Oh man... you didn't transfer this with proper polarization... it looks all weird in my 3D glasses. Yes, I wear them all the time... as everyone knows, 3D glasses really just add one more dimension to whatever you're looking at. So I can see the room in 4D. And when I look at a clock... blows yer mind. Just be sure to start with wrist-watches and VCR/microwave clocks, before you look at any big ones.
Depends in the browser. Consider that applications in Palm's WebOS are usually written in Javascript. Which is why they've spent so much effort tweaking up Javascript speeds. As this is probably more interesting for mobile devices than PCs (which pretty much get Adobe plug-ins, if you want them), this is not a trivial issue.
And until the 1.4 release of WebOS, Apple actually had a faster Javascript engine on the iPhone 3GS than either Palm or Android (not huge, but faster). Given that, based on the closed nature of the iPhoneOS, there will NEVER be full Flash support from Apple (because, like the Commodore 64 emulator, it offers a way to add applications that you didn't buy from Apple), this might be rather significant to iPhonies as well.
The issue with AT&T and T-Mobile is the general issue with HSPA/UMTS, the basic 3G technologies under GSM.
The CDMA folks, Sprint and Verizon, use a thing called EvDO for their 3G system. This needs 2.5MHz of RF spectrum for downlink, 2.5MHz for uplink. So they just run it at either 850MHz or 1900MHz (USA), same spectrum as the 2G and voice.
HSPA really wants a full 10MHz bandwith (half up, half down). This presents a big problem.. most cell companies didn't have this extra spectrum. So the FCC set about freeing up some, which they eventually auctioned off.
AT&T owned licensed in most areas for 850MHz (only two slots available, Verizon usually has the other) and 1900MHz. So they can offer 3G by using a 1900MHz downlink and an 850MHz uplink. They also have an odd half-duplex version of 3G, which takes turns transmitting and receiving over a single 5MHz channel. It's a spec... I don't know if anyone really uses it.
So anyway, AT&T was able to launch 3G, and got a nice head start. T-Mobile had to wait for a spectrum auction, and picked up slices at 1700MHz and 2100MHz.
The iPhones also only support the original 384kb/s upload speed of original UMTS. Even the 3GS. HSPA+ uploads can run over 2Mb/s.
You can absolutely only see a 2G connection from Verizon... I had EvDO as the "house internet connection" some years back, and often saw this. The problem was a combination of distance and load, not technology. The one cell I could reach was a 3G cell, but I wasn't within reliable 3G range.
And of course, Verizon is occasionally assimilating other networks.. they brought in Alltel last year. Could be some upgrading was not yet complete. But the official word, anyway, is that all cells were upgraded some time ago, and Verizon is currently working on adding 4G LTE infrastructure. They're have a big-ass "turn on" even this summer, in over 30 cities. Or at least, that's the plan.
For a single cell, the goal is always to keep your phone (or device) reliably connected. 2G generally runs farther than 3G, all else being equal. If the cell has a enough trouble with you (I'm about 1.5 miles from the cell tower, and I live in a forest, and at least part of my house is made of field stone), it drops off the 3G and down to 2G.
There may be other factors at work, too. You only understand the relationship between your phone and the one cell it's actually connecting through. But it's the network, at least for 3G and CDMA 2G signals, that decides which cell you really use, if you can see more than one. There are probably issues of competition and other load balancing stuff you can't see, and while the network can, it doesn't necessarily always make the right decision.
Keep in mind, 21Mb/s, while one valid HSPA+ number, is not necessarily what the customer ever gets. AT&T has been installing HSPA+ for awhile now, and claims they'll have over 30 cities wired by this summer. HSPA+ uses a pair of cells per tower, so it's just a simple upgrade of existing cells. And AT&T's putting a 7.2Mb/s download cap per user, though if you have just one phone on any given cell, it could go much faster.
There's a good reason for that... if you regularly offer 21Mb/s or some other crazy high number when it's possible (it's 3AM, you're the only guy on the cell), the typical user will get frustrated when it drops to more "normal" speeds. You'll complain. So they prevent this by never letting you go so fast. Not sure what kind of caps T-Mobile will do... they just finished their planned HSPA coverage (which doesn't mean every cell does 3G, just that they don't plan on upgrading any more, at least not to plain old HSPA).
There are already a few Android phones in the same class, give or take, as the DROID... depends on what you want. I love my DROID, I even like the keyboard (but hey, I was used to a Palm), but I'd probably have found the Nexus One or the new Sony Nexperia X10 just as cool. That's the great thing about Android... lots of choice, and Real Soon Now, every US carrier. I'm betting there will be "free" Android phones, in 2011 if not this year. And a plethora of other Android devices, too. Fun times.
The worst ever was Nextel, before Sprint sucked them up, so hopefully no one ever has to endure them again. Naturally, it's best when you don't need customer service, but I did. First thing... I ordered direct from them, an odd Nextel phone with a secondary GSM mode (I was travelling in Europe back then, frequently, and the only GSM service in the USA was Voicestream, before T-Mobile bought them up... not useful on a practical basis). They sent two phones. I sent one back. Eventually, I realized they were double-billing me (didn't help that I was spending 50% of my time in Germany, so I went through bills pretty fast when stateside).
So, I present this to them, and their solution is to cancel both accounts (and my number) and create a new account. Which they did. 150 miles away, at the wrong end of the state (ok, so it's New Jersey... not quite as bad as having this problem in California). Multiple calls later eventually fix this.
Then there was the phone... it failed to work, pretty much at all, on GSM networks. Basically an alpha version of the phone. And after countless calls, from Germany and later the USA, I still couldn't find a single person who understood what phone I had and could tell me how to get it fixed or replaced.
So, I go to cancel the service. Call them up, cancel it, write CANCEL with a red sharpie on the bill... doesn't help, they keep billing me, not just end-of-contract leftovers. Horrible service... but they had halfway decent coverage in South Jersey, back when all that mattered was voice.
That led me to T-Mobile. Wonderful salespeople, great service, never any billing errors, etc. But there were nothing but dead zones, including my house, and much of South Jersey (their maps were, let's say, very optomistic... may be better today). I wanted to keep them, but couldn't.
