Charles on… anything that comes along

Nice report by Jo Best at silicon.com on how the UK government sexed down its report this week which admitted that this Linux stuff could be, well, OK for use in the public sector. From time to time. (The report is here.)

And how were the alterations made visible? By using the “Track Changes” function of .. Microsoft Word. First it shows who had their fingers on the Iraq dossier. Then it even catches out Microsoft itself.

Truly, those whom the gods would destroy, they first provide with the world’s most overspecified text editor.

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The Times is going tabloid across the UK from Monday - which is certain to mean a boost in sales for the Daily Telegraph. Compared to The Independent, which went fully compact (as we are pleased to call it) earlier this year, The Times has many more older readers; and its broadsheet definitely had more content than its tabloid.

That’s a key difference from The Indie’s tabl..compact version. It was a remarkable piece of alchemy, but the broadsheet Indie and its smaller sibling had precisely the same content. So you could be sure that if you couldn’t get one, you weren’t missing anything by getting the other. And the circulation has kept going up.

By contrast, The Times has a lot of people who like their broadsheet (my father being one) who I think will not be pleased by being forced to take the smaller one, which has never pulled off its design together; it still has an inelegant, knife-and-fork look. (This is not me knocking for the sake of rivalry; if I thought The TImesloid looked better, I would certainly say so.)

So I think on Monday the Daily Telegraph, still the most authoritative daily in terms of news coverage, will see a boost in sales that will bring smiles to the Barclay Brothers’ faces. No doubt they’re already ordering a larger print run.

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