But compare it to the Kickstarter page:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console

Hackers welcome. Have at it: It's easy to root (and rooting won't void your warranty). Everything opens with standard screws. Hardware hackers can create their own peripherals, and connect via USB or Bluetooth. You want our hardware design? Let us know. We might just give it to you. Surprise us!

After people began calling Al Sutton out over this, he made things even worse by implying that root access was a priviledge and Ouya hadn't promised much of anything (instead attempting to compare the console's openness to that of consoles you can buy at Gamestop).

As for "Open"; Well, a year or so ago the idea of going into a gaming centric store like GameStop or Game, buying a console, taking it home, writing a game on it, and publishing it without spending big money on development kits, licensing, and the like was pretty much non-existant. That's where OUYA is open; It's open to anyone to write games and apps without having to pay dev kit and licensing fees, it's open in that once you have your console you can code for it.
The reason you can still simply get root access is that I've seen people want to tinker beyond what most users would do. OUYA could stick to what was originally put on the Kickstarter page and take away root from non-devkits, but I, for one, would be against that, because I've seen that people do use it constructively and responsibly, and not everyone bricks their device then raises a support ticket to try and get OUYA to fix it.

So yes, I'll stick to calling it "shocking."

PS. A functioning non-OS-dependant recovery mode isn't just important for hackers. It could also be the difference between a faulty official update merely inconveniencing you, or outright bricking your console.

I decided to never buy one after I learned that the company didn't support a genuine end user recovery mode, and witnessed an Ouya employee (Al Sutton) berating and insulting the customers who insisted on one.

His attitude about custom firmware was shocking as well.

http://ouyaforum.com/showthread.php?3193-Let-OUYA-know-we-NEED-to-be-able-to-boot-to-recovery

I'm keeping a track of how many requests we get relating custom firmware, and from what I'm seeing the user base is not as interested in custom firmware as you might think, which is echoed by this thread (we've shipped 60,000+ units, and less than 10 people have commented in the last month in this thread about getting access to recovery mode).That doesn't mean that we're shooting the idea down, you need to keep in mind that in terms of priorities this is way down the list as you'd expect from any feature where it's being requested by less than one tenth of one percent of the user-base.

It really floored me to read this a week before Ouya's launch, given the kickstarter page's promises of hackability. Anyone with a reflashable phone (or any pretty much any other Android device whatsoever capable of using custom ROMS) knows that a real recovery mode is absolutely essential, in case the OS/kernel gets borked. Ouya's supposed "recovery mode" relies on an already-bootable OS, so it's useless.

In their rush to infringe on the 2nd Amendment, New York unwittingly banned cops from carrying certain guns earlier this year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NY_SAFE_Act#Criticisms

Poorly thought-out authoritarian extra-constititutional power-grabs aren't solely a left- or right-wing thing.

Agreed. If you count tablets as "PCs" then you should include smartphones. So don't.

Some may be wondering how this could be possible when almost all Apple devices have built-in cameras. The military employs a skilled third party to remove them completely instead of just disabling them. Here is some of his work (a Mac with the iSight taken out): http://i40.tinypic.com/2yvs9ki.jpg .

This guy makes a compelling case that it was intentional (I especially like the "can't put my finger on it" shot): http://youtu.be/K1r5dOwUS6Y

The reason I always bought Intel SSDs was because they always had Intel controllers, and Intel controllers were always stellar. Intel for years prioritized random access and did it better than anyone else. The 510 series, the first to be released with a non-Intel (Marvell) controller, seemed like such a pointless drive, with worse random performance than the 2 year old X25-M.

The problem is that sequential numbers are always faster and therefore easier to market to people who don't know any better. The 510 served a marketing need, not an engineering one.

I don't follow the market as closely anymore so I don't know if the 520 series makes any more sense, but if we know that Intel was willing to sacrifice random access performance to use a Marvell controller. What will they sacrifice for a Sandforce controller? Reliability?

I have bought six X25Ms in total; all are tremendous performers and give me no problems. The are all G2s and range in age from 1 to 2 years (except for a used 40GB one I bought a month ago).

Unfortunately the Intel 320 series (really the X25-M G3) has had its own reliability issues with a nasty firmware bug that causes it to suddenly report its capacity as 8MB (causing complete data loss).

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/236468/intel_acknowledges_ssd_320_bug_working_on_firmware_upgrade.html

It's ironic that a power failure triggers this problem, since Intel had marketed the 320 as especially resilient to them:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review

Some posters say it can happen without a power failure:

http://communities.intel.com/message/133499

Intel said they found the cause and released a firmware update, but applying it seems to have actually triggered the bug in previously problem-free drives for many posters:

http://communities.intel.com/thread/24121?start=0&tstart=0

Intel has not acknowledged any problems with the fix, nor told anyone which serial numbers were affected. Nobody has reported on the bug since Intel said they fixed it, including Anand.

This issue was enough to convince me to buy something else (even though the 320 series would otherwise have been my first choice) when I had to shop for an SSD last month. I found a used "like new" (according to the SMART data, at least) X25-M G2 on amazon instead.

Interestingly, X25-M G2 prices have held steady ($2/GB or so) and only gone up over the last year. Yeah it's probably because of dwindling supply, but I can't help but suspect that lack of confidence in the 320 series may have contributed to an increase in demand for the G2.

. . . but upon closer inspection it turns out to be Maybelline.

I should have mentioned that it was the Windows version (7.7.1).

I just installed it on your recommendation but can't find any option to disable automatic updates. Any software that requires phoning home every time it runs is a non-starter for me.

Yes, they learned that passing a constitutional amendment involves the participation of the People, who then realize that it's within their power to prevent that amendment (or indeed, revoke it after the fact). Note that when they restricted both guns and drugs soon after, they just ignored the Constitution and left the People out of the loop.

This is true. And while I sometimes have trouble shopping for pants, it's worth being able to make tough decisions and stick with them.

It's that, and the fact that higher upstream traffic causes higher (corresponding) downstream traffic. In fact, manipulating upstream traffic is exactly how linux QoS works. This is a very well-written guide:

http://tomatousb.org/tut:using-tomato-s-qos-system

You should look into getting a router that supports third-party linux firmware with QoS, like Tomato and TomatoUSB (not DDWRT, its QoS GUI (among other things) is long-broken with no fix in sight). Then you can not only cap your upstream traffic, but also give priority to certain traffic (such as DNS, HTTP, IRC, POP, IMAP, etc.) so that your internet connection is always responsive no matter what you're doing.

Don't worry, they will "shaky-cam" the footage in post and overlay the letters REC with a blinking red dot. This will override the audience's minimum quality threshold, replacing it with an appreciation for (literally) gritty realism.