The iPhone, the iPad and The iPod touch may be wonderful devices but one thing I hate about them is the amount of hyperbole they inspire in people.. including the head honcho Steve Jobs himself. There's been a zeitgeist that Apple is going to depreciate the Mac in favor of iPhone devices. Tonight Steve Jobs said to walt mossberg of the walstreet journal that this transition isn't going to happen anytime soon and when it does personal computers will still be around just like trucks are still around despite most people using cars for their transportation. In my opinion iPhones and iPads are more like scooters and bikes and or a smart car if you must do a car analogy. Sure they get you around town but they aren't like regular cars or trucks for all purposes.

People on the internet are acting like the personal computer is going away and it's easy to interpret steve's remarks and even apples recent actions that way on the surface. This makes me complain for a number of reasons... and I realize I'm speaking only for myself so with that in mind:

Form Factor & Hardware

Sure the iPad or iPhone may be great form factors as a satellite device especially for doing simple tasks away from my desktop. However most of the time I like to create and "consume" on a large screen just like my iMac. Unless I'm on the go using a screen less than half the size of what I use every day doesn't appeal to me even with a bluetooth keyboard attached to it to do long text entry. The only way I can see it working is if they got a lot more powerful, you can dock them into an iMac shell and when it's docked the UI turns into a full OS X. Until then they would only suit my purposes as a satellite device for simple tasks and perhaps a game or two that fits the type of input it provides and mostly when I'm away from home.. and despite what they might have you believe not all games or apps are suited for that environment. Even if they make an iPhone OS device with an iMac form factor there's still problems. I don't want to always have to use a touch screen even on a big screened computing device that I'd do my main computing on. I don't want to have to keep the screen within arms length all the time. In fact I keep my 27 inch iMac's screen just outside of arms length. Nor does having to always touch a screen to do pointing and clicking tasks sound appealing to me both from an ergonomics point of view and from a keeping the screen clean point of view.

I agree with the person in the appleinsider forums who said this:

Unless you are an illustrator who paints on a screen with a digital brush like a wacom tablet to mimic free-hand painting or drawing, a touch screen is useless for the intricacies of design. I can't imagine spending all day wearing out the joints and muscles in my whole arm pointing and swiping at a large screen, when a minor move of my wrist with a mouse or digital pen can cover the whole screen, corner to corner while resting comfortably on my desk as opposed to one holding an arm out to the point of muscle failure, like back in the day when corporal punishment was acceptable and teaches used to make kids stand with their arms stretched out as long as they could if they screwed up. Plus the great thing about a monitor vs. paper is you don't have to look around your own hand to see the image you're trying to create as you work. A touch screen is a step back in the evolution of design ergonomics in that respect.

Software & Operating System

Certain people may look down upon OS X as somehow being more closed than windows or linux (I don't agree with this except when comparing how many components are open sourced compared to linux but that's another story.. and it being more closed than windows is a laugh). But the iPhone OS is even more closed than windows with its walled garden app store where they dictate what can run on it and what can't unless you jail break your OS. I don't relish using this as my every day OS even with jail-breaking as I'd have to do that with every OS revision and I don't want to do that.

Each application in the iPhone OS is full screen at all times and you have to essentially alt-tab into other applications when you are "multitasking" in iPhone OS 4. It reminds me of the day before the windows desktop operating system rose where all applications where forced to be full screen. My first computer had an OS called Tandy deskmate that was like this and it was a pain to use especially without a mouse. I don't want to return to this and I value being able to do things like have different application windows mixed on the same workspace. Even just simply being able to have several text files open for comparing\copying and pasting and being able to see them all at once is valuable to me. The only things I like permanently full screened are videos and games.

