I am furious about it not being able to be upgraded to Windows Phone 8

Why? How do you know you'd even want W8 on your phone?

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

Because Office (well 2007/2010) are BETTER. I've tried using free versions and they're OK, but not as good.

Cue about a zillion downvotes for daring to have an opinion people don't agree with.

It took me three years to work out the ribbon

I really don't think you should boast about that.

Re: !!! Anecdotal Alert !!!

People are still writing apps for the iPhone 3GS and Android 2.x. So what's the big deal?

Note also that not everyone buys a smartphone for apps; I didn't.

Re: But will Windows Phone 8 owners be left out in the cold when Windows Phone 9 ships.

If people who bought W7 phones are stupid then nearly all Android users are stupid because most are still on 2.x and will be forever.

This whole "it's useless if you don't get the next OS" argument is ludicrous.

Re: When money is not enough

I think you're missing the point - artists are complaining Spotify take nearly all the money and don't pass it on. If Spotify took 30% like Apple do and £7 of you monthly £10 went to the artists then that'd be just fine.

She earned $281.87 for a single recording session probably lasting a couple of hours.

And how much do you think it costs to hire a proper recording studio for a couple of hours?

Re: How come

A handful of plays on BBC3 would earn her that much. Radio and download may be different, but if people are paying to use Spotify the artists should get their fair cut because users think by paying for a subscription they are supporting the artist and therefore don't need to buy an album.

Well if you mean generic wireless communication it counts.

Re: Moral of the story...

Yawn. If you're so scared of the internet maybe you'd better stay away from it.

Your bank, utility companies, local council, etc all have your intimate personal data and have done for years. Telling people not to put data on the web if they want it to be private is just burying your head in the sand... the data is already out there waiting to be leaked even if you join the cool kids who laugh at facebook and only access the web via proxies. I guess you don't use phone or email either in case they record and leak your conversations.

There's being sensible - making sure your data can only be seen IF it's leaked rather than because you didn't RTFM - and there's being paranoid.

Re: Excellent Idea

I had one two on a little breadboard. Then we built an electric shock machine instead but it was too painful with a single AA battery so I got scared!

Re: Egg Meet Face

I'd use W7 over OSX any day - I DO run both. I never ran a graphical version of Linux to compare.

Re: New fangled Microsoft strategy...

If they know a threat is already out there or will be out there before they can test a fix to the insanely high levels of QA such things need, this is the sensible thing to tell people.

Re: Moral of the story...

I think you'll find you're living in the dark ages. You're the kind of person who born 50 years earlier would be the pensioner who keeps their savings hidden in a pot in the garden.

Re: Unlike, say, religion?

Teaching people to love each other is "tearing down what's right"? In modern culture - probably.

If you don't like looking at porn, then DON'T LOOK AT PORN.

If you don't like looking at grannies being beaten up, don't look at it. There's such a thing as not believing the whole world revolves around you and your desires.

Re: Not surprised

Thanks for your random rant that has absolutely nothing to do with this story.

Re: Shooting themselves in the foot

Find something which lets you do this, like Action Pack. Or, get more appropriate clients who don't expect a lone developer to be running a cluster... that kind of work should bring in enough money to afford proper licenses :)

Where in the story does it say you won't be able to continue what you're doing anyway - does it definitely claim that?

@Mr Torx

How exactly do you know that Linux doesn't have many of the same issues? We only know Windows has them because people looked for them.

And AutoRun is a good feature. Linux users don't agree using a PC should be easy though.

Re: This at first looks like a good idea

Of course there is accountability. Their party can fire them. You can vote them out in a local election. You can vote the whole party out.

Well it sounds like v15 is the first version to get some major new features for years... lots of swanky online collaboration stuff mainly. Which might actually be useful, with remote working getting more prevalent.

Re: is it shit or is it good? is it shit or is it good?

