I've tried running X11 on top of OS X. It's awful. I'd rather lose business due to not testing in Safari than have to work like that all day.
Don't forget that OS X is a full-blown Unix (bash Terminal, GNU Toolkit and all) that can easyly provide all the Linux goodies you want.
I know it's officially certified as a UNIX, but it's got so much of the Apple-stuff tied into it that it never quite seems to work the same. If they did, then things like Fink wouldn't be the big projects that they are.
I think you are confusing Linux with UNIX. Fink provides source compatibility with linux based projects.
Wow, just wow. You have obviously never even used OS X Tiger. Spotlight will search within documents including PDF's and you can create these things called "smart" folders which behave like smart playlists in iTunes. Nice try troll.
BTW. I tried out Vista on my MBP for a few months before and after the official release but I decided that I needed the harddrive space for my media and opted to recombine the partitions into one OS X partition.
Unless everyone you work for and with does the same, I doubt it. There are a few things a file-translator just can't quite nail when you're importing someone else's stuff. (I know Apple's got built-in exporters to Office, but I've learned not to put 100% faith in those either.) Come on now. Office 2008 for Mac will be dropping VBA macro support so even the mac version of Office will not be compatible with Office for Windows. Your best bet for compatibility in a macro heavy environment would be Neo Office or Open Office as they support Office 2007 formats and VBA macros. Macros aside, previous versions of Office for Mac were not 100% compatible with their windows counterparts.
If iWork provide higher compatibility (outside of macros), then that should be good enough for most people.
The HD2600 is an acceptable, but not great, mid-range card. It probably won't do well with action games, at least not at the high resolutions of the iMac displays. It should be "good enough" now, but in three years it will probably be laughable.
Also, I do believe the graphics on the base model are a downgrade. At $1199 it goes from an X1600 on the previous iMac to an HD2400 now, and I think the older card had better performance. Based on your comments, I'm thinking that you have never even tried gaming on the mac. I have a 1.83Ghz (first gen) MBP with a GIG of ram and an X1600 in it and I was able to play Star wars: Empire at War (original and expansion) at 1920X1200 on my external LCD with most effects high except for anti-aliasing which was set to low under XP. Even under XP, the performance you will get is determined by more than the gfx card. Factors like the bus speed and the overall layout of the motherboard can make or break performance in a gfx intensive game. I also have been able to play Age of Empires III on the OS X side (OpenGL) at 1920X1200 resolution with only the anti-aliasing set to low and everything else set to high.
In a nut shell, your experience with that card on a cheap generic motherboard in windows via directx will not necessarily reflect the performance users on OS X will experience with the same card on OS X. I should also note that Mac gfx cards do not use a video bios but rather use the EFI equivalent mechanism for initialization and control which can result in significantly different performance over a video bios model.
If I am able to get decent performance at high resolutions on my X1600, I would think that this new card in the iMac should have no problem running the latest games.
That'd be the sound of your cognitive dissonance knocking. Google/Apple = good, patents = bad. But, Google/Apple like patents!
I wish they wouldn't run stories like this...now what are we supposed to think? Do you make a habit of using psychological terms in your everyday speech? I have yet to encounter anyone who would use the term "cognitive dissonance" in an ordinary conversation. Why do people on slashdot insist on writing like a walking thesaurus? Rather than making you appear more intelligent, use of uncommon words tends to isolate you from the the group and can make what you are trying to express more difficult to grasp for the average reader.
I would suggest using common language to express how you feel rather than throwing in psychological terms haphazardly.
Supercomputers are a series of synchronized processors working in parallel with a shared memory pool. Supercomputers have been around a lot longer than this patent. I hope this company loses their garbage patent.
"Good. You are not supposed to make phone calls while driving. Assholes that make phone calls while driving have the same diminished reaction times as someone who is intoxicated over the legal limit."
