However, the reentry heat one normally thinks of comes from one of two additional vectors (sometimes both!) that make the effect larger than it would be from a simple drop from a balloon.
First, most objects fall from orbit. Depending on how high of an orbit they were in, they were deliberately put at a high lateral orbit speed somewhere below escape velocity.Which as it turns out is pretty damn fast when compared to the atmosphere, so objects returning from orbit "skid in" at high speed compared to the surface.
Some objects from from faster than escape velocity (space rocks, stuff coming back from orbiting the sun or to the moon) and have an additional "get there" velocity.
While a super-atmosphere sky diver might have to contend with speed related friction heat, it's not a large given like it is with other scenarios. With proper propulsion breaking it is possible to step out of a "stopped" capsule after coming in from a moon mission (for example) and drop to the earth in just a specialized suit.
It's not PRACTICAL to do so if you are running a space mission, but it's possible. Kittinger's missions were for investigating other things than reentry from orbit of humans though.
The problem is WHO makes the mess. WYSIWYG editing lets SuziMcMarketing do "minor" updates to the web site, which invariably make spaghetti code and use proprietary IE-only features.
Sites with WYSIWYG editing that are updated by folks that know what not to touch, and can learn some procedures stay nice and clean.
In other words, the approach-ability of WYSIWYG editors is the problem, not the fact they have GUI tools to do what is ultimately a code generating thing.
That said, I code sites in DreamWeaver, but stay in the code view most of the time. I have problems visualizing what the code does until I mess with it a bit, and working exclusively in code view would have kept me from coding at all. Only when it comes to decorating text with formatting do I do input in the GUI frame of the editor. DW is good for managing files and pointing out errors and taking the tediousness out of file paths, etc. If you do any serious work with tables, FrontPage is still the best tool for the job. (Seriously!)
All that built in menu crap I don't touch. If I don't type it out, it's not in the site, but it's stupid to walk away from a tool that may get around shortcomings or characteristics of how your own brain works just because some other nerd says "his way" is better.
Right, and none of this can help the interviewees that leave before the problem is fixed. The interviewees, take on considerable risk to themselves for _maybe_ helping others? Yeah, the guy above who said "fuck that" is wholly correct, if a bit blunt.
Actually you're the idiot. I know several people on the gov't dole. And the ONLY reason they say do NOT get a job is that they would need to get a job pay X amount so it would be worth getting off the dole. They say why get off the gov't teat IF they(and their family) would be worse off.
This is exactly right. They also go through the whole "get job think it's great, do the usual screwup, get fired/laid off, struggle with new rules, get back on dole at slightly lower rate" cycle.
There really should be some sort of "low paying job but teaches you stuff" substitute run by the government that gets put in place in replacement for just getting a check. Like "you get X if you don't do this, and you get X+Y if you do this, and you complete this training"
There are lots and lots of people who can work, but see the short term only (because that's the way they are) and the short term is clearly on the side of "stay on the dole".
I know several people in this cycle. Sure they could boot strap themselves however the reality is, some people wont do that. Until the point at which society decides to just grind them up for soilent green, society will have to deal with them, so wishful thinking about those people being different needs to be stifled. It's useless.
I think he means that he can go back to slinging shit on Youtube unfettered by a real name.
The thing is, one of Youtube's greatest assets is the lowest common demononator crap people post there. They may be trying to "clean it up" by removing some of that. Which is both stupid, and won't work (because never will they get a high enough ratio of people using G+ and posting Youtube to make the signal to noise ratio to where they want.)
They'll have to remove comments completely and let only G+ users comment.
People will just leave Youtube and go somewhere else in that case, and they'll (google) will end up realizing their ad revenue from Youtube suddenly dried up and they'll kill Youtube. (Which has to be very expensive to run, file sizes, processing, local caching, not to mention the copyright leech lawsuits.)
The UI has improved quite at lot since it debuted. Not long ago, I visited it for the first time in months and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.
It is much better than Facebook as a place to communicate people who share the same interests - photogrpahy is a common example.
I don't think it's as good as Facebook for the personal network of friends stuff.
