I agree in principle but when I tried the cingular/at&t 32-bit USB dongle (sierra) it didn't work at all, trivial email took forever, browsing like 300 baud... really sad. The iPhone is not blazing, but does get some 3G throughput. The firmware/software/driver behind the hardware is different I guess. Maybe the dongle gives up too easily, and the iPhone is like the eveready bunny. This is what I have observed though. Maybe the antenna of theiPhone is better...
My father is a resident at an extended care facility. He cannot get dsl or broad band for any amount of money, and edge/3G based USB dongles don't seem to work reliably in his room. He has a MacBook and an iPhone. The iPhone seems to have better connectivity than the dongles. He can't stand browsing on the iPhone, and he shouldn't have to. He already bought $1500 of Apple hardware and has an AT&T contract (pays $30/mo for inet). I just can't understand why, having spent all that money, he can't take one small step and get satisfaction. I just kick myself for not getting the tethering app when it was available. This is a problem that just doesn't seem to have a solution, and it bothers me a lot. I want to love apple, but they are falling short in so many areas these days.
I was sitting waiting for take out food and fooled with my iPhone. The "about" function told me how much memory was in use. It turns out buying the 16GB iPhone was important because I was down to 9.3GB available and I didn't have anything significant stored on the phone besides the latest firmware and 50 entries in my address book. It seems the operating system takes quite a bit of space, like almost half of the storage in an 8GB unit. I bought the 16GB unit because I am a software developer, but I am not developing because they have made me afraid with their NDA and non-approval policies. The Apple marketplace is well thought out in term of giving them the lion's share of the control and profit. Although those of use who bought stock hoping to share the profit have not. In fact that was a major disappointment. I was ready to buy a hundred shares just before the 3G rollout, but sanity arrived in time.
Thank you Steve for adjusting my erroneous belief in such a polite manner. I stand corrected and my face is slightly red. As a software engineer, technical accuracy is very important to me. You have my appreciation. My apologies to those I misinformed.
I purchased the PS3s because I recognized the Cell made them a powerful computing engine, and I thought they would make a nice addition to my development network. Since then Sony has cheapened the product, and I consider my units to be valuable collector's items. I purchased Yellow Dog. My only sadness is the lack of ability to add substantial ram.
I don't like violent games. I do like driving games, but don't like steering with my thumb. Is there a high quality human interface device currently for the PS3 that would make my driving games more enjoyable? Something from Logitech maybe? I would value your advice on this.:-)
I also am waiting with anticipation for the release of the @home service as I am a nerd hermit who wants to participate in a 3D world, but doesn't really like 2L.
Thanks again, Doug
I haven't seen any Chinese companies disclosing their source code so that we in the US can feel good about their products. I think that they think they can do this because we want to sell into their vast population, but I predict that after we disclose, similar chinese products will appear, and those expected sales will not. A country with as little regard for copyright issues and pirate DVD and CD markets can hardly be depended on to do the right thing with our source code, and while we are at it, I would like to review the source code of the high end routers we buy from China that are being used to operate our network infrastructure.
The one thing that the PS3 does not do that an upscale player will do is upsample the old DVDs to provide near-HD quality. A $100 DVD player can do this in hardware, but the software of the PS3 does not do this. So even though your PS3 is hooked to an HD display, DVDs you play on it will not look as good as a DVD played on an upsampling player attached to the same display. If your entire collection was BD then that is one thing, but while your collection still contains DVDs, either a high end BD player, or a PS3 and an upsampling player together are a better solution. That is what I have. An HDMI enabled display, an HDMI switcher, a PS3, and an upsampling DVD player, so I can play games, watch BD movies, and watch my old DVDs (in near HD quality).
ISO only exists to sell printed material anyway. They are the official source of printed standards. If we all decide to take our standards and go home, they will have nothing to sell. They do need to pay attention and keep us happy. They like their little monopoly, and if they want to keep it they do need to play fair in the long run. And by the way, deciding that the criteria for voting was showing up with money made it too easy for Microsoft Gold Partners to overrun the meeting.
