To judge from the amount of hate directed towards geohot, PS3 fans are a very vocal bunch...

The Nokia N9 (MeeGo based) scores well on those points. That's why people are trying to give MeeGo a 2nd chance even though Nokia gave MeeGo a death sentence.

It'll probably only work when it's placed between a chip manufactured with a genuine Sony Heat Spreader, and genuine Sony Heat Sink.

Well since you were asking, me. I don't know why I'm like this, but I don't feel that just because something isn't mine I can basically vandalise it.

I think I returned the last hire car I had cleaner than how I received it, heh. Mostly because I wanted to avoid the bogus sounding "£50 valeting charge if returned dirty" penalty.

...from another manufacturer. Nice to have but not vital, so sorry Sony, you don't get my money.

I'm just glad it's not your underwear drawer.

Why not? I've heard that statement before and I don't think I entirely go along with it. Is it because those other players don't stand a chance against the current evil empire? If a new mobile OS can do something better than the existing ones then why wouldn't you want it. The world benefits from someone introducing a disruptive new technology. That's true for more than just mobile phones.

Swallowed?! I'd like to see someone escape using that one! Actually no I wouldn't like to see that. It's probably already on the Internet one some sick fetish site I want no part of.

As an N9 owner it's been a shame to see a great phone not achieve it's potential. I wish them luck, but I can't get excited about this just yet. Without the N9's excellent swipe UI MeeGo could just turn out to be yet another plain phone. The swipe UI, which seems to be what a lot of people seem to be mistaking for "MeeGo" is actually Nokia's own proprietary UI. The N9 is not straight pure MeeGo, any future products are unlikely to resemble the N9.

Unfortunately I can't help but be reminded of the Amiga's dying days when it seemed to be getting passed from one owner to another with promises of future models and the community eagerly believing in that news...and then nothing ever showing up. I'd like to see some diversification of the Apple/Android split of the smartphone market, but I'll only believe it when I see it.

Services going off are just a part of life. I don't expect to claim compensation when I burn more fuel stuck in roadworks, or for when I have to buy bottled water because the mains are turned off for emergency repairs. Not having phone service for two days that you've paid for is inconvenient, but the mobile networks seem to do well enough when it comes to uptime. I've had a mobile for 12 years and I've only ever noticed the service being down two maybe three times. YMMV but that's been my experience on a plain consumer contract.

If we get compensated for the slightest outage all that'll happen is costs will go up and lawyers will get rich writing up the rules about when and how compo gets paid out. I'm not in favour of doing things that end up just making lawyers richer, they're doing alright as is! But I wouldn't challenge the claim that regular people do get financially dinged a lot by employers and organisations when it comes to charges for "damages", unusual requests, etc. I'm not a corporate apologist.

Now we're finally hearing of the important consequences of O2's network being down. I couldn't help but be irritated at how this was being reported in the news. Hysterical accounts of how Joe. Q. Public couldn't use their mobile. One news paper even found it news worthy to report that someone on twitter said they missed a phone call from their daughter! Wow, that really sounds like a living nightmare. Of course, there is also the inevitable talk of compensation... SPOILER: most people use their phones for inconsequential, inane yacking. For most people mobiles are a convenient toy they can live without. I hope it was just the news stirring things up and that we haven't all been reduced to being whiny cry babies. My mobile was affected (GiffGaff) but somehow I managed to deal with it and get on with life.

My sympathy is entirely with the engineers who would have certainly been under immense pressure to get this fixed ASAP, and to also provide a totally useless "ETA to resolution". Urgh, I've been there :(

Me too, but only because I thought they had photographed Pac-Man or Mario in space :(

I think in reality that girlintraining was going for the +Funny mods with that one. I could not imagine anything more absurd or implausible to present to the /. crowd. Seriously.

Say what? How would the typical /. reader appreciate women having easy access to contraception!?

(yeah yeah, someone has to write it).

You're absolutely spot on there. This is my pet peeve because my employer is doing the same thing. My employer's product is getting outdated, the competitors are closing in. We know what needs to be done but I'm never given the go-ahead (I'm the s/w dev manager) because...it'd cost money. My employer's company is loaded (for now), so money should not be an issue.

Unless a customer is paying for a change (like you said, changes need to be paid for in an order) it doesn't get done. Some changes are very important, like making the product truly client/server (running as a Windows service) instead of a desktop app someone has to start. Customers have asked for that because our competition has this, I say "Give me two developers and six months", management say "it'll cost the customer too much in dev time". I'll never know why they imagine our customers will us pay to improve our product. And this isn't developmen bespoke to that customer, this is getting our customers to pay for changes that we'll roll into the main product for all our other customers. It's considered that if the dev's salary isn't being paid for by orders then the developer is losing the company money. HUH? Let's see how much it'll cost once sales start being lost to competitor products.

Sorry, off-topic rant over! But it's nice to see that my employer is keeping up with the latest business trends, heh.