I've been using something similar at work for a long, long time: A USB 2.0 docking station.
Included are PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, a USB hub with two ports, RS-232, parallel, and 10/100 Ethernet.
I plug one cable into my laptop when I plop it down on my desk, and I've got network, scanner, sound, and whatever else connected and ready to go. But it's obviously an old adapter, hence the array of legacy ports, though it seems to do just fine in terms of speed. It was expensive when it was new -- about $90 from unashamed Chinese importers, and up to $200 from various retailers, but similar devices are a lot cheaper these days...
I can easily imagine a Light Peak docking station which might include a USB hub, a video adapter (with HDMI or DVI or VGA or some combination thereof), sound, and gig-E. I imagine that such a device will also be fairly expensive at first, but that it will get cheaper after the chips become better integrated and volumes increase.
The smartphone app sounds like a very good idea. I read that comment not long after I posted mine.
But it'd cost money, however little, to implement for a new city. Accordingly, it may take a bit of a push to get it moving. Perhaps if 311 were to publish an email address that would be monitored regularly by the same folks who man the phones, it'd be an inexpensive (or free) stopgap.
Or, it might be useful for the non-smartphone (but reasonably savvy) crowd: Even my old and crappy Motorola flip-phone could send photo attachments with an email with almost no effort.
I had one that was half Maine Coon. He weighed about 30 pounds.
One night I found him outside fearlessly sizing up a good-sized possum.
And when we had a pet rat, he'd try to eat it whenever we had it outside of its cage: Straight for the throat, from behind.
For awhile, when he was just a kitten, he'd corral the children (aged 5 and 8) away from the floor in front of the TV. We thought it was funny at first, until we realized that he was defending what he thought was his territory and that he really was chewing on the kids so that they'd move away.
He wore a dog collar, because the ones for cats weren't big enough, and shit turds big enough that they'd pass for human.
Which, you know, mentions nothing about quality. Different encoders, different settings, different [etc]...
Bitrate isn't everything. I've got one or two high-bitrate 1080p Blu-Ray movies that look like shit.
The real question would be: Given your 3.6Mbps video, and the same video encoded by Netflix, which one looks better?
I'm a picky bastard (much to the annoyance of the entire family) when it comes to encoding artifacts, but I'm increasingly pleased with the overall quality of Netflix's streams, which seem to improve as time wears on.
I hit a good-sized doe at about 55MPH in a 1996 Pontiac Firebird with slightly lowered suspension. A car like that is about as low at the front end as anything that's not exotic.
It ruined the car (monetarily, at least, it was totaled) but everyone inside was unharmed and the windshield was intact.
It could've been worse, obviously. It also could've been better. (The same could be said of your own experience.)
*shrug*
I'd like to suggest that good brakes and a controllable vehicle go a lot further toward avoiding and minimizing accidents than simply throwing mass and height at the problem.
I think that if your fancy-pants phone can do all of that with a text message (my Droid certainly can't do that precise combination of things), then it would do every bloody bit as well to just send the folks an email instead.
But my favorite amplifier (in my possession, anyway) is an Ashly FET-1000, which has no relays. The only thing to go "cha-whump" when turning it on or off is anything else on the same circuit, when the voltage on the line dips for a moment as the power supply caps first charge and the lights dim a bit.
Clearly, it's possible to design componentry which needs no relays to avoid horrible noises. There are exceptions, though:
In the livingroom, I have an old Rotel preamp which makes horrible squeeling noises whenever it is unplugged. Amusingly, it has a turn-on delay and is very well-behaved in instances other than loss of power.
The system by the PC certainly does go "cha-whump" when the computer turns on, or is rebooted. It runs into straight into the power amp section of a Proton D540 with no volume control in-line.
It'd be nice if the sound card (an Audigy) wouldn't do that, but I'm not holding my breath. The speakers are in sealed boxes, so a big meaty high-amplitude cha-wump won't immediately destroy them, and the particular amplifier does have huge amount of current available for brief moments as a design feature, so I worry not about my particular rig.
It's just not loud enough, long enough to heat up the voice coils or piss off the amp. And it's too low-frequency in nature to cause the 8" woofers any particular mechanical distress.
Were I using ported cabinets, smaller drivers, and something like a Class D Tripath amp, I'd be more worried about hurting things. But I'm not, so I don't. It's just annoying.
