Charles on… anything that comes along

This week in The Independent I’m mulling over the renaming of Longhorn to Vista, and more importantly the question of who will buy Vista? Consumers hang on to their machines for about four years, and generally don’t update their OS. Windows XP is only now achieving two-thirds penetration (going by the stats at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp - scroll down, pausing only to gape at the stats for Firefox, but noting that the visitors to the site aren’t representative of the Web as a whole). Businesses are only gradually moving to XP. That’s four years after XP launched.

Plus there’s the thorny question of quite what Vista will do that XP doesn’t. It all adds up to a big questionmark. But of course, there’s a long way to go.

(One editing slip is that it suggests that Microsoft’s naming video “tells us that “using Vista will, at last, enable you to: sit in front of a computer, show someone your tablet PC, show someone else your mobile phone, get into cars while carrying a laptop and walk through sun-soaked rooms with highly polished floors, even while being buffeted by pulses of multicoloured light.” Actually, that was Joe Fay at The Register’s take on it. Mm, pulses of multicoloured light…)

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Ah, great. You wake up and find another considered headline from the Daily Express. Isn’t life grand?

One wonders too why they held themselves back at that - surely they’d have preferred to have had the headline the other way round…

Also, when they say “asylum seekers” I think what they actually want to say is “illegal immigrants” because the latter is, um, illegal while the former are legal. But “asylum seekers” fits two decks in 72pt much neater than “illegal immigrants”. 6 units + 7 units vs 5 units and 10 units, for those who know how to do unit counts for headlines. (Every lower-case letter is 1 unit, except m which is 1.5, and i & l which are 0.5. Capitals are 1.5.)

And isn’t it enough to say “bombers are bombers”? Isn’t that far enough beyond the pale? Oh, no, because the Express isn’t as interested in getting rid of bombers as it is in getting rid of asyl… illegal immigrants.

(Oh, I took the picture in the newsagent. No way I’m going to pay for stuff like that.)

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