The great thing about the Series 3 was that you could keep it in your pocket and use it frequently for a couple of weeks on a pair of AA batteries. The Series 5 needed charging overnight.
I have no idea WTF you're going on about... The Psion Series 5 was advertised as running for a month on a single pair of AA batteries (light usage), and I got about a week per pair of heavy usage, for the duration of the time I was using my 5MX.
So, kids, if you hand in something like this to your boss an tell him to patent it, nag him till he does.
Most companies give ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to their employees in return for a patent going through & being licensed. Some will give a tiny little fixed-sum for every patent, up-front. It's extremely rare that you'll get a cut of an profits, after all, just about every contract says your employer owns every single thought you have for the duration of your employment.
The only way to do it is to keep your bright ideas to yourself, develop them on your own time, with your own money and equipment, and patent them yourself.
(TSMC / Globalfoundries / TI are all less than half the investment of Intel and Samsung in fabs).
And yet, with about half as much investment, all of the above are only slightly behind Intel and Samsung, and turning out perfectly competitive chips. Sounds like Intel's fabs might be highly inefficient.
Remember this is on the old process. If Intel used the best process (22nm I think) the results would be even better.
Intel really needs its best fabs for its highest-margin products, in order to financially support spending all that money on R&D.
Personally, I don't like Intel on smartphones... They've done far too well keeping 3rd parties from developing chips using their x86 instruction sets (with the only exceptions being those few who got in cross-licensing agreements early-on), while ARM is a wide-open field. We can have competition within a single open architecture like ARM just fine.
Personally, I was looking forward to a different competitor... MIPS. With China throwing it's weight behind development of MIPS CPUs (Godson/LoongSoon/whatever), and with MIPS historically having a much higher DMIPS/MHz than ARM, there's ample opportunity for very cheap, very fast MIPS CPUs to jump into the market. The $100 Chinese Android ICS tablet being one example of just how potentially game-changing it could be.
Watch out. I waited a long time for them to get the latest smart phone (can't remember which brand) and bought one immediately. It worked long enough to sign up for service and then started rebooting itself every ten minutes or so.
If this company works for you, fine. For me, it was an education that T-Mobile customer service really wasn't the worst on the planet, and far from it.
Last time I dealt with Boost customer service was about 5 years ago, when calls weren't coming through to the phone number I signed-up with... The call to support was free despite the per-minute plan I was on, and it only took about 30 minutes to get them to change the phone number, and everything worked fine for years since then.
When they finally came out with a decent Android Slider (Samsung Transform Ultra) I bought it immediately, and found that the touch-screen was a twitchy, buggy nightmare (search youtube for "Transform Ultra screen problems"). I took it back to Best Buy and exchanged it for another unit, found it had the same problem, and took it back in for a refund. No trouble at all...
Of course I was unhappy because there was really no other way I could see to get cheap cell service with a halfway decent smartphone... Virgin mobile's Optimus Slider has an ancient ARMv6 CPU that can't run MANY important programs, such as Adobe Flash for one, and the lack of a light-level sensor was an unexpectedly HUGE hassle I wouldn't tolerate either.
My savior was Amazon... A couple months later I checked out their product page for the Transform Ultra and found almost entirely great reviews... I took a chance, and sure enough, Samsung had quietly fixed the massive bug with their device. I'm now a happy Boost Mobile customer. Their CDMA coverage is unfortunately considerably poorer than their iDEN (Nextel) coverage, but the fringe coverage problems certainly haven't been serious enough for me to consider canceling, with prices these low.
Unless the other carrier follows suit, how on Earth do they expect to keep customers?
They have been screwing their customers for a good long time, and their market-share keeps increasing... Supply and demand. Apparently they don't want to keep growing so fast, so they will keep on manipulating the supply-side until it happens.
Sprint and T-Mobile may be small, and AT&T has sucky customer service and/or coverage
Sprint is more than 50% the size of either Verizon or AT&T. They aren't doing as much marketing to get themselves in the public consciousness, but they're actually pretty damn big, and a solid #3. What's more, they're the only one doing anything innovative... Boost and Virgin mobile are the only respectable pre-paid services, the most inexpensive ways to go, and they're both Sprint. Republic Wireless (at $19/mo for unlimited everything) has real potential to completely disrupt the cell phone industry, and it's all based on Sprint's network.
