Yeah, the point is that it's not necessary to have the entire ebook reading application running in the background, rendering pages that aren't being displayed. Doing that is a waste of power.
Why is that a funny thing? You don't need to have a movie running the the background when you aren't watching it. Decoding video that isn't being displayed is a waste of power.
Well here's the thing that most analysts won't tell you: the business market ultimately tends to go to whatever is considered a status symbol by executives. Blackberry's success in the enterprise market is only partially due to technical benefits of their devices/software. A lot of their success has been because around 10 years ago, someone decided that having a Blackberry was a symbol that you were extremely important.
Frankly, iPhones started making inroads in the enterprise before they were technologically ready. Whether or not the IT people will thrilled with the idea, if the CEO or VPs wanted to use their iPhones, then the iPhone became a supported platform. You'll hear lots of justifications and technical arguments after the fact, but the actual decision is as much as anything determined by why the PHB thinks is cool.
I still say, "Who needs multitasking on a phone?" There are a few set things that I'd like to be able to run in the background, but I don't need real multitasking. I don't need to be able to edit word documents while watching a Netflix movie. I don't need the phone to be displaying an ebook in the background while I'm using the display to display web pages. All that stuff just wastes RAM and CPU cycles. Everyone recognizes this.
In truth, Microsoft is copying Apple here in a very particular way: they're trying to create a limited device with which only does a few things but does those things well, rather than creating a feature-rich hunk of junk. It's probably a smart move, too. Get the basics working well, then add bells and whistles with software updates. There's no sin in copying someone else, only in copying someone else poorly.
Netflix pays their ISP for their bandwidth. I pay my ISP for my bandwidth. Nether ISP has grounds to complain when we use that bandwidth. Anyway that's not what these things are really about. The big issue is that ISPs want to find a way to get a cut of the business going over their lines, and they want to push their customers into using their services rather than competing services.
Right, well I'm sure it depends on the community, the school system, and even the particular kids. Also, there is the possibility (though I won't really try to argue it) that the honors kids you knew were cheating, and you just weren't aware.
However, I was in one of those "best public school system in the country" sort of places, and I'm talking about those types of kids who were in competition to be the valedictorian, went to Ivy League schools, took so many AP tests that they started college as a sophomore. They usually didn't cheat on tests unless they had a pretty fool-proof way of not getting caught, but they copied answers on classwork/homework and they'd commit plagiarism on their papers (i.e. using each other's papers or someone else's paper as a base, rewriting the sentences to match their own voice, shuffling paragraphs around, adding/subtracting stuff as needed). One guy I knew, his parents did all of his homework for him, wrote all of his papers, etc.
They weren't too obvious about their cheating, and generally the teachers, administrators, and even some of the other students would have been surprised to learn what was going on. But yeah, they cheated all the time. I'm sure it wasn't like that everywhere, and maybe it wasn't like that were you came from. Still, I doubt what I'm talking about is uncommon.
Similarly, Thief: The Dark Project. Great level design, fun weapons, and to this day it might be the best stealth game ever. Extra-awesome if you try to ghost through all the levels. Unfortunately Thief 3 was not very good.
The issue is that this is kind of a basic thing. If the guy got hired with the understanding that he could handle architecting the network when he was not capable of doing so unless/. gave him good advice...
Maybe he's capable of doing it, but wanted the throw the question out there to see what kind of feedback he'd get. I know that, for my job, sometimes I ask questions that I'm pretty sure I know the answer to, just to see if someone surprises me with something that I hadn't thought about.
Oh, and I forgot: if possible, use the same *exact* hardware on all client computers, and develop a good imaging solution. This will save you some headaches down the road. If you buy a bunch of Macs, then getting different configurations for different users will hurt less; thanks to EFI and OSX including all the drivers for all their configurations, imaging a Mac is simple.
I would generally stick to desktop machines unless people really are going to be taking them places. Laptops are generally more expensive and less upgradeable. They're also a nightmare as far as ergonomics go, unless you buy external peripherals and use them as desktops anyway. Also avoid all-in-one machines for some of the same reasons.
Beware of roaming profiles; make sure you know how the syncing is working, or you'll lose data. Oh, and I mentioned this earlier, but avoid software that requires activation. I don't say this for ideological reasons, either. Activation is all well and good until something goes wrong, and then you might find that you're screwed.
