Mark Gilbert’s Blog

Microsoft has been fined €899 Million by the EU for violation of the 2004 anti-trust ruling. This amount is the fine is the sum of daily fines from June 21st 2006 to October 21st 2007. This makes Microsoft the first company to be fined for non-compliance.

I have previously mentioned that this was coming here.

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As we all know, Blu-Ray has fairly well won the HD DVD wars. It was included in the PS3 console which massivly increased it’s user base. I think it would be interesting to see figures breaking down Blu_ray player sales into PS3 sales and standalone player sales. This would give a clearer insight into how much of a part the PS3 has played in this battle.

The other question that goes round my head is this, “would the outcome of this battle been different if Microsoft had included HD-DVD players in the Xbox 360?” Perhaps not the basic versions, but the Elite versions only. I feel this should have happened and it may have been an oversight on Microsoft’s part not to. I understand the logic behind not oncluding HD-DVD drives in the 360, MS did not want to be seen as having a dead weight round it’ neck if HD-DVD lost, but that may have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Most of the time I’m a fairly happy and content person, but every so often someone does something that really winds me up. For example Internet Exploder only sites really annoy me, HP’s Channel Services Network site only works correctly in IE. Firefox, Opera and other all fail to render it correctly. Is it beyond the powers of HP, one of the largest technology companies in the world to write standards compliant code? Of course it bloody isn’t but they just can’t be bothered to do things right.

I also find myself quite annoyed by a lot of things the government and it’s minions say and do. Appointing Michael Martin as speaker of the house, for example, mean that an incompetent buffoon who deserves to be removed from the post for his disgraceful conduct. At times during commons debates he seems to have very little grasp on what is going off, and since his position is to enforce and keep some kind of decorum, knowing what’s happening would seem like a key part of his role. During the newly appointed Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s second PM’s questions The Speaker completely forgot to call his name. The Speaker has to have wigged clerks pass him advice during parliamentary debates, nothing immediately wrong with a bit of advice but this is becoming all too regular. Besides if the man at the top needs constant pointers on how to do his job, you have to wonder how well suited to the task of advising him the people below him really are.

I could go on down this line but I’d be moving at a tangent away from my main point, which is the latest piece of legislation to come from Whitehall regarding ISPs policing their users. The government has said that ISPs who do no take steps to curb illegal downloads of music and films will face legal sanctions. The suggestion is that ISPs operate on a disconnection after ‘three strikes’ rule. Under the proposals, the first strike would be an e-mail warning from the ISP with the second strike resulting in suspension and finally termination of contract on the third strike.
It would seem that the Labour party has been receiving some rather large donations from the BPI and FACT.
Really how can this be enforced? An ISP would have to block access to every site thought to be offering links to illegal music of films, but this would not do anything to counter the so-called “deep web“. Therefore this would have to be paired with a policy of inspecting individual packets traversing their networks and then block users based on this data. However false positives would be a major problem for all approaches. What recourse would users have if they were wrongly identified as downloading illegal music? What happens when multiple people share the same network, who gets banned? If the person whose name the account is in then another account with another ISP could be opened in a different name.

However the point I think ISPs will be most concerned about is this effectively removes an ISPs “mere conduit” status as set out in the EU Electronic Commerce Directive (Terrorism Act 2006). “Mere conduit” status means that ISPs are not responsible for the traffic going over their network when they are not aware of the content, for example an ISP cannot be held liable if a terrorist attack is planned via e-mail or Paedophile ring is run on it’s network. The same applies to telephone companies such as BT and other similar organisations such as Royal Mail. “Mere conduit” status relies upon the fact that the carrier has no idea at all what is being carried, they are simply there to deliver the message, regardless of what it is. Without “mere conduit”, ISPs face legal action over traffic that’s outside of their control. This could drive ISPs out of business or drive customers out of the EU to ISPs based elsewhere.

