Small Fish, Big Pond

Quote of the day:

I used to make fun of the Green Lantern for being vulnerable to the color yellow. Then I choked on my orange juice one morning and nearly suffocated.

…

*sigh*

BTW I’m wearing my Quantz failure shirt today. I like his comic so much I should permanently add a link to it and boost his google rank by an infinitesimally small amount.

I always get tons of comments from people while wearing his shirts.

I’ve said it before but whenever I mention it around others online it starts an instant flame war.

Augmented reality is ALL gimmick.

So to quantify that I’m going to post some evidence. Remember these apps are supposed to simplify you life by making it easier to find other people or locations in your immediate area. Try to keep in mind the usefulness of what you see; don’t fall into the, “Gee shucks! It put words over a live camera image!” mentality.

Image 1 Layar:
This is a layer on Layar that shows where government stimulus money went. It’s basically tying the money to the buildings in charge of the department that got the money.

The Augmented Reality version on the left.

Look closely and imagine you’re trying to got to one of these locations. Apart from the useful radar map in the corner the dots don’t match up to anything in the real life image. It fails on every level in that you are now constricting your vision in to a 320×480 rectangle full of data that has no relation to anything else. Other than turning to face your destination and walking a straight line (through the buildings and across busy streets) you have no help in getting to your destination. And you lose awareness of your surroundings while increasing the danger of walking into moving traffic, an open manhole cover, or other pedestrians.

Now focus on the normal version on the right. Basically what google maps or any existing navigation software can get you.

Wow, now we can actually see where those dots are in relation to each other and our location, not to mention how to navigate the streets to get to them. Compare the radar image in the corner to see that you’re still facing basically the same direction but the data makes so much more sense now.

Image 2 Stalqer
This is a social networking program that shows where your friends. Imagine you’re in a big city and you need to find all 113 of your GPS phone carrying friends within a 50k radius.

AR version:

From our view from what is apparently the Carlton Ritz valet drop off we can see that buddy Rob with the $90 pre-worn cap from American Eagle is hiding behind a stack of luggage to the right. Just left of center our buddy the “The Larch,” is in the trunk of a car, and under the hood some dude in a suit is getting a picture with Richmond. Thanks to AR It looks like there’s a party in the Ritz parking lot and everybody’s invited!

Normal version:

Now we can actually see where everybody is. Which is the point of the whole app in the first place!

Now the usually disclaimer. AR is actually quite amazing when deployed correctly, however nothing available on a phone currently is at that level. Not to mention that it currently being shoe-horned into gimmicky uses that provide nothing other than “Gee Shucks!” moments. I have a friend who was toying with AR on his phone pointing to me the direction that all his contacts were which ultimately provided me with NO information since they were all across the city. Not to mention that it’s was so inaccurate it pointed to me as being at home 20 miles away.

Watching somebody show off and AR app to somebody else reminds me of when the iPhone app store first opened and iPhone users would use their “lightsaber apps” to have imaginary lightsaber duels. I’m sure they were having fun but it’s the nerd version of a circle-jerk; from the perspective of everybody outside their bubble they look like fools that shouldn’t allowed in public with socially stable individuals.

Here’s hoping that AR eventually evolves into a useful tool that can enrich our lives. But please people open you eyes and quit raving over the current useless tech baubles that only impresses people as blind as yourself.

I usually don’t get a new OS until it’s been out for at least 6 months so it can work out all its bugs. This was a godsend for Vista since I missed out on all the compatibility issues and had a smooth transition from XP. But since the WIN 7 beta went so well for me, and 7 is just a refinement of Vista I decided to install from day one.

Before I mention the install I want to point that Vista is a GREAT OS and light-years beyond XP. People who bad-mouth Vista (looking at you Gizmodo bloggers), either A: just parrot other articles on the web or are Mac fanboys, B: were dumb enough to install a new OS on a 5 year old computer built for XP, or C: installed on day one, got frustrated with the driver issues and never came back or fixed the issues.

