I am by no means opposed to regulating advertising; if anything, there is not nearly enough regulation of advertising. That said, unlike intrusive junk mail in all its forms -- postal, spam, telemarketing -- television advertising isn't attached to anything vital and is therefore easy to avoid: turn off the TV. No one needs television, and its one practical use -- news -- is much better satisfied by literally every other medium by which news is available. It's just a source of entertainment, and it is almost completely paid for by advertising. If you want to watch TV, the terrible hardship you must endure is hitting the mute button when the ads come up, you poor thing.
This is nothing more than a politician looking to score some easy votes by attacking something that everyone dislikes but which, since it actually harms no one, won't matter much if the bill disappears in committee and is never seen again. Congress' time would be better spent doing something about unavoidable forms of advertising instead of making a fuss about one of the few entirely avoidable forms.
I'm pretty sure we're talking passive sensors here, so it's not going to be "bathing the cosmos with infrared light" as much as it's going to be bathing in the infrared light of the cosmos. If scientists hadn't stopped writing in Latin, we wouldn't have these little word order screwups, now would we?
But it's good it will be finding the coolest stars. Aside from giving us new insights into the age of the universe and stellar evolution, it'll give NASA something to boast about on Facebook.
Strengthening defenses against Internet criminals would also strengthen defenses against any military-directed cyberattacks, the United States maintains.
How much do you want to bet that "Internet criminals" in this case are people pirating music and movies? While I'm glad to see that we're finally engaging the Russians, it'd be nice if our foreign policy wasn't being directed by the RIAA and the MPAA.
The problem is that everyone is a wrongdoer by someone's definition.
I see this sentiment a lot these days. It sounds good, but it doesn't actually mean anything. You could substitute "wrongdoer" with any other value judgment and it would still be both true -- and irrelevant. Everyone is a shitty programmer, a poor choice for professional hockey goalkeeping duties, and an excellent choice to dog-sit little MocMoc while we vacation in the Bahamas.
I suspect that the intended point is that all sorts of seemingly benign things might be used against one in a court of law, and that's true, but it's a different point altogether.
Is there enough cpu to chipset bandwidth to make use of all this cpu power?
That's really going to depend on the intended use. And on whether the intended use involves problems that a) can be efficiently parallelized, and more importantly, b) actually have been efficiently parallelized. But unless each core gets its own memory bus and its own dedicated memory with its own cache, I rather expect that the only things that are going to be parallelized to their maximum potential are wait states. All that said, it will still probably run faster than a two- or four-core CPU for many tasks, but it won't be running 48 times faster. I would not, however, refuse a manufacturer's sample if one was handed to me.;)
On the positive side, if this beast actually makes it to market, it might help spur the development of new parallel software.
but isn't this something that can be done more efficiently by private industry
I know that there is, in some areas, a belief in the unicorns-and-rainbows magical power of private industry to perform more efficiently -- a view that makes one wonder how many of its adherents have actually held real jobs in private industry -- but the evidence is simply lacking, particularly where government contracts are concerned. Ever seen the miracles private industry works with DoD contracts?
The vital difference between the public and private sectors that market ideologues always fail to take into account is that private businesses have to turn a profit. That's an expense that not-for-profit activities don't incur. Given the choice between scientists who care primarily about the outcome of the project and private contractors who care primarily about billing for more than the cost of the project so they can make a profit, it's far from clear that the latter will always do the best job.
Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett's theory is that conserving energy doesn't reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use.
While I can't speak to the validity of the underlying theory as such, a conclusion like this doesn't really come as a shock. The 20th century saw an steady stream of "labor-saving" inventions that are now part of our daily lives, but we don't have more leisure time than our ancestors -- in many cases, we actually have less -- because all of that liberated time was promptly consumed by new forms of work.
Sooner or later, we're going to have to come to terms with our now obsolete species-wide obsession with material acquisition. It made sense before we developed tools and civilization: grab all you can while it's abundant because scarcity is the norm. Now that we have all we actually need and then some, we're just killing ourselves with the byproducts of our superfluous production.
The OS differs from the usual computing model by (1) making all apps web apps [...]
Well, I guess we were overdue for another well-funded attempt to flog the dead horse of thin clients again. I'd read the press release to see how many lines I have to scan before the first appearance of the word "convergence", but I feel too overwhelmed by indifference...