In my opinion ISPs should not inspect any traffic traveling across their networks. I would not expect Royal Mail to open my post or BT to listen in on my phone calls. It violates my privacy as an individual. Nineteen Eighty Four was supposed to be a warning, not a guidebook. How far can an ISP go before they lose “mere conduit” status? Is spam filtering going too far? Messages have to be inspected to perform this task. Would blocking spyware infested machine that were spewing spam constitute waiving “mere conduit” status? Are ISPs which throttle bandwidth to P2P apps going too far towards monitoring traffic on their networks?

Will ISPs want to enforce this legislation? Probably not, but if it’s the law they will have very little choice. Will businesses be exempt from this monitoring. I work for an IT Services company which uses remote VPN links to other businesses including insurance companies, pension companies, banks and accountancy firms. I think some of our customer would be most upset that our ISP and their own was looking at their data. In some cases it may even be illegal for ISPs to inspect data since it could be in violation of confidentiality or data protection laws. Will ISPs even be able to inspect data that is encrypted? The government has clearly not thought this through properly, which leads me to either one of a few conclusions. Either the law will come into force and be ignored by everyone. The law will be shot down in the commons as it should be. The law will come into force, and will be enforced rigorously, then the whole UK Internet will simply melt down.

Which ever outcome actually happens this just goes to prove that the government is either not aware of the implications and practicalities of legislation it is proposing or is fully aware of both of these but chooses to ignore them anyway.

If you feel as strongly about this as I do then I suggest you sign this petition to the UK government.

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The most popular alternative browser on the web has just hit half a billion downloads. Internet Exploder is still the most common browser by a fairly long margin, but Firefox is gaining all the time.

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Reuters is reporting that Toshiba is giving up on the HD-DVD format and admitting defeat to Blu-Ray. Toshiba’s share price rose 5% on the enws with investors happy that Toshiba have decided to cut it’s losses after a last ditch price cut was unable to prevent Wal-Mart putting all it’s eggs in the Blu-Ray basket.

A Toshiba source who asked not to be named said

We have entered the final stage of planning to make our exit from the next generation DVD business,

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The EU Competition Commission have conducted anti-trust raids against both Intel and large retailers in Germany and the UK. Intel’s Munich offices were raided on Tuesday and German retailer Media Markt-Saturn and UK retailers DSGi plc.

This comes not long before Intel has to answer to charges alleging that it abused its dominance of the market for processors. Jonathan Todd, a EU Commission lackey spokesman was quoted as saying,

“Commission officials carried out unannounced inspections at the premises of a manufacturer of central processing units and a number of personal computer retailers (believing they) may have violated EC Treaty rules on restrictive business practices and/or abuse of a dominant market position.”

The Commission has powers to fine companies up to 10 percent of their worldwide annual revenue if they are found to have committed competition abuses.

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How cool is this, a chair that literally floats on the air.

The chair uses repelling magnets to float the seat part of the chair above the base. The company that build the chair, Hoverit, compare the feeling to “floating on a cloud”. However don’t get too excited just yet, obviously huge magnets will have huge effects on TV’s, hard drives, phones and pace makers, so if you plan on buying one, make sure the room you’re going to put it in is suitably large.

The product is going to be launched at the 100th Ideal Home show in London next month and will come with a starting price tag of £5875.

Personally I would love one, what a conversation piece.

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Windows Vista SP1 has been RTM earlier this week, but reports are now coming out that SP1 could cause more issues for users than it solves. Microsoft have admitted that there are some new driver issues in SP1, drivers that worked on the original Vista build may not work in SP1. Mike Nash who is charge of Vista product management was quoted as saying;

“Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers, these drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices.”

Basically with the changes to the core of Vista being brought about in SP1 drivers may cease to function correctly. Before SP1 is installed it will check for the drivers that have known issues and not offer SP1 to those users with the offending drivers, although Nash remained tight lipped at present as to what those drivers were.

