It's a little confusing, but you can tell by the name:
WD TV - the original 720p device. Obsolete
WD TV Live - Replaced the WD TV, added 1080p and a bunch of other features, but is missing hardware support required for Netflix/Hulu support. Obsolete, but often still available for ridiculously good prices, and still perfectly functional if you don't need Netflix or Hulu. I have one of these for the bedroom.
WD TV Live + (sometimes written as "Plus" instead "+") - The WD TV Live, plus Netflix and Hulu. It's literally exactly the same, with the addition of the hardware-level DRM that Netflix requires. Obsolete just like the WD TV Live, but also often available for ridiculously good prices.
WD TV Live Hub - Has a built-in hard drive, and debuted the new UI. Intended to be more of a stand-alone media "hub" rather than a streaming player, thus the included hard drive. I bought one of these for the in-laws to use on their boat where they have intermittent internet connections.
WD TV Live Streaming - The replacement for the WD TV Live +, with the Hub's new UI and remote and a redesigned case. I don't know why WD didn't just ship the new UI on the older WD TV Live +, given that they're pretty good about updating firmware frequently.
The Live +, Hub, or Live Streaming are all excellent choices for inexpensive streaming media players with Netflix/Hulu support.
Maybe less smooth than CE kernel which is better at (hard) realtime than either Linux or iOS.
Implying that has anything to do with how smoothly it scrolls. WP scrolls smoothly because a lot of work was put into GPU acceleration of scrolling. App developers can still easily muck it up (by not virtualizing long lists, for example). Conversely, Android can also scroll quite smoothly if the developer puts the work into it. The difference is that WP makes it easier to achieve smooth scrolling in the normal usage case (not-too-long lists).
The latter is also more flexible with the various resolutions of computers, smart phones, and tablets. Flowable layout is a prudent choice nowadays.
Too bad a large majority of sites don't have flowable layouts. So many sites with narrow layouts (usually less than 1000px, because obviously 1024x768 maximized is the standard?), even narrower content areas (yay, 425px content columns!), using non-scalable units for text sizes and positioning.
Web page "designers" need to get over their magazine mentality and realize that the web is supposed to flow. And seriously, em math is no more difficult than pixel math, and often actually easier. If you want a nice, flowable, scalable, column of text that's not too wide for readability, make it 30ems wide. Now as the base em size changes, everything. just. works. Or use percentages (though nested percentages can get tricky). Either way, pixels for layout and font measurement must die.
I'm not too worried about that, it's more being constantly bothered to join, last thing i want is a phone which will start telling me that i need to join any particular thing. I don't mind the windows live id, because i already have a few to pick from. Thanks for the info though.
I've not seen any nagging. It's been a while since I've gone through OOBS but I think it just prompts you once ("Hey, you can add accounts!") and then never again.
Also, if you have multiple live IDs and you have one associated with an Xbox Live account, use that for the WP7 phone. You gamerscore and avatar will carry over to the phone, and any achievements you get from phone games will add to your Xbox gamerscore total. It's a nice little touch that makes phone gaming a little more interesting than, "I've got a minute to kill, may as well throw some birds at pigs."
You need a special TOKEN just to develop for the damn things? And there's a shortage? Do they have a basement full of MS trolls hand-crafting each token?
Not exactly, no. You can develop for the emulator for free (all the tools and SDKs are available for free). If you want to put what you developed on your phone itself you can either pay $100/year for access to the market (the standard approach that Microsoft wants you to do, because it gets apps in the market and everybody judges smartphone platforms by the size of their market) or you could pay the Chevron guys $9 and get the exact same level of access to your phone but not be allowed to submit apps to the market. The apps you write can only be used by other people who have paid for Chevron or are "official" developers. They call this "homebrew".
I don't know why Microsoft chose to limit the number of tokens for Chevron customers, but at least they're actively working with the homebrew enthusiast community rather than doing everything in their power to shut them down like Apple.
Since you have the phone and might be able to answer this, i don't use facebook, or any other social networking stuff, except form msn messenger, can that strong integration be removed or hidden, ie, if i don't use it, i don't want those tiles to show up nor options to be available to use the social networking?
I believe the only thing you have to have to use a Windows Phone 7 phone is a Windows Live ID (you can use any email to sign up for a Live ID, not just live.com/hotmail.com email addresses), which brings with it some small amount of social-ness (contacts, picture sharing) but of course you don't need to use any of that. the Live ID is only there for marketplace/Zune access. For all the rest, if you don't put in a Facebook account or Twitter account or whatever, it won't integrate with those services. It's not magic. It can't automatically sign you up for Facebook or find your unrelated Facebook account from the Live ID you gave it, so it can't make you accidentally the social networking if you don't want it to. And for the accounts you do add, you're given the ability to decide what pieces of data are pulled in from each (calendars, contacts, pictures, etc) For example, I have my phone setup with my Live ID that's associated with my Xbox, my gmail account, and my Facebook account. I have no interest in setting it up for Twitter, and so as far as I'm concerned I just don't put in a Twitter account and I never see Twitter tweets.
