Gabe and Valve keep talking about innovation but it's now been nearly 3 years since they floated the piston box prototype and with this new announcement we'll be waiting for another prototype in spring 2014. Exactly how long does it take to build a special purpose PC? That is all this Steam Machine is after all, correct?

The last time I paid attention to what Valve had to say it was Gabe back in 2010 or so talking about how with the Steam platform they would be delivering small incremental updates to Half-Life 2 instead of the "lengthy" episodes or even longer Half-Life 3 box sequels. Sorry Gabe, but 2014 is around the corner meaning it's been 7 years since Half-Life 2 Episode 2. You want the industry to follow your company's lead with Steam and games on demand type development then please lead by example.

Suddenly millions of people cried out at once when they realized they haven't used a PC expansion slot in over 5 years.

The "PC enthusiast" scene has been quietly dying for years.

I'm sure the books were so good that even without the success of the World of Warcraft game this movie would've gotten greenlighted.

Probably waited a little too long. Story went off the rails around Cataclysm. Problems with class imbalances favoring overpowered death knights and paladins are so 2007 and 2008. Even the Mists of Kung-Fu Panda complaints are so last year.

That Cinnamon Control Panel looks very similar to OS X's System Preferences.

You can't trade used games in Steam, either. You'll need to find another example to compare your disappointment with the new Xbox with.

Does the new Xbox One not play games?

Then what's your problem with it? So the new TV features aren't for you, so what? I too play my Xbox 360 on a smaller TV in a bedroom but I do understand that many people have it in their living rooms as an entertainment hub. That doesn't prevent me from playing games the way I want.

Keep an eye on the newer Yahoo mobile apps. I tried the new weather one and was happily surprised. I still use GMail and probably will for a long time forward but I'm watching Yahoo now.

Microsoft is a software company, right?

Demo isn't really a demo, he doesn't open up anything or scroll much, just shows off a bunch of icons.

Sounds like it might be a problem on your phone. I haven't seen this problem at all on iPhones.

A big bang, if you will.

The real revolution was that Apple became a big enough player with the iPod to force the hand of the big 5 of the RIAA to actually offer their music online in digital form for what many people deemed a fair enough price to not pirate. It seems commonplace now in 2013 enough to forget, but in the mid 2000s there were very options for consumers to get their music online, and one could argue this was one of the bigger reasons for online piracy. We see echoes of this still today as the news reported last week that the HBO show Game of Thrones is one of the biggest pirated shows online, and some would argue this is because of consumer's perceived lack of options for watching it online. Apple challenged the old distribution model and won, that's what the story is.

In a way you made my point. There was a time when a PC was the "new shiny". There was a long period of time during PC history when there was no PXE booting and WDS, no AD, no GP, no easy configuration through the network or management tools. But yet it caught on and eventually became what it is now. I look at the large cycle of history of the PC and I see how it replaced the "restrictive" old client-server paradigm in favor of all that local power and freedom on your desktop, only to be retrofitted over the years to go right back where it began with the restricted and confined client-server paradigm. And now we're seeing it start over again with the whole BYOD movement.

An interesting "full circle" given the history of the PC that the main reason given now for keeping it around is that is corporate inertia.