You may think of Wal-Mart as a down-market PC seller, but as emails in the Vista "junk PC" case show, Wal-Mart was furious at Microsoft's Vista Capable scheme, and thought that Vista Home Basic never should have been developed, much less released. They're not alone. Other retailers, notably Office Depot, thought Vista Home Basic should have been killed. Here's all the dirt, including emails.

Open sourcing Windows is more hassle than it's worth and Microsoft sees little gain in releasing code, according to the man leading Microsoft's server marketing and platform strategy.

Here begins the lesson on Embrace, Extend and Extinguish (EEE). Classically, this technique is used to perpetuate vendor lock-in by introducing small incompatibilities into a standard interface, in order to prevent effective interoperability, or (shudder) even substitutability of competing products based on that interface. This EEE strategy has worked well so far for Microsoft, with the web browser, with Java, with Kerberos, etc. It is interesting to note that this technique can work equally well with Microsoft's own standards, like OOXML.

Have you tried Vista and wound up with one of the many horror stories? Tech website DVICE wants to hear your story. They're even willing to put up a prize for the best Vista horror tale: a new 2 GB Toshiba Gigabeat MP3 player. Just head over to DVICE.com and post your story in their comments section by 5pm Friday. The best story wins the prize.

The developer program is turning out to be bunch of hype for something stupid. The restrictions on what your application is allowed to do is total, laugh-out-loud, crap.

I was initially excited about the SDK and developer program for the iPhone. I was willing to live with Apple being only distributor of Apps and getting a cut of the profits. I was willing to live with an entrance criteria to get into the App Store.

After all this time, all these spams, all the complaints from all over the globe, I can only come to one conclusion: Microsoft is trying to kill email...Microsoft is simply deleting legitimate emails. Why would I bother using such a service? It's like buying a car that will only start once in awhile, or a refrigerator that keeps the soda cold, but lets the milk go bad. It's useless.

"...sarkozy has managed to outrage the French public yet again, this time by hiring a 24 year-old “cyber spin doctor” to monitor the Internet for slurs on the President..." -- AFP: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5inXOLbqugHM-2bvCt8h6VP_JtsbA