Just a jump over the 49th parallel (Canada) we have Wind Mobile (major cities only). $40 for pretty everything unlimited, no contract. You guys in the U.S. are getting screwed up the ass.
People who don't shop-around get screwed, wherever they are in the world...
Down here in the US, Boost Mobile is $50/month for unlimited everything, and shrinks by $5 every 6th month until you bottom out at $35 (add $5 to that for Android phones, $10 for Blackberry). Virgin Mobile is $35 for unlimited data, text, and about 300 minutes of talk time. Both are on Sprint's network so they've got nation-wide coverage (just not quite as exhaustive as Verizon), and they're both pre-paid (no contract).
And if you're somewhere that you really need Verizon's level of coverage, you can get off a hell of a lot cheaper with a contract on Sprint, which will allow subscribers to roam to Verizon's towers as needed...
And if you want something really impressive, Republic Wireless is beta-testing their $19/mo unlimited everything service, which merges VoIP service on Android smartphones with transparent fall-over to cell service (again, on Sprint's network).
For other inexpensive services in the US, see T-Mobile, cricKet (now has the iPhone), MetroPCS, net10, etc, etc.
Those who have a $100+ monthly cell phone bill have more money than brains, or at least more money than free time...
They are going to lose "third place" to Windows Phone this year, and will never gain it back.
I'm thinking of a major telecommunications company who are betting significant amounts of money that you're wrong... I'm sure they're betting vastly larger sums than you could cover.
The company is now actively losing money, instead of making less money year-over-year.
That tends to happen when next-gen products are being developed, but haven't hit market yet...
The longer they wait to split it up, the more cash the company will burn through before the end.
Or the BB10 launch will turn everything around...
Or maybe it won't, they'll see that they aren't going to turn it around, and they'll back into a maintenance mode, shed all the huge costs, and get back into profitability that way.
Actually, RIM is probably going to stick around, as a solid third-place platform. BB10 (BBX) is just around the corner, and many of the features coming will (finally) get them comparable with iPhone/Android.
And besides phones, QNX has a solid market in in-car systems, and other embedded systems, guaranteeing at least another DECADE of life to come.
What killed it for me was the shocking battery life. With the fun bonus that since all your apps and data were in RAM, if the battery went dead, you lost everything.
But that was true for ALL similar PDAs back in those days... The battery life for anything with a color screen was under 3 hours, which is one reason I loved my black & white Psion 5mx with 1 month of battery life on a pair of AA batteries... And a CR2032 backup battery was the only thing keeping your data safe on any PDA of the time.
In truth, things have only slightly and slowly improved in the portable space... It just turns out that the sum of those many small improvements turned PDAs from useless toys into primary computing devices for many people.
so unless the browser can magically convert a poorly designed website into something readable in a mobile format, it won't make a difference
I had the same complaints about browsers on PDAs over a decade ago. But Opera figured out the secret sauce a couple years thereafter, and the default Android browser, as well as Dolphin and others, do the job quite well. They zoom in to the main column of text, and lock on to it, re-paginate text to fit, and zoom images and embedded content to fit the screen width.
It's sad that Apple gets puffed up as the genius UI designers, and yet they screw over their customers with a stone-age web browser. Do yourself a favor and check out Opera for iPhone. It's not as good as other Android browsers, but probably the best Apple is going to ALLOW on iPhone.
This just in: The DoD has announced that it is reinstating Project A119, to 'test' the effects of detonating a nuclear weapon on the surface of the moon.
" If your walls are made of water or bone, then yes you will need to stay with gigahertz frequencies:P"
This is an idiotic statement to make. One of the first things you should have learned in science is that damn near EVERYTHING contains water, including rocks... Those wooden walls are holding quite a significant amout of water. That AIR you're breathing has substantial water in it (see humidity). And not to mention things like resonant frequencies of oxygen mollecules...
With all this stuff absorbing radio energy, you CAN still use these frequencies, but you should be well aware that you need to crank up the power a hell of a lot to compensate for it. Not only does that become impractical, but DANGEROUS, as your WiFi starts functioning like your microwave oven...
The Baby Bells model was pointless... Still only have one, government regulated, option for local service, now it's just a small company that isn't named AT&T.
We're already far, far better off in the cellular space. We have at least 5 major players offering overlapping service in the same markets. Don't like AT&T? Switch to Verizon. Don't like either? Switch to Sprint, or T-Mobile (or if you're crazy: MetroPCS, Cricket, net10, etc).
