They were just a smaller laptop. Certainly, blurring the lines is going to happen.

Same thing happened to me, I bought a DVR after I had been a customer for many years. A year after I bought the DVR I switched to Dish but DirecTV wanted to bill me for another year of service. I still get calls about it and that was like 4 years ago.

These guys are just weaselly in general.

No weird problems like this at all. I didn't do an upgrade though, it was a fresh Alpha 5 install.

I will never do an operating system upgrade - it seems too risky.

These were engineered to last forever and parts are cheap & plentiful on eBay

Downside - big & ugly, my wife hates it.

I did a little bit of research, but it didn't seem like a good open source platform to play with. I couldn't find a site with publicly downloadable dev tools and there were app-store-like restrictions. If it isn't any better than my Motorola Ming (cool phone in its day but a huge disappointment) then why bother?

As a hard core open source advocate, I don't see any reason to use Android - I am going to wait for the Nokia N900 to compare.

I would expect that the BSD product is similar in design - basically chroot on steroids.

I don't even have time to respond to the original poster. Most of his complains are just completely ridiculous - and many (such as differences between distros) are a strength rather than a weakness!

The only valid complaint about Linux is that maybe it takes some time to learn a new OS (same as if you jumped from Windows to Mac) and the lack of native app support (Wine/Crossover/Cedega covers 99% of this problem).

I haven't read the whole article, but the issue that the poster mentioned - sound hardware problems - are simply not a valid complaint when it comes to mass market Linux.

Mac & Windows generally come pre-installed on compatible hardware. If you try something like the Dell Ubuntu models things work great. It is a miracle that Ubuntu runs so well on the range of hardware that it supports - I would like to see Mac do that.

YouTube videos are depressingly awful. They should allow users to submit high quality videos and charge extra for them. I would pay $10/mo for it.

For businesses, I can certainly understand the appeal of a BSD style license. The problem is that you will potentially end up with a situation like what we have with Apple - all of the work that went into BSD was stolen by Apple and Macs don't allow proper code sharing.

As an end user, I always want true GPL software so that I know it will be mine forever.

If I were developing software to integrate with some proprietary code, that would obviously make the decision a little more painful. Unless one is willing to make the full RMS kinds of sacrifices for freedom, the occasional BSD style of license will be required.

This is trivial, I use dvdbackup to do this. It is especially easy if you start with Linux Mint which pre-installs all of the dvd decryption and codecs you will need.

I went through this same agony a few years ago, and I ended up with an mencoder command line that does a good job.

The only problem is that it can't auto detect the media you are encoding, which is mainly a problem with frame rates. e.g. some are 30000/1001 and some are 24000/1001.

Under no circumstances should you bill for bandwidth used - this kind of gotcha capitalism is immoral.

You should, however, set up multiple tiers of service. For example, the entry level can be 256 kilobits a second, and for a little more money allow 640kbits etc etc. I would also do some limited QoS to limit the 256k users to maybe 128k if there is a lot of traffic.

Just don't have surcharges for bandwitch usage.

Sadly, without the ability to get HD channels like Discovery, HBO, etc, these boxes will always be at a serious disadvantage.

It is ridiculous that we let the telcos drag their feet so much.

We need to understand the failure of the Clinton/Gore attempt to wire the country with fiber, and make it happen for real. This will mean a lot of shared sacrifice for the local phone monopolies.