I was doing some light pro-audio stuff with my Dell notebook, and noticed noise on the output. So, the next time out I brought along a USB sound adapter and got exactly the same noise.
Then, I noticed that the noise was completely gone when running on battery and not plugged into the wall.
The cause? Ground loops. Somehow, even with things grounded sanely (and tied to the same outlet), I'd always get ground loops. No matter where, or what - if there was another ground reference in the system (an amplifier with a grounded power cord, say), the Dell machine produces noise.
Since then, I always isolate the ground on the machine (generally with a "2-prong adapter") when doing this sort of work, and it's as quiet as could be. Transformers would have also done the trick and would be a bit safer...
Your PS3 would've played them as well, if it were a model equipped with an Emotion Engine chip.
Instead, you were either cheap or late to the PS3 party (I myself am of the latter group), and your new-fangled PS3 can't play PS2 games because it lacks the PS2 hardware that older/more expensive units included.
I'm familiar enough with one-way paging (it's part of my job) to be wary about such things performing properly, but it sounds like this is a good system. I'm looking forward to it.
Now, it just needs to be able to have alerts sent into the network wirelessly. Here in tornado country, where the lines are all stupidly overhead, one can't rely on a cell tower to have connectivity to the real world when the shit hits the fan. I guess that it will be easy enough to do once the handsets adopt the system and the ubiquity of it makes such things practical to look into.
And finally, one more question: Suppose someone never wants any alerts about anything, ever. It's obviously an implementation detail, but are you implementing it? Or are we headed one step further toward 1984, wherein Big Brother can contact us whenever he wants to whether we like it or not?:)
It's just two antennas, connected together. In a car (which acts a bit like a Faraday cage), you might just think of it as a hole that allows the RF to leak in, plus a little bit more height.
In my mostly-windowless work van, I've built my own: There is a through-mounted gain antenna on the roof, and a magnetic mount gain antenna on the inside, connected by a few inches of coax.
Works well enough: I put it together after I was on my way to a job one day, and close to my destination there was a bridge out (I'd been ignoring the detour signs because I was close). So, I pulled out my trusty Droid, fired up Google Maps and, lo! There was no cell coverage. I spent half an hour trying to cross that body of water, and was late. Boo.*
So, I threw it together out of spare parts. And the next time I was in that stretch of the woods, I had plenty of bandwidth. At a glance, it would appear that any of the stuff you linked to would behave similarly well. (My antennas probably have higher gain, but the off-the-shelf passive repeaters don't have the connector losses that mine does.)
*: A paper map would've worked just as well, but wouldn't help me make phone calls in poor coverage areas, would've had non-zero cost, and wouldn't give me an excuse to drill holes in the truck. (I like drilling holes in automobiles.)
I've got a little bit of experience with some of these devices.
I've installed an inexpensive 2-node system in a factory of about 15,000 square feet.
I've also installed, and maintain, a much larger distributed system that covers a 7-story hospital building, with several antennas on each floor (if you're thinking "holy shit is that a lot of 3/4" Heliax," you're on the right track -- we used miles of the stuff), and in each stairwell, with additional coverage for VHF fire/EMS and 800MHz law enforcement.
In both cases, power levels (inside and outside) are very low -- the idea is to radiate as little energy as possible, while still getting things to work properly. The outside antennas are directional, with a panel antenna with integrated electronics on the former system, and a collection of Yagis feeding a 7-foot rack full of stuff on the latter.
And, in both cases, the coverage went from no signal, to great signal. And I don't just mean signal strength -- much quality time was spend monitoring error rates, taking notes, and futzing around with service monitors. (I guess them hams was wrong -- we amplified our crap and got great results.)
The cheap system (made by Wilson, IIRC) was a no-brainer to install: Stick the antenna on the roof, run some 75-ohm coax to it (we used RG-11), power up and aim the thing (it had a lovely LED bar graph on the back of it), and then place the indoor antennas where appropriate. And then, just walk around with a handset in test mode and see if the coverage is as expected, while possibly reorienting the indoor antennas.
The expensive system is a complicated maze of big 50 ohm coax and incredibly expensive low-loss splitters, with a variety of amplifiers and several different antenna configurations. I don't take credit for designing it -- the manufacturer does that themselves, working from a blueprint of the building.
