Posts by Gulfie

Ten Essential... iPhone Accessories

Atomic Floyd is the answer

After my third set of Apple headphones broke I decided to shell out for a pair of Atomic Floyd HiDef Drum earbuds. They have a much, much better sound and despite being a little north of £100 have already paid for themselves; they have lasted a year while the three sets of of iPhone standard headphones only lasted about three months each despite careful handling...

See http://store.apple.com/uk/product/TW051ZM/A - they are now £99.95, proving prices do fall even in the apple store, or £99 from Atomic Floyd

Apple in shock public attack on Adobe

Adobe is no longer the issue

The real issue that this whole spat (if that's an appropriate word) has highlighted in big flashing neon that Apple can crap on anybody's business model, regardless of the size of the company, with apparent impunity.

Given their growing footprint in the smartphone space this cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely. The question is, how long before action is taken? What percentage of smartphone market share would Apple need to get to before this can be actively pursued as an abuse of a monopoly position?

Apple bans Pulitzer Prize political cartoons from iPhone

Nothing...

Already have a robot (Nexus One) alongside my Jesus Phone (tm). The only feature that is missing from the vanilla Android 2.1 is USB/Bluetooth contact and calendar sych. Was originally going to upgrade the iPhone - the Nexus is mainly for Android development - now I'm not so sure I'll bother.

'Groom-a-Tory' iPhone app sparks privacy paranoia

"The Tories are yet to respond"

Why not get a 'friend' to give the Tories your details using this app - I bet you'll get contacted soon enough...

iPhone 4.0: iAds, multitasking, and 98 tweaks

"The only apps that will have ads in them are free apps"

Got that in writing, signed in blood from St Steve have we? No? Then don't be surprised if paid-for apps also start getting adverts. That's a bit like saying "I paid for access to the Times Online so I don't expect to see any adverts at all" - Naiive at best. Yes, many paid apps will stay advert free. I bet games get adverts very quickly - I'm sure the likes of EA would like to cross-sell their latest releases when you fire up one of their games that you paid £5 for.

Manipulative? Apple?

"The most likely reason is that this is a cynical attempt by Apple to get everyone to upgrade to the latest model"

Absolutely. Which is also why the iPad has been designed to accept a front-facing camera that isn't in the current model - come product refresh time hey presto, a camera appears and the cost is minimal as the tooling for the case (and probably the hardware and software development) has already been done. Hey presto, a reason for existing users to upgrade a perfectly good machine that should have had a camera from day one. Remember also that the iPod Touch also has room for a camera but none fitted...

Love my OSX machines, really going off the whole mobile range because of the cynical marketing to and manipulation of Joe Public, and the extreme efforts that Apple are going to to force people to learn Objective C++ to write for the iPhone (on OSX only, of course).

iAd? No Thanks

Some interesting ideas in this although nothing I'd call a game changer or killer feature. Apple playing catch-up. If anything, coupled with the apparent attempt to block cross-compiled applications (get a life, Steve) I'm actually less likely to upgrade from my 3G to the new hardware due in the summer, and start spending money on Android apps instead.

There may be a crumb of comfort to those of us with a 3G - if it won't support multi-taskling then it might not run iAd at all? Perhaps Steve sees two phones - a cheaper one which constantly interrupts you with adverts you can't turn off or quickly dismiss, and a more expensive one with no adverts outside of iAd enabled applications.

I will never, ever pay for an application that includes adverts that can't be turned off. Similarly I'll never buy a phone that pushes adverts to me when I'm using built-in features. Apple has to tread very carefully here, get this wrong and they could quickly alienate a significant percentage of users.

In short, I'll stick with my 3G and Nexus One until I've seen how the whole thing pans out. Definitely not a day one adopter of a new iPhone.

Brown promises no change to basic tax rate

Is that the same Gordon Brown...

... who promised no rise in the basic rate of tax (happily encouraging teh view that this meant no changes to personal tax) and promptly put up NI instead?

... Who abolished the 10% rate of tax and was forced to re-instate it via another route?

... who promised an end to boom and bust but failed to ensure there was sufficiently rigorous financial regulation in place?

... who ignored calls for political reform, along with one T. Blair, from the Lib Dems (amongst others) for 13 years, because it suited them?

Had trouble choosing an icon for this one - WTF, FAIL, new keyboard, hand grenade all admirably suited.

