If some of the people who post here were as smart as they think they are, they'd figure out:
* Whitehouse.gov is not running Drupal on a ten-dollar shared server at GoDaddy.com. * Building and maintaining a large, continuously updated website is not something you do in a weekend with Notepad, a giant bag of Cheetos, and a case of diet Coke. * Any Drupal project of this scale involves layers of extremely high-performance caching and multiple firewalls. * The site's administrative tools aren't available from the outside. (This is not difficult to implement.) * Life does not begin and end with your personal favorite programming language, database server, etc., or with the boundaries of your parents' basement. * Security reports are reports of vulnerabilities that have been fixed, not vulnerabilities that lie in wait to ambush your site. A properly run open-source project has a documented process for handling security issues.
I don't know any details of the site's technical architecture beyond the obvious, but it's blazingly fast. My bet is that when you hit the site, you're pulling completed pages out of RAM on a customized and hardened Varnish, but that's just a guess. The HTTP headers identify the server technology as "White House."
Moments after Firefox on my Windows PC complained about the.Net extension (which I do NOT remember installing), I got a system notification telling me about an important Microsoft security fix that included.Net.
So I accepted the update. And it failed.
The ineptitude is just mid-boggling.
At this point, iTunes and a couple of games are the only reasons Windows is still installed at my house. I would much rather ditch Windows entirely for Ubuntu. I know Apple doesn't want to enable Linux as a rising competitor, but a portable iTunes would be a big stake in the heart of the beast.
Governments around the world, and especially the U.S. government, HEAVILY subsidized the home computing industry.
The #`1 driver of ramp-up in demand for home computing devices was the Internet, which was directly the result of government spending (much of it military research).
Fabrication plants around the world are located where they are largely because of government subsidies, inducements, tax breaks, loans, etc. Recent examples: Dell got $200 million to build a plant in Winston-Salem, NC. Google got a $100 million incentive to build a data center in North Carolina.
"Stoners in a garage" may have bolted together some pre-existing parts to create usable devices, but there's a lot more to the creation of the home computer industry than that. Where do you think those parts came from? Why were they created?
This is correct. GEM was an acronym for "Graphic Environment Manager," and it required an underlying DOS ("Disk Operating System"), which might be MS-DOS, CPM-86, or -- in the case of the Atari ST -- TOS or a TOS-compatible multitasking OS such as MiNT or Micro RTX.
GEM had a low-level VDI (Virtual Device Interface) layer and a high-level AES (Application Environment Services) layer. The AES included a file selector, windowing and dialog box tools, etc. It supported cooperative multitasking. It really shouldn't be considered an operating system.
One week when I was working at a Minneapolis newspaper without enough to do, I wrote AES bindings for a C compiler in Motorola 68000 assembler. It was mostly dumb grunt work, yet no small feat. Atari made it almost impossible to get documentation and was quite successful in killing its own future by not understanding open-source concepts.
Maybe it's just my imagination, but I seem to recall a time when a post about software development would be answered by people who knew something about software development instead of gamerz eager to declare their own ignorance. Anyone who imagines themselves to be a developer yet doesn't understand the words in the original post should find a more suitable line of work, such as perhaps bagging groceries at Kroger.
It's not just the initial configuration. It's the lack of proper ongoing support and upgrades.
My daughter has an Acer Aspire One. The "Linpus Linux" abomination is based on Fedora, but is quite likely to corrupt itself it you update from Fedora repositories. It's not even a current version of Linpus. So the choice is: Stick with the outdated Acer Linpus configuration (Firefox 2!!) or risk bricking the netbook.
Parent was unfortunately moderated as "insightful" despite unsourced misinformation. Here's a sourced correction for you. Note that Google makes extensive use of MySQL in production:
Question: What's the biggest MySQL DB?
That's like asking what's the biggest Ferrari! What counts is performance and scalability. Omniture runs over 250 billion transactions per quarter on a farm of MySQL servers. Google uses MySQL for AdSense and AdWords. Other large installations include Wikipedia, Travelocity, Weather.com, etc. The databases can be hundreds of gigabytes. Sites run on hundreds of servers, some on thousands.
