Posts by Michael Jennings 251 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2008
The new 13 inch Macbook Pro only has a 1280x800 screen, while the 13 inch Macbook Air has 1440x900, so the supposed "Pro" machine is clearly inferior. That's funny.
Of course, the 13 inch Macbook Pro is really the same machine as the Macbook but in an aluminium case instead of plastic, or at least it will be when the Macbook gets the same Sandy Bridge update. There is usually a delay of a month or two. The 15 and 17 inch Pros are genuinely high spec machines, but the 13 is more for people who want to sit in Starbucks with a machine that looks nice while they browse the web and run office apps and relatively lightweight stuff. Nothing wrong with that, but notwithstanding the "Pro" in the name, its closer to being in the same family as the Macbook rather than the other Macbook Pros.
That said, once Apple gets some LV and ULV Sandy Bridge chips from Intel and upgrades the Macbook Air, I can't see much reason to buy the 13 inch Pro. At that point the Air will be superior in just about every way, and not much more expensive.
The trouble with a two month delay is that this means the new product becomes available in May or June. June is when Apple has in the past released new iPhones, and they may not want two major product launches at the same time, if only because big launches are hard work for their retail staff and they may want to give them a rest in between. So a four month delay might actually be better than a two month delay.
Apple probably wants to release new iPad models closer to Christmas anyway, as it is a product that is going to be given as gifts a lot. As it is, Apple releases new iPods in September or October, but that category is in decline and it might make sense to use that release period for iPads instead. Some rumours have suggested that Apple would release an iPad 2 in the first half of this year and an iPad 3 in the second half of this year to achieve this, but if there is a product delay on the iPad 2, this becomes less possible
Franky, at the moment, Apple is streets ahead on the product. We are only just seeing the first competing tablets, and they are expensive and dramatically inferior to the Apple product for now. The existing iPad may be a year old, but likely buyers are not going to abandon it right now for competitors products. The iPhone is in more danger, because after playing catchup for several years the competition there has reached the point where it is pretty good. Competing tablets will catch up, but it is going to take a couple more years.
I went to Romania last year, and it's actually a surprisingly nice country (given that it is famous for Ceausescu and Dracula, basically).
However, I made the mistake of attempting to log in to my email account. I was immediately locked out. I received an e-mail saying "Your account has been compromised", asking me to check carefully for signs of misuse, and explaining the somewhat onerous security procedure for getting it unlocked.
There was no "We suspect there is a chance your account has been compromised" or anything like that. Straight to the "evil hackers have stolen your identity" stage.
<em>That is significant given that Microsoft's Internet Explorer surfing tool continued to slide, notching up its worst performance ever last month, by reeling in a still impressive 56 per cent of the browser market.</em>
Presumably the word "ever" has been redefined as meaning "since about 1999".
Of course, under English law, the phrase "since time immemorial" has sometimes been defined precisely as meaning "since at least 6 July 1189".
All credit to Samsung for getting a vaguely viable iPad competitor into shops before Christmas (nobody else did in significant numbers) but I do wonder how many of these have gone unsold. Every mobile phone shop had them, every electronics store had them, and general retailers like Tesco had them. I went travelling in the Balkans before Christmas, and they were very easy to buy in places like Bulgaria and Serbia too. There was some interest and a fair number of people demonstrating with them and playing with them, but the general feeling seemed to be that they cost too much. Apple has only sold the iPad through channels where people expect high prices. For these gadgets to sell in Tesco, they need to be a lot cheaper.
I've encountered these problems, and a partial fix is to manually connect to T-Mobile's network instead of Orange's. Of course, at the moment, T-Mobile and Orange customers can roam to each other's 2G networks, but not the 3G networks. So, if Orange has problems, I can use T-Mobile's GPRS, which is good enough to check my e-mail and find out the latest cricket score, if nothing else.
If Orange and T-Mobile got their roaming to include 3G networks, things would be better. There might be a little manual messing around, but I would at least have a full speed connection at the end of it.