... from the same Labour party that promised reform of the Lords and then got bored half-way through the process?

... from the same Labour party that discussed lowering the voting age to 16, knowing that statisically they had the most to gain from such a move?

Expediency. Oh yes, We've heard of that. And credibility? Hang on, where's that dictionary.

Frankly I'm surprised he can put his face outside his own front door. I've never been a Labour voter, I understand that many core Labour voters will continue to vote for the party, but who can look at all these things and say "yes, I not only believe everything this man says, I also support him personally as a future Prime Minister".

Apple's iPad - the device for execs who create nothing

The boss is paid...

... to look forward and plan the strategic direction of their company; to frame new product opportunities; to look at acquisition opportunities. They (should) know their company and their business space inside out. For the most part that _does_ involve consumption of information. And when an opportunity is identified I'd expect a good exec to delegate and support the detailed investigation and inevitable strategy report to somebody at a lower level, not to spend days of their own time doing keyboard work.

Does the MD of a large company cut code? Does a developer make high-level strategy decisions? The more one works at the coal face (be it in development or in sales) the less time is available for strategic thinking.

Unfortunately a significant percentage of execs don't know their company or their business space and so appear as, and frequently are, incompetent, under-informed and only interested in seeing how often they can get onto the golf course in company time. First priority - a fat salary and pension, second priority keeping it whilst doing as little as possible.

One company I worked for failed spectacularly simply because upper management spent too little time doing stregic planning. The result was that a 70% share of a vertical software market fell to less than 25% inside 18 months.

Apple uncloaks deep details of its 11 iPad apps

There is only one argument...

"I can do all this on a netbook or laptop that costs about half what Apple want for the iPad. Oh, and that will let me view Flash web sites and won't try to tell me what I can and cannot install".

Now, give me a decent counter-argument to that.

iPad is a rich man's coffee table book. A nice piece of technology with no unique selling point, but looks good to have one lying around.

MSI tells 97,000 customers to 'Read The F***ing Manual'

Chris Tarrant...

... did the best April Fool's joke ever when he did the Capital breakfast show in 1989. He went into the studio on Saturday April 1st and repeated the breakfast show he'd done the previous day.

Caused a fair amount of havoc. People going to work and sitting in a big, empty office. People not doing what they were supposed to to because they thought it was Friday, not Saturday. I think there was even court action.

Sheer class, had me going for about 5 minutes - except I had my Saturday morning hangover so I knew it couldn't be Friday again...

Your health, tax, and search data siphoned

Fail to you too...

Did you not see the part of the article that points out that this works as a man-in-the-middle attack too? You don't need stuff to be put over the air, or even decrypted - you just need access to the data packets flowing between the web server and the end user, wifi or no.

Brown creates one UK.gov website to rule them all

If you're going to fail...

What complete and utter rubbish!

"Let's build a single web site, accessible to everybody, to do everything."

Yeah right, and that's not got epic fail written all over it has it?

Haven't learnt from the NHS fiasco have we? This must be a factor of ten bigger project at least. It'll take so long to do that it won't be able to keep up with changes in the government's own legislation, tax and benefits rules. And now, when it gets it wrong, everybody will be affected.

How much money on this being tied into ID cards - one system to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them. Oh, you'll need your ID Card Mk 2 to log in. For anything.

Net downloads cause 'millions of lost jobs'

In general terms...

... how do you spot a legal download from an illegal one? Putting aside the protocol argument for one moment, I regularly download large, completely innocuous files from the internet. Some are via bittorrent, some via FTP client and some as clickable download links in my browser. If current actions are successful in pushing people away from bittorrent it will simply mean that they are using different means to share. File sharing only receives attention because bittorrent has (a) made it easy and (b) therefore become the number one choice and by extrapolation the number one channel for illegal sharing.

Short of turning off the internet, banning memory sticks, CD/DVD/Blueray writers and networking, sharing will carry on (and even then we can return to the good old days of C90 cassettes, one album each site). The muppets in the trade haven't thought this far ahead and don't have a business model ready for when they do.

There are solutions, but the potential business models are so different from what we have now, I dispair that big business will ever consider them. I guess its easier to carry on with existing behaviour and become close friends with key home office ministers...

Minister: Banks should give ID cards to people with no money

Let me correct that for you...

