If you've read Daemon and/or Freedom by Daniel Suarez, this sounds like the Hummers guarding Matthew Sobol's house. There's other autonomous vehicles, but I won't give anything else away.

Five things:

1. 1. When 3 of 4 major carriers don't sell the iPhone, the sales numbers for other devices could be much higher than those of the iPhone.
2. 2. Android phones are the first phones in a long time to have a mass appeal of "doesn't suck" or "not corporate", i.e. Palm/Windows Mobile and Blackberry.
3. 3. Consumers that are happy with another carrier, or don't want to switch to ATT, can finally upgrade to a phone with iPhone-like features.
4. 4. Consumers who were in the market for an iPhone waited for v.4.
5. 5. Price.

Seems simple enough to me.

I manage a small group of machines that are connected to each other, but never to the Internet. Our customer asked for the Vista upgrade, paid for proper licensing, we installed Vista in a small test group, customers were happy. Vista failed, customers were extremely unhappy.

This is the sole reason that we haven't migrated all the clients to Vista. And why we had to rollback the test group back to XP. Vista's phone-home cycle is 180 days, then it lies to you and says that "Hardware Changed..." and drops the computer into its restricted use mode.

There is a solution for this problem, Microsoft Key Management Services (KMS). We SAs are ready to deploy KMS, but have run into management resistance for 6+ months now. Vista left such a bad impression with them, they decided to just wait until we migrate to Windows 7 to setup KMS. And that won't happen until the next hardware refresh cycle, so maybe 1Q2011.

Once you have KMS, the 180- to 90-day change really isn't that big of a deal.

Here's how I see it:

• Playstation Home? Charge for it. I used it a few times when I first signed up, but it doesn't really do anything. I'm sure the costs outweigh the virtual trinkets and mini games they sell.
• Playstation Store? Access needs to be free. Any store costs should be included in the price of the game/movie/tv show/theme pack/etc. Plus, on the movies side, it costs enough already to rent or buy movies.
• Multiplayer Games? Who is hosting the server? EA, R*, etc? The hosting cost should be figured into the price of the game. Or they (Pub/Dev) charge a separate subscription fee. Sony hosting the server? Charge for it, XBox Live style.

I have no issue with paying for PSN as long as the price is reasonable. I paid for XBox Live for years, before I got rid of my XBox. $60/yr is perfect, $5/mo. That's $5m per month with 1m users (random user number). I couldn't see servers, bandwidth, datacenter, licensing, and power costs being beyond $60m per year, but then again, IANA MMO SysAd. Any more than $60, and it will fail. Maybe they could get away with a $100/yr price if they included a full Skype client, with video...maybe.

eh hem...put on tin-foil conspiracy hat... Could this be the beginning of a real-world "Newspeak?" With everything else the UK has done in recent years, it is merely one more step toward 1984. For those unfamiliar with Orwellian Newspeak:

• 1984
• Newspeak
• Newspeak Dictionary

Well, I did put "quality" in quotes for a reason, but you are correct.

I've been looking for a replacement for my 12" G4 Powerbook and looked at the Dell Mini 12. Good dimensions and screen resolution, but what killed it for me was the Intel GMA 500 chipset and Atom N530. Underpowered and overpriced, plus flaky compatibility and lousy battery life. Its like a TFT maker had leftover panels and Intel had the junk leftover from making "quality" GMA 9x0 and N2x0 parts and sold it to Dell real cheap.

Roll in a candy coating and sell it for $100+ more than the good Mini 10 series and presto! A line that will be quickly discontinued because the geeks that actually buy netbooks know better.

I don't think Shakrai was implying that education and health care should be run by for-profit corporation. Only that they should not be run by the Federal government. While I like my private health insurance, I believe that education should be run by the local government. Afterall, they should understand the local community better than any bureaucrat in D.C. or a state capital.

Well said. Thank you for posting that. I wish more people understood the points you made, especially about IT being about service.