This was hardware, not software. And their lawyers *were* very busy patenting stuff and fighting each other in court. Especially TI, who had invented the IC first (sort of).

Desktop systems won't go away, since they're used by Intel et. al. to design motherboards and processors, so they know what's up.

They'll just get more expensive as the demand goes down, and they'll only be sold by vendors of professional gear.

I concur. Heck, I even have an old Panasonic analog PBX, so I have to dial 9 to get an outside line on my old Western Electric rotary phones from the early 20th century. They still work just fine, thank you. (There is DSL on my second line for access to Slashdot and videos of cute kittens playing in boxes.)

The Macintosh was such a superior machine in nearly every aspect that the unsold Lisas had to be hauled off to the landfill.

We have at least a hundred LEGO sets from various of the "unimaginative" series from Harry Potter to Star Wars to the underwater things. They get built once according to the book, then they gradually get taken apart and mixed in with the giant bins of random LEGO parts. All these strangely shaped and colored parts mix together quite well, and my children have had no trouble whatsoever in creating weird fan-fic style mashup vehicles and action sets.

The guy states in his article that the battery pack hack was not something that he'd be comfortable with other people duplicating. That's why I brought it up.

I, too, applaud his doing of the thing. I make things too, but I try to use parts that are available to the general public when I post how-to articles about the things that I build.

Indeed. But how many of the readers have their own laptop repair shops? A general source of such batteries is a requirement to get this project in the hands of the average tinkerer.

The author could have done some research on battery packs instead of hacking up a laptop pack as he did. There is a company called batteryspace.com that sells multi-cell Li-ion packs with a protection circuit built in. They're not cheap, but they are reasonably safe.

Apple is doing enough of that to get the job done all by themselves. No need for the rest of us to pile on.

Movies are stored on 1/2" wide tape. Music is stored on flat, black plastic discs. What is this business about storing movies and music on computers?

That's the thing about storage - since it doubles in capacity every 1.5 years or so, the app writers happily double their app sizes at that rate.

The last I heard, there was a $1 billion damage award. Has that been overturned while I wasn't looking?

Given that my first disk drive held 72 kilobytes, I find your comment a bit funny.

There's a large, smoking hole in the ground where the price fell through the Earth's crust.

The TVs were made that way on purpose, to allow the TV police to easily sniff the sets' internal oscillators to track them down for taxes, right? (I'm American.)