"Now what do we miss here…? You felt bold, you have accepted so many brakes: over-delayed N900 launch, over-priced device, over-delayed shipping, lack of navigation, Gravity, dictionaries, portrait mode and more, now you feel like N900 might not be ready for you.
Would you like to know why?
We got scared. "

whole article here http://utestme.com/2010/01/26/the-n900-and-the-dragons/

"I can’t help myself telling you one thing: extras, extras-testing and extras-devel repos are indeed containers of early releases, unbaked apps and maybe dangerous code"

this statement is just not true! yet another "journalist" too lazy to search for "extras" in the maemo wiki, but encouraging users to "brick their device". great.

Oh wow.. that's just.. Wow. Talk about ignorant wannabe journalists missing the point.
________
Cheap glass bongs

This blog post isn't the easiest to parse. You think that its purpose is to complain about the N900 not being finished enough, but that isn't actually what the author is trying to say at all.

This article is chastising N900 users, whom the author claims must have been aware that Maemo 5 still needed more development, and were bold enough to buy it. He is tell us all to not balk from taking part in the growth and development of this wonderful device, and has scorn for those that want to back out by replacing it with a safer and more closed device (Nexus One, iPhone).

Some revising is called for, but he does take up an important issue. Most of the people that chose the N900 wanted the challenge, and are the kinds of people that want to test and try works in progress. A lot of people in the forums are used to dividing people between developers/coders and users, with coddling of the "poor users." Its condescending, and should stop.

There needs to be a reassessment for how non-coders can contribute, and make it easier for those people who don't know how to wrangle up terminal commands to roll back from broken code, so they can get their hands dirty. They want to.

at least he edited it after i complained in the comments

That's good, but it's offtopic.

@flailingmonkey
What do you say about "there be dragons" anathema on testing & dev? For me it looks like somebody from apple would have managed to infiltrate into the deepest nokia core and made things "a la carte", against users and testers...

I believe the author here is trying to say that others have been trying to keep people from diving into testing and dev because it "isn't safe," while the authors own opinion is that everyone should be getting involved with development.

The article could probably have used another revision

Call me a weirdo, but the fact that the N900 isn't 100% polished and finished and perfect is part of its appeal to me... being able to help push it closer and closer.