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Not so. In regard to devices, Rhodes is a cross-platform app development environment entirely built around Ruby and Rails. In fact, as far as I know, it is the only cross-platform mobile development system that has gained any popularity.

Actually, the MOST popular cross platform mobile development tool is phonegap, or as it is now called, Apache Cordova. Rhomobile is not very good according to my friends who like Ruby. It uses an older version of ruby and has a lot of problems as well.

"Once you start integrating with devices and complex webservices then Rails is not as good a fit as something like Java."

Not so. In regard to devices, Rhodes is a cross-platform app development environment entirely built around Ruby and Rails. In fact, as far as I know, it is the only cross-platform mobile development system that has gained any popularity.

And as for web services, I have no idea where that assertion came from. That was really a rather odd statement to make. It is no more difficult to integrate with web services using Ruby and Rails than with any other language or framework. I should know; I do it all the time.

> But did Google *pay* for Angry Birds to do that?

I have no idea what their contract, if any, with Angry Birds looked like.

But they have certainly been encouraging web developers to do just that, yes.

> And what is your source for that Skype behaviour?

Personal experience, for one thing. You can see a screenshot from the advanced install at http://people.mozilla.org/~khuey/skype-install-2011-10-3.png if you want.

As far as a Google search not finding anything.... https://www.google.com/search?q=skype+chrome+bundling shows http://www.webmasterworld.com/goog/4135280.htm and http://www.winrumors.com/skype-for-windows-updated-to-remove-google-product-bundling/ and http://mynetx.net/6494/skype-removes-google-integration

It also finds, not coincidentally, http://www.osnews.com/comments/25184 (do read the first response too!) and http://www.salsitasoft.com/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome-is-growing-market-share-ask-adobe/

A similar search on Bing also finds http://www.quora.com/Just-got-a-Skype-update-and-they-wanted-me-to-install-Chrome-Why

The marketshare and insane profits came before the lawsuits. Those lawsuits appeared because of copycat products. Android is a perfect example.

Um......no.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_

It can't, not anymore. Its damned near impossible to BSOD a Windows 7 system with a bad driver, it will just silently kill and restart the driver (as a system should) and make a little note in Action Center about it. And while your experience may vary I had a HELL of a lot bigger time with crashing X Server than I ever did with BSODs. it especially didn't seem to like having a video playing while surfing to pages that may have an embedded video or surfing pages with possible embedded video while playing tunes in the background. Hell Firefox won't allow hardware acceleration in Linux because X Drivers are buggy and they don't want to be blamed for X crashes.

As for TFA it has nothing to do with Android and everything to do with shitty governments wanting a pie in the sky. A $45 tablet and they want milspec? yeah and I want my Alyson Hannigan sexbot for $50 and a pack of Lucky Strikes and now we're both disappointed, while certain things ARE inflated one thing that isn't is how damned expensive it is to make electronics that can take milspec abuse. The reason a toughbook is so damned expensive is because of the amount of abuse it can take and you just can't get the materials to absorb that much punishment for $50, just not gonna happen. And they want double battery life and double CPU for the same price? Again the reason the price was so low was precisely BECAUSE it was using chips not in high demand such as its ARM 11 366MHz CPU. You want something that is going in more high dollar cell phones you have to pay a more high dollar price, that's reality. What it sounds like they are wanting is a milspec iPad for $50 and are using that as an excuse to give one of their buddies the contract who will of course probably come out with something worse than what this guy is offering so they can pocket more profit after bribing officials.

It's about marketshare. IT has only ever been worthwhile for virus writers to target a platform that is popular enough to warrant a return on investment, whether that be fame or clandestine botnet software.

People always used to use half baked arguments trying to claim that OS X was mroe secure because it was "unix" or some crap, despite OS X being very insecure for most of it's run.

Aside from being common sense this is supported with some pretty solid mathematics, not least an article in an IEEE journal showing there is a certain percentage of marketshare that would attract malware. We are now seeing this with OS X and we have seen it previously with Android.

What will be interesting is how Apple react. Will they tighten the grip they have on their users and restrict them even more, or actually get off their buts and increase their security and respond to problems in a mature and timely manner.

That wasn't the only prototype android device. See here.

