My kids have Windows Live Family Safety installed on the PC that they have access to; I can remotely deny or allow access to websites and check their browsing behaviour no matter if they're using IE, FireFox or Chrome. I can even use it to restrict how much time they're spending playing games - although their machine is in the front room where both my wife and I can see what they're up to - and all Messenger friend requests have to be vetted by me.

It's not that I don't trust my kids - I do - but I don't trust the wider internet, and they're simply too young to be given unfettered access.

Apologies for replying to my own post, but the more I think about it something else occurs to me:

Back in my ZX Spectrum / BBC Micro gaming days, the availability of games was lower than it is now; I remember playing games to death simply because I'd spent the time and effort going down to my local WHSmith and forking over the £10.00 for a cassette. The other factor was the time and effort required simply to play the damn things; remember how long it took to actually load the game into your home micro from tape? Fiddling around with the head because the damn thing would fail to load after 10 minutes of waiting?

Nowadays, gaming is so instant and available that there isn't the compulsion to stick at a single game and see it through to completion

I can't speak for anyone else, but the main reason why I rarely complete games these days is 'Real Life'; much as my disposable income has disappeared with the arrival of children, so has my disposable time. Years ago I could fritter away hours at a stretch playing Civilisation, but no more. It's very rare that a game comes along these days that I can muster the enthusiasm for to invest time and effort in to complete.

The last game that I played through from beginning to end was "Enslaved: Oddesey To The West", which was an almost perfect title for me; the overall length of the game was quite short (the whole thing was completed over a couple of evenings), the learning curve for the controls was slight and it had a character-led story that I actually wanted to see through to the end. Generally though the sequence goes something like:

• Purchase new game and play for a few evenings when time permits
• Real Life gets in the way and game is not booted for a few weeks
• Arcane control system needs to be relearned
• Plot has become lost in the mists of time
• Cannot be bothered to retrain muscle memory / relearn the plot (such that it is), so game goes back on the shelf

GTA IV is sitting on my hard drive, barely touched - I liked what I played, but I just don't have the time to spend on it. Likewise Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect 2, Arkham Asylum and so on. It took me at least three attempts to finish Bioshock (and I'm really glad that I did), but that's one of the few exceptions. Nowadays I'm finding myself playing more and more 'casual' games (Cut The Rope, Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies mostly) rather than 'serious' titles - maybe after the kids leave home and before arthritis fuses my hands into impossible shapes I'll get time to play properly again.

Ditto; I absolutely loathe iTunes. When I got given an iPod Touch for my 40th a couple of months ago, I installed iTunes in a VirtualBox XP instance so I could activate the iPod without having it installing all its crud in my primary OS. Personally I use the dopisp plugin for Windows Media Player which works beautifully. I might consider trying iTunes again if it ever supported automatic folder monitoring properly as WMP does; all my music is on a shared folder on my network, and any changes are replicated in WMP almost immediately, but iTunes has no such facility.

I could be wrong, but I don't think .NET/Mono is relevant here - both the C# Language and the Common Language Runtime are ECMA standards. Whereas Sun did indeed open-source the Java language, but the runtime remained completely under their control and if I've understood the complaint from Oracle correctly they are attempting to go for Google on the basis of the Dalvik VM. As I say though, I could be completely wrong about this ;)

That's not the same thing at all; if you had installed Firefox through Microsoft's own (imaginary) application store, and it was pulled because of a hypothetical catastrophic security flaw, and the terms and conditions of the (imaginary) application store specifically stated that Microsoft had the right to this, then yes it would be the same thing.

The only applications that Google can remotely pull from an Android device are applications that were installed via the Android Market. Applications that are installed via alternate application stores or directly via an .apk on the device are out of Google's control.

Crap, I buggered up the app store links:

• SlideMe
• AndAppStore

Just to clarify; Google nuked two applications that had been distributed via Android Market, which they explicitly reserve the right to do via their Terms Of Service (see section 2.4).

However, if you don't like these terms there is nothing that stops you from downloading applications from alternative sources and installing them on your Android device - there are a number of alternate Android application stores like SlideMe and AndAppStore for example, not to mention downloading .apk files directly to your phone and installing that way bypassing Android Market altogether.

Besides, what are they supposed to do if there are malicious applications on Android Market? Pull them and leave affected users with crap on their devices?

Oh well, I'm perfectly happy with my HTC Magic running Cyanogenmod 5.0.8 downloaded and installed via Clockworkmod ROM Manager, which itself was downloaded from Android Market.

This is hardcore...

Google Chrome 5.0.375.38 beta seems to render the demonstration page perfectly on my system (Windows 7 x64)

FYI, tidy itself can do the job; just use

tidy -xml

Failing that, the excellent xmlstarlet is a great tool to have around - it's useful for formatting, querying or even editing XML documents straight from the command line

Personally, I think that the success of the iPod range can be squarely laid at the all pervasive and, dare I say it, cool advertising campaign that accompanied the product. It wasn't sold as a box of electronics that could easily play your favourite music, it was promoted and sold as a lifestyle choice.

Of course, the general media picked up on this new device and as far as they were concerned, the iPod was the first device of it's kind and merely added to the (very clever) Apple marketing campaign.

You have to wonder if Diamond had marketed their Rio in the same way whether 'Rio' would be the generic tag that the great unwashed use for MP3 players rather than iPod.

when they modernized it, then tried to appeal to a younger market they shut out us die-hard Doctor Who fans from the 1970's and 1980's

Speak for yourself; I would categorize myself as a 'die-hard' fan from the 70s - 80s - I had shelves of the Target novelisations, and have even introduced my kids to the earlier Doctors (they particularly love the Peter Davison era), and I've absolutely loved the rebooted series. Yes, there have been some crap episodes (Fear Her stands out as being particularly awful), but there were some truly atrocious serials before (Time And The Rani and Underworld immediately spring to mind). I, for one, haven't been 'shut out' at all.