They don't want to force people to Google+.

Really? Because I'm unable to rate or review apps in the Android Market unless I have a Google+ account. This despite the fact that this all worked perfectly fine for years, before Google+ came along.

Try reading past the first sentence of my post, and get back to me with your clever plan to easily and transparently support both ASCII and EBCDIC format.

"The Empire never ended."
-- Horselover Fat

Compaq used to sell insanely expensive and over-engineered PCs. I seem to remember my company paying $30k for a desktop PC from Compaq in the early '90s.

Compaq had very good WORKSTATIONS and SERVERS, but their PCs have always been cheap. I distinctly recall their later 90's PCs, which were non-standard over-sized motherboards, with all (cheap junk) components integrated onto them. They were right along side companies like Packard Bell in the race to the bottom.

Their workstations and servers, however, were always very nice. They used large fans, with plastic ducting, multiple thermal zones, etc, decades ago. They got the benefit of all that DEC engineering expertise and experience when they bought up the remnants of the company.

The same should be said of HP as well. Their desktop PCs were junk, but their workstations were heavily over-engineered and well-designed. I remember late 90's ~200MHz HP Workstations with numerous slots for memory, and a riser card that gave 6 PCI slots, as well as 2 ISA slots, which kept those PCs expandable and relevant far after their expected shelf life. Little touches like only two levers to pull to completely remove the case made them a pleasure to work with, as well.

And to Compaq and HP's credit, when HP bough the company, they dropped their own Netserver line, and rebranded the Compaq Proliant as the HP Proliant server, and that has now become the best selling x86 server brand out there, so they did something right. Though I'm still fairly annoyed at the licensing, limitations and clumsy proprietary tools to interface with their iLo out-of-band management.

Could it be that Dell discovered the hard way that their servers are, in-fact, too expensive? Companies like Dell and HP are seeing declining server sales due to projects like OpenCompute that are bypassing 1st tier vendors and going straight to ODMs for simpler, cheaper servers. Some of the companies buying these cheap servers include cloud service providers like Amazon.

Obviously Dell can't do that with their own in-house offerings, so perhaps they just couldn't compete with vendors running on cheaper servers.

Im fairly certain that adding strawberry scent to soap does not remove its properties as a soap.

That depends... Are you using it to wash strawberries?

(Iodine has been deprecated for most things. It's not terribly effective.)

Iodine is quite effective (though not the best), but it's relatively expensive. Chlorine & Alcohol are much cheaper, so they've replaced Iodine in a number of places.

Betadine surgical scrub consists of:

Active Ingredients
Povidone-iodine, 7.5% (0.75% available iodine)

Inactive Ingredients
Ammonium Nonoxynol-4 Sulfate, Nonoxynol-9, Purified Water, and Sodium Hydroxide.

http://www.purduepharma.com/PI/NonPrescription/A6910B16.pdf

Iodine is the most common antibacterial agent in surgical soap solution, but no, surgeons aren't pouring the standard liquid form of povidone-iodine on their hands. It wouldn't lather, and would leave a horrendous stain on their skin.

Running a Linux system in a Chroot, and X11 available only via VNC, is a far cry from a native system.

If Blackberry and Microsoft with their $Billions can't compete with Google and Apple, how can a tiny project like this?

Android started as a tiny project, too.

And the answer to your question is, as always, to be technically superior. In this case in particular, compatibility with Android apps is a pretty good start, too, making switching much less painful.

There is an absolute cult following for the N900, due to being basically a full Linux system on a phone, and as a result, every desktop Linux app you could want, not found on any other mobile platform, could be had with MeeGo, such as the NX Client, and many, many others.

Android isn't bad, but it honestly is more thin-client than full computer... Good SSH client, good VNC/RDP client, but no NX, and no good local terminal emulator and no included local linux command-line commands. The oh-so-nice SSH client (VX Connect Bot) is just a GUI app, so no scripting and automation, X11 forwarding, etc., etc.

There is only on kind of soap that works, the one that ALL the doctors are using, the plain, simple, normal SOAP. No artificial ingredients, no strawberry scent (who wanna to eat soap!!!) nothing.

While most medical staff do indeed use plain soap, surgeons at least, are required to use antibacterial soap.

Backwards compatibility means never adding new features such as this trendy new "ASCII" thingy...

Since plain text is so simple, there's no uniform header or similar, that the system can use to autodetect the contents and switch between the two transparently, so there's no easy way to support ASCII will staying EBCDIC compatible.

Of course my experience is only with a small sliver of IBM's product line (several mainframes). But a quick look at Wikipedia reports the following:

"All IBM mainframe and midrange peripherals and operating systems use EBCDIC as their inherent encoding,[3] but AIX running on the RS/6000 and its descendants including the IBM Power Systems, Linux running on the zSeries, and operating systems running on the IBM PC and its descendants use ASCII."

Some nice context in there as well:

"the EBCDIC alphabet is non-contiguous, interleaved with unassigned characters which may or may not be in use. Data portability is hindered by a lack of many symbols commonly used in programming and in network communications."

I just took the opportunity to throw-in one of my pet peeves. Even a simple text file needs to be converted to be readable anywhere else... Things that are absolutely trivial on every other platform, like FTP'ing a file, become complex, because of the need for character conversion... It's a constant annoyance.