Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Re: Boycott east Texas

@frank ly, what you don't understand is that patent trolls ALL file in east Texas, they COULD file somewhere else but then there would be a fair trial, which would usually have the numerous cases of prior art come up and invalidate their patents. The argument for bringing these cases into east Texas, instead of somewhere with fair judges, is that these companies do business in east Texas. If I started a business, I DEFINITELY would exclude this area from my business, forcing any patent trolls to do battle in a fair location.

Failure to understand

Re: "why is everyone so obsessed with Javascript performance? When do you ever sit there in front of your browser thinking "hmmm, this script is really taking a long time to add a table row and apply a CSS style" ?"

I have had significant speedups on my 1.3ghz Atom, going from Firefox 3.0 to 3.6, due to 3.0 slowing to a dead crawl on some of the bloated Javascript some pages had. It significantly improved my battery life too.

"You don't. No one does. Chasing JS performance is a waste of time, for the vast majority of users it is completely irrelevant."

This is the kind of attitude that ends up with the bloatware that plagues the lives of Windows users (both the Microsoft-included ones, and the horribly written apps that can be added later.) Some have the attitude that, if their application runs adequately as the only thing running on a single-user system, they are done. Traditional UNIX tihnking has ALWAYS accomodated a large range of system speeds, and accomodated the idea that there may well be multiple users on the system. Your app runs well enough on a XYZmhz system? Good, but see if you can make it faster, then the system can accomodate more simultaneous users. In addition, on a battery-powered device, improvements in performance SAVE BATTERY POWER.

Regarding Apple,

They've been a big user and abuser of lawsuits since the 1980s. They have good excellent PR firms that have, let's say de-emphasized this. But it's true.

Anyway, sad but true. And to be honest, I think this is one big reason companies in China and such are rapidly overtaking the US'ian and European companies --

a company here in the States... 1) Come up with a good idea (or bad idea, I guess). 2) Lawyers. 3) Patent check. 4) Buy licenses (if you've got money left, otherwise abandon your idea). 5) Find someone to manufacture or reproduce, who may also decide there's "IP" problems. 6) Profit? Well, maybe, but it must be banked against both legitimate patent owners whose patents you missed, and ESPECIALLY patent trolls who produce nothing of value but will try to find SOMETHING in your product to sue you over.

China? 1) Come up with idea. 2) Find someone to manufacture or reproduce idea. 3) Profit. Of course, someone will probably clone your product, but if yours is the best it'll still do OK.

So without a volume know,

how does one adjust the volume?

Anyway, looks far too fancy for my tastes, but nice.

Most vendors are not innovative

That's just how it is. Dell, etc. did not develop SCSI, IDE, or SATA, RAID, AGP, PCI, DIMMs, they haven't designed processors, and generally not their own chipsets. (HP did for their UNIX workstation line, IBM does sometimes on desktops too). This is not what they do, they put together the commodity components. I don't think this held anything back, other companies supplied flash and now that prices are becoming more reasonable Dell etc. are beginning to use them.

archival mistakes

"If someone today proposed storing data in a custom closed file format, on USB sticks, only readable on OS X, the pitfuls should be obvious."

Except that's what I see people doing. I read about a recent archival project. They said, well, we've heard CDs and DVDs dont' last long, we are going to use MO cartridges (magneto-optical.) So, these ARE rated to last a long time, but how many MO drives can you find now, and how many do you think will be left in 20 years given how uncommon they are now? They also say "Well, no Office files (which is smart), but decided also to not use plain ASCII, ODF, PDF, JPEG, etc., saying the specs may not be stable for 20+ years, in preference to making their own archival format." OK, so you are archiving data in your own proprietary format? In other words, to *make* things archival-grade, some now are making EXACTLY the same mistakes they made then.

----------------------------

I had one of those IBM floppy drives do *just* that -- plugged in an old PC with one of the full-height 5.25" drives, flames and smoke just *poured* out of the damn thing. I was chuffed to realize I was on the opposite side of the "U" shaped work area from the fire extinguisher, but it went out on it's own anyway. We have had several probably working ST-412s come in, but due to data disposal policies were required to send them out for disposal (IDE, SATA, or a few types of SCSI we'd wipe, the rest had to be physically destroyed.)

Sixth sense

I think Anon E Mus hits it on the head. And, contrary to a few comments, I don't see young people getting a phone as parental neglect or abuse or whatever, not saying it's a great thing but it sounds to me like those people in the 1950s that said Rock and Roll was corrupting our youth, and so on. It's a societal change and you can either fight it or go with it.

Food for thought, if you read some of Victor Vinge's writings on the technological singularity, he sees the possible methods of some super-human intelligence emerging as being:

1) Computer becomes self-aware and gains super-human intelligence.

2) Computer netwrok (and possibly associated users) does the same.

3) Computer/human interface becomes so intimate the user can be considered superhumanly intelligent.

4) Biological upgrades.

Obviously, Facebook updates and tweeting are not helping anyone's intelligence. But it appears to me things are moving very much towards #3, at least in terms of people being able to stay in communications; I see people fire off and read texts almost subconsciously, they can literally keep up a verbal conversation while they are having a text conversation with someone else. This seems for some much less like them typing and reading an external device, and more like the device is a direct extension of their consciousness. Even with those awful touch screen keyboards haha.

I could see it being unnerving to have this taken away, it's almost like saying you are going to remove someone's sense of hearing or touch for a day to see how they like it.

So, a couple of my cousins have this bad (they're about 10 years younger than me.) It's like

(One of my uncles): "We're going to the retirement home to visit your great aunt, she's not in good health so we're seeing her while we can."

Them: "OK." *tap* *tap*

Me, I say real casually... "Oh, umm... when I was there a few days ago, there was not cell phone service, the mountain blocks the signal."

