The case for copying versus obvious design choices and its merits here can be debated and frankly I don’t care, but something struck me as interesting in both cases – the Windows laptop makers don’t want to show you Windows.

If you look at any of Apple’s product shots the screen is always showing something interesting – some photo editing, a video call, even just the Lion desktop in the case of the new MacBook Air. Macs never have a black screen. Conversely, Lenovo and Samsung’s product shots for the two new ranges linked above either hide the screen entirely or show it in the “off” position. Nothing there. Zilch A quick trip to HPs UK laptop page tells a similar story: rows of machines sporting a blue background with the HP logo.

It’s almost as if they’re ashamed of the software they have no choice but to ship on their machines.

The pricing scheme for the digital releases is going to be an enormous component of this initiative.  Price it too low, and retailers panic and wonder about being undercut by one of the publishers they rely upon for consistent sales and cash flow.  Price too high and you risk removing any hope of building a new readership.

So, on the one hand you could price nice and low and maybe bring new readers to, let’s face it, a dying medium that has been slowly choked by the cost of physical media.

Or you could price high so the guys running comic book stores can still make a living.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d hate to see a man lose his livelihood, but I’m also not going to abandon my word processor for the sake of the guy that sells typewriters.

Anyone who says ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ does not know where to eat.

On the one hand, a very fine meal can indeed surpass the buoyed feeling of gentle elation one gets from feeling attractive. I’ve enjoyed such meals and they are better than sex, religion and adrenaline. There’s this sushi place in York I could just eat at until I explode or go broke or pass out; I once ate a steak somewhere in Cornwall that I didn’t shut up about for weeks.

In short, it’s a perfectly valid statement.

Now, I want to believe that the reason you’re a big tubber is because you enjoy a life of epicurean delight. You sample only the finest wines and cheeses, platters of exquisite chocolate truffles, the finest cigars, beef ravioli such as can make a grown man weep, consumed by the trough full. It’s not true though, is it? The reason you look in the mirror and weep buttery tears is more mundane: you’re stuffing yourself to the oily gills with utter crap. Cheap biscuits, noxious sugary cocktails, fist-sized hamburgers made from special offer bread and mechanically extracted meat, topped with a slice of elastic cheese.

Feeling thin and pretty may not match up to the joy of eating a perfectly prepared sirloin steak, but it knocks the shallow, fleeting delight of stuffing yourself with cheesy wotsits into a cocked hat.

Or at least that’s what I hear.

Pass the malteasers?

I got a kick out of that, considering I’m running a half-marathon tomorrow. 21km, when I can still remember not being able to make it 5 without feeling like my heart would explode.

The plan is to run it in under 2hrs – if Matt drops behind I’m going to leave him for the raptors. Hope my knee holds out.

update: 1hr 57! Narrowly beat an old guy in a Wally costume.

Whatever it is, just tell me so I know what magic glyphs to put into google image search and I’ll be on my way, alright?

Before I begin this letter in earnest, let me first entreat you to secure any and all nearby balls. Do not be unduly alarmed, but it is my solemn worry that the contents below may indeed cause you to trip all of the balls.

I am writing in response to your posting for [job] which I observed in [place where jobs are posted]. As outlined in the accompanying CV, I have a first class degree in kicking arse as well as a thorough self-taught grounding in taking names that I believe makes me particularly suited for this role.

Working in [where you work now] I have developed extraordinary reflexes and cat-like agility, as well as the ability to immediately tell when a human is lying to me.

Over my career I have worked constantly to deliver just shy of what is expected of me in a way that my employers can totally overlook. This has primed me for great success in the field of [relevant field], and is also the reason I am well regarded by both my peers and the demonstrably inferior as a highly skilled negotiator and taxidermist.

I hope that I will have the opportunity to interview for this position and shake your hand really firmly – I’ll be working on my utterly unnecessary vice-like grip until I hear word from your office.

Yours sincerely,

Bob T Gorilla

“For all intents and purposes … this enables you to convert any room in a house into a TV room”

Talk about aiming for the stars.

I have to admit it’s a pretty good first step, but a terribly cautious one. Why not let me take my iPad to a friend’s house and show him the channels he’s missing out on? Or, even simpler, why not let me watch the channels I’m paying for wherever I have a working data connection?

Restrictions like this are rife among these first-attempt moves to a digital delivery system; I can only imagine that when the dust settles they’re something we’ll look back on as a transient and ill-advised fad, like DRM.

In this world, you can only buy movies in the movie shop. Most large cities have a movie shop, though smaller cities often don’t and towns are right out. Live in a village? It’s off to the big city to get your stories, kiddo.

And no, you can’t buy movies online either. OK, you can, but there’s only like three websites that sell them and they don’t carry a lot of stuff and they look really sketchy. You wouldn’t trust them with your credit card.

