Posts by GrantB

Thank you Firefox

Without Firefox, (and Apache) we might have an Internet which only works on Windows.. or at least better with MS.

I work for one corporate client recently & found that they had standardized on Firefox a few years ago as there web based replacement for the corporate terminal happened to run faster/better on Firefox than IE6/IE7. Now, even with new boxes arriving running Win7 (they skipped Vista & still mostly run XP), the IT dept (and individual users) still out of habit drop Firefox on new machines even though IE8 is probably good enough browser to use (though still a little slower).

Even in slow moving corporates I have noticed that IT departments are happy to quickly switch browser such as to Chrome; its free and little training or impact required compared with say switching from Office 2K3 to Office 2K7. Personally I am finding myself using Chrome as it does seem more robust & light-weight when running Flash apps; anybody else notice that Firefox does not cope with webcam streaming via Flash for extended periods of time?

code translator

Exactly what I was thinking.

Sure, Apple might want native apps written in Objective-C just for the iPhone/Touch/Pad devices.

Third parties might like generic app frameworks that can take one common source code base and assets like graphics/sounds, and then churn out versions for Flash (for websites), Android and Apple i-devices. You can do this by writing a layer on the device that runs say Actionscript so that your Flash app runs on the iPhone. Which Apple have banned.

You can just as easily have your translation layer that takes your Flash app source code from one machine, and churns out native Objective-C source code for a proper Apple compliant application on another machine (a Mac) where it is compiled and tested. No Actionscript needs to be anywhere near the Mac or the iP*-device

All legal as far as I can see; all you are doing is automating the code-monkey who would otherwise be manually porting code from one language and environment to another. Apple don't ban you from borrowing your C64 basic code from your mid-80's Space Invader code and writing a native Objective-C version of Space Invaders for the iPhone, so an automated or semi-automated version would be silly to ban.

The 800lb gorilla here is MS. They are unlikely to support the iPhone, but would be interesting if they made a Silverlight to iPhone converter; see how Apple reacts to that.

Tablets run software

Pretty obviously, really its all about the software. My old phone (an LG) had good hardware specs, but crappy firmware and no apps.

If I get an Apple iPhone/iPad/Touch or an Android device, I know any software I need will be found easily on iTunes or Android stores for a few bucks.

Pretty much any other tablet (or phone for that matter), no matter how good the hardware is, needs to prove itself in the market and get great developer support. Right now Win 7 Mobile has no software and the other tablets the same. Even a Win7 tablet would have little software designed for the tablet environment.

Apple games console.?

Love it or hate it, iTunes is a killer feature as it has critical mass and works well.

Even if companies come up with a better phone, MP3 player, iPod Touch (portable gaming device) or iPad style reader, then they still don't have iTunes for apps, music, portable games or books.

Apple iPod Touch seem to nibbling away at PSP and Nintendo DS marketshare as far as I see, but the Apple TV has pretty much failed.

Sony are too big for Apple to buy, but I always thought Apple having a deal with Sony for the Playstation division would be interesting; the PS3 is a nice living room box with grunt to burn, but Sony don't do the fully integrated stack and smooth UI like Apple do. A PS3/PS4 that runs an Apple OS and downloads movies, games and apps from iTunes would be an interesting beast, as it would be cheap to make, and high profit for Apple.

But, sadly, I think if Apple can make the iPad a success, then it might be cheaper for them to port the iPhone OS to cell or there own CPU powered son-of-AppleTV for in-house gaming. The PS3, Xbox360 and Wii are all starting to look a little long in the tooth, so could be interesting timing in the next couple of years to hit the home multi-media gaming machine market.

cloud switch is more complex?

"But let’s all acknowledge that the cloud switch is more complex than some would lead us to believe"

Actually sounds pretty simple if they managed to migrate thousands of users from Exchange to a totally new system with only 1 day or less outage for some number of users (users will whine about everybody having no mail when its just them and their mate from the next desk). I have seen Exchange servers down for longer just with an upgrade or switching spam filtering providers.