Anyone with their wits about them and an F crimper or compression tool could install the former, simple system. It's easy. There is no detailed configuration. It just works. This is the sort of thing the article is discussing -- a simple-to-install repeater system that has no means by which a user could screw it up.
The complicated system required three days for the manufacturer to adjust and test, on-site. It possessed the potential to completely ruin communications over a broad swath of spectrum if it were not properly configured. But it as a few orders of magnitude more expensive, as well...
Please don't assume that everything is as challenging as that, or that the concept is somehow unsound. It's just not the case. While there is certainly potential for a poorly-designed do-it-yourself system to trash a cell network, it seems to be more the exception than the rule, and we've already got laws to deal with folks who do stuff like that (unintentionally, or not).
As an example, 200 people get sick eating tomatos.... Suddenly 300 million people stop buying tomatos... All because no one can do that math in their head and figure out that they only have a 0.000000667% chance of getting sick eating tomatos.
I routinely perform this kind of math in my head, if there are more than 3 zeros after the decimal point, I generally don't have to worry about it. The sensationalist media doesn't help, but if people could do a little fact checking on their own, then we could avoid 99% of the problems caused by overreaction.
I do the same math in my own head. And I further decide that if 300 million people aren't eating tomatoes, I get to take advantage of the lower price of them at the supermarket.
Besides, food-borne illnesses aren't particularly new, and a healthy human is fairly well-equipped to deal with almost all of them. Those that aren't handled swiftly by a functional immune system are so rare that I don't even bother to keep track of the math.
If I'm at a restaurant and the waiter asks how I'd like my hamburger cooked, I've got no problem saying "medium." And if it shows up medium rare, I'll be happy to eat it. (Mad cow? I'd rather bury myself in a pit during every thunderstorm for fear of lightning strikes than worry about that.) And steak? Rare, please.
To each his own, but my math says I'll almost certainly die from something other than a food-borne illness almost irrespective of the conscious risks that I take when I intentionally eat undercooked or tainted food.
Likewise, I don't bother with worrying about terrorism. It's an ugly thing, terrorism, but by not allowing myself to be terrorized by it, I refuse the terrorists the one thing that they want: Fear.
I, for one, would be much happier (and less scared) if folks could travel freely without the choice of either a trip through the porno machine, or an "aggressive" pat-down. And if most folks agreed, we wouldn't be in this situation.
First: Is there any sort of method in-place wherein a message can be repeatedly broadcast, but only alert subscribers on the first successfully received message? This would help mitigate coverage issues inside buildings and other areas of bad coverage, as a message could be repeated several times over the course of a few minutes without being burdensome to those who have already received it, and should obviously have very little impact on the cell network over a one-shot send-and-forget system.
Second: With what geographic granularity will the broadcasts be sent (or perhaps more properly, received)?
Third: Is there any pertinent documentation available that I can ogle?
I think my main, initial point was that we were all ignorant here, and that there wasn't enough data available to support any meaningful correlation.
Presumably, by now, someone's done some more testing. I haven't bothered to check.
Besides, last I checked, I'm still human and capable of changing my mind. And it's not like I entered this discussion with an axe to grind: While it's an interesting philosophical debacle, it has no practical merit to me since I will never own such an ill-device.
Given how easy it is to access the slot on some WP7 phones, I think it my theory works just fine.
Meanwhile: Do you have a better idea as to why an SD card slot and card are integrated, instead of just soldering the same flash hardware onto the same board as everything else?
Because, if you scroll up a bit, that is the question.
They conclude that the card doesn't work anywhere. Not "anywhere else." Please try to read the words in front of you.
That said, we're into the realm of wild conjecture.
You think the phone became useless the moment the card was removed. This is probably true.
Your conjecture comes into play when you presume that upon reinserting the card that things don't start working again. This is to say that the card is a brick, and maybe even the phone itself.
Meanwhile:
I agree that the phone was probably useless the moment the card was removed.
And I conject that the phone will resume being a useful phone the moment that the unmodified card is reinserted (give or take a reboot). Unless the card was trashed in some other fashion, which (in the case of engadget's single sample) seems likely.
Slashdot Mirror
You have somehow managed to completely miss my entire fucking point.
I've been using something similar at work for a long, long time: A USB 2.0 docking station.