How about arranging a decent vision plan for your employees so they can afford the glasses they need? Not to belabor the obvious, but if your employees are having trouble reading a 22" monitor two feet in front of their faces, the problem isn't the monitor.
Re:Methodology fads
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I wonder what the fad of the 2020s will be?
I'm almost certain that the language fad will be functional programming, unless of course something even bigger and sloppier comes along to counteract Moore's Law. The management and process fad? Who cares? Except for a lucky few, we'll all have to nod and smile and suck it up until the next silver bullet comes along.
While I recognize the goal of precedent -- to provide consistency in legal decisions -- I have to envy the Germans on this one. The major side-effect of precedent in American law is that it creates such a huge body of law, often piling ambiguity on top of ambiguity, that the general public cannot understand the law. At the very least, I wish that case law that added to (or invalidated) existing statutory law forced the law back to the legislature for clarification and correction.
As it stands, you might want to get a solid five-year warranty on existing recordable DVDs, because the odds are you'll be disappointed as little as two years down the road. I have 5.25" floppy disks from the 8-bit Apple II era that have a higher data retention rate than a lot of DVD-R discs.
I hate to belabor the obvious here, but Oracle is not terribly concerned with what developers think about them. There are two reasons companies buy Oracle licenses: they either absolutely have to have them, or someone much further up the chain than the developers -- at least in most companies -- thinks that they do. From the altitude in the org chart where those decisions are made, there's no difference between us and the janitors.
I'm not sure it's restricted to OSS development. The phenomenon seems to be well-established in mailing lists, web forums, and any number of Usenet newsgroups as well. You end up with a bunch of assholes who dominate the conversation and drive away everyone else. In the case of software developers, at least on the successful projects, they tend to be smart and highly skilled assholes, but that still doesn't make them any more pleasant to deal with. While part of it reflects the leadership (or lack of it) in any particular project, I think the main factor is that most network collaboration is easy to get into and easy to leave, so any net community will tend, over time, to accumulate assholes and drive off pleasant people.
Find a solution to that -- and it's obviously not naive moderation/rating systems -- and you'll fix a lot more than just OSS development.
Right. That's why I'm still running XP on the Windows side of the box and have no plans whatsoever -- nor really any motivation -- to upgrade to Windows 7. And the next box will likely be running XP under virtualization. Odds are that it will be quite some time before there is any significant Windows software that won't run under XP.
You can bandy the word "professionalism" around with all of its varied meanings and hope that no one here is literate enough to call you on it -- this is Slashdot, after all -- but the fact of the matter is that the only relevant aspect of professionalism here is the amount of money involved. When you're running a multi-billion dollar company, you can afford to test your software on a wide variety of machines with a large QA staff to run the whole exercise. Microsoft and Apple have the billions; Canonical does not.
All that said, there are any number of free software packages out there that are polished and refined and blow away their commercial competitors, so it plainly can be done. On the other hand, an operating system and all of its associated software is a lot more complicated than any single application, so testing it thoroughly has got to be a daunting task. Moreover, the risk and effort involved in downloading the latest Firefox beta is much less than downloading and installing an operating system beta, so there are probably a lot more testers for apps than OS distributions. Still, the last couple of Ubuntu releases have had non-trivial problems, and for a distribution that prides itself on stability, this definitely should serve as a wakeup call to the folks at Canonical.
In the end, though, I'll take a rough start on an Ubuntu point revision over the "professionalism" of Windows Vista and, for that matter, the rough start that many people have reported with Windows 7. And while I'll grant you that OS X is a polished product, several OS X releases have had noteworthy issues, and that doesn't even begin to cover the primitive suckware that passed for the MacOS pre-OS X. Modern operating system development is hard. Neither commercial nor free OS producers do it as well as we'd like. Even so, how much do you want to bet that there are fixes for the problems with Ubuntu 9.10 a good six months to a year before Microsoft issues its first service pack for Windows 7?
Yet he seems to have become slashdot's resident legal columnist. I don't think I've read anything of his that hasn't irritated the hell out of me.
Is there a net.celebrity who isn't irritating? I think it's as much a part of the job description as being an asshole is when it comes to food service managers.