I am guessing the IT dept thought it was simple as well; but underestimated what sheer volume can do. Probably ran a trial with 50 users, all went well so though 10,000 accounts would be no different.

Only fail here is not migrating users office by office or dept by dept to deal with training or any scaling issues. Sounds like migrating a few hundred or few thousand users per week would have been a more conservative approach. They must have considered the effect of just transferring mailboxes, each hundreds of MB for thousands of users, would have killed a companies bandwidth.

Device drivers

Interesting thing that kills pretty much any OS from competing with Windows is drivers.

There has to be an assumption that a nice new netbook/tablet running ChromeOS will just work automagically with your camera/printer/iPod/3G card etc plugged into the USB ports.

It is getting easier these days with a few more standards in place for things like cameras (pictbridge?), but printers at least could be interesting.

A true online OS could do some funky steps though; you hit print on a webpage, the request gets sent to Google HQ along with the ID of the connected printer. They can then run the job through a Windows printer driver (this is Google - they could have 100,000 VM's representing 99% of the worlds most common printers), capture the data sent to the USB port on the VM, compress it and stream it back out to the printer device. End result is that you device has no printer driver but can talk to any printer that is attached that Google knows about... and Google advertisers get to pop up suggestions that if you are printing those photos, you might want to consider this online printing service that does 6x4 glossies for $..

Oh and on the issue of:

"ultimate irony is that after years of criticizing Microsoft for bundling its OS with its browser, Google has nearly made them one and the same"

Well, no, Google quite fairly criticised MS for bundling a hideous, slow, non-standard based browser to try and kill the (Netscape) competition and slow the progress of webapps which threatened (and still do threaten) the Microsoft platform. I notice in the screenshot that they had Hotmail listed, so they don't mind competing on webservers.. but if they subsidise the purchase cost (like the cellphone model) then they will want a fair bit of control.

"rollout the table to 158 hotels"

Meanwhile Apple, more famous for style than technology, have pushed about about 50 million+ multi-touch devices in the form of iPod Touch, iPhones and all the new Apple notebooks.

You get the feeling that Microsoft under Ballmer need to claim 'look we can demo this too' rather than just getting on with putting practical solutions in the hands of punters.

Modchips

Please, for every 1 person that installs a modchip so that they can play an out-of-region game, 99 will be installing them to be able to play free/cheap copies of games.

Can't feel too worried that they being booted off Live. MS have always been clear that you pay to play. So wannabe pirates will have to have two xboxen or a switch to offline 'steal' mode and 'online/live mode'.

Only issue will be if MS boot people who have done nothing wrong other than replacing the HDD drive with something larger. That would bite given the cost/size of the official units.

D Moss Esq get it right

Follow the money.

Say you load €100/$100 or whatever onto your pre-paid mobile provided by your friendly Telco -say Vodafone. The money is sitting in bank account belong to Vodafone earning interest for them, but associated with your phone number via a unique GSM SIM ID. Now you use it to pay for calls, data, SMS/MMS, ringtones,then the telco providing all the infrastructure for the payment billing system, makes very nice profit margins on each dollar/euro/£ spent. In the case of SMS, each dollar spent makes them nearly 100% profit margin.

Now what happens if that same credit loaded up on your machine is used to buy train/bus tickets, cans of coke from a vending machine etc? The telco might be able to get away with a 2% margin on the transaction; but why should say masstransport or vending machine operators pay much commission because the users has an iPhone rather than cash? And the telco might be paying for expensive infrastructure and support costs for payments but reaping little of the revenue if somebody with an iPhone uses it for the odd txt but lots of payment transactions.

Have been in this situation before when a large local telco killed a project I was working on because the business case did not stack up.

Of course, never write off Apple; they have managed to work around telcos and RIAA before, very very well. If any company could get Telco's to pay for Apple/iPhone users to have an advantage, then Apple could. But I bet it would be a hard slog.

The Island

Caught a bit of 'The Island' on TV the other day. Even with Scarlett Johansson, its a Michael Bay movie so not much worth watching, but the product placement was cringe-worthy bad. Obviously Microsoft had a part to play as there were adverts (made to look like scenes in a movie) for XBox and MSN.

