I'm pretty skeptical that human beings form useful opinions about anything, not just iPads:)
IMHO, 90% of what one believes is their honest, independent opinion of X is really just the opinion you adopted so that you could maintain your peer relations. For something like an iPad, which almost no one has actually seen with their own eyes, and over which no one's opinion is of any consequence and nothing is really at stake either way, the proportion of peer-correlation of ones opinion over genuine independent judgement tends to 100%.
It's like religion or politics: since there is no verifiably correct position, and especially since your opinion has almost zero effect on the outcome, you'll tend to choose your position on the basis of friends it makes you, and the fact that so little is at stake will make you adhere to this opinion all the stronger.
Comparing features side-by-side, a swiss army knife has a better feature/price ratio over a K-BAR, but I know which one I'd rather have in a barfight;)
Not being into this sort of thing, they probably didn't have an opinion one way or the other, and either didn't want to get into an argument with you, or were looking for cues from someone knowledgeable whom they knew, in order to decide what their opinion should be.
I think we can all agree that "fanboys" are the single most destructive force in the arts, wether they are gamers or the Paris Jockey Club ca. 1860, and that the mentality of "giving people what they want" is sortof where creativity goes to die. YMMV.
Gary Kildall was scared off by IBM's nondisclosure agreement and reputation.
That makes no sense. Why would someone like Gary Kildall be scared off of a deal that a nobody like Bill Gates took in a heartbeat? It's been made pretty clear in the historical record at this point that Bill actually understood the complete dimension and scope of the deal they were getting, the money involved and how IBM was clueless and basically giving them the farm for free.
Why didn't Gary want the farm? He didn't realize it was there. It doesn't happen very often but this is one of those situations where a clever person had a "vision," a way of seeing the world that's completely novel, and had BillG and Paul Allen had not seen the possibilities, they'd probably be millionaires after selling their middlingly-successful compiler/DOS company to Borland in the mid-80s.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Bill Gates "fan" or anything; I've never in my life owned a Windows PC, or even really used one for work, but the man deserves his due. The wrongheaded idea, held by a lot of misinformed people, that Gates was some kind of trust-fund baby who was handed the keys to the kingdom and merely didn't have to fuck up, is a fallacy.
If there's nothing at all innovative about that product set, then why? Why would they do that?
Interoperability. They don't want an SMB server, they just want to be able to open their files over the network. Think of it this way: the SMB spec is essentially a kind of DRM on file sharing. Same thing with OpenOffice and the.doc format -- OpenOffice doesn't implement the.doc format for people to actually use, since it's a terrible, underdocumented and messy standard, but it is provided so people can get in and out of OO into the hegemon MS Word.
Being the only glazier in town doesn't mean you can go around breaking windows and calling it "innovation."
It seems strange to me that people keep repeating this mantra that Microsoft never innovates, when all around us we see open source projects struggling to duplicate stuff that Microsoft has already done. If Windows Networking isn't innovative, why write Samba?
If GNU iconv "struggles" to properly support EBCDIC, that doesn't necessarily imply that EBCDIC is "innovative." I'm sure Tridge would rather have spent his time doing a lot of other things than write samba, but people with Linux machines wanted to interoperate with Windows servers. It really wasn't about providing the features SMB does, nobody on Linux actually RUNS an SMB server unless they have to.
A lot of people hold the folk belief that the free market rewards original thinking and individuality, and that if you create the better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door, and that the things that benefit the most of us will naturally be the most profitable and successful. (This folk wisdom is particularly pervasive in the US.)
The idea that the most profitable and successful people just copy others and leverage their monopoly power/superior marketing to make money, and that the real profits in the economy are to be found with the Middle-Men, is actually very challenging to many people, particularly when they've been inculcated with dogmas about free enterprise and the self-interest of the one guiding the welfare of the whole.
(Gary Kildall?), which person didn't show up. Surfing or something. Wasn't interested in meeting the suits.
Gary Kildall, the writer of the CP/M operating system, wanted to go flying that morning. QDOS was written at a shop called "Seattle Computer Products" by a worthy named Tim Patterson.
