If that were true, then they could just use OpenID to accomplish the same goal.

Many sites that use OpenID for logins make it easy by providing pre-configured FaceBook, Google, and Yahoo buttons along with an 'Other' button for those who want to provide their own OpenID URL. For example, StackExchange sites provide five buttons and a more link on their login page. This makes it trivially easy for most people, possible for most of the rest and provides alternatives for geeks and contrarians.

I use spamgourmet.com for disposable email addresses.

Among other things, spamgourmet lets you set the number of messages that can be sent, so it can be useful for things like placing an order where you need to register, get an email with a link to validate your email address and then get an order confirmation and a few tracking status emails, but then stop accepting anything after that.

It doesn't catch as many bad actors as I thought it would, but when they do misbehave, it's kind of cool to see the number of deleted messages that never filled my inbox.

They also have it set up so that it you can reply to messages routed through spamgourmet without giving away your real email address. There's also an alternate domain so that when you're dealing with an actual human being they won't be freaked out by an email address that has the work "spam" in it.

The Scala community has tried to move the problem into a more practical realm by adding things like parallel collections, DSL's to abstract out the problem for specific applications and the Akka Project for simpler concurrency.

Most of the parallel programming discussion I've seen is very complicated and not likely to appeal to those who have to do practical day-to-day business projects. By pushing the abstractions up a level, I think the Scala folks have made parallel programming more accessible for the average developer.

Ref: Parallel Collections video.

That's what the Firefox extension, Platypus is for... unfortunately, it's no longer maintained, but Aardvark can produce similarly readable web pages without out too much work. Combine that with the Greasemonkey script, Autopagerize to join those multi-page articles designed to make you look at a whole new set of advertisements for each paragraph, and you come a little closer to having the experience that Tim Berners-Lee had in mind for the world wide web in the first place.

Daemon would be even better than Snow Crash. Sure, it's not technically Cyber Punk, but it has all of the elements and is much more up-to-date and terrifying.

Besides, The Delivinator won't work any more because the pizza delivery scene dropped the '30 minutes or free' thing for exactly the reasons that it was so sensational in Snow Crash. That is, pizza drivers who were afraid they'd have to pay for a late pizza would drive like crazy and occasionally get people killed.

I generally buy my eBooks from WebScription, which is mostly Baen SciFi, or FictionWise, which is everything else. Both are much cheaper than Amazon and both offer non-DRM'd books, often in multiple formats. Sure, their site design is not as snazy as Amazon or Kobo or even Diesel, but I can find what I want and get it at a reasonable cost with no DRM most of the time.

I started with Kobo, but, at one point, I bought a book listed as "mobile", which I assumed was suitable for an eBook reader in a venue without WiFi, but discovered that, by "mobile", they meant online. Even though I hadn't read a page, they wouldn't refund my money, so I looked elsewhere, discovered WebScription and FictionWise and haven't looked back. Both are, not only cheaper than Amazon, but also generally cheaper than Kobo as an added benefit.

The proprietary version of the software, StarOffice / Oracle Open Office, had a lot of other goodies like additional file filters, clip art, document templates and enterprise environment management features. If Oracle was willing to give that stuff to the OO.o foundation as well, then a merger would definitely be worthwhile.

Agreed. In fact Scala has introduced Parallel Collections with version 2.8 that allow looping methods on parallel collections that spread the work of the iterations across multiple processors and handle the partitioning of the work automatically. Very cool stuff.

SuperGenPass is a simple bookmarklet that can generate hashed passwords based on a master password. Like KeePass and LastPass you only need to remember one password, but unlike those, it doesn't store anything and you can use it pretty much anywhere.

Although I love my Alex eReader, I am little disappointed that e-paper is being used as a display instead of being used like paper like it was originally conceived.

The basic idea was that you'd get a special electrostatic printer that you'd load with a ream of e-paper and print out your documents as usual, then, when you're done with a document just return it to the hopper so that some other document could be printed on it. It was supposed to be the ultimate recyclable paper.

I suppose that it was never really likely that e-paper would reach the price point where such a thing would be reasonable, but it was an interesting concept.

Even though people complained that computers, not only didn't hearken the arrival of the paperless office, but actually increased the amount of paper that was used, I think that the trend is going the other way and people are beginning to print less and less. So, the demand peak for a product like this has likely passed and few would see it as a valuable option.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm in no rush to use either of these since I have a device with a physical keyboard and they totally neglect thumb typing in all of the scenarios discussed. As far as the size, it doesn't look like it takes up much more room than the regular software keyboard, so I don't see that as a uniquely serious drawback.

The first link in the original post is to the product home page. It does seem to be the same thing you're referring to. There are also videos on that page that look fairly compelling. Their FAQ makes it seem like they do plan to add customization at some point.

Something that can be operated with one hand using the thumb would be ideal. There were also some interesting motion input strategies back when Palm was de rigueur, but they were all proprietary and expensive and went nowhere at the time.

Why not just use Graffiti. I think it would be much easier to learn and provides visual feedback. It's also now available for Android platforms.

Although very cool at the time, the original Apple Newton handwriting recognition recognition was somewhat weak and suffered from too much emphasis on predictive dictionary lookup. So much so that even a perfectly formed "falafel" always resulted in "father" until falafel was added to the dictionary. The solution was Graffiti. Later Newtons had much better handwriting recognition and Graffiti was no longer needed, but the Palm Pilot, a Newton competitor, adopted Graffiti and was, thus able to run on much cheaper hardware and take over the PDA market. After many years, legal wrangling put the ownership of Graffiti in the hands of Access, which has made it available for Android.

Back in the day, ZOE was exactly what you're looking for. It's an open source, cross platform turn-key, solution (Simple Server is built-in) that is designed to archive, index and search your email (using the Apache Lucene search engine). Jon Udel has a good article on O'Reilly that includes some screen shots.

ZOE meets all of your requirements, though data import is a bit of a problem. There are several different strategies for data import, so one of them may meet your requirements.

Unfortunately, ZOE is abandonware so it's not for the faint of heart. The original author was on the bleeding edge and tended to make 'interesting' technology choices like Tapestry for the framework, and using his own, home-grown build system and a Creative Commons license that isn't usually used for software. He eventually abandoned Java development for Lua and let the registration for the home page lapse. As a result, it's difficult to recommend this for all but the most determined, high functioning users.

Wahoo! Now Skype can be moved off of their proprietary protocol on to an open standards compliant... oh, wait you said Cicso... never mind.