Sent using blackberry

Comcast owns the local cable monopoly, and is the only provider of terrestrial high-speed Internet in the area. Comcast is a monopoly, and they own a lot of the local infrastructure for transmitting bits over wire, which is generally recognized as one of the best ways of transporting electric binary numbers over moderately large distances fairly quickly and cheaply.

T-Mobile USA is a division of a German monopoly, Deutsche Telekom--but in the United States of America it's in a fierce competition with three other national mobile telecommunications carriers. T-Mobile leases the necessary last-hop infrastructure from the federal government, which while useful for connecting highly-mobile targets is often considered inefficient and limited in speed given contention and interference.

It seems almost brain-dead obvious that the wired carier--Comcast--should have the better Internet rates. At the moment, they're advertising to rates for my area: $24.95/month for 1Mbps down and 384kbps up; or $42.95/month 15Mbps down and 3Mbps up.

With an existing family plan for T-Mobile (voice), one can add a second line for $5/month, and get a flat-rate data tariff for $25/month on top of that. That means that the line would cost an even $30/month--just over the $24.95/month of Comcast's cheaper plan, and well below the $42.95/month of their premium plan (excluding taxes and other fees on each). The T-Mobile plan supports High Speed Packet Access usage at 14Mbps up and 5.8Mbps down--much closer to the higher Comcast tier.

Admittedly, this requires the purchase of a GSM to WiFi bridge, but a Comcast plan would also require the purchase of a cable modem, or a monthly lease, the final rate of which becomes about equivalent.

Additional qualifications:
a) Of course this only matters if you actually get a UMTS connection where you live, in-doors. A UMTS repeater might be an option, but isn't always.
b) Sending packets over the air will have higher latency in almost all cases than sending them over a wire. Comcast would have to really screw something up for this not to be the case.

My biggest argument against switching to a mobile connection primarily is that you would most likely lose a directly-addressable IPv4 address. IPv6 could of course render this moot, and the increased filtering and the failure of net-neutrality has already gone a long way of doing this anyway.

Research In Motion is a Canadian based company responsible for popularizing the now genericized term BlackBerry. They have their own line of BlackBerries.

They have also been called Lawsuits in Motion given their propensity to fight battles in court over tenuous patents rather than via creating better products.

BlackBerry is a common noun, meaning either a small berry in the rubus genus, or more commonly today, any mobile phone that has support for real-time or semi-real-time push email.

The first company to coin the term BlackBerry was Canadian-based Research In Motion, but by no means are they the only company to produce BlackBerries which has through aggressive use as a noun by both RIM and its partners (noticeably Verizon Wireless who uses the tag Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry and uses the term as a noun in its advertisements).

Other companies that currently make BlackBerries include Nokia, HTC, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola and a host of other mobile phone companies. It's argued that to be classified as a BlackBerry, you also need to have a slow, unstable, and basic web browser, but this appears to no longer be the case as even the Research in Motion mobile devices have announced that they will be switching to a webkit-based browser making it the last popular maker of BlackBerries to do so.

Apple Computers has a business section of its online iTunes Store, but ironically usage of any of these programs for commercial use (i.e., what would be expected in a business situation) is prohibited by the terms of service.

Routing is handled by servers at Opera, and the computer on your desk is addressed as "unite://computername.username.operaunite.com". Where possible connections are peer-to-peer, in just the way that the internet was originally envisioned, but much routing will be through the Unite proxy. Conspiracy fans have long posited that the proliferation of NATs and Firewalls is part of a process to divide the internet into "publishers" and "consumers", and Opera is happy to play up their part in reversing this process…

I remember when the Mozilla browsers first added in-browser FTP and HTTP engines, which seemed like a neat idea, but as these were add-ons or extensions, their reach was even less than that of the Opera web browser.

This is a neat idea, which I would hope would be picked-up by other entities. The return to a universal publisher model of the web would be a good thing for everyone as it not only provides the masses with greater power, but it would liberate the minds of the non-technically gifted.

In an odd trend, when the web was younger, it seemed more common for most users to have a web page of some level, just to have their say--even among the non techies. Grandma would have a cookie recipe posted, while mom and dad would highlight what's going on with their kids. These days, doing this is considered a cyber-space oddity; the exception rather than the norm. People have moved from a democratic model to the walled garden social networks which has limited their expressive power, but provided a comfortable cookie-cutter communication experience. The current mentality has shifted to the believe that the common people need an environment managed by a large corporation to tell them how to express themselves.

If the idea behind Opera Unite catches on, the victory will not be that users have yet another way of making data available, but that it will cause a mental shift back towards what Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned, a web where users had control of their own information and the masses were the soul of the web.

There has been discussion of including a ballot screen for choosing alternative software packages in the upcoming version of MicroSoft's Windows Operating System version 7. While this has been discussed in the past, most recently this is related to the ongoing European antitrust investigations of Microsoft, and center on the exclusive nature of Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser.

The proposal would allow users to easily select their preferred software to install from the original system installation instead of making them do so afterwards. More importantly, providing the interfaces for tighter integration would let users choose from a wider selection of options, including those that are not pre-installable. This would not be much different from the distributors of most other operating systems--somebody who installs SuSE Linux chooses from several web browsers that integrate just as well into a unified desktop environment (and, admittedly, many more that don't try and integrate themselves to the same extent).

