I am in Brookline MA and we share Comcast infrastructure with Boston. I have 22MBs according to my tests, and Comcast promises me even greater speed if I upgrade to a DOCSYS 3 modem. My brother reports the same in New Jersey, and my other brother is getting 12 to 15 MBS from his provider in San Diego. A year ago, my connection was at 7 - 9 MBs, so things have improved greatly. My data bill has stayed the same.

Unless you are in marketing which makes no credibility redundant.

Lets look at MS challenges:

1) The release of the Surface is saying fuck you to their channel. Acer CEO just reacted to the Surface announcement by saying they would look at alternatives such as Android.

2) All of MS's recent announcements surround Metro UI, ARM tablets, and Cloud services.

3) .NET and all of the related PC based services will continue to be supported and evolved. MS will not kill off their bread and butter business until people start eating their new cupcakes in mass volume.

4) Qt? Microsoft doesn't care. If Digia focused on supporting Metro UI with Qt then I doubt MS would pay much attention. All they would need is a C++ SDK for WIndows 8. (the biggest barrier to Qt on WIndows Phone 7 was the lack of a public C++ SDK). Microsoft seems to be pushing HTML5 and Javascript for lighter weight apps. I think they see this as the volume market for apps.

What?? There was world wide financial collapse??? When did that happen??? Guess it's not important because I didn't know about it.

I know what you mean. Nothing is more important than a weapon that cleans carpets prior to killing the enemy.

There was a time when GNOME was a good idea. It works, it had support of vendors, and it evolved in a consistent fashion. I used it because it came with my distribution. Sometimes I used Ubuntu and other times Fedora, depending on my project. Both distributions supported GNOME and the difference from a user's perspective was small. Note that I was a professional Qt developer, but felt no urge to switch to KDE based on the my alliance with Qt.

Then came GNOME 3 with Fedora 16. I was baffled. The interface was not intuitive. It wasn't just the deviation from my expectations, but my total inability to do even the simplest task. I wrote to the project manager for Fedora and asked him what I should do, he suggested I try KDE. I am now using KDE as my desktop and find it manageable. There are lots of things I don't like, but it doesn't get it my way of doing work.

I own an iPad, iPhone, an Android Phone and Tablet, a Windows Phone 7, a Nokia N9, a MacBook and an Ultrabook running various Linux distributions and Windows 7. I am familiar and comfortable with touch screen devices and I think GNOME 3 is unusable. So excuse me if I don't buy the argument from GNOME that change is hard, and the release of GNOME 3 is all about the move from the desktop to touch devices. It is a bad, design that is unintuitive and clumsy and I pity the fools who decide it is a good platform for their product.

I must be missing something. Square allows me to say my name to purchase coffee and saves me the great pain of opening my wallet and taking out my credit card and handing it to the cashier. I know I am a lazy fuck, but I seem to always have the energy to take my credit card out of my wallet. I know there must be more to this. Perhaps Square intends to offer debit card like services with lower transaction fees in the future and cut Visa and MasterCard out of the picture.

I am not sure I want Starbucks to track me on my phone as I enter the store, or even as I walk by the store. I definitely don't want to provide them with more data about me. I definitely don't want my children subscribing to Square. Who knows who will be tracking them.

So that works for the short term. What about Windows 9. If they use the same UI will it be called "Windows 8 UI Style' on Windows 9? Metro was much better. Too bad they fucked that up.

Pretty strong and incorrect comment from a coward.

Qt largest growth sector is embedded systems and QML Is the driving force behind this market. You cannot get the performance from Widgets that you can from QML objects (Well you can if you rewrote the widgets in a light weight framework like QGraphicsView or SceneGraph, but then you would essentially have QML.)

I don't know where you get your facts, but QML behaves very well in highly animated GUIs on fairly low end embedded hardware. The fact that it is backed up with a highly optimized SceneGraph engine that removed the overhead of the QGraphicsView engine makes QML even better performing.

The comment above about Digia is greatly misleading. Digia focuses on the commercial license market which is a legacy business. The growing embedded market uses the LGPL version and gets support from the open source community. Companies like ICS and KDAB are growing at a very fast pace servicing this market. Digia has not been able to transition well to the embedded space.

75%-80% of all people earning about $500,000 per year did not come from wealthy backgrounds. Mobility is not as difficult as your make it to be. The bigger issue is that it now takes time and money to move between financial classes. You must have a skill and you must put the time into developing it.You must also be willing to take some risk. Hard work at your job alone is no longer enough.

I am surprised the the parent is modded up. It is unsubstantiated opinion and bordering on pure fiction.

Comcast says that they have a 250mb cap, but I have never noticed any change in my service from lots of video downloads.

I realize that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but please turn me on to your weed supplier because you are smoking some really good stuff. I wish I was hallucinating like that.

I don't mean to sound condescending, but did you research the history of Facebook before you make uninformed comments? Zuckerberg was very savvy in how he structured the IPO. He kept much more control then would normally be given a public traded company. In essence, he negotiated a position where he was in charge of Facebook's fate. So yes, it is his problem and not those of the banks and investors.

Everyone seems to be ignore the big Gorilla in the room. The issue isn't the management of the IPO and capital market expectation. It is the distrust that Zuckerberg built around Facebook. There are many users, but few who are interested in opening up their pocketbooks and spend via Facebook's various marketplaces. We buy from Amazon and EBay because then garnered our trust. Facebook scared us away with their missteps over their privacy policy. Whether or not it is warranted or fair, that is the current perception. To quote my ex and close friend, "perception IS reality."

Zuckerberg has to navigate his way out of this mess. He is a smart and savvy and that will go a long way.

nice revisionist history. TCP/IP was deployed not long after it was tested and found stable. The roll out was in 81/82 and 5 years later was in medium size deployments including the NSF network and regional research networks that included hundreds of companies. TCP/IP was never planned as a government Internet, but a means to tie lots of organizations together, including companies.

It was another government/education funded project at CERN that created world wide web, and an individual at a University associated with the government funded Super computing centers who created the browser. The Web is what drove the expansion in the middle 90's. I was involved in some of the deployment of the Internet in 1982 at CMU. I had Internet connectivity continuously from the onset, including a global roll out of AFS on the Internet. None of this was commercially interesting. In 1994 I saw my first Web site, and left my software employer to join an Internet Service Provider. Within a year, growth became exponential and everyone wanted a web site.