But I had a look at tonight's schedule, and I have to say there's not much on BBC 3 I'd watch (except Family Guy, and I've seen them). There's more tat than I remember, but I *do* tend to check BBC 3 and 4 when planning my viewing. Most of the best of BBC 3 is also on HD, to be fair, although 3 gets more repeats - Being Human, Harper's Island (yes, I know, an import), Dr Who... there has historically been plenty more, but I'll admit it's been a little while.

BBC Four is an easier sell. I'd watch most of what's on tonight if it wasn't a repeat, or didn't clash with two other programmes that I'd rather see.

Okay, these aren't mainstream channels - but if "the public" want to watch reality TV and talent shows, I'm very glad they exist. It's harder to find good television on 1 and 2 these days - of the twenty or so shows that I have series linked, there are only a couple of BBC 2 comedy panel shows that are terrestrial BBC.

Actually, hands up, I'll admit that I'd not read the references and noticed the link to sudo.

This does, perhaps, raise the question of what the patent is actually for. If it's for the elevation of privileges, then sudo covers it. If it's for the GUI selection of accounts, there's plenty of precedent, and the patent - as you say - claims that the GUI is just an example. If it's the autogeneneration of a prospective accounts list then - as magnetik says - it's a bad idea from a security perspective, and probably still not new.

It would be better for the reader if the patent had to point out the novel step, rather than restating the functionality of prior art and burying the novel step in it. Of course, it's in the interests of patent lawyers to try to make the patent covers as much ground as possible, in the hope of pulling in unrelated infringers.

I don't think Microsoft are entirely evil in this - the corporate culture encourages people to get patents monetarily, so you can't blame them for trying - but I still claim there's no way I'd have permitted this one, because the innovation step, if any, isn't significant enough even compared with the prior art that they state (never mind what's actually out there).

On the other hand, you've got to like the patent office doing their best to get themselves put out of a job. What's not clear is how one could possibly get rid of the software patent system (internationally) without a logistical nightmare for everyone who's already in financial negotiations relating to patent deals - although I'm in no doubt that it would be better if every software patent (and possibly a good many others) were immediately invalidated. Maybe someone should find a solution. And patent it.

I only read the patents at a relatively basic level, since I'm near enough to falling asleep as it is, but as far as I can tell the new patent talks about a mechanism for allowing the user to run an task as though they were a user which has more privileges, whereas the old patent that The H talks about is a matter of a privileged server checking the privileges of a client before servicing requests (not that it sounds like this one should have passed the obviousness/precedent test either). I could be too asleep to make the distinction correctly, though.

Microsoft's new patent adds a GUI to allow the user to select one of several possible user accounts that have appropriate privileges for the task in hand, apparently automatically. Sudo (in its native form) specifies the user to be run for each task explicitly. So, if anything, Microsoft's "innovation" is to search for possible accounts that the user could choose for this program and let the user select them from the GUI, rather than having an explicit option preconfigured.

Is this innovation enough to have been granted a patent? Not by a long way, in my book, and I'm sure there's plenty of precedent in the open source community for graphical utilities that help set up your sudo settings (I prefer a text editor, so I wouldn't know).

But then I'd like to see *all* patents thrown out (almost nothing is unlikely to be invented repeatedly, these days, and people aren't going to stop announcing cool stuff in conferences regardless of whether there are patents in the way), and copyright law expanded so that the drugs companies can still defend against having all their hard work stolen.

Incidentally, support for sudo being "recently" added to Linux as OS X is a little rich. "Recent" as in neither operating system is more than twenty years old, but the functionality has been there pretty much since they gained multi-user support, which is extremely early in the development cycle of either system.

"Each Cell processor is running at 3.2GHz, and has eight vector processors (which are used to do the graphics in the Sony PlayStation 3, among other tasks the Cell chips were created to do)."

Um, no, they're not (usually). The Cell architecture is a sort of half-way house between a GPU and a CPU, with a hefty dose of Cray thrown in, but it's not a GPU of itself. There's an nVidia "RSX" chip in the PS3 that does the graphics.

