The week in your words: Highfield hops into Windows

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 14 Nov 2008 at 17:18

In a week that saw former BBC digital guru, Ashley Highfield, desert Kangaroo's snug pouch for Microsoft's equally cosy pile of cash, a study reveal spammers make their money through stupid people, and the British Computer Society call for more women in IT, we take a look back to see what our readers have made of it all.

Highfield ditches Kangaroo for Microsoft

Glowing early coverage of Windows 7. A host of innovative products, and nary a launch delay in sight. These are dark days for Microsoft, which has decided to redress the balance by hiring Ashley Highfield, the man who ushered the BBC iPlayer out of the door, and wonderfully proclaimed there were only 600 Linux users on the BBC... before checking his abacus and realising there were actually the best part of 100,000.

"It was obvious from the beginnings of the iPlayer that the BBC and Microsoft were far too cosy, this just makes it even worse," notes pcernie, putting an awful image of a snuggling Steve Ballmer in our minds.

"If Microsoft came calling would you turn it down?" Wonders beardybuck, compounding the problem.

"Yes," proclaims hdasmith, who's clearly not applying for the job of Jerry Yang's new adviser. "If I went to work for a software company, I would want to be using really novel code, not regurgitating the same loops that are functional but slow."

Nope, definitely not applying for a Yahoo job.

Storm spammers make $3.5m per year

New research this week reveals that spammers only need a response to one in every 12.5 million emails they send to turn a profit. Given that spammers are raking in $3.5 million a year, we can safely extrapolate from these findings that one in every 12.5 million people on this planet is a tool. Which, reassuringly, is well below what we would have guessed.

"If the largest ISPs in all the G7 countries enacted some serious anti-spam policies, smaller ISPs and those from other countries would have to get their acts together or lose the ability to get their customers emails delivered," notes qpw3141.

The battle to combat spam had made a bitter soul of JJW009, though: "Let me give you two examples of important emails that were blocked by my email provider as spam: Halifax e-banking account reset details and Easyjet e-ticket for my holiday. Why were they blocked? In part, because the MX record didn't match the IP. Who's fault is that? Halifax and Easyjet. Why did they overlook it? Probably because the emails were sent from a website hosted by a third-party IT company."

Firms "must do more" to keep women in IT

A study by the British Computer Society has found that calling women "toots" may be detrimental to retaining their services in the UK's IT departments. The report goes on to claim we need to do more to keep woman in IT, though whether this involves better bonuses, or the use of tranquiliser guns when people try to quit, we may never know.