People never had more than 1MB of email because their email accounts were only 3 MB or 5MB. With 1 terrabyte of storage, I'm sure people will want to store more than just emails in their account. If there are no limiting factors (like some ridiculously small max size for the email, or a really low upload bandwidth etc.) its only a matter of time before people will be uploading their documents, videos, mp3s etc. into their email accounts. With the superior search capability its really not a bad way to store data online. What you dont realize is that never (at least not that I am aware of) has a web user had *free* access to more than a few MB of storage on the web. If Google guys havent anticipated this (which I very much doubt..) then they are in a lot of trouble.
The IPods not much smaller than the Sony player. Sony's player has the following dimensions: 11.5 x 6.3 x 1.7(cm) as compared to 10.4 x 6 x 1.57 (cm) for the IPod (20 GB)
Not sure if the Sony player plays video though.. It has a color screen and 20 hours of battery life. May give some competition to the IPod if the ease-of-use factor does not suck.
Oh yeah, and for all those nay-sayers who say that this will crash and burn, dont be so hasty. I know people who will buy a gizmo only because its a Sony. It has a good reputation that it will cash in on..
I think the scenes in the end, where they were all bidding each other goodbye lasted for 15-20 minutes (maybe longer!)..
That could all have been replaced with 2 minutes of footage where all the hobbits, dwarves, elves etc. wave goodbye to the audience as soon as they had won the war.:-D
Heck, if you are really good you can write the program to simulate your daily digital life.
Heck thats real easy on Slashdot. I am going to write a script that posts the following posts randomly in various discussions:
1. Cowboy Neal jokes
2. In Soviet Russia jokes
3. 1-2-3-profit jokes
My karma will keep improving (even after I am dead!). And with my amazing Karma I will be reborn as Neo in my next life.
And heres my list (for Java programmers and command line afficianados.)
1. gvim
2. cygwin ( I need my Gnu tools.)
3. mozilla
4. JDK
5. eclipse
6. putty
7. Adobe Acrobat reader
8. Winzip
9. OpenOffice
10. IrfanView (Excellent support for a lot of file formats and free)
11. Ghostview (postscript)
12. vlc (for media.)
13. Adaware.
I like working on the command line a lot. So my cygwin is most usually setup so that there are shortcuts to all frequently accessed folders from the command line as well. (My Documents, My pictures, etc. are linked to folders in my cygwin home directory as well..) And of course I copy my old vimrc and plugins..
Off topic slightly. But are there others who have tried the linuxant drivers for centrino on FC1? I tried the demo version of the drivers over the last month, and though its not noticable when downloading data, but when I play streaming media over the net, there are major jerks in the stream. The jerks are not there when I play the same media over a direct ethernet connection. Is this the demo crippleware or is the quality of the driver(wrapper) code really that bad?
But migration is a one time cost. And Sun (see the last line) does provide migration services. Not sure how cheap or expensive they are. I am sure managers have figured out by now how M$ will continue to hold companies on ransom by forcing an upgrade every couple of years.
I think its based on the birds (gulls?) that are a part of the OOo mascot. As someone else already pointed out this is the new mascot of the OOoEdu project and not the OOo project.
2 billion dollars over the next 10 years is not a big amount for a company like Sun. Undoubtedly they didnt sell out. I think it was a move that could not be averted. Sun is doing really badly and it simply cannot afford to spend money just to keep up the image of being a Microsoft hater. It has learnt its lesson from Big Blue. IBM forms alliances with whoever it can. Its operative word is profit. Sun was very profitable before the millenium and could afford to keep up the image of being able to take on Microsoft. Now, it just does not make economic sense to do stick to the image. They have simply decided to cut their losses and start focussing on making profits where ever they can find it. Its a time for Sun to lay low and really focus on how to turn the company around. They have done a lot of monkeying around with quick fix profit making schemes all of which have failed.
Moral of the story: when the shit hits the fan, everyone ducks.
I enjoy watching "Law and Order" just for this reason (and for Elizabeth Rohm of course:-p) . No fricking private lives - everything is about the case from the beginning to the end. And no fancy pants lab technicians who try to act cool just because they got a nose hair from the ass or whatever. And no stupid "The Practice" like cases where every episode some lawyer realizes that he is trying to protect a criminal - OMYGOD! (DUH!)
Off late on Law and Order though, some of the one-liners seem contrived and Lennie almost always has to say something smart. Still, a new "Law and Order" episode always manages to keep my attention. They have a simple formula and they execute it very well. I remember they had one techie episode with a hacker in it and it was quite decently researched by Hollywood standards.
