Your economy is in the crapper, Australia's isn't. We're doing pretty well, partly thanks to our mining sector selling raw materials to China. We also had a recession back in 1987 due (from what I'm hearing now) to bad assets. It had the result of (eventually) clearing out all of those bad assets and leaving our banks stronger than before. So when the GFC hit everyone, we were able to weather it rather well. You guys haven't, and you haven't gotten rid of the toxic assets that caused it in the first place! We're all in for more pain...

Maybe. But the nice thing about lossless encoding is that there's no generational loss. So just transcode your FLAC rips to ALAC to send to your Airport thingies. Still equivalent to the original CD!

It's a pay-off. Yes, it does cost you RAM. But compressed RAM is still much faster than rotating disk, and probably SSD too (for now). So sacrifice some RAM (and CPU) and save swapping quite as much.

The Firewire plug/socket design is very close to that of the Game Link Cable. See this photo on Wikipedia. As for USB - not as much.

Check the forums - people still haven't received this hardware and are cancelling their orders. The main website hasn't been updated in a year. AI showed some neat ideas but have utterly failed to deliver them. In the mean time the big manufacturers have picked up those ideas and are selling slick consumer devices you can actually buy. Sorry AI, you're dead.

Another neat idea they had was having the main system (SoC + Wifi + BT) in a phone-sized module with its own screen that can be removed from the tablet part and used as a (VOIP-only) smartphone. But that's also been tried by one or two big manufacturers since they showed this idea.

As opposed to, you know, figuratively playing the clip of the bus jump in Speed.

My Grandpa got duped by this group a little while ago. He was never very tech savvy and is now going senile. And his vision is going too. The description in the summary is just about spot-on. He found some local PC tech to check out his machine and found it clean. Amazingly it looked like the scammers were simply after the money. He managed to cancel the payment and eventually got new credit cards. IIRC, it took Mum and her siblings a while to convince him to do that though. He thought he was safe because the local tech hadn't found anything on his PC, but they could have taken any of his banking and other details.

If you don't mind going a little DIY, there is the Ubiquiti RouterStation Pro. It's a board with four GigE ports and three mini-PCI slots for wireless cards, and comes loaded with Open WRT. Look around online and you should be able to find a few places selling it with a simple case, power pack, and a wireless card for ~$150 or less. Note, I haven't used it, so I can't speak from experience. It's on my wishlist though :)

I love my Milestone (essentially a "Droid"), but I have mixed feelings about the keyboard. Apart from only having four rows and thus requiring combinations a little too often, the main problem is Android itself. From what I understand, Android treats a screen rotation as another screen size, so the app redraws the screen in the new size. But if you have a "dialog box" up, that is lost. And it doesn't take a genius to realise that a dialog box is something you'll often be entering text into.

So what happens is this:

1. Using app...
2. A dialog box pops up asking for text to be entered e.g search, or enter a POI on the map
3. Slide open keyboard and turn phone on side (the first action forces the device into landscape mode anyway)
4. Dialog box gone! You're back to wherever you were before the dialog box opened.

Even Google (App) Market does this. Yes, even the latest 3.0 version. If Google can't get this right, with one of their most important apps, what chance do we have with other software?

Yes, it was rushed. You're thinking of "Long Horn", which dragged on way too long and was eventually put on the back-burner when the higher-ups realised it wasn't going anywhere, or at least wasn't going anywhere fast enough. So Vista was then hurriedly put together in a few years.

It does here in Australia:

I guess you do if you're running Window servers, which apparently Diginotar were.

AJAX. Almost any large website will include dynamic content to some extent. Haven't you noticed?

It's not that GEGL (and BABL) is large, simply that not many people are working on it. And like you said, porting/rewriting the internal tools to use GEGL, not to mention all of the plugins and scripting languages, is/will be a lot of work.

Because Windows is the only desktop that makes managing windows so primitive. Unix/X11 has had multiple virtual desktops for decades. Even Mac OS/X has had Spaces since 2006. MS Windows just piles windows onto the single desktop. So to keep things cleaner, apps have to use the horrible MDI system, which nests document windows inside the main app window (essentially mimicking the original Mac layout inside a window). The downside is that the main window covers up your desktop and any other windows, which may need to be accessed.

You know the funny thing about this supposed Photoshop emulation? PS on Mac uses multiple windows and I haven't seen anyone complaining about that. So this single window BS is just emulating PS on Windows. I wish they'd put their effort into integrating GEGL instead and allowing use of 16-bit component images so I can finally do away with buggy CinePaint.