Re: The real story is

Whenever you see an app being advertised, you always see the Apple App Store logo, you usually see the Google Play logo, you very rarely see the Blackberry Store logo and you almost never see the Windows Marketplace logo.

People don't write apps for Windows Phone because nobody buys the phones. People don't buy the phones because nobody writes apps for them. It is exactly the same network effect that works in Microsoft's favour in the desktop market working against them in the phone market.

Re: Nope...

If I post a comment somewhere saying, "Hey, check out this amazing article - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/23/gov_should_act_on_web_browsing_copyright_issue/" El Reg could possibly sue me for copyright infringement in their article, or maybe not. The issue is being argued in court at the moment.

Some people want the government to change the law to make it clear that such an act is legal. The government wants to wait to see what the outcome of the court case is.

Re: Word count

Word-count is an essential feature for journalists and students. For most other people, it is completely unnecessary.

Re: Apple Tax.. extra revenue

I have an oldish PC running OpenSuSE and the Netatalk service, and I can do time machine backups to it without any problems. I'm guessing your Netgear runs Busybox with the Netatalk service. Most network hard drives run Busybox, and if they have Netatalk as well as the more usual Samba, they will work.

Re: Erm...

The monitor is receiving a TV signal from the laptop, so go directly to jail.

An Apology

On dd/mm/yyyy we claimed that Samsung copied our iPad. This statement is incorrect. Sumsung did not copy

[list of features that iPad has and Galaxy Tab doesn']

In the Patent County Court in London, Judge [x] ruled that the iPad is much "cooler" than the Galaxy Tab.

We apologise to anyone who purchased the Galaxy Tax thinking they would get a copy of the iPad.

Re: Thats funny

They are registered with the Luxembourg FSA as an electronic money issuer. That isn't quite the same thing as a bank. They have some regulation, but not as much.

Re: Good for O2

They probably put mine in your envelope by mistake. Prince Philip might ask if their mailroom is staffed by Indians. I won't comment though.

Re: Why - Oh Why waste so much money when Open Office & LibreOffice are free?

Save it in MS Office format, and it will work in MS Office. Opening Office documents in LibreOffice might not work, but there is more chance of it working than there is of it working in a different version of MS Office.

Re: Who the frig cares? Browsers never made any money....

Have you seen how much money Mozilla gets for having Google as the default search engine? Browsers do make a lot of money.

Re: So that's why my browser disappeared!

It isn't illegal when the law requires them to do it.

Re: When BCS will be available for Apple iPhone/iPad?

Chrome is a skin for Safari. The only alternative browsers are Opera Mini and Skyfire which render pages on an external server.

Re: Please don't insult OS/2

I'm sure there are still some museum artefacts out there, but most cash machines these days run XP Embedded.

Re: So...

Office 2003 still works and you can still use it.

Re: Batteries glued to the case?

They replace the case as well as the battery.

Re: Now ask me why ...

Email exploits these days don't have infected code as an attachment or a script, they encourage you to visit a website that contains the payload. As a result, it makes no difference whether your email client is Outlook or an ASCII only client.

You can't get it apart safely - you end up with battery goo all over the place. That means when the battery goes, likely to be the first thing to go on it, you can't replace the battery, you have to get a new computer.

Re: Will have to buy a copy.

I tried Windows 8 on a Parallels VM on my Macbook. It is certainly faster than Windows 7 on the same hardware, and only slightly slower than XP, which is what I use most of the time.

However, two problems with Metro. First, you have to hunt through all the non-important stuff (eg. Canon Utilities which you run once to set up the printer, then never look at again) to find the progs you actually want to run. Second, if you run your VM in window mode, useful if you regularly switch between Mac and Windows progs, finding the exact pixel on the screen that activates the Metro UI isn't that easy.

Re: They're watching you - but how?

If the authorities want to know the location data for 07700 900 123, they can get that easily enough.

Getting location data for a pay as you go phone that has a strong correlation to the location data of a bank issued phone, and probably isn't on the same network, isn't so easy, if that is all the information you have to work with. And this is back in 2007-2008, and they probably don't keep the data for that long unless they were asked to at the time.

In Roman times, Egypt was a major producer of wheat. Now it is a desert, so we've always known it was a bit colder back then.

Re: It would be conjecture...but

Barclays had written lots of interest rate swap contracts. Higher interest rates meant they had to pay out more money on these contracts. The total value of the LIBOR swap market was around $300tn, and Barclays is one of the largest players in that market. Barclays weren't the only bank involved in this scam, there were other major players who also stood to benefit from it.

That brings us to the SME swaps scandal, where lots of small businesses were sold unsuitable swap contracts. For example the contracts went on for a lot longer than the duration of the loan they were insuring against. As a result of the LIBOR scandal these businesses had to pay out a lot more money to Barclays and other banks than they should have done, and quite a few went bust or had to downsize as a result, leading to redundancies and unemployment. That does affect Joe Public directly.

Turning to compensation. The entire GDP of the UK is $2.2tn, so 0.7% of the swap market paid as compensation would wipe that out completely.