Like I said, I installed Vista about 6 months after it came out, on a new system built with up to date components that were Vista certified, and I NEVER had any issues with it. Even now, 2 or 3 years later I can count the number of times I had a system crash on one hand (and I load a lot of buggy betas on my PC), where as XP I could count the number of blue screens I had in a week on one hand. Shadow copy saved ALL of my contacts, notes, tasks, and other PIM info one time when my synch schedules conflicted (due to me tampering where I shouldn’t). And frankly it’s nice not seeing the system slow down to a halt when you get within 10% of C drive being full.

Vista was a great OS and people who say XP was better were fools of one kind or another. That being said Win 7 is MUCH better. Vista was great but is was a bit bloated, Win 7 is a refinement that smoothes the rough corners and makes things a bit more efficient.

That being said, how did the transition go?

Again my system is very good and up to date hardware wise. I have a geforce 9800 GTS video card that can handle high end games. Quad core 6600 intel processor that can handle more than one thing at once. The whole system is 64 bit rather than 32 so I maxed out at 8GB memory, memory is dirt cheap so there is no reason to skimp (Vista and 7 use 1 Gig just to run). And finally for this install I got rid of my last IDE drive and filled the system with SATA2 500GB drives, and two 250GB drives in a RAID0 config to hold the OS.

Again, Win 7 is about 8 years older than XP, don’t install it on 8 year old technology.

The biggest hang-up was that the discounted copy of the Win7 I got is an upgrade edition, not standalone. I didn’t notice when I bought it so I was caught off guard when I couldn’t enter the product key on the newly formatted RAID array. 4 hours later I figured out what was wrong, threw Vista on in 30 minutes and then dropped Win7 on top in another 30 minutes.

So the install of the OS took me:

• 5 hours on Friday to organize and document everything I wanted to carryover (my system was a mess). And like I said before, I prefer to install a new OS clean just to “clean house”. Mac ads describe doing this as a detraction; with as messy as my system (and mine is cleaner than most) is it’s a benefit.
• 5 hours Saturday night to install the OS. 4 was me not noticing my mistake, 30mins me fixing that mistake, and 30 mins to install the OS on the new machine. People gripe about 8 hour install times. Even prepping my files the day before and installing the OS took less time than that. Again don’t upgrade from a mess, install on a newly formatted machine (or throw an old OS on a newly formatted machine and upgrade from that).
• 1 hour to reinstall the programs I wanted on the new machine and to run Windows update.

Except for a 4 hour mistake on my part wondering why I couldn’t load things putting Win 7 on was virtually painless. In a half days amount of time I’m upgraded and have a much cleaner, more organized computer. I’m sure I’ll still discover small tweaks to be made over the next week or two of use but for now everything is back to full operation.

Some key points people upgrading might want to be aware of:

• Upgrade disks need to be run from an existing OS, not to a blank reformatted drive. I don’t know how Microsoft detects the old OS but it needs to be there before it will install.
• When I installed Win 7 from the freshly installed Vista, I reformatted the drive during install and it worked. Again I don’t know how it knew Vista had been there, it must have left some hint in the temporary install setup files.
• All devices were discovered immediately and drivers installed on their own except for a Rosewill dual SATA port card; even the HDTV tuner card was automatic and immediately integrated into Windows Media Center. Most of my hardware is a year old or more.
• Windows Media Player data couldn’t be manually transferred over from Vista, it had to re-detect the library. The ratings and album art are embedded in the tags so they carried over but the Play-Counts are reset to zero; kind of a bummer but I use last.fm to track my music anyway. And with over 45k tracks even in 4 years most still said 0 anyway.
• I couldn’t figure out a way to move the Speech Recognition Training files over. But I hardly use it so it’s no big deal to me.

Bottom line. Easy and cheap if you have a student email address, all for a snappy upto date machine. Ars also has a great overview of of installation and quirks incase you’ve been living in a cave the last 6 months.

Is Japan’s culture dying

Originally uploaded by Kerensky97

I’ve been reading "Dogs and Demons" a book which points out some of the cracks in Japan’s seemingly perfect image. In the process of modernizing since World War II Japan has forsaken much of its historic beauty and style for the sake of being what they now define as modern.
I was noticing that this restaurant looks much more "Japanese" than alot of the places I ate in Japan. At least as far as Japan’s traditional Edo style is concerned. Even from the outside it looks more Japanese than concrete and steel rectangles that define modern Japanese architecture.
It doesn’t show in this pictures but the front is even planted with Japanese maple, now a brilliant red.
Its quite a statement when a Japanese restaurant in the US has a garden not seen outside of a Temple in Tokyo.