Notice how every one of these stories involves someone at the very zenith of their career blowing-off a meeting with the punk Bill Gates. This general lackadaisy strongly hints at just how insignificant people though PCs were going to be at the time, and how BillG primarily deserves credit for being the only person in the room at the time who didn't think the Personal Computer, as a concept, wasn't a total joke. Even the people who wrote CP/M and QDOS thought PCs were a joke, and that their creations were just weird redheaded stepchildren of their minicomputer OSs. Only Gates and Jobs thought personal computing would go anywhere, and while Jobs was and remains in love with the idea of PC as a Personal Information Appliance, and BillG was the only one that thought you could make a huge business out of selling the software, completely ignoring hardware manufacturing.
Again, you have to compare like to like. An AppleTV replaces a cable subscription. A console cannot. A console is always going to be half the package, you still have to actually have a way of getting the content into the house, and getting money from the customer.
You keep wanting to make the AppleTV into one of these hobbyist gizmos that people are using to play their stolen movies and ripped DVDs, but it's specifically designed to not do that; it is, exactly like a cable box, simply a storefront that provides the same content but with a different payment model. Why are the cable boxes winning and the AppleTV losing?
The iPod supports MP3 and allows consumers to directly use their content from external sources (ogg notwithstanding).
There is a quicktime component for ogg, but this is undermining your point, since iPods can't really play a wide span of media, iTunes has to keep transcoded versions of anything that ain't Linear PCM, MP3, AAC, or Apple Lossless. Cable doesn't let you the user control any of this, it just gives you a button to press and shows you the show.
Perhaps Apple's ala-carte plan would have been more successful if they had coupled it with the ideal that gave us Rip. Mix. Burn.
No vendor provides this -- if this isn't how cable or consoles are winning it can't be how the AppleTV is losing.
Ripping CSS DVDs is forbidden in the United States, and is illegal -period- in the UK and most of the rest of the first world. That doesn't keep you or I form doing it, practically speaking, but it definitely keeps Apple, Sony and Microsoft from putting it on the box. Which brings me back to my original point that the only way a console could possibly compete with cable is by leveraging media piracy to obtain content. Consoles just don't have good storefronts, and where they do have programming, they offer no real advantage over the iTunes store.
I was using the term "open" in contrast with "fucking locked down" as per the gp, not open in a FSF sense.
I'm not sure you've even established your point to that standard. Is a PS3 less "fucking locked down" than an AppleTV, or just "fucking locked down" in a different sort of way? At least when you put an iTunes movie on an AppleTV, you can at least play it in HD, without having to worry about network buffering -- there's your tradeoff.
Either way, the Mac mini and console-modding solutions are pretty thin gruel to argue on success or failure of an entire strategy, considering how little penetration they've achieved compared to Plain Old Satellite/Cable/DVR. I don't think any of these has shown a true "way out" of the cable block-channel-subscription model. Everything out there in the Internet Television world is still pretty half-assed compared to cable, and when we try to assign the reason for something like AppleTV failing, you have to show why people didn't buy it instead of X, and if X in 90% of cases is cable TV, then arguing the comparative merits of PS3 modding is sorta unresponsive.
The AppleTV was a test device to see if people were willing to do what people on slashdot have been begging to do, namely, "let me pay for only the shows I want!" It's a cable-killer: in it's primary use case, it makes cable redundant. Lo and behold, this prospect didn't actually appeal to alot of people. Which is interesting, and says a lot about how much "freedom" people are actually willing to pay for.
Apple's attempts to restructure their sales in a more all-you-can-eat way, most recently reported before Xmas, have failed, primarily because many of the largest content creators, Time-Warner, Disney and Sony, have huge interests in cable distribution. This is remarkably similar to how the plain film industry was organized up to the early 1950s, and studios back then would essentially pull the same crap that cable providers pull on their customers -- they'd force theater owners to book two bad films in order to be able to book one good one, they'd use formula deals to create artificial scarcity, etc. This was finally resolved by the SCOTUS forcing the studios to divest their theaters on anti-trust grounds... I wonder what the chances of that happening again are:)
Sure, that's one reason -- but another is that AppleTV can't do what a PS3 or 360 can do (among other set-top boxes and blueray players).
I don't follow. You're comparing an AppleTV (a media appliance thingy that buys content off iTunes and plays Quicktimes) to two consoles (which play videogames, several movie formats of varying openness, and optionally BluRays, don't have media buying options, thus their movie-playing functionality just exists to facilitate bittorrent piracy).
Hulu works on PS3? I thought there was some "artificial restriction" on that; same thing for XBox, actually. Neflix has been admirable in their support of these consoles, but on the other hand they are actually collecting MONEY from their subscribers, and they didn't exactly open-source their player, nor did Xbox or Sony open-source their interfaces. Netflix support on consoles is a closed, opaque business decision between small numbers of huge media players.
