Note to Apple: The device needs to be more useful than a less expensive netbook, not less useful. Apple cachet and fanboys will only get you so far. It’s still just a shiny and expensive toy to me at this point.

Note to AT&T: WTF?!? Maybe sign up for an entry level course in security at the local community college.

Maybe once it gets a front facing camera for video chat, which is common on netbooks these days and Yahoo! video chat compatibility (my Sweetie’s baseline requirements for keeping in touch with family overseas), I might consider it.

I played with one at the local Apple store while killing some time at the mall the other day. I do like the OS, it’s very elegant and intuitive.  It seemed to draw the elderly like (old and arthritic) bees to honey. I guess that’s a testament to ease of use. Since I’m drawing closer and closer to that age myself it gave me the same feeling as receiving my first invitation to join AARP, oh hell no and don’t ever ask again! I’m too young dammit! Maybe in another decade or two.

So, wait for the next hardware release and reevaluate.

If you don’t want MS snooping around your PC have a look ay how to avoid the update that adds their nasty little “Windows Activation Technologies” update.

I can honestly say I’ve earned many of these…

The phone geek at Engadget are really excited about MS getting up on their hind legs and actually releasing what looks like an interesting mobile OS. They rewrote the whole thing from the ground up. It’s about time.

My last taste of a MS mobile OS was WinMo 6.1 on a T-Mo Shadow I got for the wife. The hardware platform was OK, nothing spectacular. The OS managed to both suck and blow at the same time. It was annoying, obtuse and ugly. When I got my first iPhone shortly thereafter it was like night and day, in terms of ease of use and polish.

It’s likened to the Motorola WebOS release, where a long time player totally jettisons an aging OS. It’s a big risk, but they really didn’t have a choice. Another incremental upgrade would have relegated them to irrelevance in the mobile market. Android, WebOS and iPhone OS X hasd truly left them in the dust.

People have wondered for years what Google might be up to with all that dark fiber it had bought up around the country. Now, we may have an answer: delivery of open-access, fiber-to-the-home Internet service at speeds of 1Gbps. That's right: 1Gbps.

via Your new ISP? Google launches 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home trial.

This is good news, as the US has been falling behind in the speed, penetration and cost of broadband. Our geography is partly to blame. We’re larger with large swaths of empty space compared to some of the European countries we’ve fallen behind. It’s more difficult and expensive here.

The other reason is I’ve yet to see anything resembling a cohesive national broadband strategy. If Washington wants to stimulate the economy by spening money on projects, accelerating the roll out of fiber to the home would be a great idea. It get construction types, who’ve been hard hit by by the economic downturn, back to work doing something useful that doesn’t lay the groundwork for another real estate bubble.

A third problem is a lack of real competition. I have exactly two broadband providers to choose from. Their prices are within pennies of being identical. One of them blocks inbound port 80, which prevents me from running my little web server. So I go with the one I’ve always had. Some choice there.

The open access part is important. The Comcasts, Cablevisions and Time-Warners of the world really want to be able to control what you have access to over the internet. They want their content to get priority and competitors content to be slowed or stopped entirely. I am a fan of net neutrality. It should be at the heart of a national broadband strategy.

I really believe that the fiber backbone should be a public resource, like the interstate highways, and free from mucking about by ISPs who want to raise their profits by controlling access. I really don’t know if Google is really committed to net neutrality, or if this is part of their master plan to rule the world.

In my lifetime I’ve seen a revolution in information. I can’t wait to see what becomes possible with 1Gbps fiber to home. What new apps and services can be built on that? I dunno, but I’d sure like to see.

The issue seems to be with the iphone’s radios, not with the AT&T network. Don’t get me wrong I love my iphone as an internet device and music player, even for some portable gaming action. Not so much as a phone. We’re a two iphone family, with my wife using the 1st generation model, while I have a 3GS. She’s become so frustrated with call quality and drops that she hardly uses it as phone anymore. I think the only reason she has it around at all is that it plugs into the ipod adapter I installed in the family car (2008 Prius) last year. To be fair about it, since this is an off contract carrier unlocked phone we use it on T-Mobile. It’s also due a battery replacement and refuses to go a full day without charging.

