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Microsoft's giant touchscreen

Microsoft is trying to out iPhone the iPhone. The software company, not renowned for its slick interfaces, has built a piece of equipment that will turn any flat surface into a giant touch-sensitive screen.

Michael Arrington, of the TechCrunch blog, got a sneak preview of Touchwall, due to be unveiled at Microsoft’s headquarters today. His video demonstration (above) shows off the screens capabilities.

Users will scroll through content by caressing the surface and zoom in by sweeping their hands apart in an amplified version of the finger-pinching motion used on the Apple iPhone. Tapping on images, videos or documents embedded in the surface brings them up to full-screen size, while digital drawing tools allow users to add text and free-hand illustrations.

Microsoft's demonstration focused on office applications, but with a little imagination the device could easily be yoked up to gaming and home entertainment systems.

Unlike Surface, Microsoft’s sophisticated but prohibitively expensive table-top computing system, Touchwall has been put together using hardware costing only a few hundred dollars: three infrared lasers and an infrared camera. The lasers project a mesh of beams over the front of the surface, while the camera detects when and where the beams are broken.

Inexplicably, Microsoft said it had no current plans to put Touchwall into production.

All the news that's fit to print (about your block of flats)

News organisations such as this one do the best they can to record events deemed relevant to a particular country and indeed the world, but what about stories that are of interest only to a single apartment block?

Residents in a particular postcode and in some cases on a single block may soon be able to read news tailored to their own 'micro-geography' thanks to a site which trawls the web for information relevant to a highly specific location.

The 'news' - which could include anything from a recent crime to a planning application having been lodged or a picture having been taken nearby - is then packaged up on a map so readers can see where events relevant to their location took place.

"A regular journalist would never write about a mundane planning application, but if you live in that block it's totally news to you," Adrian Holovaty, founder of the site, called EveryBlock, said.

EveryBlock, which so far only covers Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, works by trawling publicly available databases for information such as addresses using a process known as 'scraping'.

Notorious spammer must pay $234 million to MySpace

Sanford Wallace, a.k.a "Spamford Wallace", has been busted again. This time to the record tune of $234 million (£120 million) for bombarding MySpace users with more than 735,000 messages, the Associated Press reports. The judgment is being called a landmark victory for anti-spam crusaders, and it breathes a little respectability into the much maligned piece of American anti-spam legislation, the Can Spam Act of 2003.

MySpace's chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, told AP that Wallace and his business associate Walter Rines created scores of MySpace accounts and hijacked existing users' accounts by stealing their passwords. Once inside, the duo, in some cases masquerading as trusted friends, messaged other users urging them to check out cool new videos or websites, some of which linked to pornographic sites.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered Wallace and Rines, who never attended the hearing, to pay $300 per message, the maximum penalty allowed under the Can Spam Act guidelines.

This isn't the first time Wallace has been busted. The US Federal Trade Commission ordered him to pay $4 million in damages for hawking bogus anti-spyware software in 2006, and in the 1990s his former company, Cyber Promotions, was sued by Time Warner's AOL.

While some see it as a day of justice for spam fighters, nobody expects that Wallace will actually pay up. AP had no luck tracking down Wallace at his last known address in Las Vegas, where he went into business of promoting night clubs. He's probably working on a new get-rich-quick scheme to pay off his legal tab.

Britain's online video habit: three web clips per day

Here's a finding that, while inevitable, is sure to raise the blood pressure of your typical ISP executive -- and your boss. Our daily online video habit is reaching a staggering proportion.

According to Comscore, Americans viewed 11.5 billion (yes, billion...with a b) videos in March, or an average of 83 videos for every American who ventured online last month. The most recent tally for the UK is even greater, Comscore says. In December, Britons watched 3.1 billion videos, or 108 videos per UK net user.

Assuming an average video length of two minutes, you are talking about more than 103 million hours spent (some may say "wasted") in front of the computer watching YouTube and, for a week at least, the BBC iPlayer (the iPlayer launched on Christmas Day klast year).

It would be interesting to see Comscore's most recent numbers, which will reveal the iPlayer's contribution to our video-snacking habit. It will also no doubt trigger more howls of protest from the likes of Tiscali and Sky, who see the iPlayer as the biggest threat to their business.

In the US, YouTube is the dominant player, Comscore reports. The video-sharing behemoth has 38 per cent of the market (by videos viewed; 51 per cent if you count unique viewers) and its audience is growing.