Re: Puma redux

Because it is an incremental upgrade rather than a major new features upgrade, just like Snow Leopard.

Re: Hmmm..

Or you can just wait 2 minutes once you get home. Switch it on, take your coat and shoes off and it will be ready by the time you get back into the kitchen. That's why nobody is buying these things.

Anyone with a hotmail account already gets free Skydrive. Do you get more storage if you have Windows 8?

Re: fork !=war

The problem here is licence incompatibility meaning that people can't combine code from two different projects with different string copyleft licences. For example Linux can't offer support for ZFS because the licence that the free version of Solaris is released under is not compatible with the GPL.

Re: WiFi MAC database flaw

When I tether my iPod Touch to my Android phone the wifi location on my iPod is pretty accurate, even if I am on a train travelling along at 125mph.

Re: @Dave Bell

It doesn't have to be free wifi. It can pick up the location from WPA2 protected hotspots even if you don't know the password.

Re: "Or do you prosecute a bank robber for one crime if they've hit ten banks?"

If, for example, you have a burglar up before the magistrates court for one offence, and he is found guilty, he may tell the court he committed 100 other acts of burglary and ask for them to be taken into consideration. The reason he would do that is because the sentence for committing 100 burglaries is a lot less than 100x the sentence for committing 1 burglary. By pleading guilty to these other burglaries and being punished for them, it means he can't be prosecuted in future for them.

These people are guilty of 779,816 counts of unauthorised access to a computer system. English magistrates can only take into consideration the offences they committed in England, possibly Wales and maybe in limited circumstances Scotland and Northern Ireland if there was an English or Welsh link to the offence. They have no jurisdiction in any other country, and can't punish them for offences committed there.

Re: Out of cat5 range?

Or alternatively http://www.maplin.co.uk/cat-5e-network-cable-utp-solid-76

Of course using all 305 meters of it as a single length of cable isn't recommended.

Re: Sounds like an opportunity

We are talking about a table app that doesn't require a network connection to run, and if the kid needs it to talk to people, it probably isn't going to be used for anything else. The app costs $300, so it is a major investment, not an impulse purchase. If you support even just one model of android slab, that gives people exactly the same amount of choice that the had with the ipad app. A wifi slab would be perfectly fine, and the wifi is likely to be switched off most of the time to extend battery life.

They could even buy a load of slabs and sell them with the app pre-installed.

Re: Sounds like an opportunity

With Android, you don't have to distribute it on the Play store, you can sell it yourself, and email it, provide password protected access to a download site of whatever. Most Android devices support non-market installs and the company could provide a list of the slabs they support. People would buy that particular slab just to run the software on it.

Re: Just use a search engine.

Probably because if you want to know what happened in Scotland, or in Northern Ireland during the times they were responsible for extraditions, those records aren't held in Whitehall and you would need to ask the question in Hollyrood or Stormont rather than Westmister.

Re: Just out of curiosity...

Technically, they logged on to their Natwest Stockbroker accounts and sold their holdings of Enron shares before they went belly up, as a lot of people did. The Dept of Public Prosecutions here thought there was no case to answer, and I really don't understand what jurisdiction the US authorities have over the matter.

Re: Licensing payments for search

If it is anything like Mozilla, Google will pay Apple a % of the advertising revenue they get from iDevice users in return for making them the default search engine.

Re: Self-service checkouts

Back when XP was the latest and greatest, the ATMs used NT4. They use old versions of Windows because it means cheaper hardware, and also because most of the bugs and security holes have been fixed.

Re: Excellent Work by the Council

The powers that be are quite happy to have millions of cctv cameras everywhere to watch over us.

Why are they so concerned when we deploy a few of our cameras to watch over them?

Re: Blame the US - Yep

The foreign currupt practices act only bans bribing of foreigners. Bribing American politicians in the form of campaign contributions is perfectly legal.

The Bribery Act bans it everywhere, UK included. The first prosecution was against a magistrate's court clerk who accepted bribes for "forgetting" to log motoring offences on the DVLA database.

Re: Apple took out the Ethernet port

Your thin light laptop isn't so good if you have to carry round a bag of adapters to go with it. They may not be very heavy, but trying to find them is a pain.

Re: Ban lifted

It was the lead councillor who ordered the ban to be overturned.

Re: Quantity

There is an obesity crisis because the school dinners aren't sufficient to fill the kids up, so they supplement it with crisps and chocolate.

Re: Utter Disgrace...

Deep fried mars bars are about as easy to find in Scotland as frogs legs are in Paris. Everyone says they know someone who has seen one, but nobody actually has seen one themselves.

Re: A lesson in big business

As other's have said, the lesson isn't over yet. She had 2m visitors before the ban. How many hundreds of millions of new visitors will this ban generate. I hadn't head of it before today.

I've posted a comment on her blog suggesting that she gets round the ban by drawing pictures of the food, or by getting a friend who is good at art to do it for her. Other people have suggested the same thing.

Re: Good words

Or, given that they probably still have the same computers that they had when I was at school, BBC Basic.

I believe Windows 7 itself does, but a lot of the software written for it doesn't.