People accept all kinds of boneheaded restrictions just fine as long as you sell them on the primary benefits: lets you watch the stuff you wanna watch for good price. People prefer paying for Netflix over AppleTV, clearly, but attributing this to "openness," when all of your counterexamples involve proprietary videogame consoles, proprietary or patented/licenesed media formats, proprietary client software, and streaming non-saveable movies, is a bit rich.
She works in a non-tech environment, so a tablet with a simplified OS is probably the perfect thing for most of them.
If I told my boss that I had invented a new computer that was in the tablet form-factor, had good Office-type apps, he might buy one for himself. If I told him that, as an added feature, it made using AIM and streaming media over the internet a total hassle while doing work, he'd probably buy 20:)
This seems like a highly speculative conclusion, given that MythTV hasn't exactly taken over my TV credenza just yet. Are you sure AppleTV hasn't failed on account of the fact that people prefer to pay for cable/ DVR over paying for shows episode-by-episode? I think the AppleTV model just doesn't match up with how people want to pay for content at the moment. There's a lot more perceived value in being able to record all-you-can-eat off of 300 channels onto a 30-hour DVR over actually paying for episodes.
What reasonable excuse is there for Apple to have any control over what people do with their iPhones?
Apple openly touts that it will babysit your phone, will curate the apps available for it, that it provides this as a service to its owners, and that this is a positive selling point for the device?
People have been buying subsidized phones for years, and this proved the principle that people are willing to reqlinquish control over something they owned in exchange for something else of value: lock to our network, we give you money to buy the handset -- the handset is still "yours," but you give up some control over it. Apple's offer is similar: give up some control, and we give you a better experience.
One man's big brother is another man's "Find my iPhone," one man's walled garden is another man's "Parental Controls", one man's sandboxed single-tasking is another man's anti-spyware. These are Apple's solutions to these problems; they are extreme ones, no one disputes that, but I don't think there is any doubt at this point that people are really receptive to these solutions, even given the drawbacks.
You can either see the people accepting these conditions as making a decision, or as ignorant morans. Up to you.
A major problem, though, is that 5 years from now the book will likely be around $15 retail, and the ebook will probably still be $15
It's debatable that prices will hold like that, considering the environment is begining to get more competitive, and 5 years from now the information and enjoyment of the book would probably be worth $20, the way inflation is going.
There isn't some moral law or something that says books must decline in sale price, and absent that process, market distortion must be occuring. There is no problem here. The information in the book is worth money to me, the producer's marginal cost is irrelevant in my value calculation.
It takes a lot less energy to beam me a book than it does to cut down a tree, and to burn the gas to transport and process it, and two plant "two trees in its place," and wait the 30 years or so for that stand of trees to turn over. For a book I might read twice, what's the point? The only reason people own large numbers of books is as decoration, to signal to visitors of their home that they're well-read and cultured. People don't actually use books over long spans of time (with some obvious and very limited exceptions).
The book is $35 retail, so I saved $20 and a tree. As far as I'm concerned the information in the book and the enjoyment of reading is well worth the expense. Books shouldn't be gratis, and while it's a bit of a pill that it's DRMd, I was really only going to read the thing ONCE...
Thats the thing about books, and to a greater extent TV and movies: you generally only consume them a couple times. DRM is a pretty tolerable model for such media. Music is different, but then again people don't seem to buy music at ALL any more, unless they're going for something specific: they usually just start up Pandora, which is an example of an even LESS libre model than DRMd media.
I [...] happily read what I want from/b/torrent in any way and manner I choose.
Free-rider. Maybe if everybody read books like you, we wouldn't have this problem of authors getting paid for writing, and if I didn't like any of the books out there, I could just take an existing bad one and "fork it" or something.
Just add monks, and the demolition of the post-feudal synthesis will be complete.
What are you talking about? I just bought the Vieira biography of Irving Thalberg (Univ of California Press) for $15.99. There is no hard-and-fast one-price rule on Amazon's Kindle store.
On the other hand, they have managed to shoot themselves in the foot with pinpoint accuracy.
You speak as if MacMillan pulled their offerings from the Kindle store. They didn't. Amazon delisted them from their store because (according to Amazon) Macmillan demanded higher prices.