So now, been on Verizon for four years. They work everywhere, which is a good thing to have in a pocket communications device. I was nearly done with them due to their lack of any interesting smartphones available, but they solved that this fall with the DROID (before that, I had a Palm Treo, pretty ancient and going nowhere new, Palm had stopped playing years before). I hear you don't want to tangle with their customer service, fortunately, no problems. And they were doing evil things to phones, cutting out features and all, but that seems to have stopped, at least here and there (they can't mess with the DROID, it's a "Google Experience" phone).
That's kind of true. No so much with CDMA phones, since you're just about guaranteed that every cell is 3G, on both Verizon and Sprint networks. But for both voice, 2G, and 3G connections, CDMA systems actually stay in touch with several cells at once, where possible (GSM does this on 3G, but not 2G). So it's certainly possible the phone + network is making a poor decision about which cell to use.
With GSM phones, of course, it's far more likely there's a big difference between 2G and 3G. Some cells have not been upgraded to 3G, and in T-Mobile's case, they use different spectrum (1700/2100MHz) for the 3G connection. And there may just be more competition for 3G connections... so you may find you're jumping for the 3G cell even when there's a prefectly good 2G cell much closer.
On the other hand, every Verizon cell is 3G, so it's not as if you're skipping a better 2G cell for a distant 3G cell. Distance and excessive traffic can stick you with a 2G connection. Unlike GSM/HSPA, all of the CDMA systems use the same channels for voice, 2G, and 3G. That's generally an advantage -- it's why Verizon and even Sprint have pretty universal 3G coverage, at least where they have coverage (no new spectrum needed). It's also why the best GSM/HPSA connections can run better than twice as fast as the best EvDO connections.
Flat helps. So does the carrier frequency... if you're not in a city, you will get better overall service at 850MHz than 1900MHz... more range at the same power levels, better service through foliage, rain, and walls, etc. Even better if you're in a desert (no rain, no trees)... of course, they're going to put up fewer towers where there's less population.
There are only two 850MHz carrier slots in any given area. One of them is probably Verizon, the other probably AT&T, based on following all of the original companies to where they've finally wound up.
There are some historical issues than can factor in. If you're in an area that used to be AT&T Mobility, you may run into some odd little deadzones. That's because AT&T Mobility used DAMPS, not GSM, before the Cingular buyout. DAMPS cells had a slightly better range than GSM at the standard power levels, so a perfect cell grid under DAMPS leaves some grey areas under GSM.
For years, I met every Friday with some friends at a rather out-of-the-way Mexican place for lunch. You got pretty decent cell coverage at the time (a somewhat different mix of carriers back then), but sit down at our table, and you're lucky to get anything. A real phantom zone.
What does Apple do in-house? They improve things, yes, but start them? Not all that much.
They bough NeXT, and out of that grew MacOS X. They also got WebObjects from NeXT. They bought KeyGrip from Macromedia (before Adobe bought the rest of it), and relabeled it "Final Cut". They bought DVDirector from Astarte, and relabeled it "DVD Studio" They bought Spruce Technologies, got DVD Maestro from that deal, and that became "DVD Studio Pro" (guess they liked it better than DVDirector). They bought eMagic, and got Logic. Still called Logic. GarageBand was developed, originally as a clone of Acid, by the same eMagic folks. They bought Silicon Color, got FinalTouch in the deal, relabeled it "Color" They bought Nothing Real (a spinoff of Sony Imageworks) and acquired Shake. Still called Shake. They forked the KHTML rendering engine to create WebKit, and from it, Safari.
This is why it's good to have lots of cash. Part of what you get, particularly when you buy an existing application AND the development team, is not just an existing and tested application, but a development team with perhaps decades of experience. It's much harder to start from scratch and build something competitive, but particularly if you don't have a team that does that thing. This is professional software, too... few of these things existing in any similar professional level on Linux, largely due to a fairly exclusive market. And, well, folks like Apple buying up these little companies and killing off any non-Apple versions of the products (plenty of this happening among Windows companies, too).
Though if you look at Apple, they've been very smart about building their software empire. They started with the things you absolutely had to have to use a Mac in a professional world: media tools. This started when Jobs was out, but it's grown under Jobs too, so clearly, the idea of selling a few thousand dollars worth of software to a big chunk of the Mac users out there (not to mention those regular upgrades) seems to have caught on.
In media content creation, they've bought-up or re-created just about everything you'd buy from Avid or Adobe other than Photoshop. Next big thing was the web browser, to ensure they could control this critical piece, and in particular, bring to the handhelds.
So it wouldn't be a big shock to see Apple release a Photoshop replacement, or an Office replacement. In truth, Photoshop was the one piece of software Adobe really did well when Apple started this whole thing (Premiere stunk, Adobe had not yet bought up CoolEdit or any number of other apps), so why not leave that for last. They already have Aperture, which lines up directly against Adobe Lightroom... next logical thing is a photo editor proper.
I'd almost claim they have to here. Apple's healthier now, but Adobe did essentially start pulling the plug on a number of apps, before Apple switched over to x86 and made it much less overhead developing for the Mac. Given Jobs approach to the world, this makes perfect sense at some point.
And then there's the office suite... does Apple really want to be at Microsoft's mercy every few years, when MS re-evaluates whether they'll keep supporting Office on the Mac, presumably in order to get something out of Apple.
In short, deepening any reliance on Microsoft, or much of anyone else, seems very out of character for the current Apple. They also usually have the hubris to believe they can go it alone...and at least today, they are correct about that in the smart phone business. They're almost certainly to lose their lead... it's difficult at best to maintain an proprietary system against an open one (open in the vendor sense... anyone can build a Windows machine, anyone can build an Android phone, only Apple can build an iPhone or a Mac).
You would kind of hope that Apple makes these decisions based on "better". But they don't... they're making their decisions based on "better for Apple". They could have any and all Google apps on the iPhone... they keep them out because they're threatened by it in some way. Or because they have their own app, and want to force every iPhone user into using that.
That's typical... same reason you can't get an alternate web browser for the iPhone. Is Safari good? Sure. Is it the best possible mobile web browser there ever will be. Unlikely, and that question's answer is certainly based on personal preferences. Is it the best ever to be on the iPhone... best, worst, and only.
Apple will certainly take this approach with every other app they want every iPhone user using. And this is the precise reason Google got into the phone business. They clearly didn't care about making money selling a phone OS, but they did care about access to mobile search, which will be larger than desktop search before you know it. Given that mobile platforms have typically been locked down harder than desktops, Google took a great approach -- build a better mobile OS, keep it open, and give it away.
