I've been around for a while, reading though not posting often. For some of us your resignation ranks up there with Jobs' (but more unexpected and, one hopes, not for similar reasons). All the best in whatever you do. You must be in your mid-late thirties, and have an entire life ahead of you!

It's cross platform because it runs on 99% of all desktops

What MS didn't see coming was that many people are accessing the web without desktops (or laptops). On mobile devices, Microsoft has a negligible marketshare and there's no Silverlight for iOS or Android (I don't even know whether there's Silverlight for Windows Phone 7!)

Adam handles video fine. In transflective mode it's black and white, but the speed is not affected.

2: Color LCD mode: Which is worse than the cheapest LCD on the market. Colors are weak and viewing angles are terrible.

But the brightness can be set at minimum, and I'm the only one viewing the thing most of the time. It's not a family entertainment system. It's good for reading, surfing the net, and some other things.

But it is true, you need to see it before you buy it. And that is hard to do.

I own an Adam too. The Pixel Qi is quite usable outdoors, though not as high-contrast as old-fashioned paper (or, probably, e-ink). It's a light-gray rather than white background, and dark-gray rather than black text. But I've used it outdoors for up to half an hour and it's very comfortable.

Indoors, the backlight is required but I leave it permanently at the lowest setting (and I wish there was a still lower setting). It is much better than any LCD I've used.

As for the glossiness, that's why they ship a matte screen protector. Presumably it's not default because some people don't like matte.

For me, the Pixel Qi is the unique selling point of the Adam. (The hackability is the other big plus -- if you don't like their ROM, flash your own -- but it's not unique.)

Read the FAQ (bottom of the project page). This isn't meant to be a package manager

I have Arial installed, and "allow pages to choose their own fonts" checked. It shows slashdot in DejaVu Sans for me, which is my default sans-serif font (firefox on linux, and also chrome on linux). Some sites force Arial on me, but apparently not Firefox...

Thanks for the link. However, I'm not sure you read beyond the title. On page 2, Knuth foresees two types of reactions based on reading the title alone, and yours sounds the first type. In fact Knuth does not disagree with Dijkstra, and he quotes Dijkstra to show that Dijkstra was not dogmatic about GOTO either. Knuth's purpose is to explore where GOTO has a place and where it is better to eliminate it.

Linux "just works" unless you have unsupported hardware. Same as Apple -- except that a lot more hardware is supported under Linux, these days. There's a reason Apple doesn't allow third-party boxes to run OS X.

Dragging a window to the top maximizes.

Actually, KDE 4 does that too, and it took me a while to realise it: for a long time I thought I was accidentally double-tapping the touchpad (double-clicking the titlebar also maximises). Extremely annoying. I disabled it as soon as I figured out what was happening. But I notice Windows users prefer to work with maximised and minimised windows.

KDE4 also half-maximises on dragging to a left or right screen edge, but that's not so bad because one is unlikely to do it accidentally (the mouse cursor needs to be at the screen edge, which means the window will be half off the screen). So I've left that enabled.

Rather than hope the VLC developers will read this, you could, you know, e-mail vlc-devel@videolan.org? You don't need to register to do that, and it is what the story asks you to do.

Once upon a time, Slashdot editors did read what they posted. I guess both 3706 and 6544 remember.

When did you last use KDE4? I've been running KDE 4.2 since a little before its release, and all the applications I need work including a pretty good network-manager plasmoid; and I find kwin4 *way* superior to compiz-fusion. The effects are well thought out and actually useful. (And yes, it has a cube, but that's just eyecandy.) Before January I was running gnome+compiz-fusion, for pretty much the reasons you say.

I have to second anonymous's surprise. Every mathematician I know uses LaTeX, not just for documents, but also for presentations. Some physicists use powerpoint or keynote, but always with a LaTeX plug-in for math. MS Office's math support is a joke. Do you actually write mathematical documents?

Here's the opposite kind of story. I bought a USB-to-serial adapter, which "just worked" in linux, but required a driver for Windows XP, which I installed. Some time later, when I plugged in the device into a different USB port, XP asked me for the driver disk again. I had mislaid the disk, but on a hunch, I unplugged it and plugged it into the port I originally used, and it worked. So XP requires a separate driver installation for each USB port? (All the ports worked with Linux, and the other ports worked with other devices on XP, so it didn't seem to be a hardware problem).