Re: [tlug] shopping for a 7" tablet; non-Android linux on tablets...

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:
 > On 6 June 2013 17:41, Kalin KOZHUHAROV <me.kalin@example.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > The other day I won iPad mini out of the blue which [...] I dully
 > > returned to the other church (they call it the Apple store)
 > 
 > Blasphemy! The Great Steve shall gnaw your bones for all eternity!

I don't have any problems with Android vs. iOS.  They're both B&D OSes
designed to turn what in the 80s we called "supercomputers"[1] into fuzzy
household appliances ("smart toasters", for short) with '70s
functionality in the base distribution (except for the UI, which I
admit is a spectacular improvement over, say, the Palm Pilot).

Fortunately, just like the Japan national team the other night, we
(FLOSS) have fought the bad guys to a draw, got into the next round of
the world cup.  IOW, FLOSS[2] works for generating the kind of interest
that the vendors need to sell new toasters long before the old ones
stop toasting, and neither Apple nor Google is going to do what's
necessary to produce un-rootable devices.  They'd be cutting their own
throats -- as those ostriches at Sharp proved with the Zaurus, the
wrong way to use a free OS is as a cost-cutting device.

Footnotes: 
[1]  How many bits did a Cray word have, hm?  How many MFlops could it
(allegedly, on toy benchmarks) generate?

[2]  N.B. You don't have to go all the way to FLOSS to have a
sufficiently open ecology, of course.  So my usage of FLOSS here is
more than a bit loose.