The Atom processor is, IMO, the reason for the downfall of the netbook. Not to mention the fact that 7-10" screens are barely usable. A 11.6" screen with a decent processor (at least 2.0 Ghz i3), and a usable amount of ram (at least 4 GB) and it would have made a fantastic netbook. But Atom processors are so painfully underpowered, that using the machines was painful. My netbook died and I had to temporarily use a 10 year old Pentium 4 laptop with 256 MB of RAM, and that machine was WAY more powerful than my 1.6 Ghz, 2 GB RAM netbook.

Then you had that ridiculous Windows 7 Starter edition that was extremely crippled as an operating system. Pick any Linux distro and it was far superior to Windows on netbooks by miles.

Now you have these companies who didn't market and didn't properly build netbooks trying to go the other direction with Ultrabooks, which aren't much more powerful than netbooks, but cost 4 times as much. I simply will not pay $1,000+ for a machine with a 1.5 Ghz processor and 2 GB of RAM just because it's slim and pretty.

Exactly. Eventually, they'll make the shopping lens part of some big meta package, like they love doing, and if you try to uninstall it, it will also uninstall your entire desktop environment. Like they used to do with so many packages. If you tried to uninstall evolution, it would uninstall the entire gnome-desktop. It's better to simply pick a distro that respects your freedom and doesn't force you to have something installed that you don't want.

98 SE was better. I've not been a fan of the NT line. I wish they had kept DOS as the base and just updated it. Even if they stopped calling it DOS and caled it Windows Core, or something, made it multi-user and multi-tasking. I like keeping an OS' base system abstracted from the GUI. It just makes sense.

The problem when it comes to unpaid internships is that I have rent and a car payment and groceries and other living expenses to think about. In short: I need a paid job. Internships are full time jobs, so if I take an unpaid internship for six months or a year, how exactly am I supposed to make ends meet?

I would very much like a job in IT right now. I have been self employed for the past 5 years doing IT support, but these dime-a-dozen repair shops keep popping up all over town (these shops seem to be some kind of franchise or turn-key get rich quick thing) and it's killing my business. In the past 6 months I have lost at least 50% of my business. Plus, I would very much like to gain the experience of working in a larger business setting (my largest client is a medical office that has 3 locations and about 20 computers). I didn't go to college. I got scammed by one of those certificate mills, but I still learned, got a few certs, and have been working. I've been continuously learning and growing over the years. I've been obsessed with computers and technolgy all my life. Not only is it what I do for a living, it's my hobby. I come home in the evenings and build Linux servers. I have a deep passion for technology and would love to land a job as a junior admin and eventually work my way up.

The problem is that no one cares about my experience. Because it's not from working for someone else, no one counts it as valid. And I have yet to see a single admin job posting that doesn't requrie a BS in CompSci. Even Level 1 help desk jobs these days are asking for the world, but only offering $9-$10 per hour. And that's simply unfair. I've paid my dues when it comes to Level 1 support. That's the biggest part of what I've done. I shouldn't have to work unpaid for a year only to get a shit job for another few years before hoping to get promoted.

Basically, looking at the job landscape (listings at Dice or Monster or CareerBuilder) there's no company that would hire me. And I don't even get the chance to prove myself. You say experience is important, but from what I'm seeing, you need 5-10 years of experience and a BS to even get your foot in the door with anyone. What's a person to do?

No, i don't mean to imply it's all due to sloppy code. I refer to the enterprise IT shops that have some sort of mission critical, in-house web-app that are built agasint a single browser (or specific version), like requiring IE6/WinXP. People have done the same with developing against FF. After 3.5 so many IT shops went apeshit because the dev cycle sped up and they were writing agaisnt 3.5 and their apps were breaking. There are definitely bugs inherrent to FF that are no fault of devs, but devs should also not be making their apps work only on a specific browser version.

People shouldn't be writing apps/sites that target specific versions of a browser (or specific browers at all). They should be written well enough that the browser/version of browser is irrelevant. No, you should not be writing apps/sites in ASP or C# with ActiveX controls. That is bad and you should feel bad. Same for any other browser. Write sites/apps with open technologies (HTML, CSS, javascript, php, sql, etc.) and you won't have a problem. The fact that it's 2012 and people have to be told this is frustrating.

Until Mountain Lion +1 when that option is removed and you cannot install software from outside the App Store.

"Is asking the user to actually pay for their software abusive?"

This isn't the right question to ask. The right quesiton is: is locking down a platform and creating a digital police state so that the user has no control over the things that *they own* ok, just to prop up the business model of a developer who cannot figure out how to make money?

The answer is a resounding no.

