I had one SSD drop dead on me in a week - catastrophic total failure. One minute it was working, next it wasn't and I couldn't get a single bit off it. The replacement - exactly the same make and model - performed flawlessly. Is this typical? Maybe. I can't completely rule out murphy's static finger but it seems that the consumer drives are still a bit of a crapshoot.

Which reminds me, I really should run a backup.

The transformer is very netbookish but, as a hybrid device, it's a little hard to really categorise it as "just" a netbook. From the perspective of netbooks it looks like an ultrabook, but from the perspective of ultrabooks it looks like a netbook. And it's a tablet.

Neither fish nor fowl.

Must be why I love mine. :)

Neutrinos only interact very weakly with matter and wouldn't follow an optical fibre.

@AC They don't, they just sit in the middle of it and complain.

Actually they do have a monopoly. You can't run non-apple-approved software on an iOS device. They often simply ban software from iTunes if it competes with their own offerings. How is that not abusing a monopoly?

Nanolinguini?

Your argument seems to be "Apple made a thing, then something similar came along to exploit a similar market, therefore they are ripping off apple". By that logic apple are ripping off... HTC, who released the Wallaby (aka O2 XDA, Qtec 1010 and others) a full four years before the iphone, with a full-featured touch-screen interface. Icons on a grid...

There was a trend towards touch-screens before Apple glot the iphone out. Android was following that trend. Apple was following that trend.

Sorry, you lose. Apple may have marketing success but they did not invent this interface, and they cannot claim they are being ripped off by something that is merely *similar*, yet different enough to be noticeably so, and which is simply following the prevailing paradigm.

Defamation is in the eye of the beholder. Or would you rather give people the power to have every post critical of, say, Orlowski removed from this site because it was "defamation"? Because that's what they're proposing, in essence: the ability to have posts removed simply because someone has complained, without recourse to courts or any form of defence.

The ability to speak freely and anonymously is one of the cornerstones of western democracy. It allows us to hold our "masters" to account by providing a means to disseminate information that they don't want us to see. Given that much of that information could and has ben declared defamatory in one way or another, it's arguable that people *must* be allowed to post defamation if democratic government is to function. The alternative would cripple our ability to hold the state to account; we already face the reality of people declaring the truth to be libel in this country. This proposal would allow them to not even bother having to go to court to do it.

Everyone within chair range at least professes to believe it.

Slavishly copied?

I'm holding an LG GD510, also known as the "pop". First released at the end of 2009 or thereabouts. Predates the iphone 4 by about a year. Now from a distance, if you aren't paying too much attention, it does actually look a *lot* like an iphone. It's got about the same dimensions,in bright light it's about the same colour (admittedly very bright light), it's got roughly the same radius on the corners..

What I'm trying to say is, you seem to believe that apple invented this look, but I'm holding a device that disproves that.

Now stop slavishly copying and trying to pass off on my name or I'll sue you.

He was right, based on the information he had at the time. Subsequent information doesn't change that.

Steve Jobs took a risk and it paid off but it was a *big* risk. The sort of risk that either makes you a billionaire or leaves you wandering the streets in the tattered remains of your last suit. He was right too. They were both right, it just depends on how you look at it.

Made it work... by redesigning the antenna to avoid the problems highlighted with the previous one. Problems they denied were ever there.

A failed design gets replaced and that somehow justifies denying it was a failed design.

You must be new. The only editorial line The Register seems to have is "barbecue the sacred cow!"

And long may it stay that way.

To be, or not to be.

Hm. Not to be.

*BOOM*

When IIS came around the web was already well established enough that it wasn't going anywhere, so the market was able to bear a license fee, which would only ever take a minority position against free alternatives. With Gopher, unless I'm misremembering, there wasn't the same entrenchment, WWW was already there to compete and there wasn't any alternative to the licensed server. So it died.

An ode may rhyme, there's no rule that says it *must*.

@AC

It's true. The issue is energy density, something that fuel cell, hydrogen and battery advocates always either ignore or prefer not to talk about.