Even though it was a 2005 movie, Microsoft were showing a future where people went to pay phone boxes (and supposedly paid) to use MSN search, complete with giant fluttering butterfly logo (Bay does not do subtle obviously, but the advertising was so in your face it distracted from Johansson).

So only 4 years ago, they couldn't see that MSN had no future? That to find information people would just borrow a Google or Apple smartphone rather than some MS video phone. So much for being innovators.

Some of us remember Bill Gates pushing the smart watches with 'SPOT" and have been around long enough to know that when trying to figure out where computing is going, don't bother trying to follow MS for a lead. They don't have a clue.

Certainly brought the climate change deniers out of the woodwork

Same old arguments that get pulled out every time science works the way the science methodology works, which is continuing refinement and correction of base data.

Even 2 minutes looking at a Wikipedia article would address most of the points raised. If commenter don't bother even spending the time doing this, I suspect they don't want facts to get in the way of their beliefs. To accuse people who accept the science of global warming to do the same would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Typical comments include Charles Manning "too many environmental groups have forgotten about other factors" .. and those factors are? You really think that thousands of scientists spending years working on this just overlook natural warming, solar minimums etc? You can find why these things don't explain/fit with real observed changes in climate with a quick look online.

Michael 10 raises the old argument about surface weather stations - in an article about refining the detection of climate changes from satellites. Again, in the time taken to post, they could have an answer (hint - satellites and most of the world being water).

Wade Burchette thinks that weather == climate. Fail. You can predict that summer will be warmer than winter, much better than if it will be raining London in 10 days .

Denying human input into global climate change (to some extent or another) does make it stop. It doesn't imply that we all have to buy electric cars or even that we need to do anything; our response to climate change is a political issue, but the science has been refined more and more over the last 30 years and it's highly probably as real as evolution and other science facts.

Assuming some grand conspiracy of scientists is also not feasible; the way science works, is that a really good research that showed humans weren't at least partly responsible, would make a scientist very wealthy and famous. Bjorn Lomborg is famous primarily for his counter approach - and makes good money from it. Doing more research that confirms the same old evidence as everybody else does not make great/exciting careers for scientists. In my experience working scientists love to poke holes in data/theories, just like this research that improves raw satellite data; but does not in any way suggest that global climate changes is not occurring as suggested by some posters.

McBride

Was no doubt paid big money for being a CEO of a public company .. that he destroyed.

So now being a CEO with many years experience will no doubt roll on to another highly paid job, if not for private firms capable of googling his name, at least on the board of the odd company (perhaps legal firms) or government advisor.

Must hurt to have been a shareholder or on the staff at SCO, seeing the salary this turkey earned for doing sweet FA.

Will Win7 be any better?

Work brought me a new lappy 15 months ago; dual core T6400, 3GB ram, Vista Ultimate x64 patched to SP2. I try and keep it clean & lean with few add on crap other~than google desktop - which I need as Vista search is fundamentally broken.

Startup times (even resume from Sleep) have still declined to the point that it takes several minutes to start up simply to check an email in Outlook 2007.

I will probably just buy another laptop running Win7 in due course, simply to avoid the expensive pain of clean & reinstall everything (include hassles with getting licence validation for some tools). But will Win7 be any better after 18 months of use? Lots of people claim Win 7 is faster, but then a new clean install of Vista is (as the article shows) 75% faster than a mature install of Vista. Wonder how many people claiming speed increases in Win7 are really comparing like with like.

I am running fewer and fewer programs that need Windows. So the price of a MacBook is starting to look attractive given the time I waste fighting with Vista. One thought is that given the cost of laptop hardware compared with software prices is to re-image my current Vista box with Ubuntu to use for day-to-day webbrowsing, email etc and only use a new Win7 box for MSOffice.