"Nerds like to say that people care about choice at that level. Nerds are wrong. Nerds care about choice, and nerds are such a tiny minority of people that nobody else much cares what the hell they think."
I hate this comment with such a burning passion. Not just about Adroid, but about any piece of software or operating system. It just assumes that since so few people care that you should punish everyone. Do nerds care more about choice and control over their digital life? Yes, becuase they understand it better than others. And I try very hard to help my non-techie friends and family understand the dangers of locked-down platforms, closed source apps, and privacy invasions. More and more, people are coming out to try to help the public understand that our phones are the most perfect surveillance devices every created, and closed systems help facilitate it.
If an app developer wants to keep things closed, if operating system devs want to keep things closed, if app markets want to keep things closed, it's because they are doing things they do not want you to know about. Should we just allow app developers to take our contact lists, turn on our cameras and microphones, take our calendar data, our phone records, etc. - most of the time without our knowledge - just to preserve a business model? And should we continue pushing this as the preferred way, simply because a large number of people aren't tech savvy and don't understand how these things work? Since most users don't care about "choice", should we just let them be taken advantage of, as long as they stay blissfully ignorant?
No. Absolutely not.
I don't care if half the Android app devs on the planet lose their shirts and go out of business. A business model is not worth preserving if it preys on the users and keeps them in the dark and in chains, unable to control a device that *they own*.

Do you really believe that voters have any power whatsoever anymore? Citizens United saw to that. Elections are a sham, a dog and pony show. We do not elect our officials anymore, they're bought and paid for by corporations with more wealth than any indivdiual citzien can imagine. They are the ones who get to decide politicians, and those poiticians are beholden to the ones who purchased them. The goverment is no longer about the peopel. We have zero - absolutely zero - say in our government anymore. We are irrelevant in every way. Elections are just a way to pacify the public without doing anything at all.

The game is rigged. The dice are loaded. The house always wins. Would armed rebellion work? I doubt it. With unmanned drones, ICBMs, nuclear weapons - the US military could kill half the people in this country and never have to set foot off a military base. Citizens haven't the firepower to fight that. But trying to fight it at the ballot box is equally futile.

We need mass stikes. We need work stoppages, strikes, walk-outs - bring this country's economy to its knees, and keep it there. The people have to realize that to do this, you have to be ready to lose everything you have now: your job, your home, your cars, your toys. You have to give it all up and fight. Destroy the economy, tank the stock market, stop all commerce. And not just here and there in a few cities, but everywhere all over the country. And when the economy collapses, and the businesses no longer wield the power they have now, then we truly bring the fight to the government. This can be done without violence on our part. It can be done without guns, without death. Will they fight us? Will they beat us? WIll they kill us? Yes, but we mustn't return in kind. We show that we are the ones who are right and they are wrong.

So what this boils down to is that open tablets that allow me to install whatever I want are bad because the manufacturers won't like it.

I don't give two shits what the device maker wants or likes. When I buy something, it is mine. Not theirs. If I own a device, I have the right to have full admin priveleges on that device and do with it as I please, install whatever software and operating systems I want.

This is just bullshit FUD trying to con people into being ok with purchasing devices they don't own.

No, not no, but MF'ing hell no. I hope that clears this up. The CLI is VERY powerful. If you want GUIs, fine, I have no problem with GUIs. But CLIs give power to those who want it, and it should never be taken way. Full stop.

This is something I recently discovered by installing Permissions Free on Android (I tried PDroid, but couldn't get the patch to work properly on cyanogenmod 7). It is SHOCKING what priveleges apps want. Why does any app need to be able to read and write my contacts and calendar? Why does it need access to the dailer and info on who I've called? Thankfully, this app lets you prevent those apps from doing that. A Backgrounds app has no need to read your contacts or calendar or to be able to write to them. If I installed some sort of calendar related app, or a contacts related app, I could understand. But apps are taking far more privelege than they need. And like they always say, you give a user escalated priveleges and they will use them. Same goes for apps. If it has those permissions, it WILL use them. And the ability to ban these permissions should be *built into the OS*, not requiring third party tools, rooting and hacking to do it.

I agree totally. People need to stand up and make it very clear that this is unacceptable.

Not sure why it was happening, either. It was on both XP and 7. Everything with MSE was the default settings. I've seen malware fiddle with hosts files before, but it seemed odd that it would assume that all modifications are malicious.

I was using hosts for web filtering for a small business client of mine. They wanted some computers to have limited access to the web, while allowing others full access. Hosts files were the easiest solution. But not long after I implemented it, MSE flagged them all as viruses and removed my modifications.

This was several months back, though. Maybe MSE has had an update that resolved the issue since then.

Another problem with the Windows hosts file: if you're running Microsoft Security Essentials, it will view modificaitons to the hosts file as a virus and remove them.