The Cell's a bit closer to a GPU than one might necessarily want in a system which has its own GPU - where it shines against a conventional CPU is in the kind of application where one might consider using a GPU instead - which does make me wonder whether the idea for the PS3 was to use the Cell on its own, and the RSX was added when it became obvious it wasn't going to be fast enough. This might explain why the PS3 seems to be a bit harder to program for than the XBox 360 - although I'm not a game developer, so I don't wish to make detrimental claims which may be hidden by the tool chain.

That said, the Cell is a bit more MIMD than most GPUs, so there's a class of problems for which it beats both a GPU-like heavily SIMD architeacture and the relatively-scalar CPUs. Nice to know that you have to get your algorithm right *before* buying a multi-million dollar supercomputer, isn't it?

So, after the fuss over the phenomenally bad idea of making a "reimagined" Buffy film in an attempt to cash in on the fans of the TV series, but not using anyone or anything from the TV series at all, they're now trying to do exactly the same with BSG? Clue: the TV series of Buffy and the new BSG were popular because they were good, not because the original on which they were based was somehow guaranteed to drag in a lot of people. At best, the tie-in to the original BtVS or BSG would make people read a review.

Since both reimaginings were vastly more popular than the originals, any attempt to ignore them is going to make fans keep away - these fans being those who were intrigued by the hook to the original the first time round. It's like making a Spider Man film based on the comic series and ignoring the recent films, or making a Batman based solely on the Adam West version (not that this doesn't have its place in history).

Still, at least this time the people involved weren't directly responsible for the original being less good than it could have been. I'm not sure that the fan disappointment at the ending of BSG (TNG) is going to make them come and see this, though.

Now, how about a film of Veronica Mars? A Buffy film actually set after Chosen, in Whedon's Buffyverse? (Even getting Summer Glau to do Fray?) Tie T:tSSC into a Terminator film?

Sadly, I'm betting on Friends: The Movie happening first.

This is up there with anamorphic projectors as a silly idea. I'm all for extra pixels, but the inability of a 2560x1080 panel to map each pixel of 1920x810 to a single pixel in the panel (when stretched up) is going to make a mess of high frequency content - in the same way that a 1366x768 panel will do a worse job of 720p content than a native 1280x720 set. If you really want widescreen content to look good, you'd be better off making a 1920x810 panel and throwing away the black bars. If it's not very good for 2.35:1 video content and it's (obviously) wasteful for 16:9 content, let alone 4:3, I'm unconvinced. I'm sure it does a very expensive lovely job of upscaling a 2.35:1 DVD, though.

Still, best of luck to them for innovating. It'd have been a better idea than saddling everyone with 16:9 as a compromise format in the first place, but these days complying to a standard is a better idea than any oddball proprietary solution. It might make an interesting gaming monitor, if you can drive it at full resolution.

It's not really an option for my house: the space my TV fits in is limited horizontally (my walls are filled with book shelves), whereas I'm prepared to lose the clock on the wall if anyone switches to a really tall standard aspect ratio.

Well said, sort of. I have a couple of DSLRs (and a selection of 35mm), several grand worth of lenses, a medium format camera and some Leica kit. I'm delaying buying a compact until after my next phone upgrade because the camera on a phone might suit my "always on me/unexpected chance for a photo" requirements well enough that I'd need a decent compact to do much better (and for *decent* compact money, I'd rather have another lens for my SLR); while I'd rather use a decent camera than the one on a mobile, the best camera is the one you remembered to bring with you.

But still, I'd like to know more about this phone than just how good its camera will be, since it's likely to fall into the range "awful" to "passable if necessary in good conditions". I'm tired of people advertising "12 megapixel mobiles" (the camera's 12MP; the bit I care about, the screen, that everyone spends all their time looking at, rarely gets a mention).

Anyway, I'll be interested in seeing whether S-E manage to get it right this time. "Mixed reviews" is being generous to the X1, from what I've seen; here's to some decent graphics acceleration for a start.

Can we talk about something other than the camera? I'm a photography bore, and *I'm* bored.

I *assume* that's a typo, and that it's really WVGA (why it needs an operating system update to support a new resolution is beyond me), although there are phone LCDs out there with oddball aspect ratios and S-E do have a history of 320x208. WVGA would be nice, since the one thing that's keeping me with Windows Mobile is that nobody else offers an 800x480 screen. If Apple, Palm or Google (or even someone shipping a more complete Linux phone than Android offers) had more pixels, I'd be there. I could probably still do with a keyboard, though, so it looks like it's a TP2 for me until my next upgrade cycle.

