As a Canadian I also find the US system weird and unfortunate that it leaves so much financial burden on those who are sick or injured.
Our private system is similar to the Australian one. The private hospitals/clinics don't offer any different quality of treatment (the money the hospital can (legally) receive from the government is fixed for each treatment/process, and they cannot charge the patient beyond this) but private facilities can charge over the top for things like private rooms, personal nurses, shorter waiting queues, etc. (Some/many private facilities require you to pay for a room in order to receive treatment there.. and thusly they make their $). The cost of the treatment itself is covered by OHIP.
Drugs and prescriptions are not covered by OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan). For this, most of us have 3rd party insurance, personally I have this as part of my benefits package at work. Even from when I was working as a teenager part-time at a national pizza chain we had access to benefits packages that would cover this insurance for reasonable deductions from your pay ($20-40 month).
If you break your arm, and are one of those that don't have their own insurance for prescriptions/drugs, the hospital isn't going to turn you away with nothing.. I've been in this situation myself between jobs and they've hooked me up with a free bottle of (prescribed) tylenol 3's to get me through it. From what I understand there are programs set up to get people access to the basic drugs they need if they're in such a situation where they can't afford them otherwise...
From my perspective, the system just works, and its crazy that the US hasn't adopted something similar sooner!
(The above applies to taxpaying citizens in the province on Ontario at least.)
Yes Cyanogen is great, I run it on an Android phone or two and love it to bits. But that's not really the point...
The question here was about shipping a phone with CM preloaded, and that comes down to a number of business concerns.
In order to get the real penetration that this would need to get off the ground, CM would obviously need to pair up with a hardware OEM in order to get a handset crafted (or repurposed) and then they would also needcarrier backing in order to get the sales penetration needed for a sustainable plan.
The major issue carriers will have with CM is the fact that the OS is rooted out-of-the-box and that carriers have a multitude of requirements imposed on handsets they'll slap their brand name on. Carriers tend to have business needs that require them to preload certain content on the device, rooting a device allows the user to quickly remove this content (something a carrier might have to swallow from the more knowledgeable users, but not something they would be willing to allow their userbase to perform at the flip of a switch). Rooting also opens a whole mess of security questions, which a carrier would tend to want to stay away from:
User: "My personal info was stolen from my phone!"
Carrier tech support: "Well your phone is rooted and you downloaded some nasty apps that captured your private data"
User: "But you sold me a rooted phone."
You also face issues like some of those mentioned in the comments here to the tune of "CM7 makes it easy to use Netflix". This is one example of many, but Netflix is currently only supported on select few handsets. I can imagine the lawsuits if a carrier were to sell and sponsor a device that "allows user to easily bypass device restrictions" put in place by app vendors. I'm not saying I don't have fun tinkering and hacking around apps in my spare time... but opening those doors to the masses and being liable for such a product is a whole different story.
Now the carrier is faced with having to support and guarantee a product that in the hands of an ignorant or unknowing customer can go horribly wrong.
Sony Ericsson has tackled this issue lately, allowing them to certify phones with carriers and have a secure out-of-the-box experience, but allow the customer to void his/her warranty by punching in their handset's IMEI on a website, obtaining an unlock code for the bootloader allowing full modification of the device. Forcing the customer through a lengthy agreement that renders all warranties null and void makes the carriers and OEMs safe from fallout if the user screws up their device from that point forward.
Cyanogen mod has quite a ways to go yet until they're ready to play in a commercial (and corporate) world where legal implication and stupid users require everything to be dumbed down and secured for consumption by everyone from preteens to seniors. I look forward to the day when I can sign up for my wireless plan and walk away with a Cyanogen handset, however I fear that if they look to commercialize the product they will end up taking away all that is great about CM in the first place.
In my opinion CM will thrive best staying where it is, being the best after-market mod/distro for Android devices.
Rogers Wireless in Canada has had MMS enabled on iPhones since 3.0 software came out (July 17th 2009)... and has seen no negative impact on the network. In fact, because MMS is such an old technology and only allows messages up to 300k to be sent (600k on WAP 2.0, but not on iPhone), images must be compressed and shrunk. For this reason, most users will still prefer to attach a photo or sound clip to an email and send it that way... I'm really not seeing a reason why AT&T has been so slow to join the game.. and ontop of that, why they're seeing such a huge impact to their network. MMS was never originally included on iPhones because of it's limitations and backwards thinking.. Apple assumed people would smarten up and just use email. They caved and introduced MMS in software 3.0 because of user complaints.. but I'm still not seeing why anybody would use MMS nowadays.
