I've been a gog.com customer since their early access beta in September 2008. While I am certainly annoyed by this blatant publicity stunt, I'm far more relieved to know that gog.com is still in business.

This stunt aside, the folks at gog.com are very cool. Not only do they release affordable and fantastic games - most of which I'd never heard of; but they are clearly doing this as a labour of love.

I host an annual LAN Party for the Computing students where I work. I contacted gog.com before going on a shopping spree there to see if they had any objections to me using a single paid copy of each of their games for the one-day event on the entire lab full of machines. Of course, there was no technical problem with this, I just wanted to check that they had no objections with this.

Far from objecting, they very quickly and enthusiastically gave me the OK and asked that I take pictures of the event to share with them. They were completely professional and reasonable to deal with.

So, for about $100 I was able to legally fill a lab full of machines with great games, some of which were new to the students. What a deal.

(I should also mention that Valve has been equally generous with Steam licenses, though they typically work for 24 hours only, which doesn't give me much prep time. Valve the company has also been much more difficult to communicate with.)

Anyway, back to the thread at hand: Welcome back GOG.com. You got me fair and square. Now DON'T EVER DO ANYTHING LIKE THIS AGAIN.

Now please excuse me while I rush off to buy the copies of Syberia and Another World that I'd been meaning to pick up...

Sure, you can buy a new PC laptop for under $400, but will you enjoy using it? How about in two years?

You can pick up good quality used macs for the same price as crappy new PCs. And a decent new PC isn't cheaper than a low-end MacBook.

Personally, I'd rather own a three year old MacBook than most of what Best Buy/Future Shop/Stapes are pushing from Acer/Asus/HP/Lenovo. Most of what is in stores is junk. Apple doesn't sell junk.

(Having said this, I'm typing this on a lovely HP 2710p running Ubuntu.)

OK, I accept your challenge: The HP EliteBook line. (Which are never in stock at Best Buy/Future Shop.)

I'm typing this on a three year old HP 2710p which has since become the 2740p. It's an extremely tough 3.6lb machine with a lovely screen and stylus support, trackpad and trackpoint, a light (like the ThinkPad lights). The battery is rated for 5:30, up to 11 with an optional slice. It can take a very slim dock for extra USB, DVD, video, etc. The 2740p has both touch and stylus support and can be configured with Core i5 CPUs or ULV options, depending on your needs. They have the best keyboard I've ever used, they come with three year warranties as standard options, and they are lovely to work on. (I've upgraded HD and RAM on mine.)

I own it and a MacBook. It is by far my preferred laptop. The screen works well outside, it's sturdier, and it runs Linux brilliantly.

However, on balance, I completely agree with your assessment. Almost all PC hardware is junk. Apple doesn't make many types of machines but they are all of very high quality, they run Windows (and usually Linux) very well, they have stellar battery life, and they are the same price as decent PC laptops that can't run Mac OS.

I recommend Macs a lot at work. Why not? Don't like MacOS? No problem. I prefer my HP EliteBook but they're a pain to buy in town. I can send people to a half-dozen different stores in town that sell the full line of Apple laptops. As a bonus, the hardware is well understood and I might not have to support Windows! Easy decision for me. Plus, in Canada, Apple and Dell seem to be the only two companies that haven't switched over to bi-lingual keyboards with odd layouts.

It's a sorry state at the moment. Microsoft as monopolist was bad. Mac OS is a lovely OS and Apple makes nice hardware. Still, as companies go, Apple aren't great to deal with. I'm happy to see that MS has been unseated as the untouchable monopolist but I have to think that it will be worse if Apple finds itself in a similar position.

Here's hoping the competition will improve. Linux does keep improving steadily. If it could emerge as a reasonable competitor and keep things even, that would be my preferred outcome. Time, development, and consumer decisions will tell.

On Palm/BeOS: No, Palm/HP doesn't own BeOS.

