If you live in the UK and are unfortunate to be a customer of Orange, you will have seen pretty much every carrier introduce unlimited data bundles apart from Orange. They seem unwilling to accept that anyone on their network may want to do anything other than make phone calls or send text messages.

I hope device manufacturers (namely HTC) don’t touch Orange, not even with an extremely long orange barge pole. Infact, I hope everyone who reads this leaves Orange as a matter of protest.

Today I accidentally Sent/Received email today on my SPV e650 without WiFi turned on, a novelty that no doubt lead to me being charged a ‘flat fee’ of £1 - AWESOME. If I did that every day, it would be £31 a month.. How much is unlimited (or reasonably limited) data on O2? £5 a month.

In Orange’s defense, you can get a 30mb bundle for £8 a month - that’s all the data anyone will ever need.. You could also choose to pay £5 a month for ‘unlimited’ evening and weekend browsing, great for keeping on top of work during normal business hours.

In a world where every other mobile device promotes mobile internet, Orange really is running a risk. It seems like the whole world is moving forward and Orange is just standing still.

Everyone at the top of the Microsoft corporate machine gets humiliated in public eventually, and today it was the turn of Steve Ballmer at the Hungarian School of Economy.

And in true Microsoft style, Ballmer took it like a man cowered like a little girl behind his desk after an onslaught of lets face it - balls of protein - were chucked at him.

You could see a combination of looks on his face when he realized what was happening, looks that will be familar to any Microsoft board members around Ballmer when it was announced he wouldn’t be getting a box full of Yahoo by next day delivery.

At least he recovered - which was more than can be said for Mr. Gates, although at one point in the video he looks ready to break into his infamous “Developers, developers, developers, developers” speech from the Windows 95 launch - something from which, 13 years on, he probably wouldn’t recover from. It seems that when times get tough, its just automatic for Ballmer to sweat enough water to fill small borehole and instantly form 5 stress induced stomach ulcers by pacing backwards and forwards on stage.

Yahoo today responded to yesterday’s letter from Microsoft inviting Yahoo to join the boys up in Redmond. The letter rejects Microsoft’s offer for the web services giant unless more money is offered.

In a summary of their response Yahoo said:

We are open to all alternatives that maximize stockholder value. To be clear, this includes a transaction with Microsoft if it represents a price that fully recognizes the value of Yahoo! on a standalone basis and to Microsoft, is superior to our other alternatives, and provides certainty of value and certainty of closing. Lastly, we are steadfast in our commitment to choosing a path that maximizes stockholder value and we will not allow you or anyone else to acquire the company for anything less than its full value.

The key phrase in this summary is “includes a transaction.. if it represents a price that fully recognizes the value of Yahoo!”. So come on Microsoft, more money please..

According to The Times today “The internet could soon be made obsolete.”, in an article published today The Times states that scientists at CERN, the world largest particle physics laboratory will enable a superfast ‘internet’ which could be available this autumn.

“The Grid” which is remensicent to the network that founded the internet half a century ago (ARPANET) - The Grid has been designed to be a network of supercomputers collaborating processing power to analyse the results of CERN research.

The Grid will ‘revolutionize’ the internet because its network is solely fibre optic and this will eliminate the slow downs in our current internet caused by copper cabling. But isn’t this network occurring already? Telecommunications networks across the globe are being upgraded to fibre optics which makes The Grid a mere example of why we need to convert all networks to fibre optics.

So in response to The Times - No, The Grid won’t make the internet obsolete, it will only drive mass upgrade of copper cable to fibre optics - and that won’t be pervasive for at least the next decade and even then there will always be weak links in the network, when you deal with a network as big as the internet, it becomes impossible to ensure uniform bandwidth.

Whether The Grid is over-hyped or not, it is certainly a necessary kick that telecommunication providers need to get their networks upgraded.