The thing I find irritating about virtually all discussions involving interpretations of law is that the fact that there are so many varying interpretations isn't a call to settle on one of them, it's a symptom that the laws are either inadequate or unclear or both. Do we really want legal precedents going back to the days when educated people believed that matter was made of varying proportions of earth, air, water, and fire to delineate our rights in an age where varying configurations of electrical charges have become valuable property? I don't want my electronic privacy rights to depend on the judge du jour concluding that they are "like" a bank account or a glovebox or a fucking rutabaga. Email isn't any of those things. I want explicit statutory law saying that my email cannot be accessed by the government without a proper warrant issued on the basis of probable cause. Then we can still sit around and have theoretical discussions about what email is "like", but we'll know that it is specifically covered under U.S.C. such-and-such.
The author's intentions need to be respected here.
The author no longer exists, and therefore cannot possibly have intentions.
That said, this kind of posthumous sequel is almost always a disaster, but that's only a problem for the people who read them. If the idea bugs you at all, rest assured that you are bothered infinitely more than the original author is.
As we rush to purchase Apple products and services on Cupertino's monochrome treadmill of shiny shiny
We? Like the overwhelming majority of the human race, I have not purchased an iPhone. I did buy an Apple product once -- the Apple//e back in 1985. I really wanted a IIgs, but wasn't interested in the Mac when it came out, so I migrated to the PC. Didn't much care for Windows 95 when it came out, so I migrated to Linux, though there are a number of things I have to have Windows to do. Microsoft remains a pain in the ass, though much less than it was back when Linux was less mature.
But Apple? While I have no doubt that they would be at least as obnoxious as Microsoft if they had Microsoft's market share -- they control both the OS and the hardware and the network (in the case of the iPhone, anyway) -- Apple has absolutely no effect on my life, aside from occasionally having to listen to one of my friends gush about their Apple products. Good for them; I'm glad they like it, but I have different needs and tastes and plenty of alternatives.
Here's a hint for people who feel constrained by Apple: buy something else. There are alternatives, some of which are pretty good if less fashionable, and if it affects their sales enough, Apple will be obliged to change to continue to attract customers. If you're an irrational fanboy who keeps buying Apple's (or any other company's) products no matter how much they screw you, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Last time I checked, the space race was over for all intents and purposes by the early 1970's, and the world's space agencies had spent the following four decades mostly dicking around half-heartedly.
Mind you, I think a renewed space race would be great. But there isn't one going on right now. There's not even a space special olympics at the moment.
I haven't worked in the gambling industry myself, but based on what I've read about its extreme computing requirements, I'd be very interested in seeing a resume from someone who had worked in it. The same goes for parts of the online porn industry for much the same reason. Both are very technically challenging environments and are often leaders in innovation. Their achievements aren't lauded as much as they might be if the subject matter wasn't so unseemly in the minds of many, but at the end of the day, data is data.
I'd recommend going for it. Even at its worst, it's nowhere near as disreputable as, let's say, being on the development team for MS Access.
Shockingly, we played games in the 8-bit era just as obsessively as the current generation plays games in the present day. Still more shockingly, we enjoyed the hell out of them without spending a lot of time thinking about how much better the graphics would be in twenty or thirty years.
This isn't a getoffmylawn post, though I'm sure someone will react that way. The graphics in the current games are pretty impressive; I'm often amazed at how good each new round of games looks. But as a great many gamers who weren't born until well after that 8-bit (or, for that matter, 16-bit) era will readily complain, there are still a lot of genuinely awful but visually impressive games out there. As with software generally, presentation can enhance functionality, but cannot replace it. And, of course, when it comes to games, functionality is enjoyability.
Good games are good games. Better technology can sometimes add to them and sometimes not, if the various attempts to "upgrade" Pac-Man with 3D graphics are any indication. Play the games that are fun, and leave the marketroids to bloviate about their benchmarks.
Frankly, I don't understand this kind of behavior. At best, it saves them money in the short run, but the people whose consoles were bricked are not likely to go out and buy Sony's next product, and it's awful PR. Conversely, it'd be excellent PR if they sent out someone who said, "Oops, our goof. We're very sorry and we're going to make it right at our expense. And here's a free game for your trouble."
Of course, that would require long term thinking and a basic sense of decency...
The problem is that small claims court -- or for that matter, even a regular civil court -- won't collect the judgment for you. At best, you get a piece of paper that says that the defendant owes you money. Then you have to find a way to get it out of them.
And in many jurisdictions, lawyers are specifically barred from small claims court.
