Not exactly prime time

I heard that Kodak are ditching all their loss-making operating businesses and transforming themselves into dynamic, fully focused patent trolls.

Bloomberg: Kodak Wins a Round in $1 Billion Apple, RIM Patent Dispute

All of course made possible by the great system in America where the founding spirit of claim jumping and cattle rustling seemingly allows today’s entrepreneurs to patent things like a method for using either a) the left; or; b) the right; or; c) both hands in the operation of computer keyboards.

Linux uses different fonts that are not necessarily part of the standard recital of fallback options used by web designers. Many sites do have alternatives and this shouldn’t be a problem,

One tip if you decide to go ahead and install Ubuntu on the laptop; google for and run “Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder” and make a note of your Vista license key somewhere (there may be two); you never know when a spare license can come in handy.

Agreed.

Would try to create a Ubuntu live CD to boot from and see if you like it. Reasonably low power requirement, easy to set up, and a total cost of 1x blank CD.

Sounds to me like you may have either no dedicated sound card or one of the vast majority on the market geared towards gaming.

A good, audiophile type sound card with high quality digital/analogue and analogue/digital converters and proper shielding makes a massive difference when encoding audio.

If I were you I would take a look at the range made my Asus; I have a Xonar D2 which is just excellent, and the newish Xonar Essence is supposed to be even better.

You’re right but you’re wrong about the example you give in petrol/crude.

In fact the requirement to meet the economic definition of competitive markets is significantly stricter, especially the need for the factors of production (labour & plant) to be interchangeable with other markets.

In practice this means that only markets for agricultural grains are perfectly competitive, where the same fields, machinery, barns and storage facilities, etc can be employed growing a variety of crops.

As an aside, somewhat paradoxically agricultural produce arguably features the heaviest state intervention in any mature economies, for example with massive subsidies, regulation, etc.

The reason for this is that with the conditions potentially present for perfect competition to exist, the outcome is an unmitigated disaster, resulting in regular food shortages, famine, and land price bubbles. But of course such minor details tend to be of little importance to free market proponents.

Wowza. Wish I had some of whatever you're smoking there, Doug

Are you aware of the recent developments in subscription licensing?

On Monday the Readability app got knocked out of the iTunes store. In justifying this Apple pointed to the following clause in their guidelines:

11.2 Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an app will be rejected.

You can read more about that case here: http://blog.readability.com/2011/02/an-open-letter-to-apple/

This decision appears to have caused mayhem in a number of places, with a large number of content/service providers suddenly alarmed that their business model had been destroyed. It is quite possible that Zino were panicked into this move due to the Readability decision.

Of more enduring impact is likely Apple’s imposition of new terms for publishers of subscription based content that a) Apple will charge a 30% flat rate commission on iTunes sales and b) no similar subscriptions offered outside the iTunes store may undercut pricing therein.

I trust you are not seriously suggesting this move is designed to ensure a “seamless customer experience”. Indeed it is another flagrant anti-competitive move from Apple, that in effect denies publishers’ rights to set pricing in discrete distribution channels according to their cost structure.

I give it 9 months before this gets binned, one way or the other.

The simple fact is that performance is largely directly correlated with power consumption, until you get to a processing power point of diminishing returns. However, for the highend yet still consumer grade NAS drives costing £600-800 ex disks that point is some sort of Core2Duo, with power consumption accordingly elevated.

In my view the more affordable NAS drives are useable for photo stuff, but if your interests extend to working with larger data (eg video encoding) the limited speed makes them impractical.

For me the best solution is to have a local raid setup, somehow backed up externally. But even if you prefer to work with laptops, this should be possible since many now have the facility to use two hard disks and come with some sort of Intel raid management hardware/software combination.