In the long run I think it will stay around. And honestly, as much as I distrust Facebook, it is still useful to have the major parts of the web divvied up amongst more than one company. The current situation - Facebook has the social network, Google has (nearly) everything else - is better than Google having everything.
So, it's a replacement for usenet and forums. (Which do have a sort of social aspect to them.)
I have "Friends" that I have absolutely zero things in common, and don't really want to discuss things with them, but who still entertain me (and me, them) on Facebook.
I hope that by the time they get around to linking Gmail in with Google+ that Yahoo has fixed their email... so I can switch back.
When Google stops abruptly deleting services simply because users didn't use them the way the think thought they would, maybe... if it doesn't suck and it fulfills the roles I need.
Google has a long and sordid history of shutting shit down that's just perfect because they want to steer people into something else. Sometimes years and years after releasing it. Hell, do we know for sure Gmail is out of "beta" yet? What's to stop them from shutting that off arbitrarily?
Furthermore, they've fucked with usenet and the online forum replacement repeatedly, Google video, they are shutting down IG (one of the FEW useful things they made in the last 5 years) etc etc.
People don't like having all their stuff connected together. Sometimes they want to say shit that not everybody will see, be able to track, or dig up later. At least Facebook doesn't follow people around and then repost and archive everything, they just follow people around to do ad tracking. (Which is what the "like" button on all the news and many other sites is doing. It's a web bug they trick site owners into installing.)
NO FUCKING WAY am I going to spend the time to build a profile and seek out relationships with existing people or those I haven't met yet on Google's temporary fly-by-night more-invasive-than-it's-worth crap-ass product.
From what I read, the shooter came into the theater from outside through an emergency exit door. I don't know how he got it open, unless perhaps someone had propped it open to sneak their friends into the theater, that happens at my local theater all the time...
Witness reports indicate he paid for a ticket, left via the door (presumably propping it open), suited up and armed himself and came back in. His vehicle was out back there.
Many of those doors are down a dark hallway, and at 12 AM starting time it would be an easy thing to miss that it was open, and an easy disabling of the latch to get it open again.
We need to inject the idea that e-waste collection is worth it into the Meth-heads. Then households just gotta take the stuff to the curb and let the skinnies pick it up.
Heck, legalize Meth at the drop off stations and let them buy and use (can't carry) the stuff there. Problem solved over night.
The real problem with this is back-end user fees. I bet someone doing a little research could show how much of that stuff gets serendipitously stashed in the garbage stream by someone left with 3 CRT monitors of unuseful size left by dead grandparents in their basement. People won't pay $150 to get rid of three screens to some hippy-deluded municipality to haul that shit away. They just put it in the dumpster at the Quickie Mart late at night.
If there are disposal fees, they have to be UP FRONT and when the purchase is made. Then, anything that was made before the fees started needs to get grandfathered too.
"Recycling" the shit is a non fucking starter if people have to pay to get it done. Especially if they SEE and FEEL the payment personally.
Blocking cellphone signals (in the US, anyway) is illegal everywhere except hospitals (who block them to keep them from interfering with medical equipment).
The reason is because if an emergency happens, people need to be able to dial 911. At the hospital, dialing 911 is moot since you're you're already there.
No it isn't illegal. Blocking with passive construction means is fine. Hell, half the big-box stores do it accidentally by building steel supported steel trussed steel walled buildings.
Blocking using ACTIVE equipment that broadcasts something is illegal.
For a theater, it's a simple matter of decorative wall coverings made from proper metals and grounded. Of course, they'll have to do a good job of it or it'll be "Hello? Hello! HEELLLOOO I AM IN THE THEATER ENJOYING A MOVIE! HOW ABOUT YOU? YOUR SISTER POP THE BABY YET? WHO'DA DADDY?"
Get your fat ass up and go to the front desk if you need to make an emergency call.
It's sorta funny to read this type of bleating in a Slashdot article that appears on the same day as one that says the Chinese government has backdoors in 80% of Telecoms to sniff information.
Look, ya dumb sheep.