Currently the most efficient form of energy storage for road vehicles is petrol simply because it packs the most energy into the smallest space without the need for expensive, dangerous active storage facilities. Hydrogen can leak from even the most perfect of seals because it's so small and requires extreme compression to achieve even remotely the same energy density as petrol, which then requires expensive and dangerous cryogenic storage. Hydrogen fuel cells are marginally better but still suffer the same basic storage and transport problems as hydrogen. Batteries? They're largely dead weight. Look at the average battery powered car and you'll see that they're essentially useless. People complain about a phone that lasts less than a week, how will they act if they have to "fill up" their car every day? I'd only have to fill my car every day if I was doing a daily commute all the way from lands end to john o'groats.

The only solution I can see is artificial petroleum produced in some sort of high intensity centralised facility (ie not one that requires the use of vast tracts of arable land and food crops). Everything else seems to be a waste of time and effort with very little energy returned on energy invested, especially given the fundamental rebuilding of a large chunk of our infrastructure and economy that always seems to go along with them.

I don't get sunburned any more!

Perhaps we should invent a giant hat for the earth. :)

Not only that, there are regular finds of deep graves and the ruins of farms under ice on what is now permafrost. Permafrost is not easy to dig and nobody in their right minds would try to farm grain on it, let alone dig a six foot grave.

You're kidding, right?

Our ozone layer isn't "totally hosed", it's still almost entirely there and it is constantly replenished by higher frequency electromagnetic radiation interacting with O2. But never mind that, you're apparently claiming that an "intact" ozone layer would prevent a gamma ray burst from doing anything to us?

Bull.

We aren't talking a dribble of light here, we're talking the entire output of the sun hitting us in moments. The ozone layer wouldn't stop a tiny fraction of that. In fact it'd probably be blown away in the first second.

Just for once, look past the sort of petty vindictiveness that tries to blame humans for everything and realise that the universe is far bigger and more powerful than we could ever hope to comprehend.

"Well, they currently have *no* ozone, "

Wrong. They have a reduced percentage. The ozone "hole" is not a hole as you seem to believe, it's a thinning, like the hair on my head, or the credibility of your posts each time you make a new one. Still there, not as much as before, and it's highly variable as well.

There comes a time in a man's life when he has to bear left and take the next exit, but that time has, sadly, long passed for you. Son, you better slow down, maybe make a u-turn soon and get back on the road to your destination as soon as you're able. Okay.

@irons

Given the way its "family" has been treated by apple...?

@AC

Logical fallacy. They may be writing some part of the kernel, that doesn't mean they know jack about securing it.

They're usong churches because they're a convenient tall tower that's usually close to the people that these wifi schemes are meant to serve. It's why a ot of steeples also gave phone masts installed - they provide coversge wthout fhe mast being a visible eyesore.

@Dick Emery

Of course not! We have to get through duotronic "tape"-reading behemoths first.

Don't forget.

IBM still has that racetrack memory on the go. I quite like the idea, it seems very scifi.

How often?

Well, lets see, in the last several months I've booted various family computes from a USB drive several times, and from a CD numerous times as well, to either repair an existing installation or to install something new. I do it quite regularly. A lot of people do it quite regularly. More than enough to make something like this a huge problem.

As for importing keys, surely you can see this renders the entire concept pointless? If you can import keys, so can other people. In that case all you have is a needlessly complicated additional step to getting a working system. It's rather like government bureaucracy in that respect.

Or swedish. The wife's name was over 30 characters long (not including spaces) before we married and, due to Swedish conventions for naming, she kept her surname as a middle name with mine tacked on the end. Believe it or not, a 40+ character name with accents is not something you can just brush off as an edge case. It's very common.

We've had no end of trouble with idjits who can't comprehend a slightly foreign name. She's been called all sorts of things on paper, from minor misspellings, to using the wrong name as her first name, to the unforgettable Mr Omordlinap in one case... it's fun waiting to see each new permutation.

@404 harder to crack, too...

Pedal Stool

That some sort of unicycle without wheels?

I think you'll find it's pedestal. As in, the large lump of stone often found between a statue and a plinth.

Plinth, incidentally, is the sexiest word a woman can say. Try asking a woman to say it sometime and watch their face. Magic.

What a world that has such noble titles in it

Answer: why not?

- the general