Yes, it is true, Steve ‘Barmy’ Ballmer the exuberant Microsoft CEO has confirmed that he is to retire. The 52 year old originator of the Monkey Dance as performed in tribute by Ricky Gervais during an episode of The Office, was speaking to an audience in Washington earlier in the week when he let slip the big decision: he will be stepping down from his role as big cheese of the biggest software company on the planet.

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Look, everyone who has ever read any of my PC Pro columns over the years will know that I am something of a Firefox Fanboy, just like anything that makes my web browsing more efficient and effective. Which is probably why I think the whole Yahoo SearchMonkey thing is just simply bananas.

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Forgive me if I have misread the ‘Business Value of Windows Vista‘ paper that Microsoft has published in an attempt to convince the corporate user to switch to Vista now instead of waiting for the arrival of Windows 7 instead. However, the way I read it, it seems that Microsoft, when it says users jumping from XP to Windows 7 will have “a similar applications compatibility experience… as exists moving to Windows Vista from Windows XP” are actually saying that both migrations are pretty dire.

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Michael Phillips, the Product Director at ConsumerChoices.co.uk, has today called for Government action to redress the balance between townies and rural users when it comes broadband. He says that “recent analysis has shown that we have a distinct first and second class society in the UK when it comes to Broadband speeds. Rural areas are getting a raw deal when it comes to their home broadband service and coupled with the ‘out of area’ service charges many broadband providers apply, they are suffering a double whammy.”

Well, I am a rural broadband user and while it did, I have to admit, take a couple of years longer to arrive in my village than in the nearest market town a few miles away, it is here now and working well. I get an average speed of between 3000 and 3500kbps, which is not stellar by any means but god damn if it isn’t fast enough for sending my email, browsing the web and even streaming the (very) odd bit of video when the wife is out.

My ISP, Zen, do not apply any additional ‘out of area’ service charges just because I chew straw and eat with my hands, and I do not feel like a second class netizen it has to be said.

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For anyone who had hoped that Buzzword Bingo had jumped out of the same 10th floor window as the dotcom investors who excelled in playing it when the bubble burst a few short years back, sorry but I have bad news: it is alive and kicking. The proof can be found within my email inbox every single day as there is always at least one press release that dispels the notion that given enough time monkeys and typewriters can produce meaningful prose (with apologies to sign-reading chimps everywhere.)

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Any Google Earth fans out there? Good. Now how about Google News fans as well? Excellent. Ever thought how cool it would be if you could combine the two? No, neither had I to be absolutely honest. However, this kind of maps and events mashup is something that has been happening for some time now. Myself and a mate even created something using Google Maps and BBC traffic news a couple of years ago that did just that, overlaying traffic reports onto a Google Map of the UK. All quite cool and interesting at the time, although now a long since forgot about project. Oh yes, back to the point of this posting. Well now it seems that Google itself has gone and produced a Google News layer for Google Earth.

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It had to happen at some point, and now an AI powered avatar is being tested within the Second Life virtual world by its creators, researchers at the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory. According to reports, Edd Hifeng has a mental age of about 4 years and is capable of only basic AI reasoning. As such he can engage in simple conversations such as where are you from, but only if the question is put in English and even then only if it has previously been translated into a mathematical logic so that Edd understands it. Not exactly cutting edge of AI is it?

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Please forgive me for falling into the stereotype trap here, but in my defence I was born in South East London so feel I do have some right to pass judgement on the place. Anyway, the thing is I got this press release today which was bigging up (that’s me trying to be street, or something, and obviously failing) the use of mobile technology as part of a South London college project to tackle gun and knife crime. The LIFEWISE collaboration involves no less than 200 young people from South Thames College as well as six secondary schools across the London Borough of Wandsworth, who were given 200 Vodafone v1615 handsets with unlimited Internet mobile data access to help them work collaboratively on the project.

Very commendable, but am I the only person wondering how many of them still have those handsets? If the reports that hit the headlines only yesterday are anything to go by, then the answer should be 160, as 40 of them are statistically likely to have been nicked during a violent street mugging. The Design Council survey, on which the headlines are based, revealed that 1 in 5 of youngsters aged between 11 and 16 in London had been victim of a mugging where an item of mobile personal electronics (mobile phone or iPod essentially) had been nicked.

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If, like me, you are fed up of the seemingly continual string of easy headliner stories in the red top and serious press alike which blame video games for the increasing problems of violence, aggression and crime in society, then you will probably rather like this posting. You see one Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex has suggested that there is very little evidence that this is the case. His research, published in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry yesterday, actually found quite the opposite: that there is a real argument to be made for such games reducing real world violence.

The really interesting thing being that his research involved actually reading and analysing all the previous research that had been done on the subject of video games and links to violence, the very same studies that ‘experts’ are quick to call upon and which journalists quote from when screaming for the likes of Grand Theft Auto to be banned. Kierkegaard admits that the GTA effect, where graphical realism is really quite intense, is becoming more important and most gamers look forward to each release precisely because of the violence, the crime and yes even the sexual or drugs related plots. However, there remains a huge difference between visiting a virtual prostitute and a real life one, for a start your crotch is likely to remain much less itchy and no actual women will have been exploited in the process (sits back and awaits angry comments from the bra burning brigade and the manbag men arguing that somehow a pretend prostitute does exactly that) and there remains a huge difference between committing a virtual crime and a real one.

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Sometimes you just have to laugh, even when you really do not want to. I found myself having a little titter missus, which turned into something of a ROFL before morphing naturally into red-faced spitting feathers anger last night. The cause of the kerfuffle being the widespread media reporting of the massive victory for MySpace which had just won a $234 million lawsuit against the Spam King himself, Sanford Wallace along with his partner in crime Walter Rines.

MySpace has been quick to make much fuss about this being a record payout, about it being the biggest judgement in a CAN-SPAM Act ruling yet. Fair play, at face value there does seem cause for celebration. Anything that helps take down the spammer scum has got to be good news, right?

Wrong.

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