When you've gotta go,...

…you've gotta go.

While we're at it...

...could we get rid of that dweeb who currently plays the doctor too?

Bill Gates...

…is no Steve Jobs.

WP was King

I used Word Perfect from DOS days through Windows 3.1, 3.11 and 95 in the admin jobs I had at the time. I absolutely loved the script writing ability of WP - you could simply and quickly write mini-programs to deal with fiddly tasks such as filling in fields to print on pre-formatted form paper instead of writing it out by hand.

I worked for the Housing Commission (public housing provider) where we had to manually write out an initial five rent deposit slips for the new tenant to use until their printed book arrived. There were six fields to complete on each slip - name, address, account number, reference number, and a couple of others i can't recall. The fields were small, so it was a time consuming, diabolical tasks to do 30 times a day x 5. Then I wrote a WP script (took me about 20 minutes to write it and get it working perfectly) which allowed staff to type the info up in 20 seconds to have 10 slips printed in about the same time, down from the 5+ minutes to hand print 5 slips and eliminating the hand cramps everyone complained about. That was the power of Word Perfect.

Word Perfect was a better program. It was a more powerful program and as noted by someone else, had a reveal codes function which actually revealed all the hidden stuff, allowing you to quickly identify and remove unnecessary formatting codes that were causing a document to not preview as expected.

I currently use Pages and occasionally MS Word 11 but if Correll released a new version of Word Perfect for Mac, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

They're applying to make it a STANDARD

As such, it would need to be transferable and open to every operator/manufacturer to adopt. If it is a standard, how could it possibly be a lock-in?

It makes sense to me - the SIM only holds data after all, and a pitifully small amount of data at that compared to the capacities of today's phones. Why not have the data sitting on the internal storage and do away with the SIM altogether?

It would also allow multiple accounts on the one phone without the need to physically change over a SIM, auto-switching between providers as required, and even have multiple user accounts on the one phone with each different user having a different network provider if needed and without any fuss.

Oh, and also means reducing the weight and complexity of the gizmo. And we all know how compulsive-obsessive Apple is about 'thin'.

Seems like a win all the way around to me.

Or a software problem

It could be some odd interaction between some Apps and the OS or perhaps Apps which need to be updated and should have been updated three updates ago that are causing the problem.

Flash is crap

Unless you're a web developer. But for the end user, Flash is useless, annoying, buggy, intrusive crap. It is only a matter of time before it dies on the desktop. And good riddance.

As the saying goes...

The only good cat is a dead cat.

Use common sense

I know there's nothing so uncommon of course…

But anyway, it's fairly easy to avoid these things on the Mac anyway.

* Don't visit dodgy websites and download things from them.

* Dodgy email? Delete, delete, deleeeeete! (said in my best Cyberman voice).

* Have some anti-malware software installed - the Apple supplied one, ClamXAV, etc and run them occcasionally (and every time you get a memory stick or disc of unknown virtuousness.

* Turn off all but the most essential things on your social networking tools/accounts.

There may be no Mac OS X viruses out in the wild but as someone else said - never say never - and hopefully you won't be sorry.

Re: Another leftie fail

@ Chris 96

Not another "leftie fail" at all. Just another mouth hired by Microsoft to push their interests in the guise of "better public policy".

Cost of stupidity

Whatever the cost of periodically stabilising the orbit, surely it has to be an order of magnitude cheaper than building a new space station of that size from scratch and putting that in orbit? Far from having money to burn, the various space exploration outfits currently need to pinch pennies until they bleed.

Aside from that, the ISS is massive. How could you possibly have any guarantee of control over how it breaks up and where all those big chunks will splash down - or crash land.

I can just see it now:

"Authorities have ordered the immediate evacuation of the Australian city of Perth and the South African city of Cape Town after the controlled re-entry of the ISS went awry.

"We're not exactly sure how many cities are at risk, at least two for sure, but we're currently tracking a half dozen pieces of the ISS which unfortunately have not followed their intended course and pose a major threat if they crash into population centres", stated NASA.

"We've scrambled fighter jets to intercept the debris, but we can't be sure we'll be able to destroy it before it hits the city. It's simply outrageous that they could have allowed this to happen at all - what were they thinking?", the Australian Defence Minister said. The minister refused to comment on whether the Australian Government would demand compensation from the United States and other ISS partners for any deaths and damage.

Won't happen, can't happen? It almost did once before - remember what happened to Skylab.