I downloaded it through Gopher onto well over a dozen 3.5-inch floppies using a PC at the library at work -- and a 2400bps dialup connection. There were no ISPs back then. I connected to Gopher through a University of Minnesota library dialup number. If you knew how, you could jump out of Gopher and into FTP to MIT.edu.
I took the boot disk to a junk computer dealer across the street from the Minnesota Supercomputer Center. "Make me something that will boot this, and I'll buy it," I told him. I left with an 80386.
Like you, I had been running a UUCP system -- on an Atari ST. Some of us had set up a UUCP-to-Citadel network gateway. I wrote an rnews clone.
Once I got Linux connecting through SLIP dialup, I thought I was in heaven. Started patching the kernel with daily alpha updates FTP'd from Finland.
Nexuiz is in the Ubuntu 9.04 repository, so I gave it a try. On a 3-gigahertz Pentium 4 with 1.5 gigs of RAM and an ATI Radeon 7000 video card, the game is unusable.
I'm not talking about dropped frames; even the configuration screens are unusable due to lag between the mouse and the pointer.
The original Quake I and II engines ran fine on a Pentium with one-tenth the speed of this one, so the guys recoding the engine must be having an awful lot of fun at great CPU expense.
Whether you use WebSphere from IBM or Sharepoint from Microsoft, you have the ability to leverage an API and develop a custom solution around something that has a few things.
1. A community. 2. Documentation 3. Support
Now I am all for open source in an environment that deems it important, but having an SLA for a solution that is now going to become your intra/extranet is important -- and Drupal doesn't provide that. Sharepoint does, and so does Websphere.
All these things are available for open source solutions as well. If you don't think the Drupal community is adequate, there are companies that provide managed Drupal solutions and support. If you need an SLA, you can get one. If you need design or implementation services, they are available from a growing list of consulting firms. Drupal's code is open and documented, and if you can't read code, there are plenty of books. We handle our own Drupal projects internally, but not because we have to. There are many options.
"Release early, release often" doesn't mean you push non-working software into production channels.
The point of "release early, release often" is that a wide and open circle of potential users can become collaborators in the development process.
That doesn't mean they write code or even follow good formal test practices. Even without technical skills, users can contribute materially to the development of a well-run open-source project.
If you won't want to sign up for the responsibilities that come with participation, including acceptance of risk, then you shouldn't download and use alpha, beta, and other pre-release software. Nobody is making you do it.
In the case of Linux, the typical participating user also was a developer, which is why a project with the breadth and complexity of Linux 1.0 was even possible. And when it was released, Linux 1.0 was infinitely more stable and secure than anything Microsoft was selling at the time.
Right now I'm in the middle of an internal company project to migrate all of our newspaper websites onto a new platform based on open-source software. Users are deeply engaged in shaping the direction of the toolkit. We're committed to open development and testing, with new production releases every two weeks.
You cannot get good outcomes creating complex systems in a vacuum.
Everybody makes mistakes. It's important to catch those mistakes early in the process, and not build a software equivalent of the Spruce Goose.
Talk about split personality disorder. Contradict yourself in the same post...
Nope. Diversity is not a contradiction.
There are more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States. Profitability varies widely.
Several large, high-profile newspapers are headed for failure within months.
Dozens of small weeklies that were only turning 4-5% profit in the good times are also destined to fail.
But the bulk of mid-sized papers continue to be profitable at levels most other businesses would envy.
When the economy goes sour, some businesses fail and others do not. The difference between failure and survival often comes down to quality of management and leadership, local market conditions, and depth of capital pockets.
Right now you're seeing bankruptcies by companies that have no resources in their pockets. They can't ride out the recession.
About the time I wrote my earlier post, the owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly.com and Philadelphia Daily News announced Sunday that they were entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They are still making an operational profit. The problem is that the current owners bought the paper just a few years ago, with very little money down and a very big load of debt. Now the level of profit has dropped below that which is needed to pay the bankers.
