The problem is it isn't just manufacturers looking for cheaper labor and then shipping their product right back to us. It's companies exporting to other countries who need a local presence.

And Toyota and Honda assemble cars in the U.S. Sometimes you just gotta do stuff locally.

Sure, if you'd like, leave the tinfoil hat on. I'm happy to provide data to MS (well, I would be if I used IE). I've become very interested in usability so it makes me jealous to read about all of the data they get to make decisions with. Just read this blog entry and look at all of the percentages they know about real world usage and how they used that for the IE9 UI overhaul.

A few examples:

• over 97% of IE sessions have 5 or fewer tabs
• 54% of people have 2 or fewer items on their Favorites bar (we ship with 2 by default)
• The most commonly used item in the Status bar was “Select Preset Zoom” used by 1.6% of people

Yeah it's just begging for a backlit Apple logo on the roof, lighting up the sky like the Luxor.

As a web developer, I'm happy to say that in my limited experience so far with the IE9 beta, MS *finally* got it right. Unfortunately it will still be years before the damage done by its predecessors is undone.

It's amazing how much of the geek community is completely at a loss for why Apple is so successful. Somehow it's impossible that the user experience they provide is what people want so it must be their marketing.

That's not really true any more, it's just different. But I know what you mean, I still use Firefox/Firebug at work but Safari at home.

Step 1: Ditch Firefox. It's become a cow. Unless you absolutely need some extensions you can't get elsewhere, try Chrome or Safari.

So the benefit of WiFi speeds can be used for extremely low bandwidth needs, but not high ones. Great, I'll be much happier that my 50 byte messages go over WiFi after a couple minutes than over 3G immediately.

I think that would have to be "garbage collected."

Nothing that requires a full computer hooked up to the TV will ever be popular outside of geeks.

Plex, which started as a simple port of XBMC for Mac, has morphed into a much more impressive architecture. They separated the media management into a server component allowing different clients to consume it, including Mac (seems a Windows port is coming), iOS, and soon, LG TVs and Blu-ray players. You can read the developer's vision for it here:

http://elan.plexapp.com/2010/09/02/plex-and-the-future-of-television

Ars Technica live blog said they are commercial-free.

Here's a more realistic use for it:
http://www.youvebeenleftbehind.com/

<cough>

Not all dead. The latest addition to my RSS reader: http://www.propublica.org/

I feel I've been trolled, but Microsoft beating Netscape into submission was not nearly as exciting as the 5 way competition we have now.