Our MD will invariably be ordering one of these as soon as they become available in the UK, so I'll pass judgement on usability etc. once I've actually had a play with one (I'm the poor sod who'll have to do the setup etc.)

From a personal point of view, however, iPhone OS=lockdown=no sale - if I want computing on the move I'll use my Dell Mini-10v

I remember doing a 'conversion' of The Valley on the Commodore 64 around 1983/84, whilst another friend of mine did it for the Spectrum - writing it for the Speccy posed a few problems but the net result was a very faithful conversion.

Because the original code was for the PET, the C64 conversion wasn't *that* difficult even if it did take a bloody age to type in. Heady days indeed, and could well be the reason why I love rogue-like games even now.

Thanks for the links too .... it's *very* tempting to download the source and re-jig The Valley in Java or Perl :-)

... and maybe we'll talk.

Until then, they can cram it. Pity really, since once of these would make a nice companion for my Mini-10v netbook (which *did* have Ubuntu as an option, even if it was Dell's crappy 'remix')

... that the inevitable backlash was Arruda wakening for them ...

Coat. Check.

Door. Check.

Outta here :-)

'Cos if it is, they can cram it where the sun don't shine ...

And, knowing Cisco, it'll have a kick-ass price to match ...

"Fanboys are an insecure bunch at the best of times, but console buffs take the cake."

I reckon PC gamers have both camps beaten - pop over to somewhere like bit-tech.net and read a review of a game which is either a) console only or b) slated for 'later release' on the PC. You ain't seen vitriol like it.

As for the iPod Touch, it's definitely on the 'nice to have' list for now (plus my 2nd gen Shuffle is more than adequate for days out on the bike)

"So how much Road tax do you pay?"

No such thing as road tax - hasn't been since around WW2 if memory serves.

However, I pay approximately £125p/a in VED for the car, not to mention fuel duty, income and council tax, all of which pay for the upkeep of the roads.

OTOH, I don't pay VED on any of the 3 bikes I own, have third party insurance courtesy of membership of the CTC as well as personal accident insurance (a wise investment given an annual cycling mileage of around 12,000 averaged over the past couple of years)

There are bad cyclists, there are bad motorists and James Martin, whoever he is, comes across as a complete tool. Deal with it.

"Netbooks need higher screen resolution. 1024x600 is serviceable but higher rez screens as standard for the platform would be very nice. I've read that Intel and/or M$ pressure the netbook makers to not exceed 1024x600 - is this true?"

More than likely.

Component cost is a factor too - you can get 10" displays with higher resolutions but they're still quite expensive compared to the more bog-standard 1024x600/768/whatever displays. For me, 1024x768 on a 10" screen is ideal, 1024x600 is a minor pain although since my netbook isn't my 'main' machine I can live with it for occasional use.

"I'll take two - one for the laptop, one for the backup drive."

I'll wait until Western Digital and/or Samsung announce something similar, assuming they haven't done so already. I like my hard drive firmware to be reliable, you see ...

"Fixing sound, esp. on Dell's, esp. on recent Ubuntu's, is normally as simple as removing as many packages with the word 'pulseaudio' in their title as possible."

What the man said - pulseaudio blows goats. End of.

Removing *all* of the pulseaudio modules on my Mini-10v fixed pretty much all of the audio hassles I had when I installed Ubuntu 9.04. Plain ol' ALSA is plenty good enough for me.

As for the Samsung - looks nice, but in no way is it worth the asking price (IMO). If I'm going to lay out that much cash on a laptop then I'll get a 'proper' one with a decent spec (granted, my Mini-10v ended up costing £250 but that included an upgrade to a bigger SSD and £20 for a 2Gb stick of RAM from Crucial)

I've long believed that the whole 'Small Cheap Computer' thing is now dead in the water - this machine does nothing to disprove my belief and, at this particular price point, is chock full o' fail. Rather like pulseaudio, come to think of it.