Power corrupts

Now if this had been any other company, any non-media company, engaged in such corrupt behaviour, their offices would have been raided and executives arrested. What is even more extraordinary is that even after reports Murdoch's minions were frantically destroying documents and deleting email records, still no raids have taken place.

Best to not kick the dog too hard I guess. Especially THAT dog!

Before; BEFORE?! You're living in the past Marg, quit living in the past!

The original code base for FCP was written back before 1998 by Macromedia. For this type of software, where the technology surrounding it has advanced considerably, you'd have to say 13+ years is a pretty good run but you reach a point where it is too long in the tooth and you have to start over. Remember, this software was released before OS X was on the scene, so bear in mind the jump from OS 9 to OS X, Carbon to Cocoa, PPC to Intel and the jump from 32 to 64 bit (CPUs and the OS), so there would be all sorts of legacy crap gumming up the works after jumping through all those hoops. It was no doubt impractical, inefficient and/or impossible to bring the existing code base to 64bit goodness without further bogging it down.

It should come as no surprise that it would, at some point, need to be completely rewritten from the ground up. It is also reasonable to expect, with such a major exercise, the release of this rewritten app would be missing a lot of features present in the previous version.

Sure, sometimes you just want to slap someone at Apple. There's times where you think they're just doing things to deliberately piss people off. Sometimes they're so anal they risk disappearing up their own orifice. Keyed USB extension cables designed to ONLY connect with their own keyboards/mice comes to mind. But sometimes they do things, however inconvenient, because they simply have to. I think FPX falls into the latter.

It's not like FCP has suddenly stopped working.

If you're so keen to be on the bleeding edge, then you'll probably get a bit bloodied yourself. Me? I tend to sit back and wait for the dust to settle before venturing into the unknown. Maybe they will make a complete pigs breakfast of it, but it's a little early make that call.

Treated water in an OPEN reservoir?

Are they completely nuts? What is this, the third world?

Note to self: Do NOT touch the tap water if I ever visit Portland.

I have the original...

...Mac OS 9/X release of this game.. I'm not really a game player, particularly if there are a gazillion button combinations to remember, but this is one I still play from time to time.

I look forward to the Mac version for this latest incarnation.

Non-Apple branded computers

We may not be permitted to run OS X on non-Apple branded computers, but Apple is free to run OS X on any hardware they feel like.

But it might not be OS X. It could be some other Unix, heaven knows there's plenty to choose from. But it won't be Linux and certainly not Windows.

So what...

The guy created an application which activated functionality Apple had, up until WWDC, decided against including in the iphone for whatever reasons, including security.

The guy "created" a logo by combining the Apple icon for syncing (the chasing snakes) with Apple's logo for Airport (the radiating wave).

He accessed APIs or used them in such a way which was not permitted, and unsurprisingly had the app rejected. He then sold this rejected app in an "renegade" store in defiance of the agreement entered into with Apple.

And in the wash up, he has made a bucket of money, but now the sun is setting on that particular little venture.

Don't look for any sympathy here.

Question...

If Richard Branson can knock up a sub-orbital reusable space plane in a few short years, how could it possibly take so bloody long for NASA to design, test and build what is essentially just a very big rocket?

Nutters, the lot of them

"Plague of US preachers falsely claim to be Navy SEALs

Well, at least it's not the other way 'round."

I'm pretty sure you'd find a plague of current and former Navy SEALs, and other military types, proudly proclaiming at the very least their religious nuttiness, since a disturbingly high proportion of Yanks can be defined as religious nutters. Which is a large part of the reason much of the west + world views the U.S. with a high degree of suspicion, concern and distain. The other part of the reason is the obscene mixture of capricious, fundamentalist capitalism with absolutist Christianity to form the U.S. state religion which the U.S. insists on imposing on others at every opportunity.

Soundsticks

I'd really like to see Harman Kardon update their gorgeous Soundsticks system with 7.1 digital surround sound, remote and wireless speakers. I'd pay a $1k for that!

Outrageous Price!

I looked at some titles on the iBooks store but was turned off by the outrageous prices the publishing houses are forcing Apple (and I imagine others) to charge.

Take away the cost of printing, storage and distribution of a physical book and the price should be significantly lower for an ebook.

Sometimes I'm faced with the same choice when buying a music album.

For an extra couple of bucks, I'll just go to my local book store until they get real on the price.

What the majority of uses need

Apple gets it right by offering the right mix of features that the majority of everyday users need. Their products aren't just slapped together, an enormous amount of thought goes into absolutely every minute detail, right down to balancing the weight of the device so it sits and feels comfortable in the hand.