WP7 allows you to add Live/Hotmail*, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and several other account types to the phone, all of which will get synchronized with the various hubs based on what accounts you have linked. For example, if you add a Live/Hotmail account, you'll see pictures and documents from Skydrive as well as any Messenger contacts. If you add a Facebook account, you'll see facebook contacts and updates in the People hub. For any account you don't add, you won't see information. Pretty simple.
* I'm not sure WP7 allows you to not have a Live ID account (which is not necessarily the same as a Live.com or Hotmail account, since those also come with Microsoft-hosted email but you can use any email address you want to create a Live ID -- I use my gmail address for my Live ID, for example). You definitely need a Live ID in order to use the marketplace, use integrated Xbox features, or have access to Zune content (also need a ZunePass account to stream music) and that functionality is pretty baked into the phone, so perhaps a Live ID is required.
Yeah, but no PC editor support mkvs, only mp4 (and no, mkvmerge being able to split an mkv is not editing)
Huh? That doesn't seem right. But even if that were the case, the beauty of MKV is that it is so easily muxable. Pull it apart, edit the component streams in whatever editor you like (any good editor should be able to handle individual component streams), put it back together. Tada! Edited MKV.
MKV is a container, and a relatively simple-to-mux one at that. The fault is not with MKV, but with video editors that spend time doing the hard work (editing H264 is not easy) and then skimping on the easy part.
Others have touched on your other points, so I wanted to address this:
Switch to a standard.mp4 container. Much better supported on hardware or software. Some day you will want to be able to stream from your server to a thin set-top box or load a file on your kid's phone. On that day.mkv will make you cry.
Plenty of thin set-top box clients play mkvs already. Devices from Western Digital (WD TV Live), Netgear, Seagate, Roku, Popcorn Hour, Boxee, and many others all support mkv out of the box, with header compression support, subtitles, chapters, multiple audio and video streams, and some even support 3D (not the new mk3d format yet, but SBS works) and will play subtitles correctly. Most mkv files contain MPEG2, h264, or VC-1 video and AC3 or DTS (or the newer Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, etc) and all of these players handle those just fine. Don't blame the container for being flexible enough to allow any random codec. Blame whatever crap source you stole your videos from for using a random codec. Those of us archiving our DVDs and Blu-Rays will either encode in H264 or remux the original MPEG2/H264/VC-1 streams untouched and have no problems.
If you want to move videos to a phone, that's easy enough to do. The beauty of being a completely open container format means that it's trivial to demux Matroska containers into their component streams, which than then be remuxed into mp4 for devices that suck. Since you'll probably want to down-res the videos anyway for handheld formats (even on tablets you won't want higher than 720p), there's no reason to keep the originals in mp4. Keep your original, untouched videos in mkv and re-encode at lower resolution and bitrates into mp4 using Handrake for mobile devices.
Divx (yeah, whatever, they're still relevant) has adopted MKV as their HD container format, and the proliferation of "networked media tank" devices plus Matroska's openness makes it not only relevant but desirable for long-term video storage. Using 5+ year old devices like Xbox 360 and PS3 as your benchmark for what containers to use would be a bad idea (Xbox still doesn't even support 6-channel AAC in mp4, never mind supporting AC3).
I know other browsers render it centered, but that's not the (only) point
The site's punishing you for using an ad blocker. I just tested Chrome with adblock, Chrome without adblock, Aurora with adblock, Aurora without adblock, IE9, Opera 11, Safari 5 with adblock, and Safari without adblock. In every case, when adblock was turned off (or not available), the page rendered correctly*. When adlbock was turned on, it rendered like a steaming pile of shit.
The remainder of your points are completely valid. Fixed-width, fixed-font size, ad-spattered, split-for-the-sake-of-page-views "design" doesn't really inspire confidence about their ability to validate usability testing. At least they don't have an always-on-top floating toolbar like so many other sites are doing. But I probably shouldn't be giving them any ideas...
* It's worth noting that the page is still a steaming pile of shit when rendered "correctly". The only difference is that it's centered.
Could this hack be used to protect your ebook purchases so they can't be revoked after the fact 1984 style?
You don't need a jailbreak for that. You just need to remove DRM on the books you purchase. This is easy to do (hint: Apprentice Alf is your friend, and Google knows about him...), and combined with a tool like Calibre you don't have to worry about losing any of your ebooks ever again.
Aren't you just describing an inefficient system that justifies itself ? I say cut the inefficient part.
