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Just want to check -- would you consider the work paramedics do to be real work? How about railway engineers? What about retail bank staff?

Because there are significant numbers of paramedics, railway engineers, and retail bank staff doing real work on iPads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/new...

http://www.sourcingfocus.com/s...

Americans now take an average of 29 months to upgrade their cell phone

That's Apple *and* Samsung

Yeah, and later on the say the average for Apple alone is 22 months and Apple are offering a subscription model to reduce this to 15 months

Originally, Munster thought the program would reduce the average iPhone user's upgrade time frame from 22 months to only 15 months. But that 15 month time frame would mean iPhone users would be upgrading their phones 14 months earlier than the average American, based on Citigroup's new data. And with Apple's iPhone sales currently slowing, that quick upgrade time seems even more unlikely.

You can see there that the time for the average American is 29 months, and the time for Apple users is 22. They tried the subscription model to reduce it and then, I'm sure coincidentally, decided to throttle old iPhones to make them slower. Of course iPhones have an odd bug which causes them to shut down when it is cold that other cell phones don't seem to have. However throttling old devices is a good way to convince people to buy new ones, particularly if you don't tell them you're doing it because they need a new battery.

Apart from throttling Apple's upgrade system means old phones get new software. Which probably has decent performance on the latest device but crappy performance on the old ones. And cell phones tend to slow down with time anyway - my old S5 got slow and the battery life was bad so I did a firmware reset and replace the battery. When it got slow again I decided to replace it because V20s are pretty cheap now.

I.e. Apple have a number of subtle pushes to upgrade - throttling old devices, upgrading them to new software by default and making the battery non upgradeable for the vast majority of their rather non technical user base.

Which has got them a 22 month upgrade cycle compared to the 29 month average. And they're aiming to get that down to 15 months. A $1000 phone that lasts for 22 months on average is not a good deal. And actually if you t might cost you twice that.

https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/new...

The cost of owning the latest iPhone, including the inevitable screen repairs, is set to be higher than ever for the hoards of Apple fans who have already pre-ordered the latest iPhone X.

It comes as more premium pricing emerges for the after-sales element of owning the iPhone X.

Inc reports that it will cost $279 to get the screen repaired on an iPhone X. "Miscellaneous" repairs will be billed at as much as $549.

It almost goes without saying, therefore, that you should BUY A CASE.

Applecare? That's $199, compared to $129 for the iPhone 8 and $149 for the iPhone 8 Plus.

So let's take a look at how this works. Let's assume you buy a full price iPhone X off contract. £1,149. We're going to work on the basis that Apple is using 1:1 pricing for everything else as it is for the handset.

You're going to want Applecare. £200. Now let's assume you smash the screen three times (it's likely) in the two years.

If you don't opt for Applecare, that's £840. If you do, there's still an excess of £25 a pop to pay. That's £275, assuming you don't drop it in the toilet.

For an example, we're added in Three's Advanced Plan at £29.00 a month. In total that's £696 in airtime. We'll ignore Three's no-upfront-cost Advanced Plan, which will set you back a mere £114 per month for two years. That's £2,736 before case, repairs and so on!

Now let's add a decent case for good measure. Mobilefun is doing a Ghostek Nautical Series Waterproof case for £39.99. That's far from the most expensive here, but it'll do the job.

So that's £2,359.99 without any roaming charges, any "miscellaneous" damage repairs, any subscriptions to Apple Music, any ap

"Edward Snowden has warned that no smartphone is safe..." Is he correct? http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news...

Yup. And here's a source with links. Yay?

Is this the sort of thing that the EU could override?

Of course not. The European Union wants the exact same thing. They just take a more circuitous route to reach the same conclusion.

Don't believe me? Read it and weep.

Money quote from the above link:

As part of the focus on cybercrime the EC [European Commission] said it is important that, while the privacy of citizens should be respected, the right data for law enforcement agencies is also vital to protect Europe’s security.

“Clear rules are needed to ensure that data protection principles are respected in full, while law enforcement gains access to the data it needs to protect the privacy of citizens against cybercrime and identity theft,” the report said.