This would not be the first time a major SP release has caused problems for Windows users, think back to the XP SP2 release a few years ago.

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Four of the guys who run The Pirate Bay have had legal action brought against them. The plaintiffs in the case include Warner, MGM, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI among others.

If the charges stick the defendants face a maximum of two years imprisonment. The prosecution are also pushing for a fine of £90,000, which they say is the minimum amount of profit which The Pirate Bay has made from the disputed illegal activity.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industries said;

“The operators of The Pirate Bay have always been interested in making money, not music. The Pirate Bay has managed to make Sweden, normally the most law abiding of EU countries, look like a piracy haven with intellectual property laws on a par with Russia.”

Time will tell if the charges will stick or not, although in the past there are more often than not problems with prosecuting charges of this nature.

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While browsing The Pirate bay today, I noticed that they had changed their logo to include a url, http://iwouldntsteal.net/. I thought it might be worth checking it out and they actually have a really interesting video on there, done as a take off of the FACT trailer shown at the start of most DVD’s and films now.

Have a look.

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Also quietly out of the door today was Microsoft Office 2008 for OS X. Updates to all the usual suspects are included however Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications is not supported in Office 2008, which some have suggested in Microsoft’s way of not fully supporting Office under OS X without explicitly having to announce that they are ceasing support.

Personally I think there is very little that MS Office 2008 can offer that current alternatives such as NeoOffice and Pages cannot.

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Two updates in the film arena today. First off Apple have announced that starting today if you’re Living in America (boo) you can now rent full films. Every major studio going ha signed with Apple, including Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, Lionsgate, Newline, Fox, Warner Brothers, Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Sony.

30 days after a DVD is released it will appear in the iTunes store and will cost $3.99 for new films and $2.99 for archive titles.
Current HD releases will start at $4.99 with archive titles at £3.99.
All types of title will stream over the net so you can start watching straight away, and UK support will be coming later this year.

To go with all this Apple have also announced an update for AppleTV, this will bring HD support and full Dolby 5.1 surround, along with the ability to buy films directly from the AppleTV interface without a computer required.
The update will be released in a few weeks and will add the support to all existing AppleTV units.

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The next big announcement at Macworld 2008 is the new Time Capsule. In basic terms it is an Airport Base Station with what Apple refer to as a server grade hard drive inside to do Time Machine backups. It comes in two different capacities, 500Gb and 1Tb obviously you want the 1Tb version, Time Machine backups can be quite large.

This is something that users had been crying out for since Time Machine was introduced in OS X Leopard, however support for backing up to Airport connected drives was apparently removed, and now we know why.

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Well once again Macworld here and brought with it a whole host of new goodies.

First off the Macbook Air. Essentially a thinner version of the existing Macbook, but ohmygodhaveyouseenit? It is simply stunning. The features are as follows;

• 13.3″ widescreen backlit LED display
• Backlit keyboard with ambient light sensor
• 80Gb HDD as standard, upgradable to a 64Gb solid state drive
• 2Gb RAM
• 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo as standard with the 1.8 GHz upgrade option
• 802.11n
• 5 Hours of battery life

Things to note are no optical drive comes with the machine, but then at just 0.76″ at it’s thickest down to 0.13″ at the thinest it’s sort of expected, and when you realise it weighs just 1.36KGs it really is a very good prospect.

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The malicious widget, named “Secret Crush” will first popup as a request when one of their friends has started using the widget, and asks if you would like more information. On clicking the widget installs and before you are allowed to use it you must invite 5 friends.

So far this all seems fairly normal, not all that different from any other facebook widget. It is after this that things turn nasty, no information on who your secret crush is or could be has been reveled up to this point, since finding out who this person is will have been the goal of installing the widget in the first place then users will inevitably have come this far.

The user is next presented with frame asking the user to download and install software that purports to reveal who the person with the crush is, however instead it links to Zango, the spyware application.

