And from another source there have been information that the Infineon chipset never had been tested in a production environment.
I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it does seem hard to believe they'd ship without testing in production. Given that the same source wasn't complete certain that Infineon is even the supplier, I'd have to take that claim with a pretty good grain of salt.
Well, the alleged problems with Social Security are largely myths, promoted by people who'd like to see all that money directed into private investments instead: it'll stay solvent for decades, and at that point it'll only need small adjustments to stay solvent for decades more.
Believe what you want, but that doesn't make it true. People have been concerned with Social Security's solvency for decades and it's really only been very recently that the private investment push has really come out.
Are you saying it's impossible that voluntary funding might fail to provide enough money to run the entire system? I think it's awfully dangerous to base such a system on the idea that people will just keep funding it out of the kindness of their hearts -- if they're free to stop donating at any time, we can't ignore the possibility that they might do exactly that.
No I'm not. Are you saying it is impossible for the government to fail to provide enough money? But my argument is that it's less about money than actually delivering help to people. The government is moderately good at taking money from it's citizens. It's horrible at effectively putting that money to good use.
No insurance company is going to offer a contract with a premium of $0. Meanwhile, we-the-people want health care and retirement/survivor benefits to be available even to people who can't afford to pay a premium. How would privately funded insurance be able to deliver that?
You missed the my last line - the insurance companies don't have to offer it for nothing. The funding for the basic level for individuals who can't afford it themselves can still come from the government. Think of something like food stamps. The government doesn't try to control/manage grocery stores.
In the house, it passed 384 to 45. Of the 45 No votes, 34 were Republicans, 10 were Democrats.
In the senate, it passed 91 to 8. Of the 8 No votes, 6 were Republicans, 2 were Democrats.
I know there are some difficulties with blanket classifying all R's as conservative and D's as liberal but the voting records only list party, not ideology. That said, I would call 197 to 10 House Democrats and all but 2 Senate Democrats as quite solid evidence of across the board support.
Guarantees? I see nothing guaranteed about anything the federal government does. A new election cycle brings about different priorities and programs abandoning others. And in areas where there is something of a de facto guarantee (like Social Security) how's that going to work out? No one in my generation actually believes the money will be there for us and if it is, without drastic changes (which no politician seems to have the courage to deal with)...well I'll save the speculation, we'll just have to wait and see how much damage it causes.
The federal government has the power to raise as much revenue as it needs to fund such programs. A private company or charity does not.
I suspect you and I have more in common in the results we'd like to see, but are just coming at this with different philosophies. Because I consider that a bug rather than a feature (of government);)
I do believe there is a role in the government providing a safety net (contrary to an earlier poster). I just think it should be as minimal as possible and society as a whole both those in need and those paying for them are better served by a government that sets up frameworks to deliver help rather thing doing it themselves. By this I don't mean funding either - I truly believe voluntary funding & charitable contributions could get us much further along than forced onces. By framework, I mean the tax & accounting rules as well as some uniform reporting requirements.
Specifically: the disability portion of social security is a good thing and while there are private sector solutions, they are substantially complex for full/widespread usage. Social Security's survivor benefits on the other hand are much more effectively solved by a life insurance.
Our current health insurance disaster could be effectively dealt with by government providing a framework of coverage and letting the private sector provide at it. I can call hundreds of insurance companies and shop around for the best price for a 20 year term life insurance contract for $200,000. Why should health insurance be any different? What's missing is the framework - set up a handful of classifications/levels of coverage and the criteria that they must follow. From there, government can roll in funding for emergency services and some level of preventative care and it won't require the level of socialization of the national health care plans.
After my frustration boiled over today with incredible slowness editing some text and just plain moving around, and I finally completely disabled Aero & set Vista's appearance settings to maximize performance. I now have an OS that visually looks like the bastard child of Windows 2000 and Vista, but at least Flash CS3 runs closer to the speed Flash 8 ran on XP/OS X.
Then it seems you've already rejected the GP's position that "nobody should be forced to... give up their money to help others". Congratulations! You aren't "calling BS" at all: we agree that the government must play a role here.
Not surprisingly, you're making an substantial (and incorrect) assumption here. That only the government can provide a safety net. I used to work for a fortune 500 company that was not-for profit (strange as that might sound). The company didn't have to pay taxes - instead was required to give what it's tax burden would have been to charitable funds. They always did considerably more. Know why this is allowed? Because the millions of dollars they delivered to help people was tremendously more effective at actually delivering the help than if it had been funneled through the federal government.
