Crashed Pips - Computers, politics, emetic trash

Friday, July 18, 2008

News round-up for week commencing 14 July 2008

Here’s this week’s weekly news round-up, and we begin with a continuation of Crackergate from last week. The Republican National Convention, which will be held in the Xcel Center, across the road from the Science Museum of Minnesota, has stepped up security, including the ludicrous step of getting the Science Museum to close to the public. Do they expect mutant scientists to emerge from the museum with octopus armies and test-tube cannons? If so, then Jeremy Clarkson’s claim that, in some parts of America, some people must have started mating with vegetables might well turn out to be true.

In technology news, E3 was this week, and there’s been the typical fest of corporate cock-waving that usually takes place at these conferences. There was an unfortunate incident where the soul singer Duffy was asked by confused journalists about the company strategy and corporate characteristics of a company whose product she was promoting - whoops…

In the world of chip-making, AMD has found a ten-pound note on the road, and has decided to spend it making more Phenoms (the high-end triple- and quad-core processors) and launching a new mobile platform to compete with the Centrino. It’s called the Turion X2 64 Ultra, and I can’t really think what else to say. And AMD wonder why they’re making losses. Intel, on the other hand, is doing quite well with profits up 25%.

Borgsoft hasn’t been doing too well either.

In the metablogosphere, WordPress 2.6 has been  released. It includes a host of new features, such as the fixing of several bugs in the admin panel, and a new version control feature called Post Revisions.

In politics, it turns out the MoD has lost over 100 USB flash disks, some of which had sensitive data on them. This is getting quite silly now. And the Government has claimed it hasn’t made a decision yet on whether or not it will change its own borrowing rules. Overall, a bit of a fiasco, then.

In other news, the latest edition of Simon’s Cat has appeared online, having been premiered on The Culture Show on BBC Two on Tuesday. Keeping in with this theme, some lolcats have wormed their way into this site lately, so I shall now go hunting for them and put them somewhere else.



Wednesday, July 16, 2008

More proof of Vista’s failure

Filed under: Microsoft, Windows — Tags: , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 20:46

One knows a client operating system has failed when it actually becomes more efficient to adapt the server version of said operating system to perform a similar function. And, it would seem, some have become so infuriated with Vista that they’ve forked out the extra £300 or so for Windows Server 2008, and then transformed that installation into something that has the same smoke and mirrors as Vista, but underneath retains the speedy, powerful core of Windows Server.

The sheer fact that a server OS works better as a workstation OS than the specialist client OS is truly embarassing for Microsoft, and they will certainly need to make Windows 7 a lot, lot better if they’re to avoid further damage.



Friday, June 27, 2008

The Borg is leaving the house

Filed under: Microsoft — Tags: , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 21:41

So, today was Bill Gates’s last ‘official’ day at Microsoft. He’s now spending the rest of his life giving away his money to deprived people.

However, the departure of Bill Gates is going to be bad for Microsoft. The Beastmaster at least had some idea what businesses and users wanted in the product, and shared some of their frustration with himself; an internal e-mail, dug up by a Seattle newspaper recently, complained to some of his colleagues that he was experiencing extreme difficulty downloading the latest version of Movie Maker. He wasn’t what you’d call an innovator, but he certainly capitalised very well on the demands for programming languages, OSes and office software.

I really can’t think of anything very original to say about Mr. Gates, because his life has been documented down to practically every detail in the media. However, I will say this: Gates’s (sometimes selfish and ruthless) streak has certainly made him one of the most successful businessmen of all time - an amazing achievement for someone who dropped out of college.

Original image by Kees de Vos on Flickr. Used under license.



Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Deal or No Deal, Yahoo?

Filed under: Internet, Microsoft — Tags: , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 00:37

Jerry Yang ponders Ballamer\'s offer.

This is starting to get more and more interesting. Steve Ballamer has written to Yahoo!’s board of directors, effectively bemoaning the fact that they didn’t manage to obtain the Board’s endorsement of their proposed takeover at $31 per share.

I shan’t go into the details here, but I think a Microsoft and Yahoo alliance would be incredibly ineffective. Both do better as independent companies, and adding Yahoo onto Microsoft would add more bloat onto an (already bloated) company. Although, to be fair, most of M$’s bloat consists of lawyers and those idiots who come up with names for features. Like “ReadyBoost(tm)”. Somewhere, out there, a marketing committee is still patting themselves on the back for that. Ugh.

Original image by Mitchell Aidelbaum on Flickr, modified under licence.



Powered by WordPress 2.7 Comments are the responsibility of their respective author. The Rest © 2007-2009 Jonathan Rothwell, unless otherwise stated.