Oh, you!

You nearly got me...

What a bunch of houzi de pegu

I've only. just started playing with Win8. But my initial reaction has been the same as when I first tried WinPho7: "what the (bleep) were they thinking".

Well thanks to Mr Turner at least I know. They're not thinking.

What a load of marketing-fluff rubbish. Looks like the 'skip every other version' maxim will hold true.

About bloomin' time.

Here we are in the year 2012, and nary a moonbase to be seen! Sci-fi writes throughout the 20th Century must've been tutting over mankind's sluggishness in this oft-predicted area.

Hummph

I'm fairly sure Mr Jobs, whatever failings he may have had, was at least literate.

The salary seems rather low. Considering they seem to be asking for a PA, academic assistant, support technician (on critical and bespoke electronic, digital and electric systems) and automotive engineer all rolled into one!

I guess they're hoping that someone will want to do it for the chance to work with a brilliant and celebrated physicist.

"don the famed batsuit and blubber heroic cheese incoherently for two hours or so"

Well said! I was thinking I was the only one that didn't really get the appeal of batman. I saw 'the dark knight' at t'cinema, and thought it was a well-made enough film, but nothing really special.

What pretentious rubbish.

"I'm a different and unique rebel" - spoken in chorus by one million iPhone owners.

Mr Wozniak is so proud of his 'counterculture' culture, that he does the same as so many other fashionistas and fails to see that all he's doing is conforming to another standard.

Having structure, discipline or a corporate dress standard doesn't stifle creativity any more than the act of wearing a t-shirt enhances it. Idiotic.

Joining the herd...

I clicked comment to say this, but I see others beat me to it: Rainbow Islands was good, but Bubble Bobble was better. Even if only for that insanely catchy music!

They missed a trick there.

They were trying to think of an animal whose name began with P, to name a linux distribution, and they only managed 'pangolin'?

Surely it should've been "Perceptive Polar-bear"!

Good review. I was quite impressed myself. It's an interesting mix of the familiar MMO elements, and some strong story-based gameplay.

Though I have to disagree about the controls: I found them awful. As a reasonably seasoned PC gamer, I'm use to the ol' "WASD to move/strafe, mouse to look" combination that has worked well for so many games. But SWOTOR ditches this in favour of using W/S to move, A/D to turn, and Q/E to strafe. The only way to aim with the mouse is by holding down RMB, something which sounds small but had my hand cramping after a while of constantly holding down the button. So I spent most of my game running around facing slightly the wrong way.

It sounds like I'm making a big deal of this, but for me it was the only thing that spoiled the game. 'Steering' with the keys feels very clunky and inaccurate, it was reminiscent of playing Doom (surely a classic, but not right for a modern game). It was a jarring experience, I could only feel immersed by imagining that my character had some sort of deficiency that kept him from being able to face the right way!

I can understand why the makers would want to distance themselves from 'normal' PC games, because it is in many ways not a normal game. But it'd be nice at least to have the option to control our characters in a way that works.

Engage grumpy old man mode.

I liked the fact that Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace (to a lesser extent) eschewed the traits of earlier films. Gone were Q and the silly gadgets. Gone was the slapstick and the wise-cracking 007. I liked these because I really like the books, and the first two films were a lot closer to those classics.

I just hope them having cast a Q doesn't signal a return to the cheesy Moore-day bond films.

Even without the Facebook 'app', most HTC android phones can still post status updates directly from the home screen, show friends' updates in a scrollable feed, and upload pictures directly from the camera.

How much more intregrated could it get? Unless of course, as some have suggested, it will automatically tell all your facebook friends where you are and what you're doing. Perhaps it will automatically poke any other facebook phones you pass? This could be scary indeed...

Meh

"Ultrabooks". This seems to me to be such an unnecessary new buzzword. As far as I can tell, it means "laptop designed out of macbook air envy".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a mac fanboy deriding such imitation. I just think it's stupid to try and foist a new buzzword onto the already saturated laptop market.

*sigh*

"From the pen of Doug Naylor".

So like Series 7 and 8 then. And like the abysmal Corrie crossover special?

And not at all like series 1 - 6, which were actually good?

I am probably just a fanboy. But for me, once Rob Grant left the writing team, the show was over. You've only got to read his and Naylor's separate novels to see which was the one with the comedic talent.

