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That helps some but you are still left with the internal wiring. Unless there are some mandates in that regard, the usefulness of that fiber connection will be limited.

Even relatively low end streamer appliances benefit from a real, wired ethernet connection.

Think of the backhaul capabilities fiber offers compared to copper. (Also think of the copper savings).
Also think of digital TV capabilities.

The usefulness of the fiber may not be as limited as you think.

Sure, there may be some home monitoring capabilities as well because the backhaul allows easier monitoring capabilities (video or audio) within the household, office, or school.

You've already seen announcements of in-household video monitoring via cable boxes. Hard to tell if these are truthful simply planned for Skype support.

This chart doesn't go up to 4K, but suggests that you'd have to sit closer than 10 feet away from a 100" screen to take advantage of even 1440p:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/ [engadget.com]

Actually that graph shows that you'd benefit from 1440p if you sit 12.5 feet away from a 100" screen. I'd also argue that it is much more apparent than that, but I don't have any pretty graphs to show for it.

even the jump from SD to HD was marginal

Holy shit, and this is how you know that you have no idea what you're talking about. The difference of SD to HD was more significant by far than the change from black and white to color. It's huge! Do you have a 10" tv that you're watching from 7 ft away when making this comparison or something?

Are you old enough to remember the B&W TV days? I think you're underestimating the scale of the switch from B&W to color. I still remember when my parents got a color TV (we had a B&W set far longer than most people) and the difference was amazing and quite apparent to everyone. It didn't take a side by side comparison to see the difference between B&W and color, and you could see the difference no matter the size of the screen or how close you were.

On my current 37" LCD (capable of 720p, 1080i), I notice only a minimal difference between SD DVD's (480i) and HD Blu-rays. The difference is so minimal that I stopped paying the extra dollar or two for Blu-ray disks from Netflix because I couldn't really tell the difference. Perhaps if I had a bigger 1080p capable set I might notice more of a difference, but at my normal viewing distance (10 - 12 feet) the difference is quite minimal on my current set. I don't think I'd notice any difference at all between 720p and 4K without a much larger TV, or sitting much closer to the TV.

This chart doesn't go up to 4K, but suggests that you'd have to sit closer than 10 feet away from a 100" screen to take advantage of even 1440p:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/09/1080p-charted-viewing-distance-to-screen-size/

Does anyone else remember 2009, when Red supposedly demoed their RedRay codec, promising 4K video in an 10Mbps stream? http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/25/red-blows-away-small-room-of-videophiles-with-4k-red-ray-footage/

I haven't been following it much since then, but it looks like the RedRay is actually finally available. Anyone have any hands on experience with it?

As you can see from the EnGadget review, the UI is nothing like Sugar.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/07/hands-on-with-the-xo-tablet/

It's Android, with a custom skin designed to be child-friendly (and parent-friendly too, from the looks of things - you can escape it back to plain old Android). It also comes with a curated set of 100 child-friendly apps, and 100 ebooks for children.

While the tablet specs themselves aren't stunning, they're not bad either: 1024x600, 8G SD, dual-core 1.6GHz ARM, 1G RAM, HDMI out, microSD, f/b cameras at 1.3/3.0 mpixels. And the content seems like it could well be worth it for some busy parents who don't want to spend a whole lot of time trolling through the Play Store trying to decide whether that app is safe for Junior.

If it hits the market anywhere under $200 it seems fairly worthwhile to me. I'd buy one for my kids, I think.

Fishy? Not really. Your facts are just poorly aggregated.

For instance, you only accounted for iPhone sales, but Apple also sells the iPad, iPad mini, and iPod Touch, all of which are also iOS devices that can download and run these apps. Through March 2012 they had announced 365M iOS device sales, and by the end of the next quarter (i.e. the quarter when iPhone sales were winding down before the iPhone 5 and iPad mini rumors were rampant, thus slowing sales) they still managed to sell 35M units, bringing them to over 400M iOS devices by the end of June. So, already we can tell that you're off by 150M units at a minimum, and that still leaves the following six months of sales unaccounted for.