Yes, I'm describing an inefficient system that justifies itself. However it's facetious to simply say, "cut the inefficient part." You're talking about huge companies, some of which have been in the business for a hundred years or more. They have no incentive to cut the inefficiencies.
Also, this is exactly what smaller independent publishers are doing. They're cutting out a lot of the inefficiencies, allowing them to make a profit on lower-priced ebooks while paying the authors more of a cut. But these publishers generally don't print paper books, and right now paper is still king (sadly). This is changing, but it would change much more quickly if agency pricing wasn't in the way.
However the point was, and still is, that "printing cost" does not give the whole story when looking at purchase price. There are things that you simply can't do away with and still have a good book (editors, proofreaders, typesetters familiar with current ebook formats, etc) and those will cost you money even if you never generate a physical paper product.
That has nothing to do with what the DOJ are investigating - they can't stop a publisher or retailer from setting their own price at a rate you deem "greedy", but they can stop what Apple is attempting to do in saying "you cannot price your book cheaper anywhere else than the set iTunes price - if you do that you will cease to be able to sell on iTunes" while still adding an extra 30% cost over other outlets.
Even that's not really the issue here. Apple can charge whatever they want for you to sell on their OS, though there could certainly be monopoly concerns (leveraging their mobile OS "monopoly" to gain an advantage in the ebook market?). The problem with agency pricing is that it's not an MSRP value. It's a price set by the publisher that cannot be changed. For example, a publisher can price a paper book at $15 but Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc will often sell that book for $7 or less because they can. The MSRP is just what it says it is, a suggested price. But Amazon, Kobo, Sony, BN, etc cannot run a sale on an agency-priced ebook. This is why it is commonplace to see ebooks selling for a higher price (and often much, much higher!) than the exact same paper book. That's what the DOJ is investigating, and Apple's part of it because they were the ones who started the whole "agency pricing" crap in the first place.
Obviously providing the means to download relatively small files is cheaper than manufacturing and shipping books, so good thing something might be done about it.
The fallacy here is that the physical cost of a book (printing, storing, shipping) is the largest contributor to its price. It's not*. For mass market books, print runs are done in such large quantities that the economies of scale bring the physical price down to pretty much nothing per book. The real cost of a book comes from people -- the author, editors, proof readers, cover artists, marketers, agents, researchers, people doing layouts, etc. That and marketing, of course, because nothing will sell if it doesn't have a million dollar marketing campaign behind it. All of the rest of that is needed for ebooks just as much as it's needed for paper books, so the net result is that from a pure cost perspective a paper book and an ebook should cost about the same (assuming the mass market paperback print copy here, not the limited-run hardcover). Also, at least currently, the big publishers are still very much stuck in a print mindset and all of their processes are geared toward a print world. This has obvious repercussions for ebooks, but less obvious is that a lot of editing that happens for a print run is done on copies other than the original manuscript, in formats that are difficult or impossible to convert back to a proper ebook (mobi/epub, not PDF, as PDF is not a valid ebook format). This is why we end up with so many poorly-edited ebooks from major publishing houses, some of which are very obviously OCRed rush jobs without even broad proof reading for obvious mistakes.
The investigation here is whether or not price fixing has taken place, and at least from my perspective it very obviously has. The agency model prevents retailers from setting their own prices or running sales. If you want to sell a book under the agency model, it can be no more and no less than the same price your competitors charge. That removes competition, and that's the problem. The funny thing is that agency pricing was just the first step in Apple's evil plot for (ebook) world domination -- first force everybody to sell at the same price as Apple, and then for step 2 charge ridiculous fees for in-app purchases of books such that Amazon et al can no longer viably work on your platform (if 30% has to go to Apple and 70% has to go to the author, and the price cannot be more than the price in the iBooks store, how can Amazon make money selling on iOS?), thus driving everybody to buy their books from the iBooks store (muahaha!). Of course step 2 failed, with 3rd parties finding loopholes or simply abandoning the platform for greener pastures, leaving Apple in a tough position. Nobody wants to buy anything from the iBooks store, and Apple can't run sales to entice new readers to buy because they're bound by the agency pricing agreements. Oops!
* This applies to large-scale publishers, not smaller houses or vanity presses. In the paper world, if you're not guaranteed to sell several hundred thousand copies you're not going to get a contract with a big publisher because they can't afford to do a small print run. Smaller presses afford it by charging more per book. In this scenario, ebooks are a huge win for smaller/independent authors because the huge cost of a tiny print run is no longer a factor. And of course let's not forget the ability to cut out the middle-man entirely. Ebooks make it much easier for authors to self-publish, depending on how much effort they're willing to put into the process beyond simply writing a book.
Specifically, why do inexpensive Android Tablets and Phones have such horrendous touch-screens?