Wether or not their books are entitled to sell at those higher prices is sortof an academic question-- I bought a new book on my Kindle last night for $15, so it's not like it's unheardof or anything. Since Amazon's explanation of their pricing issue makes no sense, the only reason for them delisting the books that remains is that Amazon is trying strongarm people that try to sell thru the iBook store. You're seeing Amazon get pissed because Macmillan DARES try to sell it's books thru another ebook store that doesn't suck.
So no, bascally. An N900 is eency small compared to this MSI tablet or the iPad. And I was sorta looking for the optimized UI. What's the point otherwise? Might as well get a netbook and gain performance at the expense of form factor.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty skeptical that human beings form useful opinions about anything, not just iPads :)
IMHO, 90% of what one believes is their honest, independent opinion of X is really just the opinion you adopted so that you could maintain your peer relations. For something like an iPad, which almost no one has actually seen with their own eyes, and over which no one's opinion is of any consequence and nothing is really at stake either way, the proportion of peer-correlation of ones opinion over genuine independent judgement tends to 100%.
It's like religion or politics: since there is no verifiably correct position, and especially since your opinion has almost zero effect on the outcome, you'll tend to choose your position on the basis of friends it makes you, and the fact that so little is at stake will make you adhere to this opinion all the stronger.
Comparing features side-by-side, a swiss army knife has a better feature/price ratio over a K-BAR, but I know which one I'd rather have in a barfight ;)
Not being into this sort of thing, they probably didn't have an opinion one way or the other, and either didn't want to get into an argument with you, or were looking for cues from someone knowledgeable whom they knew, in order to decide what their opinion should be.
If the org is a Mac shop then they're probably using Leopard Server for their groupware.
I think we can all agree that "fanboys" are the single most destructive force in the arts, wether they are gamers or the Paris Jockey Club ca. 1860, and that the mentality of "giving people what they want" is sortof where creativity goes to die. YMMV.
To be honest I never read your comment :)
That makes no sense. Why would someone like Gary Kildall be scared off of a deal that a nobody like Bill Gates took in a heartbeat? It's been made pretty clear in the historical record at this point that Bill actually understood the complete dimension and scope of the deal they were getting, the money involved and how IBM was clueless and basically giving them the farm for free.
Why didn't Gary want the farm? He didn't realize it was there. It doesn't happen very often but this is one of those situations where a clever person had a "vision," a way of seeing the world that's completely novel, and had BillG and Paul Allen had not seen the possibilities, they'd probably be millionaires after selling their middlingly-successful compiler/DOS company to Borland in the mid-80s.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Bill Gates "fan" or anything; I've never in my life owned a Windows PC, or even really used one for work, but the man deserves his due. The wrongheaded idea, held by a lot of misinformed people, that Gates was some kind of trust-fund baby who was handed the keys to the kingdom and merely didn't have to fuck up, is a fallacy.
Interoperability. They don't want an SMB server, they just want to be able to open their files over the network. Think of it this way: the SMB spec is essentially a kind of DRM on file sharing. Same thing with OpenOffice and the .doc format -- OpenOffice doesn't implement the .doc format for people to actually use, since it's a terrible, underdocumented and messy standard, but it is provided so people can get in and out of OO into the hegemon MS Word.
Being the only glazier in town doesn't mean you can go around breaking windows and calling it "innovation."
If GNU iconv "struggles" to properly support EBCDIC, that doesn't necessarily imply that EBCDIC is "innovative." I'm sure Tridge would rather have spent his time doing a lot of other things than write samba, but people with Linux machines wanted to interoperate with Windows servers. It really wasn't about providing the features SMB does, nobody on Linux actually RUNS an SMB server unless they have to.
A lot of people hold the folk belief that the free market rewards original thinking and individuality, and that if you create the better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door, and that the things that benefit the most of us will naturally be the most profitable and successful. (This folk wisdom is particularly pervasive in the US.)
The idea that the most profitable and successful people just copy others and leverage their monopoly power/superior marketing to make money, and that the real profits in the economy are to be found with the Middle-Men, is actually very challenging to many people, particularly when they've been inculcated with dogmas about free enterprise and the self-interest of the one guiding the welfare of the whole.
Gary Kildall, the writer of the CP/M operating system, wanted to go flying that morning. QDOS was written at a shop called "Seattle Computer Products" by a worthy named Tim Patterson.
