What’s more troubling however, is the whole approach to performance optimisation as a matter of “knowing the secret handshake”. Optimisation is far more complex than that, and spending time on these “optimisation tricks” are rarely worthwhile and might often lead to unmaintainable code, if applied too early.

Google have published [PHP performance guidelines](http://code.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-php.html), in addition to their [HTML/CSS/JavaScript page speed guidelines](http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/using.html). Similarly though, they are full of errors, contradictions and unsubstantiated claims, resulting in the PHP development team itself [responding to them](http://groups.google.com/group/make-the-web-faster/browse_thread/thread/ddfbe82dd80408cc).

PHP optimisation is certainly not my forte, but this quote from [Troels Knack-Neilsen at SitePoint](http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/26/a-note-on-googles-so-called-best-practises/) gets to the core of universal performance optimisation advice. Documentation of this enhancements is always, tragically, written in an all-or-nothing, absolute sense. It disregards more pragmatic, less easily measurable qualities in application development like code legibility, future maintenance, even security.

So many performance optimisations are technically, measurably ‘correct’ by miniscule margins, and are provide simply irrelevant gains in the real world, at much greater cost to other aspects of your code.

SitePoint A Note on Google’s So-called Best Practices, via [Christian Heilmann](http://www.wait-till-i.com/2009/06/29/ttmmhtm-easy-fixes-for-everything-pirated-html5-ipod-vs-walkman-hubble-data-and-propaganda/)

Apple and other big phone makers have struck a deal with the European Commission to start selling phones with universal cell phone chargers starting next year.

I find it especially interesting that a mere two years after shipping, “Apple” is the big-name manufacturer and everyone else is just “others”.

The news itself is excellent, too: mobile phones standardising on micro-USB for charging means we can kiss proprietary chargers farewell next year.

CNET News via [Dave Morin](http://www.facebook.com/davemorin)

Hotelling’s law is an observation in economics that in many markets it is rational for producers to make their products as similar as possible.

Hotelling’s law, in follow-up to the [previous article](http://blog.benward.me/post/132145435). via [David Thompson](http://fatbusinessman.com).

The upgrade option was not available, Microsoft said, because it was trying to comply with European competition regulations. This means that IE is not onboard Windows 7 in Europe.

BBC NEWS Windows 7 pricing gets unveiled

The Windows 7/Internet Explorer unbundling malarky is an utterly confusing tangle.

What seems to be happening here is that Microsoft, having been ordered not to ship IE with Windows in Europe, are denying customers a smooth upgrade path (which would, apparently, entail _removing_ IE from the user’s system, and then asking them which browser they wanted to use. Or something like that.) I think this is a tactical move to irritate people. Bear in mind that Internet Explorer is not absent in Windows 7 at all; the Trident engine and JScript libraries are shared components of Windows (just as WebKit is on Mac OSX) and are used by all number of first and third party applications. At most, all that’s removed, or hidden, is the Internet Explorer executable.

The self-install consumers are a bit of a distraction though. They make up a tiny, miniscule subset of the number of people obtaining Windows 7. For most users, they don’t get Windows 7 from Microsoft; Microsoft provide new copies of Windows to OEMs, and Windows reaches the consumer preloaded on some new hardware. The OEMs are supposed to choose which browser to put on the system by default. They will, I’m certain, all choose to install Internet Explorer.

This ‘default browser’ thing is one area where the PC sales market is a complicated mess, and where a comparison with Apple actually kind-of works:

Consider all computer hardware manufacturers as equals for a moment: Apple, Dell, HP and Gateway are all in direct competition, at least from the perspective of Dell, HP and Gateway.

Apple differentiates itself in the personal computer market in a number of ways, but one of the important ways is in the _curation_ of the user experience.

In simple comparison, the functionality of the software bundled with a Mac maps to that of a Windows PC: There’s an operating system, a mail client, a web browser, a photo manager, a music player. Every Windows PC ships with these tools, too. Apple, as a computer manufacturer, ships a different set of software from other computers. That they build the software themselves themselves is not so relevant here, the point is that they select software to ship with their computers for the purpose of providing their users a better user experience.

Compare to Dell. At the root, their motivation _should_ be the same as Apple: Ship the best possible user experience to their users, so that customers value ‘buying a Dell’.

