Posts by Sean Timarco Baggaley

@Tom Oliver:

Which part of the number 18 do you not understand?

ALL the games mentioned in the report are RATED 18, for f*ck's sake. They're NOT intended for children and are therefore designed as such.

"You and I may be able to tell the difference; but we are not one of the disenfranchised youth who are being molded by the violent games they play."

Have you been living on Mars for the last thirty years? Commercially-produced computer games have been around since the early '70s. Granted, the graphics have improved in leaps and bounds, but the input devices haven't changed all that much. Most games still rely on a minor evolution of the control systems of *cranes* as their primary user interface.

As long as we retain that 2D display (no matter how "enhanced" it is with coloured films and faux-3D effects) and that physical, abstracted interface, we aren't going to be in any real danger of confusing the game's simulated models with reality itself.

"In the same way an entire generation of young people do not consider spelling or punctuation to be important, thanks to the wonders of SMS and facebook, a generation are going to lose any ability to show compassion when they encounter a real life event which is similar to a computer game."

Oh do shut up you sad, deluded person. Any kid who can use abbreviations like "4nic8" must have a pretty decent vocabulary. Most kids use SMS abbreviations because they're *used* to them, not because they don't know how to spell. And no, they're NOT all roaming our streets trying to kill us. Most of them are no better or worse than we were at their age.

If spelling were the only metric for intelligence, half the Ph.Ds of this country would fail your test. The lax spelling skills of many adults today can be traced back to the rise of word processors and spell-checkers. Failing grammar skills can be similarly traced to people relying increasingly on their computers to do it for them.

It's the quality and range of your vocabulary which defines the clarity, depth and subtlety of your thought processes, not how good you are at spelling.

@RegisterFail:

Apple's lawyers are presumably on a *salary*; it doesn't cost the company a damned penny extra to dig out the usual "Stop using our IP" template, fill in the blanks and send it off.

Case law, however, makes it pretty damned clear what *might* happen to your trademarks and other IP if you don't protect it. So: they can do nothing and potentially lose a lot of money later on, or they can do *something*—at no cost to Apple—and not take the risk.

The separate PSU...

...would be required anyway, even if it were a traditional connection. It's a 3.5" 1.5Tb drive, which means it's a *desktop* model. No 3.5" external HDD I've ever seen will run without an external PSU, wireless or otherwise.

Trial by commentard

There is insufficient data to make any kind of judgement call on this. The child could have mental health issues. The mother likewise. The neighbours might have been the ones who called the police. The child might have been having a genuinely dangerous fit....

If an adult can be tasered, why not a child?

And to those complaining about the small (though certainly not trivial) act of violence committed against the child, I have news for you: hormones weren't invented in the 1970s. Do you think adolescents weren't also sulky and rebellions in the 1880s? 1780s? Go back as far as you like and you'll find our ancestors thought nothing of giving a recalcitrant child a clout round the ear when they deserved one. "Decent society" is whatever society says it is.

Moderation is the key, not extremism. A punishment has to be meaningful if the threat of it is to have any effect. Kids learn this very quickly, which is why our education system has suffered somewhat. (I'm not advocating the cane, but I *am* advocating we stop listening to the parents of spoiled brats; they've already proven their incompetence.)

Odd.

The two oldest, still-working laptops in my family are an Acer Ferrari 3000 LMi (or similar; the first of the "Ferrari" models anyway), and my mother's paving-slab of an HP. Both are around six years old. Both get a lot of use, though the cooling fans in both appear to be on the way out now.

My brother was the first person I knew who bought a Mac laptop—a PowerbookG4 12" model—and, guess what? That's still working too. (He used to DJ with it and it's still his main laptop.)

I've owned quite a few Macs since 2005, (I upgraded frequently as I'm an ex-programmer and developer, and Apple kit tends to hold its value rather well, so it makes sense to sell on and buy new every 12 to 18 months or so. I'm a techie. So sue me.) The family also has an ancient Sony, two cheap and nasty Asus "Pundit" desktop PCs (built by me nearly 7 years ago) and a fairly recent Asus laptop.