It's not the screens that are the problem. It's the OS. Android was historically developed without any GPU acceleration requirements, and the OS up through Honeycomb still does most UI drawing on the CPU instead. The lagginess people recognize as "bad touch input" is actually bad drawing, and doesn't exist so much in other OSes that use GPU acceleration for UI elements. For example, Windows Phone 7 renders all UI via the GPU and is generally considered to be much more responsive and smoother than Android despite only supporting single-core CPUs. Ice Cream Sandwich fixes this, but also has hardware requirements that mean very few existing devices will be supported. This is an unfortunate but natural consequence of an open platform with little or no hardware control. The OS developers can't assume things like a GPU will be present, so they have to write for lowest common denominator or consciously exclude devices.
(Note that I'm only talking about OS/launcher behavior. Within apps themselves, developers can make things somewhat better or much, much worse depending on how they handle UI elements.)
Supporting iPhone (or iPad for that matter) for corporate email might be difficult -I do not believe that there are Notes or Outlook mail apps for these devices (although the new outlook webmail is pretty decent)
Wrong, at least for Outlook (or rather, Exchange). iOS supports Exchange ActiveSync natively, including required pin locks and remote wipe. Of course as an end user those things are annoying, so there are plenty of jailbreak patches that remove the pin lock requirement (or rather, cache your pin so that it's only required after a reboot). I have no idea what level of Notes support is available on iOS, but seriously who uses Notes anymore?
Until you can prove that the benefit to the government of subsidizing broadband access for rural residents outweighs the costs, don't ask the government to intervene. It isn't the government's role to pick the winners and the losers.
Do you like food? Fuel for your vehicle(s)? Biodegradable plastics? Farming requires space. Space that can't be used for condos and high-rises and other population-dense structures that are "profitable" for a cableco/telco to support (but only if those structures sign exclusive contracts paying for the highest level of service for decades).
My parents are in a similar situation, in that they live on a rural farm 5 miles from the nearest town, surrounded by farmland that they actually farm, but can't get broadband. Well, that's not 100% true. Where they live is extremely flat and treeless (see: farmland) so the wireless provider from the nearest town can service them. But the local cableco won't touch them when their nearest neighbor is a mile away. Signing up two contracts per mile is not profitable for them unless there's some sort of subsidy.
Or you could starve while living in your densely-populated urban environment. Your call.
you want to keep 802.11a/b traffic on 2.4Ghz and 802.11n on 5.0Ghz.
Good luck getting 802.11a on 2.4GHz -- that's 5GHz stuff.
Also, there are two separate 802.11n implementations for the different frequency bands. As long as you use WPA/WPA2 for your security, it's okay to have your router set to b/g/n or a/n shared mode. You'll only be limited in speed by the cleanliness of the radio signal (distance from router, interference from other sources), not by the other devices connected to the network unless you're using WEP or unsecured. It's usually a good idea to set the 5GHz network to n-only, just because nothing uses 802.11a anymore (which is 5GHz). This unfortunate naming leads to some irritating situations, with devices claiming "n" support but only for 2.4GHz. For example, the Xbox 360 Slim consoles have internal wifi with 802.11b/g/n support, but only for 2.4GHz. But if you have the external n-adapter, that supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz.
OF course anything stationary really ought to have a wired connection. Wifi should only be used for portable devices (laptops, smartphones, portable media players, tablets). Wifi will never be able to compete in sheer speed and reliability with a good old wired connection (if/when wifi breaks the 1gbps barrier, you can rest assured that 10gbps wired will be standard).
I use the Netgear WNDR3700 which works quite well with OpenWRT
The WNDR3700 is great if you don't mind 5GHz ranges of approximately a 10' radius of the router (why would you buy a simultaneous dual-band router and not use the 5GHz frequency?). I replaced my 3700 with a Linksys/Cisco E3000 because of that, and have been happy with the E3000 ever since. I do run stock firmware (shut up), but DD-WRT is also supported. OpenWRT lists the E3000 in the "Possible but not being worked on" section of its supported router list, so if OpenWRT is a requirement then you're out of luck here. OpenWRT apparently does not like any Linksys/Cisco product that's newer than ~5 years old.
I've also heard good things about the new E4200, but it's a work-in-progress at DD-WRT and as mentioned above OpenWRT won't go near Linksys/Cisco stuff, so consider what that's worth.
Worse, Slash'EM is already the name of a (real) rogue-like (game). Obviously these guys are trying for a witty or clever play on "rogue-like" and "slashem", but it just comes off as confusing and lame.
But I can't help but think their patent tax on Android and others is too much about the money rather than preventing products being sold.
Which would you prefer? $5 going to Microsoft for every Android phone, but you can still buy Android phones? Or not being able to buy Android phones at all? Microsoft is doing the former. Apple is doing the latter. In this case, I'd say Microsoft is doing the more respectable thing. They're not trying to shut out competitors from the market. They're not even trying to seriously hamper competitors ($5 really isn't that much, and it seems that where they can they choose patent trading instead of licensing fees -- it's really HTC's fault that they don't have anything they can trade other than money).