@Anonymous Coward Posted Sunday 4th October 2009

Great attack, actual reasoning based on reading the article carefully and displaying a real knowledge of stats and research. Pity you didn't give your name as it was a good post. End result; further proof that not only did people not read or understand the article, but they don't read the comments. That is the real fail/wtf.

The research is a single study and I would be reluctant to draw too much from it without reading more about the stat's used (multi variable factor analysis of a small-ish sample size is somewhat problematic) but seems sound enough to state that on the evidence presented, carrying a weapon is more likely to to get you shot.

For the record, New Zealand police are still unarmed and although again there are lots of factors, certainly appear less likely to be shot than a cop in the US.

imates - Windows Mobile

I used to see iMates around.. before the iPhone came out and every CEO/CIO that was not carrying a Blackberry seems to have made the switch.

i-mates business model was selling mobile hardware made by somebody else (who could sell them cheaper/better directly) and adding software made by Microsoft. That model is looking a little strained at the moment with MS being a year or two behind everybody else.

Basically is anybody making money of Windows Mobile? I know that Acer WinMobile phones have been dumped on the market, and I see the odd HTC one, but basically it looks like the 'Plays for Sure' MP3 player market; and we know how that turned out.

MS will no doubt extend Apple envy to bring out their own phone to make sure they really kill off what remains of the market. And the rest of the world will continue to buy iPhones, Blackberry and Android.

@Andrew Culpeck

trying compressing air sometime & then letting it escape quickly. The pump heats up very quickly when compressing & the air freezes (forming ice) when uncompressing. Welcome to thermodynamics, (or check out wikipedia article on compress air engines).

This makes compressed air cars less efficient and more difficult than you might think.

Batteries + electric motors still have the most potential for a replacement for petrol/diesel ICE motor-vehicles, simply because the huge investment in many industries (a better battery would be huge for transport, laptops, phones, you name it) and they just don't have the same mechanical issues.

My children

Being modern kids, they thought most sci-fi/horror stuff was a bit naff.. but Blink and the echo's of "are you my mummy" (Empty child) had them squirming on the couch (and my 8 yr old diving behind the couch to hide at key moments).

Brings back fond memories of me having nightmares as a kid watching Tom Baker. I have never gone back to the old episodes; I suspect my memories are far better than the actual quality of the programs.

@Andy Miller

Er, the new Nano has FM radio. Not that I ever understood exactly why people were buying MP3 players to listen to FM radio anyway.

I brought my wife a feature-packed Sony player a while back to use while jogging. The Sony 'Connect' software was so hideous that the player was effectively un-useable.

Features are only good if they are accessible. You have to give Apple credit for making iPods features very easy to use.

Ballmer has serious Apple envy problems

Check out Ballmers opinion of a superslim laptop just one year ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar_r2kE9Ej4

Yet, two years after Apple, they are going to bring one out. If they are doing nothing but chasing (several years behind) Apple and Google, they are seriously in trouble.

How long before Ballmer is kicked out?

said it before

Take a look at how people are actually using those millions of iPod Touch and iPhones; games, books and other niche/vertical market apps (all 50,000+ of them on the store) are important capabilitiesm, probably becoming more important than just playing MP3's or making calls which any $50 device can do. You can buy a cheap Chinese knock-off (or a Palm Pre) that can play video/MP3's, or work as a cell-phone as well as any iPod/iPhone, but none I have seen will run Apple App store games/applications. Archos have also proven the market for larger more capable media players; and Archos don't have anything like the software or music/video store tie in's that Apple have.

Apple would have huge amounts of data about how people use Apple devices; far more than people writing this off before it is made public. I suspect that they could keep ahead of the market; if the new device is the right balance or price/performance. Given Apples recent track record, it would be foolish to just write them off.

MS are behind on this one

30 million mobile devices running Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1?

Maybe; but its still different versions of Windows Mobile with different UI's running on a wide range of devices and capabilities (i.e some might have tilt sensors, most won't). Apple in a very short time have sold more devices that are all very similar, and the beauty of iTunes serving the apps is that iPod Touch and iPhone owners are used to single click purchase of apps.