The Acer and HP models have had to be serviced once, in the dim and distant past. (The former's optical drive failed. The latter had the same problem my current MacBook Pro had: a dud battery which refused to recharge. In both cases, the batteries were manufactured by, er, Sony!)

I claim my statistically irrelevant anecdotal evidence award!

Oh yes: you do realise that those Extended Warranty companies often cover "accidental" damage too, right?

"Gosh, my expensive warranty runs out in a month or two!"

>>CRASH!<<

"WHOOPS! Butterfingers!"

>>tap-tap-tap... ringgg... click... "this call may be recorded for training purposes... your call is important to us..."<<

(30 minutes on an 0845 premium rate number later...)

"Yay! I'm getting a brand new laptop!"

(Meanwhile, at the extended warranty company...)

"I say, have you noticed how few laptops manage to survive three years?"

"Yes! And an awful lot of them seem to break just before those three years are up!"

"Amazing! Who knew, eh? I think there's a press release in this..."

Symbian...

... had an awful lot of legacy cruft from the days when it was called EPOC32 and maintained by Psion (who created it). Think "custom memory management", as C++'s default features for that were less than stellar at the time the OS was developed.

It's basically a repeat of the "Microsoft Foundation Classes" (or "MFC") framework introduced way back before C++ had been stabilised. Similar workarounds and kludges exist in both, and both reached a point when it was clear they could go on no longer. Symbian has taken longer to reach that stage than I expected, but it's clear that an OS originally designed to run on very resource-limited hardware is no longer a great fit for machines with multiple built-in digital cameras, multiple networking antennas and stacks, full web browsers—often with Flash too—and 16-million-colour, 4" OLED displays capable of playing entire movies from their internal RAM.

It needs a serious rewrite, along with a willingness to kill off a lot of legacy support.

(All the above should be taken with a pinch of salt; it's been a few years since I've even used Symbian in anger.)

My current phone is a Series 40-based Nokia 2630. Nokia can still a good, decent, cheap and reliable phone, and that's still a huge market. I don't think Nokia themselves are therefore in any great danger of going under.

Symbian, on the other hand, is a survivor. It may not have a long future in the mobile telephony world, but then, it began its life as an OS for netbooks and PDAs way back in the 1990s. There's always a market for a small, lean, mean OS which can be squeezed into very, very low-resource hardware.

@Neil Stansbury:

You really don't get it do you?

(With apologies to Mr. Pratchett.) Take the universe. Squeeze it up. Wring it as tight as you can and I *guarantee* you will find not one atom of "justice", "humanity"—whatever the f*ck that is—or "freedom". There is no such thing as an "innate" or natural "human right". Such a concept does not exist beyond the bounds of human mind. It's a wholly artificial concept.

The only "rights" you have are those mutually agreed upon by the society in which you live. Merely writing some words down on some paper does NOT make them a universal truth. (Just ask any Bible-thumper what he thinks of the Qu'ran if you don't believe me.)

Just as Statesiders believe that there is an innate right to "freedom of speech", or to "bear arms", so there are societies on this world who believe that THEY have a *right* to live according to the laws set out by some deity they happen to believe in. Why is YOUR definition inherently superior to theirs? Who made YOU god?

If you want the entire population of Homo Sapiens to agree that there is a "right" to freedom of speech, I suggest you get to work building a strong world government. Until you do so, you're no better than those other idiots with the beards and comedy accents.

Didn't the "Gator" crap...

... put the kibosh on this approach? I bet some of the people who invented this previously worked in broadcasting and thought, "I know just what the world needs! Ad breaks! On PHONES!"

Amazing.

All this vitriolic ranting. And yet...

