But you can't legally run it on hardware that isn't "Apple Branded" according to the EULA.

Agreed. The one thing that gets forgotten in the hullabaloo about the iPad is that when it was announced, the prices were significantly cheaper than many people had been expecting, and that this caught a lot of the 'me-too' manufacturers off guard. If the Galaxy is more expensive than an equivalent spec iPad, then not only does it lose out to the 'buy the cheapest' crowd, it also gives Apple ammunition to say: "see: we aren't expensive". TBH though, because of the app-store lock-in, Apple ought to be able to virtually give-away iPads and still make lots of money, so I can see this battle going on for a good while yet.

You could argue that they are currently also being screwed over by Intel, who can't offer an i5 or i7 with decent graphics, hence the ridiculous shenanigans that Apple are doing with graphics processor switching in MacBook Pros, and the lack of i5 or i7 in the latest Mac Mini.

Someone please mod parent clueless rather than insightful. Neither IIS nor SQL are at fault in this case, it is a third party add-on that is being exploited. There is nothing here that uniquely makes IIS or SQL more or less vulnerable than, say, Apache and MySQL. It is perfectly possible to code a LAMP application that is equally vulnerable, and recent attacks on applications such as Wordpress prove this is true. The article IMHO is being needlessly attacking towards IIS. It's like saying 'Mass SQL injection attack hits x86 servers' therefore somehow implying that servers running on Arm would be secure.

And there you go, proving my point.

According to you, I must be an Apple fanboy, and a "dishonest prick" simply because you don't accept a point of view that I have expressed.

Therefore pretty much proving yourself not to be such a "reasonable" person as you would probably wish to be.

I agree that if you buy an iPod or an iPhone you are likely subject to lock-in. You, as a clearly well-informed person, do not want to get locked in. But you DO want the lovely shinyness, dont you? Otherwise why do you get so angry and start calling people pricks? - I think you protest too much!

There is one fundamental difference between Microsoft and Apple. Apple don't have a monopoly (virtual or otherwise) on PCs or Phones. You have a choice. If you don't like their DRM or their App submission policies, don't buy a Mac/iPhone/iPad and don't develop software for them. Other people may make a different choice. Why does this have to mean that Apple are somehow "evil" ? they aren't holding a gun to your head if you don't buy one of their products. What I think most people have a problem with is that Apple stuff definitely looks and feels "nicer" than everything else, and in this day and age that's all that appears to matter to the average (non nerd, non /. reading) consumer. Ranting on to other /.ers and Mac zealots is simply naval gazing.

Yes. It's called Bluetooth.

Your old P4 is a minimum 3 - 4 times slower at raw CPU tasks than the Athlon X2 (http://techreport.com/articles.x/18448/13). The story about your 512Mb XP machine running faster than the Athlon X2 3Gb machine simply does not ring true. Perhaps you were only playing solitaire on it? No-one is denying that Puppy Linux is fast, or small, or that it fits in memory. Try running Open Office on it with only 30Mb of Ram and then tell me that it is fast.

YES the part about HDD cacheing slowing things down. HDD cacheing speed things up! Memory Swapping slows things down - which is simply a question of how big your application + operating system's "working set" of memory is (i.e. the memory that simply has to be held in Ram because it is being actively read and written). 3Gb with Windows 7 is plenty for "normal" apps, and it won't be any slower than your 512Mb XP machine running the SAME applications - in fact it'll be a load faster because it won't have to swap as much and the disk is likely faster.

There is no correct answer. The original post I was replying to stated that there was no definition of a netbook which could include an iPad. I merely gave a definition which I think fits. You don't like it? then fine. I don't see anywhere in your ranty hissyness any coherent statement of what a netbook is vs a phone or a desktop PC.

At least I have some logic. You have none apart from the fact that you simply *know* that "Mobile Phones are not netbooks" and then you're off on one that now it's a "Tablet"?

It's not a tablet. I can't swallow it. :P

Yes, they achieve these functions. But they are not great for these functions primarily because the screen size is too small, not because they physically lack the functionality. Which brings us back to the iPad as a pretty good merger of the two.

I define a netbook as an easily carried computing device that I can use to do web browsing and email.

By that definition, the iPad looks like a pretty good Netbook to me.

Except that the iPhone delivered significantly LESS functionality than other phone manufacturers were giving us, and was significantly behind the times (like 4-5 years) compared to actual features in things like Symbian and Windows Mobile. The thing it did was take what functionality they had, and make it really easily accessible - so much so that people like you, apparently, think that it had more functionality than it's contemporaries. That's what puts the iPad in competition with netbooks - it's a netbook that is easy to use, which is where it will find its market.

Fundamentally, I believe that the iPad is positioned to compete with netbooks, with a side-order of e-book reader. The netbook market is well established, and is currently in a cycle of increasing features, speed etc. because actual netbooks are slow and have tiny unusable screens and tiny unusable keyboards. The e-book reader market is small, but is widely believed to be "taking off" with things like the Kindle. I don't think that the iPad is necessarily the ideal platform for a dedicated slashdotter, but it will be: a) Incredibly easy to use. There were *plenty* of smartphones avaialable before the iPhone, but until the iPhone, nobody used any of the features. b) Not Nerdy. There is a larger potential market for non-nerds than there is for nerds (=slashdotters). This market does not care whether they are "locked in" "locked out" or whatever, they just think it's shiny and cool. c) O/S improvements will continue. The original iPhone didn't support 3rd-party installed apps, tethering, or even cut & paste. These were added fairly swiftly and I see this happening with time on the iPad to support things like external cameras, some kind of multitasking etc. Everyone seems to keep going on and on about the lack of "proper" multitasking, but why, really? what you really need is message push so that you can be alerted to switch apps when something happens - e.g. a twitter message.

That's the whole point of this type of engine - it's not your traditional ION drive which has very low thrust but high specific impulse. VASIMR has relatively high thrust - not enough to travel through the atmosphere, but high enough to be used to shove the ISS up to a higher orbit.

I'm struggling to contain a snigger here. How many contractual obligations have been broken during the recent financial crisis? quite a few I'd wager.

Why should the technology of reviving you improve faster than (or ever become cheaper than) the cryo-sustain technology? And in any case, neither will ever be cheaper than simply turning you off.