sentient beings

The iPad is a device that has no USB ports, no Flash support, no front cam and no multitasking. Let's see what this means.

You won't be able to add additional storage. In a its cheapest form, it has 16GB of storage. That cannot be expanded. Think how many pictures and music you currently have on your netbook or laptop.

It won't play music on the web. Last.FM, Facebook, YouTube, Hyves, MySpace and a myriad of other websites use Flash to let you listen to music. "The best way to experience the web" is as a deaf person.

You won't be able to connect to network or USB printers. This rules out the iPad as a business tool. Unless you absolutely never have to print anything out.

You won't be able to connect to external storage devices. You won't be able to connect to your Network Storage or other laptops - Windows, Mac or Linux.

It has no camera, so there won't be any videochat. Almost all current netbooks and laptops have a built-in webcam. And you won't be able to add an external webcam because, you guessed it, no USB support. There's also no mention of a microphone so even skyping won't work. Oh, and there's no USB support so no USB microphones either.

It won't play video on the web. Sure, it will have its built-in YouTube app, but since it doesn't have multitasking, that means you will have to stop browsing and watch the movie. When the movie is finished, you'll have to start the browser again. Manually. That's acceptable for a Smartphone, but not for a tablet. And you certainly won't be able to watch MySpace video. Or Vimeo. Or Blip.TV. All of which are very good and valid video sites with extremely good content.

There's no easy way to type text on the tablet. And you can't add a USB keyboard. Because it has no USB. So don't expect to type long mails to your mother - which you could just Skype if you had a webcam. Or even a built-in microphone.

For those of you who think the absence of Flash is good because "you browse with Flash turned off anyway". That is not entirely true for most. Most run with a Flash blocker which allows them to turn Flash ON every once in a while to experience additional content on a website. But you don't even have that choice. There is no Flash. And I highly doubt that it will have HTML5 video support.

So there. No iPad for me. I'll stick to my Acer Netbook for couch surfing.

Recently, I've been getting spam on a mail address I only use for uservoice.com. What's worse, the amount of spam is about 30 mails a day.

It's weird, because nowhere on the uservoice.com website is your mail address actually displayed or linked. So, either someone who participates in the tweetdeck uservoice discussions had a virus, or uservoice.com has had a privacy leak and all the mail addresses in their database are now being spammed. The latter seems likely because of the high amount of spam I'm getting, which could indicate that spammers believe this address to be recent and valid.

I would like to hear from other people who've had their spam count increase dramatically over the past few weeks and if they can determine why.

Edit: At least 1 other person is experiencing this: http://twitter.com/bjq/status/1784497230

Computer Futures is an IT recruitment company. At least, that's what they claim. In fact, they're nothing more than a call-center disguised as a recruitment center. There is no personal contact, no real assessment and no real matching.

In 2003, I applied for a job through Computer Futures. They have kept that information on file for over 6 years without a follow-up call. Any decent recruitment center would have either stopped using that information or place a follow-up meeting to make sure the data is up-to-date. More on the legality of keeping data that long in the last paragraph.

In the meantime, I keep getting job offers that do not concern me. I got job offers for developing in languages or environments that I never worked with and that certainly weren't ever mentioned in my resume. I got job offers stating that the candidate had to live in close vicinity to the offices - which were halfway across the country for me. I got job offers that didn't even mention a job offer, just a description of the company they were "recruiting" for.

I have asked to be removed from their systems several times over the past year. I have done so by writing to the call-center agents that mailed me, by writing to the e-mail address they mentioned in their e-mails and by writing to info@computerfutures.nl. I kept getting mails.

Today, I called them and the person answering the phone couldn't tell me why I hadn't been removed from the system, even though I had used the mail address mentioned in their mails for about four times. Upon asking to be removed, I was told that "I will make sure that you will no longer receive our e-mails". That's not what I asked. I wanted to have my information removed from the system. The call-center agent replied that "I will block everything that I can block". He could not affirm that my data would be permanently deleted. He also wouldn't confirm that they never had face-to-face interviews or that they screened persons by a real-life interview. When I pushed, he asked me if I wanted to have my e-mail removed or if I wanted a discussion. I told him that the latter would be nice since I had some questions about the way they treated me and my privacy to which I got blown off with a "I don't have time for this". Well, thank you! Just another confirmation that Computer Futures doesn't care about you as a person.

Itmight  also be useful to add that Dutch Law states that data concerning job applications should not be held longer than one year after which they have to be destroyed. It looks like Computer Futures is breaking that law. Not only that law, but they're also breaking the OPTA rules which state that everyone should have the right to know what personal data is being kept by an organisation and should have the right to ask for immediate removal of this data from any databases and archives that this organisation stored his or her data in. So, I'm filing complaints with the appropriate government institutes. It'll take time and effort, but that's how tired I am of Computer Futures.

This is another typical Microsoft-based development issue. Everyone is writing tutorials and omitting what references need to be set to make the tutorial code work.

Anyway, if you're looking for the MSHTML library, it's a COM reference and it's actually named "Microsoft HTML object library". You need to put using mshtml; in your project to be able to reference it.

may still be true in 2009. Here's Steve Jobs in 1996, talking about Microsoft who, by that time, just released Windows 95. The sound is completely out of sync, so my apologies for that.

Here's the transcript.

The only problem with Microsoft is they have no taste. They have absolutely no taste and what that means is ... I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. In a sense that ... they ... they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product. And you say "why is that important?". Well, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting in beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea. If it weren't for the Mac, they would never have that in their products. ... Erm ... And ... So I, I guess, I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success. I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success - for the most part. I have a problem with the fact they just make really third-rate products.