Adults miss out when they shun kids' games

I enjoyed all of the Harry Potter books, and I enjoyed them in their original children’s covers, not the darker, more sombre jackets designed to make adults feel better about reading them. They’re kids’ books, so why pretend they aren't?

I feel the same about video games. Mario Kart, Super Mario Galaxy and the forthcoming Super Smash Bros Brawl all got great reviews, but some adults feel the need to avoid these games as if, because they are suitable for kids, they must be unsuitable for adults.

I played the original NES Nintendo entertainment system when I was a child and have continued to play the company’s systems and games ever since. I enjoy the escapism of running around in a land with bright red and blue mushrooms and giant monkeys bounding about. Being child-friendly doesn't make the games easier, just generally more imaginative and brighter in the visuals.

That’s not to say I don’t still love a good online frag fest. Both types of game can be equally enjoyable, and I think some folk miss out on great games because they ignore the 'suitable for all' games, unaware of the similarities between them and more adult-orientated titles. For instance, both Grand Theft Auto IV and Mario feature jumping on or kicking other characters heads — just in a very, very different context.

The Google Street View car causes a stir in Rome

For many Romans, these are jittery times. For the first time in a generation, the mayor of the Eternal City, once a left-wing stronghold, is on the political right. Gianni Alemanno, a former neo-Fascist, swept to power late last month on a tough-on-crime platform that included bulldozing encampments of Roma people, expelling supposedly violent foreigners and installing London-like surveillance cameras around town.

So a group of Romans can be forgiven on Wednesday afternoon for assuming the worst when a black car sporting a massive, rotating video camera, slowly drove down Viale Trastevere, a busy thoroughfare, filming everybody in sight. On cue, pedestrians shuffled off the street and into bars, out of sight of the offending vehicle, no doubt wondering if these are the new intrusions that must be endured after a sudden shift to the right.

Your correspondent managed to snake through a queue of cars at a traffic light to get a better look at the vehicle that upset so many mid-afternoon espressos. A new type of video surveillance vehicle aiming to capture random Romans on a sunny afternoon? Nope.

It was the seemingly more benign Google Maps vehicle. After snapping a few photos on my Nokia N95, I was asked by a group of pensioners who was driving the offending vehicle. "Google", I informed them. "They are filming the city, street-by-street", I added. They just shook their heads in bafflement.

Just then the Google car swung left and I followed, in a very slow pursuit. The identical scene unfolded before me: Romans stumbling into shops and bars, hoping to be out of view of the camera's lens. I cannot wait to see when Google Earth will have a street-level view of Rome. Don't be surprised if you see the backs of a lot of Italian hurrying for the door.

Does Microsoft really want to buy Facebook?

Out of one multi-billion dollar attempt to take control of an internet company and straight into another?

So it would seem for Microsoft, which has reportedly lurched from aggressively seeking to take control of Yahoo!, the struggling internet portal, to politely approaching Facebook and asking what it would sell for.

Fresh from being rebuffed by Yahoo! - for which Microsoft had offered $47.5 billion - on the weekend, the company's bankers are said to have approached Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old chief executive, to inquire what he thinks his company is worth. Or so reported the Wall Street Journal. (Neither company has confirmed the approach.)

Certainly, for Microsoft to express interest in one of the world's most talked about and influential social networking sites is not surprising.

The software giant already owns a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook - having bought a $240 million chunk in October which valued the young company at $15 billion. And only last week Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, cited it as one of only six 'internet properties' that had "any real scale."

As with many of Microsoft's dealings, however - and the company is a veteran corporate operator, not least in the field of takeovers - there may be more here than meets the eye.

In their own ways, Microsoft and Apple push the next iPhone

Microsoft sent an unambiguous message to European consumers this week: the next iPod killer will arrive imminently. It's called the iPhone. The 3G iPhone. Well, in truth, Microsoft never mentioned Apple's iPhone. Instead, it announced a -- yawn -- new software upgrade for its Zune music store, saying the phantom device will now play video too. You'll have to take their word for it, European gadgetheads. There is still no word on when, or if, Microsoft will make the player available here. The latest rumour is that it will be 18 months from now, in autumn 2009, when Microsoft introduces the third generation Zune.

