The Insane Ramblings of Wonko The Sane

Yahoo has rejected a takeover offer of $41bn (nearly £21bn) from Micro$oft saying that it undervalued the company!

Shares in Yahoo closed at $19.18 (about £10) on the 1st February when Micro$oft made their offer and the $41bn offer would have been worth $31 (about £15) per share.  Amazingly, the Wall Street Journal reckons that Yahoo won't accept less than $40 per share and that Micro$oft will probably pay it.

A combined MSN/Yahoo will put Google back in the position of plucky underdog which can only be a good thing because they've been turning corporate lately.  But increasing the dominance of Micro$oft is generally a bad thing for the consumer and, of course, merging MSN and Yahoo reduces consumer choice.

Micro$oft reckons that by merging with Yahoo it can offer a better and cheaper service but Google already offers a better search engine and better free web applications than Yahoo and Micro$oft for nothing.  As painful as it is to admit it, Micro$oft is good at writing software.  Ok, it tends to be bloated and full of features that are useless to most people, not to mention incredibly expensive, but technology would be nowhere near where it is today if it wasn't for Micro$oft.  They now need to move away from the desktop and look at ways of better supporting remote working but for that they need the communications industry to "grow up".  Micro$oft are approaching the challenge the wrong way - at this stage they would be better off investing their $40bn in the communications industry to develop the technology that will allow them to deliver their bloated applications into the home over residential internet connections than investing in a company attempting (and failing) to create a market for online content that only a relatively small percentage of the population can fully benefit from.

Federal Europe is launching yet another investigation into Micro$oft 3 months after concluding their last investigation which resulted in a €500m fine.

The first investigation was into allegations that Micro$oft was shutting out rivals in order to dominate the web market.  They were found guilty in October 2004 and launched an unsuccesful appeal which ended in October 2007.  This latest investigation is into interoperability with rival applications and has been requested by Opera, which is based in Norway, and a European software developers group.

I don't like the way Micro$oft does business.  I don't like the way they price their products out of reach of most people then impose restrictive measures on their software to try and stop people from pirating their software.  However, this is a step too far.  No other company is subjected to this kind of treatment.  No other company would be forced to hand over its trade secrets to its rivals.

I thought Box.Net would help me keep up to date with backups but it hasn't worked like that, partly because I never get round to doing it.  Problem now solved, though, by your-data.  The backups are made via an SSL connection to a server in the UK and backups can be scheduled on your PC to happen automatically.  The standard package is £10pm for 1GB of disk space but you can buy more if you need to.  There's also a server option aimed at SME's and uber-geeks.  The service is pitched at the UK market but they tell me that it will work anywhere in the world.  I've been using it for just over a week now and no problems.

Click here for their website.

I had an invite to Box.net yesterday from a friend so I went and had a look to see what it was all about.

Basically, it's an online storage type thing with 1gb of free space similar to Flickr but not restricted to pictures.  I used to use something similar a long time ago which disappeared off the web back in the 90's.

There's an upgraded version with extra features and a 5gb limit which is $5 a month.

The free version gives you 1gb of space, drag & drop and public/private files.  You can't deep link files using the free version but you can share them with a url which will serve a page with a thumbnail link.

Anyone can register for Box.net and there is an affiliate-type scheme where you can get a free upgrade by referring 5 people to their service.

A division of Lucent reckons they'll have a 300Gb "holodisc" on sale this year.

The name "holodisc" isn't really accurate but in a nutshell, this is how it works:

On a normal disc (CD or DVD), the data is burnt as a series of pits in the surface of the disc representing 1's and 0's.  On the new "holodisc", the data is written at various levels inside the disc itself.  A CD or DVD drive can only write one layer of the disc but the new drives will feature lasers that can vary their angle and intensity allowing them to write at multiple levels within the disc.  It doesn't burn through the other layers because it combines multiple lasers with beams too weak to burn the disc but where the two beams meet, that point is sufficiently strong enough to burn to the disc.

No idea of the costs but ... 300Gb on a CD-type disc?  That's pretty impressive.

Miscrosoft has successfully sued Opt In Real Big, one of the worlds most prolific spammers, for $7m (£3.9).

Microsoft estimated that Opt In Real Big was sending up to 30 million spam emails a year.

They have pledged to spend the $7m on its anti-spam campaign.

Ok, so it's a bit lame but it's my first VB.NET application and I made it all by myself (with a little help from Ged's cSFX class to make it play a wav file).

The application is a simple stopwatch and alarm.  It's all self-explanatory, no instructions needed.

You can run it from here and download it from here.

I signed up to the Visual Studio .NET 2005 BETA at Microsoft a few weeks ago and they sent me a lovely DVD and some literature.  Not got round to installing it yet though.  I might get round to it this weekend.

As I'm still a .NET virgin, is starting with the current version of VB.NET I have now going to hold me back when 2005 becomes common place?

When I started blogging the occassional thing about politics I here didn't realise it would take over my blog in quite the way it has.  The intention was that this blog should be primarily a programming/computing blog so in an effort to put it back on track and give the other stuff a bit more relevance, I have set up a new blog for everything that's not to do with programming/computing/vbCity.

The new blog can be found at http://blog.wonkosworld.co.uk or http://www.wonkosworld.co.uk/blog/blogger.html (whichever you prefer).

If you have a link to Wonko's Rants on this blog then please update it to the new url.

I'm not abandoning this blog, I will continue to post here but from now on it will be focused on IT.

Seems like the Scottish Parliament is getting a bit too big for its boots and now intends to legislate on the licensing of air-guns, something that falls within the remit of the UK government, not the Scottish Parliament.

There is a process in place called a Sewell Motion where the UK government legislates on behalf of Scotland on matters the Scottish government has no authority over.  However, with this proposal the Scots have said that they will go it alone if the UK government doesn't support it.  The UK government, of course, immediately caved in to the Scottish demands and the Home Office have given their approval to the Scottish Parliament making a law that they have no authority to make.

France, along with a lot of other EU leaders, are calling for the UK to waive its subsidy on EU contributions.  Currently, the UK pays £5bn a year in contributions and then receives a subsidy of around £3bn.  This means we pay around £2bn per year in contributions to the EU.  On the other hand, France - with it's larger country and population - pays only £1bn after subsidies.  Even Slovakia pays more than France.

At the current rate, I think we are better off in the EU because we would almost certainly lose more than £2bn worth of trade by leaving the EU.  If we lose the subsidy we may as well not be in the EU.

All this led me to do some maths on the figures that the anti-EU camp bandy around - UKIP in particular.  Their election leaflet for the South Staffs election gives two figures for the saving we would make from leaving the EU.  The first figuer is £39m per day and the other is £30m per day.  I can't seem to get anywhere near this figure.

Annual contribution: £5,000,000,000
Divide it by 365 gives you:
£13,698,630 per day

Take into account susidies of £3bn per year:
Annual contribution: £2,000,000,000
Divide it by 365 gives you:
£5,479,452 per day

So where do the figures of £39m per day and £30m per day come from?  These figures of £13.7m and £5.5m per day that I got don't include any of the benefits of free trade agreements, preferential trade agreements, tax and duty benefits, etc.

Can any eurosceptic please explain to me how the UK leaving the EU will save the country £39m or £30m per day?

Thanks.