The countries involved will legislate if the the advertisers decline to follow the voluntary code. This is the worst of end games for the advertisers because the legislation will likely be more draconian and far-reaching than the DNT code of conduct ever was. It's win-win for Microsoft.

Like it's not already. Seriously, Nokia with the present corporate culture in place could not have fucked things up more spectacularly if they'd tried. Their whole company culture needs ripping out and flushing away. Microsoft might be staid and boring, but they're successful and profitable. Some other corporate culture might be better, more fun, whatever, but Nokia really needs to get a grip and do something.

Considering this is a story about hacking, on the 'news for nerds' website, you certainly got a good conversation going about PAY TOILETS, of all things. Well played sir. I never realised this would register so high on the conversational agenda. I'm going to try this one at my next dinner party :-)

The stock market is fickle. They love the volatility that comes with aapl, and have largely been ignoring msft, even though the latter has brought home record profits two years in a row.

Someone may call me on this, but i think P/E & EPS & other key indicators are stronger at msft, but everyone keeps thinking aapl are gonna carry on eating their market share. Hence looking at it from a fundamentals point of view, it starts to look like aapl may be overvalued, and a lot of that share price can be attributed to speculation on future results. I reckon that's well placed speculation and the goose will yet lay a few more golden eggs.

msft's results have been too strong for it to remain flat, although there's always room for them to screwup! Essentially, everyone thinks Ballmer is about to drop the baton, despite recent results to the contrary. MS need to give the investors a little more confidence (Ballmer going may help), get a big win somewhere and their share price might fly. Ballmer isn't 'fundamentally' doing a bad job, but everyone thinks he's fluking it! Maybe so, but with their tenacity I'm sure we'll eventually see a strong offering which exceeds expectations financially and then it'll be interesting to watch the various tech stocks react.

Right, MS Zealot here, love their stuff and earn a living from it, but always want to keep my options open, just in case (as well as increasing my nerd rating, of course!). After flirting with linux multiple times since slackware '96, last weekend I've given it yet another go and I'm posting right now from the previous version of SUSE. It's the first distro I've ever installed and EVERYTHING seems to work. I've tried Linux about 20 times, but had given up after a few hours of mucking around because my mouse, or my graphics card, or my sound or my network or SOMETHING wouldn't work. Finally I've found one where everything works! I've been on it a week, and apart from not knowing how to do anything, the only problem is my fans sound like they're about to take off.

So, I'm struggling with the basics, but learning a little every day. Does anyone know a decent Windows-Linux Conversion guide which explains the parallels between the two - such as how to install drivers, where the hell is 'Program Files', what do I do if I want to install software but it's not an rpm or whatever it is suse uses. (Damn, I miss MSIs & EXEs!)

Also, is there any mail client I can use to connect to my exchange server for work email? (using MAPI \ RPC over HTTPS)

This is quite a lot of fun, and I've noticed that it seems to render flash video nicer than windows, BBC iPlayer HD is a bit stuttery on windows, but is smooth as silk over here.

Any hints and tips gratefully received!

That's not how it works because in science you can't *absolutely* prove anything - unlike in maths. For example, we only have extremely strong evidence that the earth is (roughly) spherical, but we can't *prove* it. Yet you don't hear scientists going round suggesting they have an open mind on it being cuboid for instance. It's because the evidence is so strong for it being spherical, it's to all intents and purposes true. Now the evidence for 'angels' for example is just sketchy reports from madmen. Until something a bit more substantial comes in, then we correctly denounce their existence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

See also Russell's Teapot for this argument in a religious context.

Single Core - True, the iPhone 4s computationally flies, but I don't think this will hold the Nokia back. Gaming may be the exception here, but as long as the developers know the platform they're aiming for they're good at compromising (360 vs the more powerful PS3 for eg - there are differences in the games but you have to be eagle eyed to spot them) for day to day phone/email/music/internet etc, well, I've got a slower Win phone than that, with Mango, and I'm trying to think of a time where I wished it would hurry up, but can't. Need for Speed is probably the biggest CPU killer I've got on there and I've noticed very occasional slowdowns, but hey, it's not like it's a COD deathmatch or anything :-)

Pixel Density is not that great, but Super AMOLED whoops backlit LED out of the park - the colours saturation and contrast are simply amazing. Seeing the two side by side and the iPhone looks like one of those ancient LCD color efforts - despite the extra pixels. I think Android potentially has the edge here, with it's many platforms able to regularly push the envelope on what's possible, although I don't think there's been an AMOLED with the density of the iPhone - now *that* would be awesome.

No US launch before Christmas - yep, that's a massive air swing, but with Nokia circling the toilet, this launch is damage control, the next one will be the biggie.

Pro's

I don't know about the camera either - Nokia are usually pretty solid in that space though.

The N9-alike (what's it called again??) is a nice bit of kit, feels really solid and nice in your hand. It's a smidge smaller than my Omnia 7, which sharpens up the display a bit. The only thing that's weird - NO USER SERVICABLE BATTERY! How much flack do Apple get for that??

I'm not sure WP is actually lagging iOS - the core functions are there, it's solid. Massively in it's favor are things like the way it consolidates all your different data sources (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail etc etc) is unmatched anywhere. For me I like, for example, the way facebook events and My exchange calendar are now one - the number of times I've turned up bleary eyed for a meeting I've scheduled because I forgot it's so and so's birthday the night before... and they're right in your face on the lock screen. It's like MS have just gone, f*ck this, let's go over the top and be the number one aggregator. FB, twitter et al do all the underlying hard work and Microsft gives you this single window where everything comes together. It's fricken awesome! Also you don't have to plug in to all these services if you don't want to, but as far as I can see that's the biggest benefit of the platform. iOS is nice and all, but feels so last century compared to WP. Android usability is a bag of nails in comparison. (I know, I know, Android comes in to its own when you like to tinker, but on my phone, I don't, nor do lots of people, as evidenced by iPhone. YMMV)

The phone is comparable in price to a iPhone 4s, Build quality is similar, although the iPhone still has the edge on style I guess. Comparable featuresets which I think is better in some key areas.

