No, it's because...
1) Last year we used USB dongles and it was a bit of an operational nightmare. The drivers kept conflicting and we had to rebuild the laptops a few times, Windows would freak out from time to time for no apparent reason, the tests all had to be initiated by hand, and there are differences in USB dongle performance anyway so it doesn't totally insulate you against that.
2) Last year I got a lot of criticism around "who uses USB dongles? Everybody's on smartphones!"... so I thought we'd use those popular smartphone devices. I tried to make the devices as similar as possible.
3) Sensorly was willing to work with us to create a great field test app that I think tested a bunch of connectivity aspects really wekk.
Nah, we just had to plot out a trip that took no more than 22 days, where both cars started in Detroit (that's where we got the cars) and covered the maximum amount of large cities, where each city had as many 3G/4G choices as possible, and with no more than about 350 miles of driving per day. It was gated by things like car availability and publication deadlines.
I was going through my old Usenet posts and I found one from 1994 where someone recommended I install NetBSD on something. "This is one of the cheapest solutions, but NetBSD
is highly experimental," he said.
I know absolutely zero about Usenet patterns in Europe and Asia and if you want to gut my argument, a good way to start it would be "Well, outside the US..." and then to provide some evidence.
What IS happening outside the US in this story, I wonder?
Given that I'm discussion a period from 1987-1996, all of these things are possible. The pre-AOL bit and the burning CDs bit are in different sentences; they're different parts of the time frame.
Weak argument; too many of those terabytes are alt.binaries.boneless. You really don't want to do "Usenet lives!" arguments based on byte flow, because what does that byte flow consist of?
What you want to be doing is counting up the number of new articles in the various offshoots of sci.physics each and every day. Then we'll talk.
I'd argue that while, yes, there are people posting to sci.physics, it's a tiny number of people compared to the number of people discussing stuff on other parts of the Internet now or compared to the proportion of Internet discussion that was happening on Usenet in 1993.
Re:Apparently decent reporting is DEAD at PcMag...
on
R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Mmmm. So you basically use Usenet as a binary firehose and you download from one big centralized location (the premium server.)
You're just making my point. Usenet as I was celebrating it - highly decentralized and thus "ownerless", yet a socially central one-stop forum for text-based communication on a wide variety of topics, died a while ago.
As other posters have pointed out, there have been multiple causes for the decline of Usenet as a social and discussion forum. The appearance of Web 1.0 and 2.0 fora, the automated spam plague of the 1990s, the way younger people seem to like photos and video in their social messaging, etc etc etc.
But I think the way Usenet became a massive carrier for warez and pr0n binaries made it a liability for ISPs in a way it wouldn't have been otherwise. The way the binaries groups tend to dominate byte traffic also leads/led ISPs to see Usenet as, basically, a gigantic flow of binaries with some tiny text stuff tacked on. They didn't like what they saw.
You see the same problem with P2P. There's nothing inherently illegal or evil about P2P, as we all know, and it has many excellent uses. But enough P2P traffic is/was pirated movies/music that the whole protocol gets tarred with the brush, and then you have ISPs cracking down.
I know a lot of posters here have been celebrating that handful of third party news servers, but to me one of the big pluses of Usenet was its extremely decentralized nature. Because it was on every ISP, because it was local to everyone, nobody could really control it. It was as close as we get to "public space" on the privately run Net. If everyone's using Giganews, then they're just basically using a proprietary bulletin board system that happens to use NNTP as a protocol.
No offense personally, but I agree with the person above who said "you are part of the problem."
What I'm nostalgizing about is the central, yet decentralized, text-based discussion forum for various topics that Usenet was in its heyday.
I'm also, frankly, a little frustrated by the way pictures and video have become so central in modern Internet socializing, perhaps because I am a deformed troll.
Anyway, I don't consider a firehose of warez and pr0n binaries anything to celebrate. I'd consider most of the binaries groups to be net.abuse.
Re:Hmm...Giganews and other services are still the
on
R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Try reading past the headline next time. Maybe even to the conclusion of the story. That usually improves the quality of your comments.
Guess sarcasm doesn't exactly come through to you, huh?
But, dropping into my sweater-vest "get off the lawn!" mode, many of teh kidz seem to want to post a lot of loud music and videos and pictures of themselves with no panties, all wrapped up in a giant, pulsating animated GIF background. Okay, that was also sarcastic.
