Gradiente (the company making the phone) wants to paint themselves as the good guys, who simply got lucky of registering the name before Apple (they even have a video, in Portuguese, saying that their phone is "cheaper and have less features" while praising Steve Jobs in the process for making the "other" iPhone).

My guess is that they are doing everything that is legal around here just to hike up the price. They probably know that being assholes would burn their brand (which is almost dead for around a decade) and just make Apple put more lawyers in the process.

The problem with "always online" DRM is not that "there are situations that you can't connect to the internet". The problem is that you rely heavily on the other site and the medium for it to work flawlessly.

Let me give you an example (there is a problem with it and I reckon right from the start): It's a matter of only 2 or 3 years that Blizzard changed the maintenance cycle of their oceanic servers in WoW to coincide with the Oceanic timezone. Before that, any WoW player in Australia (for example) would get home on Tuesday and find that the maintenance cycle had just started. And that it was later extended another another for whatever reason.

Reports of Blizzard losing connecting to whole networks (like AT&T) happened even recently.

Now imagine that you finally got a day off. It's a rainy day, there is nothing going on, so you decide to play Diablo 3. And then you get the news that the servers are down or that there is a problem with the connection of Blizzard and your provider or Anonymous got ripped off in some Real Money AH and decided to bomb Battle.net login servers. Now what?

There are too many variables to give you an 100% fun experience with it.

I have no problems if they required a Battle.net account with a registered Diablo 3 key in it to play multiplayer (i.e., the lack of LAN play). My problem is that I may want to have a quick fix and I have to go to a check list to make sure I'll have fun.

Seems his auto-correct changed a lot of "happen" to "happy". If any editor is watching this, could you guys fix that?

Not sure what you mean "native to the platform, like Java". Java is mostly platform-less (more or less) as most code can run unmodified in any platform, be it Linux, OS X or Windows (again, let me say "more or less". There are some differences between platforms, even in Java).

Also, most Linux home users already run Mono applications, like Banshee and Tomboy, which are part of the GNOME desktop.

That being said, in my opinion the biggest problem with Mono (apart from the whole patent debacle) is that it was always lagging behind the official .NET specification. I lost the count of the number of .NET applications, compiled in the official C# compiler, that I tried to run with it and it would simply not work.

GPL is based on copyright, dictating the rules by which the work can be transferred (or sold, or given). It's the same as breaking the Microsoft EULA when you pirate your Windows copy.

Surely, there may be not enough GPL authors going after people breaking their licenses, but it falls on the same category [I *think* the FSF sometimes offers legal help for those trying to sue companies to enforce their GPL-licensed products.]

And, in the final part, I was here, just waiting for a Tauren Paladin to jump into scene and gank the mage while the guy was explaining why it would be a good thing for kids.

Yes, I'm that horrible.

You know, you could add a pen to the device, so you don't have to deal with, say, something that makes it hard to swipe your finger across the screen and reduce the grease in the screen.

Then, after that, you could make the movements more like handwritting, since people are used to that.

Then, maybe, to help people write things faster, put split areas for letters and numbers.

You know, I think I saw that somewhere else before....

"I have some bestiality on my computer, but you can see clearly that the girl is ENJOYING IT!"

And ten days ago... http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/09/16/2052244/Microsofts-Chief-Exec-For-Latin-America-Says-Open-Means-Incompetent

From the "Features" page:

"Firefox 4 Beta includes an updated Windows interface that's sleeker and easier to use. (Mac & Linux are coming soon!)"

The Chromified look is not available in the Mac and Linux builds yet (just tried.) Everything else is there, though.

I'm also from the South hemisphere (Brazil, more precisely) and it's too damn hot for this time of year.

Well, not quite. Weave is freaking awesome if you have Firefox on your mobile and your desktop: Log in in, say, Slashdot and weave will carry your session and cookies to your mobile.

[I reckon Mobile Firefox is not that spread, but it surely helps that I have the reference hardware ;)]

I was wondering the same thing ("MeeGo is now on Nokia's hands")

Well, one thing, this could be Intel cheating Nokia after Nokia cheated Intel porting MeeGo to ARM processors (or so it seems, from what I read somewhere.)

I keep all my open source projects on Google Code. I had one that was marked for deletion for more than 1 year. Then I decided to reactive it when Mercurial support landed. For some reason, the repository wouldn't work no matter what format. I searched and searched and searched and finally found the Google Code project page. Submitted an issue about the repo and kept watching it for two days. On the second day, the issue disappeared. Before opening it again, I decided to check the repo: everything was working as expected.

Support for Google products exist. It's just a pain to find it.