Them: "Umm, what? Really?" *TAPTAPTAPTAPTAP* (they both looked a bit startled, and started texting like madmen, I think warning everyone they'd be out of contact for a good half hour or hour.) They managed not to get the shakes for that hour or so. When we got back in service, it sounded like their phones were going to explode from dozens of queued texts shooting into them.

KDE 3.x and gnome 3, and long term compatibility

@E 2, if you find KDE 3.x is no longer available eventually, I have KDE4.6 on my Gentoo systems, it can be made to look and behave pretty closely to KDE 3.x (including having vaguely similar resource usage.) Agree w/ K.Adams, KDE 4.x sucked pretty bad until about 4.3 or 4.4. They have not made the mistake Gnome 3.x apparently has of removing flexibility. (My couple other systems have Ubuntu, with the usual modded-a-bit-by-Canonical Gnome desktop.)

No comment on the Gnome 3.x interface. The still photos didn't look too great to me, but even the review admits they don't do it justice. So, no comment until I've tried it. It sounds like it could be OK, as long as things aren't too sensitive (for instance, I like to place a Terminal in the top-right of my screen, a browser in the top-left, so I want windows to full-screen if I try to fling a window *past* the top, not have gnome randomly decide to full-screen my windows while I'm arranging them). It really depends on how well it behaves itself.

@JDX, true UNIX users are conservative, they DON'T like change. My college profs in my classes (from 1997-2001) got their blackbelts in UNIX-Fu in the 1980s, so they used twm, vi, troff, and so on. And you know what? It was fine, the distros of 2000 included all of these. now they still include it all except possibly twm (which is in a package.) In the Windows world, a technology will be developed, within a few years it'll be deprecated and replaced with something else, so then (for compatibility reasons) Windows will have the old *and* new libraries installed. Linux and UNIX, a new technology may be in a state of flux for 6 months or a year or two, but then it's stable and could be very similar for 20 years or more, not only there for compatibility but still the official way to get something done.

I actually built a copy of Mazewar a while ago, ported from the Xerox STAR to UNIX in 1986, with the last modifications made in 1988. I had 2 build errors, I made a 1-line changes to the lines the compiler said were in error, and it built and ran great, network play worked too.

Tech bubble? Yes. As bad as 1999? No.

"And your bank is involved in this game right now. They are taking cheap money from the government and giving it to fuckwits in the hope of discovering the next Geek Pie*"

Mine's not. I am with a local bank. MOST banks were not involved with this. They did not do anything with these stupid credit default swaps, didn't lose their ass on stuff like that, so they did not have to whine to the gov't for a bailout (which those banks should NOT have gotten -- they should have been allowed to go bankrupt, competent banks would have bought the mortgages and accounts at firesale prices, strengthening the competent banks. Free market in action.)

Is there a tech bubble? Absolutely. There are, again, loads of companies that are providing service with little plan for making money, and yet valued at millions, 100s of millions, or even billions of dollars.

HOWEVER, is it as bad as the 90s? I don't think so. In the 90s, there were companies like WebVan, which would buy your groceries and deliver them to your home with NO MARKUP (assuming they'd somehow make money with enough volume), companies that'd ship 50 pound bags of dogfood (ignoring the fact the significant shipping costs outweigh any savings compared to just buying it at the store), all kinds of services that cost REAL MONEY with no charges to cover those expenses. The plan was "we are losing money on every single customer, but if we get A LOT of customers, we'll somehow become profitable."

Now, most of these bubble companies are massively overvalued, but social services can be run very inexpensively (how much computing power does it probably take to generate a tweet? Not much. And the humans generating the content aren't paid at all), so it seems to me even though banner ads don't pay much, they may be able to make enough from ads to at least be marginally profitable.

Not a femtocell!

A signal booster is not a femtocell! That is, it's not a Verizon Network Extender, it's not a Vodafone SureSignal, etc. A booster simply takes whatever it receives, amplifies it, and retransmits it.

Some US Carriers have sold them. Some of them out west ran cell sites with over a 50 mile signal radius, so people out on towards the edge of the service area (or *past* the edge of normal service) could get a booster, perhaps a directional Yagi antenna, and have plenty of signal strength for their phone.

I'm actually with the cell cos on this one. I figure there are 2 likely outcomes, neither desirable. I figure either people either people will abuse boosters (for instance, buying a booster because they "only get 3 bars", LOTS of AT&T users are already buying femtocells because they get 2 or 3 bars but bad service, so i could see them buying boosters instead) and this will generate additional service problems. Or boosters will become fully FCC-approved but will be absolutely neutered, so people who have a legitimate use for one will no longer find one that has the amplification they need. I do think the cell cos should permit boosters (not requiring femtocells) in cases where the booster truly increases service though; in general, they already do though.

@"Missing the point"

It's hopeless. You can make this as clear as you want, the Apple fanbois will come up with twisted, circular logic about how what Apple is doing is right and how everyone else is wrong, how this is what Apple intended all along (they didn't change their mind!), how it's really for your own good, and so on.

Glad I don't have any Apple products!

Could it be both?

If people want to use it for point-to-point rural data type stuff do it. If people want to use it for community TV, do it. If either steps up, it'll be fallow. I don't see why it should have to be all one or the other.

It sounds to me like you all are pretty lucky to have a (admittedly full of crap, but isn't all TV?) Freeview system. Here is what I can get over the air (note the channel numbers are "fake" -- for some reason, when the US did it's digital transition, they made it so the "channel number" and the *actual* channel number don't match up at all so for instance 2 is up in the 50s somewhere).

2 -- CBS.

2.2 is a music station.

9 -- ABC.

9.2 is actually just called "9.2", it has a few extra episodes of shows 9 would air otherwise.

12 -- PBS. There's 3 of these.

15 -- Fox

20 -- WB. But the program guide is not filled in so my DVR records off 26 instead.

