Most stuff that runs on XP also runs on Windows 7, however it generally does not run on other non-Microsoft operating systems. The cost of converting even one program to run on a different operating system would be vastly more than the cost of Windows 7.

Re: No different

If you are talking about iTunes, if you bought it from them, you can redownload it or stream it from iCloud or whatever it is called these days. So unless Apple agree to transfer ownership, you do still have it whatever the software does.

Not quite

It won't reduce advertising, what it might reduce is the sort of adverts that say "you looked at this pair of shoes in xyz shop and didn't buy them. Why don't you come back and buy them now?"

Re: Ironic really

Mostly descendants of people who came from Spain and Portugal.

Re: Ah christ

Mid quality print is 600 dpi in 2 (monochrome) or 16 different colours (for colour prints). These displays are > 300 dpi in many more colours than that so they are already better than high quality 1200 dpi prints.

Re: Sorry, but at the moment...

Yes banks are more trustworthy, which goes to show just how untrustworthy bitcoins and the exchanges built around them are.

Re: It's not too bad

Your fiver will be accepted at many bureax de change around the country, were they will exchange it for the green coloured bits of paper the retailers there prefer.

Re: 3% VAT

If you buy from a Luxembourg company, you pay Luxembourg VAT, not UK VAT.

Re: Tax

It does, because they pay Luxembourg VAT on ebooks, which is 5% rather than 20% over here.

Re: Told you so

That is likely a problem with your TV rather than the laptop. Try changing the input settings on the TV to "pc mode". Most TVs have this problem. Certainly I've had that problem with both LG and Panasonic TVs on my MacBook and an HP desktop, which have Nvidia graphics.

Re: One of them lies

Well where I am, the actual street names seem to all be in the right places.

It is just that there are now precisely two points of interest in the town - the train station and the Apple Store, and the satillite images look like a mossaic rather than an actual picture of the town.

With Google Maps, you could get directions to another part of town by bus, complete with bus times. That isn't available on Apple maps.

Re: Surely Android store is now the benchmark

There are more mobile phones in the world than toilets. In many countries, including the UK, there are more phones than people. So 1.35bn activations isn't necessarily more than 1/5 of the planet's population.

Re: Where the hell is it?

It is a Samsung shop, outside the main shopping centre bit, on the pathway towards the Olympic stadium. A bit like the Apple store upstairs, except selling Samsung gear, and nothing like as busy.

Re: TVL

My advice is to tell them that

1. You have revoked their implied right of access

2. Any further communication from them will be treated as harrassment.

Those are the two magic phrases that get them to go away

Re: Time for a new law

The Law Society requires a source code escrow for solicitor client account software, so it can be done.

Re: Reg online standards converter

About 2 chicken's eggs. Honestly, they really are nothing to write home about.

Re: OpenStreetMap

They are using TomTom apparently, not OpenStreetMap. Where I live, OpenStreetMap is considerably more reliable than Google. Apple's offering is considerably less reliable than Google. The Apple Store is in the right place, but that's about it.

Re: Relativity

On my Samsung phone, I can carry a spare fully charged battery in my bag, and swap it over in a couple of seconds. The longest part of the process is the reboot afterwards.

Re: I find the whole business very strange.

Anyone who cares about which browser they run would have visited www.google.com/chrome or www.firefox.com anyway without the need for prompting. Anyone who doesn't care, or is quite happy with IE, wouldn't have been annoyed by the stupid browser choice thing that they need to delete and wouldn't have noticed it wasn't there.

Re: I don't think I want the hassle of logging in to a phone...

Except it would be nice if Apple could use the same sized chip card as everyone else.

Re: Stupid

A Windows 8 tablet might work in the corporate market, because Android hasn't really established itself as the alternative to Apple yet, and having the same os as the desktop could have its attractions, but in the phone market, it is going to be very difficult to get application developers to support three or four platforms. In both the phone and tablet markets, there just isn't room for another single-vendor OS.

For the phone. market, HP should probably concentrate on the mobile worker market, handheld machines with barcode readers and optionally small thermal printers for people who need to collect data on the move -warehouse / stock control, delivery drivers, service engineers; that sort of thing. They have traditionally used Windows Mobile. Windows Phone doesn't really work for that model, but either Android or WebOS would, as the device will have one App which is custom developed for that business or sold off the shelf as part of a much bigger package.

Re: App vs Broswer

No, and I don't think you can do it with the iPhone YouTube app either. Certainly not the built in one, I haven't tried the Google one yet.

Re: @ auburnman

The advantage of Apps over web pages is that you only have to download the user interface once, and you can do this when you have a fast connection, such as home wifi. Then the app only needs to download the data, so when you are on the road and have a slow 3G or even 2G connection, it will be faster than using a web page.

For YouTube however, the data makes up the vast majority of the bandwidth requirements of the site, and it doesn't really make that much difference whether iPhone's native h.264 video player streams from YouTube via the YouTube app or via a web page in Safari.

Does anyone actually pay attention to the "do not track" header?

Re: Waste of my time

Well if we were to switch to driving on the other side of the road, it would need to be done overnight. You can't have some people driving on the left and some driving on the right. Maybe you could start with some islands that are connected to the mainland only by ferry, but otherwise, it would need to happen at a particular time, and if Northern Ireland were to switch, the Republic would need to switch on the same day as well.

Having said that, I don't really see the point of it. It would cost a lot of money to replace all the road signs, repaint the road markings and redesign junctions, with very little, if any benefit.

