You seem to have used my post as a reason to talk about yourself. This I don't really understand. Regardless...

The 'Apple is more expensive' line has been debunked over and over. The reality is that Apple isn't trying to gain market share at any cost, and since there are no competitors producing macs (well, not legitimately anyway) they can keep their prices reasonable, make a profit, and put that back into R&D, whereas companies like Dell have to slash their margins in order to sell more units and compete on price.

Well good for you. I've never found any reason to buy any Ford, BMW, Sun, or Prada product. That doesn't mean there isn't a market for them, or that people who buy their products don't enjoy using them. I have, however, purchased several Apple products, but only after products from Dell, HP, and so on proved themselves to be unreliable and Windows proved cumbersome and insecure.

Again, good for you. I'm very interested in computers, and going to conferences, meetups, and events, I find that Apple products are in good supply. Three years ago, half of the laptops at a given conference were Macs. A few weeks ago I went to another conference, and this one was nearly 100% Apple. And none of these conferences were the least bit Apple-related, incidentally. The only conference I went to at which that this wasn't the case was a Microsoft conference, but at that one, almost no one had a laptop out.

Ok, so Linux is used on servers, which isn't news, and people write apps for Windows. None of this is a big surprise. It's a question of market penetration, and Windows nets you a bigger piece of the pie. That doesn't mean that Apple isn't making significant strides and rapidly gaining in mindshare.

What gets me is that you seem to have packaged this rant up for delivery whenever the least opportunity presents itself. Not a single measure of what you said has anything to do with what I said. You simply used a position that you disagree with, apparently passionately and vehemently, to spring off into your own personal diatribe. That's kind of sad.

Ballmer has also stated that the iPhone and RIM don't have 'momentum' (despite selling in colossal numbers), whereas the real market momentum is in 'windows mobile and android'. Which no one buys.

It's all marketing and PR BS. Apple's in a fantastic position, and will continue on that trend. Microsoft may have more money, people, and market share, but they've got nothing worth using it all for. The best they can come up with is a few stolen features, a few half-assed 'innovations', the occasional good idea, and a lot of competitors besieging them on all sides.

Probably by looking at the source code. WebKit, WebCore, and JavaScriptCore are all open-source. This is why they're used everywhere, including in recent GNOME browsers, QT 4, on Symbian, Android, and WebOS on the Palm Pre.

Google Gears does this.

The reason NOT to do it with Adobe Air is the same as the reason not to use any cross-platform toolkit - all you end up with is the lowest common denominator experience and functionality.

It should be definitely doable to make Bespin Gears-aware, so that you don't need your internet connection for the duration - just when you're done editing, want to save to the server, etc.

The problem with that is that you end up with a graphical interface being shipped pixel by pixel over the network to your machine, and your keystrokes shipped back to the server.

With Bespin, for example, your editing work happens on the local end, and is sync'ed over the network to the server.

Yes, web apps are even more efficient than X11 for such things. Crazy, huh?

There's been an abundance for the last eight years, the cost has dropped substantially.

And 2 better girls?

From my understanding of the DMCA, Apple is entirely correct that this is a DMCA violation - despite the fact that it shouldn't be illegal, the real problem is the law, not Apple's interpretation of it.

On my iPhone, I use an app called SBSettings. By doing a swipe gesture across the status bar at the top, I get a drop-down that allows me to quickly and easily enable/disable WiFi or 3G, or to adjust the brightness. This single feature alone is what I jailbreak for. I also like to be able to SSH into (or out of) my iPhone, and having a UNIX terminal that I can do basic administration from.

Theming is nice, there are some neat apps like MxTube, which lets you download YouTube videos to store and watch offline (but not re-share), but in the end, there are things for everyone. Unfortunately, quick and easy piracy is now one of those things.

It's the same familiar concept that encourages people to use a lot of products â"Âwhat Palm was offering was the least worst. If you hated WindowsCE/PocketPC, your only other choice was PalmOS. Despite how awful it was, it was the least-worst option.

The best PDA on the market these days, especially if you have a Mac on the desktop, is the iPod Touch; the best smartphone is the iPhone. Opinions may vary, of course, but 'PDAs' aren't dead, they've just been absorbed into other products, namely phones and MP3 players.

There's also netbooks, if you want something with a little more power but still portable (and Linux-able).

More like the courts are saying once and for all that the unfounded claims being made by people about vaccines causing autism have no basis in reality, which any good doctor could have told you.

Not just useless - in some cases, detrimental. Because of the visual impairment I have and the way my brain learned to deal with it, I don't have proper stereoscopic vision. My brain uses the picture from the dominant eye, and then fills in whatever's left with my other eye.

Aside from not having any depth perception, this also means that '3D' films are, at best, not 3D, and at worst, unwatchable and migraine-inducing. More 3D movies means less movies I can actually watch, and thus less money to the studios from myself and other people with visual impairments.

Only if you want to make a 20-year-old processor.

When I read the poster's question, I heard 'I'm an open-source geek, and I think everyone should use open-source software because it's inherently better. I just got a job at a university and I'm sure that if I tell them open-source is better enough times, they'll switch. I don't know anything about how universities or software licenses work, but that's probably not important. What do I do?'

There are a variety of reasons why this might not be a good idea. If everyone uses OpenOffice, switching to MS Office, with a different layout of features and a different interface, will confuse the hell out of them. After four years of OO, they'll be surprisingly sub-standard at mere document editing compared to their peers.

Not saying it's not a bad idea, but forcing a massive change in university could be detrimental to students down the road. There are far too many things to consider here for someone who isn't even in a position to know what's being paid, let alone influence what's being paid for.