LaO SVU is not very interesting since sexually related crime cases start getting nauseating after some time. The other LaO spinoff sucks bigtime. That retard of a detective cranes his neck and makes outrageous conclusions without any basis whatsoever. ("She has written the Sigma symbol in her math book many times so she is suicidal." WTF? )
The post is not exactly a troll and makes sense enough to be moderated as interesting. However, nobody wants to see some idiot gaining karma points by mooching off of some other persons opinions/ideas. Shouldnt there be some mechanism whereby the post is modded up but the poster does not get the mod points? Or at least some reporting interface that will blacklist the poster for having copied the post verbatim...
Note, if the poster had given due credit to the original post, it probably would have been okay.
Thats probably because no big organization wanted to try and capture the programming workforce that Perl and Pthon programmers represent. Java is much more widely deployed and there is huge potential for a split in the market. Many small vendors can can make a lot of money if they appeal to even a small segment of programmers.
You already have IBM making core changes with the introduction of the SWT classes, completely screwing up the whole "write once run anywhere" concept. You cannot write a Java app using SWT and expect it to run on all platforms that other Java apps can run on - just the ones that IBM is interested in supporting. This threat is almost as bad as the whole M$ VM thingy, though I dont think Sun has the resources to fight a battle with Big Blue.
but I really don't understand why "freedom of speech" needs to protect obviously dangerous elements of society.
Because whats obvious to some is not obvious to all and you cannot rely on the testimony of average Joe to decide what is obviously dangerous and what is not.
To demonstrate my argument, I am altering one of the sentences in your post and requoting it..
Homosexuality? For God's sake, this is, in my non-professional opinion, not a sexual preference but a symptom of some psychological problems.
And a few decades back, this may have been an obvious statement to many! (If you want to argue that homosexuality is simply a sexual preference and not a danger to society, further consider the correlation between AIDS and homosexuality, so as to classify it as dangerous.. In other words, consider the incorrect, but marginally palatable argument that homosexuality leads to AIDS and it is therefore dangerous).
Note that I am in no way trying to insinuate that 20 years from now necrophilia or paedophily will be seen as acceptable, but I am merely trying to say that censorship may, among other things, lead to wrongful persecution because the other person's point of view was stifled. Let people speak, for it helps us see the world as it is and not veiled by the opinions of the censor. If you want to prosecute a particular necrophile or paedophile fan, then first prove that their action did incite some crime or is liable to incite crime, rather than preemptively and blindly shutting their voice down because you think they are wrong.
Re:One Rule For 90% of Bugs
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 1
The last para wasnt specific to Java debuggers, I was referring to command-line and gui debuggers in general.
About logging, I was referring to log4j used as a debugging tool, rather than as a logger. Refer to grandparent post which talks about using printfs to debug errors. I wanted to point out that log4j provides a nice and convenient way of doing it in Java. [Will save you a google search.. log4j]
If you do want to use log4j as a logger in the production version, it is powerful enough that you can drastically reduce or eliminate logging by changing parameters in the config file. You can also have logger output sent to rolling log files, to a Syslog daemon or even write your own class to deal with it.
In my experience, managing log files is not a big problem just so long as you account for it.
Re:One Rule For 90% of Bugs
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 1
While coding in Java, things have been much better since I have been using log4j. I can catch a lot of the obvious bugs by reading through the log. When I am writing code, I generously put logging statements all over the place. I use the config file to switch on and off debugging information if I am being flooded with too many log messages. And all without recompiling.. Sure the performance takes a small hit, but before moving the code into production I can always run a script to comment out the logging code.
The issue I have with using command line debuggers is that, very often I get too distracted using the debugging tool rather than tracking the code flow, and if you screw up, you have to start all over again.. gui debuggers are good in that sense, but they still cant be used in all situations - debugging on a remote machine say... or debugging jni code..
...but it's one of the great examples of how it's MS playing catchup, and not everyone else.
Dont get me wrong, I am a big fan of Mozilla and use it for daily browsing. But I have to disagree with your statement. M$ is not playing catch up, its playing dont care. Especially since it still has an overwhelming lead over all the other browsers out there. I refuse to believe that M$ could not have come up with a new version of IE with all the features that Mozilla has (many of which Opera had earlier..) It does not make economic sense for M$ to waste development resources on developing enhancements for IE when they have the market licked.