20.2 AntennaTV -- old shows and movies. This just came up a week or 2 ago.

26 -- Also WB.

26.2 is ThisTV.

That's it! And, some of these channels are almost 70 miles away, so I have a large Grey-Hovermann antenna and 20dB amp to get what I do get (without it, I'd get 20/20.2, 12.1/12.2/12.3 and maybe 15). This is hooked to a high-quality USB tuner. Sometimes I'll get 7 (NBC) with 7.2 and 7.3 (RTV and ThisTV -- both show old shows and movies) and 28 (another Fox.) 7 and 9 are both VHF so they seem to be qutie picky about interference and antenna aiming (I'm not aimed at the stations at all, i must be picking up a strong reflection, they don't come in at all if I actually aim the antenna at them!)

You're also lucky to have centralized sites. I luckily found a compromise aim where I only lose one station (48 - PaxTV) but some of my stations are NNW (2, 7, 9, 28 and 48 if I got it), some are NE (20, 12), 15 is south, 26 is due east (if I had a little better antenna 4, 6, 8, 18 are also due east.)

Agreed

Plenty of people use Facebook and Twitter. Might as well put notices up on them.

Some just don't know better

@Steven Knox, maybe. The other possible factor is signal strength. Verizon in my area is highly reliable, but DO have a lot of rural areas where the signal dips to 0-1 bars. They have it tuned so voice quality is unaffected by this, data speeds don't drop much, and although signal gets to *0* bars, it'll get "0" off 2 or 3 cell sites ("soft handoff") so it doesn't drop that last bit to "no service". But given IPhone's well-known subpar RF, I could see some of these areas being "no service" with them.

AT&T, on the other hand, people complain they drop calls even with 4 bars, and calls garble until they are useless at 2 bars or so (due to excessive use of AMR-HR (half-rate voice codec)). In quite a few markets, AT&T has cell sites from both the former AT&T WIreless ("blue network") and Cingular ("Orange network") so they could easily have higher average signal strength than Verizon in these markets, I think people tend to consider dropped calls with 4 bars "coverage" problems. It's not, it's a congestion-related problem.

@AC Re: "THE USER IS STILL HAPPY WITH 4% CALL DROP. News at 10."

Some just don't care that much.

But, at least in howardfourms, quite a few people just assume it's normal for all carriers to regularly drop calls, have data either fail or get terribly slow during rush hour, and so on. People tell them "No, that is not normal" and then someone inevitably replies the person that said it's not normal is just a fanboi for some other carrier, reinforcing the idea that these network faults are entirely normal. When these people finally DO try another carrier they are invariably shocked at the difference (well, almost always -- AT&T does have some exceptionally good markets, I hear Seattle is especially good. And every carrier has some weak markets as well.)

Time for a civil suit right?

I assume you have civil suits in the UK. And probably class action suits as well? I'm just saying, the CPS refusing to doesn't mean Phorm must get away with this crap scott free. You sign up for the class action suit, the lawyer sues on behalf of thousands of people and gets hopefully a massive settlement against Phorm, and you get your fraction of the take. They won't get jail time like they should, but at least they'll probably be bankrupted.

It's the IPad2

"The US has some rather patchy networks"

But Verizon's not one of them. If you look at their coverage, it's solid over a large portion of the country, and with roaming agreements is pretty dominant. The international perception the US has patchy networks comes from the best coverage carriers here using CDMA, with the GSM carriers being "the rest", meaning bad news if you come here with a quad-band GSM phone. National carriers, you have Verizon Wireless (CDMA) and AT&T Wireless (GSM) as the "tier 1" carriers, with VZW having **much** more native coverage, and quite a bit more total coverage including roaming. Tier 2 (less costly, but less coverage), you have Sprint (CDMA) versus T-Mobile (GSM), Sprint has more native coverage (and will roam with every CDMA carrier, giving them MUCH more coverage compared to T-Mobile), T-Mobile tends to not have "in-market" roaming with AT&T, so if you're well away from T-Mobile coverage your phone will roam, but if you're near T-Mobile coverage but can't get it the phone goes to "Emergency only". Regional carriers, there's some solid regional GSM carriers, but the likes of US Cellular, Bluegrass Cellular, CellularSouth, get pretty close to blanket coverage within their (fairly substantial) coverage areas, meaning Verizon & Sprint often have solid roamers to fall back on while often AT&T & T-Mobile either have no roamer, or one that's not as solidly built out.

Back on topic... if rebooting makes the IPad2 decide to get service, it's not the network. And, secondly, when Verizon does roam within the US, the phone is supposed to show "Extended Network" (which in Verizon terminology, means "Data, voice, etc. work the same and bill the same as if it says "Verizon Wireless", but don't blame us if there's problems, it's not our network"). "Roaming" is strictly for when you are outside the US (meaning "Don't use your phone or you'll be sorry when you get that bill!!!").

It's the IPad2.

Market domination

Verizon has a large percentage of the US (both by population, and by actual land area) covered. But, even when they didn't (before the purchase of Alltel, which provided huge amounts of coverage out west) they still had unlimited voice and data roaming. I don't think they need a deal like this, but there could be people pulling GBs of data roaming, so it surely won't hurt them any.

AT&T, on the other hand, covers a largeish percentage of POP, but has HUGE swaths of roaming. They have a SEVERE roaming restriction -- the lesser of 20% of your data allowance of 24MB a month, whichever is lower. Ouch! Worse, AT&T has their phones lie and say "AT&T" *ALL THE TIME* (unless they are internationally roaming). They like to play this game that they cover the areas that matter, and on the national-level map don't even distinguish between native and roaming coverage, despite having STRICTLY enforced data, voice, and text roaming limits. So, it's hard to tell how much of your coverage is ACTUALLY on-net and how much is roaming, until AT&T complains you roamed too much.

Sprint has a roaming limit of 300MB.

I don't know what T-Mobile's limit is.