More generally, I really hope the Orange / T-Mobile merger does not lead to Orange's network quality on the merged network. T-Mobile's 3G network is excellent. (Their 2G network, less so). If we end up with a merged network that has T-Mobile's 3G network quality, that would be good. Orange's network quality, not so much.
*Which* Atom CPU is an important question. Netbooks with the dual core N550 go for about £320. Single core netbooks with an N450 or N455 with Windows 7 starter go for about a hundred quid less than that. If it is a dual core atom, you are paying an extra £180 or so you are getting a touch screen, a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium rather than starter (although in my experience Starter is fine on a machine of this power - most of the extras in the more expensive versions aren't useful on puny hardware like this), and 32Gb of flash rather than a (roughly) 250Gb hard drive. You can see where most of that money is going, although it is still expensive, and my guess is that the user experience on Windows 7 without a keyboard is horrible. And the screen resolution is still crap, and the aspect ratio is wrong for a tablet. And I wonder about the battery life. Is it closer to the two hours you get on many netbooks or the ten hours you get on an iPad?
If it is a single core Atom, though, the price is outrageous however you look at it.
You can buy a perfectly nice single come netbook based on the N450 or N455 CPU for £199 if you shop around. The dual core N550 options seem to start around the £300 mark.
Either Intel has production issues with the dual core parts, or somebody is taking the piss.
Although the T-Mobile/Orange merger was supposedly "a merger of equals", like virtually all mergers it was really about one partner taking over the other, ie Orange taking over T-Mobile, ie the French buying out the Germans.
Now we are seeing Orange/France Telecom's legendary customer service coming through.
Yes, I have a T-Mobile contract. Yes, I chose them because of the generous data allowance. Yes, I am pissed off by this.
The Germans have different beer cultures in different parts of the country, and different beer glass sizes in different places. In some instances the pouring culture varies due to the different glass sizes. In Cologne and Dussuldorf they do have those 0.2 litre glasses, but aggressive service to go with with them. The moment you are finished, you will be brought another glass be the waiter, unless you beg him not to bring one (or put your coaster over the top of the glass). It's an easy culture in which to drink too much, actually, as there is always a full glass in front of you.
Australians have traditionally used different glass sizes in different states and have had the same names for different glass sizes in different states and different names for the same glass sizes in different states, so it can be a little confusing for visitors. I don't know where the author of this article got the idea that a schooner is two thirds of a pint though, as this size is unknown in Australia.
A schooner in Sydney is three quarters of a pint (originally 15 ounces, but these days rounded to 425ml as Australia uses the metric system). A schooner in South Australia is these days a half pint (10 ounces, 285ml) but used to be smaller (9 ounces, 255ml). However, what is called a pint in South Australia is three quarters of a (British) pint, and the same as a schooner in Sydney. The Sydney schooner size used to be uncommon elsewhere, but has become more available nationally in recent times, although it is still relatively rare in Melbourne and Perth. The half pint is available just about everywhere (and always has been) but under a variety of different names (middy/handle/pot/ten).
The (British) pint is not a traditional glass size in Australia, but has become more common in recent times, possibly due to the opening of theme Irish pubs. This is a bit silly - in hot weather you want to drink from smaller glasses so you are finished before the beer gets warm.
On the other hand, allowing pubs in the UK to serve in whatever glass size they like strikes me as sensible. I sometimes frequent a Portuguese place in Stockwell that serves beer in 0.2 litre and 0.4 litre sizes. They have imported the original Sagres glasses from Portugal to serve it in, and are just being culturally authentic. However, at the moment they are breaking the law. Polish places sometimes sell beer in 0.3 and 0.5 litre glasses, which are the standard sizes in Poland. Once again, why not? Many continental types care more about the beer being served in the original branded glass from the brewery. Forcing them to make glasses in non-standard sizes if they want to sell draught beer in the English market seems silly.
No real disagreement. It is deferred payment, just like most other mobile phone contracts. The data part is worth something though. Three will give you 15Gb of data a month for about £15 a month with a USB dongle. On that basis, the iPad is costing you an additional 24x10 + 199 = £439, which is not too bad given its retail price is £529.
