That's kinda the point. The hardware provider should have provided a fully functional device. Not everything needs to customized.

x86 is not strong hardware, it wasn't in the 80's and it's not now. ARM is so much better in the performance per watt game.

Well based on the spec sheet I'd have to go iPad. I'll take a 1ghz ARM over an Atom any day. Plus its lighter.

#1 Problem is Android. There should be "Some Android Phones" that support flash. Either they all do or none do. Android is already so fragmented that as a developer I can only focus on the least common denominator. This is also the biggest problem with Windows. The OS holds the hardware developers back.

Infinite choice or options just to have options are not always a good thing. Sometimes it really is better to have few options that work well.

We nerds need to get past this notion that every nuance of our computing experience needs to be customized and tweeted.

Looks pretty, eats battery life. The whole idea of this is not to provide infinite flexibility but instead to provide the best user experience possible. To much flexibility is generally a bad thing.

I'm tired of the "just a bigger iphone/ipod touch". This is a little a bus is just a bigger car. It's true but doesn't capture the fact that I can do a lot more with a bus then a car. That statement implies the iPad is at best a toy and at worst a complete waste or money since I can get an iPod to less.

Anyone making this statement lack any vision of what's possible. Over the next 10 years this type of device is going to become the normal everyday device. This is what "computing" will become. Because its not "computing", its so transparent that people will just take it for granted.

This device is as revolutionary as the GUI was in 1984. For the next decade the computing industry continued to look at the GUI as a toy. Real work was done in text UI's or at the CLI. We nerds need to realize that the rest of the world doesn't want to depend on us to get their work done. And they don't want to think about the device in their hands. What they want is something that just works 98% of the time. Push the button and its ready to use.

The average grandma doesn't spend a lot of time typing. They want to keep recipes, look at photos, read email, and do some web browsing. Just what this device excels at.

The average business user wants to do light note taking in meetings. But really is just scheduling the next event, looking up emails, or reading preexisting docs.

The average sys ads is sshed to a remote server or working through VNC or some such. Having a netbook or laptop doesn't help me get remote task done faster.

And for all the above typing tasks I can hook it up a keyboard dock or pair it a one of several bluetooth keyboards I already have.

Computing is change, this is where the industry is going. Love it or hate it you need to accept it.

And I wish to return the old days of computing where hardware and software were almost always developed by the same people. Hardware and software (OS) should always be connected at the hip.

Flash playback for end users is subject to the whims of Adobe.

What's the difference?

Look we need to get off this notion that anything but oxygen free. At least in the US nothing is free and never will be. As for h264 video its not in the interest of MPEG LA to charge individual consumers and if the service provider can't generate enough revenue from ads or subscription than they shouldn't be in business.

1) Would be great if it were true. Flash is far from an ubiquitous platform.

2) Ya it sucks to create standards based content for competing clients with different capabilities. We really should just write everything for the Adobe produced runtime and cut out the consumer choice and corporate competition.

HTML has a long way to go for what? Every major browser, expect IE, supports the core parts of HTML5 (I'll ignore video for a second) well enough to provide a clean upgrade path from HTML4 and flash (remember ignoring video). Flash offers nothing but crap technology that just confuses end users. Do everyone a favor and use standards whenever possible.

I just solved this same problem at work. We generate ~14 TB every 12 days, and after looking at a bunch of backup solutions I went with good old fashion tape. LTO4 delivers 800GB raw and ~1.6 with modest compression, is fast up to min of 120MB/s, cheap ~$34 a tape, easy to store, and there's lots of great FOSS backup software.