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Actually: Intel Inside, avaricious near-evil American megacorp Outside. Jobs spent a lot of his life knocking Intel products, whilst moving the religious following from one dead end to the next. Then, in typical Apple fashion, left customers high and dry and moved to them. New-speak at its finest! Who do you suppose Google had in mind?

That's how it should work, and work in favour of the consumer. But Apple doesn't see it that way at all, and the US courts are heavily biased in their favour: They want to brainwash people into believing that Samsung and others weren't producing phones and tablets long before they were, and that Apple hasn't borrowed heavily from other people's designs. In fact, that they own the customer, and everything else! If anyone invented the tablet it was Nokia - I had three different Nokia Internet Tablets long before the iPad was ever heard of, and there were plenty of touch-screen phones before the iPhone. Their products have always used plenty of carefully concealed Samsung components. They are masters of spin, and still fool many people. I'm pointing out here that the next two Apple products will undoubtedly be blatant copies of Samsung firsts. That's OK by me; many people will buy them, and good luck to them. But.. when Apple start bleating about unfair competition and trying to stop competitor's products being marketed no one should believe the propaganda for five seconds. Though, that US courts will buy into their anti-competitive behaviour is pretty much a given. Look at how the US courts have treated our own BP over problems created by an American drilling company in the Gulf! A US company would have been treated quite differently. The much vaunted A-for-Apple CPUs at the heart of the iPhone and iPad are in fact British designs from ARM. Much of the graphics silicon is from British company Videologic. These UK companies receive only a few cents royalty and are bound to secrecy, whilst Apple pretends they are its exclusive intellectual property, and stacks up billions in profits offshore. They don't repatriate these excess profits because they refuse to pay their taxes to the very government who aids them in their unfair practices. Only the lawyers and the spin doctors get filthy rich. Now doesn't that sound rather similar to some situations nearer home?

Well... actually... it's the joke for tomorrow: Cameron, Miliband and Clegg are on a long flight in RAF One. Clegg produces a £50 note and says "I'm going to throw out this £50 note and make someone down below very happy." Not wanting to be outdone, Miliband says, "If that was my £50 note, I would split it into 5 x £10 notes and make five people down below very happy." Of course Dave doesn't want these two characters to outdo him, so he boasts "I will take 100 x £50 notes and throw them out to make 100 people even happier still." At this point the UKIP candidate pilot, who has overheard all this bragging and can't stand it anymore, comes out and says, "I'd like to throw all three of you out and make 60 million people absolutely ecstatic." Yes! Use your vote to support the UKIP Pilot! Cameron, Miliband and Clegg are on a long flight in RAF One. Clegg produces a £50 note and says "I'm going to throw out this £50 note and make someone down below very happy." Not wanting to be outdone, Miliband says, "If that was my £50 note, I would split it into 5 x £10 notes and make five people down below very happy." Of course Dave doesn't want these two characters to outdo him, so he boasts "I will take 100 x £50 notes and throw them out to make 100 people even happier still." At this point the UKIP candidate pilot, who has overheard all this bragging and can't stand it anymore, comes out and says, "I'd like to throw all three of you out and make 60 million people absolutely ecstatic."Cameron, Miliband and Clegg are on a long flight in RAF One. Clegg produces a £50 note and says "I'm going to throw out this £50 note and make someone down below very happy." Not wanting to be outdone, Miliband says, "If that was my £50 note, I would split it into 5 x £10 notes and make five people down below very happy." Of course Dave doesn't want these two characters to outdo him, so he boasts "I will take 100 x £50 notes and throw them out to make 100 people even happier still." At this point the UKIP candidate pilot, who has overheard all this bragging and can't stand it anymore, comes out and says, "I'd like to throw all three of you out and make 60 million people absolutely ecstatic."Cameron, Miliband and Clegg are on a long flight in RAF One. Clegg produces a £50 note and says "I'm going to throw out this £50 note and make someone down below very happy." Not wanting to be outdone, Miliband says, "If that was my £50 note, I would split it into 5 x £10 notes and make five people down below very happy." Of course Dave doesn't want these two characters to outdo him, so he boasts "I will take 100 x £50 notes and throw them out to make 100 people even happier still." At this point the UKIP candidate pilot, who has overheard all this bragging and can't stand it anymore, comes out and says, "I'd like to throw all three of you out and make 60 million people absolutely ecstatic." Yes! Use your vote to support the UKIP Pilot!Cameron, Miliband and Clegg are on a long flight in RAF One. Clegg produces a £50 note and says "I'm going to throw out this £50 note and make someone down below very happy." Not wanting to be outdone, Miliband says, "If that was my £50 note, I would split it into 5 x £10 notes and make five people down below very happy." Of course Dave doesn't want these two characters to outdo him, so he boasts "I will take 100 x £50 notes and throw them out to make 100 people even happier still." At this point the UKIP candidate pilot, who has overheard all this bragging and can't stand it anymore, comes out and says, "I'd like to throw all three of you out and make 60 million people absolutely ecstatic."

