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The Weekly Round-Up: 16.05.08
Work from home - career enhancing or calamity?

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 16 May 2008

Office workers across the UK were urged to stay at home yesterday.

Regrettably it had nothing to do with UK plc urging spontaneous holidays for the entire work force but everything to do with National Work from Home day swinging around again, much to the chagrin of public transport companies.

Work Wise was hoping that millions of workers would sample the benefits of working from home, such as avoiding crowded public transport, (or perhaps avoiding driving to work in this).

Other benefits claimed include saving time, reducing stress and the pleasure of speaking to the boss wearing a pair of M&S socks and nothing else. It's a revelatory experience, the Round-Up can assure you.

This is the third time the initiative has been run by smarter working group Work Wise UK and kicks off Work Wise Week 2008.

Phil Flaxton, chief executive of Work Wise UK, said: "The benefits of working from home, even occasionally, are now widely accepted.

Peeking out from under his duvet to speak to assembled reporters he added: "Not only does it reduce the amount of commuting people have to do, enhancing their work/life balance, but many are actually more productive."

Nearly 3.5 million people already work from home in the UK. The highest proportion of home workers is in the South West with 15.7 per cent. Is it a coincidence that the region also reported the highest level of job satisfaction in the UK? The Round-Up thinks not.

The South West was followed closely by Eastern England with 14.4 per cent. The lowest is in the North East with 9.3 per cent, followed by Scotland with 9.4 per cent.

Last year, silicon.com's editorial staff shunned human contact by staying away from the office and keeping in touch by mobile, instant messenger and email.

And this year they did it again, steering clear of the office and surviving on their own. With - shall we say - mixed results.

Two of the team struggled to get online in the first place, while another managed to miss the online meetings. As one reader pointed out: "Whoa, you technical guys are covering yourselves in glory here, aren't you?" Quite.

Yet another was all but driven from the house by builders drilling outside. And the rest of them got a bit lonely and were grateful to return to the warm embrace of silicon.com towers this morning, vowing never to leave the office again, or at least not until the pubs open.

See here for the full report.

Some attendees at the recent Sun Microsystems JavaOne conference in San Francisco were as sick as parrots last week and it had nothing to do with the company's technology roadmap.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health warned that several people had become ill after attending or working at conferences at the city's Moscone Convention Center between 30 April and Thursday. That includes the time when the Sun Microsystems JavaOne conference took place there.

Officials believe it was norovirus, a particularly nasty type of virus that spread by touching dirty surfaces. Lovely. The norovirus causes nausea, vomiting and frightful diarrhoea and lasts 24 to 48 hours.

According to an Associated Press report, workers at the conference centre disinfected surfaces including food preparation tables, escalator handrails, desks and bathrooms to reduce the risk of the virus spreading further.

They needn't have bothered.

The next big tech event to be held at the Moscone Center is the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, which kicks off at the start of June and as everyone knows: Mac users don't get viruses...

Call the Round-Up a stuffy, old traditionalist but patches and service packs are meant to fix problems not cause new ones.

You agree? Well, there's a first time for everything.

So spare a thought for owners of some AMD-based computers who are finding the move to Windows XP Service Pack 3 has sent their systems into an endless reboot cycle.

Not that the XP start-up process is dull, far from it. It's one of the great life-affirming experiences, up there with swimming with dolphins, skydiving and speaking to the boss wearing nothing but a pair of M&S socks.

However, as delightful as the XP start-up process may be, one imagines that being stuck in a Nietzschean cycle of eternal recurrence is going to cause you to take a productivity hit.

Microsoft has issued a statement. Want to know what it is? OK, here it comes.

"While the root cause of this issue is complex, it results from OEMs improperly placing a Windows XP image created for an Intel-based computer onto machines with non-Intel chipsets. Microsoft issued guidance to OEMs advising them to only load Windows XP images onto like hardware in 2004."

Which the RoundUp translates as: "It's not our fault. Leave us alone and stop bothering us. Look, we've got a new operating system out and it's great. Go buy a copy of that."

In happier news, Microsoft has launched its WorldWide Telescope, a free web-based program that allows web surfers to explore galaxies, star systems and distant planets. And it is very cool indeed.

The program seamlessly stitches together incredible images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and other telescopes so profoundly huge they have a noticeable effect on global tidal systems.

Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement: "Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from 1,000 years ago.

Clearly no stranger to hyperbole, Gould added breathlessly: "I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe."

Astute readers might remember Google Sky, a mode of Google Earth that offers views of the universe, including high-resolution photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope and background information on discoveries and constellations. You can check out the best of Google Sky's images of the cosmos here.

Eagle-eyed readers might also note that Microsoft seems to have adopted the web 2.0 paradigm for product release cycles championed by Google by releasing everything as a beta.

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, said in a statement: "The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe. Our hope is that it will inspire young people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest to better understand the universe."

The Round-Up's betting that Gates didn't really write that statement. It was probably written by a PR while the Microsoft founder continued the lengthy process of clearing his desk of 20 years' worth of accumulated squeezy balls ahead of his departure later this year.

In all fairness, WorldWide Telescope is cooler than a chilly winter morning on Neptune - even if you have to download the .NET Framework to view it.

In fact, the Round-Up would go as far as to suggest that in this case, Microsoft beats Google hands down.

There, the Round-Up feels dirty now.

Again, there's a first time for everything. Microsoft beating Google, that is - the Round-Up feels dirty all the time...

In other news this week:

HP has made a wild grab at the horns of the cash-cow known as UK government IT projects by splurging a huge amount of money - almost $14bn, kids - on global consultancy EDS.

Coy RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie refuses to be drawn on the issue of whether the company is planning to release a touchscreen BlackBerry to take on the iPhone. "We don't comment on products that haven't launched yet… We have evolved our products, so we're not religious on form factor."

And the government gets ready to roll out Vista…

Finally, Bubbly! Get your creative juices flowing with the caption competition!