In the long run, Apple will be relegated to the same kind of niche they enjoy in the desktop world. They won't make an iPhone so cheap it's "free with a 2 year contract", but there will be Android phones sold that way, by 2011 if not 2010. It is inevitable that Android eclipse the iPhone, and other proprietary systems. This probably doesn't worry Apple all that much... they're already the most profitable company selling cellphones (in a big part because they ONLY sell smart phones, and the smart phone market generates over half the revenue and 2/3 of the profit in the cellular hardware industry), and that's probably not going to change, for the same reason. As long as they can keep adding less than $40 to the BOM of an iPod and getting 3x the retail price, they'll be happy enough.
Of course this happens, and all the more in the world of digital. In many cases, there's absolutely nothing left to do to improve the device. A true audiophile is not going to use the DACs built-in on their device anyway... they'll probably have a separate HDMI driven DAC box, many times more expensive than a Blu-Ray player ought to be, so they can feed their tube amps or whatever. And folks like me (I care about real improvements in audio, but am immune to the "snake oil" level of this business) will run the HDMI directly into a good quality digital amp, and be happy enough. Low-end folks will use the TV's speakers (well, one can assume that's why they still bother building speakers into TVs... I haven't used my television speakers since five main televisions ago (current DLP, previous CRT-projection HDTV, previous CRT-projection SDTV, and previous tube based SDTV were each integrated into an audio system).
So your Blu-Ray player is a computing device, primarily. There's not much room for improvements in performance versus the low-end: no DACs, not much analog at all. Features, sure... little things. But there's still a crazy market for upscale hardware. Not a huge one... not really large enough for independent product development, at least not from any major CE company. At best you get a consumer board with higher-spec components, at worst you get that same old consumer board. In both cases, maybe tweaks to the firmware to make it look upscale on-screen, maybe even offering a few options not available on the regular product. And of course, a nice expensive looking case.
I'm not claiming there are no high-end units designed from the get-go as high-end units, but there's only so much you can do of any real value to affect the look and sound of the Blu-Ray, as used in high-end systems. And the fact that this same board gets much better reviews in the high-end box than the low-end box is simply telling what everyone here pretty much knows: for the most part, the audiophile emperor is not wearing clothes.
.... that an "audiophile" product is simply the same old regular consumer product in a fancy box. I guarantee this happens all the time, and at least many of the self-professed audiophiles don't have a clue. Just like the "coathanger speaker wire" test of a year or two ago.
About the only news here is that the THX people were involved, and apparently certified a player that didn't meet their own specifications. That should be big news.
I2S was originally supposed to be a board-level interface anyway, not something you run across cables. Sure, that's done now, and it usually works, but it does invite the chance of clock issues. Good digital interfaces for over cable, like AES/EBU, Firewire, Ethernet, etc. are pure serial, with the clock embedded in the signal. That way, no possibility of data vs. clock skewing.
And naturally, you did all of these tests double blind, so you know the results are not related in any possible way to expectations. Right?
A couple of truisms... the Sony/Philips optical over TOSlink is basically "cheap consumer crap" level digital. There's not a great deal of standardization of driver levels or receiver sensitivity, and this plastic. They all are...the standard here is plastic fibre. S/PDIF over a proper 75 ohm RCA cable is a much better bet. Better still is the AES/EBU digital connection over balanced cable, and usually XLR connectors... better in multiple ways, particularly if you need a long run. Like all modern serial streams, S/PDIF and AES/EBU contain data and clock in the same signal... you don't get jitter issues going digital to digital, but you can definitely get dropouts if the signal is corrupted along the way. Unfortunately, there's error correction and not usually any way to monitor it in consumer gear. Which leads to snake oil salesmen selling "high end" plastic optical cables that have magical properties.
TRS does you absolutely no good for speakers, or any other connection, unless you have differential drivers and receivers. If you're a noisy environment, naturally cable length may matter, but it's far more likely the cable shielding is the real issue. Signals between gear are usually either -10dBV for consumer gear or +4dBu for professional signals... low level enough that you need to worry about shielding. Again, balanced doesn't help here one bit unless you have balanced drivers and receivers. Speaker connections are measured in large values of volts, and not usually subject to noise problems. Sure, that does depend on environment... if you're setting up audio in a very noisy area (I did an audio setup at a carnival once, where the air was just full of crazy noise from multiple power generators) -- there's you're glad your PA uses shielded speaker wires (which it did, but we had problems with other cables picking up random audio frequency noise... a 15ft cable just held in the air measured nearly 2V on a handy volt meter).
Home built is fine... my Dad built his entire audio system back in the 1960s, including a huge speaker rig based on some Altec Lansing plans, all tube of course. And mono... stereo had not yet caught on. Of course, my Dad was designing very delicate analog measurement gear at Bell Labs for his day job. Not everyone should be building their own audio gear. And it's more difficult still to do it right "from scratch", rather than from a well designed kit.
But as far as that goes, it's usually down in the lower ranges of milliseconds, for things you're trained in.
Most musicians can hear delays on the order of 5-10ms, give or take.... this is why there's been so much effort, in things like MIDI and specialized audio drivers for computers, to keep things down to a few milliseconds of latency, tops.
R/C drivers notice the difference between 10ms and 20ms of latency very readily, particularly if they're driving higher-end racers (I designed one of the first all-digital R/C controllers). Here's the thing... you're driving a 12" car at an actual 60-70mph over a radio link. At that scale, lots of stuff can happen in a relatively short time.
For most things, people are far more forgiving about latencies... it's only special training that makes one sensitive to very fast things.
Well, we're still even thinking "life as we know it"... the "golden zone" where earth-like life can exist. There might be other possibilities... we have not travelled anywhere near enough to rule this out.
"We" have actually been to two other worlds... Luna and Mars. A few short-haired dudes went to the moon, and I think we're all pretty satisfied enough there's no life on the Moon. I'll absolutely concede that one. But even in looking for life on Mars, our space probes have often been flawed: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/25/1442231. If they can't find life on Earth, there's a problem.
In short, we don't have a bloody clue about life in this solar system. We know there might have been as many as three planets capable of supporting it at some point throughout their history. One is a definite yes today, one a pretty damn definite no (Venus), barring the extremest of extremeophiles living that heat. Mars is more like a "was" than an "is". And we know very little about possibilities, in any practical terms... space probes only help so much, if the expected zone of life is a thousands meters below the moon's surface, as suggested of Europa. The probes to check out Europa, Io, Callisto, and Ganymede won't launch until 2020, with an arrival sometime in 2026, see:http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/europajupitersystemmissionejsm/.
