Correct, Atari failed to place any controls on the platform and the market eventually imploded. In particular, since there was no controlling body limiting the number of the games or ensuring any quality standards, the market got flooded with shovelware (making the platform unattractive to customers). To make matters worse for the few good games, copy protection didn't exist so there were rampant cases of games being cloned by competitors (which led to quality original developers exiting the platform).

Nintendo on the other hand took great strides in controlling everything, and likewise was able to dominate for so long. Nintendo did things such as only allowing licensed games which they enforced with a rudimentary copy protection chip that only they could install (so all games came through them and they could ensure quality). They limited the number of games each company could publish per year to five (creates an incentive for those companies to make it their five best games), and they forced third party developers to sign platform exclusivity agreements for a couple years (severely hurting competitors). They took several other steps as well to do things like control distributors who were mostly companies much larger than them - it's actually quite impressive). In fact, they were so successful that case studies on Nintendo are taught as part of the core strategy class for graduate business schools.

They are regulated [1], but the price isn't FIXED at an exact value. I have been paying Comcast $2/mo for mine since 2008, and my first card is now free since I don't have a Comcast STB (in my area, the first STB is included with service). This is substantially cheaper than both their STB and DVR.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cf...

Actually, the board of directors for a non-profit is arguably the most critical component, and having a bad director can have major consequences. Board members have fiduciary duties, usually summarized as the "three Ds". A quick summary is as follows:

Duty of care: Board members are expected to actively participate in organizational planning and decision-making and to make sound and informed judgments.
Duty of loyalty: When acting on behalf of the organization, board members must put the interests of the nonprofit before any personal or professional concerns and avoid potential conflicts of interest.
Duty of obedience: Board members must ensure that the organization complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations, and that it remains committed to its established mission.
(Source)

In this particular case, the "duty of obedience" is a real concern given the new board memeber's history of violating anti-trust laws through non-poaching policies. For example, while those tech companies involved in the non-compete scandle had enough cash on hand to pay for the settlement, the impact to Wikipedia could have been much more substantial.

That's my understanding as well, and I generally agree with your sentiment for home use however it is still a pretty significant bug. For most folks that always connect to the same systems that you trust, it's not a big issue. However if you're in a position where you're constantly connecting to new servers (i.e. at a large company), the fact that your private key can be leaked is very scary. Normally the biggest risk of connecting to an unknown server is getting your password stolen (i.e. A bad actor with dtrace access can debug sshd), but they would normally still not get your private key. With this but, a bad actor can easily get both.

I have a couple first generation US Nintendos (NES) that still work fine. One of them needs to have the game inserted in the game genie to work (I guess the game genie was slightly wider than a standard game so that has widened the interface so games without the game genie are loose). I can't say it has had consistent or daily use for some time although it has been pulled out a couple times a year, and I've never had a problem of it not working (I'm sure the lack of moving parts helps).

I believe my dad has a couple old Atari 400/800s in the garage somewhere that I'd love to try and set up one day. When I was very young (2-3) he would set it up on the TV with two controllers and we'd play games like Star Raiders together. What I didn't know at the time was that the second controller didn't even work, not that it mattered as it was really about spending the time together.

Systemd has taken an all or nothing approach for its components, and it has enveloped several significant components such as udev/upower/udisks. What this means in practice is you either have to take all of systemd (i.e. replace your init system, syslog, etc.) to use any of the components it has absorbed or you need to fork and maintain what you need yourself.

Here's a personal example: I use Gentoo an MATE as a desktop which in turn uses upower for suspend & hibernate. The latest version of MATE requires the latest upower (now dependent on systemd) to support those functions. So now if I upgrade MATE, I have to either replace my init system (OpenRC) with systemd or not have those upower features on my laptop.

Forcing their users(or distros) hand like that is not playing well with other software and I applaud Busybox for standing up.

This is not a breach of contract (and likewise can't be used to get out of your contract without paying the ETF) because it doesn't go into effect until the contract ends for the folks that are still under contract. Now most folks who have unlimited data are not under contract but there still a number of them that use loop holes that allow you to continue with unlimited data and get subsidize phones but make you sign up for a contract. Generally the loopholes involve transferring the upgrade to a second line, doing the upgrade on that line, and transferring the new phone back.

I still highly recommend the Thinkpad T-series line, now owned by Lenovo, for running Linux on a laptop. I've been running Linux on various generations of the T-series since when IBM introduced the line (T21 running Fedora Core 1-4, then Gentoo), and I've never had any significant or insurmountable problems. They use mostly Intel parts and Intel tends to be fairly open source friendly which leads to them being easy to support. My current laptop is a T430s running Gentoo, and my prior laptop was a T400 also running Gentoo. Sleep/hibernate both work as does all the other features (video camera, ultrabay, etc.). The build quality is quite solid too (I only replaced my T400 because I wanted more than 8GB of RAM).