Steve Jobs may be a genius but he isn't always right and the fact is more people are buying the tech he often maligns... namely netbooks than they are iPads. It's not like he's a dictator that can shove things down my or anyone elses throat. If I don't agree with a product roadmap I wont invest in it... put that in your pipe and smoke it Steve. Some people envision Apple phasing out Mac OS in favor of the iPhone OS and that day they have lost me as well because using such a locked down OS as my primary OS doesn't appeal to me no matter how many people jump into that bandwagon... sorry. I see the iPhone OS as more suited to an apple TV device than a macintosh to be honest.

The day they either get rid of OS X or the Mac is the day I'm sorry to say I will be transitioning to systems that will welcome people like me with open arms. If push comes to shove I'll go wherever that may be. I doubt they are going to revise the iPhone OS to cater to people like me as their full time OS anytime soon. You can pry my "truck" from my cold dead hands!

The iPhone, the iPad and The iPod touch may be wonderful devices but one thing I hate about them is the amount of hyperbole they inspire in people.. including the head honcho Steve Jobs himself. There's been a zeitgeist that Apple is going to depreciate the Mac in favor of iPhone devices. Tonight Steve Jobs said to walt mossberg of the walstreet journal that this transition isn't going to happen anytime soon and when it does personal computers will still be around just like trucks are still around despite most people using cars for their transportation. In my opinion iPhones and iPads are more like scooters and bikes and or a smart car if you must do a car analogy. Sure they get you around town but they aren't like regular cars or trucks for all purposes.

People on the internet are acting like the personal computer is going away and it's easy to interpret steve's remarks and even apples recent actions that way on the surface. This makes me complain for a number of reasons... and I realize I'm speaking only for myself so with that in mind:

Form Factor & Hardware

Sure the iPad or iPhone may be great form factors as a satellite device especially for doing simple tasks away from my desktop. However most of the time I like to create and "consume" on a large screen just like my iMac. Unless I'm on the go using a screen less than half the size of what I use every day doesn't appeal to me even with a bluetooth keyboard attached to it to do long text entry. The only way I can see it working is if they got a lot more powerful, you can dock them into an iMac shell and when it's docked the UI turns into a full OS X. Until then they would only suit my purposes as a satellite device for simple tasks and perhaps a game or two that fits the type of input it provides and mostly when I'm away from home.. and despite what they might have you believe not all games or apps are suited for that environment. Even if they make an iPhone OS device with an iMac form factor there's still problems. I don't want to always have to use a touch screen even on a big screened computing device that I'd do my main computing on. I don't want to have to keep the screen within arms length all the time. In fact I keep my 27 inch iMac's screen just outside of arms length. Nor does having to always touch a screen to do pointing and clicking tasks sound appealing to me both from an ergonomics point of view and from a keeping the screen clean point of view.

I agree with the person in the appleinsider forums who said this:

Unless you are an illustrator who paints on a screen with a digital brush like a wacom tablet to mimic free-hand painting or drawing, a touch screen is useless for the intricacies of design. I can't imagine spending all day wearing out the joints and muscles in my whole arm pointing and swiping at a large screen, when a minor move of my wrist with a mouse or digital pen can cover the whole screen, corner to corner while resting comfortably on my desk as opposed to one holding an arm out to the point of muscle failure, like back in the day when corporal punishment was acceptable and teaches used to make kids stand with their arms stretched out as long as they could if they screwed up. Plus the great thing about a monitor vs. paper is you don't have to look around your own hand to see the image you're trying to create as you work. A touch screen is a step back in the evolution of design ergonomics in that respect.

Software & Operating System

Certain people may look down upon OS X as somehow being more closed than windows or linux (I don't agree with this except when comparing how many components are open sourced compared to linux but that's another story.. and it being more closed than windows is a laugh). But the iPhone OS is even more closed than windows with its walled garden app store where they dictate what can run on it and what can't unless you jail break your OS. I don't relish using this as my every day OS even with jail-breaking as I'd have to do that with every OS revision and I don't want to do that.

