Well played. Now, go take your alzheimers medication before you forget. *duck*

1976. Now get off my lawn.

I'll pick on Linksys. Products which overheat, have bug-ridden firmware, and an utter lack of quality control do not belong on the market.

Remember that small workgroup switch you'll often find stuffed behind a file cabinet in small office environments? It's the one whose existence you only become aware of when one or more people suddenly cannot connect to the network. A brief power outage / moon phase / random fart caused that switch to quit receiving packets, requiring a power cycle. Yep - Linksys switches are infamous for this.

The WRT600N wireless router was a decent piece of hardware, but suffered greatly due to substandard firmware. Not only was the web interface prone to random acts of stupidity like refusing to clear a field (DNS entry #3 was one such field which could not be cleared without a complete factory reset), but wireless connections to this router would become inceasingly unreliable over an approximate period of 24 hours, at which point the router would drop connections completely.

Then there's the WRT120N. This router shipped with a slight flaw which prevented Intel 2200 wireless cards (Centrino) using the Intel drivers for Windows from obtaining a connection. How did QA miss that little bug?

Seeing the quality of products Cisco has shipped under the Linksys brand makes me wary of using Cisco-branded products as well. Any company which could put such badly made and tested products on the market doesn't need my business.

Leopard won't install on any machine with a cpu clock of less than 800 MHz without some prodding. Apple also removed the drivers needed to support the old G4 Sawtooth series machines , since none of those ran at 800 MHz or above, as shipped.

There are ways around both issues, of course - it's possible to use OpenFirmware trickery to fool the installer into thinking your, say, 667 MHz G4 is an 800 MHz. The developer's preview of Leopard also appears to have Sawtooth drivers, meaning that theoretically, one can do a Leopard install on a Sawtooth using a few kexts taken from the preview. Whether this is legal or not, though, is another matter.

Of course, this is a moot point when it comes to Snow Leopard, which completely lacks support for the PPC platform.

You asked what to do with your PS3, and I provided an answer. Another option is to simply keep it and deal with the crud Sony is going to shove down your throat. It's up to you.

Agreed. I couldn't bring myself to buy a PS3, or anything else from Sony, once that whole fiasco with the rootkit blew up. My PS2 is likely the last Sony purchase I'll ever make.

There are other companies on my personal blacklist for similar reasons, including a certain fruity company from Cupertino. Sadly, treating customers like trash is becoming fashionable nowadays.

You bring up a good point, identifying a potential market segment that could be monetized.

I think I'll start a new business venture to provide a place where buyers and sellers could meet, and swap money for used items. Perhaps it could allow for bids to be placed, like an auction house, since the potential exists for there to be more demand for a particular item than there exists supply for it.

Now that I'm thinking through this new concept, I see all sorts of possibilities unfolding before me. Now, all it needs is a catchy name...

Ooh, I know! I'll call it 'eBay'! I'll be rich! Muahahaha!

That might work. A 6 ft soldier would appear to be displaced by about 4.5', if that ratio holds.

I beg to differ. Comcast tried to charge me for the cable box I returned. The poor customer service rep sounded a bit befuddled when he verified that the equipment had been returned, while a bill was generated anyway.

In the end, *all* ISPs suck.