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Death to Word

Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper.

New For Internet Explorer 10: Compat Inspector

Back in 2011, Microsoft has revealed a Compact Inspector feature for Internet Explorer 9, which allows web developers to quickly notice the IE’s platform changes and tweak sites accordingly.

Now, with the new Metro UI overtaking pretty much everything, the software giant has revealed a tweaked version specifically for IE10 and as you might have guessed, it does use Metro tiles.

Microsoft Loses Grip On UK Small Business Market

According to an Accredited Supplier poll, Microsoft is losing their grip on the UK small business market under increasing pressure from cloud computing and open source software. Accredited Suppliers poll of 1400 Microsoft customers, all small businesses in the UK, has raised concerns over Microsofts future in this market segment.

Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?

Still, bad though it is, I vaguely prefer the clumping, clueless, uncool, crappiness of Microsoft’s bland Stepford gang to the creepy assurance of the average Mac evangelist. At least the grinning dildos in the Windows video are fictional, whereas eerie replicant Mac monks really are everywhere, standing over your shoulder in their charcoal pullovers, smirking with amusement at your hopelessly inferior OS, knowing they’re better than you because they use Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard. I don’t care if you’re right. I just want you to die.

Acer’s Linpus Linux Lite ultra-portable laptop piles the pressure on Microsoft

Given the specification (Intel atom N270 chip, 8.9 inch screen, webcam, 1024 x 600 resolution, 8GB SSD, three USB ports, VGA, and two SD card slots, two mini PCI slots (one for the WiFi and one for upcoming Wimax or HSDPA), Ethernet port, touchpad, 802.11b/g WiFi and a default 512MB of memory with a spare slot to add more) the Aspire One represents stonking good value for money. This is a seriously useful piece of kit and Acer are not hiding their light under a bushel either.

Linux-Windows Single Sign-On

I am an advocate of centralized identity management and I think Active Directory makes a great repository for user account information. Interoperability can be a challenge, though. For example, you may work in a mixed environment of Linux/Unix and Windows and want users to take advantage of their Windows accounts when logging on at a Linux/Unix machine. This provides single sign-on for users who otherwise would need to maintain two different sets of passwords.