I really find the iPad crap. It's more than the cost of other tablets that give you full hackable desktop OS but most importantly it's got NO USB host! Even phones have USB host now! (Nokia N900 off the top of my head)

With USB host you can make your portable device do pretty much anything: want more storage? Add a pen drive, hell with a battery powered USB charger the N900 can run a laptop disk! Want a decent keyboard? Just plug in your desktop keyboard!

And I would of thought "Apple customers" would of wanted USB. Take photos with your fancy digital SLR camera, plug that into your tablet and upload them strait to your employer/local paper/flickr stream. The N900 can do that...

I've started indulging in a life long fantasy of writing and in my writing I've found it almost impossible to write on a (standard) computer. They have FAR too many distractions, even the option of being able to change you font size for me is a distraction ("oh, would it be easier to read on this screen in size 11, no, size 10 it is..."). To have something that you just sit at and fire your thoughts onto, complete with spelling mistakes, missing punctuation and shit sentences and paragraphs, is really liberating. It's what I was wanting to do all along, I didn't want to check spelling, I wanted to tell a story.

When writing I now use a Tandy WP-2 word processor, or "Electronic typewriter" as it's 1989 marketing called it. It cost me £12 (US£20). It's got a daylight reflective 8 by 80 character screen, runs for more than 24 hours on 4xAA batteries and stores around 70 pages with the 128Kb memory upgrade I got it. With it's 5Mhz Z80 processor all you can do with it is type. It works brilliantly, it's so slow that it actually cant insert text at the rate I can type. It drives me to write more and then only when the creative part is done, so it never interrupts, comes the boring part of the editing and spell checking on a full computer.

Before I remembered about the existence of devices like the WP-2 I was quite tempted by the idea of a type writer, with a scanner and OCR software it's not even hard to upload your work to a computer for editing. However on portability alone the A4 sized WP-2 wins, but just encase, I do own an Olivetti as well...

Microsoft claims the hardware acceleration will enhance the appearance and readability of fonts on the web, with sub-pixel positioning that eradicates the jagged edges on large typefaces.

So TWENTY years after Acorn added anti-aliasing that ran extremely quickly on a 16Mhz RISC computer Microsoft realise that they can do it too, only they require a Direct-X compatible graphics card...

Yay for innovation...

Resolution was great...good enough to inspect x-rays and MRIs in detail.

Rubbish. I've worked in veterinary imaging and the common screen we installed for viewing X-Rays was a 22" wide screen that had a resolution in the region of 2500x1500 and was black and white. Speaking to a vet using it she said this was "ok" but having to zoom in and out was annoying. Last time I spoke to that company to save money (for the customer) they were starting using 23 and 30 inch Apple displays but the contrast and DPI "are a bit crap". So ether you don't know what your talking about or your hospital is a death trap.

Well we could have a form of World Peace if we found aliens, then we'd have someone to all get together and blow up...

You're going to need to burn fuel for the generators, heating, transport, etc.

I'd suggest using an unmanned station powered by a thermoelectric generator, there in use in the Antarctic circle for lighthouses already and are extremely reliable. Even if the station was manned thermoelectric generators would still be a good way to go, although they don't make *that* much energy they make plenty of excess heat to keep scientists alive.

Why is this news for nerds?

Wait, you can read Slashdot comments sober?

As much as I would like to see that happen; history shows that whoever is best at marketing, wins.

Generally yes.

But among my geek friends we're pretty interested in the G1, if only because it's a phone that might actually let us do what we want. And this, well I want this now, I mean even with my current phone I can't backup texts or phone numbers without a Windows system and some Nokia applications. This thing looks like I could write a cron job to back up everything to my server over SSH nightly. I want, I'm going to tell my friends, and that's pretty good advertising... ;-)

Unfortunately for the astronauts they'd be far more efficient if they lived on insects and fungus. Not very glamorous but far more efficient...

The definition is not "up to the authorities".

Local authorities in the UK defined 955,000 as potential terrorists and searched them under the stop and search laws in 06/07. As far as I see it it's the officers and officials that enforce those laws who decide the definition. I mean if they don't arrest/search someone then they've defined them as NOT a potential terrorist and if they search them under stop and search then they've HAVE defined them as a potential terrorist.

When 169 of those stop and searches were investigated 88% were found to be unfounded and when the definition of a terrorist/suspected individual in law so all encompassing I find it quite incredible that only 12% were founded. You know it almost sounds like they maybe getting creative with their interpretation of the definition...

I got my stats from here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/steep-rise-in-stop-and-search-complaints-941727.html

Actually you'd be surprised. It's an excuse/problem I've heard from a couple of "noobs", their so scared of downloading things, after all the warnings and viruses they've gotten with windows that they really dont feel confident downloading an ISO and burning it on CD.

One friend of mine bought a Dell Ubuntu desktop as it was cheaper and she has XP on CD and just planned to wipe it. She used Ubuntu for about two or three months after she got off to a good start getting her broadband modem working and found Pidgin without any help. But eventually she needed fully compatible Power Point for her work so got her boyfriend to do the Windows install. He botched it (somehow :-S) and left the machine unbootable. She took this as a sign (Her technical boyfriend cant get windows working, but she can get Ubuntu to do anything she wants...) and decided she wanted Ubuntu back. She didn't have CDs and that's when she called me with "How do you get Ubuntu?" I thought that was a simple problem but explaining how to download and burn an ISO to her turned out to be beyond me. In the end I burnt her a disk and she been back using Ubuntu for the last 6 months.

On a side note she reckons it's far simpler, she can find her files now, feels far more secure and thanks to Synaptic shes happy to install new software...

Please, call her anything but that. She has next to no musical talent.
She's just a model who got the idea into her head she can sing. Her songs are truly sleep inducing.

Well as much as I hate her politics I actually really like her first album, her second is crap and I've still to hear her third. "Quelqu'un m'a dit", "L'excessive" and "Raphaël" would be my favourites, especially the latter. No more sleep inducing than any other acoustic singer song writer type.
 

I'm posting this from a four year old Thinkpad T43, with 15" display, at 1400x1050.

I'm also posting for a T43 and the common models of our laptop had a 14.1" screen, which is even higher DPI (and what your probably running). I always thought that higher DPI was better for screens and this laptop has proven it for me, with sharper smother edges on fronts you read faster and more easily. When viewing images the extra sharpness is incredible compared to normal screens. I do all my browsing, writing and coding on this just because of the DPI.

Finding a new screen for myself is now quite a problem. Everything looks CRAP.

My desktop has a 20" Sun CRT that runs at 1600x1200 (Sony Trinitron tube) and it's colour is fantastic, it's really really good for gaming with. A 24" TFT is bigger but try running Baldurs Gate, which runs at 600x400, the rescaling artefacts would be terrible. Even my spare screen is a 19" 1600x1200 CRT, another Trinitron - it looks great but the extra inch is good when gaming, still I'd probably use this for the DPI if I did anything else on my desktop.

So when it comes to getting new screens I really don't know what I'm going to do. All desktop TFTs look crap. Compared to BOTH of my CRTs they are going to have crap DPI and rubbish colour, and artefacts when resizing resolution. And all for a little extra desk space, my desk is a 12 foot by 4 foot dining table so that's not something I'm exactly short of...

I take photographs of white water kayaking. You need to keep moving down river so cant really use a tripod and normally need a fairly large zoom so this actually looks pretty useful if it helped you steady a big lens better...

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a cargo ship full of datacenters?