Microsoft has announced the US pricing regime for the latest incarnation of Windows:
Security vulnerabilities thrown in at no extra charge.
Don’t you just love the nomenclature — Basic, Premium, Business, Ultimate. No Latte, though.
The rule of law (New Labour version)
From today’s Guardian…
John Reid will sanction the forced removal of up to 32 Iraqis today after telling the high court he would ignore any last-minute legal challenge to their deportation. The Guardian has learned that the home secretary has told the high court that today’s specially chartered flight will not be stopped by anything short of an injunction.
Last November, an attempt to deport more than 70 Iraqi Kurds ended with just 20 going home because of a host of last-ditch legal applications. Mr Reid has since decided to take a tougher stance and told the high court today’s flight would go ahead regardless of any legal applications.
Footnote for overseas readers: Dr Reid is the British Minister of the Interior. For some reason, he is called the Home Secretary. It’s a sinister post which turns almost all its occupants into monsters. The only exception I can think of is the late Roy ‘Woy’ Jenkins, an erudite, civilised and liberal man who wound up as Chancellor of Oxford University.
MySpace driving more retail traffic than MSN search
According to Techcrunch…
New Hitwise findings indicate that MySpace sent more US traffic to online retail sites last week than MSN search, the third largest search engine on the web. That’s big news, as it’s tangible evidence that youth oriented online social networking is a market driver of serious proportions.
The Hitwise report puts Yahoo! as the source of 4.69 percent of traffic to online retail sites, MySpace as 2.53 percent and MSN search at 2.33 percent for the week ending August 26th. Google leads the pack at 14.93 percent.
Search related advertising last year was a $5 billion market, still small compared to $22 billion in magazines and $74 billion for TV advertising – but the landscape is changing. The Financial Times ran an article on Tuesday about the belief that the shortage of marketers skilled in negotiating sites like MySpace and YouTube is one of the biggest barriers to the growth of advertising online.
Even in the short term, it’s still up in the air between the big players. Google’s advertising, which is generally believed to be more effective than that of competitors, hasn’t kicked in at MySpace yet. If Google can make MySpace search more bearable when it takes over in the fourth quarter of this year, then you can expect MySpace to drive more traffic to retail sites than ever. At the same time, IE 6 doesn’t have a native search box in the chrome of the browser and IE 7 will – to search either MSN or Live.com. We’ll have to compare these numbers with Live.com in the future…
Ageism at Carphone Warehouse?
Hmmm… This is from the Daily Mail, so I’m not sure I believe it.
After walking the Great Wall of China and making plans for a trip to Russia, Shirley Greening-Jackson thought signing up for a new internet service would be a doddle.
But the young man behind the counter had other ideas. He said she was barred – because she was too old.
The 75-year-old would only be allowed to sign the forms for the Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk phone and broadband package if she was accompanied by a younger member of her family who could explain the small print to her.
Mrs Greening-Jackson, who sits on the board of several charities, said: “I was absolutely furious. The young man said, ‘Sorry, you’re over 70. It’s company policy. We don’t sign anyone up who is over 70.’
“Later a young lady said company policy is that anyone over 70 might not understand the contract. She said, ‘If you would be prepared to go to the shop in town and take a younger member of your family we might give you a contract.’
How Google lights up the planet
Amazing animation.
MySpace To Sell Music Through Snocap
The move to the new ecology continues apace. TechCrunch reports:
MySpace is getting into the music business. They announced today that they will allow nearly 3 million unsigned bands to sell their music directly to Myspace users. Snocap will provide the back end technology for the service. The agreement also includes performance-based warrants to purchase stock in SnoCap (Fox recently took an equity stake in startup SimplyHired as well).
The music will be sold in MP3 format without copy protection of any kind (see eMusic and Amie Street for similar models, as well as others). This comes as major labels are starting to experiment with free music downloads, albeit with copy protection.
It’s unclear whether Myspace will also offer music from major labels pursuant to the deal. The agreement does not prohibit these sales, and Snocap has deals with most major labels.
Downloads of music from labels would require copy protection pursuant to Snocap’s existing deals. Look for additional deals from Myspace as they continue to develop their overall music (and revenue) strategy.
New York Times report on this here.
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Cat on a hot glass roof
Autumn
I love this time of year. Here’s why.
“John Naughton Certified as Braindead.” Sigh.
Lovely post on Thomas the Tank Engine Blog. It’s headed “John Naughton Certified as Braindead; Few are Surprised” and goes on:
In my first ever attention grabbing, go out on a limb, blog post, I decided to comment on John Naughton including Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends (1984-1991) among his worst 50 TV shows of all time (discussed here).
The inevitable conclusion of his including Thomas and Friends on such a list is that he’s lost his mind. I suppose there might be other conclusions… feel free to post below should you think of any but my list is as follows:
John Naughton is so stupid that he sits on the TV and watches the couch
John Naughton recently sat on an airplane in close proximity to a loud-mouthed Thomas loving 2 year old
John Naughton thought no one would pay any attention to him unless he said something so stupid that it was news worthy (I have no doubt that this is true… whether he realizes it I have no idea)…
Good stuff, eh? It goes on a bit in the same vein.
Sadly, it’s nothing to do with me. There’s another guy with the same name who writes about film and TV for low-rent magazines (and, I think, the Sunday Times). I still get sarcastic flak from my academic colleagues over a review he wrote, many years ago, of a compilation of stag night videos!
Just for the record, I loved Thomas the Tank Engine and often had learned (and interminable) conversations with my kids about Annie and Clarabelle (who — I need hardly remind you — are Thomas’s carriages).
Later… It’s interesting to see what bloggers pick up. When I looked on Google Blog Search, I found that the two things that had been most widely linked to were my piece about ‘websites that changed the world’, and my doppleganger’s Radio Times piece about the worst TV programmes ever. Clearly there is something about lists that piques people’s interest.
The interesting thing about the ‘websites’ piece was that I didn’t choose the sites — that was done by other Observer writers. I was merely asked to write the introduction to the list. But that hasn’t saved me. On Friday I was having lunch in Cambridge University’s West site (where the Computer Lab and the Microsoft Lab are located) when a prominent computer scientist walked in, spotted me, and said severely “I have a bone to pick with you, John Naughton”. She then sat down and berated my for the list which — she opined — was far too oriented towards what she dismissively referred to as “leisure sites”.