Nice! We started playing L2D but Kim got a bit scared...

The reason Apple is getting the negative press re using Foxconn is simple: Put "Apple" or "iPhone" in a headline and it will get five times the page views that "Dell", "Intel", "Sony" or anyone else would get. Sad but true. PC Pro did a story about this recently (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/07/01/and-thats-why-we-talk-about-the-apple-iphone-4-so-much/). Around 15% of their news stories are about Apple, but in June nearly 75% of their page views came from stories about Apple. It's MENTAL. If anyone actually paid for news, it would be a great time to write about Apple :)

Sweatshops? You mean Foxconn? Which also manufactures stuff for Dell, Sony, Intel (if you have a machine with an Intel mobo, it was made by Foxconn in the same factory as Apple's stuff), Philips, Nokia... etc etc etc. That PS3 you're thinking of getting? Made by Foxconn. Your Wii? Made by Foxconn. Basically, if you've bought a piece of high tech in the last five years, it was made by Foxconn (AKA Hon Hai Precision). By the way, the touchscreen on your Android phone by HTC? Made in a sweatshop - http://act.ly/1xf There's even a specific local campaign targeting HTC for a boycott because of it. You can even get t-shirts! http://emblack.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/campaign-against-sweatshop-htc/

Tsk, my grin tag vanished from that last post. I hate HTML.

1. Uh huh, sure, and this is the year of Linux on the desktop too (And to answer Dan - they've "fucked up" by making all those billions, the bastards, when they they should have gone down the Google route and not actually had a business model. /me shakes fist at air). 2. Not sure about this. Poker, bingo, etc all seem to be doing pretty well long-term with the "push short term addiction" buttons. 3. I think this is only true if you're measuring success in terms other than actual, proper, real, accountable revenue. It's easy to look like a massive success when all you've actually got is a huge audience who don't spend any money with you and a big profile on TechCrunch. Look out for companies that aren't taking VC money but do have actual revenue streams - and back them. 4. In games? Yeah. But wait for the inevitable slew of vampire/romance bollocks cashing in on Twilight. 5. If you buy one second hand, make sure it's not the one that got pinched from us!

Just a little note, commentors: If the name you're using to comment is something like "Hairstyles" and links to a site you're trying to SEO upwards, I'm just deleting the URL. Just so you know.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. The only reason that I can see for Amazon releasing this to international customers (and marketing it so strongly to them) is a failure to get mobile networks on board. Either that, or it's a stop-gap before the next generation of Kindle comes out... or it starts to license the Whispernet technology to others. Apple Tablet "with Whispernet" anyone? After all, Apple already has a commercial relationship with Amazon via its licensing of One-Click...

Dear Austin, I am, however, capable of using capitalisation. Back to school with you.

Sarah, I don't think we've ever met either virtually or in the real world, but I think you're handling this exactly the right way. One of the of horrible sides of the idea that people should turn themselves into "personal brands" is that all-too-many folk think that makes you public property. The semi-anonymity that people can post comments with combined with the idea (encouraged by social media gurus) that "YOU MUST LISTEN TO MEH!", and we've got to the point where a lot of discourse on the net is pretty unhealthy. It's one of the reasons that I've long argued that the only approach with social media is to keep it to "real" friends. Now a real friend doesn't have to be one you've met in real life - it can equally well be someone you've conversed with regularly online - but it's the only way to get a lot of value without the shit. That doesn't protect you from blog comments, of course, but there's nothing wrong with not having comments at all if you're getting lots of shitty ones. Anyway, good luck!

I followed the contortions that the whacko end of the conservative movement put themselves through on this issue at the time, and it's a little more complex, alas. The "birth deniers" (as I like to call them) insist that a "Certification of Live Birth" isn't the same as a "birth certificate", despite the fact that it's what you get when you register a birth in Hawaii. They claim that you can register a birth when someone is born out of state - but, of course, in that case Obama's place of birth wouldn't be recorded as Honolulu :) Thankfully, McCain jumped on this one during the campaign pretty quickly, told his supporters that Obama was a citizen and to stop being stupid, so it didn't get much traction amongst the conservative mainstream. But, like the "moon landing was faked" meme, these things tend to take on a life of their own.