Ah, name calling, how mature. Perhaps you need reminded that the iPhone is more than a phone. What if I have it connected to my car stereo and want to skip to the next song? Are people who operate CD players/iPods also assholes? So making phone calls while driving thereby endangering not only yourself and any passengers you might have onboard but other drivers is mature? If you choose to put your convenience above the safety of others then you are an asshole in my book. I'm just calling a spade a spade. If they are distracted by fumbling with a device when they should be concentrating on the road, then yes, they are also assholes.
Ironic that we get tons of articles on Slashdot about the amazing forward looking, innovative and world changing aspects of the products...
But not a peep when it's revealed that the Apple iPhone launch is now widely considered in the industry (outside of Apple and its zealots) a failure. 160,000 units in two days on launch, when even the conservative analysts were calling for 400,000 units in two days and stating that anything else would have to be considered a failure given the hype. We have no numbers on actual sales during the last quarter. Most of us are aware that AT&T were having trouble activating phones which they did not resolve until the beginning of July. The number you are quoting is the number of successful activations, not the number of purchased iPhones. Even so, that 160,000 figure would work out to one activation every 1.08 seconds during a full 48 hour period. Wait until Apple releases the sales figures for the end of the quarter today before jumping to conclusions.
Where are the articles in Slashdot pointing this out? Where are the Apple zealots who were claiming a million units would be sold over the weekend and they would be asking for I told you sos when it happened? See above. Nobody knows how many were sold in the month of June or how many have sold since the last quarter. You don't have any numbers to prove the opposite pal.
The iPhone has no buttons... except that it does. Every screen has buttons that need to be pressed. The only differences between those "soft" buttons and real buttons are:
1) You need to look directly at the screen to press them, like while driving. Good. You are not supposed to make phone calls while driving. Assholes that make phone calls while driving have the same diminished reaction times as someone who is intoxicated over the legal limit.
2) You have to take the phone/mp3 player out of your pocket, activate the screen, and sometimes navigate menus if you want to adjust the volume, skip a song, etc. If you want to skip a song, press down on the button on the headphone cord. If you want to look like a perv playing pocket pool go right ahead and use a player with a lot of buttons. BTW. the iPhone has a physical volume control on the phone IIRC.
3) You waste power every time you need to find and press these buttons.
You waste time and power fumbling through menus on other phones and fumbling with the volume control on all phones.
I'm all for reducing clutter and making interfaces intuitive, but there's a point when ideology surpasses practicality. What's your point? I'm not seeing it.
Legally, I suppose it would be within your right to create a fork under GPL2 but ethically and morally it would be stealing since the original copyright holder (Michael R Sweet) was the main contributor and any other patch contributors assigned rights to him before they were included in the repository. You would basically be carrying out a coupe and violating the spirit of the license if not the letter of it by taking something none of you owned and creating a fork of it.
Bullshit. Taking the GPL2 codebase and forking it (still under the GPL2 since only the copyright owner can change the licensing) wouldn't be stealing at all. When CUPS was licensed under the GPL, the owner was declaring to the world that anyone is allowed to take the code and, within the rights granted by the GPL, do whatever they want with it. This includes forking.
Seriously, if the project hadn't been GPL'd in the first place, do you think it would have received such broad support from the community and gotten where it is today functionality-wise?
Fine, it's not stealing. But it's considered leeching and impolite if the original author did the majority of the work and you did nothing but you wanted to be a glory seeker and start up your own project based on the work of someone else. Just because a license gives you the option it does not necessarily make it ethical.
The initial goal of such licenses was to encourage community involvement in improving a project but ultimately, most projects end up having improvements coming not from the community but from the original author. It would be unethical for the community to all of a sudden take that work and fork it without having contributed to the original project beforehand.
You would basically be carrying out a coupe and violating the spirit of the license if not the letter of it by taking something none of you owned and creating a fork of it.
What?!? The right to modify the code and distribute modified versions is fundamental to the spirit of the licence,
I don't think you would be allowed to license it under the GPL3 without the copyright holders permission since only the copyright holder can change license terms.
