Category Archives: In the News

Tech news and opinions

Windows 7 market share nearly doubles in a month, Vista and XP falls

Leave a Reply

Windows 7 appears to be doing quite nicely at the moment. According the HitsLink, the Windows 7 market share nearly doubled in November. It went from 2.15% in October to 4.00% in November.

In addition, Vista and XP are beginning to loose their market share. Vista’s market share has fallen from 18.83% in October to 18.55% in November and XP’s has fallen from 70.48% in October to 69.05% in November.

This definitely shows that Windows 7 is pulling people over from older versions.

I have to say I think this is a bit of a fluke. Microsoft’s advertising campaign in the UK has been pretty awful – this “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea” junk.

Oh well, I suppose I should be glad that people are finally moving away from XP – but there’s clearly a long way to go…

Office 2010 confirmed for June next year…

Leave a Reply

Microsoft today confirmed to Ars Technica that Office 2010 is expected to be in general availability by June 2010, after a beta tester apparently reported similar information.

The good news to that is that we should hopefully have 6 months of beta testing! Awesome.

However, don’t get too excited. OK, Windows 7 did actually launch on time, but Vista and Office 2007 were severely delayed. Microsoft aren’t brilliant at meeting deadlines, lets face it!

Oh well. GEEK! will keep you posted if any other news crops up, but for now lets hope that Office 2010 is worth it. Personally, I am yet to see anything that makes Office 2010 worth upgrading from 2007 (or 2003 for that matter). It still uses the annoying DOCX format unless you specifically tell it not to use it – but that removes some features from Word.

If you haven’t got your hands on the Office 2010 beta, you can grab a copy here.

We could be at the end of the free public wi-fi era… already

1 Reply

I was reading on the news site ISPReview today that we could well be at the end of our free wi-fi era already. The reason is that the government’s Digital Economy Bill would appear to suggest that wi-fi holders are to be held fully responsible for any data transferred across their internet connection.

Basically, this means that if you are in a pub using free wi-fi and you download an illegal MP3 from a site you are putting that pub owner at full responsibility for that download and is at risk for a hefty fine for allowing illegal downloads.

It was in the news that a pub owner has been fined £8,000 for an unknown customer downloading illegal files.

So this could signify the end of free wi-fi. Companies can’t afford to give out free internet if they risk being fined for something they didn’t do.

It’s a shame really, but I think it’s silly that business owners are put in responsibility for crimes they haven’t committed.

Mininova torrent site tracked down and destroyed!

1 Reply

Mininova, one of the biggest file sharing torrent sites, has recently been broken down by various legal agencies.

Following a court procedure, the owners of the Mininova website have been ordered to take down all trackers that are related to any copyrighted content or face a multi million euro fine.

Mininova has followed this procedure and has removed all illegal content. Just to make sure, I did a search through their site for various CDs to see if the rumours were really true. They are. Everything is gone, and the admins of Mininova say it is now a “content distribution” service.

If you want my honest opinion, this is a good day for many companies and vendors. This will have eaten into a large proportion of file sharing piracy, which is great, because I have always been against it. I find it really depressing that people don’t want to support the artists that make their music.

Anyway let’s not go onto a miserable topic about P2P and illegal file sharing…

Hopefully this is the start of the future. I really hope that eventually we can minimize piracy because it’s an awful thing. It’s exactly the same as shoplifting – and would you have the courage to do that?

Sadly, I don’t think piracy can ever be truly stopped, but the more we can close down on it, the better.

Spotify for Symbian out and available

Leave a Reply

Yes folks, you are reading that right. If you are in possession of a Symbian mobile phone, you’ll be delighted to know that Spotify today launched Spotify for Symbian.

You’ll of course need a Spotify Premium subscription costing £9.99 per month, but I promise you it is well worth the money.

Sadly, I don’t have a Symbian phone so I wont be testing the new software anytime soon. However, if you have a Symbian phone, head straight over to m.spotify.com and you’ll be redirected to the right download. If you aren’t sure whether you have a Symbian phone or not, you can use that link anyway and the site will let you know whether you’re good to go or not.

This is good news for Spotify as the new release hugely broadens the market that Spotify can get to and will hopefully help the company to persuade more people onto their premium plan.