There's a rash of hyperbolic commentary lately about the "death of newspapers" from people who have no idea what they're talking about. Doctorow's post is just one more float in the parade.
In the United States, the typical newspaper is fundamentally a local-regional advertising business. Local and regional advertising is changing, but it's not going away.
The typical American newspaper produces a portfolio of print (daily, weekly, monthly) and online products. These include both mass and targeted media. It turns an annual profit (not a loss) ranging from 10 to 20 percent. The ad revenues alone -- not counting print circulation --roll up to a $45 billion annual total nationwide.
Some newspapers are losing money and will close this year. But the more common situation is a publisher cutting staff, pagecount and sometimes even frequency in order to maintain profit margins so that corporate finance requirements can be maintained.
Corporate finance is the real problem. Over the last 20 years, newspaper owners borrowed heavily to buy more newspapers (and take over other chains), assuming that historically aberrant profit margins -- sometimes in the 35 to 45 percent range or even higher -- would continue forever.
The current business recession has suddenly placed those debt-laden companies in peril. Lee Enterprises, which recently narrowly avoided bankruptcy by renegotiating some loans, actually turned an operating profit of over 20 percent last year.
I'm not in denial about the effects of the Internet. They are real and serious, but they are longterm, and they are not the cause of the crisis currently facing newspapers, regardless of the self-serving BS being spread by various media pundits.
The irony is that the financial crisis has awakened slumbering newsrooms and sales forces, while robbing them of the resources they need to respond to those longterm challenges.
Ever since I left print and moved to the online side of journalism in 1994, I've been battling people who had their head in the sand about the importance of the changes in media caused by the Internet.
No more. Confusion and bewilderment, yes. Denial, no.
I fully expect to see some big bankruptcies in the next several months. Journal Register Co. declared bankruptcy Saturday, following the overleveraged (Chicago) Tribune Co. and the Minneapolis Star Tribune in seeking protection from creditors. Some big dailies, such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, will close, along with a lot of weeklies.
But hundreds of other papers will continue to operate profitably.
Among them, some will be smart enough to invest in creating new products that are more aligned with our net-connected and increasingly mobile lives.
[Note: Worrying about this stuff is my day job. You can follow me on twitter or at my blog.]
The web browser's default home page takes you to quite a few free downloads, but it's not a complete listing of the available Blackberry software. Nevertheless, with a bit of searching Twitterberry, Slacker Mobile, Viigo, AP News, etc., were not hard to find.
The problem with "app stores" is that they're all hardwired to make money and/or extend a totalitarian control model (as in Apple), not make it easy for the user to find software (as in Linux/BSD distros).
I installed Mobipocket Reader, and it has a built-in bookstore. Nice. Click, buy a book.
However, it only finds paid-for books; if you want any of the Gutenberg project.mobi books -- available from the Mobipocket website! -- you have to download them to your computer and copy them to the Blackberry manually.
What is striking about all these comments is that there seems to be a lack of clarity about what Ubuntu Mobile is, and whether it even needs to exist.
It's not for netbooks. Netbooks currently run Intel processors, most have 1024x600 displays, and they all can run standard Linux distributions (after the usual wifi struggles). Linpus and Ubuntu Netbook Remix provide alternative desktops with big icons. A lot of people immediately turn that stuff off.
Ubuntu Mobile seems targeted at a market that barely exists and may not survive: ARM-based Internet tablets. I have one of the few entries in this field, the Nokia N800 running Maemo (based on Debian) on the TI OMAP processor. It's a good and useful device, but as a product it's become trapped between the netbooks and the smartphones.
If a product is big enough to support a usable keyboard, it's big enough to run real Linux. If it's small enough to fit in your pocket, it's small enough to run Android.
Unfortunately, a gesture like this does not take into account the insidious scenario of walking into a cafe, buying a coffee and then (legally) using the cafe's wi-fi.
