Take an ARM chip and then make a consumer PC out of it. See how well it sells. Can cheaper ARM based PCs outsell Intel based ones?

It's among the reasons I too am a customer of theirs. It's also what worries me about the Sprint merger. I have a gut feeling that we'll end up with a Sprint-like T-Mobile (not super-evil, but still a huge corp), rather than a T-Mobile like Sprint (a company that seems to go out of its way to make life miserable for Ma Bell and VZW).

Back in my day, if you wanted internet on your laptop, you needed an actual cable long enough to go from your phone jack to your dial-up modem...and somehow, my parents survived!

First, in order for airport wi-fi to not-suck, you'll need a massive subnet with a TTL of no more than 30 minutes. Yes, I've been in airports where a /24 subnet was apparently just dandy...

Second, everyone who's in an airport seems to want to stream Netflix or something like that; I do hope that Netflix throws a peering widget their way, because the thousands of iPads in that airport will strain the pipe pretty efficiently.

Third, you're on a single collision domain, half-duplex, along with everyone else. 5GHz may help matters, but 2.4 will still be needed for compatibility, and if you're stuck on it, you'll probably get useful speed out of a dial-up optimized RDP session an an SSH window, but the only way regular web browsing is ever worth it is if you have some absurdly early flight (5AM takeoff or similar), at which point 'using my computer' plays second fiddle to the better activity: sleep.

Sorry, I've just never seen it worth it. I always load up my hard drive before I go, and I've never regretted it.

The airport: the worst place to be in the cloud.

I genuinely don't know, but it's possible that the issue isn't "get the program to compile on Windows" as much as it's a "get the program to run like an actual Windows application". Har harr, I don't mean 'it crashes every five seconds" or "has a metric ton of DRM" or "litters stuff all over your file system". There are other aspects of a QT application on Windows that go beyond just getting it to compile...

1.) Codec support. Windows users will fully expect files from their devices to get onto a timeline, and this includes MPEG-4, AVCHD, and Quicktime files. If Openshot is going to work on Windows, 'working with the dominant file types on that platform' is a prerequisite. A word processor on Linux that didn't support ODT wouldn't get too far...same principle here.

2.) the 'open' and 'save' dialogs of QT applications on Windows applications are very Linux-y. I'm generally okay with this, but the absence of shortcuts on the left side, along with the necessity of going through the complete file structure to get to the user's profile folders, are decisively not-Windows behavior.

3.) Some GPU acceleration can be done with OpenGL...but I don't think MPEG-4 encoding typically is. That's a bog standard feature in basically every video editing title on Windows...and is VERY handy for longer stuff.

I'm sure there's more, but 'compiling and shipping and slapping on an Installshield Wizard' isn't all there is.

On Soviet Mars, Earthlings land on Mars in flying saucer?

(fanboi warning)
Origin PC. I'm north of four years on my EON-17. Yes, it's a Clevo chassis, but they're easily serviceable, and fiercely supported. For the most part, Macbooks are cheaper than the base units of each series, and if you're looking for the less-expensive route to the same thing, go with Sager - Sager is the unaffiliated,"drop-ship the hardware" Clevo rebadger, and Origin is more the "we have your back no matter what, and will custom paint your rig and install your software and test it out for you" option, with each company's pricing reflecting these respective stances. Either way, if you can deal with the weight and the less-than-stellar battery life, and you like laptops that make tinkering possible, and money isn't a consideration, then they're your answer. I don't work for them, and I don't own their stock, but I'll never buy a laptop from anyone else.

David,

Thanks for responding here. You sure don't see the guys over at Comcast responding directly to the Slashdot crowd, so respect there.

One thing I've been hoping that OpenDNS would adopt is the system that FoolDNS uses to thwart tracking and redirects. I'll be honest and say that I switched my router's DNS addresses to FoolDNS for that reason. Is there any meaningful discussion within OpenDNS to provide a service like this?

Thanks!

Behold: someone's already thought of that: http://i0.wp.com/leadershipfor...

By that definition, *you* don't trust it, but Chuck Norris would be able to trust it for about twenty kilometers.

HP's business grade laptops are fairly decent, but there's a pretty good reason for that - when you're selling a 3 year soup-to-nuts service plan on it as a standard feature, you're going to spend the extra $50 to ensure you're not replacing it in two years.