As if the outsourcing weren't enough of a kick in the pants, this is just one more reason to feel bad about my choice of a lifelong occupation. Considering that many IT tasks need to be performed after hours because server maintenance often needs to be done when staff aren't expecting the servers to be available, this just adds insult to injury. At first you might think, "Just come in late so you can work the same number of hours, but some of them occur after prime time", but excuses regarding having to be available to support the staff during their normal hours, meetings, and normal employee rules about being there during the day tend to make you work the normal shift, then extend your day to perform the server maintenance also. We all know that backing up the servers (with huge hard drives) takes extensive amounts of time. Verifying that backups are viable takes even more time, and the initial installation and configuration of operating systems and application programs have a way of keeping you there until the wee hours getting every last property set just so. If you care at all about the quality of your work, there is no way around it, you are going to have to burn the midnight oil if you want staff and management to experience the "perfect" operation and reliability you want to provide. Also, when machines get infected or crash, it is always super high priority that they be returned to perfect working order by the start of business the next working day, which means tonight or over the weekend, you will be explaining to your girlfriend or wife of significant other why you can't come home as expected. In my case, I was always self employed, and my work just never seemed to end. All of this is just one more reason why my choice of occupation was a poor idea in the long run. A form of slavery where expectation exceed those of other occupations by orders of magnitude.
Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer,
We appreciate your business and strive to provide you with the best online experience possible. One of the ways we do this is through our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The AUP outlines acceptable use of our service as well as steps we take to protect our customers from things that can negatively impact their experience online. This policy has been in place for many years and we update it periodically to keep it current with our customers' use of our service.
On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time.
In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers.
250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it's very likely that your monthly data usage doesn't even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following:
Actually I did have to pay $19 for the priv of paying more to load further programs. The upgrade that provided that feature for the iPod at least, costed money.
If you cannot load your Xcode developed program onto an iPhone unsigned, you cannot even distribute 100 copies. The certificate only lasts six months, and if they don't renew it, you are out of business. It may be that these apps will have to be revised, if only to get new signatures periodically. I am not sure about this, but it would give Apple a lot of control to have ALL apps with a maximum lifetime of six month, and new versions required for continued operation. Does anyone know for sure?
I would pay real money today for an email client that could fetch mail from an exchange server with SSL using imap, and would work reliably for more than a few minutes. If Apple is blocking the distribution of an email program, perhaps they should examine why anyone would pay for an email program and enhance their own Mail User Agent and compete instead of blocking. I am a programmer and an iPhone developer. Maybe I should write my own and distribute it privately at my church. We probably don't need more than 100 copies running anyway. That would solve my immediate problem today.
The certificate warning is about protecting their ability to sell a cryptographic signature for $500. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft has a piece of Verisign, or is intending to start their own commercial Certificate Authority. Control over the root certificate cache in the browser is worth big bucks. Those of us who were early adopters of PKI know that the warning indicates you aren't sure who you are connected to, but the session is encrypted. If the DNS has been tampered with, many bets are off anyway.
I am really unhappy about the buggy support in the iPhone for communicating with Exchange, native, imap, or pop, the support doesn't work reliably and I am taking heat about it at the church where I help out with IT. We have a huge darn server, Windows Server, exchange, and a bunch of iPhones, and it is still impossible to get the mail flowing with regularity. The only reason I am not swearing about this is I am a pastor.
Since I have a large enough plan and I already get free long distance, I haven't been wanting to get skype to avoid paying cellular charges. There are just some people that are easier to catch at their computers than their phones and there are some locations with multiple computers and only one phone line. Also skype has a video mode using webcams that is cool. There are people I communicate with in the middle of the night that would flip out if I woke their wives by ringing the phone. So skype has its uses.
In the PC hardware game, products compete on the basis of functionality and price. The functionality is implemented with minimum hardware (an FPGA) and some glue code. When you are competing and you have to add functionality, you try to do it in software first, and rev the hardware if you absolutely have to.
This is why each vendor has their own... The deliniation between hardware and software becomes vague in the world of FPGAs and GALs.