There are two points to a 16:9 screen on a computer.

1) To match the aspect ratio of HDTV for video playback.

2) To save money, because a 16:9 screen has less area than a 16:10 screen with the same diagonal.

So what they've done here is charge a reasonably large amount of money for a machine with an inferior resolution to any 1680x1050 screen (let alone WUXGA), that has an inferior aspect ratio for document editing (try fitting two A4 pages on it - 16:10 is much better), and that can't display HD resolutions without scaling (blurring) them.

Personally, I've never found black bars (aka "somewhere off-screen to put the DVD player control) distracting - certainly no more than the screen boundaries. I'll be amused if someone starts doing ambilight-esque coloured borders. This is entirely a cynical attempt to fob off a cheaper panel than a "real" 17" screen would have been, and claim it's superior.

16:9 is not, and never has been, a good choice of aspect ratio. Now it's polluting our laptop screens. Eugh.

Pint glass, for looking at distorted images through.

Tom - I doubt they're targetting HDMI 1.4 at CRTs. My peripheral vision, too, can detect flicker at 70Hz - but that's mostly irrelevant when it comes to the rate at which you can throw images at an LCD. Motion usually looks fairly smooth above ~30Hz (and cinemas prove that 24Hz is acceptable to most, although I'd prefer to see 60Hz). There's always interpolation in the TV, as with most 100Hz+ screens.

Of course, once everything starts using black frame insertion the flicker will come back. :-)

Just to join in, *NO* to sucking all the bandwidth out of the environment by trying to drive this resolution wirelessly. If you want a wireless display, use a projector. Otherwise, think of your neighbours (and, if you must, stream the compressed video not the uncompressed full-size image). The recent reports about TV extenders confirmed what I've been saying for ages, and I'm grateful that none of my neighbours seem to have been inconsiderate enough to get one of these abominations yet.

It can't be any more of a bad idea than the Buffy remake (without Joss Whedon or any of the TV series cast, done by the people who screwed up the first film). I'd not mind so much if they wanted to film Fray and give Summer Glau a job for a bit...

So they've not actually increased the bandwidth at all? You can do 3840x2160@30Hz within the 340MHz bandwidth limit of HDMI 1.3 (type A connector).

As someone with an elderly 3840x2400, 48Hz monitor, and since Microsoft messed up spanning in Vista, I've been waiting for someone to come up with a connection spec which would drive it at full refresh down a single head. A type B HDMI 1.3 connector would do it (dual link 340MHz->680MHz pixel clock), as would the proposed update to the otherwise pointless DisplayPort. A shame the HDMI consortium hasn't forced type B connector compatibility out there as a way of keeping up. It sounds like they've just made these resolutions (more) standard.

Gates of Hell, because a working spanning mode stops this from being a problem.

@Shingo: You could see this as an ending, or you could see it as an opportunity for quite an interesting (to me) set of new story lines. Presumably the resistance is less effective in John's absence, in which case John will want to go back and correct the time lines (and presumably put Cameron's chip back in place). If the resistance is doing fine, how would John cope with finding out that he's completely irrelevant after being told his whole life that he's the saviour? Maybe human Cameron is completely vapid. Maybe the "robot resistance" has different priorities than John and Sarah. How would Sarah's health pan out? What is John Henry/Cambot combo doing?

Leaving it to the imagination is one thing, but I don't think they wrapped things up nicely - I think they left a teaser of all the interesting directions the show could go. It didn't feel like a deliberate ending to me, however much the creative team are resigned to it. (I'd still like to see a Peacekeeper Wars style rounding off of the story, so long as it's not as bad as the Stargate bonus shows were.)

@Jonny2284: They took a long time building up relatively subtle plot threads. It's true that you'd get most of what was going on if you missed some episodes, although you'd get more out of it if you saw the lot, and got all the refrences. They probably couldn't move too quickly if they were to have any hope of picking up casual viewers. I'm grateful, because I missed one episode around the new year when Virgin had a break in showing it and didn't advertise that it was back on. The development of the characters of John, John Henry and Cameron (and Riley) was gradual - if you're just looking at what got blown up in each episode then not much changed, but that's not where the long term plot arcs were.

