More specifically, one company has a history of announcing product to prevent their enterprise customers from buying the latest technology from upcoming competitors, and then never delivering it... Or delivering something substandard just as the up-and-coming competition runs out of funding.

That said, there's no reason to believe Windows Mobile 7 won't actually come out. It's just a version bump of an existing product. Also, Apple isn't in danger of running out of funding any time soon.

I don't know when you went to school, but science classes in the US are exclusively taught in Metric, and have been for almost three decades.

Also, only bartenders know what a jigger is, and only Simpsons geeks remember that the hogshead is a unit of measurement.

You must either have had a weird physics teacher, or you're very old.

I have. I'd trade the e-ink for the ability to read web content on a quickly scrolling full color display though.

Of course, I'll fully admit I'm not the target audience. I'm not going to buy either device. I'd be mildly tempted if there wasn't an insistence that the hardware be bundled with a service infrastructure.

Go look at the Kindle DX. It's been flying off the "shelves" at Amazon.

It's bigger, the same thickness, the same price, the same weight, has less storage, is similarly non-expandable, and can't play video. Sure... it has e-Ink for a display... But really, why would you buy a Kindle DX when you can have an iPad for the same price? (The "free" wireless isn't a good reason. It's not really free when you dig in. Free wireless only if you're accessing paid content, essentially. I'd rather have the WiFi, personally.)

Now, I'm not sure why anybody would want a Kindle... But people have been buying them. And those type of people will be buying the iPad instead.

That's why IQ is dumb though. It's up there with grading on a curve in terms of how much actual sense it makes.

The most important thing you can do as a parent is teach your children reading and math. (Yes, it's the parent's job, not the school's job).

So by that metric..

(Second most important is telling them all the things they don't want to hear... Like how they have to take responsibility for things and such... But you don't need classes for that. Just a spine.)

tftp said:

Since this CAD program doesn't have modern features that commercial CAD programs just started adding in the last 15 years, it's never going to work to design something that was already done over four decades ago.

Wait, what?

99.9%? Given that Nintendo has the current market-leading gaming platform, I find it difficult to believe that it's anywhere near that high.

I've never come across a new car where the dealer ad was affixed using non-factory-drilled holes.

I simply wouldn't buy such a car. Holes? Really? You know what's going to rust out first.

Anyway, every dealership around here puts the crap on when the cars arrive on the lot. And I don't trust anybody to do a damage free job of removing stuff.

No, it can't "just" be a stylus. It should also be lcm or less thick, weigh very little, and have 6+ hours of battery life. And I don't care if it's about as powerful as an average netbook.

$6-700 seems about right for that. If it's got the pressure sensitive digitizer. Without it, maybe $500.

Als, you can't get a decent laptop for $300. There isn't a single one on the market. Sure, you can get a laptop for $300. But you'll get a complete piece of crap that will probably break in a year, and it'll have a totally crappy screen. You have to pay at least $599 before you can get something halfway decent.

Every car I've ever bought new has needed an immediate ad-ware removal (bumper sticker & license plate frame).

Almost all of them, in my opinion, also needed an immediate brake pad replacement as well. Most people are satisfied with the crap that comes on there from the factory, though, even though they spend the first 20k miles scraping gunk off their wheels from the crappy pads, without even getting very good performance in exchange.

Many people buy a new car, and promptly shell out for "dealer options", such as rust proofing, scotch guard, that newish transparent film stuff that is the new version of a car bra, extended warranties, etc...

Really... Buying a new car isn't much different from buying a computer.

You've never been to the games section, have you? It's *very* pro-microsoft. Or maybe you really get yourself for not identifying the biases that that you agree with?

The main tool out there to do that is from Black Duck, and it's an unmitigated piece of trash that is designed for the sole purpose of scamming stupid CTOs and CEOs.

Their piece of crap database isn't even audited, so it attributes tons of code to people who stole it themselves and lists it under the wrong license. Then, if that wasn't enough, it produces so many false positives that anybody tasked with running it sets it up just enough to appease their incompetent boss while routing the results directly to /dev/null.

Far, far from awesome.

If ever a story deserved the "itsatrap" tag, it's this one.

All Microsoft had to do was remove the offending code. Instead they built themselves a 1st party case study in how the GPL is a virus that forces companies to give up their intellectual property.