Of course many hardware builder try to make the hardware look the same, but cheaper, so they can use the built in drivers.
I have a story to help you understand that. I used to work for an operating system company. My job was to write custom I/O systems to make the OS run on non-PC hardware. After a while, when I had seen most of the common I/O chips, hdc, fdc, dma, video, serial, parallel..., my kit of core drivers was in pretty good shape. I finally quit and went out onto my own. One day I get a call from a Huge client (riteaid). They wanted to use machines with the operating systems for two users each, but the I/O code had grown too large. I looked into it and what had happened is that the programmer that had done the adaptation had purchased books at a technical bookstore. In the books were c++ libraries for handling that kind of hardware. These were huge generic libraries with endless options and functions, well beyond the needs at hand. Once compiled, this code from the book was over 128K (these were in the 640k days). I re-wrote the driver as 6.6k of assembler code and became a hero. The moral of this story is that people don't really want to analyse the problem and write the elegant minimum code, they want to cut and paste huge chunks of existing code and hack it up till it barely works. When each version of the operating system requires twice as much or more ram, people take liberties about how large (and sluggish) implementations can be. It seems there is very little pride in workmanship on that level any more.
Another quick story... I was briefly employed at Teradata in El Segundo (1 day). They had a database application that was hand written in assembler and was just over 1 megabyte of executable code. I was astounded as I had never seen a bina ry that large before. You should be able to do anything in a megabyte of ram... A million bytes, wow!! Bill says 640K should be enough for anyone. Back when the purpose of a computer was to read input, do some calculations, and output the results, that was very true. Many mainframes at that time had 16-32K of main ram. But Apple proved with the early Macs that people weren't happy with text editors, they needed word processors, with fonts, and colors, and graphics. Needless to say, editing productivity fell off badly when we started wondering which font to use, when we used to just be worried about getting the words right. Clicking and dragging and dropping, eye candy, Xeox Parc stuff put larger demands on the CPU and memory and hardware, for the sake of the presentation layer. But even in the early Windows days, a few megs of ram was plenty, because windows apps like mac apps knew about sharing memory, and only using what was needed. As of Windows 3.1 with Enhanced mode (386 required) we no longer had to worry about giving back ram because we had plenty (16MB = $1200), and there was virtual memory of sorts to help garbage collect. Don't worry about memory usage Microsoft said. If you are honest and your memory still works, you will admit this. The advent of the open architecture IBM-PC brought us infinite hardware combinations and the operating system had to become magnitudes larger to contain the enormous amount of drivers required for modern computers. Then as the average user went from one to four applications open at the same time, memory usage blossomed. I wondered if Microsoft hadn't invested in memory manufacturers because Windows was eating memory like there was no tommorow. My first microprocessor (i8085) had a whole 4k of ram (4116's) and 2K of eprom. My latest machine (Mac Pro) had 16GB of ram. I assume that it will take me several years to figure out how to use all that ram, but the day will come when I challenge that boundary too.
All of this is why I have always had a spot in my heart for embedded programming. Sometimes it is nice to work on something with an actual specification that has maximum limits and limited functionality, so that you can do an elegant job of writing the minimum code that reliably and efficiently handles to hardware and does a job well.
Oh but it does... Microsoft (and the TCI) made a decision that native coders could not be trusted, so a system based on Microsoft technology has code written in a single sourced, closed source language compiler that produces intermediate code that is interpreted by closed source runtime and runs on a closed source operating system. Now any way you slice it, that reduces the scope of the parts that can be verified to the highest level source code, which can be examined and judged on the basis of, "it looked like it would work".
I would hesitate to sell it to them unless you want your friends and acquaintances to end up at a porn site when they were browsing for your home page. I have refused to sell my domain to people in the Netherlands multiple times. I ask them what they want to use it for, and tell them my concern, and I never hear from them again.
This numbers game is as old as phones. If you ever noticed having to wait a few seconds for a dial tone around the day the time changes, that is about too many people trying to use their phones at the same time. When the Internet exploded into use, the phone company said they measured things and 38% of all calls were internet, and 58% of all internet calls were longer than three hours. No wonder the cost of phone lines went up, and they could hardly wait for cable modems and dsl.