By our calculation, that will be a good 15 or so months after the European launch of the 3G iPhone, all but burying the Zune's chances here. Apple appears set to announce its plans for a high-speed 3G iPhone next month.

According to the New York Times, the 3G iPhone will arrive in Europe as early as August. Citing a person familiar with the roll-out plans, the paper says the first 3G iPhone market is Italy via a deal with Vodafone and Telecom Italia Mobile, I type with a huge grin from my perch here in Rome.

A 3G iPhone is seen as a necessity for Apple as sales of the current models, which plod along on GSM networks, have begun to dip and retailers fear a glut of unsold 2.5G models.

Freesat: a sign of Freeview's failure

An uncharitable view of Freesat, the free-to-air satellite TV service launched today by the BBC and ITV, is that it demonstrates the failure of Freeview. Why else would the very people who begged us to buy a Freeview set-top box now be urging upon us an alternative, incompatible system involving a new set-top box, a satellite dish and professional installation?

In fact, Freeview has not been a failure. It has the makings of something much more frustrating: a short-term success. More than 14 million British households already use it, but some doubt its suitability as a national broadcast system for next-generation television.

It faces two main problems: patchy coverage, which leaves more than a quarter of the population without a signal, and problems cramming bandwidth-hungry high-definition signals onto the part of the broadcast TV spectrum. Limited trials of HD over Freeview are expected to begin next year, but only four channels will be available and viewers will have to buy yet another set-top box.

Freesat, which delivers its signal via satellite, will liberate the BBC and ITV from the constraints of the broadcast spectrum and allow them to offer more high-definition programming. Both broadcasters see HD as a way of holding onto viewers (and advertisers, in ITV’s case) in a fragmenting media market, and until now they’ve had to sit back and watch Sky TV take an early lead in HD programming.

Encouragingly for both broadcasters, nearly half a million subscribers have stumped up for Sky’s high-definition channels, proving that there is an appetite for super-sharp TV. A similar service without the barrier of a contract and monthly subscription is likely to be popular.

So where does that leave Freeview? Anyone who gets a good signal with the existing system and has no interest in upgrading to HD will probably stick with what they’ve got, but it would be hard to recommend it to anyone who has not yet made the switch to digital TV. For a relatively small, one-off fee, Freesat offers a much more future-proofed system.

That’s frustrating for those who plumped for Freeview but now have an HD-ready TV and want to make the most of it. Some will no doubt find the cash for Freesat, but the cynics among them may be wondering how long they’ll have to wait before it too is rendered obsolete.

GTA IV and the battle of the consoles

Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to sell out today on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but already the console makers are battling to get the upper hand. Sony has released a PS3 package that comes with the game, but it's Microsoft that have really pulled out all the stops by spending a reported $50 million on two downloadable additions to the game that will be available exclusively on Xbox Live.

The content of the packs is currently unknown, but with each costing Microsoft $25 million, it's fair to assume that they will add significantly to the already huge game – and that they won't be cheap for us to buy. But given that most serious gamers already own one of the two machines, will it be worth forking out for the 360 to get the extra content if you already have a PS3?

If you’re a well-off PS3 owner who plays every game through to the bitter end, then it might be worth getting a 360 for the downloadable add-ons that will entertain you for another few hours. On the whole, though, I doubt that many will be tempted to buy an additional console.

Nor are the two versions different enough to encourage much console switching. The graphics are more or less identical, by all accounts, which is disappointing – Rockstar, the game makers, could have used the full power of the PS3’s cell processor to up the ante in the visual stakes.

If you have neither console and this is your idea of car-jacking, gun-toting, drug-dealing fun, the 360 seems to be the one to go for. But if you are a movie buff with an HD-TV then the Blu-ray player in the PS3 may well be the clincher.

Essentially, we have two companies that have pretty much bottomless pockets fighting to be top dog in an industry worth billions of dollars per year. Regardless of the outcome, even the loser will be sitting pretty. If you find yourself appalled by the content of GTA IV or just are becoming a little too involved in the criminality then you can always fork out yet more for a Wii Fit and throw yourself in to it's yogic bliss to centre yourself once more.

Full GTA IV coverage:

Man stabbed while waiting to buy Grand Theft Auto IV
GTA review: Not just a game, but five-star entertainment
It’s just a game, says GTA producer

Is the web twisting your sense of time?

Concerned that you - or indeed your company - are falling behind in the race to be noticed in the digital age? It may be because you are operating according to an industrial concept of time.

