Agreed. If you want absolute privacy, your own BES is the way to go.

And you can get BES Express for free (you lose some of management policies, but the core security stuff is there) though you'll need a mail/calendaring/contact server to hook it up to, which means (if you want to avoid Exchange) probably VMware's Zimbra.

I have a question: other than nationalising it's industry, exactly why is Venezuela lumped in with North Korea or Libya. Hugo Chavez is no angel, not by a longshot, but in the bastard rankings him, and his government, aren't particularly awful. Heck, there are much worse people whose boots we'll happily lick.

It's rather telling that a petroleum-producing state, and especially one in the western hemisphere, that shows a little backbone and follows the "wrong" economic doctrine, gets a disproportionate amount of scorn. I think it well and truly freaks out many American politicians, and the business interests that back them, that governments like Venezuela's can exist; governments that decide they don't feel like playing by the rules of the international economic game.

Even if they develop their own graphics chip for tablet use, it'll a) probably be enough for what you'd do on a tablet (seriously: on a desktop PC, for anything except gaming, Intel's stuff is good enough), and b) it depends on how well the software's done, anyway (case in point: on many recent Linux distros, and again, unless you're gaming, Intel's chipsets provide a better overall experience than much more capable nVidia or ATI hardware).

PC-BSD has a respectable set of packages and a decent format. And ports isn't too bad. It's not great, either, but it's not bad.

There is something seriously, fundamentally, not right with Compiz. I can't think of a single version or distro I've used where it didn't have some problem or another with video playback, 3D, composting or something else. I've gotten close on Intel GMA on, I think, Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04, but that's it.

Seriously. Mac OS X has had working, seamless, compositing window management for a decade or thereabouts. Compiz still sees video tearing, and it's far too common for people to say "Just turn off compiz" as a solution to too many problems. If Ubuntu has made a mistake, it's tying so much of Unity to Compiz. I get the feeling that decision will cause them real trouble.

Something I forgot to mention: it's a same Red Hat will not (and, at this point, with years of history and enterprise baggage, cannot) move from yum/rpm. Nothing in Fedora remotely compares to Synaptic (yumex comes close, and isn't that close at all, really) and Ubuntu has set the bar for consumer Linux higher still with Software Centre. The command line tools are mostly at parity (though virtual depedencies don't seem as elegantly handled; can't tell if that's an yum/rpm thing or Red Hat et al not sweating the details) but the GUI tools aren't even close.

It would be nice, and a good thing for Linux on the desktop, to move to Ubuntu's model.

It's likely a massive case of NIH. Red Hat, despite being significant contributors, seem to be a bit dicey on this kind of thing. One of the reasons Ubuntu didn't adopt gnome-shell and created Unity, has a lot to do with GNOME, and thusly Red Hat's, reticence. The thing applies to systemd's being chained to GNOME, which stands a pretty good chance of relegating GNOME 3 to Red Hat and Red Hat-ish distributions.

It's a real pity, too, because Red Hat has and does a lot of good stuff (GNOME 3, some weirdness aside, works very, very well). Package management and UI refinement just happen to _not_ be things that they're good at.

Canonical, to it's credit, has pushed the UI and user experience issue very well for Linux as a whole and raised everyone else's game as a result. Unity might not be their finest hour, but they are trying to meet the needs of most computer users and grow Linux in a way that most other vendors had not in the past (remember when UI development was "how blingy a theme can we make?", or KDE's tendency to cram as many controls per square inch as possible?), and it is improving, version after version.

Mint does it's own thing very well, too. What it is, though, ultimately, is a riff on Ubuntu for conservative technical people who already use Linux and for whatever reason aren't a fan of Canonical's design direction. That's fair, and a good thing, but it's not forward-thinking, and it's not a lot different from any one of a number of other distributions. It fills a niche, sure, but it's not the new Ubuntu, nor should it be.

I don't actually have own an iPad now and am typing this, or trying to and having it stutter and lag, and on an LG Optimus Pad running Honeycomb. But the point is that salesnumbers, among nerds and non alike, the show the iPad far ahead, I and for good reason : it is better to use.

If "pointing out the obvious " is advertising, and then I'm sure guilty as charged.

Why not pressure Google into doing better instead of of burying your head in the sand and dismissing contradictory opinion-holders as sheep?

