Posts by MegaZone

Man FLIES with Android-powered homemade bird wings

An admitted hoax

He admitted it is fake: http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/humanbirdwings.asp

US spy drone hijacked with GPS spoof hack, report says

I don't know - I'd expect the drone to be using the encrypted military GPS signals, not the open civilian signals. And without the keys you can't spoof the encrypted signals - that's kind of why they exist in the first place.

Android respawn horror: Hacker says hackers' phones hacked

'The United States" doesn't call HSPA 4G

Don't paint us all with the same brush, just because some idiots at T-Mobile's marketing department, and to a lesser extent AT&T's, call HSPA '4G' in their ads doesn't mean all of us yanks call HSPA 4G. Some of us do know better. ;-)

Sprint eyes T-Mobile acquisition

More standards in the soup pot

So Sprint is CDMA, and they acquired Nextel which uses iDEN, and that went over so very well indeed. Sprint is still struggling with the legacy iDEN network as there are dedicated users who do not want to switch, and they don't plan to shut it down until 2013. Of course, this task is made easier by the former Nextel customers who fled due to Sprint's customer support.

And, as we know, Sprint decided to do their own thing and use WiMax for 4G and not LTE, thinking they'd get a jump on the market as LTE was still gelling. But delays in building out their network and lukewarm hardware support (everyone else is going LTE, why make a WiMax handset?) has kept growth slow. And with Verizon and AT&T building out LTE, and able to select from more handset offerings, now Sprint is facing an increasing headwind in attracting users to their 4G network. Enough that Sprint has increasingly warmed up to the possibility of switching to LTE in their public comments. I think it is inevitable that they will, and fortunately for them a lot of WiMax and LTE base station gear has commonalities, so hopefully they'll be able to upgrade their netwoek without a total forklift replacement. But that's still going to be a royal mess.

Now they're looking at acquiring T-Mobile, a GSM carrier. That seems to be just what Sprint needs, yet another network protocol in the mix.

From a technical standpoint, if that were to happen, migrating their network to GSM+LTE would seem to make the most sense. Verizon is on a trajectory toward CDMA+LTE with designs on pure LTE down the road. Going GSM+LTE would give Sprint access to a wide variety of handsets, and with Sprint's bandwidth they might be able to move away from AWS and have some commonality with the handsets used by AT&T.

Of course, Sprint is larger than T-Mobile and they have more CDMA users than T-Mobile has GSM users, so if one network had to go it'd probably be GSM. That'd leave GSM users without a lot of options - AT&T would be the only major US GSM carrier. But how long would this take? Sprint will be dealing with the iDEN cutover for the next couple of years, do they need to add a GSM migration on top of that? And if they do come to their senses and switch to LTE for 4G, how will that migration work?

Are we going to see one carrier juggling CDMA, iDEN, GSM, WiMax, and LTE? And that's leaving out HSPA+, EVDO, etc. And even if Sprint & T-Mobile were to merge the resulting Frankencarrier would have roughly 27% of the US market, they'd still be number three.

Sprint - Jack of all Trades, Master of None

T-Mobile today at least has the advantage of being seen as kind of the scrappy underdog with innovative pricing and some nice hardware - and they don't load up their phones with the bloatware the other carriers lard on their units. On the Android front they've also been good about keeping their handsets hack friendly without locked down boot loaders and the like. And while they have bent the truth pretty sharply with their '4G' claims, their HSPA+ network has actually tested out faster than the 'real' 4G WiMax/LTE network performance from other carriers today. The big caveat is the limited coverage area. As the LTE networks are upgraded I know HSPA+ will be left behind, but right now it is fast if you have the coverage. (I put 'real' in quotes because of the controversy over calling today's networks '4G' when the speeds are still no higher than the high end '3G' speeds.)

I switched from AT&T to Verizon when the Droid launched. I'm up for renewal in July, and I will seriously consider switching carriers again to get the best handset. My Droid is rooted and running a custom ROM, which Verizon is making increasingly hard by locking down newer handsets. Depending on the state of things this summer, T-Mobile is actually a tempting carrier due to their policies. But not Sprint.

Palm 'innovative Wi-FI device' invite points to Foleo revamp?

It is the Palm Treo 800w

It's the Palm Treo 800w, bet on it.

When the Foleo 1 was killed Palm said they might revisit it *AFTER* Palm OS 2 is out, and if and when they did Foleo 2 it would run Palm OS 2 (their Linux-based OS). Since the OS isn't done, let alone out, it isn't a new Foleo.

Unannounced Slingbox surfaces on the web

Why does everyone miss the big news?

I've seen a lot of blogs and such cover this - but I seem to be the only one who noticed the big change: This is a *cable modem*. Look at the FCC Test docs and the manual. This new box is a combination DOCSIS modem and Slingbox - they've never done that before. It is an entirely new direction for Sling Media.

Chris - Slingbox does local media streaming. Not UPNP, but it does work locally.

Rob - The SlingCatcher will supposedly do that.

Mike - 128Kbps is too slow, you need at least 256Kbps for a usable stream - more is always better. The Slingbox accepts video input, then encodes it using VC-1 (WMV9) and streams it to the client. The resolution and bitrate are dynamically adjusted to handle the available bandwidth and the quality of the pipe. Remote streams are sized up to 320x240, local streams at 640x480. And it will go up to about 8Mbps at full quality for a local stream.

Utah backs calls to boot porn from Port 80

Of all the idiocy

OK, I thought the .xxx TLD was idiotic. Sure, if people *want* to use .xxx, I'm all for it. But there were people talking about trying to legislate its use to force adult sites into the .xxx ghetto. First of all, the US government can't event define pornography better than "you know it when you see it". I have frank, adult, non-pornographic content on my personal website, which I'm sure some would consider pornographic simply because it discusses sex. Hell, how many blogs, LiveJournals, MySpace pages, etc have sexual content?

So, anyway, now they want to push porn off port 80? Please, that'll never work, period. It is just absolute idiocy. Sure, just move the porn sites to port 443 and don't bother running SSL, your firewall probably allows that. Not on port 80, so it is fine! Or are they going to establish the vice port - 666? Oops, taken:

mdqs 666/tcp

mdqs 666/udp

doom 666/tcp doom Id Software

doom 666/udp doom Id Software

# <[e-mail]>

The US government keeps forgetting that it is the WORLD WIDE web. Even if they managed to pass this and herd all US sites off port 80 (or into .xxx) under the weight of law, servers around the world would laugh at the US government and continue to serve the content on port 80.

Legislating morality is always stupid, but these people just take it to a whole new level of ludicrous. It figures someone connected with SCO would be involved too.