Gary Gale

Two ways to make money. The first, find a stray rabbit and ransom it on the net; give me $50,000.000 or I eat the rabbit. If you've got any spare cash then Toby's owner would love to hear from you.

The second way is software licenses. Windows licenses to be exact. Microsoft has finally started to come clean on its strategy of licensing Windows. Which you can read about in all of its patronising glory here. Or you can read another version of the same information here. Which would be funny if it wasn't so damn accurate.

The bottom line is, want to run Windows cough up your cash. Cough it up quickly in a large sum or more slowly in smaller sums, it's all the same. Time to start thinking about making a business case for Linux or BSD.

Last week I suffered a major hardware failure. We're talking catastrophic failure here; a drive which does nothing but emit plaintive clicking noises and which won't even show up in the BIOS.

The drive which failed hosts this web site. Backup? Well, you're amongst the poor deluded few who actual read this, so yes there was a backup.

This is good.

I recently got my hands on a 3rd generation 15 Gb iPod, thanks to my wife buying me one as a birthday present. Not having access to a Mac (at the time; this has all changed since I wrote this post originally) meant it would have to be connected to a Windows box, which hasn't been an easy path to follow.

I wanted to try out the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), which meant installing and managing the iPod through iTunes, which is only available for the Mac or for Windows, which meant I was restricted on my choice of hardware, most of which runs some form of Linux or BSD distribution.

As far as Windows machines were concerned I had a choice of either a desktop machine, a Dell Dimension 8200, running Windows XP Professional SP1, with a 2.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor and 512 Mb of RAM or a laptop, a Dell Latitude D600, running Windows XP Professional SP1, with a 1.6 Mhz Intel Pentium processor and 512 Mb of RAM.

On the back cover of last weeks Guardian Guide magazine is an advert for the latest book by John Grisham. Now I don't have any particular axe to grind where Mr Grisham is concerned; he's not my favourite of authors nor is his legal thriller genre one which I read that much of.

My gripe here is with the advert itself which, to my mind, contains not one, but two oxymorons.