Slashdot Mirror
I am by no means opposed to regulating advertising; if anything, there is not nearly enough regulation of advertising. That said, unlike intrusive junk mail in all its forms -- postal, spam, telemarketing -- television advertising isn't attached to anything vital and is therefore easy to avoid: turn off the TV. No one needs television, and its one practical use -- news -- is much better satisfied by literally every other medium by which news is available. It's just a source of entertainment, and it is almost completely paid for by advertising. If you want to watch TV, the terrible hardship you must endure is hitting the mute button when the ads come up, you poor thing.
This is nothing more than a politician looking to score some easy votes by attacking something that everyone dislikes but which, since it actually harms no one, won't matter much if the bill disappears in committee and is never seen again. Congress' time would be better spent doing something about unavoidable forms of advertising instead of making a fuss about one of the few entirely avoidable forms.
I'm pretty sure we're talking passive sensors here, so it's not going to be "bathing the cosmos with infrared light" as much as it's going to be bathing in the infrared light of the cosmos. If scientists hadn't stopped writing in Latin, we wouldn't have these little word order screwups, now would we?
But it's good it will be finding the coolest stars. Aside from giving us new insights into the age of the universe and stellar evolution, it'll give NASA something to boast about on Facebook.
Strengthening defenses against Internet criminals would also strengthen defenses against any military-directed cyberattacks, the United States maintains.
How much do you want to bet that "Internet criminals" in this case are people pirating music and movies? While I'm glad to see that we're finally engaging the Russians, it'd be nice if our foreign policy wasn't being directed by the RIAA and the MPAA.
The problem is that everyone is a wrongdoer by someone's definition.
I see this sentiment a lot these days. It sounds good, but it doesn't actually mean anything. You could substitute "wrongdoer" with any other value judgment and it would still be both true -- and irrelevant. Everyone is a shitty programmer, a poor choice for professional hockey goalkeeping duties, and an excellent choice to dog-sit little MocMoc while we vacation in the Bahamas.
I suspect that the intended point is that all sorts of seemingly benign things might be used against one in a court of law, and that's true, but it's a different point altogether.
Is there enough cpu to chipset bandwidth to make use of all this cpu power?
That's really going to depend on the intended use. And on whether the intended use involves problems that a) can be efficiently parallelized, and more importantly, b) actually have been efficiently parallelized. But unless each core gets its own memory bus and its own dedicated memory with its own cache, I rather expect that the only things that are going to be parallelized to their maximum potential are wait states. All that said, it will still probably run faster than a two- or four-core CPU for many tasks, but it won't be running 48 times faster. I would not, however, refuse a manufacturer's sample if one was handed to me. ;)
On the positive side, if this beast actually makes it to market, it might help spur the development of new parallel software.
but isn't this something that can be done more efficiently by private industry
I know that there is, in some areas, a belief in the unicorns-and-rainbows magical power of private industry to perform more efficiently -- a view that makes one wonder how many of its adherents have actually held real jobs in private industry -- but the evidence is simply lacking, particularly where government contracts are concerned. Ever seen the miracles private industry works with DoD contracts?
The vital difference between the public and private sectors that market ideologues always fail to take into account is that private businesses have to turn a profit. That's an expense that not-for-profit activities don't incur. Given the choice between scientists who care primarily about the outcome of the project and private contractors who care primarily about billing for more than the cost of the project so they can make a profit, it's far from clear that the latter will always do the best job.
Because now Veri$on will be able to disconnect anybody for any reason under the pretext of breaking a rule.
...which I'm sure they'll rush to do, because with no customers, they'll cut AUP violations to zero.
The more numerous the laws, the more corrupted the state.
Was that knee-jerk anarchism or knee-jerk libertarianism? It's so hard to tell sometimes.
Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett's theory is that conserving energy doesn't reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use.
While I can't speak to the validity of the underlying theory as such, a conclusion like this doesn't really come as a shock. The 20th century saw an steady stream of "labor-saving" inventions that are now part of our daily lives, but we don't have more leisure time than our ancestors -- in many cases, we actually have less -- because all of that liberated time was promptly consumed by new forms of work.
Sooner or later, we're going to have to come to terms with our now obsolete species-wide obsession with material acquisition. It made sense before we developed tools and civilization: grab all you can while it's abundant because scarcity is the norm. Now that we have all we actually need and then some, we're just killing ourselves with the byproducts of our superfluous production.
Your neighborhood hospital will probably be installing them for thirty years before insurance companies will even think about paying for them.
The OS differs from the usual computing model by (1) making all apps web apps [...]
