Stuart Turton, bring that maniacally-follicled, weirdly shaped head over here so I can slap you round the back of it for praising Windows 8.

I’ve just watched Microsoft’s Windows 8 reveal and it’s clear that Messrs Sinofsky, Ballmer et al have not so much jumped the shark as chucked the whole company into the aquarium.

Let’s start with the quite bad news before moving onto the really dismaying stuff. From this (admittedly early) video, the heart of Windows 8 looks much like Windows 7. Once Jensen gets over the exciting slidey touchscreen features of Windows 8, the same Start menu and Windows furniture is lurking beneath. Skip to three minutes through the video – that’s Windows 7, and it looks exactly the same as the operating system I’d be running right now if I didn’t like OS X more.

This consistency is broadly good news for PCs. Windows 7 is a great operating system and doesn’t need too much tinkering. The bad news is that with a full-blown desktop operating system at its heart, Windows 8 is still going to need decent hardware.

Windows 8 can be a desktop and laptop operating system, or it can be an operating system for tablets – it cannot be both

It’s an assumption to say that Windows 8 on a tablet will be a chuntery, grinding experience, but I’m going to say it anyway. A full-blown desktop operating system like Windows requires too much power to run properly on an ultraportable, low-power processor, which is why Apple only brought the barest bones of OS X to the iOS platform, and why any tablet PC running a full version of Windows 7 is absolutely doomed.

I remember watching Ballmer announce a sensationally boring set of tablets at CES in January and thumping my head against the desk, along with everyone else who’d ever tried to use a Windows 7 tablet. Windows 8 can be a desktop and laptop operating system, or it can be an operating system for tablets. It cannot be both.

Stuart’s right about Microsoft and touch when he says Microsoft hasn’t cracked it, but he’s wrong about why the company has struggled. Microsoft’s problem isn’t that it cannot design a touch UI; it’s done a great job with Windows Phone 7. The company’s problem has been trying to shoehorn touchscreen devices into markets that don’t need or want them.

Like a showhorse with a handgun, a touch interface on a desktop makes no sense. Once you’re sitting in front of a computer with a keyboard and mouse, the screen’s either too far away or at too oblique an angle to be reasonably used as a touchscreen, and why Microsoft thinks everyone wants to get fingerprints all over their desktop screens is so beyond me it’s in danger of colliding with the International Space Station.

A desktop operating system that integrates a huge swathe of touchscreen features is a waste of time, and before you argue with that, how many times have you used Windows 7’s touch features, or even been tempted to buy the hardware to use them?

Let’s head for Stuart’s main contention, though, which is that Apple is too big a threat for Windows 8 to be awful. I don’t disagree that Microsoft can ill-afford to have a Vista-style misfire with Windows 8. But Windows 8 already looks awful, and the person who decided that a loud, purple/orange/vomit colour scheme would make a good first impression needs to visit the opticians.

Second, remember Vista? When it came out, Microsoft was feeling the squeeze from a resurgent Apple, XP was well and truly on its last legs, and Microsoft badly needed to pull something great out of the bag. The result? An operating system that cost the better part of $6 billion to develop, gave a sensational first impression, and then spent the next five years annoying users until they gazed wistfully at their XP disks and reinstalled that. The idea that Microsoft will respond well to the threat of Apple is unproven at best; the only exception I can think of where the company has truly risen to a challenge set to it is Windows Phone 7, and that arrived no fewer than three years after Apple set the bar. As for its decision to spend $8.5 billion on Skype? All I can say is that the money could have been better spent on splitting Windows into two streams, one for traditional computing and one for touchscreen devices.

At the end of Microsoft’s teaser video, Harris says: “This is the new version of Windows. It’s going to run on laptops, it’s going to run on desktops, it’s going to run on PCs with mouse and keyboard, it’s going to run on touch slates: it’s going to run on everything.” All well and good, but the danger – if not the flat-out likelihood – is that if Microsoft designs Windows 8 to run on everything, it may not run well on anything.

I feel bad for Ed Vaizey. First he didn’t support net neutrality, then he decided he did, to the cat-calls of the geek community. Now he’s been tasked by the Conservatives to pick off some of the ripest low-hanging fruit: child safety.

