When it comes to the mobile phone arena and its numerous operating systems, the lack of cross-platform ability becomes even more of a problem. Microsoft has never been into making their tools cross-platform because their real interest is in promoting their own platform. As long as they continue down that route, I think the user base of their development tools will continue to dwindle.

Ah, I see - like the lack of cross-platform tools/ability is causing the Cocoa Touch/iOS platform to dwindle?

This is rubbish. If Microsoft had had a good mobile strategy 5 years ago, instead of flogging (with a stylus) the dead horse that is Win CE/WiMo, they would own this market now. Instead Apple & RIM (both emphatically not cross-platform or open) have thrashed them by producing good products that people want to buy. Astonishingly, this is what it takes to succeed in business today.

There are some parts of the .NET BCL that are wrappers around Win32 (File I/O, Windows.Forms etc), but I don't think it's valid to say the entire BCL is 'basically the managed version of Win32'. Where is IEnumerable<T> in Win32?

Surely a faster / better built fiber network would have a queue of customers beating down their door?

Not without running the service at a loss. Telstra offers 'fast enough' service for most users over fully-written-down infrastructure and should totally spank a commercial greenfields national FTTP network on price. The government can't run the NBN non-commercially (at a loss), otherwise the expenditure has to come on-budget.

Whats her secret?

Um... reading glasses? I guess the point is that the iPad, with its larger display, is even more suitable for this scenario.

...hating to have to quit whatever they are doing to respond to a message or lose whatever they are doing when someone calls them.

Hmm.. if an iPhone app doesn't remember what you were doing when it quits, then it's poorly written. I personally haven't come across any (although I haven't used a large number of apps). There are valid reasons for wanting multi-tasking, but in my opinion, having apps invisibly doing nothing in the background because you don't like the idea of them having to relaunch, isn't one.

Your business rant appears to be an argument against businesses ever upgrading anything. While I've certainly come across a lot of businesses that think that way, good ones tend to ask relevant questions like: "What's the return on investment for this project", "What are the risks of continuing our current approach", "How can technology better support our business processes" etc. For some, the answer may well be that an iPad solution is the best option for them.

I call bullshit on the 'grandparents won't like it' argument. My Grandma has an iPhone instead of a computer. She uses it for email, internet (3G - she doesn't have a fixed internet connection), photos and SMS. She's had laptops and adsl on several previous occasions, and consistently ended up giving them away because she never used them.

And having to quit whatever they are doing to use a second program...

I see this argument a lot from people who have clearly never used an iPhone. Substitute 'alt-tab' wherever you use the word 'quit' and you'll get a better picture of how this works in practice. Given the likely high percentage of computer users who run all their apps maximised on a single monitor, I'm struggling to understand why people see this as such a deal-breaker.

$100 or so dollars per unit

The iPhone Developer Enterprise Program may help out with those crippling costs. I doubt iPads would see any significant adoption in clerical work environments, but areas like warehousing, stock management, transport, mobile sales - everywhere that mobility and ease of use are important - may see some activity. Despite Apple's almost total disinterest in the sector.

This is part of what GP is probably referring to:

http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/03/hansens-y2k-whopper/
and
http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/23/nasa-hide-this-after-jim-checks-it/

FWIW I don't think it's fair to characterise the NASA guys as 'faking' the data - they just stuffed up. It doesn't reflect particularly well on them that they attempted to quietly & retrospectively correct it though. Note that it also only affected US temperature readings.

NB: I'm sure Steve McIntyre doesn't count as a 'reputable' source as he's a heathen denialist who clearly doesn't understand climate science (despite being the one to find & report the anomoly). There would be other references, I'm just too lazy to look.

"It's an election promise! Therefore, normal rules of legislative diligence do not apply!"

Unfortunately Stephen Conroy is at the top of the senate ticket in Victoria and even a targeted campaign has practically no chance of unseating him.

That's easy. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is already sympathetic to their cause and should be available for a bargain price.

Because he's used to Winforms, which (by default) generates a private instance variable in your form subclass for every control you've dropped onto the designer. IMO it's an ugly carryover from the 'put all your code in the UI' VB6 days - I much prefer the arms length interaction between controller & view in Cocoa, notwithstanding it requires more manual connections.

I was always convinced that Moses' next door neighbour chowed down on a bunch of mussels & crabs & whatnot and left them in the sun out the front of his house for week. "Bad news, guys, God just told me we're not allowed to eat those any more".

Clean, well-separated code should be able to be ported to a new database platform at least three times before it starts to approach the break-even point that would have made building your own general purpose database abstraction layer worthwhile. This is the sort of false economy that you commonly find rearing its head with developers who are attempting to solve problems that don't exist yet.

If avoiding vendor lock-in is such an important requirement, it would generally be cheaper to buy a database abstraction framework (or, thinking outside the box here, sticking to standard SQL) rather than attempting to roll your own. However, in practice I think vendor lock-in on the database platform is less of a concern than vendor/technology lock-in on your web application framework, so to my mind it's questionable that you're getting a great deal of value by going down this path.