TechRadar UK Blogs: Computing blog

Microsoft was widely criticised in the US for its adverts featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. At least, it was criticised on the blogs I read.

But I liked them. They didn't tell me any thing new about Windows, or indeed anything at all. But they were funny and weird and I liked the fact that Microsoft was content to waste millions of advertising dollars on something so off-message. For a fleeting moment, I even warmed to the brand.

But this I'm a PC flim flam has me right back to square one. It's irrelevant and humourless. It is also logically flawed. You can't disprove a stereotype with counterexamples. If there were a billion Ku Klux Klan members in the world, you could probably find six that bake cookies.

That doesn't mean that our general impression of the organisation is necessarily inaccurate. And all these great, salt-of-the-earth types aren't using a PC as any kind of lifestyle choice - they're using one because the PC has overwhelming market dominance and if you don't bother to actually decide, a PC is what you end up with. It's the default.

So I entirely reject the notion that any of the putative coolness (or niceness or wonderfulness or whatever) of the PC-using population reflects on the value of the PC (or, let's be honest, Windows) as a brand.

These are just cool, nice, wonderful people who are stuck with a Windows PC for various complicated reasons beyond their control. Mother Teresa ate quite a lot of nan bread but eating nan bread doesn't make me altruistic.

If - if - Windows is a cool operating system that enriches all our lives, by all means explain to me why. But don't just show me other cool people and expect me to trust you. I'm past that.

Microsoft has a plan to make Windows boot faster. Their idea is to have a super-fast booting subset of the OS that gives you limited access to certain applications.

As I recall, we used to have this, back in 1990. It was called DOS. You could boot the PC in about 15 seconds and run Word Perfect or whatever. Then if you were feeling masochistic, you could type Win and wait two minutes for the GUI to load.

This is not what instant-on means to most people and to suggest that it might be a "feature" is ridiculous. Even Microsoft knows it's ridiculous, which is why it is asking for customer feedback on the idea.

Well, here's my feedback. Making Windows start faster by having it do less is a backwards step, not a forward one. What they need to do is provide the same services but provide them more efficiently or start them on demand or store the system state in flash or something. Not just do less. You can make a car that accelerates to its top speed in five seconds, if you limit the top speed to ten miles an hour.

There is undoubtedly a lot of bloat in Vista. Things that they could skip and most of us would never miss. But none of these are what Microsoft is planning to omit in its rush to boot early. They are talking about things like your internet connection and your external drives. You know, things you actually use. And there isn't really any way around that because Windows (and every other OS) is designed in a modular way with separate chunks of code to perform discrete tasks.

In my alternative, (ie completely unrealistic) world, Windows would be like progressive JPEG. You would boot almost immediately into a monochrome desktop with very simple icons, and a network connection that supported TCP/IP but not FTP or streaming video.

Then, seamlessly, the "resolution" of the OS would improve. So the graphics would gradually get prettier and the features richer. Likewise, your word processor would initially just support raw text and then features like spell checking and advanced formatting would trickle in after a minute or two.

Or we could just go back to leaving our PCs on standby and Microsoft could divert its development budget to pay for our electricity bills.

According to ComScore, who likes to count these things, YouTube is now the number 2 search engine on the net, at least in the US. Yahoo! dropped 5% in total search traffic between July and August this year, moving it down to third place.

Frankly I'm astounded. I'm astounded that anyone is still using Yahoo! as their search engine. Incredibly, in August Yahoo! still managed to scoop almost 20% of the traffic.

That's 2.3 billion searches where someone has used Yahoo! over Google. Even if you are recondite enough to insist on Yahoo! As your home page, you still have Google on your toolbar, don't you? Don't you? Tell me you do.

This isn't the mid-nineties when being net savvy meant having a toolkit of half a dozen or so different search engines, each useful in certain circumstances. Google is the only search engine that makes any sense at all for anything.

The war is over; Google has won and in fact, I have already said that I would like to see Google replace the DNS protocol as well.

Having thought about it hard, I can come up with just one reason why Yahoo! receives any search requests at all: accident. Clearly every person searching with Yahoo! already has the page open, to read the celebrity gossip or check mail or something and they accidentally type their search into the Yahoo! box instead of into the Google one on the toolbar above.

One way to measure this would be to look for pairs of searches very close together from the same IP address. First, a search on Yahoo! for "interracial kitten hot fudge" (just an example, jeez!) and then moments later that same search string in Google as Joe Six-pack thinks "Wait a minute! This isn't Google… D'oh!"

Interestingly, if you do try that particular search string, Google will turn up some distinctly NSFW results. Whereas Yahoo! comes up completely empty. Which I suppose could be another reason to favour the number 3 player.

Disney's lawyers must think they are pretty clever with their 57-page, on-screen EULA that comes with the Sleeping Beauty Blu-ray disc. I can just imagine them giggling hysterically into their Martinis as they sit around in the bar after work, congratulating themselves on this master stroke. The idea that anyone - I mean literally anyone on the entire planet - will actually read through 57 pages of small print displayed on their TV screen is of course risible.

That's the whole point. The number 57 was decided on by extensive focus group testing as being precisely the number of pages required to ensure that no one will read to the end. And in fact pages 3 to 56 are probably just cut and pasted from various random legal documents culled from the net. Their purpose is to act as a buffer, to place soothing distance between the inviting convenience of the "I Agree" button and the crucial page 57. Which says this:

"By reading this document, you agree to upgrade your entire collection of Disney movies to Blu-ray, within six weeks of them being released and to similarly upgrade your library to each and every new format as and when they become available. This shall occur regardless of the fact that your youngest child is now 27 and you have seen Aristocats approximately 860 times."

Well, it probably doesn't say that. But it might, who knows? The point is that whatever it does say, you'll agree to it anyway.

I should probably point out at this point that, by reading this sentence, you are deemed to have agreed to my EULA, which requires you to "accede to my every whim, however unreasonable". No, it's no use looking away quickly. I know you read the EULA. That means you agreed and now I own you.

It goes without saying that these are times of great economic uncertainty. But just when I thought I had adequately factored in the upheaval in the money markets, something happens to throw the whole thing into flux again.

Next week, the new talents and class changes will go live on all realms in World of Warcraft, as has been widely anticipated. But included with this patch is the new Inscription profession, which will therefore be available to level up to a skill of 375, before Wrath of the Lich King goes live! Since the raw material for inscription will be herbs (to make inks for scrolls), this will send the price of herbs through the roof. Cash-rich, level 70 players typically have at least one crafting profession already maxed-out at 375 and they will be highly unlikely to drop this because of the exciting new recipes that will soon be available for skills above 375. This means that any 70s wanting to take up inscription will be dropping their gathering profession, and that means they will be buying all their herbs on the auction house.

I had plans in place to drop mining for herbalism and level it to 375 before the expansion in November so that I could make a killing selling herbs to impatient noobs. But now I need to get to 375 in less than a week! If I wait until the expansion, the first rush will already be over and prices will stabilise as everyone gets bored with their Death Knights and runs them round Elwyn Forest picking peacebloom. But if I spend my limited play time picking low level herbs in Arathi and Stranglethorn Vale, I can't finish levelling my character. I'm stuck at level 65 at the moment and I'll need to be at least 68 to be on that first wave of pilgrims heading to Northrend in six weeks.

It is for this reason that I shall be appealing to the Chancellor for an emergency cash injection of 50 billion or so. This will allow me to hire a team of bots to pick herbs for me, with enough left over to pay myself a modest City bonus.