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cannot be used for any applications that tether [...] to laptops, PCs, or other equipment for any purpose

No iPhone needed, but you may need to be an AT&T customer as the wording is a bit dodgy. http://www.att.com/gen/general?pid=11375

I thought the SBC browser was IE, with some branding. That's what they gave me when I signed up for SBC/Yahoo DSL years ago. Gee, Thanks.

I'm glad you brought up Bell Labs as an example for why AT&T shouldn't do research. *rolls eyes* I don't think they ever got out of the research business. Their corporate website talks about the new AT&T Laboratories. Basically it's a joint venture with the former SBC Laboratories, BellSouth Laboratories and AT&T Laboratories.

Let see Bell Labs has produced a total of 6 Nobel Prizes. They did their part in developing radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser and information theory. And let's not forget: the UNIX operating system, and the C programming language.

Yeah AT&T should stay out of research...those bastards need to make sure I have phone service at the bottom of the abandon mine on the outskirts of town. *rolls eyes*

In all seriousness, I'm a current customer of AT&T and I have no gripes with their cell phone service, privacy or billing. I admit that I don't get perfect service when I go snowboarding, but I'm sure that will change soon. I'm happy my money is funding research if they want to play around and possible improve the web browser good!

http://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/atttilt/

For those that don't want AT&T, their self-branded "Tilt" is really an HTC TyTN II (P4550/Kaiser). It's available unlocked and thru other carriers in other countries.

that does everything the iPhone plans on doing (and more):

http://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/atttilt/

You can even change the system look and feel to have it look and behave like an iphone... for 1/3 the cost.

Most providers do offer it in major metropolitan areas. AT&T Wireless, the carrier for the iPhone, for instance, shows their data coverage here. A subset of these areas supports 3G, as shown here. It's pretty easy to take a look at the data map, though, and get a feel for where there is population density that supports the rollout of the tech. If you go here you can see a similar coverage map for Verizon Wireless -- click "Broadband & V CAST" and look at the dark blue areas.

Most providers do offer it in major metropolitan areas. AT&T Wireless, the carrier for the iPhone, for instance, shows their data coverage here. A subset of these areas supports 3G, as shown here. It's pretty easy to take a look at the data map, though, and get a feel for where there is population density that supports the rollout of the tech. If you go here you can see a similar coverage map for Verizon Wireless -- click "Broadband & V CAST" and look at the dark blue areas.

As a C++ programmer, aircraft enthusiast and a resident of a country set to buy the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) I clicked on Stroustrup's link to his 'JSF++: Joint Strike Fighter Air Vehicle Coding Standards PDF' http://www.research.att.com/~bs/JSF-AV-rules.pdf but it was completely broken.

Given the JSF has gone through all sorts of delays and stuffups, it just seemed so poignantly ironic.

The thing is, C++ is huge. Just to have a solid working knowledge of the core language, you need to master whole rafts of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the low-level operation of the machine, because even the core is a labyrinth of obscure corner cases that make language lawyers drool, and which, if expressed in pseudo-code, would be a bunch of gigantic switch statements with a couple dozen levels of ifs nested inside each case.

Absolutely. This is fairly easy to check, too; here's the most recent draft for C++0x, and it's already 1200+ pages! And they haven't even included everything they want to get there yet (such as concepts, which alone will add a lot more; a full list of what's not yet there, but is going to be, can be seen here). Now, how do you think, how many developers are going to understand it well enough?

Your logic is flawed. It assumes

• That there are other ISO-standardized languages, comparable in scope, with a spec much smaller than 1200 pages.
• That there are other languages comparable in scope, period. Note that C++ needs to carry the baggage of C.
• That developers actually learn the language from the ISO standard rather than books.
• That developers have to relearn the whole language when C++0x comes out.

Seriously, you people keep claiming C++ is huge, but never seem to come up with any solid evidence. A decade ago it used to be an argument used by Java advocates, but from what I hear (I don't use Java) that language has grown quite a bit since then.

Also see Bjarne's canned rebuttal.

You're confusing "knowing just enough about your tools to not cut yourself" and knowing the basics and overall use of a set of tools without memorizing every single nuance so that you are capable and comfortable to use them effectively, looking for more information when needed and knowing basically where to find it, without wasting your productive time on trivia.

Mastering the nuances of usage is essential to security. You cannot deny that is important.

Given your attitude, somehow I'm not surprised that you don't understand the difference. The first is being a novice (a state that some people never get out of). The second is mastery.

