Dropbox

Of course Dropbox uses S3 as its storage back end and is fully integrated to the file system on the local machine. So lots of us have seen this working.

Why not a tablet?

If the chrome books are only good for web browsing and light media consumption then I don't see the point of them compared to a tablet. The Nexus 7 and 10 being very good tablets.

I have a laptop and a tablet. The laptop is used for real work on the go, the tablet for web browsing and media consumptions. The laptop is really at its best sitting on a desk when you need to type. The tablet is best in all other locations where you don't need to type much.

Reminds me of the failure that is DNLA

I wasted money and a lot of time trying to get a DNLA solution working to display videos from my computer on my living room TV. It failed because DNLA is a spec not an end-to-end solution. Multiple devices supporting the standard don't actually mean that something useful is going to happen. That device A will be able to successfully display output on device B is in no way guaranteed or likely.

This sounds exactly the same. There is a standard for a network, but only a suggestion that something useful could happen with it. There is so much more to define on top of a network before something useful can happen. For instance the fact that there is a WiFi connection on my TV, games console and phone doesn't mean that I can play videos from my phone on my TV. There has to be something on the phone that knows how to work with a different something connected to the TV. The network doesn't matter that much.

Does having an Intel CPU lower the total cost?

As I understand it the CPU isn't that big a cost itself in the total bill of materials (BOM) of a phone, compared to say the screen or the battery. However it can have big cost side effects if it is hard to integrate, skews the board design and worst-case requires a bigger battery.

ARM don't sell CPUs, they sell designs for cores that manufacturers integrate with as much other stuff as possible onto one piece of silicon. This is convenient and lowers the total BOM. Are Intel trying to sell a standalone low-power CPU? Regardless of how power-efficient or not it is, in a tiny embedded device that could end up being more expensive to use than the ARM option, even if Intel gave it away for free.

Had to turn off iMessage

My wife and I had to turn off iMessage after using it for a week as too many messages were getting lost. iMessage just isn't as tolerant of poor quality connections as SMS is. The problem being that there is a delay between Apple trying to send via iMessage before it gives up and then falls back to SMS. So I would leave work and text my wife, she would be marginally out of reception for some reason, about 5 minutes later iMessage would give up and try to communicate back to me to send an SMS. By which time I was on the underground and out of contact myself, so the message would completely fail. Whereas with SMS it is fire and forget. I send the SMS and the operator then will keep trying the target until they become available.

Seeing as texts are effectively free with my plan iMessage had problems and no benefits.

Constant crashes

I upgraded from iPhoto 8 to iPhoto 11 at the weekend. I haven't lost any pictures in my upgrade, but I have been shocked by the number of crashes when using the faces feature. I had iPhoto 11 crash on me around 10 times, each time while searching for additional pictures containg the faces I had just tagged.

Also all the tags I had set on pictures disappeared.

Mentally Ill?

Unfortunately the man was probably suffering from some form of mental illness. Taking him to a local hospital may have been more useful than taking him to a police station and charging him.