Just an anecdote: I currently have a PS3 and a Hulu Plus subscription. A good number of the shows that I watch regularly are available so it's always been worth the $8/month to me in lieu of paying for cable+DVR (I have erratic work hours so a DVR would be a must).

That being said, I just got home from working a 12-hour shift and couldn't wait to collapse into the couch and watch TV... Apparently Sony released a system update today/yesterday. In order to log in to streaming video services you have to have your system up-to-date. I have been sitting here for 20 minutes now waiting on the update to download/install and it's not quite done yet. I just wanted to watch a damn TV show...

Note: this isn't an everyday occurrance and I can't remember the last time it did happen, but it is something worth taking into account when weighing your options.

Can someone explain to me why Microsoft isn't capitalizing on the phone market in the same way they have the PC market? Why design a phone operating system that can only be run on a small niche of devices, and can't even upgrade phones that came with WP7? Why not instead go after the entire market and design an OS that can be installed on any mobile phone of adequate specifications.

While there may be some serious difficulties to overcome in the short term, this to me seems like a very possible end-state for the industry. Just look at what happened in the (non-Apple) PC market: competing hardware+OS standards evolved into a common hardware standard and a separate OS market that Microsoft dominated.

Disclaimer: this is not necessarily an end-state that I would like to see happen, just some ponderings that I've had.

Yeah, and why should anybody want more than 640K for their desktop either?

In all seriousness, if support for future devices with higher-resolution screens is so ridiculous, then why design Windows Phone 8 to be capable of running on 64 cores? I don't see many 64-core phones floating around right now either.

Except that it's not. For some theoretical computations that could be made perfectly parallel, this might be nearly true. However, in most cases (presently), the limiting factor in computation speed is the clock speed of an individual core.

Can someone please explain to me why Sony doesn't do more to encourage indie games? As best I can tell, because Sony makes most of their profit from game sales, they don't want to risk allowing a new market to compete with the money-makers, which is logical.

My feeling, though, is that opening up new markets and capabilties can only increase the demand for the console, which in turn should at least balance out a theoretical loss in game sales: Nobody buys a console specifically for indie games, but for many it's definitely an influencing factor, and these additional buyers are almost certain to buy something. Indie apps hasn't exactly killed Android.

Not to be rude, but what cave are you reading magazines in that doesn't have sufficient light to read a magazine?

I'll give you two of those three. GNOME 3 is certainly an interesting concept and different, but I have yet to see it justify itself as an "improvement".

I've got it! Instead of trying to get Congress to fund "space exploration", we get them to fund "IP infringement notice deliveries to extrasolar nations".