I have less experience with the other Thinkpad lines, but I would imagine both the X-series & W-series would also work well. If you go with a different brand, I generally recommend going straight to the business line (i.e. Dell Latitues, etc.) of the laptops for better build quality.

I am not sure if it fits your size requirement, but I hear the Sony Xperia Z2 LTE tablet is quite good. I didn't need LTE access so I went with the Galaxy Tab S, but I was considering the Xperia prior to my purchase. I was on VZW'so site last night, and they definitely still sell/support it.

I went from a Nexus 7 (2012) to a Tab S 10.5 this year, and I am very satisfied. The original Nexus 7 was woefully underpowered in my opinion (particularly in terms of RAM) so the Tab S feels substantially quicker. As others have mentioned, the screen is gorgeous; it's also easy to root and has a decent rom community. The new model (Tab S2) just came out however it's not much of an upgrade (lower resolution, no flash, slightly smaller & faster) so you stand a good chance if scoring a deal on the original Tab S right now. On a side note, I am coincidentally typing this post from my Tab S.

It will be interesting to see how this impacts third party retailers like Best Buy, Costco, etc. I doubt the higher price per customer will make up for the volume of customers who will delay or avoid purchases at full price (particularly at the mid-to-high end). Will retailers continue to offer discounts on phones as a loss leader or take the hit to their revenue? Likewise, I expect demand for second hand phones to increase as well (leading to higher prices there).

It will also be interesting to see how this impacts VZW's customer numbers in the long run. They're somewhat safe in the short term as people are going to still be on their current contracts for a while. As the LTE phones are substantially more portable than the previous generations of CDMA phones and now new customers are no longer in a monthly contract, I would expect a decrease over time. I think they're over estimating their market power, but I guess only time will tell.

I completely agree; systemd is in my opinion one of the greatest threats to Linux in particular and open source in general. From a competitive strategy perspective, systemd appears to me as a deliberate envelopment attack(pdf) to give RH substantial control over a huge portion of the Linux stack; in fact it's so strategically targeted that I wouldn't be surprised to find out years later that a Big 3 consulting firm recommended it to Red Hat. I have a lot of respect for what RH has done for Linux (and OSS in general), but if everyone switches to systemd, their level of control over the Linux ecosystem will be too much. Personally, I'm on Gentoo (have been for over a decade) and run OpenRC and eudev, but if Gentoo/Slackware fall, then I'm off to the BSD land.

There are some functional benefits to a wrist watch over a pocket watch such as the ability to tell the time even with your hands full, but really, watches (particularly at the higher end) are more about being a piece of jewelry than funcitonality. Consider the fact that a $10,000 Rolex or Omega automatic is typically substantially less accurate than a $100 Seiko with a quartz yet people still pay the substantial premium. Heck, I've found myself guilty of wearing an automatic watch set to the wrong time because I was in a rush in the morning and wanted to wear the watch for the look.

There's tons of better, more accurate sources to tell time, but people wear watches anyway. When you start viewing watches as just a piece of socially acceptable (typically male) jewelry, they tend to make much more sense.

Pre-compiled binaries do exist as ebuilds in portage for some very large apps (i.e. libreoffice, firefox, seamonkey, etc.) however they are not very common (only ~100 ebuilds out of ~17K available on my laptop running unstable aka ~amd64) however there's another option called BINHOST that lets you take prebuild packages on one system and distribute just the binaries to other clients.

There are both public and private binhosts, however Gentoo doesn't officially provide any so you're somehwhat using them at your own risk. It's actually pretty easy to set up your own binhost, and if you are doing anything in scale, it's definitely the way to go (especially if you have standardizes hardware).

The big issue with using binhost, and at least part of the reason why it's not popular (and why you want standard hardware), is because you have to sacrafice optimizations to do so. Unless all the client systems have the same CPU, you have to go with the least common denominator when it comes to optimizations (aka CFLAGS). i.e. if one of your clients is a Core 2 Duo and doesn't support sse3 or newer, you can't build any packages with that CFLAG without risking broken packages on the C2D system. Additionally you have to sacrafice customization with binhosts as all your builds will have the same USE flags.

As both optimization and customization are both features that often attract people to Gentoo, the lack of binhosts and minimal formal binary builds makes a lot of sense.