Indeed. And with that in mind, I would be very interested if anyone can cite even a single credible source that compares "workstation" and "gamer" cards objectively from nVidia and/or AMD. You'll find a load of people who parrot the line that you "must" use the far more expensive workstation cards for certain kinds of professional applications, but few can really tell you why, and even those who do generally refer to drivers rather than any difference in the hardware. And that's before you even get into nVidia doing things like deliberately nerfing the drivers on its gaming cards because otherwise they were going to show up the many-times-more-expensive workstation cards built on essentially the same platform.

I'm with the guys who want Vendor #3. Both personally, as someone who used to enjoy gaming before there was a 50+% chance of pathetic bugs spoiling the experience and at least half of them seemed to be down to poor quality drivers, and professionally, as someone who uses some of those absurdly expensive applications and needs the performance to match, I'm fed up with the constant race to the bottom in quality control and non-existent customer service. I would literally pay twice what I have paid for any recent high-end graphics card, in either a personal or a professional capacity, for a high-end card that worked reliably and came from a vendor that provided honest information to help me choose what I need and then offered real customer support for the useful lifetime of that device.

If someone could fix all these trendy new technologies like HDMI and DisplayPort so they actually worked at least as well as DVI did years ago, that would be nice too. I'm fed up with all the windows on my twin monitor set-up reducing to 640x480 every time I switch the damned monitors off, and apparently the "newer, more advanced" connection technologies used by my "high-end professional workstation" graphics card and accompanying "certified" drivers have a lot to do with it.

You're conflating two issues.

If a cookie is strictly necessary to do something the user has directly requested, all this new silliness was never going to apply anyway. That takes care of session cookies for logging in, shopping carts, and so on.

It's when you start getting into areas like analytics that are not strictly necessary from the user's point of view that you cross into a grey area, and that's where the whole opt-in/opt-out (or, if you prefer, explicit/implicit consent) issue arises.

FWIW, it seems Google Analytics is relatively sane on this count, in that the technology they use and their current use of the data are (reportedly) not as intrusive as some people assume.

On the other hand, if say Facebook wanted to track people as they surf the web by using cookies connected with content on third party sites, then Facebook and/or the sites that support them could actually be in trouble at this point, even with all the hedging of bets that is going on at the ICO. I suspect it's "Like" buttons and so on that these rules were really aimed at, not genuine analytics genuinely used by sites for their own improvement.

Actually, the ICO seems to have pulled a complete U-turn with 48 hours to go, and now says that implied consent can be enough.

Whether that will stand up to the seemingly inevitable legal challenge in the European courts remains to be seen, but I suspect even the ICO think this is a dumb law behind the scenes, and their language has been softening substantially in recent weeks relative to their early advice.

Well, them and a strong majority of the British public consistently wanting to stay out of the Euro. But this is Slashdot, so let's not let facts get in the way of a good rant.

And of course, jokes about similarity aside, the Tories haven't actually been the ones running the show since Tony Blair's first New Labour administration took office in 1997. The Conservatives have been the more powerful party in the current coalition since 2010, but for some reason, in the past couple of years no-one from any major UK party has been suggesting that we join the Euro any time soon.

I don't know how true that is, but in any case, the politics in most countries in Europe is rather strongly left-leaning by global standards, in much the same way that both the main parties in the US would be regarded as quite far to the right on a global scale.

Yes, because what we really need right now is for some of our closest neighbours and major trading partners to suffer severe financial problems that will keep our own economy down for a few more years without anything we can do about it. That will definitely help to advance the interests of both of the groups you mentioned, and of course to help the Conservatives to win the next general election outright as they presumably want to.

In this case, it seems to be more a case of "Do as the European bureaucracy says, not as we do, but our guys won't really go after you if you're being reasonable about the spirit of the rules anyway, as long as you don't take the piss."

I don't know. Unless I missed the quietest product launch in Microsoft history, Windows 8 isn't out yet.

However, it appears (from the fact that we're having this discussion at all) that Microsoft are indeed restricting the capabilities of their new generation of developer tools that go with Windows 8, so to that extent the answer to your question would be "yes".

Also, I'll mention here that the default presentation Microsoft chooses will probably have a big effect on a lot of users, even if there are technical options you can configure to go back to how things were. If most people see bright colours and big rectangles on their screen when they turn Windows 8 on, then that's what most people are going to think Windows 8 is unless Microsoft make any alternative presentation very obvious. Again, the OS is not released yet, so I'm not going to speculate about how well or otherwise they might do that.

No, I'm talking about the developer tools, which are the subject of this Slashdot discussion.

Well, OK, but don't send me the medical bill for your RSI.

Personally, I'd rather have a good ol' 102-key (or similar) keyboard with a robust action and full size keys for everything that are in their normal places.

And this is the crux of our difference of opinion. I don't think you can work around the kind of limitations we're talking about, whether it's the input method or the amount of screen real estate available, with a couple of bits of substandard bolt-on equipment and a quick UI refresh.

I was working on a programming project earlier this afternoon, using two monitors with about 8 megapixels between them. I was using every inch of screen real estate I had to save time switching between different source files, documentation, build windows, and so on.

