It's pretty easy to consider the desktop PC the greatest "open" device out there, and OSS options on it have always had these problems. But instead of the single device manufacturer locking OSS out, it's component makers not releasing driver sources or specifications.

On the software side, of course the smaller and more focused software solutions are going to get less interest. That's how it's always been, and probably will always be. For every narrow target a project encompasses, there are only X interested users, and Y interested developers. X will always exceed Y.

When you say "keyboard in the middle of the screen" are you specifically not wanting a numeric keypad of any type? This part can be a bit tricky, as manufacturers are typically more interested in having a "complete" keyboard on larger machines since they're able to tack on an additional bullet point for those users that will only buy a machine that has dedicated numeric keys.

I will agree in reference to the media keys that come on so many machines - the lack of such keys was actually a bit of a plus when it came to choosing my Sager NP8130 (Clevo P151HMx). The Sager keyboards tend to be fairly tightly placed, and without the plethora of frills you'll find with more mainstream brands.

It's my hope that one small side-effect of the tablet market taking off like gangbusters, is that the manufacturers of laptops will be able to focus on the reasons why people buy a laptop over a tablet or powerful mobile phone (or in conjunction with same). And that is, to type and computer on it.

Laptops have traditionally - at least for the last several years - been designed around media consumption and occasional creation at the high end, and basic web browsing on the lower end. But the market should be changing, and perhaps Apple's upcoming refreshes will force other manufacturers to adapt to the new world of multiple portable options and what the strengths and weaknesses are on each.

How much clearer does it need to be made to us, that our oil addiction is putting us in bed with some really, really objectionable regimes around the world?

Don't get me wrong, I'm no hippie on a bicycle, and I don't hate Muslims or their faith (at least, no more than I dislike Christians or Christianity) but when you've got nations involved in the whole "execution for apostasy" game, cut them off. Yes, geopolitics is hard, but we should never have let ourselves get put in a position where we'd support any regime like this.

Pretty solid, actually. DC really put some good writers on this project. J. Michael Stracyznski, Darwyn Cooke, Brian Azzarello, Len Wein. All great creators with the capacity for writing extremely well. The same thing can be said for the artistic side of the books involved. Every single book has A-list artistic talent on it.

And as Peter David said in his comments published by newsarama.com today, it's rather funny for Alan Moore to be all defensive about this considering that the characters he based Watchmen on were all just rebranded ones from the old Charlton Comics line that DC had acquired just before Watchmen was done. Also of course, the fact Moore used fictional and historical characters in his own works such as League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls. Watchmen was work for hire, and if DC hadn't published and promoted it as heavily as they did, most people here wouldn't even know Alan Moore's name.

That's what I first thought of. My school was too cheap/broke to actually have the turtle, but the draw-on-screen Logo software out there was a great thing to learn with. It would be interesting to see someone take the idea of Logo, an instant-feedback system, and create a new language with just enough functionality for educational use. You could make it really simple, maybe even an embedded sort of thing on a ROM chip. Just something really basic and low level that you can put on a little box designed to connect to a TV, since even the poor households these days have those. Heck, a hundred dollar box that can hook up to your TV and run uncomplicated little programs that kids could type in from textbooks or even magazines devoted to the idea would be brilliant.

We could call the language something simple to remember, that evokes the lack of complexity inherent in the design. Something really basic.

I see a great future for this. Kickstarter, anyone?

As someone that's done a lot of end-user work, it annoys me to see the level of arrogance coming from posts like this one where the idea of using multiple passwords for different services is touted as the Only Responsible Way to do anything online.

It doesn't bother me because it's a bad idea, it bothers me because if it's so goddamned important - why haven't the companies that make our web browsers and operating systems put some fucking effort into building features for this into our infrastructure? I have accounts on dozens, if not _hundreds_ of sites, and the best I can manage for passwords is having a stable of a few passwords of increasing complexity dependent on how secure the site in question is. If it accesses my money in any way, it gets high-security. If it doesn't, it gets mid-security, if it's a hobbyist or community-run website it gets low security. On occasions, I need to change my low security password (such as the Gawker hit) but that's part of the game. When I needed to change it however, I needed to change it on dozens of websites.

