It's not just marketing, it's making products that work and do feel and look good. In spite all the limitations that any itemized feature check-list of apple products vs the competition will show, I have chosen apple products a couple of times.

The last istuff i bought was an iphone to replace my Motorola razr. I wanted a nokia N900, until a saw it had the thickness of a pack of cigars with a proce tag close to the iphone. I could have fun with linux on the nokia, but fun only lasts for a while especially for a thick heavy phone. Size does matter for a phone and a thick heavy phone would lay forotten most of the time in my backpack.

Why is there no serious competition? Are all competitors secret Apple fan boys? Why is it the the apple line of laptops look cool and sober and PC laptops have 10 stickers, a miss-match of random useless applications pre-installed and blinding leds and chrome all over? I am writing this on a 6 moth HP elite book that I quite enjoy and is not that bad, but it still looks like a farm tractor next to my wife's macbook pro.

It is only a mater of time untlil the lock down is in place. This is Evil Plan basics:

1. Launch the store
2. Increase acceptance because it's secure, convenient and apple branded. Brain wash as needed.
3. Wait a bit an profit.
4. Start tarpitting third party distibuted/downloaded apps and free sotware.
5. Profit even more!

All smooth sailing with happy mac heads and software makers.

If Apple was ever in the dominant position Microsoft has been, we would be lucky to have free software and comodity hardware at all.

I use KDE for the same reason I use eclipse instead of emacs: It is functional, integrated and easy to apply my work flows to it. KDE is comfortable and comfort if very important when you are using the desktop hours on end every day of the week.

I hate to use MacOSX or Windows because I lack empathy to the way Mr Jobs and the whole MS & Partners think I should interact with my desktop. I annoys me and instead of getting things done, I get the feeling of fighting the computer. I also dislike plain window managers with overlapping xterms, because they feel very hard-edged to the user, even after editing a 10-page config file written in obscure script, they still feel not quite right.

With 4Gb of ram and a dual core chip with an intel x3100, KDE 4 works fairly well, even with a galore of firefox windows and eclipse running on the background. When this system bogs down, it is usually firefox's fault :)

I would love to see the district9 aliens playing the role of the blue smurfs.

I think it was about 95/96 I was an undergraduate student.

A friend of mine in the lab installed Slackware from floppies, complete with doom, on a pentium 120MHz. It was the only lab computer with a serious game. Linux seemed both alien and magical to a DOS/windows 3.1 user.

At the end of the year I was running c++ code on a Alpha station with RedHat 64bit installed, it was buggy (no X, console garbage) but faster and more useful than NT.

To think that it took me almost 10 years to come back to 64bit Linux on my workstation :)

Depending on the year of deployment and relation to other servers and services, we have namespaces of minerals, godzilla monsters, fruit names, lord of the rings characters, etc...

Adds some fun to functionality :)