originally funding by the public purse anyway.

If you want to charge out the ass for access to research papers, return research to corporate America. $40 for an IBM or Xerox or Microsoft research paper? Okay, that's capitalism.... $40 for a paper from any university that gets public funding? Where's my receipt, and how does that nullify or return come tax time?

Agreed. For handsets, it looks like it's cooking down to iOS, Android, RIM (ultimately strictly corporate, then fading away if they can't stay in front for value added... using the iOS email interface, all I can say about it is if mail were my bread and butter, anything would be an improvement, and this is allegedly RIM's strong point), and Microsoft's various half-assed attempts to buy Windows Whatever into the marketplace.

For my money, I think the "now" will get More So over the next couple of years - businesses under contract will stick with RIM, nerds will use Android,hipsters will use iOS, people who've never bought a mobile phone might get suckered into whatever Microsoft is trying to push.

In a moderate span of time, RIM will be absorbed by Google or Microsoft - by GOOG as a business grab or by MS as a desperate marketshare grab. The marketplace will then consolidate to iOS, Android, and whatever Microsoft thinks they can offer, with RIM integration grafted into Android or Microsoft offerings. (Apple will continue to put more effort into their website's description of iOS's mail capabilities than they will iOS's actual mail capabilities, as they always have)

Phone OSsen will ultimately boil down to iOS, Android (merging with ChromeOS as developers continue to think the iPad is something worth targeting) and possible Windows-Whatever, which may have an actual strong advantage given the sudden realization that despite years and years of hardware and software development in the slate/tablet form-factor space, the tablet PC did not exist AT ALL until Apple invented the iPad. Never mind that you can run photoshop "out of the box" on a PC tablet running Windows - Apple has nuked the hell out of marketing in the "tablet space" and despite being massive orders of magnitude more capable, everyone else is now playing catchup, thanks to massive marketing fail.

Diatribe divergence aside.... five to ten years from now? Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM. In alphabetical order, specialized, and fighting for dominance as opposed to swimming in moneyhats. Apple as the new Sony, Google as the new Amiga, Microsoft as the new IBM, RIM as the new-old IBM, relative to the market-space.

Yeah? No?

Who knows. There's plenty of time for another company to rise up and turn the industry on its ear. Smartphones are roughly where PCs were at in the early 80s - something might just come along and make iOS look like CP/M.

I wouldn't bet on it, but I wouldn't count it out, either.

Seriously. All the tech-press yammering about Android's exploding market share makes my brain itch. It's overtaken vertical solutions (RIM, Apple) by running on a broad variety of hardware - it's gaining market share the same way Windows did back in the day, by running on COTS hardware instead of the more tightly-bound offerings from Commodore or Apple (or others). It would be more accurate to compare Android against, say... MeeGo, Symbian, etceteras. Marketshare comparisons are only really valid if the phone owner has a choice of operating systems - you're not going to be running iOS on a Nokia phone, for example.

I'm sure RIM and Apple aren't losing market share - these rapid gains are coming by handset vendors dropping an OEM OS for Android, or shipping the same handset with an Android option.

I moused through school and for the first three or four months of work, with my wrist pissing and moaning at me all the while, raising to a shrieking crescendo of near disability a couple of days before a major deadline.

Desperate for any improvement, and fortunately working as a kiosk designer (thus having access to several different types of input devices, including touchscreens), I tried a WACOM tablet, then I pulled a trackball from the "spares" pile. My wrist stopped screaming immediately - the throbbing subsided to a twinge, then left altogether.

I've been using a trackball exclusively for the past twelve years. The closest I've gotten to RSI since the switch is a grumpy index finger from marathon work sessions, and a brief trial period of a new keyboard - the board was maybe 1/4 inch lower than its intended replacement, and that much of a drop at my work desk made both of my wrists shriek at me with a homicidal rage.