There was a very cheap Win Mobile 6.1 phone I could have brought in the weekend for 1/3 the price of an iPhone. Thought about it, but if I buy the iPhone I can purchase 100's of good apps and games via iTunes. If I get the Win Mobile phone, then I might be able to download apps in December? I don't have a LiveID.

Only thing I could see working is if MS made if very cheap & easy for iPhone developers to also spin off a copy of their apps for Win Mobile. Can't see that happening though.

Apple might have a point

My 11 yr old daughter recently brought an iPod Touch. She loves it and carries it everywhere; not unusual among her friends where it seems to be _the_ device; the DSLites appear to now have become uncool among her girlfriends and even pushing their cellphones into just cheap txt/call devices.

Interesting thing for me (who has owned a 5th Gen 30Gb iPod for years), is that while I have my iPod crammed with music and podcasts, she spends about 50% of her time using the iTouch hooked up to our Wifi network, reading books, playing games, browsing the web. Only downside for her was the lack of flash on the iTouch.

For her spending hours per day reading books on the iTouch, a larger screen version of the same; perhaps with video/camera and video editing and sharing would be a must have device. Though she (and her poor suffering parents) won't be able to afford it if Apple pricing is anything to go by.

So wrong

Napster was buggy in the early days, and really was not well written. I was an early user in the days of downloading MP3's with 56k modems (and writing them to CD's as I never had enough disk space for a decent collection).

But... it had critical mass. I remember telling an old guy at work about it & he getting excited about finding somebody sharing some obscure Pink Floyd stuff. He (and I now I think about it) would have gladly paid a buck a track to download. Nice thing about it was the community/social networking aspect of it; before Myspace/Facebook etc, you could chat to people about music & other files being shared on Napster

I remember venting at the time when the RIAA was fighting a court case to shut it down; if they had just kept it going a little longer they could have bolted on a charging mechanism; I reckon they would have got millions paying fees & not had P2P or torrents to deal with to the same extent.

The fight against the Pirate Bay indicates the same brain dead execs are making the same brain dead decisions 10 years on.

Ted got a few things wrong

A anon coward replied to most of the points about, but does Ted bother to consider how much he gets wrong?

"Corporate IT workers everywhere have to port decades of esoteric business logic codified into Excel macros to Google Spreadsheets"

Just how out of date are you? Having business logic embedded in spreadsheets was never a good idea, and Excel macro's have been a security risk for about 15 years since people started to email them around. These days business logic is held in RDB's accessed via the Intranet. Even MS will tell you to use Sharepoint and their custom solutions - not Excel.

"Have you ever tried to use Google Docs for any serious task?"

No; but I certainly use websites for serious tasks. Given that your job is publishing on line rather than on dead trees, don't you?

"The Microsoft Office institution will not easily be overthrown by a bunch of jokers writing JavaScript"

You better tell MS about this; they are offering Office Live.. on the web. You will be able to use the 'Microsoft Office institution' on Chrome OS. In fact I already have run Office via a Linux desktop with Citrix.

"Can you replace Active Directory with a web app?" Why yes actually; (try FreeNas sometime), though you seem to be confused about what a 'web' app is. If you mean a IP based service, then very much so. Not that I think the target platform (a netbook) will be used as a corporate server, but you could run Samba (remember AD is based on open source protocols that MS borrowed).

"Is there a site I can visit to connect to my office's shared printer?" Printing. Yeah, I remember that; not that people do a lot of printing from netbooks or iPhones, but our office HP printer seems to work fine from Linux and OSX boxes so I assume. You might also want to check out online printing services; for photo's they can be better than via your office printer.

"What do you mean World of Warcraft doesn't run in the browser?"

It can - Blizzard can and probably will make this happen. My kids play Runescape (and a surprising amount of other games) in the browser.

"How do I play a DVD in Google Chrome?". Same way you play DVD'd in any netbook!. I have a full sized notebook & have use the DVD drive about 3-4 times per year - mainly to back up files for somebody. 8GB USB sticks are now cheaper than a stack of DVD's; software is installed via the web, and music & video is downloaded.

