Lotus Notes is a great development platform. I've been developing for Notes for 15 years now. Agreed, though, the UI is not that great, but browser based Notes apps can look great.

dXm99...Lotus Notes is great product. I'll bet you've never used it for anything other than email...if that.

Lotus Symphony, on the other hand, is just a prettier version of OpenOffice, which is an awful office suite. dXm99, you are right about them being sooooryyyy, Symphony is only marginally better than Oo. It will be painful for them at first.

I give IBM credit, though. They should eat their own dogfood.

Actually, the whole 'Windows 7 isn't even released yet' is a bogus and invalid argument. RC1 has been available to the general public for months now. Developers and MSDN/TECHNET subscribers have had access for much longer. Apple has had access at least as long as I have. There is no excuse for them not to try a bit more. They could, at the very least, make it work better under Vista. iTunes is a pig and the latest release is no different. It is ugly and about as graceful as a bull in a china shop. Windows users are Apple's biggest customers, they should make their software work better. I don't give a rats butt Mac OS X. There are way iTunes users on Windows than Mac OS X and that should be the priority for iTunes devlopment, not the other way around. For a company that is supposed to be so concerned about the 'user experience', they sure do ignore the largest group of users they have.

Well, first off, netbooks are not eReaders. I can use my Kindle pretty much anywhere and, importantly, hold it like a book. It's battery lasts for days. the 3G service allows me to buy content anywhere I can get a signal...I can also use the basic browser to look up things and check news, email, etc pretty much anywhere I have service. The content is free or very cheap. I can add my own content. In fact, about the only thing your netbook does that I cannot do on the Kindle is watch video. I'll use my pmp for that, thanks.

Amen. FSF just needs to chill. As one of those paid developers, I sit on both sides of the fence. I deal with packages that have been purchased and those that we developed ourselves and those that are open source. Guess which is almost ALWAYS LAST in our thinking? Yep. The open source. And, contrary to what FSF wants you to think, most of the paid-for software we use is extensible, especially the Microsoft stuff. We can pretty much mold it any way we want. And, when we can't, we can get help from them or another vendor who specializes in them. I don't see the issue that FSF sees.

Yeah, it AND the original are butt ugly. But, then again, not many game consoles have been all that attractive anyway. The 360 and Wii look OK. The PS2 slim looked OK. The original PS was ugly as was: SNES,NES,Atari Jaguar,Nintendo 64, Gamecube, Gameboy, Atari 5200 and the original Odyssey. Fairchild Channel F in its woodgrain trim was not very pretty, but the later all black one looked like a fine early 80's piece of gear. Intellivision, original Atari VCS, Odyssey 2, Sega and the Atari 7800 are examples of better looking consoles.
For handhelds, DS Lite takes the prize and the nicest looking and least childish looking device. PSP at least looks like it is worth the higher price, even if it is not. GameGear looked cool too. The GBA flip looked nice too, but all of the other Gameboys were just ugly, including the original DS. Style was definitely not a Nintendo or Sony strength. And the original XBOX? It has an industrial appeal and looks like it would be right at home on the bridge of the Battlestar Galactica. I bet if you look closely, you might find one there.

Are you freaking kidding? NO governmental body here in the US or the EU, especially the freaking EU, have no business dictating how an operating system should be built. Period. I don't give a rats butt about how Microsoft operated fifteen years ago. The market is completely different now. This is just absurd. If MS has to do this, then every other OS developer should be forced to do this...to level the playing field as you put it. This is not a win for any except the whiny people running Opera and Mozilla. Opera is an insignificant browser that almost no one uses or even heard about. They should stick to cell phones and Nintendo products.

By 'more reliable Xbox 360', I meant more reliable than the current devices, NOT PiS3. I would only buy the 360 if it were more reliable. Who wants the headache of having to send the damn thing in for repair? No, until PS3 is better priced-and, no, 300 is not better-and Xbox is more reliable, I will stick to PC gaming, last gen games and Wii. I don't care about not being cutting edge...PC games are usually more cutting edge than console games anyway. None of three systems, to me, appear to have many truly compelling games anyway. Nintendo's offerings have been retreads of older games-fun, but retreads nonetheless. Xbox and PS3 games tend to be mindless shoot 'em ups, tired sports franchises or awful attempts at Wii-like games. None are worth what the publishers want, certainly not the fifty to eighty dollars that seem to be the norm.

No, I don't give a rats butt about Sony or the PiS3. They blew it, as far as I'm concerned, when they said 'people will want to work extra hours to pay for this' back in '06 when the behemoth was announced. And, to this day, the ONLY game I have seen that I would want to buy Motostorm or whatever the hell it was called. Most of the games on the system do not interest me. I'd rather have a cheaper and more reliable Xbox 360 than this.

I really do not understand Engadget's mockery of flash based content. I would much rather have a collection of little SD cards with music and/or video content than a collection of discs. They are easier to carry and take up far less room. Plus, and more importantly, can store more than your average CD or DVD. Slot Music was a great idea that was a bit too late.