"If the UK got a writen constitution todasy it would be full of the rights of citizens to give up their freedoms in exchange for silly laws being passed to prevent nameless bad people doing nameless bad things in nameless bad place... from being prosecuted"

There. That's sorted. NuLab would put together a croney's constitution - nothing more, nothing less.

US broadband seeks ISP speed stickers

Still one thing missing...

That broadband rating sticker should also indicate if the ISP uses traffic shaping or treats all traffic as equal. Alongside misleading headline speeds and prices this has to be the biggest con going.

I agree, sad but true, it'll be a cold day in hell when we get such a system. I'm paying £25 a month for up to 25Gb of unshaped traffic on top of my BT bill (which is generally just line rental and a few odds and sods on top). It's worth every penny though we currently struggle to use even 50% of that.

Googlephone sales top, um, 135,000

Choose your walled garden...

I agree with your sentiment. Apple and Google have both produced walled garden phones, with Apple its the app store, with Google its integration with the greater Google. I had to open a gmail account to activate my Nexus One - I regarded this with the same trepidation as those who wanted an iPhone but not iTunes. The first thing I worked out how to do was to switch off all the cloud sync with my shiny new gmail account - which I won't use. I'm currently working out how to sync contacts and calendar with my Mac...

I don't see the problem here

Only available from the USA, can't play with the phone up front, there is no surprise it's not selling well. Once it gets into the shops it'll be a different matter though. I ordered a Nexus One at 11am last Wednesday, it was signed for at my house at 10am on Friday. Beat that Royal Mail.

My first impresson is that Android 2.1 on Nexus (or equivalent) is a better consumer experience than the iPhone. I have both now, currently using the Nexus. My only day one gripes are lack of built-in support for 'local' address book and calendar sync.

Particularly enjoy not having to wait for Twitter to re-load each time I want to use it. Screen is fantastic.

The next iPhone MUST have a high-res screen and support background processes to keep up with modern Android handsets. I can see why they are sueing...

ID cards have three databases, says minister

What is wrong with just storing the info on the chip?

I imagine this is for verification reasons. As and when somebody manages to (a) modify an existing card in a way that it still looks internally valid to card readers or (b) creates a whole new card that looks internally valid to a card reader, you need some way of refuting the contents of the card. A simple mechanism would be to hash the card contents, hash the database contents, compare the two.

If you don't have two sets of data, you can't do that.

And to all those who ask why multiple databases, the simple answer is likely to be security. For verification purposes all you need is some kind of hash from the biometrics database. Separate that data out, put it in an utra-secure environment and only allow verification requests and responses from the outside world. This helps prevent disclosure - accidental or deliberate - which should be topmost in the minds of the people designing this system.

Not that I want it - I just wanted to explore possible reasons for some of these design decisions. Still fail.

Battle lines drawn in Apple-Google warfare

Search engine...

Only the default! Apple would default the search engine to Bing. At the moment my iPhone offers Google and Yahoo as search options. The real question is, if Apple add Bing and make it the default, will they leave Google in the list? It'd be a more valid argument if Google disappeared as an option altogether.

Nope, don't see this

Any kind of official co-operation is likely to be stamped on heavily. The FTC even investigated the Microsoft/Yahoo search/advertising deal closely. The US government is highly unlikely to allow the two companies that dominate consumer computing to have any kind of formal alliance.

Google Wave opens extensions gallery

Been there, done that...

... and I'm thoroughly underwhelmed. About the best use I can see is as a collaboration environment for a small, geographically diverse team. I think of it as a cross between pastebucket and a twitter stream. Something may come out of this experiment eventually, and I'm sure people will find uses for it, but I don't see it going mainstream until Google binds it inas an inescapable part of gmail... ;-)

TSA worker tried to sabotage terror database, feds say

Sounds like...

... he was given notice but expected to work it.

I saw this once in a small company, one of the IT support people was laid off but made to work the month. Insufficient oversight... we later found all kinds of stuff had walked in that month, and somebody had 'accidentally' set a number of sys admin accounts to be accessible externally...

Never, ever, make someone work their notice, it simply isn't worth the risk.

Former model sues Universal over 'x-rated prop' outrage

Good luck to the Moderatrix...

... reviwing the comments from this story. Permission should have been sought under the circumstances. I guess they didn't ask because they already guessed what the answer would be...

Google Nexus One

Give it time...

