I think the naming scheme is clear and brilliant: a number according to size, not "version" or "bandwidth speed" or any of that crap that most non-techie consumers could care less about. No more of that "S" or "Galaxy" stuff. No more internal numbering. "Nexus" is the brand family, and that's it.

Consumers are starting to think of this new network-computer world of "phones," "tablets" and "mini-tablets" exactly in terms of comfort vs. portability. How big is it? That's the only major quesiton they care about in terms of usability. Sure, there are other factors important to some users, but that should be the starting point.

I hope for their sake they keep the Nexus family numbering scheme consistent from now on. The can release new versions of these (like Apple does) with a simple numbering scheme (say, Nexus 7 version 2), but the name itself being tied to the size is perfect.

A desktop shell is a very small part of the experience. Try sending an email using Thunderbird via a tablet, and you'll quickly see the problems... What Ubuntu needs in order to be a good tablet OS is an application ecosystem, at the very least the basic stuff.

Thing is, having a relatively cheap reference platform (mature distro on an ARM tablet) will allow a lot of devs an opportunity to make touch-friendly version of their apps. And, a few years from now, we might have a smoother experience between desktops/tablets/phones.

The advantages of having a single platform for all are mostly for the devs; but when devs are happy, the benefits trickle down to users, too, who have a much more vibrant ecosystem. This is exactly what MS is doing with Win 8/RT.

Would also be great to see Ubuntu support running Android apps! Lets have the best of both worlds!

Let me attempt clarify this further:

Wayland does not entirely replace X11. You can definitely continue running an X11 server that renders to your local Wayland (it is a client of Wayland). The challenge is that this server is not ready yet. it needs to be programmed essentially from scratch, and include all the weird parts of X. But, the xwayland project is already running pretty nicely for the main parts of X11 that most toolkits require. Check out the demos!

Toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt already support pluggable rendering backends (GTK+ even has a cool web backend!), so they would just need to create a new one to support Wayland. (It would be MUCH simpler than their X11 backend.) But, even if they don't support Wayland, they would be able to continue working through their X11 backend and the xwayland client.

Bottom line is that Wayland (once xwayland is finished) will have only advantages. The toolkits already support X11, so all apps written for GTK+ and Qt will continue to support network transparency. But, when running locally, they will have the option of using a Wayland backend for much improved throughput.

Thing is, what if people write applications without GTK+ or Qt, that use Wayland directly? These, of course, will not be able to enjoy network transparency. But, writing applications like that is highly specific and likely the coders will be doing it for a good reason.

I've initiated and maintain several large free software projects, and I agree wholeheartedly with the basic premise here: I think that software without documentation is close to useless, and I put huge amounts of effort into it.

But, let's be realistic here: it's a LOT of work. I can easily spend more time maintaining the documentation than the code. I consider it time well spent, but realize (as others have pointed out here) that it's a different kind of skill-set, which programmers don't always have.

The bottom line is that I would rather people release software than not release it a all. (close to useless != useless). Still, I wish more projects would take this issue more seriously.

The first reaction of the article and many commentators here seems to be that the main target is the consumer market, where the tablet would compete with Android and iOS devices.

But remember that a significant part of Microsoft's revenue is from the vertical market, where there's a lot of need for a tablet that could connect to an Microsoft-oriented enterprise backend. This tablet could then be customized by Microsoft and other contractors for very specific enterprise needs. Other vendors will be releasing Win RT tablets, but it's important for Microsoft that they 1) have one reference platform device, and 2) that they can create a complete solution for clients that involves both the backend and the tablets.

The article totally misses this point.

LaTeX is the technology, but LyX is the document processor (not word processor) that you want.

I've made the switch from OpenOffice/LibreOffice to LyX and haven't looked back!

For what it's worth, I work in academia and often have to create documents with complex bibliographies. I use JabRef to manage my bibliographic database, and it integrates so smoothly with LyX. My colleagues who are stuck with MS Word+Endnote are green with envy when they see my professional quality printouts.

But the real benefit is pleasure of the WYSIWYM (what you see if what you mean) paradigm. When you're actually doing work, you want to think in terms of content, not in terms of how the printout will appear. LyX is just so perfect in this respect: I get to define the screen fonts that are comfortable for me as I work, while relying on LaTeX's power to make things render nicely in the end.

This is not entirely true: entries in some encyclopedias are credited with specific authors, and in some cases do represent a citable opinion, or even citable, factual results of research. These "entries" are essentially "articles." This is not true for Britannica or Wikipedia, but is true for many, many encyclopedias in many fields.