At the time that BeOS was sold to PalmSource, there were two Palm companies: The hardware (called PalmOne at the time - later renamed to Palm) and the software (called PalmSource).

PalmSource (the software behind PalmOne, Sony, Dana, Tapwave, and other PalmOS 5.x devices) bought BeOS assets for $12m, PalmSource eventually was bought by Access Software, a Japanese company. They used Be technology to create PalmOS 6. It never shipped in a device.

Access eventually sold rights to PalmOS 5.x back to PalmOne (the hardware company). PalmOne renamed themselves back to Palm and shipped PalmOS and WinCE devices until the Pre and WebOS. Now Palm is being sold to HP. I'm not sure what Access is doing with the PalmSource software. I know they ship an emulator for Nokia's Maemo devices, such as the N810/N800.

So, HP/Palm/PalmOne own rights to PalmOS 5 (and all of PalmOne/HandSpring's IP), Access owns rights to BeOS and PalmOS 6 (and 5, I think.)

What a tangled web this is.

I'd also opt for the Sony.

A friend gave me his PRS-505. I find it to be fine. Not great but fine. No doubt the newer ones are nicer. The 505 reads ePub very well, handles PDF, works with the pilot Digital Editions Library service offered in my municipality (borrow eBooks for two weeks at a time.) It works well in Linux and Mac OS. Getting books on and off is a snap, just using drag and drop. Battery life is good. The Sony Reader store has a reasonable collection of books at a decent price. It's generally not cheaper than a print book from Amazon.ca but the format and selection is convenient for me. The old Sony eReader Store used a proprietary locked-down format that nothing else could handle. Thankfully, the new Sony Reader Store now sells books in ePub format.

Now, the ePub books sold at the Sony Store are DRM-encumbered. This, of course, is very bad. (See other comments for good examples of why.) Having said this, if you live in a country with sane fair dealing/fair use laws, you can, with a little work, find reasonably straightforward ways to remove the DRM from the books sold at the Reader Store.

Piracy is bad, so is treating your customers as thieves by default. I won't ever pirate a book; nor will I invest in a locked format that I can't use as I'd like. I buy almost all of my music on-line now because I can finally buy MP3 and AAC files without DRM. I won't buy into digital movies or Blu-Ray because of the DRM. I was very reluctant to buy into electronic books until a I had a good source of DRM-free ePub books.

Thankfully, publishers seem to be getting this faster than the music and movie studios. Pretty much all O'Reilly books are now available as ePub. The Sony Reader Store sells ePub that you can eventually turn in to standard DRM-free books. The situation appears to be getting better. One can now read books purchased through the Sony Reader Store in Linux and with ePub software for phones. The situation with Sony reminds me of iTunes pre-M4A. Yes, you could buy an album electronically but you had to burn it out and rip it back to side-step the DRM. Not terribly user-friendly but not horrible.

To me, the worst thing about eBook readers is that vendors are locking customers in to closed silos. A Nook can't read Kindle books, Kindle can't read the ubiquitous ePub format. All the while, you can walk down to the store and buy the print version without any of these limitations for about the same price. This is madness.

Privacy concerns are also a problem. The thought of a device, with an always-on wired connection, allowing companies to remove books post-purchase scares me. The thought of Amazon knowing what page I am on of every book they sell me also bothers me. In all of this, Sony, of all companies, looks the least bad. Go figure.

No doubt it's early days. I think you'd be nuts to buy anything that can't handle ePub and PDF. I also wouldn't buy anything that locks me to a single supplier of books.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the pinnacle of netbooks:

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?sku_id=0665000FS10128254&catid=27003&logon=&langid=EN&dm=DEBUG

Intel Atom, 9" 1024x600 matte screen, 2lbs, thin, runs Linux perfectly, decent battery life, perfect keyboard, $200.

That's a netbook. 12", dual-core, 3+lbs, $500 isn't a netbook, that's a decent 12" laptop without an optical drive.

