It was developed to be the fragile single point of failure for all manufacturers.

It's collusion of planned obsolescence.

This argument does not hold up to the fact that Apple itself abandoned its previous 66-pin design and effectively destroyed any "lock-in" that it commanded.

I completely agree. The number of times I have had a micro-USB connector fail is shameful.

Micro-USB is designed to be the early point of failure on hardware -- it is the "planned obsolescence" for consumer devices.

I've seen both the connector in the device simply break-off for no good reason and the cable-side connector mysteriously stop working with no visible defect.

Micro-USB is trash.

Apple was right to re-imagine this connector.

My work Windows 7 machine BSoDed all over the place not a month and a half ago.

Windows still BSoDs just fine, TYVM.

This guy makes one huge mistake in his reasoning. He assumes that we aren't constantly littering the world with our finger prints for anyone to retrieve. Dude. Finger prints are as easily obtained as taking out the garbage.

Finger prints are not something that we need to protect from being proliferated, because we proliferate them ALL THE TIME.

Idiocy.

Sounds like a perfect test case to start hacking away at the UK's continued abuse of free speech.

We rarely watch movies on Netflix. The real strength of Netflix is the television series that it carries. Our kids can watch tons of the kids shows that they want all afternoon long on rainy days. It's a great source of content if you approach it from that angle.

No news here people. The fact that existing fiber optic cable can be reused with new terminating equipment to increase transmission speed is not anything new.

MCI was doing this throughout the 1990s.

The inherent properties of the fiber optic cable have always meant that their potential "max speed" was much higher than the current terminating equipment of the time.

This is as interesting as someone saying "Hey, I bought a new sports car and drove it faster on this old road today than I did on my motor scooter yesterday!"

Remember those great Intel software-based modems back in 1993 that Intel had for Windows 3.1 that weren't supported by any operating system afterwards?

Remember how Intel sold that line of business and left us all hanging? Yeah.

Software based hardware like this is destined to be a one-trick pony. Use it in one system, and then it's stuck on that operating system for the duration. You'll be left in the lurch when the next version of you OS is released.

Go ahead and line-up to get screwed by WD and Intel. I'll skip this round of fleecing.

> I don't see such a problem here.

Until someone plugs-in an infected USB device...

... on companies that have already been in a huge race to the bottom.

Right.

I hope they enjoy eating their own poo for a change.

You are completely correct.

PC manufacturers are in a constant race to the bottom. They don't value their products, so neither do consumers.

Mod parent up!

outside of its core strength, it will mismanage and the kill the already ailing acquisition.

I'm still steamed at Intel for that modem of theirs that I bought back in 1993 and they didn't support and then killed not long after that.

Intel is where companies go to be bought to die...

Yes, in 10 years pop music will consist of recorded bathroom noises of the "artist" digitally tuned to sound like a human singing.