Why assume the A4 is a dual-core PowerPC when it's built for an OS that restricts the use of multitasking?

Because Occam's razor tells us that this surely must be the case. Of course you put a dual-core processor to churn binary translation into your mobile device!

Sony loses money on every PS3

Are you sure about that? The component costs have come down by a lot since launch (esp. the Blu-ray laser, but also the Cell CPU) and I'd not be surprised at all if they turn a profit nowadays, especially with the Slim. But the big money is certainly in collecting license fees.

Can this actually be verified? The PS2 was initially bundled with Yabasic in some regions in order to circumvent taxes in the UK, but this didn't work and Yabasic was dropped from the package pretty soon.

Thumbs up to this. I wish the whole distro release system would go away. Unless there is a major change coming that will break everything (libc5 -> glibc6-type changes) I should not have to reinstall my system just because I want a new version of some application.

They made one of those vids too.

Indeed. For some reason the hot new trend in shit website design is hiding information behind tabs or even better, hidden tabs. For a prime example of this, see Sourceforge. Every time they have redesigned the site they have made it more difficult to use, primarily by hiding all the relevant information in increasingly complex ways. Originally all the relevant info was on one big page and the functionality was in easy and simple menus. In the next design they put all the info in a small box so you couldn't see it all at once but had to scroll the contents and in the current design you can't fucking find anything.

So it shouldn't have been a problem to apply it to glibc then.

Apple don't use glibc in any of their OSes.

One thing that's completely omitted from the Edge piece is mentioned in IGN's history of Sega:

"We got together with [Sony] and defined what we'd like to see in our next hardware. We had this great idea that it should be a joint SEGA-Sony hardware system. If we had to take a loss on the hardware (which was the norm then), we'd split the loss on the hardware, but we wouldn't split software, so any software they did, they'd get 100% of the profits, and any software we did, we'd get 100% of the profits. It seemed like a fair deal since we were eons ahead of them in terms of software development.

"So we go to Japan, and Sony management liked the idea. Then we went to SEGA, and Nakayama hated the idea. [laughs] So that was the end of that, and the rest is history once again. Those were the specs that became the PlayStation." -- Tom Kalinske

Earlier, Sega of Japan had also shot down Sega of America's proposal to use the SGI chipset that later became the N64.

According to David Shippy's "The Race for a New Game Machine", Sony planned on making a very simple graphics processor themselves and relying on the Cell to do the heavy work, but around mid-2005 they realized they weren't going to be able to make it for the planned Christmas 2005 release.

That said, I do remember reading an interview with Kutaragi where he said they did plan on using a second Cell for graphics at some point but realized it wouldn't work; I assume this was at a very early stage in the project.

Douglas Engelbart did not invent hypertext. Vannevar Bush thought up Memex in 1945, and even Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu was started in 1960. There may well be even earlier examples, but those are two well-known ones that precede Engelbart. He also didn't invent GUIs, that honour at least currently goes to Ivan Sutherland who made Sketchpad in 1963.

AFAIK he also wasn't directly involved in the development of ARPANET, though the first host was running in the Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center, which he headed.

I don't want to diminish Engelbart's achievements or influence, but credit where credit's due.

X11 is/was often broken and needed XFree86 compiled instead of Apple's X11. This might have been dealt with in all cases now.

You pretty much have to install XQuartz to get X11 programs working nowadays. Even applications not installed via Fink or MacPorts like Gimp needs it. But it sure beats having to compile it yourself.

The rationale for a 64-bit build was a 40% performance improvement.

Ignorance, insane optimism or some single special case application?

But in the Atom SoCs Intel are using PowerVR, which is definitely not opensource-friendly. Until someone buys ImgTec the most you'll ever get is a binary blob driver.