Between Microsoft and Apple, it seems pretty clear that they could entirely destroy Android (at least in the US) through patents if they so desired. Apple is trying to do just that. Microsoft is not. If you won't use WP7 because of that, it's hypocritical to continue to use iOS.
I signed up because I was under-employed and needed the work and money. It was only slightly better than working for Supershuttle. Most of the people at TSA need to feed themselves and pay their bills too and most often couldn't get other work. I'm sorry you can't see past your comfort and personal sense of entitlement which you imagine to be moral high-ground, but can you honestly say if you had no better options that you would rather starve than serve as a TSA screener?
You know who else "just needed work"? Nazis. At the Nuremberg Trials it was determined that the "Superior Orders" defense (or, "I was just following orders") is not sufficient to escape punishment. Every TSA agent is responsible. Every single one. I don't care if you needed to eat, or you were just following orders, or you didn't make the rules, or whatever. You chose to go along with it, so you're just as culpable as the corrupt government agency itself.
The TSA can't exist without screeners. If every screener stood up and said, "No, this is not right. I'm not doing this," the TSA would simply cease to exist. Not immediately, of course. They'd probably bring in the military to replace the screeners, maybe even arrest everyone who said, "No". But it would be the last straw. The TSA would become political suicide, and it wouldn't be long before it was disbanded.
Putting money in the pockets of lower wage earners is not waste and helps the economy and boosts social stability. On the other hand, putting money in the pockets of the super rich at the expense of the lower wage earners does quite the opposite.
I'd rather tax dollars pay people to dig ditches and fill them back up so that the next group can dig the ditches again. It's entirely make-work, but it'd be more meaningful and productive than the TSA.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a little confusing, but you can tell by the name:
The Live +, Hub, or Live Streaming are all excellent choices for inexpensive streaming media players with Netflix/Hulu support.
Implying that has anything to do with how smoothly it scrolls. WP scrolls smoothly because a lot of work was put into GPU acceleration of scrolling. App developers can still easily muck it up (by not virtualizing long lists, for example). Conversely, Android can also scroll quite smoothly if the developer puts the work into it. The difference is that WP makes it easier to achieve smooth scrolling in the normal usage case (not-too-long lists).
Too bad a large majority of sites don't have flowable layouts. So many sites with narrow layouts (usually less than 1000px, because obviously 1024x768 maximized is the standard?), even narrower content areas (yay, 425px content columns!), using non-scalable units for text sizes and positioning.
Web page "designers" need to get over their magazine mentality and realize that the web is supposed to flow. And seriously, em math is no more difficult than pixel math, and often actually easier. If you want a nice, flowable, scalable, column of text that's not too wide for readability, make it 30ems wide. Now as the base em size changes, everything. just. works. Or use percentages (though nested percentages can get tricky). Either way, pixels for layout and font measurement must die.
I've not seen any nagging. It's been a while since I've gone through OOBS but I think it just prompts you once ("Hey, you can add accounts!") and then never again.
Also, if you have multiple live IDs and you have one associated with an Xbox Live account, use that for the WP7 phone. You gamerscore and avatar will carry over to the phone, and any achievements you get from phone games will add to your Xbox gamerscore total. It's a nice little touch that makes phone gaming a little more interesting than, "I've got a minute to kill, may as well throw some birds at pigs."
Not exactly, no. You can develop for the emulator for free (all the tools and SDKs are available for free). If you want to put what you developed on your phone itself you can either pay $100/year for access to the market (the standard approach that Microsoft wants you to do, because it gets apps in the market and everybody judges smartphone platforms by the size of their market) or you could pay the Chevron guys $9 and get the exact same level of access to your phone but not be allowed to submit apps to the market. The apps you write can only be used by other people who have paid for Chevron or are "official" developers. They call this "homebrew".
I don't know why Microsoft chose to limit the number of tokens for Chevron customers, but at least they're actively working with the homebrew enthusiast community rather than doing everything in their power to shut them down like Apple.
I believe the only thing you have to have to use a Windows Phone 7 phone is a Windows Live ID (you can use any email to sign up for a Live ID, not just live.com/hotmail.com email addresses), which brings with it some small amount of social-ness (contacts, picture sharing) but of course you don't need to use any of that. the Live ID is only there for marketplace/Zune access. For all the rest, if you don't put in a Facebook account or Twitter account or whatever, it won't integrate with those services. It's not magic. It can't automatically sign you up for Facebook or find your unrelated Facebook account from the Live ID you gave it, so it can't make you accidentally the social networking if you don't want it to. And for the accounts you do add, you're given the ability to decide what pieces of data are pulled in from each (calendars, contacts, pictures, etc) For example, I have my phone setup with my Live ID that's associated with my Xbox, my gmail account, and my Facebook account. I have no interest in setting it up for Twitter, and so as far as I'm concerned I just don't put in a Twitter account and I never see Twitter tweets.