The competition is there... See VirginMobile unlimited 3g data for $35/mo including 300 mins of voice calls. See BoostMobile's unliminted EVERYTHING for Smartphones for $40/mo after 2 years (starts at $55 then shrinks by 5 every 6 mo).
If you want some real ground-breaking stuff, see Republic Wireless, which is currently $19/mo, working on the premise that people are usually on WiFi, and so using VoIP for calls, and having software do a transparent hand-off between WiFi and Cell towers as needed... Or look at the upcomming WiFi standard, that provides automatic connectivity to open APs, and transparent hand-off between them, possibly turning the patchwork of WiFi into an ad-hoc cell network.
The only thing the gub'mint needs to do is to stop the bigger telcos from buying up their competitors... If they do that, the smaller guys will keep undercutting the big guys, even as they improve their networks, and possibly implement newer technologies, until people notice how badly they're being ripped-off and flock away from the big two... Hell, even now AT&T is in a losing fight with Verizon, and they're going to have to do something to turn it around. We could well see consumers getting better deals here soon.
" Now, if only someone can invent technology to get rid of those awful graphic overlays advertising other shows/movies."
Way ahead of you... I already took care of that... I canceled my cable TV service about 6 years ago. Problem solved.
OTA is now superior in every way. Picture quality is perfect, there are numerous sub-channels ensuring a good selection. It's all top-rate networks, with original content. If you want to simulate the cable TV experience, just set your DVR to record all the first-run shows, and replay each series in an infinite loop on it's own virtual "channel"...
With a DVR, you'll have more TV content than you know what to do with... even as you skip commercials, speeding up things by 1/3rd, you'll still never catch-up. All I really need is one PBS channel to exceed my TV quota for the week... NOVA, Frontline, Nature, American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, etc. News, a few shows, maybe some old shows from THIS or AntennaTV and you're set. If that's not enough, or you're still missing shows you really want, you can throw-in HULU for free, and get several original series from cable networks like the Daily Show, Colbert Report, Burn Notice, etc. And plenty of old stuff like Firefly, Total Recall 2070, etc.
Plus there's a few other one-off shows that are available online directly from their website only, such as Conan. And if that's not enough for you, throw in a few dollars for Netflix. After all, the highest-end Netflix subscription is probably less than you pay for cable service...
Anyhow, there's everything you need for TV without popup ads over the program. And the fact that it's saving you tons of money is just a perk.
* Root-out of the box * Hardware QWERTY * Removable SD storage * Large internal storage * Works with T-Mobile 3G/4G bands (if not just the latter) * FM+RDS Transmitter * USB Host * Onboard Wifi that can be repurposed for carrier-hostile tether * Debian-based userland * Relatively curve-free body (unlike most everything HTC).
Devices aren't rooted out-of-the-box, but it's trivial to root any Android device. USB cable to the PC (Linux/Windows/Mac) and run a shell script to invoke ADB and transfer the SU APK. Really, really simple.
Hardware QWERTY is very easy to come by with Android.
Just about all new Android phones have removable microSD.
Size of internal storage varies from phone to phone. If you're willing to spend good money, you can get at least 64GB. Personally, I'm perfectly happy with very limited internal storage, and relying on said swappable microSD cards.
I'm sure you can find plenty that'll work on T-Mobile's network. Personally I'd strongly recomend looking at Sprint first, though...
FM Transmitter seems like a ridiculously silly requirement to me, (long-live bluetooth) but I imagine you can find an Android phone that has it.
Any high-end Android phone will support acting as a USB Host... And if it doesn't, you just need to root it and install the appropriate app.
Once you've rooted the phone, you can install a plethora of Wifi Tethering apps. There's at least one that claims to work without root, but I can't vouch for it... YMMV.
Lots of people install a Debian userland on their Androids... It only gets ugly if you want to run X11 apps (NX Client, for me), and I'm hopeful that the new X server will get up to snuff soon.
Firefox on android has always been a dog slow, steaming pile of crap. I just downloaded the Beta, and it seems this new version FINALLY isn't... It starts up pretty quick (the old one takes forever) have gotten rid of the nightmare UI elements like scrolling off the left & right sides of the web page to see controls and tabs.
Plus, Flash support is a big deal, that it should have had from the start.
