We're talking first gen /release day games here. Take PS3/Xbox 360 release day games and compare them to late PS2/Xbox games. It was exactly the same thing. Heck, just compare first year 360/PS2 games and compare them to new releases for those platforms. They are worlds apart. It takes developers a while to ramp up and get to know the architecture that they are writing for.

  Also, waiting for the next gen console before upgrading is fine and dandy if you don't plan on playing any new console releases. Give it a couple of years and most major developers will no longer be releasing most of their titles for the previous consoles.

Considering the record sales of the new consoles, I don't think your assumption that a lot of people are going to be skipping this generation is anywhere near the truth. You still can't find Xbox Ones and PS4s on store shelves or online stock, they're selling faster than either company can produce them. There might be a very small pocket of gamers who will, but so far all indications is that most will be upgrading at some point.

I wonder if this is at all related to their Captcha outage on the 22nd. I still haven't heard a peep as to what caused the outage, or even an acknowledgement that there was even an outage, even though the captcha group was filled with sysadmins complaining about captcha being down.

It's time that Nintendo start porting their properties to other consoles. I'd love to play the next Super Mario game on my Xbox One. I'd love to play Mario Kart on my PS4. Don't even license out the games, create/produce them the same way you've been doing for years, but just start porting them to other platforms and get out of the console business.

I third this recommendation. I have 3 WD Live boxes in my house, all connecting to my media SANs (DNS 323s with DLNA enabled) , streaming my music, videos and photos. It also does netflix, Hulu (US only), Pandora, YouTube, TuneIn, Shoutcast and a few dozen other built in apps. The best deal is to get them at Costco as they're not only cheaper but they come with a HDMI cable. The one I bought at an electronics store didn't come with the HDMI.

In my case, with the power of today's PC, I run other OSes in a VM. Instead of having a Windows desktop and a Linux desktop, I run a Windows desktop with VirtualBox and run my Linux instances inside a VM with an extremely negligible impact to performance. Most of my co-workers are doing the similar things, running different OSes in a VM instead of having a second box.

Now I'm only going by my circle of friends, family and acquaintances so this might be a small anomaly but...

It appears that not only is tablet use displacing having a 2nd or 3rd PC, it is more importantly replacing the laptop (name brand). When buying a desktop, the people in my circle have been moving away from buying the Dells and Compaqs and other name brands and have either been building their owns or buying the local PC shop pre-mades, Numbers that wouldn't show up in these reports.

  As others have mentioned, today's desktop PCs also tend to last longer as they are still very powerful 3-4 years later.

Mix all of these together and it's no surprise

I'm sure the meetings with the record companies went something like this:
Apple" iTunes has 65% of digital music sales. With iRadio, listeners will be able to buy a song directly in the player. Failure to allow us to spin your records in iRadio will cost you money".
Record execs: "Where do we sign???"

Except Pandora is pretty much US only, and even though Spotify is available in about 3 dozen countries or so, still doesn't have a user base of more than 20 million. I suspect iTunes Radio will be available for every market where there's a local iTunes music store. A much much much bigger possible market.Will Pandora survive? Probably, though it will probably lose listeners. Spotify may not. In either case, I would think that iTunes radio would have a much bigger userbase than both combined.

People said the same when Google came along. It won't be long until it dies and something better comes along.

Yahoo, Alta Vista, Google, they were just part of a cycle. Another search engine will come along to supplant the dominance. The life cycle for a websearch engine was about 3 years back then. How long has Google reigned supreme?

Things aren't like they used to be. These types of things tend to either die out fairly quickly, or stick around for many years. I don't think Facebook is in a situation where they'll die off any time soon.

This may sound like a stupid question to some...

When going to Europe, I would get a burner phone as it was cheaper than paying roaming/data fees. Since they must now unlock the phone (in my case, an iPhone), does that mean that when I now go to Europe all I need to do is buy a SIM card/service from a local cell provider and stick it in my iPhone and it will work?

She didn't become the Doctor, she partially became a Time Lord. Not at all the same thing.

The mother to be of course wouldn't be forced to have an abortion, nor would she not be given any time off. What it does mean however is that she can't collect any EI benefits and probably no income topoff from her employer, so you get 0$ for the time she is off. It would end up being an unpaid leave of absence.

There's really no such thing as a 'maternity leave payment'. It's Employment Insurance, but instead of collecting it because you got laid off, you're collecting it because you gave birth. And by law, your employer must have the same or similar position available to you upon your return.

This exact thing happened to my wife's acquaintances. She ended up pregnant 3 months after the birth of her first child. It was pretty tough for them for a couple of years.

You require to work at least 6 months (37.5 hr work week) between maternity leaves in Canada. Since a good portion of maternity leave is EI, you have to meet the minimum amount of hours worked to be able to claim it, regardless of the cause. If memory serves me right the number of required hours is around 900 hours. A little more than just a few weeks.

If you're employer tops you up on top of EI, they have their own guidelines too. I know in the case of my wife's employer, she must work at least a year to be able to get her maternity leave topped up again.

Google Docs is only dropping support for old formats (Office 97-2007). Old applications that haven't been patched in how long? No reasonable business that requires documents should still be running on those old versions anyways. You can only keep backwards compatibility for so long before things start to get bloated and buggy.