They are already waging war against us, enemy and "friendly" states already use their government resources to steal intellectual property and wage industrial espionage against the United States. You obviously don't actually run any internet-facing services or you would see this shit in your logs.
The fact that our government doesn't do it aggressively too is the odd part. It's time to man up and fight back or your children (assuming you manage to breed) will be speaking Chinese and working for Russian mobsters for a daily loaf of bread.
Oh christ. Are you that lacking in imagination you can't think of any way that possibly, some techies could spread this out a bit?
How about, ISPs can run their own campaigns and then voluntarily ask to have their blocks shut off on their schedule?
Or, the DNS server admins do it on a schedule using simple hash codes. "Hey, ISP, if your IP address block octets add up to X hash, we are blocking it on Monday. If it's Y, it will be next week.
ISPs themselves could block traffic to these servers slowly to spread out the service calls.
Oh sure, just throw up your hands and spread your ass-cheeks for the ass fucking by the bad guys, because you refuse to think. While, letting the bad guys get away with more, and harming all the rest of us more. Fuck you and everybody that thinks like you.
You know, just for once, the people that are too stupid to run computers without getting infected should pay the pain on this. This "fix" only "fixes" it for a few people who would be inconvenienced on the immediate time frame.
If the pain really got to the people that got infected, they might do things differently, like, not get infected or learn a little teensy bit about using a computer, or maybe vote for politicians that actually tell the cops and their analogs to go find, and prosecute the malware purveyors.
This fix is like patching up the kid that got shot by a gang banger, and not bothering to go arrest the gangbanger, let alone prosecute them.
It's stupid, it's lazy and over the long run it won't work.
With algorithmic pricing, the Amazon marketplace is just operating as an automated dutch auction. It's how markets should behave: raw supply and demand, with no collusion or other market distortions propping up prices.
Because everyone automatically undercutting their competitors by a few cents over and over until everyone is selling at cost and all but a couple players eventually have to shut down because they can't afford to run a profitless business forever, whereupon the few remaining players can finally raise prices... isn't effectively collusion or a market distortion.
.... and the Chinese will simply run a few more hours and make the supply available to the next startup person that wants to try because the artificially inflated price only has one seller so there's lots of room for a startup.
Your worst case scenario horror story is weak (friendly lucky duck) sauce.
They aren't selling 8000 kilowatt step down transformers on Amazon, it's LED based non-replaceable battery finger flashlights and other crap.
They already gave up. In, a uncharacteristic (to Japanese) way, they threw up their hands and quit the nuclear power game over what amounts to a relatively minor aspect of a major natural disaster.
What's left to talk about? Shut up, clean it up and start whining about not having enough power.
Politicians bloviating about this is a COMPLETE waste of time. They'd be MUCH better off worrying about the fact the Korean car industry is about to wipe the floor with their kimonos in most major markets. Korean cars are both as good as, and cheaper than, Japanese cars are and Americans have noticed this.
One could just as easily say, Fukushima would have not been a disaster had the nuclear power been driven to the point that it was replaced with better and safer models long ago.
The middle managers are the ones that decide the cuts. "What does IT do for us anyway?!" (Never mind the fact that IT is also their research.) I think your guess about what is going to happen relies too much on cold introspection of a nerd, and not enough on "what's good for MY job".
And anyway, what the R&D has managed to produce, sucks anyway. They SHOULD be cut. The phones, OS, Apps, and batteries all suck.
I don't know about any of that stuff, but here's what I do know.
Everybody that I know that owns a Blackberry, curses at it every time I see the thing.
Hardware, apps, OS, and batteries all suffer inconsistencies and massive problems.
iPhone, Android, and other type phones hook directly to Exchange server now.
Marketing shmarketing, if people fucking HATE THEM the only way the phones and services will be sold is if they compete on lower price. Which is going to make them suck more.
Until they can get some Chinese wiz-kid manufacturer to fix all their problems for them, they are fucked. Marketing is going to do nothing but waste more money they SHOULD be putting into making sure their phones don't suck.
