... and Vegas/Premier/Avid and AutoCad/Blender/Maya and CGminer/Folding@home/SETI and ...

One word - Lenovo. I tried Sony and Toshiba in the old days. Complete junk. Screens fell off, keyboards stopped working, cooling systems crapped out. Got a used Thinkpad (1999 era) in the mid 2000's that is still being used as a print server in the back room. Got a dual-core in 2009 that still works like new. I just replaced a couple months ago with a W530 (workstation grade) quad-core so I could do HD video editing on the road without dying of old age before a render finished. Wasn't cheap though. About $1700 with SSD main drive and 500 GB secondary in the optical bay

BTW, I rarely use laptops as actual laptops. I mainly stuff them under the recliner with the lid closed and attach ethernet, a monitor on a swingarm, and a wireless keyboard & mouse. I have this setup in both of my houses. The only time I use the internal screen and keyboard is when I'm stuck at an airport or a family member's house.

Nothing is closed off on the original Tivos if you have a shell. You can use the i2c bus to interact with any hardware device on the motherboard - switch inputs, switch channels, mute, record, etc. All you need to do is print a device ID and a hex number to /dev/i2c and stuff starts happening. I used to have a partial list of characters and what they did, but I can't seem to find it ATM. As I recall, there was a tool created by Andrew Tridgell (Samba) called iicset.c that you could compile and use that made it even easier.

Haven't played around inside one for years so I don't know if you can still get a shell on the newer ones.

...and you never will. Smart criminals don't get caught. Prisons are filled with the stupid ones.

There was a lot more money in selling them whores, bullets, and booze.

Exactly. In my state, sales tax is damned near 10%. When I drop a couple of grand on an order of server parts, I'm NOT going to pay an extra $200 for no good reason. I buy from Amazon only when no one else has what I need in stock, including local merchants. Most of the time. I buy from NewEgg or B & H Photo, then spend the 10% savings on hookers and blow.

That's because the demographic that watches live TV (old people) tend to be on fixed incomes and don't buy new TVs every few years. Most other people have a DVR and that's where the cable card lives.

Same here. 7+ years on a 42" Sylvania. It just won't die. Not looking forward to the physical aspects of replacing it though, as it's hanging on the wall and weighs something like 120 lbs.

The neighbor to the north (WA) has a sales tax of almost 10%, but they are one of a handful of states that do NOT have a state income tax. That's why WA and OR are roughly comparable. One has sales tax, one has income tax. If OR added a sales tax, the financial burden on its citizens would be as oppressive as neighboring socialist hellhole to the south, CA. OR simply does not have the population density nor the amount of industry that would enable CA-levels of taxpayer-rape, and they certainly don't have the infrastructure to justify it. (most of OR is uninhabited desert and mountain ranges. Nearly everyone lives along the coast, the Columbia river, or the I-5 corridor)

The proposed vehicle usage increase is probably not about a lack of existing revenue to fix roads anyway. I'm guessing that they just want more money to spend on the kind of hippie, nanny-state bullshit they are famous for.

Seriously? You genuinely think there are people who don't have a one-way ticket to midnight?

Should we be getting off your lawn?

This has precisely jack squat to do with "pay-by-phone". The article is about "order-by-phone". In the case of the author, he has a credit card on file with a fast food burger joint staffed with high school drop-outs (what could possibly go wrong) and the order is placed, charged, and processed thru the restaurant's internet-facing computer system. It's no different that buying something from Amazon except that you have to go get the product yourself instead of having it delivered by UPS

The Palms in Vegas has a suite that runs $26,000 a night. I think it has it's own basketball court. $450 wouldn't even be a decent tip for the valet. FYI, the Palms is just a mid-grade hotel in Vegas. If you want to spend some REAL money, head over to Wynn. They have a Ferrari & Maserati dealership on the main floor.

Same here. VLC has a hard time with Canon MXF containers, even though the codec inside is plain old mpeg2. The audio drops out after a few seconds and clicking around on the timeline a few times will seize the playback completely. SMplayer/Mplayer has no such issues. Neither one can handle RED's R3D format though.

How the fuck is it "much better"? Try copying 100,000 files over a LAN from an XP box to a Win8 drive. The OS will shit itself and lock up entirely. Not even a blue screen, completely unresponsive DOA requiring pulling the plug. How about the "full line select" bullshit in file manager windows that makes it a huge pain in the ass to select files with a mouse?

All the review talks about is a bunch of stupid top-layer eye-candy bullshit that NO ONE CARES ABOUT. The goddamned OS should not be an "experience". That's what programs are for. The OS should shut the fuck up, do exactly what I tell it to do WHEN I tell it to do it, and generally stay the hell out of my way and out of my sight. Vista, 7, and 8 are abject failures that can't even correctly perform the minimal basic I/O tasks that are the exact reason we even HAVE operating systems rather than writing directly to the hardware.

Microsoft, you absolutely DON'T GET IT! You keep trying to pander to the idiot teenager mobile device crowd and people too stupid to even OWN a powerful computing device and you are pissing in the faces of everyone who actually uses your shitty OS to do REAL WORK and put food on their tables (mainly because the applications they use won't run on a REAL OS). Quit fucking around and DO YOUR GODDAMN JOBS OVER THERE. Fire the stupid assholes responsible for the abomination that is Win8 and put out an OS that at least does the bare minimum. Window dressing and eye candy is for children. Try aiming at the grownup market for a change!