We've known for a while that the iPhone 6 was going to be a fair bit bigger (once again), but here is a leak of one of the dummies supplied to case manufacturers to ensure they have their sizing absolutely correct. The white phone is, of course, a Sammy Galaxy S5. The Apple copy of the Galaxy Note seems to be due later. That this exists is in no doubt, and is another climb-down for a firm which ridiculed the original Note (and just about everything else they have slowly backtracked on). The Note 4 will be out near year end, so Apple have a lot of catching up to do. What it will be called is intriguing as surely they won't stoop to calling it the iNote? iPadPhone sounds more than awkward! None of this would matter if Apple adopted a live and let live attitude to competitors, and didn't constantly spin that their own originality and innovation was being compromised. The truth is that they are the biggest cloner of other people's ideas on planet Earth!

Myners (and other's) shock tactics seem to be working - there's a surprising unanimous vote for fundamental reform. Pity he can't do the same for parliament! Give the man a peerage - oh!

LOL they'll have to do a lot more than that to sell Norton AntiVirus to me!

Here's cast-iron* proof that you can still go on conning at least half the populace. The people who voted this down were fooled. Notice that the description on this vid clearly says: But.. still more than half the audience ignores the label and sits through an almost ten minute spoof video because they want to believe in something for nothing! Some have even wasted materials and even more time actually trying something that "has a zero percent chance of improving your internet and download speeds". There's a lesson in this, and it's one not lost on the political establishment! ------------------------------- * English words used in their regular sense, and not the Cameronian meaning of please fall for my bogus promise yet again.

Sounds rather like yet another of those nuggets of ancient folklore - that someone just invented. At least Wikipedia would demand attribution.

You know you are old when... your jaw drops watching this: ...or... when it's hard to remember how we used to send our text messages.

Yup, you could have bet money on it! I wonder what a current generation BBC journo would make of CP/M?

LOL I rather hoped that someone would steer the thread away from computer talk! It's in the article about The Game of Thrones guy. He doesn't like spelling correctors, and still uses Wordstar on an old disk operating system (sic) machine, apparently. I'd have imagined someone would have ported it to 'doze, or there are emulators which can run the old Wordstar codebase at many times the speed. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502 Anyway, has anyone seen my flares? This retro thing could easily catch on.

...you read an explanation like this in a BBC news item: Not MSDOS computers please note. Maybe I will be around long enough to read this: Just kidding! Has anyone seen anything in print which made them seem old?

Yeah, there are lots of live CDs that are just as good or better at diagnostics, but the Puppy distros seem to be USB stick (UFD) centric and super-small. Don't know about you, but the last of my machines to have a CD drive hit the cupboard several years back, and I positively hate getting an external CD/DVD drive out. The disro I'm using is only a few hundred megs, but you wouldn't know that it when it pops up. On the downside the file system is a bit wierd; it loads a pseudo-disk file into RAM, and a quick attempt to install GCC has thrown up all sorts of probs. Searching on the error messages I'm surely not alone here. Just going to install the latest Java SDK and see if it is a viable development platform. But for an average end-user there's more than enough functionality and it's delightfully free of set-up nonsense. Some of this may be due to an obvious attempt to kill all "localization" but our mother tongue! Even the package manager offers to remove any language bloat from its downloads. That sure gets my vote! You're root all the time, except for an option to run the internet stuff as user: spot (spot the dog - gerrit?). This undoubtedly raises eyebrows, but simplifies many things.