Still, it was never going to be for everyone. I'll miss it. Here's to a Family Guy style renewal (and that got much better after it came back!)

FWIW, I'm not an Apple fanboi, but I don't morally object to the idea of the iPhone. There's plenty it can't do, but there's no doubt that at least some of what it does, it does quite slickly. Equally, there's some stuff that the Windows Mobile phones can do that the others can't, but some functionality is relatively clunky. And I'm not just biased because my Windows Mobile phone crashed repeatedly over the weekend while trying to take pictures of bluebells - maybe the colour makes it think of a BSOD.

I don't suppose there's any chance that we can agree that some people might buy an iPhone for a justifiable reason, or that others might have a reason for an alternative, is there?

I'm obviously a Jobs-worshipping fashion victim. You can tell by the grubby jeans, T-shirt and trainers, and the way my current phone is wedged in a foam-lined canvas case so that it doesn't die when I drop it. (Why does every "stylish" case have exposed corners?) TBH I'd rather buy a Linux phone with decent facility for skinning it to a usable GUI, if one existed with moderately current spec, but for as long as people want their branding on phones it's not going to happen.

So, they renewed Dollhouse (with a reduced budget; all hail Joss, but it's still allegedly not very good - find out tonight!), Fringe (unless it got much better in the second half season, awful - I gave up shortly after the giant alien suppository episode) and Lie to Me (appears to be like The Mentalist, but a bit more obvious), and killed this. After *that* season finale? (And Smallville's still going?)

If the second season were out on disc yet over here, I'd have bought it by now; it's going on my blu-ray shopping list as soon as Sony drop the price of the PS3.

I know it got bankrolled a bit by Terminator: Salvation. I'll be very pleased if there's a tie-in moment. I'll be even more pleased if another studio picks it up for another season. Come on Sky, we need a replacement for BSG. I doubt Caprica counts.

I can't understand how this didn't get better ratings. I wish, at least, they'd give these shows enough of a heads-up to finish off their story lines when they cancel them. When you tell a story, you have a contract with the viewer that you're going to explain things - as Lost has found out - and it's really rude to leave things up in the air. Would you cancel 24 after 12 hours? They need to find a better way, or people are going to give up on watching series with long plot arcs (i.e. the good ones) out of frustration.

RIP T:tSCC. (And Veronica Mars. And Firefly. And BtVS/Angel.)

[Go, because it shouldn't have been stopped.]

I just had a play with one in a friendly T-mobile store.

Firstly, silly me, it's (I'm told) proprietary not a skinned Windows Mobile - so no competition for the HTC phones from the perspective of third party apps.

Secondly, the screen is nice - but there's no stylus. The flippy gui works a bit better than in the emulator, but still goes chug a little. I'm not sure that the cube effect actually adds anything, and they miss out on some touches (why doesn't the menu button do something useful in the menu screen, like switch to the next one, for example?) A shame, because the pinch multi-touch thing is something I'd like.

I don't get on with the on-screen keyboard either (it's *very* Apple, including the pop-up keys and correction suggestions). This might have put me off a Touch Diamond 2 - I can imagine that the larger screen on the Touch HD might help.

Otherwise, it's quite slick, but does seem to trip over here and there in the functionality. The half-press focus on the camera is nice, but it's not very slick at doing things with the result, for example (first impression only, of course).

Now, if someone would produce a decent WVGA Android phone...

If these are positioned as "like a notebook-not-netbook" (cheap and light) but for people who want a bigger screen, the article does a particularly fine job of not mentioning the resolution anywhere. I'll be astonished if the public is clamouring for a 15" laptop with a 1024x600 screen.

As it happens (rummaging on Acer's site), they all appear to be 1366x768 - so enough either to display 720p content with a black border all around it or stretched content so that it's blurry, whilst being a bad fit for anything but video. Got to love the rush to 16:9.

I'm not grabbed. I'll keep saving for a Vaio P, which doesn't look like costing much more.

(I'll get me coat. Into which a Vaio P would fit, but this won't.)

