The old one worked great and wasn't a problem. The new one makes no sense and I can't find anything that I want. I have no idea what they were thinking. Let's see how long it takes for them to revert or change this POS interface... or hire new UX devs.

Time to make the move. I thought Verizon would at least have the courtesy to grandfather all current data plans and let us stick with the $30 unlimited plan, but I guess not.

It's not that I'm a data whore and that I plan on slurping 10GB a month on my phone (I actually use under 300MB a month), it's more just the concept of being metered and having to check and worry about what I'm using.

That said, all major phone carriers are really making terrible decisions right now, and I should just move back to my silver Motorola Razr that I had 3 years ago and have a few hundred minutes and texting.

This would be awesome if they could get it perfect, but it's impossible. There are too many variables that would change the pattern and it would just get annoying. Sure, you could eventually get it right, but users would just get fed up and would rather just use a longer more cryptic password than deal with starting over each time.

AIM was for teens and younger kids, IRC & ICQ was for the geeks and people who paved the way for where we're at today with the internet. I was an AIM user as I was younger at the time. I caught IRC and ICQ towards the end of it's era.

With a lot of budgetary issues in today's economy, I find it hard to believe that school officials & administration will actually pounce on over-priced solutions to allow a lot of students (figure between 1,000 and 4,000) to take lessons online rather than canceling one day of school.

Similarly (as other comments have outlined), they're going to run into a whole lot of issues with lower income areas that do not have access to the same resources and higher speed connections that a lot of more privileged areas have.

To actually outline the changes that would have to happen in order for this to be remotely successful could easily fill a 5 page document - the problems with it are huge. I don't see this happening for another 10 or 15 years, at LEAST.

You're a programmer - I would hope you understand a fair amount of networking, etc. You should be able to pick this up quickly. Get whatever hardware - don't buy low end but you don't need to be buying Cicso crap or something that is intended for tens of thousands of end users. Read a few books about whatever system you're going to implement (Are they running Winblows Server?), and about TCP/IP / networking and you'll pick it up in 2 minutes (bet you could read a book a day). Definitely avoid anything Windows and AD - the network is too small to even be worth dealing with how awful it is. Maybe use CentOS (to avoid paying for Redhat Enterprise, as long as you're confident in your ability to fix stuff).

I doubt this was Anon, and if it was, they will never admit to it - they'll just blame ebaumsworld. Sounds like Sony trying to cover up their massive failures and continuing ignorance to what is going on and/or what customers want.

This is a great alternative. People are very opposed to setting up their own servers - setting up any lightweight XMPP server is NOT too difficult, and the server space will not cost you an arm and a leg. Granted, it depends on what you're doing, but you can set this up and have super encryption and security. Unfortunately, Adium hasn't added support for XMPP audio or video, so Pidgin it is.

Yes, audiophiles all love to argue about Bose's shortcoming with audio because their systems are greatly overpriced. I personally consider myself an audiophile, and I have no issue with Bose, although I wouldn't buy it as the system for my home theater / audio rig. It's just too damn expensive for the sound you're getting. Guarantee you could find 20 different opinions of what is wrong with Boses sound from audiophiles, all different.

IMO this is what separates Chrome from other browsers - the fact that Google is turning stuff out like this, and keeping the active development cycle going, quickly. Firefox seems to be playing catch up at this point with other browsers - sure it's more customizable and has a few more features, but do we see Mozilla rolling out protocols that "cut page load times in half" (I have some doubts that it'll be half, but that's just me). Thank you Google, for taking another step in the right direction with your browser.