Lovely

Sadly as people may know I was a little slack on posting at times this year. I enjoyed writing my 2005 tech review, hopefully people enjoyed reading it, but when 2006 came round there was simply nothing posted. I didn’t write anything. In hindsight this was a mistake, so this year I have decided I will write a tech review, and so without any further ado, here is my 2007 tech review;

10. Windows Vista
Ooh controversial. Does Windows Vista deserve to be on here? Some will say yes, some will say no, but the fact that Microsoft managed to finally get such a large project out of the door is an achievement in itself. Although my most anticipated feature was sadly missing Vista is in most respects a step forward from Windows XP. Yes it runs slower, but then it has many more security features in place than XP. A lot of software is yet to support it, but from the bigger development houses you want to look at who’s to blame. The big boys with top MSDN accounts have had access to Vista builds for well over a year before launch and so have no excuse. While now most software is compatible only a small few developers are still whining on about their difficulties in getting their software to work.
Undoubtably Vista is the way forward, people like Dell may be offering XP as a BTO option but for how much longer? Microsoft can pull the plug on that whenever they want to, so as the saying goes, ‘Get with the program’

9. 21CN
BT’s 21CN simply stands for 21st Century Network, and that pretty well sums up what it is. With their grand plan, they are moving the UK’s old Public Switched Telephone Network based on a digital rework of old analogue technologies, over to a VoIP solution. 21CN will allow BT to completely revamp the services they offer both businesses and home users. Many larger businesses already use VoIP systems internally and the move to an IP based transit system instead of the traditional PSTN will make the whole implementation easier.
This whole project will cost BT £10 billion in capital expenditure over the next 5 years, but should set all of the UK up for faster broadband and pave the way for many more IP based services.

8. CentOS
Taking the RedHat source code, removing all the branding throw in a little love, recompile and distribute a free binary compatible RHEL clone. Sounds nice? Well it is, the CentOS guys have been doing this for quite some time now, but only recently receiving recognition for their efforts with some web hosts staring to offer CentOS on their dedicated servers as an option. I have played with CentOS and it’s a lovely distro, I have plans to use it on some servers sometime next year, and I chose it because I want RHE, but without paying for the branding and support contract.

7. Ubuntu
In 2007 Ubuntu really has gone from strength to strength and marked itself out as the Linux distro of choice for the desktop. Built in WPA detection, native NTFS read and write support, and includes Compiz and Beryl for all of you whole like your eye candy. I have used Ubuntu and it is incredibly easy to get to grips with.
As a brand Ubuntu has almost become synonymous with desktop Linux and the fact that they will send you discs to pass onto your mates isn’t half bad either. With Dell now giving its customers the option to have Ubuntu preinstalled on some of their systems I see only bigger and better things for Ubuntu in 2008.

6. Intel Quad Core
2007 was the year that Intel’s ‘Core’ chips finally completely destroyed the competition. AMD released the rather pathetic Barcelona to try to gain some point back but was met with underwhelming reviews. Having used a Core 2 Duo for the last year on my iMac I can say with certainty that Intel have the formula for success at hand, so slapping two Core 2 Duo cores together must be a step in the right direction. The thermal envelopes for the Quad core parts is generally lower than the old P4 chips, as show here and here.
With AMD’s Phenom nowhere to be seen and Intel’s quad core parts batttering Barcelona on both price and performance fronts, coupled with Intel’s soon to be seen 45nm processes, the future looks bright, and very small.

5. Asus Eee PC
An ultra-portable PC for £215? Madness you say? Not so, the Asus Eee PC tips the scales at only 928g and runs a custom Linux distro. It ships with Firefox and OpenOffice and is a great machine if, like the majority of the world seems to, all you want is a machine to do a few letters on and surf the net. It comes complete with a webcam built in, 802.11g as standard, so really what more do you want? For probably most of my uses of a computer that would be fine, since I seem to spend most of my time either surfing the net or working on documents, it only lacks in the ability to do the other part of my time, gaming and video encoding. Otherwise, it’s a great machine that deserves some great kudos.

