Getting rid of XP will soon become important in order to improve market share of "modern" browsers capable of rendering HTML5 / CSS3 reasonably correctly.

I guess you're right there. Sony BMG in any case was a big record company before Betamax...

I think I'm using a more liberal interpretation of what deprecate means, but it doesn't matter - we both mean the same thing - redundant, pointless, once relevant now no longer relevant.

Good point in the irony - though I wonder if their protectionism is driven by agreements with content companies that allowed Sony to defend BluRay in the first place? After all the hardware manufacturers shouldn't care much about how their hardware is used, unless they need help from the big studios etc. to push their hardware formats.

Minidisc was an affordable recordable digital format before CD burners became prevalent. DAT was better though as it was 16 bit, 48KHz. Minidisc was a lossy compressed format, though it wasn't a total flop.

For non hacking, Sony do manage to be reasonably relevant. The PS3 and the win for BluRay exorcised some of the ghosts of the Betamax era (and Betamax was a superior technology from a quality point of view). Their midrange consumer equipment is reasonable, and their semi pro stuff still dominates in AV markets and provides a big range of equipment.

That being said, they're no longer dominant in home audio (though they still have reasonable CD players and stuff) since their real flagship - The Walkman - has been deprecated by apple. Home HiFi is not selling as much, the PC is the new media center and there it's Apple all the way for most of my real music-mad friends. Sony have big corporate culture issues, but that's nothing new.

If you really are director of studies at a major uni, given your language and style, I'd like some of what you're smoking at night please.

- not many people have 5.1 listening equipment where they listen to music
- it's likely that audio engineers for music don't have 5.1 in their workspaces either unless they regularly work on film too, which usually means in a studio big enough to house an orchestra

But it's an interesting point. I'd quite like to have a few 5.1 mixes, where do you get them from?

Let us not forget that double blind doesn't mean telling apart (they may both sound different) but actually telling which source is which while listening to a sample that is randomly selected so that you don't know which one it is beforehand and neither does the test observer (hence double blind).

MP3s encoded properly from a proper CD rip (Exact Audio Copy comes to mind) at >192kbps for all passages and VBR is practically transparent even on reasonably good equipment. Very well mastered CDs may sound different (depends on how good you notice these things) but double blind tests consistently show transparent results above 192kbps.

Shitty 128kbps mp3s (typically the median bitrate) are not transparent. Never have been.

Very nice low power setup. Running complex stuff too. The Sheeva plug looks a good candidate for a NAS / media server without the pain of big optimisation, and would save me $$$ compared to running PC tower configs to mostly copy files to my box under the TV.

Can't help but think that the main thing holding back BlackBerry in non-users is that it isn't as glitzy and has very little "wow" factor compared to Windows phone 7, iPhone and Android. For personal use - photos, video, checking personal email quickly (but not replying, which is a pain even with predictive text) and surfing casually. Add contacts to Outlook and they're straight on your phone. Email includes a your local addresses and can query the enterprise contact DB. SSH is possible via BlackBerry and can be inside the local network for access to server admin.

BlackBerry is great for email & scheduling, allows you to reply to email comfortably, and the touch version adds some of the other advantages that currently belong to Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Sounds to me like a lot of people are confusing not checking the default OS font size, or not setting your own (changeable) font size. Most of the comments I've seen about this type of bug also happen if you change default OS fonts - nothing to do with DPI... mrchaotica summarises it well

It's been done before, depends what you need from the library : http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/, http://www.uclibc.org/, etc (but these are clearly targetted at embedded systems).

That being said, dependency hell is the main reason Linux cannot get ahead of Windows or Mac for the masses - the abstraction layer may not be as optimisable as on Linux, but you can distribute small binaries and be _sure_ they work out of the box with no issues.

The state of course intervenes against the overall interest of pure profit, that is what it is there for. The level of state intervention is a matter of politics, and indeed you need but look at Copenhagen to see that overall business competitiveness is the cornerstone of any negotiation on absolute emissions reduction.

So there is a balance and nobody ever gets it right, they sway from overprotective "socialist state" and hard right "private enterprise and free market economy rules" according to geography, political will and geostrategy.

Euro & Japanese manufacturers are less influenced by the US fuel lobby. Explain why petrol costs way less in the US : (the answer is taxation in Europe). The taxation strategy indirectly subsidises (it's not quite a subsidy, of course, but to the end user making one fuel cheaper than the other is akin to subsidy even if the difference is the level of taxation)

Agree in part with behaviour patterns in Europe, but I've seen roads from Fort Worth & surroundings to Dallas clogged with large vehicles mostly used for a less than 20 mile daily commute...