New Labour have been elected no less than THREE TIMES by the very population that claims to hate it so. (And the second two times were *after* the declaration of a UN-sanctioned invasion AND an illegal, immoral war—effectively forcing our military organisations to fight on multiple fronts while under-equipped.)

The Tories are no better, having created much of the mess New Labour have failed to clean up. (PFI and PPP are Tory inventions, as were the series of botched privatisations, like the railways.)

It's time for reform. End of.

If either Labour or the Conservatives are elected next year, this country will have only itself to blame for the results. (The Labour and Conservative parties are basically the same package, but with different branding.)

At the very least, we need to make it illegal for a party to remain in power for more than two consecutive terms. Both the Tories and New Labour have demonstrated that this is a certain path to failure.

(My vote is LibDem. They're not perfect, but they're still half-Liberal, which is the very antithesis of everything New Labour and the Tories stand for.)

Decoupling.

The key advantage of electric vehicles is the decoupling of the power generation from the point of use. A petrol engine can only be powered by petrol. An electric motor can be powered by electricity generated using whatever you wish. THAT is the key advantage of electric vehicles.

Initially, such vehicles will probably use batteries of some sort. Hydrogen fuel cells, should they become viable, can trivially be designed as drop-in replacements for existing batteries. If some other magic wonder-storage medium pops up, we can drop that into the battery slot instead.

You don't get that flexibility with diesel or petrol vehicles.

@George 24:

Er, no. This myth has been disproved over and over. I've handled customer services for an online-delivery-only games company founded in 2000 and used to work in the games industry (mostly as a developer) myself from the late '80s right up until a few years ago.

I've *personally* seen software sold for a couple of pounds ripped-off by pirates. Even the iPhone isn't immune, and the apps for that are in the region of a couple of dollars each.

People want good stuff for free. I don't understand why so few people realise this. It's *normal* for people to pluck low-hanging fruit. The *reason* developers go to so much effort to make piracy *harder*—note, not *impossible*; they're programmers and know damned well they can't do that—is to make that fruit hang higher on the branches. They don't expect to stop piracy entirely, but they can make it harder for the newbies and general public.

Xerox PARC...

...*invited* them in! Nobody stole a damned thing. Xerox were infamous for not commercialising their PARC work.

It's not as if PARC invented the GUI either; they just created an early *implementation* of one. The concept had been around long before. (Since the 1960s in fact, when the mouse was invented.) Even the general public read pop-science mags like "New Scientist" and "Scientific American", both of which were covering the WIMP concept long before the Xerox PARC visit.

Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Windows Vista...

...may look like a pig after a particularly nasty incident with a bus, but I've never actually seen it BSOD as such. (Unlike my old XP-based PC. Though that was primarily caused by Creative Labs' famously poor software skills.)

@fred slack 1:

From a "core competence" standpoint, it's clear Microsoft are a developer tools and technologies company first and foremost. Windows is just a platform they maintain for their development technologies to run on. There's a good reason for Microsoft's success: their development tools are second to none. Make developing apps for your platform a piece of cake, and you'll not have to wait long before third party developers appear.

(Note: I'm a Mac user these days, and don't even own a Windows box any more, so I can hardly be accused of being a Windows fan, yet I still haven't found a development tool as good as MS' Visual Studio suite. Apple's Xcode isn't anywhere near as good, though it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. And it's light years ahead of the old Metrowerks crud Apple developers had to use back in the pre-OS X days.)

Microsoft have genuinely innovated in the developer technologies front too. Their .NET framework really is what Java *should* have been. MS also realised games developers would need a single, unified set of technologies to target, so they created DirectX. (That took a while to catch on, but only a fool would build a PC game without it today.) And MS' XNA toolchain for their Xbox360 console is also leaps and bounds ahead of anything Sony or Nintendo offer.

I honestly don't get all this hatred between Microsoft, Apple and Linux users. Not one of these operating systems is directly competing with the others. Apple are primarily consumer-focused. (Clue: if you're reading this website, chances are you're NOT Apple's target market.) Microsoft are primarily corporate-focused (in the PC market; the Xbox360 is another beast); Linux is... a kernel which comes with a free political movement.