4. Windows Home Server
Windows home server seems like one of those technologies that should be a given for Microsoft to produce. A simple yet powerful server product that can run on hardware that is well below the bar as far as current PC performance goes.
Based in Windows Server 2003, WHS makes it very simple to share and control media on both the server and the computers connected to it, as well as monitoring the health of both the network and the connected clients. Storage worries are taken care of by WHS, all RAID configs are handled easily as well as backup of the clients to the server. Microsoft really are spot on the money here, and with vendors like HP taking up the baton and running with WHS, MS are onto a winner here.

3. Google Apps
The buzz goes that Google Apps are MS Office killers. Well I actually agree with the buzz, Google’s Apps are fantastic pieces of work. Google provide most of the functionality that’s found within the Office suite from Microsoft, with Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Page Creator and Start Page all being included for the rather cheap price of nothing. Gmail, we all know and love, Google talk is based on the jabber IM protocol, Calendar does exactly what it says on the tin, Docs mimics the basic functionality of MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint, page creator is a basic GUI web page editor and start page offers a customisable home page.
All this seems a little much for a free package, but then so did Gmail when it was launched, offering 1Gb of storage while other languished around 10Mb. With Google Apps the whole set is portable, any net connected computer can be used to access the same documents, contacts and events as you would on your office or home PC. Simply put, why spend £250 on MS Office when you can have Google Apps for free and take them with you wherever you go?

2. Apple
Apple, consistently developing new products that seem to attract consumers like moths to a flame. That could be there company mantra, the iPhone has had a phenomenal launch worldwide and seen a large uptake, even though it is locked to one network in each region. 30,000 units sold in 5 days since the French launch, 500,000 unit expected to be sold in Europe by the end of the year, and Millions sold in the US, no one could say the iPhone’s sales have been lackluster. Apple also expect to sell 10 million worldwide next year but some analysts put the figure higher.
Leopard has taken off this year too, with a hell of a lot of people, myself included, queuing up outside and Apple store to buy Leopard. Apple claim 2 million copies sold in 2 days at launch, stick that in your pipe and smoke it Vista. It’s especially good going when you consider Apple estimates that there are only 21 million machines worldwide capable of running Leopard.
On top of all that though the new iPod range is stunning as usual and the new iMacs leave little to be desired, Apple made the right choice with Intel and its a decision which is playing off in spades now.

1. Nintendo Wii
Nintendo really had to steal the show here. At the end of last year they managed to create a product which by all accounts has largely outsold all the competition in such a short space of time as to be staggering. VG Chartz really show the big picture as to how well Nintendo are stomping the competition in terms of sales.
The Wii is something everyone wants to play on, when friends come over we all go on the Wii, no matter how old they are or how young. The selection of games still sadly tends to favour mini-games at the moment but things like Zelda and Mario Galaxy are starting to buck that trend. There are a lot of good things to come for the Wii, a lot of large publishers were caught off guard by just how popular the Wii was going to be and as a result they have been behind in development, but now they’re starting to catch up.
Nintendo has brought gaming to the masses with the Wii and do it all at the right price too, and so for that they take the top place in this review.

I hope you all enjoy reading this piece, please comment as you please on it, I always welcome the discussion.

Cheers

The lovely Transmission Bittorrent client available for OS X, Linux, Unix and Solaris has now reached version 1.0. I have been using Transmission for a while now on OS X and it really is great, small lightweight, everything a BT client should be, unlike the increasingly bloated Azereus.

Just like most OS X apps it just works, drag a torrent to the windows or double click it and the download starts. No fancy bits, just simple effective torrent handling.

I suggest you check it out if your on one of the supported OS’s

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Shawn Blanc has an extensive review of Panic’s Transmit FTP application. Have a read over on his blog at shawnblanc.net.