The first question is, who will be supporting these servers and what kind of expertise do they have? Second question: what are your needs? What kind of software will you be running? Third question: what does your budget look like? Answering these questions may answer your questions.
If your users are comfortable with Windows and you only know how to admin Windows servers and your business needs MS Office and Exchange, then you'll be buying a bunch of Windows machines. You won't find a manufacturer that people don't complain about, but Dell and HP are generally fine.
If you're a real Linux whiz and you want to save money on licensing costs, then Linux is certainly worth considering. Assuming you want an office suite, web browser, and email, it should be fine. Watch out, though-- if someone absolutely needs Adobe CS or MS Office (or other Windows specific software), you'll probably want to use Windows or Mac clients.
Macs: I like them. Imaging is easy. Administration is easy. They run Unix tools. Users like them. You can get major commercial software like MS Office and Adobe CS. I actually like iWork quite a lot. If you want to, you can run Window or Linux on them. On the down side, they're expensive and there are limited configurations. Most configurations are not upgradable. Also, it's worth noting that Apple is stopping production on their only rack-mount server.
Where does all this leave you? I don't know. I'm sad to say that if you're running a small business with limited tech capabilities, Windows SBS with Windows clients is a pretty safe bet. People are familiar with Windows, it's well supported, Windows domains provide an easy single-sign-on, and Exchange works well. I stay away from Windows, though, because I refuse to buy software which requires activation. Also, windows licensing can get expensive (don't forget about the CALs!).
Fixing the crappiness would be an admission that their feature creep has created an improperly designed and bloated mess. Sandboxing the whole thing just admits that there are security problems.
Yeah, I can't speak about all schools everywhere, but only my own experiences. I went to a public school a couple decades ago, and as I said, cheating was rampant even among the "good kids". Even the best most naive goody-two-shoes kids cheated constantly-- so much so that they didn't seem to think of what they were doing as being particularly wrong or dishonest. It was just what you did if you wanted to do well in school.
Looking back, what frustrates me most about it all is the feeling that I was robbed of good educational opportunities. We studies WW2, ancient china, the American Revolution, and lots of other topics, but I learned very little of interest. When I graduated from highschool, I would have been able to tell you what year the magna carta was signed, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you what it said or what the relevance of the document was. And all this stuff is genuinely interesting. If my teachers had been knowledgeable and enthusiastic, I can't help but feel that I would have been genuinely interested myself and I would have learned a lot about history.
And not just history. I feel that way about all the subjects. I hated reading when I was a kid because I thought of it as a stupid chore of memorizing details and lines of dialog. Now I know better.
Cheating is ubiquitous in our education system. I remember in high school, all of the "honors" students would sit around at lunch swapping homework and copying answers. Many of them cheated on tests as well. I don't think any of those "good kids" who took a bunch of AP tests and had a >3.6 GPA didn't constantly cheat.
In their defense, their workloads were insane. I didn't take a lot of honors classes and only took a couple AP courses, and I still had 5 hours of homework a night. Every teacher acted as though they were the only ones giving homework. Meanwhile the homework was the most inane busy-work. History classes were all about memorizing names and places and dates, but you rarely got much insight into the complex causal links and cultural backgrounds underlying the events. Math courses were usually just plugging numbers into formulas that you were expected to have memorized. English courses spent a lot of time testing whether you remembered random facts and details about the book, just to prove whether you read it.
Meanwhile, kids were constantly being told that "doing well" in school consisted of doing what you were told and getting good grades. The purpose of all of this was explicitly to get into a good college. No one was focused on actual learning. No one expected classes to be interesting or worthwhile on their own right. This is why our school system is absolutely insane.
Yeah, I really don't know what this guy meant, but it's worth noting that being at the end of a life cycle generally also means you're at the beginning. That's why it's called a "life cycle" and not a "life timeline". The end of the cycle is when you start over.
So to me, if you say that a piece of software is "at the end of its life cycle", I read that as, "This software is complete. Time to start working on the next version."
I think "netbook" has become one of those terms like "Web 2.0" or "the Cloud". It's a term that's pretty vague and unclear; lots of people think that they're well-defined terms, but if you ask 2 people you can get 2 very different answers.
Originally the term "netbook" was used to describe laptops that were designed to be as cheap and small as possible, which was accomplished by making them underpowered and usually lacking internal storage, and they were called netbooks because they couldn't be used for anything more complex than web browsing. Like you said, it was like a thin client.
