...he introduced the Apple community to Android, Windows Phone 7, Linux, Windows, and OS X Snow Leopard.

He says Bill Gates needs to come back, and then states Gates listened to J Allard about the Xbox, Microsoft's only real consumer success story in the last decade. Doesn't that mean that maybe J Allard should be the new CEO of Microsoft? Or can Block not connect the dots he himself puts down on the paper?

from old media, over me accessing songs I own from wherever I am, or any device I have.

Sorry, I was on a Firefox forum the other day and saw Beta 10 tossed around frequently and just dove right into my post.

Wasn't this supposed to be the answer to Chrome - yet Chrome has shipped several iterations in the time it took them to get from 3 to 4? I think Firefox is on beta 10 or whatever. For a while, I maintained that I would switch back to Firefox once it matched the speed and minimalist interface that Chrome had, as I didn't like using a browser from Google. Now? Not so sure anymore - I'm so used to Chrome and it fits my workflow so well. It will take a lot to get me back.

Really? In the past 6 months, I know about twelve people who have left their iPhones behind and went to an Android device, instead of upgrading to an iPhone 4 when their contracts were due. I realize this is anecdotal, but I see more people switching from iPhone to Android than the other way around.

The poor performance of Wave when it first debuted quickly killed any hype it had going. Everybody was eager to try it out, then realized it ran like a dog in pretty much everything except Chrome (and even sometimes in Chrome, too.) That and the fact that it was a standalone app - I wanted to be able to work with my Google Docs, share items from my Reader, and work on emails from within Wave, spreading information between all three if I desired.

The difference here is that you can still install applications from outside the app store on Windows (and Android for that matter), where on iOS you can't. That's why everyone was worried about the next version of OS X moving to a more iOS-focused paradigm; Apple has final cut on everything.

In most organizations, the IT department is treated as pure cost instead of something that provides strategic value. These IT departments have no chance of getting a budget approved that will allow them to "start over" on any part of their implementation; hence the constant onslaught of temporary fixes and patches.

I love the shuttle program, but I would never wish something to go wrong on a mission just so they can launch another shuttle.

Exactly right. Of course, most people don't realize this, and are content to bash Microsoft for purposely trying to make them unhappy and confused.

This isn't about taking market share away from Google, or Bing, or whatever; it's keeping Google out of what Apple views as an increasingly important source of market research. Right now, every natural search performed on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad goes through Google - so Google can view that data and use it to refine/improve/develop their own competing smartphone OS. By further locking in users to their own search engine, Apple effectively closes the pipeline of free research to Google - unless users explicitly go to the webpage of their search engine, which will only be done by a small, small number of users.

At my current university, there are two undergraduate networking courses and one undergraduate security course. There's one network course in the graduate curriculum, but that's meant as a recap of the two undergrad ones if you didn't get your undergrad here. I would love to load up on network and security classes, but there's simply none being offered.

As a current college student, I use my laptop (OneNote ftw) often for note taking. However, during a really boring class, even I'll start surfing the web. I notice a lot of students playing games, watching movies, doing online shopping, etc.

However, instead of just banning laptops, there's a lot that the professors and university can do to make students want to pay attention. First off, Powerpoint has ruined the university lecture. Most textbooks will come with companion slidesets for each chapter, so often a professor will just throw those up on the board and reiterate the same content TO THE WORD that is in the chapter. You're basically paying whatever your university's undergraduate or credit rate is for an audiobook of that textbook.

Also, a lot of professors these days come unprepared for lecture, especially because they feel like they can just use the textbook powerpoint as a crutch if the need arises. I can't tell you how many classes I've sat in over the past year where the professor is teaching material out of order or not relevant to the current reading or homeworks.

Lastly, many professors have become incredibly boring and prone to ramble about personal anecdotes. I just had a server technology class where the professor droned on every class about some single incident in his own experience that wasn't even related to servers half the time. He also spent a good amount of time talking about the Toyota issue. Why would I want to pay attention to that?

If the university wants to ban laptops in classrooms, they should look inward and reevaluate their own faculty first. If they still want to ban technology in the classroom, extend that to the professor as well - I'd gladly pay attention to see how many of these professors and doctors can't swim without their beloved Powerpoint.