Apple vs. Blu-Ray

There's a good reason why Apple don't fit Blu-Ray hardware as standard: most of their sales are in the laptop sector. Their desktop models are—with the sole exception of their Mac Pro series—also based on laptop components. (Including the iMac.)

So Apple need Blu-Ray drives that are (a) laptop-size, and (b) cheap enough to not push the prices up too high. (There are also some licensing fees involved for the DRM side too. Dell don't have to worry about that: they don't make operating systems or video playback software. Apple do.)

Finally, there's the small matter of iTunes. Apple's approach to media is that the internet should be your primary source. Instead of buying physical media, you simply download it. At present, iTunes doesn't support the higher HD resolutions, but most consumers will be hard-pressed to spot the difference on a typical 720p TV. (Most of the flat screen TVs already sold aren't capable of full 1080p in any case; "Full HD" TVs have only been affordable for about two years or so.)

The only other advantage of Blu-Ray is archiving. For backups, most people just buy another hard disk; it's quicker and much, much easier.

@WarrenG:

"Oh yes, don't let me do what I want with my expensive tech, it's not like it's mine anyway."

You can do whatever you damned well please with your iPhone. Apple are merely making it clear that if you don't use it the way it was *DESIGNED* to be used, you don't get to demand Apple kiss it better and make it work properly again when you bugger it up.

Believe it or not, EVERY manufacturer imposes similar limitations on their warranties. That's why it's *called* a "limited warranty". If I crash my brand new Nissan Micra into a tree within hours of buying it, Nissan aren't going to fix it for free.

It's called "arse-covering". A concept invented specifically to counter the vast quantities of stupid which appears to be this universe's most abundant resource.

"Actuall, she isn't.."

What Anonymous Coward above said.

And I suspect PH has rather more money than most of this site's readers too.

(I'm no PH fan myself; I barely follow the mainstream media as it's so crushingly boring. Forbes suggests she's earned at least 15 million dollars to date. If that makes her 'vacant', what the hell does that make *you*?)

Apple don't take risks?

People pointed and laughed at the first iMac because it had no floppy drive and lacked anything other than USB ports—none of the old Apple-proprietary serial interfaces were included. Prior to the iMac's release, *nobody* was really pushing USB at all; you could count the number of useful USB peripherals on the fingers of your left elbow.

Apple don't do new *technology*, but they do take risks. (Mac Cube, anyone? Apple TV?) Hell, even the first iPods and iPhone were derided—the latter didn't even come with 3G or MMS support in its original incarnation! Who's laughing now?

Apple is all about the user interface. That's what they do. It's not magic. It's not even a secret. They don't give a shit about hardcore corporate sales—that's what Windows is for. (It's also why all those "Windows has 90%+ of the market!" stats are utterly misleading: those stats invariably include the millions upon millions of PCs sitting in offices around the globe. Apple don't sell to that market and aren't interested in it. The *correct* stat is *consumer* market share.)

The video...

... narration tells a blatant lie: that the game warns you that "killing the game" kills your documents. No. It warns you that killing *aliens* deletes your documents. It even tells you which document it's deleting when you kill each alien. Not cool, Symantec. Not cool.

Seriously, Mac users may not be famed for their awesome PC repair skills, but you'd have to be a complete and utter moron to not know what the game does.

Malware is software written with *malicious* intent. This game EXPLICITLY tells you what it will do. In big, bold, very obvious warning messages.

Computers can only mitigate against software like this up to a point. No OS on the planet will prevent you deleting your *own* files if you tell it to, either directly, or indirectly (by running a game which deletes them for you).

The missing link is education—an unfashionable concept for many. AV and anti-malware snake-oil merchants wouldn't make anywhere near as much money if it weren't for the wilfully ignorant.

