The deal with old phones is that there was a FCC mandated sunset of non-e911 capable phones. You could maintain already activated phones, but couldn't activate - or reactivate those phones after that date.
You're dredging up old news - there are very few people with 6 year old non-e911 phones.
And yes - there are still valid technical reason for not being able to transfer hardware. You can't use an ATT or T-mobile gsm phone on a Verizon cdma network.
Or an ATT tdma phone on an ATT gsm network.
Cellular carriers are less monopolistic than ever before.
There are fewer players now, but with their expanded networks, they are now most all in direct competition with each other, rather than the almost feudal state that existed in the days of patchwork coverage areas.
There are many situations where a request for comments is mandatory.
Your right winger knee jerk reaction is utterly without a basis in the facts of this particular situation.
The irs actually does a pretty fair job of making some sort of sense - twisted though it occasionally may be - out of the spaghetti legislation handed to it by congress.
It's hardly surprising that they would ask congress to ditch a law with which maybe a half dozen people on the planet comply.
The cost of maintaining the documentation, training it's agents, publishing forms no one uses - what's the point?
It's typical that even when an agency steps up and says "um...we've looked at what we're doing and there are some practices that don't make sense, and don't serve anyone, and we'd like to change them - anyone else have any input first?" - some troll crawls out of Limbaugh's jock to piss and whine.
Actually, it's very easy to get your phone unlocked by ATT. I've done this for several of our people who travel overseas to gsm areas not covered by roaming agreements. All it takes is a phone call.
Well, I pretty much have that already. My Tilt/HTC Win Mobile phone cost my company $200. I have a 2gig micro sd card in it currently, but I can bump that up for pocket change if I want. I can load any app that it's capable of running, from any source, and I don't need anyone's permission to do so. I can get an upgrade any time I want, as the contract on that line has been met. But there isn't a compelling enough phone to justify an upgrade - ie: not enough delta. I'm not interested in the phones designed to emulate the iphone look/feel. I need the finer control on my screen that comes with a pressure sensitive screen/stylus. Smart Phones already do let you run apps from any vendor. The Iphone is NOT a Smart Phone.
Instead of being concerned that your downloading habits might result in loss of service or civil action - people you know just disappear.
"Microsoft-style execution" becomes a household word.
Wouldn't it just be more exciting!
instead of just a slightly more corrupt, slightly more successful version of the mutual ass-kissers of the Old Boys Club.
Still - at least MS accomplished something significant. Morality aside - the event of a group of bean counters and a group of old school geeks joining forces to utterly dominate an industry is impressive.
Actually, the reason for the limited versions is that the big pc retailers negotiate oem licensing down to a pittance compared to retail pricing.
With the even thinner margins on cheapo netbooks, MS felt pretty much forced to either take a loss while Dell et al cleaned up, or refuse to discount the licensing further and see defection to alternative operating systems.
Personally, I think they are being too timid, and that given the general stupidity of consumers any fear of mass defection is groundless.
If only *nix were available, consumers would buy netbooks with it installed to save $20 - then turn around a week later and buy Windows at full retail after they realized that they just can't handle living in a linux world.
The aren't going to suddenly go open source, and I don't particularly desire that they do so.
The point I was sneaking up on is that because of the way the open source arena has evolved, it has a distinct disadvantage in terms of support.
So looking at this from the point of view of open source adopters, they are going to have support costs which aren't anywhere near trivial.
As much as I'd like to move the company for which I manage IT into open source products, the support costs would be staggering.
And lest I sound like a MS shill, let me also point out that the example I mentioned isn't likely to occur anymore unless we're talking very large corp customers or oem's.
MS learned a long time ago that supporting a mass of the largely computer illiterate in the use of an OS is a huge resource sink, and they've done everything they could to move away from it.
This is reflected in the way they've pushed oem licensing, with the responsibility for support pushed to the system builder, which really is as it should be.
MS awakes tomorrow, and jumps with both feet on the foss model.
However, they also charge for support.
Now, given MS existing penetration, could the *nix companies compete?
MS has depth of support that few linux companies can approach.
I indirectly worked for them briefly after the 95 launch as a support rep.
