Asus, where is the B204 w/Linux?

Dear Asus (pron: “a-sue-s”, not “ace-us”, apparently),

I’ve been looking for a small set-top home media player running Linux, with an HDMI on board, capable of running 1080p video. Looking around I’m quite fond of the Eeebox B204, but I don’t want to pay for MS Windows. I like the Bluetooth for my remote keyboard/mouse/input, and the battery UPS is cute up until the point the battery has lost its ability to charge/discharge.

I wanted to email you, but your asus.com web site has telephone numbers only. Its been a long, long time for you to bring this product to market in the UK. You’re also reselling different models in different markets, and your branding of the models is somewhat confusing: the B204 is “better/higher spec” than the B206 that was released at the same time?

Having said that, the on-line retailers I am Google-Frugal-Shopping searching through all seem to list the product, but have zero stock. Are there supply line issues? Is the product recalled? Or is it selling really well? Where are the Linux versions (sans-Microsoft-tax)? And why is your UK channel selling these at a considerable mark-up compared to the US retail prices? Currency does fluctuate, but I’m sure that UK£ and US$ are not on parity…. yet.

Sincerely,
JEB

MySQL views versus tables

An annoyance: at work we’ve been using MySQL 5.0.x for a reasonably high volume service. We recently swapped a table we were using from MyISAM, to a view containing several normalised MyISAM tables. Despite having indexes to make the joins in the table efficient, it seems that a SQL query with a “NOT IN (x, y, z)” style WHERE clause performs so much worse than the non-normalised original MyISAM table. So while a view may look equivalent to the original table, it won’t perform the same for all queries.