The thing that got me was the ABSOLUTE SILENCE after the sale of Palm to HP. If this were Apple, they would have kept the hype building from that point forward until product release. Ads would have been taken out, prototypes shown, and bloggers paid to rave about the new thing. It would have reached a fever pitch before release, and then the quality of the product versus the price would not have mattered so much.

HP did not really fail so much as the heart of the company was not invested in it. They have much more return for their dollar in the business world as opposed to promoting consumer toys.

Before someone replies to this, I realize I was comparing forward compatibility to backward compatibility there. My point should have been that the PC I bought with windows XP five years ago has Windows 7 now and still runs any application I would like to put on it. Likewise, I am running three year old laptops with Windows 7. That is a much better use of my money.

Some years ago (three? Four?) I bought a 1st gen iPod touch. I enjoyed it in the beginning. Just a year later I wanted a new skin for it and found all the skins fit Gen 2 and not Gen 1. A year and a half later Apple was releasing a version of iOS that wouldn't work with my 1st gen and three months after that I found that many of the apps I wanted to use were incompatible.

This keeps me in Windows 7 laptops and netbooks because a 1.5 year lifespan on a $600 product is nuts, in my opinion. With windows I could run an MS-DOS application if I wanted to.

I build all my own PCs as well, simply because I like to know what is in there. Don't want to pay top dollar and risk getting a second rate part inside, after all that is how the bundlers make money.

Is that what Google is doing? Helping me survive? Keeping my best interests at heart?

And all along I thought they were doing it for profit. I guess I have been proven wrong.

Would you use that hospital with hundreds of doctors if they were funded by selling your medical history to anyone who would pay for it? Because that is Google.

Actually scratch that, Google is more like having an auditor at the hospital logging time and duration every time you cough, sneeze, crap, piss, get into bed, watch TV, what shows you watched and for how long, what ads you saw, how you crap, how you piss (ie. bedpan or bathroom) what you condition is from minute to minute, who your visitors were, how long they stayed, when your visitors used the bathroom and for how long, what door they entered into, what door your entered into, how they travelled to the hospital, how you travelled to the hospital, which specialists you saw, what your wore, what your visitors wore, what you ate, how long you took to eat, what you brought to the hospital, what you left there, what you threw out.... along with all the stuff that normally goes in the chart and your medical history, all sold to anyone who will pay for it. Really, I find the thought plain creepy.

And, I don't think I would use that hospital.

Transitory data in the open is WAY different then stagnant data in the open. This is why Google wanted to be a holder of email as opposed to simply relaying it. Gives them all the time in the world to scan it.

You're forgetting about the downside.. you are inviting all your friends family and acquaintances to be part of the Google crop to be harvested.

I agree with you completely.. It surprises me how many people are on a tech forum that don't like doing tech themselves. Makes it really blatantly obvious how Apple is so successful with hiding every sign of tech from the user. After all if the geeks don't want to do these things how will we ever expect an average joe to put up with even the slightest bit of configuration or administration.

Thank you, I host my own mail too and I always wonder the same thing. The problem I have with google and email is that they are not only scanning my emails but it is emails of everyone that knows me as well. None of their business really. People get so swayed by a glitzy web panel.

Personally I kept using my internet provider email account, but I use fetchmail to pull the email down from it via imap every 5 mins or so. That way I get the benefit of their spam blocking, don't have to change my email address, etc. Fetchmail pulls down to my cyrus ipapd + postfix mail server, and I also have squirrelmail AND roundcoube as my front ends. I use roundcube when I'm on a full browser and squirrelmail in a pinch when I am on my phone. That way I know I have everything backed up and local. Google makes me feel like they're looking over my shoulder all the time and that creeps me out. I even stopped using Google Reader for RSS when I found out they knew details about you down to HOW LONG you spent in each feed. Creepy.

Can they actually throttle OpenVPN though? I was under the impression that it goes on port 443 and looks like normal SSL traffic unless you decrypt it.

Yup that is what I use. If people don't want to walk the 20 extra steps to the grocery store they're going to pay a premium for convienence.. That's the way it works. IN my mind Red Box is pretty damn convienent enough for the price.

They do that to PUSH OTHER BUSINESSES OUT, then they jack up the proces WHEN THEY FEEL THEY HAVE ENOUGH MARKET PRESENCE TO BE MORE PROFITABLE. There, fixed that for you.

I think the heart of the matter here is that, more then anyone, 'geeks' see these devices for what they really are as compared to what they could be. Geeks want to see cool stuff on the market but not at the expense of having a leash. Geeks want to explore and exploit the full capability of a product but the leash only serves to hold them back. This is the reason why jail breaks exist but how much more potential could these iOS devices have if Apple was standing behind making them like the jailbroken device. Unfortunately these devices are targeted at the mass market which is full of people who literally chose a product because it is shinier, or because their friend has one and likes it, or because it looks nicer, or because it has the best advertising. That is all very sad from a geek's perspective because in spite of our valid reasoning, we are suddenly stuck on the sidelines looking in. The popular market has no use for us. We are not being considered in this new exciting world.

It's about making money for sure. But if any product comes out of the free market system that is technically great then it is a fluke. The free market system is streamlined towards creating products that are financially successful, not ones that are revolutionary from a technical perspective. Therefore why should any geek give any consideration to the free market system when it does not give them any consideration back.