Everyone likes children; everyone hates things that aren’t safe for children. Not so much low-hanging fruit, in fact, but pre-picked, washed and packaged fruit. An open goal.

Better yet, he’s taking on the internet. Give the tabloids a choice between putting a child in a room with an annoyed Rottweiler or a room with an internet-connected computer, and the child will be attempting to disengage its arms from Fido’s jaws before you can say ISDN.

It’s Safer Internet Day today, which means we get to watch ministers wring their hands over the FILTH our kids are watching online. We also get to watch this patently absurd video which, I guess, tries to get across a point about cyber-bullying through the medium of 90s Euro house music and teleporting teenagers.

Where does Vaizey come into this? Tasked with cheerfully popping a ball into an open goal, he’s quickly discovering the goal mouth is lined with razor blades and the keeper has hands like mattresses. “There is material online that, while legal, is not suitable for children.  In the physical world youngsters are protected from inappropriate content and the same needs to happen online,” he said today. “We will continue to work with industry to address the legitimate concerns the public has over children having easy access to inappropriate content.”

Letting a child access the internet without supervision is like letting them browse Sky’s post-watershed channels

He’s right, of course. The internet is positively awash with pornography and graphic violence, much of which, I’m sure, has the potential to do great damage to immature, easily impressed and naive minds. Could a clever piece of internet-filtering software help?

No. Last Christmas I was in a room full of relatives, and, as can happen when conversation dries up and the last glass of wine has been slurped, the talk turned to YouTube Videos We Had Seen. We decamped to the computer room, where we watched – I forget – something about an ice-skating dog. Anyway, the video watched, the adults became distracted and the kids took over control of the search bar. Less than five minutes later they had found a wet T-shirt competition.

Having noted the address, I was taken aback to realise that this happened not only on a computer that already had filtering software, but on a website (YouTube) which supposedly filters content.

Adult content is everywhere online. Any innocent search on Google Images has the potential – if not an actual likelihood – to produce an array of startlingly adult images, scattered like rude confetti through legitimate search results. If the internet can return porn when you’re not even looking for it, what hope does an automatic filter have? Kids are smarter and more tech-savvy than their parents and will defeat all but the most draconian filtration systems.

There is, however, a filter that works. It reacts fast and it doesn’t matter how content has been disguised: if it’s adult content, it will be recognised and shut down immediately. If a child repeat offends, the filter can react with an array of cruel punishments, from the withholding of money to earlier curfews. Earlier versions could deliver a clip around the ear.

The filter is the parent or guardian of a child, and that either would allow a young person to access the internet – filtered or not – without supervision truly boggles the mind. Letting a child access the internet without supervision is like letting them browse Sky’s post-watershed channels.

That’s why I feel bad for Ed Vaizey. He’s been instructed to make the Government look like it has a command of technology, and the conscience to deploy that technology to protect children. What he should be doing, though, is telling parents to pay attention, and there’s not much political capital in that.

And I wrote what I considered to be an innocent line: “…for landscape shots, place your camera on a tripod, use a remote shutter release to minimise the risk of camera shake, and apply a small aperture (f/16 is ideal) to get as much of the frame in focus as possible.”

This prompted subscriber Simon Barnes to write to PC Pro’s editor, Tim Danton, to say: “he makes a canard, suggesting f/16 is good for depth of field in landscapes, when in fact, even at full frame this is already straying into diffraction, which will be worse with smaller sensors. He’s not the only one saying this of course, it’s regularly trotted out.”

Quite apart from teaching me a new word, Simon was raising an interesting point, which I’ll attempt to tackle here. I should add that the pratical effect of diffraction in photography is to limit the resolving power of the camera as a whole – in other words once diffraction sets in, your images will in theory be softer, with less detail.The “sweet spot” for lenses is normally f/8 – f/11, so shooting f/16 might not get you the absolutely sharpest possible image you could possibly, possibly get.

What it will get you is very good depth of field – i.e. if you’ve focussed properly on one point in the frame it’s likely the rest of the landscape will be focussed as well. If I had the choice between a 100% focussed image that was slightly soft or an image where focus fell off towards the back of the scene I’d take the 100% focussed image and either live with the softness or sharpen it out afterwards.

