Cloud computing isn't for everyone. It is for those who want to use their age old Pentium 3's and 4's with old sound cards and graphics cards, and still have a Vista or Windows 7 experience despite having an age old machine that can barely support XP with elan.
So if I have a P4 machine that works perfect for me, but I want to have a Vista/Win7 machine without the hassle of buying a new machine itself costing around 500$ or more, I can have everything be done in a cloud. That way, I can always work with the latest and greatest versions of OSes if available and have hardly any hardware costs. Plus the beauty of buying a cheap netbook and have it work like a high end desktop.

Well, that doesn't happen all the time. There is no guarantee that when you go on a date you'll get laid. On the other hand, when you go with a hooker, you WILL get laid.

I am sorry to say but this is not the case. I am an iPhone developer myself, and the cost is not just $100. The cost is 1200$ for a Apple Mac with the Leopard version of OS X (as it was required in October 2008), buying an iPhone to test your app ($200 for the cheapest iPhone + all the extra data plan that you have to pay for every month which in addition to your existing plan can cost up to 80$ minimum if not more), and then the $100 fee for an individual developer which is actually chump change compared to the rest of the cost. So you really see at least 2000$ spent on the iPhone development process in all.

Let us talk about making money from the apps, the worst app that sells for us has made us only 150$ so far. And Apple does not pay you as soon as 1 app gets sold. They pay you in blocks of $250 of actual sales, which can turn out to be 70% of $250 for you or some magic number like that. Not to forget the time you invest in making the application itself.

Writing an app for the App Store is a lottery business. There are more than 40000 apps, and if you do not know OpenGL or do not have a cool game idea, you're shit out of luck because utility apps sell only a limited amount, and if they start selling well, someone comes out with a free as in beer version to undercut your revenue. And you cannot beat marketing by large corporations who make apps that might do the same thing as yours, but their budget is bigger.

App Store is over rated. Some people get lucky, but then there are those that get lucky when they go to a casino or buy a lottery ticket as well.

What are "vegetative patents" ?

It is mentioned twice in the summary on /. and only once in the article.

That is because Moore is obese, and does not want to highlight his own problems.

Mother Clusters...

NASA should just do an IPO, raise the funds, go completely private, remove the redundancies created by bureaucracy and go ahead with their work. Then they can throw the frivolous projects out, and continue with the useful stuff.

IMHO, the Russians/Chinese/Indians/Private companies with their space organizations will get to the moon/Mars much faster than NASA anyway since their motivations are different, and especially, those countries take a lot of pride in their space related work.

What is your method of "rearing" your kid ;) ?

Because they want to run Vista on it.

Amazon should rename their product to "Swindle".

As opposed to using the base software from Linksys/Cisco where you don't know where the flaws lie, and if someone figures it out, it rarely ever gets published on the web openly or gets fixed soon enough in a firmware update. How is that different ? At least if you use Linux, you have people who care, and only people who care about their networks or improved experience with their routers use DD-WRT/OpenWRT/Other in the first place. Most just use the default software on their routers, which remains unpatched for a large portion of its use if at all.

Someone please tell that to the Facebook developers. That site moves slower than the clouds in the sky, giving a new meaning to cloud computing.

Same for masturbation.

That's a little unfair to the users of BSD based operating systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OSX and other variants.