Wrong. You can't just walk into a cafe in Mumbai and use the wifi. You have to show a government ID (such as a passport), which is recorded, before you even get access credentials.
The point of this exercise is to shut down anonymous Internet access, which is illegal in India.
Similarly, you can't legally buy a SIM card for a mobile phone in India without providing identity credentials to the seller, who is responsible for recording the information for possible police followup.
* Newspapers have experimented with specialty devices -- and premium/pay services -- for years. Doesn't work. Generalized computing devices and free services have flooded the marketplace and there's no turning back.
* Newspapers are already dropping print editions all over the country. Gatehouse itself announced yesterday that it's killing the printed Kansas City Kansan, and going online-only. I have yet to see a case in which this is anything other than a desperation move by a failing business. In the case of the Kansan, I think they only have 7,000 monthly unique users on the Web. That's not a viable business, regardless of what you might "save" by not manufacturing and distributing a printed product.
* Gatehouse's complaint -- and I've read it -- contains a laundry list of issues, some of them in direct conflict with one another. But there is one charge that isn't easily dismissed. The Boston Globe is essentially creating a derivative product to enter hyperlocal markets where it previously had no presence. Gatehouse points out that nearly all the links on the local Globe products are Gatehouse content. That may flunk the fair-use test. (On the other hand, that argument effectively puts Gatehouse in a position of claiming it's entitled to preservation of a monopoly.)
* Gatehouse licenses its content under a Creative Commons no-commercial-use provision. Defining what's commercial use is a big hairy mess, but it's not possible to argue that the NYT company is a noncommercial effort.
If you look at a Gatehouse RSS feed, you'll see that it is clearly marked as copyrighted material and licensed under a Creative Commons "no commercial use" provision.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but I don't want Whitehouse.gov doing that. Allowing feedback on the high profile website is STUPID and ignorant.
Apparently, allowing feedback attracts the stupid and ignorant.
If some of the people who post here were as smart as they think they are, they'd figure out:
* Whitehouse.gov is not running Drupal on a ten-dollar shared server at GoDaddy.com.
* Building and maintaining a large, continuously updated website is not something you do in a weekend with Notepad, a giant bag of Cheetos, and a case of diet Coke.
* Any Drupal project of this scale involves layers of extremely high-performance caching and multiple firewalls.
* The site's administrative tools aren't available from the outside. (This is not difficult to implement.)
* Life does not begin and end with your personal favorite programming language, database server, etc., or with the boundaries of your parents' basement.
* Security reports are reports of vulnerabilities that have been fixed, not vulnerabilities that lie in wait to ambush your site. A properly run open-source project has a documented process for handling security issues.
I don't know any details of the site's technical architecture beyond the obvious, but it's blazingly fast. My bet is that when you hit the site, you're pulling completed pages out of RAM on a customized and hardened Varnish, but that's just a guess. The HTTP headers identify the server technology as "White House."
If your security beliefs are based on Googling " exploit" I hope you're not in charge of anything important.
Moments after Firefox on my Windows PC complained about the .Net extension (which I do NOT remember installing), I got a system notification telling me about an important Microsoft security fix that included .Net.
So I accepted the update. And it failed.
The ineptitude is just mid-boggling.
At this point, iTunes and a couple of games are the only reasons Windows is still installed at my house. I would much rather ditch Windows entirely for Ubuntu. I know Apple doesn't want to enable Linux as a rising competitor, but a portable iTunes would be a big stake in the heart of the beast.
You anonymous cowards are clueless.
Governments around the world, and especially the U.S. government, HEAVILY subsidized the home computing industry.
The #`1 driver of ramp-up in demand for home computing devices was the Internet, which was directly the result of government spending (much of it military research).
Fabrication plants around the world are located where they are largely because of government subsidies, inducements, tax breaks, loans, etc. Recent examples: Dell got $200 million to build a plant in Winston-Salem, NC. Google got a $100 million incentive to build a data center in North Carolina.