Would a password management system be a good idea? Hell yes. Is it the best way to manage things? Sure, _as long as the repository is safe_. My problem with the arrogance noted above is due to the fact some people somehow magically expect normal users to do something that trained, knowledgeable IT people frequently consider too much of a pain in the ass to bother with.

If this is truly an important problem that needs to be tackled (protip: It is) then let's get some industry muscle put to work here. Get the HTML standard to include a password management and transmission feature, something robust enough to handle the hundreds of sites people may actually visit. Build the OSX Keychain into my web browser, instead of having to set up plugins like KeePass to do a job the browser should already be handling. Fucking do _something_ to improve this situation, on a wide-scale infrastructure level. It's not impossible. It just takes the right people to get it done.

What you're posting however, are mostly opinions. Not facts.

A fact is "The sky is typically processed by the vast majority of Human eyes to be a blue color, when clearly lit by the sun and not affected by obstructions, pollutants or clouds."

Climate science is an evolving area of study, and doesn't boil down to clear "Right" or "Wrong" options.

Separation of Church and State is a Constitutional issue, and as such can only be decided by the sitting Supreme Court. Your opinion, my opinion, or that of the government in power does not make any decision right or wrong. The same can be said for aspects of Affirmative Action, Civil Rights, Abortion, the War on Drugs, the Second Amendment and potentially even Unions.

These things may be right or wrong in your opinion or mine, but until they are determined by the processes built into our government's laws, neither of us is actually correct.

I've been talking about this for around a week now, without reading any of the other online speculation beyond the pieces that seem to fit together nicely. The way Apple seems to be migrating themselves as a company, they're slowly edging into network appliance territory and away from general purpose computing. That isn't to say they're going to drop general purpose systems like the current Mac line altogether, but I suspect they're on target to go ahead and reintroduce a whole new category that those of us who have been around for a long time have seen before as Information or Network Appliances.

Only this time, they'll have the proper groundwork laid for it to succeed.

My personal suspicion is that they'll introduce a new Mobile Me experience (Me.com, is it?) and tie that together with a fourth pillar of the company's product lineup, likely something to replace the Mac Mini but limited to App Store software. Of course, the limitation will mean they can make this new product with cheaper parts and at a typically-Apple high margin. Storage will be cloud based as everyone pretty much expects, and it'll share out to iOS devices and full-tilt computers. Though, the latter category might be a while in arriving on the desktop.

Of all the companies that have tried, or could try, to run a cloud based system introduction, nobody's ever been better positioned than Apple is right now. They've got the hardware, the experience to make the software, and most importantly the mindshare to achieve the kind of critical mass necessary for cloud based systems to be economically viable along with the cash to start it up.

Privacy and security implications are of course a big question, but the inevitability of this kind of product has been building for a long while.

I wish I'd had some money for stock. :P

I know that every other comment under the sun here is going to focus on the app store and DRM concerns, but I'm also somewhat concerned about the fact that CPU speeds on these new Macbook Airs seem to be... rather pathetic. C2D 1.4 and 1.86 Ghz processors? Is Xcode really that much better at leveraging the GPU, to where they can release something like this when announcing Lion and its new features that sound like they're going to brutalize processing power. With CPU speeds like these, it almost seems like they just didn't want to say the word 'Atom'.

I actually don't have a problem with this. It may be a little tougher at first, but since you're working with something that requires a whole new style of muscle memory and limited hand motion, it really isn't that bad.

What's bad, is when you try and replace existing muscle memory with new ones to adapt to something. What's doubly bad, is when you need to do it on two hands at once. Whenever possible with a new skill, I don't bother trying to learn the "lefty" mode if one is even offered. So long as it's new enough that I don't have an existing pattern, I dive "right" in.

I also shoot rifles righty, but pistols lefty. Though that might be more of an eye-related issue.

Schools do have to provide accomodations. When I was in college, one girl put in a request for a keyboard with the numeric keypad on the left hand side. It was going to cost $200, instead of the $10 that a keyboard typically ran - but because she put it in as an ADA thing, she got it. Ridiculous, and I say this as a lefty that _cannot_ change my mousing hand for gaming.

We're not cripples, we're just _lefties_. We certainly do need to adapt, but only as far as we can manage. It is up to us to put some pressure on designers to at least take our needs into consideration going forward, but we shouldn't be militant douchebags about it.

And I never understood switching the mouse buttons. Seriously. That's just fucking retarded.

