My guess is that along with temporary cubicles for visiting employees with dynamically assigned telephone numbers they have fairly good call screening and that in order to get to many of these tech people you will have to leave a message first.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft regularly engage in underhanded practices (call it evil if you will).

Google changing a link from Yahoo maps to its own Google maps might be considered equally evil. But my recollection of Yahoo maps back when they were based on Mapquest was that they were pretty awful. Hard to navigate and hard to read, the small window you were shown almost never included both points of departure and destination. The various map programs now are much more similar than they were then and any of them are probably "good enough".

I wonder if most people who intend to use a map program start out with a generic search? I generally go to the map page first, I happen to use Google maps, but I've used Microsoft's at time too when satellite images from Google had gotten too fuzzy in my area (compared to MS's).

Pull the other one. You SV types need to come up with more realistic stage names, like, uh, Beach.

I think all this hype over industrial waste is overblown.

But I did hear if you grind up all that stuff into a very fine powder and dissolve it into some nasty solvents it makes an excellent bug spray. We'll be going into production with it in a few weeks. We won't be spilling any of it into a river near you. Promise.

Excellent research and reporting!

Now, is Boing Boing a blog about the airplane company, or pogo sticks? I've never been able to stand reading it long enough to find out.

And, is Xeni a he or a she, or has that been determined?

Originally a patent was of no value until someone actually MADE something based on it. The patent protected the guy with the idea from not only having his idea stolen, but from some more well heeled entity rushing it to market first, leaving the idea man not only out his idea but all the money he had sunk into production costs.

That is hardly the case with software, where you may well (as with Facebook) sue someone who had violated an NDA or other trust agreement. On the other hand a loosely defined patent on "social networking" could put Myspace, Facebook and many others out of business. Hmmm, come to think of it, maybe software patents aren't such a bad idea.

Almost all professional women do this these days. Well, with the exception of one profession.

On the other hand, I could see some use for a doggy door that only opens for YOUR dog and not just any dog, cat or raccoon that pushes on it.

A coded IR signal could do that although I would think an RF would be better.

I showed someone a Google satellite view of our neighborhood the other day. They were amazed. When they asked me if the picture was live, I was amazed. The only thing I could think of to say was that no, it wasn't live, but some day it probably would be.

I find a three hours drive a safe distance.

Now if we could just solve the problem of big cities needing to tax everyone in the universe to pay for their decaying infrastructure.

A better test case for city-wide WiFI would be small towns, oh, say a beach community with only one major thoroughfare and a lot of transient visitors. I think some already have it.

My trust in technology companies is directly proportional to the number of high-up technologists who can speak freely without the appearance of a management-type moving their lips in the background.

Of course when those technologists become better known for their odd (cupcake and shoe) fetishes, I'm not so sure.

Someone has finally figured out how to monetize Facebook.

If there is money to be made on this they will make it on licensing the software, not building the boxes, which are fairly generic components I think.

(1) NOT lock you into Google,
(2) NOT lock you into a single phone service,
(3) NOT lock you into a single style (touch screen or keyboard, open or flip) device.
(4) Probably not cost an arm and leg to own.

I hope it comes soon.

I guess they decided that the answer was more.

Case closed.

Ballmer sits atop a technology powerhouse, and really knows how to operate a marketing machine that can find quasi-legal ways to lock itself into large governmental and corporate cultures that would otherwise rather be standards-based and flexible in product choices.

When it comes to actually understanding the technology his company produces though he is every bit as clueless as the semi-senile grandma that lives down the street.

He may not be evil, but his ignorance, coupled with his (inherited) power produces evil results.

Hopefully the technology landscape will change rapidly enough (as it did with IBM) to shake Microsoft from its position of inordinate importance.

A kid entering high school when Yahoo promised to match Gmail capabilities would be half-way through college by now and still waiting. They simply can't deliver, so they do what other who can't deliver do: talk.

The toast is done. No, it's burning.

Agreed. It is totally irresponsible at his age (even if there were no health issues) to not have a fairly obvious successor and of course wrong in the first place to rely on personality cultism as a centerpiece of the company's branding.

It will not be a pretty sight for the company's stock the first time someone else is getting up there to do that speech. But it would be better to make that substitution now (or find another way to make big announcements) than to wait until there is no alternative.

But are you saying she is not going to NY, LA, SF? That wouldn't make sense.

This place at the beach in Delaware does a fair number of book signing things and the area draws a fair number of folks from "the big cities" (NY, DC, parts of PA, NJ and MA)in summer.

[www.booksite.com]

Late Spring, early Fall might also work. Winters are cold and deserted.

PS: our good friend Dan passed away recently. His son sent him one of those newfangled wireless gadgets and as soon as he turned it on his pacemaker started shooting sparks. You should have seen it.

Apple: Free your browser search!

There.

That's why I use Firefox rather than Safari on my Apple computer. The two play tag with one another on features, but it irks me that when I go to set my default browser on OS X it actually launches a part of Safari to make the setting.

Apple is no better than Microsoft when it comes to using the OS they control in order to gain an unfair advantage in other areas (iTunes, iPhone, iEverythingelse). The only thing that differentiates Apple from Microsoft as far as software goes is that they dumped the first bloated mess they created and started over with an Open Source base. I think they pretty much killed end-user BSD use in the process.

I think the Internet is here to stay. It will continue to allow a lot of companies to profit, but unlike the past it will not continue to allow just a few companies to make ALL of the profits. Companies that are expected to come up with yet new monopolies on the Internet (MS, Apple, Google) will be seen as relative failures (relative to expectations). These ridiculous lock-in strategies that have provided advantage in the past will only become a hindrance in the future. I think Google understands this, I'm not so sure about the rest (and I'm not always so sure about Google).

The ultimate cell phone will be something cheap to produce, so that you can drop it, lose it, jump in the swimming pool with it, and have a replacement by going to the nearest convenience store... think current $20 Trackfone with more features.

Technology is here to do this, we just have to endure a few more years of being milked for all we are worth by Madison Avenue (and now Silicon Valley).

Why didn't they add cut-and-paste with this version? Because they want to sell you another one in about a year that's why.

The people that I know that own these devices are slaves to them. Straining their eyes to read a web page on it even when they are in the same room with a full sized PC screen.

I don't know anyone using the Internet that doesn't have an e-mail address, thus I can "poke" anyone in the world almost, simply by having that address. Facebook and similar services by comparison are like being on a feature limited version of the Internet where you can only interact with other people who have volunteered to be feature limited.

They do allow you to create your own private network of friends, but there is nothing new here that wasn't fully explored by ICQ and AIM long ago. Once everyone figures this out there isn't going to be a need for too many of these services, and for those that survive, well there won't be too much of a need for them either. Like Geocities, they'll be a mostly forgotten concept glommed onto one of the big companies.