Over here in the UK 100W incandescent bulbs were phased out around 4 years ago and 60W bulbs not long after. As a result my house now has a mixture of old incandescents and newer CFLs, as well as a halogen bulb or two. The halogens give a harsh light and the CFLs make the room look like it's lit like a multi-storey carpark - not exactly a "homely" look. The living room still has two 100W incandescent bulbs but due to the ban they're becoming really hard to source; there's a loophole where less-efficient 100W bulbs can be sold (as "rough service") but they only seem to last for a few dozen hours rather than 1000 or so. Whether that's because they're cheap Chinese tat or whether it's because they genuinely aren't made to work indoors I couldn't say.

Thankfully old pre-ban bulbs are still available on eBay etc so I've stocked up with a couple of years' worth... hopefully by the time they run out alternative lighting will finally have caught up with the quality of light you get from an incandescent.

It's interesting to see the wide variety of responses to the story. I guess the only way we'll ever know the exact legal situation is if the case makes it to court, but I'd bet that Zavvi will try anything they can to settle out-of-court in order to save themselves the chance of receiving even more bad PR.

It's one of those situations where Zavvi can't win. If they let the person keep the Vita then those who sent them back will be annoyed. If they set the legal eagles loose then it'll just generate more bad PR for them. Zavvi itself had loads of bad PR a few years ago when the original company went bust; it was one of those situations where gift cards weren't honoured during the administration period and the media was full of people moaning about the company. That didn't bother The Hut, though, who bought the rights to the name and then set up a new online shop.

FWIW, my thoughts are that it'd be pretty obvious upon opening the packaging that a Vita+game had been sent rather than just a game. As such, I'd have felt pretty guilty if I'd tried to keep the Vita and I'd hope that I would do the obvious thing and send it back, although it wouldn't be at my expense (a pre-paid Special Delivery label would be my request, as that way the returned package would be insured - sod's law says that it'd go missing on the way back and then you'd have no Vita, no game and would still have the company hounding you for its return!)

The whole sorry mess could have been alleviated by giving a gift voucher upon the return of the Vita, or some other token to say "sorry for messing you around". Doing it the way they did just leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth!

All it means in the UK is that chavs will have a new sport, that of stealing people's deliveries.

Stupidly expensive, which has been the story of EE's 4G in general.

3, for example, offer consumers 7 GB for £25 (=£3.57/GB) on their network - and that's as a PAYG thing. If you're a business and bulk-buying it'd be way cheaper than that. The only snag is that 3 doesn't offer 4G (yet)... when it does, expect EE's pricing to plummet!

Wow, setting it to 150% actually works with SIMS...

Good on MS for deciding to fix the crummy programs which ignore Windows' DPI settings (such as the aforementioned SIMS). The method for doing it does generate fuzziness, but that's because it's resizing everything (effectively lying about the resolution Windows is running in). That's actually *way* better than the way it was before, which means programs like SIMS would enlarge fonts in some areas and not in others, leading to a right old mess.

A toggle switch for XP-8 or 8.1 behaviour would have been a good idea though for those who find the fuzziness of non-DPI aware applications annoying.

Hmm, odd - I use a desktop PC with a Sandy Bridge i5 at work and the Intel HD graphics drivers (from here: http://downloadmirror.intel.com/22627/a08/Win64_152815.zip) work just fine under Windows 8.1. Admittedly that's via DVI rather than HDMI, as my monitor doesn't have an HDMI input.

Hmm, it's more like the spiritual successor to the old Psion palmtops. They were amazing for their time and every so often I wonder what would have happened if they hadn't just given up in 2001...

...well, a bit at least. This anti-skeuomorphic craze is pretty damned irritating - the new logo looks worse than the old one in my view, just as the Windows 8 theme looks worse than Aero Glass and iOS 7 looks worse than iOS 6. I had enough of 2D, flat icons in the 80s (when there weren't the resources to do better); I can only imagine the designers doing all this 2D stuff today weren't around back then.

