What? Smartphone pioneer? How do they figure that?

They were a PDA pioneer, but did very little, if anything revolutionary or pioneering in the Smartphone space. They just did what everyone else was doing... they did not pioneer anything in that space. They were already pretty much washed up and a has-been by the time the smartphone revolution rolled around. Not saying their phones weren't nice or quality or anything, just saying they weren't anything revolutionary.

I have just one thing to say: 2 you and the swine humping oxen you rode in on!

Oh here, let me translate: 4 off heathen!

Unfortunately, it's not a terminal situation for big business. Take a look at the telecom and to an extent the cable industries. When they start losing customers, they lobby to get "fee" attached to their bills (and other companies bills WTF!) that directly benefit them. Universal Service fund immediately springs to mind, but there are lots of other examples. Just pick up a bill and read it carefully.

Canada has that goofy law where you pay taxes on blank media... which goes directly to the recording industry. Government mandated payments to a business because the business forces away customers.

Only if you're one of those freaks that starts counting with their thumb. The problem comes at 2 for the rest of the civilized world.

You don't hold your thumb up when you are miming to someone that you want one of something you use your index finger, so why do you start counting with your thumb? It makes no sense consistency wise.

The summary reads like an angry teenager implying that they could do better.

Really? Do yo have any idea how hard it is to actually manage launching something like that in to space? We should be more amazed when everything goes right and a rocket actually makes it there. The rocket failing is, of course, not a good thing... but at least they are trying in the face of failure, instead of giving up and whining about for a decade like the US did after the shuttle disasters.

Launching a rocket into space is a marvel of just about every discipline involved.

I did not recognize many of the names on the list... but most of the ones I did recognize read like a who's who of who to avoid doing business with. I would say roughly 90% of them are companies that have already shown themselves to be worthless scum that should be avoided. At least they are all compiled on one list now for easy viewing.

Bunch of useless pricks, all of them.

It's the Xbox Zip for me, or maybe even the Xbox Orb.

This device was never intended to be an iPad killer. Amazon itself said as much. The linked article makes it sound like it was set to be an iPad killer by "important people," but the link just links back to another pcmag.com article. What a joke.

The fire is not intended, has not been intended to be an iPad killer. It's a cheap tablet device that does what many people need it to do without all the extras that the iPad has that some people will never use. It's one of the primary reasons I returned my iPad and got a Color Nook and rooted it - the Nook did everything I wanted a tablet to do at a fraction of the price. If I were to do the same thing today, I would buy a fire instead of a Nook.

Feet / Flintstones ... that's how they drive. With their feet. It's hard.

Too poor, you don't even have feet to drive.

?? Seems to make the most sense to me.

Slowly and carefully... You'll probably never get done and in the end you'll be applying similar band-aids to get things running/keep things going as your predecessor did. Then you'll leave and someone else will come in and the cycle will start all over.

Good luck and god speed, sir.

This pretty much sums it up.

I also wanted to point out that Ubisoft is not releasing a PC title because of all the piracy... so in effect, they'd rather get 0% of nothing instead of >0% of something.

Yeah... that makes sense!

Where are you getting your "standard" pronunciation definition? I've heard both ways equally... though I am assuming you really mean by "comp" + "arable" as "comp" + "rable" with the emphasis on the second syllable instead of the first. The two common pronunciations of that word are as you describe the first, and the second pronunciation completely or nearly so drop the first "a" sound by extending out the "r" sound or it being covered up by the emphasis on the second syllable instead of the first. The "ar" in "arable" being overshadowed by the emphasis on "a" extending out the "r."

I have a number of machines running integrated graphics for numerous reasons. Least of which is the kids machines - you sure as hell don't need a discrete graphics card to play stupid little flash games and do homework.

Machines that are for checking email and surfing the web... don't really need discrete graphics either.

Plenty of reasons to use integrated graphics.

That's nice and everything, but I would just wait for Haswell, which is due in 2013.

So yeah, just hang on for the die shrink from Sandy Bridge if you care about performance and power consumption. My next system will definitely be Haswell based.

That's nice and everything, but I would just wait for Broadwell, which is due in 2014.

So yeah, just hang on for the die shrink if you care about performance and power consumption. My next system will definitely be Broadwell based.

It is false because of these two statements:

[quote]The controller is fine for FPS[/quote]

It's not "fine" for FPS gaming. It may be "adequate", "marginally acceptable," or possibly even "workable." But it is not "fine." Fine implies that does everything required of it, and being as it has almost no precision, it falls short in that area (as well as others, but you only need one area to be less than "fine")

[quote]games and HDTVs have the same amount of lag that PC monitors do.[/quote]

HDTVs do not have the same amount of lag that PC monitors do. SOME HDTVs may have the same amount of lag as some monitors, but I have yet to see an HDTV that has the same or less lag than the best monitors for gaming. I'm not saying they don't exist, I've just never heard of nor seen them.