The strategy also calls for greater cooperation between all elements of society when tackling cybercrime, so that key information is shared with all relevant parties.

Crypto War II. It's what's for breakfast. Download your copy of GPG while it's hot.

You can never (in practice and under usual economic border conditions) make closed source secure. On the other hand, while you must make it open in order for it to be possibly secure, you must do other things in addition.

Really, get a grip on basic logic and stop claiming bullshit.

Sorry, but I've spent WAY too much time over the last year or two dealing with huge vulnerabilities in open source to believe any of the stuff you are spouting. OpenSSL alone (Heartbleed and several other critical flaws) has cost me a huge amount of time, and that's one of those open source security related products that theoretically will attract the most auditing attention and should be "secure due to the number of eyeballs theoretically always auditing it". Yet despite being open, it has not become secure, or even close to secure.

On my web hosting team (which hosts thousands of websites and uses both Linux and Windows), we have spent far less time over the last couple of years patching or dealing with closed source critical Windows vulnerabilities than we have spent on various open source critical vulnerabilities. Things always go in cycles, and probably we'll have a year here soon where Windows racks up the most major headaches again, but the point is, there's no way you can claim you can "never make closed source secure" but that "making it open could make it possibly secure if you take some additional steps". That's all nonsense. Neither model is any better than the other when it comes to security, and neither can ever be made totally secure, especially as complexity continues to rise.

Open source has its benefits, but security has never been one of them, as recent history demonstrates. It just seemed that way for a while when it had less of an install base. Now that everyone, even commercial products, are embedding open source packages like OpenSSL into them, the target base is easily big enough to invite the black hat attention, and we see that things are basically the same as they are for closed source packages with a large install base.

PS - The Linux foundation is working with researchers to make a huge push to audit OpenSSL to look for issues. This, again, proves things are the same between open and closed source. Windows gets repeatedly, badly owned, and Bill Gates writes his secure computing memo directing a huge amount of resources at security training and auditing, and things do actually improve (though they are never perfect). Now, OpenSSL gets owned, someone directs huge resources at it, and it will probably improve, in the same way and for the same reasons as closed source. Put the resources behind it, you can improve security, but without a dedicated, directed push, things slide in both models because programmers, whether in closed or open shops, are in general are fairly lazy and like new shiny things, and don't really enjoy doing mundane boring tasks like auditing old code.

Citation, please.

Well, you can read all the headline news about how all the malware is on Android because Apple keeps it off of iWhatever, or you can try to figure out which system is better for the stuff you're actually going to use:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131011092523.htm

You can read the false equivalence narrative about how both Apple and google suffered data breaches recently, or you could use your brain and realize that you have seen evidence that it's pretty easy to get "private" stuff out of Apple's cloud, but there's not much evidence of getting it out of google's cloud:

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2364799/google-confirms-five-million-customer-data-dump-but-denies-breach

You can read about how Apple is going to revolutionize payments, or you can read some of the user stories here about how people have been using google for payments for a long time with no problems, and you might think about how, even a few months ago, Apple had a major https problem:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/24/apples-security-breach-should-scare-you-more-than-targets-did/

And finally, you can ooh and aah about how iOS is now encrypting everything in a way that only the user can decrypt it "unlike [Apple's] competitors" and google is playing catchup, or you can dig deeper and find out that this has been an option on Android for three years, and all google has to do to match Apple is turn it on by default. (They probably had it off by default simply so Apple wouldn't be beating them in storage benchmarks.)

So you actually approve of a Business Model based on Tracking (and Selling) your every online move?

Now I have to ask you for a citation. Google targets ads to you, but AFAIK, unlike, say, Facebook, they don't actually sell your data directly to others. That's because, believe it or not, it is precious to them. Whether or not I approve the business model is immaterial, but I reject the premise that Apple is capable of handling data better because their business isn't based on handling data. Seriously, doesn't that sound like a stupid claim?

...and people think Apple aficionados are delusional???

That's only because enough of them are that it's a thing.