I've kept Firefox around as a last resort, because web pages that won't work on any other Android browser, even with the user agent switched to desktop, usually DO work with Firefox, but otherwise, refuse to use it. The latest beta sure cranks down the pain level by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, almost no ad-ons work for it right now, so I can't test much, and it looks like It's still a long way from something I'd use as my primary mobile browser, but it seems to be a hell of an improvement.
" I think the Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced approach holds tremendous promise, especially if there is an active feedback mechanism where kids and parents can be involved as well as educators. The power of many, many people each providing a little bit of the work is staggering and inspiring."
Wikipedia isn't crowd-sourced like you say, with lots of people contributing a little. Instead, there are an exceedingly small number of smart people doing just about all the hard work, and the "crowd" at large does nothing but spelling/grammar/sanity checking.
In addition, Wikipedia is the last model in the world you should follow. It's insanely easy to corrupt or otherwise devalue, and it takes an extremely large number of man-hours to get action against a single non-blatant vandalizer or targeted article. It's the honor system, except it's a huge burden on those wishing to follow the rules, and no consequences for violators... It's sorta like communism that way. It just can't hold up under its own weight in the real world.
If you are over-weight, there is only one way to lose weight... Consume fewer calories. End of story. And further, it is preferable that you consume just slightly fewer calories, over a long time-frame.
In theory, exercise is an alternative, but really, unless you can force your flabby butt to go run a marathon, you won't even make a dent, and even if you do, your body will crave more calories and your increased food intake may eliminate any gains.
There are no alternatives, there are no short-cuts.
All the diet schemes out there are intended to get you to consume fewer calories, when you lack the will power to just jump head-long into it and do so directly...
Diet pills basically exist to make you feel slightly sick, so you won't want to eat so much. Secondarily, they may do the same thing as taking fiber before eating, causing your body to excrete more of the food you eat before it is digested and converted into calories.
Drinking water before a meal will occupy a portion of your stomach with calorie-free liquid, so you will feel you are "full" before you have consumed your normal number of calories of food. Diet foods work this same way... they have the same volume as normal foods, with a lower calorie count, so it takes more effort to stuff your face. This is similar to diets that reduce sugar... Less sugar means less calories, and also less insulin production may affect how soon you feel "full". The down-side of all of these is that your stomach may simply expand, over time, completely compensating for the reduced calorie intake per-volume of food. A similar problem for those who have their stomach "stapled", but aren't dedicated to maintaining a low-calorie diet.
The last option that comes to mind are single-food diets. They work by basically restricting the food you eat to a narrow subset, so you can consume as many calories as you need, but you'll basically get bored of eating the same thing over and over, and hopefully won't over-indulge on the same boring food.
But they all come back to reduced calories, just indirectly. And IMHO, the best option is just to SLIGHLY reduce serving sizes over time.
You can eat all the same greasy and wonderful fast food and junk food you want, you just have to eat LESS of it. Get the single burger instead of the double burger... Or get the burger you want, and just don't get the sides (french fries, onion rings, etc)... Or get all the same food, and just drink water with it, instead of soda/juice/milk. All of which will reduce your calorie intake, and over time, your weight. And since you're still able to eat all the same food, I believe this is, by FAR, the easiest diet to stick to.
I personally lost about 60lbs with this strategy... First it was smaller versions of the same fast food, and/or fewer side dishes (which saved me a lot of money, too... "super-sizing" FEELS like a good value for the money, but in fact spending less is ALWAYS the better deal).
Then it turned into rotating between a few single-course cheap and simple meals at home... rice, potatoes, pasta, ramen, sandwiches, etc. with just the occasional splurging on a quick run for greasy fast food when I had a craving for it. And that became less and less frequent, too.
As a fringe benefit, as you stay just slightly hungry, your energy level goes up, and you have the URGE to exercise (you don't have to force yourself to do so). And as you lose weight, exercise is also easier, and endurance goes up. But most importantly, the added muscle mass will serve you well in maintaining your weight... If you go back to eating poorly, whether for a short or medium term, the muscle will do a great job of helping your body consume the excess calories, turning it into more muscle, or heat, instead of fat.
"So, if and when 4G/LTE chipsets can provide the speed without a major hit to battery life, that will be a viable option."
It has nothing to do with the chipset, and everything to do with 4G coverage. Transmitters use a signal only just strong enough to reach the nearest tower. Whatever *G you're on, if you've only got one bar, or less, your phone will get HOT as it's broadcasting at full power to try and get the signal through.
