The new balance

Don't you just love it when intelligent people seem to lazily put the world to rights? Take a look at Structured Procrastination. John Perry, a philosopher at Stanford wrote some essays "defending yet more life choices generally seen as faults". I'll get through them all at some point.

Microsoft has frequently imposed non-interoperability; now, for example, it promotes the patented bogus "standard" OOXML instead of supporting Open Document Format. Microsoft believes it is so powerful that it can design an incompatible format, create obstacles to its implementation by others, and pressure most users to switch to it. Do you think users are really as foolish as Microsoft predicts?

I'll buy that. Thank you Richard.

Source: PC World

This is just a quick note that I hope Google will index for the benefit of anyone else with the same problem: I tried to Google it when I first suffered with this irritation, but found no hits. Hopefully, this will help someone.

I bought a second-hand Daewoo Lacetti 1.6 SX. Lovely car, apart from one problem: an irritating knocking sound heard when the car was driven over uneven road surfaces, speed bumps or pot-holes. On affected vehicles, the sound emanates from the right off-side front quarter as heard from the cabin, and only occurs when the full weight of the engine drops down after a bump in the road. It is impossible to apply this force when the car is up on the ramp, so get the mechanic to test drive it hard with you.

The investigations made by various garages lead to replacement of (in order) stabilizer (anti-roll bar) bushes, right shock absorber, lower arm and steering rack. This was after 7 visits. Beware of misdiagnoses of this fault (although you might be glad that other faults are fixed, especially under warranty)!

The actual cause of the problem is well-known to Chevrolet, but because they do not deal with mechanics at even their main dealers, this crucial information was not passed on for many weeks. Have the hydro engine mounts checked. These are not like standard rubber ones on other cars, which clearly separate if faulty, but contain many components which produce the knocking sound on compression.

This fault affects both the 1.6 and (rarer) 1.8 models. Feel free to get in touch if I can help you in any way.

I'm very frustrated about Microsoft's new approach to licensing. The computers I am buying for home users come with Vista. Whilst I wouldn't subject my business customers to Vista, I thoguht that it would be harmless enough for light users, and in any case, many machines come with Vista Home Premium and you can't have XP or a OS-less version of the machine.

My issue is not the four to five reboots that seem to be required for many reasons when the machine is first used. It isn't with the cantankerous interface, per se. It is with the Office 2007 trial.

In case you don't know, people like me tend to order OEM software when new machines are purchased for our customers. I install this for them and deliver the computer in a working condition. Things are a bit different with Vista and Office 2007, however. Office now comes fully installed on a new computer, but it is necessary to enter a license key to use it. A trial key can be downloaded for free using the Trial tool which comes with the machine, or by using the MS Trial website. That allows 60 day's free use. At any point during this trial, you can pay for a new key through the website. Supposedly.

I have tried every way possible to do this, following all the instructions and being a but creative. The website is most unhelpful, referring to buttons that simply aren't there, and taking me around the same 4 pages in an endless loop of hopeless advice.

When I finally got on the right track, the payment website let me select my country of residence, but then did not allow me to continue. After several redirects around the web, I ended up (even after clearing the cookies and with a reboot) at a page with a menu on the left and one single line error in the content area:

You have experienced an error. Please clear all your cookies and try again.

Has anyone else had this problem? Googling for it doesn't seem to produce any helpful results, but I've seen this on two machines, now.

Does anyone know if the trial upgrade cost is less than the OEM cost?

Cheers!