I'm another 2133 owner who bought it solely for the screen. Without it, this is just another machine in a sea of similar devices - no matter how pretty an how nice the keyboard. (I've been happy on a Libretto for years - the 2133's is wasted on me.) In fact, it's *less* than most of them, since it's got even fewer pixels. Who listened to all the "1024x600 doesn't give you enough room" complaints and decided that cutting off pixels was the solution? What's the point of 16:9 if you don't have the resolution for HD anyway?

Having had to reinstall Linux on my 2133 anyway (loose hard disk when shipped to me, trashed the boot sector before I re-seated it), throwing out the Microsoft OS doesn't bother me too much, other than moral objections to Microsoft tax. Given that HP never supported the Linux version anyway (my 2133 came with a note saying that if I had the Linux version, don't bother calling tech support) I'm surprised they can't be bothered to offer it.

Glad to see they've kept the multicoloured nipple illuminators, though. There's nothing like a bright LED shining straight in your eyes to make the screen easier to read in the dark. (The trick is never to take your hands off the keyboard, even if you dare to stop for a drink...)

I have a house full of compact fluorescents (although the sooner they get *more* compact so that they fit behind uplighters properly, the better). The exceptions are a couple of artsy ceiling lights which take miniature bulbs for which - for some reason - LED replacements aren't yet available (I rarely turn them on anyway), and the halogen spotlights in the kitchen and bathroom (tried a compact fluorescent, but they're neither bright enough nor directional enough; awaiting cheaper and better LEDs). Oh, and a filament security light which is only on for a few seconds - I'd switch it to LEDs if full-size LED bulbs weren't stupidly expensive.

I have, fortunately, no dimmers - although last I heard dimmer-based CFLs were becoming available.

Still, banning incandescents is a dumb idea. By all means *tax* the incandescent bulbs to subsidise a switch to something with a lower power consumption, but when I'm trying to colour match a print-out and don't want random metamerism getting in the way neither a fluorescent nor an LED will do: full daylight spectrum or nothing.

As for astronomy (stuff the astrologers - they can make it up anyway) it'd be better if councils would stop using high pressure sodium street lights unnecessarily. Low pressure sodium (the very orange ones) are easy for astronomers to filter out and are more efficient anyway. In a few places I'll buy that having less monochromatic light would help people avoid driving off the road, but most of them are just wasteful.

(Alien, because I'd like to be able to see mars from my back garden.)

Hi Paul.

I have a Toshiba Portege G900, which has an 800x480, 3" screen (~310ppi). The (widely-applauded) Touch HD has the same pixel count in 3.8" (~246ppi). One primary reason I don't want an iPhone is that I don't want something with such a low screen resolution; hence my mention of WVGA. (I'd *like* a WVGA phone that doesn't run Windows Mobile, but that's not an option at the moment.) I have a 204ppi desktop monitor which I'm happy to use for a full desktop.

The only reason I don't put my G900 on a table and type is that it falls over (nice one, Tosh). I'll put it on a table for web surfing, though. 20" is about my comfort range (dodgy eye surgery means I'm a little fuzzy beyond that anyway). My experience with a Libretto is that having a latop on your chest while lying down, or immediately in front of you on a sofa, works fine.

I wasn't intending to strap it to anything. A notebook that fits in the hand can be held close to the screen. Want to type two-handed? Rest it on something handy (e.g. a window ledge), and lean in. I don't see the issue.

But you're right that this kind of thing has been thrashed to death before - I was just hoping that the silence was one of understanding. :-)

Hmm. Well, I'd rather have a Lifebook U50 (or Vaio P) for the resolution (1024x600 is a bit low), but I have to say that the price for this one is more appealing. This is significantly smaller than a Libretto - and my 70CT is dwarfed by my mini-note. I'm not sure I like what they've done with the Q and Tab keys, though (or space bar, if you have a Google for a better picture)..

As for "why", because it's a proper PC that genuinely (just) fits in a pocket, or is light enough to leave in a bag the whole time just in case you want it. Subnotebooks are PCs to have with you when you didn't know you were going to need one - if it's small enough and light enough (and cheap enough), there's no reason not to carry one with you. It also appears to have a half-decent keyboard (in as much as I learned to type fast on my Libretto but can't on a phone keyboard). It's not quite a mythical Psion FX (I want an Epson 7.2" 1920x1080 display - the *only* circumstances under which I want a 16:9 display), but it's a good effort. They've also done exactly what I'd do: give it a decent battery and let the USB port handle all the expansion.

