Handstream

I was at my friends house this week when her daughter, who is 11 years old and quite tech savvy, asked me about Skype. Her friend has it and would like to set it up on her mobile (she is on her third handset). I set an account up for her and ran through the basics. She was positively surprised that she has this free phone network within a network and of course her network '3' (not '3G' as every single mobile phone shop worker seems to think it is) allows free Skype calls over their network on their handsets. Even on pay as you go. Actually the Acceptable Usage Policy is 4000 minutes per month. My really poor maths tells me that's about 133 minutes over 30 days. I have never heard of anyone being notified of using the service too much either. After the obligatory 'test' phase where I made a few random calls to 'check it works' , I got into thinking, After a reasonably aggressive campaign to promote Skype, why are youngsters not informed? I have...

I've just been reading about that profits are up for Apple and down for Microsoft. This for me signals the shift in power away from Win32 to OS-X. I'm not surprised and pretty glad to have contributed to Apple's good fortune. I'm also predicting a huge backlash against the 'new fabulous' Windows7. From using it via Virtualbox 's virtual machine, I'm sad to say there's not much to get my juices flowing, suffice to say 'There's nothing to see here, move along'. With the imminent release of Google's Chrome OS it can only spell bad news for Bill and his friends.

It's happened. I am finally free of all things Microsoft. Secretly since Windows Vista I have been disappointed with the operating systems coming out of Redmond. At work I have been using Ubuntu and things are fine but not entirely happy with the interface and in a quest for something different I have purchased a Macbook Pro. I won't bore you with the details suffice to say, It's a whopper fully loaded and the O/S is 64bit. I have set up more or less everything I need to develop on this machine and working on it is a joy. Today I configured Coldfusion9 to connect to a free tiny sql database named Sqlite3. Now I can ditch my Virtualbox virtual machine running Window7. After seeing how little progress has been made with Windows7 I'm glad I made the jump. It still feels like windows 95 and until Microsoft get brave and roll out an O/S that doesn't have to be backwardly compatible (or for that matter using compatibility modes) then I am embracing the Mac and all the cul...