Should you be sacked for sending SHOUTY email?

Friday, September 4th, 2009

This week it was reported that a New Zealand woman was sacked from her job as an accountant at a healthcare company after colleagues complained that her emails were too “shouty”.  This was because of her tendency to write her emails in CAPITAL LETTERS.

Perhaps understandably, she thought that by using capital letters, her fellow employees would PAY MORE ATTENTION to her missives than if she used regular, lower case.

An employment tribunal also heard that Vicki Walker behaved “provocatively” by highlighting the REALLY IMPORTANT phrases in bold or red.  In one office-wide email presented as evidence she had typed in bold blue letters: “TO ENSURE YOUR STAFF CLAIM IS PROCESSED AND PAID, PLEASE DO FOLLOW THE BELOW CHECK LIST.”

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First look: Corel Digital Studio 2010

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

I’ve just hot-footed it back from the London launch of Corel Digital Studio 2010. The product is a combination of photo and video editing software, along with apps for burning and watching DVDs, all for the very reasonable (suggested) price of £60. But is it any good?

It’s certainly very slick. Both the PaintShop Photo Express and Video Studio Express applications share a common interface, which is clearly focused on making the software as easy to use as possible. In fact, if I had a pound for every time the words “easy” or “simple” were used in the hour-long demonstration, I wouldn’t have bothered coming back here to write this blog post, and would by now be sipping champagne with a lovely lady on my knee in one of Soho’s finest establishments.

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Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Mozilla’s Security team has disclosed a very interesting piece of research which suggests people refused to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox because they were afraid the browser would expose their, ahem, private collection of websites.

In May, the company decided to have one last attempt at persuading the people on Firefox 2 to move up to Firefox 3, by hitting users of the old version with a pop-up that prompted them to upgrade. Those who declined were invited to fill out a questionnaire, asking them to reveal why they didn’t want the latest software.

The number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people’s bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed. No fewer than 25% of Firefox 3 refuseniks cited this as the reason they wouldn’t upgrade. In fact, almost all of the people who provided feedback had tried Firefox 3, didn’t like what they saw, and headed back to Firefox 2.

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Hands on: Sony’s superb Reader Touch

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

“I want my books to be made of paper, to have a spine, and a cover. I like the feel of them in my hand”

This was the first comment I heard this morning when I returned to the office after visiting the British Library to play with Sony’s new Reader Touch. As an eBook advocate, I’ve been hearing this refrain ever since the original Sony PRS 505 dropped on my desk last year. People who like to read adore paperbacks. They’re cheap, perfect at what they do and are pleasingly tactile. We like how they feel, the way they smell; we like to run our hands over them in a book shop.

eBook readers have failed to convince because books don’t need upgrading. It’s brilliant that an eBook reader can hold 350 books, but the majority of people don’t carry around 350 books. The majority of people won’t read 350 books in their lifetime. If eBook readers are going to break out of their niche and really scar the public psyche they need to start offering useful features their paper brethren don’t. And with the curtain raised, let me usher the Sony Reader Touch to centre stage.

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Why you could lose your broadband connection for doing absolutely nothing wrong

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

How nice to have friends in high places. Having failed to convince Digital Britain author Lord Carter to cut off the connections of alleged illegal file sharers, the creative industry has somehow managed to convince Lord Mandelson and the new Minister for Digital Britain, Stephen Timms, that it’s a good idea after all.

Hence today’s announcement that the Government will now urge Ofcom to suspend people’s broadband connections as a “last resort”. But on what evidence will ISPs be forced to clip your connection?

Rights holders will be required to identify the IP addresses of people they claim to have caught file sharing, and pass those details to the relevant ISP (as they do currently). But here comes the clincher. “The standard of evidence required from rights holders should, as a minimum, establish an infringement on the balance of probabilities,” the Government’s own consultation on legislation for illegal P2P file sharing states. So no innocent until proven guilty – a high likelihood that you’re in the wrong is all that the rights holders need to press the ISPs to cut off your broadband.

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Psst – want to buy some content?

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Last week News Corp reported a $3.4 billion loss. The same week, Rupert Mudoch’s media machine announced it was going to start charging for content in all sorts of places. It had tried the scheme on one site and it had been a great success and as such it was going to start rolling out across the world — the first UK site was going to be The Sunday Times. Every other news organisation carried the story — the BBC suggested people might pay to see the exclusive Michael Jackson rehearsal footage which The Sun’s website had published a few days before.

