I actually agree with this, but I am an unfortunate oddity on this one. I have terrible eyesight so I can't drop down to far screen-size wise or I can't read anything because laptop screens are generally all 1080p these days (or at least, they are on the laptops worth actually paying good money for). I could just up the DPI but this breaks far too much stuff to be practical.

I used to have an old 11.6" Laptop and that was perfect but it's actually hard to find a small(ish) laptop that DOESN'T have say a 1080p screen that I just cannot use.

I wouldn't go that far. It's more like the difference between a 24" and a 21" monitor. Both are still "big" compared to what the majority of people use (Which is probably about 19" these days, perhaps 17") but there's a shift towards them. Your point is still valid, however, once you go bigger it's hard to go back.

That being said, you don't cart that 23" screen around with you. I have a 24" monitor on my desktop, but I still go back to a 15" laptop because 17" is too big to carry around.

Unfortunately, Lenovo don't operate like that in the UK. Their site is just a showroom and you have to go to a reseller to get Lenovo machines.

I would agree with that, but the cost Dell was charging was higher than what I could pay for a custom built option with the same (or in fact, better) specs.

I recently was given the task of upgrading my development machine. We're a small company but management is happy to spend money on hardware if we need it.

I decided I'd prefer an SSD and yet when I looked at the big suppliers of office machines - Dell, HP, etc. none of them even offered SSD's as an option. SSD's only came into it when you started looking at the really high-end, £2,000+ workstations but there's no reason why this should be the case.

In the end, I just custom built the machine as it was the only way to get the hardware I needed without having to fork out for workstation graphics (which I didn't need).

It's a case of demand. There's no demand for those routers and switches because motherboards don't have 10GbE ports on them. Motherboards don't have 10GbE on them because there's no cheap routers or switches. Something has to give eventually and the motherboard probably makes the most sense to give in first.

Considering that cheap spammy ads are able to determine your location so they can offer HOT, SEXY LADIES IN YOUR AREA, I think the BBC can manage.

Why would they need a hardware addon when we have NTP for this kind of thing?

That is true, but there's always been more to it with consoles. While people don't necessarily drop down to assembler as much these days, it's still worth getting to grips with each console's underlying design in order to get the most from it. Take the PS3, its well known that it has CELL chips but writing code for it can't really be left up to the compiler to sort out, you have to know when to use the CELL over the PPC chip, you have to know the best way to package that data and send it, when it's optimal to do so versus when it's going to hinder performance. It has two different types of RAM and it's worth knowing which is best to use and when.

Even the Xbox 360, although much "simpler" to develop for, has a few exotic bits you don't find on the PC - like the ED-RAM on the GPU that can boost performance considerably as long as you know how to use it effectively. I believe both the PS4 and the Xbox One have a few subtle differences that'll be worth paying attention to, but they're a lot closer to the design of a regular PC than previous consoles (with the possible exception of the Xbox).

I guess the main difference will be the amount of control you'll have. A SteamBox should just be a PC, ultimately. Steam has no reason to lock down the underlying hardware in any way, so yeah there is a difference between that and the consoles.

Hence the "massively" part. There will always be exclusives, hell there are games on PC that are "exclusive" to Steam or Origin. That will never change but I think we'll see a LOT more multiplatform games because it's so easy (i.e. less costly) to port between them.

It's probably not a coincidence that the PS4 and Xbox One are both running x86 chips inside them. Aside from a few choice bits, developing on each machine should be incredibly similar to the point where it's just a different API for either.

The best part is that this should translate equally well to the PC industry. If Valve does the SteamBox right, we might just have that "standard" the article is clamouring for. If Valve mandates that a certain level of Steambox has at least an 8-core x86 CPU with a GPU of equivalent power and 8GB of RAM (or better yet, convinces AMD to release an SoC similar to what's inside the PS4), we'll have 3 very different platforms that are easy to develop for, even easier to port to and a golden age of gaming where your platform of choice won't massively impact the games you can play.

If they do this by issuing real IPv6 addresses, with CGNAT to IPv4, I actually don't have a problem with it. but using it in full IPv4 mode just makes the existing situation worse.

I don't disagree with that at all. I wish I knew what BT's plans were in this instance, but at some point CGNAT will need to be rolled out. I guess you could argue that IPv6 is less of a priority because if IPv4 addresses run out, people are screwed and ISP's need to have a solution in place - right now, IPv6 is not that solution because it only gets you on to the (rather small and limited) IPv6 internet.

CGNAT will be necessary for as long as there's still people out there only on IPv4. I don't disagree with what you're saying - as IP(v4)'s become scarce, they'll be worth more and ISPs will probably try to charge for them until people get the idea and move to IPv6.

There's more to it than NAT vs IPv6. The reality is we'll need both in the future. Say BT switched on IPv6 tomorrow and everyone in the UK got an IPv6 address - brilliant. But that's only half of the problem, they still need access to the IPv4 internet because all those servers the world over aren't IPv6 accessible yet.