The improvements to Airplay are pretty underrated. You can now stream your entire iTunes library to your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch (if they're on the same LAN). That's kinda a big improvement, because so many people on /. whine how they can't fit their entire library on only 64GB of space. Videos too.

Unless you have a first or second gen ipod touch, or iphone 3g or original. The second gen runs 4.2.1, but not 4.3. Unless they backport security fixes to the 4.2 line, iphone 3g and ipod touch 2nd gen are now out of support.

VPS is a temporary "fix" at best, as nearly all mail providers are now starting to list VPS-land IP space in the same category as residential/dynamic IP space. Any advantage using a VPS gives you in delivery is about to go away

Agreed. My comment about trusting a cable modem connection was one of reliability. A couple of VPSes in different places set up redundantly is an inexpensive way to ensure uptime. You also know they won't block your outgoing ports, but you will still have to be concerned about getting filtered into large providers' spamboxes based on IP range. The solution is to send through a large, trusted SMTP server and receiving at your VPSes. Leave the cable modem for non-server purposes.

Even if you have a non-cable modem IP, it can be difficult to send (opt-in) business email from a small mail server. The reason is that spam filters at major email providers like Yahoo are turning to whitelisting, and you have to contact each major provider to avoid getting your email sent straight to the spam filter.

Since the implementations of spam filters at the server level seem to vary quite a bit, I tend to avoid sending particularly important single emails through my own small email server for fear they just end up in the spam folder of the recipient.

That said, in general I wouldn't trust a business-class cable modem connection to host an email server for business purposes. Virtualized servers are commonplace now and quite affordable (I pay $15/mo for mostly personal use). Set up the backup on your own connection.

So we've got several big contenders or those who want to be in the "smart phone" space (an increasingly meaningless term, as even my dumb Symbian phone can do a fair bit). Android and iOS are the biggest, then you've got Blackberry, Win Mobile 7, WebOS, MeeGo, and in the "dumber" category Symbian.

Three of these are Linux-based to one extent or another: Android, WebOS, and MeeGo. WIth the way apps get developed and sold, it's not clear to me that all three can survive on top of their more-closed counterparts (Blackerry and iOS, primarily). I've heard that various platforms are seeking compatibility with Android apps, but I doubt it'll be perfect.

Given that Nokia seems to be giving up on it, MeeGo seems like the obvious candidate to be the one dropped (its technical merits aside). There's plenty of fragmentation within Android alone now. Personally, I think the biggest potential loss is either the dropping or downplaying of Qt by Nokia. It'd be awesome to see Qt become a cross-mobile-platform toolkit to aid developers (on everything but iOS, of course). While I switched away from KDE during the 4.X debacle, it's clear that Qt was superior in many ways. Its commercial underpinnings seemed to really bolster its quality.

The worldwide death toll from the flu and its complications is in the hundreds of thousands. This is potentially more than just preventing an occasional annoying illness. It's more on the order of preventing all fatalities from traffic accidents.

The movie seemed to have a remarkable attention to technical detail in that scene. I don't know if Zuckerberg uses Linux, but in the movie he is depicted as using KDE. Not only that, but it looked to me like they got the version of KDE about right for the time.

If you have to buffer on Netflix with any frequency, it's you, not them. They have by far the fastest and most reliable streaming I've seen. Much better than Youtube (HD), Hulu, or ABC's own website. Keep in mind you really need at least a 3 Mbps connection, but I had 3Mbit DSL from ATT for years with great streaming.

The assumption, as best I can tell, is the same that drives carriers to charge $20/mo tethering fees for using smartphone data plans with a laptop. Basically, they don't expect you to use very much of your monthly plan.

The ipad+mifi deal from Verizon is another good example. If you want just a mifi (for, say, a laptop or an existing ipad), you pay $260 + $40/mo (contract) for 250MB or $60/mo for 5GB. If you buy it with an ipad, you pay only $130 for the mifi device and get the option to buy month-to-month $20 for 1GB, $30 for 3 GB or $50 for 5 GB. With the right usage pattern it wouldn't take long for the ipad to pay for itself.

Frankly, dedicated computer links (via USB or wireless) tend to have pretty lousy rates. Why? Because the carriers know these tend to be business customers (who have their companies pay for it) and they also tend to use more of their service than many smartphone users.

That said, provided they have the coverage you want, there are good alternatives to the standard ATT/Verizon choices. Virgin Mobile sells a mifi for $200 from Walmart with a $20/mo prepaid 1GB plan (if you buy direct from VM, it's cheaper but you only have the choice between $10/100MB or $40/unlimited). It uses Sprint's network (actually, Sprint bought Virgin Mobile USA last year).

I think you mean patent, not copyright.

Correction: it is not trivial for unmaintained, closed source software. Upgrading maintained, open source software is a breeze, as any Debian user can attest.

Having had a single Debian install for 8 years, I can attest that it works remarkably well, but it is not always a breeze. And over the course of 5+ years, there are major revisions to software like Apache which require new configuration. The backported security fixes in RHEL allow users to keep a very consistent system for a very long time.

You trust the server hardware after 6 years?

Rotating out hardware is essential, virtualization makes this far less of a chore.

It's certainly not always the administrator's choice about whether hardware gets replaced. Besides, there's a long history of UNIX hardware being around forever (well over a decade, sometimes two).

On a personal note, I just retired my 12 year old P166 desktop which was functioning as a router/firewall. It had been running the same install of Debian, suitably upgraded, for 8 years. The only components I had to replace in those dozen years were the CPU and PS fans.

RHEL provides a 7 year lifecycle, which is unmatched by the other major distributions I know about (even Debian). This is crucial for the enterprise; I know of a number of systems which are still running RHEL3 after 6-7 years. Upgrading production computers is not a trivial process, and 2-3 year lifecycles just don't cut it in some situations.

My impression was that Baen books is primarily science fiction. I've drifted from that genre over the years, but I'm a fan of many of the "classics" (Dune, Foundation series, the Ender series, etc).

Perhaps the best recommendation would be a great book by an author with many other books available. That way if I like the first I know where to go next for similar fare. The real issue is that I really hate starting a book and not liking it; I want to finish it and it just nags at me when I don't. Fortunately that is very rare and tends to happen with poorly written non-fiction.

Baen Books has been posting e-books, several formats available, for several years now.

As someone completely unfamiliar with their authors and catalog, can readers of Baen books provide some recommendations? Anything available as an ebook (free or otherwise) would be of interest to me.

This is one advantage of the larger stores - it is usually straightforward to find the bestsellers within any given genre. For those of us new to a genre (or new to the modern works in a genre), this can be a helpful starting point. So many books, so little time.

My income tax is almost triple what my federal income tax is.

Huh? The maximum income tax bracket in WI is 7.75%, with most income falling in the 6-7% range. Federal tax brackets are much higher (15-20% easily).

It's true that some states allow fewer deductions than federal taxes, but if you truly pay 3x income taxes to state as federal you have some very odd tax returns (with very low federal taxes, I imagine).

And what do you get for your taxes? As a former resident of WI, I would say that on average the public school systems are much better (especially those areas where property taxes are high), the state university system is excellent with far lower in-state tuition than its peers, and the roads are MUCH better than Michigan (though that's not saying a whole lot).