Microsoft

I often use Tesco's self service tills when there as the queues are generally smaller. Perhaps the reason they're smaller is that the Microsoft kiosk systems that run them are badly implemented with obvious flaws in workflow. They've had an upgrade and went even further downhill. Well done Microsoft; only you can be relied on to fuck up consistently and get away with it.

Is there a point where an employee stating on their CV that they worked for one corporation should make them toxic and unemployable by another? Perhaps not at the lower range, but in the higher management positions, and with some corporations it should. The point is, when someone leaves company A to work for company B, can you be assured they've actually left company A?

The whole Gnome 3 / Unity thing has got me wondering if we're losing something we used to tout as a feature, a reason to free users from Windows; the freedom to change at your own pace and not have to retrain every time. When Gnome 2 becomes end of life, every distro will have to choose a new path. This post is aimed more at small companies, charities etc rather than home users but the principle does still apply. Lets step back a few years and put in a hypothetical example.

I've heard a lot of good things about OpenSuSE 11.4 since it's release so I thought I'd give it a go. I decided to try both the live KDE and live Gnome CDs as live sessions and was very impressed with both. Before I delve into this I'll get the "conflict of interest" thing out of the way. I have been a long time XFCE (GTK) / Debian (Ubuntu / Mint) based (Apt / Synaptic .deb etc) user. I also don't like the whole Microsoft / Novell / Mono thing. So let's begin.

I've had some thoughts after reading an article about a Microsoft Store. The great innovators in chief over at Redmond have struck upon a brilliantly original concept of having brick and mortar stores to sell directly to the public, just don't tell Apple, they might follow suit. Seriously, do they do anything original these days?