"Stoners in a garage" may have bolted together some pre-existing parts to create usable devices, but there's a lot more to the creation of the home computer industry than that. Where do you think those parts came from? Why were they created?
This is correct. GEM was an acronym for "Graphic Environment Manager," and it required an underlying DOS ("Disk Operating System"), which might be MS-DOS, CPM-86, or -- in the case of the Atari ST -- TOS or a TOS-compatible multitasking OS such as MiNT or Micro RTX.
GEM had a low-level VDI (Virtual Device Interface) layer and a high-level AES (Application Environment Services) layer. The AES included a file selector, windowing and dialog box tools, etc. It supported cooperative multitasking. It really shouldn't be considered an operating system.
One week when I was working at a Minneapolis newspaper without enough to do, I wrote AES bindings for a C compiler in Motorola 68000 assembler. It was mostly dumb grunt work, yet no small feat. Atari made it almost impossible to get documentation and was quite successful in killing its own future by not understanding open-source concepts.
It's sad.
Maybe it's just my imagination, but I seem to recall a time when a post about software development would be answered by people who knew something about software development instead of gamerz eager to declare their own ignorance. Anyone who imagines themselves to be a developer yet doesn't understand the words in the original post should find a more suitable line of work, such as perhaps bagging groceries at Kroger.
,,, it would look like this:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/08/09/article-0-0237E35600000578-961_468x541.jpg
It's not just the initial configuration. It's the lack of proper ongoing support and upgrades.
My daughter has an Acer Aspire One. The "Linpus Linux" abomination is based on Fedora, but is quite likely to corrupt itself it you update from Fedora repositories. It's not even a current version of Linpus. So the choice is: Stick with the outdated Acer Linpus configuration (Firefox 2!!) or risk bricking the netbook.
Parent was unfortunately moderated as "insightful" despite unsourced misinformation. Here's a sourced correction for you. Note that Google makes extensive use of MySQL in production:
File a patent on a business method involving patenting all the really bad ideas we don't want to see implemented.
Soft Landing Systems created the first Linux distribution.
I downloaded it through Gopher onto well over a dozen 3.5-inch floppies using a PC at the library at work -- and a 2400bps dialup connection. There were no ISPs back then. I connected to Gopher through a University of Minnesota library dialup number. If you knew how, you could jump out of Gopher and into FTP to MIT.edu.
I took the boot disk to a junk computer dealer across the street from the Minnesota Supercomputer Center. "Make me something that will boot this, and I'll buy it," I told him. I left with an 80386.
Like you, I had been running a UUCP system -- on an Atari ST. Some of us had set up a UUCP-to-Citadel network gateway. I wrote an rnews clone.
Once I got Linux connecting through SLIP dialup, I thought I was in heaven. Started patching the kernel with daily alpha updates FTP'd from Finland.
Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Nexuiz is in the Ubuntu 9.04 repository, so I gave it a try. On a 3-gigahertz Pentium 4 with 1.5 gigs of RAM and an ATI Radeon 7000 video card, the game is unusable.
I'm not talking about dropped frames; even the configuration screens are unusable due to lag between the mouse and the pointer.
The original Quake I and II engines ran fine on a Pentium with one-tenth the speed of this one, so the guys recoding the engine must be having an awful lot of fun at great CPU expense.
Whether you use WebSphere from IBM or Sharepoint from Microsoft, you have the ability to leverage an API and develop a custom solution around something that has a few things.
1. A community.
2. Documentation
3. Support
Now I am all for open source in an environment that deems it important, but having an SLA for a solution that is now going to become your intra/extranet is important -- and Drupal doesn't provide that. Sharepoint does, and so does Websphere.
All these things are available for open source solutions as well. If you don't think the Drupal community is adequate, there are companies that provide managed Drupal solutions and support. If you need an SLA, you can get one. If you need design or implementation services, they are available from a growing list of consulting firms. Drupal's code is open and documented, and if you can't read code, there are plenty of books. We handle our own Drupal projects internally, but not because we have to. There are many options.
Parent item is an uninformed Microsoft troll.