There were no voices saying that the previous Republican majority wasn't conservative until after the government failed miserably at everything it tried to do.
Not true. Many conservatives called the Bush Administration out for No Child Left behind being decidedly un-conservative. Clearly anti-federalist - a big chunk out of state & local rights/control. Beyond that, there were many compelling arguments by conservatives (liberals at the time we very much in favor of NCLB though they later changed) that NCLB was unconstitutional and as a result, at most, participation was optional.
Personally, it's always been about fiscal responsibility money/spending being about as objective of view of government reach as we have. Right or wrong, to some extent, I've always been able to partially justify Reagan's deficit spending because it was necessary for the times and ultimately deserves at least some credit for winning the cold war. Where the circumstances of the times give Reagan some justification (excuse) the Bush administration never had any such reason other than they just liked to spend money.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many people who are "pro-abortion." Not wanting the government to be in charge of such a personal matter is a far cry from jumping for joy each time a poor girl in a terrible situation walks into a clinic.
Well in general, it's not different than classifying people who are anti-abortion as being anti-choice or against women's rights in general. That said, in the more narrow cases, I find partial birth abortions and the practice of allowing failed abortion, live-born babies to just die so horrific and inhumane that I don't think it unfair at all to classify someone in favor of those as pro-abortion. I get the slippery slope argument but there is a bright damn line and once a child is outside of the womb & born, it's clearly infanticide.
What can't be highlighted enough is the cut-throat competition. They were chasing the money - there was a market. But the market isn't remotely there (yet?) for solar cells. Activity is increasing & the market is growing, but the only way to actually create the same sort of motivation would be for the government to practically bankrupt itself artificially propping up the market. Maybe that's an extreme case - but when it's put out there that "we just need to do it like the tech industry/semiconductors did" it screams of a lack of understanding of markets. There are certainly places where the free market doesn't do such a great job - externalities and investors seem to have become entirely too short-sighted these days. It's probably more en vogue now than ever to slam capitalism, but that's exactly where credit for the explosion of technology & Moore's law belongs.
Maybe the answer is government/private prizes, I dunno.
I get the point you're making about Apple PR to some extent having to reap what they have sown. And generally, that's the sort of think I can sit back and appreciate, sometimes even take perverse pleasure in. But the truth is this wasn't really about full disclosure or health privacy - it was something nefarious and I can draw you a picture:
I took this to mean transition some one else in and re-assign them to another important project. Parent could have been clearer but I'm betting that's more what he meant.
That's not even the half of it. First of all, when the Feds come knocking, is it every really a gentle request? But the real issue here, the real reason for immunity is that in most cases, when there is a warrant, when the telecoms are sued, they can present the warrant in court as a defense of why they turned over info. But in these cases, not only is there no warrant, because the whole thing is classified & state secrets, they cannot defend themselves whatsoever. In many cases, they can't even say the feds asked for the information. I'm no fan of ATT or bit telecoms, but putting them in that situation just ain't fair.
There are any number of problems with the legislation - so many concerns about the whole thing, horrendous government transparency, serious constitutional violations, etc. This whole blow up over the immunity portion is just plain stupid.
Deterioration over time for burned CDs is much, much worse than pressed CDs. I've been creating interactive CD titles for almost 15 years. Every once in awhile I'll check our archives - pressed CDs from are mostly still OK. About 1 in 10 or so will have a failure when we try to copy the CDs to hard drive. Burned CDs - the master & backup master we originally created fair much worse. About 1 in 4 discs have at least one error that comes up when copying to hdd - and nearly half of those is actually totally unreadable.
Interestingly, pressed media results are petty flat - it's a gradual degrading over time. Burned CDs actually got a little better, then much worse moving from furthest back to more recent. I think this is partially manufacturing - initially the manufacturing improvements resulted in quality gains, but then price competition started to bring quality down. But mea culpa - over the years, we definitely went from using only premium quality media for masters to cheap media. Getting a viable master to the duper was the goal, not creating an archive that would last. Cheap media was just fine at the former - noticeably inferior at the latter.
I would absolutely not trust anything of high value to optical backup. In my experience, DVD-Rs are even worse than CD-Rs.