Odd.

I remember when, back in 2005, everyone was whining about the casting of Billie Piper. "She'll suck!" they cried. "She'll be worse than Bonnie Langford!" they wailed.

And they were wrong. Every damned one of them.

Nobody's seen any of the new series yet. How about giving it a bloody chance?

At least it won't have Russell T. Davies, who produced four seasons comprised almost entirely of low grade fan-fiction. (RTD freely admitted on Charlie Brooker's "Screenwipe" that he really does just make it up as he goes along, writing himself into corners. Hence the overused deus ex machina endings. He's a good comedy writer, but he really needs to work on his plotting.)

I hold out better hope for Moffat's efforts, but as with all the hype about Gordon Brown taking over from Blair, I'll believe it when I see it. Just because a guy can write, it doesn't mean he can *produce*. They're two different jobs.

(Of course, Brown sucked as both a Chancellor of the Exchequer *and* as Prime Minister. So Moffat has an advantage there.)

So many idiots...

... so little time.

Context, people! Context!

This is The Register, a UK-based online content creator and publisher. The language it is written in is known as "English". There are a number of known versions of English, but the ".co.uk" in the URL should make it clear that the original "UK English" version is likely to be dominant.

Given that, and the immediate context of the offending phrase: "Virginia, America", we have a clear and unambiguous meaning: It refers to a location known as "Virginia" within a larger entity named "America". As "America" is a common contraction among English-speakers for the country known as the "United States of America", the intended location is perfectly clear from the context.

As no other nation in the Americas actually uses the word "America" in its name today, there is no confusion for English speakers: "America", in the UK, is invariably assumed to refer to the nation of the United States of America. Using contractions like this is no worse than referring to "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" as the UK. Contractions are not unusual.

The article was written in English and is clearly aimed at English-literate readers. Spanish, French or Italian readers have their own damned languages to get pedantic about and don't get to vote on English usage.

Just curious...

...but surely the cost of patent royalties would be included in the cost of the relevant components?

Apple don't make their own GSM chips, CPUs or antennas. The component breakdowns published on the likes of ifixit show a bunch of mostly off-the-shelf components for the phone elements. (The multi-touch display is presumably their own IP.)

Why are Apple being asked to pay *again* for something that should have already been paid for?

@TR (Robert Pulliam):

You write:

"I know that you picked up the "ridgid" description of the car from the Sun article while in fact the vehicle is better descibed as "semi-ridgid" which allows navigation of a 5000 foot horizontal radius and a 50,000 foot verticle radius. When combined these parameters allow tranversing the topography encountered on this route."

I hope your engineering is a lot more accurate than your spelling and grammar.

@Keith Doyle, et al.

"Choose Apple, and there is only one way to do things-- the Apple way."

Every single fucking car I've ever seen has the EXACT SAME UI: a big wheel for steering, a brake pedal on the left, throttle pedal on the right, gear lever in the centre console, etc. Where's our "choice" there, eh? Why is requiring all four limbs to move a vehicle in a mere two dimensions a *requirement* (short of a car specially adapted for the mobility impaired.)

Most importantly, given that NO government actually REQUIRES this particular UI, how come NO manufacturer has bothered giving us any genuine alternatives? (And please don't prate about how it's a historical standard; the earliest cars had all sorts of weird and wonderful user interfaces. Including combined brake-throttle levers!)

Similarly, if I want to drive on the wrong side of the road, I'd get arrested. (Or, more likely, killed.) That's so control-freaky! Why aren't people whining about the lack of "choice" on how and where we can drive? Why shouldn't I be allowed to drive a Hummer on pavements and private lawns when I want to?

Perhaps "choice" isn't quite the universal panacea some posters here would have us believe. Maybe, just maybe, having a single, unified, *standard* set of interfaces can be a genuinely good thing.

