apple juice

Qwest finally got its act together in my neighborhood, and we’re enjoying some decent speeds. (12mbps) As nice as it is to have two options for broadband instead of one, we seriously lag our european counterparts when it comes to broadband access.

Not only that, but the Verizons, Comcasts and Qwests would have you believe that “we’re number one, U.S.A., U.S.A!”

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Not only do we lag in broadband adoption, the speeds of “broadband” lag significantly, and we pay more for it.

Typically, the lowest price for broadband in the United States, not counting promotions and bundled deals, costs an average of $35 a month for a measly 1 megabit per second connection. Twice this speed is available in Denmark and Canada for lower prices; more strikingly, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sweden have broadband available for under $20 a month. Additionally, the fastest speeds in the United States are comparatively slow. The common top speed available for residential services in the Unites States is 50 Mbps (and costs $145 a month), while several nations have speeds available that are up to four times faster, for less than $60 a month.

Our best chance is to support the idea net-neutrality and the National Broadband Plan. Of course this plan isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t go nearly far enough in ensuring that Americans will have the same types of access enjoyed by other nations, but it is a start.

Check out this slate article for more info: Denial of Service

I haven’t spoken much about my decision to purchase a Nokia smartphone a year ago… Mostly because it has been an unmitigated disaster.

That may be a bit strong. I do like the phone I purchased, an N85. (said through clenched teeth) It has a really good camera for a phone (5 megapixel). It multitasks for real (all those iPhone ads asking “can your phone do that?”, yes, my phone can do that). There is a wealth of free and open-source software for the phone.

However, it has failed miserably in other areas:

I’ve returned it to Nokia FOUR TIMES for a stupid crack below the directional button. Same exact spot, four times in one year. They finally replaced it for a new N85 (even though I pleaded in a letter to have them swap it for some other comparable model).

Nokia’s whole operating system ecosystem is a mess. They offer literally 3 different ways to check your email on the phone. All of them slightly different, (and from what I’ve found, slightly different on different models of phones).

Their Microsoft Exchange support is ridiculous: You can only have one calendar. It is 2009. I have more than one calendar.

Their newest features only show up on random models of phones. Facebook app? Only on two models. Instant messaging? Some other batch of phones. Etc.

I could go on, but despite all of this, I’m rooting for them to succeed. Competition in the mobile phone market is essential, otherwise we’ll be ruled by the networks, and who wants that?

If I were in charge:

• Wayyyyyyy less models. Try 8. I think they currently offer 8000.
• One OS. Maemo looks great, this new Symbian version sounds good, but you also have S60 (3rd and 5th Edition, (what happened to 4th edition? No idea)), S40, and probably others.
• Give away your services, such as Maps. Have you heard of Google? They offer these things for free.
• Get a visionary to lead the company. Sounds like your current guy is a bit of a bore. (See “Can Nokia Recapture Its Glory Days“) You do not need boring. You need vision, excitement and focus.

So, if you’re out looking for a smartphone, considering a Nokia… proceed at your own risk… but I wouldn’t bet against them finding their groove again.

My next phone? Undecided.

From Study: Internet use won’t cause social isolation | Digital Media – CNET News:

I found this interesting (and true, in our case):

“Frequent Web users are more likely to communicate with neighbors in person than those who don’t use the Web as often, Pew found. In fact, 61 percent of respondents said that they talk to a neighbor at least once per month. The study also found that bloggers are 72 percent ‘more likely to belong to a local voluntary association’ than those who don’t blog.”

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

given how much this blog was originally about apple stuff, it is funny how little I post about all things Mac these days.

but, I wanted to give a little shout-out to iTunes, which received a major version upgrade last week. i would certainly recommended updating to this version when you have the chance.

the genius feature, while not new with version 9, is easily my favorite new function from the past few versions of iTunes. I think it gets a bad rap as it tends to repeat stuff if your library isn’t that large, and it doesn’t always stay within the same mood.

but on the whole, it makes interesting playlists quickly. i think through some serious manipulation of the smart playlists, you can make some pretty nice “radio-style” playlists… but it’s really not worth the effort when you can click the genius buttton and start listening.

i actually sent in an enhancement request to apple, something I’ve never done before with iTunes. I can’t imagine how much thousands of hours I’ve used iTunes, and this never occurred to me before.

what if you had the option to get “relative dates” when you shrink the last played or date added fields? Then, instead of seeing a whole list of dates and times, you would see last played as “Last month” or “Last week”.

A few months later, I don’t really care about the specific time of day, and I’d just like a quick visual for how long it has been since the last play.

(on a related note, I’ve long felt that instead of simply storing play count and last played date, storing every plays timestamp could lead to some interesting smart playlists, show me things that i’ve listened to 10 times in the past week, for example. as it currently stands, you can only pick things that have, for example, play counts greater than 10, and that the last play is in the last week)

Anyway, upgrade when you get the chance!

“I’ve reached a point where I can no longer just sit back and watch this. The iPhone ecosystem is toxic, and I can’t participate any more until it is fixed. As people have told me so many times: It’s Apple’s ballgame, and Apple gets to make the rules, and if I don’t like it, I can leave. So, I don’t like it, and I’m leaving.”

(Via stevenf.com.)

Probably not stuff that your average iPhone user cares about, but this kind of stuff bothers me too… so I chose not to go the iPhone route…

Classilla: Building a Secure Web Browser for Mac OS 9
and the Classic Macintosh OS

I know I’m a total nerd, but I love this stuff…

Now we’re trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldnt solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

via The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online .

This article neatly ties up a lot of the thoughts I’ve been rolling around. The big question is, how do we apply this logic to education? What do your SAT scores matter if you can’t collaborate with others? I’d like to make the terms ‘project’, ‘paper’ and ‘test’ synonymous with ‘group’.

And, I think ‘digital socialism’ is a much nicer term than ‘dot-communism’.

This NYTimes article, Psst! Need the Answer to No. 7? Just Click Here. Hits on the same idea, from a different angle:

Course Hero offers three million student-submitted items from 400,000 courses at more than 3,500 institutions, including lecture notes, study guides, presentations, lab results, research papers, essays and homework assignments. Users who submit such items can navigate the site free of charge; others pay a monthly fee. Mr. Kim declined to say how many users had registered beyond “hundreds of thousands” and said they included more than 1,000 professors using the site to refresh their teaching materials.

The emphasis is mine, but these professors are the ones who are seeing value in the network, and using it to better their own work.

It will be a defining shift in the education system, when sharing and cooperation are the norm for students.