Yesterday, I was working on a graphics project on the same system. Again, I was using all that screen space, with my work and a couple of frequently used toolbars on one screen and all the secondary stuff on the other. I was using a combination of (full size) keyboard, (ergonomic and many-buttoned) mouse and tablet (of the graphic input device variety) to control the system, and the amount of processing power between the CPU and GPU of this computer is staggering, but necessary if you need to visualize a lot of graphics effects in almost real time.

No amount of UI cleverness and Bluetooth keyboard+mouse sets would have let me do these kinds of work on a tablet as efficiently as I did on my serious computer. It's just not the right tool for the job.

On the other hand, when I wanted a break, I took out the iPad and fired up a puzzle game to play for a few minutes by touching the screen exactly twice while relaxing on my sofa.

Well, OK. If you want to write your own code and don't use a Mac anyway, don't write native apps for iOS. As you point out, there is nothing inherent about the tablet medium that means development has to be difficult. Apple choose to be developer-hostile, and while they can get away with it up to a point because their hardware is so much better than everyone else's right now, in the not-so-distant future I think they will suffer for it, just as Microsoft will if they pursue the policy we're discussing here on Slashdot today.

Console games are frequently mocked by PC gamers for being substandard, and you can spot a console game ported to PC a mile away by the lack of sophistication in its presentation and often the lack of depth in its gameplay, so I'm not sure they really do "beat PCs in several genres". However, even if you maintain that they do, please consider that:

1. PC games are often pretty mod-hostile these days. All the malware maquerading as anti-cheating or copy protection has a horrible chilling effect on the kind of people who used to make level mods or new units or better AI algorithms. A few games/developers make a point of being mod friendly today, because it's actually a good marketing spin to attract a certain kind of fan.

2. Consoles would still serve a purpose anyway, which is to be relatively cheap and hassle-free to set up compared to PC games.

3. Most people don't care about exporting their data from a console to another system some time later. What good would that do if the data in question is a saved position from a game you completed 5 times already and haven't played for 2 years? So the whole lock-in vs. data portability issue is moot anyway. A lot of gamers are demonstrably willing to spend lots of money on games with on-line tie-ins that can literally be turned off tomorrow on the whim of the operators (and sometimes are, for apparently arbitrary and/or purely commercial reasons) so I don't think lock-in is really the top of their agenda. They'll just suck it up and buy something else for their entertainment tomorrow if it happens.

In other words, gaming is not a great example of the general trend I was describing. The data involved doesn't have the kind of longevity and portability needs of, your music collection, personal photos, e-mail history, financial records, etc.

But how is that any different to saying someone who owns a VCR/PVR/Blu-Ray player might want to write some code tomorrow for another purpose? It's a different tool for a different job. If you want a cheap and cheerful system for learning to program, check out things like Raspberry Pi, which has been conceived from the start to fill that kind of niche. If you decide programming is something you enjoy, you can step up to more serious equipment and software later on.

I guess I just don't live in the world you're describing. Outside of work, most people have always been more consumer than producer. They probably always will be, for the simple reason that it takes a lot of hard work, often well beyond the point of being enjoyable just for fun, to produce really good work that others will enjoy consuming. Most of that work is done in return for payment as part of a job one way or another. You also get keen amateurs/hobbyists who produce very good work, but they are relatively rare, and probably doing it for the satisfaction of helping others and/or producing work they can be proud of. Those people aren't going to be stopped because they need to download and install another bit of software or spend a bit of money on different hardware, and for the majority who are happy to share ideas with friends via Facebook or the occasional blog post, using a tablet/smartphone/whatever isn't really much of a limitation anyway.

It's interesting that you chose to write "...that locked-down tables perpetuate" there.

I'm all for openness and I'll be the first to agree that mobile operating systems, particularly Apple's, are sadly lacking in this respect and a huge retrograde step in flexibility.

However, I think that is a separate issue. The basic nature of these mobile touchscreen devices is that they are lousy for creating new content. You can't type at 100+ WPM on a touchscreen. You can't display both a large area for your content and as much area again for menus, toolbars, command pallettes, script windows and whatever else you need, if you're starting with a screen that has about a 10" diagonal.

I think we're seeing the next logical step in the evolution of personal computing technology: devices that are more specialised than an old general purpose computer, but where interoperability and communication and sharing data and the behind-the-scenes standards compliance necessary to achieve those things are really important. Some people offering these products/services will hold out and try to lock people into their platform, whether that's by trying to lock down the hardware or the network or the data itself, but in the long run they are fighting a losing battle. Computing is ultimately all about your data and what you can do with it, and tools and software and networks that let people do more useful/interesting things more easily will have a natural advantage that I think will win in the long run.

From this point of view, I am quite happy that we now have mobile devices that allow simple UIs and easy consumption of content without being tied to a desk. People want these facilities, and my new iPad is better at supporting them than any laptop I use. But it's still a laptop -- a large one, with a big, high-res screen -- that I want when I go to a meeting with my clients. The difference is that today, I can use the right tool for each job, because now someone actually makes both tools.

But why would we say that? Most people won't, and that's the point. For better or worse, most people outside of work are primarily content consumers not content creators, and tablets are better content consumption devices for many people's needs than a desktop PC.