Windows 8 has a *lot* of under the hood improvements including I/O processes and what not. Even if you got rid of metro so that it pretty much looked exactly like Windows 7, the OS itself operates completely differently. It's faster and more secure. Do some people like Metro? Yes. Do some people dislike it? Yes. Do some people hate it for reasons that aren't really sound? Most definitely yes. Will this always happen for anything Microsoft ever does? Yes. Metro is what MS sees as the future replacement of the desktop. You can hate it or you can like it. That'll be the reaction to *any* significant change. You can't stop that. Some tech people *do* like the ribbon. Some tech people *do* like metro. The problem is, people who dislike something are almost *always* louder than people that do like something.

You may as well be right about some people liking Metro, although I'm starting to suspect they are either Microsoft shills or there's something slightly wrong with their heads. I am yet to find a single real person that I personally know that actually likes Metro, but then my sample size is somewhat small.

That said, what happens to those people who dislike Metro or the ribbon? As far as Microsoft is concerned they can stuff it. They can either use Metro and love it, or they can use Metro and hate it. Even with third party addons the Metro interface is still present in many places. Windows 9 will take the integration even further, relegating the Desktop to legacy applications.

I used to think that Microsoft was trying to unify the interface across all their devices to encourage adoption of their Windows Phone platform by leveraging their desktop market. The latest data is showing the opposite seems to be happening. Yes, part of the PC sales decline can be attributed to extended useful lives, but another part is directly related to the resistance to Metro.

What will happen is people will weigh their options. Do they continue using Windows or will they switch to a tablet, or a PC running anything but Windows? I find myself in this predicament, because one thing is certain. I will NEVER use Metro unless forced at my work place. And knowing how fast moving my industry is, I think Windows 7 will stick around for a decade or so. At home I will also keep Windows 7 around as long as new hardware drivers will be available for it. I wish I could switch to Linux, but some of the games that are very dear to me do not run very well under WINE. Although Valve may change that...

I hope Apple manages to patch every single bug that would allow jailbreaking. They had a pretty good run with the iPhone 4s and 5, clocking in at 98 days and 136 days respectively.

Too many people buy iOS devices based on the premise they'll be able to jailbreak them in order to make full use of the hardware they bought. And that rewards Apple and its walled garden model, which is beyond broken. Sadly many consumers are too complacent, lazy or stupid to care they are only renting their iPhone or iPad. In 2013 I am not buying the "It just works" mantra, because many other devices just work better. However if even a fraction of those 18 million jailbreakers had opted for more open alternative, the marketplace would look very different right now.

At the very least, it would have forced Apple to reconsider their stance on the walled garden. If say 5 million of those 18 million people did NOT buy a new iPhone, on top of those opting for Android, BB or WP anyway, Apple would leave at least at least $2.2 billion on the table for competitors*. I have a feeling though that is already happening, as Apple's growth has slowed, and their share price has plummeted in the past few months.

Since this is slashdot, I know the Nokia N900 still has a cult following. Imagine if Nokia had been rewarded for its N900 by people buying it instead of jailbreaking their iPhone 3Gs? Identical hardware specs, but sooooo many more features in a completely open garden. We may have continued to have real Linux phones, with QT apps and repositories instead of the JVM garbage we currently consider the best alternative.

* Profit margins on the iPhone 5, similar to the 4s: http://www.zdnet.com/iphone-5-16gb-costs-an-estimated-207-to-build-7000004476/

Let's see... I owned a T20, T23, X30, T41p, T43, T60, T60p, and a friend owned a T600e, T42, X60, X201, X220 and now X230. Of all these machines that were never abused, here are the problems:

T20 - just stopped powering up one day, when it was about 5 years old, never figured out why because by then it was not worth repairing.

X30 - LCD stopped working when the laptop was 3 years old, same as above

T41p - Ethernet flaked out, turns out the chip had desoldered and the only fixes were reflowing or new motherboard. Kept using WiFi instead

T60p - USB ports on the right side refused to work with a mouse. Lenovo provided new motherboard, two new USB daughter cards. Turns out it was either incredible bad luck with replacement parts or a design defect.

X220 - IPS screen ghosting issue

X230 - Random reboots, traced it back to the motherboard.

Yes, all the above are anecdotes, but what I am trying to say is that Thinkpads DO die or have defects. Even IBM built Thinkpads, not just Lenovo build Thinkpads. They used to be great laptops with amazing build quality in terms of fit, finish and especially keyboards. What truly set them apart, and this still holds true for HP and Lenovo business class laptops was the level of support. Every problem I had with them during the 3 year warranty period was fixed ASAP.

