After a waste-of-time election we've got Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman, both solidly New Labour.

You only need to look at the turn out, half of Labour Party members, and just 8% of affiliated Trade Unionists. I certainly couldn't vote for somebody who didn't nominate John McDonnell.

I'm sick of right-wing politicians talking the socialist talk while busy selling off public services, the deputy leader election really brought some of this out. But as Owen Jones points out, they needed to use left-leaning language in order to get anywhere, thanks to the recent shift leftwards in the unions and the party.

The move leftwards has clearly alarmed the New Labour gang, Brown announcing he'll scrap trade union votes on policy making at the Labour Conference.

For those under any illusions about Brown, John McDonnell recently covered a sticking point at the EU summit.

True to his neo liberal philosophy, the reason Brown demanded Blair go back into the negotiating room and dig his heals in was because he was fearful that the French were undermining the free market. He was angry that Sarkozy of all people was seeking to "dilute" the operation of free competition in the EU market.

On the plus side in a recent poll only 22% of people said David Cameron would make the best Prime Minister. I think from that we have no danger in losing the general election, and I think it is time to start pressing the campaign against New Labour, and the Tory moles inside it, and ultimately for us to reclaim our Party and steer it on a socialist course.

Has anybody else noticed that the Mac zealots seem to be getting dumber lately? I spotted this (via Channel 9) on MacDailyNews:

MacDailyNews Take: The IT guys are in for a rude awakening and the iPhone is only the beginning. They will have to accommodate the iPhone. Too many important employees will demand it and IT won't be able to stem the tide. The fact is that business people will decide which device they want to carry and their businesses will adapt to it. Just as they did with "Microsoft-incompatible" Research In Motion's Blackberry. Apple's iPhone will be a success with business users whether the IT guy wants it or even whether AT&T and Apple tailor marketing to businesses or not.

Note to CEOs: Who runs the company, you or the IT guy? It's your job to make the decisions and it's the IT guy's job to implement your decisions that relate to technology. Just as with Macs, you need to educate yourself instead of relying on someone with their own, possibly hidden, agendas to make extremely important technology decisions for your company. Most of you could be saving a LOT of money right now, but you aren't because you've delegated an important part of your company's decision-making to people who, frankly, in our experience, aren't capable of making good, sound, strategic, long-term decisions. Most IT guys (and we know many) are not open-minded enough to be able to consider new, better, more effficient, more effective options that would benefit your company. In fact, most IT guys we've met will throw up road blocks and repeat myths until they're blue in the face in order to avoid change. Especially change that might make their department less critical or smaller. Bottom line: most of you CEOs have given the IT guy way, way, way too much power. It's time to take it back.

The iPhone in a corporate environment? Have they lost their minds. The iPhone just isn't built around that sort of environment. Businesses don't use Yahoo! to handle their e-mail, most businesses use Outlook and Exchange, does the iPhone sync with Outlook? No. Employees who need e-mails pushed to their devices like with Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices are out of luck with the iPhone, I guess they'll visit Yahoo! Mail, or try and jiggle up POP3, and hope they don't have many e-mails waiting, the iPhone lacking 3G and only having Wi-Fi when you sign up for an AT&T data plan would make that rather painful. Then what about security? Oh dear, stolen or lost iPhone with corporate data on? Devices for the corporate market have security, Windows Mobile devices can be set to erase if the password is entered incorrectly.

Then they have the nerve to call "most IT guys" not open-minded enough. The fact is these Mac zealots of closed-minded to the possibility that their platform, well it's not even a platform, their phone isn't for businesses. Worse still they urge CEOs to take charge of IT in companies, yeah put somebody who probably isn't an expert in technology in charge of the IT department, great call and fantastic business sense there.

It's nice to see the House of Lords, messing around with democracy again. They've recently amended the GLA bill, limiting the Mayor of London to two terms.

As you can imagine the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are behind this, they know they can never defeat Ken Livingstone in an election so they call on their unelected buddies in the House of Lords to stop Ken from running. Pathetic.

Abolish the House of Lords, simple.

