Sadly, you have this 100% backwards. Apple is the king of omitting what you need. In this case, they're omitting the SATA controller and connector. You need it so that you have more storage options. They're also omitting a full fleet of memory slots, and normal GPU connection.

Man, I miss my extremely-lowered S13. That was insane. I had nothing in the motor, either.

As always, though, some people are really using the improvements. My S13 never saw a track but I did manage to really wring it out in the canyons on a regular basis. But then, I knew that my money was best spent on suspension :)

Likewise, I went to six cores because I'll really use them, and I do. And as soon as bigger SSDs come down in price I'll budget for one of those, too. I have an Intel X25-M at 80GB now, with a very slow and old 320GB spinner next to it... Because I definitely have tasks which are I/O bound on this system with all its RAM and CPU cores. Even just generating a minecraft gmap (with pigmap) gets I/O bound before six cores. I need a faster SSD...

No, no you couldn't, and you certainly couldn't do both of these things at once. Thunderbolt 2 is still inadequate for connecting a GPU, it will not keep up with modern graphics cards. Not surprised to see you of all people get this wrong.

When you change from living to dead because you can't get water, your estimation will revise from refusing to believe to being unable to believe.

For a second there, I thought you were talking about an insurance salesman. The simple truth is that most of our jobs are not useful. They amount to behaving like decapitated poultry, or as some sort of gatekeeper.

You really have no idea what you're talking about. Before video games, the idiots in the rice rockets were idiots in muscle cars. And before muscle cars the idiots were in hot rods. Before that, you had people who would whip their horses into a froth and pull their surrey too fast. (They even optionally had fringe on the top; compare and contrast "dingle balls")

Video games can improve driving skills. Gran Turismo did for me. It made me a smoother driver even around the speed limits.

I'm a well-known Microsoft hater, but I'm also a long-time PC gamer, and that means I care about Windows. I wish it didn't, but it does. But I haven't had to have any games on Windows 7 yet, so XP has been holding me... Back when XP came out, I had experience with Win2k from work, so I was fairly excited to see Windows 98 and ME go away and be replaced with an NT-based system, especially given that NT5 was good and this was NT5.1.

The simple fact is that many gamers were excited about XP, and justifiably so. It was a dramatically better platform for gaming than Windows 98 (and Windows ME doesn't even get an honorable mention — more DOS games will probably run properly on XP than on ME.)

Only a small handful of years ago I regularly used a single-core 1.4 GHz 32-bit processor and 2GB RAM, my phone is from 2011 and it's got 1.5 GHz and 512MB. Today's phones beat the living shit out of machines I still use. This is easily accessible.

You're not doing a very good job of playing the devil's advocate when you ask such a ridiculous question. The cop doesn't need to know if the accident was caused by texting or not. That's something an investigator can find out later, with a subpoena. You only need to know if an accident was caused due to drug use so that you can run someone to the hospital for a blood test so that you have evidence of impairment.

That might be true, because so many of them are mostly Aluminum, and Aluminum oxide protects Aluminum in precisely the way that Iron Oxide doesn't protect Iron. But it might not be, because who properly maintains cars? Washing the undercarriage regularly and so on? Pretty close to nobody.

Isn't it possible to produce conversion parts?

No, put the blame where it lies, with Sony. You have conveniently forgotten that the hackers laid low on the PS3 until they removed Other OS, at which point there was a flurry of activity. But that is really only very slightly relevant. The truth is that if Sony didn't want to offer the feature, they could simply have not offered the feature, and not given it at the beginning, and then taken it away later. To me, what they did was theft. People were deprived of a feature which was part of the product when they paid for it. It saddens me that people are stupid enough to continue to support them.

"Sony ditched the curvaceous aesthetics that previous PlayStation consoles relied on and went with an angular motif"

Uh what, and also what? Someone's never seen the original Playstation, or any Playstation 2. Or any PS2 accessories.

"the latter of which makes it a little like a modern day VCR player"

A modern day videocassette recorder player?

"(if the format were still around)."

psssst it is. For the few old people who refuse to switch to discs. I keep a VCR around (a six-head sony I got from fry's as an open box for $35) because I often find surprisingly current movies on VHS at yard sales for a buck or less.

Anyway, complaints about the article aside, the PS3 clearly has more hack value for anyone but a roboticist, who might want to use the new Kinect. So I sure hope someone blows the locks off this thing, because it would be a sweet machine to buy used someday.

Anything from Giga-byte with Dual BIOS(tm).

Well, you're wrong. From a quick search of the gigabyte product line, it looks like DualBIOS (between my first and second paragraphs, I did a little research and they seem to have made this a one-word feature since I noticed it) is a standard feature for them these days. My GA-MA770-UD3P 1.0 has it, and it's a pretty old AM3+ board. It's also operating system indepdendent, and you can flash from a BIOS menu.

I guess I should see if I can get coreboot working on this system; if I'm a good boy and don't overwrite my primary BIOS, then the system should automatically boot the failsafe BIOS on failure.

Whatever you call it, people were excited about Windows XP because of what it brought to the consumer desktop, and people actually upgraded to it on purpose. Same for Win2k vs. Windows NT on the corporate side. Which upgrades since have not been dreaded? Windows 7, which is just Windows Vista Unfucked Edition. How about on the server side? I haven't had to go there in a while, thankfully. Regardless, only a few delusional cases clung to Windows 3.1, or Windows 95, but Windows XP is fairly compelling even today with its low resource requirements and unparalleled compatibility.

Corporate users will upgrade to windows 8 pro (or 8.1, soon) with windows 7 downgrade and install that. Home users who won't pay for Windows 7 won't pay for antivirus, either.