I'm mad as hell to the shitty level of thinking that goes into the alarmist scifi nonsense we've seen so much off of late. I'm an old AI developer who used to do this stuff for a living (but then thought better of it) and have digged deeper into more human and philosophical issues, and I wrote this a couple of weeks ago; http://sheltered-objections.bl...

Hmm, I own a Asus Transformer, and I'm actually damn productive on it. I take it everywhere, write, do sketches, all manner of web stuff, slight programming, Citrix Client into a serious dev environment with HDMI to big screen, you name it. The only time I need my laptop is when doing heavy development with NetBeans and heaps of various server services running, even though I *could* do that through Citrix (but I'm not that crazy :) ). For everything else, the Transformer is bloody fantastic!

Funny thing, I was working on the train on my Toshiba P300 laptop on a SharePoint connector in Visual Studio running in a Vista VM under Ubuntu 10.04. A guy and a girl were standing up in the aisle waiting to get off on the next stop, and he burst out, "Hey, he's working in Ubuntu!" This is on the South Coast line south of Australia! Computers are still a novelty down here. This is a sure sign of either the apocalypse or the coming of the messiah. Not sure which one.

> And they don't appear to close half of their .php files with '?>'. Why is that? Ah, now that is because they are smarter than you. :) The hints are; 1) whitespace control, 2) conscious idea of separating code and markup, and 3) slight but minuscule speed improvement.

My upgrade went fine, except that I used OSS instead of ALSA. I had *no* problems whatsofever. I *then* chose to go back to ALSA to see if they had improved support for Intel embedded sound chips, and -after stuffing around a bit, as usual, with the crappy asound / modprobe options - indeed they had, even the microphone seems to be alive. I like the Karmic Koala, it's all coming together very nicely. There's been a slight flurry of updates the last few days, which is good as they sort out the kinks, but all in all this beats Windows down the pants; I was a Windows user since version 2.0 (!!!) and a DOS users for years and years before that. I switched to Ubuntu about 9 months ago, and I am *blown*away* with it, and ashamed I didn't do it earlier.