That depends on whether it was licenced as "GPL 2" or "GPL 2 or later". If you decided to start a fork project but you had not ever contributed a single line of code to the project, how would you feel that you had the right to create a fork? Who do you think granted you those rights to you in the first place?
As for "GPL 2 or later" it remains to be seen whether that can be legally binding given that most authors entered into the license the good faith assumption that later versions would be compatible with GPL 2 and not change in any fundamental way. GPL 3 is not compatible with GPL 2 no matter how much the FSF claims it is. The changes they have made have altered the terms to such a degree that I would not be surprised if we see a number of lawsuits by authors who feel they have been betrayed by the FSF with the "GPL 2 or later" clause.
Legally, I suppose it would be within your right to create a fork under GPL2 but ethically and morally it would be stealing since the original copyright holder (Michael R Sweet) was the main contributor and any other patch contributors assigned rights to him before they were included in the repository. You would basically be carrying out a coupe and violating the spirit of the license if not the letter of it by taking something none of you owned and creating a fork of it.
Are you implying that forks are ethically wrong? Sounds like every fork I have ever heard of.... Forks of community projects with a lot of community contributions is one thing but take a project that basically had one developer on it would be basically leeching off the hard work of the original author of the software. Even with a community run project, a fork would would be ethical if it was initiated by a significant portion of the main contributors to the original project.
Yes Apple did the smart move from a business viewpoint, but if it should ever consider itself a foe of Linux operating systems, it could pull the rug out from modern printing support (I'm not talking about crusty old lpd) and leave a number of distros high and dry.
Are you sure? My interpretation is that once something is under GPL, it is there forever. We have CUPS. Apple may now have ANOTHER COPY of CUPS that looks the same, but under a different license.
Apple can decide to fork the project and work only on their own proprietary version of CUPS. That means that the Linux community will be solely responsible for updating/maintaining the open-source version, while Apple has the responsibility of updating/maintaining their proprietary version.
So, AFAIK, they cannot take CUPS back. They can just stop helping to maintain it. You have it backwards. The copyright holder can terminate a license anytime they wish and they are not bound by the GPL. If Apple terminated licensing of CUPS under GPL, their version would continue on. You would have the option of forking from the last GPL'ed release of the source but the copyright holder always has the original version. I think you are confusing Public domain with licenses like the GPL. Such licenses exist to grant rights to other people but they do not remove rights from the copyright holders.
it seems that apple bought CUPS and changed the licence so that people could create proprietary derivatives on MacOS legally. You don't seem to understand how copyright works. The GPLv2 does not remove rights from the copyright holder which meant Michael R Sweet could have licensed CUPS under another license in addition to GPL.
Apple bought it to ensure that it remained GPL2 as GPL3 is considered dangerous.
Legally, I suppose it would be within your right to create a fork under GPL2 but ethically and morally it would be stealing since the original copyright holder (Michael R Sweet) was the main contributor and any other patch contributors assigned rights to him before they were included in the repository. You would basically be carrying out a coupe and violating the spirit of the license if not the letter of it by taking something none of you owned and creating a fork of it. I don't think you would be allowed to license it under the GPL3 without the copyright holders permission since only the copyright holder can change license terms.
Yeah, whatever. The customer should not have to worry that his/her computer is 'compatible' with the iPhone in any way, as long as it's fairly modern and mainstream. Isn't one of Apples 'soundbites' "It just works?" So you are blaming Apple for MSFT's decision to fork their OS into two versions instead of doing like Apple has done with Leopard?
Apple's software is not the only software that does not work with the 64bit versions and it has a completely different driver models. What you should be asking is who is the moron at MSFT that thought it would be OK to break compatibility like that for drivers and third-party software.
How is it that Apple, as a small company, can develop a flexible OS that works only both 32bit and 64bit OSes while MSFT cannot seem to do the same? Maybe MSFT has become too fat in the middle perhaps?
