brazen sms charging

Its fairly obvious for anyone who thinks about it for a while that SMS is appalling bad value per-byte compared to IP or voice over the same system.

But Orange UK really made me laugh/cry with the brazen way in which they juxtaposed two menu options to make it so clear:

To buy 50 UK SMSes valid for a day for 1 pound, press 1.
 To buy 50 Mb of data valid for a day for 1 pound, press 2.

Yes, 1 UK SMS == 1 Mb of internet data.

W
T
F

disappointing new mac

Well my last mac died, as they do every now and then. So I activated my usual replacement behaviour: go to nearest mac store (in this case, Amac in Utrecht) and buy a new macbook.

Alas this new macbook started BSODing every few days, usually after a resume. So I took it back to the shop. They took it off for repair and diagnosed it with a faulty hard drive (?) and returned it after a week with a new HD.

Macbook still BSODs ever few days.

So back to the shop again. I thought maybe this time they'd give me a real replacement. No they want to take it off for repair again. I wonder if some dude has to sit in a room repeatedly suspending it and unsuspending it for a week to try to reproduce? Presumably it'll come back in a week with "cannot reproduce" and then it will continue crashing for me and then I will have to go argue with them lots?

This is a disappointingly slow and lame process which is not what I expected from either a Mac or from a Premium Reseller. grumble.