I know it's bad-form replying to my own post, but it does appear that there is some kind of namespacing going on in the OData spec. Does anyone know if this namespacing is part of the JSON standard, or is it just a convention that OASIS are using?

Eitherway, I still prefer XML! :D

Does JSON support namespaces? AFAIK it doesn't, and that would seem to make it suitable only for fairly simple data interchange and not really scalable.

As far as which is best visually... XML is a bit wordy/busy, especially if it uses a lot namespaces, but it's a pretty minor problem given that with both XML and JSON, it's a piece of piss to write a nice visual editor.

The important thing for me is having a solid platform for building applications, and XML has the capability and maturity for that - even if it is a bit ugly!

In July 2012 I was searching for car insurance and found it hilarious that More-Than's (morethan.com) password policy at the time was:

• Be between 8 and 14 characters
• Not include more than 2 repeated characters in a row
• Not include the word 'guest'
• Not contain swear words

Obviously they're storing the password, and at a guess, the reason for no-swear-words is that their call-centre staff confirm your identity with your password... or something? Whatever. But what's up with not including "guest" in there? It must be some kind of magic keyword that makes their system do something different or something!!

I didn't get my insurance with them in the end!

True, but it's worth noting that that Microsoft is well positioned to fill those gaps (assuming we're specifically talking about an app-store, search, email and maps). Whilst I do appreciate that Android without the Google bits and with no alternatives is a bit crap, it seems a bit unfair to blame Google for that. That'd be like if Microsoft open-sourced Windows and gave it away for free, and then complaining that they didn't include MS Office.

This. I recall from my childhood having to "test" both shatter-proof rulers (for some reason when you're aged 8 shatter-proof = indestructible = must test this) and water-resistant watches (when you're 8 years old, water-resistant = completely water-proof).

You're the spirit of Jazz?

Ummmm, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and have those TPS reports for us this afternoon.

I'm surprised this thing is very different to modern viruses given that it's *only* 30K years old. I appreciate these things are always evolving, but I would've thought they'd have done most of their evolving in the previous 3-billion years or whatever. So presumably, being big wasn't a problem for a virus until relatively recently?

Maybe it's a "you didn't make me CEO of MS, so this is what you get" message from Elop?! :D

The hilarious thing about this is that there's someone as MS who has decided that the best way to approach the problem of Android/ChromeOS taking their market share is to... compete on price. Because that's going to work isn't it?

Ahh... sorry for misunderstanding. Yeah, that would be pretty funny!! :D

It would be good to see other companies competing with Google for a bundled app-stack on Android, so if MS or even Apple were to compete, then this would be a good thing.

But just to pick up on your point about it being "amusing", I assume you're saying that because Google created Android, and thus if they got screwed over for making a genuinely open platform, this would some how be funny?

Let's be clear here, Google have been playing nice (mostly) all the way through. That's why other people can take that platform and monetise it without paying Google a bean. I'd love to see MS do something like that... because of course, they wouldn't.

Wouldn't you feel insulted if it had a kernel panic right after taking your picture?!

It could do with another scrub though... them Martian dust devils are getting lazy!!. I'm amazed any solar energy actually gets through all that stuff.

[raises glass to the continued awesomeness of Opportunity rover]

That was a box of 10! But they are generally a bit more expensive it's true.