I had a case escalated to the point where MS paid for the customer to ship their PC to Redmond so that the engineering department could comb through it to diagnose a low level driver that was flaky.
The result was a hotfix that replaced the floppy driver used for Toshiba notebooks.
The whole process took very little time - a couple of weeks.
Sure, linux *can* respond as quickly, but as a rule it doesn't.
Case in point - the glaring flaw in the glibc libraries of RH 6.2 that made it wholly unusable on multiprocessor servers because threads would start spawning and eating up resources until the system crashed.
Yeah - it was that bad.
Yeah - RH knew about it, and so did many developers in the community.
No, no one ever did fix it iirc.
It remained broken until 7.0 came out, and it had it's own serious flaws.
They at least read the source article, in which case it's clear that the feebs didn't seize an entire colo. They seized the machines of one customer of a colo.
A real geek might also have googled the company name, and noticed oddities - like zero web presence - no domain of their own. That just seemed weird to me.
News content has declined steadily over the last 20 years.
But really - that's just the product keeping pace with the consumer.
Look at the devolution of the typical slash dotter.
When I first started following/. I was impressed by the breadth and depth of knowledge possessed by it's readership.
Now - I'm underwhelmed.
Literacy and education have been severely devalued in the US.
Make the claim that people who have invested their resources in education and personal development are inherently more valuable to society, and you'll be immediately attack as an Elitest - as if that's a pejorative.
News reporters (the actual reporters - not the talking heads) have essentially stopped investigative journalism entirely, and what's worse is that no one calls them on it.
My local paper, The Oregonian, published a slew of articles railing against a local "meth epidemic."
It has since been pointed out that Steve Suo, the hack responsible for most of the content, simply made up those statistics that didn't come straight from a local cop, who in turn freely admits he made up what he told the reporter.
Was there a hue and cry against such an obvious attempt to influence public policy and opinion through yellow journalism?
Nope.
But a lot of us have come to realize that the newspapers can't be trusted as far as you can throw them.
No, it's not an Evil World Dominating Conspiracy - it's just laziness, incompetence, and greed.
A knowledgeable admin subscribing to a well maintained rbl with transparent policies is one thing.
Unfortunately, not all rbl are created equally. Some are just about as predatory as the fave AV sites, and about as honest as the spammers.
When rbl admins do not respond to inquiries, there should be a reasonable period - say 24 hours - after which the rbl's connections are severed.
I'm not saying all disputes must be resolved in 24 hours - but if they can't at least respond in that time, they aren't doing anything positive, and their uplink should suspend their connectivity temporarily to get their attention, and remove it permanently for repeated offenses.
Anyway....the previous poster's point was that the Feebs are abusing a system to grind a personal axe - much as certain rbl providers are using the ignorance of the average email administrator to prove their point, because it's more fun and a lot easier than actually contributing to solution.
Yeah - what's the url for the company's home page? I wanted to go look em up - you can often find really interesting things in domain registration records. If they had a domain.
Slashdot Mirror
Just remember - just because we've taught you everything you know -
that doesn't mean we've taught you everything *we* know...
It needs a better backer.
Seriously, David Perry is a shitheel in the gaming community.
Acclaim's 2moons is so bot and hack infested as to be nearly unplayable.
Likely because no one at Acclaim, and certainly not David Perry, has written a line of code in a decade.
Welcome to Outsourced Gaming.
The deal with old phones is that there was a FCC mandated sunset of non-e911 capable phones.
You could maintain already activated phones, but couldn't activate - or reactivate those phones after that date.
You're dredging up old news - there are very few people with 6 year old non-e911 phones.
And yes - there are still valid technical reason for not being able to transfer hardware.
You can't use an ATT or T-mobile gsm phone on a Verizon cdma network.
Or an ATT tdma phone on an ATT gsm network.
Cellular carriers are less monopolistic than ever before.
There are fewer players now, but with their expanded networks, they are now most all in direct competition with each other, rather than the almost feudal state that existed in the days of patchwork coverage areas.
There are many situations where a request for comments is mandatory.
Your right winger knee jerk reaction is utterly without a basis in the facts of this particular situation.
The irs actually does a pretty fair job of making some sort of sense - twisted though it occasionally may be - out of the spaghetti legislation handed to it by congress.