I'm impressed that no-one's had a go at the dot pitch yet. It does, of course, have larger pixels than all the 800x480 mobile phones on the market - but normally someone's complained by now. :-)

@Didier - Huh? People know how to type on offset QWERTY keyboards. I have a non-offset Kinesis Advantage, and can only use it in Dvorak mode because it feels weird in QWERTY. Regular grids are okay for thumbing, but if this thing has pretensions of being a "proper" keyboard, they did the right thing.

If only I had any money these days...

Much though I wish the Psion crowd well, I have to admit that any kind of ban is a bit overkill; heavy-handedness doesn't make anyone friends.

That said, I have two problems with the name "netbook".

1) Yes, it referred to a Psion product. Seriously, how hard could it have been to find a name that didn't already belong to something? It's only marketing fluff anyway - "budget subnotebook" would have covered it. IT has far too much of names being reused, and it's hopelessly confusing at the best of times; this particular case is reasonably clear at the moment, but in five years' time there are going to be confused people on eBay.

2) People can't even decide what "netbook" means anyway. Sony's new subnotebook gets bashed for being an "expensive netbook". Fujitsu expand a long line of subnotebooks and get accused of producing a netbook. Someone brings out a cheap laptop with a 13" screen and it gets called a "big netbook". If we're going to use the term, at least use it right.

Of course, it's not particularly meaningful anyway. A device dedicated to web surfing would be something more like the Nokia n770 and successors. An EeePC is certainly no better (and mostly worse) at web surfing than the average laptop, cheap and small or otherwise. My "netbook" gets used for programming and photo editing, rarely for web surfing. What netbooks have done is replace the eBay market for old/slow subnotebooks - that's a good thing, but it doesn't need a marketing-fluff name.

But now with an extra complaint about text speak. Am I the only one whose phones have had T9, which actually knows how to spell? It takes longer (although admittedly fewer characters) to type an abbreviated word under T9 than the full version. Acronyms for expressions are another matter, but "ROTFLMAAOBPO" predates text messaging - although I can't speak for "LOL"; nobody things "CUL8R" is correct. If you want to blame anyone for bad spelling, blame marketeers ten years ago who thought that a plethora of "X", "K" and "Z" in names looked kewl^H^H^H^Hcool. (WAREZ, D00DZ!)

Skipping apostrophes is confusing - it hides meaning from place names that are otherwise ambiguous. Software should only need names to be distinct, not meaningful, so stripping punctuation at comparison time should be harmless; that's not the same as mangling the official names of places.

That said, I work in "Meadlake Place", which is opposite "Medlake Road", so maybe I should pick my battles.

> Mullaney rested his case with: “It would be tragic if the ambulance couldn’t find your street if you forgot to use the possessive apostrophe.”

Could I suggest that this point is debatable? It would be the best scheme I've yet heard for encouraging good grammar.

Besides, if this took off everywhere it would be harder to spot tourists - for example those who, in Cambridge, don't know the distinction between Queen's Road and Queens' College. Think of all the students who would be run over.

Speaking as someone who followed a florist's van this morning with the slogan "Wer'e bloomin' good" on the back of it, I despair for humanity. Thank goodness for programming languages, which usually insist on correct punctuation.

(Not a member of the APS, but I have been known to correct the label on the front of the Cleaners' Sign-In Book.)

REG^H^H^HThe English language.

It's like having a small machine behind your screen and a wireless keyboard. Except:

1) It'll cook your legs and/or sound like a hair drier.

2) It'll suck all the wireless bandwidth in the area (I'll keep mine for networking, ta).

3) Its battery will go flat much faster.

4) It'll weigh much more.

5) It increases the likelihood of someone snooping your screen.

6) You don't get to choose your preferred style of keyboard.

7) It's size-limited when it comes to adding hardware.

If people really care so much about having a cable running from a computer to

their screen that they want to use wireless video, best of luck to them. I'd rather

stream everything that's *not* the high bandwidth uncompressed video signal.

Seconded about the projector, though.

Okay, when this rolls out (and people use it) I'll finally stop complaining that DisplayPort is pointless. I'm assuming that they'll keep the connector compatible, rather than shooting themselves in the foot like the HDMI consortium did with the type B connector that nobody uses. (Yes, a double bandwidth DisplayPort connector is only slightly more capable than a type B connector with HDMI 1.3 340MHz transmitters, but since there's noone using them I can't really say it's a better "standard".)