Any great NEW technology like efficient light bulbs or a cancer cure or whatever will usually have such a huge payoff to its developer that a few extra million isn't likely to add much extra incentive. If funders think it can be done then they'll fund it even without the prize. If those who would fund it see it as a long shot then the prize won't change the equation much.
I can't say that I disagree completely, but there are some extra wrinkles. One of them being, there's a certain degree of externality to these sort of endeavors. The energy savings aren't really a benefit to the makers of the lighting. The current manufacturers don't have a substantial incentive to do something revolutionary when they can keep selling what they are. Sure there would be some competitive advantage they might gain - but it's not really that different from fuel mileage in the US the last 25+ years. The market wasn't really clamoring for fuel efficiency so Detroit didn't place a high priority on it. The improvement/revolution probably needs to come from some one smaller or an outsider who isn't part of status quo, and prizes can be that motivation for those types to come up with a novel solution to a problem (that many don't even see). There's also the marketing factor. While some small company could build a better light bulb, if it's different enough to require additional infrastructure or fittings, they might not be able to build any momentum to even begin moving people forward. With $20 million and the publicity of being called a winner, they can gain that initial traction.
Responsibility comes when the action you did was intrinsically a crime (regardless of the consequences).
Context does matter and this idea of something being intrinsically a crime is well...imaginary. Lying under most circumstances is not criminal. Lying while under oath is. Shooting a gun in the woods is OK. Shooting at group of innocent people - very different. There are very few things that are absolutely bad/criminal intrinsically/in all cases.
The final outcome makes a difference as well. Driving drunk & crossing the center line is one thing. If there just happens to be another car on the road at the same time &place and you hit it & kill someone, it's a very different deal even though in truth, it could very well be the only difference was blind luck.
In this case, doing what she did to a grown up would most likely be seen as a practical joke. Doing it to a young girl who was emotionally vulnerable and suicidal to begin with is a very different situation. And we know that she knew the girl had problems because she said so in her own words, early on using the age old blame-the-victim strategy. In terms of the case of her defense, probably more than anything else, making public statements that the teen was suicidal may be what results in her conviction.
Without getting into the in's & out's of the particular charges and approach used against this woman (which is a separate issue) as far as justice goes, there's definitely a smell-test issue. It's quite clear that what this woman did was creepy, vicious and just plain wrong morally. Here actions resulted in something terrible - and any reasonable person would see that it tormenting the girl in this manner would very likely lead to this outcome.
Adobe likes competition about as much as Microsoft does. They had a very fine competitor in Macromedia & the two companies pushed each other along creating better products for their respective customers. Then they merged, ending the competition on many fronts and killing some very good products in the process.
As far as competing on tools - Photoshop is probably a good case to look at. Steep educational discounts & looking the other way as the kids grow up using pirated versions of their tools to become the defacto standard. Then they start implementing heavy handed anti-piracy measures that actually gets in the way of legitimate, paying customers. Oh and don't forget, getting rid of pretty much all of their programmers (because it's not like you need to do any sort of innovation anymore) and hiring out the occasional minor tweaks (that they call "upgrades" and charge a small fortune for) to the cheapest provider possible.
The minute someone using their published swf spec provides any sort of real threat to their market share or revenue stream, Adobe will figure out a way to squash them. Macromedia had been releasing the spec for swf for years (though as others have noted with more NDA/non-compete strings attached). Whenever the heat got turned up, they'd just wait a year or two until releasing the an updated version of the spec. And Macromedia was 66.6% less evil than Adobe.
Besides, wasn't there a similar situation with a deceased US soldier's Yahoo Mail account a while ago? If I recall, Yahoo forbid the family from accessing his account because it was his property.
I don't remember that case, but it seems pretty problematic to me especially if framed in the manner of "it was his property." If that's the legal box it fits in, then just like any physical property the inheritance can be determined based on the presence of a will and the probate laws of the state. Now if the accounts are instead, legally not property but a service contract between a person and the company, with terms that say in the event of death, it all gets deleted that's another story.
I'm running in bridge mode - I already had a perfectly good (definitely better than 2wire) wireless router but I think even if I didn't already have one, I'd still bridge it & buy a real router.
But this is most certainly not for the average joe. I struggled finding good documentation on how to do it and it was still some trial & error. They definitely don't support or encourage this - on the contrary it seemed convoluted & difficult to me.
