Mobile Data Bandwidth Running Out?

Interesting long-ish post on The Mobile Data Apocalypse, And What It Means To You. Of course, as noted in the posting, the assumptions are made based on the Cisco provided data — Cisco not exactly being a disinterested party when it comes to selling more WiFi and network gear.

The mobile industry is now completing a huge shift in its attitude toward mobile data. Until pretty recently, the prevailing attitude among mobile operators was that data was a disappointment. It had been hyped for a decade, and although there were some successes, it had never lived up to the huge growth expectations that were set at the start of the decade. Most operators viewed it as a nice incremental add-on rather than the driver of their businesses.

But in the last year or so, the attitude has shifted dramatically from “no one is using mobile data” to “oh my God, there’s so much demand for mobile data that it’ll destroy the network.” A lot of this attitude shift was caused by the iPhone, which has indeed overloaded some mobile networks. But there’s also a general uptick in data usage from various sources, and the rate of growth seems to be accelerating.

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The Death Of Uncool

Interesting thoughts from Brian Eno on the impact art and culture diversity and availability is having on society. I share his hope that this will translate into advances in politics and other attitudes as well.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

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Nokia N97 vs iPhone 3GS

From the Nokia97Forum:

Some of the pluses of N97 over iPhone are:

– Full Qwerty keyboard (iPhone doesn’t have)
– 5MP fully functional digital camera with Carl Zeiss optics and several editing options(iPhone has 3MP basic camera)
– Camera dual LED Flash to take pictures in dark (iPhone useless in dark)
– FM Transmitter (iPhone doesn’t have)
– Stereo bluetooth 2.0 (A2DP) (iPhone doesn’t have A2DP)
– TV out, (iPhone doesn’t have)
– expandable memory with 16gb microSD card (takes total memory to 48GB!) – iPhone has only 16 or 32mb max with no expansion.
– Unlocked so will work on any carrier (locked to AT&T in US and in most countries, where not prohibited by law)
– Widgets so you don’t have to opens most used apps like Calendar, email etc., (no widgets in iPhone)
– Flexibility to self sign a lot of free applications and install (iPhone doesn’t provide this flexibility)
– Resistive touch screen so you can use it with your gloves on or with stylus in winter (you’ll have to use your fingers only with iPhone)
– better screen resolution at 640×360 (iPhone has 480×320)
– Removable battery so you can carry one extra or replace on easily(iPhone does builtin battery)

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Snow Leopard Secrets

Learn all about Snow Leopard’s secrets using the Secrets app.

The hidden tweaks are a mix of features that didn’t quite make the final cut or were deemed too slight to deserve their own tick-box, and deep system changes that normally call for terrifying terminal commands. And they don’t stop at Snow Leopard: Secrets, which has been around in one form or another for a while now, has collected a huge library of “gray” settings for other apps too, from Apple’s various software suites to civilian apps like Skype and NetNewsWire. The app is free, and installs as a PrefPane.

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SuperFreakonomics Gets It SuperFreaking Wrong

Apparently, in their haste to produce an even more controversial followup to the first book, the authors of Freakonomics get the facts colossally wrong (from the New Yorker):

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modeling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate.

“The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them,” he observes. “The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking.” Pierrehumbert carefully dissects one of the arguments that Levitt and Dubner seem to subscribe to—that solar cells, because they are dark, actually contribute to global warming—and shows it to be fallacious. “Really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you,” he writes, that this claim “is complete and utter nonsense.”

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Google Wave Guide

If you have received a Google Wave invite only to login and stare blankly at the screen and say ‘ok, what now’ get yourself over to view the excellent online Google Wave guide. This is the most comprehensive guide to gWave that I have seen so far.

And if you are too impatient to read through the wealth of information there, here is a quick tip: In the search box in the upper left replace the text ‘in:inbox’ with ‘with:public’. This will show you a listing of all of the current waves that are marked as public. You can further search by including additional tags after public (for example: ‘with:public cincinnati’ for cincinnati related public waves).

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Google Wave Sandbox

From Read/Write Web:

Google just opened the Google Wave developer sandbox for federation. Developers can now begin prototyping tools against WaveSandbox.com. Google tested earlier versions of Wave with a small number of developers on the Wave sandbox and this server will now become the platform for testing interoperability between different Wave servers. Google also released a how-to document that explains how to set up a Java-based Wave server over the weekend. More details about how to implement the Wave Federation Protocol can be found here.

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