Time for a rant, the Digg crowd has been annoying me for some time, it's the same old anti-Microsoft Linux and Mac crowds, only probably some of the least mature out of them. I've just noticed that in the technology section the following was in the top 10 'Vote to have Linux Dell PCs available Worldwide'.

What the hell? How come something like that possibly get in the top 10.

So we come to Dell's IdeaStorm, this was a website set up by Dell so customers could make suggestions to them, it started off great and has had many good suggestions for Dell to make, like having options to not pre-load PCs with lots of bloatware.

However it was abused by a lot of Linux zealots, who have frankly wrecked it with endless anti-Microsoft nonsense. It started off with a suggestion for Dell to sell PCs with Linux pre-installed (they have done this in the past), thousands of Linux fans signed up just to vote saying they would love to buy a machine with Linux on. So after a few months Dell released such a system, it was something like $200 more expensive than a system with Windows on it (not surprising when you have to consider the additional support costs Dell would have to manage).

Now I have no objections to Dell selling PCs with Linux on, but IdeaStorm has been ruined, all the other great ideas like not having lots of pre-loaded bloatware installed get swamped by thousands of these zealots, despite them being in the minority, that isn't how a democracy works.

Now what are they doing? Trying to get the Linux PCs sold worldwide, I really hope Dell has the sense not to decide this based on their troll-infested IdeaStorm website. How are the trolls doing this? By using multiple accounts and legions of anti-Microsoft children and/or trolls to cover the web in links to this post on IdeaStorm.

For Dell, who were lead on to believe they'd get significant sales from having Linux installed on PCs, I'm sure are not happy about this, all those anti-Microsoft children, with their 6 different accounts voting and leaving comments like 'I'd buy a Dell Linux PC', and then Dell only sell about 7 systems.

Come on grow up, there are so many more pressing matters in the world you lot can direct your energies into, instead of childish OS rivalries and trying to flood every community on the web with your propaganda.

Some of the worse cases coming from the Microsoft support newsgroups, where perhaps a dozen of these trolls hang around urging people to download and install Linux. In many cases these aren't computer savvy users, yet they're being told to format and install Linux, led to believe all their problems would go away. The trolls don't stay around afterwards to hear that their computer won't boot anymore, or that even if they can get Linux installed, none of their hardware works properly, or they can't get on the internet anymore.

This shows how utterly stupid the trolls are, by pushing Linux on the mainstream at this point in time, when Linux is utterly not ready for the mainstream, they're only creating a bad reputation. These people, normal every day computer users, who have been duped into installing Linux, will probably never go near it again, and when one of their friends talks about it, they'll just repeat their bad experiences like 'I had to edit all these texts files for 3 days just to get my modem to work and then the browser kept crashing and I had to pay £100 to pay somebody to fix my computer and put Windows back on it'.

I think we need to start a campaign 'Say no to Linux trolls', heck I'd be willing to bet most Linux trolls run Windows anyway.

For those that haven't seen what Microsoft Surface is all about have a look at on10 for a demonstration of some different applications running on it.

It'll be shipping this year at $10000, so very much aimed at the commercial space at the moment, but hopefully within 5 or so years it'll start becoming more mainstream.

I want one of these as my coffee table, and we need some cool applications for it too. Like Pac-Man and Geometry Wars.

From a hardware perspective, it's a PC running Windows Vista, in a box with a projector and a few cameras which are watching the surface, so it's not a touch screen, which means you can place objects on the table and it can recognise them. Pretty neat.

Long Zheng did up a recent post on his blog covering Ultimate Extras, or lack of. This was a concern for many people going back to when it was announced, will Microsoft get bored and turn its efforts on something else. It's been pretty quiet for the last 5 months, Dreamscene RTM has yet to ship, and we've had one content pack released for the beta version, and some wallpapers.

I for one would like Microsoft to clarify what they're doing and what the status of the Ultimate Extras team is. Long made a good suggestion, letting users pick a couple of Games for Windows games to download over Ultimate Extras, now that would be a good idea. Heck I'm sure most people would settle for that funky photo editing application they demoed back at the beginning of the year or even an announcement on what they're working on instead of the near virtually wall of silence we're facing at the moment.