Then there's Titan... no liquid water seen so far, but a cold climate (94K), with liquid hydrocarbon seas, a relatively thick atmosphere of nitrogen and methane, weather, rain, and earth-like features. Earth life, no. A different kind... well, I haven't been there to say for certain....
Really. We already count the "golden zone", orbits hospitable to life as we know it, extending from the orbit of Venus to the orbit of Mars. Nothing changes here. It's also pretty clear that either of these planets might well have supported life before we came along.. Venus with an earlier atmosphere, Mars before it cooled off and lost most of its atmosphere, might have supported life. This term, ne, is not changed by finding life on Mars. It's definitely affected by our greater understanding of where habitable planets might be, such as large moons around warm gas giants.
The real question is a simple one: how likely is life on a planet that could support life. If we find that Mars had life, and it couldn't have been that which begat life here much later, then we have a fairly profound datapoint. Not a huge sample, obviously, but this would suggest life is fairly likely to show up on planets that can support life. This is the f term in the Drake Equation, and finding independent life on Mars impacts the Drake Equation only here.
That's a very different question than "are we alone", at least in the sense of other intelligent life. You need a planet stable enough for life to evolve into intelligence, and ecosystems that support the very high energy cost of intelligence (that's fi term in Drake's Equation... no changes here, either).
That "6000" number may (you didn't provide data) only be touted by 0.1% of religious groups, but they are the loudest out there... the radial, vocal far right.
That number, and the whole Young Earth fairy tale, is a very recent invention. In the 1700s, there was no major Christan group (or any other Western Religion) espousing such nonsense. Various groups had once believed in a "young earth", but it has been soundly rejected by all of them, centuries ago. This is why most Europeans, even the devoutly religious, hear this stuff and do wonder about America.
This all started in the early 1800s, in the USA. William Miller, a New York farmer, came to believe that the Bible contained coded information, including the date of the "end of the world". This took form as the Seventh Day Adventist movement... followers of Miller organized and prepared for his calculated end of the world. He gained a national following in the mid 1800s, and finally named a final year, based on his calculations: 1843. I'm guessing he screwed up somewhere. Then it was somewhere between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When that year passed by, he got out his pencil, did the calculations again, and pronounced the real date as April 18, 1844. After that passed, he posted a new date: October 22, 1844. Curiously, the world also didn't end then. This final one became know as "The Great Disappointment".
Anyway, curiously enough, this crazy person's religion did not fail based on these failures, but continued to grow, backed by followers... Miller himself went into seclusion. In 1923, George McCready Price, a Millerite and Seventh-day Adventist, wrote a book called "The New Geology" (he was not, in fact, a geologist), which established the earth at somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old, and claimed "The Genesis Flood" responsible for many modern geological features of the earth. This one book pretty much started the ball rolling among this fringe types.
As for this not being a mainstream belief... true. But not as true as you think. In 2008, Gallop conducted a poll, that indicated 44% of US adults agreed with the statement "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so".
As for that number being thrown out... I understand this. I really don't care what various creatins believe, whether it's young earth, Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster... as long as they keep it to themselves. But these folks have had a very, very dangerous effect on the policies of the USA, at least during the eight years of the Bush Administration. This does not sit will with those of us, such as myself, who value science over superstition, logic over "what I feel in mah gut", etc.
Well, yeah, it says men are evolving faster... specifically, the Y-chromosome, and more specifically, it's related to sperm production.
In short, your junk is evolving. Not necessarily anything else. That MIGHT not be considered a complementary thing, depending on how you feel about your particular junk.
The IBM PC keyboard has always had the stupidest feature of any keyboard... the GIGANTIC CAPS LOCK key. I started out on DEC and Commodore keyboard arrangements (some of the latter Commodore keyboards being influenced by DEC's, they were natural enough). And sure, over the years, I've mostly adapted to the PC layout, largely because it's difficult to find a decent keyboard with a better layout. Particularly one with a jog-shuttle built-in, but that's another story.
Sure, you can remove this or software-disable it. If there's 1% of users who find this anything but annoying, I would be surprised. The need to put something useful in its place, and move the CAPS LOCK somewhere else. Hey, maybe right next to the other rarely-if-ever-used keys: Print Screen, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break.
For one, there's a technology difference. Every Verizon (and probably Sprint) cell is a 3G cell. The EvDO technology works in the same bandwidth as 2G/EDGE/Voice, the original 2.5MHz block. So they don't need new spectrum. So, much cheaper upgrade. GSM's UMTS/HSPA needs at least 10MHz, and the 7.2Mb/s HSPA+ stuff needs 20MHz. They don't necessarily have the license, and even if they do, it's much more gear to add to a cell site.
Second.. Verizon has 850MHz coverage nearly everywhere they want it. 1900MHz makes more sense in very crowded areas, but on 850MHz, you get much more range for the same power. AT&T has most of the other 850MHz licenses, but they had to convert from the older DAMPS system... just completed in 2008. Cingular was laregly 1900MHz, so, much less range per cell.
And in fact, I'm paying less on Verizon than I would be on AT&T, and Verizon actually reaches my house, indoors. So that's easily proven false. T-Mobile has a new lower-cost plan, but I'd have to go outside, and usually to the end of the driveway.
Also, rural coverage isn't necessarily for people who don't use it. It's the coverage you get while on the road, in the middle of nowhere, population-wise, but on a major interstate. If the phone fails, you lose. But you aren't even seeing those on TV... the Verizon ads show the 3G coverage maps. The maps in the AT&T ads show any level of coverage (these are also online), and you'll find they pretty much have the same 2G/EDGE/Voice coverage as Verizon. It's just that only about 1/5th of their cells are 3G. Sprint and T-Mobile don't even really play, unless you're looking for some kind of 4G coverage (Sprint, as part of Clear, has it... others don't, yet. Verizon goes hot this summer, probably, AT&T probably sometime next year. Both on much better spectrum than Clear/Sprint).
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Oh man... you didn't transfer this with proper polarization... it looks all weird in my 3D glasses. Yes, I wear them all the time... as everyone knows, 3D glasses really just add one more dimension to whatever you're looking at. So I can see the room in 4D. And when I look at a clock... blows yer mind. Just be sure to start with wrist-watches and VCR/microwave clocks, before you look at any big ones.
