More rants of a dead man

I used to work for AT&T for a short time, and I very quickly learned why people say most of the things they do about the phone company, large buisnesses and other negative things in general.

But then there’s tmobile. They’re not really a phone company, they’re a cell service provider. But my they seem to have their act together. Most technical people know that given a few pieces of good technology it doesn’t take long to click together to create a truly cool or innovative product. All of the pieces are there, you just have to put them together. This is a prototype, and proves the concept. Rolling it out as a reliable service to a huge userbase is quite another thing. Which is why nothing all that useful ever comes out of the phone company. But tmobile truly outshines the rest (at least in the united states).

If you think about it all the other service providers have great networks and don’t drop calls and offer you more minutes than are physically possible to use in one month. Brilliant. Marketing at its finest.

But tmobile actually made a gadget that lets you make ‘cell’ phone calls using the cell network or a wifi hotspot. How genius is that. Not that the idea is so remarkable, or that some hacker even sat down and got it to work. But THEY DID DO IT, and they rolled it out to a real customer base and it really works. Meanwhile all the other cell companies are selling more minutes. Yay.

And now they’re rolling out service for google’s gphone or whatever it’s called. Granted this isn’t as cool as wifi cells from a tmobile engineering point of view, but it shows that as big a company as they are, they are nimble enough to produce and roll out real interesting new products while everybody else can’t even start to play catch up.

In 1999 I got some x-10 gizmos and the computer interface, and in 2001 I swiped a voicemodem from somewhere. So I was able to write some software that plays my answering machine messages for me when I walk in the house and turns on the lights, and when I get a message, it emails me the wav file to me at work so I don’t have to call home to get my messages. Not a terribly brilliant set of ideas, but all it took was a couple of programs and some really really cheap hardware. It’s not that hard, but now they sell this for hundreds of dollars as home automation.

I know if I were to try and sell my setup I would fail miserably, it’s set up for my house because that’s all I wanted it to do, but I can just tell that the engineers over at tmobile are just as into getting things done as all the other hackers in the world, and they obviously have a management team that allows them to really make products based on their cool work.

Everybody tells me I’m doom and gloom pessimistic all the time, and I am, so every once in a while when I see something truly GOOD, I like to say something nice about it.

In the good old days of writing software we used to ‘reorganize’ it, now we ‘refactor’ it.

Stackoverflow.com is a wonderful site that lets you ask questions and get answers from real geeks. Like the kind that you find the picture of on the front of all those 800+ page books you find slathered on the discount counter at barnes and nobles.

It’s kind of sad though, stackoverflow has undone years of work google has spent on building a great search engine, and has reduced it to a human effort, which was once done by a computer.

We call that progress.

http://www.youtube.com/5friendsvote

Somebody paid all these famous people to spread an email virus to convince you that voting for the lesser of two evils is a good thing.
They’re just as bad as the problem, they’re instigating people to make it worse.
A vote for the presidency is a vote for our system of government as it stands.

I never understood the top level domain thing. Why was there only .com .net .org .edu and the few others? You create the problem of mcdonalds having to buy mcdonalds.com mcdonalds.net mcdonaldssucks.com and mcdonaldssucks.net, and so on.

If everybody was allowed to register top level domains themselves, there would be no problem.  Now they’re finally getting around to it, and apparently it costs $15K or so to register a tld and only registrars can run them or something like that. I don’t keep up with the details. But the whole thing seems a big waste to me. There’d be far less confusion and problems if I could just register ‘deadpelican’.

Which brings me to another DNS problem. Everybody around the world whines that the americans own DNS and can do whatever they want and charge whatever they want and it should be taken over by the UN.

I have a better idea. Why not run your own DNS system. You live in germany, tell your government to run some dns servers that are isolated from everybody else’s dns servers and then you can register whatever names you want and aren’t beholden to anybody else. You’d then advertise a little that if you want the german domain set you use this set of DNS servers. And being all nationalistic, you’d get quiet a few takers.

Of course all the people who paid big bucks for domain names would suddenly find that they have to go register themselves with lots of different country’s dns systems. Yes this would make for a lot of confusion, but if it was planned out and perhaps there was an easy way to switch and maintain which dns you use for what, it could be a good thing:

Sure there are problems, all the bad guys would register all the common names and spyware you to death, I’m not saying there aren’t lots of problems, but it gets me that all the people who are complaining that they don’t like what the americans are doing are well within their power to do something about it, but they don’t, they complain about the bad americans.

What’s not microsoft about them.
They’re the name everybody thinks of when you think of the biggest mover in the sector for the past bunch
of years. They are a huge goliath of a company. They are trying to take over desktop office applications, they are trying to take over the browser, so they can do more stuff on your desktop (if they were truly not evil
they’d have helped an existing product).
They make more money than anybody else in their market.
I rather thought everybody figured they were already the next microsoft.

IBM is like britian, once on top and now happily living life as a very successful has been.

I have a friend who says we’re all in trouble when ipv4 address blocks get all used up.

from uncensored:

Nobody seems to want to implement IPv6 in any significant capacity — there’s no short term ROI.  On the
other hand, when that last block of IPv4 is allocated, all hell is going to break loose.  Everyone knows
this, but we’re headed straight for that target anyway.
from me:
Sep 26 2008 10:31am from Ford II @uncnsrd
I think given the state of the economy at the moment, I can’t see why anybody would want to spend money on something with no ROI.
I don’t think all hell is going to break loose when the last block is allocated. Ip’s are a commodity like
anything else, as it becomes scarce, the price will go up.
If all the blocks are taken (by whichever acronymed agency hands them out) then the companies that have
block A’s will start selling vpn access to smaller blocks, and there will rise an exchange of ip trading.
This will certainly be a lot cheaper than EVERYBODY switching to ipv6, so likely something like that will
happen.