There is an iPad keyboard; it doubles as a dock. It’s an extra $69 though.

EC2, Eucalyptus, other major cloud projects run on Linux. “Not having a corner” is a bit vague and may mean merely that it is not the case that 100% of the cloud is using Linux cycles and Linux managed storage.

Joe Brockmeiser wrote “It should go without saying, though I’ll say it anyway, that Linux powers the bulk of cloud computing solutions. You’ll find some Windows-based offerings, but Amazon, Google, and other major players are running their cloud infrastructure on top of Linux.”

So there. Actually, there: http://tinyurl.com/4sh98s2

Linux doesn’t have a corner on cloud computing.

Paco’s right, in this and also the fact that while dbs are one application increasingly run on the cloud, that’s just because dynamic web sites use dbs for persistent storage.

The Windows 7 ad is dildoic, but MS does offer commercial cloud computing services on server farms running server versions of WIndows.

(I’ll agree with Greg if he says *sane* people provide cloud computing services on Linux or other versons of Unix …)

Unnecessary for computer typesetting purposes, but still good practice, so all those of you who are out there doing it, keep it up for those of us who like to mess around with the text using awk.

99 percent of what I type is typed in emacs.

Paco, are you saying that the Microsoft ads are correct? Because, that would be a big fat “no” back at ya. And I did not say that Linux had the corner. But it does have most of the street.

Mike I want to get an iPad and a keyboard and duct tape them to together sort of like two halves of a clam.

No. Cloud computing is (cpu) cycle serving. If those cycles are consumed interacting with a database then…whatever…it doesn’t matter what the cycles are used for. And you can build clouds on just about any major operating system. Linux doesn’t have a corner on cloud computing.

i use all-new BBC!

great content – at a price you can afford [/cheesy voiceover]

Of course, you’re correct that typing space twice on an iDevice gives you a period, but with only one space following, not two.

The uppercase “I” auto-conversion is a little annoying sometimes. my iPad wants to do that when I’m closing an italics tag, for instance. (I do rudimentary HTML editing with mine when I’m composing a blog entry, with the MarkdownNote app as my HTML verifier.)

I can disable that through the system settings (i’ts part of the autocorrect feature), but I don’t know of any per-app provision to do so, which means that when autocorrect is on, it’s on everywhere. Using a bluetooth keyboard seems to override at least some of that.

For me the single most irritating feature is the shake-to-undo. When you’re working with something balanced on a knee, such a feature quickly becomes a bug. Unfortunately there is no Apple sanctioned way to disable it; you need to jailbreak first.

Comparing your iTouch to an iPad isn’t valid, though. The iPad uses a considerably faster processor than the first-gen iTouch. It’s actually faster, more responsive, and “smoother” than the 3GS. It handles about like the 4G. I don’t think it’s particularly fair to state outright that the iPad isn’t as smooth as they portray on TV based solely on your experience with three-year-old hardware.

Also, there aren’t compatibility issues with iPad software – since it’s all officially available through only one channel. Whether Apple’s walled garden is really a good way to handle software distro (in the long run) or not remains to be seen; however, there are no native iDevice viruses, and for the most part there aren’t compatibility issues. The biggest ones seem to come from folks who download software intended for the 3G or later, who discover it doesn’t run on their first gen devices.

As for typing – yes, a touch typist will be operating at a deficit with the iPad. I’m not good enough at touch for it to work; I keep looking at the keys on physical boards, so the iPad’s keyboard doesn’t throw me, particularly in landscape mode. I’ve written something like 200,000 words on my iPad so far.

What’s funny, though, is that the iPad’s onscreen keyboard has little graphical nubs on the home keys, just like a physical keyboard has physical nubs – even though you can’t feel them.

Where the device really shines is with anything that uses tactile gestures. Painting apps are fun; Angry Birds is simply outstanding. Book reading is all right, as one expects; apps like Flipboard, though, do a very good job of demonstrating how a rich-media digital device can display content in a way that’s quite enlivening.

For what it’s worth, though, all iDevices work using a fork of Darwin, which is Apple’s version of FreeBSD, which is of course BSD, which is (sometimes seen as) a fork of UNIX. So the pedigree of iOS as a hacker’s system is pretty solid.

It’s amazing to me to compare iOS today with Slackware, which was the first Linux distro I installed on a 486 way back in the 90s. Took forever to get Xwindows to run, and even then all it was really good for at the time was loading JPEGs.

It’s equally amazing to see how tightly Apple has tried to lock Darwin down. You’d think something with a Linux history would be a hell of a lot more customizable for sophisticated users.

Oh, and I agree that most computer ads are irksome.

That is a widely believed myth. You don’t have to in the same way that you don’t have to type “I” because your software will convert a lonely “i” into an “I”. The final result is still I and it is still a period with two spaces.

If you work with text files instead of word processors, you should use a period and two spaces to signify the end of a sentence so that software that uses that convention to identify a sentence works better.

Sometimes I just don’t know what the world is coming to.