Depends in the browser. Consider that applications in Palm's WebOS are usually written in Javascript. Which is why they've spent so much effort tweaking up Javascript speeds. As this is probably more interesting for mobile devices than PCs (which pretty much get Adobe plug-ins, if you want them), this is not a trivial issue.
And until the 1.4 release of WebOS, Apple actually had a faster Javascript engine on the iPhone 3GS than either Palm or Android (not huge, but faster). Given that, based on the closed nature of the iPhoneOS, there will NEVER be full Flash support from Apple (because, like the Commodore 64 emulator, it offers a way to add applications that you didn't buy from Apple), this might be rather significant to iPhonies as well.
Yup.
The issue with AT&T and T-Mobile is the general issue with HSPA/UMTS, the basic 3G technologies under GSM.
The CDMA folks, Sprint and Verizon, use a thing called EvDO for their 3G system. This needs 2.5MHz of RF spectrum for downlink, 2.5MHz for uplink. So they just run it at either 850MHz or 1900MHz (USA), same spectrum as the 2G and voice.
HSPA really wants a full 10MHz bandwith (half up, half down). This presents a big problem.. most cell companies didn't have this extra spectrum. So the FCC set about freeing up some, which they eventually auctioned off.
AT&T owned licensed in most areas for 850MHz (only two slots available, Verizon usually has the other) and 1900MHz. So they can offer 3G by using a 1900MHz downlink and an 850MHz uplink. They also have an odd half-duplex version of 3G, which takes turns transmitting and receiving over a single 5MHz channel. It's a spec... I don't know if anyone really uses it.
So anyway, AT&T was able to launch 3G, and got a nice head start. T-Mobile had to wait for a spectrum auction, and picked up slices at 1700MHz and 2100MHz.
The iPhones also only support the original 384kb/s upload speed of original UMTS. Even the 3GS. HSPA+ uploads can run over 2Mb/s.
You can absolutely only see a 2G connection from Verizon... I had EvDO as the "house internet connection" some years back, and often saw this. The problem was a combination of distance and load, not technology. The one cell I could reach was a 3G cell, but I wasn't within reliable 3G range.
And of course, Verizon is occasionally assimilating other networks.. they brought in Alltel last year. Could be some upgrading was not yet complete. But the official word, anyway, is that all cells were upgraded some time ago, and Verizon is currently working on adding 4G LTE infrastructure. They're have a big-ass "turn on" even this summer, in over 30 cities. Or at least, that's the plan.
For a single cell, the goal is always to keep your phone (or device) reliably connected. 2G generally runs farther than 3G, all else being equal. If the cell has a enough trouble with you (I'm about 1.5 miles from the cell tower, and I live in a forest, and at least part of my house is made of field stone), it drops off the 3G and down to 2G.
There may be other factors at work, too. You only understand the relationship between your phone and the one cell it's actually connecting through. But it's the network, at least for 3G and CDMA 2G signals, that decides which cell you really use, if you can see more than one. There are probably issues of competition and other load balancing stuff you can't see, and while the network can, it doesn't necessarily always make the right decision.
Keep in mind, 21Mb/s, while one valid HSPA+ number, is not necessarily what the customer ever gets. AT&T has been installing HSPA+ for awhile now, and claims they'll have over 30 cities wired by this summer. HSPA+ uses a pair of cells per tower, so it's just a simple upgrade of existing cells. And AT&T's putting a 7.2Mb/s download cap per user, though if you have just one phone on any given cell, it could go much faster.
There's a good reason for that... if you regularly offer 21Mb/s or some other crazy high number when it's possible (it's 3AM, you're the only guy on the cell), the typical user will get frustrated when it drops to more "normal" speeds. You'll complain. So they prevent this by never letting you go so fast. Not sure what kind of caps T-Mobile will do... they just finished their planned HSPA coverage (which doesn't mean every cell does 3G, just that they don't plan on upgrading any more, at least not to plain old HSPA).
There are already a few Android phones in the same class, give or take, as the DROID... depends on what you want. I love my DROID, I even like the keyboard (but hey, I was used to a Palm), but I'd probably have found the Nexus One or the new Sony Nexperia X10 just as cool. That's the great thing about Android... lots of choice, and Real Soon Now, every US carrier. I'm betting there will be "free" Android phones, in 2011 if not this year. And a plethora of other Android devices, too. Fun times.
I had different results.
The worst ever was Nextel, before Sprint sucked them up, so hopefully no one ever has to endure them again. Naturally, it's best when you don't need customer service, but I did. First thing... I ordered direct from them, an odd Nextel phone with a secondary GSM mode (I was travelling in Europe back then, frequently, and the only GSM service in the USA was Voicestream, before T-Mobile bought them up... not useful on a practical basis). They sent two phones. I sent one back. Eventually, I realized they were double-billing me (didn't help that I was spending 50% of my time in Germany, so I went through bills pretty fast when stateside).
So, I present this to them, and their solution is to cancel both accounts (and my number) and create a new account. Which they did. 150 miles away, at the wrong end of the state (ok, so it's New Jersey... not quite as bad as having this problem in California). Multiple calls later eventually fix this.
Then there was the phone... it failed to work, pretty much at all, on GSM networks. Basically an alpha version of the phone. And after countless calls, from Germany and later the USA, I still couldn't find a single person who understood what phone I had and could tell me how to get it fixed or replaced.
So, I go to cancel the service. Call them up, cancel it, write CANCEL with a red sharpie on the bill... doesn't help, they keep billing me, not just end-of-contract leftovers. Horrible service... but they had halfway decent coverage in South Jersey, back when all that mattered was voice.
That led me to T-Mobile. Wonderful salespeople, great service, never any billing errors, etc. But there were nothing but dead zones, including my house, and much of South Jersey (their maps were, let's say, very optomistic... may be better today). I wanted to keep them, but couldn't.
So now, been on Verizon for four years. They work everywhere, which is a good thing to have in a pocket communications device. I was nearly done with them due to their lack of any interesting smartphones available, but they solved that this fall with the DROID (before that, I had a Palm Treo, pretty ancient and going nowhere new, Palm had stopped playing years before). I hear you don't want to tangle with their customer service, fortunately, no problems. And they were doing evil things to phones, cutting out features and all, but that seems to have stopped, at least here and there (they can't mess with the DROID, it's a "Google Experience" phone).