Just putting some of the parent-post's rebuttal statements in perspective.
India is self sufficient as regards food grains and does export a lot of food products. Note that the link contains more recent stats..
The Expansionism link is from a website which is a mouthpiece of the for the ultra left and rebellious Communist Party of Nepal (CPN), which has been known to spread propagandist statements against India (and the US!!).
Cray computers: Never happened.
US did refuse to give India Cray super computers and we invented the Param supercomputer to do the same job in much cheaper and more efficient manner. Hell, I had classmates in undergrad who worked on many of the projects to develop Param and its successors.
It takes a lot more than a technological accomplishment in design to compete with the likes of Boeing and Airbus. But its definitely a start. Something similar happened in the Pharma industry 15-20 years back. But Indian pharma companies are beginning to compete with American pharma giants in their own markets due to technologies and expertise they developed.
Public healthcare in India is lacking, but as was the original posters claim, there is still FREE public healthcare available to the common man. Hopefully, as India as a country matures and becomes richer, the quality of healthcare will improve.
However your 'facts' and arguments are completely false.
Not quite...See above.
Fastmail.fm gives you something similar. You can link any number of aliases of the type yahoo@yourname.fastmail.fm or cheaptickets@yourname.fastmail.fm to your account. Then use the filter to delete out spam..
Just taking this opportunity to list, what I think are important features lacking in many email clients (mostly Mozilla since that is what I use..)
Whenever I try to track email conversations in Mozilla, the most irritating thing is to track your own responses. By default email clients store your responses in the "Sent" messages folder. Therefore these are not usually available when you are looking at the threaded view. Trying to match up the responses to other mails in the discussion is a bloody pain.
The above problem is mostly becuase Mozilla uses uses folders to separate emails. Another example of the same problem, it often happens that in most cases I want emails from Mr.X to go into a separate folder, but when there is a discussion in which X is one of the participants, then it is terribly tedious to generate a threaded view that includes X's responses to the discussion. I think Opera mail got it right in this respect since they employ a mail db backend rather than a "folders" based backend. Therefore folders are simply "views" of the mail db generated due to a query. There is a default view that lists *all* the emails in the system and this view is ideal to track discussions (along with your own responses). This view of emails also makes it easy to find emails and discussions since it is simply a query to the db to show mails with certain characteristics.
Another missing functionality: I often discuss issues using the mail and the IM. I would love to have something that will integrate the two so that the messages are stored in a common database. That way an IM response can be linked to an email etc.
A lot of the readers have said that newsgroups and forums provide the same functionality. I agree that they do provide the functionality but there is definitely a need for such a functionlity in email clients as well since a lot of discussions are ad-hoc and private. I dont want to start a new forum or a newsgroup to hold a small discussion between 2-3 people. While I agree that what MS proposes is not path breaking,
but they have at least partially identified some features that are lacking in email clients.
Maybe not! Check this presentation out from the sun website.. It demos their new Project "Looking Glass" for desktops. It looks amazing!!! Wonder when they will package it on the desktop systems. This sure looks compelling enough for the average user..
I agree. I think, as usual, Sun is rushing into this without forethought. The average buyer is not going to pay money for something that doesnt install AOL or Quicken or any of the games that the next guy on a windows PC has. I don't think it will matter if the darn thing is half the price of a Windows PC (In fact I am curious to see how they will price it. I doubt if they can sell a PC for any lower than $250-300. But then you can get a Dell for $400). Linux is a decent desktop but it has a long way to go before its UI is as smooth and comfortable as Windows.
If they are really serious about this, I think they should offer the Linux desktop only to corporate customers for now (maybe the corporate customers aren't flocking as they hoped.. maybe thats why the home PC idea). They should wait for a year or so until their developers have had enough time to smooth out the chinks and write/package really compelling apps with a stable interface. Also by then hopefully OO/StarOffice would have gotten better.
At the face of it, it looks like another one of those frantic attempts from the Sun folks to make some money. I think their home pc desktop idea will lose credibility just like how Java apps lost credibility because they packaged it out too soon.
The cable companies will simply put some sort of DRM on all the content that they stream, so that people wont be allowed to record it (using DVRs or anything..). No TiVO then, and people will have to view all the ads. BTW, does anyone know what rights does the consumer have over content that is streamed over cable? Is the user allowed to record it for personal use?
