I go out with my partner and often see families with children come for nice meal in a nice restaurant. Mum is updating her facebook status while dad's checking ebay, Junior and his sister are toying with nintendo. Parents cant communicate with each other let alone their children. I see scenes like this all the time and I really dont think its a healthy way to live together - if we cant be social as a family unit when we have gone out to be together what hope is there for mankind?

I have no problem with people using their devices for whatever they see fit - but when they have gone out for a special occaision or for a nice meal to be a family together it just seems very broken to me.

N.

"almost as fast" as they would if they were proper applications under a real OS

Just like Windows then...

I have two HP Laptops an old core 2 duo c700 and a couple years old i3 G62 . Both are still going strong - both great Linux machines. The c700 amazes me how it can still hold its own against my newer machine its a bit battered through plenty of usage. The G62 i have upgraded with additional memory and second SSD drive (in the optical bay) - its my main work machine and goes with me everywhere. While both these laptops were at the budget end of the spectrum when i bought them I feel that for the money i paid for them i got a good deal. Neither machines are going in a gallery next to any Apple devices as far as looks are concerned - but I dont have money to burn on machines that are 3 times the price for the same hardware/cpu inside. All the manufacturers you cite make high end machines nowadays out of higher quality materials if you are prepared to pay the premium.

You say that consumers want quality - of course we do - but most consumers want quality that they can afford. Apple stuff is expensive and while their phones and tablets can be had at good deals from the phone shops subsidized by contracts their computers are too expensive for the average joe.

HP Touchpad please!

"An x86 processor is a necessary component but, in itself, not sufficient to make a "PC" that can run Windows. Or, for that matter, Linux."

My moneys on Linux running on it at some point once all the security measures have been subverted. In fact i would imagine work will begin in earnest as soon
as the first consoles hit the streets.

N..

This is always the argument - that PC's will very quickly surpass the console hardware - I dont disagree with that at all. But in case you havent noticed desktop's are on their way out - at least as far as the home is concerned the next games hardware will still be in a box under the TV - be it a steam box or a PS4 / Xbox.

Most new PC's sold are laptops or if you want to count them tablets or mobile phones. Unless you havent noticed - although mobile devices have pretty reasonable
3D performance for games etc . The big barrier is the touchscreen - bar puzzle /physics type casual games its a dire experience for anything remotely like what games we are used to playing on console / pc with a keyboard/mouse/joypad.

While there is a market for anything beyond angry birds / tetris (heck id rather play tetris with a controller) there will be a place for dedicated hardware with proper physical controllers.

Does this put the source code into the public domain - and thus now might it be possible to port it to other architectures?

Ok Jailbreaking iPhones is news i guess - although why someone would buy an iPhone in the first place with the intent on jailbreaking it is a mystery to me - surely thats an admission that the phone doesnt check all your boxes. irritation aside ....

they found some icons that arent currently in use by any apps. big f***king woop. Im sure you could find a bunch of unused icons on any windows , linux, amigaOS.

Just because its Apple - this is some sort of game changing discovery that merits a wordy article on cnet - only to appear on slashdot hours later.

Come on now are the moderators that bloody nerdy now that a glimpse of a new icon gives them a semi ?

N.

What about games you purchased new?

What happens should you buy one of the first batch of consoles - rushed out to hit launch day and it breaks just outside warranty and you decide to purchase a new one.
Will you need to replace the games too ? or what happens if you purchase several consoles for your home - will you need to double up the games too ?

This would be a very inconvenient situation indeed - surely Microsoft will at the very least allow games to be used on a maximum number of X consoles and allow them to be de / re authorised for different ones.

Come on ... surely thats not a real name .

OK, new rule.

Every time Slashdot posts an asinine, hit-trolling, golly-gosh-gee-what-if article like this one, they need decrement all red hues by #01 and increment all blue hues by #01.

This rule will hold until Slashdot reaches a color more appropriate to the caliber of its reporting.

". Should Microsoft be afraid? Methinks so. "
Spoken like a true Apple fanboy! And for that sort of price it will remain an item for those with more money than sense.

Seriously though - most of my "media consumption" devices are streaming over my home network or via the cloud. If i need
portable storage - USB sticks come in very high capacities these days for a fraction of the cost. Not to forget many currently available Android devices
can be expanded via SD card or USB.

So other than wanting to be the envy of my friends (NOT!) remind me why i wouldnt spend my money more wisely?

N...

"I currently work in a call centre while I'm studying."

How do you concentrate?

Not sure about anyone else - but on my Ubuntu systems SSD made a significant difference to more than just startup times - Web Browsing for example is much snappier - im guessing this is due to the drive more readily capable of writing image / web page data and fetching from disk cache for rendering etc.

Any "runtime" performance that relies heavily on disk based caches will see a benefit here. I've used SSD for I/O intensive applications such as running
Solr / Lucene search engine the improvement here is also very significant. Applications that are heavy on writes will also benefit.

So i kind of disagree with you on that one i guess!

"And then when you update your Linux once and the entire thing crashes and burns, you'll go back to Windows. At least, that's what keeps happening to me when I try to switch to Linux."

I hear this comment a lot or variants of the theme - and i just dont get it - I've been using Linux since ~2000 - now back then things could be a problem and a comment like the above would have its place. But as an experienced Linux user - i find "it just works" (tm) . I dont have to screw around installing drivers or fanny
around with settings at all. Compare that with a windows box or a OSX and , if you've been using Linux as long as i have and plug say a (for example) midi interface into a windows or OSX box you be astonished to find yourself hunting for drivers etc like wtf ?. On a modern linux distro that sort of thing "Just Works" and thats the kind of experience I have with Linux. The same can be said for updates for the most part are pretty damn reliable - I have an ubuntu box thats running 12.10 and i've upgraded every time theres been a distro update over the last 3 years and it usually goes without a hiccup.

So whats the deal here? Im no Linux newbie but im not doing anything special - i mean - its been that long since i edited Xf86config i've forgotten what half of it does.

I would geniunely like to know what these Linux newbies coming over from Windows are actually doing to screw up there systems so badly - its pretty difficult do to that nowadays?

Anyone care to comment - im sure if we can get to the bottom of what is happening to these guys that we as a community can do something about it!

N.