Where other manufacturers get it wrong, is to offer everything under the sun, regardless of whether the majority of users will ever use those features. They stick in a video out port, USB ports, SD slots, physical buttons here, there and everywhere. They add complexity, just because it's a way to differentiate or to add bullet points to a spec sheet, and the result is more weight, more things which can go wrong and more things which can break. They also produce multiple models which quickly get superseded and dead-ended by the latest version, resulting in poor support for owners of the previous models. People really don't want a bewildering array of models, as championed by the likes of Dell in the traditional computer space, each with only minor or incremental differences between them but wildly different physical designs which add no value to the product and no real benefit to the end user.

More complexity means more support costs to the manufacturer and less money for R&D, testing, fine-tuning and divining the optimum user experience. Ultimately this leads to a poor product for the end user.

I guess the questions are...

...what does MS actually mean by "native HTML5" and what are they actually up to?

I'm can't answer the first question, but I think I can answer the second question: No good if history is any guide.

Not just emergency services

It is my understanding that the new national railways wireless communications network requires a dedicated chunk of this spectrum. There has already been considerable good work and expenditure testing and preparing to move the current fragmented railway communications systems to one national standard but this is now at risk because the Government is listening to the wrong people about how to divvy up this new money pot.

slowly winds down??

What alternative universe are you getting your information from Lewis???

That's entertainment!

nuf said.

Hello, Earth to U.N.?

Isn't about the the U.N. put a complete stop to this nonsense before it all ends in tears for humanity?

sink without a trace

A few years back the slither photovoltaic solar cell developed by the CSIRO was to revolutionise solar energy production, as power is still generated when more than 90% of the cell was shaded whereas a traditional cell cuts out after a small percentage is shaded. It was also flexible rather than rigid, used significantly less materials and therefore cheaper to produce, and could be coated onto almost any surface including the glass panels of high-rise buildings whilst still allowing significant light to pass through. The only hurdle at the time was the need to hand cut the slithers, which was to be achieved with large scale automation.

This would have proved to be hugely disruptive to the traditional power generation industry. Needless to say the technology, which was bought by a large coal burning power company in Australia, sank without a trace. The last reference to this technology is from 2006.

Cue large traditional power generating company with a promise to develop this technology to large scale deployment, and quick as a flash, this artificial leaf technology will also disappear without a trace.

There he goes again!

Mr Page taking at face value without blinking every reassuring utterance issued by the discredited, secretive, dishonest, and deceptive disinformation campaigns of the Japanese nuclear power plant operators and government regulators. It's all been carefully stage managed and has been for so many years that the people have little faith in what they are being told anymore.

There was sufficient evidence even before this accident that the extent of "damage control" activities undertaken by these bodies was first and foremost aimed at shoring up the public perception rather than the physical risk to the people and the environment.

It's worth noting the independent nuclear watchdog in Japan hasn't been allowing to say a thing. Now why do you suppose that is?

Offensive to a large group

It would, of course, be offensive to the GLBT community, but also to the supportive parents, siblings, relatives, friends and colleagues and offensive to the vast majority of health professionals who find such "gay cure" nonsense dangerous to the well being of vulnerable people this app is aimed at.

Thank you Apple.

@ Andy Christ

Actually, Snow Leopard was originally slated for both Intel and PPC G4 and G5 processors above a certain GHz rating and with 2+ cores or physical processors but all references to Snow Leopard on PPC were mysteriously pulled. No doubt an infuriating situation at the time for relatively new G5 owners and after Steve Jobs' promise of supporting PPC for "many years to come".

I have no doubt that Snow Leopard was meant to be the last hurrah for PPC and would have given this platform a mighty boost in performance. Someone decided otherwise unfortunately. We are left to imagine what could have been.

The Power Mac shown on Page 2 of this article, is from the same family of machines I'm using right now, the "Quicksilver" (mine upgraded to a dual 1.73 GHz G4 processor), almost ten years old now itself, still going strong and still running rings around my three year old Dell XP desktop at work.

You'd have to drink a lot of water

But humans DO drink a lot of water in a year. Not to mention the fact water is a major component of practically everything we eat and drink.

What was your point again Mr Page?

I vote for a trilogy...

...directed by Peter Jackson. I'm sure he would do the story justice so long as he doesn't try to make it "family friendly".

Clean: no. Green: no. Cheap: no. Safe: no.