Going forward past June, Apple has since then released the iPhone 5, a new iPod Touch, the iPad mini, and the 4th gen iPad. Whether the mini is cannibalizing larger iPad sales or not will be revealed soon, since Apple is set to do their earnings announcement for the holiday quarter in about two weeks. Even if it is, however, its sales are estimated to be in the 8-10M range. Meanwhile, the iPhone 5 represented over 50% of smartphone sales as we got towards the end of the year, so it's safe to say that it's been selling well so far. Not to mention that iPad and iPod sales have traditionally picked up during the holiday season since they're not tied to contracts.

As such, 450-500M is a perfectly reasonable expectation for where they are today, given that it's six months since their last announced numbers and they've updated every single product line that's relevant right before the biggest sales time of the year.

And if we assume just 450M devices, then that would mean 40B/450M, which is around 89 apps on average, which is extremely reasonable, given that they're doubtless including all of those apps that people download, check out for five minutes, and then delete because they aren't what they're looking for. I did a quick sanity check, and I have 84 third-party apps currently installed on my smartphone, not to mention a few more on my tablet, and that doesn't include the dozens I've installed and deleted over the years. I wouldn't even classify myself as a heavy user; I actually think my usage is pretty close to typical for most users, since I don't use it as a geek tool or like a power user would.

100 kW is considered to be militarily useful, 1 MW is considered to be a battle grade laser.

There are 100 kW solid state lasers available to the US military so this is not exactly leading edge military laser power. The interesting bit about this article is the revolver design they used.

Came here to remind of that. Here's a hands-on.

According to Engadget it is not something we are all going to bring to work day to day just yet

If you're interested in snagging one of the top two units, be advised that the price of the 512GB edition is a staggering $1,750.00 -- so you'd better get working on impressing that MLB scout next time they're passing by.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/07/kingston-1tb-flash-drive/

And in three years they'll be selling them at the office supply store for $30.

Ain't the relentless march of tenchological innovation wunnerful?

If you're interested in snagging one of the top two units, be advised that the price of the 512GB edition is a staggering $1,750.00 -- so you'd better get working on impressing that MLB scout next time they're passing by.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/07/kingston-1tb-flash-drive/

The company has gone through a couple of bankruptcies, and has tried to reinvent itself with a number of less-than-popular products including: an Android powered "smart camera"

Was this referring to the Polaroid sc1630 that was a rebranded Altek Leo / Aigo A8 device, or the upcoming IM1836 camera?

Christ. Year after year, iOS alarm clock, DND, or something breaks on new years, leap year, DST, or something.

IT JUST WORKS!!!!!

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3795574?start=0&tstart=0

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/14/ios-daylight-saving-time-woes-continue/

JUST SHUT YOUR NNTP MOUTH

Copyrights and trade secrets protected the software industry just fine before the USPTO opened the flood gates on software patents in the early 90's. They should stick to the original intent of the constitution, and protect the free flow of ideas by banning patents on mathematical algorithms (which includes software, IMO). They should not overturn the patents they've granted - that would harm the companies that filed them - but going forward, patents should cover something more than what can be executed in any mainstream computer language. If I can violate your patent simply by writing C code, it should not be patentable.

Software patents have resulted in:
The Open Invention Network
Peer to Patent
Oracle suing Google over Java
37 Android related patent suits
Nearly killing RIM
Linux patent suits ...

I'm afraid we're at the point where the anti-software-patent people warned we'd be. Small companies live in terror of being sued over any software they write. Big companies waste billions of dollars in court. Coders like me intentionally "code dumb", to avoid accidentally using a patented software idea. It's a terrible waste, and it makes me very sad to see America throwing away it's software innovation lead in this way. Thank God software patents weren't around when we wrote so much of the software that still powers the world. If they were, we'd all still be renting time on IBM mainframes. Just imagine a world where Donald Knuth patented all his ideas.

MS didn't just get nailed for bundling IE, but for strong-arming Dell, HP, Gateway, etc. to not allow another browser and to not sell PCs without Windows. Additionally they tied IE into the OS itself in such a way as consumer had less choice. With Google, it's a matter of typing http://someothersearchengine.whatever/ to use an alternative service. To replace Windows it was a matter of installing another OS entirely. Context and scale matters, not just the bundling of products.

