My father's computer is running Vista. I tried to upgrade him to Win 7, but lack of drivers for his Samsung laptop meant that his USB dropped to USB 1.0, no drivers for his printer, no drivers for his scanner, and no drivers for his wifi. The color calibration system he uses wouldn't work on Win 7. Upgrading to Win 7 also forced him to upgrade his Creative Suite, which then wouldn't support the RAW format on his very expensive DSLR.

This isn't just a matter of "clinging to old technologies". To support high end photography, he buys expensive cameras, scanners, printers, color calibration systems, and more. Upgrading isn't just an afternoon of work. It would involve throwing out thousands of dollars worth of hardware and software, and starting over.

Businesses run into these kind of situation all the time. Multiply it to thousands of employees, and the costs can be staggering.

I get that no one on Slashdot RTFA, but this time even the description says "200 miles of flowing hydrocarbons."

The problem with intel, and why people are "bashing" them has little to do with what is required of them. It is because Intel is clearly seeking to make money off of Android which was built by others contributions, and being selfish pricks in the process. Android has hundreds of millions (maybe billions?) of dollars worth of investment and contributions in it by people and companies not named Intel. Intel is making some minor changes, running around telling everyone how great those changes are, and then saying they aren't willing to contribute those changes back. At best, that's deserving of some amount of criticism.

They may be well within their rights, but they have to expect some criticism as a result.

Caching the route does work. At least it does on every Android phone I've owned. When you drive through parts of the southwest United States, you often travel for hundreds of miles with no cell coverage at all. Google Maps keeps chugging along, as long as I don't end navigation on my current route.

So you are suggesting the solution to privacy issues is a proprietary black box, where one benevolent corporation, who is trying to eek every bit of profit out their platform, is the only one in control? That's the solution? Really? Have we already forgotten the situation where iOS was keeping a log of the phone's location?

At least with Android I know I can flash a new (AOSP) ROM where every line of code is OSS, and know what is truly happening with my device.

And the TMobile Sidekick by Danger (now Microsoft) did it many years before Opera. Nothing to see here. Move along.

And if the market for devices capable of creation shrinks, prices for such devices will likely rise due to loss of economies of scale.

So Amazon shouldn't try to slim tablet features down to hit a $199 price point, and instead charge 5-600 for a full-featured tablet like everyone else, because if they do it might theoretically drive the price of content-creation devices up? You...kill...me.

Do you all whine like this because a Ford Fiesta doesn't have the same features as a BMW 3 Series? Should economy cars not be built because they are a barrier of entry for those that want a rear view camera and a high fidelity sound system so they can park in a tight spot while their ears are delighted? Amazon is putting out a very attractively priced tablet with slimed-down features. If you want the additional features, go pay $500 for an IPad or a Xoom. This has been done in every competitive market before - stop acting like it's a new abomination.

At least this exercise taught us one thing: The wrong way to transition a product to open source. Google should have made this announcement and the prior "cancellation" announcement one single communication. Instead, they freaked out their community and received a bunch of negative reaction. All the time, they were doing the exact thing we always hope companies will do: release a proprietary product as open source.

Very true. I suspect the more likely scenario is that traditional nuclear power goes away from reactions to Fukashima, and in the future we use safer thorium reactors. In the meantime we make plugin electric cars that are usable/useful by the masses and have extended range, which are powered by thorium plants feeding the grid rather than the carbon-producing coal plants that dominate today. Cars powered by thorium, though indirectly.

For what it's worth, I wasn't trying to get +5. I was just responding to the comment. The sad thing is the +5 has more to do with my comment being high on the thread. Try to get +5 by adding a comment near the bottom of a long thread; it's almost impossible. That's why so many people reply to early comments when their reply isn't at all related to what they are replying to.

No, you have to charge 43% extra to break even when Apple takes a 30% cut. For instance, if a book is 1.00 normally, you need to charge 1.43 because 1.43 * .3 = .429. This means the margin is so high it's not even close to competitive with Apple's own products.

Sort of. The difference is, NFC is in wide circulation with MasterCard PayPass and Visa Paywaive.

People seem to be ignoring the massive difficulty and investment in bringing the point-of-sale in alignment with the mobile device. Google has solved this by partnering with MasterCard to allow their wallet to work via NFC with PayPass POS devices which were already deployed at many merchants. It is difficult to imagine that BT4 could compete with that built-in install base. Apple would be smart to integrate NFC rather than attempting to blaze their own trail. It certainly is not impossible, but it doesn't make much sense.

And all have their hardware, or use hardware, manufactured in China...

Isn't that the way we want it? High wage white collar engineering jobs in the U.S. and laborers working at low wages in bad conditions so they can make us glorious technology that only we can afford?

It sure seems en vogue for Americans to hate on the American experience while living in the most affluent country in the history of the world. Sad, really.

Even if the information carried by inaudible sound waves is "cryptographically sound", it's certainly not a secure "wallet". Bragging that it doesn't rely on a chip may sound great, but there's more to Google Wallet's NFC chip than simple radio communications. The chip also serves as what Google calls a "Secure Element". This allows Google Wallet to securely store your card details and payment details inside a completely secure chip that's sandboxed from the OS itself.

If this technology is secure at communicating, but not secure at storing your card details, it's pretty useless (imho). Unless you think entering your card details every time you want to pay is better than carrying the card in your wallet.

Tonido plug is an open source wal mart server, similar to PogoPlug. I've never used it, but it sounds like exactly what you are looking for. FLOSS Weekly had a nice episode on Tonido. They have web, iOS, Android, and BlackBerry clients and are completely OSS, including the server and clients.