I dont think Joe User is ready for desktop linux quite yet. The posts I have read here all talk about using the OS as it it, but you forget one thing....third-party hardware and software. Users wont be ready to use linux flavors on the desktop until vendors are ready to support them.

Case in point, I recently worked a call center job for an ISP that served rural America. The service worked for "every operating system and every browser." However, we supported Windows XP onward and Mac OSX(limited). As far as browsers we supported IE 7+, FF 3.x+ and Safari(limited). If you could connect your modem and run it smoothly using your linux box be our guest, but dont come to us with your problems. It is a process-based job which means there are step by step solutions for agents to walk users through with pretty screenshots. Your screen doesn't match? You can't follow the process with me over the phone? Powercycle your equipment and tell me if that solves your issue. If not i'll note your account and move on. Bye.

The company i worked for isn't the only one out there that's process-based as im sure most if not all level 1 helpdesk positions are. I wasn't scripted, but there are only so many words you can use to tell a customer to do what they need to do.

Until a company can step up and develop a locked down no config necessary(by which i mean changing/creating values in a text file or terminal) that looks and acts uniformly on any hardware vendors and dumb users wont touch it.

I suspect that's the answer you were looking for, but i'm afraid that's not an answer. Something like this would probably require hardware switches to be truly effective. It's much simpler to take out your battery as a few others have already stated. and dont forget to discharge the device by holding in the power key for a good 10-15 seconds.

It's been said that as we grow older we lose our sense of wonder about the world. That's certainly true of the slashdot crowd. Here we have an article talking about the technology behind creating an animated movie, and I see a bunch of comments bashing the script and progression of the movie. Face it folks, this movie isnt for you. Dreamworks wasnt trying to make it for you, and as long as youre older than 14 Dreamworks wont try to cater to you with this genre ever again. Let the kids have their fun with fart jokes, bright colors and possibly some cartoon violence. Take them into the theatre, cuff them to the seat then go down the hall to enjoy your movie with mile deep character development and a plot that takes 1:30 to make sense of.

i'm sure that's a goal too, but that's not news for nerds now, is it?

c'mon.....this is slashdot not huffington post

What the hell is a palm? Is that one of those $99 android tablets you can buy at your local drug store?

Regina of Dino Crisis is a strong female role. If you dont know the game it's pretty much Resident Evil with dinosaurs

The whole attraction to console gaming is that it used to "just work" Now there's the BS with internet enabled games and dlc and the like, but guess where that came from? Ya, that idea was brought to you by PC gaming.

The pain with PC gaming is that everyone's PC is configured differently. Games have dependencies that may not exist on your PC. A game may take advantage of a niche feature of a video/sound card that doesnt exist in other cards. A game might work with a specific version of a hardware driver. This list can go on and on. Console developers and users dont have this problem. The hardware is there. The software is there and all of the capabilities are the same. Console gaming just works.

You donn't complain that networks dumb down your tv programming to account for your tv. Imagine if your tv were as complicated as a PC, and you had to account for audio/video codecs, aspect ratios, and framerates. Sure, you may have to do this if you download content from the net, but imagine if broadcast programming were this complicated.

awesome...

You'll either have to keep the phone you have or buy your phones outright. As soon as you get a new subsidized phone you'll be moved to their new plan model which includes unlimited minutes and text with a bucket of data

Unlocking devices isn't as relevant in the US as it is in other parts of the world. The big 4 in the US all use different technologies to provide service, so taking a device from carrier a to carrier b doesn't make sense in terms of being useful. Of course there is always the argument of "it's my device let me do what i please" and I agree more with that, but those people should pony up the full retail value of the product. If you buy a phone that is carrier subsidized you're essentially financing the phone over 2 years.

If the carriers want to move to an unsubsidized model they should give consumers an incentive to pay upfront costs. T-Mobile's "value plan" is a good example. The customer buy's the device at a discount and pays an additional fee of $20 until the device's retail value is paid off. The plan then becomes $20 cheaper. If carrier's want a BYOD to work they need to offer cheaper rates.

The carriers can offer their retail salespeople a rate plan of $20 at the cost of BYOD. Why can't they do this for consumers? The plan's dont even have to be that cheap, but a $40-50 plan is not out of the realm of possibility. When I worked retail I bought my own Galaxy S3 and paid $25 for my plan. For an upfront cost of ~$520 I saved about $1800 over the cost of a 2-year consumer rate plan

When opening this article I half expected to read about the next installment of Grand Theft Auto or some other title riddled with adult themes.

if only i had mod points...

Nokia has given up, but is there still a dev community for it? Are consumers sticking to Symbian for some app that doesnt exist on other platforms?

I dont have an Instragram account, so i didn't pay too much attention to the hype around the ToS changes. What I did gleam from it was the change saying Instagram could sell your images without paying you a dime or even letting you know about it. That's essentially what Facebook's user agreement says without expressly saying so. You own the content, but they sub-license it. IE. They do what they want and you're screwed.