I put the 5.0 upgrade on my 2012 Nexus 7 to try it out. (That is no longer my main tablet so I can try new things there without affecting my everyday use.) It was horribly sluggish. Google finally pushed the 5.0.2 update to me yesterday and it is a HUGE improvement; performance is now back to about the same level as under KitKat.

When you are as rich as the Koch brothers, it becomes difficult to match market returns. The problem: you are a big enough player that your actions influence the market.

They already have a product in the price ballpark of an iPod: the NWZ-A17. No touch screen so the UI isn't as fancy, but it still does high resolution audio playback. http://store.sony.com/64-gb-hi...

If you're looking for a bargain in this space, the FiiO X1 is your player. It's a mere $100, but it has no internal storage so plan on spending another $100 or so on a 128GB Micro SD card. http://www.fiio.net/en/product...

A big part of the problem is that web pages keep getting more and more Javascript code. Just having Facebook open is a huge CPU drain these days.

The Mac Mini is a legacy product for Apple, much like the iPod Classic was. They aren't going to be putting much money into upgrades, but they will continue selling them so long as people buy them and the parts to make them don't get discontinued. (The demise of the iPod Classic finally happened when 1.8" hard drives went out of production; Apple was the only significant customer that was still using them.) Apple might even consider going to a new motherboard for an upgrade if they can go to the SAME new motherboard for all the models, rather than needing multiple versions for different parts of the product line.

The Mac Pro is a different beast that has a different reason for existing. Apple probably isn't making any money on the Pro; doing all that custom engineering and manufacturing for a low volume product pretty much guarantees that. But it's a product that needs to exist to keep high end creative professionals in the fold; if no such product existed those people would start to defect to Windows or Linux. Having those people in the Mac ecosystem helps Apple sell their higher volume iMac and Macbook lines.

The Macbook Air is a key part of Apple's product line. It will certainly get an upgrade unless Apple decides to shift to ARM.

Likely but not certain. It would be consistent with their previous upgrades to those lines. There have been rumors that Apple is considering a shift to ARM for their Mac line; if they go that way they won't be buying future Intel processors.

One reason you can't get that in the US: EDGE networks are being turned off in some places, a trend that will continue with time. HSDPA is the minimum point of entry to GSM-network data now.

You have to stream a lot of music to get in trouble with data caps unless you have a plan with a really low limit measured in MB rather than GB. (Exception: the new Tidal high quality streaming service that streams lossless music.) Some people have unlimited data plans. Postpaid T-Mobile customers get free streaming from the major services; that data doesn't count against your cap.

The sound quality of music on YouTube is highly variable. Early uploads had terrible sound because YouTube was using a poor codec, and they didn't preserve the original uploads back then so those videos will not sound any better now. Anything where the highest available resolution is 240p or 144p is likely to be in that category.

Current videos have the audio encoded in AAC at reasonable bit rates, so the sound quality is comparable to other streaming options if the uploader provided good audio. (That means not quite as good as music downloads, which in turn are not quite as good as CDs.) Officially posted music videos are usually fine; user uploads may or may not be.

Apple designs its own mobile processors but they are manufactured by TSMC. They do the industrial design of all their systems even though most of them are built for them by other companies. The new Mac Pro is the notable exception; Apple actually builds those.

Apple has had success at making money on hardware because they target the premium end of the market, where there is actually some profit margin available. Companies like HP and Dell are struggling because the bulk of their business is in commodity rather than premium systems. Competition with companies like Acer and ASUS has sucked most of the profit potential out of those products.

HP and Dell do have bright spots. HP makes money selling ink and toner. Dell has been successful with monitors; there are people who are willing to pay a small premium for a better display and Dell has done well at targeting them. Those niches are likely a big part of what is keeping those companies afloat.

Microsoft's software is in a decent place right now. Windows 8 has UI problems, but most can be fixed with third party software. Windows 10 seems to be on the right track to be what Windows 8 should have been. Office has its own problems and it's rather big and bloated, but it is mostly reliable; people would have abandoned it in droves if that were not true. Microsoft's developer software continue to be solid and their cloud offerings are following suit.

Their biggest problem in the past year has been with software updates. They have pushed out multiple updates to Windows that have broken significant numbers of systems. They need to get that problem cleared up ASAP.

Canada has content laws for broadcasters, requiring that a percentage of what they broadcast be connected in some way or another to Canada. Written there, performed there, done by Canadian performers, and being about Canada all figure into the formula. (Ironically, that means that the Great White North sketches on SCTV were a grand slam of CanCon even as they mocked it.) The justification is in part that broadcast spectrum is a finite resource. Cable channels are not regulated as tightly, and satellite radio has an overall requirement for the entire package of channels offered rather than content requirements for each channel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

French language preservation isn't about preventing the adoption of new words - words for concepts that the language previously had no words for - from being borrowed from other languages. It is about keeping words that are already in use from being displaced by words from other languages. Usages like le weekend and le drugstore are frowned upon by many people there, though they are also frequently encountered.

At one time there was something to the superiority of tubes. Early solid state designs really did sound terrible, because of things like crossover distortion (that has nothing to do with the crossover in your speakers, it has to do with bad things that happen when signals cross the zero point in an amplifier) that those designers did not understand. Transistor amplifiers (even now) also sound worse than tubes if they are pushed past their limits; solid state designs in that situation distort in ways that are uglier to our ears than tubes do.

But... there isn't much excuse for pushing a solid state amplifier past its limits. Getting a given amount of power output with transistors is much easier than it is with tubes, so there is no reason not to design your sound system with ample reserve capacity.

There is one market where the desire for tube amplifiers makes sense - electric guitar amps. The characteristic distortions of tubes are a part of what we recognize as the distinctive sound of the instrument. When people are trying to fill an arena with guitar sounds, it's not uncommon to feed the guitar into a tube amp, put a microphone in front of that amp, and then feed that signal into the big sound system that fills the arena - a quality condenser mic and solid state amplifiers faithfully reproduce the distortions that the small tube amplifier contributed to the guitar sound.

Slight digression: blues harp (harmonica) is nearly always amplified with one of two vintage models of microphone: the Shure 520 "Green Bullet" or the Astatic JT-30. (A version of the Shure is still being made, though some harp players prefer the earlier versions.) The microphone feeds into a tube amplifier that is usually being pushed hard; for large spaces that amp would then be mic'ed and reamplified just like the electric guitar. Both the sound of the microphone (which is far from neutral) and the amp are part of the sound that we associate with blues harp.

Similarly, digital recording pushed past its limits and into digital clipping sounds horrible. But again there is no reason to let that happen; 24 bit recording has lots of dynamic range so you don't have to push the top limit. (No commercially available DAC achieves the theoretical limit of 144dB, but more than 120dB is available.) It's easy to normalize the recording when you master it for CD so you take advantage of all 16 bits of that medium.

If you want to hear something even better than CD, try some high resolution downloads. You will need a sound card that can handle 24 bit samples and preferably at least 96KHz sample rate to take full advantage, but even many integrated sound interfaces can do that now. http://www.hdtracks.com/ is a good place to start.

You have two more days to get the free high resolution holiday sampler from Linn: http://www.linn.co.uk/christma... Get it even if you're allergic to holiday music; most of the songs in the sampler have nothing to do with any December holiday.