Most of my favourite landscape images (such as the one above) are taken between f/8 and f/16 and I’ve got no problems with the sharpness of the images taken at f/16. Every lens is different, obviously, so a thousand pound wide-angle lens will perform much better at f/16 than the lens that comes with a 1000D.

Tim passed my comments on, to which Simon responded: “But again there is no mention of the sensor size which is critical in this! Also diffraction cannot be mitigated by better lens design as it’s a property of the light and aperture, not the glass.” Hands up: he’s absolutely right (for more details, visit Cambridge in Colour, which has an excellent discussion of this very subject).

But: the odds of a landscape being ruined by diffraction or sensor size are tiny compared to the odds of it being ruined by misjudging composition/focus/exposure/using a non-professional lens. In other words, it isn’t, personally, something I’d worry about. The lens attached to a camera has a much bigger impact on image quality than the camera it’s attached to (caveats apply as always… in most cases… with some exceptions… etc).

Then again, photography is a personal thing and if Simon has found a way of working that produces sharp, beautiful images that he’s proud of then I’d absolutely urge him to ignore me totally and carry on.

For people looking for a general guideline I’d still say f/16 is a good starting point. (If you have the inclination, look on that Cambridge in Colour page for the section headed “Notes on real-world use in photography” and read the first two paragraphs – that’s what I’m getting at.)

f/16 is a pretty general rule. As with most aspects of photography the rules change depending on what you’re using, what you’re shooting and what kind of light you have available. And it’s true that if you’re shooting with a compact then different rules apply once again.

In particular, when the “what you’re using” is a compact rather than a Digital SLR, diffraction becomes a much bigger issue. As the Cambridge in Colour article points out, the sensor size in a compact is so tiny that diffraction is an issue at quite large f-stops, which means far more pictures will be affected.

It makes sense to me, though, that with the image quality/lens quality on offer from compacts being so much lower than that of DSLR, that diffraction will never be noticed before the other flaws in an image. I confess, though, that’s a bit of an assumption, so I’d be fascinated to know if people have encountered diffraction issues with their compacts – or indeed their DSLRs at f/16.

Yet, Toy Story 3 is categorically the last film I will ever pay extra money for to watch in 3D. My local Odeon was showing a 3D print of Toy Story at half-past six and the 2D version two hours later: I’ve concluded I’d have gladly waited.

Why? Aside from the 3D surcharge imposed by the cinemas and the ear-chaffing discomfort of the 3D glasses, there’s another problem: I can’t see my popcorn.

3D glasses, being polarised, are darker than not wearing glasses. The problem is that they’re so much darker they affect the image quality of the film.

Let’s do a little, vaguely scientific test. With my DSLR set on aperture-priority mode, I pointed it at a wall and pressed the shutter halfway to have it work as a kind of light meter. To get a good exposure, my camera told me, it would fire the shutter for 1/125th of a second.

Then, I held my 3D Glasses over the lens and did the same thing. This time it metered and told me it would fire the shutter at 1/50th of a second to get the same exposure. That’s less than half as fast. Photographically, that means that my 3D glasses absorb one and a quarter stops of light. In real-world terms that means my glasses make anything I look at – a film screen, for instance – less than half as bright as it would be if I was using the naked eye.

I’m not alone in this: Christopher Nolan, who directed the (thankfully non-3D) Dark Knight, said, “on an experiential level, I find the dimness of the (3D) image extremely alienating.”

When I flicked my 3D glasses away from my face during Toy Story 3 I saw a bright, vibrant image that did justice to the artists’ vision. With the glasses on, I lost track of details in dark scenes. Films shouldn’t be hard to watch, you shouldn’t need to squint, and you certainly shouldn’t come away with an experience any less than the director and photography crew wanted just because the current vogue is for 3D effects.

I wouldn’t say Toy Story 3 was ruined because it was in 3D. I still loved it, I recommend it whole-heartedly and if it doesn’t win an Oscar this year I’ll eat a pair of 3D glasses. But they’ll be the last pair I’ll ever own.

You can read the full-length version of this blog here.

I realise that looks the wrong way round. Palm is the smaller company. The weedy David to Apple’s giant Goliath. But each time the chance to go to war with a company several times its size has been presented, Palm has reached for it with both hands like a 19-stone man lunging for cake.

