We all know that Australians throw prawns on the BBQ and drink Beer. We have never heard any Australian on any programme ever refer to fruit.

Therefore Apple's case is completely valid as no Australian knew what an Apple was before Apple showed them the picture, in fact it wasn't until the mid-90s that Australians knew that there was a fruit called the Apple rather than it just being about a computer.

Quite clearly therefore Apple owns the right to every apple-esque or indeed fresh fruit like Logo that is possible to be created.

In separate developments they also own the concept of 3D in Germany.

I've got this amazing thing that is just like something out of Star-Trek, you put it on your ear and it enables you to make and receive calls. I can even TELL IT WHO I WANT TO CALL and it automatically connects me with them.

Oh wait its a Bluetooth headset and a Nokia 6310i

2001 called they want the future back.

Very few countries didn't accept the UN findings on climate change, China and India both did for instance. Now in terms of signing up to doing something then that is a tougher argument, but getting people to agree on the problem was the first step and there the UN did well.

On Healthcare, you are right the US might have a different opinion. Most other countries would think that having the highest per capita spend on healthcare and having lower life expectancy, 700,000 people a year forced into bankruptcy and 1/6th of the population not even covered is a bad thing. I mean some mad people might think that a system where you ended up paying less, covering everyone and increasing average life-expectancy was better... but unfortunately those systems don't deliver 30% profits to insurance companies, which is of course the american way (apparently).

Is the UN really that slow?

Look at UNHCR which are just about the quickest set of people to react when a disaster strikes

Look at the Climate Change pieces which brought together the whole world and came to an agreement (sans one little country called the US)

Now what you might mean is that it takes the UN a long time to crack down on other countries who do things that your country doesn't like, that is certainly true. These are the people after all who refused to rush into Iraq, the slow-coaches.

The UN is an organisation that works by getting people to agree. ICANN should be the same. Having ICANN as an extension of US policy doesn't mean that things happen quicker (look how long its taken for the US to get a decent health service or a policy on climate change that makes sense) but it does mean that they are open to accusations of prejudice.

The UN does a good job, having people like Bolton, Bush and Cheney knocking it alongside people like Qadaffi complaining about it really just underlines what a good job it is doing. If it can piss off Cheney AND Qadaffi it must be doing it right.

But because sex sells, the Western culture is getting increasingly positively schizophrenic about it

Now us Brits are pretty stuck up on it, but not in the league of our American cousins who set new standards for being uptight and moralistic that make Victorian England look balanced on the subject.

Meanwhile over the channel in France, Netherlands, Italy and lots of other countries there really isn't the same set of hang-ups. Sex is a normal thing and people who preach about it being immoral are laughed at. Hell Italy have elected a bloke who seems to come out of a Porn film, France elected a string of leader who were regularly unfaithful including their latest President who split with his wife pretty much straight after getting elected and married a super model.

Western culture is fine, the problem is that Mid-Western culture is increasingly spreading to the rest of the US.

The question of course is "Is 4000 good, average or bad?" can't be answered because closed source companies just aren't going to publish this sort of information.

So what we can say is that the quality of OSS is trending upwards, but we can't say whether this makes it better, equivalent or worse than close source competitors.

What are the odds on any of them taking up the challenge?

To all those people who think "What is the big deal about faking yourself as Apple?". The point is that these are reserved identifiers in the same way as barcodes are reserved identifiers.

Would it be right for Palm to use the iPhone barcode for the Pre? Clearly not.

So here is another case where there is a specific rule around reserved identifiers and Palm broke the rules. Their alternative is to opt-out of the USB group and do it themselves without its blessing or just suck it up.

Complaining about the rules of a game after joining the table and playing a few hands is just dumb.

You used a rake? What a lightweight.

Rakes are hard and pointy. Real Men(tm) use the leaf blower with a pack of bendy balloons and aim to beat the game using an inflatable giraffe.

Are you kidding? TOS is still used through-out the computing industry. In fact its normally pretty big news when people make TOS modifications as they are behind some of the biggest pieces of software out there in the world.

What people don't know is that the team behind TOS shifted its emphasis towards specialising in very hard to understand and complicated programmes that were designed to confuse those who read them, like Perl but with longer words. This new coding approach was then adopted by Lawyers everywhere which is why everyone now clearly states they have a "TOS" for their website/software/whatever.

Over beer in 1993 an Atari developer was asked by someone what TOS stood for and jokingly said "Terms of Service". This name stuck, particularly with the lawyers and hence TOS now dominates as the underlying operating system for legal documents.

What most people don't realise is that you can run "Chess Master 2000" on the Supreme Court.

One thing you can always remain impressed by Microsoft is how they manage to spin something that everyone has been doing for 20 years and talk about it as a trend.

