Two great little pocket devices have appeared this week, both of which I can see myself picking up as soon as they are available.

The first is the Zink Bluetooth Camphone Printer, a tiny printer that will print out a photo straight from your phone, using similar technology to the Polaroid cameras of old. There's a great overview of the device on Gizmodo (Zink Pocket Printer: iPhone Companion?), and a hands on at First Hands On: The Zink Bluetooth Camphone Printer. For an expected $99, and a 20 cents a print (on 2x3" paper) it might be a good solution when you want a quick instant print from your otherwise digital photo.

Vista came out this week. I haven't checked the release version yet, even though Microsoft were kind enough to send me a copy. And before you ask, yes, I will be installing on an iMac!

But as I sit here contemplating the one hour installation time, I wonder whether we really need large monolithic operating systems anymore, and I include Vista, Mac OS X, Solaris and most of the full releases on Linux.

For me, I spend large periods of my time in a brower with web applications, both in terms of interfaces to online systems and my own applications. I am, for example, writing my blog post right now in a blogging environment that is part of the rest of my self developed intranet, where I also read my news, manage my diary, run my projects and read some of my email.

As outline in this announcement from Skype yesterday, Skype making its way into businesses, Skype is gaining a lot of momentum for communicating between businesses and offices as a cheap and viable alternative to using the standard phone system. For those companies that spend a lot of time talking between different branches the potential savings could be huge just on the inter-branch calls.

Certainly the new business focus will be a step in the right direction for those companies not only using Skype for basic calls, but also for those companies that want to extend their Skype usage elsewhere.

As outlined in this Slashdot.org piece, Farewell To the Floppy Disk, which links to an original piece at the BBC PC World says farewell to floppy, the floppy disk is, finally, dying.

I actually can't remember the last time I used a floppy disk, but I can count it in years, not months. I haven't had a floppy drive on any of my machines for 5 years, possibly longer.

While they were great at the time - and I used to buy my floppies in the hundreds - they were horrendously unreliable, particularly if you used them regularly, and although for their age they held a reasonable amount of information, today I can get a memory stick the size of a fingernail that holds 1000 times that.

I don't know whether I've just been unlucky, but I've not had much success trying to get into conference services or indeed other services that require me to use the keypad after I've dialed in, using Skype, either through a computer interface or the new DUALphone.

Sometimes I just simply can't get in, other times I can enter my pin number, but then additional settings (muting for listen only, for example) just fails to be acknowledged.

Of course, the ideal would be to run the entire conference on Skype, but while were in the transition mode from landline to Skype, it's these issues that can become annoying.

Curious about the costs of virtualization ? Microsoft have put up a Windows Server virtualization calculator where you can enter the number of servers, virtual machines and work out which version of Microsoft Windows Server will work with your server/VMs combination.

Sadly, it doesn't actually calculate what would be really helpful - determining how much you could save by consolidating your existing servers and using VMs to provide your requirements. But you can do that quite easily: work out the cost of each of your servers, work out how many you could combine into one server, and then take the new configuration away from the old to find out the savings. Oh, and make sure you count electricity savings into those calculations.