Status-Q

Nice article by Roger Ridey in today's Independent: How Microsoft changed my life.

OK. As of about an hour and a half ago, www.livingwithoutmicrosoft.org is live. We'd had a lot of interest even before the launch. Let's see how it goes....

All fairly quite at the moment; I'm preparing for tomorrow's launch of livingwithoutmicrosoft.org.

CNET is starting a series of articles on Microsoft's plans for world domination via Windows XP.

Microsoft is renaming the contraversial Hailstorm to '.NET My Services'. Three times as many syllables.

At first I thought that the original codename Hailstorm must have

sounded a little too threatening. But this sort of thing seems to be a trend. I think there's a belief in marketing circles that the harder a name is to say, the more it will stick in people's brains. Do they really think people are going to sit around sipping their coffees and saying, "We should make this into a .NET My Services service"? Come on!

I suggest abbreviating it to '.NET My S' which has a more pleasingly ambiguous sound.

Having moved quite frequently between several different machines over the last few months, I thought I might offer some advice on how to do things on different operating systems:

Windows

• You can probably do it in several ways
• None of them will be particularly intuitive
• Some of the ways will cost you lots of money
• If it doesn't work, getting support will cost you even more money
• At least there are an awful lot of other people who can sympathise.

Linux

• You can do anything
• It won't cost you anything
• It will be exceedingly reliable
• It will probably be horribly complicated
• If you can't do something, just modify the source, update your compiler, find and install a few extra packages, and recompile the kernel
• Well done! Go to a party and see if you can find anyone who appreciates how clever you've been.

Mac OS X

• Things on the Mac fall broadly into one of two categories:
• Things that have been done right
• Things that haven't been done yet
• You can therefore do it easily or not at all
• If you can't do it, just relax and go to Starbucks instead
• It probably wasn't that important after all, man.

Bob Metcalfe's law states that the overall usefulness of a network is proportional to the square of the number of people connected to it (because each of the N users can make N-1 connections). I was thinking of this while listening to a radio programme this morning about the

global dominance of English as a language.

A similar multiplying effect must occur with databases on the net. The more data a particular database contains, the more people will use and add to it. The marvellous Internet Movie Database was an early example.

Now, I wonder if this one will ever really get going....

I was sad when the U.S wireless network Ricochet was shut down a few months ago. It offered quite a good service to the insufficient number of people who subscribed. Still, if you're in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings, wondering where it all went wrong and why you bothered, then you can't get a much better finale to raise your spirits than this story.

OK, I guess I'm just a bit slow, but I've suddenly discovered an area of computing that I'd never come across and which had never occurred to me before... Did you know that, as well as a Flight Simulator, Microsoft also sell a Train Simulator? And that Hornby not only sell model railways, but virtual ones as well? Wow, there's a whole page full of similar software here!

Any serious anorak-wearers will be wondering, no doubt, which planet I've been on for the last few years, but somehow I had managed to miss these. They seem a bit sad and yet rather fun at the same time. Good Christmas presents, I guess, for the right person, and think of all that attic space you could save....

Follow-up to the Fidelity Investments story: If you're wondering what this XML thing is and why a company should want to spend many millions of dollars using it, you might want to read The Importance of XML. Feedback welcomed.