Interesting, but is it possible that the younger pups were just playing, while as they got older deeper hunting instincts were kicking in and they used those tactics?

Oh, I've no doubt the behaviour is instinctual - they were definitely honing their skills on me. The thing that makes me wonder is "how did they decide which wolf would have which role" - there has to have been something which made them decide that the male would ensnare me while the females went in for the "kill".

Here's something which I can't explain. Maybe a reader here can shed some light on it?

Back in 2006 we had three wolf pups at the wolf centre (I became a volunteer after adopting Kenai, mentioned above). They were hand-reared, so were used to people right from the start.

I decided to do a fun experiment, knowing it'd be the only chance I'd get. Nobody else was this daft!

* When they were three months of age, I ran away from them in their enclosure. They chased me, but when I zigzagged away from them they gave up.
* At four months old, I repeated the experiment. This time they followed me even after I zigzagged, before catching up with me (whereupon they licked me profusely).
* At six months old, I did it for the final time. This time the two female wolves ran away from me and vanished behind some trees. The male wolf came straight towards me, staring at me intently. When he reached me, he wrapped himself around my legs, causing me to wobble a bit. As I was working out how to extricate myself, there was an almighty "whomp" from behind as the two females jumped upon me. That knocked me over and I was licked half to death by the happy pups.

To this day, I don't know how they communicated their tactics to one another, although clearly they did somehow. Wild wolves do the same thing, of course, as you'll have seen on those nature programmes where they use the pincer movement to get a bison calf away from the herd. FWIW there was no noise from the wolves beforehand, just the rustling of grass as they executed their manoeuvre.

You won't hear a wolf bark very often (and it tends to be distinct "wuff"s rather than a long, continuous series of barks - Mosi at the UKWCT barks if a particular person comes into the centre) but certainly with howls you can that there are different scenarios. For example, the wolves at the UKWCT will do long chorus howls when the nearby church bells ring, but if you take one particular wolf out she'll howl a few times when she's out of sight of the other wolves - presumably to let them know she's still around. If the wolves are feeling playful, they'll sometimes "rally" (which is a real cacophony, you can hear one of my recordings on the wolf page on Wiki, which someone has labelled "rallying cry"). Before the rally properly starts they'll howl, but the pitch varies rather than being a pure note.

Fun fact: when I played one of the wolf howl recordings I'd made, the oscilloscope on WinAmp showed a perfect sine wave for a few seconds. I was impressed!

FWIW, wolves do emit different types of howl - a given wolf won't produce the same howl each time.

Although nobody can say for sure what the meaning is, wolves will make different types of howl if they're separated from their pack, if they've completed a kill, if they're about to "rally" with the pack and, interestingly, if a wolf dies.

For general howling, then yes, it's been known about for years that you can identify a given wolf by their howl. My old adopted wolf Kenai (who lived at the same wolf centre as the original research author used for their studies) had a very recognizable two-tone howl.

Most MMOs rely on server-side stuff for generating the numbers - meaning the bulk of the work is displaying the results to the user, ie more in the way of GPU rather than CPU usage. WoW, for example, is very light on CPU usage but much heavier on the GPU (to the extent that on a 2600K going from a 460 GTX to a 670 GTX resulted in something like an 80% framerate boost in Pandaria.)

Bear in mind that the pace of performance growth has slowed markedly in the last decade in terms of day-to-day usage, with each new generation of Intel chips, for example, only adding around 10% performance each time. That means a 3-year-old PC's CPU isn't far behind the latest ones and it'll be more than adequate. Compare that to, for example, a P3-500 from early 1999, which was the fastest consumer CPU you could buy. 3 years later you had your choice of a 2533Mhz Pentium 4 (which cost around the same), or, if you jumped ship, a 1733MHz Athlon XP.

Things are advancing way more slowly than they used to, meaning PCs stay current / acceptable for longer and thus need replacing less often. And that, in turn, means less will be sold.

(NB, the one exception to this is high-end gaming - GPUs are still advancing a bit more quickly, but even there a decent 3-year-old GPU is still adequate for most things).