Unfortunately, if you're serious about boycotting a company then that means avoiding the good as well as the bad. If you say "I'll never but from Sony again. Except this eReader" then you're not really serious about boycotting.

I agree - their e-Readers are great devices and I'd be very happy to own one but, like the grandparent, I've been burnt and put off by the antics of other parts of the company to ever hand them any of my hard earned money again.

It's not just the rendering model though. A lot of these crappy intranet products use custom ActiveX components that simply will not work with IE7 or above - sometimes due to architectural changes, other times due to security blocks (ActiveX Killbits). IE 8 already has a "Compatability mode" for rendering but this is not enough.

ActiveX. Because running arbitrary non-sandboxed code direct from websites is a Good Idea!(tm)

Uerghhh....

Ahh, sorry - you've lost me. There was only ever one Matrix movie.

Don't cross the stre^H^H^H^H pacmen!

If you have a friend on hand (or some serious ambidextrous skills....) click "Inser Coin" twice and use the WASD keys to control MsPacman!

I remember seeing a post from one of the devs on the WoW forums (can't seem to find it atm) - they basically said that although they have no intention to create Linux native ports at this time they do acknowledge that a proportion of their fans like to run their games on a Linux based OS. So they try to keep their software Wine friendly/OS agnostic where they can. That and their codebase is probably already port-friendly by having to support OS X and Windows simultaneously as mentioned above seems to keep their software running with little to no trouble on WINE.

I suspect we'll see the same for Source games. Even more likeley we already have - they've been developing a Mac version for sometime so it's safe to assume that the Windows version already benefits from similair OS agnostic design considerations, D3D reliance asside.

Yes, but once you have that list of results you're wide open to snooping again - those URLs you visit can be snooped the same way a Google search string can be.

The rest of the web is as as open and interceptable as a plain Google search. Far better to do your dodgy web activities from an anonymous location or via something like Tor.

In either case, this is a site that's piggybacking on another company's services for free. Google haven't deliberately blocked them and whatever my personal opinion of the company may be, they are under no obligation to check if their updates break these kinds of sites.

Performance on it's own isn't meaningful for everyone. If I'm setting up a server or better yet a data center, performance against cost has to be considered. And that's not just the cost of the hardware but also things like MTBF and power costs.

I'm not implying that one is better than the other here, but a raw performance comparisson between like-for-like processors is not enough information to make spending decsion with. It may be better value to buy the system with poor performance and spend the savings elsewhere for example.

Don't Google offer an appliance for in-house use? Basically a rack mount server - plug in, config and away you go. Get the benefit of a web-based office suite with none of the security and legal concerns.

Of course that implies that you have full control over the server - I've never worked with one so I can't say if that's so.

If the market was fair and the populace well informed. People don't choose Flash - they have Flash thrust upon them.

I'll also add this in response to the grandparent:

At no point did they say they want to make non-commercial infringement *legal*. They want to de-criminalise it. Most countries in the world draw a line between criminal acts and civil violations. I fully agree that sharing files for personal use should not result in jail time, that police time and effort should not be spent safeguarding movies and music.
However if someone wants to bring forward a civil suit against someone who's been filling their shelves with torrented music and video then fine. I may have that wrong but that's how I interpreted that (although in some nations civil lawsuits are way out of control as well).

All in all I find their aims reasonable, acheiveable and good for society - and not particularly detrimental to honest business either.

Irrelevant. How an open standard is defined is not the point (unless it's seriously lacking in functionality - but then it would never be used anyway).

If a standard is open it means that

a:) Somewhere there is publicly available definition of how to implement that standard. Like a list of all HTML tags, what they mean and guidelines on hwo to render them.

b:) No patents or licencing restrictions. A particular library or implementation may be protected (Opera's paid for web browser, for example), but I and others are free to choose other software that also follows the standard or implement our own.

c:) Documents and data based on the standard are interchangeable - I can view an HTML document in nearly any browser and still read and view it.

Ultimately, encouraging the use of open standards limits noone (be it company or individual) and empowers end users and society in general. In the case of a format like ODF for example, nothing at all prevents MS fully supporting it - that they do so half heartedly is their choice.

What a widely used open standard does do, however, is force sofware implementations to compete - be it on value for money, features, reliability, speed etc. That's only bad for those companies or groups that simply lack the ability to compete fairly.

So no, it matters not how the standard was defined - if it's solid, useable and open then it's all good. Needless to say, it's often better to have multiple open standards for certain things to allow competition between the formats themsleves.

Of course they (the publishers) see that as someone else choosing to spend $45 on a used game instead of buying a new game from them.

The re-seller in your example may purchase more new games with the extra money from his old games, but that doesn't equal the "lost sale" that the publishers perceive. And it's slight worse than that - most newly released games are already available second hand within a few days of release - and at only a very slight discount. In exchange for a paltry discount on a breaking new game, the publisher loses a sale. I see brand-new, just released games already in the second-hand game bin 24 hours after it hit the shelves and usually only 2 or 3 pounds cheaper. And unlike most physical goods, there's less of a stigma about used games - there is no degredation of quality in used software. Most of us are not concerned with having a shiny new copy of the DVD as long as it works, unlike - for example - walking around in a second hand suit.

I sound like I'm on their side, don't I? Well I'm not. I do empaphise - this immediate undercutting must put a dent in their sales. But it's part and parcel of commerce. Any non-disposable product you produce is subject to be resold, given away, shared etc. You take that into account. You make the idea of owning the shiny new one more attractive. You don't start using kill switches or disposable components.

I dislike the way the games stores have pushed and grown the second-hand market to it's current state. Second hand used to mean getting an older game a few weeks or months later at a reasonable price. Now it means cutting out the publisher for hardly any benefit to me. £3 off a £50 is nothing, really. But it's still going to beat the full price new copies.

But the publishers approach to this is equally deplorable - one-shot DLC? DRM (since that what's it's really for nowadays)? Non-transferable online components in a single player game? It's like trying to fix a problem by making your products worse, not better.

Sorry, my response was to parent. Fat-fingered click-itis today....

My initial response is "how callous, how cold" but stepping back I can't argue that your're completely wrong. I see many "how can you justify killing a child" type responses below and once again I find myself gritting my teeth at how we all want and need simple black and white answers to complex moral dilemmas.

Is a child's life worth a few hundred dollars or whatever? Of course not.
Will capitulating to such a demand encourage such acts in the future? Very likely.

What's the answer? I don't think there is one. I both envy and fear the fact that you can make such a judgement call so solidly but I think I'd never be able to make such a decision until I was thrust into such a position for real.

Scale it up from a singel criminal versus a man and child to whole countries, communities and nations and it gets more complex, not less.