But, they don’t. They ship the same software over and over because they dare not impose change on their users. They have been shipping what Microsoft provides them in the Windows bundle for a generation, and have never exerted control over the experience of ‘using a Dell’ over ‘using a Compaq’ or ‘using a Gateway’.

In the PC world, the manufactures are incredibly weak, and they’ve cemented their weakness.

Shipping alternate browsers doesn’t require a piece of European Union legislation, it requires a manufacture to take control of the user experience of their machine and curate the software they ship. They could have installed Firefox or Opera on their Windows images and set it as the default. They could have advertised “tabbed web pages” and “virus free browsing” as features of buying their machine. They didn’t.

(In my view, advertising advantages of third party software you ship as a feature of your machine wouldn’t be disingenuous. The source of the alternate, better software is important, but you’re promoting the fact that you, ‘Dell’, took responsibility to bring it to the user coherently, in a package, and that you, ‘Dell’, can be trusted to provide this user experience in the future.)

In the past, I’ve understood that Microsoft offered financial incentive to manufacturers to favour IE and Windows Media Player in their distributions, or even inconvenienced licensing to those who wanted to ship alternates. That’s certainly anti-competitive and if not already illegal, seems like a more useful focus of legislation.

The core problem remains though, that _the manufacturers do not curate_. They bundle software through partnerships and are paid to include time-limited trials of substandard and often duplicitous applications. Dell charge their customers to _not_ have that software included.

The culture of PC manufacture is not going to embrace this chance to ship Firefox, or Opera, or Safari. If they wanted to curate the experience they would already do it.

Instead, they’re going to do what’s easiest and cheapest. That means they’re going to take their fresh, Internet Explorer-less Windows image, install IE8 on it, and ship that to their customers. Because their customers know Internet Explorer, and shipping what they know will result in less support calls for assistance with web browsing.

This is why the user experience of the PC is so appalling: An entire industry of manufacturers offloaded their complete user-experience to the third-party provider of their operating system. Now they’re at a point where that provider, Microsoft, is misfiring and producing poor software. The manufacturers don’t know _how_ to improve the user experience to their customers, let alone be in a position implement and support it. There’s a lot more to providing a great computing experience than swapping the ‘Blue E’ for a ‘Red O’.

Cracked.com’s If Everyday Life Was Directed by Michael Bay

#Cracked.com’s [If Everyday Life Was Directed by Michael Bay](http://www.cracked.com/article_17527_if-everyday-life-was-directed-by-michael-bay.html)

An excerpt from “Michael Bay’s Rejected Transformers 2 Script”

#An excerpt from “Michael Bay’s Rejected Transformers 2 Script”

Michael Bay’s Rejected "The Dark Knight" Script – The Spill.com Movie Community

Michael Bay’s Rejected “The Dark Knight” Script – The Spill.com Movie Community

I saw Transformers 2 yesterday, so now I’m trawling the internet looking for ways to avenge my poor, mangled brain from Michael Bay’s assault.

This is from last year. The plot for “Michael Bay’s ‘The Dark Knight’” is both more substantial and makes much more sense than Transformers 2. It also accurate represents his depiction of women in the new film.

We’re pleased to announce a formal partnership with  Yahoo! to support the NVDA project. Their first funding contribution will enable us to implement enhanced table navigation and reporting in virtual buffers, ARIA land marks, ARIA drag and drop and other ARIA improvements in NVDA over the next couple of months

I tend not to post much employer related stuff here, but reading that Yahoo! have popped some funds into the excellent NVDA accessibility tool is really warming news. Nice to see us assist with Good Things™

> Providing feedback via synthetic speech and Braille, NVDA allows blind and vision impaired people to access and interact with the Windows operating system and many third party applications.

[NVDA Project](http://www.nvda-project.org/wiki/About)

via. Yahoo! Supports the NVDA Project

Microsoft are full of shit

Word has always done a great job of displaying the HTML which is commonly found in e-mails around the world. We have always made information available about what HTML we support in Outlook. For e-mail viewing, Word also provides security benefits that are not available in a browser: Word cannot run web script or other active content that may threaten the security and safety of our customers.

#Microsoft are full of shit

Shazam Geotags Music

#Shazam Geotags Music