The trouble with microtransactions is they'll create an incentive for content publishers to "nickel and dime" readers.

Just look at phone and tablet games with "in app purchase" models. A great idea in theory. In practice, it drives the entire game design from "pay to play" to "pay to win".

If the content industry figures out how to make microtransactions work (a pretty big if)... just watch. Content will adapt from trying to attract and genuinely appeal to readers to a "nickel and dime" them to the maximum extent possible!

When I *really* don't like something, I vote with my dollars AND by influencing others not to spend their dollars either.

I'm sure EA would greatly prefer if dissatisfied customers merely voted with their dollars, but kept quiet so as not to build a public awareness and cause others to do the same. Well, that's not how things work, especially in the modern times of widespread internet connectivity and online social networking.

I personally don't play video games much. But I recently tried a few on an iPad. My first experience, Plants vs Zombies, was fun. It seems to have been designed before this in-game purchasing became a big deal. But then I tried another, and another, and yet another... and it quickly became clear they were designed to force you to make in-game purchases. One even had 3 times of in-game resources, plus 2 types of time limits, which you could pay your way around.

Those games just aren't much fun. That's the problem. if you don't pony up real money, they're incredibly boring and repetitive... pretty much being stuck in a purgatory of inadequate resources to play the game. I tried paying on a couple. Guess what... then you've got everything you need and the game quickly becomes not very interesting either. It's a low quality experience either way.

When you make a poor product, word gets out. When an entire industry moves in a direction that's initially profitable, but ultimately results in poor products that people don't enjoy, eventually the marketplace wises up and demand for those products declines or evaporates. That's simply how free markets work.

Critical public commentary is simply part of that free market process. EA may not like it, but that's too bad. Sooner or later, as enough people vote with their dollars, EA will respond with better products, rather than wishing their dissatisfied customers would quietly go away.

My own Kickstarter project, used to launch Teensy 3.0 (a low-cost Arduino compatible board with a 32 bit ARM chip), shipped on time.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulstoffregen/teensy-30-32-bit-arm-cortex-m4-usable-in-arduino-a

We had 2 levels of rewards shipping, half within 2 weeks, the other half the next month. We did end up shipping the last several September rewards on October 1st, so technically we slipped 1 day for small group of rewards. Otherwise, all the September rewards actually shipped in September, and the rest shipped before the end of October.

Of course, a tiny number of backers didn't respond with their address or had other logistical problems with their info. Most of those shipped late, but even then, we resolved nearly all of them in October.

Much of the reason for USB's slow disk performance is the simplistic bulk-only transport protocol used by virtually all USB mass storage class devices on the market today. The problem is bulk-only transport is a synchronous protocol, where every transaction must be fully completed before the next is begun. Even though it's transporting SCSI commands, you don't get important performance enhancing features, like command queuing. It's impossible to make best use of USB scheduling by sending the next command before the previous fully replies with the status code.

There is a new protocol called UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) which aims to fix all this. But who knows when or if Microsoft will ever support it?

"The FCC's rush to takeover the Internet is just the latest example of the need for fundamental reform to protect big cable companies".

There, fixed that for you Jim (Sen. Jim DeMint)

I really wish flash advocates would stop saying "write once, run anywhere" until Adobe actually releases a Linux flash player with quality on par with the Windows version!

Truly, if you're a Flash developer/designer/artist who only tests on Windows, and there obviously MANY out there, you have no idea what a completely buggy piece of shit Abobe's Flash is on Linux. On all but the largest of sites, even trying to play video on many sites other than youtube and vimeo, Flash regularly crashes the entire browser. Yeah, Linux API are a moving target and audio is notoriously messed up, but there's no reason any plugin should ever completely lock up the browser, ever!

In reality, Adobe Flash is "write once, runs well only on Windows".

As a Linux user, I'm glad Apple is causing Adobe so much pain and I hope the horrible code that is non-Windows Flash becomes unnecessary someday. Alternately, Adobe could write a quality Flash player for Linux, but that seems to have a snowball's change in hell, especially with this horribly wrong mindset that Flash actually works well on anything other than Microsoft Windows!

Adobe's Flash player causes Firefox on Linux to regularly lock up. In fact, playing video from pretty much anywhere but Youtube and Vimeo seems to do it. I installed the flashblock extension, so all flash comes up as a blank box and I can click on it if I really want to see what it is. But I cringe every time, because more often than not, my browser is going to lock up either while that flash object is doing whatever it does, or shortly after.

It's pretty clear Adobe only invests serious effort in quality for Windows. People who only experience Flash on Windows just don't have any idea how horribly buggy it is on other platforms.

Would that complaining be about theoretically oppressive licensing restrictions, or about actual harm done to real people due to those conditions being enforced, or even threats of enforcement?

Did anyone else notice how the Q9550 and Q9650 are absent from this article?

Probably the last thing Intel wants is these previous generation (and attractively priced) chips appearing in the "overall performance per dollar" chart on "Page 17 - The value proposition". Instead, we get a graph where only the i5 and i7 chips appear to perform well beyond any of the older options, but it's a carefully crafted illusion because the faster (and attractively priced) versions of those older chips weren't tested.

Without critics Linux can't improve, yet it has improved steadily year after year.

Something just doesn't add up here.