"The more pirates that are prosecuted, heavily fined and imprisoned, the better off the world will be. I say hang every one of the scum bums."

You are Lars Ulrich and I claim my five pounds ...

I remember Herpa from way back in the days when I played with model trains (had a fair number of their 1:87 scale car and truck models) and the certainly used to make good stuff.

I must admit, I rather like the look of the model Trabi, especially those bad-ass alloy wheels :-)

Here's hoping they can pull it off in 1:1 scale.

"why isn't somone (maybe even the councils) buying the rights and the source code ?"

Don't you know there's a recession on? Council executive bonuses don't pay themselves, you know ...

Maybe so, but it still doesn't change the fact that PHP is a bastardised version of Perl, no matter how much Zend want to dress it up.

"Anyway, weren't Cisco trying to shut the d-link arm down or something?"

ITYM LinkSys.

Some of their products are just as bad as D-Link's, but it' still a totally different company.

Fail - 'cos that's what this device does.

Being 12.5mm deep it sure as hell won't go in my laptop. However, it *might* just go into one of my external enclosures ....

*goes off to look for his vernier calipers*

"TechCrunch embodies all that is wrong with blogging as journalism: shoddy fact checking, writing that would fail a high school English class, and a pre-adolescent in-the-brain-out-the-mouth reporting style."

'Nuff said ...

Still. Never let facts get in the way of a good rant, eh?

... that's making me go back to PAYG as soon as my current contract expires (or until Vodafone/whoever take over T-Mobile, whichever comes first)

I'll keep my trusty Nokia 6300, thank you, but you can take your 18 and 24 month contracts and pound 'em up your wazoo. Like a lot of people, I'm not that keen on the iPhone but the Pre could have been a contender if it were with anyone but O2.

Title says it all.

I bought a PS3 second-hand and three months later it had been sold on for a nice profit - no PS2 backward compatibility and a piss-poor collection of games were the nails in the coffin. There's no way in hell I'd have paid full whack for one.

It's still a mystery to me how Sony could get the PS3 so disasterously wrong on so many levels. For now, I'll stick with my old slimline PS2 and the white box from Redmond.

"A Radeon graphics card does 1.2 Teraflops for 160w of power, so 800 of them is a Petaflop for 130Kw. A 50% increase in processing power and 30% decrease in energy should just about do it."

And who knows, the resulting assemblage of silicon might be able to run Crysis/Vista/A.N.Other renowned resource hog[*] with all settings at max.

I know, I know - I'm already out the door ...

[*] - delete as appropriate

"I tend to be a little bit nervous and suspicious of something that tries to do everything at once,"

Too right - I was taught, many moons ago, that it's preferable (although not necessarily desirable, depending on circumstance) to write a number of programs, each of which does one thing well, rather than some monolithic behemoth which does a number of things adequately at best.

As for the languages thing, I don't have much exposure to Erlang and I do most of my coding in Java at the moment. As for writing software for distributed systems, when I earned a living doing that I used Python. Horses for courses.

Now if we could just torpedo the marketeer's myth that 'cloud computing' is something new and funky ... it ain't.

"Hopefully be better than the movies though. They seriously lacked in laughs for the most part."

Could they be any worse? Really?

After enduring "Bender's Big Score" I was beginning to think that the writers had been afflicted by brain slugs.

... so, nothing to do with the fact that it tastes like ass, then. In fact, almost without exception diet colas taste bloody horrible. Diet Pepsi is just about palatable, whereas I find that Pepsi Max tastes vile.

I prefer unleaded(*) Dr.Pepper - after all, what's the worst that could happen?

(*) - unfortunately, being diabetic kind of rules out any fizzy flavoured water with real sugar in it.

You forgot Simon Cowell as Culture Secretary ...

Or, better yet, the whole lot of 'em can just drop dead.

I wouldn't shed any tears.

"What's wrong with X?"

Hoooo boy, there's a loaded question. It may be more productive to ask what *isn't* wrong with X ...

