Wastholm.com

The Windows Browser Ballot, the browser selection screen that is being offered to Windows users in Europe starting this month, is already coming under fire. Slovakian IT news site DSL.sk decided to test the ballot and found that its distribution was very peculiar, with Internet Explorer appearing in the rightmost position almost 50 percent of the time when the ballot was viewed from within IE.

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This browser ballot, as simple as it is, has been months in the making. The decision to do the randomization client-side, where it depends on the web browser, rather than server-side, where it would be consistent for all users, is a little surprising. But most remarkable at all is that no one responsible for signing off and saying "that's an acceptable response to the Competition Commission's complaint" bothered to do this testing. If this browser ballot is important then surely its implementation should be a high quality one?

Patent thug Nathan Myhrvold turns out to have over 1,000 patent proxies with which to potentially attack and extort those who do not pay “protection money”; he also spent over $1 million lobbying his government

Microsoft is the largest, most profitable software company in the world.

And its profits are still being generated by the same engines that have driven Microsoft for years: Office, Windows, and its server division. (Meanwhile, its entertainment and devices division is only recently profitable again, and its online division is a money pit.)

The new Microsoft WAT [Windows Activation Technologies] regime relies upon a series of autonomous "cradle to grave" authentication verification connections to a central and ever-expanding Microsoft piracy signature database, even in the absence of major hardware changes or other significant configuration alterations that might otherwise cause the OS or local applications to query the user for explicit permission to reauthenticate.

Microsoft will trigger forced downgrading to non-genuine status if they believe a Windows 7 system is potentially pirated based on their "phone home" checks that will occur at (for now) 90 day intervals during the entire life of Windows 7 on a given PC, even months or years after purchase.

When I asked myself why people visit my sites, and the ones that I make for other people, the answer was always for the content. Content that is almost always written words and that means type.

That is why I'm now advocating to my clients (and to you), that where feasible, not to waste hours in time and a client's money on lengthy workarounds in an unnecessary attempt at cross-browser perfection. Instead, you and I should provide simple but effectively designed HTML elements. This means great typography for headings, paragraphs, quotations, lists, tables and forms and no styling of layout.

Apple (AAPL) is in talks with Microsoft (MSFT) to replace Google (GOOG) as the default search engine on its iPhone, according to two people familiar with the matter. The talks have been under way for weeks, say the people, who asked not to be named because the details have not been made public.

Having people tag images by hand is an onerous task. Shenoy and Tan of Microsoft Research developed a way to tag images automatically by reading people’s brain scans while they look at images. The people did not even have to specifically think about trying to tag the image; they merely had to passively observe it.

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

To put it in more approachable terms, observe that Ecma-376, OOXML, at 6,045 pages in length, was 58 standard deviations above the mean for Ecma Fast Tracks. Consider also that the average adult American male is 5′ 9″ (175 cm) tall, with a standard deviation of 3″ (8 cm). For a man to be as tall, relative to the average height, as OOXML is to the average Fast Track, he would need to be 20′ 3″ (6.2 m) tall !

And that's why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It's grim, it's slow, everything's badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'm an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That's why Windows works for me. But I'd never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, "Hey, have you considered Windows?" Not in the real world at any rate.

Until now. Microsoft, hellbent on tackling the conspicuous lack of word-of-mouth recommendation, is encouraging people – real people – to host "Windows 7 launch parties" to celebrate the 22 October release of, er, Windows 7.

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