In the railway age - an age when trains apaprently did run on schedule - timings were far more rigid, and the importance of abiding by them was paramount. Now our sense of time is more 'fluid', meaning we feel less willing to making temporal commitments because of the ease of breaking them - by making a call on the mobile or sending a text.

So, anyway, says FutureRealWorld - a research company which tracks consumer behaviour and trends. "The most obvious expression of this is in media consumption, where we've witnessed the end of prime time because of the advent of PVRs [personal video recorders]," said Tamar Kasriel, FutureReal's director, warming to her 'time' theme in a speech at Internet World in London. "But it's influencing social patterns too. Rather than arranging a meeting now, people schedule a 'proxy-meeting'. You'll say Friday. Then in the middle of the week - you might specify Friday afternoon, and then as time gets closer, you gradually nail down when and where you'll meet. There's a sense that you can bend time, and for some people that provides a great sense of empowerment."

Those starved of the vocabulary of digital marketing and consumer trends were also feeling empowered after Ms Kasriel's speech. Featured in her 30-minute talk were a raft of creative - and sometimes slightly bamboozling - phrases which sounded nothing if not very 2.0. Among them: "the half-life of data is much shorter than it used to be", the "world wild web" - a reference to the perceived unlawfulness of many activities on the internet, and "the tyranny of immediacy", which has something to do with the fact that we and many of the services we use are "always on". Still with us?

'Government 2.0' has a little way to go, says the Government

The blogging habits of David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, are well-known. Rather less documented are the Government's - or at least the civil service's - other attempts to embrace the web 2.0 age.

Today the Central Office of Information (COI) - which runs the communications for the whole of the civil service - revealed a little more about how it is attempting to reach the MySpace generation in a speech given by its director of digital media, Jamie Galloway. (Or former digital director. Mr Galloway recently left the organisation after an eight-year stint to set up his own digital agency.)

Among the government schemes about which Mr Galloway spoke  were an instant messaging component of Frank, the drugs advice campaign aimed at young people, which allowed children to install a 'virtual robot' on their phone which would answer drugs-related questions via IM.

He also gave details of a Royal Air Force recruiting drive which involved a serviceman blogging about his experience on the front line in Afghanistan, and - perhaps most innovatively - of a climate change awareness campaign involving a youth-focused virtual world called Dubit.

In the latter, the COI joined Dubit, which is similar to its better-known competitor, Second Life, and 'installed' a virtual glacier. COI representatives masquerading as virtual penguins then set about distributing messages to the world's inhabitants about the perils of environmental degradation. (Are you still with us?) The two-week campaign culminated in the glacier melting and the entire world flooding, which Mr Galloway demonstrated with slides showing a virtual music festival clogged with mud and water - a scene reminiscent of Glastonbury.

"It certainly got the message across," he said.

But, he added, the civil service still had a long way to go before it properly grasped the potential of web 2.0, especially in comparison with the US, where presidential candidates such as Barack Obama had raised vast sums of money by reaching out to the so-called 'long tail' of voters - people who would contribute $5-10 to his campaign - via the web.

"When I joined the COI no one wanted to talk about digital, but now a lot do, and I think you're going to see a lot of the lesson from the US in the past couple of years applied here," he said. "We've had ministers blogging, but gradually more decades-old processes are being turned on their heads by the reality of being able to share information more easily."

The boardroom voting scandal at the (usually sedate) '.co.uk' company

Rarely does dissent, intrigue and acrimony ripple through Nominet, the organisation which for most of the time takes care of the highly unglamorous and for the most part sedate task of administering the .co.uk domain name.

But this week is an exception. Tomorrow, the organisation - a not-for-profit company set up to register the now 6.6 million .co.uk domain names - has a crucial boardroom vote which may influence how much it costs a company or individual to set up a website. And the outcome is hotly contested.

For 12 years exactly - the time Nominet has been in existence - the wholesale price of registering and renewing a .co.uk domain name has remained unchanged at £5. Some members want that changed, though, and there's a significant and unusually heated debate about how.

Approximately half of Nominet's members run a business selling domain names to companies and individuals. They want the price reduced, because it will mean that the cost of 'sitting on' addresses prior to selling them will be reduced. (Some companies have more than 20,000 domain names in a pool waiting for the sale, so the twice-yearly cost of renewing them would come down by tens of thousands of pounds if the wholesale price is reduced even by £1.)

