It's a free festival. Internet access was kind of all or nothing. At the main stage speed test over verizon 4g clocked in well north of 5mbps. Over near the shore, on the rocks and the like I got bupkus. No signal at all.

Not really a big deal to walk a few feet to get coverage but this is seattle, we tech hard so going the extra mile to have a weed festival with great coverage is important-ish. :)

Yeah but the first part sounds kinda interesting. Anyone who works at any of those tech companies next to the park could probably plug in to their wired network. That'd be a trunk line onto the public internet. Getting that out of the building ... maybe run cat5 from the closest port near the roof then wifi it over to a main hotspot that relays to the rest.

Or wifi it through the windows to the nearest park hotspot.

They'd take a bump to their internet traffic but if it is mostly over a weekend and they're nowhere near their cap... hell put a donation cup in front of the parpark hotspot to pay em :)

You still hang with your friends. You just have much cooler stuff to share than ripped up magazines or broken-spined books.

Nice, good linkage.

Damn sorry to hear that! Jkjkjk :)

Oh and microwave, wimax and COWs strike me as the most promising/practical so far. Even here in seattle it might be hard to get the tech companies to sponsor (though maybe 429 branded beers and the like might?)

Definitely interesting imho. I'm a hobbyist, 1st time at festival this year, and would have defaulted to using hotspots as wifi backhaul but maybe that's not the way to go.

then again I'm used to bringing in stuff from home to work (pc components mainly) but enterprise hardware is like a superset of home hardware. SAS, fibrechannel and the like.

I thought his question implied that they were going to use 4g hotspots to provide wifi. Not to extend 4g coverage but to use it as a backhaul for wifi. Why would he need the hotspots to move? The geography is fixed. Coverage sucked near the shore but was fine around the main stage. I thought he qas asking if there's a better way to position the hotspots to provide maximum wifi coverage...

Normally I'd say this was a bad for users kind of decision. But honestly office on a phone is mostly irrelevant. Now that OneNote on android and ios are tolerable I think they've hedged their bets well.

Coming from someone that thinks winphone is beautiful but because of network effects will not be a real contender (os/2 warp anyone?)

Typical reactionary FU. My kid will be 3 levels ahead of yours because he's been doing math, physics and biology since he was two. And more importantly having fun while doing it.

At this point I think tablets are mainly ideal for kids. I never use mine except when playing with my son (ultrabook is much more functional).

Lighten up. The kids love them, they'reunbelievably educational and they provide a great way to bond as you play together. Download zoodles and only let your kid play the educational stuff.

Zoodles is excellent. You can even lock the kid in zoodles "kid mode". I got it when my son turned 2 and still use it. Liked it so much I pay for it but it's fully functional for free.

They have hundreds of apps arranged by age. And you can add links to other apps (e.g. angry birds). They send you a weekly report card with more graphs and stats than anyone needs.

  Zoodles is awesome.

You don't play an instrument? I thought it was quite a clever name...