I watched the original seventy minute demo. After it, I couldn't help but thinking that MS Exchange / Lotus Domino / Novell GroupWise are forever in the "LEGACY" camp.

That is to say, I think Google Wave is the new thing, and the old things are something we maintain, but do not like.

There is a minor problem with Wave, that there is too much overhead in TCP/IP for it to be speedy over the Internet. But on a local server, it is awesome (compared to the legacy communication forms).

Everything that is annoying about SMTP conversations goes away when you use Wave to access a single instance communication.

But that would be far too French.

That made me smile.

But thinking about the whole problem of hyphens, en dashes and em dashes, I'm thinking one regex could make it all a moot point. What we really need is a bunch of XML transforms. Real data should be stored in databases....

That made me chuckle. At the moment, yes I do still have a phone line that works.

I do think that the lack of a standardized way of accounting for "pissed off customer expense" drives companies to create stupid plans (in an effort to save money). The GAAP does have a section for "Good Will" where dollar amounts are assigned to intangible assets. There should be a standard that "cost savings" = "Ill Will".

This would turn around a huge number of bad plans.

Well, I can dream. There is no way that an accountant would try to sell their company on the idea that saving money = pissed off customers. May be true, but it is NOT politically correct. It's the opposite of financially-politically-correct.

First - "Because shouting at inanimate objects helps." - that made me chuckle.

About AT&T not providing phone numbers, it does seem true that The Phone Company is REALLY averse to taking phone calls. I'm sure it is because some accountant knows that human beings on the clock are expensive, and the less humans they have, the more money they make. If you can be pushed to using anything except talking to a person, it is a financial win for them. Obviously, the accountants know jack about sales, and how to treat customers.

I think your initial sales order ticket was closed for the same reason. It looks bad to the management (perceiving the world the way an accountant would) to have the ticket open for too long. Any excuse to close the ticket is used, because there is no measurement of "pissed off customer expense". The intelligent way to measure would not be to count total open tickets, but rather to count open tickets without progress. That would require some sort of way to track progress. Instead of just sitting in pending mode, someone should have gotten on the phone and called you. I suppose that is a bit much to ask of The Phone Company.

FWIW, I am an AT&T DSL customer. They are a decent provider, and less expensive than the competition. Unlike Comcast, they haven't tried to hurt their customer traffic and then lied about it. So AT&T is my current choice, and I'm happy enough with them. But I have had to work with them (trouble tickets) more than I did with Comcast. They do exhibit anti-customer-friendly behavior pretty consistently.

That said, when UVerse shows up in my neighborhood, I'll sign up the day it happens. And there happens to be a backhoe digging a hole next to the neighborhood phone distribution point....

The connections are SSL secured. It has clients for Windows, Linux, and Mac. You are going to need to set up your own server though.

That made me smirk.

Double points if the source code CD also works as a death frisbee.

This week I set up an iFolder server, and installed clients on two Windows machines, and one SuSE machine. All sync to the shared folder automatically and happily now. Near real-time syncs. There is a web interface if you need to download a particular file (like the iFolder client).

It uses .NET on Windows, and Mono on Linux though. If you don't want those, it won't work. It uses SSL instead of SSH, and there needs to be a central server everything logs in to and uses as the staging / storage server. It doesn't do peer-to-peer yet. User authentication can be LDAP, Active Directory, or local accounts in the iFolder system.

Sure - I'll grant you that Prop 13 also made tax increases harder. But the point remains that the problem isn't that government doesn't have money - it's that the legislature grows the budget beyond it's income in spite of knowing how much money will be coming in.

You mistakenly think Prop 13 is bad. All Prop 13 did is limit property tax to 2%. And if inflation makes property values go up, so goes the taxes. The new tax rate was steady, predictable, foreseeable, and absolutely reasonable.

It was the legislature that that decided to live beyond it's means. It was Governor Davis that gave the prison guards a 22% raise.

A good example of the corruptness of the legislature and taxes was the California Lottery. "It's money for Schools! Who doesn't want money for schools?"

Reality was that the first year, the Lottery brought in an extra $400 Million. The second year, the General Fund portion of the school budget was reduced $400 Million. "Oh looky here: we have an extra $400 Million for pork!"

You can't pin that kind of thievery on the voters.

We had a local vote that passed that raised sales tax a little to build a new jail facility. But nowhere in the sales pitch did the campaigners say that the tax had to be permanent. In fact, quite the opposite: the pitch was that the sales tax increase was for only two years.