Well, I guess we were overdue for another well-funded attempt to flog the dead horse of thin clients again. I'd read the press release to see how many lines I have to scan before the first appearance of the word "convergence", but I feel too overwhelmed by indifference...
How about arranging a decent vision plan for your employees so they can afford the glasses they need? Not to belabor the obvious, but if your employees are having trouble reading a 22" monitor two feet in front of their faces, the problem isn't the monitor.
I wonder what the fad of the 2020s will be?
I'm almost certain that the language fad will be functional programming, unless of course something even bigger and sloppier comes along to counteract Moore's Law. The management and process fad? Who cares? Except for a lucky few, we'll all have to nod and smile and suck it up until the next silver bullet comes along.
While I recognize the goal of precedent -- to provide consistency in legal decisions -- I have to envy the Germans on this one. The major side-effect of precedent in American law is that it creates such a huge body of law, often piling ambiguity on top of ambiguity, that the general public cannot understand the law. At the very least, I wish that case law that added to (or invalidated) existing statutory law forced the law back to the legislature for clarification and correction.
As it stands, you might want to get a solid five-year warranty on existing recordable DVDs, because the odds are you'll be disappointed as little as two years down the road. I have 5.25" floppy disks from the 8-bit Apple II era that have a higher data retention rate than a lot of DVD-R discs.
I hate to belabor the obvious here, but Oracle is not terribly concerned with what developers think about them. There are two reasons companies buy Oracle licenses: they either absolutely have to have them, or someone much further up the chain than the developers -- at least in most companies -- thinks that they do. From the altitude in the org chart where those decisions are made, there's no difference between us and the janitors.
I'm not sure it's restricted to OSS development. The phenomenon seems to be well-established in mailing lists, web forums, and any number of Usenet newsgroups as well. You end up with a bunch of assholes who dominate the conversation and drive away everyone else. In the case of software developers, at least on the successful projects, they tend to be smart and highly skilled assholes, but that still doesn't make them any more pleasant to deal with. While part of it reflects the leadership (or lack of it) in any particular project, I think the main factor is that most network collaboration is easy to get into and easy to leave, so any net community will tend, over time, to accumulate assholes and drive off pleasant people.
Find a solution to that -- and it's obviously not naive moderation/rating systems -- and you'll fix a lot more than just OSS development.
Right. That's why I'm still running XP on the Windows side of the box and have no plans whatsoever -- nor really any motivation -- to upgrade to Windows 7. And the next box will likely be running XP under virtualization. Odds are that it will be quite some time before there is any significant Windows software that won't run under XP.
You can bandy the word "professionalism" around with all of its varied meanings and hope that no one here is literate enough to call you on it -- this is Slashdot, after all -- but the fact of the matter is that the only relevant aspect of professionalism here is the amount of money involved. When you're running a multi-billion dollar company, you can afford to test your software on a wide variety of machines with a large QA staff to run the whole exercise. Microsoft and Apple have the billions; Canonical does not.
All that said, there are any number of free software packages out there that are polished and refined and blow away their commercial competitors, so it plainly can be done. On the other hand, an operating system and all of its associated software is a lot more complicated than any single application, so testing it thoroughly has got to be a daunting task. Moreover, the risk and effort involved in downloading the latest Firefox beta is much less than downloading and installing an operating system beta, so there are probably a lot more testers for apps than OS distributions. Still, the last couple of Ubuntu releases have had non-trivial problems, and for a distribution that prides itself on stability, this definitely should serve as a wakeup call to the folks at Canonical.
In the end, though, I'll take a rough start on an Ubuntu point revision over the "professionalism" of Windows Vista and, for that matter, the rough start that many people have reported with Windows 7. And while I'll grant you that OS X is a polished product, several OS X releases have had noteworthy issues, and that doesn't even begin to cover the primitive suckware that passed for the MacOS pre-OS X. Modern operating system development is hard. Neither commercial nor free OS producers do it as well as we'd like. Even so, how much do you want to bet that there are fixes for the problems with Ubuntu 9.10 a good six months to a year before Microsoft issues its first service pack for Windows 7?
Yet he seems to have become slashdot's resident legal columnist. I don't think I've read anything of his that hasn't irritated the hell out of me.
Is there a net.celebrity who isn't irritating? I think it's as much a part of the job description as being an asshole is when it comes to food service managers.
