you mean that fancy multi-touch trackpad doesn't even work properly in windows? that's about 50% of the reason I even considered buying a macbook. and now I hear the battery life sucks if you don't run OSX. that was the other 50%. i did not intend to run OSX even if I did buy a macbook, but I thought it might be worth the money for the nicer hardware. it doesn't matter if it's apple's apathy or malice that is causing the windows drivers to suck, it just means the laptop does not function as advertised. i guess it's time for me to forget about apple and buy a thinkpad.

I hate that %&$#*#% adapter, it should not be necessary at all. The one that lets you use 3.5 while charging costs $15 online and it's a total ripoff. I keep it in my car to hook up to my stereo for internet radio, but it's very easy to misplace. Good thing MS has required that all WM7 phones have a 3.5 audio port. I think that's the real reason why HTC has included one on their newest phone and all phones thereafter.

I think I would like the G1, but I'm not ready to jump ship to go with Android mainly because it's too new. Same goes for WebOS. I'd rather have an established developer base and mod scene.

err, 3.5mm, sorry :)

Crappy hardware from HTC? What's crappy about it? Crappy software, sure. Windows Mobile really sucks and needs a lot of work but at least it is easily hackable and upgradeable. HTC are assholes about providing drivers for their GPU chips also. Xda-devs help a LOT in making these phones as good as they can be. I can install any damn software I want to using a .cab file that I can download on the internet.

The HTC hardware, on the other hand, kicks total ass IMO. I consider it FAR superior to anything else I have used. Of course I probably have different criteria that I am looking for in a phone.

I want a large, high resolution touchscreen AND a large, comfortable hardware keyboard in a slider or clamshell design. Standard SD card slot for storage and USB port for charging / data transfer are absolute requirements. I also want 3G/HSDPA, Bluetooth, GPS, and perhaps FM radio. 3.5" audio jack is nice to have, too. My HTC Kaiser was near-perfect hardware IMO, and the new Touch Pro 2 is much closer to the mark, since it is higher-res and has 3.5" audio jack in the US versions. Wish it had physical d-pad keys on the face, but oh well, thats the trade-off for a bigger screen. Right now I'm 90% sure my next phone will be the Touch Pro 2 from Sprint.

I think that is a very weak argument. How is it any more difficult to test? If Windows is preinstalled, then the EULA must be accepted before the computer will be able to do anything. Why wouldn't they test using a LiveCD or LiveUSB of some sort, that has nothing to do with the installed OS and can run a series of pre-defined tests? I fully support OEMs (including Apple) being required to sell computers with blank hard drives in them (and refunding the "OS fee") if that option is chosen by the purchaser.

No, but maybe you should be required to offer it with no operating system at all (at least the ones that allow customization of the computers). I can understand if you are selling pre-boxed PCs at a store, they cannot be customized prior to sale. But if they let you add an extra stick of RAM or a different video card or a bigger hard drive (Dell, HP, etc), then they can just as easily put a blank, brand new hard drive in it. Is that really so difficult? I think most decent and reputable system builders will do this for you, anyway (PowerNotebooks.com comes to mind..). It's the big-name OEMs that collude with Microsoft and force you to buy Windows when they could just as easily not sell you Windows by not imaging the hard drive with Windows prior to installing it. Most people who use Linux would prefer this option, anyway, because the first thing they do will be to install their distro of choice.

I wonder if anyone has ever tried this with Apple.. Wipe out OSX and request a refund for it because you plan to use Linux.. I bet it would be even more difficult than getting a Windows refund.

yea, its true that raid is not backup. but what am i supposed to do in order to backup 4 terabytes of data? and these 4 teras are rapidly filling up, i will soon expand to 6+. i can store the most critical stuff on a separate machine that's usually powered off, but how can i back up my multi-tera RAID-6 properly without buying twice as many spinning disks? is there an economical tape solution for home use?

You aren't stuck with it. Just re-flash the phone to the OEM firmware. At least with HTC phones, its very simple to do. Can't imagine it's that much harder to do to a Nokia. Good story though. Didn't know ATT would help you use an unlocked phone on their network like that. It's refreshing compared to the crap that Verizon pulls. However, I think your story hinges on the fact that you already were an ATT customer with a $15/month data plan. If you didn't already have that, you would have been reamed like everyone else.