Playing Foursquare

Originally uploaded by Kerensky97

Lunch at Kyoto again. This teriyaki donburi is massive, with the california roll I dont think I will finish.
Yay for the weekend!

I’m upgrading my PC to Windows 7 soon. And I’m going to load a full legal copy onto my netbook (replacing the Beta version).

Even though both systems can be upgraded rather than completely reinstalled I like refreshing my installation every few years. I’ll admit that not all the programs I load on my computer are stable mainline programs, a lot of betas and unsupported programs go on and after a year even the best well maintained computer starts to collect dust (KDE on windows can goto hell, talk about screwing with your system!).

Anyway I’m well familiar with the process, usually done over the course of 3 hours on a lazy Saturday afternoon:

1. Backup documents, pics, songs, vids, etc.
- You should be doing this by default but so many people don’t. Personally all my files are kept on separate hard drives which backup to network drives. So wiping an OS has no affect.

2. Backup OS and program files and settings.
- I’ll admit, this mostly involves copying video game saves to a safe place. But some things like Firefox and other frequently used programs may have settings that can’t be exported (although they should!). Write down what you might forget to put on the new system, especially passwords, logins etc. (use xmarks on firefox to sync bookmarks and passwords to the cloud beforehand).

3. Make a list of the programs you have on your existing system so you can add them to the new one.
- This is a good time to eliminate old programs you don’t use. And get upgraded copies of the programs you do use. I keep all installation files in on a separate drive so I can download and replace those copies in the days leading up to the switch and avoid doing it on the new machines.

4. If any driver files are needed get updated copies and load them onto a separate drive so you can load them without a network connection (especially network drivers if needed).

5. Plug the laptop into the second monitor, watch a movie, and start the reformat->install process.

6. Spend the rest of the night installing and testing programs on the computer.

This time should be a bit easier, Techcrunch mentions a new site Ninite that allows you to install multiple programs in one big batch. I’ve seen similar programs to this before but they were all mostly hacks made by individual programmers that worked good customized for their system but was a bit sketchy if you didn’t have the exact same circumstances as they did.

It doesn’t cover all programs but it does cover the core programs that usually get installed first. In fact going over the other programs I have to install Ninite will be doing about 80% of the work that takes up the last and longest step of reinstalling an OS.

Anyway I must truly be a geek at heart, I’m already looking forward to spending the night upgrading my OS. I’ve got chips, salsa, beer, and the Rifftrax for Transformers: revenge of the fallen (plus the RT of Twilight on standby if the install goes long).

I honestly don’t know who’s bad idea it was to make a 7 patty whopper, thank god it will only last 7 weeks, and only in Japan. Although a commenter at Engadget mentioned that you can get one anytime in the US if you ask, I don’t know if that ’s a good thing or a bad thing.

I notice he stops after the first bit. I’m sure most people who polish off one of these is going to be blowing chunks soon after.

But that’s seriously the strangest cross promotion I’ve seen.

Pink Tentacle(via Gizmodo) has an awesome old set of magazine illustrations from Japan predicting what life would be like in the future.

I love this kind of stuff because it’s always so overblown, like the Jetsons which aired in 1962 and takes place in 2062.

2062 seriously?!

Anyway these 1969 images (of life in 1989) from Japan are even better because the majority of the predictions have actually come true (roombas, personal computers, laptops, computers in the classroom, telecommuting, remote surgery). There may not be 1960’s styling but this guy basically saw what life would be like us today (minus the flying car); technically he was 20 years off but still pretty good considering that “computers” in his day took up an entire room, and by “computers” I mean big calculators.

Be sure to check out all three images broken down on the site.

Gathering of Scions SLC
Originally uploaded by Kerensky97

I got a letter in the mail about a Scion gathering today. I used to be in an Xterra club so I thought I’d check it out and find some other people enthusiastic as me about the car. There were some really good looking scions with some impressive work done on them. I’ll have to see if I’m willing to dump money into it like I did the Xterra.