pwb says, of Chris' point: "It's that stuff that's digitally reproducible at near-zero cost will trend towards Free." Yes, but "trend towards" doesn't equal free. In fact, it will *never* be free, because neither distribution not content creation are zero-cost activities. Slice any cost you like up between as many different people as you want, and it will never become zero. It's the "too cheap to meter" fallacy all over again, as Gladwell points out. You can see this from YouTube, where content costs Google bucket-loads of money to distribute - and YouTube is trapped in a free model which makes it impossible for them to make money at the moment. On the revenue side, as long as the bandwidth/server capacity demands increase at a percentage rate that's higher than revenue increases, YouTube can never make a profit. YouTube could sell 50% more ad inventory this year - but if its server/bandwidth costs increase at 50% or more, it will continue to lose money. In effect, YouTube's ad sales team have to run to stand still, which is difficult in a recession. And, of course, in a recession "free" becomes more powerfully attractive to customers - which means it's likely that Google's server costs will go up rather than down. Of course, YouTube could adopt a model which limited the growth of its bandwidth/server usage according, recognising that these are scarce resources. The method we usually use to allocate scarce resources is called "pricing"...

I think it's actually the same as the UK Wimpy (which does still exist!) UK: http://www.wimpy.uk.com/ SA: http://www.wimpy.co.za/

And, just in case you think I'm not being totally serious, here's something from today's Economist : "And as the New York Times has noted, some economists and traders have begun to refer to London by an ominous moniker: Reykjavik-on-Thames. Like the Icelandic capital, London is home to a stricken financial industry that once underpinned the economy, and to banks whose liabilities dwarf national output. As in Iceland the banks' collapse has catalysed a new recession and rising unemployment, and may well contribute to the fall of a prime minister—even if Gordon Brown's defenestration is likely to be more decorous than that of his ousted Icelandic counterpart. 'Reykjavik-on-Thames' exaggerates Britain's predicament—probably. But it captures the way in which, at the moment, the country looks to some to be as much a victim of globalisation as its champion and beneficiary."

Thanks for the compelling argument as to why I'm wrong. Now, care to explain why the pound is so very different? The parallels are interesting. Both the UK and Iceland exploited non-membership of the euro to boost their financial sectors compared to the rest of Europe. I'm not just making this up: for years, one of the government's key arguments against joining the euro was the importance of the financial sector. The argument was that we needed a government controlled lender of last resort (the Bank of England) to underwrite the finance sector, or they'd head off to somewhere else. In other words, unless the taxpayer was prepared to bail out the money men, they'd leave. Well, we're now having to pay out on that risk - so those chickens have very much come home to roost. The Icelanders took the same kind of risk, on a much smaller scale. The result of this for Iceland is disaster. But the risks we took were much larger, and - unfortunately - whether or not we have the underlying economy to pay out on the guarantees we made has yet to be seen. We took a bet by staying outside the euro - and although we profited for a while (or at least, a small group of very rich individuals did), we ultimately lost the bet. The difference is purely one of degree: the international crisis has hit Iceland harder than the UK, so far. But this may not be true forever: the key question is whether the pound has hit its floor yet. If so, the pressure to join the euro will ease. If not... well, we could be in the same boat that Iceland is in. There's an interesting parallel to be made, too, between Iceland and Ireland. Like Iceland, Ireland's banking sector grow out of all proportion to the rest of its economy, largely by the same method: investing in UK property and companies. While Iceland has had to go begging to the IMF, Ireland's membership of the euro has protected it from the worst excesses. While this is undoubtedly annoying to Germany and France (as it means they have to shoulder some of the burden of weaker or less-wise countries) it has prevented Ireland going bust - surely a good thing for Europe as a whole. So no, it's not a stupid comment - there are a lot of reasons to believe that Iceland won't be the last European country seeking the sanctuary of the eurozone. The question is whether the eurozone will want us. Will Nicolas Sarkozy be in the same position in 2009 or 2010 as Charles de Gaulle was in 1963: saying "non" to Britain joining a European club?

