i want function, i want to be able connect to wifi in the house and control my media center…. i would also like to be able to ssh or vpn in from starbucks and check on the kids while i am not at home.

apple is good at redesign and marketing to the point where they’ll sell you a car with no doors and say that’s extra and then sue the previous developers and manufacturers of past tech for infringement, for them to have a decent competition it has to have more function and be totally customizable. with a windows machine i can just peek and poke the ports i need without violating something, with linux i just have to script it, with apple…. i gave up after powerpc clones.

i don’t know the WeTab looks neat i am glad it runs *nix but the price is a bit out of range for most. if they can get the price down and market it as a tabletpc that’s more usable than an iPad, then i’ll drop the laptop.

it’s a good step not saying its a bad one, but the spec’s i want to see are what it can run, if it is linux, and can i compile anything on it to make the things i want to run, compile and run.

WeTab offers felxibility, having flash, java, linux & android which has been proven to be a stable and excellent OS with so many options including for ereaders that I feel this is a great option. If you want a webcam, you got it. If you want gps, you got it. If you want to import & export ebooks you can easily. You can also edit docs online and offline with its openoffice. Plus the quality of the product is good. Considering all that it can handle the battery life is also good. So far so I think this is a great option & I look forward to having many other tablet devices out there for tablet computing I believe is on the rise and will become a staple in the near feature.

Well you can do it this, or you can do it that,
or you can do it this, or you can do it that,
and maybe it will this, or maybe it will that,
but one thing that is sure, is that it will drive you bats

What most linux heads don’t realize is that every tweak or customization made by a user can result in a disaster that will cost time and maybe money. If we all had enough sytems programming background then we could recover and go on easily, but we don’t. Even after a summer working with command line tools a few years back I now can’t remember enough commands to get me out of trouble when something doesn’t work.

So when a user hears “you can do it this, or you can do it that” what registers in a users head is “you can play Russian Roulette this or you can play in traffic that”. What Apple knows is what Ben There states, the user needs to have a device that works and does stuff that improves your life, period. Second, and this is just as important, if there are ways to customize the device or program, something many users really like to do, then it has to be in a sandbox so that it can be tried and only after it works will it be incorporated into the system.

So two key lessons all linux developers need to learn if they want to get market share are:
1. Push no more Russian Roulette games on users
2. Provide a sandbox for the curious, adventurous and technically skilled to try their customizations so that the baseline functionings of the device or program can continue.

The sandbox can be provided via a virtual environment or by a system restore function which enables a user to reboot and really , truly get back to where they were. Microsoft provides a preliminary, rough approximation of this function, but the main problem with system restore in Microsoft is that it rarely restores a busted system, so users can’t and don’t count on it working when they need it.

Where do I sign up??