That's all I really see this as. There's something to be said for that, and I think this is the kind of device I'd be using while spending time in the bathroom (I use my Palm Pre there now, but if it had a larger screen, it'd be nice). But that's about it. Maybe it could replace the laptop while sitting in front of the TV, but not until everything that's flash based that I use (IE games on Facebook) was able to run on the iPad, one way or the other ...

I knew it was a bad movie when I took the time to text my sister during the movie, at the dance scene, "We have reached a point in this movie at which the writers started doing some *really* hard drugs."

Well, I've not had a problem with "horrible" customer service with Sprint. They've been mostly good. There have been a few issues that have popped up recently (browse for "Sprint" in my blog at http://blog.ericdives.com/) but I must say, for day to day stuff they're excellent.

They all have their problems. Really, it's all a matter of personal experience. For me, Sprint hasn't been that bad.

Thing is, it sounds like he IS running a BES. I'm running one, and one user just updated their contract. Thing is, Verzion ignored their existing contract, took off the BES access (which is extra) and suddenly she stops getting her mail. Turns out that BES access on Verizon is an extra charge.

When I upgraded my Blackberry and my Sprint plan to an "Everything Data" plan, all of a sudden my BES access stopped. When I called Sprint, they were all like "Oh sorry, BES access is another $20 a month." Sprint promptly got the phone handed back to them and I picked up a Palm Pre instead ... which ended up being better at email than a Blackberry ever was (and will be, until Blackberry drops their archaic service and jumps on the ActiveSync bandwagon).

I have a hard time not including certain words in the next sentence:

I don't understand exactly why, when the provider does not run said BES server, that they charge an extra fee for BES access on "unlimited" data plans. When it comes to Sprint (a company I've been mostly happy with up until this point), giving me an "Everything Data" plan that doesn't cover "Everything Data" pisses me off.

So yeah, I'm not as happy with Sprint as I used to be. But really, they're just becoming more like the other providers out there ...

My current plan is to live out my 2 year contract with Sprint and see how the provider/phone field looks then (and try to hold off the lusting at every other product that comes out between now and then).

We are finally moving from the Age of Geocities to ... what? We've been in the Age of Google for a while.

Maybe it's different for different products; like for search engines there was the Age of Lycos, and now the Age of Google (of course I might also argue there was an Age of DejaNews).

Ditto. I find I get my grammar practice by writing my blog (so, it might suck but I don't think it's gotten any worse), and spell checkers tend to aid me with my occasional spelling issues. My cursive has never been particularly readable, and my print is usually all caps. I scream when I write in print.

I'm one of those people that refuses to sacrifice proper English when I Tweet or text. If I'm running out of space, I'll start by doing number words to numbers (eg, "1" instead of "one"), and "and"s to "&". If I'm still running out of space, I'll do my damnedest to rephrase my thought into a smaller sentence or sacrifice superfluous words. I will break messages up into multiple messages rather than resort to anything resembling "leet speak" (with the rare exceptions of using "lol" - there's a fine line between "common shorthand" and "leet speak" that I will not cross).

Facebook: To be "Friends" you have to have a mutual agreement to be so. On Twitter, I can follow Adam Savage (@donttrythis), Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself), and others (oh yeah, Wil Wheaton @wilw), but they don't have to follow boring old me. You could say that you could have this interaction on Facebook with the Fan pages, but I don't know if it would necessarily be the same.

Honestly though I'm not going to get much more into justifying Twitter. It can be a colossal waste of time. I don't understand it when folks follow like 500 people (or even 100 - I'm reluctant to follow much more than 60) - I start to wonder how much time they're (thank you mandatory preview for helping me catch using the wrong word there) spending on Twitter, or if they're really paying that much attention.

The other thing is that I can have running conversations on Twitter (even if it's just with myself ;) and, if I'm using the right Facebook app (or not connecting them at all), not spam all of my friends with every status update (Selective Twitter Updates is much better than the "official" Twitter app for prolific Twitterers).

Wait - didn't I say I wasn't going to try to justify it any more? Bah, I babble. Anyway, it took me some time to really get into Twitter. It helped that I knew a few people on it and had 5-6 people I wanted to start following right off the bat, but I can understand if it seems a little "too" plugged in to you.

You know, I miss Pine because of this. I'll admit to using a HTML in email now, if only to use a custom font (nothing else though). Honestly, that's because I got complaints that my plain text emails looked "Boring" from the Director of Communications and was advised to change.

Oh and yay me for my first accepted submission!

You forget Real Networks. The worst, in my opinion (you can decide the humbleness of it).

I'm torn between giving someone "equal time" to respond to something done to them by a company, and saying that Slashdot did nothing more than feed a troll by allowing this particular posting.

When you used a computer as a time clock (running the client software and using a card swiper, instead of buying the special timeclock hardware), the licensing system on the "server" (which had to be logged in to run, as it wasn't a service but a running process) would lose track of a particular computer's license if more than one computer was running the timeclock client - and issue a new one the next time the client was run.

So, if you had purchased 15 licenses and were running 2 or more clocks (but less than the 15 you were supposedly allowed), you'd run out of licenses after a couple of days, even with light use.

After working for a month or so with the company to resolve the issue, what was their long term solution?

Give us a code that would give us "unlimited" (or somewhere in the area of 32,000 licenses).

After several years (like 8 or so) and much griping from me to switch to something else, we're still using the software, actually (but with only one swipe station, and only for our student workers in our biggest department), but will supposedly switch to something hosted and web based "soon".