According to Nokia Siemens Networks, the average amount of smartphone data used per day is 15MB (about 450MB per month). If you're using ten times that amount on a grandfathered plan that costs you peanuts, it's hardly surprising that someone somewhere will run the numbers and work out that you are of no value to the company.

By all means shout "right, that's it! I'm off to Sprint!" but it'll be a hollow victory as Verizon will probably be more than happy to see the back of you.

Well, that article is mostly a "duh". Of course people come in wanting one of two things- #1 Android or #2 iPhone. It is going to take a LOT of work on Microsoft's part to try and get visibility now.

Nokia ditched perfectly good Linux based mobile OS's for their high-end phones and now they will have another uphill battle.

Given, as you rightly said, people come in wanting either Android or iPhone, Nokia would probably still have had the same problem even if their platform ran Linux - and the integration with Windows PC's may not have been as good,

Primarily it's format agnosticism and skin capabilities. 99% of my library is in MKV format, which WMC does not care for

Not quite. If you install Media Browser and the Shark007 codec pack then MKVs - as well as a number of other formats and containers - will play just fine in Windows 7 Media Center.

Both are free and Media Browser is released under the GPL.

You fund 1,000 projects, in the hope that 1 of them will return more then the other 999 consume. What Google is doing, is what most US companies are failing to do to get ahead of the rest of the world.

Whilst I agree with you, the problem that Google has is that some of their projects are so poorly defined and then poorly executed that it's patently obvious that they're going to be a disaster before they even launch.

Google TV is one example. A device with a remote control with that many buttons and a non-existent ecosystem of content is going to fail, however hard you try.

Nope, I have an ipad 2 and they're nonfunctional. I wish slashdot would change the interface to make them usable on touchscreens.

I wish Slashdot would change the interface to make it just plain useable.

Have you tried Avantslash?

There isn't a template specifically for the iPad 2 (make one!), but the desktop or classic templates should work just fine.

An interesting article originally posted by OKCupid (until they were bought and it was pulled down) explaining why you should never pay for online dating:

http://interestingreads.posterous.com/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating-ok

Worth a read.

Marketing is far more than people sitting around designing posters or television adverts. Doesn't anyone here actually work with a Product Manager?

You know, those people that own the product, build the roadmaps, speak to clients and internal departments to get their requirements, prioritise those requirements and flesh them out into something a little more useful that can be fed into the technical teams for them to produce low level documentation (as well, as be used for feedback on edge cases and ambiguity).

Or do you think that the business requirements and direction for a product just get made up by someone in the technical team with no consideration to anyone or anything else?

So I read the description of the story and thought to myself "this makes no sense, if you posted photos as private or friends only, how on earth did Channel Seven get hold of them?"

So, shockingly, I read the story and it turns out the description is completely wrong. Here are the key parts (bold mine for emphasis):

Australia's communications regulator has ruled that television networks are not breaking the industry's code of practice when publishing photos lifted from a public Facebook profile.

[...]

"The ACMA found that due to the open nature of the tribute page, the absence of privacy settings and the non-sensitive nature of the photographs, Seven did not breach the privacy provisions of the code," the ACMA noted in a press statement.

In short, they lifted photos tagged as public on a public tribute page, littlekorea completely twisted the truth (by mixing up "public" and "private") when submitting the story and timothy didn't do any basic editing.

It'll be interesting to sit back with the popcorn and watch the comments from outraged slashdotters who didn't bother to read the story and the upvotes from those with moderator points who equally didn't bother to read the story ...

Nice troll, but the vanilla Android devices (Nexus line) don't ship with the CarrierIQ software, which means that either the handset manufacturers or, much more likely given the US-centric focus, the carriers are responsible for installing it.

By "responsible" you need to mean that the carriers asked the manufacturer to install, enable and configure (to a carrier defined list of settings) Carrier IQ on a device and that the manufacturer agreed to do so.

I know it's not as exciting as thinking carriers just went off and sneakily installed it themselves (despite them having no access to the source code or, generally, phone OS development experience) but for those of us who have worked in that area, this sadly common misconception is more at home on CSI.

This is Michael O'Leary just drumming up some free PR by proposing something completely outrageous so that it gets mentioned in all the papers. Last time it was suggesting that they'd charge people to go to the toilet.

That proposal (like this one) will never actually happen.