Yeah, I'm still a novice. I am still uncomfortable about some of the side effects of operators on matrix operations in APL on the IBM 5150. Someday I hope to appreciate fully the four basic loops of C and the nuances of stdlib. If I have trouble with inheritance in C++ I know there are better people to take it up with than you.

That has little to do with the topic, which is the mystic abortion that is .NET. The simplest answer is usually best. The elegant solution expresses completely the solution eloquently. Form follows function. None of these ideals are present in .NET. .NET is complexity for the sake of incomprehensibility. It sells more bootcamps. It drives up the price of certs. Those certs are used by idiots to gain entry into the halls of business where they wreak havok with knowledge but without understanding. It's a bad thing. It's ephemeral and will be obsoleted by another, more complex, equally bad thing because that is its purpose.

You've been saying this throughout the thread. We're discussing mobile phones. That statement is complete total bullshit. "Can you hear me now?" "Fewest dropped calls" "More bars in more places" Notice a trend there? They're all advertising great coverage because mobile phones are notorious for shitty reception, dead zones, and just simple lack of coverage. When people think "mobile phone," crystal clarity and five nines uptime is NOT what comes to mind. I don't know ANYONE who doesn't complain about cell coverage on occasion. Look at AT&T's present coverage map. If the phone is as mission critical as you claim it to be, then it should be a crime for Apple to prevent unlocking, because I see a lot of "no coverage available" areas on that AT&T map. I should be able to carry sims for every network just in case Truckasaurus attacks me on a country road that AT&T doesn't cover and I need to phone for help.

The real problem with the Iphone is that it's locked to AT&T wireless. Despite their "more bars in more places" advertising, their coverage is spotty even in major markets. Check it out: http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer will show you what they claim their coverage to be. Look at the pretty colors, then check to see what those colors actually indicate. If you throw away everything from "probably get a signal standing in the street" down there's not a lot left. Keep in mind, that map is generous; your experience in real life may be much worse.

So why should I (or anyone else) buy a $500 phone with a $80/month service plan that can't be used at home or the office and only has a usable signal for about 1/2 mile along the daily commute? That's just plain silly - and there's nothing that Apple can do to make their cell phone more attractive to me (except change providers to someone with real coverage).

There's a lot of people like me who have to use Verizon phones; say what you want about that company, but they do a very good job of providing solid coverage. Around where I live: Verizon works, AT&T doesn't.

Having far too much experience with the way that Verizon cripples their phones, I find all the hyperbole about Apple's restrictions to be questionable at best. Music? Sure, but the only way to load a music file is through Verizon's pay site. Games? Only if you buy them from Verizon. Camera in your phone? Sure, but the only way to get the pictures off of the phone is through Verizon's pay site (at $1 per picture!) Bluetooth? Sure, but Verizon has disabled most of the BT profiles to the point where all it can work with is Bluetooth hands-free devices. And that support is limited, too. Internet access? Sure, but the browser is almost useless and only works through Verizon's gateway (for a fee, of course). And don't bother trying to visit sites that Verizon doesn't want you to visit.

Right now, with nothing more than the Iphone comes with out of the box, it's a far more functional and useful cell phone than anything you can get from Verizon. Too bad about that coverage problem...

Someone pointed this link to me the other day which apparently does let you do iPhone for business.

Excessive use of Partner coverage may subject your service to early termination, in accordance with your service terms. Data services may not be available.

I'm not much of a coffee drinker ...

LOL. Nor are most Starbucks patrons, it seems. Those folks in line are mostly ordering "drinks" which, from what I can gather, amount to a slice of chocolate cake thrown into a blender with some coffee, and served up with whip cream in a plastic cup and a straw. I guess drinking coffee out of a cup while using a fork to eat your desert is too fattening, or maybe just too old skool. ;-)

That said, I agree about the "comfy chair" environment. Whether you want to socialise, hit on babes using Thinkpads (I've seen them!), or just hang out, it's hard to beat. The fact that people are conducting actual business (interviews, meetings, etc.) in those same comfy chairs shouldn't surprise anybody.

As for the wireless thing, it's obviously a business decision to counteract the falling stock price and stave off competition from the bottom feeders like MacDonalds and donut stores, but it does translate into a nice perk for Starbucks patrons. I have ATT DSL, so I believe I have (or soon will have) free wireless, but I've not bothered yet to check it out yet as I already have a comfy chair and espresso machine. If I do get free wireless, then I expect I'll be spending more time sitting among the "coffee drink" drinkers.

You can now get an iPhone under a business plan - click "Rate plans and activation" on this page.