"The difference is there is nowhere the amount of crud (the dumb stuff like the iFart and crap liek that)" - Give it time, Android hasn't had the same level of maturity that the iPhone OS has. With the 2.x release and now the Nexus I fully expect a flood of pull my finger apps to appear in double-quick time...

You won't 'avoid' VAT and duty...

... the duty will be bundled into the handset price and then VAT will be added in the usual way. I finally caved and ordered one online yesterday. Vodaphone won't be selling unlocked handsets (I have an iPhone on O2 so a locked phone is no use to me) and I'm expecting, like all US-origin goods, that there will be a small but significant mark-up to cover currency fluctuations. About the only benefit of waiting for a UK launch will be that you get a mains charger with a UK plug on it, but you can charge from any USB port and (I imagine) an Apple iPod/iPhone charger will work just as well...

UK.gov OKs plan to flog digi dividend by end of year

Good luck with that!

After all, companies are falling over themselves to make large-scale investments in new telecoms networks at the moment, aren't they... not. This auction will not raise anything like the auction for 3G - just combine the recession with the relative saturation and high price of existing mobile broadband.

I'm not saying it won't sell, but I'll be very surprised if it sells for anything above £250mil, what with the restrictions being eased on existing spectrum.

Government spends £11k on ID card 'branding'

No surprise there...

... just ask Scot/Brit* Andy Murray. Either nationality matters, in which case be consistent. Or it doesn't, in which case STFU.

Hope you're enjoying the UK. I far prefer the multicultural country we are now to what we were in the 80's...

* losing/winning

UK is safer from al-Qaeda 'bastards', says security minister

I see your point...

... and don't entirely agree. You see although we don't haul many people out of their beds in the middle of the night, we have constructed a web of surveilance networks, lawsand police extrapolations thereof that have resulted in perfectly ordinary people having their civil rights impinged upon many times a day for no conceivable benefit.

Got a camera? Be careful where you point it or you'll be jumped by the police. Want to make a speech in public? Be careful where you make it, it might be illegal. Got plans to fly? Then get a password with unneccesary biometrics and walk through this useless new scanner. Driving? I don't know how many automatic numberplate recognition cameras I drive through each week but it its 100 that's 100 too many. Speed cameras - on sections of road it is generally impossible to break the speed limit on under normal conditions (I'm looking at YOU, M25 and YOU, M6). Walking in town? You're being video'd. And, coming soon, the national ID card. All your personal details folded in to one small piece of easily lost plastic. Also coming soon - all your internet traffic logged 'just in case'. DNA database full of people never charged with a crime. Do I have to go on or can I leave the country now?

As individuals we are more closely monitored than ever before, all ostensibly because a tiny minority of a tiny minority might manage to cause some trouble. I'm not belittling the trouble that has been caused in the past by the IRA or other more recent groups of people, but the extreme lengths our government is going to are excessive (depressingly so, when you list them like i have just done).

In information terms we are all living in glass houses, with no curtains, bathing and showering in public and proclaiming our every small private piece of information in ten-foot high flashing neon. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear? Rubbish. Nothing to hide, no reason for every last detail of my life to be on show to the government. You need to wake up and smell your own bullshit.

Apple's draconian developer docs revealed

Calm down dear...

I'm mystified by your post on a number of fronts...

Heat: I run seti@home on my Macbook Pro, which sits on my lap most evenings. Burns - none. Yes it gets warm, but no warmer than my old Dell Inspiron.

Firewall: Apple admitted in 2008 they'd got this wrong (after the '08 pwn to own competition) and started shipping machines with the firewall turned on, so for the last two years, nearly, this has been addressed.

Admin rights: Have to agree with you, Apple still ship machines with admin rights enabled, but do advise you to create non-admin accounts and use those for day-to-day use. Bear in mind though that many Windows users are given local admin privs - equivalent to the OS X admin rights - because if they need to install software, they have to have those rights. Even large companies don't necessarily tie people down by making them unprivileged users. So no difference to the competition, really.

Safari: the number two application I use on the Mac (as I develop web applications), I can't recall it ever crashing. Not once. I do get the odd application crash, usually the MySQL Browser or Eclipse, but I've never found the comment box you talk of when submitting crash reports, please enlighten me.

Security Lock: you must have this set up wrongly because I have my system set to lock after a period of inactivity and I've never come back to it to find that it hasn't locked. Application dialogs or no.

I could go on but I'm not entirely convinced you're currently using a Mac at all.