Nope, it's right. The hacker claimed to be part of Anonymous.. Which is kind of odd, most of the time they do vigilante justice on organizations that actually deserve it, like Scientology.

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news...

The maths is simple. Which part are you having difficulty with?

http://m.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/review...

I had an N95, it was great for its time but became an anachronism the day the iPhone was released. Today you can buy Nokia phones that do more than iPhone for less money. Really, /. Nobody likes Microsoft but it's time to accept that Winphone is a good product, that people like it, and that it is going to seriously challenge Apple and Google.

I know that's what he told his biographer but when it comes to taking his company down with it over it and essentially throwing it all away? I'm not so sure he was without some sense of reason.

http://androidandme.com/2011/09/news/intel-and-google-announce-android-x86-optimization/
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2109367/df-intel-outlines-developer-tools-android-tablet-integrationhttp://www.itproportal.com/2011/12/05/intel-google-design-android-smartphones-run-atom-processors/
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/105189-intels-x86-android-smartphone-and-tablet-plans-exposed
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the-first-intel-medfield-phone
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/24/3040706/intel-x86-image-for-android-ice-cream-sandwich-sdk

Sales for the Lumia 800 are very strong in the UK from what I gather. The fact it's gone from only being sold by 2-3 providers to being sold by just about every phone shop certainly seems to indicate it's a big seller. According to this sales of the Lumia 800 alone were enough to push Windows 7 phone past Symbian in terms of market share.

The 610 will probably be a big seller too, low end budget phone (unlike Android, Windows works well on low end handsets).

...the British Governments Cloud service suffers the inevitable Microsoft kiss of death.

In my country you used to be able to by Linux pre-installed on Eee. You can no longer do this (for some time), despite Linux being just as popular as Windows for purchasers. Microsoft bribed Asus here so that Linux was no longer an option. As for citation, Google is your friend, see how many hits you get when you use the phrase "Asus and Microsoft join forces against Linux". In one example v3 confirms the report with Asus.
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/1941481/asus-microsoft-join-forces-linux

Now you may say that this is just hardball business practice. However, if you understand US law you'll know that this is illegal. It is illegal to use a monopoly in one space (desktop) to attempt to gain market dominance in another space (netbooks in this case). However, since Asus was paid and the Linux crowd lack the means to bring it to court then nothing is done (plus in 2009 the US DoC had been lax with MS for some time).

Ahem. Apple doesn't have the App Store. It has an App Store. And that's official. They lost their case precisely over this against ... Amazon :-)

iPad and iPhone : so good Samsung tried to ban them in order to be able to get a foothold in the market. See how that knife cuts both ways ?

No one is saying that. This is a boxing match, all parties are exchanging blows and we're only in the second round. So why does everyone start crying foul whenever one of the Android camp takes one on the nose ? Why gloating when Samsung asks to block the sale of iPads and iPhones but outrage when Apple retaliates ?

Is this a phishing site - I see no review but a bunch of ads...
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/review/2099409/ibm-pc-original-review-personal-model-5150

The review can only be seen with JavaScript enabled.

Amazon quotes Apple chief executive Steve Jobs in the filing referring to the iTunes App Store as "the easiest to use, largest app store in the world".

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/mac-inspector-blog/2046035/amazon-files-response-apples-app-store-suit

whats not fair is RIM backdooring their product to appease third word oppressive regimes.

They didn't. Prove it or shut up.

Uh, yeah. They did.

Neither of those links say anything of the sort. If you actually read into the issue you'll see the primary issue is:
The main problem is that the smartphone ecosystem does not comply with local regulations because it sends data outside the country.
And that the solution is to have a server in the country. WRT data encryption it is based on a symmetric key system, which as RIM said, isn't able to be decrypted as it goes through RIM's servers, the solution they have provided is a method to track email - if necessary - and then the security agencies can subpoena the corporation for the decrypted email.

whats not fair is RIM backdooring their product to appease third word oppressive regimes.

They didn't. Prove it or shut up.

Uh, yeah. They did.

