A great read, but important too for understanding why some parts of the internet are weak for fact-checking:

If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.

Glenn Fleishman:

Those competing with Apple have to advertise every new device and computer as being substantially different enough to justify a quicker upgrade cycle. If Apple makes $400 from a low-end MacBook Air that might be in use for five years, and Dell makes $50 (after paying Microsoft for Windows) for a low-end laptop, how quickly does Dell need to sell that person another device? During those five years, Apple might get $29 two or three times for updates to Mac OS X; Dell gets nothing from any Windows upgrades. Apple may also now reap additional dollars from Mac App Store purchases, too. Dell? Nothing.

Intriguing argument which implies that Dell has to keep growing even to survive - though of course for Dell having a big installed base to pick from *should* mean it would reach a point where constant renewal of machines guarantees a given revenue and profit.</p><p>

But maybe that's what's gone wrong. (Fleishman also blogs for The Economist.)

Since everyone and their dog is burbling on about potential Google Nexus 7in tablets, here's a link back to an article which asked: why exactly did Apple choose 9.7in for the iPad screen? And how did Samsung's 7in screen measure up?

Check out the comments too: apparently Apple was rumoured (on Gizmodo and Macrumors) to be about to launch a 7in iPad "in time for Christmas". Some rumours never go out of date.

Hated, that is, by those trying to compete with it, or which have found their businesses overrun by it. "The success of the iPad made HP and RIM vastly over-estimate demand…" But makes in vertical markets, PCs, netbooks - they all have reason to grind their teeth too.

"Imagine it’s late 2005. Apple’s fiscal year just ended and they reported their performance. You’re an analyst whose job includes forecasting the company’s performance for next year. This is a weighty responsibility.  Your forecast will be blended with those of your peers and used as a “consensus” average. That consensus for the next year will be used to measure the current value of the shares in a ratio called the forward PEG or Price/Earnings/annual earnings Growth."

This hilarious - really - narrative shows how apparently rational choices don't always lead to good forecasting.

So far, it has infected 4.5m PCs: "The malware detected by Kaspersky Anti-Virus as TDSS is the most sophisticated threat today. TDSS uses a range of methods to evade signature, heuristic, and proactive detection, and uses encryption to facilitate communication between its bots and the botnet command and control center. TDSS also has a powerful rootkit component, which allows it to conceal the presence of any other types of malware in the system.<br />
"Its creator calls this program TDL. Since it first appeared in 2008, malware writers have been perfecting their creation little by little. By 2010, the latest version was TDL-3, which was discussed in depth in an article published in August 2010.<br />
"The creators of TDSS did not sell their program until the end of 2010. In December, when analyzing a TDSS sample, we discovered something odd: a TDL-3 encrypted disk contained modules of another malicious program, SHIZ."<br />
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Bad news all round.

Dediu on the latest market numbers for smartphones. As he says, it's hard to get seasonality out of the growth. Prize for best blogpost title, though.

With Apple's financial results coming up this week, bloggers tracking Apple's numbers do far better than professional analysts; Deagol is one of the best. <br />
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"It's amazing to me that such a highly regarded analyst as Gene Munster, and considered by many the most bullish on Apple, has managed to underestimate EPS by a whole 5 bucks and a half over less than 3 years. That's a whole $100 worth on AAPL if you price it at an 18x multiple. And that's our bullish guy. Mr. McCourt on the other hand, managed to misplace almost 5 bucks in only a year and a half. Give it another year and he'll easily be 8 bucks behind, or near $150 on the stock by a conservative multiple. But he'll go on giving interviews on CNBC and such."

Michael Gartenberg, who has seen tons of consumer gadgets come and go: "So, why so much hype about the post-PC world? Because historically, as PCs have become increasingly sophisticated, they’ve also become increasingly complex. Users become empowered by new features while simultaneously being forced to contend with complex systems..<br />
"This is one reason why devices like the iPad have become popular. No, they can’t do everything a PC can do today—but that’s not a bad thing. The iPad performs some tasks quite well, all while keeping those tasks simple—and that means an iPad can replace that second or third PC someone was thinking of buying.<br />
As we transition into a post-PC world, the ability of devices to balance new technology and features against complexity for a given set of functions will help drive purchases. The key will be for users to figure out just what device best matches the appropriate skill set or need. Need to decode the human genome? There’s no app for that just yet."