Sony

I have been thinking of this topic for some time. I am a happy owner of the old Phat PS3 Model. At one time, I use to do a fair amount of gaming on my computers. So when Sony marketed the PlayStation 3 product, it was cool to see a machine that did:

1. Gaming
2. Movies, Music, Pictures
3. Blu-Ray
4. Ran Linux

I convinced myself to buy a PlayStation 3, that I’d use it for playing with Linux apart from gaming. The regular gaming did not excite any more, perhaps it had to do with the limitation of time. On running Debian on it, was when I realized that the Linux support was merely a joke. The Linux support included running a Linux distribution in a VM with not much access to the full hardware resources. Not a Great Experience

First you go unethical by forcing users (stating security concerns) to upgrade to a newer firmware. And then, you don’t even do a good QA on the firmware you release. It clearly looks you were in a hurry to strip off the “Other OS” feature.

I lost all my gameplay in the firmware upgrade.

Purchased a Sony DSC-M1 recently.
Man, proprietary stuffs are real costly. The storage device alone (1 GB) costs $200.
But in total the camera is good to have. It’s compact, 5.1 Megapixel lens and blah blah blah.
For an ignorant photographer like me, having a smart digital camera helps capture moments in good pictures to save them for future.

Learnings,
if possible try going for commodity stuff which isn’t proprietary unless you have the passion of spending money on “Love at first sight at $omething”. Yes, proprietary stuff are unique which increase the temptation.