If there’s one PC peripheral that’s seen about as much change as the Queen’s hairdo over the past 20 years, it’s the keyboard. Sure there have been attempts to jazz it up with ergonomic layouts, wireless transmitters and models with flashy shortcut buttons, but by and large, if someone plugged a 1989 model keyboard into your PC you’d barely notice the difference.
The deathly pace of keyboard evolution is actually a barrier to progress, according to HP vice president Phil McKinley, who I met last week. “The keyboard is still a hugely intimidating factor for users,” he told me, referring especially to users in developing countries who haven’t grown up with computers. “It still has a System Request and Break key on the keyboard. When was the last time you touched the Break key?” he asked.
While Barry Collins was researching his free upgrades to Windows 7 news story, he stumbled across possibly the most ridiculous offer I’ve ever seen: you, my lucky, lucky friends, can download Windows Vista Home Basic from the Microsoft UK store for £137.01. Excluding VAT.
Now before everyone rushes off to bag this bargain, I should point out that you can also buy Home Premium for £166.37! Obviously excluding VAT again, Microsoft has to make a living you know.
A quick trawl online reveals the going rate for the full version of Vista Home Premium is around £130 inc VAT - and you can buy it for less than £90 inc VAT if you’re willing to opt for the more restricted OEM version, which is tied to the motherboard you first install it on (so if you build a new PC, you’ll have to buy a new copy of Windows).
So, taking away VAT, Microsoft is charging a premium of over £50 if you buy direct from its store. It would be amazing to discover just how many sales it’s made for these two excellent picks, but sadly I don’t think I’m going to get much joy out of Microsoft on that one. My guess? A princely zero.
Once upon a time, when Google could declare “We’re not evil” without hundreds of thousands of shareholders to worry about, search engines were just search engines. Now, it appears, they’re not. Microsoft is calling Bing a decision engine, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, and Yahoo is… well, let’s not go there.
You could argue Microsoft’s position is born out of desperation. On whatever metric you chose to use, MSN Search (or Windows Live, I lost track of its names in the end) fell behind Google. Number of users, amount of money it made, brand awareness, effectiveness of the raw search - Google kept on winning. Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft’s pricing and upgrading plans for Windows 7 in Europe are bordering on a farce. You can’t upgrade from a previous version of Windows, but you can elsewhere in the world. You can buy the upgrade product but you will get full retail box instead.
And it won’t come with Internet Explorer 8, in a strangely “the sky is falling down” reaction to the antitrust spat with the EU. Microsoft hopes that this is enough, the EU doesn’t appear to be convinced.
But this could be a marvellous thing indeed. By forcing you to wipe the machine and start afresh, it is possible to ensure that all that accumulated crap is wiped from the machine. A clean OS is a happy OS. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently I decided to brush up on my knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO) to see what the current view of best practice is. I was amazed at how things have changed…
Yes, it makes extremely comfortable and effortlessly trendy furniture, but it doesn’t get social media.
Habitat is in the middle of a disapproval-a-thon on Twitter right now, after the company, or someone acting on its behalf, added Iranian election hashtags to tweets about its “totally desirable Spring collection”.
Well, the idea was to attract attention, so it worked. In a way.
Processors, memory and hard disks go through numerous iterations each year; faster, smaller and shinier, while the humble plug remains as defiantly chunky as it is painful to accidentally step on.
The problem is one of scale; they’re on the end of every lead attached to every gadget, and built into every room across the country.
It would take so much effort and money to upgrade the standard that any politician would be mad to go anywhere near the idea of suggesting that maybe we think about upgrading. Wars and bank bailouts are much less contentious. Read the rest of this entry »
Firefox 3.5 is out as a Release Candidate - as close to a final version as you can get without being a final version - so I’ve taken a look to see how it compares to its competitors.
Porn/Private Browsing
Most other browsers already had this feature, and now Firefox does too. With nothing more than a quick Ctrl+Shift+P your tabs will be whisked away and stored safely, leaving you with a fresh window for your… personal research.
When you’re all finished up, the same shortcut will bring back all your previous tabs and send all trace of your secret session into oblivion (it does not erase feelings of guilt). Read the rest of this entry »
Over the past week I’ve been dipping into the flood of “tweets” pouring out of Tehran. And I’ve been impressed: primarily, of course, by the spirit of the Iranian people, but also by the way Twitter has kept me informed with an immediacy and rawness that mainstream media coverage can’t match. What we’re seeing in the east is a landmark event, not only in geopolitical history, but also in the history of the internet
But while Twitter has undoubtedly played a major role in events, there’s a technology which I think has been even more pivotal. I’m talking about camera-phones — such as the one that captured the last living moments of a young Iranian woman named Neda, shot dead during a protest on Saturday in the streets of Tehran. Read the rest of this entry »
If there’s one thing you could never accuse Microsoft of lacking, it’s good old-fashioned Chutzpah.
The world’s favourite monopolist has launched a new “Get The Facts” campaign for Internet Explorer 8, that seems remarkably short on fact and a bit top-heavy on the codswallop.
You can see Microsoft’s version of the facts running down the left-hand side of the page, where the company has decided to compare Internet Explorer 8 against Firefox and Chrome. Yes, that’s right. Internet Explorer 8 wins in every single category, apart from a couple where it generously shares the honours with its rivals.
We could spend a couple of hours demolishing the argument for almost each and every one of those Microsoft ticks. Then again, we could spend a couple of hours shooting fish in a barrel or stealing sweets from children with only one arm, but we’ve got better things to do, so we’re just going to deal with the most blatant of Microsoft’s whoppers.
If there’s one PC peripheral that’s seen about as much change as the Queen’s hairdo over the past 20 years, it’s the keyboard. Sure there have been attempts to jazz it up with ergonomic layouts, wireless transmitters and models with flashy shortcut buttons, but by and large, if someone plugged a 1989 model keyboard into your PC you’d barely notice the difference.
Over the past week I’ve been dipping into the flood of “tweets” pouring out of Tehran. And I’ve been impressed: primarily, of course, by the spirit of the Iranian people, but also by the way Twitter has kept me informed with an immediacy and rawness that mainstream media coverage can’t match. What we’re seeing in the east is a landmark event, not only in geopolitical history, but also in the history of the internet
