There's not much air conditioning going on in Germany in the summer. Maybe for two weeks we use some fans, and in the rest it's not that warm to turn on any aircon or fans.
Germany is slightly further south than the UK (where I live), and airconditioned offices are reasonably common here (which is why I specifically said _offices_, not homes).
It may not be blisteringly hot in the summer, but I seriously question the ability to "exactly match" the heat generated (up to 34KW per generator) with the heating requirements of homes during the summer (probably not far off 0KW - the amount of heating required for peoples' showers during the summer is pretty tiny compared to the amount of heating required for most homes in the winter).
Uranium is a finite resource too, much more finite than fossil fuels in fact. If the world suddenly switched massively to nuclear power, there would be about a decade worth of uranium to extract. See this page.
*known reserves* of U235 are pretty limited, but we have stacks and stacks of U238. Maybe you missed the bit in the article you pointed at that states: "We thus conclude that all the worldâ(TM)s energy requirements for the remaining 5Ã--10^9 yr of existence of life on Earth could be provided by breeder reactors without the cost of electricity rising by as much as 1% due to fuel costs. This is consistent with the definition of a âoerenewableâ energy source in the sense in which that term is generally used."
I live close enough to Chernobyl to know that nuclear power is simply not acceptable. Unless you just love thyroid cancer.
Massively flawed reactor designs being run by complete idiots is simply not acceptable. Modern reactors are extremely safe and (in the West) well regulated. If you're going to ban the modern nuclear industry on public safety grounds, you'd better ban the whole chemical industry too since that deals with chemicals that are way more harmful and is far less well regulated. Replacing all the coal fired power plants with nuclear plants would massively cut pollution (coal plants put up a *lot* of particulate pollution into the atmosphere, much of which is radioactive and/or highly toxic, not to mention the environmental concerns of the toxic and radioactive fly ash which has to be disposed of - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill for why this is bad).
Now the heat production of the engine will be exactly matched to this need (same as before).
How do you "exactly match" the heat production when heating and power requirements fluctuate all the time? I'm sure that will be "exactly matched" really well in the height of summer when all the offices have their aircon on....
The point is that nuclear plants can't be shut of in a few minutes (coal plants neither) and waters storing plants are not flexible enough. Because of that many windmills and water dams are shut of even thou they could produce green energy. So what it really means is that this technology will allow real green technology to run when ever it can.
Alternatively, instead of having hundreds of thousands of CO2 producing generators with the ability to rapidly ramp up and down production, you could have a few nice green nuclear power plants and ramp up and down the load instead (e.g. by using the excess power to do useful stuff like cracking water).
Seconded. I moved from Orange to T-Mobile, despite the fact I was largely happy with the Orange service, to get the G1.
I moved from Orange to Three when I got my HTC Dream because Orange's data price structure is totally uncompetitive with pretty much any of the other MNOs....
Id be tempted at this point to just release the sucker in the wild and post up links to any and all places anyone who might even *slightly* want a c64 emulator for the iPhone might be, after restoring the BASIC functionality as it was in the c64. Just to spite em.....
How are you going to do that when you can only install apps from the official app store (unless you root your phone)?
Yes fried pigeon is quite yummy. Unfortunately since a serious bird flue outbreak a few years ago all over Mainland they tripled in price so we don't eat pigeon so often any more, maybe a few times a year, down from twice a month at least. They haven't come down in price really. You can still get them fresh in the market as well (the vendor will kill and pluck the pigeon for you). I live in Hong Kong, for the record.
And you have to remember to remove the SD cards from the pigeon before chucking it in the pan.
I believe I addressed that point by pointing out that everyone and their mother has a Killswitch and nobody flips out about it.
Nobody flips out about it? Plenty of people refuse to buy DRMed content and shout about how bad DRM is for precisely this reason - I'd count that as "flipping out about it".
I realize it's a bitter pill, but you just have to swallow with the knowledge that it'll probably be fine.
Except it probably won't be fine - we've seen this kind of crap pulled countless times before, whether it's some company actively revoking your rights, or simply just deciding they don't want to continue running the authentication servers that their flawed DRM model requires. I see absolutely no reason why this example amongst many should be seen as some kind of cornerstone heralding a new era of customers not getting screwed over - I'm absolutely positive that these killswitches will continue to be used.
If you want to hold a grudge against amazon, then I suppose you'll be holding a grudge against LOTS of companies and simply not buying anything electronic. So be it. Personally, I'd rather just get over it.
This isn't about holding a grudge, this is about people making a choice not to get themselves into an abusive relationship with a vendor. It doesn't require "not buying anything electronic", it simply requires that people are aware of the options available to them and make informed decisions when buying.
I don't buy anything DRMed (with the possible exception of DVDs, which have such a laughably weak DRM system that even an EU court has ruled that it doesn't constitute an "effective copyprotection system" and thus is completely legal to circumvent.). I still buy plenty of electronic gadgets.
I didn't buy an iPhone, partly because I consider Apple's relationship with its customers to be very abusive and I have no interest in being a part of that.
I don't buy DRMed music - CDs work just fine and I can even buy and sell second hand ones.
I don't buy HD DVD/BluRay because I simply don't see HDTV to be a big enough deal to sacrifice my rights over - I have no interest in spending money on a type of media I can't play on whatever gadget I like, nor do I feel like spending money on a player that can have its ability to play new discs revoked on a whim.
If you look at the options available, you will usually find plenty of alternatives to the DRMed ones, and frequently you'll find the non-DRMed ones suit your needs better anyway.
Actually, in most cases, they do have a right to do all of those things that you mentioned...you just didn't read the license agreements.
The parent was talking about the legally enshrined rights provided by the copyright legislation. Whatever the EULA says is pretty moot because there is no legal requirement for you to agree to an EULA.
However, even if you were to assume that the consumer agrees to whatever licence they are presented with and that the licence is enforceable, you are still wrong: When I buy a DVD, I am never presented with a licence agreement - I go into the shop and say "I want to buy this DVD", hand over some money and get given the DVD in return. You cannot argue that this doesn't constitute the sale of the DVD (which would give me all the rights and restrictions granted by copyright law). Iff I were to go into the shop and say "I want to buy this DVD" and they said "you can't buy it, you can only licence the content, here's a licence for you to sign" then you could argue that I didn't buy the DVD and that I am therefore bound by the licence terms, but that never happens.
its a pretty safe bet it won't happen again anytime soon (unless there's a court order, for instance, forcing Amazon's hand).
Yes, amazon still has a kill switch, but I think they've been sufficiently humbled to the point where we're very unlikely to see it ever used again.
