That, of course, is the whole point. They need users only to finance the activity and relax.

I'd go for anything as long as it's not Accept360.

Please note that the "amigos" are the reference UI graphics -- i.e., placeholders. The least a device vendor should be bothered to do is to provide their own visual style definitions and gfx to customize the platform before shipping products to customers...

Prepare to be left in the dust by the mass's desire to use our precious internet for what we perceive to be inane and pointless.

Ha! I've already been left in the dust once. This whole "web" thing is 99.9% protocol overhead, and 99% of the content is junk. I want my nn back, it had at least smaller overhead.

Ah, but take a look at RFC 2543. As long as the net-heads had the reins, SIP was still sane. Once the telco actors got in the game, SIP went to hell faster than you could compress the word "idiocy" in your SIGCOMP VM with the counterpart-provided bytecode decomp implementation.

This is also how Rome became the superpower of its time. They absorbed popular religions and trends from their newly-attached regions -- the Greek pantheon was adopted with suitable localization in Rome, for example. And later Christianity, with the Pope twist added for control.

The Chinese have done their homework...

No, they will drop the SSDs from the rest of the MacBook line in the next refreshes.

That was the trick with the new Air's improved battery life: drop the casing from around the Flash chips and have them directly on the logic board. Saves space which you can use for e.g. more battery. I suspect they will use the same tactic for the rest of the line-up eventually.

Sharepoint is still a fancy, runs-over-http version of a shared drive, whose main benefits are 1) for users it's like a shared drive, and 2) you get to manage users centrally in AD. Plus 3) you get script hooks for directory operations.

And it's complicated enough to earn many an IT consultant their daily bread for years to come :D

Which has been incredibly irksome when you have owned a company with other similar minded, left-the-church atheists for 15+ years. Despite having left and disavowed the institution, I've still had to pay their extortion money.

Somewhat OT, but: what is your preferred solution for encoding DVDs into iTunes? (One of "many readily available tools".)

The same applies also in Europe, even if for slightly different reasons (labor costs and liabilities). R&D is expensive for big corps, and growth is expensive for small corps.

This leads to most start-ups having a business strategy of doing R&D with a skeleton crew, then getting bought by big corp X. Where X is often known from the moment the start-up is launched. Any business done before the exit stage is purely to prove the validity of the developed solution. A tech start-up without an exit strategy in the 21st century = doomed to fail.

This of course will lead to the MegaCorp world the GP envisioned. It's unavoidable.

You misspelled ruin.

"Oh, and one more thing", replies Steve. "Have you seen our new product, the iMplant?"