If the hardware interface is making you hurt, seriously consider changing your ergonomics (level of input devices, type of input devices, etc). The window manager isn't to blame,

I HATE this about commercial software, to the point where my productivity applications are years out of date and only "upgraded" when I know I'm going to have a month or two of good solid downtime to effectively re-learn them from scratch. Losing a week (or more) to get back up to speed (warp speed, not plodding along) doing the exact same thing with a toolchain that now runs slower on the same hardware is extremely difficult to justify on a regular basis.

If Vim and Emacs pulled the same stunt with every new version, the userbase would grumble, fork or recompile, and keep using their editors the way they always have. In the event of a massive change-for-the-sake-of-change ejection from a major mac/win ISV, creative professionals get to grin and bear it, lose time (and in some cases money) getting back up to speed, or not upgrade.

Much of the griping about Office doubtless comes from people who use it At Work, whose work machines are controlled by a nebulous IT department, who came in to the office one morning to find the new version thrust on them.

Software change is a lot easier to embrace when it's willful and provides a clear benefit. For many people, the change in Office was neither of these.

I hate to break it to you, but the shift towards "biased commentary" started with Walter Kronkite, if not earlier. Once the network execs figured out that viewers were trusting his face, voice, and delivery and were by and large fact-agnostic, that was basically the end of it.

Twenty to thirty years ago you could still get actual news out of the newspaper or television. These days you gotta dig long and hard, intentionally and carefully, for the few nuggets lost in the slurry of spin, opinion, and the almighty Sports & Entertainment.

This has been my experience with Huff - the last time I had the patience to wait for the front page to load, I was struck by the resemblance to USA Today. Just as tabloid, just as buzzword, just as bland - buckling under one of the most over-loaded information "designs" I've seen since the 90s.

That the site design seems contrived to make the "good stuff" hard to find., that the visual clutter is a significant majority of any loaded page, that you can get a "liberal opinion" elsewhere with a bit of effort and the celebrity drivel of your choice just by looking out the window... Huff's a perfect fit for AOL!

As a graphics and media guy who's passionately hated flash since its first release in the late 90s, I'm not frowning at Apple's disdain for flash. Point of fact, I'm giggling at all of the people shrieking and moaning about the lack of "support" for it on the iPhone - after years of Flash running like lukewarm shit on the PPC and additional years of it running like microwaved shit on Intel macs (running like greased butter on the PC all the while), with flashblock being one of the few firefox plugins I use, I can't say I care one way or the other. For me, Flash is little more than an annoyance, long since filtered out.

And if Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia to get Flash, I wouldn't care.

Adobe's had a love/hate relationship with Apple for decades - they love that graphics nerds buy macs to use photoshop, they HATE Apple for consistently kicking APIs and architectures out from under them. They've owned Flash for awhile now - with Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, the Flash and artist-friendly media tools acquired through the Macromedia acquisition... Adobe's the ONLY non-Apple ISV you need on your machine if you're a Creative Professional.*

Apple can live without Flash. They could certainly survive without Adobe, but could they take the publicity (and userbase) hit of losing the Creative Suite? Would Adobe threaten to pull their Mac apps to pressure Apple into supporting Flash? Will they? They certainly could, if they felt like it. Maybe they already have - it would certainly explain Apple's de-emphasis of Pro Anything over the past few years.

* It's an old argument, but screw Office. Ten years in media design and I've used openoffice on one project, to deal with an excel spreadsheet.

Unfortunately, for those of us in the graphics biz, the only remotely-useable alternative is Windows.

Mobile devices, etc. is fortunately a different story.

One is an ex-elite soldier recovering from torture/experiment-induced amnesia and a feeling of duty to a dead comrade. The other is a supersoldier who is REALLY good at killing things, and is the last survivor of a battle that, until last week, was never really shown. Now, which sounds like a more interesting story?

One's a pointy-haired emo whiner, the other is a heavy metal astronaut.

Now, which character would you rather play?

Seriously. Anyone else try to download Alien Swarm on Monday?