You've hit the nail right on the head here but have somehow not realised yet. There is a big problem that now that Amazon has demonstrated the existence of a killswitch, it opens the door for a court to order them to use it even if they don't want to themselves. The killswitch should *never* have been present in the first place. If this fiasco had happened with paper books then Amazon would have just paid damages to the copyright holder rather than breaking into everyone's homes and retrieving the books - that's exactly what they should have happened with the ebooks too.
Not quite. If you (the customer) purchase stolen goods then you can lose them without compensation as they are returned to their rightful owner. I'm not sure the same is true if you purchase goods which infringe copyright.
They were never free to just shrug their shoulders, say "Oops!", and pretend nothing happened.
If they had shipped an infringing physical book, they would have said "Oops!" and simply paid damages to the copyright holder. They wouldn't break into the homes of all their customers and retrieve the books.
I have to disagree. When GSM came out, analog phone cloning was a constant threat. However, it has yet to be cracked on any widespread basis. It is a highly closed protocol, and has yet to be truly cracked.
GSM has been cracked in a number of ways. Firstly, it is possible to clone GSM phones. Secondly, GSM's encryption does very little to protect you from a determined eavesdropper because it is trivial for someone to set up a fake base station since GSM phones do nothing to authenticate the base station they are connecting to.
Same with almost any DRM implementation in the past several years. Blu-Ray has yet to be cracked
Most of the DRM systems in use today have been cracked to some extent, including AACS (which is used on BluRay). For a long while AACS has certainly been broken enough to make it useless to prevent copyright infringement; its currently only useful for annoying legitimate consumers who want to exercise their fair use rights.
Windows Media DRM has yet to be cracked after the patch in 2007.
This demonstrates the problem quite well - you have to continually patch the encryption algorithm you use every time someone cracks it. In many systems this simply isn't possible.
One system that springs to mind that has done very well over the years is DVB-CSA, which has existed for 15 years and has been pretty much open for the past 7. The stakes are pretty high for this (think: free access to every subscription TV channel with absolutely no chance of a fix for many years) to be cracked and no one has managed to do it yet despite knowing exactly how the algorithm works.
Security through obscurity works and works well.
Not really, pretty much all the examples you have cited show that security through obscurity fails pretty frequently compared to peer reviewed, well thought out algorithms.
The people who make it just have to know their stuff. If you compare an open cryptosystem to a closed one where the DMCA can be used to smash any and all attempts at breaking it, the closed one (satellite TV is another example) wins every time for long term protection.
I hate to break it to you, but pretty much all the proprietary satellite TV encryption algorithms have been broken to some extent. Many of them have been well and truly broken and can be decrypted entirely in software. Occasionally you come across a system like NDS VideoGuard, which is as well understood as any open system, but appears to be well designed enough that it hasn't been outright broken (the algorithm has been implemented in software, but still needs to talk to a viewing card. The viewing card itself isn't really an example of security through obscurity, just a really good "locked box" to keep the secret keys in).
Over time (often a very short amount of time), any closed system will become as well understood as a open system. So the only way these systems can hope to stand up to attack is through a good design rather than through being kept secret. It is true that some closed systems do have a good design, and becoming well understood hasn't been a problem. However, it is also true that a great many closed systems have a terrible design and become useless as soon as they have been analysed - if you choose a well known, open, peer reviewed algorithm, you have a much better chance of it having a good robust design.
In summary: there is only a very short-term gain in using a closed system over a peer reviewed system, and the long-term risk of using a closed system is much higher.
An unlocked Android phone will only work on GSM/GPRS/EDGE. T-Mobile and AT&T use different frequency allocations for UMTS, UMTS 850/1900 for AT&T and 2100/1700 MHz for TMobile. What would be great is if we can get a quad band Android phone that supported those frequencies, but as of yet, there is none.
The HTC Dream is quad band, but only for GSM, not UMTS (which I believe applies to pretty much all "quad band" phones doesn't it?).
I'm in the UK, so I only recently realised that AT&T used nonstandard frequencies for UMTS, but I'm a bit confused - I thought 850/1900MHz were GSM bands in the US, are AT&T reusing their GSM frequencies for UMTS? If so, how are they doing this without taking the GSM network offline?
There are many radios involved these days. Regardless, standby means exactly what it sounds - standing by to be used as a phone.
Exactly - as I said, you can't consider a phone which has both the WCDMA and GSM radios turned off as "in standby".
I have no idea why using a phone as a phone is considered unrealistic to you.
Where did I say that was unrealistic?
Go back and reread - I said that running the phone for 402 hours in aeroplane mode is unrealistic (by the manufacturer's own specs). You claim to have done this with the WCDMA or GSM radio turned on - I simply don't believe you as the hardware specs indicate this to be impossible. Throughout this discussion you have used inconsistent and fictitious claims to support your arguments, this is no different.
Using a phone as a phone with occasional texting (basically free) and occasional email is very realistic use of a phone.
Using the phone for voice calls, SMS messages and email is by no means free - both have a cost on the device's power budget: Voice calls involve powering up the CPU and screen in order to dial and then the radio is transmitting and codec running for the duration of the call - this is extremely power-heavy. SMS messages involve powering up the CPU and screen while you are composing or reading them and require the radio to transmit when sending and receiving. The same goes for email, although the power costs will be higher than SMS since the protocol is less efficient and the messages bigger.
Telling anyone that using a phone as a phone is unrealistic is going to get you a look like you're an idiot every time.
Absolutely, anyone claiming that is going to look like a complete idiot, luckily I haven't ever claimed that. Conversely, accusing people of saying things they never said in a publicly archived thread is going to make you look like an idiot.
As for your math, reality says they provided a worst case power draw and the quoted specs overstate the actual draw.
The 3mA figure was lifted from their test specs. True, some of the phones they manufacture will have a slightly lower power draw due to manufacturing tolerances (but I doubt the tolerances are very big), but similarly, some of the phones produced *will* be drawing 3mA. Quoting standby figures that are unachievable by a proportion of the phones manufactured seems somewhat disingenuous.
Furthermore, it is EXTREMELY common for batteries to hold larger capacities than their rated values when they are treated nicely; especially lions and nicads. Did I mention EXTREEEEEMLY common.
[citation needed] If the battery was capable of a higher capacity then that is what would be printed on the label.
At this point, as you constantly contradict yourself
Where have I contradicted myself?
and refuse to believe factual statements
Your claims seem far from factual to me, especially given how outrageously inconsistent the figures you have claimed have been over the course of the thread.
while at the same time likely have yet to check the link I even provided to you
You might want to go back to school and learn how to read properly - I already said I had looked at the link. I also pointed out that the upper limit to the Dream's life is governed by the hardware - no piece of software can magically extend it beyond that limit, even though you claim it does. A piece of software can't change the design of the hardware or the laws of physics.
Yes, that's 16 days with the radio off. I certainly wouldn't consider a phone with the radio off to be "in standby". Turning the radio on is bound to lose more than 2 days and I'm honestly not at all convinced that the phone is going to leave the CPU turned off for the whole time, even with background data disabled.
