Observer article on MS’s “Web Services”

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John Naughton over at the Observer has written his his less than impressed take on Windows Live and Office Live.

The core of his thoughts is expressed in these paragraphs:

On the other hand, Gates and co are smart folks who know in their bones that web services represent the future. But they’re stuck, because if Microsoft were to become a major provider of such services (which it is technically quite capable of doing), it would be tantamount to cannibalising its core business – the lucrative Windows and Office franchises. After all, to access web services, all you need is a browser – and it doesn’t have to be Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer. Nor does your computer have to run Windows. Firefox running on Linux or Safari running on a Mac are just as good for web mail or search as Explorer running on Windows.

So Microsoft has a problem. It can’t go all-out for web services – which explains the pathetic fudge announced on Tuesday. The new ‘live’ sites will only offer supplements and complements to Microsoft software running on your computer.

My only quibble with that is that he forgets the fact that they could possibly, with ActiveX, at least make it necessary to run IE, although Linux users on Intel systems may be able to get away with running IE under Wine to access these services.

Lots of Space Stuff!

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OK – here’s a bunch of space related stuff from around the net.

The Planetary Society have revamped their website which looks a lot nicer than the old one. Their blog is always useful to keep an eye on to track news, and Planetary Radio has got to be one of the best podcasts I’ve found so far! If you listen to it, be warned, the location of the RSS feed has changed – it’s now here.

JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, has some good and bad news. The good news are some amazing hi-res pictures of the asteroid Itokawa, the bad news is that they’ve had to abort the drop of the marker and rover onto its surface due to an “anomalous signal“.

The UK built satellite Inmarsat-4 is due for a launch from a sea platform near Christmas Island.

The ESA’s Venus Express is now due for launch on the 9th November, and good news for Mars Express, it’s Planetary Fourier Spectrometer is now working again after reporting a fault a few months ago.

Oh, and as Jason says, now is the time for the Taurids meteor shower.

BBC OpEd Piece on Sony’s “CD” Rootkit Fiasco

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Bill Thompson has written a good opinion piece over at the BBC called “The Rootkit of All Evil ?” on the recent Sony DRM Fiasco.


Fortunately, it is possible to avoid buying discs like this. Philips, who defined the CD standard and then made it widely available, has been very clear that these music delivery systems do not count as Compact Discs and cannot use the CD logo.


As far back as 2002, Philips representative Klaus Petri told Financial Times Deutschland that “those are silver discs with music data that resemble CDs, but aren’t”.

“HELP STOP CRIME/FRAUD” spam/scam

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Well well well, it would appear that Nigeria’s “Economic and Financial Crimes Commission” has decided to email me personally to tell me that I may be the victim of fraud, and should email my “Name, Address, email and telephone number” to their excite.com email address (or should that be the universia.pt one in the headers ?), and forward it to all my friends so they can do the same thing.

Of course it’s not at all suspicious that a Nigerian agency would be sending from a Portuguese IP address that has been blacklisted for repeated 419 scam emails by SpamHaus – oh no!

Anyway, if you want a laugh at the email the 419 scammers are now sending out in their attempts to use the commission that was set up to get them to get you instead, read the whole posting..
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