I really have the feeling that AT&T will get improved roaming rates, and will not improve the roaming terms. They have really been on a cash grab of late, for instance reducing their data plan from $30 for unlimited to $25 for 2GB (oh, and then they have the gall to say, well, you paid for 2GB, but Oh no! You can't *tether* with those GBs you've already paid for, you have to pay EXTRA for that privilege!)

OK..

First, Netflix, paying $100 million for streaming rights to just about anything is retarded. How are they possibly going to make back even a fraction of that money?

Youtube.. well, I hope they do not wreck the ability to just go from vid to vid, randomly jumping around, or wreck the search capability. But, it is pretty freaking disorganized now, so having something like channels as well would surely not hurt. And I never object to original content, if it's any good.

The thing they MUST realize, but probably won't...

is they will NOT grab the attention of very many bittorrent users if the alternative is "You pay us, you get a file that is locked to a single machine, and you must use our shitty proprietary video player, on a specific version of Windows, which might or might not work."

If I buy content, I don't care if it's watermarked or something, I have no intention of buying stuff then sticking it right back up on bittorrent. What I care about is being able to get a video, type "mplayer video.mp4" and have it play! Also, I will usually play it on my desktop, but I want to be able to freely copy stuff to my netbook and possibly occasionally to my phone.

We have MMS in our bundles...

here in the states. But I still don't see the point. Text spam is illegal, and so is MMS spam. And I can and do track down any sender and make sure somebody is suing them (if not me, then my cell co does actively pursue and sue text spammers.) I honestly can't see a scenario where I'd want pictures coming into my phone.

I subscribe to one text messaging service -- I get an alert if there is a severe thunderstorm warning or a tornado warning (living in Iowa, we get disconcertingly severe weather.) It's a rare summer where we don't get at least one storm with 70-100MPH winds, at least golfball-sized hail, and flash flooding. Historically (last 15 years), we've had part of downtown levelled by a ~180MPH tornado, a second storm with grapefruit sized hail (the national weather service claims that size is impossible, with softball size being the upper limit, but I saw it), 100MPH straight line winds, flash flooding (like 3 or 4 inches in 15 minutes), and of course blizzards.. we got 14 inches of snow in one day last winter. A few of the local car dealers closed, after the grapefruit-sized hail, we had a second hailstorm about a month later (just enough time for the insurance co to clear the lot of those dented cars and bring in fresh ones) so THOSE cars got all dented up.

I've texted to "46645" (GOOGL) once in a while, usually to translate a phrase of for unit conversion (liters per 100 km to MPG for instance.). But, I just can't see any service I'd care to use that'd involve sending pictures to me.

Agreed

I don't know if Microsoft intends to use patents to torpedo Mono any more or not (they certainly planned to initially.) But, I think they've made it quite clear they are not truly interested in cross-platform compatibility, they wanted to SAY they supported it to try to knock out Java and other truly cross-platform development environments, while making sure Windows always runs .NET better. They have added all sorts of functionality in each .NET release, unlike truly cross-platform environemnts they have no concern on whether the bulk of it is just a thin wrapper around a bunch of native code (i.e. not at all portable) or if it is written for the CLR (Common Language Runtime -- i.e. actually portable code.)

For instance, Java has some platform-specific 3D support -- it wraps around either OpenGL or DirectX. At the end of the day, the kind of stuff that would use this 3D toolkit wouldn't work with some software rendering backend written in Java, it wouldn't have nearly enough speed (I don't know, there might be a software rendering fallback anyway...) .NET? Windows Forms, GDI, DirectX hooks, and on and on. Instead of reimplementing most of the stuff as actual portable code, it in fact is fairly thin layers over the same old Windows DLLs, with Microsoft continuing to insist it's portable.

Porting Mono to Android can't hurt. But I wouldn't write anything new with it.

Install experience under VirtualBox

I had an "update-manger -d" update from 10.10 in a VM. Still using Ubuntu's somewhat mutated gnome, so it worked OK. Just did a fresh install from the Beta CD. Result?

Blank desktop (just the screen background). At least for now, I assume there's no detection that the card is not OpenGL capable (I didnt turn on the options to forward 3D stuff through to the physical card that VirtualBox has), so no menu bars etc. whatsoever pop up (just the right-click menu on the screen background), and no automated offer to go to a less demanding desktop (ala the offer to turn off desktop effects on older Ubuntu distros that defaulted to them being on.)

You know,

per Top Gear, Japan has phone-free cars, where people will just glare at you and bitch you out until you get off the phone. Simple solution. Being able to text and use data without the limited range of wifi is not a bad thing. Of course, the phone will queue outgoing texts, and network will queue incoming texts, so it seems to me it could be sensible to at least provide service where possible in the stations, and you'd at least have texts come through when the phone has service, even if it's not long enough for useful phone or data calls.

Option 3?

If carriers want 3 x 40mhz up for auction and theres 126mhz available, then give public safety 6mhz. LTE has a 3mhz paired option (3mhz up, 3mhz downlink), this allows for 15.1mbps each way, per sector (at least here in the US, cell sites will almost always have either 3-way or 6-way sectorization, that is rather than the site broadcasting 360 degrees, it broadcasts 3 120 degree or 6 60 degree sectors.) Or, if politics prevent a single system, this could be split into 2 1.4mhz pairs each carrying 6.1mbps up and 6.1mbps down. This'd also leave 200khz up/200khz down left over for narrow band users.

That's as much voice as they could ever need, along with as much data as they could possibly use, and quite a bit of video as long as they use something reasonable like H.2.64.

20mhz seems VERY excessive.

Agree with Linus etc.

The FSF is about as strict as it gets on GPl interpretations, they say a proprietary app and GPL code must be "at arms length" -- they say a proprietary app cannot use a GPL shared library, that's tied together too closelfy (but LGPL specifically allows proprietary app to use LGPL library.).