As much as I hate to say this, My.MSN.com seems to have basically a clone of iGoogle. Anybody wondering about it, should go look at it and try the "Customize" and "Add Content" features. I found everything I use on iGoogle there.
I don't use an MSN email box, but could add Gmail as a bookmark easily enough, that's how I use it in iGoogle now anyway.
Plus, switching from Google to Microsoft over this will be an appropriate "FUCK YOU RIGHT BACK COCKSUCKER" to the folks over at Google for fucking with something that's actually useful.
Long answer: Yahoo sucks, is for retards, clutter is good in their eyes, heavy downloaded graphics is good in their eyes, the mail interface sucks, the shit pushes pop up windows, toolbars, and other faggotry, makes NOISES, etc.
Fuck yahoo. I'll make my own fucking web page and hide it on my company web site in some deep nested folder before I use that monkey crap again.
Aside from a locked-down desktop, the whole strength of iGoogle is it's an online web page you customize.
Granted, I blocked all the ads and only use three, maybe four of the little plug ins (a lot of the third party ones just didn't work right, so the reliable ones were the default offerings).
Not having to finger-fuck a browser on whatever computer I am in front of and get all I need by simply logging in was the major attraction. People get PISSED if you install a toolbar. They DONT get pissed if you just add another URL to their browse history when you use their computer.
I have all my work and fun related bookmarks that I want at the tip of my fingers on it. I use it every day, many times a day. Plus, from there I can use Gmail, Documents (now "Drive" whatever that is supposed to mean), etc.
Google tried to change the bookmarks by limiting it to five, and not allowing the categories and it was a huge problem.
Like it or not, there's a market for a "build it myself" link list. If I have to, I'll build my own I guess, or maybe find another service.
This whole "apps apps apps phones" thing is stupid, and going to blow over. Ignoring this fact is going to get Google in second place some day.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
However, the reentry heat one normally thinks of comes from one of two additional vectors (sometimes both!) that make the effect larger than it would be from a simple drop from a balloon.
First, most objects fall from orbit. Depending on how high of an orbit they were in, they were deliberately put at a high lateral orbit speed somewhere below escape velocity.Which as it turns out is pretty damn fast when compared to the atmosphere, so objects returning from orbit "skid in" at high speed compared to the surface.
Some objects from from faster than escape velocity (space rocks, stuff coming back from orbiting the sun or to the moon) and have an additional "get there" velocity.
While a super-atmosphere sky diver might have to contend with speed related friction heat, it's not a large given like it is with other scenarios. With proper propulsion breaking it is possible to step out of a "stopped" capsule after coming in from a moon mission (for example) and drop to the earth in just a specialized suit.
It's not PRACTICAL to do so if you are running a space mission, but it's possible. Kittinger's missions were for investigating other things than reentry from orbit of humans though.
While this is true, they make a mess.
The problem is WHO makes the mess. WYSIWYG editing lets SuziMcMarketing do "minor" updates to the web site, which invariably make spaghetti code and use proprietary IE-only features.
Sites with WYSIWYG editing that are updated by folks that know what not to touch, and can learn some procedures stay nice and clean.
In other words, the approach-ability of WYSIWYG editors is the problem, not the fact they have GUI tools to do what is ultimately a code generating thing.
That said, I code sites in DreamWeaver, but stay in the code view most of the time. I have problems visualizing what the code does until I mess with it a bit, and working exclusively in code view would have kept me from coding at all. Only when it comes to decorating text with formatting do I do input in the GUI frame of the editor. DW is good for managing files and pointing out errors and taking the tediousness out of file paths, etc. If you do any serious work with tables, FrontPage is still the best tool for the job. (Seriously!)
All that built in menu crap I don't touch. If I don't type it out, it's not in the site, but it's stupid to walk away from a tool that may get around shortcomings or characteristics of how your own brain works just because some other nerd says "his way" is better.
Right, and none of this can help the interviewees that leave before the problem is fixed. The interviewees, take on considerable risk to themselves for _maybe_ helping others? Yeah, the guy above who said "fuck that" is wholly correct, if a bit blunt.
