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In a book review of three books (The Economist) each attempting to explore the cause of 2008′s global “credit crunch” we are told that it’s simply not fair to lay the blame at the door banks. In a telling section we are sternly lectured that “It was the Basel accords on bank capital ratios………that helped push the banks into securitising sub-prime mortgages.”

This is an outrageous statement.

Continue reading The usual suspects? Or the usual bullshit?

Despite being something of a Linux enthusiast (Linux boxes at home outnumber Windows boxes) I’m also realistic. My main workstation at home runs Windows, due to the simple reason that the applications I need only run on Windows. Yes, I know all about WINE, and use it very successfully on some Linux systems at work, but some stuff just won’t, at least yet, run on WINE. Two significant problem areas for WINE are games and…. Adobe applications. And when I ain’t Photoshopping, I’m gaming. So Windows required.

Anyway, to get back to the point: having built a reasonably muscular new PC last year I decided to drop Vista on to it as my choice of Windows. Last weekend it had a catastrophic file-system error. To be fair, that’s probably not Vista-specific: Windows has a long and ignoble history of buggering up its file-system and requiring reformat, reinstall, recriminations, etc. So this was just a normal day-in-the-life of a Windows user.

The interesting part is it at last gave me the excuse I needed to ditch Vista and put Windows XP on the PC. So after several months of Vista use, why did I hate it so? Let’s list some Pros and Cons of Vista versus XP.
Continue reading Come back XP, all is forgiven!