Microscope fascination

Radio 4 program: males me think of the microscope as the Victorian YouTube - see the cool thing I just saw

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Two minute Windows 7 demo

At the end of lunch, one of the people we were meeting asked 'should I/why should I get Windows 7?'. I grabbed Simon's tablet PC and thought 'what should I actually show off?'.
30 seconds - boot is much faster
30 seconds - searching for control panels, apps, documents, emails, appointments
15 seconds - jump lists
5 seconds - pinned and active icons on the taskbar
5 seconds - unified network pop-up menu
5 seconds - Action Center
15 seconds - Aero snap 
2 seconds Aero peek
5 seconds - Task manager and the low cpu usage when nothing is happening
If we'd had a local network I'd have spent another minute showing homegroups and play to but we were in a restaurant so I just said 'it's much better' for the last 8 seconds. I continue to be impressed that I can be impressed enough with Windows 7 to show it off; and the fact that umpteen different features blend into a general 'it's much better' feeling is actually a good thing for users who will just be happier (though maybe not for Microsoft who has to sell product since 'it's better' can be as much about it not being as good before as being better now...)

Dear bank - no, I do not want to sign up for your insecure security programme, I want to shop

I want to complete my online purchase; I do not wish to sign up for your not even slightly more secure security programme for my credit card because I keep my credit card secure already, I don't want to give you my date of birth to lose, I don't want you to tell me I've already used a password when I've never signed this card up for your service before and I object to you dealing with the appallingly insecure practices of credit card merchants and banks by making my life more difficult. Get out of my way and fix your own security issues instead (how about you make chip and PIN secure or actually shut down vendors like Tesco and PC World who break the chip and PIN rules every day? no, you'd rather get in my way and give me another password to forget, have compromised or have you reset to something appallingly insecure like BANKING1 when you allow your banking site to be cloned because doing it right is much harder than annoying the shopper). And then, dear bank, you block my transaction as fraudulent...

All this from a Web site that delivers me an order confirmation on an https page that is full of content that doesn't come via https and some that shows up with a security certificate error, compromising the security of the page so much that my browser declines to show half of it. I'm going to find somewhere else to buy a server next time.