flannelbored's blog

iPhone4 and ATT

2010-08-28T16:21:00.000-07:00

Back in June I was at a Higher Ed technology conference. (The conference was at Bethel University in MN from the 2nd through the 4th.) Apple was scheduled to officially announce the iPhone 4 a few days later, but because of the prototype leak, most of the specs had been figured out.

I admit that while I liked the form factor, the item that I most wanted was the front facing video camera. I have always been a fan of video conferencing, and believe that mobile video conferencing is able to really take off.

So on June 4th when ATT announced that they would no longer be selling an unlimited data plan, I started speculating...

ATT *said* that they were dropping the unlimited plans because 98% of their users use less than 2GB of data in a month (and 66% use less than 200MB). The marketing spin suggested than most users would be getting a better deal since their plan costs would drop.

To me, this change meant one thing: ATT wanted to limit the data on their network and charge more for overages, but why?

I think that ATT knew that the front facing video camera was going to swallow in a single gulp what little bandwidth their network had left. Anyone that's ever used iChat knows that it's easy to use and almost as easy to set up.

Fring on an iPhone did a great job with the rear facing camera, but getting the thing set up was not easy. Knocking video was fairly low quality, and only one way. So if anyone could pull it off, Apple had the history to do it right.

Which scared the unlimited plans right off ATT's rate plan.

But my speculation was that ATT's exclusivity arrangement with Apple required that ATT maintain an unlimited data plan. If that was the case, ATT would be breaching their contract, and if they were to breach the contract, then Apple would be free to bring out the phone on another carrier.

Lots of people where I work might as well have a big red "V" on their chest, but they have good reason; the ATT service in this metro is marginal, while the Verizon service is quite solid. Most of them would love to have an iPhone, but most if not all of them have been willing to do so if it meant switching to the ATT network.

But it would take some time to bring the iPhone to another carrier, even if there weren't exclusivity agreements to contend with. And if it were a CDMA iPhone, there would be the radio issues as well.

While we will not ever likely know the specific arrangements, everyone knows that the ATT/Apple exclusivity arrangement would have to end someday. If the iPhone 4 was going to be the last exclusive model on ATT, then the rollout of the iPhone 4 would have been the most critical issue, and the more iPhones that ATT could sell, the more people would be locked into the two year contract and the new data plans.

My theory is supported by ATT's decision to accelerate the eligibility existing iPhone customers that would not have otherwise been eligible at the launch of the iPhone 4. I believe that ATT made a calculated guess about when Apple might announce iPhone availability on a different carrier and tried to keep those customers in the fold by letting upgrade early if they would have been eligible in calendar year 2010.

So, all of that speculation, plus an Apple even scheduled in early September, tells me that there will be a Verizon iPhone announcement in early September, that pre-orders will be available for the Christmas shopping season, and that the iPhones will ship in early January.

Oh, and that white GSM iPhone that's been delayed for "manufacturing issues"? I fully believe that's what it started as, but that Apple decided pretty early to hold that for their new carrier.

Family Tech Support

2007-08-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

Melissa has decided to start updating our blog herself, so that site will probably get a few more updates a bit more frequently.

Of course, I’m serving as technical support, so I’m trying to determine the best way for her to update the blog. Perhaps the best way is just to set up email blogging. The only issue might be posting pictures.

2006-12-21T12:30:00.000-08:00

Mall Sushi

We went to the sushi place at the Brea Mall on Tuesday. The atmoshphere is typicall mall fare, but the sushi was quite good. And it is nice to have another all you can eat place that is closer than Riverside.

No Sushi for you!

2006-12-11T12:25:00.001-08:00

We never made it to sushi on Saturday, since Melissa wasn't feeling well. I did take the kids out to Krystenia's birthday party (she's 12 now), and everyone had a good time.

Sushi Pick #1

2006-12-08T12:48:00.000-08:00

As I was mentioning to a bunch of friends today, I'm a sucker for a quality all-you-can-eat sushi place. Chomp in Fullerton has a great Sunday Brunch, but we've only gone once, since it's over at 1:00PM and we get out of church at 12:30PM.

Our current favorite place is Cabin Sushi in downtown Riverside, which is great, since it's close to my parents, who will watch the kids while Melissa and I sit at the Sushi bar and order insane amounts of tasty sushi.

Incidentally, we are going out to Riverside this weekend for my niece's birthday, and I think Melissa and I might get a couple hours in the evening to go to dinner. Cabin Sushi, here we come!

iPhone

2006-12-04T13:50:00.000-08:00

Everyone is posting about Kevin Rose laying out the specs on Apple's (yet unannounced) iPhone. I'd certainly be happy with the specs that Kevin is suggesting, and be willing to lay out the cash for such a phone.

The possibility of two batteries makes such sense (if it's true), since listening to tunes wouldn't run the risk of sacrificing voice capability. Very novel.

2006-05-28T07:19:00.000-07:00

Dayton, Ohio

I'm in Dayton for a few days to visit with my brother Ray and his family, prior to attending the CCCU Technology conference at Cedarville University.

