Unfortunately I need Adobe on my work PC to enable comments - don't think Foxit handles this. Foxit 5.0 was a bit crap (broke in some ways) but 5.1 is better.

Thanks for the pointer to Okular, this might be a good option on Windows. Included in the KDE for Windows installer: http://windows.kde.org/download.php

Mod parent up - Okular looks like a really good option for Windows covering PDF, XPS, ePub, Mobipocket, CHM, etc. Rather a large download if it's your first KDE app on Windows (80 MB to download, 200 MB installed), but disk space isn't expensive these days and other KDE apps will be small downloads. There is even a standard Windows-style installer.

Unfortunately I get the message "requires an OpenGL card" on Windows XP SP3 with an NVidia GTX260, which definitely has working OpenGL. I've seen reports of this problem on MacOS too.

Hope Supergiant Games can fix this - since this is a web-delivered application, I'd hope they can grab hardware/OS details, with user permission, to help in resolving the issue.

Do you have a pointer to the registry key that needs to be changed?

I do use Ubuntu at home so I'm aware of the apps available, which are mostly the same as Debian, and about 30,000 in total: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#cite_note-14

However there are now over 100,000 iPad apps (see http://socialtimes.com/iphone-ipad-available-app-count-around-400000-now_b65291 ) - some of them will be junk, but judging by what's on the iPhone there are many useful apps, games and other content (videos, magazines, newspapers) that aren't on Debian/Ubuntu.

It all depends what you consider useful of course - if you want scripting, software development, servers, and an open desktop, Debian is more useful. If you want games, productivity apps, multimedia, etc, an iPad is more useful.

Some of the benefits come from battery life - an iPad is ARM based but unlike ARM netbooks has a huge base of applications. Some other benefits seem to come from the lack of 'computer admin' and the full-screen model.

One big downside of an iPad would be the lack of a shared filesystem, particularly when using multiple apps to make use of a larger app such as PhotoShop. This is unlikely to change, which is why people end up using Dropbox as a shared filesystem, though not every app supports it.

Virgin is really no more of a "fibre network" than BT's FTTC (Infinity) - they use Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) like every other cable operator, so the fibre turns into coax between the Virgin building and the customer premises (hence the Hybrid).

Of course Virgin like to lie about this in their marketing and claim they are all fibre...

It is anticompetitive because Geo and others need to use the PIA fibre from BT to 'backhaul' from a village to a larger town or city. With the backhaul, they can provide local connections, maybe using wireless - without the backhaul, BT actually provides the connections to ISPs for resale, hence there is far less competition.

Slashdot just ate my original comment...

Worth starting with a Linux distro that's aimed at visually impaired users, such as Vinux: http://wiki.vinuxproject.org/index.php?title=Main_Page - Ubuntu 10.04 based, and includes full screen magnification that might 'just work' if you point a webcam at a paper book. Also this would support Chrome which is a good way to use the Amazon Cloud Reader, for Kindle ebooks (easier than using a Windows VM).

The Vinux community can also probably help in other ways with your specific requirements.

Off-topic I know, but some forms of macular degeneration respond really well to eating lots of spinach and similar leafy vegetables: http://www.macular.org/nutrition/index.html

This may or may not work, but eating spinach isn't a hard thing to try and has little if any downside.

Most likely someone guessed your password, broke into your account, and sold it on a dodgy forum. Unlikely this is anything to do with a mass hack - this sort of account takeover happens all the time with Gmail and others, but it's easier to sell a Steam account as it has games attached, and there are sometimes legit people wanting to sell Steam accounts (which is against Steam rules but still happens).

After the Sony hacks, some countries were down for many weeks - in Japan it was something like 2 months before PSN services returned, I think.

Another big difference - SteamGuard is an opt-in feature of the Steam client authentication (not the forums) that emails you a verification code any time a new browser or PC is used. For those who have enabled this, it makes the theft of a password almost a non-event - to such an extent that Gabe Newell actually gave out his password when they announced this (which he may live to regret, but it shows confidence in their setup).

None of those UIs were anything like as big a change from their predecessors, compared to Win8 / Unity / Gnome Shell and iOS.

I have never had a big adverse reaction to UIs since Windows 3.0 and early KDE, but with the advent of Unity and Gnome 3, I'm making the jump from Ubuntu to Linux Mint 12, because Mint is making Gnome 3 look sufficiently like Gnome 2 (via some of its own extensions) and also will enable MATE (a fork of GNOME 2, though it's a little too recent to be usable yet.) See http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/243403/now_with_gnome_3_linux_mint_12_will_meet_users_halfway.html

I don't think I'm alone either - Linux Mint had a 40% increase in popularity in one month after Ubuntu went Unity: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851 (includes overview of the Linux Mint 12 plans for Gnome 3 and MATE).

Since I have a lot of tabs loaded, being able to have tabs load only when I select them after (re)start is great. A browser restart now takes only a few seconds, which mitigates the need to do this for addons.

For extra points, get the Restartless Restart addon (no restarts to install, oh the irony) to quickly restart Firefox.

Firefox also feels really fast now - apparently Firefox 8 is as fast as Chrome, it certainly feels like it. And it runs all the addons I like too...