I’m talking, in case you’re not following the smartphone market as closely as you should, about Palm’s moronic battle to keep the Pre compatible with iTunes.

Now the Pre has been patched to work with iTunes again, a development so tedious it may as well have been written by Dan Brown. Does Palm really think people will buy the Pre because you can use it with iTunes?

The story so far goes like this. Palm releases the Pre in June. One of the claims the marketers made at the time was that it was compatible with iTunes. It was a sort of hook to get iTunes or iPhone users to think about transferring because they wouldn’t have to change their music software.

But iTunes is only for Apple hardware. It’s a bit silly, I grant you, but it’s Apple’s software and I suppose Apple can do whatever it wants with it. It could make iTunes only compatible with people whose names began with ‘H’, if it wanted.

So a few weeks later Apple releases iTunes 8.2.1. If you had a Pre and you upgraded iTunes, iTunes would no longer work with your handset.

Then Palm released a new version of the Pre’s firmware, and iTunes started working again.

Then Apple released iTunes 9, and the Pre was once again incompatible.

It’s at this point everyone watching began gnawing the side of their hands and wishing that Palm, or Apple, or ideally both, would vanish off the face of the planet.

Now the Pre has been patched to work with iTunes 9 again, a development so monumentally tedious and predictable it might as well have been written by Dan Brown. Does Palm really think people will buy the Pre because you can use it with iTunes?

Then there’s the very questionable wisdom of getting into a scrap with one of the world’s most successful smartphone manufacturers at a time when your own survival is anything but guaranteed. Palm is a company which had to clarify a few days ago that it wasn’t laying people off. No, it’s “better aligning our staff with our business objectives,” which could mean anything. And even if it’s not firing people, it lost $164.5 million dollars in the first quarter of 2009, and that’s bad news however you look at it.

The constant tit-for-tat is being started by Palm every time. It’s bad for the Pre’s image, not least because those likely to buy it – consumers – are unlikely to tolerate repeatedly being shut out of iTunes while Palm scrambles to release another update for long. Palm should let iTunes go and leave Apple alone. It has enough problems already.

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driving me up the wall.

Outlook 2010 tries to be all clever by bundling messages into “Conversations”. This is useful for when someone in the office CC’s everyone in on which pub to go to and you spend Friday afternoon battling a deluge of witty put-downs. In Outlook 2010 everything with the subject line “Let’s go to the pub!” is rolled into one conversation and you have to scroll through your inbox less.

Problem is, Outlook 2010 isn’t particularly clever when it comes to the science bit. Instead of being smart and looking at to whom an email has been sent, it simply grabs the subject line and lumps any subsequent email with the same subject line into the same conversation. So if you forward an email from a stupid person to a clever person and add a line saying “LOOK AT THIS MORON!”, Outlook will see the subject line and make it look like you’ve accidentally CC’d the idiot. I did this last week and nearly had a heart attack.

Take this screenshot. (These emails, by the way, are different to the one which nearly gave me an aneurism last week.) Greg Salmon does PR for Microsoft Office, Tim Danton is PC Pro’s editor. It looks to the untrained eye like they’re both CC’d in on an email with the subject “Office 2010”, but they’re not. It simply means I’ve sent them separate emails which Outlook has grouped into a conversation.

Microsoft claims Outlook 2010 is more intelligent than that. A spokesman reckons “the scenario of similar or exact subject lines has been accounted for by tracking the GUID [Globally Unique Identifier] of each message,” but I really can’t see it. Take the screenshot below as an example.

Naturally, this is less of a problem if you use nice, descriptive subject lines such as “Meeting on Monday the 25th to discuss the price of tea”, but I don’t. I send messages with stupid subject lines like “I’m…” and finish the rest of the sentence in the body of the email. Or I say things like “Meeting”, and suddenly Outlook thinks I’m taking part in a giant email conversation with 98 recipients.

Microsoft is keen to point out this isn’t the final product. “We are still working on this feature, and are planning improvements to our ability to differentiate conversations with the same subject line before Office 2010 ships”, said our friendly Microsoft spokesperson.