Of course, Three will normally give you 25% off the cost of a mobile broadband contract if you ask nicely, so on that basis, the iPad is costing an additional 24x13.75 + 199 = £529, which is exactly the retail price.
Three will sometimes give you 50% off mobile broadband if you are at the end of a contract and are talking to the customer retention department. This makes the iPad deal look expensive. On the other hand, they might well give you a discount on their iPad deal too. I haven't tried to find out.
Of course, you may not need 15Gb a month. If not, buying an iPad at retail and getting a cheaper data plan is probably a better idea.
The Boris Bike operators want to be very sure they have the details of a valid credit card for anyone who rents the bikes, mainly because the success of the scheme depends on getting people to return the bikes, and this depends on the fact that people who don't return bikes are charged (by card) for their replacement cost.
Oyster Cards are prepay cards designed for small payments. They may be linked to credit cards, but most are not. They are not designed for the larger and more sophisticated payment services that are needed for the bike rentals
In some places (Hong Kong being the most notable) Oyster Card like systems have evolved to be useful for all manner of payments besides transport. TfL has had ambitions to do this here, but they run into financial services regulations when they do. They would basically have to apply for a banking licence and then accept regulation from the Financial Services Authority. It is hard to blame them for wanting to avoid this.
I pretty much never use Ethernet on a laptop. The only occasions I recall doing so recently have been when there have been issues with Wireless drivers when installing Ubuntu. The other way of getting round this is to connect to the net using a 3G Dongle (which Ubuntu has great support for) so it is no big deal. Some people are going to have to use Ethernet for work networks and the like, but I suspect that only a minority of people would use a USD Ethernet adaptor if it was in the box.
What I would like is an SD slot. At present I take a netbook and I take a camera with me when I am on the road, and I take a lot of photographs. I like to back my photos up along the way in order to minimise the chance of losing photographs if the camera is lost or stolen. Yes, an external card reader costs about £1, but the fewer accessories that can be lost/forgotten/broken, the better.
There are a few things left out, but I doubt Apple could throw in all of them without making the machine bigger and heavier. Which are important is going to depend on the person.
Apple have decided to release no Macs with the current generation of Intel graphics, which (given that there are no nvidia chipsets for Core i-) means that all their machines with integrated graphics (Air, 13 inch Macbook Pro, Mac Mini) are using CPUs that are one generation old (Core 2 rather than Core i-). I am not sure if this is because Apple things the current Intel graphics are simply really slow or because they want every Mac to support OpenCL, or (probably) both.
Intel have promised us much better graphics and OpenCL support in their Sandy Bridge architecture next year, and Apple will presumably use those in the next generation of all their machines with integrated graphics, and performance will jump two generations of hardware at once. The next Air should therefore have much better CPU performance and better battery life, as the GPU will be on die. The graphics might be worse, though.
Still, it will be a big jump, so I won't be buying this one now.
>What can we draw from all this? Orange and T-Mobile will offer heavily
>subsidised but locked 3G iPads in the coming weeks.
There is no need to network lock a handset or other device if you provide it on contract, as the customer has signed a contract of however many months and has in effect committed to pay for it in installments. The handset subsidy is safe because of the contract, not the lock. It is pretty common to get a phone on contract and find it is unlocked, particularly if the carrier is O2 and/or the phone is sold through a third party dealer like Carphone Warehouse of Phones 4 U. Two of my three latest contract phones have come unlocked.
Apple doesn't seem very keen on the idea of locking iPads: I believe that all iPads sold so far have been unlocked, and I doubt Apple will change. Apple seems to be cooling on the idea of locked iPhones for that matter, too, as they have been becoming available unlocked in more and more markets.
I suspect that T-Mobile/Orange will simply be obtaining the same unlocked iPads as everyone else through more or less the same channels as anyone else, and then bundling them with a contract.