Netbooks became popular in concept and a marketing gimmick, but it turned out that people were actually dissatisfied with the idea because they still wanted to use the netbooks for other common computing tasks for which they were underpowered. Manufacturers started beefing up their netbook line to include more capable processors, gigabytes of RAM, and hundreds of gigabytes of storage, also increasing the price. The line between "netbook" and "notebook" has become a bit blurred.
I think it's mostly been settled for the time being by saying that netbooks are small laptops that use Atom processors. I'm not sure it's an important distinction anymore.
Following your argument to it's logical conclusion nobody could dislike anything
I said "it can get a little funny" and not "It's always funny"; I said "Depending on what your complaint is, it can be.."
So no, I don't think you can "follow my argument to it's logical conclusion". I didn't present a logical argument at all. I just posited that sometimes people's complaints about the Beatles are kind of silly.
I find it a bit strange that you could find the whole Beatles canon uninteresting. There's a hell of a lot of variety in there
I also think it can get a little funny to complain about the Beatles being uninteresting, once you take into account how much other music has been influenced by them. Depending on what your complaint is, it can be a little like complaining that "Romeo and Juliet" is boring and unoriginal because it's the same story as "West Side Story".
name a cellular device maker who has made devices less restrictive than 1-2 years ago?
Well first, cell phones have always been restrictive. Go back in time a few years, and your data services would only access things inside a walled garden. You couldn't install or uninstall any software on your phone. Bluetooth and other data connections were blocked or crippled to prevent people from making their own ringtones. So it's not as though we started with an open atmosphere and have gotten more closed off.
Second, phones are doing a lot more than they used to. There were smartphones, but they were terrible and nobody used them, so there wasn't enough of a business there to care. Now smartphones are a huge business, and so people have huge business interests.
Content owners want the content to be locked down, so you often have some kind of DRM in place. Carriers don't want people using too much bandwidth, so they have the manufacturers put in various restrictions. The manufacturers themselves often don't want you to be able to upgrade your phone's software with new features, because it would diminish your desire for a new phone.
Real computers use something called NFS and so there's no need for a user-space network file browsing protocol.
Of course, the problem is that computers with Windows installed, as unreal as they may be, support SMB/CIFS better than they support NFS. Since Windows is still pretty dominant and since the OP is asking about setting up his network to include Windows clients, this may be relevant.
Sometimes having a mixed environment is unfortunately about shooting for the lowest common denominator. For example, if you're moving an external hard drive between Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, and Windows, you may want to use a FAT filesystem-- not because FAT is a great filesystem, but because it's widely supported. Same basic deal with SMB. SMB isn't an ideal solution, but it is widely supported at this point.
I can't just take my AT&T phone and hook up to Verizon's or Sprint's network because their networks are different technologies
Well that's absolutely true. AFAIK, there still aren't any phones that support both AT&T and Verizon.
I responded to that, so now you put out some other bullshit argument about how it's suddenly necessary to upgrade all the existing phones to quad-band.
It's not bullshit. The point is that the whole thing is not as simple as unlocking the phones. You might technically unlock all the phones and still have phones be stuck on one particular network. Part of the reason is that Verizon and Sprint use one kind of network while AT&T and T-Mobile use a different kind of network. Part of the problem is that, even when they're using the same network, they might use different frequencies.
No. What is necessary is to break out of the walled garden.
That's assumed in this discussion. The question is, what do we need to change in order to actually have the freedom to move your cellphone to another network?
Vote with your dollars, buy an unlocked quad-band phone next time you buy a phone.
Does that even settle the issue? I thought quad-band was 850, 900, 1800, 1900. According to the Wikipedia, T-Mobile is using 1700/2100 for 3G. You still won't be able to bring that phone over to Verizon or Sprint.
I was actually agreeing with you until yiou said that. I am living proof that you can indeed take an (unlocked) AT&T phone, pop in the sim, and have it work.
Oh, it's entirely possible to take an unlocked GSM phone and use it on either network. Many phones, however, will only support 3G data on either AT&T or T-Mobile, but not both. Some phones will support 3G on both, but many won't.
So again, it's not as simple as unlocking the phones. You need to standardize which technologies and frequencies are supported across the industry if you want a truly open market.
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Yeah, the point is that it's not necessary to have the entire ebook reading application running in the background, rendering pages that aren't being displayed. Doing that is a waste of power.
Why is that a funny thing? You don't need to have a movie running the the background when you aren't watching it. Decoding video that isn't being displayed is a waste of power.