But, examples of "at arms length" specifically include a kernel and applications, and as AC @ 29 March 9:33GMT says, Linux has a specific clause affirming this too. Since the kernel headers are incorporated by the compiler, to me this means the headers are not under GPL protection. In addition, information (such as a list of facts) is not copyrightable, and the headers are essentially an API description rather than the implementation (which *is* copyrighted and covered by GPL.)

Now, Google *should* just go ahead and relese anyway. But, there's some pretty solid arguments why I think Linus and Stallman are right.

Shouldn't go through

This deal should NOT go through. T-Mobile's network has almost 100% overlap with coverage AT&T already has. AT&T has absolute loads of spectrum, they just do not manage it very well. Loads of people use T-Mobile because they either did not want to pay the (MUCH!) higher rates of AT&T or Verizon, or they decided they wanted a GSM phone but fled AT&T's pervasive network problems, or fled AT&T's ridiculous 2GB cap with cash overage for T-Mobile's "unlimited" (they throttle past 1GB, but do not have any data limit.)

So, a merger like this just reduces competition, and gives AT&T spectrum they don't really need in most cases.

Loathing for AT&T

One minor correction -- the CDMA carriers do sell phones that have both CDMA and GSM. If they even bother to lock the GSM side, they will give you an unlock code right away (the CDMA carriers here don't lock the CDMA side, the service provider code is 000000.) I have a Droid 2 Global right now. This does considerably limit choice of phones though.

People here do not loathe AT&T because it is an ex-monopoly, although it doesn't help! -- the old Bell system at least provided reliable service, albeit pricey. AT&T, they somehow even manage to screw up DSL, numerous reports of service problems, and now they are talking about imposing 150GB caps on DSL, *and 250GB on FIBER!!*. Making it rather pointless to buy some 24mbps plan when it just means you can blow through your cap that much faster.

Wireless -- AT&T has made one excuse after another after another for YEARS for poor service. When AT&T and Cingular merged, they calimed any problem was from "integration" (combining the networks), from the day they merged (even though they didn't start any work for over 6 months) until at least a year or so after they finished. They *still* blaim IPhones for any and all network problems they continue to have (even though they've had years to add capcity, and even though Android phones use MORE data but VZW, Sprint, T-Mobiles networks are not collapsing.).

The big problem, they run half-rate GSM *ALL THE TIME* in most markets (not just when the sites are busy enough to need it, you can call at 2AM and use half rate. It sounds BAD.) Combine that with improperly tight channel reuse (again, even when not needed) and it means if you drop below about 2 bars calls garble so badly as to be unusable -- greatly reducing the usable service area.

I fully expect one consequence of the T-Mobile merger will be, any day now, they will start blaiming any future service problems on "integrating" T-Mobile into their network (even though they won't start doing it for at least a year from now.)

To make it worse, they will umm, "stretch the truth" in their ads. They had one counteracting Verizon's ads about coverage, listing rural towns they cover. They SPECIFICALLY say they have coverage in Boseman, MT -- THEY DON'T, it's roaming. (They have a 40% roaming limit, or 150MB a month for data, if you exceed this they TERMINATE your service so it's not like it doesn't matter.) They have ads saying they have the fastest 4G network -- 1) It's not 4G. 2) It's not the fastest, they made sure to run their tests JUST before Verizon turned on LTE, then waited until after LTE came out to run the ads. This adds to the hate for AT&T, people "in the know" catch them lying again and again and again.

One more thing -- CAPS. To try to help their network meltdown, AT&T went from unlimited data for $30 to *2GB* for $25. That's low for that much cash! As a bonus, even WITH a 2GB cap they STILL are telling people they must buy a seperate tethering package to use their own data! This made sense for unlimited, but when the data use is already limited? Hell no. They just assume everyone else will follow with phone data caps... nope! Sprint -- unlimited. T-Mobile -- throttles @1GB, but unlimited. VZW -- unlimited (recently, they said for new users, they'd throttle the heaviest users if and only if the cell site is busy. Word is the throttle point is 9GB.)

This is going to make people loathe AT&T that much more -- T-Mobile is less expensive than AT&T, provides much clearer voice quality, more reliable data (maybe, AT&T claims their data is finally working better recently).. less coverage, but they can roam when you're out of T-Mo coverage, and importantly hard data cap (last I heard T-Mo would throttle above 1GB. But AT&T sucks huge wads of cash out of your pocket past 2GB.) Many people fled AT&T for T-Mobile for just these reasons, this'll make people *HATE* AT&T that they flee AT&T, and AT&T just buys them back.

@R.E.H., a little clarity -- I read in hofo that some Virgin Mobile users found they could get to *Virgin Mobiles* mobile support site but not the rest of the internet. The fact that this one site loads fine means to me, as you say, Sprint is fine, the data runs from Sprint's site to some central network operation center run by Virgin Mobile fine, but the internet connection there is completely overloaded. This seems like good news, upgrading *one* internet connection should be a cheap and easy fix. The bad news, why hasn't it happened yet when there've been reported problems for months?

Finally, regrading RBOCs. Out of all of them in the breakup, we're now down to 3.

AT&T is composed of (among other non-bells) southwestern bell (later called SBC), Pacific Telesis (operated pacific bell and nevada bell), SNET (not bell co but "southern new england telephone"), Ameritech (chicago area), and Bellsouth.

Verizon is composed of NYNEX (New York), Bell Atlantic, and GTE (an independent.)

Both AT&T and Verizon have of course bought plenty of other companies, including numerous cell phone carriers (back through the 80's and 90s, there were TONS of cell cos that would cover like a couple of counties, or part of the state, or whatever.)

USWest is still seperate, they merged with Qwest (who owned fiber optics) and renamed to Qwest then.

Cincinatti Bell, despite the "Bell" in the name, was not owned by AT&T. It's still seperate too.

