Very Local News

• It is starting to look like Windows XP was the home run. Microsoft has feed back from corporate customers that they wan to use XP for an indefinite period. What they have works and they don't want to deal with an upgrade. This puts a crimp in the whole model of forcing your customers to upgrade every three years.
• eBay is spinning off Skype. Skype is an online phone service that lets you talk for free most of the time. They paid $4 billion four years ago. I bet it goes for $15.95 and a book of coupons..
  PayPal and stumble upon are going too.
  
• The average visitor to YouTube costs Google between 1 and 2 dollars.
• One of the machines at work answered a ping, but I couldn't get hold of it in any other way. I could not log in or even get a response. It turns out it was being imaged. I thought about it. The system is using tcp/ip to talk to an FTP server. It answers a ping. it is no good to me in this state.
• Dissertations can be had for as little as $20 a page. i may have to look in to that since I cannot even spell dissertation without the aid of a spell checker..