Sunday, October 16, 2011

iPhone 4s

Reports are very positive on Siri. Despite the obvious security concerns, if you have an internet connection it sounds like it really can work some magic. I wouldn't know first hand though. I'm not on the "s" line. My theory is people are either on the "s" line (3gs, 4s etc) or they're on the other line. The early termination fees encourage you to stay within your line. For a fee (for me currently $175) you can jump the line but otherwise you end up waiting for the next thing. While Siri, a better camera and getting rid of the hideous AT&T service are very temping, $300 for the phone + $175 for the early termination fee keeps me on the non-"S" line.


The other day I got a call from an unfriendly Charter "security specialist" that was trying to inform me my bandwidth was being stolen. Evidently in the last month I had used 10x their unadvertised limit for my internet service. I told them that there was no way that someone else was using my bandwidth but that it was likely me from online backups, watching HD movies and the like. I told them I didn't know about any limits and they pointed me to some fine print in their "Acceptable Use Policy" which had been updated long after I first signed up for internet with them. When you sign up for plans or switch plans they never mention the limit, in fact you have to go looking for this policy to find it as its never sent to you or mentioned during sign up. Don't believe me? Go look at their plans on the site. The plans mention the speeds but not the usage limits. Charter isn't alone in this practice. They told me if I continued that usage they'd cancel my service. I asked them what options I had and they went through the plans.

For their "Max" package, which has 25Mb download speed and 3Mb upload speed the limit is 250GB/month combined transfer limit. This plan costs $55/month. If you start downloading at the max speed you use up your entire monthly allocation in 22 hours. Yes, for $55, you get less than a day of that advertised speed. If you only upload then it will take you 7 days to use up your limit.

After talking to them they offered to sell me their "ultra" package. Thats 60Mb download, 5Mb upload and a combined limit of 500GB/month. For this price of $100/month you use up your allowed limit within 18 hours at full speed. If you only upload then it will take you 9 days to use up your limit.  What a deal.

The limits sound ok when you put them in terms of HD movis.  HD movies (according to the charter rep) are 8GB in size, and SD movies are 2GB. So I could watch 31HD movies a month with the "max" plan. But when you work in online backup then things go crazy. They suggested rather than watching HD movies I should watch SD on my HDTV and to try to limit my use of the HBO Go that they have been advertising since that uses bandwidth too. And that online backup program (Jungledisk, Carbonite, Mozy, etc) should be turned off because my $64 1TB drive will take too much bandwidth to back up online.

In other words, they advertise great speeds but you can't really use what they sell you.

Since they're a monopoly and there are literally no other providers where I live, I ended up switching to Charter Business. There for $129/month I get 25Mb download 3Mb up but there are no limits. So I can actually use every bit of the speed i've been sold for the entire month and actually do the things they advertise that you can use your internet for. This industry needs change.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

OSX Lion first impressions






Launchpad - FAIL

Mission Control - FAIL

Saved App States - FAIL

Scrolling - FAIL

File Vault - FAIL

Auto-save - FAIL



OSX Lion Install

I was traveling when Lion came out so I got to miss the mass rush to download it etc. But about a week after it came out I gave it a shot. I bought it and downloaded it and started the install. It gave me all sorts of not-well-defined warnings about installing on a RAIDed volume. My OS disk was an Apple Software RAID RAID-1 volume. Lion told me it wouldn't create a recovery partition for me and sort of implied there may be other things I wouldn't get if I proceeded. I didn't like that so I un-raided the volume before continuing, but it makes you wonder if Apple really supports their own software RAID.

The install went clean after that (first impressions in another post) and I moved on to my next machine. The next machine was my wife's. We're on the Apple MobileMe family pack but because Apple really has no concept of a family group etc, I couldn't just download the package from her App store account because to apple we're unrelated even though both app store accounts are tried to the same family account. Fortunately, from the broken RAID install earlier I had saved off the Lion installer. Rather than login as myself etc on her machine I just copied the installer over and ran it which worked fine. Apple really needs to figure out this family stuff -- its been a mess for years.