I used X Terminals back in the day when I was at University and they were cool and all, but it was only when I started working as a developer that I realised what an absolute abortion X11 is.

The Poison Dwarf has resigned: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8080777.stm

"Oh yeah, what Britain needs right now is a good old fashioned unelected leader - now I'm sure there was another name for that sort of person, what was it?"

If memory serves, the monarch has the power to dissolve Parliament which could, in theory, force an election - the Queen being an unelected leader doesn't come into it.

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen because of 'constitutional difficulties' , which is to say 'this has never happened before therefore nobody has a bloody clue how they'd handle it'.

Anyway, we already have a good old-fashioned unelected leader - the one-eyed Scottish idiot in No.10. And please, don't argue semantics - yes, the collective 'we' voted the Labour party in, inasmuch that Tony B.Liar was the leader at the time and hence became the PM. As far as I'm concerned, Prudence Broon has no mandate to govern - when Phony Tony stood down there should have been a General Election, pure and simple, although given what happened during the Thatcher->Major transition determining whether or not this is a good thing is left as an exercise for the reader.

"Harriot The Horror Harmen!"

Don't joke about shit like that. Just don't.

Harlot Harperson needs a stake through the heart, not the Home Secretary's job.

Anyway, takin' all bets on who'll 'stand down for family reasons' next .... Darling? Hoon? Or will Prudence Broon have the cojones to call an general election? The local/European results will be a mere appetiser.

Personally, I can't wait - it'll be 1997 all over again but with far, *far* more 'Portillo moments'.

Tombstone - for the ZanuLabour government.

Good riddance to bad rubbish - I'm now looking forward to someone handing her arse back to her at the general election which, IMO, can't come fast enough.

My only concern now is which corrupt, incompetent muppet will replace her.

Flames, because there's a circle of Hell set aside for her.

Looks like Nathan Barley and his cohorts are alive and well.

More's the pity.

Mine's the one with the Wasp T-12 Speechtool in the pocket.

We've had:

USB2.0 - High Speed

Now we have:

USB3.0 - Super Speed.

What are they going to call USB4.0? 'Ludicrous Speed'?

There's a road called Butt Hedge in Long Marston, just outside York (and a few miles from where I live) - I'm fully aware of the toxophilogical connection but it still never fails to raise a snigger.

If it's anything like the 1Tb series 'Green' drives that I've got in my NAS box then the claims of quietness and meagre power usage are bang on the money.

In fact, the drives are so quiet that when I first fired them up I honestly thought they were DOA because I couldn't hear them spinning up. Granted, they're not the fastest drives on the planet, but they do their job with a minimum fuss. As for power draw, all I can say is that the NAS box pulls less than 25W under load and it's got two of the 1Tb 'Green' drives in it - that's good enough for me. They seem to run fairly cool as well - the NAS has a temperature controlled fan inside and it only ever really comes on when the drives are getting hammered (eg. during big file transfers and backups)

The only downside I can see is that 2Tb of data is a helluva lot of storage to potentially lose, backup regimes or no, and I'd be very wary of using one as a sole drive. But then, that's me.

I don't really care if the Seagate drives pull less power and/or are quieter - after the Barracuda firmware debacle they're off the supplier list for home and work purposes.

"It can't even square i."

Or 'j' (I checked, having used both i and j for sqrt(-1) in the past)

Pity - I was quite looking forward to an afternoon of squaring ludicrous complex expressions. Marginally less painful than building DNS servers.

Did anyone notice that Google Squared isn't flagged as beta? Shurely shome mishtake.

"Typical not to make one for the left handed world, over and over idiot manufacturers do this"

Did you actually *read* the review?

They do a left-handed version - trouble is, you've got to pay through the nose (and several other orifices) for it.

Personally, being ambi-mouse-trous, I'd rather use something with a certain degree of symmetry so that I can switch hands should I feel the need to. For this reason I'm still using olde-skool MS Optical IntelliMice on all my machines and I've had no RSI issues in over 10 years of working as a developer.