You're right that you still can't use it as a modem though.

Okay, so the problem is basically "the big bad evil monopoly"? I'm looking at their pricing page right now and I just can't bring myself to call $38.99 "bad". Not when I've been paying more than that (plus the same over again for TV service) for God knows how long. Even if they throw in a boatload of surcharges and extra crap, I'm STILL ahead compared to cable. I don't even watch TV anyway.
So you're upset that your choice is $50 phone+internet or $39 internet? Shit, just take the internet and go on, it's not likely to get much cheaper for that speed - in this country anyway.

Unless I see a real reason to NOT switch (along the lines of the endless Comcast horror stories) I might give them a call soon. Just pointing out how the evil corporation behaves in general simply isn't compelling enough, since by that logic I wouldn't have ANY broadband -- or modern conveniences of any kind, really.

1) Requires iTunes.

Not quite. For upgrades, probably. That's a lot like complaining that your car requires tires, though. iTunes and the iPod are a single package, not two different systems tied together.

Is that you, Randall L. Stephenson?

Why should Apple pay MORE for using bandwidth? I already paid for the bandwidth my connection uses (for iTunes or anything else) on my end and Apple paid for on their end. Why in the world would you suggest there be another fee when we both already paid for what we are using?

I can't believe the false logic used. First off he only counts his ISP costs for getting a message, but he counts both sending and receiving a message for SMS. You can immediately cut the number in half because if you're receiving a message over your internet connection then someone else must be sending it and paying their own ISP fees.

Next he incredibly doubles the number yet again because he claims people only use 1/2 the available 160 characters in a text message. The major problem here is that his original number is based on the full available bandwidth of his internet connection. That's 500 gigabytes per month. With 2.6 million seconds per month that is 193k per second or about 1.54 megabits. Used every second of every day for a whole 30 days. If you use that much bandwidth you are getting a killer deal.

So let's say he wants to send a text message using his ISP to another computer. First you need a protocol, you don't just pump 80 bytes out your internet connection and hope those bytes end up where you want them to go. That's IP where you give the message an address. Next you need to verify that tour message is getting through to a destination. That's TCP/IP. Each of these is 20 bytes, so that's 40 bytes of overhead even if you're sending just a single character. Wait though, the TCP protocol sends and receives packets simply to establish a connection (your phone must find the service and use radio bandwidth for that also), so there's mroe wasted bytes. Now you must use the SMTP protocol on top of that to send the message to the server so that it can be guaranteed delivery. Then the recipient needs to use some protocol (POP3/IMAP) to retrieve the message. So not only is he forgetting to count data off his internet connection, he doesn't count the free data that gets send with an SMS such as the source and destination numbers.

My point is that the article is moronic. Text messaging isn't for transferring large amounts of data. There is limited bandwidth in the radio spectrum for providers to operate. A lot happens behind the scenes to make sure your message is delivered. Not only that, but each message has to be tracked by billing software so the customer can be charged.

Perhaps the most glaring error in this indefeasible article is that he lies about the cost. He claims it's 20 cents per sms at AT&T. Check out their plans yourself. You can get unlimited messaging for $20 per month. 1500 messages for $15 means one cent per message.

I'd like to propose a scenario... Some kid uses their internet connection for email only and texts 5,000 messages a month (not unheard of). Then for $20 he got 5,000 messages so that was $0.004 (less than 1/2 a penny) per message. Now he pays $50 a month for his internet connection where he gets 1,000 emails a month. That's $0.05 per email. Now the internet connection costs more than 10 times as much as sms.

That's all well and good and you won't find too many people on my side of the fence that disagree with that concept.

What bothers me is that outfits like AT&T and Verizon that already own large swaths of the cellular (850mhz) band are going to be allowed to gobble up large swaths of the 700mhz band. Nobody has asked them to justify why they need this much spectrum. One would think that with the pending shutdown of AMPS that they'd have lots of free spectrum in 850mhz to do whatever they'd like with.

Why the hell are we allowing AT&T and Verizon to further cement their stranglehold on the wireless industry in the United States? If you believe that the airwaves should be used for the public benefit then you should want to see a more competitive market for wireless services emerge. This isn't going to happen as long as we allow two large companies (combined with two smaller ones) to completely dominate an industry. We should be taking steps to bring more companies into this market, not further cementing the position of the existing ones.