Yet others of us are happy. I bought my PS3 as a bluray player first and potentially a console second. Now with the most recent firmware update it is also my upscaling DVD player and a wireless media extender for my mac.
Saw a few adverts for it last night, and the whole thinking about Sushi, pop up map, click on one, it dials it, looked useful.
But watch Pirates of the Carribean on it? Um, are you sure those images are the real ones? No bumps in transmission, no pauses, no sound impact when you move from cell tower to cell tower... and wouldn't it be kind of hard to see? It is not streaming the movie. The film is stored on the local hard disk.
I love my new iMac, but I have a one year old Canon laser printer/scanner/copier that won't work with it. One year old, not 10-20. Those printer/scanner/copier units don't work half the time properly in windows let alone with other operating systems. If you want to do scanning, get a scanner and if you want to do printing, get a printer. You probably thought you were being smart and saving money that way right?
Utterly pointless. I am probably in the target demography. Traveling much, technology addicted, geeky, disposable income, gadgetry enthusiast. But that thing? What for? Nope. You are not the target demographic. These are meant for business people not gadget enthusiasts.
I'm guessing administration will be a snap since there won't be a lot of variation in hardware or software to deal with. Simple, easy. The mass market doesn't really WANT a laptop... it does too much more than what they need, it takes time booting and shutting down, catches malware and then becomes unstable and unreliable. The original palm devices weren't popular because they had a lot of features and capabilities. They were popular because they suited the needs of the users pretty well.
So I won't be able to play unreal tournament on it... I won't be watching movies either... (well, maybe I will... it uses SD cards and I am pretty handy with a transcoder...) Will I want one? I'm undecided actually. I actually like using my laptop because I do a lot of the extra things that the mass market doesn't do; what a majority of the slashdot demographic does. But I think I like it. Finally, someone else who gets it. The average slashdotter is a geek and geeks often have trouble looking at things from other points of view. It is so easy to only look at the features and the upfront ticket price without looking at the big picture of TOC which does include downtime and potential data loss from viruses and what not.
I see this as a great device for the business traveller.
A 2.5-pound notebook running Linux with WiFi and Bluetooth sounds sweet...but one report says it's a closed system, which means until somebody hacks past that limitation, it's a dead-end. For about $500, I'm expecting at least a mostly-open system (like Maemo with the Nokia N800).
Of course you would not want to buy one for yourself but this could be a great thing for giving to business users out on the road from an IT administration point of view. All of those things you are complaining about make it ideal as a communication device without the common pitfalls windows laptops have. There is less to configure, less things to get screwed up and no viruses. This should make sys admins happy.
The target market for this is the business traveller, not an uber geek like you.
The point is that it is something IT departments can trust their travelling business people to have with them while on the road without fear of them bringing back a compromised laptop to the corporate network. There is also very little to lock down or configure and the end user will receive a clean interface without the usual distractions of games and similar programs.
This is the Canadian model to be distributed by Rogers. Various sources have already suggested that Canada would be getting the iPhone prior to the launch in Europe. Given the close proximity and shared standards with the US, it is more likely that these are bound for Canada. After the device's approval by the FCC, approval by the CRTC would be a mere formality especially with a deal of exclusivity with Canada's largest carrier (Rogers).
Trying to launch the iPhone in Europe would require considerably more legal and regulatory paperwork.
Not one of them seems to carry it. What's that all about? Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the Zune and the Zune marketplace only launched in the US. Until MSFT launches it in Canada, you will not see them carrying it. As a mac and iPod owner, living I Canada, I could care less but I suppose there are some fans of MSFT that would like to buy one.
but there is very little "demasculinized" in people that are bald, especially those that sahve their heads. If anything crop-2 and below appear in general more agressive Which is why I decided to leave athletics out of my post. Instead, placing an ambiguous reference readers here would appreciate, and not one laced with testosterone-filled undertones that may detract from my intended visual. Who mentioned athletics? What about hardened criminals and gangsters with shaved heads? What about the soliders and police officers?