If you want to do business, having a merchant account is important. If you mess up and have your account suspended or revoked, it is very hard to get another one later. There are a lot of rules, and the industry really does try to keep things under control. They do watch for unusual patterns, and they ask a lot of questions , when you apply.
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I agree in principle but when I tried the cingular/at&t 32-bit USB dongle (sierra) it didn't work at all, trivial email took forever, browsing like 300 baud... really sad. The iPhone is not blazing, but does get some 3G throughput. The firmware/software/driver behind the hardware is different I guess. Maybe the dongle gives up too easily, and the iPhone is like the eveready bunny. This is what I have observed though. Maybe the antenna of theiPhone is better...
My father is a resident at an extended care facility. He cannot get dsl or broad band for any amount of money, and edge/3G based USB dongles don't seem to work reliably in his room. He has a MacBook and an iPhone. The iPhone seems to have better connectivity than the dongles. He can't stand browsing on the iPhone, and he shouldn't have to. He already bought $1500 of Apple hardware and has an AT&T contract (pays $30/mo for inet). I just can't understand why, having spent all that money, he can't take one small step and get satisfaction. I just kick myself for not getting the tethering app when it was available. This is a problem that just doesn't seem to have a solution, and it bothers me a lot. I want to love apple, but they are falling short in so many areas these days.
I was sitting waiting for take out food and fooled with my iPhone. The "about" function told me how much memory was in use. It turns out buying the 16GB iPhone was important because I was down to 9.3GB available and I didn't have anything significant stored on the phone besides the latest firmware and 50 entries in my address book. It seems the operating system takes quite a bit of space, like almost half of the storage in an 8GB unit. I bought the 16GB unit because I am a software developer, but I am not developing because they have made me afraid with their NDA and non-approval policies. The Apple marketplace is well thought out in term of giving them the lion's share of the control and profit. Although those of use who bought stock hoping to share the profit have not. In fact that was a major disappointment. I was ready to buy a hundred shares just before the 3G rollout, but sanity arrived in time.
Thank you Steve for adjusting my erroneous belief in such a polite manner. I stand corrected and my face is slightly red. As a software engineer, technical accuracy is very important to me. You have my appreciation. My apologies to those I misinformed. I purchased the PS3s because I recognized the Cell made them a powerful computing engine, and I thought they would make a nice addition to my development network. Since then Sony has cheapened the product, and I consider my units to be valuable collector's items. I purchased Yellow Dog. My only sadness is the lack of ability to add substantial ram. I don't like violent games. I do like driving games, but don't like steering with my thumb. Is there a high quality human interface device currently for the PS3 that would make my driving games more enjoyable? Something from Logitech maybe? I would value your advice on this. :-)
I also am waiting with anticipation for the release of the @home service as I am a nerd hermit who wants to participate in a 3D world, but doesn't really like 2L.
Thanks again, Doug
I haven't seen any Chinese companies disclosing their source code so that we in the US can feel good about their products. I think that they think they can do this because we want to sell into their vast population, but I predict that after we disclose, similar chinese products will appear, and those expected sales will not. A country with as little regard for copyright issues and pirate DVD and CD markets can hardly be depended on to do the right thing with our source code, and while we are at it, I would like to review the source code of the high end routers we buy from China that are being used to operate our network infrastructure.
The one thing that the PS3 does not do that an upscale player will do is upsample the old DVDs to provide near-HD quality. A $100 DVD player can do this in hardware, but the software of the PS3 does not do this. So even though your PS3 is hooked to an HD display, DVDs you play on it will not look as good as a DVD played on an upsampling player attached to the same display. If your entire collection was BD then that is one thing, but while your collection still contains DVDs, either a high end BD player, or a PS3 and an upsampling player together are a better solution. That is what I have. An HDMI enabled display, an HDMI switcher, a PS3, and an upsampling DVD player, so I can play games, watch BD movies, and watch my old DVDs (in near HD quality).
