Wasn’t the “plug’n’play” concept supposed to make it easy to install hardware?  Whatever happened to that idea? I recently purchased an HP Printer, which came with some software has that has to be installed before the printer is connected to the computer (the documentation contains a solemn warning that you must not connect the printer before installing the software).  Well,…

I found this article in Wired magazine fascinating.  For it’s here in the quaint Oregon town of The Dalles that Google has chosen to build its new 30‑acre campus, the base for a server farm of unprecedented proportion. Although the evergreen mazes, mountain majesties, and always-on skiing surely play a role, two amenities in particular…

Internet Explorer 7 is now available, and will be automatically installed this week if you are not careful.  They’ve finally added tabbed browsing, but it still seems inferior to SlimBrowser (one of a number of products that use the insides of IE and then make it do useful things).  From my perspective, the tabbed browsing function in SlimBrowser works exactly how…

I suppose that by definition any attempt to list the 10 Biggest Computer Flops of all time is probably doomed to failure.  The very fact that something can be remembered means that it made an impact – the real failures are probably the ones that we can’t remember.  Even given that problem, this is an…

Back in January I was amused that Business Week wanted to pretend that stopping publishing the magazine outside the US was somehow a good thing.  They refunded the balance of all subscriptions, and offered two ways to continue reading the magazine – one was to have it sent from the US by steamship, and the…

Last week’s Economist had an article about Ray Ozzie, who is taking over from Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect for Microsoft.  Who he, you may be asking: Mr Ozzie personally wrote a million of the first 3.5m lines of code for the first successful collaboration software, Lotus Notes. At a time when nobody had…

If you do nothing for a few minutes and then try to log off from H**C’s Internet Banking, you get this marvellous message: Please log on before you access our Internet banking service. So I have to log on so that I can log off?  Brilliant…

Seeing the announcement about the new Intel/Microsoft Origami handheld PCs I feel overwhelmed by a sense of deja vu.  About 4 or 5 years ago, I bought a Samsung Nexio, which claimed to be a PC that you could hold in your hand.  It ran a version of Windows and you were supposed to be…