Services.

A whole shitload of the XBOX is based on on line servers or gold membership for usability If MS decided to shut it all down, your single player disc based games will still work, but all the rest is gone.

Other then it pushed Alpha in to AMD's hands giving birth to the Opteron, Intel snatched defeat from the jaws of victory there.

I'm not really sure where you're going with that one, with dual-stack any system that can run IPv6 can also run IPv4.

>We've had free space optical networking for decades.

I hope renewed interest both raises speeds and reduces cost of FSO, as someone who runs a lot of p-t-p wireless links the more options the better.

>Can I call this planned obsolescence yet?

It's called a tolerance interval.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolerance_interval

If 95% of your drives should last 5 years, you'd give a warranty that long to persuade customers to buy them over the other brands. Even at the far end of the bell curve you'll cover drives that have a much higher rate of failure because a large portion of the customer base will not RMA them for many issues, mostly because after 5 years something much better is out or they are lazy.

Well, first a bunch of time has passed giving people time to think. It's not an 'unfolding story' either, all the details are out there. And lastly, 5 years is time for many slashdotters to get older/grow up. It's easy to make a weird judgement on property when you're young and don't have any, but all of a sudden you're 30 and you have a house, car, and a well paying job you tend to look at things differently.

If you look to deliver exceptional value in just one market you are going to get your lunch ate eventually. Microsoft dominated the desktop OS market for years, then all of a sudden Apple, and now Google have taken over the phone/tablet market while the desktop market continues to shrink. Microsoft didn't try to provide exceptional value to the phone market for years (WinCE and its 6 versions of the OS were total crap for that purpose). Microsoft has also spent billions in the console market and only has done marginally well, but it has kept Sony and other competitors from making inroads too far in to it's OS/gaming market because of it.

>Or will you pass a law against that, too?

No, eventually you make all the businesses pay huge amounts in taxes for using robots to support social welfare, unless you want to end up in a Manna world. http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Unless of course, you want millions of unemployed hungry people to riot and burn your infrastructure down.

I like how you conveniently forgot about the great depression and the reason why we have price supports, oh and the reasons we supply social welfare. They almost did starve. There were riots and deaths on the capitol steps. Lets not do that again.

>Except Amazon can't consume anyone's business. A customer decides where to spend money.

Yea. You don't understand how 'huge' business works.

Once you're big enough you can afford lobbying solely in your favor. With size you can use the 'walmart effect' by buying so much production the manufactures are more dependent on your then the smaller shops. When it comes down to it, the most powerful influence of consumers is price. If you have a huge enough amount of capitol you can find ways to sell your product cheaper then cost while remaining legal.

Um, I'd think this would be a pretty big deal for computers. I'm not sure if you've looked lately, but the boards are covered in caps made of all kinds of materials, some rather rare. Direct integration with SSDs is the first major use I can see off the top of my head.

>their support told us to update the firmware on the drive, which bricked it. They then refused to return/repair the drive because "firmware updates void your warranty."

I think my response to OCZ would have been: "I am contacting my state attorney general and petitioning that your products be banned from sales here."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HardOCP#Hard.7CForum

It is likely they run them two separate businesses to protect each other from liability.