I knew about it but I'd never actualy tried it until earlier this week. I'm talking about Puppy Linux. It's a Linux that you don't need to install. One that is very small (but perfectly formed), and which boots very quickly. Actually there are numerous Puppies because there is a tool called Woof that makes it very easy for the computer savvy to generate yet another one. I've now got a USB stick in my "man-bag" that can fire it up on just about any machine, and optionally install it permanently. Why would you want to do this? Well.. when you turn on that old lappy or desktop and it tells you that M$ got sick of waiting for you to buy the same old Windoze code yet again (a pop-up on the XP screen I'm told by a third party), then think Puppy Linux. You can have the old clunker working better than it ever did under Microsoft in no time at all, and you needn't pay a penny to M$ - ever! Also great if a machine refuses to boot as you can likely get at all your files, and test that it's not a hardware problem, both at the same time. This post is being written on an old Asus EeePC that was gathering dust for years. All it turned out to need was a new keyboard; £14 from Amazon. The battery is seems pretty good, so's I removed XP completely and installed Puppy. It's now better than new! Just about all the hardware was immediately recognised - no Windows driver hell!!! I will write full instructions to put Puppy on a USB stick, and make it bootable, if anyone asks here. The information is out there is you search, but there are a bewildering number of ways to do it. It only took me a few minutes and a £3 8GB stick is more than adequate. In fact a 4GB would do almost as well. Puppy saves your work back to the stick by default, so you can resume your session on other hardware. Even with slow USB 2 this is still faster than the usual Windows XP boot sequence, and it tells you what is going on at every stage. Magic! That's the new keyboard tested then! Posting beats the quick brown fox, any day!

Is that a yabba-dabba-doo then? Last year's is surely a page right out of history. Legal Notice: Any similarity to dinosaurs - political or otherwise - is purely coincidental.

...so you'll need to check that whatever you buy has a HDMI socket to connect it to your telly. People tend to either love or hate Chromebooks. So, buy your first one from somewhere that will give you a week or two to take/send it back for credit. According to Forbes the new batch (of about 20 models) is a month or two away from the shops. This could also throw up even better prices on the existing few models. So... it will probably pay to take your time. We'll also see 14nm chips in Windoze machines too. They are quoting eleven hour battery lives (from quite small batteries) for the new crop, which is highly impressive, even if this is a bit exaggerated for real-world use. http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/05/06/google-aims-new-intel-powered-chromebooks-at-mainstream-buyers/

I'm currently buying a little USB 3.0 Flash Drive to run another operating system from on my lappy, and for this the read/write speeds matter a whole lot more than gigabytes per buck. Suppliers are VERY poor at supplying this essential information, and you can waste a fortune buying them to test them yourself. But, here's a site that supplies objective comparisons so's you can make the best decision. Certainly one to bookmark on your smartphone or tab to spot bargains while you are out shopping. http://usb.userbenchmark.com/ What's particularly useful is the effective speed assessment - raw read and write speeds are not the full story! (S)He has also computed a value for money figure, and you can sort your list on any of the criteria by clicking on the column title. Remember that unless your computer has USB 3.0 sockets you aren't likely to see anything like the quoted performance on the faster products. USB 3.0 sockets generally have a tab in them that's colour-coded purple against the usually black USB 2 type.

I will go with Keith's scranchings, or maybe without the g. Aren't they illegal under EU law by now? Think I'm joking see http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-22579896. You can pretty much guarantee that the med countries will ignore this, but it will be enforced by the gestapo in the northern parts of the Fourth Reich! But - could set up schranching speakeasies! The roaring twenties will be around again quite soon.

Whoops... spot the deliberate mistake? It's actually a dual-core! Full 64 bit, so it would be interesting to see if it is being used in 64 bit mode in this machine. Comes in at about 60% to 70% of an i3 - depending on i3 stepping - so that's pretty good.