But we're splitting hairs here as we both agree, that's not a realistic use of the phone nor should it be the basis of realistic expectations.
I'm not splitting hairs, I'm pointing out that your claimed figures are an outright lie. Having to use fictitious figures to back up your arguments demonstrates pretty weak arguments IMHO.
I exceed the official standby times on my G1 all the time, while realistically using my phone.
Errm really? The quoted standby time for the G1 is 319 hours GSM, 402 hours WCDMA. I do not believe you exceed these times, especially if you are "realistically using your phone".
Frankly, your claimed standby times throughout this thread have been extremely variable - you started off saying that you got over 100 hours more than an iPhone, then you said you got 1-3 days (notice that 3 days is less than 100 hours - do iPhones get negative amounts of standby time or something?), then you said you regularly exceed the quoted standby time of almost 17 days.
The standby time for the G1 is realistic. Do not confuse standby time with usable time. The standby time for the G1 is obtainable and realistic.
That simply isn't true. By HTC's own specs for battery capacity and current consumption, the 402 hour standby time is not achievable - the specs quote a 3mA current draw when the CPU is asleep with the phone in aeroplane mode, the battery capacity is 1150mAh. Simple maths will tell you that this means you get a absolute limit to the standby time of 383 hours - well short of the 402 hours quoted, and this is assuming that the CPU never wakes up (seems pretty unrealistic) and all the radios are off (which doesn't constitute "standby" as far as I'm concerned. Especially since the quoted 402 hour standby time actually specifies that the WCDMA is active!)
But standby time is a far, far cry from talk time or actual time spent performing a useful workload.
Please re-read what I said until you understand it: according to the official specs the absolute minimum power the phone can possibly draw while powered up, with the radios off, exceeds the average maximum power you would need to be drawing in order to achieve the standby times they quote for a powered up phone with the WCDMA radio on. The quoted standby time is not only unrealistic, it is physically unachievable due to the hardware constraints.
If that's the case, then either no smart phone is a good pick for you, you need to change your expectations to be far more realistic, or you need to adjust your phone's workload to provide the mandatory life.
As I have already said, several times, I am happy to accept that no smartphone has a good battery life. The HTC Dream (in fact, anything not made by Apple) allows me to work around this problem by just taking spare batteries. This is one of the many many reasons why I consider the HTC Dream to be better than the iPhone for my situation.
If it was about maximum battery life, easily you can see weeks on an Android phone.
I'm sorry, that's simply not true (assuming that by "Android phone" you are talking about something similar to the HTC Dream). The Dream has a 1150mAh battery and is specified to draw around 3mA with the CPU asleep and all the radios disabled. That puts the absolute upper limit at a little under 16 days, and I hardly think you can really count that as "standby" given that the radio is turned off. These are limits set by the hardware - there is nothing that the software can do to either increase the battery capacity or decrease the device's minimum current draw.
I'm actually confused as to what your position actually is.;)
My position is that all smartphones have an unacceptably short battery life when being used normally and that the workaround is simply to carry multiple batteries and avoid devices that prevent you from changing the battery.
My position is also that the manufacturer's quoted standby times are a complete work of fiction and cannot ever be achieved by any means.
Then that's because you don't appreciate what is going on with your phone or have a poor selection of battery unfriendly applications.
I appreciate just fine what's going on with my phone and the apps are what I bought the phone for.
Far too often people blame Android/Phone/battery for what is really ignorance or a complete disregard for what they install on their phone.
You'll note I didn't blame anything, I simply said that in normal use smartphones generally have a crappy battery life.
After talking with him, he left bluetooth and wifi on all time, even when they were not being used. But even worse, he had his twitter application polling for updates every MINUTE of the day. That means his phone never slept. He was angry his phone couldn't last the day without charging.
I have to say that this is one criticism I have about Android - the stock OS doesn't actually make it that easy to know when apps are draining the battery and which are responsible. On the occasion that I've installed a badly behaved app that doesn't let the phone sleep, my first indication has usually been when the phone runs out of juice. Flashing the notification LED or something when the screen is off but the phone is awake would go a long way to help. The Spare Parts app is quite useful, but it still isn't easy to work out what app is responsible when the phone is being reported as running 10% of the time.
Depending on what I'm doing, I see anywhere from one to three days of battery life.
People on Slashdot often seem to struggle with the idea that people might be away from a power socket for more than a few minutes. It isn't uncommon for me to be away from a power socket for a week or more. "1-3 days" just doesn't cut it.
That's the thing, it *ABSOLUTELY* *IS* misinformation.
No, it really isn't. Sure, you can get great battery life if you turn all the useful stuff off, but that isn't what most people want to do. I'm not interested in knowing what the absolute maximum battery life I might get is, I'm interested in the life I'm going to get in normal use. This is no different to car manufacturers quoting "best case" (i.e. totally unrealistic) MPG figures - it might sell well, but it is utterly meaningless since no one will ever see that kind of efficency in the real world.
The point is, people constantly compare with the iPhone and conclude the G1 has horrible battery life.
You'll note that I didn't do this - I said they *both* have sucky battery life. In fact, I went further than that and said that pretty much all smartphones have sucky battery life.
Expecting an average user to want to use Linux when things as basic as power management requires such complex steps to get working is why none of them are flocking to it.
Ok, firstly, I don't actually care what the "average user" uses. I'm not expecting them to do anything, if they want to use Windows, OS X, DOS, OS/2, whatever, that is up to them - it is a personal choice based on what actually matters to people.
You say that the fact that basic stuff like power management is "complex" is why none of the average users want to use Linux, but this is really BS - I can point at half a dozen "basic" things that work out of the box in Linux and are really complex in Windows, so if "basic" things being "complex" stops average people using the system then they wouldn't be using Windows either.
I can point to a few hundred things which are easy in Linux and involve jumping through many hoops in Windows.
And? What is the relevance of that in relation to the complexity of power management in a Linux distro as opposed to it's absolute simplicity in Windows? This is a nice attempt at deflecting the problem, but it doesn't make it go away.
The relevance is that the original post said something along the lines of "this is what's wrong with Linux people, instead of answering the question* they tell the user to jump through lots of hoops to achieve the job" (* presumably "answering the question" should involve a simple explanation of how to fix the problem like "tick the 'don't run down my battery' checkbox"). My point is that there may be no simple answer - some times you just have to go jump through hoops to get the job done.
Whenever you have 2 completely different systems, you will find that one does some things better whilst the other does other things better - this means that you will *always* find something that is simple on one but requires jumping through hoops on the other.