"The possibilities of this CPU and generator are... Fascinating. For instance, users players (see, lines are already blurring) can exchange programs, so you can expect a lively scene of people exchanging programs. There's a nefarious side to this as well - Notch will not stop anyone from making viruses, so even computer security becomes an element of play. A virus could, for instance, disable a ship's weaponry or shields. " From: http://www.osnews.com/story/25765/Notch_unveils_0x10c_space_sim_with_custom_virtual_processors

When you quote from such an article, it helps to add a link: http://mobile.osnews.com/printer.php?news_id=25724

The reason I say that is because, while I get your point, often RMS communicates in a rather blunt manner (IMHO anyway). It's not impossible for an astro-turfer to concoct an RMS-like quote that looks plausible but contains certain phrases that trigger "nutjob" knee-jerk reactions in people. Being able to point to the actual interview helps to show that it is authentic.

Unfortunately, I don't think he does himself any favors in this interview. Like you, I largely agree with him, but I wish that he would take some advice on effective methods of getting his message across. His use of the word "ethical" is troublesome. I think I understand what he means, but I guarantee that many people will interpret it as meaning that they are "unethical" if they don't run free software. I don't think that is what is intended (I might be wrong, I suppose). As a movement geared to *help* the user, using software that isn't free is unfortunate, but hardly unethical.

A free software community is powerful because instead of being consumers, the user is enabled to be a producer. If the software is not free, they are blocked from contributing (even if it is only to help themselves). If users choose software that isn't free because it is more capable, they get more capable software, but can't form a community of enabled users. They can't help themselves; they can help their friends and they can't be helped by their friends (or some random guy half way around the world who happens to have the same problem). Everything must come from one controlling entity. If they decide not to help (or decide to charge you ridiculous amounts of money), then you are screwed.

I suspect RMS thinks that people already understand this and simply says that free software is a matter of ethics to drive home his point. Unfortunately, I think many people completely miss the point and instead become insulted. It ends up having the opposite reaction that was intended.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_

That right. Apple didn't invent all that stuff either. iPhone/iPad is just what Apple has always dones. Add a few improvements to the hard core work of others and scream they invented the whole thing with lawyers. And people like you drink that Kool-Aid by the 55 gallon drum barrel.

Incidentally, I notice your name is Macs4all. The last straw in our K12 with iMacs is Apple deliberately gimping hard drives with non standard sensor pins on the SATA connection to force the use of "Apple Branded Parts". If a commodity SATA drive is put in a new iMac, the fans run at Jet Engine. A third party extension can force the OS to use S.M.A.R.T.

http://blog.macsales.com/10146-apple-further-restricts-upgrade-options-on-new-imacs

So it isn't just self-repair obsessed nerds. Behavior like this now has us eliminating Macs by attrition and we are also going to start resisting any further iDevice purchases.

H.264 is a newer video codec. The standard first came out in 2003, but continues to evolve. An automatically generated patent expiration list is available at H.264 Patent List based on the MPEG-LA patent list. The last expiration is US 7826532 on 29 nov 2027 ( note that 7835443 is divisional, but the automated program missed that). US 7826532 was first filed in 05 sep 2003 and has an impressive 1546 day extension. It will be a while before H.264 is patent free.

Not sure I've ever seen denial that blatant before.

Of course you could put your fingers in your ears and believe what you want to believe, or you could look at some of the early previews and see for yourself that your claim is bullshit.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_

The meme that Apple invented all that is touchscreen and froody needs to die. The reality is Apple is doing what Apple always does: makes some slickly packaged incremental improvements to the innovations of others then screams they invented it all.

Get better sources.

This release is interesting, but the rest of the year is dedicated to HAMMER2 and that will be the real story with DragonFly next. Most of the work on this release was incremental. Some interesting benchmarks were posted against FreeBSD in the last few months for PostgreSQL. There was some coverage on OSNews on this

http://www.osnews.com/story/25334/DragonFly_BSD_MP_Performance_Significantly_Improved

Please read this OS News article, which explains why this does not mean "Mac OS X was ported to ARM", and the actual thesis before commenting.

tl;dr version of the OS News article - it's just a port of Darwin, using the existing ARM support, to an ARMv5 platform, that included fixing bitrot in the ARMv5 support.

