That's easy. The WP7 phones are presented with Silverlight.

I sold audio equipment for a couple of years and one of the first things I got to learn was to always give the customer TWO options. Unless the customer seemed unhappy with both choices, introducing a third option would only make the buying decision harder often resulting in a "need to go home and think about it"-response. This of course combined with lazy salespersons who doesn't feel they need to learn anything more than they absolutely need to close a deal.

This isn't exactly news to people in sales. Anyone trying to enter as a "third option" will have an extemely tough time trying to break through in the market, even if their product is better in many aspects.

(And as with any golden "rule of thumb" within sales, there is of course a shitload of exceptions, but I doubt the smartphone market is one of them)

Yeah, except for the fact that the OP makes the case that it's pretty much impossible to earn an income that way.

I agree on this. About a year ago I quit my job to try my luck as an independent web developer. Pretty naively I assumed that all I had to do was make sure I was visible online and people would find me. Nobody did. I started browsing various sites that offered contracts on a freelance-basis but just like the original poster, I was shocked to see pretty complex projects being sold for 1/10th of what I would have offered without even trying to make a profit! Would I have made a better job than them? Probably. Did they care? No. So what to do?

After a couple of months I gave up on trying to outbid the competition and started calling some local companies. Turns out a lot of them needed help either with web related projects or IT in general, such as networking, small office servers, etc. While web development was what I was going for when I started, I've noticed I really like the variation in the tasks I'm assigned now. And I still get to do web development.

So yeah, going local is good advice.

Maybe it's a sign that you should consider a new computer?

Oh, you mean sell hardware and support to companies that wants to use Linux on their hardware? But I was just told that's companies didn't want that due to the GPL?

Yeah, that's why large IT companies like IBM, Intel and even Microsoft are contributing to the BSD:s and not to Linux. Oh, wait..

This was my first thought when reading the headline. I wouldn't actually mind seeing some unobtrusive ads, but knowing ads are unlikely to be deemed "unobtrusive" if the company behind it does not pay for the service makes ad block plus an ad provider, not an ad blocker.

Here is a detailed list: http://en.opensuse.org/Product_highlights

..to patch their kernels.

Not that I think the "Catherdral vs. Bazaar" comparison is really that appropriate as a tool for measuring social networks (and it wasn't intended for that either), but using Google+ will always be - no matter how you twist and turn it - on their rules and conditions. And this regardless of wheter anonymous accounts are allowed or not. The only way to have a truly "bazaar" social network model would be using decentralized nodes. I admit I don't know much about Diaspora, but wasn't that one of their selling points?

I don't think it's as easy as just converting the package, since Ubuntu One ties into a lot of other Ubuntu specific packages. I know some have tried it for Fedora, with varying levels of success.

Perhaps, but I've got a few computers all running different Linux distributions (as is common amongst Linux geeks), and as long as they can't sync, Ubuntu One will have to wait.