My 3GS is not unlocked, jailbroken or otherwise hacked and runs stock firmware on AT&T. While I have far fewer drops than she does, it still happens enough to frustrate. While traveling from Tampa, FL to Columbus, GA this month, I had little to no 3G data coverage through most of rural Georgia once we left I-75. Only when I reached the outskirts of Columbus did I get a reliable 3G connection.  It sucks the fun right out of trying to use Google Maps to navigate. We could not get an EDGE connection or even a voice signal for large swaths of the trip once we left I-75. Relying on my 3GS to help make my way through unfamiliar territory at night was frustrating. It was useless when I needed it the most. All I can say is it was better than the Metro PCS phone someone else had, and that’s not saying much.

I’ve invested a great deal of time and money in the iphones, apps and itunes music. At this point I’m considering how much effort and expense it would be to convert all the itunes songs into unencrypted MP3s and get switched to something else less balky. Maybe there are Andriod based phones in our future? Santa, have I been a good boy?

iphone pluses:

• Lots and lots of apps, many useful free apps
• Great ipod features
• A reasonably passable gaming platform with lots of games available
• A pretty good browser, but it could still use some help (Flash anyone?)

iphone minuses:

• Crap data connections outside of cities
• Crap voice connections in many places, including in cities
• Evil policies governing what can and can’t be installed on the phone (no non-Apple background apps)
• Expensive data contract required
• Requires itunes software to be useful (I’ve had issues with itunes)

Do the pluses out weigh the minuses? I’m beginning to think not. I really think the Apple/AT&T needs to heed the advice in the NY Times article I linked to:

The data seem incontrovertible: AT&T, while meeting 4,000 percent growth in data use, has acquitted itself quite nicely. But the company is saddled with an awful public image as the perennial laggard.

AT&T and Apple could both gain by swapping talent.

Apple, send your marketing wizards to lend your partner a hand. It sorely needs help.

AT&T, send some engineers to redesign the iPhone to make better use of the country’s fastest wireless network.

Can you hear me now AT&T and Apple?

* Options for MMS are back on AT&T, but not sending or receiving.

* Non-destructive video editing means trimming a clip no longer saves over the original video but gives you the option to “Save as copy…”

* Voice Control now works over Bluetooth

* iPhone vibrates when moving icons

* Updated AT&T profile to 4.2

* Updated modem firmware to 5.08.01

* Improvements to OpenGL and Quartz

* APIs to allow third party apps to access videos and edit them

* You can now paste phone numbers into the phone app’s dialer. This wasn’t possible under 3.0

* While pasting phone numbers, a neat feature is that it will convert alphanumeric phone numbers into a real phone number (e.g. 1-800-FLOWERS becomes 1-800-356-9377)

* Calendar appointment popup notifications now display the “Location” field from the calendar entry

* Ability to save video attachments in emails to your camera roll

via Unofficial iPhone OS 3.1 change log : Boy Genius Report.

Cnet’s iPhone Atlas reports that the new firmware will drop on 7/17/09. Now if it will stop playing Lady Gaga every time I ask it to dial Mom, I’ll be happy. Let’s just say the voice recognition needs help.

Favorite new features:

• Landscape mode available in many more places
• Automatic login screen for encrypted wi-fi
• Speedier!! Upgraded CPU from 400 to 600 mhz
• Oleophobic screen coating (fewer greasy fingerprints)
• Brighter screen
• Louder external speaker
• Better (but not perfect) Bluetooth profiles
• Retained the form factor of the original 3G (wide variety of cases/accessories available)
• Finally! Copy and Paste is available in firmware 3.0
• Better autofocus camera with video support
• Improved search features

As a total package it was a good upgrade for me, moving from an original iPhone. There are a few things to not like:

• No multi-tasking, the Palm Pre has it, why not the iPhone?
• No longer compatible with many accessories from the original iPhone
• Still no MMS or tethering, AT&T I’m looking at you!