Consumer units are a different story. Head inside one if you get a chance. Instead of wire channels, you'll literally find scotch tape. Everyone I've ever known with an ENVY line laptop has an overheating problem that will trigger a thermal shutdown because they didn't use enough copper to make an effective heatsink. The one guy I know who can go all day without a thermal trigger doesn't game on it, and has a chill mat with strategically placed props to allow hot air to flow off of it. By contrast, my old Dell XPS M1730 was able to cool two GPUs and a Core 2 Duo processor, under load, with fan levels that were rarely audible. My current Origin EON17 (a discontinued model) is much better built and has a nice service panel where most of the core components can be easily accessed.

Head to Google and check out "dv9000". That was their 17" laptop from 2006-2007ish, and literally every one I've ever come across has had the left hinge fail. In my case, repeatedly. This was again due to poor construction of the heat dissipation systems that weakened the hinge until it cracked, because the left hinge started to become a de facto heatsink itself.

When I direct someone to buy a laptop, It's either Lenovo (Thinkpads aren't what they used to be but they still have pretty solid construction), Asus (performance on a budget), Apple (if they're eyeballing one anyway because they've already made up their mind) or Origin (performance without a budget). On rare occasion a Probook will catch my eye at Microcenter and I'm thinking that it may be worth rolling the dice, but would I recommend consumer grade HP? No...and I wouldn't recommend CG Dell, Acer, or Toshiba, either.

Unreal tournament will be a very interesting case study over the next year or two, because there are a lot of different variables that don't apply to mobile gaming.

First, a few questions regarding the market model:
1.) Will the game be sufficiently open source that you can download the source, write in the MindPrison Content Market, and distribute the recompile? Android technically lets you do this, but short of Amazon, no market has taken hold since Google Play comes on literally every Android phone sold through carriers. Unreal Tournament is not as similarly beholden.
2.) If it's not that free, will it be possible for modders to release their maps independently, and for players to install them without going through the market? Also different from the mobile market since every UT release ever has had this system in place; users only familiar with iOS will be confused but I see the overlap between the two markets as vanishingly small.

Next, a few differences with the TRUE market. F2P games are, ultimately, marketing to players. Unreal Tournament makes money another way: directly through Unreal Engine 4 subscriptions and the gross revenue therefrom. $20/month per subscriber starts to add up when we add in all the modders and map makers. Similarly, the next Gears of War release will make Epic a fortune with that 5% gross revenue thing happening. Epic doesn't need to make a killing from players in order to get their hookers and blow. Unreal Tournament is a tech demo for the engine and a low-barrier-of-entry for indi developers to get started.

Finally, the Epic Games that released Unreal Tournament 3 was pretty awesome. Why? Because despite not selling as many copies of that year's Call of Duty release, the folks over at Epic Games did release five update packs including the Titan pack (which had several modifiers, new gameplay modes, and new maps) for free, a year and a half after its release. It was also the only game I'm aware of that had a full plastic-disc release that never required an internet connection but also let players put their CD key into Steam and get all the wonderfulness of having the game on Steam. You don't see that kind of dedication from Activision and while it's been quite some time, I'd at least like to think that some of those people are still in charge of making decisions here. I'm fully aware that it's an unreasonable amount of optimism to have, but what can I say - I have hope.

The worst part is that they ditched the two half-decent products they HAD - PartitionMagic was excellent in its day, and Ghost 2003 was a great tool as well. Symantec discontinued both,leaving Acronis and OSS to eat their lunch in both departments. Alas, the dark side of chasing after subscriptions. ...and, shocker of shockers, they're offering 'cloud storage' now. I'm just waiting for 7-11 to start doing that.

Check out "Copilot". It's $8 (for the North American version; other regions are a bit more expensive if memory serves), and downloading maps is its claim to fame. You download the maps for the regions you need via wifi, and it navigates you without ever needing a data connection. It also has traffic redirection like Waze, which is free for the first year and some trivial amount thereafter. It reads turn-by-turn directions via the Android TTS engine, so any voices you have for it will work.

The caveats are that map updates tend to be released quarterly (a problem if you're looking for that super-new restaurant the next town over) and that addresses tend to be a bit weird - you can paste a full address, but it does its internal database queries based on 'drilling down', so it asks for city/state, then street name, then house number, in that order, which takes some getting used to.

Still, Google Maps has indeed gone to hell in a handbasket, especially for me who have this bizarre notion that "using Google for search, maps, and apps" does not equate to "I want to buy into every aspect of the Google ecosystem, everywhere, ever". Google makes it bloody hard to make that possibility practical.