In iOS, application programmers can only perform the following seven tasks in the background:

Background audio - application continues to run in the background as long as it is playing audio or video content
Voice over IP - application is suspended when a phone call is not in progress
Background location - application is notified of location changes
Push notifications
Local notifications - application schedules local notifications to be delivered at a predetermined time
Task completion - application asks the system for extra time to complete a given task
Fast app switching - application does not execute any code and may be removed from memory at any time

So basically, no; the program is suspended if it isn't using one of these facilities. The OS obviously supports true multitasking, and there is a Cydia program called Activator which lets you control how individual programs behave, but it no longer works on iOS 5, and Apple tries to sandbox app developers as much as possible to control this component of the UI experience. Their reasoning, whether you agree with it or not (and I don't think many geeks do) is that such constraints prevent "Where is my battery going?" moments for the especially non-technical. Apparently ensuring the approval of this portion of the market was more important than permitting the flexibility that true multitasking obviously allows. Since Apple makes money anyway, they can always offer to remove these artificial limitations in a later update.

But don't get too upset over that last part about money—the fact that Apple gets a cut of every single sale is still way more unnerving.

Actually, Microsoft gets more on patent revenue for every Android phone sold than they make on Windows phones: link. I'm not sure how they approach this conflict of interest. They'd be better off, financially anyway, by losing sales to their competitor.

However, you do have a point about their inability to force vendors to sell their software for every piece of hardware. It's a business model they don't have any experience with and they appear incapable of getting any market penetration as a result.

Media sales via the Android Market in general, more like it.

Close. Google have officially joined the dark side.

They bought a DRM company called Widevine, which handles the digital restrictions on Blockbuster, Netflix et al.

It looks like the original purchase was for their move into internet TV, but collateral damage has ensured that sadly, Android is now Defective by Design Those of us who enjoy using and modifying our own property will have to part ways with the official Android releases. I'm looking forward to seeing some nice Linux distros on Arm tablets.
http://www.osnews.com/story/24099/Google_buy_DRM_firm_Widevine_Solution_to_HTML5_Video_Adoption_

I thought they did this back in 2005.
http://www.osnews.com/story/12611

The MBA's still think you can describe a piece of software in Word, and then it's a trivial process to make the software that customers want. Informal language is desirable to humans because it supports leaving out details - which is exactly what makes it useless for programming a computer.

That's because software *is* the description of what the computer should do. Check this great article: http://www.osnews.com/story/22135/The_Problem_with_Design_and_Implementation

nor it would it stop government intrusion on ISPs

...because it already did. Just imagine that the network stack was proprietary and the producing company forced/bribed into providing a backdoor...

The 25 Year Old UNIX Bug.

I mean, take a look at Apple's "If it's black and rectangular, it's ours" patent.

The ipad injunction involved a European "Community Design", an appallingly stupid concept which is actually considerably worse than patents. There's no obviousness or prior art test AT ALL, they're simply granted automatically upon payment of the filing fee. It's absolutely guaranteed to be abused like this, in fact as the link shows Apple have a program that spam-registers designs which they have no intention of even using, just to make life difficult for their competitors. It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's simply a cynical device to collect those filing fees, with the negative effects on business and consumers being somebody else's problem.

Oh, and the extremely generic community design they used for the ipad thing was filed in 2004, 6 years before the first ipad announcement.

I mean, take a look at Apple's "If it's black and rectangular, it's ours" patent.

The ipad injunction involved a European "Community Design", an appallingly stupid concept which is actually considerably worse than patents. There's no obviousness or prior art test AT ALL, they're simply granted automatically upon payment of the filing fee. It's absolutely guaranteed to be abused like this, in fact as the link shows Apple have a program that spam-registers designs which they have no intention of even using, just to make life difficult for their competitors. It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's simply a cynical device to collect those filing fees, with the negative effects on business and consumers being somebody else's problem.

Oh, and the extremely generic community design they used for the ipad thing was filed in 2004, 6 years before the first ipad announcement.

The Borland license was great!... and in plain english too!

http://mobile.osnews.com/story.php/22342/Borland-in-the-1980s-Treat-Software-Just-Like-a-Book/

No-Nonsense License Statement

This software is protected by both United States copyright law and international copyright treaty provisions. Therefore, you must treat this software just like a book, except that you may copy it onto a computer to be used and you may make archival copies of the software for the sole purpose of backing-up our software and protecting your investment from loss.