When I first started using the net in Australia (late 80s) most traffic to and from Australia used the store and forward network ACSNet. At that time, Australia used the top level domain .oz, although the correct ISO 3166 code is .au . When Australia got a more full time connection to the internet (AARNet) in 1989, we switched over to the ISO 3166 code .au, and the existing domains became second level domains within this, so (for instance) uow.oz became uow.oz.au, and other second level domains were set up alongside this. Many sites used two names alongside one another for a while (so uow.edu.au and uow.oz.au would both work) and in most instances the .oz.au domains were eventually dropped. There are still a few in use though - for instance www.cs.mu.oz.au gets you the Computer Science department at the University of Melbourne, who were the people who put most of this together in the first place.
British e-mail addresses were once the other way round to the rest of the world, too (so, for instance mjj12@uk.ac.cam.amtp would have been correct), but that is a different story.
I have a couple of contracts on which I have an included data allowance that I use heavily and included minutes and texts that I don't go anywhere near using all of. I would be interested to see how the operators account for this. Do they say I am paying mostly for voice, because my contract contains lots of voice minutes (that I don't use) or do they take into account what I am actually using, and conclude that I am paying mostly for data. If the former, then they may well be overstating how much money they are receiving for voice and understating how much money they are receiving for data.
Apple has simply been unable to keep production up with demand, so they have staggered the release. This is partly a consequence of the way they structure their product line (one blockbuster product release of one model once a year, whereas many competitors release far more models and let a new one trickle out every few months) and it's partly a consequence of getting production levels wrong for this product, which may be as much about suppliers having problems as Apple directly.
I'm sure Apple would prefer to have enough for the whole world at once. They would make more money that way.
I've made a few hundred quid myself buying iPhone 4s and selling them to Russians on eBay. (The opportunity to do this has now gone, but a couple of months back it was a nice little earner). There's nothing wrong with this at all. I've even made a couple of Russians happy, and they need this more than we do.
It was a pretty clear trade-off between thinness and pixels.
For the third Generation iPod touch last year, Apple wanted to put a camera in - rumours and leaks said this, third party case designers produced case designs with holes in them, prototypes with cameras have briefly appeared on eBay and there is an empty space inside the iPod where the camera was supposed to go. However, Apple pulled it at the last minute because they simply couldn't get an adequate camera into a space that thin. (By their nature, cameras are reasonably thick. You can compensate for a smaller focal length by having a smaller sensor, and that means either smaller pixels or fewer of them. Larger pixels are better pixels, generally).
This year, the iPod is even thinner, so getting a camera in was undoubtedly again a challenge. My guess is that the 0.7MP camera was the best they could do having chosen that thinness. It's going to give reasonable video, and we will see how good it is for still pictures. It will presumably use much the same software as the better camera on the iPhone 4, and that is pretty good by this iteration, with Apple still improving it. If it is good enough for Facebook uploads and the like, it's a worthwhile feature compared to no camera at all.
The iPhone 4 has a much better rear facing camera (5Mb with a flash compared to 0.7Mp) and has GPS, compass and proximity sensor. Plus the 32Gb is a good deal cheaper for Apple to provide in the iPod (which has two lower density modules ) than in the iPhone (which has one higher density module in a smaller space). And the iPhone has a much bigger battery in order to power the cellular connection.
But yeah, it is a bit hard to see how that justifies an extra £350. I guess it is what the market will bear.
The A380 was originally scheduled to go into service in about September 2005, and it ultimately did so in October 2007. With this latest delay the 787 is going to be about two and a half years late, assuming this delay is the last one. So at this point, Boeing's delays are worse.
Neither company has exactly excelled itself here though.
When we say that "AT&T uses 850MHz and 1900MHz", we mean that there are two distinct bands it can use, each of which contains both the uplink and downlink. That is, "850Mhz" means that both the uplink and downlink are around "850MHz", and "1900MHz" means that both the uplink and downlink are near 1900MHz. Similarly, when we say "European networks use 2100Mhz", we mean that both the uplink and downlink are near 2100MHz. However, when we say "T-Mobile uses 1700Mhz and 2100MHz", we mean 1700Mhz for the uplink and 2100Mhz for the downlink. This is not two bands, it is one, but the uplink and downlink are a fair distance apart. The idiot of an analyst quoted in this article does not understand this, and because he has heard "2100" in both the description of the iPhone and of T-Mobile's network, he has assumed they are compatible, which they are not.