But it’s surprising that, even at this early stage – and remember this is the Technical Preview of Office 2010, it’s not even at Beta yet – the view is so far behind other conversation-threading systems already available.

For example, Gmail offers conversation threading as well, and the technology behind it sounds similar: “Gmail threading is determined by consistency within the subject headers and references headers of email. A subject header is commonly known as the subject line and a reference header appears in the “References” line within the original, raw message information,” according to the company.

That sounds a lot like the GUID that Microsoft’s talking about it but my inboxes don’t lie: Gmail is currently threading my conversations correctly, while Outlook 2010 is very hit and miss.

You can turn it off and arrange messages simply by the “To:” field like in the old days, but I don’t want to. I like the conversation feature. I use it in Gmail all the time and it’s brilliant, and I want it to be brilliant in Outlook 2010. Certainly the rest of the application is golden: searching is nearly instantaneous in my 5,000-strong inbox and I like how a business card pops up onscreen if you hover over an email address. But until Microsoft gets the conversation feature right I’ll be treading a lot more carefully in my emails.

A quick reminder of the rules: all the songs had to have some connection to computers and they had to be found in the Spotify library. 

The winners are:

12. It’s All About the Pentiums by irritating American “comedian” Weird Al Yankovic, as suggested by our very own (and now banned from Spotify) Darien Graham-Smith.

11. Electric Worm by rappers The Beastie Boys. Many thanks to Fat Trev.

10. Mr. Roboto by electro-rockers Styx. Included here partly for its obvious reference to brilliant Japanese robot technology, but also for the line “My true identity, I’m Kilroy, Kilroy, Kilroy“, which we can’t hear without thinking of the orange-faced Euro-sceptic dancing the robot. Now there’s an image for you. Suggested by Greg.

9. At number nine is Twisted Transistor by Korn, suggested by (erm) Steve Backley.

8. Technologic by Daft Punk follows at number eight, and is a song so incessantly annoying we only included it because if we have to suffer, so do you. Many “thanks” to Peter.

7. Naked in Front of the Computer by Faith No More is another gem suggested by Fat Trev, and gets a mention because it accurately describes the disturbing state of PC Pro’s hyperactive reviews team. This is why we don’t have a live webcam, folks.

6. Go Go Gadget Flow by Lupe Fiasco lands at number six, and gets a nod from Oliver for including a proper geek reference to the 16-bit Sega Genesis.

5. Steamy Windows by Tina Turner. Because the only logical follow-up to Chicago-born rapper Lupe Fiasco is Tina Turner. As suggested by 1980’s Olympian-turned-motivational-speaker Kriss Akabusi. Or someone using a fake name.

4. A Scanner Darkly by Primal Scream, as suggested by Richard George.

3. Left to My Own Devices by the Pet Shop Boys neatly describes the PC Pro team’s idea of heaven, and we’re grateful to Firewire Fred for the suggestion.

2. At number 2 is The Proxy by RJD2. If you haven’t mentally checked out of your office already this afternoon, this is the song that will be the final straw.

1. And finally, Return of the Mack by mid-nineties stun-gun enthusiast Mark Morrison was also suggested by our speedy new friend Kriss Akabusi. The eponymous album was released in 1997, pre-dating Apple’s massive revival by a couple of years. Silly man, funny voice, excellent IT industry prediction skills.

On that note, we’re going to give our new playlist a whirl. Thanks for all your suggestions and we’ll see you next week. If you’d like to inflict – sorry, share – PC Pro’s Spotify playlist with someone special, you can find it here.

Update: we’ve just noticed this status update on the Spotify site warning of intermittent issues with playlists. Best laid plans and all that… 

But this time I have a secret weapon. Something that will help me defeat the evil estate agent empire and emerge victorious, proud occupant of a palatial multi-room apartment somewhere nice.

I’ve got Google.

Google Maps has always been a handy flat-hunting tool, if for no reason other than you can instantly scope out your proposed house’s location and find out quickly if it’s near handy things like supermarkets, parks and train stations. But now that Google has spent a summer nipping around in funny little cars with cameras strapped to their roofs, it’s even better.