I’m really a fan, and I hope the guys at blog.iphone-dev.org roll out the 3GS jailbreak and unlock. They do seem to have made progress, but are waiting for the next firmware update to prevent Apple from quickly patching the exploit.

I didn’t really need another reason. I already had plenty, but nevertheless the boys from Redmond provide another reason to loathe them and their products. During an update to the .NET framework MS quietly installs a Firefox extension that allows websites to install software on your PC.

I guess Firefox was too secure for their liking and they wanted to bring it down to the level of the widely hated Internet Explorer. Note to Redmond: If I wanted your god damned security problems I’d use IE as my default browser.

Just to make it sooooo much more fun there’s no simple way to remove it, short of direct registry editing and much additional wanking around.  Instructions to remove this bit of crapware can be found here.

Now I have to contemplate a replacement for it. I want a Macbook but they’re so expensive. I could build a Windows desktop for myself, but we’ve gotten to like having the laptop in different places around the house. Maybe a Mac Mini, they’re a bit more cost effective.  I’m still undecided…

The Curve has some sweet hardware features. It’s the first Blackberry phone to integrate wi-fi (an absolute requirement for me) , removable microSD memory (up to 4GB), a decent 2.0 mega pixel camera and a so-so media player in one device. It sports a mini trackball for navigation. I find it much easier to use than the trackwheel thingamajig on the company issued BB 8700C. It makes the 8700C seems like the Curve’s fat ugly cousin. It also sports Bluetooth stereo audio (A2DP/AVCRP), 3.5mm headphone jack and speaker phone. The display is 2.5 inches (320 x 240 pixels, 65,000+ colors). It’s a GSM quad band world phone.

I ordered a 2GB microSD card from good old newegg.com to make good use of the media player features. The Curve helpfully offered to store pictures from the 2.0 mega pixel camera on the card, once it was in place. One major pet peeve of mine is putting the memory slot under the battery. Do they hate their customers? Why wasn’t it made externally inserted like the Pearl 8130? No changing that sucker on the fly. If I had noticed that before I ordered my memory card I would have ordered a 4GB card and maxed out storage. Bah.

It doesn’t come with a MS compatible document reader/editor like Dataviz’s Documents To Go, like the TX. It does offer a somewhat lame attachment viewing but you can’t save, edit or synchronize documents. Dataviz does plan a Blackberry release, someday. There are other 3rd party MS compatible viewer/editors out there, but I haven’t had a chance to really look at them yet.

I liked the Palm migration tool, with a gripe or two. It moved the address book, notepad, calendar and task entries cleanly over to the Curve. No help for migrating bookmarks or media files. The desktop synchronization tool needs some help. It lacks the ability to sync via wi-fi. It seems less polished than the venerable Palm Desktop. It does offer the ability to sync certificates which is helpful in the enterprise environment.

The integrated web browser is an improvement over Palm Blazer, but that wasn’t really a high standard to beat. It’s no where near as polished as the iPhone Safari Browser. It seems a bit more sluggish than the TX opening pages via wi-fi. The T-Mo Edge network is not a speed demon, but it does get the job done eventually when there no hotspot to be had.

One genuinely cool feature is the T-Mo Hotspot@Home UMA calling over wi-fi. It also allows an alternative to Edge, but is oddly not much faster for data. Since the cell signal strength at my house is weak and something about the office causes now you see it, now you don’t coverage. UMA was a prerequisite for my phone upgrade. It’s another feature missing from the iPhone/AT&T combo. The Curve latched onto the Dlink router at home and the Cisco enterprise wi-fi at the office with out trouble. The wi-fi setup application works well and is happy with WEP, WPA and certificates. It doesn’t mind the web login required by the office guest wi-fi. I haven’t quite figured out how to make our certificate based internal network connection work yet, but I only spent a few minutes playing with. Once on wi-fi, calls from both locations are much clearer than they were over GSM with few drops and awkward “are you still there?” moments.

Input is better than the Palm OS Graffiti system or soft keyboard. The Blackberry QWERTY keyboard is OK, but I thought the Tungsten C was a bit more tactile and crisper. There was some learning curve to get used to Blackberry shortcuts and input, but after a bit more than a week I feel pretty comfortable with it.

