The metadata system is effectively a directory structure where the names correspond to the different fields. They compensate for this rigidity with playlists, but that isn't quite enough sometimes.

The big problem with this system is that you don't always have ID3 info. The non-technical user lacks the ability to modify their ID3 tags, or has them set incorrectly by an automated mechanism which misidentifies the piece. This is to say nothing of unusual formats which can be played via an addin, but don't get indexed properly. (e.g. Windows Media Player can't read FLAC tags) The problem is even worse for video, which usually lacks such tags (I don't even know if the major formats support it.)

I had a song I liked which I got off some guy's site about 10 years ago and had absolutely no idea where it came from (and neither did he). (It was instrumental, so no lyrics to search for.) I only found it's origin a few years ago on a geocities archive. For something like that, filename is the only thing you have. While it might be unusual, you can bet that people have their own names for songs. e.g. Axel F is best known as 'the crazy frog'.

What we need is an indexing system which supplements the conventional model. By all means build the indexing right into it so that there's no need to search for new files to add to the database, but don't force the user to effectively dump all their files in the one directory and rely on the ID3 tags.

I'd say this is true of people in general. Humans are social creatures - if they didn't give some consideration to how they would be viewed society wouldn't work. The only difference between kids and adults is that the adults have different values informing who they respect and want to respect them.

As a law student who just finished his units on contract law, I'd like to point out that this guy does know what he's talking about.

And as an added bonus, here's a similar case.

ARM has an even more fundamental problem then that in it's current implementation. There's effectively no equivalent of 'IBM compatible' right now. If you look at the different devices which are using Tegra 2 chips (not just the same family, but the same actual chips), they're all using different GPIO pins. The end result is that we're using customized kernels for each device, which is obviously impractical. There's also no standardized way to load a bootloader - everyone's just using closed source bootloaders derived from copies of Android, with closed source tools like nvflash if we're lucky (since without these there's no way to unbrick devices with bad kernels). I'm not an open source fanatic, but these are real stumbling blocks in the adoption of ARM - for example, nvflash can't handle images greater than 4 GB.

These basic problems preventing compatibility need to be given priority over performance issues. I'm not saying that performance isn't important, but it doesn't matter how well it handles parallel operations if we need a separate kernel for each implementation. We need to standardize these things before we can start pushing for adoption. Drivers are another issue entirely. (Even though the Android/Linux kernel is open sourced, wifi drivers are usually closed source and a lot of stuff is handled with closed source user daemons).

DISCLAIMER: I don't claim to be an expert on these matters by any means, I'm just someone who's been following (and using) the attempts at porting Ubuntu to an ARM tablet/netbook.

Not in the ARM edition.

I like that Android uses the Linux kernel. It makes it extremely easy to port other Linux-based OSes like Meego or Ubuntu to it, since all you really need to modify is the kernel (which is GPLed). Admittedly, there's a fair bit of work involved, but it's nowhere near the amount that would be needed to get Linux running on the iPhone, for example.

If Android becomes the de factor mobile/tablet OS, then by virtue of the fact that it uses the Linux kernel, running a generic Linux distro designed for usage on mobile phones could very well become a reality. KDE even has an alpha version of Kubuntu for mobiles out now, and I wouldn't be surprised if Meego went down this line either.

I wanted to do the same thing on my N900. Found a cron-type program with a easy to use GUI that did exactly what I wanted and worked perfectly.

The Android market sells apps, which encourages people to churn out minimal quality apps in order to make some money out of it. AFAIK, nobody buys Maemo apps - the extras repository (yes, it uses Debian-style repositories with apt-get) has pretty much everything you'd need, and most of them are open source too. When no-one is paying sub-minimum wage for these apps, only the people who are actually interested in writing one do so. You have fewer apps (which sucks from a marketing perspective), but the overall quality is higher.

Gnome 3 seems pretty tablet friendly. Admittedly, it does require hardware acceleration, but the modified kernel for running Ubuntu on the TF is due to support that in it's next release (which is due sometime in the next few weeks/months). I've been running Kubuntu on mine for several months now (admittedly with the keyboard attached, but with the touchpad disabled) and it's worked pretty well.

I don't normally use AdBlock. I only installed it on my netbook the other day because I my wifi connection was at modem speed. But this sort of behaviour guarantees I'm not going to be reading that site.

Absolutely nothing. But it's just a rusty chip in my car - it can only do what it was designed to do. Would you consider a single logic gate a computer? What about a (non-programmable) calculator?

You differentiate on whether or not it does something more than entertainment. But entertainment is subjective. Furthermore, the concept of being entertaining is entirely unrelated to whether or not it is a computer - a calculator is neither entertaining nor a computer. Similarly, a PC built and used solely for gaming, or one of the WOW servers, is both entertaining and a computer.

Here's the definition from the Oxford dictionary:

If you can't program it, then it's not a computer. Most smart phones are closed computers - they could let you compile and run your own code, but the OS won't let you.

I prefer the following definition: a computer is anything you can compile and run your own code on. The relevant questions are whether the OS allows you to, and how much difficulty is involved in replacing it.

Agreed. Whoever thought that unlocking the screen by dragging the screen up could make sense in any way on a desktop was retarded.

This is less a praise of Win8 and more one of modern mobile phone technology. Tegra 2 chipsets (which will be obsolete soon) easily meet the minimum requirements for WinXP (apart from having the wrong architecture). Tegra 3 chipsets easily meet those of Win7/Win8. The real comparison will be how it performs compared to Android and more mainstream Linux distros.

Citation needed. Also a copy of the bot.

Those games are well known specifically because they're outliers. The majority of games can't sustain that level of entertainment. This would result in a substantial decrease in the number of games available in the app store. Because the app store's revenue is a proportion of the total value (qty*cost) of apps sold, a decrease in the number of games available would reduce their revenue. Furthermore, the decrease in revenue would result in an increase in the market fees, increasing the cost of the apps.

Additionally, if only high quality apps were available, the cost of the apps would be higher. Angry Birds sells for $1 because most of the apps sell at $1. The price most people are willing to pay is determined by the expected (average) value of an app. If you increase the average value of all apps, then the cost will also increase.

I'm not saying that it shouldn't be the way you're saying - raising the overall quality of the app store would benefit the entire platform. I'm just saying that the reduction in purchases/revenue (caused by the increase in cost) wouldn't justify it, from Apple/Google's perspective.

The problem is that a $1 app isn't going to give you even a week's worth of entertainment. The refund period has to be less than the period for which the app is useful/entertaining. A month refund period only makes sense for purchases a few orders of magnitude higher than that. Otherwise, you need a decent method of distinguishing between people who have been hacked/scammed and people who just got bored with the app. Even if the app were to phone home on installation with a device specific ID, it would be too easy for that ID to be modified on a rooted device.