Nah, it's probably just the noise.

All I meant to say was that... ah, I see what you did there.

We can only hope.

One suggestion I do have to improve things for noobs would be to make Synaptic slightly friendlier (e.g. screenshots, etc).

Synaptic does have screen shots, there just aren't many apps that actually have them yet. But I agree, it could stand to be a bit more user friendly.

No, I'm Brian of Nazareth... and so is my wife!

No they just bring out a new technology that uses a ***********drumroll************ rubber ball inside the mouse!

Holy Crap! Thats brilliant!

What about if it was Apple's OS? Would we be decades behind when it comes to hardware design?

I really don't think would have been possible. The very fact that Apple's OS was tied to it's hardware is what prevented it from becoming he de-facto standard.

That having been said, if MS hadn't become the dominant platform, then it would have been(IMHO) either IBM's OS/2(yes I know that MS was responsible for a great deal of it's early development), or some evolution of Digital Research's Concurrent DOS in combination with GEM.

Then again, with MS out of the picture that early on, a Unix-like OS may have taken over. But, as big a Linux fanboy as I am, I just don't see the DOS standard being supplanted that easily. Even MS had to gradually win people over to the NT platform, and they weren't fully successful until XP was released.

I second that.

True enough, that's how I used to archive my music. But since space is no longer an issue for me, I use FLAC. Been doing so for about a year now, and so far it's been very stable. It does take a little longer to sync with the old iPod, since it has to transcode first, but other than that no worries.

Funnily enough, you can buy music CDs that have the music already *ON* them.

And don't forget that they are also pre-labeled, both on the disc and on the fancy case, so you save on ink, sharpies, time, ect. I love this *new* CD technology.

Next thing you know, you'll be able to get movies this way!

...and they wanted to introduce you to a thing called google. Apple makes very little revenue let alone profit from music sales after bandwidth and storage costs are considered from that 30 cents per song that they get from each sale.

Perhaps, but some people aren't going to buy Apple hardware, no matter what they try, and frankly I think that it is dumb for them to think that this won't be driving customer's away. I realise that it's a calculated risk, but frankly, it's cheaper and easier to switch software than to buy a new handheld. And were I in the position of a Palm Pre owner, I'd drop iTunes like a hot rock. I've been dicked around too many times before, and I don't like it.

Seriously dude, you need to check out google. Apple has not been selling DRM'ed music for some time now.

So they finished the conversion then? About time. I had forgot all about that. I guess I got a little carried away, but the part that bothers me about this isn't really DRM, but how blatantly monopolistic this seems.

...and they said that they were making too much money and that they're tired of it. So from now on, only the iPhone/iPod can utilise their music services and everyone else can either pony up or sod off. Or at least until Palm can roll out a patch for their patch.

That having been said, my wife and I own an older(read hand-me-down) 60GB iPod, and we don't use iTunes or any service that has DRM of any kind attached. Once we pay for our music, it's ours. Period. We decide the when, where and how, not Apple or anyone else for that matter.

I'm one of those people you hear about on TV, and even I thought it was funny.

Really? Have you tried Deluge? I've never had any problems with it. Not even minor ones.