Personally I never had issue with MS bundling products, but integrating them so that they cant have defaults replaced, was a step to far. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

They are of course still up to their tricks...
Windows Phone 7 will work with third party browsers, so long as they're based on IE
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/17/windows-phone-7-will-work-with-third-party-browsers-so-long-as/

Christ. Year after year, iOS alarm clock, DND, or something breaks on new years, leap year, DST, or something.

IT JUST WORKS!!!!!

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3795574?start=0&tstart=0

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/14/ios-daylight-saving-time-woes-continue/

Quit lying, dumbass. The world doesn't end at the US border, and Korean phones were way ahead of Apple. (That's 333 PPI in 2008, in case you can't do the math yourself.)

http://www.engadget.com/tag/nvidia,defective/

Check your REAL history. Microsoft set maximum specs for netbooks that were allowed to install cheap XP starter licenses.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/22/microsoft-publishes-maximum-windows-7-netbooks-specs/
XP/Vista/Windows 7 netbook specs

Manufacturers jumped all over the chance to sell netbooks with real Windows to customers afraid of Linux. Economies of scale prevented manufactures from producing better "Linux only" low cost netbooks. They raised prices for "Windows based" netbooks just at the time regular notebook prices were plummeting. The price/performance delta shrunk and you were left with a single core Atom, low resolution, 1GB - upgradable to 2GB - netbooks, versus a full blown notebook for $100 more.

Microsoft killed the low cost netbook in a calculated move to kill Linux on netbooks. Ultrabooks became the only remaining (high cost) viable alternative for lightweight, low power, ultra portable computers. It is funny that Chromebook, with the exception of size, is now becoming the "new" netbook that the old netbook could have been if Microsoft had not sabotaged the market.

Samsung Galaxy Note II sales exceed one million in Korea, may hit 10M globally in Q1

Read and weep. Seems, somebody didn't forget what innovation means.

Sorry the FCC requires TVs to have at least an ATSC OTA tuner.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/30/fcc-deadline-july-1st-2006-tv-25-inch-and-larger-must-have-an/

http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/21/motorola-x-phone-x-tablet-rumor-android-smartphone/

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413528,00.asp

Okay, so it is nowhere near the hobby price tag of CNC, but the technology exists to print in metal. Check out this Titanium Jaw'!

http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/10/all-nvidia-8400m-8600m-chips-faulty/

And months behind the MS roll out of the same thing for WP8 and Win8. But don't worry, we'll pretend Microsoft stole it from google.

If you look at the Android phones being sold in China, Africa, etc. they are not phones like the Galaxy models. They are basically phones that are just steps up from feature phones.

China actually has some pretty nice android phones that are on par with the iPhone 5 or the Galaxy S3.

The Xiaomi M2 has a 1.5GHz quad core, 2GB ram, 720p screen, and it runs MIUI 4.1 (Android 4.1 with a custom chinese rom). It costs $310, which is less than half the price of an iPhone 5 (and it has better specs than the iPhone). The Xiaomi M2 is basically on par with the newly released Nexus 4, but it costs $50 less.

There's also the Oppo Find 5 which will have a 1.5Ghz quad core, 2GB ram, 16 or 32GB storage, 1920x1080 resolution (1080p screen!), 2500mAh battery, and it runs Android 4.1. It might also be the thinnest smartphone to date.

They have cheaper phones too, like the Beidou Little Pepper which is only $156, and it has a 1.3Ghz quad core, 1GB ram, 5MP camera, 800x480 screen, and runs Android 4.0. There's also the older dual core variant for only $110.

Then you're not paying attention. Most of the reviews I've seen say the OS is fine and Metro/Modern works okay for a tablet, it can be frustrating to use without a touchscreen on a desktop. So while Win 8 will probably work on older hardware, it might be best to wait to get it when consumers can get hardware with touch.

Samsung has more than 3 OS for their phones. It does not seem to hurt them. A company like Nokia could bet on several horses in 2009 without worries, as long as management had clear goals and niches for each OS. Making a Nokia build with Android OS would sell.

Wow, thank you for the fact check. It just goes to show that subjective memories aren't the best guides. I was sure that the gap between 2.3 and 4.0 was much longer than ten months! This is probably because I pay more attention to available devices than to software release dates.

The changes between Gingerbread and ICS were big, and the rollout took quite a while for pretty much all brands of phone. Once a phone company successfully adopted ICS, it must not have been nearly as hard to upgrade to Jelly Bean, because updates came faster.

