Actually, the "cloud" experience on Android was there long before Apple. Buy an Android phone, insert your google account, and a few moments later you have all your contacts, calendars and apps.

Premise: I'm half-Brit half-Italian.
A while ago an Italian newspaper compared the time it took to build the Channel Tunnel compared to the Milan Bypass Railway (6 vs 24 years) poking much fun at our (Italian) slowness. Now that Italy has a full high-speed rail link between Turin-Milan-Rome-Naples (which included digging new tunnels in the Appenini mountains) built in less than 20 years (nearly 1000 Km), someone should write a similar article.
Obviously these times and distances are laughable compared to France and Japan anyway.

Then why do they have a bazillion iapps ?

Same as Apple, then.

> * the media player on Unix-like systems

This is being replaced with GStreamer: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/openofficeorg-use-gstreamer-multimedia

<smugmode>

Less than four ?

</smugmode>

I have built an atom-based htpc with a zotac ion motherboard and it does exactly what I want: fanless h264 decoding. A bit more than a cash register can do.

You are all youngsters :)

Until today I hadn't realized I had such a low user id...

I have been reading Slashdot for far too long.

Oh my ${deity}, six hours !!! That's like AGES ago !

Most of these are experimenting in new directions. And ext4 is backwards compatibile with ext3 which is backwards compatible with ext2 (the reverse is not true: i.e. you can't mount an ext4 filesystem with ext3).