Each application in the iPhone OS is full screen at all times and you have to essentially alt-tab into other applications when you are "multitasking" in iPhone OS 4. It reminds me of the day before the windows desktop operating system rose where all applications where forced to be full screen. My first computer had an OS called Tandy deskmate that was like this and it was a pain to use especially without a mouse. I don't want to return to this and I value being able to do things like have different application windows mixed on the same workspace. Even just simply being able to have several text files open for comparing\copying and pasting and being able to see them all at once is valuable to me. The only things I like permanently full screened are videos and games.

Steve Jobs may be a genius but he isn't always right and the fact is more people are buying the tech he often maligns... namely netbooks than they are iPads. It's not like he's a dictator that can shove things down my or anyone elses throat. If I don't agree with a product roadmap I wont invest in it... put that in your pipe and smoke it Steve. Some people envision Apple phasing out Mac OS in favor of the iPhone OS and that day they have lost me as well because using such a locked down OS as my primary OS doesn't appeal to me no matter how many people jump into that bandwagon... sorry. I see the iPhone OS as more suited to an apple TV device than a macintosh to be honest.

The day they either get rid of OS X or the Mac is the day I'm sorry to say I will be transitioning to systems that will welcome people like me with open arms. If push comes to shove I'll go wherever that may be. I doubt they are going to revise the iPhone OS to cater to people like me as their full time OS anytime soon. You can pry my "truck" from my cold dead hands!

Lately I have been noticing that certain services that have usage caps on them are starting to offer faster speeds. I kind of question the use of offering higher speeds when you can only download so much a month or in some cases like hughesnet a day.

( More Inside... )

I've commented on this quite a bit on a friend's journal. But having done that and also having read comments from others and having some extra knowledge in general I figure I would make a post out of it as well. Recently comcast has made official that they have a 250GB a month cap.

First to put this into perspective. A few of my readers may remember that I was talking about this sort of thing a while back when I was talking about the state of broadband in rural areas. I talked about a few alternatives and how they impose such restrictions. Examples are most wireless internet services such as sattelite and cellular. It varies from company to company but most of those impose bandwidth caps. When I was on Wild Blue I had to put up with a 16GB a month cap. But it wasn't as simple as that. It was a rolling cap and you start getting warned when you hit 80% of it which actually turns out to be 13GB. A rolling cap means you don't get a fresh start each month. So if you for example download 1GB on day one it wont get "rolled off" until day 31. Same thing for the next day and so on and so forth.

Other cable companies such as Cox also have restrictions placed on their internet service. According to that page the "Premier" account has a 60GB downstream; 15GB upstream limitation a month. I don't know if they enforce it.. some ISPs have one but they don't enforce it. Upon further reading it seems they have that in place simply so that they can encourage people to move up to a higher account. Comcast had 200GB unoffically before but I don't know if they enforced it as I don't think I have ever hit it. Some companies have caps but they also have accounts that are unlimited. WiMax for example has this. Other ISPs like mine don't have a limit but they reserve the right to terminate your connection if you are putting such a load on their system that it interferes with everyone else's service.

Back in the day with dialup they used to charge people by the minute and people used to get disconnected a lot because they had restrictions on how much time you could be on in a single session. I've also caught wind that in europe and other places people have to put up with bandwidth caps such as 20GB a month or less.

So far no DSL company in the USA has such restrictions that I know of (I suggest reading the terms of service for your ISP.. I have) or plans on making them. Of course that may not stop people from worrying but at least for the time being that's the case. It seems to me that the cable companies in the US are doing this because they don't want online video to compete with their cable TV offerings.

However, even though Cable is doing this it doesn't automatically follow that others will. Again DSL in the US doesn't. An SBC (now AT&T) DSL representative has been quoted as saying that his company did not see heavy file-swapping activity as "a problem to be resolved." That and slowly but surely alternatives are being rolled out such as FiOS (fiber opic on site) which doesn't have such restrictions. Unfortunately it isn't yet in a lot of areas like mine. However, some groups of people in certain communities are getting together and forming their own ISPs such as La Cañada.