So you have a choice: 1. Go back to using the system that doesn't involve jumping through hoops. 2. Listen to the person telling you what hoops to jump through and do it. 3. Flame the person telling you what hoops to jump though and go back to complaining about it being "too hard". 4. Fix the system so that you don't have to jump through the hoops any more.
Whilst I use Linux myself, and find it much nicer than Windows for the stuff I use my computers for, I'm happy to accept that it isn't for everyone - people should have a choice in what they use. I am, however, pretty sure that the Linux community doesn't need users who take option (3).
Hard disks might not be spun down as often (or at all) under Linux.
I was under the impression that modern thinking was that spinning down hard drives was bad for power consumption (presumably due to the vanishingly small power requirements of keeping the disk spinning, vs. the relatively large power requirements of spinning it back up)?
which for many, drastically extends battery life. With WiSyncPlus you can easily obtain 100+ hours
100 hours falls into the "not great" category I'm afraid. I've just had a look at WiSyncPlus, and whilst some of the features sound nice, many of them are actually part of the stock Android OS (e.g. options to disable WiFi when the screen is off, disabling data roaming, etc.). Many of the others can be done by Locale, which I already use.
HTC claims 319 hours of standby on the Dream for GSM, 402 hours for WCDMA. This is just never going to happen - the battery is 1150mAh and the service manual specifies a sleep current of <3mA (this is with the phone in aeroplane mode - i.e. all the radios turned off). 1150mAh over 319 hours is 3.6mA - that means the GSM radio has to average no more than 600 microamps and the CPU never has to wake up. The WCDMA standby time is even more of a work of fiction - 402 hours works out at 2.86mA which is _less_ than the sleep current specified in the service manual (again, let me reiterate - the specified sleep current assumes that the CPU is totally inactive and the radios are powered off).
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised really - all the cellphone vendors have similarly fictional standby times. My ancient P900 was sold as having a standby time of 480 hours - that's 20 days. Even when it was brand new it didn't manage more than 10 days.
But note: I wasn't complaining about the battery life of the HTC Dream. I fully accept that *no* smart phone has a good battery life, which is why being able to take a couple of spare batteries with me is important. The Dream lets me do this, the iPhone does not.
Simply put, with readily available software solutions, an inferior G1 can still provide more functionality AND MORE BATTERY LIFE.
I have to ask, why do you say "inferior"?
Long story short, please, please, please story propagating the horrible misinformation that G1s have poor battery life.
As a HTC Dream user, I am talking about my own experiences here. My own experiences tell me that in normal use the battery life of the HTC Dream sucks. Similarly in normal use the battery life of pretty much any smart phone sucks (some more than others). Yes, you can extend the battery life by avoiding using some of the features, but then it ceases to be "normal use" - you can get great battery life out of any phone if you turn it off, take the battery out and pack it up in its box, but it ceases to be very useful like that. This is not "misinformation", it is personal experience.
This has not been true since "cupcake" was release.
I'm running the JF Cupcake 1.5 CRB43 ADP firmware.
The simply truth of the matter is, G1's have been battery life and iPhone 3G and 3GS.
I have never owned an iPhone, so I can't really comment on the battery life myself. I know people who own them though, and from hearing their comments on the battery life I considered it to be too short to consider getting a phone where I can't change the battery. But again to reiterate: this would apply for pretty much *any* smartphone.
So please stop parroting the misinformation feed to everyone by iPhone fanboys.
This is *not* misinformation, as I originally said, it is my personal experience. It seems to me that it is you who wants to spread misinformation in order to support your position - you're not an Android fanboy by any chance are you? I'm afraid I have little time for fanboys, no matter which side they are on, I'm only interested in facts and what works *for me*, I'm not interested in hearing people spout BS in the hope of covering up the problems with whatever platform they are a fan of.
I can point to a few hundred things which are easy in Linux and involve jumping through many hoops in Windows. Yeah, operating systems are different, and thus they have different benefits and problems.
What is there not to understand? Install Windows XP, measure battery life. Install Ubuntu, measure battery life.
Compare Fedora and XP on my laptop and the battery life is comparable (actually, it's crap in both because Acer batteries seem to suck badly, but back when the laptop was new it was comparable for the brief few hours I had Windows on the machine).
All this "provide your config" babble is just cover-up.
You're right - no one needs information about the config to figure this problem out... assuming the questioner is happy to give people his laptop instead so they can try it on a system where this is actually a problem. Of course, documenting the config might be cheaper than buying a laptop for everyone who wants to help.
Quite simple: the cellphone companies give no discounts for buying the phone from another supplier. So, you just paid more for a phone and the only advantage that you may get is being able to break the contract at less cost.
It lets you get a cheaper contract though. The best deal for getting an HTC Dream on T-mobile is £97.87 on a £20/month 18 month contract, giving you a TCO of 457.87 over 18 months. Conversely, I bought my Dream on eBay for £143, add on £15 for unlocking == £158 for the phone and then I get to choose the best contract for me.
I've got a Three PAYG SIM in it, which works out well for me since I don't make very many voice calls - I get 150MB of data for free every time I add credit to my balance (the 150MB expires after 90 days) and I can purchase 2GB of data (expires after a month) for £5. Assuming I don't make any voice calls over it and I choose to buy 2GB/month of data, that's going to work out at £90 over 18 months, giving me a TCO of £248 over 18 months, a saving of £209.87. In reality, I _do_ make voice calls, but many of them are made using SIP over 3G or WiFi rather than via the PSTN, but also I take advantage of the 150MB of free data so I will buy a data bundle less frequently than monthly. I expect it will probably cost me under £90 over 18 months.
In any case, I think the article is pretty much bunk - "none of them even seems to be trying to match the capabilities of the iPhone, let alone to knock us down with features that far surpass those of Apple's device" - that really depends on what you are trying to do. If you're interested in posing then it is hard to beat the iPhone because no one else can use the Apple logo. On the other hand, I bought a Dream instead of an iPhone because its feature set *does* far surpass the iPhone's *for my needs*. For example, the Dream has a proper QWERTY keyboard instead of a crappy on-screen thing, which is very important to me for what I use my phone for. It also lets me do stuff like run VoIP software, background tasks and I even have Debian installed on it. The battery life isn't great, which is also a problem for the iPhone, but the HTC Dream lets me replace the battery, so if I'm going to be away from power for a long time I can just take a couple of spares, which is completely out for the iPhone.
When I was originally shopping around for a phone I was told by the sales man in the Carphone Warehouse that the HTC Hero was "much more like the iPhone" and thus "better" - I quickly pointed out that if I wanted an iPhone, I'd buy a damned iPhone. I'm specifically not buying an iPhone because it doesn't do what I need a phone to do. Call me stupid, but isn't is more sensible for there to be a range of devices that covers the needs of everyone, instead of a million and one iPhone clones that only cover the needs of one specific group?