Well here's the thing that most analysts won't tell you: the business market ultimately tends to go to whatever is considered a status symbol by executives. Blackberry's success in the enterprise market is only partially due to technical benefits of their devices/software. A lot of their success has been because around 10 years ago, someone decided that having a Blackberry was a symbol that you were extremely important.
Frankly, iPhones started making inroads in the enterprise before they were technologically ready. Whether or not the IT people will thrilled with the idea, if the CEO or VPs wanted to use their iPhones, then the iPhone became a supported platform. You'll hear lots of justifications and technical arguments after the fact, but the actual decision is as much as anything determined by why the PHB thinks is cool.
I still say, "Who needs multitasking on a phone?" There are a few set things that I'd like to be able to run in the background, but I don't need real multitasking. I don't need to be able to edit word documents while watching a Netflix movie. I don't need the phone to be displaying an ebook in the background while I'm using the display to display web pages. All that stuff just wastes RAM and CPU cycles. Everyone recognizes this.
In truth, Microsoft is copying Apple here in a very particular way: they're trying to create a limited device with which only does a few things but does those things well, rather than creating a feature-rich hunk of junk. It's probably a smart move, too. Get the basics working well, then add bells and whistles with software updates. There's no sin in copying someone else, only in copying someone else poorly.
Netflix pays their ISP for their bandwidth. I pay my ISP for my bandwidth. Nether ISP has grounds to complain when we use that bandwidth. Anyway that's not what these things are really about. The big issue is that ISPs want to find a way to get a cut of the business going over their lines, and they want to push their customers into using their services rather than competing services.
Right, well I'm sure it depends on the community, the school system, and even the particular kids. Also, there is the possibility (though I won't really try to argue it) that the honors kids you knew were cheating, and you just weren't aware.
However, I was in one of those "best public school system in the country" sort of places, and I'm talking about those types of kids who were in competition to be the valedictorian, went to Ivy League schools, took so many AP tests that they started college as a sophomore. They usually didn't cheat on tests unless they had a pretty fool-proof way of not getting caught, but they copied answers on classwork/homework and they'd commit plagiarism on their papers (i.e. using each other's papers or someone else's paper as a base, rewriting the sentences to match their own voice, shuffling paragraphs around, adding/subtracting stuff as needed). One guy I knew, his parents did all of his homework for him, wrote all of his papers, etc.
They weren't too obvious about their cheating, and generally the teachers, administrators, and even some of the other students would have been surprised to learn what was going on. But yeah, they cheated all the time. I'm sure it wasn't like that everywhere, and maybe it wasn't like that were you came from. Still, I doubt what I'm talking about is uncommon.
Similarly, Thief: The Dark Project. Great level design, fun weapons, and to this day it might be the best stealth game ever. Extra-awesome if you try to ghost through all the levels. Unfortunately Thief 3 was not very good.
The issue is that this is kind of a basic thing. If the guy got hired with the understanding that he could handle architecting the network when he was not capable of doing so unless /. gave him good advice...
Maybe he's capable of doing it, but wanted the throw the question out there to see what kind of feedback he'd get. I know that, for my job, sometimes I ask questions that I'm pretty sure I know the answer to, just to see if someone surprises me with something that I hadn't thought about.
Oh, and I forgot: if possible, use the same *exact* hardware on all client computers, and develop a good imaging solution. This will save you some headaches down the road. If you buy a bunch of Macs, then getting different configurations for different users will hurt less; thanks to EFI and OSX including all the drivers for all their configurations, imaging a Mac is simple.
I would generally stick to desktop machines unless people really are going to be taking them places. Laptops are generally more expensive and less upgradeable. They're also a nightmare as far as ergonomics go, unless you buy external peripherals and use them as desktops anyway. Also avoid all-in-one machines for some of the same reasons.
Beware of roaming profiles; make sure you know how the syncing is working, or you'll lose data. Oh, and I mentioned this earlier, but avoid software that requires activation. I don't say this for ideological reasons, either. Activation is all well and good until something goes wrong, and then you might find that you're screwed.
The first question is, who will be supporting these servers and what kind of expertise do they have? Second question: what are your needs? What kind of software will you be running? Third question: what does your budget look like? Answering these questions may answer your questions.
If your users are comfortable with Windows and you only know how to admin Windows servers and your business needs MS Office and Exchange, then you'll be buying a bunch of Windows machines. You won't find a manufacturer that people don't complain about, but Dell and HP are generally fine.