Progress? What progress?

The saddest thing here is that over the last 20 years I've watch computers become more powerful, more flexible, more open - and software more easily portable. Long gone are the days when if you wanted an upgrade for your computer did you have to go back to your OEM and bend over. In a scant two years Apple has undone getting on for ten years of progress on the software front and people are just rolling over and accepting it. In five years people might wake up and realise that they are back inside a closed ecosystem. Thank god this can't happen in the desktop computing arena.

I've never seriously considered developing for the iPhone, after all I'd need to learn a new language, but the developer agreement has killed off any desire to consider doing so. This makes Google and Android look positively saintly by comparison. I use an iPhone but, and I didn't think I'd say this... I'm seriously considering the opposition when I upgrade in the summer. I'm getting a Nexus anyway for Android development, becoming familiar with it may just tip me over the edge.

Steve Jobs says 'No' to iPhone-to-iPad tether

In the words of St Steve...

"No"

There are no USB ports to plug a dongle into. Of course if you have a laptop with a USB dongle you could create an ad-hoc wifi network on that, and join it from the iPad. That might work.

Paris. She knows about having the right sockets available...

No surprise really...

When you consider that Apple are using the little-used micro-SIM rather than the standard size that has been universal for some years it should not be a surprise that you won't be able to tether your iPhone and iPad. I'll bet that Apple puts some extra "if device = iPad" logic into the next iPhone firmware 'upgrade' to prevent this.

The hardware is physically big enough that finding room for the normal sized SIM should be a non-issue. Therefore the only reason to adopt the micro size is to stop you slipping the SIM out of your (i)Phone or USB 3G dongle and into the iPad. Plain, simple, the only conceivable reason. Did Apple do this off their own back though? My suspicion is that they adopted this form factor in a deal with Big Phone/Death Star (call them what you will): "we'll stop customers from using their existing SIM card in the 3G iPad if you give them a reasonable pay as you go experience instead of insisting on a contract".

Which sucks. Blatent consumer rip-off, pure and simple. Steve must have some pretty big ones to do this to the world with a straight face.

I can forsee a trade in micro-SIM adaptors for the iPhone springing up, as well as lots of requests to mobile networks to change an existing SIM for a micro-SIM.

Remember, in modern capitalism, no-one can hear you scream...

This isn't just Apple

Apple sell the device 'as is' with no mandatory tie. If anything it would _suit_ them that you can do these things. It'll be the telcos that are insisting on this so that they can sell extra SIM-only deals and get you to pay twice - for the same reason that the device won't take a standard size SIM.

'Snowball Earth': Glaciers, ice packs once met at Equator

"Living in an ongling Pleistoscene"

Great. Can I change the shape of the UK to move my home closer to my work? Grab a big lump of green plasticene to fill the hole in Shropshire and create a new hill somewhere in Surrey with my house on the top...

Beeb deletes iPlayer app from iPhone

Boxee still works...

... that is all.

But...

The BBC is banning on one platform what they support on another. How stupid is that? Therefore the BBC cannot be right. Either this is allowed - regardless of platform - or it is not. This should simply come down to a demonstration that expiration dates are respected and that there is no way to redistribute the files elsewhere. This is no better than Apple puling adult-rated apps but leaving the ones from companies with enough money to sue.

I agree that content distributors need a degree of control over their content but the moment they get into this type of hair-splitting, they have already lost the argument. And that's before you consider that the DRM models used by 99%of all content distributors is flawed, cracked or both.

BSkyB yanks more cash from HP's hide

The reason is simple really...

Commercial contracts tend to be more tightly overseen by the customer. So when things go wrong it is much easier for the customer to point at the supplier and apportion blame with more certainty (and probably more evidence).

Government contracts IMHO are less well handled - weak governance - so what tends to happen when the shit hits the fan is that both parties are to blame, so legal action is less likely to be successful.

Apple yanks Wi-Fi detectors from iTunes

Pulling apps off of people's phones...

... will be very difficult to do without somebody deciding to start a class action. t's one thing for Apple to say that you are using your revice outside of the licencing agreement, its another thing entirely for it to be legal for Apple to reach in to your device and modify it. Otherwise I bet we'd see regular bricking of iPhones detected as having been cracked.

Google says desktop PC is three years from 'irrelevance'

If we're really lucky...

...It'll be Google that is irrelevant in three years time.

