Cutting the Cord

According to the Economist more and more people are cutting the cord in the United States:

IF YOU want to save money, cut the cord. In these difficult times ever more Americans are heeding this advice and dropping their telephone landlines in favour of mobile phones (see article). Despite some of the flakiest mobile-network coverage in the developed world, one in four households has now gone mobile-only. At current rates the last landline in America will be disconnected sometime in 2025.

I cut the cord about a year ago. I had kept a landline to make international calls (everything else went over the cell phone), but Skype, the AT&T cell phone international calling plan, and the incessant public information messages from the city tipped me over the edge.

Two things popped out at me from the above paragraph, the first is that 25% of households are mobile only, a much higher number than I expected, and that the trend will be complete in 2025, which is only 16 years away.

Given that DSL/ADSL speeds have not kept up with those provided by cable and fiber, there would seem to be little point in investing in copper phone lines anymore.

WebInno 22

I was at the Web Innovators Group last night. Overall an interesting batch of presentations. The two that caught my eye were BuySellAds which allows advertisers to control which sites their ads are displayed on (presumably these sites need to be part of the BuySellAds network,) and Fluent Mobile which allows users to get news content on their iPhone.

Would You Buy A Car Without An Engine?

There is are many days when I am really glad I left the old country and settled here in the USA, and this is one of them.

I just finished reading this post by Paul Thurrott entitled “Microsoft documents how Windows 7 E customers can get a browser” where he excepts the steps users need to take to install a browser because the main release of Windows 7 in Europe won’t include a browser.

We have known this for a while but I still think this is in-sane!

Selling an consumer operating system without a browser is like selling a car without an engine.

Imagine for a moment a trip to the car showroom where you can pick whatever car you want only it doesn’t have an engine. You need to make arrangements to procure your own engine and install it in the car yourself.

Unix Toolbox

A friend pointed me to this very useful list of Unix/Linux/BSD commands, worth taking a look at and bookmarking.

SMART

Given that two of my drives failed in quick succession, I have been getting to know SMART, specifically the smartmontools package which has been very useful, as well as this article “Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART“.

And the failed drives will be destroyed first by being overwritten with zeros and then by using a hammer.

Update on CentOS 5.3

I tried my best with CentOS 5.3 but it had a serious problem on my core i7 motherboard, for some reason everything was running about half as fast as it should have been, cpu bound application were spending a lot more time than they should have been in system land. I was getting better performance running under VMware on my MacPro!

I posted a questions to the CentOS forums and, getting no answer after 24 hours, decided to install Fedora 11, which seems to work well so far. The 150+ updates which are installed on top of a fresh install are hardly inspiring given that Fedora 11 came out barely 3 weeks ago, but everything seems to be ok so far.

Except for two drives failures in quick succession, same model and same amount of run time, both ran out of spare sectors within days if each other.

Recharge Sockets

Nice to see that the Europeans have adopted a standard for phone recharge sockets (in French on Le Monde).

I wonder when this is going to happen here in the US? Perhaps the fact that Europe is going that way will tip the balance in the US automatically.

Personally I would like to see a wireless charging standard for these devices, including iPods. My $80 toothbrush can do it (and I don’t need to pay extra for the charger,) so why can’t my $200 cell phone/iPod/whatever… do it too.

Interviewed by Steve Arnold

I was lucky to be interviewed by Steve Arnold for his “Search Wizards Speak” feature. The full interview is here.

I have known Steve for 10+ years and he and I worked together on a project for a client in Rochester, NY.

Really big Kindle

Apparently Amazon is about to release a really large Kindle (NY Times, AppleInsider.)

I am wondering if this is a good idea. Part of the appeal of the Kindle is that it is very portable, you can just toss it into a bag, a satchel, a handbag, take it with you and taking it out wherever you are and using it. Making it larger is going to make it a lot less transportable. We put up with the challenge of transporting laptops because they are so multi-function, and I am not sure that the Kindle is on the same level.

Then again I don’t know what the size is yet.

Muting Noisy Websites

Here is an interesting idea, muting noisy websites. Like a lot of people I listen to music on my computer and the only choice I have when I come across a noisy web site (ads most of the time) is to mute everything.

Apparently Apple is looking at implementing such a feature.

It should not be too difficult to come up with a plugin which allows me to selectively mute websites, or an application which does the same for other applications.