The remainder - many of whom run websites on other companies' behalf - would like it raised, because it will mean their clients will take more seriously the process of re-registering the domain name every two years. "At the moment you've got this absurd situation where whether a domain name as important as bbc.co.uk gets registered depends on whether some person in accounts remembers to pay the £5 every two years," one Nominet insider said.

Because of the vagaries of the company's consitituion, a vote on a change to the fee would require a 90 per cent approval of members, which the Nominet management says is "extremely unlikely", given the split.

Still, the progressives are adamant. They've put forward two 'rebel' candidates to be elected to the board at tomorrow's AGM who, Nominet says, would attempt to push through the changes - a move the organisation's management opposes. So last week its chief executive, Lesley Cowley, sent a letter to members urging them not to vote for the reform candidates.

Asked what kind of a majority would be required among the 40-odd members expected to attend the event in London would require, Ms Cowley couldn't be specific, blaming the complex voting structure of the organisation. "But you'd need a massive swing, definitely," she says.

Is she worried?

"It's a decision for our members to make," she said coyly today at the Internet World conference in London. Stay tuned.

What's on Mick and Keith's iPod?

Stones songs. Lots of them. From the most recent performance.

Richard Kerris, the band's former AV geek, tells Variety he introduced Mick, Keith, Charlie, Ronnie & Co. to the wonders of the iPod on the 40 Licks tour. Ever since, the band has been recording all of its shows to a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie Watts' drum stand. After the show, the techies then port the play lists to iPods so the band can listen afterwards.

As Kerris tells Variety, "If you look at any of the old videos from that tour you’ll see a laptop, a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie, everything’s recorded with these two stereo mics, so they have a rough, they have a full 48-track underneath, but everything goes into that laptop. Everything’s connected to a little distribution amp with five Firewire cables hanging off of it. So while the band was doing their bows and the fireworks were going at the very end, the backline crew would plug in their iPods, synchronize the thing, and put in their bathrobes an iPod that had that night’s show, so when they came offstage, they’d grab their stuff, get in their car and they would have the show with them right then and there. No one had done anything like that at all."

Mick, says Kerris, is a natural geek. He took to the technology in short order. And Keith? Well, that's a different story. Says Kerris, "Keith doesn’t use the computer as much, he just recognizes what part it plays."

A new infected website every five seconds

That's the findings this week from online security specialists Sophos, who say their filters are detecting an alarming rise in the number of infected web pages in the first quarter of 2008, another indication that cyber criminals have set up shop virtually across the web.

Sophos says its filters blocked, on average, an infected website every five seconds -- up from one infected web site every 14 seconds a year ago. The top three culprits are the US, China and Russia, which account for more than 82 per cent of all web-based malware hosted online.

Wii Fit: cute graphics, but little to get the blood pumping

I went to a Wii Fit launch event this morning, designed to show off Nintendo's fitness game and its  pressure-sensitive floor pad. It was a slightly surreal event, with all the Nintendo folk dressed in white tracksuits with big marketing smiles. I felt a bit like I had stumbled upon a technologically advanced cult. Thankfully, there was no fruit punch offered and we were soon set loose with the games.

To get started, a colleague of mine went through the few steps to work out his Wii Fitness age – a measure of physical wellbeing – by entering his age and height and trying to stand stock still on the balance board. He wavered and came out with a fitness age of 69. Being in his early 30s, he wasn't overly impressed. He did, however, laugh at the number, suggesting he has a mental age half his actual years, so it probably balances out.

We moved on to skiing and hula-hooping, which were fun but didn't seem to require much exertion. Nor do the other balance and Yoga exercises seem to burn off many calories, though doing headers was a bit more energetic. There are some more aerobic exercises available, like jogging, but they just aren't the games I felt were the most appealing. The game's strength is the graphical appearance, which is very appealing in a cute and slightly weird way, with funny animations popping up as you get hit by a football boot or a disembodied panda head while trying to do headers.

The problem as I see it is that the game provides little motivation to keep playing. You can see your Wii Fitness age – and hopefully see it falling – but is that enough to get you using it a few times a week? The motivation for visiting a gym often comes from peers, or because it costs you money every month whether you go or not. Even with the £70 price tag, I'm not sure that these motivational factors are there in big enough proportions to keep me using the Wii Fit.

