Windwos always tries to show a demo video on new PCs doesn't it... maybe if you RTFM you wouldn't have to 'discover' these things.

Don't worry, I never watched it either :)

"Translation: we now realise the Win32 API is crap"

Hardly. It's just old and outdated. It was designed when Windows was for desktops only and simply doesn't reflect today's needs.

My God that's ugly

WOA has desktop but no desktop apps?

>>Devices running WOA will come with both a Metro touch-based interface and the more traditional desktop ... all other apps on WOA have to be Metro-style WinRT.

That seems a bit contradictory; you can access the traditional desktop but all the non-office apps will only be visible from the Metro desktop? Did I misunderstand?

I see no problem with lack of app compatibility between Intel/Arm... if you use WinRT you can simply build twice to the two targets in the same way we do for 32/64bit builds?

"People froth at the mouth about privacy, because it f*ing *does* matter."

Thinking the web owes, or provides, you privacy in the first place is incorrect IMHO.

Also, what business is it of pro-privacy advocates what <other people</i> do with their private? Seems rather hypocritical that they have an interest in it.

Aww it's cute

seeing the privacy zealots get all frothy at the mouth. "But... they're... stealing... your.... thoughts"

$25 isn't tiny

Google earns about $30bn/year and probably has 1bn users if not more.

profanity?

I never saw any in Reg articles before. Hardly offended by it, but is it appropriate in serious journalism?

If it's that hard to open, does that mean women will break their nails on it?

Web browser

Anyone know any specifics or got a link about this? The old one is horrible.

@Loyal Commenter

>>An atmosphere that is 200% - 400% oxygen?

What part of "lake" did you not understand

re: why is FLASH even still on teh interwebz?

If you read the article you'd have one reason - DRM and other content protection/licensing.

The other thing to remember is that streaming video is only one use of Flash... and in fact is only a tiny part of what Flash does. For instance Flash is the ONLY cross-browser way to do accelerated 3D rendering.

re:Am I missing something?

>>Just create the book normally and convert to the correct format for the store.

It's a fancy interactive format, so that might be tricky.... I was wondering how much of the functionality is lost by exporting to PDF actually.

Also, Apple could easily say you're only allowed to create iBook books in iBooks if they wanted to.

re: Privacy

Shared settings is not new and not even a Google thing. 3rd-party extensions/services have been doing it for years.

Turning it on doesn't let Google know more about you than they already do.

re:Easy takings for street robbers

Just like normal sunglasses then, which also cost £hundreds for designer brands.

"Seriously , what is it with GUI designers, can't they just leave well alone?"

What a great sentiment. We'd never have got the start button in the first place with that attitude. Maybe we wouldn't have even got SVGA GUIs in the first place - text-mode GUI is "good enough".

@JakeyC

Yes but there's a big difference between being shown by default content your laws don't allow, and deliberately finding a way to access that content by working around the system.

@Paul Shirley

I mis-spoke slightly. I know there IS a MAX_PATH (IIRC you often use it when creating a char-array before calling Win32 API methods), what I meant was I've never written or worked on software which has run into problems in this regard, and I've never heard other developers bitching about it causing them problems either.

I stand by the claim it's a fairly atypical usage that you need such long file-names. I suppose competent Windows developers write software for their OS, rather than running into these limits all the time.

Graham, EzJ

@EzK and the AC troll - if you want to turn our discussion into a personal attack, feel free to butt out.

@Graham - suggesting you use Linux isn't an attack, it's a serious suggestion... if you are writing a data management system that needs this, pick the right tool.

I still don't think you need all those long names in the first place though. Storing meta-data in the file-name is a bad design decision in my book (no pun intended). If you're writing a data-management system, the obvious solution is to use a database and decouple the file-name from the title.

Big Bang

Yes and theirs actually looked more believable (no idea if it's made up or real).

My main issue with the video is that she looks about 12 and he about 35. Presumably for the type of men buying this, that's an on-target advert?

@Graham

>>every single day the 254 limit causes me major hassles

Says it all. You're clearly some highly atypical user because I've never had this problem (I'm a software developer) and didn't even know the limit existed... implying I never heard anyone else complain either.

If you need to be able to tweak every aspect of your OS, just use linux.

Questions such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time"

How does this question relate to political views or homophobia/racism?

