Godaddy.com is a favorite or ours for purchasing domain names. They are buying two commercials during the Superbowl this weekend. You can also view an add rejected by Fox in the post Janet Jackson costume malfunction era. However, in order to view the commercial they require that you to enter a captcha, a random image that must match what you enter in a text field. That got me thinking, isn’t a captcha before download a great way to slow down the crawlers who use up bandwidth. What do you think? Leave a comment with your thoughts, but first satisfy our captcha.

I’ve seen many articles of late talking about how how PDA sales are dropping world wide, I’ve also seen articles talking about how high end phone sales are climbing at a dramatic rate. This really should be obvious to the big manufactures, but apparently it isn’t. The reason is simple, people do not want to walk around with a PDA strapped to one hip, and a Phone attached to the other, it’s simply not logical to expect people to do that. After years of missing the point, first PalmOne with their Treo PDA/phone systems, then came the O2 with XDA models but until very recently, none of the really big guys have realised that the market for PDA’s has actually increased, it is only the market for PDA’s without phone functionality that is dropping. So now we have HP finally coming to their senses and releasing iPaq PDA’s with phone functionality, before long I expect it will be a standard feature for all iPaq’s. Expect the rest of the big manufacturers to follow suite once this takes off.

Given the choice of PDA to have phone functionality added, I’d definitely go for the Sharp SL-6000L Linux PDA, because it is so far the most powerful impressive unit I’ve seen. I suspect that more work has to be done to make walking around talking into your PDA look less geeky. A friend of mine is the proud owner of an O2 XDA and he looks like he is talking into a flat silver brick. Expect to see some innovative new designs as manufacturers work on new ways to shrink the PDA’s without reducing the screen size and keyboard usability. My next phone will be one of these babies, probably from Panasonic, Motorola or NEC (or any of the other manufacturers that are using Linux on their phones.) It’s an exciting time to be a geek.

A new virus is out folks, it only affects Windows machines, (shock horror), And it poses as pictures of a dead Saddam. The virus writers are getting pretty good at picking subjects that will invoke the most curiosity and it’s something of a judgement on humanity that the most successful virus’s seem to be those promising naked folks engaged in rude acts or pictures of dead people. Getting infected by this one can result in being turned into a SPAM gateway, or anything at all that the crackers want to use your machine for. If you are not sure that your spam protection is up to date, head over to ClamWin and get yourself a free copy of this excellent little anti-virus program. If you are using a Mac or a Linux box, take this opportunity to have yet another laugh at the silly Windows users. 🙂 Read more at Sophos.

The Australian Consumer Association’s Choice magazine has tested installation and usage of various Linux distro’s, Mac OSX and Windows XP and found that Linux is just as easy to install and use as either Mac or Windows. The review was very simplistically written, but that’s to be expected of a magazine primarily sold to non geeks. Read more here. Read the article here.

According to this story on TheInquirer, the time spent deleting SPAM E-mails in the US workplace is costing them 22 billion dollars a year in lost productivity. I’ve always suspected as much, if my servers didn’t spent all their time running emails though the 3 different CPU intensive SPAM filters they run, I could have made a significant contribution to mapping the human genome. 🙂

Yahoo, in an effort to gain some ground on Google in the search market, has released a beta product designed to allow you to search for related sites without leaving the page you are in. It’s an interesting idea, but search is supposed to be getting more specific and accurate, not less. I’m not sure this is a step forward, but who knows, it might have some uses I’ve not thought of yet. Read more at Eweek.

The German National Railway made a second major move towards open source Linux software when it successfully moved 55,000 of it’s Lotus Notes users onto the Linux operating system. The Railway expects “continuous cost savings, greater flexibility and integration benefits” as they move the rest of their systems over. They already replaced 150 of their servers with Linux systems as of November of 2004.

Most people think the Munich deal is the biggest Open Source deal in place world wide, but the Munich deal is relatively small compared to German Railways (Munich is only 14,000 desktops as it stands now.) Both roll-outs are very significant however and show how Germany is one of the worlds leading countries in adopting Open Source and Linux. It is also unlikely that Germany will back the software patent directive any more (yay!), now that big chunks of their infrastructure is based on Linux they will not allow big companies to use spurious software patents to cause them problems. The simple maths here, is that Microsoft can make all the threats it likes about pulling out funding from these countries, but nothing they can offer would match the amount these governments will save in the long term by not being reliant on Microsoft. So the writing is on the wall. Governments are full of bean counters, and the numbers are not in Microsoft’s favour. IBM is behind both of these big roll-outs, and is to be congratulated for both. You can read more about this at Techworld, but you may need to register to see it.