The good looking tc on the end is mine BTW.

The gains in the last week have been almost too rapid that I think we’ll still see days below 8500 in the future. But like I said this is far better than I think anybody could have hoped for at the beginning of this year. Unfortunately the real world we live in feels the fallout longer than the market so even if we jump to 10,000 by Christmas (could you imagine!!) then it will still take a year or so for the real world to stabilize under the highs of Wall Street.

It’s funny that I hear people now saying that with the market at 9000 already that it’s proof that the stimulus bills were unneeded. Um… I think the reason it’s this high already is BECAUSE OF the stimulus bills; this is exactly what they were supposed to do, they just did it better and faster than we thought they would.

That was me in July. Today the DOW broke 10,000 (hasn’t closed yet so I don’t know if it will last the day). All I can say is that from a financial perspective I’m loving it. In May I calculated that if the DOW had stopped at 8000 my 401k would have generally fully recovered in August of this year, every point beyond has just been multiplying my gains.

I never though we’d recover to 10k within the year, let alone by October. Now if we could just get businesses to calm down and start hiring again we’ll be good.

Technically the market hasn’t really done anything ground breaking today, 10000 is an arbitrary number, the real big events occurred in March and July, and today is no different than the last couple months of growth. The point is that it’s a generally steady rise upward to this point which is good.

On the otherhand if you’ve been planning on investing to take advantage of the low market the door is closing; it can’t go up forever and the real time to jump onboard was the first half of this year. Still it’s good to invest over long periods anyway; so there’s no reason to wait before re-investing in the market (my co-workers think this is crazy and that Obamma is going to destroy the market and the country in the next year or so, but I work in the reddest area of the reddest state). If you haven’t felt confident about the market in over a year now is the time to get your feet wet again.

This is all very reassuring news that the economy has more bright days ahead of it than dark.

Having the wherewithal to buy tickets to Flogging Molly before the show I was actually able to get in this time since they regularly sellout the venue, a few outside weren’t so lucky and resorted to begging for tickets. It’s surprising they’ve grown this much considering the first time I saw them play In SLC they were just an unknown band on tour with Bouncing Souls people were waiting on to finish the set and get to the main act. Now they’re huge.

They’re touring with Hepcat an old school Ska band that has been around forever but doesn’t release a whole lot of new CDs. And frankly I enjoyed the Hepcat portion of the show more than Flogging Molly. I like energetic ska music like Suburban Legends but sometimes some good ska music to just chill out with is great. The two lead vocalists Greg and Alex were great at setting a good mood to groove to some great ska.

I made a point to go buy a couple Hepcat CDs at the swag table before the post Molly rush crowded the place too much. I was surprised to see Flogging Molly was smart enough to have a credit card reader that their table to run cards. I make a point to bring plenty of cash to shows but I always see countless others who don’t have the experience to plan ahead and end up passing on buying merchandise. Considering how much the artists make off merchandise sales at a show I’m amazed more artists don’t bring card scanners.

I usually don’t have any problems with the staff serving drinks at In the Venue/Club Sound; the servers are usually pretty nice and take care of people well. This time I was pissed however, I think we can all agree that people who cut in front of line when there are 20 people waiting to get a drink are the scum of the earth and deserve a special place in hell. Especially the ones who give that smug look at you after they get served as if to say, “Suckers!”

And what can you do? When I got close enough to the front I’d give a, “Hey!” with a thumb over my shoulder to the back of the line; but even then most people got their drinks anyway, and the people in line with me just looked at the floor and saved their criticisms for muttering under their breath when the line-cutter moved on. Mandy Patinkin does a great job of how we all wish this kind of scenario would usually play out:

But even with people shouting that they shouldn’t be cutting Club Sound’s barmaid Carrie served them anyway. So if line-cutters are assholes that deserve to be kicked out, what does that make her for being the staff that serves them anyway?