Fingers crossed this hits the shelves soon and we stop pushing the old technology as the next big thing. (If only HDMI 1.3 had taken off a bit faster.)

Flames in honour of the IO that can run at 7.2GHz. A dongle would actually make a T221 useful under Vista!

...yes, it's a very high resolution screen (although not as high as, say, the Touch HD) with an odd aspect ratio. No, it's not the obvious choice for playing videos, and if you try to read it from three feet away with default font sizes, you may struggle. This does not make it pointless, it makes it exactly what I was looking for when I was struggling to program on a mini-note 2133 recently (I couldn't fit a useful amount of code on the screen).

I'm plenty not-fond of Sony as a company for many things, but kudos to them for producing something that a small proportion of the market would find damned useful. I'll be saving up.

I'd commend this kind of thing, but the involvement of Dawkins (whose belligerent criticism of anyone who might dare to believe is probably strengthening the beliefs of a generation) means I'm not going to donate. Having a discussion with someone about how the basis of their belief might be faulty and rationally persuading them to reconsider is one thing. Telling them their belief system is evil and that they've been brainwashed seems highly unlikely to work, not least because people stop listening around the time they realise you're not prepared to start with a rational debate.

I believe those who believe in (a) god are wrong; I don't believe that all that's done in the name of religion is "evil", nor that a fallacious belief in something is necessarily harmful. (Think of the "lies to children" approach of vastly oversimplifying subjects in school.)

Initially, I liked "There's *probably* no God", on the basis that at least it was slightly less aggressive than the recent pro-atheist publicity, but in retrospect it's probably true that it makes the authors sound unsure of themselves. I'd prefer a phrasing that - while acknowledging that there's no proof that there isn't a deity - better presented the viewpoint that there's no reason to believe in one.

Dawkins is probably doing better than most (by being obnoxious) at persuading religious types that all atheists are inherently evil. I was recently in a very christian community in Australia, where they suddenly got very wary of me when I indicated that I was an atheist. Ralph B's comment is a good one: atheists can have a highly-defined moral code for very good logical reasons other than that their god told them to do something. That many with religion have been convinced that, without faith, mankind cannot behave in a civilised manner is a great bolster to their belief - and says much about their innate maturity. This suggests that gently leading people to a rational viewpoint would be a better idea than demolishing their belief system without providing a substitute.

Anyway, standing up for the atheists is a good thing, and providing some balance against religious propaganda is definitely something of which I'm in favour, but I hope they work on the slogan. (Above all, don't let Dawkins re-write it, or we'll get "repent, sinners!")

I, too, recently got told that my "unlimited" 250MB/month plan with Vodafone was "now unlimited" (at 500MB/month). Fascinating, but as soon as my contract expires (had to go with Voda to get a phone subsidy) I'm still jumping to T-Mobile, whose "unlimited" is 1GB for the same cost.

At least I know to read the small print. What annoys me is that the shop staff don't. I jumped between various phone stores before choosing the contract on which to order my current phone, and in several places I got very blank looks when I asked what the limit on "unlimited use" was. I'm in the club that would be quite happy to pick a contract based on a predicted data use, but having to dig so hard to find it out is annoying; the term "unlimited" is offensive. The concept that I couldn't possibly hit 250MB in a month ("because you're not using the 'real' internet, sir" - hmm, let me show you my browser options and the reason for my choice of phone) is particularly silly; I don't, but only because I try not to.

Paris, because it's traditional.

I've still got all the mobiles that my partner and I have ever had. I took five of them with me to Cambridge last weekend: one for making calls, four as convenient portable java-capable devices for running a custom timer midlet that I wrote for a tiddlywinks tournament. Thank Allah I'm caucasian, because I wouldn't like to explain that to the police. (I also had three cameras on me, so I *must* be a terrorist. *And* one of the phones had a PAYG SIM in it, for lending to people.)

My other half's just flown to the US with one of my phones as a back-up to hers, so that she can make technical support calls with her normal SIM if her international SIM plays up while she's trying to register it (you have to be in the US first, apparently). Maybe I should warn her?