This is much different that the criticisms being put forward, such as:
"The idea of having a ballot screen as a whole is a ridiculous idea. The entire purpose of this ballot screen would be to promote competing products within Windows. Hello!!! Do I really need to explain to you how ridiculous that is? You can't honestly look me in the eyes monitor and not laugh a little inside at the thought of this. To use some of my wacky (and somewhat amusing!) analogies again, that's like Pepsi putting a label on their drinks saying "Have you tried Coke lately?" or General Motors hanging a little air freshener in all of their cars with the message "Perhaps you would prefer a Toyota?" Come on, it's crazy!"

This is instead much closer to the situation of choosing between the Toyota ZZ engine that comes stock, or a Chrystler Hemi if the user wants to feel more power, or a Honda L engine if the user would rather bias the design towards efficiency. Although not all car manufacturers will let you choose an arbitrary engine to fit your taste, most provide some degree of flexibility: Subaru lets me choose an Impreza from 160hp to 300hp, Volkswagen lets me choose between diesel and petro fuel in their Golf and has announced a hybrid engine option.

The problem is that MicroSoft doesn't offer any real options. While they offer several varieties of the same software distribution, this is just one software package that has been crippled in increasingly severe ways to create lower value variations. One way around this is to force MicroSoft to license their software to third-party distributors who would choose what software to build a distribution around.

The Graffiti Network or Graffiti Networks project was created by Andy Pavlo (Brown) and Ning Shi (Brown) as part of a networked systems class by John Jannotti at Brown University.

The project specifies as its motivation the the lack either user anonymity or long-term data permanents in existing peer-to-peer network systems such as BitTorrent. It lists as advantages for their system:
1. A newly arriving peer can still download files even if all other peers have long disconnected
2. A peer does not need to know about the existence of other peers
3. A tracker does not need multiple peers in order to enforce tit-for-tat policies.

The first two points seem reasonable to discuss from current information, although the third point is a little more unclear as the final paper has not been published. In BitTorrent, tit-for-tat is a method that peers employ to prevent freeloading. If a client notices that a peer is not returning desired data at the same rate as the client is providing the peer with requested data, it will throttle or terminate the connection. Some trackers may also implement fairness logic based upon reported upload counts, but this is often open to manipulation.

Metcalfe's Law indicates that a network's value increases with its size, and this holds true for peer-to-peer networks as they rely on connected nodes to transfer data. A peer-to-peer network with only one node is pointless as the node either has the data it wants--in which case it can't give the data to anyone--or it needs data, and has no source from which to retrieve it.

Graffiti gets around this by removing the peer-to-peer aspect. What they've done is created a highly-distributed, highly-unoptimized, networked file system with a traditional client-server model. The system has two classes of problems, technical and social.

Technically, the project is inefficient, and relies on untrusted third parties to maintain stored data despite having no incentive to do so (in some sense this is also a social problem, as the third parties have incentives to not preserve data). If the tracker is the only system that is omniscient, it also becomes a single source of failure, as if it goes down connecting clients can no longer find parts of a file, nor store new parts. If this information is shareable by a peer-to-peer model, the project claims won't hold in this use case, but the system may continue to be usable if concurrency issues can be resolved. This is in itself could be a difficult prospect, and the project web site leads me to believe that this case was not addressed.

Socially, the project is repulsive. Back before the modern web, before even the word "spam" was associated with electronic mail, FTP dumping was a prevalent scourge. Users would find anonymous FTP servers that allowed public uploads and downloads for a specified purpose, and use them to transfer unrelated files. Graffiti does the same thing, encoded as ASCII text, and spread across wiki pages. It interferes with existing communities, and unlike deleting a file on an FTP server, the records, space used, and inconvenience caused can persist even after the page is "deleted". Amazingly, the project went back through all the sites it hijacked and "deleted" its content--by creating another revision, which contained just a brief message without any data. The content--in one page I saw, this was a little under 100KB--is still recorded in the database as the previous revision.

The project's authors suggest using CAPTCHAs as a solution to protect against their system and other automated attacks. However, the reasons why CAPTCHAs are not the answer is out of scope for this article.

Singular vs Plural The message left by the project on wiki sites uses the singular, while the project home page uses the plural.

By many estimates, one in every four users of the World Wide Web were browsing with Internet Explorer 6 in 2008, over a year since its successor Internet Explorer 7 had been released. In March 2009, Microsoft released another major version, yet now two major versions behind, about 20% of all web users cling onto the version that was released eight years ago (in 2001), and was last updated in 2004.

For nearly a half-decade, the software has not changed. Sometimes that's good; if something works, there is no reason to change software for the sake of change. However, there are many bugs in Internet Explorer 6 that will never be fixed because Microsoft has stopped working on it.

This is bad for the web. Internet Explorer 7 is not ideal, nor is version 8, but both are significantly better at supporting web standards than their predecessors. The continued use of Internet Explorer 6 is retarding the growth of the web as resources need to be wasted in supporting an out-dated browser that never did a good job of supporting the standards of its day, let alone standards that have been developed after its release and retirement.

This is bad for those who use it. Internet Explorer 6 is buggy. It provides a sub-optimal experience, and most of the people who use it probably aren't aware of this because they don't have anything to compare it to. Some users may not have a choice to upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer because their version of the Microsoft Windows Operating System is too old, prior to Microsoft Windows XP, which Microsoft has also stopped supporting. In these cases users are probably not aware of other web browsers that are available, such as Mozilla FireFox or the Opera Web Browser, both of which are technically superior to an of the released versions of Microsoft's offering.