"If you’ve ever offered technical support to other computer users, you might find yourself losing a slice of your sanity over their inability to describe the problem clearly. And most times it’s not the fault of the user, it’s just difficult to describe what you see with words. A feature new to Windows 7, called “Problem Steps Recorder” looks to be the missing tool for documenting where it all goes wrong."

This is pretty useful - and even machine-parseable. Could make for some much-improved support experiences.

"When the companies entered into their partnership in 2001, Sony, Toshiba and IBM committed themselves to spending $400 million over five years to design the Cell... In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip... Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony... So Microsoft actually got the chip that Sony helped design before Sony did."

"The OSC (Open Source Consortium) has started a complaint with the BBC's Fair Trading Unit claiming that the BBC are advertising a Microsoft product that "does not even yet exist." Obviously the OSC didn't attend Microsoft's recent PDC to pick-up their copy of Windows 7 that clearly exists."

WTF, seriously. Fair enough, you dislike BBC because their iPlayer is not Linux compatible. Fair complaint. But this doesn't even make sense. What exactly have BBC done wrong?

"If you really step back and look at it, despite all of the amazing things people are doing inside of the browser, real, ground-level innovation just isn’t happening unless it comes from companies like Adobe or Microsoft... I’m not trying to disparage the open web. I think if the open web could move at the speed of a private company, we’d all be better off."

The standards vs. proprietary debate has popped up again (see the linked post as well). I think they're complementary really, another tool in the toolbox. It would be interesting to see the adoption rates of languages other than Javascript in Silverlight. I wonder why no one just creates an IE plugin to cater for its shortcomings - is that possible?

"Team SOAK (Smart Operational Agriculture Kit) from Australia have been announced as the winners of the 2008 Imagine Cup!!! This is simply an amazing achievement, SOAK members Long Zheng, David Burela, Ed Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya have all come together from different Universities across Australia to create and complete their fantastic project, SOAK ."

Awesome work guys!

"A group of Australian University students, including one of Australia’s most well-known technology bloggers, has progressed to the finals of the Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup software development competition in Paris. Students David Burela, Long Zheng, Edward Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya, collectively called Team SOAK, showcased a solution that helps farmers moderate the use of water on their crops."

Pretty cool... all the best guys!

"They are systematic symptoms of a deeper wrong which most people don't recognise: proprietary software. Microsoft's software is distributed under licenses that keep users divided and helpless. The users are divided because they are forbidden to share copies with anyone else. The users are helpless because they don't have the source code that programmers can read and change."

Surprisingly reasonable, but there still isn't an particularly viable alternative business model. Support puts the focus in the wrong place, as do services often. Why is software different anyway; do we expect Coke to provide their recipe publically? Maybe our economic system is the issue...

"Microsoft announced on Wednesday it will support ODF version 1.1 in the release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2), scheduled for the first half of 2009. The company will also support PDF and XPS in Office 2007 SP2. OOXML is partially supported in the current version of Microsoft's office productivity suite and, according to Microsoft's announcement, will not be fully supported in Office until the release of "Office 14", which as yet has no confirmed release date."

Yet to be see how well it'll support ODF and keep supporting ODF, but definitely a step in the right direction.

"According to an email sent last February by Microsoft general manager John Kalkman, the software giant lowered Windows Vista's minimum hardware requirements to ridiculous levels only because Intel needed to sell more graphics chipsets... "In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded," John Kalkman wrote to Scott Di Valerio, who oversaw Microsoft's dealings with PC partners."

Pretty explosive allegations if they're true, although Microsoft will still take the fall, just that now they'll drag someone down with them.