I've seen people use Apple computers far beyond 2 years. A lot of families I've known seem to use Apple computers until they just don't work anymore. Granted there is a passionate minority of Apple fans that upgrade every 2 years, but I think a majority keep their computers for far longer. Before the iPhone ever came out, cellphone companies were already being publicly chastised for almost deliberately engineering cellphones to last less than 2 years. Now Apple is participating in the same industry and is following suit to a degree. But if you look at their support cycle, they're doing far better than any company in the mobile industry. My iPhone 3GS just recently updated to iOS 6 more than 3 years after I bought my phone. You couldn't say that about any Android phone out there. My point here is to not defend Apple, but to attempt to point the crosshairs in the right direction: towards the mobile phone industry as a whole. To single out Apple is to ignore the multitude of other offenders out there.

Chromebook + Chrome Web Store

I always thought Steam should have a rental service. There's a bunch of games my friends and I would play at a LAN party, but never after. Certain games are fun when you can yell at your friend across the room, but without that they kinda lose their luster. You could make a list of 5 games you'd play at the LAN throughout the night, and not have to worry about excluding that one guy that didn't drop $50 on a game he'll never play again.

It sounds to me like Renraku is doing these things, but isn't going about them in a manner that the average person would. From how I read it, he's simply saying that a person with depression must force themselves to be functional, while an average person is simply motivated to be functional.

I personally think this is AT&T accepting the reality that they're just an access to the pipes, and nothing else. And acceptance that they're not gonna be able to charge for minutes in the future, so they might as well start charging for data the same way they used to charge for minutes. With video conferencing around the corner, they want to make sure they can dip into that market and skim out some profits. While I'm not saying this is a good thing for the customer right now, it might be a good trend for how a cellphone provider presents themselves as a service provider. It used to be that the cellphone company provided the device, locked down the software, and had control of how much you used what feature on the phone. Now, thanks to iPhone, Android and demand, they don't have any more control over this. The only option they have is to charge for the one service we ultimately need, data.

Just recently, my mom got a virus from Firefox. I thought, "That's odd, Firefox is pretty good about that". It turns out she was using Firefox 2.0. I was about to tell her to download the latest Firefox, but then I realized... a year from now, it's not going to get updated AGAIN. So... I told her to download Chrome.

I think the problem with the advancement of standards isn't how long it takes to develop standards, or developers adopting standards. The problem is that 30% of the users are using a browser that wont update it's self, and if it isn't for some sort of intervention, they wont. Ever. Thankfully, thanks to OS upgrades, people buying new computers, and tech savvy relatives around the world, a new generation of browser finally becomes the new standard after 5 years. This is a ridiculous amount of time to wait before you can even start suggesting to your clients to use new technology. How does all this waiting to use new technology put any pressure on the standardization process to add new features?

The first thing that I think should be standard in all browsers... is background updating forever. Even after a whole new browser version is released. If your afraid to scare away users then keep the interface the same, but update those damn javascript and rendering engines. If the user really wants a "new" experience, they'll download the "new" browser with the new interface. There are too many advantages to background updating browsers to pass it up.
With technology as cool as HTML5 coming out, it is a shame to hear around my office, "Eh, HTML5... we MIGHT see it used in 5 years". Non-updated browsers hurts the internet industry. And it shouldn't take the next "big thing" on the internet to start pushing forward a few new technologies. In a world where all browsers update in the background, everyone should be working hard to update their site just to remain competitive. Because in 2 weeks after the release of the new standard, 80% of the internet will using it.

Adobe says about Apple and Microsoft that, "...they would like you to buy into their implementation of how the seamless integration with the Web goes. What we're saying is it really shouldn't matter. That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web."

The problem with Adobe here is that they're invading the standardized Web and calling themselves the "Web". Basically, technology lag caused by slow adoption rates of standards is causing the "plugin" market to grow too large, and Flash is a result of that. The idea to counteract this is to develop a standards based ecosystem that fills the market demand for new technologies, so that the market doesn't depend on plug-ins for growth. The only way I see for us to decrease the technology lag is to increase adoption rates of standards, and apply pressure to the standardization process to explore new technologies. I think background updates would be one good way to get things moving in this direction.

I haven't seen much talk about this, but it seems pretty potentially ground shaking to me that they could use something like this GSM/CDMA chip that has been in testing since 1998. Even though some articles suggest availability of the Qualcomm chip wont be until 2011, do any of you think this shines light on the possibility of Apple pulling something like this off early?

I completely agree with the monetary system in places that it should be applied. Money works great with goods and services. But the monetary system only exists because of an idealism that created the proper environment for it to exist. The first, best environment we know to have allowed capitalism to flourish was created by a group of idealists we call our founding fathers.

Just like you can't buy love or happiness, you can't buy idealism.

Being an idealist doesn't fill your head with a cotton candy, fluffy, sweet perception of the world. That's optimism. Idealism is a cold, cynical and gritty perception of things as they are but more clearly what they should be.

I'm just an idealist. I refuse to surrender and subscribe to a brand of reality that is handed to me. The most sober consideration of money in this world is that it is a tool like any other. But, in this case, the inventor could trump the tool at anytime.