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There's not much air conditioning going on in Germany in the summer. Maybe for two weeks we use some fans, and in the rest it's not that warm to turn on any aircon or fans.
Germany is slightly further south than the UK (where I live), and airconditioned offices are reasonably common here (which is why I specifically said _offices_, not homes).
It may not be blisteringly hot in the summer, but I seriously question the ability to "exactly match" the heat generated (up to 34KW per generator) with the heating requirements of homes during the summer (probably not far off 0KW - the amount of heating required for peoples' showers during the summer is pretty tiny compared to the amount of heating required for most homes in the winter).
Uranium is a finite resource too, much more finite than fossil fuels in fact. If the world suddenly switched massively to nuclear power, there would be about a decade worth of uranium to extract. See this page.
*known reserves* of U235 are pretty limited, but we have stacks and stacks of U238. Maybe you missed the bit in the article you pointed at that states: "We thus conclude that all the worldâ(TM)s energy requirements for the remaining 5Ã--10^9 yr of existence of life on Earth could be provided by breeder reactors without the cost of electricity rising by as much as 1% due to fuel costs. This is consistent with the definition of a âoerenewableâ energy source in the sense in which that term is generally used."
I live close enough to Chernobyl to know that nuclear power is simply not acceptable. Unless you just love thyroid cancer.
Massively flawed reactor designs being run by complete idiots is simply not acceptable. Modern reactors are extremely safe and (in the West) well regulated. If you're going to ban the modern nuclear industry on public safety grounds, you'd better ban the whole chemical industry too since that deals with chemicals that are way more harmful and is far less well regulated. Replacing all the coal fired power plants with nuclear plants would massively cut pollution (coal plants put up a *lot* of particulate pollution into the atmosphere, much of which is radioactive and/or highly toxic, not to mention the environmental concerns of the toxic and radioactive fly ash which has to be disposed of - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill for why this is bad).
Now the heat production of the engine will be exactly matched to this need (same as before).
How do you "exactly match" the heat production when heating and power requirements fluctuate all the time? I'm sure that will be "exactly matched" really well in the height of summer when all the offices have their aircon on....
The point is that nuclear plants can't be shut of in a few minutes (coal plants neither) and waters storing plants are not flexible enough. Because of that many windmills and water dams are shut of even thou they could produce green energy. So what it really means is that this technology will allow real green technology to run when ever it can.
Alternatively, instead of having hundreds of thousands of CO2 producing generators with the ability to rapidly ramp up and down production, you could have a few nice green nuclear power plants and ramp up and down the load instead (e.g. by using the excess power to do useful stuff like cracking water).
Seconded. I moved from Orange to T-Mobile, despite the fact I was largely happy with the Orange service, to get the G1.
I moved from Orange to Three when I got my HTC Dream because Orange's data price structure is totally uncompetitive with pretty much any of the other MNOs....
Id be tempted at this point to just release the sucker in the wild and post up links to any and all places anyone who might even *slightly* want a c64 emulator for the iPhone might be, after restoring the BASIC functionality as it was in the c64. Just to spite em.....
How are you going to do that when you can only install apps from the official app store (unless you root your phone)?
Yes fried pigeon is quite yummy. Unfortunately since a serious bird flue outbreak a few years ago all over Mainland they tripled in price so we don't eat pigeon so often any more, maybe a few times a year, down from twice a month at least. They haven't come down in price really. You can still get them fresh in the market as well (the vendor will kill and pluck the pigeon for you). I live in Hong Kong, for the record.
And you have to remember to remove the SD cards from the pigeon before chucking it in the pan.
I believe I addressed that point by pointing out that everyone and their mother has a Killswitch and nobody flips out about it.
Nobody flips out about it? Plenty of people refuse to buy DRMed content and shout about how bad DRM is for precisely this reason - I'd count that as "flipping out about it".
I realize it's a bitter pill, but you just have to swallow with the knowledge that it'll probably be fine.
Except it probably won't be fine - we've seen this kind of crap pulled countless times before, whether it's some company actively revoking your rights, or simply just deciding they don't want to continue running the authentication servers that their flawed DRM model requires. I see absolutely no reason why this example amongst many should be seen as some kind of cornerstone heralding a new era of customers not getting screwed over - I'm absolutely positive that these killswitches will continue to be used.
If you want to hold a grudge against amazon, then I suppose you'll be holding a grudge against LOTS of companies and simply not buying anything electronic. So be it. Personally, I'd rather just get over it.
This isn't about holding a grudge, this is about people making a choice not to get themselves into an abusive relationship with a vendor. It doesn't require "not buying anything electronic", it simply requires that people are aware of the options available to them and make informed decisions when buying.
I don't buy anything DRMed (with the possible exception of DVDs, which have such a laughably weak DRM system that even an EU court has ruled that it doesn't constitute an "effective copyprotection system" and thus is completely legal to circumvent.). I still buy plenty of electronic gadgets.
I didn't buy an iPhone, partly because I consider Apple's relationship with its customers to be very abusive and I have no interest in being a part of that.
I don't buy DRMed music - CDs work just fine and I can even buy and sell second hand ones.
I don't buy HD DVD/BluRay because I simply don't see HDTV to be a big enough deal to sacrifice my rights over - I have no interest in spending money on a type of media I can't play on whatever gadget I like, nor do I feel like spending money on a player that can have its ability to play new discs revoked on a whim.
If you look at the options available, you will usually find plenty of alternatives to the DRMed ones, and frequently you'll find the non-DRMed ones suit your needs better anyway.
Actually, in most cases, they do have a right to do all of those things that you mentioned...you just didn't read the license agreements.
The parent was talking about the legally enshrined rights provided by the copyright legislation. Whatever the EULA says is pretty moot because there is no legal requirement for you to agree to an EULA.
However, even if you were to assume that the consumer agrees to whatever licence they are presented with and that the licence is enforceable, you are still wrong: When I buy a DVD, I am never presented with a licence agreement - I go into the shop and say "I want to buy this DVD", hand over some money and get given the DVD in return. You cannot argue that this doesn't constitute the sale of the DVD (which would give me all the rights and restrictions granted by copyright law). Iff I were to go into the shop and say "I want to buy this DVD" and they said "you can't buy it, you can only licence the content, here's a licence for you to sign" then you could argue that I didn't buy the DVD and that I am therefore bound by the licence terms, but that never happens.
its a pretty safe bet it won't happen again anytime soon (unless there's a court order, for instance, forcing Amazon's hand).
Yes, amazon still has a kill switch, but I think they've been sufficiently humbled to the point where we're very unlikely to see it ever used again.
You've hit the nail right on the head here but have somehow not realised yet. There is a big problem that now that Amazon has demonstrated the existence of a killswitch, it opens the door for a court to order them to use it even if they don't want to themselves. The killswitch should *never* have been present in the first place. If this fiasco had happened with paper books then Amazon would have just paid damages to the copyright holder rather than breaking into everyone's homes and retrieving the books - that's exactly what they should have happened with the ebooks too.