The problem of citation in encyclopedias, wikipedia, and even the web at large, is that of authority. If you can't trace the author, then you have no way of evaluating the authority and validity of the cited text.

The funding amounted to paying one single Canonical employee to work specifically on Kubuntu.

Kubuntu is remaining an official Ubuntu variant and will continue to be updated by the community. Moreover, bugs to the KDE package (which is part of the main repository) will continue to be fixed by anyone at Canonical, and patches will continue to be sent upstream.

The "drop funding" issue has been blown out of proportion.

Pixel Qi does both "eInk" and color, but unfortunately does both very poorly.

If you ever get your hands on one, you'll see the problems immediately. The B&W mode is faded and hard to read. The color mode is washed-out and has a ridiculously bad viewing angle. Seriously, it's barely usable. I'm sure all tablet manufacturers have reviewed Pixel Qi, and their reasons for not using it are simply that it doesn't deliver an acceptbile user experience.

I wanted this to work very, very badly, because both eInk and color tablets are an exercise in painful compromise for me. Pixel Qi sounds great on paper, but it demands too many compromises to be truly useful.

I'll just note two points:

1) Older Apple devices do get abandoned by Apple. My early iPod touch is locked at iOS 3.3 and Apple has made it clear that it will not receive updates.
2) The exciting "Siri" feature available on the iPhone 4S does not work on earlier phones, even though they do get an iOS 5 update. The official reasoning is that earlier phones are not powerful enough, but this seems to be dubious (even David Pogue, the super Apple fanboy seems to doubt this).

Bottom line: Apple plays the "obsolete" game pretty well, too.

On the other side, while Android has had painful fragmentation in the past, Google is claiming, at least, that Android from version 4.0 onwards will be able to run on older devices, though obviously not all features will be supported there. And Google is trying to muscle vendors into a consortium which *requires* them to provide updates for older phones. We'll see how well this happens! And this is all for future phones and Android versions, of course: current "early adopters" of Android will be stuck with the existing mess.

Steve Jobs was a very good salesman and micromanager, who revolutionized the field of packaging gadgets, made some wise investments in 3D cinema, and did not believe in sharing his incredible wealth. He will be sorely missed by greedy Apple stockholders and his family, and apparently by a billion people who really like their iPhone and think Steve Jobs "invented" it and was a "genius" inventor like Thomas Edison because they have no idea what anything means.

I have to object to this line of thinking.

I remember that when Linux started to become popular, it seemed crazy to many people that Linus chose the GPL, because there free operating systems out there with much more lenient licenses. Why would a vendor (Red Hat, IBM, etc.) subject themselves to the restrictions of the GPL when there are other choices?

Well, they chose Linux because of its quality. They went with the best product, and adapted themselves to the license. (Some vendors eventually learned that the GPL was good for them, because it ensured that they could get the advantages developed in-house by other vendors.)

I think a GPLv3 Android would have been just as popular as a GPLv2 Android. Vendors would have picked it because it was good, free (and encouragingly backed by Google). So, they wouldn't have locked boot loaders. Big deal! They would have adapter to the situation, and in the end the GPLv3 would have made Android a better product then it is now.

There are going to be many sarcastic, witty and plain silly responses to this post. As there should be! I am sure to laugh at many of them. (The Slashdot community can be unimaginative and get-off-my-lawn obtuse at times, but it's always witty and enjoyable.)

But I'd like to be the one that says that this upcoming get-together of the Pythons, in honor of one of them, warms my heart to no end. They were and will be the ideal geeks: smart, non-conformist, funny, and thus happy.

Chapman holds a dear place for being so very gay, so very out, and having such an insightful perspective on British (and global) culture. I salute him with all my hands, and look forward to this salute from his fellow Pythons!

I was referring to ownership over media. The censorship apparatus is still strong, perhaps stronger than in Mao's time. Could Mao have imagined the Great Firewall?

I wasn't criticizing the summary, I was criticizing the Slashdot community and its gung-ho reaction to the summary.

The summary, too, was submitted by an individual and doesn't necessarily represent the People's Republic of Slashdot. :)

All newspapers and almost all "companies" in China are party- (=government in their Leninist system) owned. There's no "independent" anything in that strict sense. That said, freedom does exist in Chinese media to various degrees. Anyway, there's an interesting discussion possible here that most Slashdot comments missed by simply slamming "China" for being schizophrenic.