Keys Corner

No, the title’s not mine. It comes from Don Reisinger, writing at CNET news.com.

I get asked by friends occasionally what PC to buy or whether to upgrade their existing PC to Vista. I haven’t bought a Windows PC for over 5 years now and although we do have a old PC in the cellar running Windows 2000 for Ruth’s PC-based quilting software (since that is where she quilts), we use our Macs for all our day to day work. I usually recommend that my friends switch to Apple Macs, but if they won’t consider it, or are on a limited budget, I suggest using Windows XP or the Linux Ubuntu distribution (which will feel much snappier than Windows XP on older PCs) – there have been so many reports of problems with Vista, not to mention Microsoft offering Windows XP downgrades via Dell, HP and other larger vendors because customers are so dissatisfied with Vista.

Don’s article is interesting because it’s the first mainstream press article I’ve seen written by someone who uses Macs, Ubuntu and Windows Vista PCs, who thus has experience not only of Windows, but the main alternatives, where the author concludes that even after a year, Vista is still not ready to be released.

Never before have I seen such an abysmal start to an operating system release. For almost a year, people have been adopting Vista and becoming incensed by how poorly it operates. Not only does it cost too much, it requires more to run than XP, there is still poor driver support, and that draconian licensing scheme [digital rights management as Microsoft has implemented it in Vista] is a by-product of Microsoft picking on the wrong people.

Don puts up a good case for the problem not being the operating system alone that is causing Microsoft problems, but also their muddled marketing.

The article is worth a read.

There was quite a lot of publicity earlier this year, when Apple struck a deal with EMI to sell their entire music collection without DRM (copy protection: digital rights management) on iTunes. And I have mentioned a couple of times, that you can buy albums without DRM from magnatune at a price which you choose.

I noticed yesterday that CD Baby also offers high-quality DRM-free downloads of albums in MP3 format. The nice thing is, the artist sets the price and gets 91% of that price passed on to them by CD Baby, who only retain 9% to pay for the bandwidth. The albums are mostly priced at around $15, which makes them a great deal for all the parties involved.

Boston police have overreacted again (remember the advertising campaign for the Cartoon Network that caused chaos in Boston in January?) and arrested a student for wearing a circuit board on her sweatshirt at Boston’s Logan Airport. Whether you regard the charges as “paranoid” or think that the student showed “a total disregard to understand the context of the situation she is in, which is an airport of post-9/11”, depends on your point of view. She was apprehended by several State Troopers armed with submachine-guns – luckily she obeyed their orders to freeze:

“She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands and not to make any movement, so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device,” a police spokesman said. “Had she not followed the protocol, we might have used deadly force.”

He added, “She’s lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue.”

Silly signs sent in to the BBC. See the rest by clicking on the picture above.

The BBC reports:

The UK has built up a stockpile of 100 tonnes of plutonium –
enough to make 17,000 nuclear bombs, according to a Royal Society report.

Well, that should be enough for any conceivable (or inconceivable) purpose, when you consider that just over 6kg of plutonium was used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. I hope it’s well guarded , because the plutonium is stored in powder form, which is ideal for use in a “dirty” nuclear bomb. The Royal Society has made several suggestions for making it harder to use the plutonium in terrorist attacks, but the British Government’s position is:

It would not be appropriate to take any decisions until the public consultation on new nuclear* has been completed and the outcome is known,

(* See the Government website here for more information on the “new nuclear” consultation.)

The Hydroptère, which reached a speed of 47,2 knots in January this year. The music is Juno Reactor VS. Don Davis by Navras, which is on the soundtrack CD Matrix Revolutions.

(via Think or Thwim)

For the last few weeks I have being using a couple of extensions to the “Services” menu which is available for all applications in Mac OS X:

• CalcService (download link)


• WordService (download link)

Both applications are from Devon Technologies, whose DevonThink I also use to index and find documents on the Mac.

CalcService allows you to type a formula or equation into any document or web form, and it calculates the result and inserts it into the document. Useful if you need to add up several items and add VAT to them, for example. WordService allows you to perform many different useful tasks in a document – insert the current date, or the path to a directory where a document is stored, or change the format of line feeds in a document.

Both utilities are free – recommended!

The front page in today’s Observer:
‘Housing boom over’ as UK bank chaos grows

Britain’s house price growth will be halved next year as the global financial crisis exacerbates the impact of rising mortgage rates, according to Nationwide, the biggest mortgage lender.

After the dramatic bail-out of high street bank Northern Rock underlined the impact of the American ‘sub-prime’ mortgage crisis on Britain’s financial sector, Fionnuala Earley, Nationwide’s group economist, said she expected house price inflation to slow to around 3 per cent next year.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re thinking of buying an iPod nano, The first comprehensive review that I have seen is on AppleInsider.

From the Manchester Evening News a couple of days ago:

A VIOLENT thug attacking a shopkeeper never expected to come face-to-face with a superhero.

But as Gerard Smith went `berserk’ in a Manchester newsagents, passer-by Kevin Godin-Prior lifted his jumper to reveal a Spiderman costume and told him: “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”...