I do support for pdas and get asked daily by somebody who's not tech-savvy enough to "find the good stuff" (however that might be) for somewhere to go to get new apps/ringtones/etc, for their phones.
With the release of the iPhone tomorrow, having an official place to suck these types of people into, and likely being backed by every service provider that's selling the iPhone, tons of folks are going to blindly stumble into the Apps Store and spend because it's easy, and because it's there.
Cost is less of an issue if you're led to believe that you're in the best (or the only) place to get something.
I don't think the Treo 750 and the other Windows Mobile Treo products are really part of this discussion.
If anything, going to Windows Mobile might be the only saving grace Palm has left. Their Palm OS is severely limited by today's standards, the most glaring of which today is the inability to deal with 3G / HSDPA speeds. If all Palm OS devices are going to be EDGE (~10-12kb/s) devices, that leaves them in the dust for most of todays data-intensive apps.
imho, they should decide the PalmOS is outdated, and either throw it out and fully move onto Windows Mobile, maybe finally changing their form factor a little to adjust, or put some serious work into developing a new generation of the Palm OS.
Or maybe the skies will open up and they'll put some work into an Android PDA... but I don't think we'll be so lucky.
I do phone support for PDAs and BlackBerrys, and my least favorite PDA line-up is definitely Palm's.
This insurance concept on phones is interesting.
Up here in Canada we definitely have no option to purchase insurance on our smartphones. I work for one of the major wireless companies up here, and regularly field calls where people have lost or had their phone stolen. Pretty much they're looking at purchasing a new phone, possibly with a discount, but no insurance policy replacements, that's for sure.
I've wondered over the years what someone with a high powered rifle taking potshots at oil/propane/liquid hydrogen tankers on the interstates would do. Mainly this crosses my mind while driving alongside one of them and having seen too many Hollywood movies with things blowing up.
Don't you watch Mythbusters? They proved you can't just go blowing up canisters in huge firey explosions with rifles. It takes a fair bit of explosives to do that.
Canada is slowly getting better though. It wasn't that long ago that a $100 data plan with Rogers earned you only 100mb of wireless downloads. Now with the newly unveiled Flexrate data plans (mainly intended for their hsdpa laptop data card users) you can get 5gb of downloads for $100. That's definitely not garnished with an 'unlimited' label, but they're definitely getting closer.
(more info: http://your.rogers.com/business/wireless/plans_services/business_plans.asp?plan=flexrate )
Prices do rise.
The main problem though isn't the gain in number of players, but the gain in groups of operations from countries like China where the cost of labor is low enough that it's feasible to cram 20 guys in a small room and play WoW 24/7 to farm small amounts of Gold by selling item drops off creatures that they camp for endless amounts of time.
This extra gold infused into the economy isn't used by these players, but sold online to other players who don't have time(are too lazy) to amass the gold themselves. Huge influxes of gold into the economy this way drive up prices, and lowers the feasibility of playing the game to its fullest without spending some extra pennies on online gold.
Blizzard of course says that buying gold online is against their EULA and will be punishable by bans, but from what I've seen, they don't seem to catch nearly enough people to make even a noticeable dent on the online WoW gold selling economy.
If you have enough money, you can easily reach this limit, but this opens many more questions about why the games economy has so poorly screwed over by gold farming operations overseas.
(for the record, i no longer play WoW, i'm a recovering addict)
No they really kill your connection up here. I've tried going through 4-5 different routers and gateways, and trying a direct connection to the modem, it's all the same. When Rogers (Canada Cable ISP) detects you're accessing P2P traffic, your entire connection drops down to crap, and you have a hard time connecting to anything. Now I'm no network analyst, but I can tell you that as soon as any computer on my network opens a Torrent, my entire LAN feels like it's connected to dial-up. (Crappy dial-up at that).
If it was a simple lowering of the QoS for the torrent traffic, you would assume that everybody beside it would fly by as normal. Unfortunately this isn't the case.
Rogers is now enforcing their "Premium Usage" overage fees. I pay $54/month or so for their Extreme package. This includes 75gb of traffic. They're still packet shaping P2P traffic throughout, and they charge me $1.50/gb if I go over the 75gb.
Needless to say, I'm shopping for a new ISP.
Our biggest ISP up here in Canada has been doing this for over a year now. Slightly humorous that nobody seemed to notice until Comcast joined the resistance:)
I'd say there's an Ontario French that's emerged from all the towns which have large french populations... french immersion attacks the children and spawns a new pseudo-french.