I started shaving my head when I started getting thin on the top and some of the ladies really like it. I'd rather shave than try to hide the thinning hair with a nasty comb over or a wig. A side effect of it all is that I'm never hassled on the street where ever I go because I look more like a thug or cop this way.
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Have you considered OS X with X11 and KDE?
I've tried running X11 on top of OS X. It's awful. I'd rather lose business due to not testing in Safari than have to work like that all day.
Don't forget that OS X is a full-blown Unix (bash Terminal, GNU Toolkit and all) that can easyly provide all the Linux goodies you want.
I know it's officially certified as a UNIX, but it's got so much of the Apple-stuff tied into it that it never quite seems to work the same. If they did, then things like Fink wouldn't be the big projects that they are.
I think you are confusing Linux with UNIX. Fink provides source compatibility with linux based projects.BTW. I tried out Vista on my MBP for a few months before and after the official release but I decided that I needed the harddrive space for my media and opted to recombine the partitions into one OS X partition.
Unless everyone you work for and with does the same, I doubt it. There are a few things a file-translator just can't quite nail when you're importing someone else's stuff. (I know Apple's got built-in exporters to Office, but I've learned not to put 100% faith in those either.) Come on now. Office 2008 for Mac will be dropping VBA macro support so even the mac version of Office will not be compatible with Office for Windows. Your best bet for compatibility in a macro heavy environment would be Neo Office or Open Office as they support Office 2007 formats and VBA macros. Macros aside, previous versions of Office for Mac were not 100% compatible with their windows counterparts.
If iWork provide higher compatibility (outside of macros), then that should be good enough for most people.
Also, I do believe the graphics on the base model are a downgrade. At $1199 it goes from an X1600 on the previous iMac to an HD2400 now, and I think the older card had better performance. Based on your comments, I'm thinking that you have never even tried gaming on the mac. I have a 1.83Ghz (first gen) MBP with a GIG of ram and an X1600 in it and I was able to play Star wars: Empire at War (original and expansion) at 1920X1200 on my external LCD with most effects high except for anti-aliasing which was set to low under XP. Even under XP, the performance you will get is determined by more than the gfx card. Factors like the bus speed and the overall layout of the motherboard can make or break performance in a gfx intensive game. I also have been able to play Age of Empires III on the OS X side (OpenGL) at 1920X1200 resolution with only the anti-aliasing set to low and everything else set to high.
In a nut shell, your experience with that card on a cheap generic motherboard in windows via directx will not necessarily reflect the performance users on OS X will experience with the same card on OS X. I should also note that Mac gfx cards do not use a video bios but rather use the EFI equivalent mechanism for initialization and control which can result in significantly different performance over a video bios model.
If I am able to get decent performance at high resolutions on my X1600, I would think that this new card in the iMac should have no problem running the latest games.
I wish they wouldn't run stories like this...now what are we supposed to think? Do you make a habit of using psychological terms in your everyday speech? I have yet to encounter anyone who would use the term "cognitive dissonance" in an ordinary conversation. Why do people on slashdot insist on writing like a walking thesaurus? Rather than making you appear more intelligent, use of uncommon words tends to isolate you from the the group and can make what you are trying to express more difficult to grasp for the average reader.
I would suggest using common language to express how you feel rather than throwing in psychological terms haphazardly.
Supercomputers are a series of synchronized processors working in parallel with a shared memory pool. Supercomputers have been around a lot longer than this patent. I hope this company loses their garbage patent.
Ah, name calling, how mature. Perhaps you need reminded that the iPhone is more than a phone. What if I have it connected to my car stereo and want to skip to the next song? Are people who operate CD players/iPods also assholes?
So making phone calls while driving thereby endangering not only yourself and any passengers you might have onboard but other drivers is mature? If you choose to put your convenience above the safety of others then you are an asshole in my book. I'm just calling a spade a spade. If they are distracted by fumbling with a device when they should be concentrating on the road, then yes, they are also assholes.
