It hasn't made programming cool, it has made some of the jobs based around programming appear cooler. If someone asks what you do and you reply that you're a cobol programmer woring for a mortgage company, it's hardly likely to make you seem like the coolest guy in the room. However, if you mention that you write apps for phones, or Facebook, or write games then it's likely to seem more interesting. People can relate to it as they will be using the devices and services you help create content for.

There's also a crossover now, with people who put together a Powerpoint presentation, or mark up an HTML page considering themselves programmers.

Exactly - i wrote that to hilight just how bad the current situation is, by reversing it (I thought I'd added enough sarcasm to the comment, but still) :

"you want people with patents to read through what would be thousands of product ideas a day?"

This, in a nutshell is the problem currently, but in reverse, with the person WITHOUT the patents having to read through potentially 10's or 100's of thousands of vague patents, AND understanding all of those patents, before having any confidence they can go ahead without being accused of criminality.

"hell you would need a team dedicated 24x7 to read all of the intended product developments"
=
"hell you currently need a team dedicated 24x7 to read all of the vague product patents"

Why shouldn't it be the responsibility of the patent owner to contact the company intending to develop a product, before they sink resources into it?

Much like building planning works (in the UK at least) the company involved must declare their intentions in the local papers, and posters around the area, so that anyone with an concern or complaint can find an avenue to raise their objections.

If there were a site where any company could post details of what they were intending to produce, then the patent trolls... sorry, I mean innovators with patent portfolios would be responsible for contacting the company. This would effectively prevent a "crime" and obviously save the patent troll... I mean innovators with the patents "millions of dollars" worth of damage to their business. Surely we'd all like to prevent crime right? Of course, this could cost the patent trolls (ah hell, I'll leave it) money scanning the site for things that could infringe on their highly valuable patents, but I won't lose any sleep over that, personally.

This would obviously only work where the invention is blatantly obvious and the company intending to produce the product is not concerned with their idea being out in the public (think: making a a cog, writing a quicksort algorythm, a web browser, etc)

At the moment the whole patent system is designed to criminalise people who often have absolutely no way of knowing they're commiting any crime. How on Earth can the law support that position?

"Just a fyi - what YOU perceive to be a valued function may not be the same as what the person next to you values."

You mean like a phone that can actually make a phone call reliably? Yeah I can see how that would be seen as an optional extra if you're just flashing the device around to increase hipster cred.

There's your problem right there. O2 have terrible coverage outside of a few major cities in my experience. I actually recently paid to get out of a contract with O2 because their service is so awful, and switched to Vodafone who are a lot better. That's not to say Apple's gear is absolved from any blame either: even my old Google G1 can get a better signal than my iPhone using the same SIM (via an adapter plate.)

As someone said though, you knew what you were getting into - Apple products have always been about form over function - people would even buy them if the cases were empty.

Well I had used the firmware available on the same day this article was posted. I returned the drive on that day, after it still failed to fix the issues. I had tried the drive on 2 different machines with different motherboards, and in each case the problems occured in the same way when the drive was used. There are plenty of other people on the forums who have had the same experience so basically I had no faith whatsoever in the Sandforce controller-based SSDs. I've bought several in the past - my gaming rig has a RAID(0) setup with the OCZ SSDs, and it experiences random lockups as one or other drive disappears. On the gaming rig the problem seems less frequent, and as it's just used for games it isn't so much of an issue - although I'll be replacing them soon.

Well my experience was that the issue wasn't fixed. I just returned one of these drives due to lockups, "disappearing drive" and random BSODs. This happened with a Corsair 120GB Force 3 SSD, but I know the OCZ drives are also affected. The issues have been going on for months.

Real hackers used unchained Mode X of course ;-) Mode 13h chained 4 segs together to give nice easy linear addressing, but it meant that the other 3 segments were wasted, so offscreen buffering and smooth hardware scrolling etc wasn't available.

If you're interested in that sort of hacking now, and Arduino + Gameduino shield is a good alternative, I've found ;-)

I was very impressed with the video of it in use. It must be using a secondary CPU or dedicated controller for the LCD as there's no way the little 8bit ATMega could update the LCD that smoothly on its own. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on one of these!