"Release early, release often" doesn't mean you push non-working software into production channels.
The point of "release early, release often" is that a wide and open circle of potential users can become collaborators in the development process.
That doesn't mean they write code or even follow good formal test practices. Even without technical skills, users can contribute materially to the development of a well-run open-source project.
If you won't want to sign up for the responsibilities that come with participation, including acceptance of risk, then you shouldn't download and use alpha, beta, and other pre-release software. Nobody is making you do it.
In the case of Linux, the typical participating user also was a developer, which is why a project with the breadth and complexity of Linux 1.0 was even possible. And when it was released, Linux 1.0 was infinitely more stable and secure than anything Microsoft was selling at the time.
Right now I'm in the middle of an internal company project to migrate all of our newspaper websites onto a new platform based on open-source software. Users are deeply engaged in shaping the direction of the toolkit. We're committed to open development and testing, with new production releases every two weeks.
You cannot get good outcomes creating complex systems in a vacuum.
Everybody makes mistakes. It's important to catch those mistakes early in the process, and not build a software equivalent of the Spruce Goose.
Nope. Diversity is not a contradiction.
There are more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States. Profitability varies widely.
Several large, high-profile newspapers are headed for failure within months.
Dozens of small weeklies that were only turning 4-5% profit in the good times are also destined to fail.
But the bulk of mid-sized papers continue to be profitable at levels most other businesses would envy.
When the economy goes sour, some businesses fail and others do not. The difference between failure and survival often comes down to quality of management and leadership, local market conditions, and depth of capital pockets.
Right now you're seeing bankruptcies by companies that have no resources in their pockets. They can't ride out the recession.
About the time I wrote my earlier post, the owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly.com and Philadelphia Daily News announced Sunday that they were entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy. They are still making an operational profit. The problem is that the current owners bought the paper just a few years ago, with very little money down and a very big load of debt. Now the level of profit has dropped below that which is needed to pay the bankers.
There's a rash of hyperbolic commentary lately about the "death of newspapers" from people who have no idea what they're talking about. Doctorow's post is just one more float in the parade.
In the United States, the typical newspaper is fundamentally a local-regional advertising business. Local and regional advertising is changing, but it's not going away.
The typical American newspaper produces a portfolio of print (daily, weekly, monthly) and online products. These include both mass and targeted media. It turns an annual profit (not a loss) ranging from 10 to 20 percent. The ad revenues alone -- not counting print circulation --roll up to a $45 billion annual total nationwide.
Some newspapers are losing money and will close this year. But the more common situation is a publisher cutting staff, pagecount and sometimes even frequency in order to maintain profit margins so that corporate finance requirements can be maintained.
Corporate finance is the real problem. Over the last 20 years, newspaper owners borrowed heavily to buy more newspapers (and take over other chains), assuming that historically aberrant profit margins -- sometimes in the 35 to 45 percent range or even higher -- would continue forever.
The current business recession has suddenly placed those debt-laden companies in peril. Lee Enterprises, which recently narrowly avoided bankruptcy by renegotiating some loans, actually turned an operating profit of over 20 percent last year.
I'm not in denial about the effects of the Internet. They are real and serious, but they are longterm, and they are not the cause of the crisis currently facing newspapers, regardless of the self-serving BS being spread by various media pundits.
The irony is that the financial crisis has awakened slumbering newsrooms and sales forces, while robbing them of the resources they need to respond to those longterm challenges.
Ever since I left print and moved to the online side of journalism in 1994, I've been battling people who had their head in the sand about the importance of the changes in media caused by the Internet.
No more. Confusion and bewilderment, yes. Denial, no.
I fully expect to see some big bankruptcies in the next several months. Journal Register Co. declared bankruptcy Saturday, following the overleveraged (Chicago) Tribune Co. and the Minneapolis Star Tribune in seeking protection from creditors. Some big dailies, such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, will close, along with a lot of weeklies.
But hundreds of other papers will continue to operate profitably.