Re:The article is good, it just fails to mention
on
Origin of the iPhone
·
· Score: 1
And how many of those models existed before the iPhone? Whether you like Apple & their products or not, the fact of the matter is the world is a better place with them in it. You can argue about whether they are truly innovative or just put things together & popularize it, but the buzz they generate and the money they make drives the competition to step up their game.
My old boss, who was a scratch golfer used to remind me as I was hacking away on the course: "Practice doesn't make perfect...practice makes permanent."
This was pretexting - which is illegal if you use it to get personal or financial information you don't have a right to. I don't know whether the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act would apply here, but if not, it seems like adding a wrinkle to the law making it also illegal to pretext with other motivations would make sense and not be so expansive to cause a ton of unintended consequences. They lied about who they were and created a fictitious person - to both get information and ultimately with malice they tormented the girl.
I personally fear no law that could be created to criminalize what they did.
The funny part is, I'll bet the clueless executives have had at least one profanely expensive "retreat" this year where they listened to expensive consultants's opinions on boosting employee morale and/or commitment.
Which reminds me of a former employer. One factor in the annual company bonus was determined by the scores from a survey on employee morale. Talk about talking out of both sides of your ass - "we take the survey very seriously so be truthful so we can better assess management & improve the company" and at the same time, "be honest & tell us the management has created a miserable work environment and we'll give you less money."
HTC Apache owner here - I bought it because of the hardware & thought I could learn to get used to the OS...more than anything else, I really liked the slide out keyboard and WiFi. It hard crashes about once a month - often while I'm talking on the phone. I can live with that frequency of crashing, I'm not complaining just stating they do crash - maybe you're lucky, maybe I'm unlucky, I don't know. But the OS is just so horrifically bad to use - the UI is miserable. And the built in apps? I chose Windows Mobile because I felt the Palm OS had just stagnated & was missing current features. But the address book and calendar on the Palm are just so much more usable than those on Windows Mobile. These are a couple of the most basic, but critical functions for a lot of users.
Slashdot Mirror
And from another source there have been information that the Infineon chipset never had been tested in a production environment.
I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it does seem hard to believe they'd ship without testing in production. Given that the same source wasn't complete certain that Infineon is even the supplier, I'd have to take that claim with a pretty good grain of salt.
Well, the alleged problems with Social Security are largely myths, promoted by people who'd like to see all that money directed into private investments instead: it'll stay solvent for decades, and at that point it'll only need small adjustments to stay solvent for decades more.
Believe what you want, but that doesn't make it true. People have been concerned with Social Security's solvency for decades and it's really only been very recently that the private investment push has really come out.
Are you saying it's impossible that voluntary funding might fail to provide enough money to run the entire system? I think it's awfully dangerous to base such a system on the idea that people will just keep funding it out of the kindness of their hearts -- if they're free to stop donating at any time, we can't ignore the possibility that they might do exactly that.
No I'm not. Are you saying it is impossible for the government to fail to provide enough money? But my argument is that it's less about money than actually delivering help to people. The government is moderately good at taking money from it's citizens. It's horrible at effectively putting that money to good use.
No insurance company is going to offer a contract with a premium of $0. Meanwhile, we-the-people want health care and retirement/survivor benefits to be available even to people who can't afford to pay a premium. How would privately funded insurance be able to deliver that?
You missed the my last line - the insurance companies don't have to offer it for nothing. The funding for the basic level for individuals who can't afford it themselves can still come from the government. Think of something like food stamps. The government doesn't try to control/manage grocery stores.
In the senate, it passed 91 to 8. Of the 8 No votes, 6 were Republicans, 2 were Democrats.
I know there are some difficulties with blanket classifying all R's as conservative and D's as liberal but the voting records only list party, not ideology. That said, I would call 197 to 10 House Democrats and all but 2 Senate Democrats as quite solid evidence of across the board support.
The federal government has the power to raise as much revenue as it needs to fund such programs. A private company or charity does not.
I suspect you and I have more in common in the results we'd like to see, but are just coming at this with different philosophies. Because I consider that a bug rather than a feature (of government) ;)
I do believe there is a role in the government providing a safety net (contrary to an earlier poster). I just think it should be as minimal as possible and society as a whole both those in need and those paying for them are better served by a government that sets up frameworks to deliver help rather thing doing it themselves. By this I don't mean funding either - I truly believe voluntary funding & charitable contributions could get us much further along than forced onces. By framework, I mean the tax & accounting rules as well as some uniform reporting requirements.