Most of the posts on this topic are from people in the U.K. and most of the remainder from North America, which would place a good proportion of you reasonably close to a nuclear power plant. Would all you apologists for the nuclear industry still be cheerleaders if this disaster was unfolding at a plant near you? Would you be having a picnic in a park with a good view of events, or running for your lives, just in case?

To accuse the anti-nuclear crowd of wishing for a huge nuclear disaster in Japan is mischievous at best and I find the suggestion absolutely disgusting. We want this situation to come under complete control ASAP with no more loss of life and no radioactive legacy but we all know that won't be the case. Many people currently working at the plant will die, some from long and agonising deaths, but because it will be one here, one there, in the years and decades to come, and not hundreds all at once, the media would have moved on and no one will really know or notice the true calamity from what has transpired up to this point.

What also won't be reported as it fades from the media spotlight and the wider pubic attention is the enormously long, drawn out, dangerous and expensive process as these damaged reactors and all the now contaminated infrastructure are disassembled and buried in a great big concrete hole to be kept "safe" for the next few thousand years.

If control is lost at a traditional fossil fuel power station it, well, stop right there! You don't loose control of such things - they simply shut down. There is no out of control reaction, no need for any sort of cooling. Any fire is extinguished with water. There is some mess to clean up, proper bunding will contain any chemical runoff, wrecked machinery you can send to the recyclers if you're a good company, dump if you're lazy. There is no need for a guarded tomb in a seismically and politically stable location for the wreckage. Not that I'm a fan of dirty fossil forms of energy production either. Humans have been burning stuff to generate energy in one form or another for over 2000 years, so there's nothing new or clever about it by any stretch. Splitting atoms to do exactly the same thing - boil water - is madness.

Back to Japan, what is currently being reported as good news? The same thing that was bad news a few days earlier: that radiation has increased a bit in the last 24 hours. Remember a few days ago 'good news' was radiation levels dropping.

There is nothing cheap about nuclear energy. It requires massive investment, massive subsidies from governments and massive costs when it's EOLd. Every link in the chain of the process from mining, processing, transporting, generation, storage, decommissioning and disposal involves highly dangerous radioactive material. And you'd be surprised how often leaks occur somewhere along this chain. It is an industry shrouded in secrecy, mis-information, deceit, cover-ups and wishful thinking. ironically on top of that, considering the main argument used to support the industry, it is still a very carbon intensive process.

Who to believe?

Certainly not the mainstream commercial media - nothing like a crisis/disaster to sell copy.

Certainly not the vested interests in the nuclear industry - they will downplay the risks as they have a product to push.

Certainly not the operators of the affected nuclear plants - every time they say things aren't that bad, they are; things are getting better, but they aren't; it is under control, but it isn't; there is no risk from a radiation leak, but there is; the radiation leak poses no harm to humans, but then it does.

Remember it was originally "only one reactor" with a "minor problem" then it became two, three, and now four reactors with critical problems.

Given the length of time it takes to decommission a PROPERLY shut down nuclear reactor where everything is intact (17+ years and heaven knows how much money), it will end up being a very long, messy, expensive and controversial process to bury this mess.

I hope that once and for all this disaster will utterly destroy not only the complete fiction of "safe, clean and green" nuclear power, but this entire dirty industry itself and direct all those billions of dollars into honestly green technologies.

Get over yourselves

You can generally get away with a bit of a polite whinge on the Apple Support Forums so long as you have a genuine question about any sort of error, malfunction, unexpected behaviour or usability issue, whether real or imagined, to go along with it.

Genuine users of the forum aren't interested in wading through post after post of rants looking for the answer to their particular problem. If I want to have a bitch about Apple, I'll come to this esteemed site or Mac news site. It's not often I have a bitch about them because I'm genuinely happy with the quality - yes quality - of the products and services they provide almost all the time.

When there is a real problem, as opposed to perceived and speculative, Apple generally issue a short statement along the lines "Apple is aware of the issue and will be releasing a fix in due course/as soon as possible. Click here for more information. In the meantime, click here for a work around."

This forum, which is after all owned and operated by Apple, is there to help their users with problems, not for a bitch-fest. The Reg forum amongst others is the appropriate place to rip a new orifice in Apple for any perceived, imagined, conspiratorial slight.

Yeah Apple are anal, neurotic and paranoid control freaks, we all know that. Just get over it.

So much for "safe, clean and green" nuclear power

So in a worst case scenario, a nuclear reactor overheats, releases radioactive steam, and potentially goes into melt-down and releases a radioactive catastrophe because you simply can't have enough fail-safes in place to counter such an event.