Notice how every one of these stories involves someone at the very zenith of their career blowing-off a meeting with the punk Bill Gates. This general lackadaisy strongly hints at just how insignificant people though PCs were going to be at the time, and how BillG primarily deserves credit for being the only person in the room at the time who didn't think the Personal Computer, as a concept, wasn't a total joke. Even the people who wrote CP/M and QDOS thought PCs were a joke, and that their creations were just weird redheaded stepchildren of their minicomputer OSs. Only Gates and Jobs thought personal computing would go anywhere, and while Jobs was and remains in love with the idea of PC as a Personal Information Appliance, and BillG was the only one that thought you could make a huge business out of selling the software, completely ignoring hardware manufacturing.
"Dune" is probably the greatest 20th-century science fiction novel. It is, for better or worse, unfilmable.
Again, you have to compare like to like. An AppleTV replaces a cable subscription. A console cannot. A console is always going to be half the package, you still have to actually have a way of getting the content into the house, and getting money from the customer.
You keep wanting to make the AppleTV into one of these hobbyist gizmos that people are using to play their stolen movies and ripped DVDs, but it's specifically designed to not do that; it is, exactly like a cable box, simply a storefront that provides the same content but with a different payment model. Why are the cable boxes winning and the AppleTV losing?
There is a quicktime component for ogg, but this is undermining your point, since iPods can't really play a wide span of media, iTunes has to keep transcoded versions of anything that ain't Linear PCM, MP3, AAC, or Apple Lossless. Cable doesn't let you the user control any of this, it just gives you a button to press and shows you the show.
No vendor provides this -- if this isn't how cable or consoles are winning it can't be how the AppleTV is losing.
Ripping CSS DVDs is forbidden in the United States, and is illegal -period- in the UK and most of the rest of the first world. That doesn't keep you or I form doing it, practically speaking, but it definitely keeps Apple, Sony and Microsoft from putting it on the box. Which brings me back to my original point that the only way a console could possibly compete with cable is by leveraging media piracy to obtain content. Consoles just don't have good storefronts, and where they do have programming, they offer no real advantage over the iTunes store.
I'm not sure you've even established your point to that standard. Is a PS3 less "fucking locked down" than an AppleTV, or just "fucking locked down" in a different sort of way? At least when you put an iTunes movie on an AppleTV, you can at least play it in HD, without having to worry about network buffering -- there's your tradeoff.
Either way, the Mac mini and console-modding solutions are pretty thin gruel to argue on success or failure of an entire strategy, considering how little penetration they've achieved compared to Plain Old Satellite/Cable/DVR. I don't think any of these has shown a true "way out" of the cable block-channel-subscription model. Everything out there in the Internet Television world is still pretty half-assed compared to cable, and when we try to assign the reason for something like AppleTV failing, you have to show why people didn't buy it instead of X, and if X in 90% of cases is cable TV, then arguing the comparative merits of PS3 modding is sorta unresponsive.
The AppleTV was a test device to see if people were willing to do what people on slashdot have been begging to do, namely, "let me pay for only the shows I want!" It's a cable-killer: in it's primary use case, it makes cable redundant. Lo and behold, this prospect didn't actually appeal to alot of people. Which is interesting, and says a lot about how much "freedom" people are actually willing to pay for.
Apple's attempts to restructure their sales in a more all-you-can-eat way, most recently reported before Xmas, have failed, primarily because many of the largest content creators, Time-Warner, Disney and Sony, have huge interests in cable distribution. This is remarkably similar to how the plain film industry was organized up to the early 1950s, and studios back then would essentially pull the same crap that cable providers pull on their customers -- they'd force theater owners to book two bad films in order to be able to book one good one, they'd use formula deals to create artificial scarcity, etc. This was finally resolved by the SCOTUS forcing the studios to divest their theaters on anti-trust grounds... I wonder what the chances of that happening again are :)
I don't follow. You're comparing an AppleTV (a media appliance thingy that buys content off iTunes and plays Quicktimes) to two consoles (which play videogames, several movie formats of varying openness, and optionally BluRays, don't have media buying options, thus their movie-playing functionality just exists to facilitate bittorrent piracy).
Hulu works on PS3? I thought there was some "artificial restriction" on that; same thing for XBox, actually. Neflix has been admirable in their support of these consoles, but on the other hand they are actually collecting MONEY from their subscribers, and they didn't exactly open-source their player, nor did Xbox or Sony open-source their interfaces. Netflix support on consoles is a closed, opaque business decision between small numbers of huge media players.