Smart move

The Blackberrys have had this functionality (and well-tested in the field) for years. It seems to me the primary cost is implementation, that is already sunk cost. So this has very little cost to RIM, but provides new functionatity for (non-corporate) customers, keeping RIM and Blackberries more relevant against the onslaught of Android phones and fruity-phone.

why sms doesn't crash a smartphone

At those who question if the carriers filter these, who knows? The researchers ran their own private SMSC and cell site inside a farrady cage for their tests. I could see equipment dropping the ones that crashed the phone by for instance claiming 10 segments when there are really 7 (since a cursory inspection indicates they are corrupted).. On the other hand, if the "outer envelope" of the text is structurally sound I wouldn't expect the equipment to look at content.

As a bad analogy, I expect most ISPs will drop corrupted packets, and drop "bogons" (packets that "got out" to begin wtih due to misconfiguration, like 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.0.x or the like) and drop corrupted packets (bad checksum). I *wouldn't* expect them as a matter of course to inspect packets for virus or malware payloads.

As for smartphones being less susceptible -- I don't think it's because they use both a baseband and service CPU (as opposed to simpler phones using the "baseband" CPU to run the whole show.) I think it's because smartphone OSes have memory protection and multitasking (instead of cooperative task switching*). So the text handler can never overwrite another area of the phone, and if it locks up it doesn't lock the phone. A daemon could watch for hung things like the text handler, and automatically kill the hung one and restart a clean copy. The watchdog counts down from (for instance) 10 seconds; a healthy phone resets the watchdog back to 10 seconds frequently, a hung phone the watchdog resets the phone when the countdown reaches 0.

*With multitasking, the OS runs an app for one timeslice (often 1/100th of a second), and when that 1/100th of a second is up the system stops that app dead in it's tracks and goes to the next one. Cooperative task switching was improperly called multitasking by both Microsoft (pre-Win95) and Apple (pre-OSX), an app runs until it says it's done running. Yes, that means if an app gets stuck in a loop or locks up for any reason, the entire system locks up.

IE versus Silverlight, FIGHT!

@frymaster, yes firefox came out years later, but mozilla was out almost simultaneously with IE6. The main impetus for firefox was originally to speed up the menus and buttons, by using native controls (i.e. windows ones in windows, gtk or qt ones in linux, macos ones on mac) instead of them also being rendered by the html engine in mozilla.

Regarding the IE teams lack of love for Silveright -- this is a natural consequence of Microsoft corporate culture. They will have teams bitterly competing with each other; and the Silverlight and IE teams are both wanting to use their technologies for app development, so they have no love for each other.

On a side note -- Silverlight, a "cross platform" environment that only ACTUALLY works right on one platform? FAIL! Mac version is not feature complete.. windows version keeps dropping support for older versions of windows with every release. And Moonlight, what a joke! Last I tried it, it'd run *some* complicated demos, while failing on others that were as simple as printing some text in a box, or doing a rotating cube (not even using OpenGL or DirectX or whatever the crap Silverlight uses, just using line draw commands.) Basically not reliable enough to actually be useable.

"Use it or lose it"

Is an excellent policy. Here in the states, for analog on 800mhz, since it was designed after Bell was broken up, one band was for the wireline company and the other for an independent. Once auctions and sales began, the FCC put a buildout date on the licenses, if some percentage of population is not covered by the date, the license reverted to the FCC. The first 1900mhz auctions did this too. It worked pretty well, where I live I've got 3 out of 4 national carriers to choose from and 2 local cell phone carriers (plus all the MVNOs). The later licenses did not have the buildout requirement, but there've been loads of sales from one carrier to another anyway. Carriers might want to sit on spectrum to harm the competition, but inevitably find another carrier's offer too lucrative and sell. A second part of this is "disaggregation", carriers here have for instance split a 15mhz (paired) license into 3 5mhz slices, selling each one seperately.

Anyway... I am concerned by TV spectrum being taken away as well. Here, a few cell cos that have worked hard on network tuning, they say there's no spectrum crunch (Verizon is of this opinion.) Some others (AT&T among them) say they need tons more spectrum, they want to cut yet more channels out of the TV band and sell them off. The 700mhz spectrum sale here sold 52-68 (and so 2-51 is still plenty of channels to avoid interference) but selling off another large block and it'd be difficult to avoid serious problems with cochannel interference.

Why?

@SuccessCase, I don't know if I buy it. People have had apps break from one iOS to the next and had to come up with fixes for it. I don't think they would turn away a nice speedup that is supposed to not change behavior at all over this.

@thickasthieves, that's the question. Some think it's a conspiracy of Apple apparently. SuccessCase and some think it's intentional but that it's to be a benefit. I figure two possibilities 1) During development the UIWebView got a seperate branch of at least Javascript code (and possibly the entire HTML renderer) from Safari, and they weren't synced recently enough. Or 2) They tried to sync, or maybe even have UIWebView use the Safari libraries, it blew up on them and they couldn't get it to work for a timely iOS release so they used older but working code.

For those who think it's intentional, I must make one comment -- it's in Apple's best interest to make things as low power as possible. If the goal was just to slow down apps on the desktop, they should use the newer, more efficient code and throttle CPU usage. This would save battery life.

Incidentally..

The 3.1mbps speed indicates they are using EVDO (Rev A), as Verizon Wireless, Sprint, US Cellular etc. use in the US. (To compare to UMTS, EVDO uses 1.25mhz channels versus UMTS's 5mhz, so in 5mhz EVDO can push through an aggregate 12.4mbps.) EVDO Rev B supporting chips are out now, it "could" support 4.9mbps per channel (19.6mbps in 5mhz). At least here in the US, though, VZW is rolling out LTE ASAP, and so far I haven't heard of any carrier planning to roll out Rev B.