Of course, two years later, the same people came back and said "We need another tax increase to pay for the staff in the new facility, and this time the tax increase needs to be permanent."

So do you think we rewarded them for lying to us during the first sales pitch?

Is this the fault of 'the stupid voter' or the fault of 'the politicians in charge'?

Frankly, I think Schwarzenegger should save the taxpayers some money and disband the CARB. They did the heavy lifting and got a lot of good pollution control work done. But now they are bored and passing rules for trivial results at massive expense. They are now more a liability than an asset and need to be written off the budget entirely.

I'd argue that the intelligent regulation would be to mandate some sort of cooling based on internal temperature differential. Once passenger compartment gets to be some percentage hotter than the outside air, the cooling mechanism kicks in to bring the internal temp to parity with the external temp.

1) Instead of mandating which technology to use, you are mandating results. The free market (and the engineers that work in them) will eventually figure out the best solution. (I think a little exhaust fan that runs off the battery would do it, although you can already get the Toyota Prius with a $3,000 option to add solar cells to the roof to run the fan and charge the battery).

2) Has to potential to stop heat death from infants / animals left in sealed passenger compartments.

3) The idea that glass will keep the car cool is only good for a very small percentage of trips. That it is enough to matter is a stupid idea.

Seriously: how much heat had to build up that you are wasting a significant amount of gasoline to cool the car down?

That is a rhetorical question, as I live in California's Central Valley. It gets so hot here, that jokes are: "You know you're from Fresno when people with black cars or upholstery are assumed to be from out-of-town." "You know you're from Fresno when you think someone driving wearing oven mitts is clever." "You know you're from Fresno when you discover, in July, it only takes two fingers to drive your car." "You know you're from Fresno when the best parking place is determined by shade instead of distance." "You know you're from Fresno when you can say 115 degrees without fainting." (There are many more, though they probably pertain as well to Phoenix as to Fresno).

Anyway - yes, I've driven the car when it is OMG hot, and the airco had to work far longer to cool down the car. On a normal hot day, the car takes 5 - 10 minutes to cool down. On the OMG hot days, it takes 15 - 30 minutes to cool down.

A) The OMG hot days only happen 20 days a year (about 5%).

B) The OMG hot car happens when you leave your car out in the sun ALL DAY. While at work, or you aren't smart enough to put the car in the garage, whatever - the car has to sit in the hot sun for HOURS to get so hot that the airco has the heat overload problem.

This glass isn't some magic that reverses the laws of thermodynamics. If you leave the car out in the sun for HOURS, it is still going to get OMFG hot. It may take longer with the new glass, but it will still happen.

So the real case for this 'solution' only solves the problem where the car was first cool AND THEN goes out into the OMG heat (5% of the days) AND THEN only stays in the heat a short enough time that the delaying factor of the new glass matters.

Way to swat a fly with a sledgehammer CARB. You are a bunch of dolts on a power trip.

That ad doesn't really do it for me either. It flashed by on the TV this evening, and I ignore it, what with the fluffy music. Then at the end, it changes gears and goes all dark and gritty and violent and visually disruptive. I look up and see "Droid Does" "November" and think "Oh great. Some horror movie about robots with the same nickname as the Android phone. Probably funded by Microsoft. That will suck."

I think I would rather see "Hi, I'm a Droid. And I'm an AT&T." But instead of actors, go with talking cartoon smart phones. Have people in the background handling the devices, which lets you show off sliding keyboards and stuff. Pitch it a little different, as 'the secret trash-talking between devices' (they communicate, you know).

Not that I'm likely to be swayed or dissuaded by ads. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get one of these phones - unless initial hands on reviews indicate there is something horribly wrong with them.

I like the one user comment:

For me, it was a 13 year journey. We've been growing apart for a while now, so it isn't entirely unexpected. And our divorce is (so far) really amicable. But it did pretty much boil down to she wanted more from me, and I was resenting what I had already given up.

As an email administrator, I would see mail get caught in the anti-spam filter. Wells Fargo was the first bank I saw that removed URLs from their emails, and said just simply 'please visit www.wellsfargo.com'. Washington Mutual was embedding URLs right up until the very end. Bank of America embedded links, but it was through their acquisition of Countrywide, so I don't know if it is all their fault.

Seriously, when I change banks (which I will be, pretty soon) this will be a pass / fail hurdle. Embed a URL in an email to me, and I'm no longer a customer of your bank. If you can't take security seriously, I can't leave my money in your hands.