Cox's Akamai node they host on their internal network is massively overloaded by all the Cox users that hit it. When I first changed to Cox last year I started noticing massive buffering when trying to access Akamai sites like Apple's movie trailer's site or even just updates for my iPhone. I was barely getting 512 Kbps downloading stuff. The minute I switched over to using Level 3's DNS servers my download times cut to a fraction of what it used to take and I was getting 20 Mbps.

I reported all this information along with detailed traceroutes and packet dumps and what was their response? "Reboot your computer. If that doesn't resolve the situation you may need to reset your cable modem." That was it. They totally ignored all the analysis and just told me the problem was on my end. I haven't used their DNS servers since.

The point is that eBooks take the vast majority of the cost of publishing out of the equation and yet they want those books to cost as much as, if not more, than a physical book made out of paper. Then on top of it they screw you by not letting you resell, loan, or just plain give the book away to someone else despite the fact that it is perfectly possible for a DRM scheme to be created that allows the transfer of electronic content while removing your access to read it.

Bullshit. I live in a rural area of Ohio and the air is clean, the skies are blue, and the visibility is as far as the horizon. Beijing on the other hand... well... there were plenty of examples of its air quality around the time of the Olympics when athletes were complaining they had difficulty breathing in the fucking air and pictures out hotel windows could barely see to the next block on some days. That was AFTER they shut down the factories for the duration of the Olympics!

This is an enormous pet peeve of mine. I've got Kindle on my iPad and my Droid phone but I can't bring myself to actually BUYING any eBooks. The entire concept seems absolutely ludicrous to me. I can go to Amazon or Borders and order a hard copy book that usually is cheaper than the ebook, and gives me total freedom to resell, loan it out, or toss it on my bookshelf for future generations of my family to pick up and read when the time comes. If the ebook was a fraction of the price of a print book or had technology that would allow me to loan and resell, or at the very least print a hardcopy of the book, I may reevaluate the technology. At the rate we're going though, I have little hope my grandchildren will even know what a library is, much less see one filled with current edition books because the concept of sharing and borrowing is being lost in this digital generation. Publishers are turning the concept of sharing into a dirty criminal thing when in fact we go out of our way to instill those values of sharing into our children from the time they are babies. It is insane.
 

The point is there should be a bootloader in ROM that allows for a failsafe to restore the device to factory conditions or at least allow it a minimal capability to load such an image off another system. Nothing in erasable storage should ever be able to brick the phone. It's trivial for designers to avoid that unless they are doing it on purpose to punish hardware hackers.

How exactly do YOU hold your phone? I just naturally picked up my Droid and held it up to my ear and I pick it up with my left hand with my thumb extended along the length of the left-hand side of the phone and two or three fingers wrapped around the back holding the right hand side of the phone. It certainly seems natural to me, and I'm right-handed. The way I naturally hold my phone causes the fat-pad of my hand to cross that imaginary antenna slot if I had an iPhone 4. I imagine the vast majority of people would hold their phones the same way if they're right-handed (in their left-hand since we use our dominate hand to dial and manipulate the UI).

The iPad is a HORRIBLE porn viewing device. There's no easy way to set it down to view hands-free and if you're holding it... well... let's just say it's slippery enough as it is without any fluids involved.

Oh for crying out loud, you guys need to have your sarcasm meters checked. He was obviously joking.

They'd probably rather license the content to mobile providers using services like Verizon's VCAST. I recently read they went live with VCAST for Android which could explain why Hulu is blocking Android phones with Flash. No sense in letting users get something for free with ads when you can charge them for a premium service right?

I guarantee you within 10 years every Apple computer will use its trusted computing module to disallow you from running unsigned code. Apple is trailblazing this technology on mobile devices today, getting people accustomed to it and even astonishingly getting their more fanatical users to defend their use of it to restrict their activities. Unbelievable. You'll need to join the Apple developer program and pay your yearly fee to them just to write code for your own computer and they'll do it all under the guise of preserving "performance" and "security".

Also, the big content providers in the USA seem to be purposefully blocking access from mobile devices. Try going to Hulu or CBS and displaying videos and you will be blocked even though Flash is perfectly capable of displaying those videos. This just astonishes me that they don't want me to view their advertisements from my mobile device. I can only assume Steve has arranged some exclusive deal with them or they're planning on releasing pay-per-view versions of their web sites, perhaps using a dedicated video application. FAIL.

"We found a revolutionary new way to display Flash content that won't drain the battery..."

Comcast's cable box is not capable of downscaling to 480i? I find that hard to believe.

My magical iPad did get a girl to look at me in a cafe last month though. Well, it was either that or the ridiculously loud Hawaiian shirt I was wearing.

The first thing I noticed when I got a Motorola Droid was that I could actually read the text on the browser page at the default size without zooming in. With my iPhone 3G the text was usually pretty blurry and pixelated from the low resolution screen when trying to display really small font sizes like a page full of text. I think that alone was one of the things that I loved about switching to the Droid... I could actually read a page without constantly zooming in and scrolling around like a half-blind man with his magnifying glass trying to read the newspaper.