I heard of a plan here to install some access points in pay phones. But by the time it got off the ground, the payphones were gone. Even my dad finally had to get a cellphone, after he got somewhere on a trip, went to call a cab, and found there were no payphones in the entire airport.

regedit, service packs

"As an ubuntu user since version 5.10.... #

...and various BSDs before that, I'd like to point out that all operating systems have bugs, even Linux."

NEVER!!! Linux is perfect!!11one.

But seriously, I am a little disappointed in Microsoft releasing these machine-killing service packs -- they did it before with an XP service pack, where certain OEMs installed an Intel driver on AMD systems, it worked fine until I think SP2 (or maybe SP3?) was installed then they'd drop dead. Now, again with the 7 service pack.

------------------------------------------------------------

@Big Bear, re: "Joking aside, I really should upgrade but I need to build up the enthusiasm to find all the drivers and support for the various bits of bobs inside the machine and then fiddle so that it works. Maybe once this darn project delivers I can set a weekend aside..."

You probably don't need to. I've run updates from 8.04 up to 10.04 then 10.10, and I didn't have to reinstall a thing. My parents even have the Samsung-provided driver for their CLP-510 (it had SLIGHTLY better color matching than the open source driver) and THAT kept working after going from 8.04 all the way to 10.10. If you don't have an option showing to upgrade, you run "update-manager -d" and then you do. Of course I'd still wait for your project to deliver, doing an upgrade in the middle of a project could be a bad idea.. but I think you'll be surprised at how smooth it goes.

---------------

RE: Everyone who brings up the Linux command line. I have one response: Regedit. You seriously cannot pretend that starting regedit, going in the registry to "Local Users"->"Blah de blah"->"The fourth choice", inserting a string object called "foobaz", and putting in "{ABC12-2345-CDE-DEADBEEF}" for foobaz is in any sense easier than having to go open /etc/foobar with a text editor and put "somejunk=1" in there. The reality is, in this day and age, normal Linux users don't have to crack open a text editor, and most Windows users probably do not crack open regedit.

"Russian Roulette" and 1 week notice?

@Michael C, de facto this happens. Go to xdadevelopers.com, or one of plenty of other sites, and there are ROMs for your phone that incorporate newer versions of Android, fixes people have collected up, and so on. But as K. Adams alludes to, some people would not handle this well.

We used to have problems with return attempts at the surplus store I worked at -- we had normal (used but functioning) computers for down as low as $50, and scrap machines for $5-$10 -- they had an arrow saying "parts machines, as-is", people would specifically ask and I'd point out they don't run, they might need RAM or the like and quite a few have blown capacitors (but they could pop the lid and look, and I'd even point out the blown caps for them). Most people who bought them replaced the caps etc. and were happy, they'd get like 90% to run and resell them and use the rest for spare parts (these were mainly piles of Dell Optiplex GX270s so everything was interchangeable). Every so often, someone would keep asking about them like 3, 4, 5 times (not different days, like 5 times in a row), like if they phrased it right the answer would change to "oh they actually work fine" and every time I"d point out they don't run and are not returnable -- they'd buy one or two -- then come back to return them and be all shocked when I'd point out they are as-is, I told them they are as-is, and there's a giant sign saying they are as-is so no I won't accept a return. (We had to be firm on this, otherwise we had customers playing a sort of "Russian Roulette" with caps, they would want to buy and return $10 machines until they got one that worked (a few had a blown cap on an AGP slot or something that didn't affect how the system ran) and a few resellers tried to strip the machines they bought but couldn't repair and try to return basically empty cases.) It'd be just that much worse for phones if a company prereleased updates, they could stress a dozen times that they may cause problems, and some people would just hear "I get features first!!" and not accept it when problems happen.

One week notice on Google Apps? Pray tell, what happens if the IT manager tests a new version and it breaks a bunch of stuff for him? Does he actually have an option to tell Google he's having problems, and to not update his companies instances of the Google Apps?

Some perspective...

Apple does a lot of stuff I disagee with. But in this case, I would assume the browser and desktop are handled by two different teams. Using version control, the browser guys have their branch, improved the javascript engine and checked it in; the desktop guys would have their branch where they'd do their thing, check it in only to find that the javascript engine in the browser is now out of sync. I don't see any conspiracy here.

Second bit of perspective, on my Droid 2 Global, which has a 1.2ghz TI OMAP and Android 2.2, the browser Sunspider benchmarked at 6549.9ms. It benched like 5300ms on my 1.3ghz Atom netbook which has Ubuntu 10.10 with Firefox 3.6.15 (Firefox has been getting good Javascript speedups of late too.) (Why don't I say "the benchmark ran in 5300ms?" Because it took a good minute or two to *run* -- it runs a bunch of times to ensure a +/- 5% accuracy.) Point being, a 10000ms time shouldn't be crippling.

Something interesting.. here's some Sunspider results I found from 2 sources, both using Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz one in Dec. 2007, and one in March 2011. Every bowser has HUGELY sped up in that length of time:

Firefox 2.0.11: 10,471 ms

Firefox 3.6.13: 753

Firefox 4.0 Beta 12: 247

IE 7.0.6000.16546: 21206.4

IE8: 3746

IE9 Final Release: 214

Safari 3.0.4beta (523.13): 6583.6

Safari 5.0.3: 310

Opera 9.50.9613 beta: 5391.2

Opera 11: 240

Finally (no 2007 results)

Chrome 10: 248

Chrome 11 Developer: 243

Why app stores?

Why app stores? 1) The apps in the app store should actually work on your device. I know to make sure to put "Android" in my google searches, but if i didn't, I'd end up with apps for Windows, OSX, IOS, Ubuntu, Palm, Blackberry, and on and on. 2) Automatic updates. (Or, at least, having a centralized location to tell me when updates are available.) Oh, 3) Ratings and comments. Anybody is going to say the app they themselves wrote is the shit, the reviews will reveal if it's *the* shit or just shit.