You, sir, are an idiot.
Actually you're the idiot. I know several people on the gov't dole. And the ONLY reason they say do NOT get a job is that they would need to get a job pay X amount so it would be worth getting off the dole. They say why get off the gov't teat IF they(and their family) would be worse off.
This is exactly right. They also go through the whole "get job think it's great, do the usual screwup, get fired/laid off, struggle with new rules, get back on dole at slightly lower rate" cycle.
There really should be some sort of "low paying job but teaches you stuff" substitute run by the government that gets put in place in replacement for just getting a check. Like "you get X if you don't do this, and you get X+Y if you do this, and you complete this training"
There are lots and lots of people who can work, but see the short term only (because that's the way they are) and the short term is clearly on the side of "stay on the dole".
I know several people in this cycle. Sure they could boot strap themselves however the reality is, some people wont do that. Until the point at which society decides to just grind them up for soilent green, society will have to deal with them, so wishful thinking about those people being different needs to be stifled. It's useless.
I think he means that he can go back to slinging shit on Youtube unfettered by a real name.
The thing is, one of Youtube's greatest assets is the lowest common demononator crap people post there. They may be trying to "clean it up" by removing some of that. Which is both stupid, and won't work (because never will they get a high enough ratio of people using G+ and posting Youtube to make the signal to noise ratio to where they want.)
They'll have to remove comments completely and let only G+ users comment.
People will just leave Youtube and go somewhere else in that case, and they'll (google) will end up realizing their ad revenue from Youtube suddenly dried up and they'll kill Youtube. (Which has to be very expensive to run, file sizes, processing, local caching, not to mention the copyright leech lawsuits.)
The UI has improved quite at lot since it debuted. Not long ago, I visited it for the first time in months and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.
It is much better than Facebook as a place to communicate people who share the same interests - photogrpahy is a common example.
I don't think it's as good as Facebook for the personal network of friends stuff.
In the long run I think it will stay around. And honestly, as much as I distrust Facebook, it is still useful to have the major parts of the web divvied up amongst more than one company. The current situation - Facebook has the social network, Google has (nearly) everything else - is better than Google having everything.
So, it's a replacement for usenet and forums. (Which do have a sort of social aspect to them.)
I have "Friends" that I have absolutely zero things in common, and don't really want to discuss things with them, but who still entertain me (and me, them) on Facebook.
I hope that by the time they get around to linking Gmail in with Google+ that Yahoo has fixed their email... so I can switch back.
When Google stops abruptly deleting services simply because users didn't use them the way the think thought they would, maybe... if it doesn't suck and it fulfills the roles I need.
Google has a long and sordid history of shutting shit down that's just perfect because they want to steer people into something else. Sometimes years and years after releasing it. Hell, do we know for sure Gmail is out of "beta" yet? What's to stop them from shutting that off arbitrarily?
Furthermore, they've fucked with usenet and the online forum replacement repeatedly, Google video, they are shutting down IG (one of the FEW useful things they made in the last 5 years) etc etc.
People don't like having all their stuff connected together. Sometimes they want to say shit that not everybody will see, be able to track, or dig up later. At least Facebook doesn't follow people around and then repost and archive everything, they just follow people around to do ad tracking. (Which is what the "like" button on all the news and many other sites is doing. It's a web bug they trick site owners into installing.)
NO FUCKING WAY am I going to spend the time to build a profile and seek out relationships with existing people or those I haven't met yet on Google's temporary fly-by-night more-invasive-than-it's-worth crap-ass product.
"A year from now, ten, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make peoplebetter. And I do not hold to that. "
Progressives have just made Reavers. Not like in the story, but just as scary.
From what I read, the shooter came into the theater from outside through an emergency exit door. I don't know how he got it open, unless perhaps someone had propped it open to sneak their friends into the theater, that happens at my local theater all the time...
Witness reports indicate he paid for a ticket, left via the door (presumably propping it open), suited up and armed himself and came back in. His vehicle was out back there.
Many of those doors are down a dark hallway, and at 12 AM starting time it would be an easy thing to miss that it was open, and an easy disabling of the latch to get it open again.
