DISQUS

I think maybe the quote meant to be $1M/year for each hour he puts into maintaining the site per week?

It's true that there are more committed people at a pay site. Plenty of Fish wouldn't be making as much as they do if there weren't good reasons to use a pay dating site, since most, if not all, of PlentyOfFish's ad inventory is for other dating sites.

Liam, I'm not impressed by other companies attempts to compete with the iPhone. Honestly, I really expected more, sooner.

When (if?) they catch up, I can imagine that they'll be suitable platforms for mobile web apps. To the extent that native apps are important though, I have my doubts that they'll be able to catch up with Apple.

The other smartphones were around before the iPhone, and their sales were growing at a healthy rate, and yet mobile application sales were stagnating. How are they going to turn that around?

They might be able to turn that around by taking a page out of Apple's book, but they are already at a disadvantage. They'll have to negotiate with the carriers if they want to make application acquisition as seamless as it is with the iPhone. They don't have the presence on end-user desktops that Apple has with Macs and iTunes to use as both a lever for dealing with the carriers, and to provide a desktop compliment to the mobile user experience.

Let's face it, developers may want options so they don't become too dependent on a given platform, but they don't want too many options. The personal computer world used to have and incompatible Apple, Atari, Commodore & Tandy, not to mention various CP/M systems, before the IBM PC (and MS-DOS) came along and provided the critical mass to create a virtuous circle that lead to mainstream adoption.

We can quibble whether we've hit that inflection point in the mobile space yet, but I think most will agree, it's not far off. So, is there anyone with ambitions in the space who isn't going to bet on Apple? My guess, almost everyone bets on Apple, but their other bets are split among multiple contenders.

I've seen some crazy speculation from other people about the "product transition" mentioned in the Apple earnings conference call. I think you are on the right track. The MacBook Pro could use a major update, and wacking some weight/bulk out of the package is the first place I'd start.

I would like to see a Mac mini-tower for gamers who want to dual boot into Windows and be able to upgrade their video cards frequently.

Yeah yeah yeah. Honestly, none of the quoted prices sound outrageous as long as there the apps are of good quality. I agree that $2 for a novelty like iBeer is silly, but then again, it is only $2, the cost of two music tracks, or a couple of good doughnuts.

I find the Google App to be rather odd. For one thing, it doesn't look very iPhone like. For another, most of the other app icons don't look very iPhone like, and their functionality gets launched in Safari (it doesn't even do the embedded browser thing).

I think it is really an Android app running on the iPhone.

Windows only.
Booo!

I'd heard that they spun this out into a separate company, and then decided to reabsorb it (and it may have originated as an acquisition).

Interesting. I wonder when toyota will ship a plug-in hybrid.

I wonder how many users are actually behind those >15M profiles.

I don't know where you live, but the $1,500/month they quoted you is pretty ridiculous and well beyond T1 pricing. Speakeasy (among others) will provision a business class T1 for $350, including telco charges) in a lot of locales.

Meh-sh?

I find Flash to be a CPU hog on my laptop. I'm not missing having it drag down the performance and battery life on my iPhone.

The longer I go without flash on my iPhone, the less I care.

Besides, I find that flash is a CPU hog on my Windows laptop, with a processor that runs at many times the clock speed, has more pipelines, speculative execution and access to 10x as much memory (and Flash supposedly runs better on Windows than MacOS).

So, why do I want that dragging down the snappiness and battery life of my iPhone?

Yanky doodle ( a term of derision used by the British, coopted by the revolutionaries).
Lenny Bruce.

Its time to take the power of the word away from the republiks.

We could all adopt it as our honorary middle names.. We can force it on Karl Husseiin Rove, John Hussein McCain, Rush Hussein Limbaugh, Matt Hussein Drudge.

This is an interesting story. I hope the comments don't get threaded with a bunch of ignorant "what does a homeless person need with something like grandcentral [they don't have a phone, need food more, etc]" comments.

Among other things, this augments the programs that give people loaner cell-phones so they can schedule job interviews. Now they have a phone # they can use any time.

As Dave points out, Archive.org is incomplete. There are various reasons for this, including the fact that some people don't want their sites archived because they loose control of their data, but that gives me an idea.

What if those who cared could communicate a policy to archive.org. Maybe they could say "archive this, but don't make it publicly available for 5 years from the date you archived it. Or, archive this, but "hide it from public view until 10 years after it disappears from the web."

I think, if anything, Ballmer has signaled to Zuckerberg that he and the company he leads are as clueless as IBM was in the early days of MS-DOS. That partnership worked out very well for MS.

Lately http://petprojectblog.com has been finding it's voice

Hmm. LiveJournal started in 1999. I'm not sure when all their various privacy and friend network features were rolled out, but I'm pretty sure they were all there when I started checking it out in mid-2001.

It's funny that you have no interest in your iPhone, because my friends with iPhones, and I, are still surprised that we seem to be using the damn things to do things that could be done more easily and effectively using the computer that is usually only a foot or two away.

"Its been hell getting Django installed on Windows"

I haven't deployed on Windows, but getting it running with the dev webserver is really easy, and I've had no trouble turning around and running the stuff I've developed on Windows under mod_python on webfaction's hosting.

I don't know about screencasts, because, I don't find screencasts to be very useful, anyway. The pace is always off they are either too slow, or they breeze over something important, and I have to go back over it 10 times to try and make out what happened on the screen. Give me a well written tutorial any day.

Does anyone know the real scoop about O2's 3G coverage in the UK, and T-mobile's coverage within Germany? It's hard to get the real scoop, because a lot of Europeans seem to like to use 3G to take digs at the US mobile industry, and a lot of American's like to use poor 3G as a reason to bash AT&T.

From what I've been able to tell though, both carriers may actually have extensive EDGE installations. This may mean that the first European iPhone's will, in fact, be EDGE, which would also help explain why the current iPhone sold in the US is a quadband phone.

I have been watching this for the past few days. Until yesterday, everyone thought Vodafone was a lock, perhaps for most/all of Europe. However, the earlier rumor/news about T-mobile getting the contract for Germany along with this latest rumor/news about O2 suggests Vodafone, whose biggest strength was the breadth of their subscriber base across Europe.

It also suggests that Apple's European carrier strategy is similar to their US carrier strategy of partnering with someone they can exert more leverage over, which gives them more strength in negotiations to extract things like a share of services revenue. Given Vodafone's reach, they might have thought they had more leverage with Apple than they apparently did.

More updates and analysis about this on my blog.

I'm eager to see them succeed, but I'm even more eager for Apple's exclusive with AT&T to expire.

I suspect that Apple will be releasing updates to the iPhone on a regular basis for the next year with the following dynamic:
1. The updates will deliver compelling new functionality, so people will really want to install them.
2. The updates will not work on a hacked iPhone system, so people will have to do a clean reinstall.
3. The clean reinstall will block the attack vectors previously used to unlock the system.
4. The hacking teams will have to find new ways in, but by the time they figure it out, a new update will be coming in for a landing.

Finally, interest will wane, on both the side of the hackers, and the consumers of their hacks. The dynamic has already played out to a large degree with iTunes cracking (though some people have been carrying the torch forward). It also seems to have happened among people making it possible to run OSX on generic PC hardware.

As much as I'd love to see the iPhone unlocked, I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, I'm not linking to sites like iphoneunlocking.com. I suspect many if not all of them are just doing it to build a domain with high pagerank to be exploited later.

Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. Even if they do manage to unlock it, you can be sure that not everything is going to work right, particularly the Visual Voicemail.

Bummer for my friends who are still plugging away at Oxygen Media.