Included are PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, a USB hub with two ports, RS-232, parallel, and 10/100 Ethernet.
I plug one cable into my laptop when I plop it down on my desk, and I've got network, scanner, sound, and whatever else connected and ready to go. But it's obviously an old adapter, hence the array of legacy ports, though it seems to do just fine in terms of speed. It was expensive when it was new -- about $90 from unashamed Chinese importers, and up to $200 from various retailers, but similar devices are a lot cheaper these days...
I can easily imagine a Light Peak docking station which might include a USB hub, a video adapter (with HDMI or DVI or VGA or some combination thereof), sound, and gig-E. I imagine that such a device will also be fairly expensive at first, but that it will get cheaper after the chips become better integrated and volumes increase.
The smartphone app sounds like a very good idea. I read that comment not long after I posted mine.
But it'd cost money, however little, to implement for a new city. Accordingly, it may take a bit of a push to get it moving. Perhaps if 311 were to publish an email address that would be monitored regularly by the same folks who man the phones, it'd be an inexpensive (or free) stopgap.
Or, it might be useful for the non-smartphone (but reasonably savvy) crowd: Even my old and crappy Motorola flip-phone could send photo attachments with an email with almost no effort.
Good luck.
I had one that was half Maine Coon. He weighed about 30 pounds.
One night I found him outside fearlessly sizing up a good-sized possum.
And when we had a pet rat, he'd try to eat it whenever we had it outside of its cage: Straight for the throat, from behind.
For awhile, when he was just a kitten, he'd corral the children (aged 5 and 8) away from the floor in front of the TV. We thought it was funny at first, until we realized that he was defending what he thought was his territory and that he really was chewing on the kids so that they'd move away.
He wore a dog collar, because the ones for cats weren't big enough, and shit turds big enough that they'd pass for human.
Main Coons are cool.
Which, you know, mentions nothing about quality. Different encoders, different settings, different [etc]...
Bitrate isn't everything. I've got one or two high-bitrate 1080p Blu-Ray movies that look like shit.
The real question would be: Given your 3.6Mbps video, and the same video encoded by Netflix, which one looks better?
I'm a picky bastard (much to the annoyance of the entire family) when it comes to encoding artifacts, but I'm increasingly pleased with the overall quality of Netflix's streams, which seem to improve as time wears on.
And as another point of comparison, I'm paying $55 per month in the US for 12/1.5 VDSL.
Feh.
I hit a good-sized doe at about 55MPH in a 1996 Pontiac Firebird with slightly lowered suspension. A car like that is about as low at the front end as anything that's not exotic.
It ruined the car (monetarily, at least, it was totaled) but everyone inside was unharmed and the windshield was intact.
It could've been worse, obviously. It also could've been better. (The same could be said of your own experience.)
*shrug*
I'd like to suggest that good brakes and a controllable vehicle go a lot further toward avoiding and minimizing accidents than simply throwing mass and height at the problem.
Some cats are delighted to eat rats. (Example imagery.)
I think you missed the 90s.
I think that if your fancy-pants phone can do all of that with a text message (my Droid certainly can't do that precise combination of things), then it would do every bloody bit as well to just send the folks an email instead.
I'm just saying.
Great - so, it's the 80's all over again.
We grew out of that. We'll do it again.
*shrug*
What year are you trolling from, exactly?
And is your time machine available for rent?
Also: I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Good points, and all.
But my favorite amplifier (in my possession, anyway) is an Ashly FET-1000, which has no relays. The only thing to go "cha-whump" when turning it on or off is anything else on the same circuit, when the voltage on the line dips for a moment as the power supply caps first charge and the lights dim a bit.
Clearly, it's possible to design componentry which needs no relays to avoid horrible noises. There are exceptions, though:
In the livingroom, I have an old Rotel preamp which makes horrible squeeling noises whenever it is unplugged. Amusingly, it has a turn-on delay and is very well-behaved in instances other than loss of power.
The system by the PC certainly does go "cha-whump" when the computer turns on, or is rebooted. It runs into straight into the power amp section of a Proton D540 with no volume control in-line.
It'd be nice if the sound card (an Audigy) wouldn't do that, but I'm not holding my breath. The speakers are in sealed boxes, so a big meaty high-amplitude cha-wump won't immediately destroy them, and the particular amplifier does have huge amount of current available for brief moments as a design feature, so I worry not about my particular rig.