That's kind of true. No so much with CDMA phones, since you're just about guaranteed that every cell is 3G, on both Verizon and Sprint networks. But for both voice, 2G, and 3G connections, CDMA systems actually stay in touch with several cells at once, where possible (GSM does this on 3G, but not 2G). So it's certainly possible the phone + network is making a poor decision about which cell to use.
With GSM phones, of course, it's far more likely there's a big difference between 2G and 3G. Some cells have not been upgraded to 3G, and in T-Mobile's case, they use different spectrum (1700/2100MHz) for the 3G connection. And there may just be more competition for 3G connections... so you may find you're jumping for the 3G cell even when there's a prefectly good 2G cell much closer.
On the other hand, every Verizon cell is 3G, so it's not as if you're skipping a better 2G cell for a distant 3G cell. Distance and excessive traffic can stick you with a 2G connection. Unlike GSM/HSPA, all of the CDMA systems use the same channels for voice, 2G, and 3G. That's generally an advantage -- it's why Verizon and even Sprint have pretty universal 3G coverage, at least where they have coverage (no new spectrum needed). It's also why the best GSM/HPSA connections can run better than twice as fast as the best EvDO connections.
Flat helps. So does the carrier frequency... if you're not in a city, you will get better overall service at 850MHz than 1900MHz... more range at the same power levels, better service through foliage, rain, and walls, etc. Even better if you're in a desert (no rain, no trees)... of course, they're going to put up fewer towers where there's less population.
There are only two 850MHz carrier slots in any given area. One of them is probably Verizon, the other probably AT&T, based on following all of the original companies to where they've finally wound up.
There are some historical issues than can factor in. If you're in an area that used to be AT&T Mobility, you may run into some odd little deadzones. That's because AT&T Mobility used DAMPS, not GSM, before the Cingular buyout. DAMPS cells had a slightly better range than GSM at the standard power levels, so a perfect cell grid under DAMPS leaves some grey areas under GSM.
Sometimes, you're just in a dead zone.
For years, I met every Friday with some friends at a rather out-of-the-way Mexican place for lunch. You got pretty decent cell coverage at the time (a somewhat different mix of carriers back then), but sit down at our table, and you're lucky to get anything. A real phantom zone.
But hey, at least it was consistent :-)
"Business is War" - Jack Tramiel.
What does Apple do in-house? They improve things, yes, but start them? Not all that much.
They bough NeXT, and out of that grew MacOS X. They also got WebObjects from NeXT.
They bought KeyGrip from Macromedia (before Adobe bought the rest of it), and relabeled it "Final Cut".
They bought DVDirector from Astarte, and relabeled it "DVD Studio"
They bought Spruce Technologies, got DVD Maestro from that deal, and that became "DVD Studio Pro" (guess they liked it better than DVDirector).
They bought eMagic, and got Logic. Still called Logic. GarageBand was developed, originally as a clone of Acid, by the same eMagic folks.
They bought Silicon Color, got FinalTouch in the deal, relabeled it "Color"
They bought Nothing Real (a spinoff of Sony Imageworks) and acquired Shake. Still called Shake.
They forked the KHTML rendering engine to create WebKit, and from it, Safari.
This is why it's good to have lots of cash. Part of what you get, particularly when you buy an existing application AND the development team, is not just an existing and tested application, but a development team with perhaps decades of experience. It's much harder to start from scratch and build something competitive, but particularly if you don't have a team that does that thing. This is professional software, too... few of these things existing in any similar professional level on Linux, largely due to a fairly exclusive market. And, well, folks like Apple buying up these little companies and killing off any non-Apple versions of the products (plenty of this happening among Windows companies, too).
Though if you look at Apple, they've been very smart about building their software empire. They started with the things you absolutely had to have to use a Mac in a professional world: media tools. This started when Jobs was out, but it's grown under Jobs too, so clearly, the idea of selling a few thousand dollars worth of software to a big chunk of the Mac users out there (not to mention those regular upgrades) seems to have caught on.
In media content creation, they've bought-up or re-created just about everything you'd buy from Avid or Adobe other than Photoshop. Next big thing was the web browser, to ensure they could control this critical piece, and in particular, bring to the handhelds.
So it wouldn't be a big shock to see Apple release a Photoshop replacement, or an Office replacement. In truth, Photoshop was the one piece of software Adobe really did well when Apple started this whole thing (Premiere stunk, Adobe had not yet bought up CoolEdit or any number of other apps), so why not leave that for last. They already have Aperture, which lines up directly against Adobe Lightroom... next logical thing is a photo editor proper.
I'd almost claim they have to here. Apple's healthier now, but Adobe did essentially start pulling the plug on a number of apps, before Apple switched over to x86 and made it much less overhead developing for the Mac. Given Jobs approach to the world, this makes perfect sense at some point.
And then there's the office suite... does Apple really want to be at Microsoft's mercy every few years, when MS re-evaluates whether they'll keep supporting Office on the Mac, presumably in order to get something out of Apple.
In short, deepening any reliance on Microsoft, or much of anyone else, seems very out of character for the current Apple. They also usually have the hubris to believe they can go it alone...and at least today, they are correct about that in the smart phone business. They're almost certainly to lose their lead... it's difficult at best to maintain an proprietary system against an open one (open in the vendor sense... anyone can build a Windows machine, anyone can build an Android phone, only Apple can build an iPhone or a Mac).
You would kind of hope that Apple makes these decisions based on "better". But they don't... they're making their decisions based on "better for Apple". They could have any and all Google apps on the iPhone... they keep them out because they're threatened by it in some way. Or because they have their own app, and want to force every iPhone user into using that.
That's typical... same reason you can't get an alternate web browser for the iPhone. Is Safari good? Sure. Is it the best possible mobile web browser there ever will be. Unlikely, and that question's answer is certainly based on personal preferences. Is it the best ever to be on the iPhone... best, worst, and only.
Apple will certainly take this approach with every other app they want every iPhone user using. And this is the precise reason Google got into the phone business. They clearly didn't care about making money selling a phone OS, but they did care about access to mobile search, which will be larger than desktop search before you know it. Given that mobile platforms have typically been locked down harder than desktops, Google took a great approach -- build a better mobile OS, keep it open, and give it away.