Can't they just leave my fond memories of the early, funny, Red Dwarf, alone?

Although of course you can already play Angry Birds on your PC/Mac. If you're using Chrome, you can download an in-browser version for free.

I wonder if this freebie will disappear once it goes retail?

Strange...

At the start of this review I saw the score, and the bold statement that WP7 is now better than Android, and I thought that maybe my view of WP7 could be wrong. This is a view that was formed from my experience with test handsets by HTC back when the OS was first released, and is in essence that the OS is clunky, confusing and inflexible. I've not read anything since then to change that view.

However there were so many little irksome points mentioned throughout the review that I wonder at how such a high score was arrived? For most of those niggles I found myself thinking "well, that doesn't happen" or "you can change that behaviour" in comparison with Android. Or even with IOS in some cases.

The review gives me the impression that progress has been made, but it still doesn't inspire me to change my disinclination to recommend WP7 to anyone, technical or not. As so often seems to be the case with Microsoft products: I think I'll wait for the next service pack.

XFCE is a very nice desktop.

I've been using it for a while. I started with Xubuntu on my first laptot, which worked nicely on the small, 800x480 screen. I stuck with it on my main laptop because it always felt faster than Gnome or KDE. Since Unity was introduced I've swapped my desktop to Xubuntu, too.

Hoorah!

A fine tribute to an excellent game.

No need for car-boot sales, I still have my old A600. Well, somewhere. I'm sure it'd look great on a modern HDTV. And I'm sure I've got a copy of the DOS version kicking around too.

Also I think mention should be made of the music. Amiga 8-bit synth-y versions of various classical or well-known ditties. They would inevitably get stuck in your head after an extended session of lemming-directing.

"from randoms"?! What are you, a 17-year-old girl?

From Merriam-Webster. Random (n): a haphazard course.

This is a word in modern misuse that annoys me particularly. Random as an adjective should by rights means statistically so, chosen by a random-number-generator. A person may be odd, eclectic, surprising or just plain weird. They cannot be 'random'. They cannot be 'a random'. The English language is full of wonderful and varied words (which El Reg are normally quite good at employing). Why not use one of these, rather than forcing a word to do their job just because it's popular?

Language rant over.

Good stuff. I'm looking forward to my copy arriving.

This review raises a good point. I think it's perfectly alright for this game to re-tread well-trodden ground, if it's doing it so well. The question is of course when this stops becoming acceptable?

It's a completely different medium, but the general public, and me certainly, seem to be tiring of cinema's endless repeats, re-imaginings and (as the hateful term goes) 'reboots'.

When might this happen for games? Or specifically, this series?

Agreed

There are very many things in this world of which we should get rid, and software patents (or perhaps, the vague and litigation-inviting patents that seem to exist) are comparatively high up the list.

I'll add my voice to the clamour of "well then I won't buy any music". I think I bought one MP3 track from amazon, once. But apart from that, all my music comes on CD.

There's just no replacing the tangibility, or the tantalisingly interesting look of a shelf of CDs. But then, I bet similar things were said by vinyl fans in response to predictions of that medium's death. Enthusiasts might've decried CD (or perhaps, tape) for its lacking the warm, rich, sometimes scratchy sound of a record. And of course vinyl is still, in a smaller way, with us.

The thing that strikes me though is that CDs have special value as a complement to a live performance. Every gig I've ever been to has had a merchandise stall. And they can't really sell downloads there, can they? Not to mention up-and-coming bands who may be able to strike a deal for a studio session, and a CD production run: for to flog from the back of a van in the pub car park after their gigs. I doubt many of these will see uploading their work to the itunes store, for a meagre pecentage of the pence per track it's sold for, as a good alternative.

And finally of course many CD purchases are made for gifting. It really wouldn't be the same to unwrap the paper and find a plastic gift card for an online download in there.

No I think there will always be a place for physical media. And since CD is so prevalent, and so widely accepted as a good format, why change it?

Unbelievable.

Contract or no, the crux of this is whether or not the facebook posts were private. I personally don't think that the fact that a so-called friend can repeat something makes it public. And therefore I don't see how a work contract can apply to it.

Another nail in the coffin of privacy, surely.

"It is not possible that GTA V is digital download only, ZERO probability."

Those sound remarkably like words that will come to be eaten...

I'm looking forward to the game. I think the series has generally gone from strength to strength.

