My first computer program was written on optical cards in the late 70's. I was 11 years old, and our maths teacher showed us how to write simple basic programs.

We'd write them out by hand, work out the ascii code in binary for each character of the program line, then using a soft pencil would painstakingly fill in the 'holes' for the binary code of each character on an optical card. One card for each line of program.

These cards were sent off to a university to be batch-processed on their mainframe. If you were lucky you got your output a week later with vaguely sensible results. In my case I think I only got a print-out back saying 'syntax error'.

I've been with Virgin Media (formerly Blueyonder) for years. When it was Blueyonder it was without doubt the best internet you could get. Since the merger and branding it's gone steadily downhill.

A couple of years ago my connection started slowing down at peak times, becoming essentially unusable with packet loss and high erratic pings due to oversubscription, Virgin are generally very slow to sort these issues out, as it costs a lot of money to upgrade the UBRs for increased bandwidth. I had to complain to the Internet Service Providers Association to get the problem sorted, and got put in contact with Virgin's CEO's office, who finally got the problem fixed for me. I found out that as my area has a large student population they were torrenting 24/7 on the uncapped 50mbit service, which was causing problems for everyone in my area.

Now it's Virgin's fault for oversubscribing, but it's also some users fault for acting like gluttons at all-you-can-eat restaurants who grab every piece of pizza that appears and leaving crumbs for everyone else.

Fast forward two years, and after a recent upgrade to 20mbit I find the same issues AGAIN. The area is oversubscribed so online gaming in the evening is impossible due to the terrible pings and packet loss. Support confirm the oversubscription, and say the problem's not due to be fixed for THREE MONTHS.

I'd leave Virgin if I could but the fastest ADSL in my area is 2mbit.

I participated in a community forum for a game series I worked on for many years. As a member of the game dev team I was able to give insight and information to the community, and help with tech support and problem solving.

I helped build it into the central place on the net for info about our games, and in doing so we garnered a reputation for excellent customer support, and I had a great time interacting with the very people who played the games I worked on, and made some good friends.

You do have to filter what the community are saying - a lot of it is contradictory, and of course your most loyal fans are by definition the most core players, so they'll often request features which could make the games less appealing to less core game players.

I'm now working for a different company and I'm not involved in community building anymore, and to tell you the truth, I really miss it.

I believe that that direct interaction between a developer and their customers is a good thing, and can build a loyal community who will help promote your games. That sort of good will is priceless.

I worked on a DS game and it was massively pirated, so much so that it failed to meet its sales expectations which meant that a sales bonus I was hoping for didn't materialise. It was leaked as soon as it entered the supply chain and was downloaded thousands of times before it even reached the store shelves. The game reviewed very well, so you can't blame the lack of sales on a poor quality game.

This was all made possible by widespread use of R4 style carts, which are used not just by what we would call hardcore pirates, but by ordinary families who don't even consider the harm they're doing to developers. For example, a couple of Christmasses ago I visited a family friend and they asked me what I was working on. I mentioned a DS game, and they said 'We gave our kids DS's for Christmas and their uncle gave them these R4 carts where they can download the games for free!" I wasn't pleased to say the least.

If Apple had put the antenna gap on the bottom rather than the side of the phone it'd have made this problem far less easy to trigger accidentally.

It's not bad, but it can't handle rapid joystick waggling. Try playing Wizball on a C64 emulator and waggle the stick to activate a power-up. It doesn't work half the time.

Take a look at Microsofts answer to Steam - Games For Windows Live. You might say it's their prototype of an app store for windows, and it's appalling.

The UI is clunkly and slow, it has no resume on downloads - if your download stops you have to download the entire game again, it has hidden activation limits that aren't disclosed to the user, and the in-game client makes games run slower and more unstable.

Steam by comparison is light years ahead.

Apollo was designed to go to the moon - trips of ten days or more, and needed to carry all the consumables and equipment needed for the trip. The new capsule is designed for short duration flights to the space station, so presumably it won't need to carry lots of supplies and equipment, hence more space for crew.