The thing I find irritating about virtually all discussions involving interpretations of law is that the fact that there are so many varying interpretations isn't a call to settle on one of them, it's a symptom that the laws are either inadequate or unclear or both. Do we really want legal precedents going back to the days when educated people believed that matter was made of varying proportions of earth, air, water, and fire to delineate our rights in an age where varying configurations of electrical charges have become valuable property? I don't want my electronic privacy rights to depend on the judge du jour concluding that they are "like" a bank account or a glovebox or a fucking rutabaga. Email isn't any of those things. I want explicit statutory law saying that my email cannot be accessed by the government without a proper warrant issued on the basis of probable cause. Then we can still sit around and have theoretical discussions about what email is "like", but we'll know that it is specifically covered under U.S.C. such-and-such.
The author's intentions need to be respected here.
The author no longer exists, and therefore cannot possibly have intentions.
That said, this kind of posthumous sequel is almost always a disaster, but that's only a problem for the people who read them. If the idea bugs you at all, rest assured that you are bothered infinitely more than the original author is.
As we rush to purchase Apple products and services on Cupertino's monochrome treadmill of shiny shiny
We? Like the overwhelming majority of the human race, I have not purchased an iPhone. I did buy an Apple product once -- the Apple //e back in 1985. I really wanted a IIgs, but wasn't interested in the Mac when it came out, so I migrated to the PC. Didn't much care for Windows 95 when it came out, so I migrated to Linux, though there are a number of things I have to have Windows to do. Microsoft remains a pain in the ass, though much less than it was back when Linux was less mature.
But Apple? While I have no doubt that they would be at least as obnoxious as Microsoft if they had Microsoft's market share -- they control both the OS and the hardware and the network (in the case of the iPhone, anyway) -- Apple has absolutely no effect on my life, aside from occasionally having to listen to one of my friends gush about their Apple products. Good for them; I'm glad they like it, but I have different needs and tastes and plenty of alternatives.
Here's a hint for people who feel constrained by Apple: buy something else. There are alternatives, some of which are pretty good if less fashionable, and if it affects their sales enough, Apple will be obliged to change to continue to attract customers. If you're an irrational fanboy who keeps buying Apple's (or any other company's) products no matter how much they screw you, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Last time I checked, the space race was over for all intents and purposes by the early 1970's, and the world's space agencies had spent the following four decades mostly dicking around half-heartedly.
Mind you, I think a renewed space race would be great. But there isn't one going on right now. There's not even a space special olympics at the moment.
I haven't worked in the gambling industry myself, but based on what I've read about its extreme computing requirements, I'd be very interested in seeing a resume from someone who had worked in it. The same goes for parts of the online porn industry for much the same reason. Both are very technically challenging environments and are often leaders in innovation. Their achievements aren't lauded as much as they might be if the subject matter wasn't so unseemly in the minds of many, but at the end of the day, data is data.
I'd recommend going for it. Even at its worst, it's nowhere near as disreputable as, let's say, being on the development team for MS Access.
yet still entertaining
Shockingly, we played games in the 8-bit era just as obsessively as the current generation plays games in the present day. Still more shockingly, we enjoyed the hell out of them without spending a lot of time thinking about how much better the graphics would be in twenty or thirty years.
This isn't a getoffmylawn post, though I'm sure someone will react that way. The graphics in the current games are pretty impressive; I'm often amazed at how good each new round of games looks. But as a great many gamers who weren't born until well after that 8-bit (or, for that matter, 16-bit) era will readily complain, there are still a lot of genuinely awful but visually impressive games out there. As with software generally, presentation can enhance functionality, but cannot replace it. And, of course, when it comes to games, functionality is enjoyability.
Good games are good games. Better technology can sometimes add to them and sometimes not, if the various attempts to "upgrade" Pac-Man with 3D graphics are any indication. Play the games that are fun, and leave the marketroids to bloviate about their benchmarks.
Frankly, I don't understand this kind of behavior. At best, it saves them money in the short run, but the people whose consoles were bricked are not likely to go out and buy Sony's next product, and it's awful PR. Conversely, it'd be excellent PR if they sent out someone who said, "Oops, our goof. We're very sorry and we're going to make it right at our expense. And here's a free game for your trouble."
Of course, that would require long term thinking and a basic sense of decency...
The problem is that small claims court -- or for that matter, even a regular civil court -- won't collect the judgment for you. At best, you get a piece of paper that says that the defendant owes you money. Then you have to find a way to get it out of them.
And in many jurisdictions, lawyers are specifically barred from small claims court.