I’ve noticed this problem alot in the service industry that goes along with the “The customer is always right” proverb. Some jackass ignores the implied or posted rules but the staff helps them anyway because they don’t want to risk losing a single sale. But what about the 20 other good rule-obeying customers they just alienated by helping somebody that cut in front? Logically a business proprietor would tell the rule breaker to fuck themselves and an lose the 1 bad customer and better serve the 20 good customers, instead in the vein of “The customer is always right” they commonly serve the asshole and screw over the majority.

The sad part is that people put up with it anyway like sheep. Even after remarking, “I can’t believe she’s serving them even though they obviously cut!” I watched a girl leave a substantial tip anyway. Well I’m sticking by my response to the girls comment, “I’m closing my tab, not tipping, and never buying a drink from here again.” Although that’s a lie, I did leave a tip on my recipt:

“Tell Carrie not to serve people who cut”

If a business provides bad service they should receive a bad tip if any at all. They’re lucky we don’t walk out when the staff symbolically joins in the “Suckers!” slight given to the people who waited patiently for them to do their job.

I know that tips are shared among servers and bartenders so good servers at Club Sound are punished as well. Which is too bad since I know two of them are great bartenders and deserve big tips, hence the “Tip” on the receipt that a coworker’s bad decisions are costing them as well and they should set her straight or do themselves a favor and replace her. Because the tip they lost from me is nothing compared to the fact that I refuse to get drinks there from now on. I’m not a frequent customer but losing $15-20 each time I go is more substantial than their share of one nights tip.

That may seem a bit extreme but really it’s more of the straw that broke the camel’s back, the $14.40 price above is for TWO draft beers, and one of those was Coors Light (All other taps were dry at the time, I had no choice); I could get 3 pitchers at Cheers to You for that price. So fuck Club Sound, their overpriced drinks, and lousy service. I’m never buying a drink there again and I recommend you do the same if only to send a message that a tip line on a receipt is no guarantee that you actually deserve the tip.

Back to the concert.

After 30minutes in line I missed Flogging Molly’s opening of course. I was one of the first in line when the last band ended too. I’m sorry for those behind me, they probably missed half the show. The crowd was out of control; people crowding around the bar entrance were jumping up and down or moshing and they’d invariably bump into people coming out with drinks in their hand then complain about it. “Screw you, you jumped into me, what did you think would happen?” I slid into a relatively calm corner and watched the show.

I have to say Flogging Molly is great but I think alot of the music is better listened to as it is on the albums. That is more introspective, music and not “mosh-pit, kicking and shoving” music. Songs that are introspective ballads on the albums were sped up to bouncing high-energy songs, and high energy songs from the albums were so high tempo it was hard to sing along with them. I almost feel sorry for poor Bridget Regan working a fiddle at that speed. She must have massively strong arms to play shows like this every night.

Speaking of which it was great that the normally bad sound mixing at In the Venue was good enough that the fiddle and penny whistle sounded really good. I noticed that Rancid the night before had good sound too. Did In the Venue get a new sound guy or has he finally figured out how to mix for the site?

It was a great show but the crowd that Flogging Molly gathers is kind of an irritation to me. A UK friend at last.fm once mentioned how all Americans pretend to be what they think of as “Irish”. Maybe a bit of an overstatement, we’re not all like that, but Flogging Molly sure draws that crowd. It’s almost like they’re there because they think it gives them some tie to a non-existant Irish heritage even though Flogging Molly is a US band playing Irish-American Punk and far separated from traditional Irish music and culture. It’s the same crowd that claims the reason they drink too much is because “I’m 1/16th Irish!”. No you’re just a drunk. The same crowd that think all Irish people dance like Michael Flatley or Riverdance even though Flatley is American. I actually saw some girls in the crowd doing their own approximation to step dancing during the show!

Most kiddies seemed like they were there for the scene and not the music. Whenever the word Irish came out of Dave King’s mouth a loud cheer would go up regardless of the context. But when there was a reference to the seminal “Irish-Punk” group The Pogues less than half the crowd cheered or understood who they were. Earlier when talking to a self described “Huge Fan” of Flogging Molly I asked if she liked The Pogues or The Tossers as well and all I got back was a blank stare. I think alot of the self professed diehard fans here were those group of newbies that like them because it’s cool in American to claim to be Irish and listen to Irish-American music. Which is fine so long as you don’t start to confuse yourself into thinking that it really means you know something of or are connected to real Irish culture.