The phone seems to have good reception and all the bells and whistles one would expect from a modern PDA phone. It has marginal a voice dial feature that mostly seems to misunderstand me. I think I liked the voice training process on my Razr better for its accuracy. It was a bit more trouble to setup but it did work more reliably. The speakerphone is usable and surprisingly loud. You can dial from the voice recognition (if you’re lucky), the address book or phone numbers turned up in a web search from the browser.

It came packaged with the Blackberry Maps application. That was the first bit to get uninstalled and replaced with Google Maps. This version of the Curve lacks the integrated GPS of the 8310, but the 8310 lacks wi-fi.

It has the standard business oriented BES push e-mail features like the 8700C I have to carry around when on-call. It also has BIS and had no problem at all connecting to the IMAP4 SSL, POP3 SSL or SMTP SSL running on my SME 7.2 Linux box at home. Yahoo mail integrates nicely and Gmail is trivial to setup with Google Mobile applications. Hotmail requires the subscription service, but can be used over the MSN Mobile service for free.

The Blackberry Desktop Manager includes a version of Roxio Media Manager. It seem extremely slow to navigate through files on the device or memory card. While you can change mp3 tag information on the files stored on the PC through Media manager, I can’t find a way to change mp3 tags after they’ve been imported to the Curve. Overall, I think I’d prefer to sync music with Real Player or Windows Media Player, since both can see the Curve as a removable drive. Even Windows Explorer would be better. I do note that file transfer times are better then on the Palm. It’s a welcome improvement.

To summarize, the Curve is a full featured PDA/smartphone that offers Blackberry’s enterprise class push e-mail features, wi-fi, UMA calling, up to 4GB of microSD memory, a decent media player, PDA features and a quality mobile phone in a sleek package. It straddles the border between the business oriented 8700 and 8800 and the Pearl model while catching the best of both and a bit more. It’s not without blemishes. The screen could be larger and it should come with better software out of the box. And why does anyone put the microSD slot under the battery anymore? The 312MHz Intel XScale processor is a bit on the anemic side, they could have bumped it up a notch for performance sake, but that would have required a larger battery and case. A bigger display would have been nice too. That’s the only thing I miss about the TX. All-in-all it’s a great PDA phone.

Japan’s Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future – washingtonpost.com
Perhaps more important, competition in Japan gave a kick in the pants to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), once a government-controlled enterprise and still Japan’s largest phone company. With the help of government subsidies and tax breaks, NTT launched a nationwide build-out of fiber-optic lines to homes, making the lower-capacity copper wires obsolete.

“Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace,” said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT’s senior manager for public relations.

His company now offers speeds on fiber of up to 100 megabits per second — 17 times as fast as the top speed generally available from U.S. cable. About 8.8 million Japanese homes have fiber lines — roughly nine times the number in the United States.

The burgeoning optical fiber system is hurtling Japan into an Internet future that experts say Americans are unlikely to experience for at least several years.

NBC: Peer-to-peer costs corn farmers money
But the bigger issue here is that NBC wants the FCC to require ISPs to filter content. How this would work, exactly, is not explained, and as the public interest groups point out in their filing, “nearly any Internet protocol can be used to illegally transfer copyrighted materials—instant messaging, the Web, e-mail, and many other protocols are capable of being used for this purpose.” The groups also argue that such filters (assuming that they work well, and this is a major assumption) would hinder fair use and would basically put the FCC in charge of setting Internet technology policy. After the agency was smacked down by the courts for exceeding its authority when it came to the broadcast flag, FCC officials are probably not in the mood to tackle such a controversial new policy.

One of the most important points made in the reply concerns NBC’s charge that network neutrality (which this is all about) would prevent most “network management” tools from being used. Packet shaping, prioritization, deep packet inspection, bandwidth throttling—NBC argues that all of these tools would become illegal. This is a crucial question, since many of these management tools serve a useful purpose; does anyone not want VoIP traffic to be moved through network with less latency than, say, a P2P download?

