I'm in a similar boat.

It's a small boat.

I think the fact that you need to put more crap on your phone in order to not have it break is bullshit, personally.

And the irony is? All the money came from the tax payers.

I'm certainly not an Apple fan, but I used to give them credit for at least providing quality products, even if it was marked up considerably over their competitors.

From what I've heard, it seems like they just haven't been putting as much quality effort into the iPhone 4 as they did for the previous generations.

But maybe that's just what I hear from the interwebs.

That's almost as intelligent as this post

that doesn't work so well when you crash into people who were driving safely.

Couldn't have said it any better myself. ... wait ...

So much for that ultimatum:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/07/14/1448209/OpenSolaris-Governing-Board-Closing-Shop

I can't speak for the entire country (in fact I can't even really speak for the area I lived in), but where I lived previously while attending college, Verizon FIOS was making a big push. I went to one of the stupid little kiosk stands in the mall, and asked if my house was available. The Verizon rep told me 'nope', and upon further questioning he told me that Time Warner was basically engaging Verizon in long term law suits in an attempt to prolong any sort of real competition as long as they could.

Now, granted, that was a Verizon rep, so I'm sure he was biased, but it seems to make sense.

Where do I begin with this one?

Competition is not equivalent to lack of opportunity.

Google saw an opportunity to make profits while still innovating in an already saturated market, making it all the more impressive that they've been this successful.

Later google released gmail. We had millions of online email providers, hotmail was really hot that time with MSN-chat integration and your profile page (taking a throw at MySpace)

I'm confused, you're saying that there were tons of companies like this, and then Google released a better product. That looks to me like an OPPORTUNITY that Google capitalized on. God didn't come down and say "oh here Google, take this Gmail product and bedazzle the world with its all-mightiness".

I doubt someone sat at Yahoo thinking "ok, this is slipping away", no they thought they were doing the thing generating the most profit.

I never said they had an all hands on meeting and voted on whether or not to let the email business slip away. That doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Every large cooperation at a certain point starts to work profit driven and do get greedy in a sense.

Every corporation is profit driven...that's why they're a corporation.

Their short sightedness (re: my original post) is what caused them to fail.

Their up front greed, caused them to fail.

Their lack of understanding, caused them to fail.

Should I keep going?

Now, I'm not meteorologist, but I think comparing Google to a hurricane is a piss poor comparison.

Google came to be because there was an opportunity in the market, and a very large one at that.

Saying that "Google happened" like it was some inevitable event pre-planned on the timeline of the Earth is a very poor reason for why Yahoo failed.

Yahoo, in every thing they've done has had the upper hand, and let it slip away. They grab a market, and fail to innovate beyond that. They get greedy with big checks from advertisers and can't see beyond that.

I've been watching it for years. Yahoo lets another one of its markets or products just slip away as they refuse to innovate, and let another company sweep in and take it away.

In theory, I'd prefer the faceless corporations that I get to vote with my feet.

However, as has been reiterated many times on this thread already, there really isn't a choice to vote with your feet.

I wouldn't give a damn about net neutrality if we had real competition in the market, but that's not how it works.

As long as the industry is monopolistic, it should be treated as such with regulations by the government.

From the article:

It could fetch upwards of $250,000

Maybe I haven't used it in a long enough time, but I thought the Mono project bridged that?

At my school, they taught us C# by using the Mono project. Worked fine for me.