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Let the "cloud" be an opt-in, "use THIS much of my up/down" defined thing so that anyone either downloading a game or willing to serve as a content node for a game is then using their bandwidth to - effectively - make the "It's FREE AND YOU CAN GET IT NOW!" statement from Valve actually MEAN "get it now" and not "you can watch Steam poop itself every time you try for it until you magically without any explanation get a slot!"

In certain circumstances, BT is potentially a Damned Handy thing for content distribution.

(In other circumstances, it's a damned aggravating thing that makes lawyers salivate, but that's not what I'm talking about here)

If this ever happened to me, there wouldn't be much of a decision-making process. I'd either roll back the OS to a version that actually works (eg doesn't have the ad shit), disable the ad thing somehow (even if it means going crazy with the hosts file), or, failing all of that, just install Windows on my mini.

I did the same thing with tynt.com - That it's an ad/analytics thing is one thing. That the assholes break twenty-plus years of clipboard DWIM in the process, however.... unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable. Fortunately, you can add tcr.tynt.com to your hosts file - problem solved.

Apple's been cutting corners on hardware since the beginning - on the desktop side, they've always made up for it in software. Here, not so much. This isn't a new thing - you're having the same experience that Power Mac, Newton, Apple III and Performa owners the world over have had... the difference is that since it's happening to YOU it's NEW and SPECIAL and MUST BE FIXED NOW DAMMIT!!!

Yeah, get in line. Behind the Apple III owners, the eMate owners, anyone who's ever heard of a Pippen, and the rest of us who were sick of using Apple hardware BEFORE it was "cool."

I own an iPhone. It works, the battery life is a joke, and the keyboard is Fawlty Towers incarnated as software.

But it's COOL, dammit!

Talk about irritating - a few months ago (maybe longer), Google decided my handle is a plural. So now if I want to googlebate, I have to search for "solios -solio" (and throw in a few other minuses to weed out Matrox, etceteras). Google's first hit for 'solios' is not solios (there's a shock), whereas the first hit on Bing is something me-related. There's also this - a case example of Bing coming back with DWIM and Google sticking its thumb up its ass and getting drool on the floor.

Google was fantastic when there weren't any real alternatives - now, Bing is (largely) Better, and intertia is the only thing that's keeping me using it. Inertia, and Bing's UI doesn't feel quite as 'clean.'

Combine with the clunkiness of Analytics and GMail's refusal to sort by name or date (yes, you can SEARCH but sometimes you need a SORT, it's FASTER), and Google isn't particularly good at anything these days - they just happen to serve up a useable array of related services. They're more convenient than higher quality (and supported) alternatives, and some cases (iPhone, for example - at least for now), there is no alternative.

If Google's threatened 'socializing' of GMail goes through, it had better be opt-in. Not opt-out.

The ultimate monetary advantage of using OpenGL for games (imo and ime) is it makes Mac porting a hell of a lot easier.

The ultimate monetary downside of making Mac games is that only a small fraction of the install base can upgrade their video cards - the one constantly-moving PC gaming component.

You can build a useable gaming PC for under $700 - the buy-in for a Mac with an upgradeable video card is presently $2499. With the vast majority of PC gamers using wintendos, Windows/DirectX is the LCD. It's where most (or all) of the money is.

I think it's fantastic that iD uses OpenGL and makes all of their games cross platform. I also think it's unfortunate that iD is the exception to the rule... but I also vote with my wallet, and I use a $600 non-upgradeable (video, anyway) Mac Mini for all of my Mac-oriented needs, and a massively-upgradeable, equally-priced Shuttle PC for everything else. Which includes a long list of games that haven't been released on the Mac - and even if they had been, wouldn't be playable on the GMA-950 video chipset. It's shite for games, fine for Photoshop... and Windows is the reverse for me.

If I need a wintendo to play Orange Box or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., does it really matter if the game uses DirectX or OpenGL?

Not really. :-|