So it's unintended comedy.

When they hired John Smedley it became fairly obvious that it's going to fail. Guy has long history of overpromising and under delivering combined with epic fails like Starwars galaxies NGE.

Uninstall updates on those apps first. Then it will let you disable them.

This is the reason why missus doesn't use our point-n-shoot anymore. When you are taking pictures from kids SLR is clear winner since you get picture taken when you want it, not when the camera has pondered the situation enough and situation is allready over....

I guess it's intentional... You never know when Sony declares that pictures you take gear manufactured by them is their property.

The N900 is good, but I think eventually Android development is going to catch up to the iPhone and have good commercial games. The N900 probably never will (well, aside from emulators and Quake). Its like the difference between buying a PSP and a GP2x, the GP2x is more hacker friendly, both have similar feature-sets, but you are going to get better quality games on the PSP at the expense of not being able to run a few nifty apps (assuming a non-hacked PSP). Community driven projects are great at making emulators, ports of old UNIX games (look at the 100,000 versions of nethack out there) but for new, full featured games that are more than a tech demo, you usually have to go with a commercial OS. Android is good in that it will allow unofficial "shady" development (emulators) while still enticing commercial studios.

I'm not saying that an MBA assures a good life, or an engineering degree prevents one. I am arguing that from the sample size I have seen:

1. Damn hard working, ridiculously smart engineers make OK money, get a little recognition if their lucky, and maybe even a 9x12 cube instead of a 9x9 one.

2. Dolts with MBA's (many of them also with engineering degrees, though often shoddy engineers who had to go to plan B) often easily slip into some form of management, start life with a 9x12 cube, and get heaps of recognition when projects succeed (usually despite, not because, of their "leadership").

Just my distilled observations from 10 years in the trenches.

The most heartbreaking example I witnessed while at HP/Agilent was seeing one of they most amazing engineers I'd ever met take early retirement in disgust. He is the holder of many patents, and was the driving force behind numerous kick-ass microwave instruments (i.e. ones they were huge money making platforms for a decade or more). As the story goes his wife, who was originally hired on as a secretary as part of his recruitment, had worked her way up through management. She was not a bad manager, but nothing special either, and was making 2x what he was making as the best damn engineer in the company (at least in the top 1%, and widely recognized as such).

Just saying that the incentives as they stand today are against someone smart going into science and engineering. If you do the math, as smart hard working dude can make a lot more, and be a lot less stressed going for the MBA track, than if they go the science or engineering routes. Once you add in the relative portability of an MBA, versus being a pigeon holed expert in a corner of engineering, the MBA starts to look a lot better.

China's desire to control its exchange rate isn't just advantageous for them, its good for us (those of us in westernized countries) too. If it wasn't for their exchange rate, we wouldn't be able to buy all the cheap products we have today. Flat screen monitors, computers, hell even little dinky plastic parts would be much more expensive. As much as we may not like our money flowing into the east, I highly doubt anyone here would be willing to give up the lifestyle that cheap Chinese products has provided us.

You're doing something wrong, as you only need to give Software Update your password once when installing multiple system updates. Unless you have an incredibly slow internet connection, perhaps, and it takes so long to download the updates that the authentication expires?

The iPhone isn't getting down to a $50 price point anytime soon. It's quite possible that the Universe will expire from heat death before it happens.