I still have a spare bag of screws IBM sent me when I swapped the motherboard in the T60p because their service manual specifies replacing the screws when replacing the motherboard.

All that said, I stopped buying Thinkpads with the T60p. The T61p had the infamous Nvidia G84 chip that would fall the fuck off, so I stayed away, and I moved to other manufacturers. I realized I can get better performance for the same price from Acer, Asus or especially Sager. The downside is a complete lack of support, but when you are saving hundreds of dollars on a similar machine it evens out in the end. And this is where laptop manufacturers except Apple miss out. They cannot build a high quality materials, excellent support but expensive machine when they are competing with cheap materials, little support but inexpensive machine.

I still remember fondly most of my Thinkpads, but I'm not going to give up my disposable Acer I am typing this on. It has an SB i5, GT540m, 8Gb RAM, 160Gb SSD that I picked up for $300. And it will SMOKE that brand new Thinkpad advertised in TFA in games.

I used dozens of Palm OS devices for close to a decade, and I can say the article is well researched but misses the mark on several very important reasons why the platform went downhill. In short, except for the very first generations of Palm OS devices, the hardware and software was never in sync, either one or the other was lacking. At the very end, both were tired and had no place in the market.

The first Palm Pilots were ground breaking devices when they came out. The premise was backing up your data to the PC and having a disposable device to access it in the field. I sat on my Palm Pilot 1000 and cracked its screen. Later that day I picked up a used Palm Pilot 5000, synced it, and was back up and running as if nothing ever happened.

That attitude started to changed when the Palm V came out. It was an iconic design, with high quality materials, extremely thin and beautiful, but it also retailed for around $700 in Canada. And the hardware had issues, like the Up key being pressed by the cover and failing over time, the glued case that made replacing the battery very difficult and expensive. Today Apple fanbois do not seem to mind, but back then this was a big deal.

The Palm V was also the last bit of hardware where Palm was ahead of the game. Every single generation after the Palm V was far behind other offerings on the market, especially the Sony Clie. I had the SJ30, NR70, NR70v, NX70, NX90 and several TH55. Absolutely beautiful devices, with high resolution screens, very long battery lives, but like the Palm V, they were EXPENSIVE. The high end models were retailing in the $700-$1000 range.

And at the end the Palm OS was really showing its age. Connecting to wifi was was slightly less painful than pulling teeth, but it did not matter because displaying a simple website took the better part of a day. Also dealing with strange file formats became tiring. Besides the organizer functions, my main use for all those devices was taking notes and reading books. There was no way to upload a text file to a Palm OS device and display it as an ebook without first converting it to PDB. In 10 years I found exactly ONE utility that could perform that function, and I still have it somewhere on my PC.

Like the author I had the chance to play with a Palm OS device I forgot I had, the Sony Clie TH55. The OS is fast, the applications load almost instantly, and it has a certain beauty in its simplicity. But then you realize it cannot do any of the things we take for granted today, and all you're left with is nostalgia.

I started off on Netscape, then Mozilla and now Seamonkey mainly because they all had a similar UI and set of features. When everybody was moving to IE6, I stuck with Netscape Communicator 4.72 for years while Mozilla was completely rewriting the code base. I think the first Mozilla I ran was M18. And when Mozilla decided to release FF as their main project, I switched to Seamonkey.

I still use an email client, so if I were to use FF or Chrome today I'd have to install two programs instead of one. There is another benefit. I always had Linux on my desktops, but not on laptops due to their weird hardware (try getting Optimus working in Linux). Mozilla and Seamonkey use the mbox file format both in Windows and Linux, so moving mail between the OSes was simple after a reinstall. Just copy over the files and you'd be done. I think Seamonkey is still the only cross platform email client.

That should be enough, but there are other reasons.

The bookmark structure in Seamonkey has remained the same since Communicator and until recently moving to a new computer was as simple as replacing an html file in the profile folder. Now it's a bit more complicated, to the extent that I have to import/export that same html file.

Seamonkey also has a lot of extra config options in the Preferences window compared to FF. In this respect FF feels completely dumbed down. I am aware FF and Seamonkey have virtually the same options in about:config, but modifying things means looking up values instead of just clicking an option.

TL;DR? I'm just too lazy to retrain my muscle memory with a new browser when I've been using Seamonkey and its predecessors for at least a decade and a half.

Next question, I'm on a roll.

Yes ripoff scams work both ways: Bad buyers and bad sellers.
So too should the feedback. Negative for bad buyers and negative for bad sellers.
The way things are now it appears bad buyers don't exist. Which is flat wrong and you know it.