Good stuff.

Minecraft is an amazing gaming accomplishment. I'm not sure it's fair to rank it alongside Portal 2, though. They are both excellent games, but you get very different experiences out of them.

Also:

"a bleak satire on everyman's need to compensate for the unprepossessing nature of his organs of generation?"

That made me laugh out loud. Nicely put!

TL;DR for the Windows XP bit:

XP started out a bit ropey, got better, everyone liked it. Vista was a bag of spanners so no-one bothered with it.

Not very well done

I signed up for this a few weeks ago, and ticked all the 'send me info' boxes. I don't know anyone, myself, who is "not online". But I'm happy to donate my time if there's someone in my local area I could help.

But I've heard nothing at all from them. I suppose I could put up some flyers around the area, prostituting-- er, I mean offering for hire, my tech-training services. But I could've done this anyway, so why did I sign to be (as they cringe-inducingly labeled me upon registration) a 'digital champion' with this campaign?

My prediction.

I reckon the 'star trek' rule will come to apply to windows versions. That is; every (in this case) odd-numered sequel will be rubbish.

Win2K was good, then there was the OS-who-must-not-be-named, WinME. XP, as we know, bounced back and was great. Then came Vista, rightly-maligned. Windows 7 turned out to be alright, so following the pattern W8 will surely be a steaming pile of... code.

Attention-seeking trolling from a raving paranoid.

I'm no apple fanboi. I own a macbook, though I bought it cheap, repaired it and now it runs linux (I can't afford a new mac but I do like their build quality!) I own an ipod, because it happens to the best best music player in my (admittedly not vast) experience.

But this kind of apple-bashing that you see so often smacks of nerd jealousy of the cool kids. It's like someone standing outside a party shouting "you're not experiencing freedom when you're cooped up indoors!" They're completely missing the point.

Yes, the apple environment is locked-in. Yes it restricts technical 'freedom'. But it also offers a great computing experience. How many of the mac owners that Stallman is trying to 'defend' really care if their computer has restrictive licensing built-in? So long as it works, so long as they can get on the web, listen to music, download photos from their cameras etc. Why should they worry? Is it really impacting on their freedom if they can do everything they want to with their computer? I don't like the iphone personally because I find its interface very limited, but a lot of people don't care about such things and just want a smartphone that works and is easy to use. Who am I, or who is Stallman, to say they are wrong?

People like Stallman are too bogged down with the technical side of things, with the minutiae of 'what people should be able to do' that he doesn't realise that most people don't care about doing these things. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, knew all about what the average user wants, and how to give them a good experience; and he built a company around products focused on user experience.

I miss the El Reg tombstone icon.

Because these kind of sourly-written rants, masquerading as articles, do make me want to never visit again etc...

Not that I'll follow through with that. You know you've got me addicted.

Not sure about that.

"Once this hits the charts, radio stations will by law have to play it"

Radio 1, for example, doesn't play everything that's in the chart. Even on the chart show. I thought it was a producer's prerogative to play, or not play, a song.

Maybe it's different in the other countries?

Hmmmm

Does anyone else remember Sim City 2000? I'm thinking specifically of the satellite power stations, and the disaster that could occur if they failed and the beam of energy from space went astray, carving a fiery path through your city.

Well that was what first sprang to my mind. Pic: obvious.

But why...

Why bother debating about an unrelated biological issue, if we don't yet have the technology to propel the spaceship?

How do we know the technological advances that would solve the propulsion problem won't also help solve the other problems too?

Good article.

Though I must dispute the assertion: "[Amazon] know who you are. Google doesn't."

Through my Android 'phone and my frequent use of Google Mail, Maps, Calendar and Reader: Google knows who I am, what I'm interested in, who my friends are, what I'm doing tonight, where I've been and they could even give you a pretty good idea of where I am right now. Amazon may know what I'm buying, but the receipts all get e-mailed to: guess where? And if Google plus ever takes over in popularity from Facebook they'll know even more about me.

It scares me when I think about it. So I try not to. Pass me some more of that digital valium please!

Hmmmm

Given the legendary standard of most Doctor's handwriting, this should be an interesting challenge for the manufacturers of digital pens.

Also: a new NHS IT project! Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, on how long before this will be scrapped and how much money it will waste in the process.

My bet: 6 months, £3.2 million.