um.... how? microsoft may get their act together and support the arm architecture. how does that involve arm selling out?

Sit next to a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. Sit on a red-hot stove for a minute, it seems like an hour. That's relativity.

-- Albert Einstein

Ouch... that's a statement I wouldn't be happy about if I were a Microsoft engineer: We don't need you guys anymore to grow in this market. "They can jump in if they like, but hey, we got Linux, so we don't care." If I were Steve Ballmer, this would feel as a punch on the nose (Oh, and I wouldn't waste my time posting on Slashdot)

I am intrigued by the possibilities that your magic rock presents to us, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Also, does your rock have the endorsement of Jenny McCarthy or Oprah Winfrey? If so, I'm sold.

You, the tinkerer, will *always* be able to buy a PC that meets your needs.

But say the iPad effectively takes over the mass computing market (including business users) you mightend up with other PCs being very specialised and hence very expensive. If it got to the stage where you had to spend (say) £5000 to get a programmable machine, that would have a serious effect on IT hobbyists.

I teach high school chemistry. Lab reports and other hwk are done on OOo writer, using the excellent (math) formula editor, then submitted to me through Moodle. I overlay my comments with text boxes and upload the response. Kids enjoy the paperless experience, and I never lose their work. Unlike LaTeX, you can teach OOo formula editor in about 10 minutes. We do real experiments. We do a bit of data logging and graphing, but not that much. There are some online java apps for things like gas laws and molelcular models that I use occasionally, but mostly real experiments. When teaching theory, I use my laptop and type notes directly into a wiki on Moodle. Kids are then assigned to clean it up a bit later, and to upload any sketches I do in Kolourpaint. (They also maintain a glossary there and contribue their own notes to the wiki.) I often jump into Google images to find something that will illustrate what we are talking about. We have some chem draw type software (linux stuff), but I don't use it much at all. Its faster for me to use kolourpaint (just a kids' paint program for the couple of you who don't know linux)

Perhaps I should elaborate, then.

Bringing up the fact that the range is *only* 300 miles is just a distraction tactic. As stated before, 90% of people need around a 25 mile daily range for their commute.

It's like when the car came out and someone said "But this thing can run out of fuel!". Yeah, no shit, but how often are you going to be going that far anyway?

Actually, the fact that Opera has to spend far too much time emulating bugs in other browsers in order to work is not Opera's fault at all. That said, Opera is one of the most standards-compliant browsers there is, so that's clearly not the issue here. In this case it's apparently browser sniffing, or the author decided to rely on bugs in specific implementations rather than following the standards.

Ahh, but "a signing profile for your machine" is something you must get from Apple, i.e. you may install on your own device with their permission.

No, they're right.

The know-how of the original moon landings is all but lost now.

This appears to be an attempt to prevent that happening by using open-source software.

One of the arguments we've heard many times in favour of open-source software is that you can always adapt it, move your data into newer environments and make it live on.

It may take them a long time, they may not even be the ones who end up finishing the project, sure, but using open tools and open formats IS the way to go.

It's a bet! Will have to wait 3-6 months after release though to see how it plays in the wild.

My prediction: that the massive amount of hype built up for this will mean a spectacular write-up of the device regardless of the quality - or else there will be a lot of egg on various 'tech reporters' faces. Also I loved the penny-arcade comic on this: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/22/

mmm - yeah, the NAT stuff does make sense - although the few broker multiplayer stuff i've played always had a 'host' player - who if they disconnected then the whole session terminated. But yeah what you're saying makes sense - probably depends on definition of 'server' - but yeah thinking about it, the EA server is probably routing the data, so in otherwords - totally screwed if your games on that list!

There's one thing i've never been that clear on with multiplayer gaming on consoles (only just got one, still avid PC gamer) - if you've 'friended' someone, eg on PSN or Live, are you still able to initiate a direct multiplayer game with that person? Or is an EA server still required to act as some sort of broker?

From what I understand, I thought each of these games on consoles, that one of the players will be the 'server' - and that the role of the EA server is matchmaking etc, but clarification would be cool. That is, is it possible to initiate a multiplayer session directly with another user, without the broker (i.e. EA Server)?

Sounds like a very good experiment with useful results.