By saying "just like a book," Borland means, for example, that this software may be used by any number of people, and may be freely moved from one computer location to another, so long as there is no possibility of it being used at one location while it's being used at another or on a computer network by more than one user at one location. Just like a book can't be read by two different people in two different places at the same time, neither can the software be used by two different people in two different places at the same time. (Unless, of course, Borland's copyright has been violated or the use is on a computer network by up to the number of users authorized by additional Borland licenses as explained below.)

So tell me Mr. Jobs are you some kind of a god? where you should be able to shamelessly take others concepts as your own but others should not? Or is it that you are just a super hypocrite?

Mr Jobs, is this what your company is attempting to do with other people's code through the use of blatant software-patents? and other dubious software-patents?

So using software patents to gain control of code that you or your company did not write is cool?

Hmm, I was aware of the LLNL port, but didn't know about KQ.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=zfs_linux_coming&num=1

While digging deeper, it seems KQ has been bought out and their work stopped:
http://punetech.com/solid-state-storage-company-stec-acquires-punes-kq-infotech/
http://www.osnews.com/comments/24853?view=threaded&sort=&threshold=0

Okay, so the closest thing I can find is this:
http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/wp-content/events/lug2011/4-13-2011/1130-1200_Brian_Benhlendorf_LUG11_ZFS_on_Linux_for_Lustre.pdf

It actually sounds to me more that Sun worked on porting Lustre to integrate ZFS as a backend, not that Sun worked on porting ZFS to Linux?

The UN would disagree with you

This is the point that started off the thread. I'm not addressing whether they're right or not. the responder accepted that (at least for the sake of argument).

However, the UN has justified Internet access being a human right. If it's not, then the French government needs to explain why the UN is wrong or why it does not apply in this case.

They all play by the Open Source License rules. You make a change to FOSS code, AND RE-RELEASE THE PROGRAM, you must provide the source code when requested.

When have Microsoft not adhered to the license terms for releasing the source code?

That's why they have always treated FOSS like the Gods Damned Plague.

Yes, there is no doubt that they have done scare tactics against FOSS, but then they have also done things like create http://www.codeplex.com/ to host open source projects (which they contribute a great many themselves).

I would love to have MS come play with Linux. As long as they follow the rules and play in good faith.

And yet Microsoft do contribute to Linux. I imagine a lot of those changes were to fix interoperability with their products, but it still does show that they do contribute and play by the rules.

The story claims that this is about copyright, and then links another slashdot story that doesn't mention copyright once.

Every story I can find about this says that it is a trademark dispute, not copyright.

I agree that it is good that patents will expire. That said, they last longer than 17 years in the US (and in plenty of other countries they last 20 years). But it will be awhile before they are finished. For example MP3 (and MPEG-1 that MP3 is a part of) will not be done till at least 2015 (and the draft standard came out in 1991), MPEG-2 is at least 2018 and H.264 is 2027. By that time, there will probably be some 3D video codec that everyone wants, so we still will have to deal with software patents.
http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264

Actually, Oracle might not have bought Sun if they could not sue Android:

" Miguel De Icaza has provided a very interesting insight into the case. His report has been confirmed by James Gosling, known as the father of Java who left Sun right after the merger. Icaza speculates that the potential to monetise on Java by suing Google was pitched by Jonathan Schwartz during Sun's sales talks with Oracle. Oh boy."

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/13/android-oracle-java-lawsuit/
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Aug-13.html
http://www.osnews.com/story/23684/De_Icaza_Sun_s_Schwartz_Pitched_Google_Lawsuit_to_Oracle

this says that you must thank hackers and enthusiasts, and not microsoft, if you can run an alternative OS.

I am no fan of the new apple, but the tibook with openfirmware ran debian-ppc back in 2003 with less issues that you have now with ia32 systems, that is all hardware worked with open source drivers with good performance.
Why did a port of a niche OS have less problems than a much more popular and mature version has on its most popular arch? hmmmmm...

Will you even be able to swap out the browser in the metro shell?

Only if it is approved in the Windows Store apparently. I wonder if browsers will be allowed by the Store submission terms.