This is not just true on the phone, for Ubuntu I install my apps via the package manager, and not by downloading random packages off the web, for the same reason (and only bypass the package manager if a given package doesn't exist.)

That said, the whole restrictiveness and such is an Apple thing. I'm using an Android phone for just that reason, there's really no artificial restrictions on what apps are available. That's an IPhone thing, and they are bringing it on themselves now by continuing to buy IPhones then act all surprised that it's restrictive.

With all that said, my apps are games, cell site location apps, navigators, etc., the kind of things that *MAYBE* "could" run in the browser if javascript is fast enough, but really are not appropriate for it. I don't have like "local news channel app" or whatever, those ARE the kind of things I would use the browser for.

Bayesian filter?

I figure "Moore's law to the rescue." I have been running spamprobe for years, this program uses a bayesian filter -- to initially train it, I save spam into a "spam" folder, any falsely marked spam into a "non-spam" folder, and then I run a "spamprobe-train" script that processes that information (it uses words and two-word groups to recognize spam and non-spam). After a matter of days, it blocked virtually all my spam with no false positives. When I started using spamprobe, it'd take a good 5 minutes to filter my mail. Now, thanks to Moore's law, it can scan my E-Mail usually as fast as fetchmail can get it (large attachments will back it up a few seconds.) When my ISP said they would charge a few $ a month for spam filtering, I said "no thanks", so my spam filter just gets trained all the better. I have had my E-Mail address since the 1990s, and personally pissed off a spammer back in the early 2000s, so I get 300-700 spams a day; about 0-2 make it through the filter.

(This spammer, I sent an E-Mail to "his ISP". Got back a real snow-job message making it clear that this "ISP" was just a front so complaints to the abuse contact would just go to the spammer. So I contacted *that* "ISP"s ISP, and they disconnected his ass. Less than a week later I went from about 20 spams a week to like 800 a day. My ISP had not implemented any spam filtering yet, luckily spamprobe had just come out. My spam quantities have actually decreased slightly since then.)

Actually...

CDMA is cheaper to deploy, more spectrally efficient, and has better range than GSM. So, no, it would be quite senseless to tear down a CDMA network in favor of GSM. As for UMTS/HSDPA/etc., AT&T has had real problems deploying it, as the carriers in the US did not get "fresh" spectrum to deploy it in as they did in Europe, and the 5mhz channel width made it hard to deploy in the existing spectrum. Really, the sensible solution would be to deploy LTE, and phase out both CDMA and GSM over time.

As for having to deploy a 4G network -- well, Sprint & Clearwire are using Wimax.. which when they started deploying it made perfectly good sense, but now means they have to use specialized phones for 4G (CDMA+Wimax hybrid phones). If T-Mobile used Clearwire for 4G, then, they would also need custom handsets, just as they would if they went with LightSquared. However, T-Mobile is no stranger to this -- they have deployed their HSDPA in the AWS band * -- so these AWS 3G phones are specific to T-Mobile and IWireless (the plain 2G GSM uses the standard bands though.)

Side note -- first T-Mobile (US), then AT&T, have started falsely claiming their HSPA+ networks are 4G (so they can "keep up" with Sprint's Wimax and Verizon's LTE deployments without actually deploying anything.). This will be especially confusing for AT&T customers; AT&T plans to roll out LTE towards the end of the year, so since they are falsely claiming their upgraded 3G network is 4G, it'll be like "Oh, here's some *other* 4G". Yeah. T-Mobile takes the cake, they have had recent ads specifically targeting AT&T and IPhone 4, pointing out IPhone 4 is not 4G (which is true) and then listing a bunch of T-Mobile phones that have "4G" in the names and claiming they have the largest 4G network in the US. News flash T-Mobile -- those phones are not 4G either, and you have a fast 3G network, but no 4G whatsoever.

* Second side note -- AWS is 1700mhz phone to site, and 2100mhz site to phone. This is not the European 2100mhz band, but I think the 2100mhz site-to-phone was selected intentionally so a world phone would not have to have so many antennas.

Patents and the cost of IE

"Maybe they should also be looking at how Google is undermining HTML5 video"

Simple: They are not. H.264 is patent-encumbered and royalty-encumbered; VP8 is attempted to be patent and royalty free. This does not undermine HTML5, it makes it so the video tag can be implemented by anyone instead of anyone with deep pockets.

"if IE isn't free how come you can download it for free....just because it is already installed doesn't make it paid for."

I can't download and use it for free. The license terms say, right up top:

"Microsoft Corporation (or based on where you live, one of its affiliates) licenses this supplement to you. If you are licensed to use Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Server 2008 software (for which this supplement is applicable) (the "software"), you may use this supplement. You may not use it if you do not have a license for the software. You may use this supplement with each validly licensed copy of the software."

I didn't pay for Windows, I'm not running Windows, so I'm not licensed to run IE. You paid for IE when you bought XP, Vista, 2003 server or 2008 server (and IE8 is a supplement to replace the version of IE you paid for with a newer one). (This particular license was from IE8, Windows 7 is not listed because IE8 is already bundled with it instead of being a supplement.)

Maybe not a mystery?

Especially if, as Joe Montana says, all connections for the country go through Tripoli.. well, if I were them I wouldn't rely on altering BGP tables. I'd unplug or cut the cables. Routes are then up but no data gets through. (Or, as Daniel B suggests, cut the routes off in the router.)

Not a rewrite of history

"Everyone loves to rewrite history. When IE6 first came out it was fantastic compared to the competition"

No it wasn't. IE6 was quite an improvement compared to IE4 or 5. It was not bad compared to the competition, but really was not fantastic either. By then Netscape had released their code and mozilla was up to the 0.9 series (Netscape 6 was based on mozilla 0.9). Opera was comparable too. These both had the big advantage of being cross-platform.