With 4G, there's just barely any towers out there, so chances are that your handset is broadcasting at full power, all the time. 3G has been around so long that you probably have a cell tower right outside your window...
"This just in, gas stations rolling out new chargers that will charge your vehicle for a whole week and it will only take 2 minutes."
Unfortunately for them, people take longer to "charge" (and discharge) than 2 minutes. To make matters worse, gas stations tend not to be the kinds of place that people want to do either of those things, so it becomes two stops.
The first major fast-food chain that comits to having a fast charger at all their locations along major highways will make a killing.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no idea WTF you're going on about... The Psion Series 5 was advertised as running for a month on a single pair of AA batteries (light usage), and I got about a week per pair of heavy usage, for the duration of the time I was using my 5MX.
WP lists it as ~20hrs of continuous use, which you most certainly couldn't consume every "night":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5
With modern, high capacity NiMH-LSD batteries, or lithium AAs, I'd bet it would really get over a month of battery life with heavy usage, these days.
Most companies give ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to their employees in return for a patent going through & being licensed. Some will give a tiny little fixed-sum for every patent, up-front. It's extremely rare that you'll get a cut of an profits, after all, just about every contract says your employer owns every single thought you have for the duration of your employment.
The only way to do it is to keep your bright ideas to yourself, develop them on your own time, with your own money and equipment, and patent them yourself.
People always say that I'm highly offensive...
And yet, with about half as much investment, all of the above are only slightly behind Intel and Samsung, and turning out perfectly competitive chips. Sounds like Intel's fabs might be highly inefficient.
Intel really needs its best fabs for its highest-margin products, in order to financially support spending all that money on R&D.
Personally, I don't like Intel on smartphones... They've done far too well keeping 3rd parties from developing chips using their x86 instruction sets (with the only exceptions being those few who got in cross-licensing agreements early-on), while ARM is a wide-open field. We can have competition within a single open architecture like ARM just fine.
Personally, I was looking forward to a different competitor... MIPS. With China throwing it's weight behind development of MIPS CPUs (Godson/LoongSoon/whatever), and with MIPS historically having a much higher DMIPS/MHz than ARM, there's ample opportunity for very cheap, very fast MIPS CPUs to jump into the market. The $100 Chinese Android ICS tablet being one example of just how potentially game-changing it could be.
Yes, we have an irrational rabid hate for Microsoft products... In the same way a battered wife has an irrational rabid hate of her abusive husband.
Last time I dealt with Boost customer service was about 5 years ago, when calls weren't coming through to the phone number I signed-up with... The call to support was free despite the per-minute plan I was on, and it only took about 30 minutes to get them to change the phone number, and everything worked fine for years since then.
When they finally came out with a decent Android Slider (Samsung Transform Ultra) I bought it immediately, and found that the touch-screen was a twitchy, buggy nightmare (search youtube for "Transform Ultra screen problems"). I took it back to Best Buy and exchanged it for another unit, found it had the same problem, and took it back in for a refund. No trouble at all...
Of course I was unhappy because there was really no other way I could see to get cheap cell service with a halfway decent smartphone... Virgin mobile's Optimus Slider has an ancient ARMv6 CPU that can't run MANY important programs, such as Adobe Flash for one, and the lack of a light-level sensor was an unexpectedly HUGE hassle I wouldn't tolerate either.
My savior was Amazon... A couple months later I checked out their product page for the Transform Ultra and found almost entirely great reviews... I took a chance, and sure enough, Samsung had quietly fixed the massive bug with their device. I'm now a happy Boost Mobile customer. Their CDMA coverage is unfortunately considerably poorer than their iDEN (Nextel) coverage, but the fringe coverage problems certainly haven't been serious enough for me to consider canceling, with prices these low.
They have been screwing their customers for a good long time, and their market-share keeps increasing... Supply and demand. Apparently they don't want to keep growing so fast, so they will keep on manipulating the supply-side until it happens.
Sprint is more than 50% the size of either Verizon or AT&T. They aren't doing as much marketing to get themselves in the public consciousness, but they're actually pretty damn big, and a solid #3. What's more, they're the only one doing anything innovative... Boost and Virgin mobile are the only respectable pre-paid services, the most inexpensive ways to go, and they're both Sprint. Republic Wireless (at $19/mo for unlimited everything) has real potential to completely disrupt the cell phone industry, and it's all based on Sprint's network.
People who don't shop-around get screwed, wherever they are in the world...