The balance board's sensitivity is impressive and works really well as a control system, so it will be interesting to see what other titles come out using it as an input device. If the fitness regime had more of a level-based system, like Super Mario Galaxy, I would probably be more inclined to play it regularly.

I don't want to give the impression it's not good. I did like it, and even though I’m probably not in the target market, I am tempted to get one once it has been released. I just feel that it could fall into the same trap as Wii Play, effectively being little more than a good way of showing off the capabilities of the hardware.

My colleague and I agreed that we probably used up more energy walking there from the Tube than we did while playing Wii Fit, but any game that features panda heads being kicked at you is alright by me.

The mystery of the world's biggest net outage solved?

Conspiracy theorists, you were right. Apparently.

The biggest net outage ever recorded was the work of two wayward ships off the coast of Egypt earlier this year. The news comes from Dubai, where the ships were briefly impounded in recent days and two men could face trial, VNUnet reports. This comes after Egypt's Communication Ministry informed us in early February that no ship was capable of knocking out the underwater cables, triggering vexing net outages from the Middle East to India.

The new version of events is that two ships -- one Korean-owned, the other Iraqi -- travelling in a forbidden zone, dropped anchor and dragged it across the sea bottom, snapping the lines.

Reliance Globalcom, which owns the cables, was able to piece together this scenario, using satellite photos to identify the culprits, essentially sinking the official Egyptian version of events.

Mac vs Windows?

My day to day job is multimedia design. If you see something that moves around or is interactive in any way, shape or form online, that's the sort of thing I do. In the late 90's I got a grant from The Princes' Trust and started printing skatewear t-shirts and moved on from there. When I started out I needed a computer so I bought a Mac. I chose a Mac primarily because I had a friend that knew about them and could help me fix it if it went wrong. I've been using them ever since and am now the bloke my friends with Macs call when theirs goes wrong. Contrary to what Apple would like you to believe, just like Windows machines, Macs throw a wobbler on occasion too.

Currently on my desk at work I have a Windows XP box and an iMac. I don't really use the Windows machine. It's not because I have any objection to the fact it's Windows, I just know how to get around the Mac better. Other folk I work with that also have the same set-up work the other way round, with the Mac hardly getting touched. Again, it's just about what they are familiar with and prefer. I find the whole frothing at the mouth evangelism some Mac users have a bit sad. I like using my Mac but I don't see why somebody who is perfectly happy with their Windows machine should be ranted at for their preference. I think the PC fanatic who rants with equal candour against the Mac is also misguided, and often misinformed. Both operating systems do similar things equally well, but there are some things a Mac does better, and some things Windows machines do better. Bizzarely, I find Microsoft Office is better on the Mac and one of my creative mainstays, Adobe Flash, is better on a PC. On a Mac it runs slower and is more processor hungry. Annoying but true.

But here is the thing. I'm glad Microsoft has the market dominance. I can't help but feel that if Apple had the same domination that Microsoft has they would be a lot more ruthless - to the detriment of the consumer. When Apple had market dominance way back in the late 80s and early 90s, the computers were astoundingly expensive. Bill Gates wanted to licence the Mac OS but was told where to go, so he made Windows. Apple responded to the new threat with arrogance and didn't work on giving people a better deal with Windows machines running at thousands of pounds cheaper than the Macs of the time. By the time Apple realised what they had done Microsoft had stormed ahead to where it's the system the majority of you are using now. Similarly, Quark was once the dominant force in publishing software, but has now been supplanted by Adobe InDesign because Quark didn't listen to it's consumers or understand the threat from the competition. Apple lost out for the same reason.

As far as figureheads go, I think Steve Jobs is an influential and charismatic leader as well as a great company figurehead, but I think Bill Gates comes across as a nicer - if geekier - bloke. I know he's been replaced by Steve Balmer as the head of the company, but I think most people still see him as the lead guy. I think the charitable trust he and his wife set up is great and his general ethos on the staggering wealth he has is a good one. I tend to imagine Steve Jobs may well sleep in a coffin, albeit a very nicely designed one.

Comment by all means but please don't prove the point of the article. Save the Mac and PC flaming for Engadget. Don't forget, even if you hate the other operating system to the one you use, the fact it exists means there is competition that will push forward the development on your favoured system. Consumers benefit and lower blood pressure all round.