Slashdot Mirror
As a Canadian I also find the US system weird and unfortunate that it leaves so much financial burden on those who are sick or injured. Our private system is similar to the Australian one. The private hospitals/clinics don't offer any different quality of treatment (the money the hospital can (legally) receive from the government is fixed for each treatment/process, and they cannot charge the patient beyond this) but private facilities can charge over the top for things like private rooms, personal nurses, shorter waiting queues, etc. (Some/many private facilities require you to pay for a room in order to receive treatment there.. and thusly they make their $). The cost of the treatment itself is covered by OHIP. Drugs and prescriptions are not covered by OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan). For this, most of us have 3rd party insurance, personally I have this as part of my benefits package at work. Even from when I was working as a teenager part-time at a national pizza chain we had access to benefits packages that would cover this insurance for reasonable deductions from your pay ($20-40 month). If you break your arm, and are one of those that don't have their own insurance for prescriptions/drugs, the hospital isn't going to turn you away with nothing.. I've been in this situation myself between jobs and they've hooked me up with a free bottle of (prescribed) tylenol 3's to get me through it. From what I understand there are programs set up to get people access to the basic drugs they need if they're in such a situation where they can't afford them otherwise... From my perspective, the system just works, and its crazy that the US hasn't adopted something similar sooner! (The above applies to taxpaying citizens in the province on Ontario at least.)
I grew up in Sudbury and blame my asthma on the nickel smelting.
Yes Cyanogen is great, I run it on an Android phone or two and love it to bits. But that's not really the point...
The question here was about shipping a phone with CM preloaded, and that comes down to a number of business concerns.
In order to get the real penetration that this would need to get off the ground, CM would obviously need to pair up with a hardware OEM in order to get a handset crafted (or repurposed) and then they would also need carrier backing in order to get the sales penetration needed for a sustainable plan.
The major issue carriers will have with CM is the fact that the OS is rooted out-of-the-box and that carriers have a multitude of requirements imposed on handsets they'll slap their brand name on. Carriers tend to have business needs that require them to preload certain content on the device, rooting a device allows the user to quickly remove this content (something a carrier might have to swallow from the more knowledgeable users, but not something they would be willing to allow their userbase to perform at the flip of a switch). Rooting also opens a whole mess of security questions, which a carrier would tend to want to stay away from:
User: "My personal info was stolen from my phone!"
Carrier tech support: "Well your phone is rooted and you downloaded some nasty apps that captured your private data"
User: "But you sold me a rooted phone."
You also face issues like some of those mentioned in the comments here to the tune of "CM7 makes it easy to use Netflix". This is one example of many, but Netflix is currently only supported on select few handsets. I can imagine the lawsuits if a carrier were to sell and sponsor a device that "allows user to easily bypass device restrictions" put in place by app vendors. I'm not saying I don't have fun tinkering and hacking around apps in my spare time... but opening those doors to the masses and being liable for such a product is a whole different story.
Now the carrier is faced with having to support and guarantee a product that in the hands of an ignorant or unknowing customer can go horribly wrong.
Sony Ericsson has tackled this issue lately, allowing them to certify phones with carriers and have a secure out-of-the-box experience, but allow the customer to void his/her warranty by punching in their handset's IMEI on a website, obtaining an unlock code for the bootloader allowing full modification of the device. Forcing the customer through a lengthy agreement that renders all warranties null and void makes the carriers and OEMs safe from fallout if the user screws up their device from that point forward.
Cyanogen mod has quite a ways to go yet until they're ready to play in a commercial (and corporate) world where legal implication and stupid users require everything to be dumbed down and secured for consumption by everyone from preteens to seniors. I look forward to the day when I can sign up for my wireless plan and walk away with a Cyanogen handset, however I fear that if they look to commercialize the product they will end up taking away all that is great about CM in the first place.
In my opinion CM will thrive best staying where it is, being the best after-market mod/distro for Android devices.
Rogers Wireless in Canada has had MMS enabled on iPhones since 3.0 software came out (July 17th 2009)... and has seen no negative impact on the network. In fact, because MMS is such an old technology and only allows messages up to 300k to be sent (600k on WAP 2.0, but not on iPhone), images must be compressed and shrunk. For this reason, most users will still prefer to attach a photo or sound clip to an email and send it that way... I'm really not seeing a reason why AT&T has been so slow to join the game.. and ontop of that, why they're seeing such a huge impact to their network. MMS was never originally included on iPhones because of it's limitations and backwards thinking.. Apple assumed people would smarten up and just use email. They caved and introduced MMS in software 3.0 because of user complaints.. but I'm still not seeing why anybody would use MMS nowadays.
woohoo achievements achievement.