In the long run, Apple will be relegated to the same kind of niche they enjoy in the desktop world. They won't make an iPhone so cheap it's "free with a 2 year contract", but there will be Android phones sold that way, by 2011 if not 2010. It is inevitable that Android eclipse the iPhone, and other proprietary systems. This probably doesn't worry Apple all that much... they're already the most profitable company selling cellphones (in a big part because they ONLY sell smart phones, and the smart phone market generates over half the revenue and 2/3 of the profit in the cellular hardware industry), and that's probably not going to change, for the same reason. As long as they can keep adding less than $40 to the BOM of an iPod and getting 3x the retail price, they'll be happy enough.
Real Conan would interview CGI Conan, then they switch. As long as it's Conan, and not Leno. Just say LeNO!
Or, really class it up like real Elvis Costello did, when he brought in real (oh so real) Mary Louise Parker to interview himself (on "Spectacle").
Of course this happens, and all the more in the world of digital. In many cases, there's absolutely nothing left to do to improve the device. A true audiophile is not going to use the DACs built-in on their device anyway... they'll probably have a separate HDMI driven DAC box, many times more expensive than a Blu-Ray player ought to be, so they can feed their tube amps or whatever. And folks like me (I care about real improvements in audio, but am immune to the "snake oil" level of this business) will run the HDMI directly into a good quality digital amp, and be happy enough. Low-end folks will use the TV's speakers (well, one can assume that's why they still bother building speakers into TVs... I haven't used my television speakers since five main televisions ago (current DLP, previous CRT-projection HDTV, previous CRT-projection SDTV, and previous tube based SDTV were each integrated into an audio system).
So your Blu-Ray player is a computing device, primarily. There's not much room for improvements in performance versus the low-end: no DACs, not much analog at all. Features, sure... little things. But there's still a crazy market for upscale hardware. Not a huge one... not really large enough for independent product development, at least not from any major CE company. At best you get a consumer board with higher-spec components, at worst you get that same old consumer board. In both cases, maybe tweaks to the firmware to make it look upscale on-screen, maybe even offering a few options not available on the regular product. And of course, a nice expensive looking case.
I'm not claiming there are no high-end units designed from the get-go as high-end units, but there's only so much you can do of any real value to affect the look and sound of the Blu-Ray, as used in high-end systems. And the fact that this same board gets much better reviews in the high-end box than the low-end box is simply telling what everyone here pretty much knows: for the most part, the audiophile emperor is not wearing clothes.
.... that an "audiophile" product is simply the same old regular consumer product in a fancy box. I guarantee this happens all the time, and at least many of the self-professed audiophiles don't have a clue. Just like the "coathanger speaker wire" test of a year or two ago.
About the only news here is that the THX people were involved, and apparently certified a player that didn't meet their own specifications. That should be big news.
I2S was originally supposed to be a board-level interface anyway, not something you run across cables. Sure, that's done now, and it usually works, but it does invite the chance of clock issues. Good digital interfaces for over cable, like AES/EBU, Firewire, Ethernet, etc. are pure serial, with the clock embedded in the signal. That way, no possibility of data vs. clock skewing.
And naturally, you did all of these tests double blind, so you know the results are not related in any possible way to expectations. Right?
A couple of truisms... the Sony/Philips optical over TOSlink is basically "cheap consumer crap" level digital. There's not a great deal of standardization of driver levels or receiver sensitivity, and this plastic. They all are...the standard here is plastic fibre. S/PDIF over a proper 75 ohm RCA cable is a much better bet. Better still is the AES/EBU digital connection over balanced cable, and usually XLR connectors... better in multiple ways, particularly if you need a long run. Like all modern serial streams, S/PDIF and AES/EBU contain data and clock in the same signal... you don't get jitter issues going digital to digital, but you can definitely get dropouts if the signal is corrupted along the way. Unfortunately, there's error correction and not usually any way to monitor it in consumer gear. Which leads to snake oil salesmen selling "high end" plastic optical cables that have magical properties.
TRS does you absolutely no good for speakers, or any other connection, unless you have differential drivers and receivers. If you're a noisy environment, naturally cable length may matter, but it's far more likely the cable shielding is the real issue. Signals between gear are usually either -10dBV for consumer gear or +4dBu for professional signals... low level enough that you need to worry about shielding. Again, balanced doesn't help here one bit unless you have balanced drivers and receivers. Speaker connections are measured in large values of volts, and not usually subject to noise problems. Sure, that does depend on environment... if you're setting up audio in a very noisy area (I did an audio setup at a carnival once, where the air was just full of crazy noise from multiple power generators) -- there's you're glad your PA uses shielded speaker wires (which it did, but we had problems with other cables picking up random audio frequency noise... a 15ft cable just held in the air measured nearly 2V on a handy volt meter).
Home built is fine... my Dad built his entire audio system back in the 1960s, including a huge speaker rig based on some Altec Lansing plans, all tube of course. And mono... stereo had not yet caught on. Of course, my Dad was designing very delicate analog measurement gear at Bell Labs for his day job. Not everyone should be building their own audio gear. And it's more difficult still to do it right "from scratch", rather than from a well designed kit.
The issue isn't human perception, anyway.
But as far as that goes, it's usually down in the lower ranges of milliseconds, for things you're trained in.
Most musicians can hear delays on the order of 5-10ms, give or take.... this is why there's been so much effort, in things like MIDI and specialized audio drivers for computers, to keep things down to a few milliseconds of latency, tops.
R/C drivers notice the difference between 10ms and 20ms of latency very readily, particularly if they're driving higher-end racers (I designed one of the first all-digital R/C controllers). Here's the thing... you're driving a 12" car at an actual 60-70mph over a radio link. At that scale, lots of stuff can happen in a relatively short time.
For most things, people are far more forgiving about latencies... it's only special training that makes one sensitive to very fast things.
Well, we're still even thinking "life as we know it"... the "golden zone" where earth-like life can exist. There might be other possibilities... we have not travelled anywhere near enough to rule this out.
"We" have actually been to two other worlds... Luna and Mars. A few short-haired dudes went to the moon, and I think we're all pretty satisfied enough there's no life on the Moon. I'll absolutely concede that one. But even in looking for life on Mars, our space probes have often been flawed: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/25/1442231. If they can't find life on Earth, there's a problem.
