Okay this is basically copying Daniel Rutter's blog post on the subject but I consider both to be worthy of me posting about as well.

Firstly we have Microsoft decided that after paying a small fortune (£190 for Vista Home Premium - the non-useless Home version - and £325 for Vista Ultimate - the version with Remote Desktop server enabled) for Vista in the first place, you'll only be able to upgrade your computer once, and on your second upgrade you have to buy another copy of Vista.

I have recently been receiving a lot of spam comments on this site; in the region of 20-40 per day. I don't know what they were advertising and I don't much care - all I know is that I don't want them.

As such I have implemented a handful of anti-spam measures, some partially stolen from Matthew, some ideas were my own. I even surprised myself by making it possible to post comments without having JavaScript enabled in your browser while still hopefully making the behind-the-scenes procedure complicated enough to baffle spam bots. You can't reply to a specific comment without JS enabled, but you can create a new comment thread easily enough.

After predicting 3°C temperatures in the middle of August for Leeds, a 188°C heatwave, also in Leeds, a total lack of sunshine in Bristol, Islington having totally different weather to the rest of London, snow for Birmingham in the middle of July and some kind of tropical storm in Belfast in June the BBC's ever-accurate weather site has turned its attention to Cardiff by predicting 719°C temperatures in about an hour's time!

Once again I'm typing this from the train, since the Cardiff -> London journey is painfully long and boring. At least this leg of it isn't too late - a three-hour trip around midnight is the worst. Yes, it's that time again: time for another Windows Live Session. Pre-event details of today's programme have been somewhat thin on the ground, but that just leaves me with more to write about on the way back and that will keep me at least slightly occupied, so no doubt further down this post will be a pseudo-update written on the way back. I say pseudo-update because I won't actually be able to post this to the 'net until I get home, by which time I will have already written the second part, so no one other than me will notice it being written in two sessions, apart from the fact that it will read totally differently - not least because the frequency of typos in my writing increase dramatically at that sort of time. Not that I'm perfect now, of course - I just managed to save this document as "blogpsot.txt" - but there is a much greater liklihood of the existence of errors later on.

Anyway, on to possibly more interesting matters... A lot has happened since my last reasonable-length post and now I have the unenviable task of trying to recall it and transcribe it into a hopefully comprehensible format. I can tell you now that there is no chance in hell of anything I write about for the rest of this half of the post being in any kind of logical order - you will just have to read about it in the order I decide to write it. It certainly saves me a lot of effort ;)

So... Nintendo have just released the name of their next generation console, previously only known by its codename of Revolution[/url]: Wii [pronounced "we"].
There isn't a lot I can say, here, because Tim Buckley has summed it up nicely in his latest newspost.
What I will say, however, is that I hope Nintendo listen to their fans and change the damned thing because there has already been a public outcry over the name and it has only been known for an hour or so at best - within minutes it was syndicated on news sites around the Web such as Slashdot and the comments left by readers on all of these sites indicate that it was possibly one of the worst names they could have chosen. It's almost as if they don't ask anyone outside of Japan for their opinion before deciding upon things, or if they do the people they question are too scared to give honest feedback so we end up with naming distasters like this.
It's a shame because I had plans to buy their next console when it's released for various reasons but I'm forced to question if I can stomach owning a device called a Wii... Nintendo had some ideas for the console that really can only be described as "revolutionary" - only time will tell if they're actually good ideas - but they've really shot themselves in the foot with the name, that's for sure.
But it appears that only Microsoft is immune to making really really bad design choices during this console generation: ignoring the supply issues and slight problem with some units not working entirely as expected they haven't made any fundamental design decisions that have come back to haunt them. Sony, on the other hand, has twice now, to my knowledge, changed their mind regarding the PS3. At first they said that they would not have a unified online service for it in a similar way to the Xbox having Xbox Live, but then they seemingly changed their mind and decided that they could better Microsoft by making their unified online service so much better than Xbox Live. Compare this Wikipedia article from 9th March 2006 with this one from today. They've also changed their mind over the controller which no one really liked: Wikipedia article about it from 22nd March 2006 compared to Wikipedia article about it from today.
Let's hope that Nintendo will listen to their fans in the same way and seriously consider a less-bizarre name, even if it involves having a different name for the console in Japan to the rest of the world - it's not as if they haven't done that before or anything and it certainly solves a lot of problems. No matter how much they try to deny it, Japanese culture is a lot different to Western culture and a name like Wii will really not go down well here.
... Unless, of course, their plan all along was to be ridiculed and sell as few consoles as possible - who knows? :)
*Back to coursework as he realises he's supported Sony far too much for one day in this post..*