Agreed. I live in Eastern Canada where they use a lot of salt on the roads this time of year. Even with undercoating, you'll rarely see a car which outlasts it's engine. Usually a car's body rots to pieces before it's mechanically unsuitable for continued use.

There are many cars from as recent as 2000 or 2001 that are full of rust holes from people who don't bother to undercoat.

Because this is a game changing technology, if it pans out.

Agreed. If the issue was that you can only get an Android phone via Rogers, then

http://www.telusmobility.com/en/NS/htc_hero/index.shtml

http://www.bell.ca/shopping/en_CA_ON.Samsung-Galaxywith-Google/69236.details

There's at least two other nation wide carriers looking to do business with you, right now. Ones who have proper coverage in Eastern Canada, unlike Rogers, in many non-metro areas.

Then they right click on the left side of the icon. Communication skills on the sender's part don't compensate for listening skills on the receiver.

This was always a sticking point for me in the Mac vs Windows debate. Windows users complain about the one button mouse as if it's a crippling feature, when in fact, the MacOS UI was designed with a one button mouse. Granted, once you go to third party apps like, say, photoshop or UT2004, you're longing for the right click, I suppose, but it does make it a less cumbersome interface for MacOS itself, as well as apps designed for the environment to have only the one button.

I work tech support for a windows heavy environment, and the bottom end users are so mind bogglingly confused about the two buttons that it's laughable.

"Click on the icon"
"Right click or left click?"
"If I say click, I just mean left click"
"Ok, it brought up a menu.."
"No, you right clicked on it, use the left button"
"Oh.. Now i have a properties window"
"No, you left clicked the menu.. not the icon.. close that and start over"
"Ok, I have the menu up again, now what? I right click on properties?"
"... bring it in, I'll do it"

We have a very unique structure at the university. Our clients are our 4000+ staff, faculty and students, all of whom have standalone laptop systems, not part of our managed systems. We are currently looking into putting our own ubuntu repository online for custom packages and updated revisions, but the headaches of this breaking mainline repository updates is daunting.

The bulk of the systems (again, 4000+ laptops) never pass through our hands, so we can't configure them ourselves, and would have to provide documentation on this to the masses, 80% of whom would have no issues, and 20% of whom we'd end up having to handhold through the process of adding custom respositories, 5% of whom we'd have to see in person.

We have a not insignificant amount of users, primarily library staff and long time faculty who are on the far side of 60 years old, and are resentful and afraid of the picture box with the typewriter.

All in all, not insurmountable, just daunting, and it will be tackled some day, but the 2008-2009 school year marked the first year of official adoption by the faculty of OSS packages. We're still hammering out the wrinkles.

And no, my official title is "Technology Services Consultant", but I act as backup to the software license officer when he is otherwise indisposed.

So angry.

Have you ever had a support contract before? At the university where I'm the backup software license officer, we've got a Microsoft Campus Agreement, as well as software site license for SPSS, and multiple other statistical and mathematical software packages. If a widespread problem occurs due to a software fault, such as the calendar issues we were having on the 2003-2007 Office switch, they had someone on the problem and the problem resolved in less than a day.

When a similar glitch occurred in our Evolution users, we had to submit a bug report, then wait for a new version to be released to repository, as we couldn't expect our users to compile from CVS, as the majority of them don't even have a build toolkit.

There's anecdotal evidence for both sides of the argument, but I stand by what's been said.

That's utopian thinking. For home use, I more or less agree with you. Business users have a lot of finely detailed and rigidly laid out documents, sometimes with proprietary macro or VBA coding in them. This stuff would be a huge pain to translate to an open standard, and there's no guarantee that OOo will display them faithfully and with fidelity.

Plus, with a MS Office contract, you have a software vendor to fall back to when things go wrong. You don't get this to the same extent with OSS, which is why business is often slow to adopt it.

Recently? They have write caching and such on NTFS-3G now.. trickled down from their commercial Tuxera project.

It means "without lack of regard".. GOD!

Baltimore Orioles number one!

I agree.. We up here in Canada would love to have some tablets, but where would we plug them in? Our igloos have no electrical and solar chargers are out since we don't get sun for 6 months of the year.

True, I assumed the right to repair, but by modding did I also give them the right to purposefully destroy capabilities of my hardware?

What you're saying is that, if you put a fuel management system on your Mustang, that Ford is well within their rights to come smash your windows out of your car, since you took on the right to repair when you modified your car.

I agree with the first statement. However, this recent round of bans has not only booted banned users from the microsoft network, but also reduced the OFFLINE capabilities of the console. The banning corrupts the NAND on the console, removing the ability to install games, purchased or otherwise, to the hard drive. Those who bought a large hard drive in order to install games to it to speed up load times (a function supported by the console, not something you get through modding) are now unable to do so.

I agree that kicking us off the network is WELL within their rights, but changing the capabilities of my console is not. I should be able to do what I want with my hardware, since I bought it. If I choose to mod it then, yes, I'm violating EULA and Microsoft no longer has to offer me support or access to their network, but they do not have the right to modify my hardware's offline capabilities.

To play devil's advocate, you can't expect any software distributor, even one the size of Microsoft, to test against every possible combination of hardware and software that people might have. Prevx is not a major player in the market. If Microsoft had failed to test against, say, Norton 360 or McAfee security software, then yes, they'd be at fault. However, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of malware solutions, not to mention the malware itself, that could, theoretically, produce ill effects on users when an update is released that doesn't respect whatever hacky workarounds the software in question might be exploiting.

Wouldn't work around here. Our local granite is CHOCK FULL of uranium. The background radiation in Lunenburg county (just up the road from the Annapolis Valley) is pretty high.

http://apps1.gdr.nrcan.gc.ca/mirage/tmp/mirage4ab358f8ee909.jpg