Holy crap, why didn't you just talk to your neighbor to begin with? Talk about passive aggressive. The real moron here is the one who couldn't get the laptop to ignore a wifi network.

The iPhone is totally pants for gaming. I mean, yeah, it's fine for playing chess or a scrabble-clone, but for action games I just don't enjoy it. Games that use the accelerometer are especially atrocious.

Now if someone would create a proper game-controller add-on and games started to support it, then, and only then would the iPhone be a great gaming phone. Though, Apple would probably need to either create an official game controller or establish an API and standards for such an add-on for it to really take off.

Any keyboard that lacks home/page up/page down/delete/end in the proper place is worthless.

You're obviously not an Emacs user. OS X supports many Emacs shortcuts in text fields, and then on top of that you can use Butler to implement even more Emacs shortcuts. I don't miss home/pgup/pgdn/end at all because I use alt- instead and don't have to move my hands from the home row.

I so want to move to the Netherlands. Don't worry, I'm sure I can make my 58" plasma fit in a small apartment. It'll be nice to be able to consume marijuana and not get arrested.

My current working environment is actually not that bad, though, but it's not typical for the U.S. I very rarely work more than 40 hrs (and when I do, I get vacation time for the time I worked). I have 20 vacation days (not counting sick days). But it's many of the other aspects of American life that make me wish I lived in Europe.

Aluminum does not give a laptop heft, quite the opposite. Aluminum is lightweight and bends easily.

I am typing this on a Macbook Pro that has some dents on it. Though I'm pretty happy with my MBP in most other respects, I wish Apple would make a more durable laptop that could take a beating (at least as well as IBM Thinkpads could).

That may be true now, but a lot of the existing installations are pirate copies of XP with IE6, and they never do software updates. Last time I went to India (IE7 had been out for a year) it was exactly this scenario. All the internet cafes were running XP with IE6 and software updates were turned off, or Win2k (w/ IE6 or even IE5!). Same thing with machines sold to consumers (all my relatives who had bought machines had pirated XP installed).

The people running the internet cafes hadn't even heard of Firefox (or Linux for that matter).

For instance, a few months ago, I ordered PPV Gran Torino in 1080p for my wife and I to view one evening. Six hours later it was ready to view, but she was already in bed.

The real WTF is why you rented Gran Torino.

Let's remember, Vista wouldn't run on old equipment, while Win7 runs on anything over a gigahertz with a gig of memory. A lot of XP users COULDN'T upgrade to Vista!!

That's assuming your video/sound card are supported by Win7. I tried to install it on an old machine (1.4 GHz Athlon) and there were no Win7 drivers for either my video or sound card. Installed Ubuntu instead.

Why wouldn't you want it on the go? Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to decide before-hand what you want on your small laptop hard drive?

Personally the only reason I have a desktop machine is because I can load it up with hard drives (have 4TB in internal drives at the moment) and not have to fiddle around plugging in external drives like I would if I was using my laptop as a main machine. Of course I do some video editing, which takes up a ton of space. I would love it if my laptop could have that kind of storage space, then I'd only have one computer.

But I don't think they will catch up any time soon unless there is some huge breakthrough in storage technology. But it seems that the amount of space video takes up will continue to grow along with growing storage capacities.

As it stands, my desktop machine is my "media machine" - containing all my video and audio files (both of which may be original content as I do both video editing and audio recordings). My laptop I use for everything else (coding, web browsing, work). Storage space is the only thing that is forcing this division.

You can't kill the Kindle without electronic paper.

I also do all my reading on my laptop (and sometimes my iPhone), but I'm generally only reading programming books in which case its nice to be able to try things out as I go along. I've read non-programming books on a laptop, and while it was ok, if I was reading a lot of non-programming books I would much rather do it on something like a Kindle (I don't think I ever want to go back to paper books, though). There are even some programming books which I would've read on a Kindle (instead of my laptop) if I had one. But I read so few books of any kind that I can't justify the expense at its current price.

It's really the people who read tons of books who are going to buy products like the Kindle (at its current prices). They are the kind of people who would otherwise be reading dead tree and they don't want to read books on a computer screen.

While it's nice that Flex is open source (I also have been working with recently on a recent project), but we need an open source implementation of the Flash Player. The SWF file format being open is a start, but the libraries that implement the Flash API are not part of this. I speculate that this is why Gnash has not been able to keep up, they have to reverse engineer and reimplement the libraries for the Flash API.

I tried Eclipse while in College and it was god awful slow compare to Visual Studio(.Net 1.1). I have not tried Eclipse since.

And this is supposed to be relevant now, how?

I've actually found that all versions of Visual Studio are unbearable slow, even if you have 4GB of RAM, have recent hardware, and it's the only thing running. 2005 was actually slower than 2003. 2008 is about the same speed as 2005 in my subjective observations, though it is doing more in the background now, so I guess its a net gain.

Eclipse is blazing fast in comparison, and I don't consider Eclipse to be any sort of speed demon. If it's slow for you, you probably just haven't tweaked the JVM settings yet (which is necessary, especially if you use a lot of plugins). Also remember that, by default, it's constantly compiling every change you make (at least in Java), but you can turn that off if you like (I don't, I like my compilation errors reported right away).

I'd of course rather be using Emacs than either of those pigs, and use it for anything that's not Java/C#. It's funny, because back in the day Emacs was the pig. Now it's lightweight in comparison to the alternatives.

I have all three installed - 2008, 2005, and 2003, though I mainly use 2008 these days (just have the other ones around just in case). I don't get what people like about Visual Studio. I personally like Eclipse much much better, and like using Emacs even better than that. Maybe I'm just scarred from having to use Visual Studio's awful Winforms designer. But they could do so much more for C# editing. Intellisense is good and all, but they should look at Eclipse's quick fixes and try pressing CTRL-1 and CTRL-. (Cmd instead of CTRL if you're on a Mac) and all the little shortcuts that allow you breeze through writing Java code in Eclipse. That said, the code editor is fairly good in 2008, just not as good as the competition as far as editing for a verbose language is concerned, and there's very little in VS that really impresses me.

I do development, and even when software crashes, the OS stays up and running.

It's pretty sad that you even have to make a statement like that in 2009. I mean, we're not talking about Windows 3.x/95/98/ME here.

Ok, so if you don't want to even run Firefox 3 (which *does* support Win2k) on the system, what is the problem with Mozilla dropping support in 3.5? For running modern software, Win2k has not been a viable option for a few years now. You just can't expect to run it and be able to install recent software packages anymore. If you need to run modern software, its time to upgrade.

Unfortunately, some of my customers don't feel this way, and we are stuck using .Net 2.0 so that we can support Win2k on one of our products when we really want to be using 3.5 which is a huge improvement (don't get me started on the bad decision to even use .Net in this product). Maybe in 2010 we can finally abandon support for Win2k, but by that time we hopefully will have replaced this product with a web-based equivalent.

BTW, I have machines from around 2001 (AMD Athlon T-Bird 1.4GHz for example) that are running Ubuntu 8.04 (desktop) just fine. Supported until 2011 (Ubuntu's long term support distros are supported for 3 years for the desktop, 5 years on the server). I wouldn't be surprised if the next LTS release works ok on that machine, too, but if it doesn't, there are other distros that cater to old hardware. While its nice that MS still releases security updates for Win2k, the most common reason for not wanting to upgrade desktops to XP has been having to pay for it.