ISO only exists to sell printed material anyway. They are the official source of printed standards. If we all decide to take our standards and go home, they will have nothing to sell. They do need to pay attention and keep us happy. They like their little monopoly, and if they want to keep it they do need to play fair in the long run. And by the way, deciding that the criteria for voting was showing up with money made it too easy for Microsoft Gold Partners to overrun the meeting.
As if the outsourcing weren't enough of a kick in the pants, this is just one more reason to feel bad about my choice of a lifelong occupation. Considering that many IT tasks need to be performed after hours because server maintenance often needs to be done when staff aren't expecting the servers to be available, this just adds insult to injury. At first you might think, "Just come in late so you can work the same number of hours, but some of them occur after prime time", but excuses regarding having to be available to support the staff during their normal hours, meetings, and normal employee rules about being there during the day tend to make you work the normal shift, then extend your day to perform the server maintenance also. We all know that backing up the servers (with huge hard drives) takes extensive amounts of time. Verifying that backups are viable takes even more time, and the initial installation and configuration of operating systems and application programs have a way of keeping you there until the wee hours getting every last property set just so. If you care at all about the quality of your work, there is no way around it, you are going to have to burn the midnight oil if you want staff and management to experience the "perfect" operation and reliability you want to provide. Also, when machines get infected or crash, it is always super high priority that they be returned to perfect working order by the start of business the next working day, which means tonight or over the weekend, you will be explaining to your girlfriend or wife of significant other why you can't come home as expected. In my case, I was always self employed, and my work just never seemed to end. All of this is just one more reason why my choice of occupation was a poor idea in the long run. A form of slavery where expectation exceed those of other occupations by orders of magnitude.
I sent an email asking if that applied to me as a business account, and they haven't replied.
Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer, We appreciate your business and strive to provide you with the best online experience possible. One of the ways we do this is through our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The AUP outlines acceptable use of our service as well as steps we take to protect our customers from things that can negatively impact their experience online. This policy has been in place for many years and we update it periodically to keep it current with our customers' use of our service. On October 1, 2008, we will post an updated AUP that will go into effect at that time. In the updated AUP, we clarify that monthly data (or bandwidth) usage of more than 250 Gigabytes (GB) is the specific threshold that defines excessive use of our service. We have an excessive use policy because a fraction of one percent of our customers use such a disproportionate amount of bandwidth every month that they may degrade the online experience of other customers. 250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of bandwidth and it's very likely that your monthly data usage doesn't even come close to that amount. In fact, the threshold is approximately 100 times greater than the typical or median residential customer usage, which is 2 to 3 GB/month. To put it in perspective, to reach 250 GB of data usage in one month a customer would have to do any one of the following:
I didn't say I was better, I was saying that Microsoft stresses me out and challenges my sensibilities. That's all I meant.
Your memory is right on, that is exactly what they did, and in the end there was no competing.
Actually I did have to pay $19 for the priv of paying more to load further programs. The upgrade that provided that feature for the iPod at least, costed money.
If you cannot load your Xcode developed program onto an iPhone unsigned, you cannot even distribute 100 copies. The certificate only lasts six months, and if they don't renew it, you are out of business. It may be that these apps will have to be revised, if only to get new signatures periodically. I am not sure about this, but it would give Apple a lot of control to have ALL apps with a maximum lifetime of six month, and new versions required for continued operation. Does anyone know for sure?
I would pay real money today for an email client that could fetch mail from an exchange server with SSL using imap, and would work reliably for more than a few minutes. If Apple is blocking the distribution of an email program, perhaps they should examine why anyone would pay for an email program and enhance their own Mail User Agent and compete instead of blocking. I am a programmer and an iPhone developer. Maybe I should write my own and distribute it privately at my church. We probably don't need more than 100 copies running anyway. That would solve my immediate problem today.
I am really unhappy about the buggy support in the iPhone for communicating with Exchange, native, imap, or pop, the support doesn't work reliably and I am taking heat about it at the church where I help out with IT. We have a huge darn server, Windows Server, exchange, and a bunch of iPhones, and it is still impossible to get the mail flowing with regularity. The only reason I am not swearing about this is I am a pastor.