In essence, they shipped out stolen property.
Not quite. If you (the customer) purchase stolen goods then you can lose them without compensation as they are returned to their rightful owner. I'm not sure the same is true if you purchase goods which infringe copyright.
They were never free to just shrug their shoulders, say "Oops!", and pretend nothing happened.
If they had shipped an infringing physical book, they would have said "Oops!" and simply paid damages to the copyright holder. They wouldn't break into the homes of all their customers and retrieve the books.
I have to disagree. When GSM came out, analog phone cloning was a constant threat. However, it has yet to be cracked on any widespread basis. It is a highly closed protocol, and has yet to be truly cracked.
GSM has been cracked in a number of ways. Firstly, it is possible to clone GSM phones. Secondly, GSM's encryption does very little to protect you from a determined eavesdropper because it is trivial for someone to set up a fake base station since GSM phones do nothing to authenticate the base station they are connecting to.
Same with almost any DRM implementation in the past several years. Blu-Ray has yet to be cracked
Most of the DRM systems in use today have been cracked to some extent, including AACS (which is used on BluRay). For a long while AACS has certainly been broken enough to make it useless to prevent copyright infringement; its currently only useful for annoying legitimate consumers who want to exercise their fair use rights.
Windows Media DRM has yet to be cracked after the patch in 2007.
This demonstrates the problem quite well - you have to continually patch the encryption algorithm you use every time someone cracks it. In many systems this simply isn't possible.
One system that springs to mind that has done very well over the years is DVB-CSA, which has existed for 15 years and has been pretty much open for the past 7. The stakes are pretty high for this (think: free access to every subscription TV channel with absolutely no chance of a fix for many years) to be cracked and no one has managed to do it yet despite knowing exactly how the algorithm works.
Security through obscurity works and works well.
Not really, pretty much all the examples you have cited show that security through obscurity fails pretty frequently compared to peer reviewed, well thought out algorithms.
The people who make it just have to know their stuff. If you compare an open cryptosystem to a closed one where the DMCA can be used to smash any and all attempts at breaking it, the closed one (satellite TV is another example) wins every time for long term protection.
I hate to break it to you, but pretty much all the proprietary satellite TV encryption algorithms have been broken to some extent. Many of them have been well and truly broken and can be decrypted entirely in software. Occasionally you come across a system like NDS VideoGuard, which is as well understood as any open system, but appears to be well designed enough that it hasn't been outright broken (the algorithm has been implemented in software, but still needs to talk to a viewing card. The viewing card itself isn't really an example of security through obscurity, just a really good "locked box" to keep the secret keys in).
Over time (often a very short amount of time), any closed system will become as well understood as a open system. So the only way these systems can hope to stand up to attack is through a good design rather than through being kept secret. It is true that some closed systems do have a good design, and becoming well understood hasn't been a problem. However, it is also true that a great many closed systems have a terrible design and become useless as soon as they have been analysed - if you choose a well known, open, peer reviewed algorithm, you have a much better chance of it having a good robust design.
In summary: there is only a very short-term gain in using a closed system over a peer reviewed system, and the long-term risk of using a closed system is much higher.
An unlocked Android phone will only work on GSM/GPRS/EDGE. T-Mobile and AT&T use different frequency allocations for UMTS, UMTS 850/1900 for AT&T and 2100/1700 MHz for TMobile. What would be great is if we can get a quad band Android phone that supported those frequencies, but as of yet, there is none.
The HTC Dream is quad band, but only for GSM, not UMTS (which I believe applies to pretty much all "quad band" phones doesn't it?).
I'm in the UK, so I only recently realised that AT&T used nonstandard frequencies for UMTS, but I'm a bit confused - I thought 850/1900MHz were GSM bands in the US, are AT&T reusing their GSM frequencies for UMTS? If so, how are they doing this without taking the GSM network offline?
There are many radios involved these days. Regardless, standby means exactly what it sounds - standing by to be used as a phone.
Exactly - as I said, you can't consider a phone which has both the WCDMA and GSM radios turned off as "in standby".
I have no idea why using a phone as a phone is considered unrealistic to you.
Where did I say that was unrealistic?
Go back and reread - I said that running the phone for 402 hours in aeroplane mode is unrealistic (by the manufacturer's own specs). You claim to have done this with the WCDMA or GSM radio turned on - I simply don't believe you as the hardware specs indicate this to be impossible. Throughout this discussion you have used inconsistent and fictitious claims to support your arguments, this is no different.
Using a phone as a phone with occasional texting (basically free) and occasional email is very realistic use of a phone.
Using the phone for voice calls, SMS messages and email is by no means free - both have a cost on the device's power budget: Voice calls involve powering up the CPU and screen in order to dial and then the radio is transmitting and codec running for the duration of the call - this is extremely power-heavy. SMS messages involve powering up the CPU and screen while you are composing or reading them and require the radio to transmit when sending and receiving. The same goes for email, although the power costs will be higher than SMS since the protocol is less efficient and the messages bigger.
Telling anyone that using a phone as a phone is unrealistic is going to get you a look like you're an idiot every time.
Absolutely, anyone claiming that is going to look like a complete idiot, luckily I haven't ever claimed that. Conversely, accusing people of saying things they never said in a publicly archived thread is going to make you look like an idiot.
As for your math, reality says they provided a worst case power draw and the quoted specs overstate the actual draw.
The 3mA figure was lifted from their test specs. True, some of the phones they manufacture will have a slightly lower power draw due to manufacturing tolerances (but I doubt the tolerances are very big), but similarly, some of the phones produced *will* be drawing 3mA. Quoting standby figures that are unachievable by a proportion of the phones manufactured seems somewhat disingenuous.
Furthermore, it is EXTREMELY common for batteries to hold larger capacities than their rated values when they are treated nicely; especially lions and nicads. Did I mention EXTREEEEEMLY common.
[citation needed]
If the battery was capable of a higher capacity then that is what would be printed on the label.
At this point, as you constantly contradict yourself
Where have I contradicted myself?
and refuse to believe factual statements
Your claims seem far from factual to me, especially given how outrageously inconsistent the figures you have claimed have been over the course of the thread.
while at the same time likely have yet to check the link I even provided to you
You might want to go back to school and learn how to read properly - I already said I had looked at the link. I also pointed out that the upper limit to the Dream's life is governed by the hardware - no piece of software can magically extend it beyond that limit, even though you claim it does. A piece of software can't change the design of the hardware or the laws of physics.
Last I checked, 16 days is "weeks".