It's also possible to do this yourself and certain companies like speakeasy have programs specifically for this purpose. If you get enough people together to cover the cost you can lease a T1 line and share it with them. I was wondering about this before and I found that it's actually a viable thing that people have done such as that community I liked to above. It's just like Municipal COOP utilities. That's if push comes to shove. The internet isn't just a single entity so no single company can control it.

I've commented on this quite a bit on a friend's journal. But having done that and also having read comments from others and having some extra knowledge in general I figure I would make a post out of it as well. Recently comcast has made official that they have a 250GB a month cap.

First to put this into perspective. A few of my readers may remember that I was talking about this sort of thing a while back when I was talking about the state of broadband in rural areas. I talked about a few alternatives and how they impose such restrictions. Examples are most wireless internet services such as sattelite and cellular. It varies from company to company but most of those impose bandwidth caps. When I was on Wild Blue I had to put up with a 16GB a month cap. But it wasn't as simple as that. It was a rolling cap and you start getting warned when you hit 80% of it which actually turns out to be 13GB. A rolling cap means you don't get a fresh start each month. So if you for example download 1GB on day one it wont get "rolled off" until day 31. Same thing for the next day and so on and so forth.

Other cable companies such as Cox also have restrictions placed on their internet service. According to that page the "Premier" account has a 60GB downstream; 15GB upstream limitation a month. I don't know if they enforce it.. some ISPs have one but they don't enforce it. Upon further reading it seems they have that in place simply so that they can encourage people to move up to a higher account. Comcast had 200GB unoffically before but I don't know if they enforced it as I don't think I have ever hit it. Some companies have caps but they also have accounts that are unlimited. WiMax for example has this. Other ISPs like mine don't have a limit but they reserve the right to terminate your connection if you are putting such a load on their system that it interferes with everyone else's service.

Back in the day with dialup they used to charge people by the minute and people used to get disconnected a lot because they had restrictions on how much time you could be on in a single session. I've also caught wind that in europe and other places people have to put up with bandwidth caps such as 20GB a month or less.

So far no DSL company in the USA has such restrictions that I know of (I suggest reading the terms of service for your ISP.. I have) or plans on making them. Of course that may not stop people from worrying but at least for the time being that's the case. It seems to me that the cable companies in the US are doing this because they don't want online video to compete with their cable TV offerings.

However, even though Cable is doing this it doesn't automatically follow that others will. Again DSL in the US doesn't. An SBC (now AT&T) DSL representative has been quoted as saying that his company did not see heavy file-swapping activity as "a problem to be resolved." That and slowly but surely alternatives are being rolled out such as FiOS (fiber opic on site) which doesn't have such restrictions. Unfortunately it isn't yet in a lot of areas like mine. However, some groups of people in certain communities are getting together and forming their own ISPs such as La Cañada.

It's also possible to do this yourself and certain companies like speakeasy have programs specifically for this purpose. If you get enough people together to cover the cost you can lease a T1 line and share it with them. I was wondering about this before and I found that it's actually a viable thing that people have done such as that community I liked to above. It's just like Municipal COOP utilities. That's if push comes to shove. The internet isn't just a single entity so no single company can control it.

This article talks about how we should have universal gigabit broadband in the US by 2015. It says that we are behind a lot of countries when it comes to broadband and I believe it. I mean I've seen quite a few places that talk about it and for example.. my neighborhood has just got 1.5Mbps DSL just recently. Sure it's better than dial-up and satellite but it's still behind what most others have... especially in other countries like Japan.

They say the only two things we have for next gen internet access are Fiber Optic To the Premises (FiOS) and a newer version of DOCSIS (3.0) the technology behind cable modems. Neither of which are being deployed in any kind of hurry. Over here we have fiber optics almost to the premises except the fiber only runs to the big box across the street and we are hooked up to it via conventional wires so we only can take advantage of it using either analog telephone or (recently) DSL.. not FiOS. My phone company (Qwest) doesn't seem to be interested in it either.

