Nothing ruder than the Tudor

People in this industry have a habit of demonising the likes of Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, but they consistently overlook the ubervillain of the high-tech world: Henry VIII.

Greensleeves - a tune said to have been written by the corpulent king for Ann 'fingers' Boleyn - is officially the most hated hold music of all time.

According to stress control site (whatever that is) stressbusting.co.uk, we in Britain spend nearly two days a year on hold because companies think it's a good idea to install automated phone systems.

Two days? Just thinking about that makes me stressed. Which is ironic, considering who did the research. Ignorance really can be bliss...

What's worse than hold tunes are all the novelty ring tones on mobiles. There's really nothing wrong with a phone that goes 'ring ring'. Call me a stick-in-the-mud if you like, but why try to improve on a classic?

One silicon.com reader has another problem with mobiles - namely the volume at which people speak into them. He dropped us a line, saying: "I have no objection to phone conversations held at a normal conversational level - I wish people would realise that phone technology has improved enough to allow this since the 80s."

His solution? "I am reduced to carrying a football rattle and using it when someone starts shouting into their mobile phone."

Hats off to you sir.

And now a novel use for SMS: divorce. A man in Dubai got a bit hacked off when his wife was a tad tardy for an appointment. So he sent her a tart text message saying: "Why are you late? You are divorced."

He later approached a court to find out if the message had legal status. And it did.

In Dubai, a man can divorce his wife simply by saying 'I divorce thee' three times. Fewer than three times and the man has the right to reverse his decision.

Which, thankfully, our text-happy chappy did. So it's all worked out in the end. Lovely.

Meanwhile, the battle of the sexes continues apace in cyberspace - and the women are trouncing the men. Quite simply, the fairer sex are better surfers: they know what they want to access when they go online, they keep their mouse clicks down to a minimum, and log off as soon as they've found what they're looking for.

Unlike men, who galumph around the web with all the grace and elegance of an exuberant elephant. In high heals.

Moreover, according to Nielsen/NetRatings research, more than half of net users in the US are women, and they're very nearly in the majority in Asia Pacific and Europe as well.

So soon there will be far more women than men surfing around the web, and they'll be better at it than us blokes.

Could this be a metaphor for life itself? (Please don't answer that. It's only a rhetorical question.)

All you chauvinists will be reassured by the knowledge that internet companies are just as male dominated as their old economy cousins. Of the top 25 dot-com start-ups in the UK, only three women are listed among the founders, according to Management Today.

Yet another piece of research, this time from Mori (on behalf of Compaq), has found that men are more likely to work at home or on the move than women. One third of male managers already work from home and have more freedom of movement than their female colleagues (especially on the dancefloor at the end of the work Christmas party. Probably.)

Nearly half of women managers are completely office bound.

Sandi Mann, a work psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire, said: "It is easy to understand why women might be put off working from home. Having struggled for so long to break into the male-dominated office world, women are reluctant to give it up. Women still view the home as their domestic domain and not a working one, besides which, women enjoy the sociability of the office and the interaction with colleagues."

The home is also full of distractions for women, according to the survey. Topping the list are children and family, and friends (which begs the question: why aren't men distracted by these things? Is it because they pack the former off somewhere quiet and don't have any of the latter... who aren't at work, we mean?)

And then there's the housework...

Flexible working is definitely on the up though - but we think HP has taken things one step too far. It's asked its employees to volunteer to take pay cuts or time off work.

A spokesman said: "It's a 10 per cent pay cut, or eight unpaid vacation days. We've had a tradition of employees pitching in and doing what they can in difficult economic times."

Compaq and Sun have also instigated similar programmes. Welcome to the economic slowdown. At least we'll all have more time to deal with those domestic 'distractions'.

And finally, we're currently running a survey about email usage - see http://www.silicon.com/goto-digitalsurvey-ru . Please take a few minutes to fill in the questionnaire - we'll be publishing the full results on a special microsite in the next couple of weeks.

Inevitably, the best feedback we've received so far are the anecdotes telling of email cock-ups. These are just a few to whet your appetite - the perpetrators will remain anonymous, for obvious reasons:

"I managed to 'out' one of my best friends after he sent a newsy email to all his family and friends telling us how he was getting on in his new job in Japan. I replied with a rather crude message about the possibilities of finding a new boyfriend as well. Only I hit the 'reply to all button', promptly shattering any dreams his parents had of having grandchildren... Oops."

"Try the one a year ago where I worked in a rather large multinational. This sceptical employee sitting near me didn't believe all the scary warnings about the "I love you" virus and decided to test it. She ended up sending an email to every employee worldwide every five seconds for about 10 mins before a techie came running and yanked the network cable out... worked out at 39,000 emails every five seconds."

"When I was getting divorced, my now ex-wife sent me a shirty e-mail telling me that she could not afford to live in our flat and therefore wanted me to buy her out. I forwarded this to a mate, adding the comment 'fantastic, the flat is going to turn into a Grade A bachelor pad, lets start pulling cheap sluts', and unfortunately copied her in the reply."

If you have any better stories, then mail us at editorial@silicon.com , or complete the survey online at http://www.silicon.com/goto-digitalsurvey-ru .

That's it from the Round-Up this week. There are a few headlines below to tempt you - and if you're into this mobile computing stuff, you may like to know that you can now get all our news sent to your PDA. See http://www.silicon.com/goto-PDA-ru for more info.