It's hardly surprising that they would ask congress to ditch a law with which maybe a half dozen people on the planet comply.
The cost of maintaining the documentation, training it's agents, publishing forms no one uses - what's the point?
It's typical that even when an agency steps up and says "um...we've looked at what we're doing and there are some practices that don't make sense, and don't serve anyone, and we'd like to change them - anyone else have any input first?" - some troll crawls out of Limbaugh's jock to piss and whine.
Get a life.
No. It's stupid and trite.
Apple pulled it from the App Store.
Do like people do with expensive broken cell phones - insure it, wait a respectable length of time, then toss her down a well.
You could also resell her and potentially recoup some of your outlay, but that's a bit more risky.
Actually, it's very easy to get your phone unlocked by ATT.
I've done this for several of our people who travel overseas to gsm areas not covered by roaming agreements.
All it takes is a phone call.
You could use a real Smart Phone instead of a Cupertino tinkertoy.
I can tether my ATT Smart Phone with no extra cost or caps.
And with a $20 3rd party app, it acts as a wireless 3g/HSPDA router.
The Iphone is pretty, but largely useless - like most of the people I see in the Apple Store when I bring in company owned Apple crap for repair work.
Well, I pretty much have that already.
My Tilt/HTC Win Mobile phone cost my company $200.
I have a 2gig micro sd card in it currently, but I can bump that up for pocket change if I want.
I can load any app that it's capable of running, from any source, and I don't need anyone's permission to do so.
I can get an upgrade any time I want, as the contract on that line has been met.
But there isn't a compelling enough phone to justify an upgrade - ie: not enough delta.
I'm not interested in the phones designed to emulate the iphone look/feel.
I need the finer control on my screen that comes with a pressure sensitive screen/stylus.
Smart Phones already do let you run apps from any vendor.
The Iphone is NOT a Smart Phone.
if Microsoft really *was* the Evil Empire?
Instead of being concerned that your downloading habits might result in loss of service or civil action - people you know just disappear.
"Microsoft-style execution" becomes a household word.
Wouldn't it just be more exciting!
instead of just a slightly more corrupt, slightly more successful version of the mutual ass-kissers of the Old Boys Club.
Still - at least MS accomplished something significant.
Morality aside - the event of a group of bean counters and a group of old school geeks joining forces to utterly dominate an industry is impressive.
Actually, the reason for the limited versions is that the big pc retailers negotiate oem licensing down to a pittance compared to retail pricing.
With the even thinner margins on cheapo netbooks, MS felt pretty much forced to either take a loss while Dell et al cleaned up, or refuse to discount the licensing further and see defection to alternative operating systems.
Personally, I think they are being too timid, and that given the general stupidity of consumers any fear of mass defection is groundless.
If only *nix were available, consumers would buy netbooks with it installed to save $20 - then turn around a week later and buy Windows at full retail after they realized that they just can't handle living in a linux world.
Oh, I don't really care about MS' point of view.
The aren't going to suddenly go open source, and I don't particularly desire that they do so.
The point I was sneaking up on is that because of the way the open source arena has evolved, it has a distinct disadvantage in terms of support.
So looking at this from the point of view of open source adopters, they are going to have support costs which aren't anywhere near trivial.
As much as I'd like to move the company for which I manage IT into open source products, the support costs would be staggering.
And lest I sound like a MS shill, let me also point out that the example I mentioned isn't likely to occur anymore unless we're talking very large corp customers or oem's.
MS learned a long time ago that supporting a mass of the largely computer illiterate in the use of an OS is a huge resource sink, and they've done everything they could to move away from it.
This is reflected in the way they've pushed oem licensing, with the responsibility for support pushed to the system builder, which really is as it should be.
Let me postulate this:
MS awakes tomorrow, and jumps with both feet on the foss model.
However, they also charge for support.
Now, given MS existing penetration, could the *nix companies compete?
MS has depth of support that few linux companies can approach.
I indirectly worked for them briefly after the 95 launch as a support rep.
I had a case escalated to the point where MS paid for the customer to ship their PC to Redmond so that the engineering department could comb through it to diagnose a low level driver that was flaky.
The result was a hotfix that replaced the floppy driver used for Toshiba notebooks.
