I recently had to assist implementing this software, and trust me, your suggestion would be a much more appropriate name. WANdisco is a horribly expensive solution to a problem that can be solved in much better and cheaper ways (the most obvious one being using something better than SVN in the first place). WANdisco essentially tries to do is turn the turd that is SVN into the turd that is ClearCase. Bleh!

It's not exactly a new phenomenon either...

There are those who act rich, yet have nothing; and those who act poor, yet have great riches.
(Proverbs 13:7)

That "justice" only ever existed for the war criminals on the losing side. Silly.

That depends on what you mean by "well designed". Apple's offerings look good, and are decently sturdy, sure. They aren't designed with serviceability in mind, though. If anything they're designed to be a pain in the ass to service, so that noone besides Apple service points will want to touch them.

There should be no reason why a laptop couldn't be well designed like an Apple, and easy to service. These are in no way mutually exclusive, which was the GP's point.

Not only that, but this might finally be a way to not being forced to pay the M$-tax on laptops. At least in this country it's currently - for all practical purposes - impossible.

Also, I used to work for a computer repair shop. We would have eaten these things up. We really hated the typical laptops which were a RPITA to work with, and almost impossible to fix even when you discovered the problem. I've really been looking forward to something like this.

Let's also hope it works better than their vehicle detection with auto brake... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ6z3IArINI

Hmmm... (looks at thermometer). A nice brisk -24 C. I think I'll defrost my freezer today. Just toss the stuff out on the balcony, and I'm set.

(Posting from Helsinki, Finland)

I believe that the GP was referring to the fact that the word "atom" means "undividable". But that's just my guess, of course...

Yes, let's. Business has been slow lately.

Okay. I bought a HP2133 (model FU337EA#AK8) as a Christmas present for my sister. It came with Novell SLED 10. The out-of-the-box-installation was completely unusable. Besides choosing a distro that's a real PITA to get forum support about (and in cases like these, it's pretty much the only support you'll get), the hardware they included had linux support ranging from poor to horrible.

Here's a list of the worst problems:

-Graphics drivers. The laptop uses a VIA graphics card, and out of the box, it only runs in an awful looking 640x480-stretched-to-fit-the-screen-VESA-mode. There are some pre-compiled 3D VIA binaries for a few kernels of some distros. There's also some source code for 2D drivers that I couldn't get to compile. (Fortunately some kind soul did get them to compile, and was kind enough to make the binaries publicly available.) Of course getting it working it wasn't that easy. You see HP offers 2 different screen sizes on this laptop, and this model naturally carried the less common one. It took me three days and several forum posts to find the obscure lines to edit in xorg.conf (And I do mean obscure, not just tweaking the resolution or modlines.) Option "PanelID" "17" in combination with a few other tweaks, I believe was the key to success.

-Audio drivers. Well, they'll work out of the box it would seem, as long as you don't want to use the headphone jacks or a microphone. HP appears to be using a not-quite-supported ADI SoundMax AD1984A soundcard. If you want to use, say Skype, you need to download the latest nightly ALSA build and compile that. Then you'll get the mic and jacks working as well. The only problem remaining is that every once in a while artsd thinks that hogging all the CPU cycles is a really good idea, and the ordinary Skype package won't work. You'll want the one labelled static-oss.

-Wireless. So far I believe the community has identified 5 different WLAN-cards used in these laptops. All from Broadcom. If you follow the instructions in the wikis really, really carefully, you'll probably have it working in an hour or two. :-P

So to sum it up: The SLED system that came with the netbook was an unusable mess. I switched to Kubuntu that I somehow managed to get working through a lot of effort, patience, and community support. The HP netbooks look very nice, and have better keyboards that most comparable systems, but given the level of half-assedness to the default install it's hard to recommend them to anyone. (The other alternative is Vista which is much more expensive, and even harder to recommend.) It would seem that HP just assumes that people buying these things are just going to pirate XP anyway, so why bother with quality control?

Oh, and I've got an Asus EEE myself. No problems whatsoever, with that one. Didn't quite like the default install, so I installed Mandriva instead. Still no problems.