Pricing is important. The top Nokia (N97), the blackberry and iphone are all around $NZ 800 -- 1000 unlocked. The HTC magic (Android G2 is the same price as the iphone... What we are facing is competition. Nokia (correctly, INHO, having used a N95) realises symbian does not "cut it" @ the high end. Maemo might -- the RIM OS needs work, PalmOS is no longer developed and Windows is worse. I want to play with this: good camera, GPS, and if it is functional as a communications 3G/wifi device it can replace the camera, basic cellphone and Eee I use when travelling. But it has to hit the right price point. And that is around the point where you don't have to think much about it: the iphone and magic are $319 -- 639 on a 2 month contract in NZ (depends on what contract you sign) and that makes buying them reasonable

SCO need to be reminded that Linus did not use Unix code, and the appropriate LART applied to their lawyers frequently until they cease.

You can easily disprove a negative, if one person paid for an item. And there are some Loki games around the house somewhere... So not "never". Not recently, as most games after CIV II don't appeal to this grumpy old geezer

Um, no. Point of standards is to make it easy for people to write and communicate. If everyone does it a certain way -- way Msoft Word -- which is NOT "easy for structured documents -- Open office is better -- on long docs -- emacs or lyx is way better... you have to use what is in fact a de facto standard. Google is going for the de facto standard of flash. If and when Ogg is better quality -- and h264 is getting there -- and with minimal bandwidth we will all switch and flash will have a nice sleep. In the end quality wins, which is why the LP continues... I think the idea that the codec should be open should be in the standard, because as the formats shift getting things translated becomes a problem: consider hi8 video, VCRs, DVDs... and how mach film etc we have on those we cannot access because the tech is now obselete.

I think the problem is that we all want eyecandy and stability. KDE 4.2 has eyecandy. Lots of it. So does Gnome if you use desklets. But when I'm working, I want stable, convenient and fast... which means weither a polished Gnome with most things like compiz switched off, openbox or xfce4. (I could simplify kde3, but have not worked out how to do this in kde4). I think we will end up with a smaller window manager and eye candy as a module...