There are many/ things that make Transmit stand out as my Mac FTP application of choice, mainly I have never had it crash, unlike Cyberduck which crashes on a very regular basic when uploading stuff to my webserver. It also is much much faster than Cyberduck for large numbers of small files and just generally a lot nicer to use.

I suggest you check it out.

Cheers

At the end of October I wrote a little bit about my experience with Leopard, and the little problem I managed to make for myself by not backing up data before an install. I also promised a more detailed look at Leopard itself rather than just my problems with it. Someone pointed out to me last week that I had yet to do the follow up, so here it is.

Personally I think Leopard is ahead of Tiger in most respects. Things are better organised and in a more logical fashion, for example, firewall settings now come under the ‘Security’ section of the preferences, rather than ‘Sharing’ as they did in Tiger. Parental controls now have their own section, rather than being hidden away in the accounts settings.

The look of the OS has changed too, the menu bar is now semi-transparent, rather than the older opaque style of Tiger, and the same applies to the Dock, it is now semi-transparent and reflective. No just shiny reflective but real-time reflective. Nice features both of them, but they serve no real purpose other then iCandy.

The bigger features include the much anticipated Time Machine, Boot Camp, and Spaces.

Time Machine automatically backs up everything on your Mac by default to an external hard drive of your choosing. It can be either USB or Firewire and does not have to be present all the time, obviously Time Machine will only back up to there when the drive is connected. You can specify which files are excluded from the backup so that pointless files are not wasting backup space. The whole process is absolutely seamless, it really is a case of set and forget. Running quietly in the background files are copied, with the oldest backup being erased once the drive gets full. Backups are done hourly and are incremental once the first full backup has run. All this leads to a solution which is much more likely to be used by the average user, which can only be a good thing. Your machine can be completely restored from a Time Machine backup with the help of the Leopard install disc, complete with permissions intact.

Spaces is Apple’s implementation of virtual desktops. The number of spaces can be configured right up to a 4 x 4 grid of them down to the simple 2 spaces. Moving between them is simple enough, control and arrow keys move you around, or click the spaces icon to see an expose-esque overview of all spaces and click the one you want to switch too. Applications can be bound to a specific space so that each time you open that application it runs in a particular space, which is a nice touch.

Boot Camp, everybody knows what it is by now, so I’ll not go into that. What I will say is that it is included with Leopard and no longer available for standalone download. It remains essentially the same as the downloadable version, but with an updated driver set and some minor bug fixes.

The interface for Front Row has seen a revamp, with the large reflective spinning thing gone, and a new, rather more minimal interface in it’s place. Personally I like it, it ties in nicely with the Apple TV interface and makes navigation easier. Some people don’t like the new design and have even reverted back to the FrontRow build that comes with Tiger, but for me, I’m sticking with it.

Printing has been massively simplified, adding my networked printer really was a doddle, I had no problems at all with all the required drivers installed automatically for me.

There have been a whole host of UNIX changes under the hood which I wont go into here, and security has been revamped, again I wont go into that here, but have a read to find out what changes have been made.

Sadly since upgrading to Leopard I have seen more crashes. Application crashes in Safari in particular I’m seeing more frequently than with Tiger, but the 10.5.1 update seems to have fixed most of these.

I’ve had only minor problem with application compatibility, and nothing like the problem users of Windows Vista have been experiencing.

All in all it’s a most worthwhile upgrade for users of Panther and Tiger, and Apple’s attractive pricing on their family packs makes the purchase very tempting for users with more than one Mac in their house.

Cheers

I haven’t posted in a while, I’ve had a lot of other things on my plate. I’m here now though so that’s the important thing.

I read a wonderful tongue in cheek review of the upgrade benefits of Windows XP when compared to Vista.

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft has really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

Have a read of the whole thing, I find it’s great, a little biased as one would expect but funny all the same.

Cheers