We need to inject the idea that e-waste collection is worth it into the Meth-heads. Then households just gotta take the stuff to the curb and let the skinnies pick it up.
Heck, legalize Meth at the drop off stations and let them buy and use (can't carry) the stuff there. Problem solved over night.
The real problem with this is back-end user fees. I bet someone doing a little research could show how much of that stuff gets serendipitously stashed in the garbage stream by someone left with 3 CRT monitors of unuseful size left by dead grandparents in their basement. People won't pay $150 to get rid of three screens to some hippy-deluded municipality to haul that shit away. They just put it in the dumpster at the Quickie Mart late at night.
If there are disposal fees, they have to be UP FRONT and when the purchase is made. Then, anything that was made before the fees started needs to get grandfathered too.
"Recycling" the shit is a non fucking starter if people have to pay to get it done. Especially if they SEE and FEEL the payment personally.
Blocking cellphone signals (in the US, anyway) is illegal everywhere except hospitals (who block them to keep them from interfering with medical equipment). The reason is because if an emergency happens, people need to be able to dial 911. At the hospital, dialing 911 is moot since you're you're already there.
No it isn't illegal. Blocking with passive construction means is fine. Hell, half the big-box stores do it accidentally by building steel supported steel trussed steel walled buildings.
Blocking using ACTIVE equipment that broadcasts something is illegal.
For a theater, it's a simple matter of decorative wall coverings made from proper metals and grounded. Of course, they'll have to do a good job of it or it'll be "Hello? Hello! HEELLLOOO I AM IN THE THEATER ENJOYING A MOVIE! HOW ABOUT YOU? YOUR SISTER POP THE BABY YET? WHO'DA DADDY?"
Get your fat ass up and go to the front desk if you need to make an emergency call.
It's sorta funny to read this type of bleating in a Slashdot article that appears on the same day as one that says the Chinese government has backdoors in 80% of Telecoms to sniff information.
Look, ya dumb sheep.
They are already waging war against us, enemy and "friendly" states already use their government resources to steal intellectual property and wage industrial espionage against the United States. You obviously don't actually run any internet-facing services or you would see this shit in your logs.
The fact that our government doesn't do it aggressively too is the odd part. It's time to man up and fight back or your children (assuming you manage to breed) will be speaking Chinese and working for Russian mobsters for a daily loaf of bread.
Oh christ. Are you that lacking in imagination you can't think of any way that possibly, some techies could spread this out a bit?
How about, ISPs can run their own campaigns and then voluntarily ask to have their blocks shut off on their schedule?
Or, the DNS server admins do it on a schedule using simple hash codes. "Hey, ISP, if your IP address block octets add up to X hash, we are blocking it on Monday. If it's Y, it will be next week.
ISPs themselves could block traffic to these servers slowly to spread out the service calls.
Oh sure, just throw up your hands and spread your ass-cheeks for the ass fucking by the bad guys, because you refuse to think. While, letting the bad guys get away with more, and harming all the rest of us more. Fuck you and everybody that thinks like you.
iPhones work.
Whereas, Blackberries do not.
You know, just for once, the people that are too stupid to run computers without getting infected should pay the pain on this. This "fix" only "fixes" it for a few people who would be inconvenienced on the immediate time frame.
If the pain really got to the people that got infected, they might do things differently, like, not get infected or learn a little teensy bit about using a computer, or maybe vote for politicians that actually tell the cops and their analogs to go find, and prosecute the malware purveyors.
This fix is like patching up the kid that got shot by a gang banger, and not bothering to go arrest the gangbanger, let alone prosecute them.
It's stupid, it's lazy and over the long run it won't work.
With algorithmic pricing, the Amazon marketplace is just operating as an automated dutch auction. It's how markets should behave: raw supply and demand, with no collusion or other market distortions propping up prices.
Because everyone automatically undercutting their competitors by a few cents over and over until everyone is selling at cost and all but a couple players eventually have to shut down because they can't afford to run a profitless business forever, whereupon the few remaining players can finally raise prices ... isn't effectively collusion or a market distortion.
