"Stop using undocumented API's in application code. Microsoft did it and got hammered for it. You only get away with it because of all the fanbois around."

No, Apple get away with it because they're not sufficiently dominant in the market.

Castelli and Galileo didn't need to use a telescope to confirm that Mizar and Alcor are separate - that's obvious to anyone with normal eyesight. They in fact made the next discovery, that Mizar itself is a binary.

I considered buying a high-end Panasonic TV a few months ago, but was put off by the presence of advertisements taking up a third of the Freeview EPG screen. There seemed to be no way to turn them off. Will this be allowed on Freeview HD? Are we going to have to put up with advertisements even to watch the BBC?

According to this page: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/telecoms/article6886886.ece O2 will allow unlocking of iphones after they lose exclusivity. It doesn't say whether they will charge for this.

Press the Recall button, or if you don't have one, tap the receiver rest. You'll get a dialling tone. Put the receiver down. The phone will ring. Don't answer it (if you do, you're back to the original call). When it stops ringing, the call will have been ended.

Is that the one that gives men the right to bare arms?

"Tabs were a minor revolution for internet users because they meant that rather than having to keep opening new versions of your browser for each site you wanted to view, killing the machine's performance and exposing yourself to crashes, you could work within one browser."

That's complete and utter bollocks. Opening a page in a new window does not require a new instance of the browser, and is negligibly more expensive than a tab. The advantage of tabs is to the user who can more easily switch between them.

... how is it going to affect house prices?

The feudal system in Scotland was abolished five years ago.

"be accretive to Oracle's earnings" - does this mean the same as "increase"?

Perhaps they are worried that this is how Nvidia is going to get a licence to make x86s.

If Microsoft's patents are valid, *no-one* can legally distribute Linux, whether Tom-Tom cross-licenses them or not. If the patents aren't valid, then the cross-licence is based on a falsehood, and probably unenforcable. It depends on the exact terms of the cross-licence, but it's not clear that Tom-Tom's position is different from anyone else's.

Ah, you mean students.

Like abolishing Heinz salad cream. For a company iike Ryan Air, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

For those of us who don't care whether the supplier is still around in seven years, can you provide a list of the suppliers making "suicidal leaps" please?

Open source tools will quite likely get updated before commercial ones. In particular, the latest release of libxml2 already supports the proposed changes.

(1) It's true that 5th edition doesn't do anything to change namespace names from URIs to IRIs ("internationalised" URIs). But that can be done separately, in a revision to Namespaces 1.0. In any case, XML namespace names are usually just treated as strings, and most software doesn't check that they are valid URIs. I don't really see the problem: even if namespace names remain URIs, that's a minor issue compared with being able to use more characters in element and attribute names. There's no "consistency" between element names and namespace names that needs to be maintaned. And typically a namespace name just appears once in a declaration at the start of a document: it doesn't affect readability in the way that element and attribute names do.

(2) IBM didn't push through "features" to suit mainframe users - they just persuaded the W3C to support the traditional IBM NEL line-end character in XML 1.1. Why anyone else should care about this is beyond me.

(3) The main problem with XML 1.1 is that Microsoft doesn't support it. One reason for that may be that they didn't manage to get support for arbitrary binary data in XML documents; XML is supposed to be a textual format.

(4) All the major XML software producers - including Microsoft - are likely to support the 5th edition changes, so the compatibility problem will be small. It's not as if zillions of XML vocabularies using the new characters are going to appear overnight.

I don't use BT, so my web browsing won't be tracked. But I have a web site. How do I opt out of having acesses to it tracked?

it's been suggested that O2 will shortly lose their UK monopoly on the iPhone. If so, it would explain why they're starting PAYG earlier than had been predicted: to grab as many customers while there's still no choice.

This all sounds quite plausible, except for the fact that there doesn't seem to be any retailer who has actually had the Linux version in stock. They all say they're waiting for their first shipment.

O2 are blaming the "overwhelming demand", but as they themselves said they only had "a limited number" of iPhones available. So their system is not failing because of the demand, it's failing to handle even the limited supply. They knew how many iPhones they had, why didn't they ensure their system could handle that many activations?

Tell them how badly O2 are hadling their product.

I can see quite a lot of people buying a shiny new iPhone for 300 pounds. But not so many buying last-summer's half-way-to-obsolete iPhone for that price.

Apparently last night O2 put up a page with iPhone PAYG prices for the UK (299 pounds for the 8GB model), but it seems to have been pulled.

See: http://www.macrumors.com/iphone/2008/06/25/o2-announces-iphone-3g-pay-and-go-pricing/

Perhaps the Reg could find out what the story is?

I want a version of adblock that not only hides the advertisements, but clicks on them as well, to cost the advertisers as much money as possible.

Cyrillic (or general unicode) domain names are all very well, but for a top-level domain? Do the Russians really want to make it difficult for everyone outside Russia to type any of their domains?

The biggest change is that O2 say they will have a pay-as-you-go option, though they haven't said how much it will cost for either the phone or the data. Jobs supposedly said that the worldwide maximum price for the 8GB iPhone will be $199, but I wouldn't be surprised if they weasel out of that.

I live in Scotland and I've not interest in seeing St Andrew's or any other saint's ady celebrated. It's just the medieval church's answer to Hallmark cards.

It means Wii owners buy 0.28 consoles per (game per year) instead of the mere 0.14 consoles bought by Xbox owners.

GET and POST are very different. Only POST should be used for destructive changes and to request real-world actions. By sending POST requests they might order a holiday, or post a message on this page.

Of all the physical dimensions of a laptop - width, depth, thickness, weight - thickness is the least important. When have you ever thought "this laptop is to thick"? I suspect Jobs insisted on it being the smallest in some dimension, and couldn't make it the lightest, which is what most people really want. It's even arranged internally so it can have a really thin front edge - the back is much thicker.

... and let us know what they say. Don't let them get away with ambiguous waffle. (You *are* journalists aren't you?)

"Should customers use the site even when there isn't a valid certificate?"

Presumably there's a law requiring you to submit a tax return, and they've done that already. Is there a law requiring you to submit it again if the tax office loses it?

Are you telling us they don't make a profit on the transaction fees? I don't believe it. How could they be so inefficient?

It will always be more profitable for someone to use the bandwidth to pack in more shopping channels, more phone-ins, more live roulette. And our government (and opposition) are so in love with anything calling itself "business" that they will always give them what they want.

My electric fire uses that in an hour - it's only 3kWh.

Presumably what they actually spelled out was trademark law.

Modern IQ scores are defined in such a way that they are normally distributed, so the mean, median and mode are all the same. If the intelligence distribution of the population changes, new IQ tests will get normalised in such a way that this remains true. So half the population are above average IQ, regardless of which average you use.

How did you manage to write this article without mentioning the number of the beast?

Because it must have ended with 13 zeros. Also, the 13th root of any 200-digit number starts with "2".

How much does it cost to file a trademark claim? It certainly seems to be an easy way of getting press coverage.

Just how much of your average pint is hops? Sounds like an excuse for increased brewery profits to me.

(And why can't I post with "60% ???" as the title?)

We have a fantastic new concept in Journalism. Think of it as The Register meets The Inquirer. We call it... The Register.