They were when they started shipping them, according to Max's blog post.. They could be offering anything at this point. The only thing they guarantee is that you'll get at least those minimum specs. They don't guarantee that you'll get anything better, but they say you probably will.

My gut feeling is that you'll almost always come out ahead of the minimum specs on at least one or two facets (like, you might get a better processor if nothing else, or more disk space if nothing else) just because given how prices fluctuate on parts it would be impossible for them to exactly meet the minimum without specifically trying. They would deliberately have set the minimum to be a fallback position that they knew for a fact they could always better at that price range.

And if all I want to do is surf the web, check e-mail, read e-books, and write, hell, a 2-pound Africa will be a hell of a lot better than the 8 pound Toshiba Satellite laptop I currently have. And at $100, it will be cheaper than even the cheapest iPod Touch. It's not like I'm going to be rendering Avatar on it or something.

You specify which OS you want at time of order, in the "order instructions" box. If you say "give me all Linux, please" they'll do it for you.

Windows might be more of a standardization issue. From reading between the lines in their blog post (where Max said you'd get "at least" Windows CE, but not Vista or 7), I got the feeling that you might get either Windows CE or Windows XP, depending on which OS the processor they had available that day would support.

Personally, I think it's kind of neat that they can make cheap machines out of literally whatever they can get their hands on. It's kind of like something Cory Doctorow would write.

Actually, according to their website, they'll ship anywhere in the world for $19 flat rate shipping. So it will cost whatever $119 comes out to in pounds whenever you order it.

Nice to see another open EP server. I'd suggest coming up with your own front page rather than ripping off Etherpad's, though. It could lead to confusion.

I really do think that this was the best thing that could possibly have happened to EtherPad. While it was still closed-source, it was locked up in the hands of one company. There was always the risk it could go away for good. (As very nearly happened right after Google bought them.) It's possible they might even have used the patent they claimed was "pending" to stifle competition if someone created a similar app from scratch.

But now it belongs to all of us, and anyone with the expertise to set it up can run a pad server for his own writing circle or for the world. People might even hack in new features and share them, like that Wave Federation thing Iba mentioned in the blog post.

But even if EtherPad's codebase stays the same forever, it's ours now and we can use it however we want.

Small wonder they wanted to acquire AppJet to send its programmers to the Google Wave slave mines to make Wave work more like EtherPad. I'm tickled pink they went through with their pledge to open-source it, and did it so quickly.

Isn't it amazing? This is the code that was AppJet's entire revenue stream...and after Google bought them for ten million dollars, they're giving all that work away to the community, free.

You can argue all you want about whether Google is really evil or not, but either way it certainly has its non-evil moments.

It's no wonder that Google bought the makers of the best collaboration software out there to improve it.

If the AppJet team is able to make Wave even half as useful as EtherPad, that will be an improvement of orders of magnitude.

Oddly enough, I just wrote a fairly lengthy review of Rainbows End over on TeleRead.org. Submitted it to Slashdot; it's still pending. (I'm not optimistic, but it was worth a try.) I talk some about the book, and about how Vernor Vinge's ideas for "the book of the future" have been evolving and changing since True Names.

It'll be fascinating if this technology actually starts to show up in real life.

How about more than a one sentence summary?