Other than spending 30 minutes waiting to get an overpriced beer it was a good show, with Hepcat really being the highlight of the night in my mind. Flogging Molly was overrated. They were still great, I only say that in context of the fact that all the kiddies coming out of the show were acting like it was a transcendent experience when it wasn’t. It was a good show, but I’d hardly agree that “I could die happy now”, as I overheard somebody say on the way out.

CDs Purchased:

I hate to say it. No, I love it. The Sidekick crash validates everything I’ve been saying about cloud computing. It’s a great business model to allow customers to backup data to but don’t let your business depend on it.

The T-Mobile sidekick held all user data in the cloud. Instead of syncing locally with your personal computer like Windows Mobile, Palm WebOS, or iPhone, the data would sync to the cloud. It seems like an excellent idea since your phone becomes a standalone pocket terminal with the power of the web making up it’s backend processor. It seems like such a good idea that ALL THREE of the above operating services are making progress to offer or transition to that business model.

I’ve been harping on about how I don’t trust giving all my info to somebody else to keep safe. Not only are you putting all your eggs in one basket, you’re letting somebody else hold the basket. You assume that they’ll take better care of it than you would but you have nothing but trust and hope to keep your info safe.

Now all Sidekick users have learned firsthand what happens when you put all your trust into the cloud and the cloud fails you. Not that it couldn’t happen to an individual who syncs their data locally rather than to the cloud. I don’t think there is anybody in the computing world who hasn’t accidentally wiped out a file or database only to realize that it wasn’t backed up. The difference is that when that happens all you can do is blame yourself. In the cloud it’s somebody else’s problem and it’s out of your hands. For some people this is a major selling point of the cloud; I’ve argued in chat rooms with people who say that the whole reason to trust the cloud is that the companies running the cloud are much more careful than we are, and always plan ahead and have an alternative incase something goes wrong.

But just like blind trust in the anything, you’re only going to set yourself up for disappointment.

Already the rumors are flying about who’s to blame (I guess that’s the true benefit of the cloud, when the screw up DOES happen you can blame sue somebody else for your blind trust). People are saying that it’s proof you should have an iPhone rather than a Sidekick, some say it’s the fault of outsourcing to third parties (I work for a telco, outsourcing is par the course and always has been), others are saying it’s proof that anything touched by Microsoft will fail. Some crazies in the comment boards are even saying that this is a foreshadowing of Windows 7 failing on release and the it’ll be the moment that Linux/OSX will finally rise to the top and conquer all other OS’s!

They’re just trying to make others look bad and make their own gadget or fanboy crush seem validated. There’s only one real thing to be learned from this and I’ll say it yet again.
Never put all your trust and critical info in one new technology, no matter how amazing and revolutionary people make it sound, especially cloud computing. It’s great for backups, great for storing a copy you can access remotely. But always be sure that you have your own “backup plan”
for emergencies.

Maybe I got that from my time in the military; putting your trust and effort into a team gives you the ability to move mountains. But before you do that you need to make sure that you have taken care of all your own personal issues.

Make sure you’re squared away personally before you become part of the team.
Make sure your important data is personally backed up before you send it to the cloud.

Technologizer.com has a quick post in praise of wires and I was inspired to do a quick write up from a Network Design perspective.

When I was working selling Cisco products I was constantly annoyed when a customer wanted an all wireless network solution. I’d try everything I could to persuade them to include some wired connections for all non-mobile computers, usually in vain. I knew that as soon as it went into full production the network would be so full of errors and slow connections that they’d be calling us back complaining that it was the problem with out hardware.

The Basics:

-Wired connections get dedicated, full speed, two way connections between you computer and the switch, and always at a faster speed.

-Wireless connections have to share bandwidth with one way communication on a high latency connection at a slower speed that is less secure.

Speed:

Wired connections get 1000Mbps (100 legacy) connections. Wireless get 100Mbps (56Mbps legacy) at “optimal” conditions, in real life this is usually less since speed decreases and latency increases with range.

