Mr. Manjoo seems to have taken a healthy swig of the Kool-Aid (or stuck his head too far into the Jobs Reality Distortion Field) when he states "Everything that's on your computer can now be played on your TV, while you're sitting at your couch, using a nice Apple remote."

Huh.

Per Apple (http://www.apple.com/appletv/), "Apple TV puts your iTunes library — movies, TV shows, music, and podcasts — plus movie trailers from Apple.com on your TV."

That sure as hell doesn't sound like 'everything on your computer' unless you are only referring to Mac users who only use iTunes for their media files. That probably covers 1/2 of 1% of all computer users. AppleTV sounds like a complete waste of time until Jobs and company offer a PVR solution that has equivalent functionality to SageTV or Windows Media Center (or heck, even the Xbox 360 if you can stand the heat and noise). Once they have that, will it be more elegant than other solutions? Probably. Will it be too late to the party? Almost certainly.

p.s. Is Mr. Manjoo going to talk about any other CES announcements (Windows Home Server springs to mind, as does the announced 1TB hard drives from Hitachi and Motorola's MOTORIZR Z6 phone - all of which are more interesting for a variety of reasons than the iPhone or AppleTV), or is he just going to provide free press for Apple?

Just a marketing campain (hell, the slogan is 'Complete your collection.'), but damn, there were some stinkers in there. Since I'm opinionated, I'll have to pile on with some missing gems (in no particular order):

The Decemberists - The Tain

Mudhoney - Superfuzz Bigmuff (Plus Singles)

The Pogues - Sodomy, Rum and the Lash

Husker Du - Zen Arcade OR New Day Rising

X - Los Angeles

The Clash - *anything* (except 'Cut the Crap')

The Who - Live at Leeds

Sleater-Kinney - *anything* by Sleater-Kinney

The Thermals - The Body, The Blood, The Machine

Heart - Dreamboat Annie

PJ Harvey - Rid of Me

Lyle Lovett - Joshua Judges Ruth

Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick

The White Stripes - Elephant

Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes

David Bowie - The Man Who Sold The World

Joe Jackson - I'm The Man

Belle & Sebastian - Push Barman to Open Old Wounds

They Might Be Giants - Severe Tire Damage

The Offspring - Smash

And one token soundtrack: Repo Man

...must...see...more.

A perfect skewering of E! and all the other starf*cker shows out there. Loved the "Bulemia - when is too early for *your* child." outro as well.

Offensive? Of course. Satire usually is.

My 18-month-old came home with a noticeable bite on his cheek today. The little girl who bit him is the sweetest little thing. Two years ago, my daughter was the biter. About once a month or so we'd get a report when we picked her up that she bit someone that day. These bites happen very quickly and are unpredictable. The little biters act on impulse. You could move your kid to a new daycare, but you'd very likely find a new biter there.

Even with great adult supervision, kids will bite. It happens quickly. Of course the adults need to watch and of course the biter needs to learn that it is not acceptable behavior, but I don't think it necessarily means the adults were doing a bad job if a bit happens on their watch.

"The reason Apple seems to be on everyone's lips is because they are actually doing NEW and BETTER things -- whereas everyone else just seems to be pumping out big old steaming piles of "more of the same."

Hmm...new and exciting things like AppleTV? Whoops, that seems to be a shameless ripoff of MythTV and Windows Media Center that is shackled to the iTunes store.

Face it: Apple rarely if ever does new things (OK, I'll admit that the iPhone is pretty damn innovative), they just have a team of extremely talented designers who dress up existing technology and, in most cases, make it extremely user-friendly. Case in point:

Leopard - a UNIX kernel with a shiny Apple UI

Mac - a PC with a shiny Apple look & feel (& price)

iPod - an MP3 player with a shiny Apple look & feel

To be fair, there is very little innovation any more, just various flavors of existing technology across the entire consumer electronics market, so I'm not just singling out Apple--just the fanboys. :)

From a userbase standpoint (which is the primary metric for measuring web-based applications), the number one and number two web-mail applications would be Yahoo! and Windows Live Hotmail. Gmail is a distant third with about 1/4 the userbase:

"A February, 2007 article in TechCrunch gives user numbers for Yahoo! Mail (250 million), Hotmail (228 million) and Gmail (51 million), but does not cite the source of the numbers." (source: Email Marketing Reports - http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-statistics.htm)

I realize you have a certain bias against Microsoft, but you should try to maintain some modicum of professional journalism and base your articles on facts. Just because it is associated with Google, doesn't mean that Gmail is a front-runner...yet.

Hotmail is NOT in Beta. It went live last May. However, the Outlook connector for Hotmail IS in Beta. See http://mailcall.spaces.live.com/ for more information (plus a handy lesson in office jacking via sheetrock from those whacky, fun-loving Microsoft drones.

There is at least *one* other extension with hotmail email addresses: msn.com. Is it silly that you have to put in the fully qualified email address to use hotmail because of this (rather than have it auto-detect your extension)? YES.

But there is, nonetheless, a reason for the crappy user experience.