UPDATE:
I got my sidebar to work again and also got the WPG2 plug-in working with Gallery 2.1.2. Also found some nifty new Widgetized themes for the blog. Now if I could just find a WordPress 2.1 compatible spell check my life would be complete and I could die happy.

* WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 10285 *

Example of an inserted gallery thumbnail using WPG2

Example of an inserted gallery album using WPG2

UPDATE2:
Ajax Spell Checker to the rescue! I need all help I can get

And this doddering twit is in charge of regulating the Internet?

TechWeb | News | Net Neutrality Finds Bipartisan Support

If there’s a better explanation of why this is important to a free and open internet, please tell me:

The Internet is the fastest-growing computer network in history. It is not, however, the first computer network. There were many before it, many of which were extremely well-funded. Something, however, was different about the Internet, something in its design.

In the view of many, the critical difference is a design principle that network architects Jerome Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David Clark call “end-to-end.” This model regulates where “intelligence” in a network is placed. It counsels that intelligence be placed in the applications. As described by Saltzer, “end-to-end” says: “Don’t force any service, feature, or restriction on the customer; his application knows best what features it needs and whether or not to provide those features itself.” Build the network to give the application or users control over the service; don’t allow the network any such control. The network is to remain stupid, and intelligence is to reside at the ends.

End-to-end was initially chosen as a technical principle. But it didn’t take long before another aspect of end-to-end became obvious: It enforced a kind of competitive neutrality. The network did not discriminate against new applications or content because it was incapable of doing so. The network can’t tell the difference between a packet carrying Republican speech and a packet carrying Democratic speech; it doesn’t notice the difference between a packet sent from a Windows operating system and one sent by Linux; it can’t filter out the streaming of video from the streaming of audio. The network is designed not to know these differences, but simply to take the packet offered and route it as it is addressed. This doesn’t mean that users can’t discriminate. The point of end-to-end is not that everything goes; it is to locate the power to discriminate in the users–they choose–and to remove that power from the network. The principle thus regulates the power to discriminate. It requires that the network have none.

This regulation too affects innovation. Just like the license governing open code, endto-end means that the network owner can’t pick and choose which applications or content will run. As the network can’t discriminate, the test of whether new content or applications run is thus not whether the network owner likes it, but whether the content or application can be coded in an IP protocol. If it can, it will run; and if it is desired, then it will become dominant. Like open code, the principle of end-to-end vests control over the evolution of the Internet in (the many) developers and consumers, and not in (the few) network owners. Like open code, it is a regulation designed to enable innovation.

The consequence of this principle has been profound. By keeping itself open to evolution, the network has developed in ways that no one would have imagined at the start. At each stage, there have been pressures to optimize on the present model, and the commitment to end-to-end has avoided such calcification. As Saltzer, Clark, and Reed note, had the network been optimized in the 1980s for telephony, as many thought it should, the World Wide Web would not have been possible. A commitment to simple and stupid networks has produced an opportunity for surprising and radical innovation.

With all the tools available to modern medicine — the blood tests and M.R.I.’s and endoscopes — you might think that misdiagnosis has become a rare thing. But you would be wrong. Studies of autopsies have shown that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 percent of the time. So millions of patients are being treated for the wrong disease.

As shocking as that is, the more astonishing fact may be that the rate has not really changed since the 1930′s. “No improvement!” was how an article in the normally exclamation-free Journal of the American Medical Association summarized the situation.

This is the richest country in the world — one where one-seventh of the economy is devoted to health care — and yet misdiagnosis is killing thousands of Americans every year.

How can this be happening? And how is it not a source of national outrage?

Yikes! No improvement since the 1930′s?? My intrinsic mistrust of the medical profession seem well founded now. Not that I never follow medical advice. It’s that it has always seemed that most of the treatments seemed to be designed to fill the coffers of the medical and pharmaceutical industries, as well as guarantee future streams of income. Curing a disease seems a tertiary concern at best. Perhaps the application of better statistical models and artificial intelligence will help better guide diagnostics. It just seems that we really ought to be able to do better in this day and age.