Anyone else see the fatal flaw with this method of generating electricity?

At least with a coal or gas fired power station, when it shuts down, it shuts down, perhaps with a bit of a dirty fire for a while, but no deadly radioactive legacy for decades to come. And with renewable energy such as wind, solar, thermal, wave and hydro (and in spite of the bollocks written earlier, it is renewable - the sun keeps rising, the wind keeps blowing, the tides.... you get the idea) the worst that can happen is someone gets hit on the head with falling debris and of course the lights (might) go out for a little while.

If you think nuclear power is the answer, then you're asking the wrong question.

Oh come on...

So there are men on here who are trying to convince us they have not tasted their own blow? Sounds like that favourite urban statistic: "95% of men masturbate and the other 5% are liars.

Thunderbolt?? Really??

Geez Steve, are you guys STILL doing acid?

Idiot opposition

When you get the likes of armchair no-it-alls, no-nothings sitting on the opposition benches in Parliament and the Murdochs of the world and right-wing think-tanks with their own sinister agendas spreading mis-information and out-and-out lies about the technologies behind the NBN it is no wonder the public is confused about what the technology represents and how it should be paid for.

Australia is a huge continent with a small population. Things like railways, highways and telecommunications networks must be at the very least subsidised and by necessity often fully funded by government otherwise they will never get built.

There would be no transcontinental railway or highways or nation wide copper based telecom networks if the Australian government had not have foot the bill. All these things are nation building infrastructure a modern society could not do without yet would not exist if we had waited for the private sector to build it. The government takes a long term view - 20, 50, 100 years when building these things. The private sector at best has a 10 year view. Investments that take 20 or more years to show their return are not things the private sector gets involved in.

Are any of the people opposed to the NBN seriously suggesting that the government of the day should not have built Australia's copper network? Or our national network of highways? Or our railways? Or our dams? Or our airports? None of these things would exist or at the least to the extent they do without government intervention. There is no escaping this simple, obvious fact.

Those opposed to the NBN often bang on about "new technologies which will supersede the NBN" - this is simply a lie. The very nature of the technology - photons travelling along optic fibre at light speed - ensures that nothing currently exists, let alone as a gleam in a scientists eye, which will be faster than light. It is unlikely we will find a new way of moving data faster than the speed of light anytime in the next 100 years. That might change some time after Zefram Cochrane invents a warp drive in the year 2063 but of course that is a fantasy - much like the arguments of the opponents of the NBN.

The gear at either end will continue to evolve until it will be a pure photons all the way from the source to your home computer's CPU and all the components attached to it. But this stuff attached to each end of the light-pipe is the easy and cheap stuff to replace as the tech advances. The major cost for the NBN is digging tens of thousands of kilometres of trenches and laying the optic cable. This is a one-off cost.

It could have been worse!

The Yanks are more stupid.

Those Yanks are an odd lot

In Australia we have a public, universal, end-to-end health care system. It works very well. It's a large part of Government budgets but easily affordable for the country and cheap when compared to the economic damage of not having such a system in place. It's not economically healthy to allow your population to live in otherwise treatable sickness or with debilitating injury.

Our Medicare levy funds the scheme that gives Australian residents access to health care. A levy surcharge may apply to high income earners who don't have private patient hospital cover but even that is modest, kicking in after AU $73K (NB. currently = $73K US).

On a combined income of AU $110K with my partner, we pay a total of AU $780 for access to first class, advanced health care including every hospital specialty from birth to death. We also have universal access to subsidised pharmaceuticals with health care card holders (unemployed, most tertiary students, low income families, pensioners) paying just a nominal amount for any covered drug, which is virtually anything and everything available.

I'm on a combination of drugs that keeps me alive, healthy and economically productive. I couldn't possibly afford it if I had to pay the "retail" price; my health would fail and I could look forward to a long, debilitating death which would leave me reliant on government welfare.

There is no such thing as "we can't afford this drug to keep you alive or free of suffering" in Australia. This includes drugs for very rare conditions which normally cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Visits to doctors and many specialist services are also subsidised requiring in most part a modest fee of about $30. We don't pay for optometrists visits either. The only thing not really covered for most people in dental. But once again, health care card holders get subsidised access.

I live in a country that believes it's the role of government to ensure we have a healthy productive population which is most cost effectively delivered by government. This is a society that firmly believes some things in society, such as health care and education, should be free of the profit motive, providing universal access to low or no cost and high quality system.

Access to health care is a benchmark of a civilised society.