omnipath

Yes, and how many of your family and friends had mp3 players before iPods? And you dismiss a feature of the iPods by just saying 'a great user interface'. I remember mp3 players back then. All monochrome UI's, with the actual bit rate and frequency shown along with the title, as if anyone but an audio fanatic would care about something like that.

Plus, and I cannot stress this enough, iTunes really was power pushing the iPod and Apple along. First, by truly binding hardware and software together to work together as seamlessly as possible. Second, by being able to purchase songs from iTunes store, and have it automatically appear in iTunes. And thirdly, and this is perhaps the most important bit, by forcing (and by forcing, I mean sometimes using the mob style of forcing) the record industry to play along. No longer did you have to know which artist belonged to which record company in order to buy music. No longer having to browse 4 or 5 different sites to find music. No longer did you have to convert songs, if you could even, to another to get around DRM to get all your music to play on one device.

So, yes, they did revolutionize the music industry.

But it WAS too expensive. The fact that the iPhone price dropped within two months of it being introduced is proof of that. And you have to remember, that most touch phones sucked at the time, and they ALL sucked if they didn't have a stylus, and it was a really, really, big deal to have an all touch interface that truly worked.

And, it wasn't as if Microsoft didn't have a mobile OS. Windows Mobile always worked decently, but never was just truly great. And it never focused on being just for phones. It was adaptable to any type of mobile environments, like Android is trying to do right now.

It is also more difficult to implement new technologies on top of old ones, which was Microsoft's first choice when they tried to make the phone part of Windows Mobile more modern, until they realized that that house of cards wouldn't stand. Then they did a rewrite of, which lead to Windows 7.

So, from Microsoft's point of view, it was a limited phone, that had no way of adding apps, no business functionality, no keyboard for typing, no true enterprise security, and for a whole lot of money, only available on AT&T. I too thought that the original iPhone wasn't that great, only marginally better than the ROKR E1, functionality-wise. Though, I did think that that original iPhone screen was truly awesome.

So, let's not come down to, to hard on Balmer for not recognizing the iPhone at first for the threat it came to be.

Um, you do know that the problem is that the system in place to help prevent these legitimate problems are done by the prisons themselves. That's a huge, pretty corruptible system. I've seen prisoners go days without getting their medicine because the guards couldn't be bothered. Nothing the prisoner did that should have caused such a retaliation. (according to everyone in the block who talked about it. Naturally, asking the guards wouldn't have gotten me anywhere.)

No mention of indeed.com? Or even usajobs.gov?

Thank you. I'll give it a whirl later this week.

Maybe because it's a pain in the butt to install it? Honestly, I tried FreeBSD 8 two weeks ago, and until there's an easier to way to install it, I can't imagine many people will be interested in it.

You mean MusicMatch? Yeah, I had MusicMatch, and it was horrid for connecting to ipods and other gadgets. Plus, the buying experience was a mess. I don't remember SoundJam too well, but I don't seem to remember that you connect devices to it to transfer music, and I'm completely certain you couldn't buy music from the software itself.

Remember, this is back during the heydays of Napster, Audiogalaxy and the free download craze for music. iTunes, along with mp3.com, made it completely easy to download legit copies of music, which hadn't been possible before.

I'm sorry, but only two of those points are true. When iTunes came out, there was nothing like it in the market. A great way to manage and buy new music all at one place? Plenty of room for invention.

The proof that is was such a unique experience? The labels spent the next 2 years fighting tooth and nail for 'control' of their music catalogs back from iTunes.

So if this is your secondary stream, what do you do for a primary income stream?

How interesting. I do have a limp handshake, because I feel too strong of a handshake can be off putting. I don't tend to like people with strong handshakes, because it feels like they're too controlling.

Buy used. That way, you get what you want, and the money doesn't go to Sony.

If you don't mind my asking, what happened to that startup?

I believe you still cannot send multi-media texts with Google voice yet.

If you are learning java, I would suggest Dr. Java. It's like the elementary school version of an IDE. It does syntax highlighting, open and close brackets, and the ability to compile and run the app from it itself. And that's about it. It's really useful to actually learning Java the language, and keeps you away from Java the environment, at least for a little while…

Netflix

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that to get most of Nokia's smartphones, you have to pay full price? It seems like most people here in the US don't want to do that. They would rather get 60%-80% off at the beginning and stay with the seemingly standard 2-year contract.

That, and it seems like most of Nokia's smartphones only works on T-Mobile's network. While T-Mobile has nice customer service, it isn't the most reliable network in US.

First all, I like this story. I think it's rather well written. But that statement in the story almost made me close my browser. Harry gets rationality in the modern-muggle world, but is very resistant, and expresses complete unwillingness to except something in the magical world until he can prove it. I feel like if I were in the story and I saw this version of Harry Potter, I'd be calling him an idiot every 4 sentences he says. Just because you don't understand something, doesn't make it impossible.

To quote Men In Black:

"Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow. " ~ K

I'll have to take your word for it, as there doesn't seem to be a way to take a casual look around the product. But thank you for explaining it to me.

Perhaps this is the proper forum to ask this question: I simply don't understand what SAP is form? Isn't it just a bunch of forms sitting on top a database? How is it different from Oracle services?

Isn't this a bit of a security risk, though? What if there were pictures on your drive you didn't want other people to know about, just to have it displayed for the world to see?

Um, I think that is because Netbeans and Eclipse are ides, while Textmate is basically a programming text editor.

The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons. I love basketball. And Bill Simmons.

It's more of an, 'I'm feeling full. Why must I still eat the delicious cookie right in front of me!?'

My goals so far for the year 2010:

1) Relearn how to eat. Do not eat just to eat, but eat for a reason.

2) Actually write a useful application.

3) Perhaps most importantly, be a creator and not just be a consumer.

For the same reason why many people in the world experience material privation: not enough time/talent to do it themselves.

If you had enough time, effort, skill, and raw material, why would you ever need to buy clothes from the GAP, mass produced food from Safeway, or entertainment from BestBuy? Certainly, it would be cheaper and healthier to make your own food. But do you really want to spend all your time making stuff, when, overall, it would distract from what you really want to be doing with your life?

In terms of Harry Potter, there is a law of conservation occurring there. Many things 'conjured' there does not last very long, and even to get them into existence requires energy from the summoner. In fact, it specifically mentions in the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hermoine states a conservation law about why wizards can't conjure food. (Don't remember which one.)

I hope this answers your question.

This American Life did a podcast (can't find it at the moment) where they followed two guys who decided to become homeless, and beg for money in NYC while trying to write poetry and stories. Each guy easily cleared 60k, as I recall. So it's definitely doable.

In fact, another article I read told about a couple in Portland, Oregon that cleared 50k between the two of the begging.

That is why I like Opera. You can actually save sessions, and return to them. So you can have more than one session going on at a time. I usually save a session once a month. It's quite interesting seeing what I was into 5-6 years ago.

What are you doing in your free time? (Off-topic, but I don't know how to private contact him.)

I've used it for school work, but not for a real paying job. It can be good, but I used MPI raw, which is C based. So there is tons of rope to hang yourself. I just remember that it was a little difficult to have each spun process talk to the main process.

What is wrong with that assumption? I assume a lot of people are starting to browse from cellphones, mobile connections, more foreign places. You wouldn't want stuff to bog down your site, just because there are people who have faster connections.