The whole process took very little time - a couple of weeks.
Sure, linux *can* respond as quickly, but as a rule it doesn't.
Case in point - the glaring flaw in the glibc libraries of RH 6.2 that made it wholly unusable on multiprocessor servers because threads would start spawning and eating up resources until the system crashed.
Yeah - it was that bad.
Yeah - RH knew about it, and so did many developers in the community.
No, no one ever did fix it iirc.
It remained broken until 7.0 came out, and it had it's own serious flaws.
So, can linux compete from a support standpoint?
examiner is as bad as slashdot.
There is no news there - just ill informed opinion and wild speculation.
Move along, troll.....
No real obligation to do so.
If the company you do business with is a crook, and get's their plug pulled, you suffer as well.
Sorta like being unknowingly in possession of stolen property.
Upon discovery, you lose it immediately, not when it's convenient.
Do business with a company with a good reputation instead of chasing every nickel os "savings" and you're a lot less likely to get burned.
I doubt that there are more than a hatful of "legitimate customers" - maybe not any.
So far, the only outcry I've heard is for a huckster of "motivational speakers."
Real geeks check sources.
They at least read the source article, in which case it's clear that the feebs didn't seize an entire colo. They seized the machines of one customer of a colo.
A real geek might also have googled the company name, and noticed oddities - like zero web presence - no domain of their own. That just seemed weird to me.
I choose to err
[Edited for brevity and clarity]
There is a wee bit of truth there.
News content has declined steadily over the last 20 years.
But really - that's just the product keeping pace with the consumer.
Look at the devolution of the typical slash dotter.
When I first started following /. I was impressed by the breadth and depth of knowledge possessed by it's readership.
Now - I'm underwhelmed.
Literacy and education have been severely devalued in the US.
Make the claim that people who have invested their resources in education and personal development are inherently more valuable to society, and you'll be immediately attack as an Elitest - as if that's a pejorative.
News reporters (the actual reporters - not the talking heads) have essentially stopped investigative journalism entirely, and what's worse is that no one calls them on it.
My local paper, The Oregonian, published a slew of articles railing against a local "meth epidemic."
It has since been pointed out that Steve Suo, the hack responsible for most of the content, simply made up those statistics that didn't come straight from a local cop, who in turn freely admits he made up what he told the reporter.
Was there a hue and cry against such an obvious attempt to influence public policy and opinion through yellow journalism?
Nope.
But a lot of us have come to realize that the newspapers can't be trusted as far as you can throw them.
No, it's not an Evil World Dominating Conspiracy - it's just laziness, incompetence, and greed.
It depends on your point of view.
A knowledgeable admin subscribing to a well maintained rbl with transparent policies is one thing.
Unfortunately, not all rbl are created equally.
Some are just about as predatory as the fave AV sites, and about as honest as the spammers.
When rbl admins do not respond to inquiries, there should be a reasonable period - say 24 hours - after which the rbl's connections are severed.
I'm not saying all disputes must be resolved in 24 hours - but if they can't at least respond in that time, they aren't doing anything positive, and their uplink should suspend their connectivity temporarily to get their attention, and remove it permanently for repeated offenses.
Anyway....the previous poster's point was that the Feebs are abusing a system to grind a personal axe - much as certain rbl providers are using the ignorance of the average email administrator to prove their point, because it's more fun and a lot easier than actually contributing to solution.
Yeah - what's the url for the company's home page?
I wanted to go look em up - you can often find really interesting things in domain registration records.
If they had a domain.
Well, you're not the only one repeating other people's assumptions.
The didn't seize all servers in a data center.
They seized all equipment under the control of one customer of a data center.
As to contesting a warrant - that's pretty unworkable.
What's the likelihood of electronic evidence not being destroyed if given a chance?
Doubtful.
It's hard to mount a revolution when all you have to work with are /. idiots in tinfoil hats.
Ah, if only I had mod points to bestow upon you....
I posted pretty much the same thing.
I used to admire slashdotters - now they just seem like weak spineless sheep, always at the ready to jump on the Me Too Brigade.
Speaking of RBL's - ever get stuck on one that's no longer maintained, but still being used by Clueless Admins?
I went through that a couple of years ago.