Updated for Windows Phone 7's People Hub
1) Don't link a Facebook account
WP7 allows you to add Live/Hotmail*, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and several other account types to the phone, all of which will get synchronized with the various hubs based on what accounts you have linked. For example, if you add a Live/Hotmail account, you'll see pictures and documents from Skydrive as well as any Messenger contacts. If you add a Facebook account, you'll see facebook contacts and updates in the People hub. For any account you don't add, you won't see information. Pretty simple.
* I'm not sure WP7 allows you to not have a Live ID account (which is not necessarily the same as a Live.com or Hotmail account, since those also come with Microsoft-hosted email but you can use any email address you want to create a Live ID -- I use my gmail address for my Live ID, for example). You definitely need a Live ID in order to use the marketplace, use integrated Xbox features, or have access to Zune content (also need a ZunePass account to stream music) and that functionality is pretty baked into the phone, so perhaps a Live ID is required.
Huh? That doesn't seem right. But even if that were the case, the beauty of MKV is that it is so easily muxable. Pull it apart, edit the component streams in whatever editor you like (any good editor should be able to handle individual component streams), put it back together. Tada! Edited MKV.
MKV is a container, and a relatively simple-to-mux one at that. The fault is not with MKV, but with video editors that spend time doing the hard work (editing H264 is not easy) and then skimping on the easy part.
Others have touched on your other points, so I wanted to address this:
Plenty of thin set-top box clients play mkvs already. Devices from Western Digital (WD TV Live), Netgear, Seagate, Roku, Popcorn Hour, Boxee, and many others all support mkv out of the box, with header compression support, subtitles, chapters, multiple audio and video streams, and some even support 3D (not the new mk3d format yet, but SBS works) and will play subtitles correctly. Most mkv files contain MPEG2, h264, or VC-1 video and AC3 or DTS (or the newer Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, etc) and all of these players handle those just fine. Don't blame the container for being flexible enough to allow any random codec. Blame whatever crap source you stole your videos from for using a random codec. Those of us archiving our DVDs and Blu-Rays will either encode in H264 or remux the original MPEG2/H264/VC-1 streams untouched and have no problems.
If you want to move videos to a phone, that's easy enough to do. The beauty of being a completely open container format means that it's trivial to demux Matroska containers into their component streams, which than then be remuxed into mp4 for devices that suck. Since you'll probably want to down-res the videos anyway for handheld formats (even on tablets you won't want higher than 720p), there's no reason to keep the originals in mp4. Keep your original, untouched videos in mkv and re-encode at lower resolution and bitrates into mp4 using Handrake for mobile devices.
Divx (yeah, whatever, they're still relevant) has adopted MKV as their HD container format, and the proliferation of "networked media tank" devices plus Matroska's openness makes it not only relevant but desirable for long-term video storage. Using 5+ year old devices like Xbox 360 and PS3 as your benchmark for what containers to use would be a bad idea (Xbox still doesn't even support 6-channel AAC in mp4, never mind supporting AC3).
The site's punishing you for using an ad blocker. I just tested Chrome with adblock, Chrome without adblock, Aurora with adblock, Aurora without adblock, IE9, Opera 11, Safari 5 with adblock, and Safari without adblock. In every case, when adblock was turned off (or not available), the page rendered correctly*. When adlbock was turned on, it rendered like a steaming pile of shit.
The remainder of your points are completely valid. Fixed-width, fixed-font size, ad-spattered, split-for-the-sake-of-page-views "design" doesn't really inspire confidence about their ability to validate usability testing. At least they don't have an always-on-top floating toolbar like so many other sites are doing. But I probably shouldn't be giving them any ideas ...
* It's worth noting that the page is still a steaming pile of shit when rendered "correctly". The only difference is that it's centered.
You don't need a jailbreak for that. You just need to remove DRM on the books you purchase. This is easy to do (hint: Apprentice Alf is your friend, and Google knows about him ...), and combined with a tool like Calibre you don't have to worry about losing any of your ebooks ever again.
Yes, I'm describing an inefficient system that justifies itself. However it's facetious to simply say, "cut the inefficient part." You're talking about huge companies, some of which have been in the business for a hundred years or more. They have no incentive to cut the inefficiencies.
Also, this is exactly what smaller independent publishers are doing. They're cutting out a lot of the inefficiencies, allowing them to make a profit on lower-priced ebooks while paying the authors more of a cut. But these publishers generally don't print paper books, and right now paper is still king (sadly). This is changing, but it would change much more quickly if agency pricing wasn't in the way.