Well the Celeron 2955U seems to come in at about a PassMark of 1550 which isn't at all bad on the scale of things. Find out what your existing gear has inside to get a performance comparison. The little SSD is almost certainly going to be faster than you existing hard drives, so it's worth a try, particularly if you are buying it from somewhere you can take it back to if you don't like it. Here's how it compares to a (likely much more power-hungry) i3: http://cpuboss.com/cpu/Intel-Celeron-2955U It's a 22nm device so not quite bleeding edge, but will have an impressive battery performance. It's single core dual threads by the looks of it, so that's doubly impressive. Someone you know has a little tablet with a 22nm dual core chip in it, and I'm amazed by the performance. AFAIK the 14nm stuff hasn't actually surfaced yet. Also impressive that a budget machine has Bluetooth 4 as standard, and a USB 3. The real irritation that I've found with current Intel based tablets is that they have no separate power jack. This means that you need to charge them through the microUSB port, and as they generally only have one, you are stuffed if you want to power them, and use an external drive or keyboard/mouse at the same time. This is truly daft! Make sure that anything you buy for serious use doesn't solely depend on microUSB power, or at least has more than one microUSB.

That's the first thing you should use it for! Download the free edition of Macrium Reflect and image your hard disk partitions right away. If you have a recovery partition on the machine then Reflect will show it and allow you to copy it. You only need copy the recovery partition once, and can store its image anywhere - on a USB stick for instance. When your drive fails or corrupts simply buy a new one and write the image(s) to it. Weekly backups of the working partitions are recommended. Macs are expensive to buy and have a high cost of ownership - especially in the UK where they are a rip-off. The best thing to buy depends very much on your existing software investment, how you intend to use the machine, and how good your on-line connection is. The trend is to cloud computing where you do need a decent Internet connection. If you are replacing a legacy XP machine, like many are at the present time, it may pay you to look at Google Chromebooks. They are amazingly good value, and there's a more powerful collection coming out from various manufacturers (using the latest 14nm Intel CPUs) over the coming months. All software is provided to you for free, without all this staged nonsense (to extract more money for more features), and the machine is kept updated quite automatically. In addition there's an ever-growing market in third party "apps" developing - just like Android. Most people just look at the ticket price when buying a machine, and don't consider the cost of ownership. I know that many educational establishments are moving their legacy XP stuff to Google Chrome as they do look at the total ownership cost. Over the next decade Chrome could easily eclipse Windows as the number one operating system - unless Microsoft wake up very quickly, and cut their fees to manufacturers and end users. Chromebooks generally have a smallish SSD and no hard drive which makes them quite compact, but you can buy them with hard drives too. You are right to consider an SSD anyway, as prices are currently crashing and they do deliver a lot more performance. They are pretty easy to retrofit, and knowing how to use disk imaging software will make this easy for you.

Back up to an external drive regularly. There's no excuse when you can get first class disk imaging software for free. Google on "Macrium Reflect". Once a week minimums if you are an active user! Also pick up a free DropBox or Amazon Cloud account to copy your current work to in the background. If you are a really serious user buy a cheap NFS with RAID. Most people have older hard drives lying around that can profitably be recycled in a multi-bay NFS. Also, buy a three quid 8GB USB stick and create a bootable pen drive for emergencies. If you don't use it you'll make a friend rescuing someone else with it. The time to do all these things is NOW; it's human nature to put off until it is too late! A failure will happen, it's simply a matter of when.

Yes, we're now up to 29! This has a completely redesigned interface which looks pretty good on my lappy and uses the limited screen depth more sensibly. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/29.0/whatsnew/ If you are still using MS Internet Explorer you really need to ask yourself why? Even the US Government warns against the risks you are running. There are other browsers of course, so, if you have a particular favourite, then please tell us all here what you like about it.

Now here you are being totally unreasonable! Without the extra tax revenue, how on earth are we going to pay the £8BN annual membership to the EU? That's not to mention the countless billions in foreign aid to fund, space programs, nuclear weapons, missile development, and all those other essentials that "underdeveloped" countries need to sustain life! And, there's not just fuel, there's the excess cost on most items we put on our tables.