In my mind it is better to refer to T-Mobile's network as using the "AWS" band (as it is referred to by US regulators) as this avoids the confusion. I wouldn't actually say that T-Mobile's setup is all that weird - it's just different from the world outside the Americas. The AWS band has actually been allocated throughout most of the Americas (excluding Brazil, which has allocated bands mostly on the European model, as have a few places in the Carribean). There are or will shortly be networks using that band in Canada, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and more before long.
Now, Apple's new iPhone 4 works for 3G/UMTS on the 850Mhz, 900MHz, 1900Mhz, and 2100MHz bands. That is every band in the world on which UMTS has been deployed *except* the AWS network used by T-Mobile. I think from this we should conclude the precise opposite of what the idiot analyst said: that Apple does not intend to offer the iPhone on T-Mobile for at least the next year. Apple could probably have fairly easily added support for AWS/T-Mobile if it wanted to - Nokia has managed to produce a phone supporting all five bands for UMTS and I suspect if they can so can Apple, but for now Apple has not done this. I suspect the issues are legal: it is widely believed that Apple signed a contract giving AT&T exclusivity for five years. Contracts are renegotiated all the time, but this likely likely has not been, so we probably have two more years of AT&T exclusivity.
I'm an Australian citizen, and I spent a couple of years traveling around with a ratty Australian passport after it got wet. Mostly, officials just treated it like any other passport, but occasionally someone asked what happened to it. The only times I was given trouble were when leaving Poland, when an official felt the need to look at it with a magnifying glass in between accusing me of working illegally in Poland because I had visited the country three times in two years, and when I was leaving Australia, when an annoying official did pretty much exactly what was described in this article. He took it away from me and took it somewhere else for a while, and came back and gave me a lecture about how "This is unacceptable at an international level" (No, I don't know what that sentence means either") and (rant rant rant). I don't think he threatened to cancel the passport (although he did tell me to get a new one), but Australian officials being a colossal pain in the arse over things like this is standard procedure.
I certainly don't approve of the fact that Australian officials are unpleasant bureaucratic arseholes, but I also don't think it is likely anything sinister was going on here.
Apple is selling the iPad through some of its own channels and Best Buy in the US, and will be selling them in a few more countries through its own channels and "select independent outlets" in a few more countries (most of the big countries of Europe + Australia + Canada + Japan) in a couple of weeks. Then similar in a few more smaller countries in Europe and Asia in July. After that, who knows who knows how long it will take for them to get to the rest of the world? I said *some* of its own channels because they are not at present selling it even through their own student and employee channels. (Apple employees who want one have to get in the queue like everyone else when off duty, although I believe they do get a 10% employee discount when they get to the front). Introduction and delivery dates keep slipping, too.
The small number of countries and channels at present is simply due to the fact that Apple is having difficulty ramping up production to meet demand. The iPad has new custom silicon, and is an all new product line, and when you cannot produce enough product to meet demand, you favour your own most profitable sales channels rather than others that you have less control of and that make you less money. Apple has said that iPads will be available through more sales channels later in the year, and I am sure they will.
I also think it is very likely that these sales channels will include mobile phone networks and their retail businesses. Apple has been quite willing to allow mobile networks to sell its unsubsidised products in the past, and has been quite happy to let them be bundled with mobile phone contracts. (There have been lots of "Take out this mobile contract and we will give you a free iPod" deals, and the like. Three presently has deals where they will give you am iPod touch if you take out a broadband contract and a MiFi, and there are plenty more deals like that). When there is plenty of availablity, I am sure we will find mobile networks bundling iPads with contracts, too.
Except that it will be entirely on Apple's terms. Mobile networks will be sold iPads at the same wholesale price that Apple sells them to anyone else. The iPads will be indistinguishable from those sold elsewhere and will be unlocked. The networks will have no input into the iPad whatsoever. In truth, I pretty much agree with most of the article.
I can't blame Opera for not going to too much trouble to customise it to the iPhone just yet, given that they did not know whether Apple would accept it or not. Now that they know they are not wasting my time, I suspect that they probably will, or at least I hope they will.