But not a peep when it's revealed that the Apple iPhone launch is now widely considered in the industry (outside of Apple and its zealots) a failure. 160,000 units in two days on launch, when even the conservative analysts were calling for 400,000 units in two days and stating that anything else would have to be considered a failure given the hype.
We have no numbers on actual sales during the last quarter. Most of us are aware that AT&T were having trouble activating phones which they did not resolve until the beginning of July. The number you are quoting is the number of successful activations, not the number of purchased iPhones. Even so, that 160,000 figure would work out to one activation every 1.08 seconds during a full 48 hour period. Wait until Apple releases the sales figures for the end of the quarter today before jumping to conclusions. Where are the articles in Slashdot pointing this out? Where are the Apple zealots who were claiming a million units would be sold over the weekend and they would be asking for I told you sos when it happened? See above. Nobody knows how many were sold in the month of June or how many have sold since the last quarter. You don't have any numbers to prove the opposite pal.
1) You need to look directly at the screen to press them, like while driving.
Good. You are not supposed to make phone calls while driving. Assholes that make phone calls while driving have the same diminished reaction times as someone who is intoxicated over the legal limit. 2) You have to take the phone/mp3 player out of your pocket, activate the screen, and sometimes navigate menus if you want to adjust the volume, skip a song, etc.
If you want to skip a song, press down on the button on the headphone cord. If you want to look like a perv playing pocket pool go right ahead and use a player with a lot of buttons. BTW. the iPhone has a physical volume control on the phone IIRC. 3) You waste power every time you need to find and press these buttons.
You waste time and power fumbling through menus on other phones and fumbling with the volume control on all phones. I'm all for reducing clutter and making interfaces intuitive, but there's a point when ideology surpasses practicality. What's your point? I'm not seeing it.
Bullshit. Taking the GPL2 codebase and forking it (still under the GPL2 since only the copyright owner can change the licensing) wouldn't be stealing at all. When CUPS was licensed under the GPL, the owner was declaring to the world that anyone is allowed to take the code and, within the rights granted by the GPL, do whatever they want with it. This includes forking.
Seriously, if the project hadn't been GPL'd in the first place, do you think it would have received such broad support from the community and gotten where it is today functionality-wise?
Fine, it's not stealing. But it's considered leeching and impolite if the original author did the majority of the work and you did nothing but you wanted to be a glory seeker and start up your own project based on the work of someone else. Just because a license gives you the option it does not necessarily make it ethical.
The initial goal of such licenses was to encourage community involvement in improving a project but ultimately, most projects end up having improvements coming not from the community but from the original author. It would be unethical for the community to all of a sudden take that work and fork it without having contributed to the original project beforehand.
What?!? The right to modify the code and distribute modified versions is fundamental to the spirit of the licence,
That depends on whether it was licenced as "GPL 2" or "GPL 2 or later". If you decided to start a fork project but you had not ever contributed a single line of code to the project, how would you feel that you had the right to create a fork? Who do you think granted you those rights to you in the first place?
As for "GPL 2 or later" it remains to be seen whether that can be legally binding given that most authors entered into the license the good faith assumption that later versions would be compatible with GPL 2 and not change in any fundamental way. GPL 3 is not compatible with GPL 2 no matter how much the FSF claims it is. The changes they have made have altered the terms to such a degree that I would not be surprised if we see a number of lawsuits by authors who feel they have been betrayed by the FSF with the "GPL 2 or later" clause.
Are you implying that forks are ethically wrong? Sounds like every fork I have ever heard of.... Forks of community projects with a lot of community contributions is one thing but take a project that basically had one developer on it would be basically leeching off the hard work of the original author of the software. Even with a community run project, a fork would would be ethical if it was initiated by a significant portion of the main contributors to the original project.