I know quite a few people think what we have is good enough and don't see any reason for advancement but with more and more things going online and applications we haven't even thought of yet not to mention being left behind by other countries I think I would like to see broadband advance in the US. Particularly its penetration into rural areas. Wireless radio internet may help in that arena but I don't think it's the only answer. With fiber being rolled out in a lot of rural areas like mine I think we should be able to take even better advantage of it than we do now. DOCSIS 3.0 wouldn't do me any good. Cable doesn't seem to reach my neighborhood at all.

Even casting a vision for broadband would be useful, but "the current Administration in Washington has simply refused to come to grips with the reality of America's descent into mediocrity on almost every internationally-recognized indicator of success in broadband deployment."

I know the cable companies and satellite TV companies may not like it if we all got gigabit internet in our houses and we started using the internet for all our media wants\needs. But it would be great even if only to get away from those stupid Enzyte or GGW commercials. ;)

I've been watching quite a few videos on hulu.com and that site seems to be pretty easy to use and well made. They've got quite a few good TV series available to watch online that are good and it seems to work even better than joost did. Joost required you download a client which was pretty buggy, flaky and didn't even run on my Mac (I only experienced it on a PC). The only complaint I have against Hulu is that since it uses flash it takes more CPU power to play a standard resolution video than it takes to play that same video as a .avi or a DVD.

Yesterday my DSL equipment came in. I spent most of the afternoon setting it up. If you have an existing router it's not as plug and play as a cable or a satellite modem. We ordered the self install kit so I was of course the one who had to install it.

( Details Inside )

It's kind of ironic to me how we now have DSL but we don't have paved streets.

The reasons why this is better than my previous ISP?

• Lower Latency: I can do things like VOIP or games now.
  
• Faster Uploads
  
• No 17GB a month bandwidth cap
  
• Cheaper (no more $80 a month)
  

The modem being smaller and nicer looking doesn't hurt either.

I've packed up my satellite modem into the box it came in. I just need someone to de-install the dish on the roof and I can sell the equipment maybe at the wild blue uncensored forum.

Yesterday my DSL equipment came in. I spent most of the afternoon setting it up. If you have an existing router it's not as plug and play as a cable or a satellite modem. We ordered the self install kit so I was of course the one who had to install it.

( Details Inside )

It's kind of ironic to me how we now have DSL but we don't have paved streets.

The reasons why this is better than my previous ISP?

• Lower Latency: I can do things like VOIP or games now.
  
• Faster Uploads
  
• No 17GB a month bandwidth cap
  
• Cheaper (no more $80 a month)
  

The modem being smaller and nicer looking doesn't hurt either.

I've packed up my satellite modem into the box it came in. I just need someone to de-install the dish on the roof and I can sell the equipment maybe at the wild blue uncensored forum.

My internet has been acting up a lot tonight. My satellite modem seems to have been having a hard time maintaining connection. I can tell because there are lights on the front and the first two lights are supposed to be constantly lit (the second is the link to the satellite I guess) but the second one that I was told shouldn't ever blink was either blinking or looking dim. So Adium kept on disconnecting and I had a hard time loading web pages.

I don't know if it was because of weather or what... typically weather doesn't affect it that much and I have had a night before where the sky was totally clear and there was no wind and it did the same thing. It's one drawback to being on Wild Blue besides the latency which makes it not good for real time applications and the restrictions on how much you can download each month. Thankfully it doesn't happen every day though.

I just hope the part that fails for some people on the satellite isn't failing for me though. At least not until I can get onto a better alternative.

Here's an article about making good arguments.. especially on the internet. I think there's one thing that they forgot to mention or touch upon. Quite a few people on the internet ignore or dismiss the good points of what someone writes and they dissect a post weeding out what they feel are the weakest parts nit picking them. It could be if you took the post as a whole the author of it may be correct but taking parts of it out of context helps them dismiss the whole thing. This is something that personally I don't like. That's in addition to the other things they mention there making things quite difficult. You also can't count on people changing these kind of habits.