I absolutely agree with you, and with every point you make. This situation is unfair to honest sellers, as I know there are a lot of dishonest buyers out there. I do a fair amount of trade locally in computer gear, and I avoid Ebay like the plague when it comes to selling my items for your very reasons.

But the problem is sellers do have an unfair advantage, especially those with 10k+ feedbacks when dealing with small time buyers like myself. Explaining the negative feedback may be just fine, but some sellers outright forbid people from bidding if they don't have a perfect rating. Besides, many people do care about their perfect rating on principle. I cut my losses on those two batteries that combined cost about $150 rather than have a negative feedback.

Ebay's lifeline are the buyers. I haven't looked in a while at their pricing scheme, and I can only assume sellers have to pay a fee for unsuccessful auctions. However if enough buyers leave the site because of unscrupulous sellers, then the sellers will leave the site and Ebay fails. That's why the rules are definitely in the buyers' favour now. If you can find a solution that would work better than the current one, by all means I want to hear it. Going back to the way things used to be is not an option.

Ebay has long deserved the hate speech it receives online. Such as forbidding negative feedback for buyers that rip-off the seller via nonpayment of goods, keeping the new shoes but returning old/wornout shoes, claiming nonreceipt of item when they have it in their hand, et cetera. (No neg feedback == No way to warn other sellers to stay away from the buying scam artist.)

Sorry, but it works both ways. The new rules were implemented because sellers were ripping buyers off as well. Shipping fake goods, not shipping items at all, refusing refunds that were within the terms of the transaction and then threatening to leave negative feedback was a common theme.

Here's my anecdote: I bought a couple of genuine OEM laptop batteries for a reasonable price. I chose a seller with good feedback and did not go for the cheapest batteries available, made sure the description listed them as genuine, OEM, made by Sony (that was my laptop at the time), made sure the pictures matched my current battery. Well, they both died within a week and they were both fakes. I asked for my money back, the seller did not answer. When I threatened to leave negative feedback he just laughed at me and told me he'd leave negative feedback in return. He did not care, because my one negative feedback would be a drop in the bucket to his 10000 positive ones (almost all from buying and selling under $1 items). But his one negative feedback would ruin my account with only 60 positive feedbacks.

So while I sympathize with decent, honest Ebay sellers, there were good reasons for the rule changes. If they are too onerous, stop using Ebay or argue to have the rules changed back.

I took a look at zareason.com and quite frankly their laptops are horribly overpriced. If you want a laptop that does NOT come with a Windows license you're much better off with a Sager from one of their many retailers like Malibal (US) or Reflex Notebooks (Canada). No, they do not come preinstalled with Linux, but for the cost difference I can waste an entire day figuring things out.

Spec an identical Sager to a Zareason on Malibal's website, and you'll see what I mean. Each of Zareason's offerings is at least $2-300 too much.

You are absolutely correct about the micro-usb connector itself, and my experience with many devices confirms your anecdotal evidence. But the connector is attached to a PCB which is housed in a device. If THAT implementation sucks, then you end up with a micro-usb cable with a micro-usb connector attached to it yet completely detached from the PCB which is housed in the device.

Read this thread, or at least look at the number of replies from people who had an issue:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=37107

Basically the Nokia N900 had a micro-usb connector surface mounted to the PCB without any additional support. Thousands of people had their connector break off just through regular use, let alone abuse like dropping the phone, inserting the cable at an angle, etc. And once the connector broke off, it would render the phone almost useless, short of resorting to external chargers, etc. While the N900 is not worth much today, a couple of years ago it was a $700 phone that Nokia refused to fix at first, claiming the port broke off due to abuse.

So there you go. You've heard of at least one case where micro-usb had an annoying tendency to break.

Uh, we don't live in the 80s anymore. Why would I want a physical copy when I can view the pictures on an good hi-def screen and backup effortlessly, without wasting huge amounts of resources to print and ship them around?

Because in about 100 years I can promise you that FB will no longer exist, and all your high res JPG pictures will be unreadable on whatever technology exists in the future. Even if the format survives, the hard drive, CD drive, USB drive they are stored on will not.

Sure, somebody like your children or grandchildren may spend the time and effort to convert JPG to the format of the day, or they will transfer them to a new medium. But it's also likely they will be busy with their own pictures, and yours will be lost forever. How many 3.5in floppies can you still read? How many IDE hard drives can you still plug into your computer? And even if you can still use these mediums, how much longer will they last? A printed picture can get torn, water damaged, burnt but you can still save it. A drive with a crashed head takes all the data with it.