What would I do differently? At the very least I would require a justification of the existing use of the spectrum that they have and detailed roll-out plans. I'd also exclude AT&T and Verizon from the 700mhz band in any market where they already have cellular (850mhz) licenses. Let the carriers stuck with the poorer-performing PCS (1900mhz) band have the first shot at this valuable space. I'd also mandate stricter rules on what they can do with these bands, including a full adoption of carterfone rules and the elimination of their practice of locking people up into long term contracts with hefty termination fees.

Did you know that in some markets AT&T owns more then 50% of the available wireless (cellular, PCS and AWS) licenses? If you combine them with Verizon in those markets the two manage to own 75-80% of the available spectrum. What's wrong with that picture? AT&T previously justified by it by saying they needed to run three (AMPS/TDMA/GSM) networks. What's the excuse now?

I got that from this thread on AT&T's U-Verse forum a few days ago. Their U-Verse package uses one of the apparently vulnerable (and, IMHO, otherwise fairly shitty) 2wire access points.

Disclaimer, I haven't yet done any verification of these claims on my own. I probably will if I get some free time sometime soon.

See, for example, this and the hardcopy literature references therein:

A000616 a(-1)=1 by convention; for n >= 0, a(n) = number of irreducible Boolean functions of n variables.
n a(n)
-1 1
0 2
1 3
2 6
3 22
4 402
5 1228158
6 400507806843728
7 527471432057653004017274030725792
8 11218076601767519586965281984173341005925142853855481024470471657123840

-- Prof. Jonathan Vos Post

Even Bjarne Stroustrup uses "\n" instead of endl (at least sometimes). I think the reasoning is: since the C standard library convention (which C++ inherits) is to fiddle any platform-specific line terminator and show just \n to the application, you might as well write that and let the library turn it to \r\n or whatever as needed. That said, I haven't tested what happens on DOS or Windows platforms (say) with his example program.

#include<iostream>
#include<vector>
#include<algorithm>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
vector<double> v;

double d;
while(cin>>d) v.push_back(d); // read elements
if (!cin.eof()) { // check if input failed
cerr << "format error\n";
return 1; // error return
}

cout << "read " << v.size() << " elements\n";

reverse(v.begin(),v.end());
cout << "elements in reverse order:\n";
for (int i = 0; i<v.size(); ++i) cout << v[i] << '\n';

return 0; // success return
}

Or access the iTunes store from your iPhone.

Definitely not AT&T's fault. My phone also came with a music store.

Are you sure that it's Apple's fault? I would bet that it's a music store that is either fronted by AT&T or get's kickbacks from that music store. Remember, you are paying for the data already. But in AT&T's mind, music bits are special.

I can't imagine any scenario for Apple to only permit accessing the iTS over Wifi and explicitly preventing it over EDGE, except if AT&T explicitly prevented them from doing so.

I would define being 'open' as permitted your end-users to access any third-party service. Even if you happen to have a competing one. AT&T just wants to get extra money over what you already paid for your unlimited data plan.

From http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/legal/plan-terms.jsp "Prohibited and Permissible Uses:" includes: ...(III) FOR VOICE OVER IP;...UNLIMITED PLANS CANNOT BE USED FOR UPLOADING, DOWNLOADING OR STREAMING OF VIDEO CONTENT (E.G. MOVIES, TV), MUSIC OR GAMES. FURTHERMORE, PLANS (UNLESS SPECIFICALLY DESIGNATED FOR TETHERING USAGE) CANNOT BE USED FOR ANY APPLICATIONS THAT TETHER THE DEVICE (THROUGH USE OF, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, CONNECTION KITS, OTHER PHONE/PDA-TO-COMPUTER ACCESSORIES, BLUETOOTH® OR ANY OTHER WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY) TO LAPTOPS, PCS, OR OTHER EQUIPMENT FOR ANY PURPOSE....

Evidently, your music store uses AT&T formatted bits, so they are allowed. And your laptop somehow can't format it's bits correctly for their network unless you pay AT&T extra.

AT&T may not be actively preventing people from doing it, but it is explicitly against their TOS, so they can kick you off their "open" network for actually using those applications they so freely permit you to have on your phone.

Note, I am not for or against AT&T specifically. I believe all the wireless carriers in the US have pretty much the same terms [they probably just copy & pasted between their individual end-user TOS agreements].

Seems like a common series of integers to me...

Mostly not. Amazing eh?
There was no teletext either. (not that the two are related technologies)

Lack of standards in both cases I guess... from wikipedia: "Adoption in the United States was hampered due to a lack of a single teletext standard and consumer resistance to the high initial price of teletext decoders."
The same place which finally produces a reasonable unlimited data plan can't seem to offer simple data services such as landline SMSes as standard.
Ah well, pros and cons of living in different places around the globe.