The Windows Phone app store is lacking in absolute numbers right now but they've got one of every sort of app as far as I can tell. The problem is network effect, where all your mates are playing an iPhone version of scrabble or whatever, but you can't join in even though you've got a good scrabble game yourself. However, it's still nice when random people on the tube are interested in your phone because they've never seen one before (I've STILL not seen a single other Windows phone user in the wild!) still that's only a bonus if you've got no life I guess :)

You'll probably guess that I'm a bit of a fanboi, but I earn my living implementing MS tech, and wanted WP7 because Apple is the new Burberry, and Android is like making clothes yourself. It's fun putting together a Microsft platform at home that, like the fruit companies efforts, 'Just Works' and it can be done - I'm quite obstinate like that. :-)

Anyway, after I seem to have written a bloody novel... I'm hopeful for Nokia, I don't think this is the killer phone they are aiming for but it's been a really tight turnaround for them to get something out this quickly. They've got a big future, and a little bird tells me they're not quite completely MS's bitch like most here would seem to believe. They still have decent ambitions of their own in the smartphone market.

I have a strong hope desalination will get vastly cheaper when the need manifests. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. There's already a number of small scale concepts that can do it cheaply. I don't think we're too far away from being able to utilise the oceans as potable water, but it's just the little countries that need it right now so why bother? As soon as Vegas (or similar) starts to wilt, I'd expect funding in this area to gain some traction.

Your android has still crashed more than his WP7, and mine for that matter. I've got a galaxy S too, and if its battery would last more than 4 hours, I probably still wouldn't use it because android is a slow buggy unresponsive sack of shit when compared to WP7 and IOS.

Unless I've misunderstood you, I think your timescales are out. 'Modern Humans' (as in Homo Sapiens) have probably been about for around 200,000 years - even if it's 400,000 it's still the blink of an eye. Behaviourally modern humans (i.e. ones you could tell apart from apes with pointy sticks) are about 50,000 years old. The entire genus Homo has only been around 2.5 million years, and austrailopithocene (the ancestors of the ancestors of humans) are about 4 million years old. If we did have a raft we could survive on for a million years, it'd be interesting to see what would happen given the starting point of such a relatively shallow gene pool. I suspect we'd still end up with different species landing the craft, than the one's who launched it..?

Hurrah! Good effort there lad, well done! Not everyone will put that amount of effort in when a someone's PC goes wrong and instead will berate them about not having off site backups stored in a nuclear bomb proof shelter in central Alaska. This sounds just about typical when my close friends computers start dying. I won't do this for everyone, but if it's a good mate, I'll do my damnedest to get as much data back as I can. It only really pisses me off when they start complaining about how long it takes, cheeky fuckers! If I ask a mate to do something for me because that's what he does for a living, I sure as hell want him to put his best effort in and do that job to the best of his abilities. eg I've got a carpenter mate who did a lovely job on some flooring for us, but while he was doing it there was something up with the joists that he was laughing at me for not knowing - did he just replace the wood?? Nope he got right in there and got his plumber mate around to reroute some overflow that was causing them to rot, solving the problem for the future. He didn't just swap bad for good, because that would have been cheap, he actually went the extra mile - now his PC also runs tip top at all times :)

Still doesn't make sense, there's more to consider than the single fact alone. Like the fact that the restaurant serves a million people a year and only made you ill once. Unless you're extremely paranoid you give them another shot, especially if they server awesome food.

I like microsoft food generally, so even if their WinMo entree gave me the shits once before, I'll try it again if they change the recipe :) YMMV

Stupid analogy.

Steak made me ill, do we never eat steak again?

3 Sentences consisting of 1 line of reasoning and 2 ad hominem attacks. Nice.

Not everyone is so prejudiced as to automatically think that everything Redmond puts out is "rubbish". A lot of it, or dare I say, the majority, serves its purpose very well - in my opinion. I mean, conservatively, three quarters of the worlds businesses have decided that the percentage point of extra stability afforded by swapping to some or other variant OS is simply not worth the loss in compatibility, available labour, ease of deployment and myriad other advantages 'M$' products hold over whatever your OS of choice is. Whatever you may think, their products are usable, performant (mostly, although they rarely top the charts for chest thumping purposes), reliable (enough), and in the right hands, secure (enough). You have a support structure that is second to none, and I'm not talking official channels here - the community is pervasive and helpful. You can see from my post history, I like MS stuff. {ducks!}

So, back on track, when Microsoft is on the back foot, that's when it tends to release its best software. IE Vs Netscape (& now chrome), Active Directory Vs Novell etc. Given how it totally fucked itself in mobile prior to WP7, you could argue this is its biggest challenge yet. Given that & the pre-release videos looking pretty good, I was excited to give it a whirl, so I did. And you know what, I f*cking love it! I'll spare you the details why, that could be an article in itself but suffice to say I've owned A BB Bold 9000, iPhone 3GS and currently have a Galaxy S from work. None of those have seen the light of day since I got my winmo 7 - they don't come close.... Who said "Shill"? Come on, own up!!

It IS pretty rare to totally fry a component from static discharge. The more likely outcome is that any stray ESD that you generate overloads the transistors in the chip to such an extent that they can become susceptible to bit flipping during operation. They'll often be fine for some time (minutes to weeks, months at a time) then randomly flip a, or some, bits and cause a crash you can't figure out.

There's a reason respectable repair shops use those wrist straps, anti-static mats etc.