The irony in reference to this post is Asus and Sony are now profitable since they dropped Windows.

Since when did either Sony (notice all the laptops with Windows 8 on them) or Asus (note the "ASUS recommends Windows 8" line). So what exactly is supposed to be ironic when both are still selling Windows machines? Maybe you meant "Windows Phone"? But then again, when did either of them sell Windows phones?

Samsung I believe is making out like gangbusters

Yes, Samsung would be the one vendor they were referring to.

ZTE

O really? Steep profits drop adds to ZTE woes .

Huawei doing great.

Huaweii profits dropped 22%. Yeah sounds like they are doing great what with their profits dropping off at huge rates.

Stop spreading this ill informed garbage.

Says the guy spreading the ill-informed garbage.

...oh you mean HTC which is STILL profitable, and makes...you guessed it windows phones.

HTC Profit Falls 79% Amid Competition. Oh and HTC makes more Android phone models than Windows phones for quite some time now.

Oh your making a point about your beloved Apple making lots of profits...I'm afraid Apples pursuit of profits is already hurting Apples market share, which didn't work out well last time...they became Microsofts Bitch. They are already irrelevant.

Yes, their market share has gone down because the market has expanded with tons of shitty Android phones flooding the market not because they are selling less phones and tablets.

It's just a shame that Lenovo management ditched the high-resolution screen options that IBM used to offer. Fortunately, now that everyone else is starting to offer 1920x1080 on small screens, Lenovo is finally getting back to higher resolutions: Thinkpad Helix is supposed to have a 11.6 inch 1920x1080 screen. But it looks like we're going to have to wait a long time before we get anything comparable to a Retina Macbook Pro.

Well, technically, we were there, and the industry decided to start moving backwards.

I still use a Thinkpad X61 tablet which has a 1400x1050 screen (150 ppi) and a wacom digitizer. I've been using it to annotate PDF's for years. However, it's on it's last legs but there is still nothing to replace it with.

I made a paper cutout of the size of the screen for 10.1" and 11.6" and 13.3" Windows 8 devices at 1080p, which have respectively 218, 190, and 166 ppi. (In my opinion, 150 ppi is the absolute minimum to be able to read subscripts in a full-page maximized document). You'll notice that all these 16:9 screens are substantially narrower and taller than a sheet of paper. (16:9 is an aspect ratio of 1.78, while 8.5"x11" paper is 1.29) So maximizing the width of a full page on a portrait TV-screen gives you closer to 1.5 pages at a time. The old 4:3 monitors were perfect for documents in portrait mode (aspect ratio 1.33 -- so enough room for a toolbar). Why in the bloody dripping hell everyone decided to use TV screens for computer displays boggles my mind. On the most common Windows 8 screen size, 11.6" at 1080p, an 8.5"x11" document is compressed into a 5.69"x7.36" space. How good are your eyes? For those of you with your calculators out, that's less than half the area of the original 8.5"x11" paper. Sure you could zoom it, welcome to an unending hell of fiddling with scrollbars on a tablet device. Oh and don't forget those 1" document margins wasting screen space. Do you know a good PDF reader that can reliably zoom away margins for screen reading? Neither do I.

The only reasonable upcoming windows 8 device, in my opinion, is the Asus Taichi, the 13.3" version of which has been indefinitely delayed. :-(

Everything else on the market either has: too small of a screen or no digitizer. So, in case anyone from the industry is reading this, bring back 4:3 screens, make them around 14" diagonal with very small bezels and while you're at it, give us > 200 PPI or higher and resistive digitizers!!!. An 8.5"x11" sheet of paper has a diagonal size of 13.9". There's a huge market out there that is unsatisfied. Everyone on the damn planet uses paper, and we need devices that emulate paper use-cases. The OP and myself would definitely buy such devices. Screw Apple and their narrow-minded "no stylus" initiative. Paper has been in use for thousands of years. It's not going to stop tomorrow.

My new car is going to have Toyota's Touch system built in. Apparently even the cheapest new Toyotas get these as standard now.