Apple's corporate philosophy is its own damned business, not yours. If you don't like it, you're NOT their target market and they have absolutely no legal, moral or ethical obligations to you whatsoever. Corporations aren't democracies. The democratic element sits at a higher level: at the buying stage. Don't like Apple? Don't buy their products! It really, truly, honestly *is* that simple.

"MacFarlane! You sell out!"

Am I the only one who doesn't understand any of this vitriol?

Hello?

Damned-near all commercial TV programming is smothered in a thick, thick layer of advertising, product placement and name-dropping! How is taking the ad money from just one corporation for the duration of a show any better or worse than taking it from 5 or 10?

The more successful the show, the more ads it tends to have, and the more it can charge for the slots. To squeeze in more room for adverts, the most successful TV shows are generally much shorter than their less-successful / niche counterparts. Where one show might have a 45 minute running time, a successful one might have 40 minuets of actual content, or even less. And that's including the credits.

You hypocrites!

@Michael C & Magnetik

You have heard of the Darwin Awards, right? Bugger "Climate Change": wilful ignorance is a far greater threat to humanity than a very slow rise in sea levels.

This is a technology news website. Its readers are, by definition, not representative of the general public, who couldn't give a shit how the magic box works. The only reason the people *you* know might be aware of what the acronym "HDD" even means is precisely *because* YOU know them... and have therefore, presumably, *taught* them.

Are you seriously claiming that everyone on Earth now understands what every IT-related TLA means now?

I handle support for a small computer games developer and am STILL getting requests from people who want to know if their operating system of choice—"Microsoft Word 2003", according to their answer to: "Which operating system are you using?"—will run one of our games. And these are *gamers*, for f*ck's sake!

I'll believe we're all IT-savvy when I see it. I have yet to see any evidence of it in these comment threads, let alone in the real world.

@Fred Flintstone:

The Royal Society for the Promotion of Immorality and Greed (RoSPIG) recently updated its rules on this area. I can only assume the memo passed you by.

The current RoSPIG Code of Practice now states, in clause 42, paragraph 13, subsection iii (and I quote):

"All hyperships constructed for the purpose of gratuitous wealth accumulation *must* be powered by one or more of the following sources of needlessly immoral energy sources:

1. Polar bear cubs. (On-board breeding facilities are not advised for logistical reasons.)

2. Live dolphins. (The "bottlenose" variety has been tested as the most calorific source, but see also Appendix. E),

3. Live baby seals. (Pre-clubbed specimens are also acceptable if live baby seals are unavailable in the necessary vast quantities.)"

As you can see, mere coal or whale oil doesn't cut it any more. The world has moved on.

Just a heads-up re. US vs. UK mpg values.

1 US Gallon = 3.79 Litres.

1 UK Gallon = 4.55 Litres.

Therefore, any MPG measurements will be lower in the US than the UK for the same car. Most people aren't aware of this difference.

In fairness to the BBC...

... the image shown in the article is probably a media / press release. For instance, the "DW" logo might be used for icons, book spines and possibly at the end of the credits sequence. (Apparently, the BBC recently introduced some harsh guidelines for those, hence the new theme and US-style rapid scrolling in Season 4.)

The main "Doctor Who" logo is likely to be the one we see in the opening titles, on BluRay / DVD covers, etc. Anywhere it'll fit without being too dominant. Where it won't fit, the smaller, "DW" icon is likely to be used instead. (E.g. on the spine of the DVD, and possibly near the small print stuff.)

In other words: It's extremely unlikely *both* will appear at the same time. And certainly not as shown.

Who cares?

Meh.

98% of people may have Flash installed, but so what? A huge number of those users still have IE6!

If ubiquity were the only reason for supporting a technology, we'd never have gotten past CP/M. There's very little Flash can do that Unity Technologies' 3D-accelerated multimedia plugin can't do. (And they've had iPhone support for about a year now too.)

Who the hell needs Flash?

iPhone batteries...

... *are* replaceable. They're just not *easily* replaceable. The 3GS' battery isn't even soldered to the motherboard any more: it's just a small plug.