People accept all kinds of boneheaded restrictions just fine as long as you sell them on the primary benefits: lets you watch the stuff you wanna watch for good price. People prefer paying for Netflix over AppleTV, clearly, but attributing this to "openness," when all of your counterexamples involve proprietary videogame consoles, proprietary or patented/licenesed media formats, proprietary client software, and streaming non-saveable movies, is a bit rich.
If I told my boss that I had invented a new computer that was in the tablet form-factor, had good Office-type apps, he might buy one for himself. If I told him that, as an added feature, it made using AIM and streaming media over the internet a total hassle while doing work, he'd probably buy 20 :)
This seems like a highly speculative conclusion, given that MythTV hasn't exactly taken over my TV credenza just yet. Are you sure AppleTV hasn't failed on account of the fact that people prefer to pay for cable/ DVR over paying for shows episode-by-episode? I think the AppleTV model just doesn't match up with how people want to pay for content at the moment. There's a lot more perceived value in being able to record all-you-can-eat off of 300 channels onto a 30-hour DVR over actually paying for episodes.
Apple openly touts that it will babysit your phone, will curate the apps available for it, that it provides this as a service to its owners, and that this is a positive selling point for the device?
People have been buying subsidized phones for years, and this proved the principle that people are willing to reqlinquish control over something they owned in exchange for something else of value: lock to our network, we give you money to buy the handset -- the handset is still "yours," but you give up some control over it. Apple's offer is similar: give up some control, and we give you a better experience.
One man's big brother is another man's "Find my iPhone," one man's walled garden is another man's "Parental Controls", one man's sandboxed single-tasking is another man's anti-spyware. These are Apple's solutions to these problems; they are extreme ones, no one disputes that, but I don't think there is any doubt at this point that people are really receptive to these solutions, even given the drawbacks.
You can either see the people accepting these conditions as making a decision, or as ignorant morans. Up to you.
It's debatable that prices will hold like that, considering the environment is begining to get more competitive, and 5 years from now the information and enjoyment of the book would probably be worth $20, the way inflation is going.
There isn't some moral law or something that says books must decline in sale price, and absent that process, market distortion must be occuring. There is no problem here. The information in the book is worth money to me, the producer's marginal cost is irrelevant in my value calculation.
It takes a lot less energy to beam me a book than it does to cut down a tree, and to burn the gas to transport and process it, and two plant "two trees in its place," and wait the 30 years or so for that stand of trees to turn over. For a book I might read twice, what's the point? The only reason people own large numbers of books is as decoration, to signal to visitors of their home that they're well-read and cultured. People don't actually use books over long spans of time (with some obvious and very limited exceptions).
The book is $35 retail, so I saved $20 and a tree. As far as I'm concerned the information in the book and the enjoyment of reading is well worth the expense. Books shouldn't be gratis, and while it's a bit of a pill that it's DRMd, I was really only going to read the thing ONCE...
Thats the thing about books, and to a greater extent TV and movies: you generally only consume them a couple times. DRM is a pretty tolerable model for such media. Music is different, but then again people don't seem to buy music at ALL any more, unless they're going for something specific: they usually just start up Pandora, which is an example of an even LESS libre model than DRMd media.
Free-rider. Maybe if everybody read books like you, we wouldn't have this problem of authors getting paid for writing, and if I didn't like any of the books out there, I could just take an existing bad one and "fork it" or something.
Just add monks, and the demolition of the post-feudal synthesis will be complete.
What are you talking about? I just bought the Vieira biography of Irving Thalberg (Univ of California Press) for $15.99. There is no hard-and-fast one-price rule on Amazon's Kindle store.
You speak as if MacMillan pulled their offerings from the Kindle store. They didn't. Amazon delisted them from their store because (according to Amazon) Macmillan demanded higher prices.
Wether or not their books are entitled to sell at those higher prices is sortof an academic question-- I bought a new book on my Kindle last night for $15, so it's not like it's unheardof or anything. Since Amazon's explanation of their pricing issue makes no sense, the only reason for them delisting the books that remains is that Amazon is trying strongarm people that try to sell thru the iBook store. You're seeing Amazon get pissed because Macmillan DARES try to sell it's books thru another ebook store that doesn't suck.
I detest it, filthy creature. Then again it has some carbon scoring, it mist have seen a little action...
So no, bascally. An N900 is eency small compared to this MSI tablet or the iPad. And I was sorta looking for the optimized UI. What's the point otherwise? Might as well get a netbook and gain performance at the expense of form factor.