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U2 manager on rampage over filesharing

The week began with U2's manager blasting the industry for inventing technology which apparently allows the unscrupulous public to steal the pennies out of poor Bono's pockets. DaChimp was not sympathetic.

"The industry only has itself to blame and not the consumer for the position it's got itself into. They were extremely slow in the uptake of the internet and then when it was spiralling out of control they brought in DRM. What a nail in the coffin that is. Why would I want to purchase a "file" which I am restricted to use?"

Good question, but mortalcoils isn't convinced.

"The truth is that a lot of you have got used to paying nowt for music, and you start to bleat when someone wants to take the freebie away," he begins, presumably with a fire extinguisher in hand. "It seems to me to be perfectly reasonable for the music industry to try to protect its revenue - that's what capitalism's all about, just as it's natural for people to want to get it for free. How many of you would be happy to see what you produce taken away, with nothing in it for you?"

Does anyone have a way out of this tangled mess? Mr_Flynn thinks he does.

"Bring back the days of the arena - we could pit recording industry executives against the idiots of Ofcom - it wouldn't achieve much but it'd certainly cheer me up. Then the survivors could fight politicians next. Marvellous."

No doubt Channel Five would lap it up too. Advertising revenues for all, problem solved.

Firefox makes gains on Internet Explorer

This week also saw Firefox continue its open-source assault on fortress Internet Explorer, an impressive feat which launched a surprisingly even-handed debate on the boards.

Grunthos kicks us off.

"Well

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done Firefox. Still don't understand why people rate it so highly though. It crashes frequently and is a massive memory hog. IE7 in comparison has never crashed on me and doesn't consume memory in the same way. Yes I understand that Firefox is more secure, but I've never had an issue with IE."

"No one seems to take in to account that Firefox is being held back by a vast number of company websites which are only IE compatible and are corrupt when viewed using any other browser," says urqcol.

It was an argument set to rage and rage until Amnesia10 played the one trump card guaranteed to win any argument - family.

"It is the most compliant of all the browsers. It is also the most secure, hence I have my dad using it exclusively."

So there, everyone on Firefox.

Gates defends Microsoft dominance
A suggestion which would probably have upset Bill Gates, who was in London this week doing his last turn as lord and master of empiresoft on these shores. However, his victory lap swiftly turned into a backs-to-the-wall defence of Microsoft's ... erm... success, with one network administrator criticising the company for creating a lack of choice in the market.

greemble wasn't having it.

"[He] needs to do some research, maybe this chap hasn't heard of Linux, or Apple, or BeOS, or BSD, or QNX, ReactOS, or THEOS, or... think that should do for now..."

Not likely. Over to you paulzolo.

"I suppose that a lot of businesses who bought into Microsoft as a supplier find it hard to get out due to legacy storage/documents, having to retrain staff in another system/package. Migrating a large organisation from platform A to platform B isn't something you can achieve overnight. So while Microsoft is dominant, it might be so because it's harder to leave than it is to stay."

catnipdave clearly agreed.

"I work for a big city authority and Microsoft got us hooked on their stuff by offering a discount on the OS, on the stipulation that we used only its stuff, as in its office suite and its browser. I don't know what the discount was but it worked. Like a lot of big organisations, we are now completely dependent on Microsoft. Changing to anything else would now be just too painful and too expensive."

Sound business sense or evil shenanigans? We'll let you decide.

See you next week.