Down here in the US, Boost Mobile is $50/month for unlimited everything, and shrinks by $5 every 6th month until you bottom out at $35 (add $5 to that for Android phones, $10 for Blackberry). Virgin Mobile is $35 for unlimited data, text, and about 300 minutes of talk time. Both are on Sprint's network so they've got nation-wide coverage (just not quite as exhaustive as Verizon), and they're both pre-paid (no contract).
And if you're somewhere that you really need Verizon's level of coverage, you can get off a hell of a lot cheaper with a contract on Sprint, which will allow subscribers to roam to Verizon's towers as needed...
And if you want something really impressive, Republic Wireless is beta-testing their $19/mo unlimited everything service, which merges VoIP service on Android smartphones with transparent fall-over to cell service (again, on Sprint's network).
For other inexpensive services in the US, see T-Mobile, cricKet (now has the iPhone), MetroPCS, net10, etc, etc.
Those who have a $100+ monthly cell phone bill have more money than brains, or at least more money than free time...
I'm thinking of a major telecommunications company who are betting significant amounts of money that you're wrong... I'm sure they're betting vastly larger sums than you could cover.
That tends to happen when next-gen products are being developed, but haven't hit market yet...
Or the BB10 launch will turn everything around...
Or maybe it won't, they'll see that they aren't going to turn it around, and they'll back into a maintenance mode, shed all the huge costs, and get back into profitability that way.
Actually, RIM is probably going to stick around, as a solid third-place platform. BB10 (BBX) is just around the corner, and many of the features coming will (finally) get them comparable with iPhone/Android.
And besides phones, QNX has a solid market in in-car systems, and other embedded systems, guaranteeing at least another DECADE of life to come.
But that was true for ALL similar PDAs back in those days... The battery life for anything with a color screen was under 3 hours, which is one reason I loved my black & white Psion 5mx with 1 month of battery life on a pair of AA batteries... And a CR2032 backup battery was the only thing keeping your data safe on any PDA of the time.
In truth, things have only slightly and slowly improved in the portable space... It just turns out that the sum of those many small improvements turned PDAs from useless toys into primary computing devices for many people.
I had the same complaints about browsers on PDAs over a decade ago. But Opera figured out the secret sauce a couple years thereafter, and the default Android browser, as well as Dolphin and others, do the job quite well. They zoom in to the main column of text, and lock on to it, re-paginate text to fit, and zoom images and embedded content to fit the screen width.
It's sad that Apple gets puffed up as the genius UI designers, and yet they screw over their customers with a stone-age web browser. Do yourself a favor and check out Opera for iPhone. It's not as good as other Android browsers, but probably the best Apple is going to ALLOW on iPhone.
This just in: The DoD has announced that it is reinstating Project A119, to 'test' the effects of detonating a nuclear weapon on the surface of the moon.
" If your walls are made of water or bone, then yes you will need to stay with gigahertz frequencies :P"
This is an idiotic statement to make. One of the first things you should have learned in science is that damn near EVERYTHING contains water, including rocks... Those wooden walls are holding quite a significant amout of water. That AIR you're breathing has substantial water in it (see humidity). And not to mention things like resonant frequencies of oxygen mollecules...
With all this stuff absorbing radio energy, you CAN still use these frequencies, but you should be well aware that you need to crank up the power a hell of a lot to compensate for it. Not only does that become impractical, but DANGEROUS, as your WiFi starts functioning like your microwave oven...
The Baby Bells model was pointless... Still only have one, government regulated, option for local service, now it's just a small company that isn't named AT&T.
We're already far, far better off in the cellular space. We have at least 5 major players offering overlapping service in the same markets. Don't like AT&T? Switch to Verizon. Don't like either? Switch to Sprint, or T-Mobile (or if you're crazy: MetroPCS, Cricket, net10, etc).
The competition is there... See VirginMobile unlimited 3g data for $35/mo including 300 mins of voice calls. See BoostMobile's unliminted EVERYTHING for Smartphones for $40/mo after 2 years (starts at $55 then shrinks by 5 every 6 mo).
If you want some real ground-breaking stuff, see Republic Wireless, which is currently $19/mo, working on the premise that people are usually on WiFi, and so using VoIP for calls, and having software do a transparent hand-off between WiFi and Cell towers as needed... Or look at the upcomming WiFi standard, that provides automatic connectivity to open APs, and transparent hand-off between them, possibly turning the patchwork of WiFi into an ad-hoc cell network.