Slashdot Mirror
People never had more than 1MB of email because their email accounts were only 3 MB or 5MB. With 1 terrabyte of storage, I'm sure people will want to store more than just emails in their account. If there are no limiting factors (like some ridiculously small max size for the email, or a really low upload bandwidth etc.) its only a matter of time before people will be uploading their documents, videos, mp3s etc. into their email accounts. With the superior search capability its really not a bad way to store data online. What you dont realize is that never (at least not that I am aware of) has a web user had *free* access to more than a few MB of storage on the web. If Google guys havent anticipated this (which I very much doubt..) then they are in a lot of trouble.
The IPods not much smaller than the Sony player. Sony's player has the following dimensions:
11.5 x 6.3 x 1.7(cm) as compared to 10.4 x 6 x 1.57 (cm) for the IPod (20 GB)
It weighs 195gms as compared to IPods 158 grams.
Read short writeup from The Register
Not sure if the Sony player plays video though.. It has a color screen and 20 hours of battery life. May give some competition to the IPod if the ease-of-use factor does not suck.
Oh yeah, and for all those nay-sayers who say that this will crash and burn, dont be so hasty. I know people who will buy a gizmo only because its a Sony. It has a good reputation that it will cash in on..
I think the scenes in the end, where they were all bidding each other goodbye lasted for 15-20 minutes (maybe longer!)..
:-D
That could all have been replaced with 2 minutes of footage where all the hobbits, dwarves, elves etc. wave goodbye to the audience as soon as they had won the war.
Heck, if you are really good you can write the program to simulate your daily digital life.
Heck thats real easy on Slashdot. I am going to write a script that posts the following posts randomly in various discussions:
1. Cowboy Neal jokes
2. In Soviet Russia jokes
3. 1-2-3-profit jokes
My karma will keep improving (even after I am dead!). And with my amazing Karma I will be reborn as Neo in my next life.
And heres my list (for Java programmers and command line afficianados.)
1. gvim
2. cygwin ( I need my Gnu tools.)
3. mozilla
4. JDK
5. eclipse
6. putty
7. Adobe Acrobat reader
8. Winzip
9. OpenOffice
10. IrfanView (Excellent support for a lot of file formats and free)
11. Ghostview (postscript)
12. vlc (for media.)
13. Adaware.
I like working on the command line a lot. So my cygwin is most usually setup so that there are shortcuts to all frequently accessed folders from the command line as well. (My Documents, My pictures, etc. are linked to folders in my cygwin home directory as well..) And of course I copy my old vimrc and plugins..
Off topic slightly. But are there others who have tried the linuxant drivers for centrino on FC1? I tried the demo version of the drivers over the last month, and though its not noticable when downloading data, but when I play streaming media over the net, there are major jerks in the stream. The jerks are not there when I play the same media over a direct ethernet connection. Is this the demo crippleware or is the quality of the driver(wrapper) code really that bad?
But migration is a one time cost. And Sun (see the last line) does provide migration services. Not sure how cheap or expensive they are. I am sure managers have figured out by now how M$ will continue to hold companies on ransom by forcing an upgrade every couple of years.
I think its based on the birds (gulls?) that are a part of the OOo mascot. As someone else already pointed out this is the new mascot of the OOoEdu project and not the OOo project.
2 billion dollars over the next 10 years is not a big amount for a company like Sun. Undoubtedly they didnt sell out. I think it was a move that could not be averted. Sun is doing really badly and it simply cannot afford to spend money just to keep up the image of being a Microsoft hater. It has learnt its lesson from Big Blue. IBM forms alliances with whoever it can. Its operative word is profit. Sun was very profitable before the millenium and could afford to keep up the image of being able to take on Microsoft. Now, it just does not make economic sense to do stick to the image. They have simply decided to cut their losses and start focussing on making profits where ever they can find it. Its a time for Sun to lay low and really focus on how to turn the company around. They have done a lot of monkeying around with quick fix profit making schemes all of which have failed.
Moral of the story: when the shit hits the fan, everyone ducks.
OO makes PDF files? What the heck am I messing around with Distiller for, then? (Besides all the other programs I do stuff in, that is.)
x port1_1beta.png
http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/images/pdfe
I enjoy watching "Law and Order" just for this reason (and for Elizabeth Rohm of course :-p) . No fricking private lives - everything is about the case from the beginning to the end. And no fancy pants lab technicians who try to act cool just because they got a nose hair from the ass or whatever. And no stupid "The Practice" like cases where every episode some lawyer realizes that he is trying to protect a criminal - OMYGOD! (DUH!)