Yes, that's 16 days with the radio off. I certainly wouldn't consider a phone with the radio off to be "in standby". Turning the radio on is bound to lose more than 2 days and I'm honestly not at all convinced that the phone is going to leave the CPU turned off for the whole time, even with background data disabled.
But we're splitting hairs here as we both agree, that's not a realistic use of the phone nor should it be the basis of realistic expectations.
I'm not splitting hairs, I'm pointing out that your claimed figures are an outright lie. Having to use fictitious figures to back up your arguments demonstrates pretty weak arguments IMHO.
I exceed the official standby times on my G1 all the time, while realistically using my phone.
Errm really? The quoted standby time for the G1 is 319 hours GSM, 402 hours WCDMA. I do not believe you exceed these times, especially if you are "realistically using your phone".
Frankly, your claimed standby times throughout this thread have been extremely variable - you started off saying that you got over 100 hours more than an iPhone, then you said you got 1-3 days (notice that 3 days is less than 100 hours - do iPhones get negative amounts of standby time or something?), then you said you regularly exceed the quoted standby time of almost 17 days.
The standby time for the G1 is realistic. Do not confuse standby time with usable time. The standby time for the G1 is obtainable and realistic.
That simply isn't true. By HTC's own specs for battery capacity and current consumption, the 402 hour standby time is not achievable - the specs quote a 3mA current draw when the CPU is asleep with the phone in aeroplane mode, the battery capacity is 1150mAh. Simple maths will tell you that this means you get a absolute limit to the standby time of 383 hours - well short of the 402 hours quoted, and this is assuming that the CPU never wakes up (seems pretty unrealistic) and all the radios are off (which doesn't constitute "standby" as far as I'm concerned. Especially since the quoted 402 hour standby time actually specifies that the WCDMA is active!)
But standby time is a far, far cry from talk time or actual time spent performing a useful workload.
Please re-read what I said until you understand it: according to the official specs the absolute minimum power the phone can possibly draw while powered up, with the radios off, exceeds the average maximum power you would need to be drawing in order to achieve the standby times they quote for a powered up phone with the WCDMA radio on. The quoted standby time is not only unrealistic, it is physically unachievable due to the hardware constraints.
If that's the case, then either no smart phone is a good pick for you, you need to change your expectations to be far more realistic, or you need to adjust your phone's workload to provide the mandatory life.
As I have already said, several times, I am happy to accept that no smartphone has a good battery life. The HTC Dream (in fact, anything not made by Apple) allows me to work around this problem by just taking spare batteries. This is one of the many many reasons why I consider the HTC Dream to be better than the iPhone for my situation.
If it was about maximum battery life, easily you can see weeks on an Android phone.
I'm sorry, that's simply not true (assuming that by "Android phone" you are talking about something similar to the HTC Dream). The Dream has a 1150mAh battery and is specified to draw around 3mA with the CPU asleep and all the radios disabled. That puts the absolute upper limit at a little under 16 days, and I hardly think you can really count that as "standby" given that the radio is turned off. These are limits set by the hardware - there is nothing that the software can do to either increase the battery capacity or decrease the device's minimum current draw.
I'm actually confused as to what your position actually is. ;)
My position is that all smartphones have an unacceptably short battery life when being used normally and that the workaround is simply to carry multiple batteries and avoid devices that prevent you from changing the battery.
My position is also that the manufacturer's quoted standby times are a complete work of fiction and cannot ever be achieved by any means.
Then that's because you don't appreciate what is going on with your phone or have a poor selection of battery unfriendly applications.
I appreciate just fine what's going on with my phone and the apps are what I bought the phone for.
Far too often people blame Android/Phone/battery for what is really ignorance or a complete disregard for what they install on their phone.
You'll note I didn't blame anything, I simply said that in normal use smartphones generally have a crappy battery life.
After talking with him, he left bluetooth and wifi on all time, even when they were not being used. But even worse, he had his twitter application polling for updates every MINUTE of the day. That means his phone never slept. He was angry his phone couldn't last the day without charging.
I have to say that this is one criticism I have about Android - the stock OS doesn't actually make it that easy to know when apps are draining the battery and which are responsible. On the occasion that I've installed a badly behaved app that doesn't let the phone sleep, my first indication has usually been when the phone runs out of juice. Flashing the notification LED or something when the screen is off but the phone is awake would go a long way to help. The Spare Parts app is quite useful, but it still isn't easy to work out what app is responsible when the phone is being reported as running 10% of the time.
Depending on what I'm doing, I see anywhere from one to three days of battery life.
People on Slashdot often seem to struggle with the idea that people might be away from a power socket for more than a few minutes. It isn't uncommon for me to be away from a power socket for a week or more. "1-3 days" just doesn't cut it.
That's the thing, it *ABSOLUTELY* *IS* misinformation.
No, it really isn't. Sure, you can get great battery life if you turn all the useful stuff off, but that isn't what most people want to do. I'm not interested in knowing what the absolute maximum battery life I might get is, I'm interested in the life I'm going to get in normal use. This is no different to car manufacturers quoting "best case" (i.e. totally unrealistic) MPG figures - it might sell well, but it is utterly meaningless since no one will ever see that kind of efficency in the real world.
The point is, people constantly compare with the iPhone and conclude the G1 has horrible battery life.
You'll note that I didn't do this - I said they *both* have sucky battery life. In fact, I went further than that and said that pretty much all smartphones have sucky battery life.
Expecting an average user to want to use Linux when things as basic as power management requires such complex steps to get working is why none of them are flocking to it.
Ok, firstly, I don't actually care what the "average user" uses. I'm not expecting them to do anything, if they want to use Windows, OS X, DOS, OS/2, whatever, that is up to them - it is a personal choice based on what actually matters to people.
You say that the fact that basic stuff like power management is "complex" is why none of the average users want to use Linux, but this is really BS - I can point at half a dozen "basic" things that work out of the box in Linux and are really complex in Windows, so if "basic" things being "complex" stops average people using the system then they wouldn't be using Windows either.
I can point to a few hundred things which are easy in Linux and involve jumping through many hoops in Windows.
And? What is the relevance of that in relation to the complexity of power management in a Linux distro as opposed to it's absolute simplicity in Windows? This is a nice attempt at deflecting the problem, but it doesn't make it go away.
The relevance is that the original post said something along the lines of "this is what's wrong with Linux people, instead of answering the question* they tell the user to jump through lots of hoops to achieve the job" (* presumably "answering the question" should involve a simple explanation of how to fix the problem like "tick the 'don't run down my battery' checkbox"). My point is that there may be no simple answer - some times you just have to go jump through hoops to get the job done.
Whenever you have 2 completely different systems, you will find that one does some things better whilst the other does other things better - this means that you will *always* find something that is simple on one but requires jumping through hoops on the other.
