MacBook for $800 new in Q3? Looks like Digitimes needed to boost their page views!

 Go Hansen! Go you silver-legged son of a bitch! There he was! Getting ready to pull it out and show the odds-on favorites what he was made of! Except he didn’t. Hell, he didn’t even show. It turned out he was made out of lose. Metaphors. They are cruel.

Giz.

Last night, after several months of rumors and speculation, Samsung finally announced their 2012 flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S III. It’s a device that I’ve been telling everyone to wait for, telling everyone that it’s going to be the best Android handset to come out this year, telling everyone that buying any other smartphone would be a huge mistake. Now that the Galaxy S III is official, I have to admit that I was wrong, and I’m deeply sorry.

Stefan Constantinescu.

If you’d like to see this film as much as I do, turn to 68.

If you’d rather die, turn to 14.

Many years ago, Jim Hughes and I had a Formula 1 blog called Fun-1. The goal then was to try and be sarcastic, bitchy, and portray a sport that was almost, not quite unlike, Formula 1. We had a lot of fun with it, but as F1 became more soap opera, it started to read a little bit too much like real news.

But one of Jim’s posts always stuck with me, and with all the tweets popping up today (May 1st), I wanted to revisit that post. One hunt through backups and archives later, and it gets a re-post here:

Today is the tenth anniversary of Ayrton Senna’s death at Imola. So what has happened in Formula 1? Are the cars safer, slower, is the driving cleaner? Yes, No and definitely not – Michael’s outrageous punting off of JPM at Imola is graphic evidence of how low F1 driver standards have sunk in the past decade.

I watched both accidents at Imola ten years ago (I also watched Berger’s accident at Tamburello a few years previously), Ayrton’s didn’t affect me. Maybe I was still in shock, but I never liked the guy. Sure he was exquisitely fast, but his general attitude to racing – if in doubt punt your rivals off – was abhorrent to me, imagine your grief if Michael was killed today? Rightly or wrongly that’s  pretty much how I felt about Ayrton.

Roland Ratzenberger was a different matter; he was one of the good guys. I’d seen him race at Le Mans a few times, and he was no muppet paying for a seat. I believe he was Toyota’s first non-Japanese works driver, which in those days said a lot, even if Toyota’s current approach to employing drivers is somewhat surreal. Just wanting Schumi lite never mind being willing to pay him millions is rather odd…

Watching a driver (or any human being) being given heart massage  on live television is not an everyday sight, and it’s not one I want to see again. But that’s what I saw after Roland’s accident and it was very moving and disturbing. Later in 1994 I went to Le Mans and one of the SARD Toyotas had four drivers’ names painted next to the door, but only three drivers at the circuit; Eddie Irvine, Jeff Krosnoff and Mauro Martini. This is the car that Roland was supposed to have been driving.

90 minutes from the end of the race it was leading, when it slowed and stopped just past me on the pit straight with a broken gear linkage. Krosnoff got out of the car, went around the back and manually selected third gear. He then set off on a slow lap of the 9 mile circuit before pitting for the linkage to be replaced. The car lost 13 minutes and dropped back to third place, 15 seconds behind the second placed car. Irvine cut this lead at a rate of three seconds per lap, and I’ve never seen so many people willing a car to go faster. Irvine took second place on the penultimate lap, but the lead car was a lap ahead, and “Roland’s” team had to settle for second place.

Roland, Ayrton, rest in peace.

Of course it wouldn’t be news if you said you were going to build a fourth ‘Olympic’ class vessel, if you were going to mention it’s a rebuild of the Brittanic (sunk by a mine in 1916), or  the Olympic (retired in 1935 after 24 years of service). Far better to say it’s a rebuild of the Titanic, call it Titanic 2, and then invite 1000 of the word’s most famous celebrities aboard for the maiden voyage.

What could possibly go wrong?

I believe I have found a knock-down argument for marriage equality: there is no decent verb for “civil partnership”. #Pedants4EqualMarriage

Tom Morris

Like this.

XKCD.

Lee Williams via CNet.

When I was at Nokia and we shipped a Symbian product and it was bad, in its worst incarnation we knew that if we just flipped the switch, we could move 2.5 to three million units — overnight, no matter how bad the product. That was Nokia. That was Nokia’s brand, we knew we could count on that.

The problem is you can only pull that trick once before the networks see the customer feedback. 24 months later, all those customers looking to buy another smartphone on contract… didn’t buy a Nokia.

Congratulations on landing something memorable for the Google Doodle on the 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum, but (a) did we have to share it with St George and (b) given the lack of complexity on show, I suspect the designer was not a master of ZX Spectrum artwork… Yes it follows the rules, but there’s an art to packing in info on a Speccy Screen, and this isn’t quite it.

Bret Taylor on Friendfeed’s blog.

We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle…

The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The latest Rock Show podcast is up, available to listen here, or over at The Podcast Corner.

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MP3 File – Show Notes – RSS Feed

With Blondfire, Emma Louise, Cosmo Jarvis, Boy, and Gemma Ray.

As in previous years, the majority of my thoughts about The Eurovision Song Contest will be found on ESC Insight (www.escinsight.com). Rather than daily news about the Contest, an area well served by many sights, ESC Insight looks at some of the issues in more depth – think of it like a Sunday newspaper compared to the daily news of sites such as ESCxtra.

Alongside the articles from myself, a core writing team of three others, and a number of regular contributors, it’s also the home of my Unofficial Eurovision Song Contest Podcast. There’s enough Eurovision news throughout the year for a weekly news podcast, but as the Contest gets ever neared (May 26th) and the countries all declare their songs for Europe, the ESC Insight team sit down to judge every single song on the podcast, in a series of “Juke Box Jury” shows.

A simple format (we listen to each song, five per episode) and rate them Hit, Miss, or Maybe. After some lively discussion. Two episodes have already been posted, with the rest to follow one a week each Friday till Eurovision starts.

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Episode 1:  Albania, Finland, Moldova, The Netherlands, and Turkey.

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Episode 2: Macedonia, Hungary, Latvia, Iceland, and Slovenia.

Don’t miss an episode of this year’s Juke Box Jury (or any of The Unofficial Eurovision Podcast episodes), subscribe to the RSS feed dedicated to the podcasts. iTunes users can find us in the iTunes Store and get the show automatically downloaded to your computer.

Well, after being seen 75 minutes late for my appointment, the news is mixed. I don’t yet have a treatment plan as I need a further test (PET scan, some kind of radioactive thing, but I won’t get superpowers). There’s no further visible tumour at the initial site, and my lungs are clear, but my lymph nodes are enlarged which indicates a “not likely but possible” chance the cancer has already spread. This test will ascertain that, so in about a month I should know whether I’m having chemoradiation (mostly radiotherapy with a low dose of chemo thrown in) or systemic chemotherapy with a bit of radiotherapy (that’s the full-on serious one where I’d lose my hair and get really sick). Sigh.

From Vikki, via Facebook. Any comments on big blue rather than here, please?

The Guardian

So it turns out the birth of your first child is perhaps the most emotionally charged experience you’ll ever have. I even put down the new Angry Birds game for 10 minutes so I could concentrate fully, and that’s set in space.