• The Cost of E-Voting – One of the many reasons that I am against e-voting machines: the cost. “The cost … increased 179 percent per voter on average.” All that money for a less reliable system. Bargain!
• Change we can believe in – I didn’t realise that we were in line for some new coins. They look surprisingly good, certainly much better than the new US notes. (Originally from daringfireball.net)
• Bali bombings: A sister’s search for justice – I’ve always said that it’s much easier to be against capital punishment when it’s just an abstract idea. Here the sister of one of the Bali bombing’s victims argues why she’s still against it.

Daniel Jalkut in his recent blog discusses a generally positive review of a useful Mac utility that closes with the suggestion that it “should be free.” The crux of his piece seems to be:

In short, if the product were free as in charity, would the product even exist, and be good enough to mention on MacBreak Weekly, where Leo could wish that it was free?

People have different motivations for making good software¹ but I think it’s fair to say that the most polished software usually has some form of income stream, whether that’s a licence fee, banner adverts or something less direct.

• Everything you ever wanted to know about “Rickrolling”… – The man who sang “Never gonna give you up,” the classic Stock-Aitken-Waterman pop song, makes an unexpected come back. (What’s wrong with Debbie Gibson by the way?!)
• Lies and Statistics – Most people in Britain believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Or do they…?
• Our Bad. Wired Had Some Tips For Apple — We Were Wrong. – Fascinating to see how much things have changed in the last ten years.

• The Best of Technology Writing 2007 – I just finished reading this book myself yesterday. I was considering writing a review but Ars got there first and said it better than I would have done!
• Protests in Tibet erupt into violence – Violence is never a good thing, but the Olympics is undoubtedly a good time to try to raise the profile of the plight of the Tibetan people.
• Open Rights Group questions Phorm – Good to see TalkTalk, BT and Virgin Media’s abuse of their own customers getting more press.

This is the second of a two-part article about YoPhoto’s photo book printing service. Previously I wrote about the authoring software and the ordering experience. Here I will go into more detail about the finished product.

I placed the order on Saturday 8th March. The dispatch notice arrived at lunchtime on Tuesday 11th and the book arrived on the next day. After waiting two weeks for some of the previous photo books it is refreshing to have this one in my hands less than three working days after placing the order.

• Dear ISP, I am not a target market – “Some things should just not be for sale, no matter what assurances are on offer or who they come from. Regardless of how the data is acquired and processed, and despite the powerful ISP friends Phorm has made since the PeopleOnPage days, spyware is spywa
• Happy now, bitches? – A fair and balanced analysis of yesterdays announcement of the iPhone software developer kit and “enterprise” functionality.
• Polls say 88% want EU referendum – About a year ago the Daily Mail (I think) published a poll saying pretty much the same thing. But they also asked “Do you understand the Libson treaty?” and about the same percentage of people said “No.” (Can anyone find a link?) Is democracy best served

One thing I noted when I first reviewed photo books back in 2006 was that most vendors were based overseas, resulting in quick printing times but a protracted and expensive delivery process. This was true of Apple (both times), MyPublisher and Printing-1. The one company that I tried that were UK based, PhotoBox, was let down by its browser-based interface that was less flexible that the native applications of the other vendors.

I was therefore quite intrigued when YoPhoto asked me to take a look at their brand of photo book as they seemed to offer the best of both worlds.

One of the big technology debates in the US goes by the thrilling title of “Net Neutrality.” In the UK we seem to have skipped this part of the debate and moved on to the next, all without many consumers even knowing that anything has changed. As we’ll see, this does not work out well for many end-users and exposes hypocrisy and dishonesty on the part of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

• Why the Kibibyte is freaking me out – From the “well you learn something new every day” category. Apparently a kilobytes probably isn’t what you think it is…
• Earthquake hits much of England – We actually felt this here in London, although in my half-asleep, half-awake doze I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was real or a dream!
• Danish wind turbine eats itself – To all those that said that wind power was safe…

So Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo. I’ll leave the detailed analysis to people better qualified than myself but I thought that I could add a little perspective simply by looking back and remembering something that happened less than ten years ago.

As you can no doubt guess from the title, the event that springs to my mind is the merger of HP and Compaq. The main problem with HPaq at the time was that merging HP’s loss-making PC business with Compaq’s loss-making PC business just wasn’t a good idea. Fiorina pushed the whole MBA line of thinking: being the biggest player will allow greater economies of scale, lower prices and more profit. Unfortunately, two big losses merged tends to make a big loss also, albeit perhaps smaller than the old combined total¹.