Am I the only one who thinks it's hysterical that this Web 2.0 site used the "Web 2.0 Logo Generator" featured on DLS a while back?

It's an attractive logo, but wasn't the whole point of the generator making fun of sites like this one?

Actually, the loss has more to do with the UK's accounting rules than Vodafone's financial state. Basically, the UK GAAP penalizes companies that make acquisitions (like Vodafone) and spend lots of money on new equipment (again, like Vodafone) since the declining value of these new assets must be written off as a loss regardless of the fact that there is no actual loss of cash. If Vodafone were based in the US or Japan it would easily be one of the most profitable companies. It has lots of cash in the bank and that gets bigger every year.

Now onto the real question: Why isn't there a proper Vodafone GSM/UMTS network in the United States?

I'd say my MDA (Vario) is very much an all in one device that has lived up to its promise. I use it for email, IM, music, movies, TV (SlingPlayer), web browsing, not to mention texting and talking.

I'm not to fond of the camera, but my standalone digital camera is a huge Panasonic Lumix (great camera, but way to big to carry around), so it's used fairly often.

I lost the charger for my laptop, so for three days while I was waiting for a new one to ship, the MDA was my primary computer and it was surprisingly functional.

Is this actually going to be released in the US? I have a Sagem I bought in France and it's a cute little phone, it would be great if they released some phones in America.

If it's cheap enough, I might pick one of these up as a gift for my sister.

Gilmore Girls.

Slung-lo by Erin McKeown

Oh oh! THe Soundbug looks awesome. I saw it on an episode of The Screensavers (or maybe it was Tech Live?) on TechTV and have been lusting after one ever since.

I'm an avid shower singer, and nothing would make me happier than to be able to turn my entire shower into an performance space worthy of my vocal talents. That would be killerawesometasticful!

Despite these on paper loses, Vodafone is highly profitable. In terms of GAAP, they lose a lot, but it terms of money in the bank, they are very much in the black, even with large dividends. Also to be noted is that Vodafone's large stakes in Verizon and SFR, amung others, are not acuratly reflected in its financial reports, despite the fact that they are highly profitable.

I really wish Vodafone had won AT&T Wireless instead of Cingular. I used Vodafone while in the UK and France (Well, SFR, but that's pretty much the same) and I couldn't have been happier. It would be nice to have a real Vodafone provider in the US.

DRM for photos won't happen. Pictures are very different from movies and music, in which most content is created for profit and there is very little (comparitivly) in the way of individual content. With photos, I'd wager that the ration of personal versus commercial images is somewhere on the order of 10000 to 1. Probably a lot more, actually. Commercial photography is so small that DRM just doesn't make sense.

As for the WMA comparison, listen to a 64kbps WMA and then the same song as a 64kbps mp3. There's a huge difference. All things being equal, I'd rather use ogg vorbis, but WMA is a perfectly acceptable, highly versatile format and easily supperior to mp3.
If this new photo format ends up being to jpeg what WMA is to mp3, I'd say it will be a welcome addition and I will activly look for cameras that support it the next time I buy.

The Mac/PC distinction has always been pretty superficial and with the Intel switch, it's even more of a useless fanboy thing. So I buy a computer online that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu linux. Do I decide to call it an LC (for Linux Computer)? No, because that's just dumb. But god forbid you ever refer to a computer made by Apple as a PC. What is the difference between a Mac Mini running Ubuntu and Compaq Presario running Ubuntu? Nothing. Yet one is a "Mac" and the other is a "PC". Even more parodoxically, a Dell running OSX is still a PC and a Mac running XP is still a Mac. What does this mean?

"Mac" is *gasp* a brand for PCs! Saying that you were surprised that your mini is more capable than your compaq is pretty much the same as saying that you were surprised that your newer, more expensive Dell was more capable than your compaq. (Compaq is the budget brand to begin with, so it's hardly surprising that it isn't much of a performer, especially with only 512 RAM)

Nothing against apple pcs. They are perfectly capable computers, but there's nothing terribly special about them. It's a Vaio, or a Dimension, or a Paviliion or an ThinkPad or a Mac. That's the real distinction, not whether it's a Mac or a PC.