Re: Waste of my time

There were benefits to doing that. In Windows, what you see on the screen is what you might see on paper when you print it out. You don't need to stick a sheet of paper on your keyboard saying what all the function keys do. You don't have a completely different set of key-press sequences to do similar things (eg open and save files and text formatting) in Lotus. You don't have to install printer drivers separately for WordPerfect and Lotus123. You can run both at the same time and copy things between them. You can have both of them up on screen at the same time.

What are the benefits of running Windows 8? It is a bit faster than Windows 7, which is nice, but most computers can run Windows 7 plenty fast enough.

Re: It has already been said, but...

Those sorts of cookies are totally legal. The ones that are not legal are the ones that monitor the items you look at in shopping sites, and display adverts for them on your form pages.

Re: Cookies are vastly under recognised

Session cookies to remember that you have logged in are of course perfectly legal. A tick-box option to remember your login details next time you visit is fine as well, though to be sure it is legal you should probably add a short half line explanation that ticking this box will save the login details on your computer. People would chose not to tick this box if for example they were using someone else's computer, or they know that other people use their computer.

One example I noticed recently which is not OK:

I visited Staples website to look at some tables. It did not advise me it was depositing cookies on my computer. A little later, I visited the Telegraph website on the same computer. I got their flat-over saying they use cookies and assume I am happy with this unless I say otherwise. On the same page, there were ads for the Staples tables I was looking at earlier.

This was on a freshly installed computer that I was using for the first time since re-installation. I had been tracked without being given the opportunity to opt-out never mind being asked if I agreed to it. Imagine, if while I was in Tesco, someone came up to me, shoved a leaflet in front of my face, and told me that I was looking at this item in another shop earlier in the day, would I be interested in buying it. This is what these people are doing on the internet. It is not acceptable behaviour.

Re: Buy

It is not an e-ink display if that's what you mean. It is an android slab where you buy stuff from Amazon rather than the Google Play store, so I think it is in the same market segment as the iPad.

Re: A wonderful idea!

I'm guessing the solar cells will contribute towards the power requirements of the electrical systems on board meaning less demand for fuel. At cruising altitute, you are usually above the clouds, so it will work most of the time. At night, and in cloudy weather, it would revert to 100% generator powered.

Re: Google don't help themselves

Except they are not. You can fit a lot more on a 10" screen than on a 3" screen even if they both have the same number of pixels. iPad apps don't display an iPhone like interface in giant letters. Android apps may well do.

Re: It's only the tech minded

When people see my Samsung phone, they recognise it as "a Google Phone". They understand that the apps and other stuff can be purchased from the Google Play store rather than the iTunes store, and that manufacturers other than Samsung make phones like that.

Re: Not hard to get around...

It might be better to say that it has correspondence with your solicitor. They are not allowed to see that.

Re: Bitcoin

Buying Bitcoins is not illegal. Selling them might be (under the EU e-money directive). There are legal uses for them, such as admiring them on your computer screen or donating them to charity.

Re: 30 days?

That is one of the options get_iplayer offers, but flashhd, when available, is the best quality for downloading, and flashvhigh which is pretty much always available is also better than the iPhone version. They use rtmpdump which fools the server into thinking it is Adobe Flash and downloads the stuff that way.

Re: "content"? discontent

Most of the radio programs are available as podcasts, so you can download them that way. On an iDevice you would use iTunes to download them.

Re: On a plane?

You only need a TV licence to watch or save the live streams on iPlayer, not the on-demand stuff. These days, with the rewind feature, you don't have to wait too long before it is legal to watch without a licence.

Re: Price?

An AppleTV costs £99, and Apple don't don't have a reputation for being cheap. I am aware that you can't watch broadcast TV on it, and you can't do much more than watch stuff you have bought off iTunes, but nevertheless, Apple do tend to set the price ceiling in the markets they operate in.

Re: What am I missing?

It is indeed a desktop environment that runs on lots of different systems. However, if you want to run "Linux", the kernel on its own isn't much use. You need the GNU operating system and for desktop use, x.org or xfree86 and a desktop environment as well.

Re: Desktops

I'm not entirely sure choice is a good thing on an operating system. When a non-technical user installs a new operating system, they don't want to be asked anything more than language, time zone and network passwords. If they are asked which desktop environment they want to install, they aren't going to have a clue which one to pick and that's when you start getting support calls.

Re: Shock announcement...

Supposing you are a music band. People who "like" your band will receive updates about what gigs you are playing, and if you are playing near them, they might attend the gig. That is an example of where facebook advertising can work. Obviously it is very different to Google advertising where people search for a Ford Transit Van for example will get links to local van dealers and might buy the van from one of them.

Re: Not quite

Scots isn't part of the Celtic family of languages. It is very similar to English.

Re: Clerk

A software developer who wants to check that their product works on Windows 8 without inflicting it on the staff for everyday use.

Re: Cue Dame Stella Rimington

Because he is one of the officers assigned to the task?

Re: No way THAT could go wrong...

You can spoof headers to make it look like you are a proxy server for another destination. This apparently is good enough to fool iPlayer into allowing access from non-UK based computers. I haven't tried it as for me, a VPN connection back home is easier to set up, and has other benefits.

Re: It's a shame they don't just use networking...

I believe you can do that with an iPhone or iPod Touch, a MacBook and Keynote. I haven't tried it though.