wayne

I skipped vista, but mostly just because I had no justifiable reason to spend the money on it. XP did everything I needed just fine, none of the additional features in vista were worth the money on my tight budget. I bought my last computer before vista even shipped and I've upgraded it bit by bit since then, so I didn't buy a new computer that ever came with vista.

When the windows 7 beta/RC came out free to try, I thought "hey, I can afford free" so I gave it a shot. The functionality was finally a step up from XP and worth the super cheap pre-order upgrade price to me.

I've still got XP on a netbook, and while I'd like to put 7 on it someday, I don't feel like the current price of another upgrade license is worth it to me for a secondary machine I only use in certain cases.

The other thing is, XP isn't going to have hardware support for newer stuff eventually, so it was about damned time I finally got something that would handle whatever new goodies I plugged in.

@trigonalmayhem Oh yeah, and I'm running android 2.0.1
ha ha at your "1.6" port, iSuckers!

/troll

Psh, tevs. I've been running android on my TOUCH PRO (the original, not even the 2) for a while now. Everything but the camera and GPS works, and in a lot of ways it's smoother and more stable than winmo. For a relatively old handset with not so great internals (by modern standards), it's been really a pleasurable experience. It gave my phone a whole new lease on life until I can afford a real android phone or until sprint brings one out that seems worthwhile (the EVO looks delicious, but I doubt I can afford it when it does drop).

Oh, ps, I'm also totally on an old SERO plan. $30/month for unlimited texts/internet and NOW I HAVE ANDROID. BUAH HA HA HA!

I had a subscription to this game. it's awful, don't buy it. it's such a shallow mess with no real point or fun to it once you get to max level and run out of shit to collect. which doesn't take very long at all. and the grinding isn't even enjoyable either.

@Gamoe you totally hit the heart of the issue in your last line there. why are we trying to replace human-powered and human-scale mobility with expensive energy-intensive devices? we should definitely be scaling down automobiles (and phasing them out as much as possible), but we should not be trying to replace that most basic mode of human locomotion, "the walk."

@juanvaldez I agree 100% with you. I was leaving bikes out for simplicity's sake. They also make better use of existing road infrastructure than cars. I'm an avid biker too, so I was by no means discounting biking as a viable form of transportation. The one qualm is they do presently exist in a kind of 'limbo' state between cars and walking where they only have a little bit of dedicated infrastructure (bike trails and lanes), but fortunately they are able to use the roads, and you can move more people on the same roads with bikes, as I was saying before.

@LMcClure Pretty much every 'local' trip anyone takes is less than 25km, and a very large portion of the non-commute trips are vastly shorter than that (like a mile or two, unless you live in the boonies, but this is supposedly 'urban' transportation, so ...). One of the biggest advantages of living in an 'urban' environment is easy access to necessities. I'm not going to get into how these things would be no better for grocery shopping than riding your bike and how they use way more energy, etc.

Part of what's going on is a chicken and egg problem. We've designed our communities around cars for the last sixty years, so we don't put things people need to get to close to where they live anymore. The easiest way to encourage more walking to these destinations is to put them closer to where people live again, but that idea is catching on very slowly since everyone still drives everywhere and developers like to play the 'safe' bet nine times out of ten. The problem is, if you continue to plan like energy (esp. transportation fuels) will always be cheap, there will be a huge crisis when it's not. You have to plan ahead for that.

Ok, I'm meandering a bit, but the chances of adding another 'tier' of transportation space/infrastructure at this point is pretty much nil. We either have to make better use of the space we've dedicated to transportation already or just give up. Cities aren't exactly known for having an excess of space to build new roads. You can't have these things on the road with regular cars because it's not safe for the people in the wobbly vacuum things. You can't have them in pedestrian areas because it's not safe for pedestrians. The only thing you can really do is min/max your advantages/disadvantages of car/transit/pedestrian uses of current space. As it stands, it's pretty damned obvious cars and cities do not mix well unless you tear down half the city to accommodate the highways and parking lots, and then you get detroit, which proves there isn't much of a city left over after that.

I'm a little unimpressed about how everyone keeps clinging to the idea of a personal transportation device for urban living. No, it doesn't work. There are too many people and not enough space (not even to get started on the global energy issues that will soon put an end to that). Unfortunately if you want to go the decentralized route like america has, you run into those energy problems soon enough (trust me, it's coming). Americans have gotten both spoiled and isolated from their neighbours and can't stand the idea of having to mix with them. We want our privacy at home AND on the road, damnit, and we don't want to ever have to face the darker aspects of our society like the homeless people cast off by our heartless system. They're just lazy, right? Not mentally ill or had a bad break of luck in an unforgiving system, no no. It's easy to avoid thinking about them or dealing with the reality of the people who are crushed by the system that provides for you when it's just some guy with a sign on a streetcorner you can buzz by or roll your windows up and pretend doesn't exist. When you're walking or riding the bus you have to actually SEE these people and sometimes interact with them. It's no wonder suburbs are so damned conservative these days.

@anonimus what's wrong with denser development along transit lines? they're still the most energy-efficient way to move large groups of people medium distances like commutes. walking works well for shorter distances, and a bike can augment that if necessary. I don't understand why we're so attached to having this old car-dependent decentralized style of development that we obviously can't afford to maintain going into the future. Why are we trying to plan ways to get around in something we shouldn't even be building anymore?

@trigonalmayhem or maybe I'm wrong and they're just stuck in the plazas because of all the stairs.

@dicobalt no no, you're supposed to sit in public plazas in it and stare admiringly out at the lovely architecture. if you're feeling daring, pedestrians start at 20 points with bonuses for old people and children.