If you're a real Linux whiz and you want to save money on licensing costs, then Linux is certainly worth considering. Assuming you want an office suite, web browser, and email, it should be fine. Watch out, though-- if someone absolutely needs Adobe CS or MS Office (or other Windows specific software), you'll probably want to use Windows or Mac clients.
Macs: I like them. Imaging is easy. Administration is easy. They run Unix tools. Users like them. You can get major commercial software like MS Office and Adobe CS. I actually like iWork quite a lot. If you want to, you can run Window or Linux on them. On the down side, they're expensive and there are limited configurations. Most configurations are not upgradable. Also, it's worth noting that Apple is stopping production on their only rack-mount server.
Where does all this leave you? I don't know. I'm sad to say that if you're running a small business with limited tech capabilities, Windows SBS with Windows clients is a pretty safe bet. People are familiar with Windows, it's well supported, Windows domains provide an easy single-sign-on, and Exchange works well. I stay away from Windows, though, because I refuse to buy software which requires activation. Also, windows licensing can get expensive (don't forget about the CALs!).
Fixing the crappiness would be an admission that their feature creep has created an improperly designed and bloated mess. Sandboxing the whole thing just admits that there are security problems.
Yeah, I can't speak about all schools everywhere, but only my own experiences. I went to a public school a couple decades ago, and as I said, cheating was rampant even among the "good kids". Even the best most naive goody-two-shoes kids cheated constantly-- so much so that they didn't seem to think of what they were doing as being particularly wrong or dishonest. It was just what you did if you wanted to do well in school.
Looking back, what frustrates me most about it all is the feeling that I was robbed of good educational opportunities. We studies WW2, ancient china, the American Revolution, and lots of other topics, but I learned very little of interest. When I graduated from highschool, I would have been able to tell you what year the magna carta was signed, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you what it said or what the relevance of the document was. And all this stuff is genuinely interesting. If my teachers had been knowledgeable and enthusiastic, I can't help but feel that I would have been genuinely interested myself and I would have learned a lot about history.
And not just history. I feel that way about all the subjects. I hated reading when I was a kid because I thought of it as a stupid chore of memorizing details and lines of dialog. Now I know better.
Cheating is ubiquitous in our education system. I remember in high school, all of the "honors" students would sit around at lunch swapping homework and copying answers. Many of them cheated on tests as well. I don't think any of those "good kids" who took a bunch of AP tests and had a >3.6 GPA didn't constantly cheat.
In their defense, their workloads were insane. I didn't take a lot of honors classes and only took a couple AP courses, and I still had 5 hours of homework a night. Every teacher acted as though they were the only ones giving homework. Meanwhile the homework was the most inane busy-work. History classes were all about memorizing names and places and dates, but you rarely got much insight into the complex causal links and cultural backgrounds underlying the events. Math courses were usually just plugging numbers into formulas that you were expected to have memorized. English courses spent a lot of time testing whether you remembered random facts and details about the book, just to prove whether you read it.
Meanwhile, kids were constantly being told that "doing well" in school consisted of doing what you were told and getting good grades. The purpose of all of this was explicitly to get into a good college. No one was focused on actual learning. No one expected classes to be interesting or worthwhile on their own right. This is why our school system is absolutely insane.
Yeah, I really don't know what this guy meant, but it's worth noting that being at the end of a life cycle generally also means you're at the beginning. That's why it's called a "life cycle" and not a "life timeline". The end of the cycle is when you start over.
So to me, if you say that a piece of software is "at the end of its life cycle", I read that as, "This software is complete. Time to start working on the next version."
No, the central lesson of modern business would be if the honest people all got expelled and the cheaters got the government to give them money.
I think "netbook" has become one of those terms like "Web 2.0" or "the Cloud". It's a term that's pretty vague and unclear; lots of people think that they're well-defined terms, but if you ask 2 people you can get 2 very different answers.
Originally the term "netbook" was used to describe laptops that were designed to be as cheap and small as possible, which was accomplished by making them underpowered and usually lacking internal storage, and they were called netbooks because they couldn't be used for anything more complex than web browsing. Like you said, it was like a thin client.
Netbooks became popular in concept and a marketing gimmick, but it turned out that people were actually dissatisfied with the idea because they still wanted to use the netbooks for other common computing tasks for which they were underpowered. Manufacturers started beefing up their netbook line to include more capable processors, gigabytes of RAM, and hundreds of gigabytes of storage, also increasing the price. The line between "netbook" and "notebook" has become a bit blurred.
