I went to see all three prequels movies, expecting to see just why in IV-V-VI they spoke of Darth Vader like he had committed such atrocities, the Holocaust was a mere footnote(no, I didn't expect the killcount from Alderaan to have outnumbered his acts in even War of the Clones, let alone Revenge of the Sith). I wanted to understand why "his kids" thought he was such a monster, before they even know they're his kids.

I was most disappointed when he isn't even thrown out of the Jedi order before last half hour or so of ROTS, I wanted to understand all that rage.

I think you need to go and read it again.

The dystopian future of Demolition Man might have been without sex and booze, but the Brave New World kept the populace happy with a weekly drug ration and regular orgies.

Indeed. There is a direct Perth-Singapore transit, but most East Coast-Singapore data goes via some combination of Guam, Japan, and Hong Kong, and the latency is the same or worse than to US West. I believe Internode set up some special routing via Perth for one particularly latency-sensitive application that is hosted out of Singapore for Australian customers (Starcraft II).

There's a new Perth-Singapore cable due to come online next year, though I can't find any information about progress of the build. When that cable lights up we should see more traffic taking this route, and hopefully better latency to Singapore for all Australian users.

The people saying the surface has to undercut the ipad are missing the point... Microsoft's strategy is to anchor a higher price for windows rt tablets...
So the oems can undercut the price without being over their own costs...(Which they would pressure microsoft about...)

touch input also includes trackpads... i wonder how well win8ui does on that... i suspect its subpar

Yeah except unless the OSes adopt common apis and abis, the most important part of that equation: "Developers, developers, developers!!" gets taken out.

And by common apis/abis, I mean a level of write once/read many greater than Microsoft's ever achieved between either the same version of its os running on different platforms, or different platforms, same on, except... "MAYBE" between the old versions of nt 4 that weren't x86(power pc and nec or alpha)...

It makes no sense to say "Microsoft just supplies a part", and have that part entirely determine the whole reason behind the purchase(people buy a computing device to run apps, not an OS, the os choice is just the biggest, simplest way to determine a "platform", at least, it was, I'm not convinced that the android fragmentation allows it to be properly called a platform.

Just because before android/ios there was no market for a personal computing device that wasn't either a desktop or a laptop doesn't mean a tablet is a pc.

Acer is confluing the two precisely because before touch interfaces, there was no "granny pc" to speak of. Now with a tablet, the "non-granny pc" is the one that's in trouble.

Putting the surface in the pc class is disturbing because it will not

1) run a lot desktop applications in an intuitive manner, because it's a user interface paradigm shift
2) will make any sense to classify tablets as anything but tablets once they overtake desktop pc sales

The two are seperate, and should be considered as such.

Microsoft HAS to make its own tablet, simply because the tablet makers don't make the OS, so what they are interested in is in making "addons" to an os, but the OS developer, when not making the hardware, basically has to pay the tablet makers to showcase the os features, which they are loathe to do, because it promotes the other tablet makers tablets... On the other hand, Apple makes the OS and the tablet, and doesn't sell the OS to others, so promoting the ipad is promoting iOS and promoting iOS for tablets is promoting the iPAD.

Publishers love to push apps in your face because it gets their branding on your home screen. When I worked in agency-land we were approached by a client who wanted an iPhone app. The RFP was basically "We need an app. We don't really care what it does, just get our icon on the phone."

If only the handset makers and OS devs make money... The author could ask them to sponsor development.

If it's not programmer incompetence, it's usually a push from the product manager to have "email me my password" as the password recovery mechanism.

Australia reporting in here.

What? You have it completely backwards.

The patent system is exactly designed to prevent the creation of competing products. You invent something and you get to sell that thing exclusively for a limited time, in return for donating the "secret" of its construction to the public domain at the end of that period.

It's the concept of passively sitting on a idea and then trying to extort money from anyone who actually brings a product to market that stifles innovation and acts against the interests of society. If I had my way, the patent system would be use-it-or-lose-it. If you don't make a genuine effort to utilize a patent, you'd have to sell it (not license it) to someone who will or it would become void.

Why are you walking, longboarding, or cycling on the freeway?

Voluntary administration is like Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the USA.

Find the "likers" on facebook.
Find out what other things they like from their profiles.
Introduce legislation to make all of those things illegal.
Mwahahahaha!