To be totally unsarcastic, the younger generation nowadays seems to have a powerful desire to express themselves through multimedia that my cohort didn't have. I *liked* having no pictures. I don't *want* people to look at me. But traditional netnews won't satisfy kids who want to express themselves through multimedia.
I don't disagree. But there's a place in the world for nostalgia. In my case, it's nostalgia for a centralized/decentralized discussion system that nobody owned and nobody controlled, but that everybody went to and behaved relatively well in.
I was just writing an email to someone about how basically, this column is about being a little wistful that the small town I grew up in is now a big city. The big city has many advantages but it's still valid to miss some of that small town charm.
The hammer - I mean the town - is the Internet, by the way.
OK. I'm going to repeat the same thing I think I've repeated 28 times, and then say something new.
This block is in the firmware of a growing number of new, T-Mobile branded feature phones, such as the Samsung T519, Nokia 6133 and Nokia 5300. It does not apply to unlocked phones or smart phones, and it's handset based, not network based.
I'm deeply troubled by the idea that the "mainstream consumer" would never want to run a third party app on their phone. It feels to me like an exact parallel of the old gibbertybabble that the mainstream consumer would never use the Internet (c. 1986) or never want a computer in their home (c. 1966). Application developers and content providers are valiantly trying to make handheld computing accessible and compelling to the mass consumer. They haven't succeeded yet, but a lot of technologies need to go through a bunch of iterations before they break through to the masses -- see those computers I mention above. But by locking out apps, carriers try to prevent that market from ever developing. It's akin to the phone companies trying to prevent the masses from ever connecting to the Net or using the many, never-thought-of-before applications that were developed by a free Internet and PC marketplace.
If you're a T-Mobile customer care rep, here's an exercise for you. Go get a T-Mobile US branded Samsung T509 or T519 or a Nokia 6133 or 5300 - there are other feature phones that are blocked but those are the four I'm most familiar with. Then try to run Opera Mini. Go ahead, I'll wait. T-Mobile has edited the firmware on those phones and others to prevent unsigned Java apps from accessing the Internet.
I work for PC Magazine, and I've had this confirmed by both T-Mobile and Nokia.
Your confusion of "don't support" and "prohibit" is terrifying. Sure, by all means, don't SUPPORT Opera Mini. But that doesn't mean you have to actively go in and change phones' firmware to stop it from working. What's wrong with saying "if you're running Opera Mini, it's your problem?"
I think one of the problems here is that people are confusing two different issues.
What I was writing about in my blog is a practice of editing firmware to block third party apps on the handset side. This started on Samsung phones such as the T809 and T509 and has since spread to Motorola phones and Nokia phones, such as the 6133 and 5300.
This is independent of, and far less OK than, the port blocking T-Mobile is doing on their cheap Internet plan. As other posters are saying, blocking unapproved ports on the cheap Internet plan may just be a case of, you get what you pay for. But locking out apps on the handset side in firmware is just malicious.
It affects a growing number of new T-Mobile branded feature phones. It started with Samsung phones such as the T809, T509 and T519, and has spread to many Motorola and Nokia phones, including the T-Mobile branded 5300 and 6133. It does not affect, and will not affect, smart phones such as the Windows Mobile MDA.
I make this clear in my original blog post, but of course, I didn't write the Slashdot post.
Thanks, Powercntrl. As I've been trying to emphasize, my blog post was just about the firmware edits. The news is that they're spreading, and that it now seems to be a blanket policy affecting many manufacturers of T-Mobile branded phones.
The port blocking issue is a different one, but also annoying.
Right. This policy affects the firmware of a growing number of new, branded, locked, T-Mobile feature phones. Smart phones, including Blackberries, are not affected.
I don't have a contract with T-Mobile; I'm a professional cell phone reviewer for PC Magazine. I review phones on all the major US carriers, compare them, and make recommendations. T-Mobile has been editing the firmware on some of their branded phones to forbid third party applications, and I think that's unwise for T-Mobile and bad for consumers.
This T-Mobile policy (as well as Verizon's BREW signing policy) harms consumers by limiting their software choices and helps strangle the growth of a vibrant, competitive third party software market for mobile phones. Stomping on competition stomps on innovation, ultimately preventing these devices from developing into the computing platforms they could be (and thus changing peoples' lives even more profoundly than they have.)
From T-Mobile's perspective, forbidding third party apps and thus reducing the vibrancy of the mobile phone software market makes data plans considerably less attractive to users and potentially lowers T-Mobile's data revenue. They're shooting themselves in the foot. It's a self-defeating policy, and deserves to be fought.
