Well, at the moment the article is slashdotted, so all we can do is speculate wildly based on the introduction. Which, if you think about it, is what we do best anyway.

That is a good idea, but on the other hand it might not be so cheery for the average Facebooker to have to answer questions when registering about what to do when they (inevitably) die... The logic is obvious, people's reaction to something that might be called morbid is a lot harder to gauge.

The article states that the memorializing function is in part to prevent exactly that from happening.

Your job blocks a PC magazine but not slashdot? As far as time spent/wasted goes, I would have thought this was the site to block.

That depends entirely on where you live, my friend. Here in Norway, some schoolchildren will happily walk to school in -20C on a daily basis during the winter, where I currently live -10C is pretty cold but yet quite normal and certainly doesn't inhibit daily life. And don't even get me started on these wimpy "snow days" that seem to play such a large part of American children's hopes of getting off school.

Sadly, that happens more often then one would think.

The movie Space Cowboys had a similar device, a satellite that would launch a bunch of warheads at the USA when it lost contact with the Motherland (or was approached by other spacecraft). Obviously it started failing, which also would trigger the launch, and the only ones old enough to know how to fix it were Clint Eastwood and his gang! One helluva movie.

But I dare say that military perspective is not on saving fuel costs. After all, why save money by putting in a smaller fuel tank when you can keep it the same size and use the fuel savings to fly further/faster?

Quite true, but that brings us to another of Linux's double-edged swords. Windows and Mac OS have many years between each monolithic release, whereas typical distributions make new semi-major releases twice a year. Great for geeks like me who like the bleeding edge, another headache for developers who have to cope with constantly shifting goalposts.

Let's face it, one of the things all Linux evangelists like to emphasise is the opportunity to use whatever you want and even build it yourself if you want to. But it's maddening for developers to create something that will work on every kind of linux desktop in existence. From political choices of free vs. non-free, to preferred distribution, version numbers, favourite window manager and a host of other choices, no two desktops will be the same. Linux isn't an operating system, it's an operating eco-system. Taking Google as an example, today I tried to install Google Earth on my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop to no avail, despite it having installed without a hitch on my Xubuntu 7.04 Pentium III plaything in my room back in my parent's house. The exact same version of the program with dramatic differences depending on where you try it, that quickly becomes a support nightmare.

Now for the dedicated GNOME/KDE/xfce/whatever volunteer this does not pose much of a problem because your target audience has broadly the same machine makeup as you do, but for a commercial developer looking for a good ROI it quickly becomes untenable. Windows and Mac OS provide a devoloper with a guaranteed stable platform development-wise, and as such are much safer bets.

I agree that the only way Linux can make itself more attractive to commercial desktop program developers is with a mighty amount of consolidation, but the problem is that I don't think it will happen. The great OS wars that went before the dominance of Windows had winners and losers because they were systems of a closed nature, and so if you held with a losing team they closed down because it wasn't economically viable and you had to move to something more mainstream, thus consolidating the market. With Linux a project will never close down as long as someone like it more than something else.

If we do accept that, we are still left wondering why the (possibly fake) Asus site is so polished and the windowsisbetter site is so crap by comparison. If someone is pulling a prank, I don't understand his reasoning.

www.asus.co.uk redirects directly to uk.asus.com, but if you go to for example http://www.asus.co.uk/eeepc/1000HE/, you will arrive at a marketing page designed to cater to British buyers. So it almost looks like some yahoo in British marketing decided to do this without be told to. "Taking initiative", I believe it's called...

The video is hosted at collaborationpeople.cdnetworks.us, so obviously it's on their account with CDnetworks (a content delivery network). CollaborationPeople, as someone has already found out and which seems to jar with the whois for collaborationpeople.com (a password protected site), is associated with this Michael Sharp fellow. So that corroborates the whois theory of who is behind the site. However, as someone mentioned, the two powerpoints only have that name because they were exported form PP to pdf, and they certainly never mention Microsoft. Now, whatever motivated mr. Sharp to make that site, I don't know. It's still looks gloriously bad even though it's linked from the Eee page. However, I'm sure someone at Asus reads Slashdot, so I expect a statement to arrive soon.