"Keep whackin' away on that Pareto Principle and let us all know how it turns out"

Power laws work pretty well; classic case is that while mainly web-apps are not as good as desktop software, they are cheaper and 'good enough' for 90% of people; case in point MS having to abandon Money, Encarta and the like. Also, in case you haven't noticed, Netbooks are a fast growing market segment, and appliance devices like the iPod and iPhone seem to be pretty popular.

"In the meantime, I'm going to go play a few rounds of Counterstrike on my Windows-based PC, because the best that my browser can do is Tetris. I'm sure that HTML5 will bridge that gap any day now"

What, you are posting from the 1990? Guess you haven't got the message that PC gaming is dead. Killed by complexity, hardware cost and piracy that is the flip side of the Pareto equation. I have XP & Vista machines but like the vast majority of people, play games on console, mobiles and in browsers. Even if you stick Win7 on a netbook, Crysis is not going to run well on an Atom powered platform.

"The notion that Google Chrome OS is going to take any serious market share away from Windows is a product of the pathological Silicon Valley attitude that newer is always better"

That's exactly the attitude that hit MS; given that MS own the desktop, you think that everybody would use IE, Live/Bing, or Windows Mobile devices. They don't. If competitor comes along with a device that 'just works' then it can change the market. See iPhone, iPod, Asus 701 etc.

"In terms of functionality, web apps have been a regression from their desktop counterparts. Run business apps over a faulty network instead of from your hard disk? What could possibly go wrong? Can I buy an extended warranty with that?"

Yet I do all my banking on the net, replying to your post on the net, about to buy a new car on the net, sell software on the net... MS are pushing there key apps onto the net.

Its not like you local hard-disk won't fail. People have tried things like Gmail and found over the last 5 years that it is not perfect; but cheaper and more reliable than a local Exchange server. Good enough for most.

"Indeed. That's probably why desktop Linux machines with Firefox have already taken such a foothold in the consumer market"

Well Firefox has taken more than a foothold - about 50% of the market on my logs. Given that XP is 'free' with machines, why would a consumer need Linux just to fire up a browser?. Windows XP & Win7 are perfectly reasonable free OS's, even if they mostly do not come with FF and Open Office built in (but do come with the blue 'E' which I tell people is there to make downloading FF easy). Maybe in 2010 I would like to see a straight choice between a cheap Asus netbook running ChromeOS (booting and being ready in seconds with software all ready to go) and the same netbook but loaded with Win7 and Office (live?) for another $100. Question will be; will people pay the difference for Windows? What if they are buying 100 at a time for libraries, terminals in call centres, cafes etc?

And the consumer market is not Linux vs Windows; its people buying iPhones, Palm Pre (whoich people have overlooked as the prototype Browser as OS) and OSX as well.

That Psion

that was so good; did it run Photoshop?

Like most people I know, I have several computers; a desktop at home with a largish screen, a work laptop and considering buying a lightweight netbook or iPhone. On the work machine I have Photoshop Elements; though judging by sales, you would assume only about 1-2% of the market would have that. In-fact if you look at other Windows only applications; somebody mentioned Fallout 3, I would guess that less than 1% of people bother with highend gaming; that won't run on my old XP laptop either.

In fact the classic 80/20 (or is that 90/10?) rule applies; 90% of the time, a netbook or iPhone would give me what I need. For the other times, a PS3 or my other computers do it.

There is always a cost/benefit; you focus on a small irrelevant (to most people/most of the time) thing like the ability to run Photoshop (though it will run Picasa no doubt) yet overlook the benefits of a smaller, kinder and faster Linux supported by Google. My mother has installed no purchased software since she brought her XP machine; but has had to worry & pay people to deal with virus. She did not backup photos or emails, so after a factory restore lost everything. A Google machine that stored her photo's, emails and contacts online makes so much more sense.

Finally, the thing that should worry MS is that within 2 years, the iPhone already has more applications and developer support than Windows Mobile ever had. Applications may not be such an issue holding people back from using a Chrome based netbook anymore.

