Happened to someone I know about two months ago. She was suspicious about the e-mails (one about the change to automatic billing, one about the change back), but they looked legit. I already guessed it was a screw-up on skype's site, as no money was charged. Just as bad: in any case (or was it jajah) is that they automatically click the little checkbox on automatic payment every time you make a payment via their web site. You have to opt-out every single time.

I had a hardware problem on my german Dell Ubuntu mini, the keyboard would get stuck on one letter. I called Dell, got routed to the person responsible for service calls on Ubuntu machines, convinced him it wasn't a software problem and arranged with him to get a new keyboard sent to me. So no, they do their service themselves.

I have no access to the Dell sales statistics, but if I go to the german consumer website of Dell, and select a mini, it is right there in my face: 2 out of 3 offers for the 9" are ubuntu, one out of 4 for the 10". The 12" inch version is only available with ubuntu. I bought a 9" early this year, and are very happy with it, it is my main machine. I mounted an SD card as a disk, increased ram to 2 GB, and I have a very efficient linux machine now.

My only problem is that dell broke the loading of .Xmodmap some updates ago, and I'm not sure how to get them to repair it. Maybe I should call? A bigger problem, though not for me personally, is the network manager in unbuntu 8.04, which can't start umts sticks in a decent way. I assigned one of the nice buttons in the dell desktop to a wvdial script, but for people coming from windows, it would be a let-down.

No. Without these malevolent hackers, the website would have gotten into severe problems anyway with this backup scheme. The ones that should be persecuted, if any, are the sysadmins who had a very sloppy backup solution to backup the data worth a lot of time invested by their community.

and smell the lid, not the container!

In Germany there are several weekly newspapers with in-depth news. "Die Welt" and "Die Zeit" I buy them every now and then actually like that concept a lot, since they won't have the one-paragraph news flashes that I read on the internet anyway, but they do have a lot of longer articles about current situations. This one newspaper gives me enough to read for a week, and it's conceived in such a way that it's not outdated when I read it a week later. In contrast, some months ago I got a free yearly subscription on "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" because of some online job site. This would normally cost about 600 euros I guess, and give me a >20-page newspaper every day. I just never got to read most of each paper, ended up with a lot of old paper, and found many articles about financial situations that were just slightly different from the news a day before. So, for me, a nice weekly 'old'-news newspaper anytime.

Or even better: hit the monkey tree times to be able to make a comment!

I am reading/typing from the train at this very moment. Since this week, I have a 40 minute train trip in my commute, and I found that it is very useful for relaxing internet stuff like slashdot. About 50% of the trip I have umts, 25% it falls down to gprs, and the rest is unfortunately without signal, but since it is at the same spot every day I can just preload some pages I want to read during that time. Currently using a linux netbook, it takes 1-2 minutes between boot and until the usb umts stick is started. I am therefore considering the android, though I am not sure if the screen will be practical enough.

For my overall 50km trip in a densely populated part of germany, I spend as much on public transport as I would on just the gas for the car. Due to traffic jams in this area even the time needed from a to b is almost equal.

I agree, the difference between the functionality of a computer OS and a smartphone OS is steadily decreasing, and at a point in the near future will be gone completely, so it makes a lot of sense to include all of them in the same chart.

There is no corrugation on the nokia screen, it just clicks. So no, they're not doing it better. The airpump system is probably not the best solution, but at least the effect of individual buttons is there.

I hate the guts out of myspace and facebook. Seriously. There is no content. For example, I search for a new 'hip' band, so they only have a myspace page. Now, try to find the band biography or past tourdates. You won't find it. Instead, you will see a list of pictures of 'friends' of the band, about whom you couldn't care less. In that respect, Geocities actuallý was better, because at least you had a chance (even if it was small) of finding useful information there.

same story here: I had a pentium 133 with 172 mb of ram running linux with a sleek windowmanager (Windowmaker / blackbox) up to about 2001, it became less usable due to more video and flash content online. All the rest it did perfectly well. Then I bought a Via Cyrix 666 mhz, with 512 mb of ram, due to a crappy on board videocard it still had problems with video content, although watching tv was still possible. I used that up to last year, where finally cheap netbooks became available that were of high quality. Because I only bought SSD netbooks (no swap!), I had to increase the RAM to the maximum of 2 GB, but that was a 17 euro investment.

And there is exactly the point: It's about the "good" in "good enough", and about the investment you need to make to get there. Up to 2008 it was impossible to buy a 300 euro laptop, I looked. There were 450 euro laptops, but those were a bunch of crap, weak battery, crappy screen, etc. The netbook and nettops revolutionized the quality-per-price ratio of the computer market.

I'm not sure about the platform choice though. One company controls the hardware and software. There are no alternatives in either category that allow you to benefit from prior investments- replacing the hardware or OS requires junking everything you already have.

sounds like the average military/government spec to me.

and... you'll have to install the keyring package all of a sudden, find the corresponding key, add the backports to the repository before updating and installing, and comment out the backports entry in the sources.list afterwards to avoid unexpected updates with unknown consequences. This is just doable, but far from trivial at the moment. There's a lot of streamlining and automated conflict checking to be done there.

Put otherwise: eReader can decide to do this as they wish. But they shouldn't be surprised if the inconvenience they give me make me take my money somewhere else.