So you have a choice:
1. Go back to using the system that doesn't involve jumping through hoops.
2. Listen to the person telling you what hoops to jump through and do it.
3. Flame the person telling you what hoops to jump though and go back to complaining about it being "too hard".
4. Fix the system so that you don't have to jump through the hoops any more.
Whilst I use Linux myself, and find it much nicer than Windows for the stuff I use my computers for, I'm happy to accept that it isn't for everyone - people should have a choice in what they use. I am, however, pretty sure that the Linux community doesn't need users who take option (3).
Hard disks might not be spun down as often (or at all) under Linux.
I was under the impression that modern thinking was that spinning down hard drives was bad for power consumption (presumably due to the vanishingly small power requirements of keeping the disk spinning, vs. the relatively large power requirements of spinning it back up)?
which for many, drastically extends battery life. With WiSyncPlus you can easily obtain 100+ hours
100 hours falls into the "not great" category I'm afraid. I've just had a look at WiSyncPlus, and whilst some of the features sound nice, many of them are actually part of the stock Android OS (e.g. options to disable WiFi when the screen is off, disabling data roaming, etc.). Many of the others can be done by Locale, which I already use.
HTC claims 319 hours of standby on the Dream for GSM, 402 hours for WCDMA. This is just never going to happen - the battery is 1150mAh and the service manual specifies a sleep current of <3mA (this is with the phone in aeroplane mode - i.e. all the radios turned off). 1150mAh over 319 hours is 3.6mA - that means the GSM radio has to average no more than 600 microamps and the CPU never has to wake up. The WCDMA standby time is even more of a work of fiction - 402 hours works out at 2.86mA which is _less_ than the sleep current specified in the service manual (again, let me reiterate - the specified sleep current assumes that the CPU is totally inactive and the radios are powered off).
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised really - all the cellphone vendors have similarly fictional standby times. My ancient P900 was sold as having a standby time of 480 hours - that's 20 days. Even when it was brand new it didn't manage more than 10 days.
But note: I wasn't complaining about the battery life of the HTC Dream. I fully accept that *no* smart phone has a good battery life, which is why being able to take a couple of spare batteries with me is important. The Dream lets me do this, the iPhone does not.
Simply put, with readily available software solutions, an inferior G1 can still provide more functionality AND MORE BATTERY LIFE.
I have to ask, why do you say "inferior"?
Long story short, please, please, please story propagating the horrible misinformation that G1s have poor battery life.
As a HTC Dream user, I am talking about my own experiences here. My own experiences tell me that in normal use the battery life of the HTC Dream sucks. Similarly in normal use the battery life of pretty much any smart phone sucks (some more than others). Yes, you can extend the battery life by avoiding using some of the features, but then it ceases to be "normal use" - you can get great battery life out of any phone if you turn it off, take the battery out and pack it up in its box, but it ceases to be very useful like that. This is not "misinformation", it is personal experience.
This has not been true since "cupcake" was release.
I'm running the JF Cupcake 1.5 CRB43 ADP firmware.
The simply truth of the matter is, G1's have been battery life and iPhone 3G and 3GS.
I have never owned an iPhone, so I can't really comment on the battery life myself. I know people who own them though, and from hearing their comments on the battery life I considered it to be too short to consider getting a phone where I can't change the battery. But again to reiterate: this would apply for pretty much *any* smartphone.
So please stop parroting the misinformation feed to everyone by iPhone fanboys.
This is *not* misinformation, as I originally said, it is my personal experience. It seems to me that it is you who wants to spread misinformation in order to support your position - you're not an Android fanboy by any chance are you? I'm afraid I have little time for fanboys, no matter which side they are on, I'm only interested in facts and what works *for me*, I'm not interested in hearing people spout BS in the hope of covering up the problems with whatever platform they are a fan of.
I can point to a few hundred things which are easy in Linux and involve jumping through many hoops in Windows. Yeah, operating systems are different, and thus they have different benefits and problems.
What is there not to understand? Install Windows XP, measure battery life. Install Ubuntu, measure battery life.
Compare Fedora and XP on my laptop and the battery life is comparable (actually, it's crap in both because Acer batteries seem to suck badly, but back when the laptop was new it was comparable for the brief few hours I had Windows on the machine).
All this "provide your config" babble is just cover-up.
You're right - no one needs information about the config to figure this problem out... assuming the questioner is happy to give people his laptop instead so they can try it on a system where this is actually a problem. Of course, documenting the config might be cheaper than buying a laptop for everyone who wants to help.
Quite simple: the cellphone companies give no discounts for buying the phone from another supplier. So, you just paid more for a phone and the only advantage that you may get is being able to break the contract at less cost.
It lets you get a cheaper contract though. The best deal for getting an HTC Dream on T-mobile is £97.87 on a £20/month 18 month contract, giving you a TCO of 457.87 over 18 months. Conversely, I bought my Dream on eBay for £143, add on £15 for unlocking == £158 for the phone and then I get to choose the best contract for me.
I've got a Three PAYG SIM in it, which works out well for me since I don't make very many voice calls - I get 150MB of data for free every time I add credit to my balance (the 150MB expires after 90 days) and I can purchase 2GB of data (expires after a month) for £5. Assuming I don't make any voice calls over it and I choose to buy 2GB/month of data, that's going to work out at £90 over 18 months, giving me a TCO of £248 over 18 months, a saving of £209.87. In reality, I _do_ make voice calls, but many of them are made using SIP over 3G or WiFi rather than via the PSTN, but also I take advantage of the 150MB of free data so I will buy a data bundle less frequently than monthly. I expect it will probably cost me under £90 over 18 months.
In any case, I think the article is pretty much bunk - "none of them even seems to be trying to match the capabilities of the iPhone, let alone to knock us down with features that far surpass those of Apple's device" - that really depends on what you are trying to do. If you're interested in posing then it is hard to beat the iPhone because no one else can use the Apple logo. On the other hand, I bought a Dream instead of an iPhone because its feature set *does* far surpass the iPhone's *for my needs*. For example, the Dream has a proper QWERTY keyboard instead of a crappy on-screen thing, which is very important to me for what I use my phone for. It also lets me do stuff like run VoIP software, background tasks and I even have Debian installed on it. The battery life isn't great, which is also a problem for the iPhone, but the HTC Dream lets me replace the battery, so if I'm going to be away from power for a long time I can just take a couple of spares, which is completely out for the iPhone.
When I was originally shopping around for a phone I was told by the sales man in the Carphone Warehouse that the HTC Hero was "much more like the iPhone" and thus "better" - I quickly pointed out that if I wanted an iPhone, I'd buy a damned iPhone. I'm specifically not buying an iPhone because it doesn't do what I need a phone to do. Call me stupid, but isn't is more sensible for there to be a range of devices that covers the needs of everyone, instead of a million and one iPhone clones that only cover the needs of one specific group?