My thoughts using it are similar to yours - it is really fast, and I missed pinch to zoom.
The real thing is that we now have browser competition on the iPhone. This is great. Some praise is due to Apple for allowing it.
The Americans decided that they would use their existing numbering ranges for mobiles, and they only use seven digit local numbers, so in a lot of cases they actually are running out of numbers. If AT&T claim they have to do this due to a number shortage, I believe them. Over here, maybe not so much. There are a billion numbers starting with 07, and about 60 million people in Britain, which is about 17 numbers each.
That said, I would have had at least that many numbers allocated to me at some point. Some of these were only for short periods and were formally cancelled (for instance, I get a new phone that has a temporary number for a couple of weeks before I port another number over), but a few were things like PAYG phones that were lost and such. I can conceive that some management and reuse of numbers is sensible - I just can't see why the wait period can't be a couple of years. That would be much better for those of us who travel and don't want to get a new SIM every time we visit a country.
Of course, the operators would probably prefer we roam rather than get a local SIM, so perhaps it isn't in their interest.
As other people have said, likelihood of failure depends on how people use the laptop as much as the actual quality of it. My mother loves having a laptop, but treats it gently and seldom takes it out of the house. On the other hand, I have been known to cart mine around South America in a backpack. I probably buy physically tougher machines than she does, but hers last longer than mine.
What matters more than failure time is the quality of after sales service. I have had laptops from Dell, Sony, and Apple. Apple's service has been the best. Dell's is sort of middling (but that's expected given their products are cheaper) and Sony's has been by far the worst. I don't know what other peoples experiences have been.
@Paul Durrant: actually for your extra £100 you get an SD slot, Firewire, a slightly smaller aluminium case, and a *smaller* hard drive.
The Pro model is actually the one with the 160Gb hard drive, and the standard Macbook has the 250Gb. Nothing sinister about this - it's just the Pro is a few months old, and they have nod adjusted the configuration as hard drives have got cheaper.
Similarly with the pricing. Apple tends to set local prices based on the exchange rate at the time a model is released, and then keep that price in local currency terms until they replace that model with a new one. Thus prices of products released at different times can have funny relationships to one another.
Orange did the deal with Apple a year ago. Part of the deal was pretty clearly that Orange would be the only new player with the iPhone going into Christmas 2009. There are clearly some people who want an iPhone and are not terribly price conscious, but who do not wish to go to O2. Coverage is one reason, and there will be others here and there. Obviously Orange will not compete hard on price before Christmas, because competition is still limited and they want the segment of the market they can pick up paying a high price to do so.
After Christmas, we more or less have open slather, and we will have the iPhone on at least four networks. If we are going to get competition on price, that is when it will come, particularly when Three gets the iPhone. The iPhone is still not going to be cheap - Apple charges a lot - but it may well be better.
I have a netbook with OS-X installed on it, dual boot with Windows XP. I use OS-X on the netbook mostly, but if OS-X stopped working, I would just go back to using Windows.
I also have two genuine Macintoshes running OS-X on hardware that I have paid Apple for, and I also own various other Apple products. Yes, the OS-X on the netbook thing is not legal, but it is mainly just a hobby - I enjoy playing around on it. I can't really imagine why Apple would want to annoy me and people like me. They make plenty of money off us.
I can certainly understand why they would want to kill of the Psystar thing, just the same.
Yes, well, if you get taken over by a company with a certain reputation for ruthlessness and which is intending a stockmarket float in six months, this shouldn't really come as a surprise. That doesn't make it any less unpleasant if it happens to you, of course.
As to whether it is a smart move from management, I am personally a Tiscali customer. I have found their service to be pretty much fine, and I like the fact that when they say "unlimited" they seem to mean it. (They claim to throttle the peak hours speed of heavy users, but that's okay. I restrict my heavy use to other times). I am well out of contract. If the quality of service drops or if Talktalk try to impose a download cap like they have for their own customers, I am gone in a flash. If this does happen, it will be a clear indication that this was not a smart move from management.