Slashdot Mirror
It's mega-brandy-spoonfuls. Trust me, if you organized this project, you'd be drinking too. (NOTE TO EDITORS: THAT IS A JOKE, I WAS NOT DRINKING)
No, it's because ...
1) Last year we used USB dongles and it was a bit of an operational nightmare. The drivers kept conflicting and we had to rebuild the laptops a few times, Windows would freak out from time to time for no apparent reason, the tests all had to be initiated by hand, and there are differences in USB dongle performance anyway so it doesn't totally insulate you against that.
2) Last year I got a lot of criticism around "who uses USB dongles? Everybody's on smartphones!" ... so I thought we'd use those popular smartphone devices. I tried to make the devices as similar as possible.
3) Sensorly was willing to work with us to create a great field test app that I think tested a bunch of connectivity aspects really wekk.
Nah, we just had to plot out a trip that took no more than 22 days, where both cars started in Detroit (that's where we got the cars) and covered the maximum amount of large cities, where each city had as many 3G/4G choices as possible, and with no more than about 350 miles of driving per day. It was gated by things like car availability and publication deadlines.
I know. It's a pity. We just couldn't make it that far this year based on how we had to plot out the drives.
No, it's {rutgers|cmcl2|uunet}!hombre!first!post
I was going through my old Usenet posts and I found one from 1994 where someone recommended I install NetBSD on something. "This is one of the cheapest solutions, but NetBSD is highly experimental," he said.
What IS happening outside the US in this story, I wonder?
Given that I'm discussion a period from 1987-1996, all of these things are possible. The pre-AOL bit and the burning CDs bit are in different sentences; they're different parts of the time frame.
Weak argument; too many of those terabytes are alt.binaries.boneless. You really don't want to do "Usenet lives!" arguments based on byte flow, because what does that byte flow consist of? What you want to be doing is counting up the number of new articles in the various offshoots of sci.physics each and every day. Then we'll talk. I'd argue that while, yes, there are people posting to sci.physics, it's a tiny number of people compared to the number of people discussing stuff on other parts of the Internet now or compared to the proportion of Internet discussion that was happening on Usenet in 1993.
Mmmm. So you basically use Usenet as a binary firehose and you download from one big centralized location (the premium server.) You're just making my point. Usenet as I was celebrating it - highly decentralized and thus "ownerless", yet a socially central one-stop forum for text-based communication on a wide variety of topics, died a while ago.
But I think the way Usenet became a massive carrier for warez and pr0n binaries made it a liability for ISPs in a way it wouldn't have been otherwise. The way the binaries groups tend to dominate byte traffic also leads/led ISPs to see Usenet as, basically, a gigantic flow of binaries with some tiny text stuff tacked on. They didn't like what they saw.
You see the same problem with P2P. There's nothing inherently illegal or evil about P2P, as we all know, and it has many excellent uses. But enough P2P traffic is/was pirated movies/music that the whole protocol gets tarred with the brush, and then you have ISPs cracking down.
I know a lot of posters here have been celebrating that handful of third party news servers, but to me one of the big pluses of Usenet was its extremely decentralized nature. Because it was on every ISP, because it was local to everyone, nobody could really control it. It was as close as we get to "public space" on the privately run Net. If everyone's using Giganews, then they're just basically using a proprietary bulletin board system that happens to use NNTP as a protocol.
I think they're generally compelling and attractive qualities, in that they clearly compel and attract many people.
What I'm nostalgizing about is the central, yet decentralized, text-based discussion forum for various topics that Usenet was in its heyday.
I'm also, frankly, a little frustrated by the way pictures and video have become so central in modern Internet socializing, perhaps because I am a deformed troll.
Anyway, I don't consider a firehose of warez and pr0n binaries anything to celebrate. I'd consider most of the binaries groups to be net.abuse.
Try reading past the headline next time. Maybe even to the conclusion of the story. That usually improves the quality of your comments.
But, dropping into my sweater-vest "get off the lawn!" mode, many of teh kidz seem to want to post a lot of loud music and videos and pictures of themselves with no panties, all wrapped up in a giant, pulsating animated GIF background. Okay, that was also sarcastic.
To be totally unsarcastic, the younger generation nowadays seems to have a powerful desire to express themselves through multimedia that my cohort didn't have. I *liked* having no pictures. I don't *want* people to look at me. But traditional netnews won't satisfy kids who want to express themselves through multimedia.
