I have an iPad and a MacBook Air. The air has 7+ hours battery life in my experience and the iPad around 10. The combination is great since I always have a device with enough charge available and in the right form factor. Putting both into one box and dropping the battery life from a combined 17 hours to under 5 is a real step backwards. If I had to choose one I would go with the air because it isn't much bigger than a tablet and works well.

"if you are in the USA there are lots of apps that do transit on iOS."

I'm sure there are, but here in New Zealand they're pretty awful. Besides which, having Google Maps able to deal with any city is great even when I travel the US since it is all in one app. I've tried the Nokia HERE app but it's public transport directions are dire for me suggesting journeys that will take three buses instead of the one I know I can get and pushing the travel time out to 3 hours.

That said, software gets better over time and as I said, Google Maps wasn't great when it appeared and I believe Apple's Maps app just needs time to improve. As for in car navigation, I use the paid for (ad free) version of Nav Free which uses Google search for POI and address finding and that works really well most times, except in Alabama it would appear. I checked in Street View on Google itself and it really does put my friend's address two miles further down the road than it is. If I didn't have a photo of his house I would have had a hard time finding him at all.

I was a frequent user of MapQuest when Google Maps appeared and for a good while there were glitches with Google Maps just like Apple is experiencing so I stuck with MapQuest. Google Maps are only as good as they are now because of all the time invested but even now they get it wrong. I was visiting a friend in Alabama and Google put his street address two miles away from the actual location.

The major loss with Apple Maps is the lack of public transport directions and for that reason alone, Google Maps needs to return. Until then, my phone is staying on iOS 5.

I have Windows 7 on my PC which I rarely use since it means I have to go to a specific room to use it. My laptop is a MacBook Air, and I mostly use my iPad for casual browsing and a few simple games. Most of my gaming is done on the XBox 360 and Wii. I don't think Linux is going to change the dynamic much or get me back to playing games on the PC. My world has moved away from PCs and I enjoy the freedom.

The real question is what will I replace my current Wii60 combination with? A WiiU? The next XBox? The mythical 'Steam' box?

Here you can rent DVDs from the local library for $2 a week. You can order them from out of area and they'll email you when the discs come in. No membership fees like the local Netflix equivalent either. We do use a local DVD store but only to rent Blu rays which the library doesnt do and since the HD rentals appear so much later on the iTunes store but that will likely change at some point too. Physical media is on the way out so any store that depends on it has a brief future. I've largely stopped buying films now too and just rent what I want when I want it. No sense in building up a large library. Similarly, the cinemas are losing out because of the high prices and the fact that a large screen HD setup gets pretty damn close (100" projection screen here) so there's definitely a shakeup coming. First run rentals for a reasonable price will eventually arrive as will an essentially unlimited library to choose from pay per view. Sadly, your friend can't do much about this but the movie industry will need to do it soon to stay relevant or the $$$ will move on to some other form of entertainment like they did when the music industry decided to be dicks about it.

OSX is based on NextStep (which came to Apple with Steve Jobs return) which was in turn based on BSD. No Linux there.

Apple did adopt KHTML to develop WebKit but they've contributed back since it was GPL and the result is that there are other significant browsers in the market based on WebKit (Chrome for example) and since there are now several strong rendering engines, the MSIE hegemony has been broken. MS has borrowed plenty of code from open source too and have also contributed back where it suited them but of all the things Apple has done, OSX and WebKit are the things which have made a substantial change to the computing landscape.

I don't pirate - I just buy the discs (usually when they're on special) and rip them using Handbrake (unless they come with a digital copy already.)

Er, handbrake and AppleTV. They're our discs, we just prefer to have them kept in the box and put them all on iTunes since we have two AppleTVs. This also saves wear and tear on the discs, especially kid's shows. And best of all, no adverts or trailers, just the program we want instantly.

Don't park your kid in front of a TV all day, but a little TV has to be fine. We would go insane if we didn't have some down time while the TV provided entertainment. The main thing we do is stick to DVDs rather than live TV to limit exposure to all those adverts.

I moved from the UK to NZ five years back and brought all my computer gear. I made sure I took the laptops and my backup discs in my carry on luggage but shipped everything else. Since power sockets are different here, I also shipped a bunch of distribution boards so I could still use my original cables and power bricks. Over time, I've retired some with replacements but I can't begin to say how much cheaper it was to keep it all. I didn't bring any white goods or my TV, but everything else I brought. The shipping company packed it all up but I had kept the boxes for everything do it all arrived in perfect condition.

Two iPhones and an iPod touch are eligible for iOS 6 but my iPad 1 is left in the cold. The lack of Google maps in iOS 6 is a deal breaker anyway so all are staying on iOS 5.1.1 for the moment.

Don't be troubled by the data volumes - learn how sequence analysis is done from first principals and you'll know what the right answer is. Too often people get bogged down in the data volume problem and worry about speed without knowing what the right answer is. First step, figure out what the best alignment is and look at the simple understandable methods for alignment, then you will see why faster methods based on indexing or suffix trees for instance will lose sensitivity. It is important to know how alignments are done at the basic level. Faster == less sensitive in most cases. Some tools try to mitigate their issues (see BLAST) but still have pathological behaviours in some cases. To deal with large data sets you will have to accept these trade offs but you need to know what they are and how they will affect your result so the basic advice of know the best methods (most computational intensive) and you'll see what fast approximations are doing and wha they are costing you. It isn't all about speed.

"And here's a youtube [youtube.com] of a Range Rover t-boning a Civic."

Mitsubishi Shogun (Pajero) actually, and the video wasn't making the case that the 4x4 was the better choice, and in fact the segment was about the compatibility problem of having these lumbering beasts sharing the roads with normal cars since the chassis height is wrong for the safety design of the regular car. Also, the tendency for 4x4s to roll over makes them a very dangerous choice despite their size. Sure, you can flatten other cars on the road, but once you start rolling you're in trouble and a 4x4 can roll when there isn't anything else on the road.

Size isn't everything and it would be better if all cars were built to a safety standard and of similar size. SUVs on the road requires everyone to drive them which is pretty much what you see in many places.

I travel to the US regularly and use my unlocked iPhone 4 buy getting a colleague to buy a Good2Go SIM pack for $65. This comes with a SIM, unlimited calls and text and 1GB of data. $55 a month once you have the SIM so a little higher than your limit but I like the data and use it more than the calls and text and since it is on AT&T's 3G network it gets decent speed and coverage. T-mobile isn't compatible with the iPhone for 3G but ai hear they have some decent cheaper plans. Depends if you need data or not but these pay as you go smartphone plans aren't terrible.

The court declared MS to be a monopoly so who should've believe? You or the court?