Among them, some will be smart enough to invest in creating new products that are more aligned with our net-connected and increasingly mobile lives.
[Note: Worrying about this stuff is my day job. You can follow me on twitter or at my blog.]
The web browser's default home page takes you to quite a few free downloads, but it's not a complete listing of the available Blackberry software. Nevertheless, with a bit of searching Twitterberry, Slacker Mobile, Viigo, AP News, etc., were not hard to find.
The problem with "app stores" is that they're all hardwired to make money and/or extend a totalitarian control model (as in Apple), not make it easy for the user to find software (as in Linux/BSD distros).
I installed Mobipocket Reader, and it has a built-in bookstore. Nice. Click, buy a book.
However, it only finds paid-for books; if you want any of the Gutenberg project .mobi books -- available from the Mobipocket website! -- you have to download them to your computer and copy them to the Blackberry manually.
I vote for leisure suits.
Someone should mod parent up as informative.
What is striking about all these comments is that there seems to be a lack of clarity about what Ubuntu Mobile is, and whether it even needs to exist.
It's not for netbooks. Netbooks currently run Intel processors, most have 1024x600 displays, and they all can run standard Linux distributions (after the usual wifi struggles). Linpus and Ubuntu Netbook Remix provide alternative desktops with big icons. A lot of people immediately turn that stuff off.
Ubuntu Mobile seems targeted at a market that barely exists and may not survive: ARM-based Internet tablets. I have one of the few entries in this field, the Nokia N800 running Maemo (based on Debian) on the TI OMAP processor. It's a good and useful device, but as a product it's become trapped between the netbooks and the smartphones.
If a product is big enough to support a usable keyboard, it's big enough to run real Linux. If it's small enough to fit in your pocket, it's small enough to run Android.
There's been an open-source, federated alternative to Twitter for some time.
http://identi.ca/
http://laconi.ca/trac/
Why would I want to use yet another Google service that might be discontinued at any time?
Wrong. You can't just walk into a cafe in Mumbai and use the wifi. You have to show a government ID (such as a passport), which is recorded, before you even get access credentials.
The point of this exercise is to shut down anonymous Internet access, which is illegal in India.
Similarly, you can't legally buy a SIM card for a mobile phone in India without providing identity credentials to the seller, who is responsible for recording the information for possible police followup.
I can just hear artifcats in 128 MP3, but not in 192kb MP3.
Couple more weeks with those earbuds and we'll fix that for you.
I said, COUPLE MORE WEEKS ....
Some facts that might get in your way:
* Newspapers have experimented with specialty devices -- and premium/pay services -- for years. Doesn't work. Generalized computing devices and free services have flooded the marketplace and there's no turning back.
* Newspapers are already dropping print editions all over the country. Gatehouse itself announced yesterday that it's killing the printed Kansas City Kansan, and going online-only. I have yet to see a case in which this is anything other than a desperation move by a failing business. In the case of the Kansan, I think they only have 7,000 monthly unique users on the Web. That's not a viable business, regardless of what you might "save" by not manufacturing and distributing a printed product.
* Gatehouse's complaint -- and I've read it -- contains a laundry list of issues, some of them in direct conflict with one another. But there is one charge that isn't easily dismissed. The Boston Globe is essentially creating a derivative product to enter hyperlocal markets where it previously had no presence. Gatehouse points out that nearly all the links on the local Globe products are Gatehouse content. That may flunk the fair-use test. (On the other hand, that argument effectively puts Gatehouse in a position of claiming it's entitled to preservation of a monopoly.)
* Gatehouse licenses its content under a Creative Commons no-commercial-use provision. Defining what's commercial use is a big hairy mess, but it's not possible to argue that the NYT company is a noncommercial effort.
Other perspectives:
Mark Potts: http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2008/12/gatehousegate.html
Dan Gillmor: http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2008/gatehouse-v-ny-times-co-not-so-simple-after-all
If you look at a Gatehouse RSS feed, you'll see that it is clearly marked as copyrighted material and licensed under a Creative Commons "no commercial use" provision.