When you don't sleep much, you ask obvious questions, for one.

Sony was never different, you are just ignorant. Their founder, Akio Morita, proudly claims that they refused to let their dealers unsold quality Sony gear for a low price to give an impression of "premium" quality to customers. This was when things made in Japan were not considered good quality in the US - around 1950s and 1960s.

Ethics, or even creating interoperable, standards compliant devices has never been Sony's strong point. Even if the said "standards" had contribution from Sony.

You strengthened the idea in your second-hand-gear-seller that Sony devices have good resale values. So now they, or people they are talking to, could get more likely to buy Sony devices.

I think old Nokia phones got it right - calling if offline mode. Airplane mode has got nothing to do with airplane - airplane is just one of the places where it might be useful. Airspace regulatory body in my country doesn't even allow mobile phones in "airplane" mode to be switched on during take off and landing, so airplane mode doesn't work for airplanes at all.

It is very useful for short quiet times where you want people to think your phone is switched off or out of cellular range. And you do not want the phone startup delay to go back to normal mode, so switch off is less of an option.

You may not feel the need for it, I am just talking about the stupid "airplane mode" term.

I think best would be wireless (bluetooth or whatever) for data, and solar / electrical inductive for power. It is just too inconvenient to connect a small item like a watch to any cable/wire.

Typically Apple understands these inconveniences, so they might go for fully wireless.

Some devices do not work (DOA, or some other defect), so all the devices out there are devices in name only. Better have no devices because SOME do not work.

Yes. But after a US court deemed it legal for a "consumer" to sign away his own fundamental right of participating in a class action lawsuit as a EULA term, class action might lose all relevance soon.

The issue that a failed class action suit results in no more class action suits allowed for the subject, makes it easy for a company "sponsored" underhanded weak class action suit against itself. When this is duly dismissed, being intentionally weak, company is safe from class action suits.

Companies have learnt the lesson that gaming the system, like they have, is their best defence.

Ok, just skimmed through TFA. But using the wireless's web interface, one could add DNS entries, or enable guest account.

Alice grants Bob casual temporary access to her router, by typing the password herself on Bob's device. Malice that Bob can carry out using this "hack" :

1. add DNS entries to take Alice to other websites than she intends to visit. HTTPS certificate might protect Alice, but most people don't understand anything about them and proceed by ignoring all warnings. Doesn't help that important websites change certificates without advance warning - gmail recently changed with only a blog post long ago about it. This trains people to ignore certificate change warnings.

2. Possibly enables guest account without telling Alice, and Alice doesn't monitor all the APs in the area or router settings all the time to check if guest account is enabled. Now the temporary access Alice gave to Bob becomes a permanent access whenever he is in the area. If he is a neighbour, Bob saves on ISP costs.

As you can see the analysis here in the garbage collection, as well as a nice research paper linked,

Time cost of garbage collection is minimal if you have physical memory 4 times as much as java heap size. I guess satisfying this requirement shouldn't be much for Google. Another limitation of java, the startup cost, shouldn't be much for Google either, as I guess most "servers" keep running for a long time.

Branch prediction and all is nice, but it is difficult to swallow the 2x estimation of performance over java. Could you give some more details? Too much floating point computation?

thanks

You are the programmer, and the computer is the programmee. When you write a python script,

1. You, the programmer, is programming.
2. No one is computing (ok, your IDE is computing, but no computing is happening as per YOUR python script is concerned).

When you EXECUTE your python script,
1. The computer is computing.
2. No one is programming.

You need to know more about lying before teaching others about it. Try this

While it is callous, but some people refuse to learn. Americans, for example, have this debilitating allergy to saving money for a rainy day. It makes the situation more tragic than it needs to be.

If a tiny population is involved in farming, more people could work to produce the manufactured goods. Now if a tiny population is involved in manufacturing, more people can work to selling them.

A few individuals think of a revolutionary idea (mass produced motor car, IBM PC, iPhone), and millions make money making them, selling them, making accessories / programs for them. A few individuals think of another revolutionary idea to replace some of these products, and resources get diverted there.

When 90% population was involved in food production, there was zero market for personal computers.

Until singularity, I don't see this stopping. People can move on to the "next great thing". Singularity, if managed well, could make machines our "slaves" and we could all be "happily retired". It can lead to bad outcomes, but we have a lot of time to plan it.

What do you mean by "such an enclosure". Does SteamOS detect enclosure and refuse to run if it is not the correct enclosure?

To start with, I see nothing wrong with ASUS CM1735-US006S "http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883220265", the first entry in newegg for the original post's mentioned range of $300-400. If Steam likes nvidia, look for nvidia GPU.

From your suggestion of Dell Zino, I guess you are thinking about small PCs from the start. That might need redesign which implies some "risk" for the OEM. BUT it is not necessary to take that risk. Any OEM can test the waters, e.g. ASUS can start with CM1735-US006S. If it doesn't begin to work, ditch it. If it begins to work, do a small redesign effort. Bite as much as you can swallow. Low risk, as I said.

Even if OEMs don't install SteamOS, the end users can install it. To begin with, at least.

It is not necessary to give the mostest elegantest solution to get much more profits than Valve is getting now. Non-too-elegant solutions win, or at least compete, in the technology sector all the time.

Your post suggests computer developer is the only new job created by technology. This is highly incorrect. E.g. telephone operators went away, now we have mobile phones. Low infrastructure costs , because less wiring is required. High margin for the operators. So they employ lots and lots of salesmen to convince people to switch to their service rather than the competitors.

I am sure in any system with a reasonable competition, mobile telephony salesmen vastly outnumber telephone operators 2 generations ago. US has a horrible telephony system, so may not hold there. But it is a problem with bad regulation as in not requiring meaningful competition, rather than a problem with technology itself.