Off late on Law and Order though, some of the one-liners seem contrived and Lennie almost always has to say something smart. Still, a new "Law and Order" episode always manages to keep my attention. They have a simple formula and they execute it very well. I remember they had one techie episode with a hacker in it and it was quite decently researched by Hollywood standards.
LaO SVU is not very interesting since sexually related crime cases start getting nauseating after some time. The other LaO spinoff sucks bigtime. That retard of a detective cranes his neck and makes outrageous conclusions without any basis whatsoever. ("She has written the Sigma symbol in her math book many times so she is suicidal." WTF? )
The post is not exactly a troll and makes sense enough to be moderated as interesting. However, nobody wants to see some idiot gaining karma points by mooching off of some other persons opinions/ideas. Shouldnt there be some mechanism whereby the post is modded up but the poster does not get the mod points? Or at least some reporting interface that will blacklist the poster for having copied the post verbatim...
Note, if the poster had given due credit to the original post, it probably would have been okay.
Thats probably because no big organization wanted to try and capture the programming workforce that Perl and Pthon programmers represent. Java is much more widely deployed and there is huge potential for a split in the market. Many small vendors can can make a lot of money if they appeal to even a small segment of programmers.
You already have IBM making core changes with the introduction of the SWT classes, completely screwing up the whole "write once run anywhere" concept. You cannot write a Java app using SWT and expect it to run on all platforms that other Java apps can run on - just the ones that IBM is interested in supporting. This threat is almost as bad as the whole M$ VM thingy, though I dont think Sun has the resources to fight a battle with Big Blue.
but I really don't understand why "freedom of speech" needs to protect obviously dangerous elements of society.
Because whats obvious to some is not obvious to all and you cannot rely on the testimony of average Joe to decide what is obviously dangerous and what is not.
To demonstrate my argument, I am altering one of the sentences in your post and requoting it..
Homosexuality? For God's sake, this is, in my non-professional opinion, not a sexual preference but a symptom of some psychological problems.
And a few decades back, this may have been an obvious statement to many! (If you want to argue that homosexuality is simply a sexual preference and not a danger to society, further consider the correlation between AIDS and homosexuality, so as to classify it as dangerous.. In other words, consider the incorrect , but marginally palatable argument that homosexuality leads to AIDS and it is therefore dangerous).
Note that I am in no way trying to insinuate that 20 years from now necrophilia or paedophily will be seen as acceptable, but I am merely trying to say that censorship may, among other things, lead to wrongful persecution because the other person's point of view was stifled. Let people speak, for it helps us see the world as it is and not veiled by the opinions of the censor. If you want to prosecute a particular necrophile or paedophile fan, then first prove that their action did incite some crime or is liable to incite crime, rather than preemptively and blindly shutting their voice down because you think they are wrong.
The last para wasnt specific to Java debuggers, I was referring to command-line and gui debuggers in general.
About logging, I was referring to log4j used as a debugging tool, rather than as a logger. Refer to grandparent post which talks about using printfs to debug errors. I wanted to point out that log4j provides a nice and convenient way of doing it in Java. [Will save you a google search.. log4j]
If you do want to use log4j as a logger in the production version, it is powerful enough that you can drastically reduce or eliminate logging by changing parameters in the config file. You can also have logger output sent to rolling log files, to a Syslog daemon or even write your own class to deal with it.
In my experience, managing log files is not a big problem just so long as you account for it.
While coding in Java, things have been much better since I have been using log4j. I can catch a lot of the obvious bugs by reading through the log. When I am writing code, I generously put logging statements all over the place. I use the config file to switch on and off debugging information if I am being flooded with too many log messages. And all without recompiling.. Sure the performance takes a small hit, but before moving the code into production I can always run a script to comment out the logging code.
The issue I have with using command line debuggers is that, very often I get too distracted using the debugging tool rather than tracking the code flow, and if you screw up, you have to start all over again.. gui debuggers are good in that sense, but they still cant be used in all situations - debugging on a remote machine say... or debugging jni code..
Mod parents up.
Dont get me wrong, I am a big fan of Mozilla and use it for daily browsing. But I have to disagree with your statement. M$ is not playing catch up, its playing dont care. Especially since it still has an overwhelming lead over all the other browsers out there. I refuse to believe that M$ could not have come up with a new version of IE with all the features that Mozilla has (many of which Opera had earlier..) It does not make economic sense for M$ to waste development resources on developing enhancements for IE when they have the market licked.