A Transformer? No. We piloted Xooms and Optimus Pads (depending on the carrier) as well as the PlayBook.

What we didn't see was much adoption of hardware keyboards for any of them---most people seemed to forgo the keyboard and go with the touchscreen. Is the Transformer's dockable keyboard any better than any of the inline Bluetooth options for the iPad et al?

No, it doesn't.

Anecdotal, I know, but I end up turning Flash off on my PlayBook, and rarely clicking on Flash content on Android to play it. When I do try to use it, it's really frustrating because it's often poorly coded and runs badly and/or uses mouseover actions and/or takes clicks when I try to drag-scroll.

^ This. It was really irritating to find out that all the Tegra 2 tablets can't play back hardware-accelerated H.264 high-profile content.

I keep my PlayBook around mostly because this is one thing it can do.

And it'll likely fail to come close to the iPad's sales figures.

It's not about price and feature parity, it's about interface and usability. Maybe, maybe ICS won't suck like Honeycomb or BlackBerry Tablet OS both did out of the gate, but I'm not holding my breath. Google and the OEMs don't seem to want to sweat the details, and the details are important in this market, otherwise the tablet becomes a rarely-used toy.

We've piloted all three. The iPads are the only devices people still use; the Android devices and the PlayBooks were returned because people found them too frustrating to use versus a normal PC and/or a smartphone.

Consumers don't care about Super-X-Hyper-AMOLED screens, Tegra-5-General-Zod chipsets or Adobe Flash/Java VM/Lisp/REXX (hah!) support. They that it works and isn't annoying, and they'll forgive a spec sheet difference. Tablets are not PCs, and can't use the fifty-percent-more-megahertz tactic. Hopefully Asus and Google will learn this before they're firesaling these at a loss while Apple's selling less-capable hardware at a premium.

I have an Optimus Pad. LG doesn't seem to know whether or not it'll get an update, the instructions (on their Canadian site) are in pretty poor Engrish, autocorrect doesn't work well and the over build quality, while not great, is not in the same league as, say, the BlackBerry PlayBook or Apple iPad, and the support experience is well, well below either.

I'd have to agree with the GP. I'm sure their stuff isn't outright awful, but you can tell they don't particularly care about after-sales support. That lack of attention to customer support is likely what's burning their end-user satisfaction metrics. HTC seems equally unforgiving and I don't have any direct experience, but I assume Samsung is as well. I can only imagine that ZTE, Huawei or such are worse yet.

You see this with Android as a platform: the OEMs and/or carriers are a little too willing to throw end-users under the bus, and Google seems inclined to let them. That could go badly if Windows Phone gets traction (Microsoft seems to be more willing to bust the OEM's balls) and/or if Apple sells lower-priced hardware (which they are, and considering that even the 3GS sells better than many more capable Android devices, might be a problem).

He didn't know what your guests are, and the fact is that, if your guests are all Windows, HyperV is less costly than vSphere 4.1 and way, waaaaay less than v5.

Yes, it's not as good, but in a big Windows shop it's kind of hard to ignore (potentially) hundreds of thousands of dollars of licensing costs. VMware was either stupid or arrogant not to have thought about it, and now a lot of it's customers are, if not switching, at least evaluating HyperV when before it wouldn't have gotten the time of day.

+1. Million.

EMC/VMware got greedy with the licensing for v5 and anyone who used some the nicer features (vRAM oversubscription) could potentially find themselves paying a lot.

The drastic limit applied to vRAM in the lower tier editions of ESXi 5 smacks of greed. They might not get caught on this now, but it was bald-faced enough to make people think about going to v5 and to evaluate HyperV instead. I might add that HyperV looks a lot more attractive since MS gives away Windows guests licenses that you'd otherwise pay for with VMware. If you virtualize a lot of Windows servers, going to HyperV could save you huge dollars, whereas vSphere 5 will cost you more.

Consider NetWare: It was a better directory/file/print server than NT, but Microsoft made a compelling argument that NT4 and, eventually, Win2K were good enough that it was worth losing some features, especially if it meant cutting down on the number of platforms and boxes to manage. The pitch for HyperV is very, very similar.

HyperV might not be so hot now, but VMware can't get complacent. Now is the time to put the boots to HyperV, not cede market to it.