A Crisis...

real or perceived is the only way to drive change. At the same time change meets resistance. How can one overcome this resistance? Apparently using one of the methods below.

Fragile...

No not the song, my laptop that is or to be more precise its operating system. Ubuntu. Yes it is a low end laptop, it came with Vista and it was not performing. Yes Vista have their imperfections and need 2GB RAM to work decent, copying file was a nightmare before the service pack BUT:

a) network cards (wifi) would not disaapear after upgrade (as it happened with ubuntu)

b) keyboard mappings would not messed up after some security upgrade (still not clear what exactly triggered this)

If I was not a young IT guy happy to tinker around, but in my 50s with a family, limited time would I have the luxury of spending 2-3 evenings (so far) to sort out the above? Let alone whatever else might come. Or would I get the 'consumer solution' and pay if /when needed 30-40 quid for tech support?

The answer is simple.User experience. It doesn't matter what is under the hood, what matter is the hood.And as long any tinkering under the hood (linux) breaks the seems of the hood, it will not be a consumer solution (except in limited cases like the asus eee)

The Giant on his knees...

from a user's perspective at least... I am talking about yesterday.First time ever that I have been unable to access Google. No email, no search, no Google documents. I did not spend much time into this, so I can't claim to have investigated the cause. In all likelihood it was related to something on my side of the ISP given that during the outage I could not get a DNS lookup for Google.

However unlike this
blog entry that suggests Google is down use Live Search instead, choice is a good things yada yada (something with which I fundamentally agree) the same can't be said for other services such as email or documents.

Perhaps Gears can help a bit with that or one could write a utility to mirror documents between Google docs and Zoho... Any volunteers?

Virtualisation... the only way

Visual Studio 2008:
Is not supported by SharePoint Solution Generator...
Is not supported by the compilation scripts for VirtualBox...

Having both 2005 and 2008 on the same machine is a nightmare at least...

Virtualisation, the only way (64bit and 8Gigs of RAM please)