Yes, I know Unix and Linux are players in the market too, but it's going to be an online OS we are all going to end up using in the future anyway. The Google ramraiding will continue.

Don't get me wrong, I love using my Mac and don't want to change operating systems. I just think some of the Apple users out there need to have a little more perspective about their beloved Apple, and to just chill out a bit. We should be more relaxed, we are running the better system after all. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?

Mobile Broadband: Seems too good to be true. Isn’t.

My curiosity piqued by the aggressive advertising for ‘wireless broadband on the move’ offerings, I thought it might be a worthwhile experiment to test one of the current solutions for peripatetic surfers.

I took Vodafone’s new 019 mobile broadband USB stick on a road trip and surfed for all I was worth. The press release promises up to 7.2Mbps downstream and 1.44Mbps upstream connections. Those speeds are respectively fourteen and twenty-two times faster than the original 3G service launched all those years ago in 2004.

Precise speeds rarely reached those levels, but the performance certainly compared favourably with the 512mbps connection that seemed good enough for us all just a few years ago.  Passing through some cells caused the performance to degrade noticeably, but I never managed to make it die, despite downloading a song from iTunes while driving down the motorway at 50mph, and taking a look at Google Maps while I was ankle deep in the North Sea.

Installation was entirely painless on either Mac or PC, with a dual-format CD configuring the 'dial up' connection entirely automatically. Even in the age of mobile phones and wireless networks there's still something extraordinary about being connected to the web while you're in a rowing boat.

If you’re paying more than £15 a month for your current broadband service - maybe because you never got round to changing suppliers during the 2006 Broadband Price War - and you’re a casual surfer rather than a multimedia addict,  Vodafone’s solution may be a much more practical solution than it might at first appear.

Unimpressed by the BBC iPlayer on the Wii

Nintendo and the BBC last week sent out press releases and made a big deal in their respective news items out of the fact you can now view the BBC iPlayer on the Wii. Am I the only person who was left distinctly unimpressed?

The nice thing about using the Wii is that it has Wii Channels that allow you to read current news, see the weather, shop for downloadable games and browse the internet in nicely skinned custom channels, optimised to work as best they can on your TV.

The new iPlayer access talked about is not a custom channel. The new exciting access just means you can browse to the BBC iPlayer web page and play the content through the Wii Opera powered web browser. This is exactly the same as you can when using a PC or Mac online but on a browser that doesn't give you the resolution of a monitor - not what I would call an exciting development. To view a show, you have to type in the URL using point and click for each letter with the Wiimote, drag the window around to get the actual player in the centre of your screen and then try to zoom in and out to get the player to fill the viewable area.

It's a very long way from a simple solution. According to Mr Huggers, the group controller at the BBC’s future media and technology division, both Xbox and Playstation won't be getting the iPlayer as they wanted to skin it to fit within their custom look, which is why only the Wii has it. A publicly funded company can't have its player commercialised. It's also the reason the implementation is so weak. If the news stories and press releases hadn't been so generally over hyped, I might have thought being able to watch the last 7 days of BBC TV on my Wii was okay, but there in lies the problem. Nobody likes a show off, especially when it's the equivalent of a 15 year old showing how well he can juggle to his peers. No matter how good you are, your skills won't be appreciated and you are rightly going to get bundled.

One skill that Nintendo are justifiably boasting about, however, is the release of a fantastic new game. If you own a Wii, you should get your coat on and head to the nearest game shop and buy Mario Kart for the Wii as soon as you can.

I have previously expressed my concern that the new Mario Kart would be another weaker offering in the series, as the Gamecube version was. How wrong I was. There are now motorbikes which I think may well be my favourite vehicle as well as the option of racing against 11 other people online.

The online racing really brings the game into its own. If you have ever played any of the previous Mario Kart games with friends you will be aware of the technique of getting a red shell (the homing missile) and waiting until the last moments of the last lap before taking out the lead kart to win the race. when you have 11 other people doing this, being in first place on the last lap will mean you are hammered with 15 or so of the red menaces.

This makes the multiplayer game both frustrating and loads of fun. You can finish 2nd in one race and 12th in the next. It really does makes the game. For all of you UK folk, we unusually got Mario Kart before the US. Time for us to hone our skills and bring on the shells when our US cousins finally get their release in a couple of weeks. And because there is no microphone option on the Wii, it also means you won't regularly be called a mother f***** by the 12 year olds online too. Which is nice.