> unless the CIA or the government is somehow clairvoyant

The Swedish prosecutor's abuse of legal process may pre-date the leaking of the diplomatic cables but it sure as hell doesn't predate the 2008 US Army Counterintelligence plan to discredit Wikileaks:
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2259550/military-plan-destroy-wikileaks

"The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site."

I'll grant that. However, even if the swedish prosecutor is abusive, you still need the victims to testify. The facts of what happen, at least what has been reported, are not disputed, even by Assange. Assange escalated it by refusing to cooperate, he even admitted that.

For this to be a government conspiracy against him requires a number of players -- the Swedish government, the Swedish courts, the Swedish prosecutor, the US government, the two victims and who knows how many others. Since the Swedes don't depend on the US for aid or protection, it is difficult to see what power the US would have to influence so many Swedes in the process.

A much more reasonable answer is that Assange screwed up. Because he's famous, it is big news. Just like Lindsey Lohan shoplifting. Thousands of people shoplifted that day in LA, the only one that makes the news is Lohan. Why? Because she's famous.

As much as we want to believe there is a conspiracy against Assange, there is no evidence that one exists nor does it appear to be logistically possible in this specific case.

> unless the CIA or the government is somehow clairvoyant

The Swedish prosecutor's abuse of legal process may pre-date the leaking of the diplomatic cables but it sure as hell doesn't predate the 2008 US Army Counterintelligence plan to discredit Wikileaks:
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2259550/military-plan-destroy-wikileaks

"The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site."

62% of iPad customers apparently. At least, 62% of the next run will be 3G models. I haven't seen sales breakdowns anywhere.

http://www.cultofmac.com/analyst-62-of-first-run-ipad-2s-will-be-3g-and-16-verizon/80752

And according to this survey, the $830 iPad is the most popular model.

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2274007/context-ipad-3g-sales-uk

Apple has made PLENTY of bad design decisions. Plenty of lists: here, here, etc.

-- Barbie

This argument would have more weight if it were not for the fact that because of Wikileaks we have been made more aware of conspiracies to cover up illegal activities ...

We have? Example, please?

Sure

and that some of those groups whose actions have been uncovered are actively trying to discredit Wikileaks and limit its ability to function

Oh, I see. More paranoia. NM then.

There is evidence for that, too.

But judging from your condescending tone, I don't expect fact to sway your opinion, so please continue.

So what would you say if the U.S. Millitary had already developed a plan to discredit WikiLeaks as far back as 2008? http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2259550/military-plan-destroy-wikileaks

He already did that. http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2259550/military-plan-destroy-wikileaks

Yep, because it's not like the military might have already planned something similar already or anything. http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2259550/military-plan-destroy-wikileaks

I agree, anything being broadcasted unencrypted you can receive legally. They probably had their reasons for recording the data; whatever that may be. There is no law for them to disclose it or not to. It would be interesting to see a wifi map on that magnitude.

Here is something else to be afraid of from an old paper.

“A British hacker has shown how easy it is to clone US passport cards that use Radio Frequency ID chips by conducting a drive-by test on the streets of San Francisco. Chris Paget, director of research and development at Seattle-based IOActive, used a $250 Motorola RFID reader and an antenna mounted in a car's side window and drove for 20 minutes around San Francisco, with a colleague videoing the demonstration. Paget picked up the details of two US passport cards, which are fitted with RFID chips and can be used instead of traditional passports for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean Paget claimed that it would be relatively simple to make cloned passport cards from the information he had gathered.”
http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/news/2235666/hackers-clones-passports-drive

But for Nokia? No, they're doing fine, I see no evidence of "scrambling".

Pride doth come before the fall.

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2264505/goatse-security-claims-gaping?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+LatestUpdatesFromVnunetcom+%2528Latest+updates+from+VNUNET.COM%2529


And does this bring anything to mind ? http://assets.portfolio.com/images/reuters/2010-06-10/net-us-att-fbi.jpg

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2264305/apple-unveils-iphone

Wrong. If you order from another EU country the company is required to charge your local VAT. It is mainly luxury and media taxes that can be dodged, but only if they're charged at the engros level or later. For example; I can (and do) avoid paying the Danish media tax on writable discs by ordering from Germany, but I still pay Danish VAT. The evil Swedish goverment insidiously charges the insanely high luxury-tax on snus at production level, so I get to pay that AND Danish VAT, even though I live in Denmark (where the tax on smoke-free tobacco is a more lenient less than 10€/kg). Yes, an opinion irrelevant to TFA snuck in, but there you are.