Are they simply equating "old fashioned" with "bigoted" because last I heard, the working Vs stay-at-home mum argument was still unsettled.

re:It's normally MS software that has security flaws

>>It's normally MS software that has security flaws (and big ones too, judging by the number of patches!)

No, MS put a lot more effort into finding and fixing bugs than most other companies. They also have far more people finding (deliberately or accidentally) bugs on their behalf. When was the last time anyone tried to find a way to take control of your PC through OpenOffice?!

Actual Tax?

So he's due to face a $billion tax bill for owning assets worth several $billion, or is El Reg playing a bit loose and means he'd face such a bill if he sold those shares?

@Ben Norris

>>Exactly what rule prevents a company plugging an xbox kinect into a pc and providing it as a solution?

I don't know if there is a rule, but MS are quite at liberty to do this. You might find that unlikely, but as someone who's worked in the games industry this is pretty normal. For instance when I worked on games in the PS2/XBox era, game-dev companies were not allowed to do their development on retail consoles, they had to buy special dev-kit versions costing £1000s. If they were found out using retail units, they could have their dev-license revoked.

Bloody hell

It's like playing poker and betting $100m

Is graphene the thing that's going to tip us over into The Singularity?

As a smartphone noob...

Would I be right to think the best thing to do would be buy one of these and then leave it in the box until an idiot-proof way to install ICS is nice and polished? Would ICS run properly on this - is it more bloaty than Android 2.x?

Eyes hurt

Yes me too.

How do I make and submit an app without having the tablet in the first place?

(real question, I never worked on mobile devices)

@drewc - thanks for the clarification. Definitely think if you're going to put someone "on probation" they should be told. Otherwise they might never even realise it's happening and figure pre-moderation is the norm.

Just the TV ads for FF make me want to retch. Terrible voice acting over some 'inspirational' woman singing.

Bit confused

I've seen some posts appear immediately and others go through moderation for a couple of weeks now. It appears my posts are still being moderated so either I'm on the naughty list or it's not been changed yet... if the former should I have been told about the posts that were naughty?

"coding for IE6 only is an intentional decision to increase support costs & is highly unethical"

I disagree. When IE6 was new, it offered some pretty cool (to a nerd) possibilities which were not available in other browsers, or or would require a lot more work when nobody would dream of not using IE in enterprise.

It's been too long to be authoritative but examples like interop with Excel spring to mind - being able to actually open Excel inside a web-page. I'm sure there are others too. Us coders love to use fancy new APIs that do "something cool".

And, @BigYin... grownups talking. Don't embarrass yourself talking about 'proper browsers'

Does the XBox version work with the official SDK?

Also if you're doing it for work, you have to follow the rules.

How come we don't get a Reg story every time a new version of Chrome is out? FF seems to be doing a major release every 6 weeks and making the same fuss as when it was every 6 months. If you're going to do such frequent releases, you need to stop telling us about them

Amazon probably had Steve Jobs' biography on pre-order since about 2007.

Cost of unit

All these "it costs $X" calculations; what do they actually cover?

- Do they just mean the cost of components?

- Do they mean components + labour to build?

- Do they cover parts, assembly and packaging?

- Do they cover manufacturing, packing and worldwide shipping Phones4U?

And then, what about the cost of research, prototyping, testing, QA, documentation, legal, blah blah blah.

Saying "they make $300 on each unit" or "their margin is 80%" is meaningless without knowing their upfront costs and ongoing costs (like marketing).

A faster processor, you say. Well, that's a shocker.

re: Cost

That assumes that hitting things _other_ than your target _doesn't_ incur a cost. And that they're always shooting at targets they _can_ hit using regular bullets.

Serious question

If you want a desktop widget, IS there an open-source, cross-platform option? Remember, specifically a widget you can put on your desktop, not a web-page... unless all 3 main OS let you easily create a widget from a webpage?

I wonder if AIR will go open-source the same way as Flex did?

Do you think there's a market...

for someone to buy Fires, root them, and re-sell with a small markup? Similar to how you (used to?) get people with "SIM unlocking" stands at the market?

@James Hughes 1

Tempting as it is to equate Linux users with the disabled, that's a bogus argument because Linux users CHOSE to use Linux, knowing full well that Linux support never has been high on anybody's list for the desktop market.

And I think your figure of 5% is as made up as his 1% is.

If KindleTab doesn't have the proper Android market (AFAIK) does this mean the figures are only picking up hacked tablets? I assume not, what did I miss?