Everything Google is doing now was done by a competitor before Google started doing it. Altavista, mapquest, hotmail, etc.

Its funny that Schmidt mentions that "Video didn't kill the radio star." Videos were a good promotion outlet for music, but the Internet effectively killed music videos on television.

Google news is an aggregation of news from various media outlet's websites. Its not going to kill newspapers, but Google news and Internet news in general is conditioning people to expect to get news for free.

In the past, newspapers were subsidized by advertising and subscribers. Unfortunately, Internet advertising is not nearly has effective as print. Sure, ads can be targeted to specific audiences, but they can be blocked, and many savvy Internet users are conditioned to ignore advertisements. Newspaper advertisements are unavoidable, and the randomly placed.

So if people expect to get news for free and the advertising is ineffective, tell me how the Internet and e-readers lead to a promising future for newspapers?

Its not about Malware, its about security risks in general. If a user installs an FTP server, thats a huge security risk. A signature on the package does nothing to negate the risk.

I really don't understand the basis for this move. From a desktop usability perspective, having the gui password prompt for an elevated privilege such as a package install works fine. Its seemless in Linux and OSX. Not prompting for authentication for signed package installs is insanely insecure and borderline insane.

Comcast will probably use the growth of FIOS as the excuse for why the merger should be passed.

It does validate some of my suspicions about the issues AT&T has been having. A lot of people seem to think that an Apple switch to Verizon would be some magic fix-all for the iphone, but I think any provider is going to have a lot of trouble meeting the usage demand of millions of iphone users.

I watch Netflix on my Tivo.

When you can sell the game on amazon.com for much more money?

US taxpayers, most of which do not ride trains, do not want to pay for fancy trains they will never ride. Its a lot easier to spend trillions on public works projects in a totalitarian regime like China.

Depending on the technology, there are many things to consider before jumping into bed with a WISP. I get my service from an ISP with a wireless division, though it's not their core business. From my understanding, the technology used is a mix of 900Mhz and 2.4Ghz, depending on distance & line of site. The closer and clearer the LoS, the more likely they will put up a 2.4Ghz antenna. Otherwise, it's 900Mhz. Often it requires mounting on an antenna tower, unless it's cellular based.

Problems I've had with it are mostly related to bandwidth saturation. Quite often these wireless PoPs will be piggybacking on one another to a central location, so unless it's properly provisioned, be prepared to be frustrated. Also, many times the WISP will put their tower on a pre-existing structure and depending on security situations, they may not be allowed to go on-site unless the owners of the property are also on-site. Think places like central grain storage co-ops and the like.

My connection is a pretty poor value. I pay roughly CDN$70 for a connection that is, at most, 1Mbit. The upside is that it is synchro, so while my downstream is pretty low, my upstream is better than most. Ping times are all over the place, but that is more a function of an over-subscribed service than anything else.

Cellular based technologies are available here, but the caps are dangerously low with overages being charged at a pretty obscene rate. And it doesn't work with my pre-existing router, which is a big negative for me. Rogers Wireless is I think $25 a month, but that's for only 500MB if memory serves. I can't verify this at present since the Rogers website sucks hairy arse.

Its not just marketing, it being able to purchase products online at the actual price. You can't just login to sun.com and buy servers via a online portal with a corporate discount like Dell or HP. You have to talk with a rep to get the actual real price, not the phony MSRP price.

I'm sorry, but how did this make to the front page? The selections on the list are wrong or obvious, but the list itself is a freaking flash slideshow with only 1 item per slide! The editors need to do their jobs.

In other words, the KDE team destroyed a perfectly functioning desktop environment to build a better Weatherbug.

This is a perfect summary of may reaction to KDE4. Mod parent up.