I have to agree. I went with an AMD FX-6300 for my last computer. Definitely saved money, and I have no qualms about the performance. Does a fantastic job (coupled with 8gig of RAM) at compiling LibreOffice, for example...

I don't need to buy it from Amazon. I don't need to buy it at all. In Canada, all of Orwell's stuff has been in the public domain since January 1st 2001.

While as a Blackberry fan I'm always sorry to see a company cease BB support, this won't matter too much. The Amazon app store carries WhatsApp, and BB10 devices can install Android apps through the Amazon store as easily as native apps.

Well, this is disappointing. My mom & dad are on an antique Dell with a 32-bit processor. First OpenSUSE announced they were abandoning 32-bit, and I thought "OK, I'll install Lubuntu or Xubuntu or something." Now Google does this. I had them on Chrome because of the baked in Flash support. I suppose I could get away with Chromium... I think the only site my folks ever visit with video is Youtube. Still, just one more annoying thing.

Don't get me wrong... Agency has downsides. Lots of them. It's tremendously annoying that there are no sales on Agency books. Kobo (my preferred store) gives out lots of discount codes, but they're of limited use because they don't apply to Agency books. And those publishers that choose to price their ebooks above the paperback price are extremely frustrating (although a few of them seem to be getting a clue. Tor, for example, prices Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books at a decent discount from paperback. DRM free too.)

But without Agency, it's entirely possible we'd be living in a Kindle-only world.

Amazon was using ebooks as loss-leaders to sell Kindles. $9.99 for the latest bestseller. The publishers hated it because it cannibalized their hardcover sales. But the danger went a lot further then that.

One of the boards I read (I think it might be mobileread.com) introduced me to the concept of a monopsony. Call it the flip side to a monopoly. There existed a very real possibility that Amazon would become the only practical retailer for ebooks, thanks to their willingness to take a loss to build market share (and the deep pockets to enable taking that loss.)

I much prefer the current, varied ecosystem in ebook retailing. I like owning a Kobo Touch, which lets me read ebooks from anybody selling epubs (as long as they don't use customized DRM, but hey, it's a pain getting Barnes & Noble to sell to a Canadian anyways, so who cares.) Amazon wouldn't work nearly as well for me. Canada is an afterthought market for Amazon.

The trial is proving interesting. CNN/Fortune has really good coverage on their Apple blog.

I've been using FreeBSD & KDE as my main desktop since 2002. I find it just works...for me, anyways. I certainly prefer it to Linux, but it's probably just because I'm used to it. I'd take Linux any day over MacOSX or Windows.

I have to respectfully disagree. While it takes some getting used to, the FreeBSD ports system is, imo, absolutely awesome. Running into conflicts is extremely rare. I ran into a software conflict two months ago. It was the first time in probably five years. (I've been using FreeBSD as my main home system since 2002.)

Yes, if you install a desktop, X is not automatically a dependency. This situation works rather well for those who want to remotely log into the machine and use a GUI. Until recently FreeBSD supported FreeNX quite well (I've had trouble with the port recently. In my spare time I'm hacking away at it.). If you're remote administering a headless system, having X pulled in as a dependency is not what you want.

I'm sorry you ran into difficulties with X. The thing with X is that you have to remember to use the x11/xorg meta-port. You can install all the X components one at a time through the other ports and I imagine that if you're building a desktop it would be an exercise in extreme frustration.

If you ever decide to try FreeBSD again you might want to try PC-BSD. It's a full FreeBSD system (they just released 9.1 as well) but the installer installs a desktop by default and the PBI system is less arcane then ports can be. (Bear in mind that PBI is built from the FreeBSD ports system and ports remain available to users in PC-BSD.)