Oh and last week, News Corp reported a $3.4 billion loss.

I thought I would mention the loss again as no one seems to be talking about it. On the other hand everyone is talking about charging for content. Will it really be the case that some time soon, everyone will be charging for content? Will it be the case that to read this blog post (and other better ones!) you will be getting out your credit card/debit card/micropayments wallet to fill the coffers of PC Pro? I doubt it…

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Want to run Exchange Server 2007 SP2 on Windows Server 2008 R2? Forget it

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Sometimes little things just pop out of the page, and hit you round the head. This official Microsoft TechNet forum, for example.

On there, “Zhengwen Zhu MSFT” stated: “There is NO support for any Exchange Server 2007 SP2 components (any roles, including admin tools) installed on Windows Server 2008 R2.

“Exchange Server 2007 SP2 will not even install on it – the pre-req check will fail during installation.”

Not even for admin tools? Something is clearly seriously amiss. I checked this with Microsoft UK, who said that it’s something to do with Server 2008 R2 having a new version of IIS (7.5) and PowerShell (v2).

I have asked for further clarification – clearly this is a barking mad set of dependencies if it has broken Exchange Server, arguably Microsoft’s premier server platform.

It could be that Microsoft simply hasn’t had enough time to test Exchange Server 2007 SP2 on Windows Server 2008 R2, and has decided to skip it – after all, Exchange Server 2010 is apparantly just around the corner.

However, you should be aware of this limitation. And factor it into your deployment plans. I confess I am somewhat shocked at this news, given that deploying R2 of Server is a fairly straightforward decision but moving from Exchange Server 2007 to 2010 will require real planning and consideration.

Why Chrome’s more fun without the polish

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I’ve been messing around with the developer build of Chrome just recently and it’s made my browsing life considerably more interesting – much in the way that bowling hand grenades would really spice up a Test Match.

For anybody unaware of Google’s peculiar approach to Chrome’s development it runs like this: a wild-eyed Chrome developer wakes up at 2am with an idea so cool that in Microsoft’s secret underground lair Steve Ballmer orders half-a-dozen cats to kick out of windows. He doesn’t know why, he’d just knows he’s angry and some kittens will have to pay.

Unfortunately, this idea is also so cool that it could conceivably bring about internet Armageddon. The solution: instead of inflicting the idea on the fifteen or twenty people using the stable Chrome release, our bedraggled Chrome developer sticks it into the developer build where it can wreak havoc without anybody getting hurt. He then pokes and prods the idea until it settles down, accepts its fate in Chrome’s brave new browser world and complies, or else he destroys it with his code voodoo. This is the world of Google; stern but benevolent – to borrow a line from Pinky and Brain.

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Why Microsoft doesn’t really care about the UK

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Here’s a theory, and I’ll admit it’s a wild one, but here goes: the left hasn’t got a clue what the right’s doing at Microsoft.

Here we are, four days after Microsoft first announced that it wouldn’t be selling the Internet Explorer-less Windows 7 E editions after all, and still the UK arm of the company can’t answer the most basic questions on the topic.

What version will people who pre-ordered the E editions receive? Will we now have upgrade versions in the UK? What about the Family Pack? All of these fundamental questions remain unanswered since Friday evening. (Update at 2.20pm: Microsoft has now confirmed some of these details – click here to read our report).

Why? Because (I suspect) the first Microsoft’s UK team knew of the decision to drop E editions was when they read it on the Microsoft blog, like the rest of us. Microsoft UK may have battalions of “product managers” holed up in Reading and its flashy offices in Victoria, but the company is run out of Redmond. Always has been, always will be.

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Britain’s scandalous upload speeds

Friday, July 31st, 2009

A letter to The Times this morning makes a spectacularly good point about British broadband. While the mainstream media has (rightly) been roasting the broadband providers for delivering only half the download speed advertised on the tin, “the real scandal is… that the upload speed may be only a thirtieth of this [headline download speed] figure”.

The Times’ correspondent is bang on the money. Ofcom’s broadband speed report claims that: “overall the average upload speed received by UK consumers is 0.43Mbits/sec, less than 10% of the average download speed”.

While that sounds a little sunnier than The Times man suggests, the report goes on to state that “even consumers on higher speed packages (20Mbits/sec cable and 16-24Mbits/sec DSL packages) receive an average of less than 0.7Mbit/s.”

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