That was going to be my suggestion as well. Has the added benefit that, unlike Vista, it will still be supported by Microsoft for years to come.

I still wince when I remember being the only person in my old workplace still stuck with an ageing PC running Windows 2000, long past when Microsoft had stopped supporting it and many newer applications required XP or later. Don't go there - it ain't a fun place.

I'm using Twitter a fair bit now myself - at least on there I'll actually see most people's posts, something that's now a distant memory on Facebook.

Microsoft-like? No thanks, I had my fill of 'Modern' Windows - back on 7 again.

Speaking of which, this was on one of the occasional Microsoft newsletters I received today - Happy Retirement, XP - I'm sure the placement of those balloon strings is entirely coincidental. ;)

The only custom URL I have for by G+ business page is the *entire* business name in full, minus spaces - RedunserCreativeSolutions - needless to say, not much use to give out to people. No option is allowed to specify a shorter versions (say, RedunserCreative). I guess I will have to consider changing my business name, since Google evidently aren't going to budge. No wonder they're trying to hoodwink as many users as possible of their other products into acquiring a G+ profile - the way they're operating G+ definitely ain't selling the service to people as an alternative to Facebook or Twitter.

[I really want to like G+, but I keep being reminded that I'm supposed to use it the way Google wants me to rather than let me find a way that works for me. Hell, the main reason why I don't post more stuff to G+ is that many sites still don't have an option to share stuff to it, whereas it's trivially easy to do so to either Facebook or Twitter.]

He rolls off some good anecdotes from days gone by. Case in point, he mentions the big push for Intel's Itanium platform, which at one time was going to be the Next Big Thing. The Register were spot-on when they dubbed it "Itanic".

Also worth noting the reference to Blackberry being the one to beat - how times have changed...

Probably because so few people remember it's out there? I vaguely recall reading something about it when it was first announced, but I've not seen any mention of it since. *shrug*

I'm debating whether you're one of those spam autoposter AIs, or perhaps Bizarro...

I suspect they want to move people away from Windows 8 to 8.1 even faster than they wanted to get people away past Vista and onto 7.

Why the nag banner? Because they're Microsoft, that's why.

I'm currently running OSX 10.8.5 Mountain Lion on my iMac. Even thought the upgrade to Mavericks (10.9) is free, I'm holding back until I'm certain that the various reported problems with Mavericks and various Adobe Creative Cloud applications have been ironed out. Thankfully, the only banner I see regarding Mavericks appears in the Updates area of the Mac App Store.

Had a quick peek. It looks... different.

Ironically, Facebook's advertising is amongst the least intrusive around - for now. They also provide means to give them feedback (on the website - sadly, their mobile apps are lacking on that account, amongst many others) about which ads you prefer and which you don't want to see. Mind you, their lack of profiling data can show up at times, usually in the form of repeated generic ads being served up.

SocialFixer is a browser add-on, it runs inside of your browser on your computer. You're thinking of Facebook Apps, which interact with Facebook's back-end through the Facebook Platform, either as web services, traditional software or mobile/tablet apps.

Agree with your comment about us getting what we paid for with Facebook. Still disappointing, nonetheless, if only because of the potential longer-term repercussions for Facebook's viability - they seem to be increasingly undermining the service's usefulness in their quest for profits. :(

Nowadays I know most of the Circle by their real names, and have trouble remembering their /. usernames. D'oh! :P

-MT.
(Alan Ralph)