Want to know if that blank space on the map is a park or a nine-acre industrial wasteland? Street View will tell you. Is your building really a “tasteful warehouse conversion” or a horrible late-nineties architectural disaster whose only remedy involves a yellow crowd control tape and a bulldozer? Street View has the answer. It’s even handy for just arranging bookings, because it allows you to figure out exactly what a building looks like so you don’t walk past it on your way to the viewing.

I even spent a long-winded but enjoyable morning creating my own Google Maps mashup, in which flats that I want to look at have blue pins, flats which I have booked to look at have red pins, and flats that I’ve looked at and dismissed – almost all of them, I’m afraid – have yellow pins. It’s a work of beauty, complete with pictures and links to the original ad. I’d share it with you, but frankly you might find out where I live and I don’t want to have to make you all tea.

It’s so good, in fact, that I spent so long doing it that I ran out of time to make any actual appointments, which is why I’ll be doing my flat hunting next weekend instead.

Among the drive’s long list of features is the ability to run BitTorrent downloads in the background. This is great news for anyone who currently leaves their PC running overnight. But before you do, the manual has the following warning:

“Warning: Please be warned against illegal downloading of copyrighted materials. The Download Station functionality is provided for downloading authorized files only. Downloading or distribution of unauthorized materials may result in severe civil and criminal penalty. Users are subject to the restrictions of the copyright laws and should accept all the consequences.”

All well and good, of course. We wouldn’t want people illegally downloading content, and no sane hardware manufacturer would condone it in a manual. Except that QNAP has used the following screengrab:

This suggests two things: firstly, someone at QNAP has a much more realistic idea of what people are going to do with their products than the text of their manuals suggests. And secondly, that person has horrible, horrible taste in films.

But I’ve been away for a year, and my PC has been turned off the whole time.

In a way it was like greeting an old friend. All the familiar sounds and lights came on when I pushed the button, Windows sprang into life, and I was reminded of how I really, really needed to take something pointy to the blue LED that adorns one of the system fans.

And then I realised that I’m a hopeless idiot. I turned my PC on to find a particular file: a single, paltry Word document. It should have been as simple as typing in a keyword and, a few seconds later, Windows helpfully suggesting a few possibilities. Instead, it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. In a barn full of haystacks. A padlocked barn. Guarded by the SAS.

I have, at last count, no fewer than three external hard disks, ranging in size from 160 to 500GB, and at least three more small, USB-powered portable disks. I have, courtesy of numerous well-meaning PRs, a backpack full of USB thumbdrives. The total potential storage is well over a terabyte, and probably closer to two.

Which would be fine and great and good and all that, were it not for the hopeless idiot thing I mentioned above. My backup regime largely consisted of dragging and dropping monolithic folders – My Pictures, say – from one disk to the other. A few of my external hard disks have My Documents folders on them. It’s impossible to say whether one is a newer backup than the other, or if they might be exact replicas of each other.

Exact replicas, that is, of the My Documents folder on my main PC, except that folder is probably newer itself, thus rendering my two backups hopelessly obsolete.

Every now and then I come across a folder named “Old”, or “Archive”, or, most uselessly of all “New Folder”. In it will be a collection of Word Files, JPGs with useful names like DSC_3891.jpg and the occasional Outlook .pst file, which itself contains hundreds of emails which might or might not exist somewhere else. It means that I can’t delete anything despite being desperate for space, without individually inspecting all the files and trying to remember if I’ve seen the contents somewhere before. It’s a bit like that card game where you uncover a card, and then try to remember if you’ve seen it somewhere before. Only instead of playing with, let’s say, a dozen cards, you’re playing with a football field’s worth, and all the files are buried under the turf.

All of this suggests three things. First, that my wife should get used to the sight of me, on a Saturday morning, head in my hands, hair sticking from between my fingers, as I mutter quietly to myself about the minute differences between E:\Archive and F:\From Old PC\My Documents\Archive. It also means once all this is sorted out in, I don’t know, December, I’ll have a proper backup regimen involving proper backup software.

Finally, it means you get to help. I have lots of files on my disks that are identical – in literally every way – to other files in other folders on other disks, and I would very much like to avoid wearing out my mouse by having to double-click on all of them. Is there a piece of software out there that can analyse my files and let me know where all my space is going, and how I can claim it back?

Over to you.