I wonder if the different variants are all the same size and travel equally well.

It has grown way beyond "eyecandy", check it out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tILWKo1RUI

How difficult has it been to keep working on the Enlightenment environment all this time and has the opensource community been supportive?

Motorola is a communications company, not just a phone maker Look at the distributed whitespace broadband that Google has been looking at deploying; now they own the infrastructure to make it happen. I see phones fitting in as a smaller piece of a giant puzzle. They has been planning this for years and owning Motorola means they won't have to wait on others to make the hardware anymore.

This will be interesting if it is true. Maybe this will delay the rollout of smartphones to combat soldiers...

Source control is important, regardless of the team size. One project I worked on years ago was some custom contracted software for a specialized industrial client. I was helping the lead programmer with initial deployment and bug fixes. Every couple of weeks the client would call me about a particular bug and let me know that it was back again. I'd go back to the code dump and they were right, a bug I had previously squashed was back again. This happened several times and I informed the lead programmer who told me that he didn't know how that bug was creeping back into the code.

I finally went to his system and found several different source code directories, all with different versions of the source tree and none that were in sync with my code base. A SCM tool would have allowed us to track code changes and enforce accountability. After the same bug popped up 5 times, the client was not very happy. SCM tools help to cut down redundant work and allow centralized quality control.

I saw original Droid phones for 1 penny (w/ contract) just before the Droid Incredible was released by Verizon. Hardly the same as deep discounting of WP7 units a month after release.

The marketing at microsoft baffles me too. I don't know any iphone/android/blackberry users that are even remotely interested in the WP7 stuff. People are staying away in droves.

Wyatt,

Guess I'm not the oldest man here after all. Don't worry, I'm getting off your lawn...

You seem to have a Strange Love for your PBF.

Why? Who needs a Chrome Wang?

Blanket statements like this tend to bother me. Here is my experience with the Koala release:

- On my netbook ( Gateway LT31, vista, 2GB ram, 1.2GHz AMD L110) I grabbed the desktop i386 torrent and started the d/l.
- While that came down I downloaded and installed virtualbox.
- Booted the koala ISO as LiveCD and created a bootable USB drive.
- Rebooted from my thumb drive and did a quick install which included shrinking the single ntfs partition; took about 20 minutes.
- Rebooted, got the Grub menu, booted Vista to make sure everything was functional, rebooted back to Ubuntu to finish configuration and add more packages ( eclipse, python3, etc...)

Everything has run very well; sound, ati accelerated driver, and atheros wifi drivers all function. My desktop system is still running ubuntu 9.10-rc, my older laptop is still running ubuntu 8.10. I ran 9.10-rc from my usb thumb drive on several different systems prior to the release and was quite impressed with the wide range of hardware support.

I've been running linux since 1994 and have been through about all of the common distros as well as commercial UNIXes, OS/2, most versions of DOS and Windows starting with 1.0, C-64, Vic-20, TRS-80s, TI/99-4a and a couple of Macs thrown in. Guess what? There have been various problems with every single platform and release version.

A bit of googling would have pointed you here concerning the lack of LTS 8.04 Kubuntu. I'm not trying to pick on you, but good answers to many questions may be found with just a little effort.

You rang? And to be slightly helpful, he could trade the xbox for an older PS3 fat model that can run linux. It actually runs ubuntu fairly well.

I sit in my car and use their free wifi... Much more comfortable than those hard plastic seats, better cup holders too.

Will the sellers be honest enough to give you all the money they drain from bank accounts?

That ad makes me think the only one making any money from MS research is the crack dealer...