Good points, David. The Pages 09/Word problem you describe is exactly what I'm referring to. You can bet that Microsoft Word will open those files - but does that mean you have to be locked into Word for the rest of time? Microsoft would certainly like it! :) The "what happens if I switch again?" question is a good one. One of the benefits of open source software is that it tends to be cross-platform - for example, Amarok has been built on Windows and (in an early form) on the Mac too. More importantly, the specfication for how the data is stored is open, which means - in theory at least - getting the data out in a form which can be imported into something else is relatively easy. Of course, that depends on the "something else" being able to import metadata... but that's something that I would hope even closed source software would want to support. After all, if you want people to switch to your platform, you want them to be able to bring their data with them. It's important to note, though, that not all open source software correctly documents formats. XCF, the native format for Gimp, is only partially properly documented (for reasons which are too complex to go into) - the developers regard the source code as the full reference to the format, which isn't overly helpful. They have, however, decided to move to a new, fully-documented format based on ODF in the future. And of course, you're right to say that in the future, the tools will *probably* be available to switch. Cunning users tend to find ways to reverse engineer these things, although sometimes it can be horribly hit-or-miss (sometime I'll write up the tale of trying to merge two iTunes libraries with third party tools...) But, for me, that just raises the question: Why should I have to jump through hoops and pray that some third party manages to reverse engineer something, when Apple could just do the right thing in the first place and use open formats, or document what they do? Especially when there are platforms around which don't follow that path. As I said, though, it's up to each individual to weigh up what's right for them. There's no single "true path", and it's the competition between different software platforms, and different approaches, which keeps everyone honest.

Hi Al - the MBP was beginning to show its age, performance-wise. Games, for example (and particularly WoW!) were really sluggish. I thought about converting the MBP to Linux, but it takes a lot of tweaking to get everything working properly (see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro1-1_1-2/Intrepid). While that's the kind of fun project that I'll probably do when I get a free weekend (or two), I wanted something that gave me better performance and was generally more "Ubuntu-ready".

"Anona", congratulations on being the first person here to fall into the category of "cliched platform fanatic". You obviously didn't bother to read to the end of what I wrote, so I'll repeat the last paragraph here, just for you: "And that's a good thing, because monocultures are bad. I want Mac OS X to improve and thrive, just as I want Microsoft to continue to make Windows better. Competition is good, and strong competition between three computing platforms which all take different approaches is a healthy thing." My choice does not have to be your choice, and what works for me doesn't have to be what works for you. By seeing the world in black and white, in terms of "pro-Apple or anti-Apple", all you're doing is making yourself look silly. The world is more complex than that. If you'd have bothered to read what I wrote, you might have picked up on something: being on the leading edge of innovation isn't as important to me as having open formats, and a platform that gives me more choices than Apple's does. Even if Apple was at the bleeding edge of brilliant innovation, that wouldn't matter to me as much as avoiding closed and proprietary solutions which limit my choices in the long run. And to your final point: I hate to break it to you, but the "mainstream marketplace" is all about Windows. And, again, if you'd have bothered to read what I wrote you'd know that having "the mainstream solution" isn't important to me, if that "mainstream solution" means being locked in to a single vendor. I hope you enjoy your Mac - it's a fine product, produced by a great company and a hugely-talented group of people. Now if you'd like to stop sneering at the idea that other people might just care about different things to you and have different priorities, we can all get along just fine.

Andrew, I hear what you're saying - and I think it perfectly illustrates why I care about open file formats. Whether an application is open source or not is a choice that is really just down to asking what the right way to get the job done is. I believe strongly in a "mixed economy" for development, with different methodologies competing and spurring on improvement over the whole industry. But when you're locked in to using a single product because the developer deliberately chose to use a format unique to itself... that's not encouraging competition. That's not encouraging innovation. It's just encouraging developers to sit on their behinds raking in the cash because everyone HAS to use their product. Incidentally, have you tried Word running under WINE? I'm told it's pretty good. http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=10

You know, the more that I think about it, the more I think it might happen sooner.

I can totally understand that, Simon. It's as convenient for developers as it is for consumers.

Blimey, didn't know that Mackenzie - thanks!

Thanks ncus. I've used Ubuntu off and on for over a year, and other distros before that - although that's always been on a "use occasionally" basis. A couple of years ago I tried using it more regularly, but at that point, it felt much less ready for prime time than it does now - driver support in particular reflected Terry's experiences (above) more than is true now. I've actually had the XPS since 12th November, and installed 8.10 on it immediately - so it's been two months as my main machine. The only time I boot into either Mac or Windows is for one Windows app which doesn't run under Wine (it's a pretty obscure one) or to sync my iPhone to iTunes (which, as most everything syncs over the air, isn't often). I've still got a Windows partition on the Dell (80GB - it's a 400GB drive, so I've got plenty of room), but I can see a day in the not-too-distant future when I'll be getting rid of Windows entirely.

I haven't looked very hard because I'm not a pro video editor. Kino does everything I need to do, in a way that I understand and find easy to use. Isn't that the definition of "right tool for the job"?

Well, you have to remember: being a pundit isn't about being right so much as being entertaining. It's the classic Rupert Murdoch approach to journalism: it's entertainment, not information.