Multiple users:

Wired gets 1Gb to each user; when you plug in a new device that device gets a 1Gb connection as well, upto the max ports of the switch. 24 ports, 24 users getting a full gig both ways (switch backplane speeds may be a limiting factor although most switches get 48G backplane speeds). Wireless connections divide the total bandwidth among users, the first user potentially gets 100Mb but that same amount is divided among users; so 10 users concurrently would theoretically only get 10Mb each.

Latency:

Overhead latency on a wired connection is minimal, on a 1Gb connection it’s often less than 5% of the line speed. On a wireless connection latency is huge, and the more users there are the more latency there is (in the above example 10 users on a 100Mbps connection would likely get 1-3Mbps per user).

Wireless works in a round-robin fashion polling devices to see if they need to transmit or receive data, so even if you’re the only device using traffic the AP will interrupt your data flow to ask all the silent but connected devices if they have anything to transmit. Imagine a busy intersection where only once car can go through on each light, compared to the two lane highway that wired provides. Because of this most commercial wireless Access Points can only handle 5-7 concurrent devices, business class devices 10-20 before latency causes the AP to lockup.

Security:

To listen to a connection between two wired devices you need to have a direct physical connection to the line in between them as a “man-in-the-middle”. Wireless beams out all data in a 360 area so that anybody within range can listen to the packets. Even if the data is encrypted the packets still go out and they can still be gathered by an outside device.

Convenience:

Finally wireless has a benefit! Or does it?
Wired connections may be harder to run from one device to another, but the speeds are MUCH higher. When moving large files, let’s say an HD movie, from your server to a laptop; if you can move the file faster by walking the laptop over to a wired connection and moving the file then walking back to your starting point is the wireless connection more convenient? Assuming you disregard the “laziness factor” of course.

I regularly re-copy my entire 300GB music collection from my desktop to my backroom server in case one or the other dies. It required running wires through half the house but the result is a 3 hour transfer over gig rather than a multiday transfer over wireless, during which the wireless connection is overloaded with file transfer traffic. A 1 time inconvenience running wires has resulted in thousands of hours of saved time.

Summary:

Wireless is awesome. It’s great to sit in a coffee shop and surf the net or to stream some music into the kitchen or patio through your laptop. But it’s a nice convenience that should be built as a low speed, low security option on top of a good wired network.

This scales up to business sized deployments. If you’re going to be putting desktop computers anywhere, hardwire them in, they’re not going to be moving so they don’t need to be wireless. Save the wireless for the few laptops or VoIP phones you’ll have in your business. And if your laptop is frequently used at a desk, leave a wired connection there that you can make use of when you’re not on the move (same at home). Computers are smart enough now that you can run wireless, sit down at a desk, plugin the wired connection, and keep doing things on the network without rebooting.

Every wireless computer that you take out of the wireless network frees up some bandwidth for the devices that don’t have the option to plugin. And even though it takes some time and money to run wires, it only needs to be done once. The savings you’ll get from not needing extra APs to cover all the computers in your business will likely cover most of the cost of getting some wiring run to your computers, and you’ll have network speed and reliability increase by a factor of ten.

…I guess iPhone isn’t a phone, as it’s users like to say “It’s in a category of its own.” -the category without Flash.

But I kid, I kid. The real big news is that hopefully Adobe is going to release a version of Flash that isn’t an insanely bloated resource hog. Even on high-end desktops Flash takes up way too much processor power for the measly onscreen output you get. Considering so many of the band websites are rendered in full or partial flash it’s a huge gripe of mine. There seems to be a law in Japan that an artist’s web page must only be rendered in 30MB worth of Flash (or a crummy text only version region restricted for phones in Japan).

In addition to traditional OS’s Windows Mobile and Palm’s WebOS will get flash by the end of the year, Android and Blackberry should follow early next year. iPhone is still left out in the cold due to Apple and Steve Job’s restrictions that lock down the phone and limit what apps have access to the phone.

It’s the common thread of the iPhone. It runs smooth as butter since everything is filtered through Steve’s approval to keep it fast. The rest of us may have phones that aren’t as smooth but we have the freedom to do as we please. Although considering how ubiquitous Flash is on the net I think Apple should really make an exception to get it on their phone.