It's just not loud enough, long enough to heat up the voice coils or piss off the amp. And it's too low-frequency in nature to cause the 8" woofers any particular mechanical distress.
Were I using ported cabinets, smaller drivers, and something like a Class D Tripath amp, I'd be more worried about hurting things. But I'm not, so I don't. It's just annoying.
Interesting that you mention noise.
I was doing some light pro-audio stuff with my Dell notebook, and noticed noise on the output. So, the next time out I brought along a USB sound adapter and got exactly the same noise.
Then, I noticed that the noise was completely gone when running on battery and not plugged into the wall.
The cause? Ground loops. Somehow, even with things grounded sanely (and tied to the same outlet), I'd always get ground loops. No matter where, or what - if there was another ground reference in the system (an amplifier with a grounded power cord, say), the Dell machine produces noise.
Since then, I always isolate the ground on the machine (generally with a "2-prong adapter") when doing this sort of work, and it's as quiet as could be. Transformers would have also done the trick and would be a bit safer...
I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Your PS3 would've played them as well, if it were a model equipped with an Emotion Engine chip.
Instead, you were either cheap or late to the PS3 party (I myself am of the latter group), and your new-fangled PS3 can't play PS2 games because it lacks the PS2 hardware that older/more expensive units included.
*shrug*
Thanks for the info.
I'm familiar enough with one-way paging (it's part of my job) to be wary about such things performing properly, but it sounds like this is a good system. I'm looking forward to it.
Now, it just needs to be able to have alerts sent into the network wirelessly. Here in tornado country, where the lines are all stupidly overhead, one can't rely on a cell tower to have connectivity to the real world when the shit hits the fan. I guess that it will be easy enough to do once the handsets adopt the system and the ubiquity of it makes such things practical to look into.
And finally, one more question: Suppose someone never wants any alerts about anything, ever. It's obviously an implementation detail, but are you implementing it? Or are we headed one step further toward 1984, wherein Big Brother can contact us whenever he wants to whether we like it or not? :)
They work fine.
It's just two antennas, connected together. In a car (which acts a bit like a Faraday cage), you might just think of it as a hole that allows the RF to leak in, plus a little bit more height.
In my mostly-windowless work van, I've built my own: There is a through-mounted gain antenna on the roof, and a magnetic mount gain antenna on the inside, connected by a few inches of coax.
Works well enough: I put it together after I was on my way to a job one day, and close to my destination there was a bridge out (I'd been ignoring the detour signs because I was close). So, I pulled out my trusty Droid, fired up Google Maps and, lo! There was no cell coverage. I spent half an hour trying to cross that body of water, and was late. Boo.*
So, I threw it together out of spare parts. And the next time I was in that stretch of the woods, I had plenty of bandwidth. At a glance, it would appear that any of the stuff you linked to would behave similarly well. (My antennas probably have higher gain, but the off-the-shelf passive repeaters don't have the connector losses that mine does.)
*: A paper map would've worked just as well, but wouldn't help me make phone calls in poor coverage areas, would've had non-zero cost, and wouldn't give me an excuse to drill holes in the truck. (I like drilling holes in automobiles.)
I've got a little bit of experience with some of these devices.
I've installed an inexpensive 2-node system in a factory of about 15,000 square feet.
I've also installed, and maintain, a much larger distributed system that covers a 7-story hospital building, with several antennas on each floor (if you're thinking "holy shit is that a lot of 3/4" Heliax," you're on the right track -- we used miles of the stuff), and in each stairwell, with additional coverage for VHF fire/EMS and 800MHz law enforcement.
In both cases, power levels (inside and outside) are very low -- the idea is to radiate as little energy as possible, while still getting things to work properly. The outside antennas are directional, with a panel antenna with integrated electronics on the former system, and a collection of Yagis feeding a 7-foot rack full of stuff on the latter.
And, in both cases, the coverage went from no signal, to great signal. And I don't just mean signal strength -- much quality time was spend monitoring error rates, taking notes, and futzing around with service monitors. (I guess them hams was wrong -- we amplified our crap and got great results.)
The cheap system (made by Wilson, IIRC) was a no-brainer to install: Stick the antenna on the roof, run some 75-ohm coax to it (we used RG-11), power up and aim the thing (it had a lovely LED bar graph on the back of it), and then place the indoor antennas where appropriate. And then, just walk around with a handset in test mode and see if the coverage is as expected, while possibly reorienting the indoor antennas.