I think I'll probably expand on this post for a blog entry later on, but I definitely need to weigh in on this subject. I'm a lefty that's tried for a long while to switch over, most recently having tried with a right-handed Logitech G500 mouse with many of the gaming bells and whistles. I spent about four months on it, and never could get my head in the right place for it. As a lefty, a whole host of things are more difficult than they're intended to be.

I spend a lot of my time gaming, usually on a PC. Console controls don't bother me with the left-right difference, but mousing is a real hassle a lot of the time. In the OS, I'm fine and can use a mouse in either hand, but in games - forget it. And it's only partially due to the mouse itself. A bigger contributor to my problems has been the need to use the arrow keys and home/end cluster for most gaming controls. I've gotten quite used to using that area of a standard keyboard layout for binding my keys, and my muscle memory is deeply ingrained for both hands.

Unfortunately, default keymaps are designed for right-handers, which means a lefty like me has to go through and rebind 2/3rds of the keys in a game to get to the point of having a functional experience. More recent, or more complex games are sometimes impossible to master just due to running out of places to put binds that your fingers can actually reach. Games where you can't rebind anything... well, those games don't get played.

My four month attempt to switch mousing hands pretty much ended with me being pissed off after four months of getting my ass handed to me in everything I played. I was constantly apologizing to teammates for shitty performance in Borderlands, taking far longer than anyone else to set up for an assault, and faster paced games like Team Fortress 2? Forget it. I spent a lot of time as an Engineer whacking a sentry with a wrench so it could do all the work.

I've tried the add-on keyboard controllers, the Logitech G13, the Belkin "SpeedPads", and a dozen mice over the last few years. Nothing seems able to shake my muscle memory out of the habits I've had with gaming since the Doom era when all you needed was weapon selection, movement and a fire button. The Logitech G13 game closest, but with its design quite heavily aimed at being used with a left hand due to a left-thumb positioned cluster of controls half of it is useless to me, and what's left doesn't feel quite _right_.

And even now that I'm sticking with a left-hand mouse/arrow keys keyboard configuration, I find myself still quite limited in options and controls. My mousing style is best described as a "fingertip" one, which works well with certain kinds of mouse design. With my keyboard needs, many of the current "ergonomic" models are simply useless.

At this point, the best companies I have to work with are Razer and Logitech. Razer may have a few dogs on the market, but they also have a capable midrange gaming mouse in the DeathAdder that comes in a lefty ergonomic design. Logitech may not be as nice to lefties with regards to mice, but the G-series keyboards haven't screwed with the fundamental 104 key layout. What those of us who can't adapt have been left with, is a pretty weak number of choices.

I have to give crazy amounts of credit to Razer, however. For a company whose products I once shot the hell out of in protest of a poor warranty situation - which they resolved, publicly and thoroughly - they really did step up. And in the case of the left-handed mouse, they claimed on launch that the left-handed DeathAdder may even be a money-loser but they still felt it was something important to do. Now, if only they'll step up the left-hand option to something like the Lachesis or Mamba.

In past days, companies weren't turning your $200+contract phone into an intentionally sabotaged brick if you looked at it funny. Screw up once, and the phone needs to be serviced by Motorola and only Motorola to fix it.

Sure makes trial and error testing a little more difficult. And a hell of a lot more expensive.

When I was doing some research for a friend who was looking into an upgrade last week, I came to a pretty straightforward conclusion. The only two processor lines worth putting money into today without worrying that you'll be completely screwed down the road, are the AMD Athlon II/Phenom II series on AM3 motherboards, and the Intel Core i7 processor line on socket 1366. Ignore i3 and i5 which are on socket 1156 like the plague, as the sockets used for those chips aren't likely to be ones that wind up sticking around. The Core X Duo/Quad line is practically dead, and I wouldn't expect any new processor announcements for Socket 775 anymore.

And when I came to that conclusion, AMD was the only choice that made sense. You can get a large percentage of the power in an i7 CPU out of the high-end Phenom II processor (which is identical to the lower-priced Athlon II, only with its L3 cache enabled) for a hell of a lot less money. Plus, you get the benefit of AMD having at least _tried_ to maintain some backwards compatibility in socket designs for the last few years.

I'm on a Core 2 Quad on socket 775 myself, and I know I'll have to re-evaluate all this crap again in about a year and a half or two years.