The iPhone arrived in 2007. Before that, anything even called a smartphone was so unadvanced it was a different market. This means that for all practical purposes, the entire market that this article is referring to has only EXISTED for under 4 years, and they feel capable of telling us where it will be 4 years from now?

Microsoft is essentially a NON player so far, so the only prediction I feel comfortable making is that Microsoft cash somehow funded these "predictions".

What the hell...45 days to "review" a "procedure"? Pure bureaucracy. We need just one reasonable person to spend 10 seconds using a Sharpie to cross out this step in the "procedure" so life can go on.

This isn't just a Facebook story...it's a problem that someone thought it was OK to share ANY user name and password to ANY service. This is something you just don't do, and people who fail to realize that need to be educated! In addition to all the other things that could be hosed, your password and E-mail address could be changed by the person logging in, to the point where you're unlikely to regain access to your account no matter how much you beg the administrators.

It sure seems that modern "crime" investigations need to start with these words: "alright, first: everyone kindly calm the fuck down".

I'm tired of hearing about cases where there is OBVIOUSLY no real victim, yet the "trial" marches on. And it appears that we have a hard time presuming innocence when there's insufficient evidence to convict.

I hope that this isn't an upward trend...maybe this has always happened to some degree, and we only hear about it more now because of the Internet. Either way, it scares the hell out of me and makes me feel like we should be putting the prosecutors on trial instead of the "criminals".

Kids won't be stopped by that. Maybe each day they'll nominate one friend to carry all the stupid devices to school and log in while the others goof off. Or worse, they'll probably threaten some small kid to do it for them.

Hmm, okay: if it's important to security, don't put it on the damned Internet, and rip the network and wireless cards out of any device that has the data. Station armed guards around the building. Better yet, scribble the information on a napkin in an ancient native language and make it look as unimportant as possible.

You're welcome...please send my 500 million dollar check. Hey you know what, I'll even make it half price and charge you 250 million.

Reminds me of a UserFriendly.org comic from a few years ago...went something like this:

"Someone is force-feeding you 5 bricks while kneeing you in the crotch. Suddenly, they decide to feed you only FOUR bricks. Do you THANK them?!?"

The thing that continues to infuriate me about tabs, is that we're expecting applications to provide them. This is a waste of time for application developers! The lack of tab support is a deficiency in the majority of window managers, that should be addressed (only) at the window manager level.

The proof is in how poorly tabs continue to integrate with OSes. Suddenly you need 5 or 6 commands to deal specifically with tabs, e.g. it seems there has to be a "Close Tab", "Open in New Tab", etc. in addition to "Close Window", all because there is no easy way for the application to distinguish one from the other. Minimization doesn't seem to do exactly what you want. And sheets on Mac OS X, originally awesome for their ability to not block access to more than one window, now end up blocking 20 tabs at once.

But even if this wasn't the case, who is to say that all my tabs should be web browsers? It is completely reasonable to want one of those tabs to be my mail client, a couple to be terminals, etc. with web browsers mixed in. The only sane way to achieve that is with window manager support.

Yes, some window managers have this, but only obscure ones. Until you have Windows and Mac doing this, Firefox won't stop doing it.

Why yes, because when I think of what it would take to quickly open and view PDFs, I immediately conclude that the only solution is a program big enough and complex enough to require a sandbox, to make sure that it can't be exploited.

For years, Adobe has been creating extremely bloated software. And it has been years, not coincidentally, since I've wanted to install any of their stuff.

Why did PDF have to have all this crap added to it? The answer is, it didn't; Adobe just wanted to keep extending their reach, for as long as they could convince people to keep installing "free" readers that just happen to contain your kitchen sink. Enough.

Recommending that people "new to computers" use Windows is the worst advice imaginable. We've given Microsoft over 20 horrible years, and they have managed to make computing almost boring in that time. It is well past time to hand the torch somewhere else...ANYWHERE else. The last thing we need is another generation who thinks Windows is what it means to "use a computer".

Even in 1990, the power and potential of machines was staggering. And I'm sorry, but Microsoft has done NOTHING with that potential. Software is still overly-expensive, locked-in, ugly, and crashing, and impressively it seems that basic tasks are even slower today than on machines of the 80s. It really wouldn't have taken much effort to bring the world way forward, to make PCs absolutely marvelous devices. Instead of realizing the potential, these incredibly sophisticated machines still have pretty basic uses, and I find that sad.

We need another generation, the people "new to computers", to use something new. Let them tinker without the chains of some stupid monopoly, and build a better machine.

Job listings don't mean very much.

Employees that are very happy with a language, and productive in it, might keep their jobs for years; you may never even know that their companies were using that language. One productive employee might do the job of 10 people in some other language, and maybe that's why they aren't hiring.

Some job postings only made me cringe when I saw them, and many make me think to myself: "all-Microsoft shop, never heard of what X, Y or Z can do". Just because there's a job available, doesn't mean the language is popular; it might even mean the opposite, i.e. all the sane people jumped ship months ago, instead of trying to maintain a steaming pile of code, that a company is now desperately trying to hire people to support.

Don't ever learn one of the stupid programming languages just to get a job. Do something you enjoy...make money without programming if you have to, for awhile, until you find a job that requires languages and platforms that you actually like and can be productive in. Nothing else is worthwhile.

I believe that people need to see the effects of accidents in order for it to truly register. (Heck, do this for other serious stuff, too, like the casualties of wars.) Making it cost "more money" to drive dangerously is basically sugar-coating, hiding the very real risks.

There should be ads in prime time that show accident victims whose lives have been turned upside down. Show people who can no longer walk, or who lost limbs, or who lost family members. Make it clear that it was drunk driving, or cell phones, or whatever, that led to their demise.

Too many ignorant people seem to think that the world is a heck of a lot nicer than it really is. That ignorance continues when they get behind the wheel.

You speak of how you want to explore the menu. On OS X that's absolutely wrong. If you have to explore the menu to find something, then someone screwed up.

Few users seem to realize that the Help menu (as of Leopard at least) has full search of all menu items. You can literally type command-? to open the text field, and start typing to have it find matching items. It is actually incredibly easy to "explore" menus on the Mac now.

On windows, you do alt, F, S and get to the save menu item in the file menu. On OS X you do contol-F2, F, S, and get to the save menu.

Well actually, on the Mac it's control-F2, F, down-arrow, S, then return. As much as I hate Windows, the Mac's method is more awkward. (Save is a bad example because it has a direct short-cut, but imagine accessing any item in a similar way.)

Every time something new is created, the squatters make millions, and everyone else has headaches. Does that not sum up ICANN's contributions in the last decade?