It's just v3 that isn't allowed. But go Android if you want choice.

No, it takes standard 2.5" drives. But good to know as it might become a server or something, in which case I may eventually put an SSD in. Only after clicking did I realise I hadn't thanked you for your advice. So thank you.

It's an IDE drive. I thought adapters were pricey? But also, it is getting a bit old with battery troubles and so forth, so I'm up for an upgrade anyway, I think.

I have a 5 year old Thinkpad, and I'm only just getting to the point of upgrading, and that's on a machine that I write asp.net/c# stuff on. Mostly because I want something smaller and something that I can put an SSD in.

Exactly. And I think what's funny is how a lot of stuff seems to be hitting maturity at the same time. PCs? Over. iPods? Over. Sat Nav? Pretty much dead. Phones? The iPhone 5 might still have people queueing up, but after that, they'll be greeted like MBP upgrades. TVs? Done. Blu-Ray? I sense people are upgrading when DVD players die, or when the kid wants a DVD player. Playstation/Xbox? Perhaps more innovation, but again I sense that we've reached a level of graphic resolution and gameplay detail that means people aren't clamouring for something more.

The other thing is that what's dragging down people's speed now is the hard drive and internet connection.

I remember a time when I was doing Word on a 486/66 and had to switch from "formatted" mode just to make it useable. It just couldn't keep up. I'd upgrade every couple of years because it made a huge difference. Today, I can't tell that much difference. I was in a shop and I booted up Win 7 on a laptop and it was a bit quicker than my XP machine, but not so much that I'd care.

This is, however, why I'm considering an SSD in my next machine.

The simple rule with patents is "would this happen without patents". Drugs simply won't happen without patents, and I suspect things like video compression improvements might not happen with it. But some of Apple's patents are just ludicrous. There's one which is little more than about making windows minimise and maximise in a pretty way, and people have been doing things about prettiness in computing without patents for decades.

One thing with cheaper coders is that for 99% of IT, they're often better than hardcore guys. I've met some real geniuses in my time, MENSA members, guys with masters degrees, and in most cases, they're a liability in an IT department. I've seen people write their own XML-based frameworks that sit on top of the asp.net framework because it was "more correctly abstracted", but of course, because code is imperfect, you then had thousands more lines that could be wrong. I also saw someone build his own scripting language because the ones out there didn't correctly fit the requirements.

In both cases, the projects failed and were rewritten because they just became unmanageable. The overhead of all the extra code just didn't make sense to solve the problem. And rewritten by someone who was far more pragmatic and just made something that worked and could be easily maintained.

All these people moaning that Amazon have pulled out of it, yet none of them seem to have made any moves to step in and take over...

It's not just fanboys. It's also people who see something super new and amazing and can't ask "but does it actually make my life better". A lot of technology is flashy, does something new and amazing technologically, but actually doesn't improve your life as a tool.

I can look at an iPad and see that it's an amazing engineering achievement, but I can't look and it and say "and it would improve my life because...". It's like all the problems of a phone (smaller screen, limited UI, restrictive functionality) with all the problems of a laptop (doesn't fit in my pocket, doesn't double as a phone).

What happens with amazing yet impractical technology is that it doesn't last for long. I remember the fad over sandwich toasters. People bought lots of them for a couple of years and then they pretty much disappeared off the market. Reason being that people realised that they never used them. I can't think of anyone I know who's been convinced to buy one by seeing someone else's. That simply wasn't the case with the iPod or the iPhone.

It's so that you can't stop to think about what you're watching. It's amazing to watch British TV from the 1970s. It was probably a cost thing, but they used to have a shot with a man standing in front of a painting, talking about it for a minute or 2. But because of that, they made sure that what he said was interesting, rather than just filling time or making some vague, glib statement.

I think most of this is about repeat viewings and dissection later by critics and people who study film about why a film or a scene works. Take the tracking shot in Goodfellas (a film I've seen a dozen or more times). It's really important because it tells you just how far Henry has reached, how much wealth and power he has. He pays someone to park the car, bypasses the queue and goes right to the table through the kitchen. Everyone knows him, no-one stops to question what he's doing in the kitchen. It's not just Scorsese showing off, it's an important part of telling that story.

But it's not about the negative impact to the public at large. It's about the impact on individuals. Society isn't just about the sum of happiness, it's also about how the weakest and least able in society are treated. We could just say "well, tough, you're in a wheelchair", but I'm pretty much in favour of society actually trying to improve the lives of people who can't do anything about their situation, to give them a more comfortable life.

And yes, businesses aren't charities, but they are part of society. That means that they, for instance, get various legal protections (regardless of how much tax they pay). A fire breaks out and a fire engine will be there quickly to put it out. There isn't a sensible alternative to private enterprise providing access to private businesses. You can't do it through more benefits, so it's straightforward and fair on all businesses to just implement accessibility.

Personally, I'm thankful that I'm not the guy in the wheelchair. And I'm happy for my coffee shop to stick a couple of extra pennies on the price of my mocha so that the guy in the wheelchair to come in.

I'd say that eBay is pretty much a monopoly as well, and for similar reasons to Microsoft, which are network effects. If you want to auction something, you go where the buyers are. And you then become part of the problem because you get more buyers to use eBay.

Facebook and other social networks don't have the same power because you can exist on many networks.

The key thing here is that you need far less than 1% of people doing anything with the platform (beyond consuming) to make it thrive. Take Wordpress... there used to be an extension to allow you to select a page as the starting point rather than the blog. 1 guy wrote that and it was used by tens of thousands of people. So WP then added it in to the default install.

The alternative model (with closed) is to guess what features customers want, or to do surveys, that sort of thing. But it doesn't work as well, in the same way that managed economies don't work as well as market ones.