I do support for pdas and get asked daily by somebody who's not tech-savvy enough to "find the good stuff" (however that might be) for somewhere to go to get new apps/ringtones/etc, for their phones. With the release of the iPhone tomorrow, having an official place to suck these types of people into, and likely being backed by every service provider that's selling the iPhone, tons of folks are going to blindly stumble into the Apps Store and spend because it's easy, and because it's there. Cost is less of an issue if you're led to believe that you're in the best (or the only) place to get something.
I don't think the Treo 750 and the other Windows Mobile Treo products are really part of this discussion. If anything, going to Windows Mobile might be the only saving grace Palm has left. Their Palm OS is severely limited by today's standards, the most glaring of which today is the inability to deal with 3G / HSDPA speeds. If all Palm OS devices are going to be EDGE (~10-12kb/s) devices, that leaves them in the dust for most of todays data-intensive apps. imho, they should decide the PalmOS is outdated, and either throw it out and fully move onto Windows Mobile, maybe finally changing their form factor a little to adjust, or put some serious work into developing a new generation of the Palm OS. Or maybe the skies will open up and they'll put some work into an Android PDA... but I don't think we'll be so lucky. I do phone support for PDAs and BlackBerrys, and my least favorite PDA line-up is definitely Palm's.
This insurance concept on phones is interesting. Up here in Canada we definitely have no option to purchase insurance on our smartphones. I work for one of the major wireless companies up here, and regularly field calls where people have lost or had their phone stolen. Pretty much they're looking at purchasing a new phone, possibly with a discount, but no insurance policy replacements, that's for sure.
I've wondered over the years what someone with a high powered rifle taking potshots at oil/propane/liquid hydrogen tankers on the interstates would do. Mainly this crosses my mind while driving alongside one of them and having seen too many Hollywood movies with things blowing up.
Don't you watch Mythbusters? They proved you can't just go blowing up canisters in huge firey explosions with rifles. It takes a fair bit of explosives to do that.
Now where did I leave that RPG...? :)
About time... Rogers up in Canada shut down it's TDMA network about half a year ago.
Not sure if I should.. but I always worry when these large powers get bigger.
Canada is slowly getting better though. It wasn't that long ago that a $100 data plan with Rogers earned you only 100mb of wireless downloads. Now with the newly unveiled Flexrate data plans (mainly intended for their hsdpa laptop data card users) you can get 5gb of downloads for $100. That's definitely not garnished with an 'unlimited' label, but they're definitely getting closer. (more info: http://your.rogers.com/business/wireless/plans_services/business_plans.asp?plan=flexrate )
Prices do rise. The main problem though isn't the gain in number of players, but the gain in groups of operations from countries like China where the cost of labor is low enough that it's feasible to cram 20 guys in a small room and play WoW 24/7 to farm small amounts of Gold by selling item drops off creatures that they camp for endless amounts of time. This extra gold infused into the economy isn't used by these players, but sold online to other players who don't have time(are too lazy) to amass the gold themselves. Huge influxes of gold into the economy this way drive up prices, and lowers the feasibility of playing the game to its fullest without spending some extra pennies on online gold. Blizzard of course says that buying gold online is against their EULA and will be punishable by bans, but from what I've seen, they don't seem to catch nearly enough people to make even a noticeable dent on the online WoW gold selling economy. If you have enough money, you can easily reach this limit, but this opens many more questions about why the games economy has so poorly screwed over by gold farming operations overseas. (for the record, i no longer play WoW, i'm a recovering addict)
No they really kill your connection up here. I've tried going through 4-5 different routers and gateways, and trying a direct connection to the modem, it's all the same. When Rogers (Canada Cable ISP) detects you're accessing P2P traffic, your entire connection drops down to crap, and you have a hard time connecting to anything. Now I'm no network analyst, but I can tell you that as soon as any computer on my network opens a Torrent, my entire LAN feels like it's connected to dial-up. (Crappy dial-up at that). If it was a simple lowering of the QoS for the torrent traffic, you would assume that everybody beside it would fly by as normal. Unfortunately this isn't the case.
still baffled how people can find slashdot.. but they can't find a decent torrent site.
Rogers is now enforcing their "Premium Usage" overage fees. I pay $54/month or so for their Extreme package. This includes 75gb of traffic. They're still packet shaping P2P traffic throughout, and they charge me $1.50/gb if I go over the 75gb. Needless to say, I'm shopping for a new ISP.
Our biggest ISP up here in Canada has been doing this for over a year now. Slightly humorous that nobody seemed to notice until Comcast joined the resistance :)
you have something against us poop-flinging shakespeare coders? :)
I'd say there's an Ontario French that's emerged from all the towns which have large french populations... french immersion attacks the children and spawns a new pseudo-french.