Unless this was some special partnership, then Facebook will have a contract with a clearly stated MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity).

If they cannot make that commitment to purchase from HTC the amount stated then HTC will charge them to get out of the contract. This will be broken down into costs for the handsets already produced and unsold, materials already bought and some additional fee for lost revenue on the rest.

In short, HTC will be okay (they'll even make a bit of profit, although not as much as if the phone had been a success) however it will be Facebook who will be left with one expensive bill.

(been there and, sadly, done that)

Google, Amazon and Apple are like those people who turn up to a "bring a bottle" party with a litre of supermarket own brand cola and then proceed to drink the Wyborowa vodka and Hendricks gin all night. They may upset a lot of people, but they've not technically broken any rules.

If governments feel that companies (that follow their rules) still manage to pay too little tax - then the onus should be on the government to change them. Anything else they do is just blowing hot air.

The US phone market is just going the way of the European phone market. You'll still be able to get a contract and subsidised handset if you want, but you can also get a SIM only deal and bring your own handset.

Not everyone can afford to drop £500 on a phone outright so there are many people who still go down the contract route.

The SIM only deals will be split into two. Either you top up the SIM at the beginning of the month and get a bunch of texts and data - or you can get a contract for your SIM which gives you a load of minutes, data and texts for a monthly fee.

Last time I had access to a network operators stats (4 years ago), customers on contract were about 51% of the total base. I wouldn't be surprised if SIM only is now the majority.

Yes and no... a few years ago when I got my first RFID card from Mastercard, I had to threaten to cancel the card if they didn't send me one without it. Two years later, when I got one from Visa, it was a 5 minute phone call and the new card (minus RFID) was in my inbox 3 days later.

A minor point, but one that people on Slashdot don't seem to understand, is that you don't actually get your cards from Visa or MasterCard at all.

They are payment processors and they pass payments from one bank to another. They ensure that the X banks in the world don't have to build connectiors to X-1 other banks just to let you buy something at a shop or online. Instead each bank just connects into Visa or MasterCard (or sometimes both) and then calls it a day.

The relationship you have is actually with your bank (in industry speak, your card issuer). They are the ones that decide what payment scheme to use and issue you a card for that scheme. They are also the ones that would decide whether or not to make available to you the option to have a non-contactless card. Visa and MasterCard have no say in what they give you.

Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

As the first poster said, -"Tech can be obvious but round corners can't?"

Worth noting that the practise of putting a proximity sensor in a touch screen phone to turn the screen off when you make a call was so obvious, not a single Windows Mobile phone launched by HTC, Samsung or Motorola in Europe prior to June 2007 had one.

When I read the title, I expected a calculation or rounding issue, or an internal range issue from built in components and not "dumb ass user didn't set the range correctly when averaging". That's not an Excel error, that's a user error - Excel did exactly what it was told to do.

Not to mention that if you use a reasonably recent version of Excel (at least 2003, which is nearly 10 years old), it'll warn you if you're doing something with a range of cells and it thinks you've missed a bunch of them out.

It's not perfect, but it's caught quite a few mistakes that I've made - which is far better than doing nothing.

When you make $40K/year, have a mortgage payment, maybe a kid or two, car loans, maybe student loans, having to pay anywhere from $70/month or higher for slow broadband is not high on ones priority.

If that's your situation, then I don't think it is too unreasonable to suggest that you shouldn't be considering purchasing a next-gen console - or even a previous-gen console.

Well there's your problem. if I had to call up my ISP every time I wanted to patch windows I'd be screwed.

Part of the problem also comes from the support model. If you have a problem with Windows or your Dell PC, you don't call your ISP and expect them to resolve it.

Yet in the phone world, if you have a problem with Android or your Samsung hardware you call Verizon/Sprint/etc.

The last two (European) carriers I worked for would have more than happily passed handset customer support to the OEMs but, unsurprisingly, they didn't want to take on the massive expense to do it.

Sorry just seen your reply and not much I can do to help I'm afraid. I know the pain about W7MC being derelict, I was hoping for great things with W8MC and nothing came.

One possible workaround would be to not set the HTPC to sleep when it's idle (since, for me, Remote Potato won't work when it's sleeping) and, instead get it to go to sleep at a fixed time, wake up at a fixed time (using a scheduled task) and then immediately reboot.

In my set-up, I have a task that runs at midnight which checks if nothing is recording and, if not, puts the computer to sleep. I then have a scheduled task that runs at 7am in the morning (so forcing the computer to wake up), waits 10 seconds and (if nothing is recording) reboots. I'm happy to share the scripts with you if you want, but I'm pretty sure you can work it out yourself.

This isn't quite as power efficient as your current set-up but ... the handshake issue will go, you'll have a stable platform (since W7MC seems to need a reboot to run okay) and you'll still have 6 hours (25% of the time) where the box is drawing very low power.

Might be better than nothing?

I'm tired of using Windows Media Center due to bugs and other problems, but since the channels are flagged it is the only option.

I'm reading at +4 and haven't really seen many possible solutions. How about looking at it another way ... what exactly are the "bugs and other problems" you're having?

Maybe we can resolve those so that you can continue to use WMC?

What if phones came in a range of shapes and sizes so you could choose the size that suited you.

Unfortunately this isn't quite so rosy when you find out that all the Android phones with screens under 4.2" are generally gimped.

Want a 4" Samsung phone that is more powerful than the Galaxy S3 Mini? No such luck.

Bruce Tognazzini (founder of the Apple Human Interface Group) has some pretty interesting ideas about what an Apple watch should do.

Personally, I'll stick with my (practically indestructible) G-Shock for sports and my mechanical watch for everything else. The latter doesn't need charging, looks great with a suit or casual clothes and I don't have to draw attention to myself when I take it out of my pocket, turn it to the correct orientation and press the power button to view the time - but I appreciate that my views will probably differ from the general Slashdot consensus.

I'd be interested to know how many people still wear a watch as anything more than a big piece of jewellery.

More than enough for Swatch group to report sales in 2012 totalling 8.14bn Swiss francs ($9bn; £5.6bn), up 14% from 2011.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20968837

Personally I have a watch because it is far more convenient, discrete and (in the case of some activities) safer to check the time by turning your wrist and glancing than it is to dig out your phone, orientate it the right way, press the power button and look down.

I wouldn't advocate big gaudy oversized watches, but there are plenty of midrange ones out there that look good with whatever style of clothes you are wearing (even a suit) and don't have to be charged every night to be useful.

Raise your hand if you're shocked, simply shocked.

Honestly? I'm surprised they didn't have more than 150.