M-x psychoanalyse-pinhead

This happened early in the days of the Irish national lottery, though it wasn't simply due to a roll-over and the people who purchased all of the tickets they could had to win the jackpot to turn a profit. I believe they succeeded though I can't remember the details!

Not to take away from it, as I think it's a nice way of raising the profile of Bletchley Park among young mathematicians, but it's decoding as you're given the code-book.

Without this software on your iDevice, you can't get adult material on the iPhone if parental locks are on. With it on, you can. What's to see here?

All apps that have unfettered access to the Internet have the 17+ nag screen. Browsers, RSS readers... This isn't a story, this is Apple bashing.

I strongly believe this is going to be a future social revolution along the same lines of the Internet and Social Media.

The point at which we have all got our mobile phone/camera embedded in our body with the ability to record at at thought will be a revolution in personal security. It will no longer be possible to commit crime against the person without serious risk of being identified.

This may come as a wearable device or it may come as an implanted device. Hell, as we're blue sky thinking it may simply interface to the retina, but I think it's the next logical step in convergent devices - converge with the user. This is a step towards that.

My approach is fairly simple. I have a pair of cheap dual disk NAS boxes, one in my shed and the other in the house. The larger one backs up to the smaller one and both have the redundancy of RAID. I'm fairly happy with that, they should survive a fire without me feeling the need to dash into the burning building to save them.

I then have a HTPC (Acer Aspire Revo running XBMC) connected to my main TV which allows photo browsing. I've set up scripts that automatically file the photos based on their EXIF date (/yyyy/mm/dd)

However, something I also do, by virtue of my wife 'ordering' photos, is get them printed. She goes through the vast numbers of photos that we rarely look, cherry picks the best ones which I sometimes crop or adjust and sent off to be professionally printed. Our house is littered with photo books, albums and frames. Sure, if the house burns down they're gone but that's pretty normal. My mother has a collection of photos with burnt edges from her childhood.

I recommend Googling Dr. David Kelly.

Hmm, you want a job and (mistakenly I think) believe that the languages you've learned are under immediate economic threat. I'd argue that the reason those specific languages are under a perceived future threat is because of their mongrel ancestry But you discount the one set of languages that are free from such problems.

For the mere-mortal programmers out there, those that often end up settling on scripting languages, I think C#.NET is a great choice. None of the lax, frankly amateur programming styles of perl and php and much of the structure that allows you to write something that will genuinely be useful to the guy who replaces you.

I'm an ANSI C refugee who never really got on with C++ and moved to all sorts of rubbish in the intervening years. I've now settled back with C# and find in it a great structure that allows me to get on and write GOOD CODE.

Honestly, if you discount .NET I highly recommend Java or php - anything else and you're niche. Sometimes the niche might be well paid (Cobol comes to mind!), but mostly you're more marginalised than you started out.

I've been holding off getting an iPhone 4 (I had a 3GS) until WP7 was released and I could have a play...

So, a few days ago, when my contract allowed, I got them to send me the Samsung Omnia 7 (a UK variant of the phone, I think they dropped the ball a LOT by having such a confusing array of manufacturers and devices around the world, they could easily have rationalised that).

My options are...

1/ Use it, replacing the 3GS and sell that on eBay probably buying an iPod Touch Gen4 to cover the few features I'll be missing for the first 6 months while 3rd party devs catch up.
2/ Sell it on eBay and buy an iPhone 4

3 days of usage in, I'm veering towards keeping the WP7 though it's a very close call...

There are problems (listed at the end), but most of them are either just annoyances, things I miss from the iPhone or software which can, and I believe will, be fixed. The economics of avoiding the iPhone are hard to argue. Over 18 months (the length of contract), this is going to cost me about £450. The iPhone minimum contract was 24 months and would have cost me well in excess of £1100 with worse inclusions in the contract. Of course, the eBay route all but negates that but still...

Positives and negatives. For what it's worth, I don't view 3rd party multitasking as a positive feature, it's introduction to the iPhone in it's current form is an unmitigated disaster. That said, the jailbreak software, "Backgrounder" was a pretty good implementation...

Samsung Omnia 7 Fundemental Problems
        Custom data/power socket. This is just Samsung's fault, they do this for all their phones and it's annoying. I guess the HTC doesn't have that problem.
        No external mute switch - Just a nice feature from the iPhone, it's probably patented.
        Freaking huge - It's bigger than the iPhones
        No RDS on radio. Apparently the chip is likely to support this, maybe the API will some day so this could be software...

Third Party Problems (I believe these will all be resolved)
        No Satellite Navigation
        No Runkeeper/MapMyRun
        Limited facebook integration and not great Facebook app. The interesting thing about this one is that I think the app fails due to it's compliance with the WP7 application styles. It just doesn't work very well for a more complicated app.

UI Problems
        No cut and paste (They've promised this soon)
        Too easy to mis-press send button ( I hope they notice this, but it's right beside the space button)
        No spaces allowed in Exchange usernames (dumb, exchange and Windows allows it)
        No navigation when in IE landscape (odd!)
        marketplace is rubbish - especially search (this is pretty unforgiveable, I think it will be resolved though)
        Can't change windows live account - (silly design bug I assume, they will hopefully resolve it)
        No lock timeout setting - I want my phone to lock, but preferably after I've not used it for 10 mins, not instantly
        Radio interface pretty rubbish (I'm writing my own as we speak)

I prefer the UI to the iPhone one. The iPhone was the first to become really responsive but they've not moved forward from there very much. This UI looks great at the moment and has NEVER been anything but slick and stable.
Great multiple file selection for delete/move. It's a small thing, but I get a lot of spam and it's nice being able to quickly select it all and delete it all.
It has an FM radio - OK, no big thing but it is a nice to have.

Which brings me to the numero uno, most important, most spectacular feature. I don't have to buy a £1000 computer in order to be allowed to pay someone £100 to be allowed to develop my own code for it. And I can even use my language of choice (C# as it happens), not some branch of another language seemingly developed for a niche. I can download the dev kit for free, the docs are good enough to work with and it's all good and familiar. Oh, and it's back to the wild wild west for programmers - a clean slate in which to innovate. They only come along every 6 months or so!

One of the amazing things about Wave is that it brings the amazing new technology of character by character chat! Oh, except that's how 'talk' used to work decades ago, before the phrase IM was invented!