free account, add a car to your profile, then either keep track of miles driven between fuel-ups (using your car’s tripometer) or record your odometer at each fuel-up (you can choose in your settings which way to record mileage).

For technology geeks like myself who are always connected, you should check out the mobile version of Fuelly for adding data right from the gas pump. I checked it out on my BlackBerry. It looked really nice.

As an added bonus, they even have a blogtastic development blog to keep everyone up-to-date on the upcoming changes, features, bug fixes, etc.

The service is still really new… barely live 24 hours but I see this application really taking off. If you end up registering account, let me know so we can be gas mileage stalking buddies

The pie-in-the-sky dream of having Internet access while on a plane just moved one step closer to reality. Delta Airlines announced that by mid-2009, it will offer Wi-Fi-based Internet access on all of its domestic U.S. flights. I bet flight attendants never imagined they’d need IT training.

First, the facts and figures. By next summer, Delta says all of its U.S. flights will provide Wi-Fi Internet access to passengers. The Internet will come via AirCell’s ground-to-air technology, which beams wireless signals up to planes and receives whatever the planes send back.

This means anyone on the plane with a Wi-Fi radio-equipped device will be able to use it to access the Internet. That includes smartphones, PDAs, MIDs, and laptops. For flights less than three hours, the cost will be $10.00 USD. For flights over three hours, the cost will be $13.00 USD.

Worth it? That’s up to you. Speaking from experience, however, I can say that no fee is too large when something really important and timely needs to be passed through the Internet. In general, however, I can last a plane ride without Wi-Fi.

That’s one issue, but what about on-plane support when the system encounters turbulence?

I can picture it already. You have a flight full of business people shuttling from New York City to Chicago on Delta Flight 80211. They’re all very busy, very important people who have much work to accomplish. They pay the $10.00 USD to access the Internet while en route. They don’t want to be behind when they land in the Windy City.

Halfway through the flight, the Internet cuts out for one reason or another. Not only will flight attendants have to deal with surly suits who were working on very important stuff, but they will probably be the ones in charge of troubleshooting the system and getting it in working condition. That is, unless Delta plans to have an Internet tech on board each flight, which I highly doubt.

Flight attendants are, of course, extremely hard working people that put up with a lot of crap from passengers. Adding in-flight Wi-Fi is just one more system that they will likely be in charge of. They won’t necessarily need a Cisco Certification to troubleshoot the problems, but they will need at least some level of additional training.

Fair to flight attendants or not, it will be a nice perk for those passengers who really need it.

Source: Yahoo! News

Early in the evening on August 4, Apple released a firmware update for the iPhone. The new version — 2.0.1 — was issued to fix bugs. Does it fix anything, and did it add any new functionality?

The stability of iPhone firmware 2.0 has already been properly beat severely by the media and users alike. Application crashes, keyboard lag, and other issues made the new firmware less than a joy to use. In fact, quite the opposite, it was often infuriating. Apple heard our pleas, and issued a firmware update for the device less than 30 days after its release.

The firmware download was a whopping 250 MB. It took a few moments to download, but the install process took far less time than I imagined it would. It was up and running with the new software in less than 30 minutes.

Lo and behold, the darn bug fixes appear to have worked. I haven’t had any applications crash since updating the firmware. Crashes were pretty consistent prior to updating. I opened every application, played with it for a few moments, and then closed it. Everything worked as it should.

I also tested out sending some text messages and emails. The annoying keyboard lag is mostly taken care of, though I noticed a few short lags here and there. They definitely weren’t as bad as previously.

Lastly, switching between pages of the home screens appears to be faster and more fluid.

So far, no new functionality has been reported. But that’s fine with me. As long as the darned thing is more stable, that’s all I needed for now.