That is not correct, and hasn't been correct for at least two years. The VAT "one-stop-shop" rules in the EU mean that in a transaction, the seller can choose which country's VAT rates it wants to comply with - which is usually the seller's country. I.e. a German seller charges you only German VAT, and Amazon smartly set itself up in Luxembourg and only adds on 15% Luxembourg VAT even if you order from Germany or Denmark.

It has to work the way you described if you ordered stuff from outside the EU - the US, for instance...

Sure:

• See here: McAfee & Symantec got the EU involved, and Neelie Kroes seemed happy to oblige.
• Or here
• A bit longer (the main stuff is a few pages in).

MS basically didn't want to do the whole dog and pony show for the US DOJ and EU's committee -- so they came up with this compromise (PatchGuard in 64-bit OSes only), and in return McAfee and Symantec dropped their objections. These links are actually after the fact (after that agreement was brokered, and the fight contnued for 64-bit windows).

Was that the first time?

According to this article it has now been passed
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2249617/french-pass-revised-three/
(article dated 16 sep)

Second time? Citation needed, seriously.

It was back in 10.1 I think, I can't be assed to Google it and shift through the billion issues OS X had back then.

There have been plenty of famous and significant data loss bugs in Windows' history, like the Windows 98SE shutdown bug

That was not a win98 bug, that was harddrive manufacturers building faulty harddrives that said "yes, I've written everything", when it was still in the harddrive caches, so Windows would power off the machine and the data would never end up written to disk - Harddrive manufacturers fixed this and don't do that anymore. But hey, if I stuck such a harddrive in to a OS X machine, the same thing would very likely happen.

the Windows 2000 ATA bug

Also another bit of hardware retardness, the IDE storage driver stack incorrectly accesses registers that are required for a software reset causing data loss.

the Windows XP bug that ate the user data folders, quite similar to the Snow Leopard bug: http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/news/2116562/winxp-bug-ate.

Not similar at all, this is by design for preinstalling. The only scenario where this would crop up is with OEMs not imaging disks correctly when they build their preinstalls, this is not a XP bug.

So, so far you've found hardware bugs that aren't the fault of the OS and some badly installed version of Windows that wouldn't normally occur.

Then there's the infamous Mozilla bug that wiped out the entire Program Files directory on Windows

That's not an OS bug.

It's not just user-level software development, either. Just look at Intel's repeated data loss bugs in their SSDs.

I'm honestly not interested in hardware bugs, 3rd party app bugs. The discussion is about the operating systems losing user files under normal operation without extraordinary circumstances (ie: hardware issues, some idiot purposely breaking the install). So far the evidence you have provided hasn't shown Windows to have done this at all.

Second time? Citation needed, seriously.

Apart from self-contained data loss bugs that corrupt single files or bork their own data, the only difference between them is the identity of the data affected--deleting your user folder is no more or less "destructive" than deleting the Program Files folder or the System32 folder or any other combination of important data.

More to the point, you have a short and selective memory. On the Windows side, the number of data loss bugs in the Microsoft KB is staggering--many of which far more easily triggered than the Snow Leopard bug (which PC World was unable to reproduce). There have been plenty of famous and significant data loss bugs in Windows' history, like the Windows 98SE shutdown bug, the Windows 2000 ATA bug, and even the Windows XP bug that ate the user data folders, quite similar to the Snow Leopard bug: http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/news/2116562/winxp-bug-ate.

How about the similar data loss bug in the Linux kernel a few years ago: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-976427.html. A simple Google search will reveal several more, before and since, in the kernel and in distribution packages.

Then there's the infamous Mozilla bug that wiped out the entire Program Files directory on Windows: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4264

It's not just user-level software development, either. Just look at Intel's repeated data loss bugs in their SSDs.

