Via cafeconleche a quote from Robert Cringley, "Bill Gates used to worry about Microsoft losing its monopoly overnight because of a technical mistake. We all laughed. We laughed because Microsoft had such financial and sales clout and had the executive suite of nearly every customer company so snowed that they seemed unassailable. But on some level Gates was correct and we've seen that proved by Google."

Which is a pretty lazy analogy. Microsoft still has its operating system monopoly. For all of Apple's success it has made very little inroads into the operating system market. Firefox is an outstanding product but it is no more than 20% of traffic on most sites.

Microsoft is still an operating system and office productivity behemoth. The only thing Google and Microsoft have in common is that they are big tech companies; but they are not in the same market. Google is an advertising reseller, while Microsoft actually sells bundled code into products. They are two different markets.

Microsoft has been trying to get into the search market with Yahoo!, but even there, it is more like Microsoft is buying Time-Warner as Yahoo! is a massive media company, not a search one.

Because Google got big so quickly it has gathered all sorts of mythical attributes in modern media. It was an innovative company, it re-created what we expect from search engines, but also managed to sustain that search functionality through a well executive advertising business model.

Then again mythos sells, in the same way that sensationalism and drama does. Lazy analogies will consistently be the domain of the writer who has to appeal to a mass audience.

What a rubbish operating system Vista is. This machine is constantly doing a run on the hard drive. I do not know why but the whole time I am using it response times are slow as the hard drive is being slammed. I have tried to remove the causes, but to no avail. This is why we never use it and choose the Macbook over it every-time. This desktop was for my business and due to having to do some windows development it was the only reason I bought this waste of money. I am sure many people love their Windows machines but I don't have the patience anymore to hunt down all the crap or to tune it so that it isn't crap. There is a reason my personal computer is a Macbook and that I develop on a Mac Pro at work. They are best of breed at the moment.

They sent me a bill for $193.24 again. So now I have to ring up and yell at them again. I canceled their service over six months ago now, but they never bothered to turn it off. So they keep sending me bills for it. I don't see why I should be financially culpable for their ineptitude.

This is the third time they have sent me this bill and each time I ring up and explain why their billing system fails it, and each time they tell me they will take care of it, and each time I get a new bill a couple of months later.

Fail.

Seriously. I know the US has county based telecommunication monopolies but if you can avoid Qwest and their billing system - do so. Qwest sucks.

A site that isn't really that important - i had forgotten my username and password it was that unimportant to me - asked these questions when I wanted to recover my password. I answered and clicked confirm; this was what came back.

Whoever thought up this extraneous step should be admonished, whoever did the implementation that fails when you put in the right answer, is probably in the perfect industry as a software developer.

Double awesome; eclipse crashed.

Apparently I have been with Liberty Mutual since the 1990s. I know I have had my car with them for a long while. Since I changed cars recently I contacted Liberty Mutual and noticed my details were way out of date. According to their website I was divorced, etc etc.

So I rang my agent and updated that information. I was told it would drop my monthly insurance bills but that didn't happen and when I added the new car it went up even further.

I contacted the company my wife is with and my insurance costs went down by 50%. So I switched over. I tried to cancel through the Liberty Mutual website but as this screen grab says, I can only remove the policy from being managed through the website, not cancel. How completely useless.

I know why they do it; it is so a phone operator can attempt a save over the phone and get another quote from an agent because I am forced to ring them to cancel.

I am not sure why the insurance industry is structured like it is. I don't care about who is my agent and who isn't. When I deal with the insurance company I don't care who handles my requests, but the insurance companies are adamant that you must talk to the 'specified' agent assigned to you or it is the end of the world.

I am not sure if it is regulation, some internal de-facto mechanism that is across all companies or just an out-dated and out-moded way of doing things. I don't care, I just want to know if I am covered or not. In my eyes I am dealing with the company not an agent.

There has been a lot of commentary around about the Gawker, Gizmode, Lifehacker redesigns. This is what lifehacker looks like at work under the policies that are intended to keep any vulnerabilities out. Lifehacker is in my rss feed, as is jalopnik, but I don't read them as they pump out too many articles and effectively spam the feed.

I have found if a website pumps out too many articles and I get behind in the rss reader, I tend to ignore it. That means most of the magazine linkbait type sites like jalopnik, dezeen, kicking tires, arch daily, cool hunting, design milk, tree hugger, inhabitat etc etc don't get read.

From here; "The woman later broke off her correspondence with Lee after she did an online search for him and determined that he had lied about his age and his job."

Such are the perils of dating through craigslist, okcupid or facebook; the guy flashing you skin might not be Mr Average Surbabanite and instead be an NFL Quarterback or Representative in Congress.