But in an interview with Newsweek, Steve Jobs made some very disturbing comments about how ‘open’ the device will be:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

This is complete nonsense. First of all, there are lots of phones out there on which third party software can be installed: any phone that runs GNU/Linux, Symbian or even (shudder) Windows Mobile. Have you heard about Cingular’s West Coast network falling apart because someone installed Python on their Symbian phone? I didn’t think so. And that’s not even just an application – that’s an entire interpreter for a 3rd party programming language.

Secondly, there’s this other network out there called the internet. People install ’3rd party software’ on the machines that are hooked up to it all the time. And guess what – the West Coast part of the Internet doesn’t crash and burn every other day. I wonder why that is, if ’3rd party software’ is oh so dangerous.

Finally, this quote is particularly disturbing coming from Jobs – a large chunk of Mac OS X is 3rd party software. The kernel was derived from BSD, which was not written by Apple. BSD is all about openness. It pains me to see that codebase used to build a completely crippled and closed environment. With software under the GPL, this would not have been possible…

I suppose the community will have to start working on a port of an entirely Free operating system to the iPhone before it will be useful. Given the existance of Rockbox, that hopefully won’t take too long.

Broadband sucks in this country. We’re paying way too much for connections that are way too slow – particularly in the upload department. With the change of power in Congress, maybe something will finally be done about this. A good first step would be to unlock the final mile. Cable providers should be forced to open up and allow competitors to run data to their customers, much like is the case in the DSL world. And, more importantly, Verizon and SBC should be forced to open up the FIOS lines they are now rolling out so that some healthy competition can drive the prices down and the speeds up.

Secondly, municipalities need to be encouraged to roll out non-profit internet service, much like they provide electricity and water in large parts of the countries. Where laws have been passed prohibiting this – under heavy lobbying from the telcos and cable companies – these laws need to be repealed immediately, and some punishment for these companies is in order. Perhaps a new tax on their local presence for a couple of years, the proceeds of which can be used to build out the municipal networks.

Sure, the big telcos and cable companies won’t like it. But frankly, they can go to hell. They are the cause for all this stagnation – they are the reason that we are falling behind. They’ve been making billions for many years, charging us all through the nose. It’s time the government steps in and forces some more competition.

Today’s phones are failures — mainly software/interface failures.

I think today’s cell phones are mostly that – phones. All the other features – with the exception perhaps of sms/text messaging – are mostly a failure. But the problem is not mainly the interface or the software. The problem is the total control of the cell phone carriers. The carriers only think in the old pay-by-the-unit model. The don’t think out of the box. Their services are overpriced and deliberately crippled. Ever tried doing data on a cell phone? It sucks. You get minimal bandwidth (since when is 300kbps broadband?!) that is advertised as ‘all you can eat’. However, if you try to really use it, chances are you’ll get a letter from your cell phone company stating that you use too much bandwidth, and that you will be cut off. And don’t try to use it for *real* work – ssh and the like are most likely blocked. In the mind of the cellphone carriers, using the internet equals browsing the web and if you’re lucky, doing e-mail. Of course it also includes the use of their totally superfluous ‘portal’ where you can do all sorts of amazing things: download a new ring tone for your cell phone. Download a new background image. ‘Distinguish’ yourself. How fantastic. Obviously you will have to pay for each and every thing you do.

Things are changing. Look for wifi-enabled devices like the Nokia 770. Combine that with city-wide wifi networks and VOIP. We’ll break out of the carrier-controls-all mold soon. I can’t wait!

I purchased a new hard drive (7.2k rpm, 100GB Seagate Momentus), a stick of 1GB ram, and a new mini-pci wifi card (MSI MP54G4).

Obviously, the upgrade from a 4200 rpm drive and 512MB of RAM has made the machine a lot faster.

The most interesting part of the upgrade, though, is the $20 MSI card. It replaced a Broadcom BCM94306 card that came with the machine. Broadcom does not release GPL’d GNU/Linux drivers for its wifi cards. In fact it does not release GNU/Linux drivers for its cards, period. This means you have to use ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper kind of works but was never very reliable for me. What’s worse, it always made my machine run really hot and therefore loud – remember, crappy thermal design.

The MSI card is Ralink-based. It uses the GPL’d RT2500 driver, which is based on a GPL’d driver that Ralink released. A real company, releasing GPL’d drivers for it’s wireless hardware? Hey Broadcom, look here, maybe you can learn something from Ralink.

The card works wonderfully. It doesn’t drop its connection every 10 minutes (there are a lot of wifi networks fighting for spectrum around here). It does not make my machine get hot – presumably because ndiswrapper introduces quite a bit of overhead. And it works with Kismet.

I love it. Suddenly I have wireless I can actually depend on. If you have a crappy Broadcom wifi card, consider spending the $20 to replace it. But beware if you have an HP or IBM laptop – their machines will actually refuse to boot with a non HP or IBM-blessed wifi card. Dell does not do this. But that’s another issue, more about that in a later post, maybe.

Oh and Broadcom, get this – I’m recommending your competitors’ hardware because you don’t release GPL’d GNU/Linux drivers. I’m filing you and your hardware under ‘completely useless’.

Thank You ,
Commonwealth Bank of Australia Management Stuff

I wouldn’t want to deal with any bank that doesn’t have stuff. Would you?

Developers are not permitted to build Custom Clients that are multi-headed or interoperable with any other IM network.

Not only that; you also need to get a ‘key’ from AOL to use the SDK, and there are licensing agreements involved, and limits on the usage of the key, etc. Lots of red tape. Oh, and while they say there are plans for a GNU/Linux/OS X SDK release, the SDK is currently Windows only. Yawn.

I’m filing this release under the category ‘completely useless’ and will happily continue using Gaim.