Well this definitely begs the question: Where's my ************ flying car?!

What comes next is the equivalent of when police drive down the street and scan license plates. You can be walking down the street and your finger gets scanned and a cop just grabs you off the street and arrests you for unpaid parking tickets.

I'm SO glad this vital security measure will be in place.

My bet is that by 2012, Apple will have released something better than the iPhone, completely changing the game again to the massive disappointment of all cell phones that are just catching up to the iPhone in overall usability.

I mean, every comment on here is talking about non-iPhones will catch up to iPhone and overtake them, but who really thinks Apple is just going to stop innovating? When I had my 60 gb iPod Video, I couldn't think of something cooler than that. Since I got my iPhone 3g, I haven't even taken the iPod out of the drawer except to back up files to it.

This kind of sentiment is exactly why Linux has to battle uphill all the time. If you want Linux to succeed, you drop the holier than thou attitude and do whatever it takes to get as close to the Mac users, or ANY users as possible.

Unbelievably, Microsoft is beating Mac on a "We're Less Expensive" platform on all those free laptop commercials. Microsoft's commercials are eating Linux's lunch and nobody is paying attention because people somehow see going after Mac users as either a losing proposition, or see the Mac user as witless and snooty. At this stage in the game, Linux needs any user it can get, but some people seem to prefer to put down Mac or Windows users as clueless. This does nothing but guarantee Linux loses another user to companies who don't care if they're clueless, only if they have money.

If a Mac user reads the above post and takes it as representative of the community's general level of interest in helping the consumer, you've just helped Linux lose market share. Worse, you helped create another "Don't mention Linux" user, which is ironic considering this article was meant to warn against that.

Don't make things harder.

Aside from the mac thing, he makes a good point. Part of the reason why there's been such a push for an easy install and good user experience is that every time you alienate a user with an OS that doesn't "just work", it creates an OPPONENT of the OS. At that point, they really have to love learning something new, or love a challenge to go back.

Case in point, the first time I tried to install Linux, the mouse driver stopped working every single time I booted the system and I literally had to chmod one of the config files in order to prevent it from being overwritten by some wacky boot-time application. The average user, when confronted with that kind of problem, will get frustrated and not spend 2 hours looking for some fringe case mouse driver or chmod hack in order to get things working (That's assuming they have more than one computer to look up the information with, which most people don't). They'll just quit and think Linux isn't as good as Windows or Mac. Unfortunately, as far as user experience goes, you not only have to combat ignorance, you also have to combat the bad experiences of those who the experience failed in the past.

Now here's the part that REALLY sucks. A few Linux users out there at this point will say "Well if you're too stupid to figure out how to get a mouse to work, you don't deserve to run the best OS in the world." That's where a major company with people who are paid to support new/ignorant users (not stupid, ignorant) for free (for the first 30 days of ownership) beats free-if-you-can-find-it support.

So when marginally tech saavy users hear the words "powered by Linux" and they tried installing it prior to 2007 or so, the first thing they feel is FEAR, and DOUBT that they will be able to get support if it fails. These aren't people who went to a LUG event and met the cool people, they tried it out, blew away their windows install and lost data.

The number ONE thing the big Linux installs like Red Hat and Ubuntu SHOULD be focused on is a campaign that says something like "GET YOUR Linux, AND FREE PHONE SUPPORT...FOREVER - GET THE PENGUIN!" and then create a consortium that funds that support. Then when people hear the word Linux, they think "hey - Linux is THE shit" instead of leaving out the "THE".

-- The Penguin loves you. Love the Penguin.

HuluDoesn't appear to work at all. I visited Hulu.com and only got a black screen with all videos. It's possible I didn't wait long enough for their player to load, but Youtube.com/xl comes up right away.

Wait, wouldn't making it so it ONLY works in Firefox and Chrome be 70-75% LESS market share?

I've written two books and several film scripts in Word, all with one file per piece. It was also an easy way to take a mailing list of Literary Agents from a table on the web, drop it into Excel and then mail merge the entire thing into a letter template I wrote in Word, because yes, you do have to print things when you're submitting to most publishers. It was never a nightmare and I never lost the whole thing in one fell swoop. Sounds like FUD. While I'm not saying that TeX/LaTeX isn't a good way to go, writing a book in Word, applying styles and publishing all worked pretty seamlessly and effortlessly for me.

Right, because Microsoft would benefit from people using computers less.

Time to have a global boston tea party and dump all the tea into the ocean. With roughly 2-3 billion less tea drinkers in the world, think of how many more searches we can do without impacting the environment! And think of those who drink multiple glasses. It's like a critical hit against tea/energy expense. Booyah! problem solved.