.... and the Chinese will simply run a few more hours and make the supply available to the next startup person that wants to try because the artificially inflated price only has one seller so there's lots of room for a startup.
Your worst case scenario horror story is weak (friendly lucky duck) sauce.
They aren't selling 8000 kilowatt step down transformers on Amazon, it's LED based non-replaceable battery finger flashlights and other crap.
They already gave up. In, a uncharacteristic (to Japanese) way, they threw up their hands and quit the nuclear power game over what amounts to a relatively minor aspect of a major natural disaster.
What's left to talk about? Shut up, clean it up and start whining about not having enough power.
Politicians bloviating about this is a COMPLETE waste of time. They'd be MUCH better off worrying about the fact the Korean car industry is about to wipe the floor with their kimonos in most major markets. Korean cars are both as good as, and cheaper than, Japanese cars are and Americans have noticed this.
One could just as easily say, Fukushima would have not been a disaster had the nuclear power been driven to the point that it was replaced with better and safer models long ago.
The middle managers are the ones that decide the cuts. "What does IT do for us anyway?!" (Never mind the fact that IT is also their research.) I think your guess about what is going to happen relies too much on cold introspection of a nerd, and not enough on "what's good for MY job".
And anyway, what the R&D has managed to produce, sucks anyway. They SHOULD be cut. The phones, OS, Apps, and batteries all suck.
I don't know about any of that stuff, but here's what I do know.
Everybody that I know that owns a Blackberry, curses at it every time I see the thing.
Hardware, apps, OS, and batteries all suffer inconsistencies and massive problems.
iPhone, Android, and other type phones hook directly to Exchange server now.
Marketing shmarketing, if people fucking HATE THEM the only way the phones and services will be sold is if they compete on lower price. Which is going to make them suck more.
Until they can get some Chinese wiz-kid manufacturer to fix all their problems for them, they are fucked. Marketing is going to do nothing but waste more money they SHOULD be putting into making sure their phones don't suck.
As much as I hate to say this, My.MSN.com seems to have basically a clone of iGoogle. Anybody wondering about it, should go look at it and try the "Customize" and "Add Content" features. I found everything I use on iGoogle there.
I don't use an MSN email box, but could add Gmail as a bookmark easily enough, that's how I use it in iGoogle now anyway.
Plus, switching from Google to Microsoft over this will be an appropriate "FUCK YOU RIGHT BACK COCKSUCKER" to the folks over at Google for fucking with something that's actually useful.
Short answer: Yahoo sucks.
Long answer: Yahoo sucks, is for retards, clutter is good in their eyes, heavy downloaded graphics is good in their eyes, the mail interface sucks, the shit pushes pop up windows, toolbars, and other faggotry, makes NOISES, etc.
Fuck yahoo. I'll make my own fucking web page and hide it on my company web site in some deep nested folder before I use that monkey crap again.
Aside from a locked-down desktop, the whole strength of iGoogle is it's an online web page you customize.
Granted, I blocked all the ads and only use three, maybe four of the little plug ins (a lot of the third party ones just didn't work right, so the reliable ones were the default offerings).
Not having to finger-fuck a browser on whatever computer I am in front of and get all I need by simply logging in was the major attraction. People get PISSED if you install a toolbar. They DONT get pissed if you just add another URL to their browse history when you use their computer.
I have all my work and fun related bookmarks that I want at the tip of my fingers on it. I use it every day, many times a day. Plus, from there I can use Gmail, Documents (now "Drive" whatever that is supposed to mean), etc.
Google tried to change the bookmarks by limiting it to five, and not allowing the categories and it was a huge problem.
Like it or not, there's a market for a "build it myself" link list. If I have to, I'll build my own I guess, or maybe find another service.
This whole "apps apps apps phones" thing is stupid, and going to blow over. Ignoring this fact is going to get Google in second place some day.
USA! USA! USA! Fuck yea! Euro-types better watch out or we'll tank our banking industry again just to get them.
Why did you go to New York City?
And, it's an "timothy".