I was in early beta for Blue Mars and was one of those wimmin folks SCREAMING for clothes that covered better than a quarter of my virtual body. "Not sexist!" they insisted. Now I load up the iPhone app, and it looks phenomenally like a "hot or not" paper doll app. All women.

At least they aren't all 3/4 nude.

Doomed.

I agree with this. Also, teach your laptop to HIBERNATE. Then you don't have to wait at all for it to start up. It takes a chunk of your system disk, but if the show start up is bothering you, it's totally worth it.

But really, your problem is not the laptop. It's Outlook.

If it's a rights issue over 3G, why does the ABC app work over 3G on the iPhone?

Does this smack anyone else as a net neutrality issue?

Reading this article just makes me wonder how old you were in the early 90's.

The walled garden providers -- AOL, Genie, Compuserve, and Prodigy -- all started as private services that were not on the WWW at all. In fact, what probably did more to degrade and popularlize the web in the early 90's was when AOL opened up their users to the web.

Each of these providers had their own market. AOL was more general, Genie and Prodigy were more casual as I remember, and Compuserve was the LinkedIn of its time -- all business.

You dialed in to a local access number to access their services and their services only. If you had an AOL account, you hung up and dialed that, and then hung up and dialed into Compuserve.

These services were more comparable to something like Yahoo's complex of homepage services. There were movie reviews, weather reports, news, games, and so on. All of them had secure transactions well before https:// hit the web. All homebrew and custom to each service.

They had *NOTHING* to do with the Internet. They were "online" in that you were accessing a closed network (hence AOL, America On Line). This was online in the same sense that you might be tying up your phone calling into a local BBS -- except the local BBS probably had more interactivity and connectivity with other BBSes.

They were able to grow because they didn't have to consult anyone on their standards, yes, but also because there were no consumer ISPs when they got into business. There were BBS systems, and there was the Internet, which was the domain of academia, government consultants, and the military.

It wasn't until Al Gore (re-)invented the internet through a 1989 bill that privatized the backbone that ran/routed Internet traffic that private companies who were not military contractors could get onto the greater Internet (open market). Then it took browsers in 1992-3 to make the web usable (open standards), and the de-weaponization of strong encryption that made e-commerce possible in 1996 (open standards) to give us e-commerce and dotcoms in the sense we think of them today.

I have, in 30-some years of watching the computer industry, never seen closed standards prosper for long. VMS and the VAX were excellent machines. Gone. The Macintosh grew its market the more it integrated standards. Same with Microsoft. Cisco has been wildly successful in creating excellent implementations of open standards, such that they often drive standards in public groups.

The App Store and Facebook have only been dominant players in their walled gardens for a couple of years. I have a conventionally configured iPhone; my fiance's is jailbroke. I spend more time on Twitter and LinkedIn than Facebook, and I'm considering deleting my Facebook account because of their privacy policies (if you can even call them that).

The two groups are just doing the same thing that the Mac did in the 90's and VAX/VMS did in the later 80's and onward, which is inviting others to improve the gene pool with disruptive innovations. And that is a cycle it's true -- but since IBM fell from the pinnacle of business computing in the 80's, the closest to them has been Microsoft, who's softer approach to openness has kept them remarkably agile for such a big company.

Apple is a blip, compared to Microsoft -- compare the market share of ip*** devices to Microsoft powered devices, and tell me this matters to many people out of our rather elite circles. and while Facebook is huge, it's not a great interface, and eventually it will no longer be flavor of the day.

It's too easy to remember when Friendster and MySpace and various other networks -- even Second Life -- were going to take over the world.

I feel like Facebook is at the tip of a series of very bad decisions. The urge to control ultimately always leads to ruin in a competitive market. This is why open standards, however slow, are a better bet.