Specifically: the disability portion of social security is a good thing and while there are private sector solutions, they are substantially complex for full/widespread usage. Social Security's survivor benefits on the other hand are much more effectively solved by a life insurance. Our current health insurance disaster could be effectively dealt with by government providing a framework of coverage and letting the private sector provide at it. I can call hundreds of insurance companies and shop around for the best price for a 20 year term life insurance contract for $200,000. Why should health insurance be any different? What's missing is the framework - set up a handful of classifications/levels of coverage and the criteria that they must follow. From there, government can roll in funding for emergency services and some level of preventative care and it won't require the level of socialization of the national health care plans.
After my frustration boiled over today with incredible slowness editing some text and just plain moving around, and I finally completely disabled Aero & set Vista's appearance settings to maximize performance. I now have an OS that visually looks like the bastard child of Windows 2000 and Vista, but at least Flash CS3 runs closer to the speed Flash 8 ran on XP/OS X.
Then it seems you've already rejected the GP's position that "nobody should be forced to ... give up their money to help others". Congratulations! You aren't "calling BS" at all: we agree that the government must play a role here.
Not surprisingly, you're making an substantial (and incorrect) assumption here. That only the government can provide a safety net. I used to work for a fortune 500 company that was not-for profit (strange as that might sound). The company didn't have to pay taxes - instead was required to give what it's tax burden would have been to charitable funds. They always did considerably more. Know why this is allowed? Because the millions of dollars they delivered to help people was tremendously more effective at actually delivering the help than if it had been funneled through the federal government.
There were no voices saying that the previous Republican majority wasn't conservative until after the government failed miserably at everything it tried to do.
Not true. Many conservatives called the Bush Administration out for No Child Left behind being decidedly un-conservative. Clearly anti-federalist - a big chunk out of state & local rights/control. Beyond that, there were many compelling arguments by conservatives (liberals at the time we very much in favor of NCLB though they later changed) that NCLB was unconstitutional and as a result, at most, participation was optional.
Personally, it's always been about fiscal responsibility money/spending being about as objective of view of government reach as we have. Right or wrong, to some extent, I've always been able to partially justify Reagan's deficit spending because it was necessary for the times and ultimately deserves at least some credit for winning the cold war. Where the circumstances of the times give Reagan some justification (excuse) the Bush administration never had any such reason other than they just liked to spend money.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many people who are "pro-abortion." Not wanting the government to be in charge of such a personal matter is a far cry from jumping for joy each time a poor girl in a terrible situation walks into a clinic.
Well in general, it's not different than classifying people who are anti-abortion as being anti-choice or against women's rights in general. That said, in the more narrow cases, I find partial birth abortions and the practice of allowing failed abortion, live-born babies to just die so horrific and inhumane that I don't think it unfair at all to classify someone in favor of those as pro-abortion. I get the slippery slope argument but there is a bright damn line and once a child is outside of the womb & born, it's clearly infanticide.
What can't be highlighted enough is the cut-throat competition. They were chasing the money - there was a market. But the market isn't remotely there (yet?) for solar cells. Activity is increasing & the market is growing, but the only way to actually create the same sort of motivation would be for the government to practically bankrupt itself artificially propping up the market. Maybe that's an extreme case - but when it's put out there that "we just need to do it like the tech industry/semiconductors did" it screams of a lack of understanding of markets. There are certainly places where the free market doesn't do such a great job - externalities and investors seem to have become entirely too short-sighted these days. It's probably more en vogue now than ever to slam capitalism, but that's exactly where credit for the explosion of technology & Moore's law belongs.
Maybe the answer is government/private prizes, I dunno.
I get the point you're making about Apple PR to some extent having to reap what they have sown. And generally, that's the sort of think I can sit back and appreciate, sometimes even take perverse pleasure in. But the truth is this wasn't really about full disclosure or health privacy - it was something nefarious and I can draw you a picture:
/ /\/ /
170
| /
|
|
| _
|/
151
I took this to mean transition some one else in and re-assign them to another important project. Parent could have been clearer but I'm betting that's more what he meant.
There are any number of problems with the legislation - so many concerns about the whole thing, horrendous government transparency, serious constitutional violations, etc. This whole blow up over the immunity portion is just plain stupid.
Yeah - but glass masters are cool and I'm guessing they'll last a long time.
