IO ports. The Beeb had millions of them, and they were used in education too. At school I wrote programs for light-sensing diodes for instance, which were just plugged straight in.

I have a BBC emulator and it's good. It truly isn't the same thing as using the real hardware though - even simple stuff like the feel of the keyboard. I have vice64 and use it to emulator the C64, but I also have a real C64 sat in my retro-cupboard all set up and ready to go. That cupboard contains a monitor/TV, C64 with 1541 snaildrive; datasette and Commodore mouse; a Gamecube and then baby-of-the-bunch Wii. Of those the Gamecube and Wii are most easily replaceable in feel since they were operated entirely through controllers, and so long as you still use the controllers a full-screen emulator will give you pretty much the same experience. The C64 emulator will not, purely down to things like key layout, keyboard feel, SID bugs making each chip unique etc.. A BBC emulator won't give you the same feel either. Both will do well, but it's not the same.

Cool, and thanks! I shall contact the local Ferrari dealer immediately...

So am I. I'm very sorry that a man who wrote the music for films of my childhood and made the sci-fi and fantasy come alive, has gone. Battle Beyond The Stars, Krull, Star Trek II - as a kid in the 80s these were all exciting and thrilling things to me. They helped create a love of music in me too, something I have continued to adulhood and now write my own music as well.

Yes, it is news that matters for nerds.

I deliberately didn't in case seen as spam but - here you go. Am currently in the "difficult second album" phase - all written, not quite satisfied with the production.

So here's an interesting one. I am a musician in my spare time, and I have an album up on iTunes. It's a good job my life's income doesn't depend on this - we are talking tiny sums of money made, but it is my album and it's an achievement for me to have an album out there and hey - there are people that like it.

I have no idea if this album is included in streaming or not. I'm not signed to a label, and nobody has asked me if I want to be included or excluded. I would have thought, given the talk of "pulling the album" etc. that there must be a separate agreement I should have to make but I haven't seen anything at all about it.

The music was published via an intermediary, Ditto Music, but they're just a publishing service and not a label. In fact, I own the label it was published under and that is the label's sole release to date. What's the situation for musicians like me? Included, excluded, paid, unpaid...?

" However, if Disney would actually give it to a good director and writers and take it darker..."

No. No. No.

Enough with the silly darker trend. Have you actuallyseen the original Tron? You know with the talking silly Bit in it? It's adventure certainly, but it's not dark. Tron 2 went more philosophical and arguably darker as well, and I happen to really like the film, but I would argue that's also part of what killed it.

Everyone time I hear of a reboot it's "we'll take the original and make it grittier", or "we'll take the original and make it darker", or sometimes we're treated to both gritter and darker at the same time. Bah. Enough of this - it's an adolescant's version of what makes a grown-up film. Give me varied films with a mix of emotions in them please. Relentless dark and misery is not what I want to be offered all of the time.

There's some speculation here regarding the difference. True it's speculation so worth what you paid for it, but it is at least reasonably informed speculation. Seems it may well be about accomodating his desire to move back to the UK, or at least spend more time there.

The reason so little went wrong is because people spent ages testing and upgrading/fixing beforehand. Had we left it all to 1st Jan 2000 there would have been issues,

It annoys me to see Y2K trotted out time and time again as a non-event. It was a very big event, and by the large part it was very successfully handled.

This sounds a lot like Gatekeeper on the Mac, which works really well. It allows the user several levels of trust - "trust store apps only", "trust store apps plus recognised developers" (certificate signed), "allow everything".

I have mine set to "store apps plus recognised developers" and ask for the rest. If I run something else, I can right click and select Open..., it asks me if I'm sure and I say yes. This is a five second operation which gives me control over my options, whilst preventing unknown apps from running without my knowledge and explicit say so. This Windows one sounds pretty much the same, with the addition of your classic enterprise lock down features - it it's a corporately-owned machine, then yes the corporate should get say over what's running on it.

Imagine the kind of download-happy, click-on-everything user that we've all seen around. They would download cunningly-disguised-malware.exe and try to run it, and the OS would simply prevent them. Now true if they had admin rights they could go into preferences, set to allow everything etc. but it's all more effort and a quick realisation that something's unusual here.

Nope, I regard this as a good move. It already exists in OS X and works well - putting a similar system into Windows seems like a good idea to me.

Genuine question as I have no expertise in this whatsoever...would crafted contact lenses help out here?

It seems to be limited to certain products. If I could pick the product myself, I'd like this. For instance I always forget to order water softener salt until it's too late for instance - would be nice to just stick this on the water so I can press as I'm loading the last of the salt in. As far as problems go it's true that world poverty is probably the greater issue facing humanity, but it's equally true that this is a nice bit of fluff that if works as advertised could well be handy.

You understand that the release of the latest iPhone generations produced the highest rate switchers away from Android and over to the iPhone, right?

I don't mind the debate - I've had an iPhone since the 3GS but was and am seriously looking at switching away for various reasons. The debate should be based on fact though, and the facts are that Apple doesn't have a dearth of people moving off other platforms and over to its own.

A lot of Java->C# comments around and comments about Playstation, but I'm more concerned whether the Mac version would continue. Am also interested in whether my all-updates-for-life deal that I got by buying early into the beta (for..err...$7.95 I think) will continue.

Missing from most of the articles on this, including the ones on their web site, is that they used to employ a senior Microsoft media guy who, unsurprisingly, set about converting everything to Microsoft Media formats - Ashley Highfield. Here's a 2007 article with a section of the controversy

BBC used to have one of the more progressive approaches to media with early mp3 streams, Dirac codec research...it then just stopped. Nice to see them get back towards the rest of the world - next step, please go HTML 5 video on the site as well and then we can avoid Flash.

It's an in-joke. It's based on the old 1980s BBC Micro naming convention, which the Pi people were also involved in.