More importantly, the different Sony divisions (Movies, laptop, portable, camera etc) are really distinct and different business entities. That's how the rootkit got to be implemented in the first place: not much from-the-top controll.

So, yeah, screw the laptop division, but their phones and tablets are great and supporting them might mean more from that division get promoted up and bring along their values to the whole.

Whilst I do agree with the Sony hate due to the rootkits and erstwhile proprietary storage media ... that is their laptop and storage division. Their phones and tablets are top-quality (after you uninstall the bloatware).

The hardware is topnotch: the z4 tablet? Wow. It weighs something like a thin square of plywood, yet feels sturdy. The one and only problem I have with it is that it feels so light that I want to break it over my knee, just to see what it would feel like :-) I'm not a violent person: you'll understand what I mean as soon as you hold one of these light wonders in your hands.

Sure, mate.

First of all, the iphone 4s (released quite late 2011, by the way) is very slow, to the point of unusability, especially if you upgraded to ios8. We support it because we must. However a measly cheapass Samsung SIII mini, released around the same time can be trivially (yeah, even for non-technical users) be upgraded to the latest android version on Cyonagen and runs surprisingly smoothly.

With minimal effort (yeah, yeah, 'most people can't/won't do that!' ... actually, a surprisingly large group of people do have friends who do that for them, as I can tell from the various app figures the Google Play console gives) a crap phone released at the same time runs much better than the Apple flagship.

The ipad2? What. Are. You. Smoking? That one-time flagship device is un-usable except for single tabbed webbrowsing.

Recently got an Alienware 15 with the highest specs. At first I thought the battery life was a bit crap, but that was to be expected with the highest end i7 and a gtx980m.

Put it in low battery mode and I get 9 hours of internet/office/video use.

And I get a great keyboard.

So, suck it, Lenovo, with your spyware.

Come on. I have used this exact same method on a Windows Mobile 5 device (HTC Touch HD) waaaay back when, using the accelerometer and gravity to determine how my screen was moving and moving a virtual object in virtual space and showing that on my phone's screen.

Not only that, but it's a rather OBVIOUS solution to a problem. Whatever happened to the "non-obvious" requirement?

"The UI on phones and tablets aren't designed to help us find one app among dozens"

I agreed with that. So the first app I made was AppGrouper for Windows Mobile, back then. It's a single icon on your homescreen which launches a panel with categories of your favourite apps. You can swipe between your categories (favs, communications, graphics, whatever you want to call them) and launch the app. You make your own categories and add your own selection of apps to them. It makes for very easy and quick launching of your most used apps.
It's also the first app I made for Android (look for AppGrouper by LifeBoatSoft on Google Play), and by far the most used app on my phone.

There's even a free, old version which you can find on the forums of XDA-Developers.

Shameless plug time!

I'm a student at Bowdoin College, and the current lead developer of the motion engine we run on our Naos to compete in the RoboCup Standard Platform League. The idea of the SPL league is that all teams use the same hardware (the Nao) so that the entire competition is about the software. My team, the Northern Bites has written our own omni-directional motion engine, vision system and behavior stack (the latter two in C++/ASM, the behaviors in Python). We recently hosted the US Open up at Bowdoin, and we're headed to Istanbul in early July for the world championships.

The Aldebaran guys rock, and the Nao is an extremely cool platform for bipedal research (it runs a stripped down version of Debian).

If you're interested, here's our public GitHub and YouTube

It's called Silverlight.

Actually not...I do stuff with intellectual property for a living, including replication management and licensing for music and film.

DVDs in retail packaging (cased, 4/0 cover, 4 color disc face, shrinked, top spine label, etc.) can cost well below 50 cents when produced in very large quantities. The last batch I had made came in at about $1.05 a disc, and was a short run for a small publisher.

As for old films: The publisher/studio is contractually bound to pay residuals/reuse on DVDs for the entire life of the copyright. SAG/DGA/WGA want their (pitifully small) cut. For the soundtrack, the AFM wants their cut. IATSE also gets a cut, which helps fund pension and health plans. This list goes on.

The point is, a certain amount of money does, in fact, flow to the original artists.

Yeah, tankers are vulnerable.

The one point of vulnerability in a wind farm is probably the power cable assembly...But if enough farms get developed, then a mesh network develops as well, insulating against single-point failures.

Unlike those major fibre chunks some captain was bribed to drag anchor over...

Another issue is that offshore oil platform are much more easily attacked by an enemy. If we are pumping 30% of our oil from offshore rigs, and we get attacked by an enemy, we could be crippled around the country by fuel shortages if they took out the rigs, which could be done very easily with submarines and torpedoes.

Related to that:

I use some very high end printer's inks...As in letterpress, woodblock printing, and whatnot. I've never payed more than $400/gallon equivalent. There are some specialty pigments that can seriously cost, and I've gotten those in 200 ml jars. A standard carbon black is dirt cheap, especially in bulk.

On the commercial side of things, offset litho inks can be had for less than $10/pound...Same ink that prints the world's magazines and books.

Inkjet ink is a ripoff, and yes, we are stupid.

There are some good laser printers...and some inkjet companies that tout cheap cartridges. It is time for people to smarten up.