Posts by Devon Buchanan

OFT sends out scam texts

Off topic?

Wow, why are they not spending the time investigating a far more damaging and common scam among teenagers... Microsoft has been ripping off schools for years, and fooling families into buying their Office software a exuberant prices because "They need it for school."

Perhaps we should be telling people they don't have to send money to the Borg to go to school.

Latest Vista SP1 tweak open to everyone with a week to spare

The mandatory joke

Lets add the mandatoy joke...

Would it work properly before the deadline?

Does it behave like other OSs, and get faster, not fatter with each update (like OSX and Linux)

Does it allow you to use you computer in the way you wish, like playing the "Premium Content" you want on the screen you want. (Like OSX and Linux)

Does it make life simpler, with only one low price, one version, and one method of operation (i.e. Working properly rather than "Dragging it's gonads across a variety of rough surfaces")

I don't think any amount of downloads with overly long names and an even longer installation processes will fix these problems.

Microsoft hit by two more EC probes

The poblem is their integation...

@ AC at the top - The problem is not that they have a search, it is that it is designed to send queries to the windows live search engine, and good luck in choosing any other search engine.

I have a search on my Linux box, and I can choose which engine to send it to, from a drop down list including:

- Yahoo

- Google

- Amazon

- Answers

- Creative commons

- Wikipedia

- I could fish around on the Ubuntu forum to add more if I wanted to

Microsoft would never let you choose any search engine but the one that earns them money, let alone include them in a drop down list to give the average user a choice.

Until we force them to.

Open Office standards row heats up

Devon Buchanan

If we start accepting Microsoft standards we will end up being even more hopelessly locked in then we already are. We are already enslaved by their OS, corporate servers and office suite.

We have an opportunity to start using truly open standards that give users choice. Tradition is what you do when you can't be bothered to think things through...

We need to kick the Microsoft habit soon, or the only digital revolution we will be getting will spin us right back to the days when computers were painfully slow, opaque machines that were used to suck money out of you...

Or are we already there? Isn't Vista the greatest OS ever!