I can see that computers will continue to become smaller and more mobile, with the big suitcase-style base unit disappearing and being replaced by a laptop, netbook (not in the office) or by a super-mini low power machine like a Mac Mini or the Dell Zino. Bigger, power hungry highly configurable desktop hardware will become more of a niche. But the desktop computer in all its forms will be alive and well for a long time to come.

Street View threatens to throw Eurostrop

Strop away!

Listen - listen to that silence. That's the sound of nobody caring. Now sod off back to the USA and take your invasion of every aspect of our lives with you...

Apple turns the flamethrower on Android

"I'm an iPhone manufacturer...

... and patent trolling was my idea"

Prior, prior art...

Digital Research's Gem! And of course more than a passing nod to Xerox PARC's GUI work...

Speech Recognition?! Technically feasible, but won't happen

Sorry, the Star Trek day when everything can be reliably controlled by voice alone will not arrive.

Even if somebody puts together the hardware and software that will reliably transcribe all accents for a given language there are other reasons why SR will not replace mechanical interactions. We still need feedback in some form to verify what was spoken has been properly understood - OK that could synthesised speech repeating back what the computer thinks you said. Also, once an individual sees/hears that their command has been incorrectly interpreted there is an overwhelming urge to use a mechanical interaction (keyboard, mouse gesture, touch screen) to correct or cancel it rather than risk trying to so using another voice command.

For me the killer technical issue is that for a computer to reliably differentiate between speech that is a command it should execute, and everything else we and others around us say, we would have to adopt a highly specific vocabulary for addressing the computer.

There is a bigger problem though that this would still not overcome. Sci Fi generally depicts speech control as an individual using their natural language to address a computer, sometimes prefixing what they say with a 'magic word'. We all understand what is going on because we are capable of analysing not just what the person is saying, but the entire context within which it is said. Thus we are able to determine not only what is being said but also the work out who or what it is being said to.

Imagine closing your eyes, listening to casual conversation between a group of people and identifying when you are being addressed, and when you are not. Sometimes you'll know because your name is said first. At other times you might be able to work it out from the context of the prior conversation. Sometimes though you'll not be able to know with a high degree of confidence if a question is aimed at you or not. It's the same for a computer - with only one source of information it won't be able to distinguish reliably enough when it is being addressed and when it is not. The irritation of false negatives (commands ignored) risk of false positives (non-commands treated as commands) will remain too high to adopt voice control in any situation where there are multiple people and/or multiple voice activated systems and/or anything vaguely safety critical. You can argue that this will improve over time but what rate is tolerable to joe public? And that's why it won't fly.

Wanna bet?

I'd wager that Windows 7 Mobile will encroach on a few Apple patents as well...

Dell Inspiron Zino HD

Zino?

Not sure of the name, Starts with 'Z', four letters - reminds me of the epic fail that is Zune...

Re: Good Value?

Can't argue about the point you make about price but even the minimum 1Gb in the entry level Mac Mini is plenty for media centre purposes with Snow Leopard, likewise if you install Linux instead. Boxee (XBMC based) works very well on the Mini (also works well on AppleTV which is much less powerful hardware).

No doubt one reason for the high price of the blu-ray upgrade will be that the drive is laptop form factor rather than 3.5".

Finally, I've had a Mac Mini switched on 24x7 running a web site for two years now without any sign of the hard drive giving out.

3D TVs to drop below £1000 in 2012

No Thanks...

1. 98% content is rubbish.

2. 50% of the rest is repeats.

3. Glasses.

4. Sales opportunity looking for a reason to exist.

NHS denies pre-election stitch-up

Smoke, fire and all that

This isn't the first thing to coincidentally pop up in the final days of this government (think change to general election voting system) so I'm with the Tories on this one. Labour have no intention of cancelling the project or they wouldn't be trying to get it all signed and sealed this quickly. Clearly they do want to prevent others from cancelling their white elephant, erm, glorious legacy.

I winced as I read this because of the oft-repeated yet never leant lesson err in haste, "repent at leisure" - either way we're going to get shafted by the incumbents if this deal is rushed through.

iPad launch may be limited to US, says analyst

I knwo what the problem is...

Not enough workers with small enough hands who are able to perform the final assembly - there are a number of vacancies now that all the under age workers have been removed from the production line!

The iPad: made with hands the size of badgers paws...