I would think that saying "America" for "The United States of America" isn't too different from saying "Britain" for "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" or even "Germany" for "The Federal Republic of Germany". It's a short form of the official name of the country, with the descriptive bits describing the political system removed. The fact that there are continents named North and South America complicates things a bit, but only a bit. None of the other countries use "America" in their names, so there is little if any confusion.
This is simply for drooling over in display stores and for people with way too much money. I can't imagine they expect to sell more than a tiny number. Sony actually do (finally) make a reasonably priced nice spec netbook for people who want one.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-VAIO-W11S1E-Mini-Notebook/dp/B002GZNGRQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1255006034&sr=1-1
By the way the price has been dropping even on that one - the RRP is £430 and it was £399 a few weeks back - I suspect even that was expensive enough that they weren't selling many. I think it is a good deal at the present price. It's the cheapest netbook I have seen with a WXGA screen, and its got a slightly faster CPU (N280) than most netbooks, too. Plus it looks pretty.
The reason for this "merger" thing is that if it were an outright sale of T-Mobile, Deutsche Telecom and hence the German government would have to take a very large write down in their books immediately, and they don't want to. By retaining half the equity for now they can either amortise their loss slowly or postpone the writedown some distance into the future. Really,though, this is a takeover by Orange/ France Telecom. In 18 months the T-Mobile brand will be gone, and they have probably already agreed that Orange will take at least a majority stake then. This makes me pessimistic. Orange has by far the worse customer service and their "Animal" plans are stupid, whereas T-Mobile's Flext deals and Web 'n' Walk are good value. and sensibly constructed.
Many national mobile markets have one large player with 40-50% (normally the major fixed line player and former monopoly), a second player with 20-30%, and one or two smaller players with much smaller shares than that. This large player normally takes advantage of its size and existing business relationships (and the scope of its network) and makes most of the money. The second player usually prices itself a little better than the biggest player (but not that aggressively) and makes cosy profits, and the smaller players compete on price but generally lose out because they lack the reach and resources to compete for the best customers.
Britain is not like this. When BT owned what became O2, they for various reasons failed to gain dominance the way Deutsche Telecom, France Telecom, and Telefonica did in their home markets, which led to the rise of Vodafone. The second round of players (Orange and (then) One2One) did much better than in most markets, and this led to a situation where four players had very similar market shares, at least in terms of the number of customers. (O2 and Vodafone's customers typically spend more so those two companies have higher revenues). Combined with a fifth player with deep pockets, this led to the British market being extremely competitive, which is good for customers but bad for operators.
Three of Britain's networks are owned by foreign former monopoly telcos that are used to being dominant in a situation as described above in their home markets. They find the British market much harder going than when they entered it. Deutsche Telecom has decided it has had enough, and decided to go home.
However, if another of the big three networks were to buy T-Mobile's assets, they would end up with a market share of around 45% of total customers. (By revenues, it would depend on which buyer). This is similar to the share dominant players have in other markets, and the buyer would see this as a chance to turn Britain into the same sort of quasi-oligopolistic market that exists elsewhere in Europe.
Yes, this would reduce competition and make things worse for customers, but the trouble is that Britain would still be more competitive than other European markets, and if they were to block this, European regulators would have to acknowledge that other European markets are not competitive. Acknowledging this would acknowledge that they are useless as regulators and/or that they would have to subsequently do something about other European markets. Which is why they will let any such merger happen.
The nVidia graphics in the 2009 Macbooks use more power than the Intel graphics in the 2008 Macbooks. To compensate and ensure that overall power consumption was about the same, Apple switched from a standard voltage CPU to a low voltage CPU, and the closest available speed for a suitable CPU was 2.0MHz. (The 2.0GHz CPU also has a faster front side bus, so it is probably a slightly higher performance CPU regardless of the slightly slower clock speed anyway).
It may be that Apple also wanted the white Macbook to have a slower spec for marketing reasons, but this reason isn't necessary. It makes perfect sense for purely engineering reasons.
Sarin was a decent CEO, and the company did make money, and I don't really mind a good CEO being well paid - it is bad ones being paid huge sums that I object to - however, how exactly does one spend £500,000 on relocation expenses. Individual seats in first class for each item of furniture? One can ship rather a few containers across the Atlantic for that much money I would think, particularly in the present depressed shipping market.