Nope. The injunction was under the insane and ridiculously vague EU Community Design system. Specifically, apple drew something vaguely tablet-like on the back of a napkin before the ipad even existed, filed it - which results in automatic approval - then used it to sue Samsung years later, being sure to file in Germany since there's no requirement to inform the other party there.

According to OSNews, the judge issued the ruling based solely on the 2004 community design and not an actual iPad. Can anyone else confirm this? The 2004 drawings are quite different from the current iPad (although, they are both rectangles). http://www.osnews.com/story/25150/German_Court_Upholds_Injunction_Against_Galaxy_Tab_10_1

Based on what the judge wrote, it sounds to me like he has his hand in the Apple's cookie jar.

OS News has more info on this.

I might question whether you are incapable of reading comprehension, but I don't know it.

You can question anything you like. There's still no doubt Microsoft knew what they were doing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/12/russia-uses-microsoft-to-_n_713653.html
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/russia-uses-microsoft-to-suppress-dissent-51505
http://www.osnews.com/story/23797/NYT_Russia_Uses_Microsoft_to_Suppress_Dissent
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Russia-Anti-Piracy-Raids-Microsoft-Piracy-Putin,11270.html
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2011/03/microsoft-sorry-for-bing-quake-tweet.html
http://techrights.org/2011/09/05/microsoft-mockery-of-the-chinese/

Apple did not invent the tablet PC, but they want to ban anyone else from making anything resembling a tablet PC.

Rpm 5, like the project of the previous maintainer ? I thought this one was dead in the water, according to the report on OS news ( http://www.osnews.com/story/24686/Jeff_Johnson_About_to_Fork_rpm_-_Again )

And regarding systemd, this was already a bloated disaster on Fedora ( com'on, who really need a init process with dbus, pam and selinux support ? ) , I can only fear the worst. I am glade to have switched all my desktop to Ubuntu 6 months ago, and I guess I will move my servers at work once the next LTS is out.

Samsung gets away with copying the distinctive look of the iPhone* to an extent that most other smartphone vendors have managed to avoid.

Only because (shocking, I know) there is nothing distinctive enough in Apple's design. From OS News:

Regarding the design related stuff - the Community Designs - of the iPad, the judge threw it all out, citing loads of prior art (like the Compaq TC1x00). In addition, the judge stated that only the front of the device shows some resemblance, while everything else is entirely different. The Kinght Ridder is also cited as relevant prior art - the judge threw out Apple's defense that the product never made it to market. To round it out, the judge also mentioned 'form-follows-function' several times. Most interesting note: the judge specifically mentions that by having such a minimalist design, the iPad basically makes itself less viable for design protection.

RT.

The following article has some very interesting information about Community Designs, which were used for getting the original injunction.

Community designs are basically unreviewed sketches of products which can be used to silently get an injunction for your competitors product.
No checks are done for obviousness, nor for prior art.

Hope you get modded up. There was also a discussion on osnews.com.

They did originate the concept in this sketch! http://www.osnews.com/img/25056/000181607-0001.png

Samsung is now showing to a court in Netherland 20 cases of prior art in tablets, such as this one from 1994: the Knight Rider http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2011/04/tablet-computers-as-seen-from-1994.html As seen on these videos, this looked exactlty like an iPad! You may follow the courtroom debates thanks to Andreas Udo de Haes https://twitter.com/#!/andreasudo and on OsNews: http://www.osnews.com/

Uhhh...tell me how EXACTLY telling the equivalent of "water is wet" a MSFT propaganda piece? You sir might want to read this article on OSNews by the title of OS X - Safe, Yet Horribly Insecure or is OSNews MSFT propaganda? it points out the Apple implementations of serveral technologies, when it has them, simply aren't up to snuff. Technologies such as DEP and ASLR either are not implemented or are implemented poorly.

Now Apple was able to get away with that with relative impunity simple because they weren't worth the effort as malware writers like most criminals are a lazy sort of creature and will ALWAYS go for the biggest bang for the least work. It is like that old saying, you rob banks because that is where the money is. You attack Windows because it has been trivially easy to get little Suzy to run your "LOL_Kittehs.screensaver.exe" trojan nasty.