In short, we don't have a bloody clue about life in this solar system. We know there might have been as many as three planets capable of supporting it at some point throughout their history. One is a definite yes today, one a pretty damn definite no (Venus), barring the extremest of extremeophiles living that heat. Mars is more like a "was" than an "is". And we know very little about possibilities, in any practical terms... space probes only help so much, if the expected zone of life is a thousands meters below the moon's surface, as suggested of Europa. The probes to check out Europa, Io, Callisto, and Ganymede won't launch until 2020, with an arrival sometime in 2026, see:http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/europajupitersystemmissionejsm/.
Then there's Titan... no liquid water seen so far, but a cold climate (94K), with liquid hydrocarbon seas, a relatively thick atmosphere of nitrogen and methane, weather, rain, and earth-like features. Earth life, no. A different kind... well, I haven't been there to say for certain....
Really. We already count the "golden zone", orbits hospitable to life as we know it, extending from the orbit of Venus to the orbit of Mars. Nothing changes here. It's also pretty clear that either of these planets might well have supported life before we came along.. Venus with an earlier atmosphere, Mars before it cooled off and lost most of its atmosphere, might have supported life. This term, ne, is not changed by finding life on Mars. It's definitely affected by our greater understanding of where habitable planets might be, such as large moons around warm gas giants.
The real question is a simple one: how likely is life on a planet that could support life. If we find that Mars had life, and it couldn't have been that which begat life here much later, then we have a fairly profound datapoint. Not a huge sample, obviously, but this would suggest life is fairly likely to show up on planets that can support life. This is the f term in the Drake Equation, and finding independent life on Mars impacts the Drake Equation only here.
That's a very different question than "are we alone", at least in the sense of other intelligent life. You need a planet stable enough for life to evolve into intelligence, and ecosystems that support the very high energy cost of intelligence (that's fi term in Drake's Equation... no changes here, either).
That "6000" number may (you didn't provide data) only be touted by 0.1% of religious groups, but they are the loudest out there... the radial, vocal far right.
That number, and the whole Young Earth fairy tale, is a very recent invention. In the 1700s, there was no major Christan group (or any other Western Religion) espousing such nonsense. Various groups had once believed in a "young earth", but it has been soundly rejected by all of them, centuries ago. This is why most Europeans, even the devoutly religious, hear this stuff and do wonder about America.
This all started in the early 1800s, in the USA. William Miller, a New York farmer, came to believe that the Bible contained coded information, including the date of the "end of the world". This took form as the Seventh Day Adventist movement... followers of Miller organized and prepared for his calculated end of the world. He gained a national following in the mid 1800s, and finally named a final year, based on his calculations: 1843. I'm guessing he screwed up somewhere. Then it was somewhere between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When that year passed by, he got out his pencil, did the calculations again, and pronounced the real date as April 18, 1844. After that passed, he posted a new date: October 22, 1844. Curiously, the world also didn't end then. This final one became know as "The Great Disappointment".
Anyway, curiously enough, this crazy person's religion did not fail based on these failures, but continued to grow, backed by followers... Miller himself went into seclusion. In 1923, George McCready Price, a Millerite and Seventh-day Adventist, wrote a book called "The New Geology" (he was not, in fact, a geologist), which established the earth at somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old, and claimed "The Genesis Flood" responsible for many modern geological features of the earth. This one book pretty much started the ball rolling among this fringe types.
As for this not being a mainstream belief... true. But not as true as you think. In 2008, Gallop conducted a poll, that indicated 44% of US adults agreed with the statement "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so".
As for that number being thrown out... I understand this. I really don't care what various creatins believe, whether it's young earth, Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster... as long as they keep it to themselves. But these folks have had a very, very dangerous effect on the policies of the USA, at least during the eight years of the Bush Administration. This does not sit will with those of us, such as myself, who value science over superstition, logic over "what I feel in mah gut", etc.
Well, yeah, it says men are evolving faster... specifically, the Y-chromosome, and more specifically, it's related to sperm production.
In short, your junk is evolving. Not necessarily anything else. That MIGHT not be considered a complementary thing, depending on how you feel about your particular junk.
The IBM PC keyboard has always had the stupidest feature of any keyboard... the GIGANTIC CAPS LOCK key. I started out on DEC and Commodore keyboard arrangements (some of the latter Commodore keyboards being influenced by DEC's, they were natural enough). And sure, over the years, I've mostly adapted to the PC layout, largely because it's difficult to find a decent keyboard with a better layout. Particularly one with a jog-shuttle built-in, but that's another story.
Sure, you can remove this or software-disable it. If there's 1% of users who find this anything but annoying, I would be surprised. The need to put something useful in its place, and move the CAPS LOCK somewhere else. Hey, maybe right next to the other rarely-if-ever-used keys: Print Screen, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break.
That fails on several levels.
For one, there's a technology difference. Every Verizon (and probably Sprint) cell is a 3G cell. The EvDO technology works in the same bandwidth as 2G/EDGE/Voice, the original 2.5MHz block. So they don't need new spectrum. So, much cheaper upgrade. GSM's UMTS/HSPA needs at least 10MHz, and the 7.2Mb/s HSPA+ stuff needs 20MHz. They don't necessarily have the license, and even if they do, it's much more gear to add to a cell site.
Second.. Verizon has 850MHz coverage nearly everywhere they want it. 1900MHz makes more sense in very crowded areas, but on 850MHz, you get much more range for the same power. AT&T has most of the other 850MHz licenses, but they had to convert from the older DAMPS system... just completed in 2008. Cingular was laregly 1900MHz, so, much less range per cell.
And in fact, I'm paying less on Verizon than I would be on AT&T, and Verizon actually reaches my house, indoors. So that's easily proven false. T-Mobile has a new lower-cost plan, but I'd have to go outside, and usually to the end of the driveway.
Also, rural coverage isn't necessarily for people who don't use it. It's the coverage you get while on the road, in the middle of nowhere, population-wise, but on a major interstate. If the phone fails, you lose. But you aren't even seeing those on TV... the Verizon ads show the 3G coverage maps. The maps in the AT&T ads show any level of coverage (these are also online), and you'll find they pretty much have the same 2G/EDGE/Voice coverage as Verizon. It's just that only about 1/5th of their cells are 3G. Sprint and T-Mobile don't even really play, unless you're looking for some kind of 4G coverage (Sprint, as part of Clear, has it... others don't, yet. Verizon goes hot this summer, probably, AT&T probably sometime next year. Both on much better spectrum than Clear/Sprint).