Is HP capable of doing anything these days without either making a complete hash of it, or landing in legal trouble?

That's an inclusive 'or' - they appear to be quite capable of making a complete hash of something AND landing in legal trouble over it.

But wait, I thought Symbian and the Nokia N900 was the pinnacle of all things mobile! How dare you say that someone might have done something equal or better!

My recommendation is to just find a job where you aren't working for a bag with which one douches.

You don't have to be in the Fortune 100 in order to have managers that aren't complete fuckheads and will actually provide the tools necessary to get the job done.

Note that some of this hardware is now 8 YEARS old, and still being supported.

The difference here is that the next few releases of OS X will also be unpaid when you buy a Mac.

Now that would be undecidedly Apple - redesigning a framework with a major OS release, realizing that it's shit, and then reverting to the concrete-stable way you did it for a decade rather than botching it together until it sorta works.

This is a change for GOOD.

Yeah, we've heard that they are going to open source stuff before, and we're still waiting. Where's my open FaceTime standard that Steve Jobs promised when he introduced FaceTime?

I'd really like Apple to put Swift and Metal out there as open source - it will only increase the adoption rate. But past performance leads me to doubt...

How about Mac OS X? It was released in this century, and against the backdrop of Windows 2000 and Classic MacOS 9, it absolutely counted as "stunning."

Not only that, but the clone makers got to just build out hardware and ship it - they didn't have the R&D overhead to actually design the system in the first place, much less develop and maintain the operating system.

Many of the clones were just Apple boards that were licensed and reconfigured. There were many PowerComputing boxes that were essentially a PowerMac 7300 for 20% off the price. I bought one instead of a "real" Apple back in the day. It's no wonder that Jobs put a stake through the heard of Mac cloners.

I was sorely disappointed with a few things about Fallout3 / Fallout: New Vegas that didn't follow the spirit of the original Fallout / Fallout2: the decision depth.

In the original Fallout titles, you could be the biggest bastard in California, and the game would adapt to that. You could steal anything not bolted down and only have a problem if you got caught, murder random people by sneaking lit dynamite into their pockets or by spamming super-stims on them, pickpocket people and then sell their own shit back to them, etc.; you could still get on in the game, sometimes with hilarious consequences.

With Fallout3, they tagged 90% of everything with a karma reduction so sneak became completely useless. You would even lose karma if you took stuff out of a house belonging to someone that was dead, and not dead by your hand. If you decided to play an "evil" character, half the NPCs just shut down and wall off half the game from you, rather than dealing with you begrudgingly like the earlier games would. It was like a sanitized version of the Fallout universe that was vaguely related, and with none of the creativity.

With Bethesda, you often don't get to experience the game as the developer intended because of all the bugs that ship in the product. You experience the game as the product manager intended, and they intended to ship with bugs still in the product that weren't blockers.

Good - I didn't install 16GB to watch it sit there idle. If it's there, use it.

Even consoles have 8GB now. If your PC doesn't, add more - it's cheap.

Was this also the reason for the highly annoying partitioning of The Strip in Fallout: New Vegas?

I never played either Fallout3 or Fallout: NV on a console, and found it quite tiring to have to constantly click through the different sections of such a small area.

Here's another advantage of that $470 PC - if that GTX 750 isn't cutting it any more, take it out and put it something better. You would still be underneath $1k

Let's see you do that with a PlayStation / XBox.

Very possible. I'm on Time Warner (who totally blows due to abuse of the CCI flags) but they are using SDV adapters on the system here - in order to get my roll-your-own-DVR up and running I needed to get both the CableCARD and a Cisco SDV adapter that plugs in via USB and daisy-chains on the coax.

Works great though - keeps those useless channels I never watch from eating precious bandwidth on my wire.