If you subtract the areas in the US where there's no GSM coverage, i.e. most of the country

Wow wow, that sounds nuts to me? Where did you get the idea that in "most of the country" there's no GSM coverage? I'd love to see the statistics about that.. I don't suppose you have any? Here's the coverage map for ATT btw http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/. I guess it's possible that including Alaska covered vs uncovered could be CLOSE ... but I'm not sure. If you count any cell coverage, (CDMA, smaller companies, etc) you're dead wrong.

"So few American have cell phones" ... I gotta see your statistics on this, the only people I know that don't have phones are my 85-90 year old grandparents. Do you really believe this bull? Just what do Europeans believe about us?! most of the US doesn't have coverage and most people don't have cellphones? Gotta say, when you're so wrong about the basic facts upon which you make your slander, it really makes me take the rest of your post less seriously. 82% of Americans Own Cell

I think that's about what T1 costs. If you want honest, unlimited, 1.5mbs, then isn't that what you should pay?

Higher speeds can be had for less:

Comcast Versus Broadband Utopia"
"Forced to offer $90 bundle in fiber-fed region"

"Utopia is one of the nation's largest wholesale muni-fiber deployments - via which users can get 8-15Mbps symmetrical fiber for $35-$45 dollars through AT&T or providers like MStar. The project has put Comcast in the unfamiliar position of having to truly compete, resulting in rare price reductions. According to this local ad[.zip], Comcast is now offering broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint."

None of the top teams entered the contest to win the money. The money is nice, don't get me wrong, but it's not the main motivation. The main motivation is the the data set. 2.8 million queries, with relevance judgements. (e.g. "This was good. Give me more." "This was bad. Give me less") It's a great data set for information retrieval researchers, which is exactly what all the top teams are.

We know roughly what the Bellkore team is doing. And we know roughly what all the top teams are doing. Simon Funk uses Singular Value Decomposition. Yi Zhang is using Bayesian hierarchical models and Expectation-Maximization All the top teams know what everyone is doing. It's not a secret. They publish what they're doing.

Gigascope Project by AT&T Labs.

Gee, yeah, AT&T spent, what, nearly 3% of their network's value on improving it in '06. That's... huge? I guess? 2006 Annual Report

Additionally, one can easily download the Hancock source code (for non-commercial use), manuals, and various research papers here:

http://www.research.att.com/~kfisher/hancock/

Conspiracy!

From a slashdot potato head: Hancock is a C variant developed to mine gigabytes of the company's telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes.

From AT&T Labs: At AT&T Labs we have a suite of Hancock programs that run daily to calculate sig-
natures or proles of AT&T's long-distance customers. These signatures are used for
fraud detection and marketing.

http://www.research.att.com/~kfisher/hancock/manual.ps

The program for parsing millions of records as they flow into permanent data farms sounds oddly close to the data mining the NSA performed after 9/11 to find targets for its warrantless spying on American citizens calls and emails

The NSA is tapping inbound communications from countries on the watch list. They are spying on foreign nationals calling into the US. Unlike Hillary Clinton: http://sweetness-light.com/archive/hillary-files-eavesdropping-on-the-bimbos

I have called comcast 'crapcast' for about 2 years, and I was a loyal customer of comcast from 2000 to 2005.

Comcast has too many failings, and several people in my neighborhood switched to u-verse http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=5838

I was and am sick of Comcast, and I never intend to go back to them. They were the only game in town in 2000, and now they are not. Now they look like a dinosaur by comparison. I think it is Very sad when nearly all choices look better than comcasts offerings. Hell they lost to the the typical last place finisher, AT&T!

I wonder if they will limit all things internety to WIFI only, as AT&T might complain about random packets flying over their EDGE

Yeah, it's not as if AT&T sells cards for PC's that support EDGE, so that any packet your PC could send out over Wi-Fi could also be sent out over EDGE.

Sadly, it will almost certainly be worse -- it'll probably require payment of a large fee to AT&T, AND require approval of your specific app by AT&T itself.

I call 110% BS. AT&T has a mobile device application developer program today, which costs absolutely $0 to developers and allows developers to self-certify any application that meets basic standards for basic fitness, reasonable UI and compatibility with the data network. See developer.att.com - it's all there.

In addition, AT&T has lots and lots of devices certified on its network, and strong developer communities for nearly all of them ... with ONE notable exception. What does that tell you about who has been calling the shots on developer access to the iPhone, AT&T or Apple?