The expensive system is a complicated maze of big 50 ohm coax and incredibly expensive low-loss splitters, with a variety of amplifiers and several different antenna configurations. I don't take credit for designing it -- the manufacturer does that themselves, working from a blueprint of the building.
Anyone with their wits about them and an F crimper or compression tool could install the former, simple system. It's easy. There is no detailed configuration. It just works. This is the sort of thing the article is discussing -- a simple-to-install repeater system that has no means by which a user could screw it up.
The complicated system required three days for the manufacturer to adjust and test, on-site. It possessed the potential to completely ruin communications over a broad swath of spectrum if it were not properly configured. But it as a few orders of magnitude more expensive, as well...
Please don't assume that everything is as challenging as that, or that the concept is somehow unsound. It's just not the case. While there is certainly potential for a poorly-designed do-it-yourself system to trash a cell network, it seems to be more the exception than the rule, and we've already got laws to deal with folks who do stuff like that (unintentionally, or not).
I do the same math in my own head. And I further decide that if 300 million people aren't eating tomatoes, I get to take advantage of the lower price of them at the supermarket.
Besides, food-borne illnesses aren't particularly new, and a healthy human is fairly well-equipped to deal with almost all of them. Those that aren't handled swiftly by a functional immune system are so rare that I don't even bother to keep track of the math.
If I'm at a restaurant and the waiter asks how I'd like my hamburger cooked, I've got no problem saying "medium." And if it shows up medium rare, I'll be happy to eat it. (Mad cow? I'd rather bury myself in a pit during every thunderstorm for fear of lightning strikes than worry about that.) And steak? Rare, please.
To each his own, but my math says I'll almost certainly die from something other than a food-borne illness almost irrespective of the conscious risks that I take when I intentionally eat undercooked or tainted food.
Likewise, I don't bother with worrying about terrorism. It's an ugly thing, terrorism, but by not allowing myself to be terrorized by it, I refuse the terrorists the one thing that they want: Fear.
I, for one, would be much happier (and less scared) if folks could travel freely without the choice of either a trip through the porno machine, or an "aggressive" pat-down. And if most folks agreed, we wouldn't be in this situation.
However: Most folks, post-9/11, are scared.
*shrug*
Terrorists win.
Good info -- thanks for sharing.
I have three questions.
First: Is there any sort of method in-place wherein a message can be repeatedly broadcast, but only alert subscribers on the first successfully received message? This would help mitigate coverage issues inside buildings and other areas of bad coverage, as a message could be repeated several times over the course of a few minutes without being burdensome to those who have already received it, and should obviously have very little impact on the cell network over a one-shot send-and-forget system.
Second: With what geographic granularity will the broadcasts be sent (or perhaps more properly, received)?
Third: Is there any pertinent documentation available that I can ogle?
I think my main, initial point was that we were all ignorant here, and that there wasn't enough data available to support any meaningful correlation.
Presumably, by now, someone's done some more testing. I haven't bothered to check.
Besides, last I checked, I'm still human and capable of changing my mind. And it's not like I entered this discussion with an axe to grind: While it's an interesting philosophical debacle, it has no practical merit to me since I will never own such an ill-device.
*shrug*
But what if they are an idiot? (Not to be confused with a moron, or an imbecile.)
Given how easy it is to access the slot on some WP7 phones, I think it my theory works just fine.
Meanwhile: Do you have a better idea as to why an SD card slot and card are integrated, instead of just soldering the same flash hardware onto the same board as everything else?
Because, if you scroll up a bit, that is the question.
They conclude that the card doesn't work anywhere. Not "anywhere else." Please try to read the words in front of you.
That said, we're into the realm of wild conjecture.
You think the phone became useless the moment the card was removed. This is probably true.
Your conjecture comes into play when you presume that upon reinserting the card that things don't start working again. This is to say that the card is a brick, and maybe even the phone itself.
Meanwhile:
I agree that the phone was probably useless the moment the card was removed.
And I conject that the phone will resume being a useful phone the moment that the unmodified card is reinserted (give or take a reboot). Unless the card was trashed in some other fashion, which (in the case of engadget's single sample) seems likely.