I think it's mostly been settled for the time being by saying that netbooks are small laptops that use Atom processors. I'm not sure it's an important distinction anymore.
So what are you suggesting? That if I want 3G data on my phone after moving from AT&T to T-Mobile, I should also buy a USB dongle and... what?
Following your argument to it's logical conclusion nobody could dislike anything
I said "it can get a little funny" and not "It's always funny"; I said "Depending on what your complaint is, it can be.."
So no, I don't think you can "follow my argument to it's logical conclusion". I didn't present a logical argument at all. I just posited that sometimes people's complaints about the Beatles are kind of silly.
I find it a bit strange that you could find the whole Beatles canon uninteresting. There's a hell of a lot of variety in there
I also think it can get a little funny to complain about the Beatles being uninteresting, once you take into account how much other music has been influenced by them. Depending on what your complaint is, it can be a little like complaining that "Romeo and Juliet" is boring and unoriginal because it's the same story as "West Side Story".
name a cellular device maker who has made devices less restrictive than 1-2 years ago?
Well first, cell phones have always been restrictive. Go back in time a few years, and your data services would only access things inside a walled garden. You couldn't install or uninstall any software on your phone. Bluetooth and other data connections were blocked or crippled to prevent people from making their own ringtones. So it's not as though we started with an open atmosphere and have gotten more closed off.
Second, phones are doing a lot more than they used to. There were smartphones, but they were terrible and nobody used them, so there wasn't enough of a business there to care. Now smartphones are a huge business, and so people have huge business interests.
Content owners want the content to be locked down, so you often have some kind of DRM in place. Carriers don't want people using too much bandwidth, so they have the manufacturers put in various restrictions. The manufacturers themselves often don't want you to be able to upgrade your phone's software with new features, because it would diminish your desire for a new phone.
But seriously, if nothing else, why not take volunteers from people on death row, that were sufficiently intelligent?
If one of them is a cannibalistic serial killer, then that's a great idea for a movie.
Real computers use something called NFS and so there's no need for a user-space network file browsing protocol.
Of course, the problem is that computers with Windows installed, as unreal as they may be, support SMB/CIFS better than they support NFS. Since Windows is still pretty dominant and since the OP is asking about setting up his network to include Windows clients, this may be relevant.
Sometimes having a mixed environment is unfortunately about shooting for the lowest common denominator. For example, if you're moving an external hard drive between Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, and Windows, you may want to use a FAT filesystem-- not because FAT is a great filesystem, but because it's widely supported. Same basic deal with SMB. SMB isn't an ideal solution, but it is widely supported at this point.
In the GP post you were arguing that
I can't just take my AT&T phone and hook up to Verizon's or Sprint's network because their networks are different technologies
Well that's absolutely true. AFAIK, there still aren't any phones that support both AT&T and Verizon.
I responded to that, so now you put out some other bullshit argument about how it's suddenly necessary to upgrade all the existing phones to quad-band.
It's not bullshit. The point is that the whole thing is not as simple as unlocking the phones. You might technically unlock all the phones and still have phones be stuck on one particular network. Part of the reason is that Verizon and Sprint use one kind of network while AT&T and T-Mobile use a different kind of network. Part of the problem is that, even when they're using the same network, they might use different frequencies.
No. What is necessary is to break out of the walled garden.
That's assumed in this discussion. The question is, what do we need to change in order to actually have the freedom to move your cellphone to another network?
Vote with your dollars, buy an unlocked quad-band phone next time you buy a phone.
Does that even settle the issue? I thought quad-band was 850, 900, 1800, 1900. According to the Wikipedia, T-Mobile is using 1700/2100 for 3G. You still won't be able to bring that phone over to Verizon or Sprint.
Yes, there are more than just the one. Still, there are many GSM phones which don't.
I was actually agreeing with you until yiou said that. I am living proof that you can indeed take an (unlocked) AT&T phone, pop in the sim, and have it work.
Oh, it's entirely possible to take an unlocked GSM phone and use it on either network. Many phones, however, will only support 3G data on either AT&T or T-Mobile, but not both. Some phones will support 3G on both, but many won't.
So again, it's not as simple as unlocking the phones. You need to standardize which technologies and frequencies are supported across the industry if you want a truly open market.