OSNews

That's only half the story; in countries such as Australia and New Zealand, flat rate plans are prohibitively expensive and the connections are castrated at peak times. The only alternative are the cheaper but metered plans which give a certain number of megabytes/gigabytes downloads per month.

Like I said in a chatroom last night, the GNOME development is far too US or more correct, western focused/centric rather than realising that not all countries have the same level of infrastructure and it would be prohibitive for many users regarding many of these pie-in-the-sky ideas.

It goes further, for example, take Apple for example, in their dash board, its all very nice for those who live in the US, but how about those who live outside who want financial data from their own stock exchange - for example, there isn't that ability.

This reminds me very much of Microsofts notion "create software and the hardware will eventually come up to meeting the requirements" - which completely ignores that those in developing (and even non-developing nations), that a NZ$1500 is expensive and unreasonable to expect an end user to invest that much money into a computer merely for surfing the internet and typing up things.

The 'network desktop' is doing the same thing, but replace hardware with bandwidth.