First up, a BBC News article about a UK artist replacing Paris Hilton’s CD with his own.

Hundreds of Paris Hilton albums have been tampered with by “guerrilla artist” Banksy. Banksy has replaced Hilton’s CD with his own remixes and given them titles such as Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For? He has also doctored pictures of her on the CD sleeve to show the US socialite topless and with a dog’s head.

(via digg)

In an article that is sure to have my grandmother ready to fly over to the UK and beat someone up: The Daily Mail reports that TalkTalk (uk based telco/isp) has told a 75 y/o woman they would not allow her to sign up, unless she had a younger person to explain all the details to her.

The 75-year-old would only be allowed to sign the forms for the Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk phone and broadband package if she was accompanied by a younger member of her family who could explain the small print to her.

Mrs Greening-Jackson, who sits on the board of several charities, said: “I was absolutely furious. The young man said, ‘Sorry, you’re over 70. It’s company policy. We don’t sign anyone up who is over 70.’

(via Slashdot)

Ian - I think you need to tell Billy they made a bit of a mistake

Edit: Reading the Slashdot comments, I saw this comment by bir0:

What I find more annoying about this article is the way that they refer to ‘The Internet’ as something you can ‘get’. You can ‘get’ a connection to the Internet, but you can’t ‘get’ the whole Internet as far as I know…

While I am having a rant…other phrases people use when referring to the Internet that bug me are…

‘I have the Internet at home’
‘I have the Internet on my computer’
or the question ‘Do you have the Internet at home?’

I always feel like saying, ‘Yes! I do. It took a long time but I finished downloading the whole thing last night’.

See, this is why we need faster broadband — so we can download the internets. (And so the tubes dont get blocked)

While I’m here, I should point out that my Grandmother actually uses Linux - KDE on Debian-Testing.
Granted, it’s via a VNC Connection (over 802.11g) from her Windows XP SP2 machine, and she only plays a few games — but I still have a linux-using-grandmother! *ahem*

And if she ever needed to use a text editor, she’d use use vi - not emacs ‘course.

It turns out Steve Ball had posted a few comments I had missed in my previous post. (In my defence, I read something like 100 comments before I posted)

First of all, Steve writes:

[...]
Finally, please remember that this conversation was paraphrased from a 20 minute phone call.
[...]
Obviously, many have a deep passion about this issue, and we’re continuing to listen to your feedback and comments.

Good to know they’re listening (seriously) - I just hope they take some action to let people disable this.

And then Steve puts up another comment linking to a post by Joe Wilcox:

FYI, some useful comments from Joe Wilcox:

http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/016933.html

“Assuming Microsoft execs are thinking like marketers, the startup sound should be more than just part of the operating system. It should be part of the marketing of the operating system. If Microsoft takes that approach, I would recommend keeping the sound permanently turned on and unchangeable without customization, at least in the early days.”

This is exactly the thinking behind this decision from the Marketing team. Thanks for good observations, Joe.

I’m stunned.

Obviously if the Marketing folks think this is a great idea - who are we to object?

Lets think that thought by Joe through a little more though — Keep “the sound permanently turned on and unchangeable without customization, at least in the early days.”

This looks — well.. okay-ish, at first glance. Maybe.

What about the people who’s entire working day is filled with installing/fixing Windows PCs? They’re going to be driven absolutely bonkers if they’ve got a machine which has some weird problem that requires they restart every few minutes (a bunch of driver installs, for example?)

What about using your laptop in a library, or classroom? You’d have to remember every time to plug in a pair of headphones, lest you risk the wrath of others.

Others keep saying that Mac has had this sound since they first had sound capability — sure, they have. Someone even mentioned that Ubuntu (or some other linux distro) has also had this for a while.

They’re forgetting one thing - in both cases, this can be disabled (and not by plugging in a pair of headphones). In the Mac case - you can hold some sort of key-combo if you want to disable it for one boot, or some sort of downloadable utility which will disable it permanently.
For ubuntu - you can just rip the sound out, or edit some config file.

Go for it, Microsoft. Install a default sound - we know you will anyway - and make it a great brand-experience (which only matters to Marketing people, the rest of us couldn’t give a damn). Just give us the option (like we have right now) to disable it without removing sound hardware.