In an ideal world, good things would get the attention they deserve and crap would disappear.

For proof that this isn't an ideal world, check out NetApplications' browser market share stats.

Internet Explorer 6, the gurning half-wit of the browser world, has nearly 17 per cent of the market. Opera, a truly great browser, has 0.72 per cent.

That's lower than Netscape (0.74 per cent), which was shot and turned into glue months ago.

To say that Opera is better than Netscape or IE6 is like saying having sex with the love of your life is better

We recently asked visitors to the Windows Vista magazine website how long it took for their PCs to start. The results varied from less than a minute to over ten!

There are plenty of factors that could make your PC startup grind to a halt, so there are plenty of tweaks to try to get your PC starting up in a flash. It's all very well listing these tweaks, but do they work?

We have a PC at home packed with so much stuff that it takes an age to load Windows Vista, so we decided to test the tweaks to find out how much time we could save.

First

Microsoft is looking to push what it terms 'consumer internet devices', with the Windows Embedded team using its Computex keynote to talk about devices that fall between smartphones and netbooks.

Various names have been applied to devices that are for surfing the internet, do not have full computer functionality but that are not smartphones.

Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, is currently the most common term, but Microsoft has labelled the category 'consumer internet devices' or CIDs.

Key area

Microsoft's OEM Division Chief

Premium video-sharing site Hulu is considering charging for some of its content, in a bid to generate more money.

The website, co-owned by three of the four big broadcasters in America – News Corp, NBC Universal and Disney – has announced that a subscription model could happen, where paying subscribers to the site will benefit from exclusive content.

It was News Corp's Jonathan Miller who spilled the beans when asked about a subscription model, explaining to The Hollywood Reporter: "in my opinion the answer could be yes.

"I don't see

SEGA delivers another winner

SEGA attracts the hardest of hardcore fan-boys, very much in the same way as its Japanese stable-mate Nintendo does. Many of these men (for they are 99 per cent male) are of a certain age and grew up through the 1980s and 1990s with the classic SEGA and Nintendo consoles and games at the centre of their worlds. And many of these so-called 'hardcore' gamers decry the recent output of the Japanese gaming giants as "mediocre, at best" and not a patch on their past glories.

And most of them are wrong.

Fresh from being a key figure in the showcase of Project Natal, Peter Molyneux has been promoted to creative director for Microsoft Gaming studios.

The man behind the likes of Populous and Fable and head of Lionhead studios was the person to show off virtual friend Milo as the potential of Microsoft's controller-less vision of gaming was displayed.

MGS addictive

And now, the games designer will be responsible for the creative direction of MGS, while continuing in a role at Lionhead and helping out at Rare.

Molyneux

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has expressed her doubts that Bing will finally crack the search market for Microsoft.

The arrival of Bing, backed by a massive marketing budget, represents Microsoft's latest attempt to gain a bigger market share in internet search.

But Bartz, speaking at the Bank of America US Tech conference, said that a short term uplift would not lead to any kind of key market shift.

No scale

"They're not going to get scale through Bing," insisted Bartz . "They're going to get some temporary

Stephen Wolfram has announced a live Q&A session about his new computational knowledge engine, WolframAlpha.

From 10pm tomorrow (Thursday 4 June), Wolfram will respond online to some of the "tens of thousands of comments, suggestions and questions" users have submitted about WolframAlpha.

If you have a question that you would like British-born computer scientist Wolfram to address, you should leave it as a comment on the Wolfram Research blog, here.

Parlez-vous Wolfram?

Browsing some of the existing comments,

MIT engineers have built a radio-frequency replica of the human inner ear that could be used to create a an ultra-broadband 'universal' or 'cognitive' radio chip capable of picking up mobile phone, GPS, radio, internet and Bluetooth signals.

The chip is faster than any human-designed radio-frequency spectrum analyser and also operates at much lower power.

The RF cochlea mimics the structure and function of the biological cochlea, which uses fluid mechanics, piezoelectrics and neural signal processing to convert sound waves into electrical signals that are