Apple can decide to fork the project and work only on their own proprietary version of CUPS. That means that the Linux community will be solely responsible for updating/maintaining the open-source version, while Apple has the responsibility of updating/maintaining their proprietary version.
So, AFAIK, they cannot take CUPS back. They can just stop helping to maintain it. You have it backwards. The copyright holder can terminate a license anytime they wish and they are not bound by the GPL. If Apple terminated licensing of CUPS under GPL, their version would continue on. You would have the option of forking from the last GPL'ed release of the source but the copyright holder always has the original version. I think you are confusing Public domain with licenses like the GPL. Such licenses exist to grant rights to other people but they do not remove rights from the copyright holders.
Apple bought it to ensure that it remained GPL2 as GPL3 is considered dangerous.
Legally, I suppose it would be within your right to create a fork under GPL2 but ethically and morally it would be stealing since the original copyright holder (Michael R Sweet) was the main contributor and any other patch contributors assigned rights to him before they were included in the repository. You would basically be carrying out a coupe and violating the spirit of the license if not the letter of it by taking something none of you owned and creating a fork of it. I don't think you would be allowed to license it under the GPL3 without the copyright holders permission since only the copyright holder can change license terms.
Apple's software is not the only software that does not work with the 64bit versions and it has a completely different driver models. What you should be asking is who is the moron at MSFT that thought it would be OK to break compatibility like that for drivers and third-party software.
How is it that Apple, as a small company, can develop a flexible OS that works only both 32bit and 64bit OSes while MSFT cannot seem to do the same? Maybe MSFT has become too fat in the middle perhaps?
Yet others of us are happy. I bought my PS3 as a bluray player first and potentially a console second. Now with the most recent firmware update it is also my upscaling DVD player and a wireless media extender for my mac.
But watch Pirates of the Carribean on it? Um, are you sure those images are the real ones? No bumps in transmission, no pauses, no sound impact when you move from cell tower to cell tower
It is not streaming the movie. The film is stored on the local hard disk.
So I won't be able to play unreal tournament on it... I won't be watching movies either... (well, maybe I will... it uses SD cards and I am pretty handy with a transcoder...) Will I want one? I'm undecided actually. I actually like using my laptop because I do a lot of the extra things that the mass market doesn't do; what a majority of the slashdot demographic does. But I think I like it.
Finally, someone else who gets it. The average slashdotter is a geek and geeks often have trouble looking at things from other points of view. It is so easy to only look at the features and the upfront ticket price without looking at the big picture of TOC which does include downtime and potential data loss from viruses and what not.
I see this as a great device for the business traveller.
A 2.5-pound notebook running Linux with WiFi and Bluetooth sounds sweet...but one report says it's a closed system, which means until somebody hacks past that limitation, it's a dead-end. For about $500, I'm expecting at least a mostly-open system (like Maemo with the Nokia N800).
Of course you would not want to buy one for yourself but this could be a great thing for giving to business users out on the road from an IT administration point of view. All of those things you are complaining about make it ideal as a communication device without the common pitfalls windows laptops have. There is less to configure, less things to get screwed up and no viruses. This should make sys admins happy.The target market for this is the business traveller, not an uber geek like you.
The point is that it is something IT departments can trust their travelling business people to have with them while on the road without fear of them bringing back a compromised laptop to the corporate network. There is also very little to lock down or configure and the end user will receive a clean interface without the usual distractions of games and similar programs.
Trying to launch the iPhone in Europe would require considerably more legal and regulatory paperwork.
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Not one of them seems to carry it. What's that all about? Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the Zune and the Zune marketplace only launched in the US. Until MSFT launches it in Canada, you will not see them carrying it. As a mac and iPod owner, living I Canada, I could care less but I suppose there are some fans of MSFT that would like to buy one.
I started shaving my head when I started getting thin on the top and some of the ladies really like it. I'd rather shave than try to hide the thinning hair with a nasty comb over or a wig. A side effect of it all is that I'm never hassled on the street where ever I go because I look more like a thug or cop this way.