" I doubt any of the people parroting this rubbish even used the versions they're talking about. 3.1 and earlier is basically just a GUI for DOS; 95, 98 and Me were all more or less all as shit as each other"

As someone who has been using since DOS3.3, you're talking junk. 95/98/ME have big differences and ME is definitely inferior. Wasn't 98 crap until SE came out, at which point it was the best pre-XP version?

Re: is it shit or is it good? is it shit or is it good?

>>Windows 8 = Really Windows 7 crippled to look like a phone. Steaming pool of diarrhoea

Don't let the facts get in the way of all those funny jokes Tom, they're hilarious.

I reckon my plasma 'boots' faster than a CRT. Certainly if you include time for a CRT to properly 'warm up'

Re: Surface apps

Loads of professional apps cost £10+, in fact cost is basically proportional to app-complexity / size-of-userbase.

Its all about pushing folks to buy Metro Apps.

No it really isn't. That is a fringe benefit.

Re: What a magnanimous

"What a magnanimous business Facebook is.

Get moving or lose it, and oh there is a reasonable alternative.

I want my money and time back thank you."

Obviously you checked the T&Cs when signing up?

They are fighting laws that actively make being gay illegal, or legally allow/encourage discrimination. The UK does not have such laws, just as we have laws promoting gender equality... how people treat each other is a separate matter once the legal issues have been resolved.

Re: Religious bigotry

"I know quite a lot of Christians, the number I know who are "anti-gay" is vanishingly small."

Since the definition of "a Christian" is not very strict, this doesn't mean much. I AM a Christian and the majority of people in my church hold to the 'old fashioned' view that same-sex relationships are wrong. However I don't necessarily equate that with being anti-gay - there is a massive difference between disapproving of what a person does, and who they are.

Re: prescrption glasses

Why can't the display automatically de-focus the image exactly the right amount through a virtual lens?

Now THAT would be a good patent to own.

Re: view the real world with a brighter, friendlier glow.

Not really. £3 a pint, that will add up to £1000s quite quickly.

Though I bet the glasses might lead to as many headaches.

Re: Religious bigotry

Come on, you're biting the bait from an obvious troll and you can't do better than throwing in the lame "imaginary friend" ad absurdium argument?

What exactly is "promotion of homosexuality"? I have a weird image of people handing out "turn gay, it's great!" pamphlets...

Re: All very well...

I find it a bit weird a corporation is lobbying on local (in the international sense) politics. Do they really care, or are they doing it as a PR stunt?

use Google+ instead

The perfect social network for people with no friends, I can see why it's popular amongst IT geeks.

Re: Massive fail.....

When I met some FB people at a recruitment event, they boasted about how "changes you make today could be being used by millions of people tomorrow".

Re: Another particle =

You don't understand the very nature of the science Vs religion discussion if you think that way.

Re: Higgs is a cannonball and it just hit

Given that many physicists assumed Higgs existed, or at least built theories around its theoretical existence, and none of them have explained why the universe happened, finding Higgs does exist doesn't mean squat in the [non existent but perpetual] argument between science and religion.

I wonder if it can be scientifically proven that science can't explain WHY things are how they are. It would be a lovely circular field of study :)

without quantum theory your computer would not work

Quantum theory we understood when building them, or quantum theory we discovered afterwards? Considering you can build a mechanic computer, or one using very simple school-level electronics, I think you're the one who is wrong. Electrical components might behave in a certain way due to quantum effects but that doesn't mean they were created/invented based on an understanding of those effects... often we invent something by discovering a certain behaviour without knowing why.

Pi IDE

I am a bit surprised that Pi can't do an IDE. It may be far below modern standards (I assumed it would be on par with a PIII 700 rather than a PII 300 but either way), but it was not so very long ago we were using 300MHz PII with 256Mb RAM as desktop PCs - I worked with Visual C++ 6, Borland JBuilder and MS Office on such PCs as did everyone else, probably only a decade ago. And those PCs had nothing in the way of GPU acceleration at all.

And with Linux being so much faster than Windows (semi serious Linux barb) that should make it usable as a low-power PC. If not why not?