Just curious, do blackberry phones have a similar dev/hacker following that HTC phones do? I'm thinking you can just flash whatever ROM you want to the phone and hack it all up if you want. Install the latest and greatest. I do this on my ATT Tilt and the haxors have managed to get the best parts of the newest TouchFlo phones to work on this older handset. I flashed away from the stock ATT rom and am never going back, so I could care less if ATT ever updates their crappy software.

If blackberry is anything at all like this then I may give it another look when I buy my next handset. I had this preconceived notion that blackberries were locked-down and apps had to be signed, and I will not buy any phone that lacks an active hacker community. Palm Pre may be an option, nokia is blech, iphone lacks keyboard and multitasking, android looks promising, and blackberry may be cool but I know little about it.

I am fortunate to live close enough to work that a bike is not out of the question. But I don't perform manual labor in a warehouse all day, nor do I have access to a shower at work. It's just not reasonable for me to show up to work stinking and sweating in an office-type job, which would be the case even with a 10-minute bike ride let alone a 30-minute bike ride. I live in Texas. Public transportation does not exist here, so I can't bring a bike and ride it home like you did. It's a nice idea for exercise, but it would suck overall.

detail view is the easiest for me to navigate. I have never understood why people with 20/20 vision would use Icon view for anything other than images, or even consider using list view. when i am looking for the file I want, I either know its Name, its Size, its Type, or its Date Modified. I click one of those buttons at the top to sort by that criterion and the file I want emerges before my eyes. There is one way to scan the files -- vertically.

With icon view, you have the useless icons taking up space and obscuring the file name, and you have to scan the files both horizontally and vertically to find a file. Unless I am looking at image thumbnails, I can't ever stand using icon view for longer than 5 seconds. I can only assume that icon view is useful to people with crappy vision and as the common denominator for people who didn't know you could change the view in to begin with.

The first thing I do on every Windows system I use is to enable file extensions, view all hidden and system files, and force detail view for all folders.

[vista rant]
Since Vista came out, MS has added an incomprehensible folder categorization feature, so anytime you open a folder it is completely random what view you will get and what properties will be displayed. I think the intent was to "guess" that you want thumbnail view and look at metadata like "tags" or "artist" because a folder contained some images, for example. It never works and is f***ing retarded. You can set a default view for all folders "of this type", whatever that means, but not for truly "all folders". For that you need to edit the registry. So long story short, my standard Windows UI modifications now include a registry edit to get my plain detail view back. I wonder if this is still necessary in Win7.
[/vista rant]

It plays Theora as well.

The moar you know.....

straight from the theora website

The COWON devices rock. I bought my SO a Cowon D2 for her birthday because it was tiny and had an SDHC slot, unlike any of its competitors that I can remember. She mostly uses it to watch dual-audio subtitled anime tracks in OGM format. Guess what, it also plays Theora. And FLAC. And Vorbis. Etc etc. Sweet little gadget, I need to get myself one now.

AT&T is metering Beaumont now? OMFG! Why do I have to live in the one place in the entire motherfucking country that has metered 'bandwidth' on every ISP available? And why has no one else on Slashdot pointed out that there is a city in the United States where TWO major corporate ISPs are capping their internet services? Why isn't Beaumont the internet's net neutrality battleground instead of these other cities?

It was bad enough when Time Warner started doing it, but now AT&T has done it, and quietly for sure. I simply had no idea, and it was not announced in any way. I thought AT&T's trial was in Reno only. This is a fucking outrage, and I think I will spend my day off tomorrow contacting my representatives in federal, state, and local government. Seriously, this is BAD. I was shopping for DSL as recently as LAST WEEK to try to get away from paying Time Warner anything, even though I am (quite luckily) still grandfathered in to their unmetered plan. I thought I had no options because DSL isn't even available where I live, but now I quite literally have NO FUCKING OPTIONS, they have all been stripped away. It's only a matter of time before they start billing me the metered rate, so I have to act quickly. Does anyone else here live in Beaumont? We need to protest!

Here's another article I found on the Beaumont caps.