I am working with a hardware company on this. The main issue we are having is that the whole program is tailored to high-volume manufacturers; little guys like us are below the Apple radar.

To apply for the program, you need to supply a lot of information, including company turn-over and a whole lot more that should be none of their business.

Then to make it work, you must integrate a chip supplied by Apple that does the authentication. That's great if you are starting from scratch and intend to send millions of products. It's a pain if you already have a working design with thousands of devices out in the field with bluetooth, but not Apple's chip.

That's what's stopped us from signing up and doing it. Luckily, in our business, people would be buying mostly tablet devices that are exclusively used for the purpose. Android here we come, which is a shame as iOS is a much nicer platform to create something that works well and looks good in very little time.

Yeah, but looking at the guy's name, I'd say he's Australian. While nobody here ends up with $100K student debt, the days of free are over too.

Australia has some of the lowest taxes in the western world, affordable quality education and healthcare and a very high standard of living. (Same big cars and McMansions Americans enjoy) All while having a $10K lower GNI per Capita than the US. So obviously, there seems to be a good balance between taxes and government spending here.

It also has barely HALF the unemployment rate of the US. Europe and US are on par hovering around 10%; you might want to check your facts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_by_country

No NBN trial for me, but with the RIM hell we have here I have good hopes of being hooked up early in the rollout!

When the NBN was going to be FTTN I used to joke that's what we already had: it's called a RIM, look how great those are!

Yeah, if we had an ADSL2+ minimux, I'd be laughing at 24mbit, but 17 ain't so bad... (I used to live 75m from here on the other side of the suburb's ring road. That was direct exchange at 21mbit.)

But there are also a lot of RIMs with severe backhaul problems, where people sync at 8mbit and get a whole mbit or two at peak times.

Internode is the best ISP in the country, not Telstra!

Having experience with both Agile ports and TWS ports, I can say there is no discernible difference in being on either of them with Internode. The only difference is price; I have to pay the Telstra tax; being on a Agile port would be $30/month less.

My particular RIM actually has no minimux, instead it is fed by a 100-pair from the exchange for ADSL.

Yes they do: Internode offers Telstra wholesale ADSL2+ where available.

I do believe they are the only ISP to do so.

It's not cheap, but you do get the best ISP in the country. Linux mirrors included.

How do I know? I am on ADSL2+ (17mbit sync) on a RIM off a Telstra-only exchange using Internode as ISP.

The larger the aircraft, the bigger the boom. A conventional 200 passenger airliner will create a very big boom.

I was surprised because the Mythbusters couldn't break any windows with an F-18 unless they were at tree-top level. But big booms from big airliners are real.

And it's not just the boom, it's also the engines. Hard to create a supersonic airliner using quiet high-bypass turbofans. Concorde used straight turbojet with after burners: very loud.

Right until the Paris crash, Concorde between London and NYC was full and making a lot of money for BA. (buying the aircraft for peanuts from the government helped) Ticket prices were barely more than 1st class going subsonic.

I would imagine a NYC-LAX service and between other hubs would be equally lucrative; there an aweful lot of very rich folks and companies!

That said: I agree the next SST will more than likely be a business jet.

Uhm, I hate to say this, but that is how Windows Phone 7 will work - no native code, Silverlight only. And only apps approved by MS, thought the MS app store.

Like Microsoft with Windows, Apple does not place any of these restrictions on OS X, just iPhone OS.

Wrong or right, each can have their own opinion, but you can not compare iPhone to Windows. Compare iPhone to WinMo7 and Windows to OS X. Looks like the two companies are not so different in their policies after all.

Booms aren't just loud, they also smash Windows and American law-makers care; the FAA specifically bans not sonic booms, but *all* supersonic flight. So even if you came up with a boomless SST, you'd still need the get permissions to go supersonic!

Your views on trips are also rather US-centric. There are a lot of aircraft flying from Europe to Asia, all over land.

If it had not been for this minor boom problem, Concorde would have been a much bigger success.

mrstrano: use Google App Engine. Either Java or Python, doesn't matter. FREE to start, great value when the website takes off and scales beyond what you'll likely need.

So how many of these (usually slightly cheaper) Linux netbooks are wiped the moment they get home and an illegal copy of XP put on?

Or after trying for a while the owner (who had the best intentions) decides they don't like Linux and put an illegal copy of XP on?

Just sayin'...

Absolutely, but in this case, from my experience it is true. I find it very easy and there are numerous stories of people new to programming making some very good and popular apps.

This is only try for the iPhone. ("historically" thus only going back 14 months!) There is not a single limation on the Mac platform; you can write anything you like and publish it any way you like. All without paying Apple anything, of course.

You should try mobile development! :) To support the majority of Java ME phones that are technically capable of running your app you should really make hundreds of builds! Windows Mobile isn't much better, with wildly varying hardware inside.

This is a gripe you have with iPhone, not the Mac platform. MS charges hundreds for Visual Studio where XCode is free, for example. They do have a paid developer program which gives early access as well as good discounts on hardware. But you don't need to pay them anything to develop or get their approval for anything on the Mac.

An ever growing number around me, actually! People buy computers very much on price and "what I already know". Luckily more and more people are realising there is something better than Windows and switching is easy.

Just because a platform has a greater number of frameworks doesn't mean it is more powerful. You could even turn it around and say that the number of 3rd party frameworks being developed indicates the language is missing some important stuff and everybody is trying to solve it in their own way, with lots of redundant, very similar frameworks.

You are probably comparing your desktop/server experience wth those languages to a mobile platform. I program Java and .Net for server apps every day and iPhone by night. The two are a completely different world. In my dayjob I am using all the frameworks and libraries that make me more productive. For the iPhone I don't even go looking for them because everything I need is right there. (The only exception to that I could see is 2D/3D animtaion and games, for which there are several great frameworks for iPhone. But that is not something I Do.)

Fifty thousand apps in just over a year on a niche mobile platform can't be argued with. The Objective-C/Cocoa Touch platform is inmensly powerful.

Ask any mobile developer that has done Windows Mobile in .Net, Java ME or Android and see which platform they create their best looking, best function, most reliable apps on and which one is the fastest to develop for. Yes, that would be iPhone.

Maybe Mono Touch will bring that kind of quality and productivity using C# to the iPhone platform, but I am sceptical.

There is a reason why there is so much quality software for iPhone - and for the Mac platform for that matter - and that reason are the Apple SDKs and Objective-C.

Great, thanks. I'll definitely make sure to have a fresh Time Machine backup in case it all goes pear-shaped!

Hmmm. Got my Mac pro with 10.4. Used retail disk to update to 10.5. Now I would like to use a new larger, faster disk as start-up disk.

Is there any way to convince 10.6 to install on that? Like having the old disk in there so the installer can see I am eligible but install on a new disk?

Or do I need to restore from th 10.4 disks, update to 10.5 and then "erase and install" 10.6!?

Why do so many folks expect the people we hire for our dirtiest jobs (like thermo-nuclear incineration of entire nations) to be do-no-harm nice guys?

At best you are going to get people who act like the majority of the society they represent.