The other half, being average PC users, didn't realize they were doing it.

True men of leisure don't require watches as they have all the time in the world.

HTML5 is a fatal architectural design mistake for developing anything other than web sites.
HTML+CSS+JavaScript is a clunky necessary evil born of the nature of web development - not a desirable development environment.

HTML for mobile will always be slower and clunkier than an platform using C or Obj-C or C++ or even Java.

There is an unfounded myth that by using HTML, a wide audience of developers can be tapped while Apple has proven that the only thing that taps developers is a platform they can make money on - developers will learn whatever they need in order to eat.

Finally, using HTML does not guarantee automatic portability across devices in the same way that Android can't guarantee it across devices - there is a limit to how much hardware variation can be abstracted away and when hardware vendors compete on features there is a very strong force working against portability.

Palm failed because of this mistake, among others, and those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.

It seems it's only a matter of time before streaming from Netflix and similars is hit in the same way.

Agreed. I should have qualified it by saying it "sucks on the desktop".

FreeBSD makes it look bad everywhere else :)

"Shut up, moron, and don't you dare placing your words into someone else's mouth ever again."
"Seriously, kill all your friends, then yourself. That will be the first and the last decent thing you will do in your life."

Wow! Talk about bitterness. You seriously need to get a grip on life and go get a breath of fresh air, perhaps you should find a diety to worship to calm you down. Atheism is clearly not doing it for you. It is only Linux being discussed and you are advocating mass murder. Lunatic.

Linus' last sentence is revealing:

"and now I need to find a new distro that actually works on the Macbook Air."

Even he needs to spend time searching for something that will work. That is not an acceptable answer for anyone who just wants to write an e-mail and browse the web and doesn't really know how to do anything else.

Please spare me the "of course, it's a Macbook Air. He'd be fine if he had machine X with distro Y" line - users don't have the knowledge, inclination or time to fiddle and match machines to distros.

Because it sucks.

https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyfmNCYpi5

If Linus Torvalds says he can't cope with a fairly popular and mainstream distro which is supposed to be one of the friendlier ones how can anyone else be expected to cope with any of them? And this is but the tip of the iceberg.

Now you may down vote me for challenging your precious world view.

Above a certain size, it makes business sense to start evading taxes legally and Apple or MS are not unique.

I personally heard the CFO of a $14B tech company boast that the company's effective tax rate was 0%.

"because this is (yet another) bug in the ASN.1 parser"

This is because ASN.1 is an insanely complex, wasteful and redundant standard that should have never been adopted for security related standards where simplicity is an important contributor to writing secure code.

ASN.1 has been the bane of all the standards that ever adopted it (SNMP anyone?) and should have been shot years ago.