All the big names have let a bug like this slip at one time or another. It's unfortunate, but inevitable.

Actually it's a bad idea to buy it from anyone that is not 100% on your side. Best would be to build it yourself.

Best to build them yourself full stop, regardless of whether or not they're apparently on your side. You'd think that with all of the co-operation they've been through the US and UK would be fairly tight but that didn't stop arguments between the UK and US over exactly this kind of thing.

They might be buddies now, but you never know what will happen in the future...

We have heard that tired, old argument before, a few idiot CIOs will swallow it, happy to pay top dollar for something that the free s/ware does better. Let them, as long as Nominum sticks to the RFCs and doesn't fork the spec - we don't care.

I guess I'm not seeing this "treachery" of which you're going on about.

You may want to click on the links to the articles to see the treachery. Here is a quote from one of the articles...

Pigs are flying low: Why Microsoft open-sourced its Linux drivers
"Microsoft originally was licensing the Linux drivers, also known as the Linux Integration Components (LIC), in a way that was in violation of the GPL. It was offering them under a combination of the GPL and a closed source license."

Nobody cares that Linksys/Cisco uses GPL code in their cheap routers.

The whole idea of releasing source code under the GPL is to make it available for use. The copyright holders of that code do not take issue with corporations using the code, they take issue with corporations when they violate the license terms under which the source code is made available to them for use. As was the case with Linksys/Cisco.

Cisco sued by FSF over GPL violation

The summary is misleading. The EU hasn't told Microsoft to do anything. They are still investigating but Microsoft decided to remove IE perhaps in the hope that the EU will be pressured into asking them to do that. But so far the EU has not asked them to do anything.

You are confusing the lack of legal verdict with whether they said anything or not. The position of the EU commission is quite clear, let me quote it for you:

The European Commission (EC) has reacted swiftly to Microsoft's intention to offer some versions of the upcoming Windows 7 operating system without Internet Explorer (IE).

"The Commission had suggested to Microsoft that consumers be provided with a choice of web browsers. Instead, Microsoft has apparently decided to supply retail consumers with a version of Windows without a web browser at all," the EC said in a statement. "Rather than more choice, Microsoft seems to have chosen to provide less."

The Commission cited an alternative option of shipping Windows 7 with a choice of different web browsers presented through a 'ballot screen', from where users could choose and easily install their preferred browser.

Source (one of many): http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/news/2244050/ec-reacts-ms-ie-plans

Preach Brother! I have had several of my customers ask about RAID, but when actually sitting down and talking to them it turns out they are looking for a backup solution which RAID most certainly is NOT.

Here is what I recommend to my clients-Use whatever you want inside your machine, but get a USB HDD or even better a NAS for backups. Most come with very capable backup solutions provided, and is much better for the purpose than RAID which as you so very eloquently is for access NOT backup. There are several cheap barebone NAS kits where you simply add your own drives, these have the added benefit of being easy to upgrade should your data become larger than the drives. Put a couple of 1Tb drives and a nice multi platform backup solution ( I use Paragon Drive Manager which comes with a nice Linux GUI based boot disc and covers FAT,NTFS,EXT2 and EXT3, but there are several alternatives to choose from) and all is golden.

But please don't use RAID as a poor man's backup, as it will come back to bite you in the ass. Get a USB drive, get a full or barebone NAS, and use a real backup software like Paragon or similar. In the end you will be a LOT better off than trying to use RAID for a job it simply wasn't made for.

It seems hardware manufacturers have a hard time learning that electronics cause heat and that this heat needs to be led away from the device.

Fixed that for you.

It has nothing to do with Apple - all hardware manufacturers seem to have problems. A quick look at google for "laptop battery catches fire" turns up this story about a Dell battery catching fire, this story about an IBM catching fire, and this story about a Toshiba catching fire. And we know those three stories aren't rare - those were just quick search results to prove a point.

If you're going to pick on a manufacturer for a faulty battery issue, make sure you don't portray it to be something unique to that manufacturer when it's actually something that occurs pretty much across the board.