The only thing the gub'mint needs to do is to stop the bigger telcos from buying up their competitors... If they do that, the smaller guys will keep undercutting the big guys, even as they improve their networks, and possibly implement newer technologies, until people notice how badly they're being ripped-off and flock away from the big two... Hell, even now AT&T is in a losing fight with Verizon, and they're going to have to do something to turn it around. We could well see consumers getting better deals here soon.
"T-Shirts where the logo is oversize to the point that it dominates the whole item."
Hell, that's the big selling point. How else could you get people to pay $15 for a T-Shirt? Mine are ad-free and cost $2/each.
" Now, if only someone can invent technology to get rid of those awful graphic overlays advertising other shows/movies."
Way ahead of you... I already took care of that... I canceled my cable TV service about 6 years ago. Problem solved.
OTA is now superior in every way. Picture quality is perfect, there are numerous sub-channels ensuring a good selection. It's all top-rate networks, with original content. If you want to simulate the cable TV experience, just set your DVR to record all the first-run shows, and replay each series in an infinite loop on it's own virtual "channel"...
With a DVR, you'll have more TV content than you know what to do with... even as you skip commercials, speeding up things by 1/3rd, you'll still never catch-up. All I really need is one PBS channel to exceed my TV quota for the week... NOVA, Frontline, Nature, American Experience, Secrets of the Dead, etc. News, a few shows, maybe some old shows from THIS or AntennaTV and you're set. If that's not enough, or you're still missing shows you really want, you can throw-in HULU for free, and get several original series from cable networks like the Daily Show, Colbert Report, Burn Notice, etc. And plenty of old stuff like Firefly, Total Recall 2070, etc.
Plus there's a few other one-off shows that are available online directly from their website only, such as Conan. And if that's not enough for you, throw in a few dollars for Netflix. After all, the highest-end Netflix subscription is probably less than you pay for cable service...
Anyhow, there's everything you need for TV without popup ads over the program. And the fact that it's saving you tons of money is just a perk.
Devices aren't rooted out-of-the-box, but it's trivial to root any Android device. USB cable to the PC (Linux/Windows/Mac) and run a shell script to invoke ADB and transfer the SU APK. Really, really simple.
Hardware QWERTY is very easy to come by with Android.
Just about all new Android phones have removable microSD.
Size of internal storage varies from phone to phone. If you're willing to spend good money, you can get at least 64GB. Personally, I'm perfectly happy with very limited internal storage, and relying on said swappable microSD cards.
I'm sure you can find plenty that'll work on T-Mobile's network. Personally I'd strongly recomend looking at Sprint first, though...
FM Transmitter seems like a ridiculously silly requirement to me, (long-live bluetooth) but I imagine you can find an Android phone that has it.
Any high-end Android phone will support acting as a USB Host... And if it doesn't, you just need to root it and install the appropriate app.
Once you've rooted the phone, you can install a plethora of Wifi Tethering apps. There's at least one that claims to work without root, but I can't vouch for it... YMMV.
Lots of people install a Debian userland on their Androids... It only gets ugly if you want to run X11 apps (NX Client, for me), and I'm hopeful that the new X server will get up to snuff soon.
Firefox on android has always been a dog slow, steaming pile of crap. I just downloaded the Beta, and it seems this new version FINALLY isn't... It starts up pretty quick (the old one takes forever) have gotten rid of the nightmare UI elements like scrolling off the left & right sides of the web page to see controls and tabs.
Plus, Flash support is a big deal, that it should have had from the start.
I've kept Firefox around as a last resort, because web pages that won't work on any other Android browser, even with the user agent switched to desktop, usually DO work with Firefox, but otherwise, refuse to use it. The latest beta sure cranks down the pain level by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, almost no ad-ons work for it right now, so I can't test much, and it looks like It's still a long way from something I'd use as my primary mobile browser, but it seems to be a hell of an improvement.
" I think the Wikipedia-style crowd-sourced approach holds tremendous promise, especially if there is an active feedback mechanism where kids and parents can be involved as well as educators. The power of many, many people each providing a little bit of the work is staggering and inspiring."
Wikipedia isn't crowd-sourced like you say, with lots of people contributing a little. Instead, there are an exceedingly small number of smart people doing just about all the hard work, and the "crowd" at large does nothing but spelling/grammar/sanity checking.