SMEs are using Rackspace and the like, people are shifting stuff to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's own strategy is about Azure and the cloud with virtualisation as "normal". In other words what Microsoft are doing here is well behind what they are talking about in the market as being normal.

But they've still managed to spin a press release out of shifting a bunch of servers into a Data Centre in the sort of move that wouldn't have got any press coverage 10 years ago. Brilliantly however they've added a "green" angle to it all thus turning what looks like a move they should have done ages ago into something worthy of comment.

Genius

You have to admire a press release in 2009 that can make shifting to a DC sound like a revolution.

There is a phrase about IT

"We don't understand the hardware, we don't understand the software... but we can SEE the flashing lights"

This has led to a whole load of crap IT dedicated to neither hard-core hardware or to hard-core software, its the land of the PHB and its the land of the powerpoint. What surprises me about clouds however is that its often the hard-core folks who are scared of the cloud, they bitch about security and latency but really its because they fear it will make them less important.

It doesn't.

What clouds do is hugely commoditise infrastructure and (in the case of SaaS) those massive package implementations that customise to death a package that would have worked much better without all that consultancy "help".

The people who should fear clouds are the ones who lived off customising packages that didn't need it and who revel in a world of powerpoints and meetings because what SaaS and clouds do is shift the buying of crap boring IT into the hands of the business and then leave the business with the real questions of how to deliver the stuff that actually matters... the hard-core software and genuinely high performing infrastructure.

So don't think of clouds and SaaS as a threat... think of them as kicking the PHB and his expensive package customising consultants in the nuts.

16 sounds like a ridiculously high number for a desktop but is it?

Already we have 4 core processes which have "soft" additional threads (Intel's HT for instance) and some people already have dual CPU desktop machines meaning they are already at the 16 CPU limit.

Roll on 12-18 months and we'll be seeing 8 core CPUs with 8 soft-cores as coming in on top end desktops. Roll forwards 3 years and you'll be seeing 32 core CPUs with 32 soft-cores which is where the scheduler breaks down.

So the problem here is that this is a brilliant optimisation for today and for pieces like the netbook market but won't be good for the desktop market long term.

With Linux looking to be strong in the netbook market however it does say that having a more efficient scheduler for that market would be a better idea than just optimising everything for the server side.

Many moons ago when I was doing coding jobs I had a series of interviews that required me to code stuff to demonstrate what I knew. I was looking to move away from my current job into new areas and didn't know how they worked but they all seemed to ask the same thing

1) Code something
2) Take a coding test

What I learnt very quickly was that lots of people are really looking to hire people not quite as smart as they are. I knew this because I had three interviews where the following happened

Interview 1:

Set an "impossible" task to code (in C) an address book and calendar solution with a GUI (this is the mid-90s) in 6 hours. No internet connection and no reference books.

3 hours later I set off to find the interviewer in the pub.

Interview 2:

Set a series of questions around "write the most effective code to do X".

There were 10 questions and I answered them in 10 different programming languages (Ada, C, Prolog, C++, Eiffel, 68k assembler, LISP, SQL, COBOL, Fortran) and the chap interviewing me didn't have a clue if I was right or wrong.

Interview 3:

They had a major bug in a current release, my job was to find the bug and explain why it happened. I knew free work when I saw it. It was a big C programme and it took me 4 hours to find the bug (pointer referencing problem). I wandered into the office of the person setting the "test" and said...

"How much to tell you the answer"

I didn't go for any of these. What I went for, and what I have done since, is go for the company that set me an abstract test that asked me to design a system which had a number of constraints. They didn't want code, just to see the conceptual model that I would create. When I joined I asked why they did it this way and the answer was enlightening....

"Because we want to hire smarter people than we are. If you talk code then its just about optimising, but if you talk about the abstract then its about thinking. We want people who give us answers we think are wrong and then they explain why we are wrong."

The key point was to give people a limited time (15-30 minutes) to understand the problem and propose the solution. You want people who are agile and quick, not people who can sit on their arses for 6 hours doing a troll job.

If you want to hire people dumber than you, set complex long tests that "only you" know the answers to. If you want to hire smart thinking people set very short tests that challenge their abstract thinking.

This is yet another example as to why the BBC is the finest broadcasting and journalistic organisation on the planet (I've never worked for them, sold to them or have any other financial connection other than the license fee).

They actually investigated something created by an industry group and found it to be bollocks and then reported it. The BBC are arguably the most "socialist" organisation in the democratic world (funded by a tax on everyone for the benefit of everyone) and yet they still question and challenge everything.

The US seriously needs something that questions vested interests and rubbish statistics as much as the BBC. Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are just comedians and FoxNews is just comedy.

Given a choice between the first amendment and the BBC, I'll take the BBC; its demonstrated more freedom of speech in a week than the US media has in a decade.