The reason you can't just whip off the back of the phone and plug a new battery in is precisely the same reason why the iPhone is so thin. You can't have it both ways. (No. Seriously. Go look up "Lithium-Polymer" on effing Google.) You can replace it yourself if you really want to, but Apple will do it for you for about the same price as buying a new battery for most other mobile phones anyway.

If you just want a power source to keep the iPhone's charge up during a heavy bout of phoning (or web browsing), you can easily buy a combined iPhone case and external 'booster' battery for it. Like one of these: http://www.mophie.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=1&gclid=CJKUsbTFl50CFZoU4wod1Fyk2g

(I found out all this basic information in mere seconds, using a website called "Google"! Who knew that site could be so useful?)

*

And no, I don't own an iPhone. My Nokia 2630 does everything I need from a mobile: make and receive phone calls. For everything else, there's MasterCa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H my laptop.

@Anonymous Coward, James Melody

No, it's not monopolistic when you can just go buy a PC and install Linux on it.

OS X is *just* a f*cking UNIX clone with a pretty GUI. That's it. There's no magic. No mystery.

The *only* reason people buy Apple's kit instead of, say, a DELL or Asus box instead is because Apple has some good designers working for it at the moment. (This wasn't always the case and, if Jonathan Ive were to leave for pastures new, Apple might well drop the ball again. A corporation is the sum of the people who work for it. Nothing more. Nothing less.)

Psystar's claim that Apple have any kind of monopoly on "premium computers" utterly flies in the face of Sony. (No, seriously, have you *seen* how much Sony charge for some of their premium models?)

Apple are no more obligated to release and support—at great expense—their own damned software on competitors' hardware than Microsoft are required to produce a version of Windows 7 that runs on a 1992-era PC with a 386 DX CPU, Ad-Lib sound card and Cirrus Logic graphics.

@MacGyver

You're wrong. And it's not because Apple's iTunes is a glorified driver and sync app for their iPod / iPhone products either: it's because there's a serious technical principle at stake.

The whole point of having vendor and model IDs for USB products is because programmers need to know what the hell you've just plugged into your computer.

The Palm Pré is NOT an iPod. It says so right there on the box: "Palm Pré" not "Apple iPod". So why is it deliberately pretending to be something it's not?

The IT world has hardware interface standards for a f*cking reason.

Any programmer will tell you why you really do need to know exactly what your program is trying to talk to. If iTunes thinks a Pré is an iPod, it may well try and reflash it, bricking the device. And guess who will get the blame for it! (Hint: not Palm.) Most people don't fully understand the distinction between hardware and software, so there's no reason to assume they'll realise iTunes does not, in fact, have a valid update file for their Pré.

For this alone, I'm with Apple and the USB Industry Group. If you're going to do something, do it *right*. Don't cut corners.

Palm's approach is primarily about cutting support costs by foisting them onto a rival. What are Apple supposed to do when a customer phones / emails to whine about iTunes not being able to upgrade their "MP3 phone thing", or run apps from the App Store, or play rented movies..? Apple's support team will now have to be trained to ensure the customer is actually using an Apple device first.

And if the customer replies with, "Erm, it says 'Palm' on the edge. Does that help?" what is the support person supposed to do? Hang up? Tell the customer to phone Palm, who would probably just tell the customer to phone Apple again? Apple have a good track record when it comes to customer support, but Palm's trick forces them into an awkward position when it comes to public perception. They'd look bad either way.

As others have pointed out, syncing 3rd-party devices to an iTunes library, with its playlists, etc. is EASY technically: it's just XML. It's documented. It's an open standard. It's been used happily by the likes of RIM for their Blackberry devices for ages. What the hell was Palm's problem?

Finally, some information for the terminally ignorant:

- iTunes is not a profit goldmine for Apple. They make a few cents per song at most. They make far more money from their iPods / iPhones. The iTunes Store is an incentive to buy the hardware, not vice-versa.

