Open source games are the way forward. My favourite game is Warzone2100, which is now free and open source. No DRM, you are free to give your friends a copy, so you can play them over the network. If you want to produce a variant, you can take the source and alter it to produce derivative games.

I was referring to XPCOM, which allows many languages (including C++) to have the same kind of dynamic binding as objective-c. It is used by firefox to implement plugins for example. Of course in C++ it looks messy as the management of XPCOM objects is exposed. In Javascript this management is hidden. There is nothing wrong with implementing the computationally heavy parts of an application in C++, and then using Javascript as the toplevel. Besides, Javascript is a proper object oriented language. Javascript is both object oriented (using the object prototype model) and supports closures (something neither C, C++, and objective C cannot manage). See: http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html

Makes sense... but I am not sold on the benefits of a dynamic language... how is this better than dynamically loaded shared libraries? If you really need a dynamic framework there is always XPCOM, which gives you the added benefit of being able to use it from many different languages, and of course the dynamic binding is built into Javascript which makes it ideal for linking together components written in C++.

Does Linux need selector uniquing if it doesn't use Objective-C? To me this sounds like an inefficiency in Objective-C that made it less efficient than C++ (the other OO flavour of C) has been improved somewhat.

Ah, so its just a driver issue, in one particular release... I don't think Windows users can feel too smug about this, I have had many driver issues with Windows. My sound card does not work with Windows7. Should I make a joke about how Windows includes amazing technology for making record companies rich, but cant even get the basics like playing sound right?

Okay, why do I not have a problem with this? I watch BBC iPlayer fullscreen flash on my 46" 1080p TV from Linux, and apart from the low resolution of the flash stream (even in high quality mode), it is perfect.

You're right, it compiles to Dalvik byte code... My bad.

Dalvik is fully compiled on the Android, so no byte code, no need for a JIT compiler. Most definitely not like Java from 10 years ago...

Try using OpenGL for the graphics, as the phones have hardware for this it is much faster than trying to scale and rotate by hand.

I have been developing for Android non-stop for most of this year. I found the SDK very easy to use (having done J2ME and Blackberry before). The API is stable, and not buggy. I found all the documentation and examples I needed on one website http://developer.android.com/index.html and found the UI classes very flexible. I was able to clone the look and feel of an iPhone app quite easily just by using the xml styling, a couple of animations and one custom layout component. The API is the best I have used, and in my opinion much better than objective-c (we develop for iPhone too), which is a bit of a cludge on top of C. Expect Android to start turning up on a lot of embedded devices, not just phones (HP photo-copiers for example, cameras). In the B2B market (selling bespoke apps to companies, handset manufacturers and network operators) there is a lot of buzz around Android. We develop for both iPhone and Android, and see more potential for Android at the moment (as we mainly are B2B, and are not too interested in writing apps that may or may not make money in the Shop/Market). We are also looking for more experienced Android developers at the moment.

Time will tell who is right...

See: http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/ Feel so confident about hydrogen being a "dead horse"...

right road vehicles account for 33M tonnes of CO2, and London represents roughly 10% of UK electricity consumption. So, moving the whole of the UK to local generation would reduce CO2 emissions the same ammount as scrapping _all_ road transport in the UK (and not allowing that usage to be shifted to other forms of transport). If you consider that those trips will have to take place by train or EV, then you can see that moving to local power generation will reduce CO2 emissions much more than scrapping all petrol/diesel cars. So the savings are a _lot_.

According to the market... If people wanted them they would buy them, the show rooms would be full of them. People don't want to risk running low on charge and having no option of a quick fill-up. Besides which the government do not want to get rid of all the filling stations, so they would need to have a role in the future. Quick charge electric satisfies that too. You don't have to believe me though, just watch what happens. It would make me happy to be wrong, but I don't think so... The British governments report on this issue, from transport and car industry experts is betting on diesel short term and hydrogen long term, precisely because of the charging and weight problems of electric cars. Honda have a hydrogen fuel-cell car ready to go to market. It looks like a normal car, not a toy, and as far as I can tell it is the future of green transport... not battery/electric cars.

I agree on the whole with what you say, but I still feel that electric cars will have to offer people something better than petrol to succeed. Diesel is the short term solution, and in Europe we have cars achieving fantastic 70+mpg with 100+mpg on the horizon. These are not factory figures either, we get a real 62mpg from a Ford Fiesta Zetec. I am talking about the mass market though, and if I am right you will not see electric cars selling in big numbers until people can use them just like a petrol car - including stopping at a filling station for 10 minutes... oh and they have to be nearly the same price as well.