Except the only reason they're "copying" it isn't because of the iPhone, it's because to do a nearly bezel-less display, it's one of the best solutions. I still think how Samsung handled it with the S8 and Note 8 made more sense, but I suppose if you want all the display you can squeeze into a device, it works. But I really don't think customers wanting an iPhone X copycat makes that big of a impact.

Sure it's useful. It refutes all the religions that claim mankind was made be some deity. That's money well spent in my mind.

I use BD-R as a method of backing up my photography work as I hit certain quotas of data (obviously pointless to burn a BD if I don't have ~25GB waiting to burn to it). I do still buy Blu-ray movies (and lately the 4K UltraHD variants) mostly because a) I want to "own" the movies (even if the studios think they're only licensing the content to me), and b) I like to use tools like makemkv to rip the disc and store it on a hard drive collection of movies. At approximately 25-35GB per movie, it can get kind of large, but the picture quality is worth it.

Wondering how long it'll be before we can rip 4K UHD Blu-rays though. :/

I use them mostly for gaming. I've found phone screens to be too small, both from a visual perspective, as well as an interface perspective. I couldn't imagine trying to use them for productivity though. Can you get BT keyboards (or use the on-screen keyboard)? Sure, but both typically sacrifice something (appearance, feel, layout) to remain portable. Even laptop keyboards don't feel right compared to a desktop keyboard.

Having said that, as others have suggested, they do have their limited uses. Watching videos, browsing the web and performing basic tasks (sending an e-mail, updating a spreadsheet, making minimal edits to a document) all fit within reasonable use for them. I also think as their prices come down they will be a basic addition for most people for just those very reasons: performs all of the tasks they can with their phone, but on a significantly larger and easier to see/interact with screen. I know the Galaxy Tab S2 is a natural complement to folks that use the S6 or S7: you can take calls/texts received by your phone on the tablet. I wouldn't be surprised to see similar functionality on iPads for folks with iPhones.

Yes, but the model up until now has mostly been either free (OTA) or paying for an entire service (cable, minus the odd premium channels). This is streaming, which inherently limits the available quality to whatever CBS feels like providing and whatever your available bandwidth can handle; with ATSC OTA there's little reason to made content look worse on purpose, though cable/satellite is a mixed bag (cue up the stories of Comcast squeezing more and more channels into smaller space).

The money they make off of television advertising (OTA/cable) is pretty big, IIRC. Also, FWIW, CBS made a profit of $1.4 billion last year... hardly sounds like they're hurting. I guess what I'm getting at is... they appear to be forcing people into a specific service using a name brand they know will get at least some people to bite. You have a loyal fanbase, why potentially ruin that by forcing them on to your platform? To make it so you have to pay for it AND can't skip ads?

Whoops, my bad, no idea where I got $15 from. :( Still, other than being able to watch whenever I want, I can see this turning into an expensive thing to do if every individual network has just one show you want to watch.

Yeah, I haven't had cable in 12 years or so. It's been a combination of OTA television (local news, some prime time television now that they're mostly off the reality television bender they were on for ten years) and torrenting. If I'm going to pay $15 a month for something as limited as what CBS is offering, it better be advertising free.

I think it loses the ability to call itself a "TV series" when it refuses to air over a conventional method for getting television into your home... Just sayin'. I love Trek, but I hope this flops so CBS will know their service is lame. (But if it flops, CBS will likely blame Trek and keep pushing ahead with the service anyways).

As languages further abstract away the underlying hardware, it's helpful to understand how it all works. Especially if you've never had to step into an assembly language debugger. The most likely (and probably relevant) architecture would be x86/x86-64, followed closely by some variation of ARM. IA64 isn't relevant, but if you read up on a little bit of it (there was a series of articles on Raymond Chen's blog a few weeks back), you'll learn about an interesting take on a processor architecture (which offloaded much of the optimization work to the compiler; it was also heavily slanted towards parallel processing unlike x86).

Hmm... I don't know. It's a value proposition for me. I've been cable free for over ten years. If there's some show I want to watch badly enough, there's the internet, for everything else, OTA HDTV works great. I couldn't stomach paying $40+ (and up to $90 if you actually wanted a choice of channels), that's $480 to $1080 a year, for the privilege of perhaps seeing something entertaining (but we don't guarantee that).

...but still lacking. I'm sad to see they're going with a proprietary memory card for games. I was hoping, at worst, they'd have two memory card slots, one proprietary one for games, and a standard SD or MS slot for expanding memory. Also sad to see video out is gone (PSP had video out at least, and I was hoping for a mini-HDMI connection or possibly wireless HDMI (since the standard is almost complete IIRC)). Oh well... maybe next console generation.

Problem there chief, but it's very likely many PS2 games could be done in software. Neverminding the fact that the PS2 hardware needed is likely DIRT CHEAP for Sony (PS2 is $100 retail, and I suspect they're raking in profits off of those systems at this stage of the game).

It's software, not hardware. They flipped a bit and turned it off for the Slim units, there's nothing hardware related with SACD playback...

Oversimplified. USB ports (the hardware) cost PENNIES. Trust me, knocking off two USB ports didn't save Sony (or the consumer, for that matter) anything. About the only complaint I have about the 4 USB ports I have is that all four are on the front. I'd have preferred one or two on the back for external storage (so it looks nicer in my rack setup).

Okay, you're obviously "informed". Educate me how the PS3 isn't powerful enough to run PS2 software?

Why would I direct my rage at geohot when it's Sony who disabled it? Am I pro-piracy? No. But I am definitely all about consumer rights, and consumers bought a COMPUTER when they bought a PS3. Sony decided, on their own, unilaterally, to force people to choose between losing their computer or losing other portions of the device THEY PAID FOR. As I've said in dozens of other places, I'll be shocked if a class action lawsuit isn't started over this. If there was ever a "line in the sand" moment for people to stand up, this was it.

Again, dirt cheap hardware. Slightly more expensive than the two USB ports, but still nothing to write home about (likely less than USD $1.00 for the whole kit).

All I know is that I paid $600 for this system and it promised me the ability to install other operating systems on it. That promise has been broken, and not by accident, but purposefully, with intent and malice. That strikes me as actionable in the courts here (and obviously it's already heading that way in more progressive regions of the world; the person who got a partial refund in Europe being a leading example).

One of the primary issues this bug causes is that it resets the clock to 12/31/1999. Most content (in fact, all content that I'm aware of) has a "licensed starting" date/time, and none of the titles I have will work at all. This tells me that they must have a secondary clock (a "real clock") that they use to tell when licensed content is valid/invalid (so people can't just change the date/time back two days to play a demo that has expired, or a rental that has expired, etc).

And since the clock is obviously integral to their protection mechanism, it is a flaw in said mechanism.

Note: No, I have no inside information, but this seems to be a reasonable deduction given the evidence at hand.

Because even offline games are unplayable, so it's clear some flaw exists relating to their protection mechanism.