Since I have a large enough plan and I already get free long distance, I haven't been wanting to get skype to avoid paying cellular charges. There are just some people that are easier to catch at their computers than their phones and there are some locations with multiple computers and only one phone line. Also skype has a video mode using webcams that is cool. There are people I communicate with in the middle of the night that would flip out if I woke their wives by ringing the phone. So skype has its uses.
This is why each vendor has their own... The deliniation between hardware and software becomes vague in the world of FPGAs and GALs.
Of course many hardware builder try to make the hardware look the same, but cheaper, so they can use the built in drivers.
Another quick story... I was briefly employed at Teradata in El Segundo (1 day). They had a database application that was hand written in assembler and was just over 1 megabyte of executable code. I was astounded as I had never seen a bina ry that large before. You should be able to do anything in a megabyte of ram... A million bytes, wow!! Bill says 640K should be enough for anyone. Back when the purpose of a computer was to read input, do some calculations, and output the results, that was very true. Many mainframes at that time had 16-32K of main ram. But Apple proved with the early Macs that people weren't happy with text editors, they needed word processors, with fonts, and colors, and graphics. Needless to say, editing productivity fell off badly when we started wondering which font to use, when we used to just be worried about getting the words right. Clicking and dragging and dropping, eye candy, Xeox Parc stuff put larger demands on the CPU and memory and hardware, for the sake of the presentation layer. But even in the early Windows days, a few megs of ram was plenty, because windows apps like mac apps knew about sharing memory, and only using what was needed. As of Windows 3.1 with Enhanced mode (386 required) we no longer had to worry about giving back ram because we had plenty (16MB = $1200), and there was virtual memory of sorts to help garbage collect. Don't worry about memory usage Microsoft said. If you are honest and your memory still works, you will admit this. The advent of the open architecture IBM-PC brought us infinite hardware combinations and the operating system had to become magnitudes larger to contain the enormous amount of drivers required for modern computers. Then as the average user went from one to four applications open at the same time, memory usage blossomed. I wondered if Microsoft hadn't invested in memory manufacturers because Windows was eating memory like there was no tommorow. My first microprocessor (i8085) had a whole 4k of ram (4116's) and 2K of eprom. My latest machine (Mac Pro) had 16GB of ram. I assume that it will take me several years to figure out how to use all that ram, but the day will come when I challenge that boundary too.
All of this is why I have always had a spot in my heart for embedded programming. Sometimes it is nice to work on something with an actual specification that has maximum limits and limited functionality, so that you can do an elegant job of writing the minimum code that reliably and efficiently handles to hardware and does a job well.
While p2p != illegal { if(sharing copyrighted material) { stealing(); } }
Oh but it does... Microsoft (and the TCI) made a decision that native coders could not be trusted, so a system based on Microsoft technology has code written in a single sourced, closed source language compiler that produces intermediate code that is interpreted by closed source runtime and runs on a closed source operating system. Now any way you slice it, that reduces the scope of the parts that can be verified to the highest level source code, which can be examined and judged on the basis of, "it looked like it would work".
I would hesitate to sell it to them unless you want your friends and acquaintances to end up at a porn site when they were browsing for your home page. I have refused to sell my domain to people in the Netherlands multiple times. I ask them what they want to use it for, and tell them my concern, and I never hear from them again.
If I hadn't already commented in this thread I would have moderated you up. That is exactly right.
This numbers game is as old as phones. If you ever noticed having to wait a few seconds for a dial tone around the day the time changes, that is about too many people trying to use their phones at the same time. When the Internet exploded into use, the phone company said they measured things and 38% of all calls were internet, and 58% of all internet calls were longer than three hours. No wonder the cost of phone lines went up, and they could hardly wait for cable modems and dsl.
If you want to do business, having a merchant account is important. If you mess up and have your account suspended or revoked, it is very hard to get another one later. There are a lot of rules, and the industry really does try to keep things under control. They do watch for unusual patterns, and they ask a lot of questions , when you apply.