If Apple jumped off a cliff...?

I'm confused

What a pointless feature you can already tick and untick the post to facebook button as and when. The issue I have is that the tracking effectively spams the hell out of your facebook feed, I don't mind my musical taste being shared hell my last.fm is there for everyone to see but I don't want to thrust it in other people's face. This feature crossed the line from social to anti-social just like all the junk you get from Farmville etc.

Idiots.

Happened last year too

Fairly sure this has a tough time every Premier League Saturday, didn't really surprise me that it happened again.

Why don't they resell?

I'm sure Dell or someone would be quite willing to rebrand a few 1U x86 servers with a custom frontplate. They can use the same tpm controls that are used on their desktops for Windows activation to prevent OSX server being installed on anything else.

Abi Word?

I don't care much for Open Office but an offline word processor or ms word file reader is essential, Abi Word is lightweight, usable and makes a good work of most formats. Shame that it hasn't been included, I'd recommend it to anyone with an ubuntu netbook edition.

Chumby One

The souped up version can be had for $120 (plus delivery and tax) on the US website, https://store.chumby.com/pages.php?pID=14

The old version has been on Veda for sometime, I'm waiting for the new one come across.

data

"would the Tories or the LibDems actually be any more computer savvy?"

Perhaps not, but neither of these parties is actively seeking to increase the amount of data the government holds. A sensible policy line after all these leaks would be something along the lines of:

"We know you value you your privacy and you don't want your data to find it's way into criminal hands, so we will now launch a review into the all government computer systems. On a case by case decide whether they are required or if the data the each system holds can be reduced."

No government will ever do that though, it'd be sensible.

Exchange CALs

There's very little point in developing for Exchange, for every Exchange licensed user (or indeed device) you can install Outlook so unless there are legions of strange companies with Linux clients running Exchange mail servers, Thunderbirds will not be go. They should be concentrating on working with the Exchange alternatives and preferable they should pick one and fund it with their Google referrer money.

erm

Hate to be a wet blanket, but so long as they don't experience mission creep there's very little wrong with this as an idea. Educational establishments are often asked to provide proof that a candidate got what he/she says they got, clearly most of this is done as decentralised chaos with lots of overlapping systems and duplicated functions and they probably waste lots of money.

So long as they keep it simple it'll be fine, but since when did government IT projects keep it simple?

emusic

Until the prices come in line with emusic (I pay 20p per track), the majors are still playing catch up. Even at £6.99 for an album you're better off waiting for the cds to be discounted, most major release will be at about £6.99 after a month or too and you get the physical product thrown in to.

NT 6.1

I'm waiting for Microsoft to prove me wrong but unless Microsoft have been developing Windows 7 for a number of years previous to the release of Vista we're going to be getting NT 6.1 which will attempt to XP to Vista's 2000. It'll round off all the rough edges and make everything that little bit more bearable.

The Windows 7 moniker is horrible marketing double speak and actually means nothing. Bring back Microsoft codenames based on their vacation locations at least they were desperately pointless instead of pointlessly desperate.

All kids are not straving

".02 cents - these kids are starving. Fix that first."

The countries (and the kids in them) that are targetted by OLPC are not straving rather they are economically disadvantaged or developing. Remember OLPC are actually selling these machines to the governments of the countries in most cases they aren't giving them away, no government however incompetent is going to waste money on laptops that could go on helping people survive.

Business support

"The moral being, you cant trust Dells remote Sales or Tech support for anything, the guy that comes through the door usually knows what they doing in my experience but no one on the phone."

The consumer support may well be poor but the the business support is excellent, once you get through (this can be tedious however if you get the direct lines to the various support sections it's much easier) to a specialist they're pleasant, scottish and know what they're talking about. The visiting techs are a local company (not Dell unless it's a knackered server) but they're generally excellent and the speed at which they change a motherboard is genuinely impressive.

Sales leaves a lot to be desired; they have very little product knowledge, often send the wrong kit and seem genuinely offended that they might have to do a little bit of work to get a sale.