I am using the MSI Wind, running dual boot XP/OSX. I have had it pretty much since the moment it was released last July, and I like it a lot. (I spent 80% of my time in OSX. It is impressive just how well Apple's latest OS runs on low powered computers not designed for it). Interestingly enough, two friends of mine have recently played with my Wind for a bit and ended up buying the same machine for themselves. I would probably get the NC-10 form myself if I was buying now and I suggested this for them, but they both reacted with "We like the one you have", which I couldn't really argue with.
I have no problem browsing and doing office apps on the 600 line screen. Still, I would pay extra for more pixels. I think Dell is offering a version of the mini 10 with a 768 line screen. I really want to see this become standard on 10 inch netbooks.
>Now, TD-SCDMA is a full-on Chinese standard
Yes, it has been developed as a partnership between the Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT), Datang and the very Chinese Siemens AG.
TD-SCDMA is derived from a technology that the Germans attempted to sell as an air interface for UMTS, but which lost out to the Japanese and the Nordics, who went for W-CDMA. The Chinese are certainly paying a lot less to Western companies in royalties than they would be using W-CDMA, but just how much of the technology of TD-SCDMA is actually Chinese is debatable, I think.
Further investigation reveals that this shift is from the Core 2 Duo T8100 (2.1GHz, 800MHz FSB) to the Core 2 Duo P7350 (2.0GHZ, 1066MHz FSB). The key point is probably that the P7350 is a medium voltage chip that uses 25W of power rather than a full voltage chip that uses 35W like the T8100.
My guess is that Apple has changed the CPU to one with similar performance but lower power consumption to make up for higher power consumption of the nVidia chipset. It will be interesting to see what sort of net impact on battery life this has.
In winter
New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania GMT+10 hours
South Australia, Northern Territory GMT+9.5 hours
South-Eastern Western Australia GMT+8.75 hours. (The little known Central Western time, so obscure that many people are aware that it exists. But it does).
The rest of Western Australia GMT +8 hours.
In summer
New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania GMT+11 hours
South Australa GMT +10.5 hours
Queensland GMT+10 hours
South-Eastern Western Australia GMT+9.75 hours.
Northern Territory GMT+9.5 hours
The rest of Western Australia GMT +9 hours.
All that for barely the population of Holland.
Daylight savings time is deeply controversial in both Queensland (which presently does not do it) and Western Australia (which presently does), so this may change. In addition (as this article indicates), starting times have been varied over the years, sometimes unilaterally by individual states, meaning that although Sydney and Melbourne theoretically use the same time in both winter and summer, there have been occasional periods in winter and automn where they don't.
And don't get me started on Australia's many railway gauges.
Mine has the Synaptics touchpad. The touchpad itself is good, although the keypad buttons are a little sticky. They are good enough though. Battery life is not very good - an hour and a half is about it. My plan is to buy a compatible six cell battery from some guy in Hong Kong when such things become available on eBay, and carry the three cell with a spare. That way I should be able to get four or so hours out of two batteries, which is okay. The power adaptor is bulky, but a lot of the bulk is the long cable between the brick and the wall plug. As this is is a cable with a standard connector to the power brick, it is trivial to replace it with a shorter one,
I travel a lot and I like to have a tiny laptop that I can stick in my hand luggage. I previously had a T Series Sony Vaio (which cost well over a grand) which was great at first but fell apart due to poor build quality and stopped working for no discernible reason when about two and a half years old. The Advent seems to deliver similar performance and is a similar size. The downsides are shorter battery life, an inferior screen (although 1024 pixels across is enough to render most things reasonably) and no optical drive. The last is less of a big deal that you might not think, particularly given that the Vaio had one of those crippled Matsushita optical drives which cannot be made region free, which nullified the main reason for having it (ie keeping yourself entertained on planes and in foreign hotel rooms). The Advent seems physically tougher though. And even if it doesn't last, for less than a quarter of the price I can afford to go through one a year if I have to.
I am pretty pleased with the purchase, basically.
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