• Analysis of Xbox360 Arcade laughable.
• AT&T paying $18 to Apple per phone. Now you know.
• Verizon $1 million back to customers for deceptive practices.
• PDF files can now attack you!
• Tax on email? This is not a good idea.
• Microsoft dropped $240 million into Facebook. Caps Facebook at $15 billion.
• Yahoo has new presearch feature. Not fully implemented.
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Theres a mini industry on eBay for unlocked iPhones. People are buying the phones, unlocking them and reselling on eBay for $100.00 profit. That could explain the 1 in 6 who unlock their phones w/o any tech expertise.
Haven’t you dropped your stupid bubbles yet?
Geeze!
Could you at least put them on ONLY ONE CHANNEL?? That way I could listen without being annoyed to the point of distraction. Can’t we PLEASE have that choice?
Sheesh!
You need a woman moaning sexy sound effect.
PDF files are more and more becoming bloatware for all I know, every time I run the goddam reader it loads TOO MUCH STUFF just to read a document or a e-comic book.
I would gladly give Apple twice that for a truely unlocked iPhone…
Best thing ever for adobe acrobat filed. freeware foxit reader.
here:
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
I will never use adobe again.
sorry , I meant acrobat files…. must have been the damn tequila.
The only kind of cell phone plan I can deal with is Pay As You Go. We have lost 2 contracts for not keeping up w/the monthly bill. PAYG is all we can deal with. No iPhone for me even if they come to Canada.
John is definitely an antagonist. what an awful cacophany of sounds which serve no legitimate purpose.
#2 It is the bubbles from the Windows 95/98 underwater screensaver
Always the sign of a slow news day. Listing your fluff effects. Anyway. Hey John, you’re not fooling us all. You and Dean Martin are/were really into apple juice (right?). But ya got put on these airs for the sponsor.
I think PDF stinks too. And been a Foxit Reader user since I first heard of it. Mainly because it’s a much smaller application. For my money, I’d like to see PDF replaced with something that let you create files (w/o a paid application) that combined text and graphic elements (like HTML does) into one file (like HTML doesn’t). That way the text would still be searchable, and not be as bloated as a scanned image. Yet the picture elements would still be there when needed, where they’re needed. PDFs are just a way of saying that “nobody’s ever going to type this stuff up, if they can simply scan it. So here it is.” And then they don’t even bother to put in any searchable index marks. So what the heck good is a reader having a search feature? About as good as a DVD without chapters, or music CDs without any indexes (I’ve never owned a single CD that had an index other than “1”). If the PDF wasn’t locked up by Adobe, then us readers could at least add our own index marks and notes, to these files.
Oh, I forgot to say something about the “email tax”. Boy is this a stupid idea! And what is the justification for it? Because they can?! We finally got rid of the 100 year old telephone surcharge, that was enacted to pay for the Spanish-American war (and then the telecos just kept billing us for it, after the war was paid for). Now they want to collect a tax on a substitute for postal mail, why? Because it completes with the Fed’s little profit making monopoly? Sounds exactly like the reason the British Crown taxed domestic tea, back in the late 1700s. Why exactly is the answer to competition, in a supposedly Free Enterprise system, always taxing the newcomer, or restricting it somehow? Shouldn’t they tax the postal mail for burning up gas and tire rubber, to deliver all that 3rd class crapola mail to our doorstep? Oh No! The Feds will never, ever, tax the senders! Just the receivers!! Because if they taxed only the senders, then spammers and junk mailers would be driven out of business, by the shear bulk of their overhead costs.
It would also slow down your relatives, who tend to forward every “joke of the day” post they come across. But I think if the tax only applied to more than ten outgoing messages per day (CC:s count per To: address), it would be fine for most of us. And poison to the spammers.
#1: That could probably account for the quarter million missing phones sold but not registered on AT&T’s network.
How can you do a Tech-5 report and not mention Microsofts earnings?
Seems to me that an e-mail tax would be difficult at best to enforce. How would it affect places that offer free e-mail like Gmail? Would they have to start charging customers then? If it really becomes the case, people will find a new method I’m sure. We can always run our own mail servers to receive mail, and most ISPs provide a free SMTP server (sounds like it wouldn’t be included in the tax). There are hundreds of ways to send text over the net, and if all of them fail, someone will come up with something better. Isn’t that what fostered the creation of Bittorrent?
Have to second FoxIt Reader as a replacement for Abode Acrobat Reader. It works so much better than Adobe it’s ridiculous. I’ve never had FoxIt eat up all my resources, or crash opening a file, or hang up my system… all the things about Acrobat Reader that drove me nuts. I’ve been recommending FoxIt for a couple years now. I even had someone from Adobe write (unofficially) to suggest I try whatever Adobe’s newest version was at the time, and in return I suggested he try FoxIt before he tells me how innately superior Acrobat is. After a week, I admitted that I still hated Acrobat, and he admitted FoxIt worked better on his machine…
As for email taxes… it will only be rejected if enough people in Congress actually understand email, and that’s doubtful. The bright side: if such a tax does pass, then we the people can go after the “under the radar” backchannel White House-RNC-Justice Dept. email system on charges of tax evasion, because you know THEY’RE not going to pay taxes…
I like your sexy tequila woman ads. I guess you not liking Mexicans doesn’t get in the way of you not liking tequila! 😉
Here’s a plan for tax on e-mail that would actually be a good thing.
First do a in-depth study to find out the maximum number of legit e-mails produced by a person or company. That number is the base. For each e-mail a person or company sends beyond that base they loose a body part from the foot up.
SPAM will be no more.
#3, Angel,
I too have to recommend FOXIT READER.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
Small, loads fast, even allows copying text into text documents (Open Office).
I have no idea if it works with IE. I only use Firefox, which all the good looking people use.
#5 & #15
Thank you!. I had never heard of FoxIt. I’ve already uninstalled Acrobat reader and added FoxIt to my collection of must-have tools. It does the same thing for PDF viewing that IrfanView does for picture viewing.
#19 – Seems to work fine in IE also. They have versions of the toolbar for both and that also looks interesting.
I kinda like the bubbles, but I can’t get the point of this Tech5 podcast. It’s so short – and shallow – that I’d rather just read it instead of downloading big MP3 files, which BTW I can’t download to my Blackberry because they are too large and exceed the limit. Why do they have to be encoded at 128kbps? What a waste of bandwidth. Getting this podcast in my daily morning update with my Blackberry would make a lot more sense than listening to it on my desktop, but in reality this podcast doesn’t make sense to me at all. It’s too poor on everything. And now these silly noises… sigh