I never said I don't think iPhone isn't any good. I'd own one myself if I had the means. I had a Japanese filp phone while I lived there, and while it didn't have an app store it was more than good enough for GPS mapping, browsing the net, email, etc. Sure I couldn't download a bunch of fancy Google apps, but I didn't strictly need them. Best of all, it was free with a one year contract because it was older than 6 months.

Hardly anyone in Japan actually uses a "smartphone". The regular flip phones are so full featured that there is not much need to. You can even download full TV series to your basic phone to watch while you ride the train. Between that, and email, and a few basic online apps, most consumers seem happy with their "bog standard" phones. The fact that a WinMo phone is in second place should be evidence enough that the smartphone market there is pretty much non-existant. Not once would you ever see someone on a WinMo phone.

Furthermore, phone fashion is a huge thing. While the iPhone is pretty nice by our standards, it's got nothing on some of the glitzy and sleek phones available there. Fashion also changes quickly, while the appearance of the iPhone has remained largely the same.

Exactly. Not like it matters anyway. I even post my email up on my website so people can like, you know, email me!

An IP lawyer once told me: A contract is only worth about as much as the paper it's written on.

That's why configuration management systems like Bcfg2, Puppet, Chef, Cfengine, etc. exist. They can guarantee that all the relevant configuration is identical across your systems.

As for services managed by the HA demon, with the modern configuration of OpenAIS/Pacemaker (even in Heartbeat 2.0) there's a CIB (Common Information Base) that shares the configuration between all the cluster nodes. It makes it pretty much impossible to not have the identical HA services configured cluster-wide.

Reminds me of my senior engineering project which we presented at a highly competitive national conference here in Canada. On the day the judges were coming around to the booths, our device suddenly stopped working. It was still connected to the computer through USB, but for some reason the analog-digital conversion was failing. Literally 10 seconds before the judges appeared in front of our booth my partner whacked the device enclosure with his fist and suddenly everything worked again. We ended up coming in 3rd :)

That's assuming of course that apple approves the duplicate app, which is highly unlikely.

That's why there's Google Gears that lets you take your documents offline. So long as you as you are using your own laptop, which in my experience is usually the case with presenters, you are fine.

Maybe if you have a lawyer who doesn't understand licensing or IP. On the other hand many companies have a good legal grasp of open source licensing and know the limitations and what is safe to integrate and what is not. I work for one such company, and much of our technology is based on open source and scientific software. You just have to know who to ask.

Exactly. Especially if it has VPN access.

The price at the new Vancouver Convention Center for a wireless 1.5/0.5 mbps conncetion with VPN is something like $120/day.

We have a full office of software developers here running on iMacs, some of which are 3 years old. All of them have a secondary external display with desktop spanning.

Thanks for informing us on your blog. However, it's a little bit too little too late. We were trying to track down the problem with our network services for a while yesterday before we clued in that it was an NS problem and had to call to verify. How about some way of directly notifying your customers immediately when there are problems like this? A low-volume notification-only mailing list? A more filtered blog? No I'm not interested in reading about "Solutions Out Loud Podcast Episode #6 - âoeThe Inaugural Ballâ Episode". Real news would just be lost in the noise...