- The iTunes store is NOT A MONOPOLY: A few seconds on Google shows Amazon sell MP3s. Napster sell MP3s. 7Digital sell MP3s. Even bloody *Tesco* sells MP3s! There's a more complete list here: http://www.mp3storeguide.com/

- iTunes is also not the only free music syncing application on Earth. There are dozens of others, many of which are free too. If iTunes is still popular despite that competition, the reason is simple: Apple's software and UI designers must be pretty good at their jobs. That other developers suck at both is NOT Apple's fault. This is what competition is *for*.

It's not the netBook.

The model shown in the image is the netBook Pro, which was released in late 2003 (Wikipedia says OCT-2003) and runs some version of WinCE. The chassis was almost identical, but this new version also had USB support, a 16-bit touch-screen display with a higher resolution, and better CPU and RAM specs too. Granted, WinCE wasn't everyone's flavour of the month back then, but for its target market, it was a good, pragmatic, choice.

The original netBook was based on EPOC32—the direct ancestor of today's Symbian OS. I used to own one of these, as well as its 'consumer' variant, the "Series 7". This original model of the netBook was released in 1999.

(My netBook spent its final years as a bedside alarm clock, with the advantage of also being an instant-on mini notebook so I could jot down any ideas I had during the night without having to faff around with lights, pens and bits of paper. And very useful it was too. My Macbook Pro performs this duty now.)

@Chronos

"Psion could have been so much more had they only stayed true to their roots."

Eh? Is there still a market for ZX81 and ZX Spectrum games?

Monorails & switches.

"The Simpsons" is a *cartoon*, not a fucking documentary.

Yeah, it's so effing hard to do monorails right and have proper, reliable switches on a technology that has been used FOR FORTY F*CKING YEARS IN ASIA.

Japan has seven monorail systems alone, most of which are proper metro lines with junctions and branches, just like any other metro, with similar capacities and frequencies. Those switches / points *have* to be reliable, so yes, it's been done. Repeatedly. And that's just Japan. Check out this list—http://monorails.org/tMspages/Asia.html—for Asia. (And before you ask, no, I'm not a member of that site. I just don't dismiss *any* technology.)

@Mike Richards: please re-read the above again, just in case you missed it. You are wrong. Demonstrably so. The traditional rail industry has its own agendas and even its fanbois, just like every other industry.

*

Personal Rapid Transit is arguably a much better fit for medieval cities like London. (Imagine doing this—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edinburgh_Tram_Works_8th_August_2009.JPG—down Oxford Street, Peckham High Street, or Charing Cross Road.) A fully suspended transport system, be it monorail, PRT, or whatever, would keep the new network above the road, leaving it free for traffic. (Unlike cities like Rome and Paris, which are blessed with wide, arterial roads, London has rather fewer diversionary route options.)

While the use of maglev might seem over the top, it's not as mad as it sounds: you pay a bit more for the energy, but you save on maintenance as there's very little friction. You also get better acceleration and deceleration. The pods themselves are also much quieter and lighter as they don't have to carry a motor with moving parts around: the maglev track *is* the motor.

(That said, there's much to be said for the "Monometro" concept currently being trialled in the Middle East. This would be much closer to a light rail system and might be a better fit for London's tourist areas.)

Finally: artists impressions, incidentally, are just that: impressions created by *artists*, not engineers! That there are elements missing is hardly surprising.

When the London Borough of Lewisham held an exhibition a few years ago for their redevelopment proposals, I noticed that the two rivers through the town centre were shown about six feet higher than their actual level, suggesting that these would have nice, shallow, photogenically gentle slopes forming grassy riverbanks. Their large model and glossy images showed people sunbathing, casually walking alongside the Ravensbourne and Quaggy rivers, etc. In reality, they'd be sliding down a very steep bank into a river at the bottom of a bloody great ditch.