You'd get an upvote, but I haven't seen mod points in a long time...

That's a good point. I miss my old beeb. It was much more fun. So much so, I recently took to writing a partial emulator to help disassemble some of the old games to see the craziness involved in writing them. Well, I found it entertaining... the missus gave me a strange look and backed away when I explained it.

I wonder if in 30 years we'll be looking back at the iPad 2 and wondering how we managed to do anything with something so slow, restricted and clunky. And what will we be comparing it to? Back in my day we had touchscreens, none of this neural implant junk...

You could replace "Android" with "Java" in this story and you'll probably find you have a dupe of a story from 5-6 years ago.

I worked on Java apps for cell phones and ran into all sorts of incompatibilities between handsets. Problems ranged from fundamental differences like screen sizes, variations in what libraries are implemented or not, all the way down to slight differences in behavior of library calls. It seems that unless you have one hardware/software source, like Apple and the iPhone, you're going to come across and have to work around a ton of variations.

The ebook prices are ridiculous. I was tempted to download a book for the Kindle app on my ipod touch. Amazon cheerfully informed me the digital version was $9.99, the paperback was $7 new or around $2.50 used. What?! This is exactly the reason that I haven't bought an actual Kindle device.

I have a Philips DVD drive with a usb port, and was using a 1GB flash drive to play back video files copied from my PC. The drive failed relatively quickly - I'd had it for about a year, but hadn't used it all that often. I started to notice the video files were corrupt on playback, but initially suspected the file itself, or possibly a problem with the DVD player's decoder. I diagnosed the problem by copying a file onto the drive, then repeatedly checksumming it. The first couple of times, the checksum value would be often be correct, then on subsequent checks it would change on me. I'd end up seeing several different checksum values, never seeing it return to a previous value. Whether this was due to a problem in the interface harware when reading, or memory cells failing to retain their state, I don't know.

Even though it was a year old and I had no receipt, the manufacturer (Kingmax, I think?) was happy to send a free replacement. The new drive has seen much more use, but is still working fine.

...and other violent media...

Yep, so you go ahead and try to get the same message printed on all movies, too, and we'll see just how long you're representing California.