I guess I tend to agree with the posters who are screaming to have this article marked as flamebait, but mostly because some people, like yourself, deliberately miss the point. The author has some anecdotes for why an unarguably cheaper solution works for him. All you have done is list some similarly anecdotal but otherwise different situations you have something that woks for you.

Because your situation is different, your responses to his "points" are actually irrelevant, he's already preempted you by giving *his* reasons why his solution is better in *his* circumstance.

For example you say that

. Well if I don't use email, my pen and paper is better than your iPad, as it has all the functionality I use, weighs less, costs less and never runs out of batteries.

The T30 he refers to 'only' weighs twice what the iPad 1 does, (not 3-4 times), and the author already made that point saying "look what else you get for that extra pound of weight".

You either misunderstand multitasking, or just didn't pay attention to what he did when he was. He wasn't talking about opening a dozen windows that "your are (sic) using ONE AND ONLY ONE AT THIS EXACT MOMENT", he was talking about streaming a radio service in one window whilst working in another.

hoggoth and others have dealt with most of the points you've made anyway, but responding to the authors' "here are five reasons A works better than B for C" article by saying "A is worse than B for C because I don't do C" isn't useful.

Agreed with Weaselmancer... There was no DRM in the Amiga OS.

The ROM was licensed and, yes, to run an emulator you are supposed to buy a license. As for the custom chips, to say it is DRM has the argument the wrong way around. The software was written for that hardware - you seem to suggest that the hardware was made to make the software hard to copy.

My Ubuntu desktop has been compiled for some custom hardware called the 'x86 instruction set', but I wouldn't say that that was DRM.

I was there for the whole night and only one team had managed to finish before you left - in fact only 2 teams finished the problem on the night.

I had a quick go in awk (solo) after the end of the night and in that language, which is DESIGNED for dealing with columns of text, means you can solve any of the problems presented in a couple of minutes.

It's pretty clear you weren't there for long as your summary is not that close to what happened, though your description of the problem is spot on.

Most solutions were a few screens long, only the awk solution I think would have fit on a single screen, only one team would have finished the problem by the time you left, and most images were not of the melbourne area, though some were. Unless you mean the new melbourne stonehenge :-)

You should have stuck around, or asked if you could enter.