Cellular suckage

Published by neophiliac | Filed under Rant

In the early days of the US mobile phone industry, the carriers wanted to ensure that they could recover their investment in building out the cellular network as quickly as possible. Faced with a chicken/egg problem, they chose to build the network, make the handsets cheap through subsidies to drive customers to try the service, and take their profits later. It worked, except that now we expect handsets to be cheap even as we expect more features than ever  in our handsets.

I was fortunate enough to play with a Nexus One just after Christmas, and as I tweeted then, “#wantwantwant”.  But reading through the Google Terms of Sale and talking to the contracts department at TMO, I realize that this adventure is far more screwed up than the usual handset subsidy. Read the rest of this entry »

Paris

Published by neophiliac | Filed under Travel

I really like Paris. I love some parts of Paris, and some things about Paris. In the last 4 years, I have spent a total of almost 3 months there with my family and I finally feel like I know my way around. I have an enormous list of places to go, but here are a few things to try when you’re there.

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Sagan

Published by neophiliac | Filed under Random

Anyone switching to IPv6? My colo and a few others are really hyping it, but while I know that this is real. it feels a little like the Y2K hype. The ‘IP Exhaustion Counter’ has been showing 810 days to exhaustion for almost a week now.

There seem to be a number of factors that are holdiing up mass adoption. There are no IPv6 devices or services that are really compelling (the carrots are moldy), and overhyping the imminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses isn’t helping (your noodle-like stick doesn’t scare me). Then there are the inconveniences; my broadband router can only be managed via IPv4, the docs for my firewall mention IPv6 but they’re pretty difficult to decipher, and my colo’s IPv6 implementation doesn’t use TSP and as such, it’s tricky (for someone who is just getting started with IPv6).

There are sure a lot of addresses in the IPv6 space, though. 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses per /64. I’ll take two, please.

Whack

Published by neophiliac | Filed under Change

Roger van Oech’s book did its job back in the early 80′s, when I first discovered it. It seems to take a lot more now to make me change direction. My 9-year-old asks great questions that often break my lookup habit and make me think; wisdom beats knowledge, especially when the ‘knowledge’ is really just a habituated response.

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