The dates are clearly in dd/mm/yyyy format unless you know of a 27th month that the rest of us aren't familiar with.

I believe earlier leaks pointed to proper support for DVB-T including MHEG support. Cablecard is great for people in North America but the rest of the world is still waiting for MCE to properly deal with the TV standards we use.

I totally agree with Adam Fuller - I would love MCE to support my 3007WFP at its native resolution although Vista looks damned good at a non-native 1920x1080 on this monitor anyway.

All in all I'm pretty happy with Vista MCE. I've not come across many bugs (certainly no show-stoppers) and as I never used XP MCE I don't suffer from the disappointment those guys have because the upgrade wasn't as radical as they hoped it would be. I'm sure the update later this year will satisfy everyone.

The difference between Apple and Microsoft on this one is that MS does licence PlaysForSure (although this doesn't apply to the Zune) while Apple refuses to licence FairPlay. Alternatively, Philips licenced the CD again unlike Apple with FairPlay. It is this licencing that makes interoperability possible as we're not dealing with standards.

If Apple simply opened up FairPlay to competitors then the EU would back off. Untile they do that then there is no reason why they shouldn't be investigated for monopolistic practices. However, as always Apple refuse to open up there technology to competitors so why defend them. There is no reason why this would be bad for Apple and iTunes could still be the most popular music service - unless they were undercut by competitors or are you people happy to continue paying more to Apple.

At the end of the day most of the arguments in favour of Apple are based on two things: fanboyism and racism (i.e. anti-European sentiments). If the EU were giving Microsoft a hard time about this I doubt that there would be too many people sticking up for them.