I have been to Dayton once that I know of, but never that I remember. (We visited with my mother's family when I was little, but I remember nothing of the trip.)

Tomorrow we are planning to go into town to a Memorial Day festival, and to see the respective homes where my mother and her father grew up.

More pics

2005-10-22T07:56:00.000-07:00

Don's TiVo

2005-10-12T14:22:00.000-07:00

Last night I helped a buddy install a new kernel on his TiVo. Don came over about 5:00pm, and we had it running tivoweb, ftp, and telnet by 7:30pm.

We started the "dd" copy about 8:30pm, which was done by 3:30 this morning, then I started another copy (to increase the swap), which finished before I went to work.

Don seems pleased with the results, so he'll probably want help with his wife's tivo later. That shoul be much less time consuming, since it already has an 80 GB drive, and we won't need to copy content.

TivOhYeah!

2005-10-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

I was biting my nails for a while, not sure whether I would be able to fully recover from the debacle that is the misuse of the MFSADD -x /dev/hda /dev/hdb command, but in the end, it's done. It did take a larger drive and just over four hours to copy about 35GB of shows that were on the TiVo, but there were several episodes of Stargate Atlantis and Law and Order:Criminal Intent, not to mention several episodes of Blue's Clues (I love that game! ;-) that I didn't want to lose.

Throughout this whole process, I've been thinking about 'net guides, especially those for TiVo hacking. Don't get me wrong, I think guides are great, and I appreciate those who put their time into crafting such valuable resources. Still, guides can be dangerous (as I've so perfectly proven) because they provide you with enough instruction to be dangerous, but not enough understanding to make good, intelligent decisions.

My problem was that I didn't really understand the MFSADD -x /dev/hda /dev/hdb command before I hit the enter key. Sure, I understood generally that it expanded the MFS volume, but the guide I was using never explained all of the possible parameters for the command. Subsequent reading of the actually documentation for MFSTools 2.0 did provide me with that info, but not before I had made the mistake.

Perhaps the issue is that not everyone wants to understand what they're doing, they just want to know how to get the result in the fewest number of steps in the least amount of time.

Hopefully it was "lesson learned" for me, and the only real cost was the part of my weekend that I gave up to fix the problem I created. I guess only "time" will tell.

TivOhNo!

2005-10-10T12:21:00.000-07:00

Argh!

So I totally biffed the TiVo upgrade, and now I'm in recovery mode. Here's what happened...

I had a hacked kernel running, TiVoWeb was up and accessible, everything was working as it should. But, when I moved to the larger drive several months ago, I had neglected to expand the volume. So my 120 GB hard drive was still giving me the 40 hours that the 40GB drive had provided.

So I popped the drive back in my Wintendo, looked through a guide for the command that I needed, and issued it. MFS volume now expanded, I popped the drive back into the TiVo box and turned on the box. But now the TiVo is in a Welcome. Powering Up... /restart loop.

After a bit more research, the command I used certainly expanded the MFS volume, but also attached a second drive to the TiVo volume set. Since only one of the drives went back into the TiVo, it went into the restart loop, since it couldn't locate the second volume.

Now I need to get another hard drive and copy the merged set (even though there is not data on the second volume) to a single drive.

Truth or Fiction: No one ever got fired for buying cisco

2004-11-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

I was paging through an October issue of Network Computing, and noticed a reader poll for an article entitled Vendor Profile: Cisco Redux. In responding to the question "Which of the following statements best describes you organizations' reason for buying from Cisco?", 17% of the 847 respondents, said that "No one ever got fired for buying from Cisco."

Now I don't have any information on how the poll was conducted, so I don't know how true the statement is (at least 144 of the 847 respondents claim they were never fired for buying Cisco), but it sure is funny.

Quicksilver (Mac OS X)

2004-11-09T13:14:00.000-08:00

In my spare time, I enjoy finding cool utilities and apps for my PowerBook. One of the more recent finds is Quicksilver.

I've been using the Mac since 1987, and this little utility is the coolest thing since the multifinder. Not only is it a great launcher for other apps, but it's not just limited to other applications or documents; it allows you to perform actions (such as launch, find, chat, dial, etc.) on objects (such as files, contacts, email address, etc.).

The craziest thing is not how cool this utility is, but how difficult it is to communicate in a clear way what it does. I'm sure part of my challenge in explaining the benefits of using Quicksilver lies in the fact that I have only scratched the surface of what can be done with it. Not that I buy lottery tickets (that's another rant for another time), but it's a great feeling to know that you've won, and then to see more and more zeros being added to the left of that decimal place. Awesome!

Halo 2 Arrives

2004-11-09T12:15:00.000-08:00

Halo 2 is out now!

The Computer store at the university at which I am employed held a launch event from 7PM until Midnight. There were four linked XBOXes on projectors. There was much fragging, and at the end of the event, they gave away a copy of the game, as well as several controllers.

They presold more than 40 copies of the game, which is pretty amazing, considering they have never carried console titles before. (And other than pre- and special orders, I don't think that they are planning to do so in the future.)