Why am I saying this? I have pictures of my 83 year old grandfather from when he was a child. I have even earlier ones of my great grandfather. Some are almost destroyed, but I can still make out my grandfather's young face in it. My children will have never met either of them, but at least the pictures will remain in a family photo album for generations to come. And with a bit of time invested into writing descriptions, they will remain relevant because you can see the pictures in front of you. Even if you've never met these people, they are your history.

So go and print out your most cherished moments, you'll thank me later.

A while ago I realized every single manufacturer of electronic devices I loved has either gone bankrupt or shut down that particular division. Here's my list in no particular order:

- Psion 5, 5MX, 5MX Pro
- Palm III, Vx, m500
- Sony Clie NR70, NX70, TH55 and many others
- Nokia E71, N900, N9

I hold a particular soft spot for Psion though, as their devices were truly works of art. It took a decade for the same level of integration between the OS and component applications to be matched. The hardware was (almost) bulletproof, with the 5 series sliding keyboard being a truly impressive piece of engineering. However having a battery life measured in DAYS is still a pipe dream...

I do seem to have a knack for picking dying technologies though. A friend joked that I should be given a free Windows phone, that will certainly spell its demise.

#2: avoid twisty two-lane canyon roads, and if cannot, go slow and keep to the right side of the lane. Disproportionately large number of accidents happen on these roads. Some because squids think they're Rossi and crash by themselves, and some because of oncoming cars crossing the center line. By simply not going to these type of roads, you reduce your chance of dying by several orders of magnitude.

Then what's the damn point in riding a bike? Save on gas, crawl from point A to point B and claim "I rode 1000km today in a straight line", or do you just enjoy being uncomfortable and less safe than in a car?

Take away the fun of the twisties and I may as well stick to my cage full time. At least then I can listen to music without headphones, have a smoke and a drink of water without stopping every 200km. And if a distracted driver does manage to plough into me, I'll have a cage and half a dozen airbags to protect me.

It's a bit sad you look at twisties as something to be avoided. Try them sometime, you may find you like them.

The difficulty with the N900 was that they introduced one phone. As an N900 user (still) I know that the N900 is not for everyone, and was targeted more at the tech-savvy user than your bog standard just-want-a-phone-that-works user. Not everyone wants a built in keyboard or a phone that large. In fact, one of the reasons I haven't changed phone is that it is so difficult to get a decent phone with a slide-out keyboard, similar the the N900. Suggestions welcomed...

Nokia needed to produce several phones around a similar theme aimed at different users, or do what Apple did and produce one phone to a very high standard aimed at the average user, not at a niche market (80/20 rule). Doing what they did was narrow minded and poor business sense.

This issue was discussed extensively on talk.maemo.org, but you are mostly correct. I had an N900 for a very long time, and not only did it have an awkward form factor due to its bulk and resistive screen (some UI elements were only accessible with the stylus), the hardware also had an enormous defect. The USB port would fall out even without being abused. At first Nokia denied the issue outright, but then started replacing the damaged phones. Which phone you'd get would be anyone's guess, ranging from the N900, N8 or E7.

I still loved it though, and with care and a couple of mods my USB survived. I loved the fully customizable interface (for instance one thing that just pisses me off about Android is the desktop grid that insists on spacing icons miles away from each other unless you run alternative launchers). I loved the true Linux repositories and apps that did not have ads. Yes, developers should be able to make money, but on the N900 people developed apps like they do on Linux, because it's fun and interesting. And I never found myself missing any features because some random Android app did not have an N900 equivalent.

The N900 was not without other problems. In Canada on my carrier I could only get Edge, not 3G. The hardware, while high end when the phone was released, is really old now and you could feel it. But most importantly, Nokia gave up on it only a year after its release. Ditching a high end, $700 phone so quickly is inexcusable. Their infrequent software updates, left bugs that were never fixed until the CSSU took over.

And you simply can't maintain a community around a single device. Eventually my N900 broke down when I crashed my bike, and when faced with replacing it I opted for a much faster Android. Many lead developers for the N900 went the same route, and I can't blame them.

So yes, Nokia should have released several devices running Maemo 5, and should have continued development of that platform. Jumping to Maemo 6, then Meego, then Windows only made them waste time and resources. I disagree with the need to always have a bleeding edge platform, which is why Maemo 5 was abandoned. Take the Samsung Galaxy Note for instance, which shipped with Android 2.3.5, a year and a half old OS and is extremely popular.

Nokia's support for developers was, frankly, not an enjoyable experience. This is where being part of the Windows universe will be an advantage to Nokia as that will be Microsoft's responsibility, not their own.

So they gave up control over half their product to a company that is known to release crappy OSes. Development and support may no longer be Nokia's responsibility, but it definitely affects its bottom line.