However the point was, and still is, that "printing cost" does not give the whole story when looking at purchase price. There are things that you simply can't do away with and still have a good book (editors, proofreaders, typesetters familiar with current ebook formats, etc) and those will cost you money even if you never generate a physical paper product.
Even that's not really the issue here. Apple can charge whatever they want for you to sell on their OS, though there could certainly be monopoly concerns (leveraging their mobile OS "monopoly" to gain an advantage in the ebook market?). The problem with agency pricing is that it's not an MSRP value. It's a price set by the publisher that cannot be changed. For example, a publisher can price a paper book at $15 but Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc will often sell that book for $7 or less because they can. The MSRP is just what it says it is, a suggested price. But Amazon, Kobo, Sony, BN, etc cannot run a sale on an agency-priced ebook. This is why it is commonplace to see ebooks selling for a higher price (and often much, much higher!) than the exact same paper book. That's what the DOJ is investigating, and Apple's part of it because they were the ones who started the whole "agency pricing" crap in the first place.
The fallacy here is that the physical cost of a book (printing, storing, shipping) is the largest contributor to its price. It's not*. For mass market books, print runs are done in such large quantities that the economies of scale bring the physical price down to pretty much nothing per book. The real cost of a book comes from people -- the author, editors, proof readers, cover artists, marketers, agents, researchers, people doing layouts, etc. That and marketing, of course, because nothing will sell if it doesn't have a million dollar marketing campaign behind it. All of the rest of that is needed for ebooks just as much as it's needed for paper books, so the net result is that from a pure cost perspective a paper book and an ebook should cost about the same (assuming the mass market paperback print copy here, not the limited-run hardcover). Also, at least currently, the big publishers are still very much stuck in a print mindset and all of their processes are geared toward a print world. This has obvious repercussions for ebooks, but less obvious is that a lot of editing that happens for a print run is done on copies other than the original manuscript, in formats that are difficult or impossible to convert back to a proper ebook (mobi/epub, not PDF, as PDF is not a valid ebook format). This is why we end up with so many poorly-edited ebooks from major publishing houses, some of which are very obviously OCRed rush jobs without even broad proof reading for obvious mistakes.
The investigation here is whether or not price fixing has taken place, and at least from my perspective it very obviously has. The agency model prevents retailers from setting their own prices or running sales. If you want to sell a book under the agency model, it can be no more and no less than the same price your competitors charge. That removes competition, and that's the problem. The funny thing is that agency pricing was just the first step in Apple's evil plot for (ebook) world domination -- first force everybody to sell at the same price as Apple, and then for step 2 charge ridiculous fees for in-app purchases of books such that Amazon et al can no longer viably work on your platform (if 30% has to go to Apple and 70% has to go to the author, and the price cannot be more than the price in the iBooks store, how can Amazon make money selling on iOS?), thus driving everybody to buy their books from the iBooks store (muahaha!). Of course step 2 failed, with 3rd parties finding loopholes or simply abandoning the platform for greener pastures, leaving Apple in a tough position. Nobody wants to buy anything from the iBooks store, and Apple can't run sales to entice new readers to buy because they're bound by the agency pricing agreements. Oops!
* This applies to large-scale publishers, not smaller houses or vanity presses. In the paper world, if you're not guaranteed to sell several hundred thousand copies you're not going to get a contract with a big publisher because they can't afford to do a small print run. Smaller presses afford it by charging more per book. In this scenario, ebooks are a huge win for smaller/independent authors because the huge cost of a tiny print run is no longer a factor. And of course let's not forget the ability to cut out the middle-man entirely. Ebooks make it much easier for authors to self-publish, depending on how much effort they're willing to put into the process beyond simply writing a book.
You seem to have confused "kernel" for "operating system". Common mistake.
It's not the screens that are the problem. It's the OS. Android was historically developed without any GPU acceleration requirements, and the OS up through Honeycomb still does most UI drawing on the CPU instead. The lagginess people recognize as "bad touch input" is actually bad drawing, and doesn't exist so much in other OSes that use GPU acceleration for UI elements. For example, Windows Phone 7 renders all UI via the GPU and is generally considered to be much more responsive and smoother than Android despite only supporting single-core CPUs. Ice Cream Sandwich fixes this, but also has hardware requirements that mean very few existing devices will be supported. This is an unfortunate but natural consequence of an open platform with little or no hardware control. The OS developers can't assume things like a GPU will be present, so they have to write for lowest common denominator or consciously exclude devices.
(Note that I'm only talking about OS/launcher behavior. Within apps themselves, developers can make things somewhat better or much, much worse depending on how they handle UI elements.)