Hrm #

Bit of a fail for a shill don't you think? Repeating the 'what about Apple' thing, even though a set of posts beforehand already pointed out the obvious differences.

Then claiming that joe user thinks the internet is a big blue 'e'. That might have been the case 5+ years ago, but in case you have not looked at a browser survey recently, it is getting to the point that IE users are gradually becoming a minority.

As for calling MS.. who exactly does that anyway? you have to call your computer supplier. Given that the browser is often one of a couple of key icons in the quick launch toolbar, and the user would have made a choice 'How to you wish to browse the Internet?... "Firefox", then I think they would click on the FF icon & find it trying to connect to the internet.

@anon coward

I'm probably responding to a paid-for troll, but did you really try it? Can't imagine any better integration than having document come in via email, click on it & it is open in Google apps.

It works very well for our small company; free & no worries about setting up and maintaining a complex Exchange server. We also use a combination of MS Office 2007 (with Outlook) and Thunderbird/ OpenOffice; Google apps just happens to be the mail server and a easy way of sharing documents for people off-site.

Previous company I worked for had enforced low mailbox size restrictions for Outlook (and even then searching mail was crap in Outlook 2003/2007), now I still use Outlook but have a 6GB+ mail box accessible everywhere.. and search that works.

Being in beta was nonsense anyway; although they occasional tweaked features it has been stable & useful for years

@CurtisB

£24.3m contract for what exactly? Given that any new hardware they buy in the country for the next 5 years comes with Windows and that they probably have enough server infrastructure to met their current needs, then you a looking at a staggering number of say Office licenses for that sort of money; at least some of which might be met with alternatives like OpenOffice or simply continuing to use Office 2003. I don't know how many desktops this agreement covers but its is a lot of money no matter how you look at it.

And how much discount did they get over what a business gets on a select agreement? Did it reflect the size of the non-competitive contract?. The NZ government certainly found that MS did not offer enough discount this year, so after many years of rolling over govt wide licenses, they pulled out. We found in our company that using a mix of Office2007 (purchased with new hardware), OpenOffice and Google App was far cheaper than buying a site license for MS software.

I'm sure everything was above board, but part of the reason for open tenders is to be sure the contract was based only technical requirements and best value; closed awards without going to tender can hide stuff.

With public money, there is a requirement to do the best as money spent on say upgrading 100K desktops from XP to Vista could be better spent on health, education or local industry.

@Andy Cadley

I use Outlook 2007 with Gmail. I paid good money for Office2007, so not a freetard. I do find it frustrating that I can't mark up a copy of an email to describe a complex technical issue with key items highlighted in colour or embedded diagrams without the distinct possibility of the resulting email being screwed up simply because MS would rather I buy a $500 office suite to send emails.

" Does it not occur to the freetard brigade that their are probably single organisations with more than 20,000 Outlook users alone, let alone worldwide. The idea that it represents a "significant" amount is laughable"

What is laughable is to think that MS still control standards. If you actually had read the site, they point at stats which indicates that Outlook 2007 is about 7% of the market (likely to be over-represented as Gmail does not show up as much). You think 7% of the users should simply not get the rendering of documents right? The odd thing, is that IE8 render engine could get it right; but MS choose not to use it.

taken a look If the success of new standard compliance browsers like FF over IE6/IE7 is

46MWh/year

Not sure where that comes from; figures I have seen suggest something like 70kWh/day - x 365 days could be closer to 25MWh per year.

Interesting thing is that modern tech should be reducing usage; CRT's are going & being replaced with lower consumption LCD/OLED etc, incandescent bulbs by CFL, and ICE cars will be slowly replaced by more efficient cars. Even with heating, heatpumps and better insulation will reduce usage.

From what I understand, a lot of growth of energy usage comes from population changes; but with higher standards of living comes reduced population growth and newer tech which over the long term will reduce energy usage. My theory is that with peak oil, we might also be looking at a 'peak energy usage per person'.