In addition, Wikipedia is the last model in the world you should follow. It's insanely easy to corrupt or otherwise devalue, and it takes an extremely large number of man-hours to get action against a single non-blatant vandalizer or targeted article. It's the honor system, except it's a huge burden on those wishing to follow the rules, and no consequences for violators... It's sorta like communism that way. It just can't hold up under its own weight in the real world.
If you are over-weight, there is only one way to lose weight... Consume fewer calories. End of story. And further, it is preferable that you consume just slightly fewer calories, over a long time-frame.
http://www.muller.lbl.gov/TRessays/22-ThePhysicsDiet.htm
In theory, exercise is an alternative, but really, unless you can force your flabby butt to go run a marathon, you won't even make a dent, and even if you do, your body will crave more calories and your increased food intake may eliminate any gains.
There are no alternatives, there are no short-cuts.
All the diet schemes out there are intended to get you to consume fewer calories, when you lack the will power to just jump head-long into it and do so directly...
Diet pills basically exist to make you feel slightly sick, so you won't want to eat so much. Secondarily, they may do the same thing as taking fiber before eating, causing your body to excrete more of the food you eat before it is digested and converted into calories.
Drinking water before a meal will occupy a portion of your stomach with calorie-free liquid, so you will feel you are "full" before you have consumed your normal number of calories of food. Diet foods work this same way... they have the same volume as normal foods, with a lower calorie count, so it takes more effort to stuff your face. This is similar to diets that reduce sugar... Less sugar means less calories, and also less insulin production may affect how soon you feel "full". The down-side of all of these is that your stomach may simply expand, over time, completely compensating for the reduced calorie intake per-volume of food. A similar problem for those who have their stomach "stapled", but aren't dedicated to maintaining a low-calorie diet.
The last option that comes to mind are single-food diets. They work by basically restricting the food you eat to a narrow subset, so you can consume as many calories as you need, but you'll basically get bored of eating the same thing over and over, and hopefully won't over-indulge on the same boring food.
But they all come back to reduced calories, just indirectly. And IMHO, the best option is just to SLIGHLY reduce serving sizes over time.
You can eat all the same greasy and wonderful fast food and junk food you want, you just have to eat LESS of it. Get the single burger instead of the double burger... Or get the burger you want, and just don't get the sides (french fries, onion rings, etc)... Or get all the same food, and just drink water with it, instead of soda/juice/milk. All of which will reduce your calorie intake, and over time, your weight. And since you're still able to eat all the same food, I believe this is, by FAR, the easiest diet to stick to.
I personally lost about 60lbs with this strategy... First it was smaller versions of the same fast food, and/or fewer side dishes (which saved me a lot of money, too... "super-sizing" FEELS like a good value for the money, but in fact spending less is ALWAYS the better deal).
Then it turned into rotating between a few single-course cheap and simple meals at home... rice, potatoes, pasta, ramen, sandwiches, etc. with just the occasional splurging on a quick run for greasy fast food when I had a craving for it. And that became less and less frequent, too.
As a fringe benefit, as you stay just slightly hungry, your energy level goes up, and you have the URGE to exercise (you don't have to force yourself to do so). And as you lose weight, exercise is also easier, and endurance goes up. But most importantly, the added muscle mass will serve you well in maintaining your weight... If you go back to eating poorly, whether for a short or medium term, the muscle will do a great job of helping your body consume the excess calories, turning it into more muscle, or heat, instead of fat.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need a cookie.
Silk was replaced by nylon nearly a century ago.
"So, if and when 4G/LTE chipsets can provide the speed without a major hit to battery life, that will be a viable option."
It has nothing to do with the chipset, and everything to do with 4G coverage. Transmitters use a signal only just strong enough to reach the nearest tower. Whatever *G you're on, if you've only got one bar, or less, your phone will get HOT as it's broadcasting at full power to try and get the signal through.
With 4G, there's just barely any towers out there, so chances are that your handset is broadcasting at full power, all the time. 3G has been around so long that you probably have a cell tower right outside your window...
"This just in, gas stations rolling out new chargers that will charge your vehicle for a whole week and it will only take 2 minutes."
Unfortunately for them, people take longer to "charge" (and discharge) than 2 minutes. To make matters worse, gas stations tend not to be the kinds of place that people want to do either of those things, so it becomes two stops.
The first major fast-food chain that comits to having a fast charger at all their locations along major highways will make a killing.