Maybe it was a test email that the spammer sent to see if it makes through...
One that I received today had a link to a non-existent website as well..
http://www.Stop6The4Spam4Already.com
Just putting some of the parent-post's rebuttal statements in perspective. India is self sufficient as regards food grains and does export a lot of food products. Note that the link contains more recent stats..
The Expansionism link is from a website which is a mouthpiece of the for the ultra left and rebellious Communist Party of Nepal (CPN), which has been known to spread propagandist statements against India (and the US!!).
Cray computers: Never happened.
US did refuse to give India Cray super computers and we invented the Param supercomputer to do the same job in much cheaper and more efficient manner. Hell, I had classmates in undergrad who worked on many of the projects to develop Param and its successors.
It takes a lot more than a technological accomplishment in design to compete with the likes of Boeing and Airbus.
But its definitely a start. Something similar happened in the Pharma industry 15-20 years back. But Indian pharma companies are beginning to compete with American pharma giants in their own markets due to technologies and expertise they developed.
Public healthcare in India is lacking, but as was the original posters claim, there is still FREE public healthcare available to the common man. Hopefully, as India as a country matures and becomes richer, the quality of healthcare will improve.
However your 'facts' and arguments are completely false.
Not quite...See above.
Fastmail.fm gives you something similar. You can link any number of aliases of the type yahoo@yourname.fastmail.fm or cheaptickets@yourname.fastmail.fm to your account. Then use the filter to delete out spam..
Just taking this opportunity to list, what I think are important features lacking in many email clients (mostly Mozilla since that is what I use..)
Whenever I try to track email conversations in Mozilla, the most irritating thing is to track your own responses. By default email clients store your responses in the "Sent" messages folder. Therefore these are not usually available when you are looking at the threaded view. Trying to match up the responses to other mails in the discussion is a bloody pain.
The above problem is mostly becuase Mozilla uses uses folders to separate emails. Another example of the same problem, it often happens that in most cases I want emails from Mr.X to go into a separate folder, but when there is a discussion in which X is one of the participants, then it is terribly tedious to generate a threaded view that includes X's responses to the discussion. I think Opera mail got it right in this respect since they employ a mail db backend rather than a "folders" based backend. Therefore folders are simply "views" of the mail db generated due to a query. There is a default view that lists *all* the emails in the system and this view is ideal to track discussions (along with your own responses). This view of emails also makes it easy to find emails and discussions since it is simply a query to the db to show mails with certain characteristics.
Another missing functionality: I often discuss issues using the mail and the IM. I would love to have something that will integrate the two so that the messages are stored in a common database. That way an IM response can be linked to an email etc.
A lot of the readers have said that newsgroups and forums provide the same functionality. I agree that they do provide the functionality but there is definitely a need for such a functionlity in email clients as well since a lot of discussions are ad-hoc and private. I dont want to start a new forum or a newsgroup to hold a small discussion between 2-3 people. While I agree that what MS proposes is not path breaking, but they have at least partially identified some features that are lacking in email clients.
Maybe not! Check this presentation out from the sun website.. It demos their new Project "Looking Glass" for desktops. It looks amazing!!! Wonder when they will package it on the desktop systems. This sure looks compelling enough for the average user..
I agree. I think, as usual, Sun is rushing into this without forethought. The average buyer is not going to pay money for something that doesnt install AOL or Quicken or any of the games that the next guy on a windows PC has. I don't think it will matter if the darn thing is half the price of a Windows PC (In fact I am curious to see how they will price it. I doubt if they can sell a PC for any lower than $250-300. But then you can get a Dell for $400). Linux is a decent desktop but it has a long way to go before its UI is as smooth and comfortable as Windows.
If they are really serious about this, I think they should offer the Linux desktop only to corporate customers for now (maybe the corporate customers aren't flocking as they hoped.. maybe thats why the home PC idea). They should wait for a year or so until their developers have had enough time to smooth out the chinks and write/package really compelling apps with a stable interface. Also by then hopefully OO/StarOffice would have gotten better.
At the face of it, it looks like another one of those frantic attempts from the Sun folks to make some money. I think their home pc desktop idea will lose credibility just like how Java apps lost credibility because they packaged it out too soon.
The cable companies will simply put some sort of DRM on all the content that they stream, so that people wont be allowed to record it (using DVRs or anything..). No TiVO then, and people will have to view all the ads. BTW, does anyone know what rights does the consumer have over content that is streamed over cable? Is the user allowed to record it for personal use?