Interesting that whatever way you look at it, wind, solar and geothermal all have _in theory_ have enough potential energy to meet the worlds energy needs. I suspect even nuclear plants would struggle with uranium supplies to power the entire world.

Obviously the future worlds power supply will include wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear and hydro; just like it does now. Hopefully far less and/or cleaner coal and oil plants. Personally I think Wind makes a lot of sense with small island nations with lots of offshore potential, that currently burn oil in generators. Solar must have huge potential; imagine some break-through where a PV cell could generate power for less than a few cents per kWh; you would see them everywhere very quickly, with other sources of power being used mostly to smooth loads.

Not great stats

10% of 400 respondents is ~40 developers used Ruby at least some of the time last year. Now there are 40% more; i.e. 56 developers. Is an increase of 16 respondents in the sampled population of developers statistical significant?

Without looking at the base data properly, it could just be that within the 400 respondents, perhaps 100 change language as projects come and go in any given year, meaning that this is just a blip one way or another.

Oh.. and "commercial SQL databases are [tow] and a half times more likely to be used as a primary database than open source SQL databases"? I find that a little strange as most commercial database vendors also offer free versions; so I would suspect that many developers (such as myself) use open-source RDB' like MySQL for many small projects, but might still consider a commercial SQL database like Oracle or MSSQL as a 'primary' for larger production sites.

@Dibbles

The comScore figures were hyped when Bing overtook Yahoo.. for about one day.

Like any internet stats; you don't have to see the months figures, but can look at day to day results. Bing is like a big $100m movie from a major studio; that opens to average reviews and a public disinterested in buying into the hype.

One of the problems for MS is that unlike the desktop where the could release a steaming pile of crap (call it Vista) & still make billions, is that

MS with Ballmer gone and a decent CEO could be scary good, but he looks like he will hold on until MS is been run down. Never thought that Gates taking a step back would affect them; but it has.

blindsearch - nice idea

I tried it and 2 out of 3* I tried, the best result was Google; the other was Bing.

I think blind and or A/B testing is important, but it does miss a couple of things:

1) I use iGoogle as my start page, have Gmail for home and Google Apps. I have results ranking switched on. Simply testing a search engine does not compare the entire experience. It would have to be a much better search experience to make me even think about bothering to switching over the FireFox default search engine, and my carefully arranged iGoogle home page when my browser starts up. And my short experience today and when Bing was first released shows that it is not as good. I am old enough remembering telling people to use Alta-Vista.. until I first tried some new start up called Google.

2) Google as a brand is 'better' than Microsoft. MS playing hardball & inflicting Vista on me, has adversely affected the 'brand equity'. In the same way beer in branded beer bottles tastes better, the perception is Google is nicer. Subjective, and possibly wrong, but MS benefits from its brand name in things like re-branded OEM keyboards and mice, but suffers from it here. Certainly my perception is that MS don't do search well.

Interesting thought experiment; if MS implemented bing as a re-branded interface to Google, the search results would be the same, it would have been much cheaper to implement.. but people probably still would not use it.

* Search terms: codeshed, fanatics models, online analysis.

Searching for local terms such as 'Warriors' (an Auckland NZ based NRL team) fails as it search is not localised unlike my normal search. Not all of us live in the US.

@Alan Dougherty Hoon

Er, Hoon is in the dictionary, at least in the New Zealand / Australian English dictionaries (see

http://www.reference.com/search?q=Hoon). There are plenty of other words in various dialects of English, which are valid English in regional contexts but not accepted world-wide.

I don't get the most of the complaints. Words come & go; if they are useful they are retained. Also, if you open your crusty old Oxford English dictionary you will find 'English words' like 'de jour' in there; it has always been acceptable to import words wholesale from other languages, and to have multiple part words. Admittedly I can't think of any old words that used numbers as well, but change is not always bad. Trying to express the new wave of social/interactive websites 'Web 2.0' will do me better than a clunky description.

I would rather than English keeps get bastardized with new imports like 'Web 2.0' or by the many terms coined by The Reg, than trying to force 'proper' English like some of the French/German attempts to stop English words creeping in.