Annoyingly Android isn't supported yet, but the only thing I really need is a 3.5 mm audio input, which my car definitely will have.. as well as a 9 speaker stereo system and sub :)

I remember reading a tech article long ago, where they showcased an LG Android phone where it was running an a visualised Android instance within the actual phone, which you could switch at the swipe of a button.

Here:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/15/vmware-android-handset-virtualization-hands-on/

Not true since Vista. Slashdot is full of folks who've last used Windows more than 10 years ago and thus complain of things like bluescreens, bloat etc. which makes them look like idiots.

Get with the times and at least update your hate machine.

FWIW, Vista is actually pretty stable if you have good hardware and drivers. Unfortunately over 65% of the early (and quite common) BSOD's on VISTA resulted from third party driver crashes (30% from NVIDIA alone). There were also hardware problems with NVIDIA chips and their BGA mounting during the VISTA era causing many intermittent crashes on laptops.

Actually you are correct, numerous cores are the future. Intel are planning a 48 core smartphone within the decade, http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/30/intel-48-core-chip-smartphones-tablets/ and Haswell is concentrating on both a reduction in power and has some neat improvements to make multicore programming much easier to manage (TSX looks very intriguing) http://www.anandtech.com/show/6290/making-sense-of-intel-haswell-transactional-synchronization-extensions. Both of these will continue as we up the core counts. The power is important as we race to the 1 exaflop supercomputers, which is actually slightly ahead of the exponential growth curve. There's some worry about continuing that trend to exaflop by 2015-2018 but we now have India, China and the US all attempting to beat one another and only India lacks every having the experience of a number 1 supercomputer. We could be entering a space-race like era again but with super computers.

Who needs all that computing power? You do know what that sounds like right? That mythical "640K ought to be enough for everybody". Look I don't want to be too mean but what you seem to lack is vision, do you really not expect new applications to arise from the excess power and fill the void? Maybe it's because I've been programming for 20 years and can see the bottlenecks so I can assure you every little bit of cpu power can be squeezed out and will bring new opportunities previously too slow for real-time calculations. We use the power we have available is how it's best summed up. I haven't even touched on the world's middle class exploding by 100's of millions, a scale like never before thanks to India and China. The strain this will place on resources does warrant a consideration, but that's a whole debate on it's own. Many applications of AI will start showing up in Joe average's devices because the power to run them is now possible, if you can only think of trying to streamline server requests you really need to read up on the near future. There's some exciting times ahead :)

perhaps those states got kick-backs from Amazon

Yeah, right.

While I misspoke about kickbacks, here's an example of what I was referring to, which is Amazon attempting to get out of paying taxes (in this case it should arguably be exempt from retroactively paying them) by creating jobs in the state and investing capital. Again, arguably a fair trade for the state, but this sucks if Amazon is your competition, because it doesn't undo the damage of Amazon cutting into your sales:

"The settlement resolves the online retailer's ongoing dispute with [Texas], which claimed that Amazon owed $269 million in back taxes. In addition to taking up collection, Amazon has agreed to create at least 2,500 jobs and invest a minimum of $200 million in capital investments, though it admits no fault, ..."

Yes, still brings back memories.

Still have my old Atari 800 and 800XL along with all the bits and pieces acquired every Christmas (sprocket printer, little graphics tablet that used the paddle ports for input, the little plotter printer. But then, by the time you had all those, you needed two extension bars for all the different transformers (keyboard, TV, disk drives, printers, RS232).

Fortunately, there are emulators for the Atari and all the other home computers like the BBC. I've used to them to type in the listings from archived articles I had always wanted to try out. All those program still run, even the "100+ free programs" that came from the shop I bought them from.

I'll be surprised if Google doesn't announce their street view cams have been adapted and installed on board ships.

That's nothing. They've already gone underwater.

Xiaomi was launched last year to great applause in China. It was lauded as an original Chinese innovation in smartphones, the company was great, CEO smart, etc. I almost bought one myself, but decided I couldn't live without a physical keyboard (HTC Desire Z). They're coming out with a new phone soon.

It's not that they are being selfish by refusing to share. It simply has never occurred to anyone at the company that there might be rules to follow and a community to participate in. To Chinese, IP is just something that may be freely copied by anyone, slightly modified, and released as your own (when it is no longer OK to copy it, naturally). Ten feet from where I am sitting right now, a man is watching videos of packaging machines in operation and drawing the mechanisms on a CAD program. He is in the R&D department.