Anyway, back to the movie shop. In the movie shop there are all sorts of movie-related products for you to browse: toys and games, clothing, promotional posters and soundtracks… and even a few DVDs containing actual movies. These discs themselves occupy at most a third of such stores.

Also found in the movie shop are movie geeks. These social outcasts love nothing more than to talk about their favourite movies with each other, the weary employees, and if you’re particularly unlucky, other customers.

You see, gentle reader, on this world watching films is considered a terribly expensive and anti-social past-time. Most movie-watchers are actually embarrassed to talk about their hobby outside of the safety of their local shop or an internet community. Sometimes a radio drama or a play will be made based on a movie’s plot or characters (though not often both), and it might even do quite well, but mass cultural acceptance of the medium is forever fleeting.

Does this world seem strange to you? It doesn’t to me, nor will it to anyone else who reads comics. Yes, that’s the Shamylan-esque reveal that nobody saw coming – Bruce Willis I was in the present talking about comic books the whole time!

Comic books are, after all, just a story-telling medium like movies. They don’t just tell stories about people who wear capes and fight crime, just as not all movies are about spies who wear dinner suits, and not all books are detective stories wherein the butler did it. Very often these days the butler didn’t even do it!

Then again, the really good ones are about people who can fly, the rest is just pretentious nonsense about Nazi mice and whatnot. And the butler generally did it.

The comic scanner, on the other hand, must first carefully remove the staples, then spread the pages on a flat-bed scanner. Then they fire up their favourite image editing program and, one by one, scan each page before slicing each image in half then tuning the colour balance so that each page looks right sat next to its opposite number scanned from a different sheet. Finally the images must be ordered and named before archiving them into a rar or zip file. It’s labour-intensive stuff, but these guys do it tirelessly, every Wednesday, slaving through the day and night so that a legion of people can get their comics fix.

Getting comics onto an iPad is no picnic either. The most reliable way is to make PDFs for Apple’s free iBooks app. Including the initial download it works out as a four-step process for getting your free comic fix.

Well today DC made their first same-day digital release through their brand-new iPad app: Issue #4 of Justice League: Generation Lost (which just happens to be fun comicking). At £1.79 it’s a modest saving of 41p versus a “real” store that’s likely due to an exchange rate wobble (the US price of $2.99 matches the comic’s American RRP), but the real drive here is the simplicity. I tap buy, confirm my iTunes password, and before my torrent client could have built up steam the issue is ready to read, right there in my hands. It’s the same process that Apple used to turn buying music and software into an effortless way to part customers from money.

It’s just one comic for now, with DC quiet about future plans, but it’s a good comic and it was stupidly easy to buy and enjoy. Hopefully the experiment works well and it’s not long before I can buy a new week’s Batman or Spider-man on my shiny Apple-toy. Until then, it’s an easy choice between driving half an hour to Nottingham or firing up Demonoid.

It’s actually glowing praise if you go into the full text of the interview, but I doubt most pundits will see past the unfortunate simile.

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I’m pretty sure nobody would mind about Flash so much then.

Let’s not kid ourselves, nobody outside the FSF has an ideological problem with flash being “closed” software, and it’s not like Flash is the only way you can make annoying ads (you may have seen people mention BusinessWeek’s animated header-covering HTML5 animated ad). Nope, the performance is all John Q. Web User** cares about.

Meanwhile, browser makers are deadlocked in an arms race towards faster, more efficient and more stable HTML, CSS and JavaScript rendering so that they can compete for your business (that would be the fractions-of-a-penny that search engines pay them every time you use that built-in search field).

Earnest competition in an open market leading to a better product? Somebody call Maggie Thatcher!

Unrelated: why is The Joker holding a Star Trek TOS phaser?

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It’s still invaluable as an ad-blocker that only blocks the most offensive and obnoxious ads, mind you.

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Pop star Dappy apologises after it emeges he took the drug mephedrone, also known as meow meow, before it was made illegal.
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A real live human operator always asks the question and waits for a real live answer. This measure has the potential to not just improve my account security but add entertainment value as well:

Q: Do you know why I think you’re so sexy?
A: Probably because you’re totally in love with me.

Q: Need any weed? Grass? Kind bud? Shrooms?
A: No thanks hippie, I’d just like to do some banking.

Q: The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men.
A: Go forth, and kill. Zardoz has spoken.

Q: What the hell is your fucking problem, sir?
A: This is completely inappropriate and I’d like to speak to your supervisor.

Q: I’ve been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from my employer, and I don’t care who knows it.
A: It’s a good thing they’re recording this call, because I’m going to have to report you.

Q: Are you really who you say you are?
A: No, I am a Russian identity thief.
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(Thanks, Joe!)

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The twin brother of Poland’s former president, who was killed in a plane crash in Russia, hopes to be elected in his place, reports say.
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