"The N900 might have been this neat little device but clearly it sold poorly or Nokia wouldn't have ditched it."

Your entire post starts from a false assumption. Actually, it sold really well considering. Some estimates are over 1mm. Here's some substantiation:

http://www.intomobile.com/2010/06/01/how-many-n900-units-has-nokia-sold/

This was a phone with no subsidies, no marketing or advertising, not compatible with anything else...

OK, then of course, the N9 must have been a sales failure, right? Nope.

http://www.quora.com/Is-the-Nokia-N9-MeeGo-handset-still-outselling-Nokias-Windows-Phone-7-handsets-February-2012

Again, no subsidies, no advertising - and Elop shitting all over it, disowning it, etc.

If anything, it looks like Nokia made the absolutely wrong decision. It's almost as if there was an agenda that wasn't primarily motivated by profit or unit sales. Hmmm.

Jeremy,

Since you're hanging about, let me take the opportunity to say thanks for making such a vital, useful and wonderful piece of software - and thanks to the rest of the Samba team, too.

I've used it at work over the decades, I use it at home even now. It's made my life better. That is not at all hyperbole.

I know that this is Slashdot, but it wouldn't hurt to say thanks, right?

Cheers!

Like Makerbot, they went closed source for their latest printer - the M2 that you're touting.

I have an M2, and it's a great printer, but there's nothing Open Source about it, sadly. Well, except for the fact that Makergear looks to the community for help with support and such.

The N900 sold somewhere between 1 and 1.5mm units.

This was without advertising.
Without marketing.
Without subsidies.

Yeah, that didn't sell particularly well. The N9 apparently did substantially better, even with Elop bending over backwards to prevent its success.

There was a presentation about the genesis of Maker Faire at the Open Hardware Summit last week. The pointed out the French translation of "faire" - and said that it was something that they learned after the fact. FYI.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. The poll is polluted by non-traveling mouth-breathers.

Consider that only 1/3 of Americans hold valid passports. I'd guess that the percentage that flies more at least once a year is around the same, perhaps less.

Which means that the non-travelers are just fine with whatever tactics that the TSA uses.

Screw Blizzard. They did this:

https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2002/04/08

The headline: "Blizzard Freezes Bnetd Gaming Platform, Sues Own Customers"

I've never bought anything from Blizzard ever since, and never will.

Well, for $1300 and weeks-to-months of waiting.

FYI, I plunked down my cash on an M2; I was given a "fuzzy" ETA of 4 weeks, now passed. New guestimate of arrival is... 1st-2nd week of July.

Has anyone received one yet? Any reviews?

Hey DBC - in case you're still watching, i'd love to hear about your thoughts on the lasersaur. Email me at jonnyh at gmail dot com, if you'd be so kind.

Actually did a good job promoting the campaign, but the rest of the critique is fair enough.

But that was my original point - people don't get excited over Kindle lights.

Why was it the best?

It was cheaper. It used less electricity, about 1/3 as much. Despite the video, it threw more diffuse and even light than the Amazon cover. The LED used was "warmer". It was provided a kickstand feature, and worked great as an ergo-grip. The light could be adjusted optimally for many different reading angles and positions, while the Amazon light worked just for one (it's not good for reading in bed, for example).

And for some folks, the Amazon light offends their vegan sensibilities, and mine doesn't.

Things like close-up lighting are really hard to get right on video, FYI.

...and no one wanted it. Seriously:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pieco/kapsule-lightstand-kindle-accessory

I guess if it's built-in and "free", people will want a reading light. Otherwise, not so much.

Another vote for Crashplan. I have the family plan. It's Linux friendly. There are no data limits. It's fairly cheap for what it is (I think that I can backup all of the computers in my "family" for $200 for two years).

But it isn't enough.

My semi-paranoid backup plan (and yes, I know that RAID is not backup):

• Windows machines boot from soft-mirrored drives
• They also back up to a Linux server w/ RAID 5 via Macrium Reflect
• Most files are stored on a another Linux server, RAID 5
• The main server rsyncs its contents to a "hidden" RAID 5 once a night. Gives a 24 hour window to retrieve accidentally deleted files locally
• All Windows and Linux boxes constantly backup to the cloud via Crashplan (but not the Macrium backup files - too large).

Sadly, Crashplan's worst problem is that it can't keep up with my FIOS speeds. It tops out at about 1-2MB/s, while FIOS allows up to 5MB/s up speeds. If it could, I'd even backup the Macrium image files.

I had a bad Windows disaster and lost a bunch of data two years ago. It was a BIOS bug, I think - Windows 7 suddenly thought I had a new drive geometry, and it blue-screened and started to automatically try to "fix" things upon reboot. I'm surprised that no one has shit all over them for this "user-friendly" design decision.

And it turns out that the precautions I had in place at the time ALL FAILED. The mirror (Intel fakeraid) had silently failed a while before (probably because of the crap BIOS) - not that it would have probably made a difference. The previous backup software had silently failed a while before. I wasn't using cloud backup. And the drives in my file server started to fail one after another at the same time.

It took two sleepless weeks to get most (but not all) of my data back.

Lesson: have several layers of backup and redundancy. And CHECK that everything is working as intended periodically, or you'll find that all of your condoms have broken.

Um, the Touchpad shipped with the Kindle Reader. It was marked a Beta, but it works very well. And they just updated it a couple of weeks ago.

I was once out to dinner with Tim (and some others). It was at a Benihana's in Napiersville, IL. It was for a W3C thing.

After several sake-bombs, he wistfully expressed regret that he hadn't gotten a patent on the URL. He his idea was that he would have freed the patent, except for anyone putting a URL in print for purposes of advertising. Those folks would have had to pay him a fraction of a cent per impression.

I'm not so sure how serious he was, be he really looked pretty sad.