Interestingly, pressed media results are petty flat - it's a gradual degrading over time. Burned CDs actually got a little better, then much worse moving from furthest back to more recent. I think this is partially manufacturing - initially the manufacturing improvements resulted in quality gains, but then price competition started to bring quality down. But mea culpa - over the years, we definitely went from using only premium quality media for masters to cheap media. Getting a viable master to the duper was the goal, not creating an archive that would last. Cheap media was just fine at the former - noticeably inferior at the latter.
I would absolutely not trust anything of high value to optical backup. In my experience, DVD-Rs are even worse than CD-Rs.
That's 2 hours of my life I won't get back trying to help out a friend.
The final outcome makes a difference as well. Driving drunk & crossing the center line is one thing. If there just happens to be another car on the road at the same time &place and you hit it & kill someone, it's a very different deal even though in truth, it could very well be the only difference was blind luck.
In this case, doing what she did to a grown up would most likely be seen as a practical joke. Doing it to a young girl who was emotionally vulnerable and suicidal to begin with is a very different situation. And we know that she knew the girl had problems because she said so in her own words, early on using the age old blame-the-victim strategy. In terms of the case of her defense, probably more than anything else, making public statements that the teen was suicidal may be what results in her conviction.
Without getting into the in's & out's of the particular charges and approach used against this woman (which is a separate issue) as far as justice goes, there's definitely a smell-test issue. It's quite clear that what this woman did was creepy, vicious and just plain wrong morally. Here actions resulted in something terrible - and any reasonable person would see that it tormenting the girl in this manner would very likely lead to this outcome.
Adobe likes competition about as much as Microsoft does. They had a very fine competitor in Macromedia & the two companies pushed each other along creating better products for their respective customers. Then they merged, ending the competition on many fronts and killing some very good products in the process.
As far as competing on tools - Photoshop is probably a good case to look at. Steep educational discounts & looking the other way as the kids grow up using pirated versions of their tools to become the defacto standard. Then they start implementing heavy handed anti-piracy measures that actually gets in the way of legitimate, paying customers. Oh and don't forget, getting rid of pretty much all of their programmers (because it's not like you need to do any sort of innovation anymore) and hiring out the occasional minor tweaks (that they call "upgrades" and charge a small fortune for) to the cheapest provider possible.
The minute someone using their published swf spec provides any sort of real threat to their market share or revenue stream, Adobe will figure out a way to squash them. Macromedia had been releasing the spec for swf for years (though as others have noted with more NDA/non-compete strings attached). Whenever the heat got turned up, they'd just wait a year or two until releasing the an updated version of the spec. And Macromedia was 66.6% less evil than Adobe.
I'm running in bridge mode - I already had a perfectly good (definitely better than 2wire) wireless router but I think even if I didn't already have one, I'd still bridge it & buy a real router. But this is most certainly not for the average joe. I struggled finding good documentation on how to do it and it was still some trial & error. They definitely don't support or encourage this - on the contrary it seemed convoluted & difficult to me.
And how many of those models existed before the iPhone? Whether you like Apple & their products or not, the fact of the matter is the world is a better place with them in it. You can argue about whether they are truly innovative or just put things together & popularize it, but the buzz they generate and the money they make drives the competition to step up their game.
My old boss, who was a scratch golfer used to remind me as I was hacking away on the course: "Practice doesn't make perfect...practice makes permanent."
I personally fear no law that could be created to criminalize what they did.
Which reminds me of a former employer. One factor in the annual company bonus was determined by the scores from a survey on employee morale. Talk about talking out of both sides of your ass - "we take the survey very seriously so be truthful so we can better assess management & improve the company" and at the same time, "be honest & tell us the management has created a miserable work environment and we'll give you less money."
HTC Apache owner here - I bought it because of the hardware & thought I could learn to get used to the OS...more than anything else, I really liked the slide out keyboard and WiFi. It hard crashes about once a month - often while I'm talking on the phone. I can live with that frequency of crashing, I'm not complaining just stating they do crash - maybe you're lucky, maybe I'm unlucky, I don't know. But the OS is just so horrifically bad to use - the UI is miserable. And the built in apps? I chose Windows Mobile because I felt the Palm OS had just stagnated & was missing current features. But the address book and calendar on the Palm are just so much more usable than those on Windows Mobile. These are a couple of the most basic, but critical functions for a lot of users.