The next machine was my laptop from work. That one had file vault on it. I copied the installer over (rather than re-download 4GB) and ran it. The installer took 3 minutes and rebooted to continue but just came back to snow leopard. Did that another time with the same results. What was going on? Turns out I had copied the installer to the desktop and ran it from there. Well, the desktop is encrypted if you have file vault turned on so when the machine rebooted and I was not logged in it couldn't get at the installer to continue installing so it just reverted. The solution was to copy the installer to the /Applications directory (where Apple downloads it to normally) and then the install went clean. You'd think their pre-install check would look for this sort of thing.

I upgraded my desktop machine too at work with no issues after this. All in all it was pretty much what you'd expect from Apple. The edge cases have a few wrinkles but nothing disastrous and things run after you've upgraded. Being in the software industry this is no small thing although you'd think with the numbers of beta testers they have etc they could cover these not-so-edge cases a bit better.

I'll post some impressions in my next post.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Is your cell phone the mark of the beast?

Watching my 12 year old daughter exchange over 10,000 text messages a month:

I started thinking about the role of the cell phone in our culture. Its how we communicate. Whether its the old phone call approach (look at her minutes used though), or TXT messages, facebook, twitter etc its always with us. Whether or not we have GPS features enabled on the phone the phone can be triangulated by the cell phone towers which is a feature companies like Apple and others have used for better maps/GPS/navigation support. So you can be tracked unless you turn it off. 

In the last year or so an increasing number of companies have begun working on the ability to make payments with your cell phone. You can already do this in a very limited manner at some places like Starbucks. There are speculations that Apple's upcoming iPhone 5 will have this ability (my bet is that it wont make the cut since its more like an iPhone 4gs than a true iPhone 5). Either way the day is coming. And from a commercial point of view it makes a ton of sense. Kids get cell phones LONG before they get credit cards. Turn that cell phone into a payment device and you've just created a whole new class of payers.

But, I have to ask, is the cell phone the mark of the beast? 

From the Christian Bible, Revelation 13:16-17:
The second beast forces all people—important and unimportant, rich and poor, free and slaves—to be marked on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that no one may buy or sell unless he has the mark, which is the beast's name or the number of its name.

Most people are right handed. They have this cell phone thing in their hand or attached to their head (bluetooth headsets etc). You may someday not be able to buy or sell without it and you can be identified at all times by it. 

Am I crazy? Either way where things are going is a bit frightening.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Google Reader - The Web App is winning

For the last couple of months i've been using the free desktop app Reeder as the client to read my RSS feeds. I've tried several desktop apps but to date Reeder was the one I liked the best. It wasn't perfect, but it was free and it seemed a little less clunky than the native google reader interface. Regardless of what tool I use, its always connected to my google reader account these days. That allows me to pick the best app on each platform but still maintain consistency in keeping up on the news.

The Reeder beta finished and now they want $10. Thats a reasonable price for good software, but since it didn't just switch on ads or cripple the app but literally disabled it I jumped back to the native google reader interface until I could make a decision. And you know what? The native google reader app improved and its hard for me to say the local app is better. So I uninstalled Reeder and went back to the google reader interface wrapped in fluid to make it an app and I haven't missed Reeder yet.

The killer will come when I need to read RSS offline, but these days I don't travel with my mac but with an iPad and iPhone. The other killer is when you buy an app like Reeder on one platform they don't give it to you on the others. I have no idea what Reeder looks like on the iPad or iPhone since they don't have a lite/free version and i'm actually quite happy with the free MobileRSS. If Reeder sold the desktop app on the Mac for $10 and included the mobile versions with that i'd consider it, but otherwise its not going to happen.

When vendors really make their apps work offline with HTML5 it will really but a strain on the local desktop app vendors. And competition is good for the consumers.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Netflix vs Redbox round 2




Saturday, May 7, 2011

Google Accounts




