There's a joke in here somewhere ;-)

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/266965

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/04/2120206&from=rss

We may lose the odd battle, but we'll still win the war ;-)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/16/iso_rejects_ooxml_appeal/

Not so long ago Windows 98 had it's 10th Birthday. PC-Pitstop, to celebrate this, ran a benchmark across the three major releases of Microsoft operating systems since the release of Windows 98, namely - 98, XP and Vista. The results weren't really all to surprising... or were they? What's not surprising is how Microsoft have stopped allowing manufacturers to supply OEM versions or any versions for that matter of Windows XP. Perhaps this is because the only way you can get children to eat vegetables is to give them no other choice? This particular vegetable is totally average.

http://techtalk.pcpitstop.com/2008/04/03/windows-98-turns-70-in-dog-years/

Sitting in an IT usergroup meeting at work this morning, a curious and worrisome fact came to light.

Microsoft do something called Volume Licensing for large businesses. You sign a repulsively large chunk of cash away to them, along with your mortal soul and whatever else they hide in the fine print, and they give you all the software and support you need for some period of time. This is generally a soup-to-nuts deal, covering everything you could possibly want from server OSes and big powerful business management tools down to Outlook and MS Office for Joe Bloggs the user. Getting yourself hooked on the MS teat this way is obviously dangerous and short-sighted, but many companies (including, regrettably, my own) love this sort of one-stop-shop for their IT needs.

What I discovered today after much wheedling is that our IT department's VL contract payments work on the basis of "number of computers on the site". Read that again. Not "every Windows install". Not "every Microsoft product in use". Every single machine!

This raises the rather ludicrous spectre of our IT dept having to pay Microsoft for all the computers that I use... even though they all run Linux.

Yes, we quite like our open source here ;-)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/27/ooxml_sabs_iso_complaint/

Interesting. Let's see if they deliver though.

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Software/3876.html