I don't disagree. But there's a place in the world for nostalgia. In my case, it's nostalgia for a centralized/decentralized discussion system that nobody owned and nobody controlled, but that everybody went to and behaved relatively well in. I was just writing an email to someone about how basically, this column is about being a little wistful that the small town I grew up in is now a big city. The big city has many advantages but it's still valid to miss some of that small town charm. The hammer - I mean the town - is the Internet, by the way.
No, I'm pining for the really good ol' days before the binaries groups suffocated the rest of Usenet.
OK. I'm going to repeat the same thing I think I've repeated 28 times, and then say something new.
This block is in the firmware of a growing number of new, T-Mobile branded feature phones, such as the Samsung T519, Nokia 6133 and Nokia 5300. It does not apply to unlocked phones or smart phones, and it's handset based, not network based.
I'm deeply troubled by the idea that the "mainstream consumer" would never want to run a third party app on their phone. It feels to me like an exact parallel of the old gibbertybabble that the mainstream consumer would never use the Internet (c. 1986) or never want a computer in their home (c. 1966). Application developers and content providers are valiantly trying to make handheld computing accessible and compelling to the mass consumer. They haven't succeeded yet, but a lot of technologies need to go through a bunch of iterations before they break through to the masses -- see those computers I mention above. But by locking out apps, carriers try to prevent that market from ever developing. It's akin to the phone companies trying to prevent the masses from ever connecting to the Net or using the many, never-thought-of-before applications that were developed by a free Internet and PC marketplace.
If you're a T-Mobile customer care rep, here's an exercise for you. Go get a T-Mobile US branded Samsung T509 or T519 or a Nokia 6133 or 5300 - there are other feature phones that are blocked but those are the four I'm most familiar with. Then try to run Opera Mini. Go ahead, I'll wait. T-Mobile has edited the firmware on those phones and others to prevent unsigned Java apps from accessing the Internet.
I work for PC Magazine, and I've had this confirmed by both T-Mobile and Nokia.
Your confusion of "don't support" and "prohibit" is terrifying. Sure, by all means, don't SUPPORT Opera Mini. But that doesn't mean you have to actively go in and change phones' firmware to stop it from working. What's wrong with saying "if you're running Opera Mini, it's your problem?"
I think one of the problems here is that people are confusing two different issues.
What I was writing about in my blog is a practice of editing firmware to block third party apps on the handset side. This started on Samsung phones such as the T809 and T509 and has since spread to Motorola phones and Nokia phones, such as the 6133 and 5300.
This is independent of, and far less OK than, the port blocking T-Mobile is doing on their cheap Internet plan. As other posters are saying, blocking unapproved ports on the cheap Internet plan may just be a case of, you get what you pay for. But locking out apps on the handset side in firmware is just malicious.
Right. This affects feature phones, not smart phones such as the Blackberry Pearl.
It affects a growing number of new T-Mobile branded feature phones. It started with Samsung phones such as the T809, T509 and T519, and has spread to many Motorola and Nokia phones, including the T-Mobile branded 5300 and 6133. It does not affect, and will not affect, smart phones such as the Windows Mobile MDA.
I make this clear in my original blog post, but of course, I didn't write the Slashdot post.
Thanks, Powercntrl. As I've been trying to emphasize, my blog post was just about the firmware edits. The news is that they're spreading, and that it now seems to be a blanket policy affecting many manufacturers of T-Mobile branded phones.
The port blocking issue is a different one, but also annoying.
Right. This policy affects the firmware of a growing number of new, branded, locked, T-Mobile feature phones. Smart phones, including Blackberries, are not affected.
I don't have a contract with T-Mobile; I'm a professional cell phone reviewer for PC Magazine. I review phones on all the major US carriers, compare them, and make recommendations. T-Mobile has been editing the firmware on some of their branded phones to forbid third party applications, and I think that's unwise for T-Mobile and bad for consumers.
This T-Mobile policy (as well as Verizon's BREW signing policy) harms consumers by limiting their software choices and helps strangle the growth of a vibrant, competitive third party software market for mobile phones. Stomping on competition stomps on innovation, ultimately preventing these devices from developing into the computing platforms they could be (and thus changing peoples' lives even more profoundly than they have.)
From T-Mobile's perspective, forbidding third party apps and thus reducing the vibrancy of the mobile phone software market makes data plans considerably less attractive to users and potentially lowers T-Mobile's data revenue. They're shooting themselves in the foot. It's a self-defeating policy, and deserves to be fought.