The thing is, you can pick up much better used 12" 3+lb laptops for $500. Heck, I'm typing this on an HP 2710p tablet I picked up on ebay. It is a 12", dual-core, can take 8GB of RAM, and is a TABLET and it cost me as much as this Asus "netbook" after taxes.

The only reason you need dual-core ION and a big screen on a netbook is because Windows demands it. My HP netbook (linked above) runs like a dog in Windows by the time you add virus scanners and all of the associated baggage. However, Ubuntu 9.10 NBR runs brilliantly. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB and put it back down to 1GB and haven't missed it.

Sadly, with the onslaught of Windows 7, it appears as though the nascent netbook market, which began with affordable computers running Linux on small SSDs, is in the process of dying. Such is life. Pick up your 2lb 9" Linux wonder while supplies last.

The announced MS/Nokia deal was just for S60.

Sun is an interesting company, Solaris is an interesting OS. There was a time when I would have completely agreed with your above statement. I work for a CS department at a Canadian university. When I started in 2003, the last of the Sun workstations were on their way out, replaced with a mix of Windows and Linux boxes. (Mostly Windows.)

Fast-forward almost six years, most labs are looking for a combination of Windows and Ubuntu. Linux is especially popular for number crunching where 32bit OSs can't go, and suddenly Sun servers and workstations are looking good again. We recently purchased three X2200s. They came with 16GB of RAM and can be easily and cheaply upgraded to 64GB RAM. I cannot get this from clone makers and Sun's prices were spectacular. The three systems will be running Linux, Windows X64 and Solaris X64.

Of the three, I will be using the Solaris server. I consider myself a Linux guy first, but Solaris is an incredibly stable OS and even Ubuntu LTS and RHEL aren't as reliable where I need them to be. I _need_ the NFS server to be perfect. I find every release of a Linux OS, even "enterprise" versions, to be a little strange in this regard. Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS has odd autofs bug that interacts strangely with NIS and NFS and may or may not be realted to udev somewhere. It's an aknowledged bug, the workarounds (one of which I suggested) are just that. Cannonical doesn't seem to be quick to fix the "problem" and why should they? I haven't paid for it, and NIS/NFS/autofs isn't their focus. Fine, but I need it. Sun does this right, every time.

I was rather shocked when I read about Toshiba preloading OpenSolaris 8.11 on some laptops, but I've used OpenSolaris. It's a nice OS. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of the latest version of Ubuntu, but in typical Sun fashion, what it does, it does well.

I administer servers, some Linux, some Solaris. It is very convenient for me to have a well-supported laptop running the same OS as my servers. I, for one, will be quite interested in a Solaris-based Toshiba laptop. Sun doesn't sell laptops and their customers need something. While this seems a little odd, both Sun and Toshiba have much to gain with this announcement.

In the past, I have been worried about Sun's long-term prospects, but OpenSolaris looks like a huge step in the right direction, they've finally opened Java, they own MySQL, OpenOffice is the only viable MS Office competitor, and now they are on the cusp of having a decent laptop option. And this is just on the software side. On the hardware side they have very competitively priced servers (never thought I'd say that) with great expansion options, their support and build-quality are worth at least the small premium they charge, and if you need SPARC (it still happens) they are the only game in town. On top of this, they run Solaris, Windows and Linux with full driver support, guaranteed.

"At my company the last enterprise Sun box went away almost 18 months ago. We're pushing Linux to supplement our AIX systems now. And Linux excels. It's stable. It's supported. It's cheap. And it's doing what the Sun box did for $50,000 more."

This is great, but you should check out Sun's x86 servers, run Linux if you prefer, have Solaris as an option for free. The website prices are not even close to what they offered us. Much to my surprise, I think that anyone buying anything that will be running as a server should check out Sun's prices. Seriously, we just bought 2xquad-core servers with 16GB of RAM for a quarter of what we paid for a V440 four years ago, and that was a 2-for-1 deal at the time.

Honestly, Sun seems pretty well positioned to me, and this is a very interesting announcement.