Wrong, at least for Outlook (or rather, Exchange). iOS supports Exchange ActiveSync natively, including required pin locks and remote wipe. Of course as an end user those things are annoying, so there are plenty of jailbreak patches that remove the pin lock requirement (or rather, cache your pin so that it's only required after a reboot). I have no idea what level of Notes support is available on iOS, but seriously who uses Notes anymore?
Do you like food? Fuel for your vehicle(s)? Biodegradable plastics? Farming requires space. Space that can't be used for condos and high-rises and other population-dense structures that are "profitable" for a cableco/telco to support (but only if those structures sign exclusive contracts paying for the highest level of service for decades).
My parents are in a similar situation, in that they live on a rural farm 5 miles from the nearest town, surrounded by farmland that they actually farm, but can't get broadband. Well, that's not 100% true. Where they live is extremely flat and treeless (see: farmland) so the wireless provider from the nearest town can service them. But the local cableco won't touch them when their nearest neighbor is a mile away. Signing up two contracts per mile is not profitable for them unless there's some sort of subsidy.
Or you could starve while living in your densely-populated urban environment. Your call.
Walls are public. If you want to send a message to a user privately, send them a message. Durr.
Good luck getting 802.11a on 2.4GHz -- that's 5GHz stuff.
Also, there are two separate 802.11n implementations for the different frequency bands. As long as you use WPA/WPA2 for your security, it's okay to have your router set to b/g/n or a/n shared mode. You'll only be limited in speed by the cleanliness of the radio signal (distance from router, interference from other sources), not by the other devices connected to the network unless you're using WEP or unsecured. It's usually a good idea to set the 5GHz network to n-only, just because nothing uses 802.11a anymore (which is 5GHz). This unfortunate naming leads to some irritating situations, with devices claiming "n" support but only for 2.4GHz. For example, the Xbox 360 Slim consoles have internal wifi with 802.11b/g/n support, but only for 2.4GHz. But if you have the external n-adapter, that supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz.
OF course anything stationary really ought to have a wired connection. Wifi should only be used for portable devices (laptops, smartphones, portable media players, tablets). Wifi will never be able to compete in sheer speed and reliability with a good old wired connection (if/when wifi breaks the 1gbps barrier, you can rest assured that 10gbps wired will be standard).
The WNDR3700 is great if you don't mind 5GHz ranges of approximately a 10' radius of the router (why would you buy a simultaneous dual-band router and not use the 5GHz frequency?). I replaced my 3700 with a Linksys/Cisco E3000 because of that, and have been happy with the E3000 ever since. I do run stock firmware (shut up), but DD-WRT is also supported. OpenWRT lists the E3000 in the "Possible but not being worked on" section of its supported router list, so if OpenWRT is a requirement then you're out of luck here. OpenWRT apparently does not like any Linksys/Cisco product that's newer than ~5 years old.
I've also heard good things about the new E4200, but it's a work-in-progress at DD-WRT and as mentioned above OpenWRT won't go near Linksys/Cisco stuff, so consider what that's worth.
Worse, Slash'EM is already the name of a (real) rogue-like (game). Obviously these guys are trying for a witty or clever play on "rogue-like" and "slashem", but it just comes off as confusing and lame.
Which would you prefer? $5 going to Microsoft for every Android phone, but you can still buy Android phones? Or not being able to buy Android phones at all? Microsoft is doing the former. Apple is doing the latter. In this case, I'd say Microsoft is doing the more respectable thing. They're not trying to shut out competitors from the market. They're not even trying to seriously hamper competitors ($5 really isn't that much, and it seems that where they can they choose patent trading instead of licensing fees -- it's really HTC's fault that they don't have anything they can trade other than money).
Between Microsoft and Apple, it seems pretty clear that they could entirely destroy Android (at least in the US) through patents if they so desired. Apple is trying to do just that. Microsoft is not. If you won't use WP7 because of that, it's hypocritical to continue to use iOS.
You know who else "just needed work"? Nazis. At the Nuremberg Trials it was determined that the "Superior Orders" defense (or, "I was just following orders") is not sufficient to escape punishment. Every TSA agent is responsible. Every single one. I don't care if you needed to eat, or you were just following orders, or you didn't make the rules, or whatever. You chose to go along with it, so you're just as culpable as the corrupt government agency itself.
The TSA can't exist without screeners. If every screener stood up and said, "No, this is not right. I'm not doing this," the TSA would simply cease to exist. Not immediately, of course. They'd probably bring in the military to replace the screeners, maybe even arrest everyone who said, "No". But it would be the last straw. The TSA would become political suicide, and it wouldn't be long before it was disbanded.
I'd rather tax dollars pay people to dig ditches and fill them back up so that the next group can dig the ditches again. It's entirely make-work, but it'd be more meaningful and productive than the TSA.
You forgot Fox News providing 24 hours of hate 7 days a week. Orwell's two minutes of hate is nothing anymore.