DVD off android? Yea, it's actually supported http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/26/samsung-intros-worlds-thinnest-external-dvd-writer/

500G HD? Funny enough, also mountable through usb http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/19/3167527/paragon-ntfs-hfs-android-app


Quad-Core x86? Yup, it's also not a 'real machine'. It's a virtual machine, on you know, a server that I can then access via ssh, citrix, xwindow support, or many other methods.

Good try on the troll, and marks for good points, but I have to give you a C- overall.

"but that would require getting direct access to the main battery output to sustain whole-house amperages"

That shouldn't be too difficult in the near future".

The new high performance charging connector allows direct access to the EV battery via low impedance connection.

Verizon doesn't want to upgrade their network and supply the bandwidth they actually sold. Overselling is lucrative -- hence the data caps

What? You mean the same Verizon that unveiled FiOS Quantum, a 300/65 connection, earlier this year?

In fact, they've invested anywhere from $23 to $30 billion dollars in FiOS. To say they didn't upgrade their network is the height of ignorance.

But hey, I guess this one didn't exactly fit into your "X does Y because of Z, always, no exceptions" template.

Sure...

Sue companies for using h.264 patents they hold?

http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/26/motorola-scales-back-itc-case-against-xbox/

Track everything everyone does online?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/google-tracks-consumers-across-products-users-cant-opt-out/2012/01/24/gIQArgJHOQ_story.html

Circumvent the privacy settings in safari to track people online?

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/10/business/la-fi-google-ftc-20120810

Refuse to integrate turn by turn navigation on the iDevices to try and keep android relevant?

http://www.webpronews.com/google-maps-out-of-ios-6-over-voice-navigation-dispute-sources-say-2012-09

Although there are multiple sources on the last one, some of which make varying claims. Some claim that google refused to do it, others claim that google wanted apple to include latitude (a different google product), the ability to display ads, and the ability to track iOS users. While they aren't required to provide anything at all, it is definitely bad faith since they already had the code base and back end capable of doing so, they wanted to give Android a better map. It wasn't about the code, the work, or the complexity. Apple at one point (allegedly) even offered to pay to have them do it, and it was out right refused.

The EU is doomed to a steady slide into bureaucratic sludge, making it uncompetitive and irrelevant. Great for the U.S., where innovation still thrives (despite Nathan Myhrvold's defense of patent trolling and other intellectual property extorts).

Not sure where you're getting those numbers. In Q3 2012, HTC recorded net income of $137 million so burning millions on unnecessary lawyer fees is in the 1-10% range of their net income. That's pretty significant and a lot of revenue which could otherwise be put towards hardware or software development. God knows a few extra engineers would certainly help push out those Android updates for more models and/or earlier. Even with a cross-licensing deal, they'll probably lose millions to Apple... who knows what they're gonna get back (don't you love when they don't disclose the terms?). Such a waste.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/08/htc-announces-3q-2012-financials/

I don't know if you've heard, but Linux/Android PC's are moving 1.5 million units per day, with a half-billion unit installed base.

Exactly!

That totally debunks the market share argument since Android has not seen a malware explosion, even with it's huge market share.

Oh wait...

That's why Google has stated that Android does not need any malware scanner like Windows Defender

Oh, wait...

...
As a real world example:
In 06 you could get a 3 GHz computer. If Moore's law still impacted speed, we would be able to get a 24GHz chip right now.

GHz is not the only measure, and maybe a little behind the curve, but still:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/08/intel-launches-8-core-itanium-9500-teases-xeon-e7-linked-kittson/

Here's a guy who managed to get hold of one (it already wasn't easy in 2006).
And here's some more background. Basically the FCC stopped requiring STBs to have a IEEE-1394 port, because it was expensive for providers and the market wanted HDMI instead. If you really want one, your provider is still required to give you one, but it will take some serious effort from you part to make them.

For the desktop, it's been done already HERE.

Samsung already has a line of tablet-like tablet PCs (i.e. not notebooks which convert into a tablet) which it's been selling for over a year. Given Microsoft's announcement of Windows for ARM, it's hardly surprising that Samsung is prepping for an ARM version to go with its Intel version.