When Microsoft starts to dip down to 80% of the Desktop market it'll be due to Apple's OS X and it's child, iOS

You're high. When Microsoft starts to dip down to 80% of the Desktop it'll be due to Google/Android. Same goes for the mobile space. Cheap hardware, and 90% of your needs satisfied. Take a look at Firefox. They're not losing market share to Microsoft. And they're certainly not losing it to Safari.

It's the hardware that's becoming ubiquitous, and Apple is at its heart a hardware company. That makes it a dinosaur. Everything is moving to the cloud, whether you hate the buzzword or not. It's just too much of a pain to have to transfer your entire life over every time you get a new "iShiny" to quote the GP. And in the cloud there are two players: Google and Amazon.

Is it that you'd run into rate limits per IP address that are far too low for a site that gets as much traffic as you reasonably plan to get?

This, plus the concern that we might be violating Google's ToS by using one (they can be very picky about that kind of thing). We don't want to run afoul of the Goog.

Well, yeah, but some of their APIs are "doing it wrong." Just one example (one that recently burned us): the Google Image Charts API has a neat feature that allows you to fetch the image data to construct an image map of a chart. Just append "&chof=json" to any image request and viola! a nice, handy JSON object.

Except... wait a second! That's totally useless! Why? Because there's no way to actually fetch the JSON object. If you put the URL as the SRC attribute of a script block, it doesn't return an instantiated object. If you try fetching the object through an async request, you'll fail because you violate same-origin policies.

What you really need is a JSONP object, as this fellow complained about earlier. Notice how many responses he's gotten? ZILCH.

Basically the only way you can actually use their handy JSON hook is to set up your own proxy that passes requests along as generated POSTs to Google's server, then returns the results wrapped in an execution block. It's completely asinine.

Once of the biggest advantages of electric cars is that they're fuel-agnostic - they don't care where the electricity comes from.

And one of the biggest drawbacks of electric cars is that the manner in which this "fuel-agnostic" energy is actual stored (electrochemical) is just about the worst, least-efficient, wasteful methods possible. Even with modern techniques to extend the lifespan of batteries, you're still looking at maximum lifespans that are complete and utter shit.

Completely agreed. This demonstrates misrepresentation and a clear lack of consideration that wouldn't stand up to any real legal scrutiny.

This isn't a conversation though

Of course it's a conversation. It's just held over much longer periods of time than your more typical conversations. In some ways it's an inferior mode of communication: I can't see your facial expressions or read any nuance in your verbal delivery, for instance. But in other ways it's much more powerful. Look here:

Good place to steal bad jokes from.

See, I can't do that in conventional conversation. I can't pull your words out and play them back in real life. I can't give rich contextual answers with speech alone. And you're ignoring the vast distances at play. And the fact that we are talking with each other, and yet can have millions of others listening in to us.

shut down the computer, and go interact with other people, or go do something with your hands

Computers make interacting with people so much easier. This entire conversation would be impossible were it not for computers.

And I don't know how you code, but I usually use my hands.

And don't feel like you're sneaking by with Sprint. They are next to be assimilated (http://www.eldergadget.com/report-sprint-testing-iphone-4s/).

Sorry... how does that logic work again? Just because they're supporting iPhones, that means they're "the next to be assimilated?"

Weak, man. I've been running my (much better than the iPhone) Samsung Epic on Sprint since Christmas. It's awesome. And no bandwidth cap.

The problem is that Java 7 has been long, long overdue. It's not that 1.6 is bad; far from it. It's just that people are starting to lose interest.

Oh give me a fucking break. Java is the defacto-standard programming language taught in schools, it's the language of choice for mobile devices (thanks to Google, by the way) as well as the business world.

It's a programming language, not fucking MTV. You don't need to keep changing things every 15 seconds to keep the kids' attention span. Shit, C only gets updated every decade or so... I guess nobody must be using that old thing.

iOS is getting a new "Notification Center" ... Like my Android phone.
Twitter is being integrated ... Like my Android phone. Facebook as well.
a split thumbable keyboard for iPads ... Like my Android phone.
wireless syncing ... Like my Android phone. Also, 3G syncing.
a native IM system for iOS devices ... Why would I want a "native" system when I can use an open one? (Like my An... oh, never mind)
iCloud will be free ... Like Google services are on my Android phone.
syncing apps (Mail, Calendar, Contacts and iWork apps) across devices ... Like my Android phone.
Photostream is iCloud for pictures ... And Picasa is iCloud for Android. So what?
iTunes iCloud will let you re-download your tracks at last ... Hahaha! By Grabthar's Hammer... what a feature!
and iTunes Match will let you match your ripped CDs to Apple's copies ... Unless Apple doesn't have a copy.

Apple is looking more and more pathetic by the day.

Sorry, Nokia, but that's what you get. Time to short NOK like it's going out of business.

I was an early Gmail adopter, and it quickly became my defacto-standard email address; thus it became the real-world link to my online identity. But it is absolutely astonishing to me how completely and utterly Google has dropped the ball with regards to social media. Not had dropped the ball... has dropped the ball, present-tense. Because it's still dropped. And yet they keep coming up with over-engineered solutions to what is a ludicrously simple problem (Buzz? Seriously?)

All Google had to do was give me a fucking homepage and a fucking textarea to jot down quick status updates, and voilà!--Facebook is dead in a month. No asinine games, no privacy-stealing bullshit, no invites to time-wasters, no childish crap. Just a public frontpage tied to my Gmail address. This is so simple... and they can still do it! Yet they continue to keep looking for the Rube Goldberg solutions.

But the craziest thing is this: every Gmail account already has a public account page! They've already done most of the work! So how do you get to it? Let's fire up Google and take a look.

Hmm... could it be this prominent iGoogle link at the top-right next to my username? NOPE. All that does it take me to a half-baked late-90s "dashboard" where I can add "gadgets" to spice up the Google homepage. Except I already have a smart phone and a desktop computer and
they ALL want to be my primary "dashboard"... I don't need the beautifully simple Google homepage to be sullied with more fucking weather apps.

So where could this link be if it's not in the "logged in" area of the top navigation? Well, it's not one of the primary menu bar links (Web | Images | Videos | Maps | News | Shopping | Gmail | more...) Maybe under "MORE"? Let's see... Translate, Books, Docs, Finance, Scholar, Calendar, YouTube... holy crap they've got everything under the sun, but no public account page. How about under the EVEN MORE link? You know, the link that opens up a separate page with dozens of Google-related projects? NOPE.

The nearly invisible way to get to your public account page?
1. Log in to your Google account
2. Add /account to the URL
And there you go.

WHAT THE HELL, GOOGLE?

And notice how the top-right menu has changed? Now instead of the lame iGoogle link, we've got a My Account link.

WHAT THE HELL, GOOGLE?

So they've already got an account page. Just put a TEXTAREA on top and show the last 5 posts and you're DONE. DONE. That's the END OF FACEBOOK. That's all you have to do, guys! Christ almighty it's so infuriating I have to stop typing so I can mop up all the frothing spittle.

Definitely the Barnes & Noble Nook Color.

Apple fanbois are so hilarious.

The problem is client browsers refuse to recognize the "Cache-Control: public" directive. This allows website developers to explicitly allow caching on public resources (images, CSS, javascript) and prevent it for sensitive or generated information.

And when I say "browsers" I actually just mean one browser: Fucking Firefox.

Respect Cache-Control:public and you've solved the SSL-all-the-time problem.