Is this REALLY so surprising? It isn't like any of the other OSes have held up very well when being targeted either. On OSX you had MacDefender followed by MacGuardian which caused Apple to give their infamous order to the Applecare guys "Do NOT say the word Malware and do NOT help those....people!" and on the Linux side we've seen Android pounded pretty regularly as well as the KDELook screensaver bug someone put out for shits and giggles awhile back, as well as this article that shows how trivial it is to infect Linux if you get the user to help you which is how nearly all modern nasties spread nowadays.

So why hasn't Linux and OSX been pounded before now? it ain't brain surgery folks it is because it just wasn't worth the effort for sub double digit userbases. And before some Linux fanboi trots out the old "but but but...Linux is used on servers!" I would point out you don't see Linux admins running "LOL_Kitteh.Screensaver.py" and if you do they should be given a nice white jacket and placed somewhere where they can't hurt anyone. We are talking DESKTOPS, not servers, routers, your toaster, or your remote controlled Linux thermostat. DESKTOPS are were the money is at for malware writers, because they have nice fat broadband connections they don't monitor for shit, they are MUCH more likely to be clueless about best security practices, much more likely to run funny software from the net if you wave a cookie in front of them, etc. it is simply easy money whereas grizzled non-sociable Linux admins don't play that.

So saying Windows is targeted because that is where the money is at is no different than saying the sky is blue and water is wet. If you want an easy target grandma on WinXP is about as easy as you can get. to their credit someone at MSFT FINALLY got hit with the clue stick and the whole "Hey lets all run as admins!" bullshit finally died with Vista, and now that I've switched the majority of my customers and family to Windows 7 I've seen infection rates go waaaaaay down. Did I magically give them a brain transplant? did my years of bashing my head against the wall trying to teach them best security practices FINALLY get through their heads? oh hell no! It is the fact MSFT makes the default a regular user now and has tech like ASLR, DEP, file and registry virtualization, and you can even do as I did and add SEHOP from Server 2K8 to Windows 7 to lock it down even tighter. this with a good sandboxing AV like Comodo or Avast free and we finally have a decent OS that is pretty locked down.

Now that Windows will be getting harder as XP is replaced by 7 it will be OSX's turn to start to worry. Apple being hip has gotten through to some who saw after MacDefender there is money there, and like blood in the water to sharks they WILL come.

Two points:

1) That old saw about Microsoft being vulnerable because of its market share is hog wash. There were over 3 million viruses and Trojans released last year. Were it a simple matter of market share percentages than about 12% of those would be Linux viruses and another 10-15% would be Mac viruses.

Not really. If 90% of the market is Windows, and 10% Macs, you don't write 9 worms for Windows and 1 for Mac. You don't roll a d10 to figure out which to write. You write Windows worms because an equally effective worm will get you a botnet 9x as big. Yes, eventually, once most Windows machines are owned, and you're fighting rival infections to get and keep your bots from them, you reach a point where you can gain more if you go for the uncontested 10% -- but even then, there's no reason to suppose it will actually be 10% of worms.

I agree with your conclusion, but that argument sucks.

Two points:

1) That old saw about Microsoft being vulnerable because of its market share is hog wash. There were over 3 million viruses and Trojans released last year. Were it a simple matter of market share percentages than about 12% of those would be Linux viruses and another 10-15% would be Mac viruses. But, they are not. Well over 99% of them are Windows viruses. Only 19% of Internet web servers are running Windows but they are the source of essentially all malware.

2) Blaming Windows users for security holes that Microsoft keeps secret from them is worse than obscene. It's fanboism to the extreme.

That 4,300,000 Windows zombie bot farm discovered last year wasn't all Windows because they were hard to break into, and the handful of command & control computers weren't Linux and Mac because they are easy to break into.

Facts are a little shallow today. Look up the Dynabook idea from 1968, published by Xerox PARC as a research project in 1972. That's really the first concept tablet by Alan Kay(pro) who later became an Apple Fellow in 1984. Guess what he had a hand in there? The Apple Newton came out in 1993, as flawed as that was (if the Nokia N800 was a tablet, then so was the Newton).

The Microsoft/HP/Compaq tablet concepts showed up way after that in 2001. They were a joke relative to what we're seeing today - they were the concrete patio tile of portable computing. That form factor never took off as a must-have product with the general public but it did find uses in industrial applications. Ok, so it was just a laptop with a screen that swivels and a stylus to tap on it.

There was no thunderous stampede to make anything like tablets until the iPad.