They could have survived as a hobbyist store, but it would have been a small chain. Perhaps one radio shack store for a city of million. The way it was now, there is a radio shack at nearly every grocery store, shopping strip, and mall.

Well, for now after two months of ownership, I haven't seen any factory updates yet. To me it wouldn't be a big issue to keep rooting the device only every now and then. In fact, I am thinking of sticking with the KitKat when the Samsung Lollipop update appears. The 4.4.2 seems like a stable smooth OS. I'll let the other kids do the testing and update only when Lollipop has a killer feature that I need.

Also, don't forget that the custom ROM itself is a vector for security issues. I am talking about the custom ROMs that are uploaded on android forums by random unknown dudes, as opposed by well established projects, and then dozens of users can't install them fast enough.

Meanwhile, the Android KitKat 4.4.2 as shipped with my new Samsung Tab S 10.5 tablet is a mature, stable, and pretty smooth OS. I do not get the obsession with always chasing the latest version. I hang around XDA forums, and I feel like more than half of people who flash custom ROMs have no clue why they even need them, but it's some kind of badge of honor to get rid of the stock ROM. They complain about "lag" and "bloatware" which are supposedly fixed, yet no one ever cared to explained to me where I can reproduce that lag and why can't they just delete a couple of pre-bundled apps by hand.

Personally, I have run into three issues, two of which I fixed myself after rooting my device, and the third I can live with.

One thing I don't get is if you know your genes carry a decease that can affect your child's health, then why even try to reproduce? Why not drop the notion of having to continue your rotten genetic line, and instead adopt a healthy child? Jeez.

Without doubt, there is now some kind of liberal conspiracy to bring affirmative action into high-tech education and workplace. Now that they have mostly won the same sex marriage battle, it seems like this is now the top item on the agenda, considering we're seeing news articles on this issue nearly every other day, like this is this the top problem hindering our progress towards some kind of a utopian Star Trek society.

The problem with Perl is not just the time to learn it. The biggest problem is that Perl developers believe in TMTOWTDI (There is more than one way to do it) principle. As a result, numerous Perl idioms exist for doing the exact same thing. No matter how much time you spend reading Perl programming books and coding yourself, you keep running into idioms that look slicker and better (or just bizzare) relative to what you know.

Why is this bad? This is a difficulty for big application development projects where there are many developers working on the same code. The more expressive the language is, the harder it is for others to understand each others code. On the other hand, Python's inventor Guido van Rossum goes into great lengths to ensure that Python has one way for expressing a given task, and usually that it is the simplest of all alternatives. The result is a simple and tidy programming language that's easy to learn and understand.

Another problem with Perl is that it looks like an alien language for anyone who is not a unix wizard. At its core, the original idea of Perl was to have ONE language that combines the ideas of Unix shell programming, C, awk, grep, and other unix tools. To a unix wizard Perl makes total sense. To anyone who is not an expert in the unix environment, Perl looks like a gibberish. And even if they take time to learn what it means, they never understand the design decisions behind it without spending a good amount of time with unix and OS X command line tools.

IMHO, the big difference is that Microsoft has been historically focused on the enterprise. Very boring and business-like. User interfaces and usability have been decent since Windows 95, but still took a backseat to Microsoft's enterprise onslaught. The end users could wait because they were effectively captive customers. And once the web and internet went mainstream, Microsoft spent a whole lot of resources on trying to lock customers into closed Microsoft-only technologies (e.g. Java sabotage attempt, C#, IE, etc) instead of thinking what's going to be the next hottest thing. On the other hand, apple was able to see what's going on beyond the traditional desktop and laptop. Perhaps that was the only route Apple could take considering Microsofts dominance in the traditional PC and server market.

Interesting info, but it does not address one big issue. When you root your android device and upload a different ROM, how do you know this ROM doesn't do something malicious? You probably don't. The only way to be sure is to compile everything yourself.

Nonsense. Closed? Yes, for obvious reasons. Insecure by design? Why would any vendor want to do that?

If you live in LA you can surf and ski on the same day. You enjoy a mild-dry climate instead of a hot and humid Texas climate (at least in the summer). Authentic ethnic food is far easier and cheaper to find in LA than in Dallas. The same "LA" arguments apply to the Silicon Valley. California cities are a great place for bicyclists, but in Texas bicyclists are being moved down with big ass trucks like they're some sort of terrorists. I can tell you from my personal observations that a small Bay Area city like Berkeley or Oakland, has far more bicycle paths than San Antonio, a Texas city of 1 million and one of the fattest in the nation.

.. simply because the OEM disabled MSE/Defender and instead shipped the PCs with a trial version of Norton or some other commercial suite? At some point those trials expire, and there could be a lot of people who neither bought the full version nor enabled MSE/Defender.

A little correction. In the last few years, Alpha hardware wasn't being updated, but nobody was beating Alpha when it was alive and developed. Once Compaq bought DEC, they simply let Alpha die on the vine. Compaq, a very x86-centric company, had not interest in proprietary Unix/RISC solution. They apparently bought DEC simply for the DEC customer's contact book.

While I normally prefer MacOS X to Linux, MacOS X 10.4 was the last MacOS X version that was officially supported on my dual-USB G3 iBook. I didn't mind it because 10.4 is still a nice OS, but some time later, like 10 years ago, I realized that getting the latest software, such as Octave, we getting increasingly hard for this OS. Finally, Mozilla announced that Firefox 3.6.28 was the last web browser supported on OS X 10.4 a few years back. At that point, I was left no choice but to install Debian.

I disagree about BB. People who are not nerds continue to shop at Best Buy. Best Buy will not price match Amazon and Newegg, so the argument about their prices not competitive is kind of moot. It's also quite reassuring for many people to see and inspect such big household items like washing machine, TV, or refrigerator before buying one.

They could have "gone back to their roots" by dumping all the common electronics that you can get anywhere and addressing the do-it-yourselfers by hopping on the robotics/Arduino bandwagons.

They could, but that would seriously downsize the scale of their operations. For example, in San Antonio, a city of +1 million, they have near a couple of dozen stores. There is not enough enough demand for DIY or hands on projects to keep all those stores open. They could afford to run at most one or two at best.