That guy gives assholes a bad name. Let this be a lesson to you kids. What your parents said is true: Whatever you send in an email, pretend it's written on a postcard.

Oh screw it! You're asking them to read the frikkin' manual or the equivalent thereof! Who does that?!? JUST DO IT! And if traveling at warp speed causes disruptions in the space-time continuum, we'll just reduce speeds and perhaps eliminate warp-speed travel, as long as the Klingons and Romulans do as well.

I'll feed ya, Anonymous Coward! :-) Why is it lame? Potentially (and admittedly it will eat giga-watts of electricity) it could confirm some very fundamental elements of theoretical physics. That, to me, is worth every giga-penny. Advancement of fundamental knowledge is money well-spent. Do you have something against science on the frontiers? Just askin'.

Correction: I run Snow Leopard in virtualization. Whatever.

Bastard. You said it before I could. If I had mod points I'd mod you up. I've switched to Mint running the last Gnome 2.x. Please, PLEASE, somebody fork Gnome so that that the goodness that is Gnome 2 can live on with nice tweaks and features. This shitty OS X imitator that's Unity is like watching a bad Pearl Jam cover band with an alcoholic lead singer with nodules on his vocal chords, and Gnome three is just a big bad barrel of WTF?!? I want a simple interface that just gets out of the way and lets me work. Gnome 2.x does that. Why dump it for eye-candy-ish half-baked buggy trash? Coding to the lowest common denominator just will not fucking bring the masses. Want Linux to be hot and cool with the masses? Find a hardware manufacturer that says screw the short-term in terms of profits, is going to be uncompromising in search of excellence in design, and will create an interface that is elegant and will attract coders. Saint.Jobs did it. Shuttleworth's a pale imitator. Anyone else? (Full disclosure: I don't own a Mac, though I run OS X Leopard in vitualization now and then. I like my iPhone. I prefer my HP TouchPad running WebOS to the iPad that I had for 4 weeks. I'm typing this in Windows 7 on my gaming rig. My other PC runs Linux Mint and my work laptop is set to dual boot Windows 7 and Mint. No one from IT has come into my cubicle yelling at me. Yet).

Welll....The OS is fucking superior to iOS - it really is quite nice. It needs more polish, but the multi-tasking is damned nice. The card interface is brilliant and is more intuitive than iOS (full disclosure: I own an iPhone 4 as does my wife and I run OSX in virtualization on PC's on VMWare Workstation despite Apple's odd restrictions). Sure, there aren't 1000 fart apps for it (I found just 1) but as a content consumption and unified communications device it borders on excellent...and you get the ability to play Flash. Overclock the sucker (did I mention that HP embraces Home-brew?) and add some cool hacks and you have a bitchin' beast that as a bonus plays Angry Birds. I can read e-books, .pdfs, remotely connect to my PC and servers, edit MS Office docs... I have access to an iPad and Playbook at work, as do my colleagues, And I've played with both over several weeks. Meh. 9 out of 39 of us bought TouchPads for what it can do, and for the potential to run Android in a dual-boot config. That was my primary reason for jumping on the low-cost 32Gb Touch pad - running Android...until I started using WebOS and dove deep into modding the device. Too bad HP will let it die a painful death. WebOS, we hardly knew ye...

...RIM's product is the best, therefore, "BBKing". Further posts are unnecessary.

...wishing I had mod points...

I'm a Toamto-holic. dd-wrt just would not work properly on my Cisco/LinksysWRT160N V3 despite careful configuration changes etc. In frustration I installed Tomato and it worked first try right out of the gate. I had also used it on an older Linksys router and it never gave me any grief. Its features cover off my needs and it's been completely hassle free. Just my own experience.

I've kept an external one for 5 years now and it comes in handy. I recently acquired a lightly used 4-year-old HP Proliant rackmount server that has no DVD/ROM and I have no USB sticks available. Having the external drive let me install ClearOS and get a damned useful router/gateway/ftp/web server running in a few hours. I also have a basement closet full of a huge variety of old/new cables, components, etc etc. you never know when you'll need that old widget.

It doesn't have to be that way. I added a replacement Kernel that lets me boost the CPU to 1.836 Ghz, added some patches that stop some logging services, a tweak here, a change there...Slashdot comes up in +/- 3 seconds. Opening a site in a new card 5-6 seconds. Not bad at all.

Wish I had mod points for OP. Nailed it. Add apps for very specific content (Ted Talks, Khan Learning) and there's no reason not to get this at firesale prices

There are already folks working on getting Android (honeycomb) and Ubuntu on it. http://liliputing.com/2011/08/hp-touchpad-afterlife-hackers-bringing-android-ubuntu-to-hps-tablet.html

I went in to the Best Buy in the nearby city this morning. I got there at 9:20. The store didn't open until 10:00. Next door was a Staples. They were open, so I went in. A sales guy said that they had 15, and they sold within 5 minutes of opening. He also said that both Best Buy locations in town were sold out (when I left Staples, a lineup was forming at BB). Another customer overheard my conversation with Sales Guy, and said that the Source by Circuit City in the mall across the street showed 2 available on their website. I got there and there was a lineup already. Crap. Light-bulb goes off. In a town about 30km away, there is a Staples and a Source. I high-tail it there, and get to the Staples 1 minute before 10:00 opening. As I walk up, there is a crowd of 8 or so, but I just breeze in past them, ask the opener how many are left. He says 2 of the 32Gb and before he finishes, I say "I'll take one". Score! Herd mentality kept the group bunched together. I was Jonesing and came from a too-fast drive. Adrenalin was driving me. It really is not a bad unit, especially at 80% off. It's actually quite good. It's very functional, but the inevitable Android hack has me excited.

To the person who modded me down: Are you willing to pay more to keep receiving your paper copy of your favourite magazine? If so. how much more? How much profit will you allow the publisher to make? Should the writers be allowed to make a living wage? I'm not being factitious - these are serious, germane questions. Unless we can answer these questions honestly, most periodicals cannot survive.