This is in addition to the earlier posts:

Make sure your phone is GSM and unlocked, and you can pick up a cheap "pay as you go" sim card in most countries. GPRS is slow, but with the Opera Mini browser (http://mobile.opera.com/next) and the Gmail applet (http://mail.google.com/mobile) it is quite cheap to stay connected, and often much more convenient than trying to find a wifi hotspot.

Post your new number on facebook or similar if people need to keep in touch with you..

If you don't speak the local language a local pone number is quite useful - imagine it is late and you're lost you can call the place you're planning to stay, and have them explain how to get there to the taxi driver. (That call would probably cost more than the stay if you used your US SIM card ;)

The current lowest price I know of for an unlocked windows mobile phone is 136.50$ including shipping worldwide. (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12811)

It is a pretty conservative prediction that by early 2012 you'll be able to buy a number of 99$ unlocked android phones - something similar to the HTC Hero I would guess, or similar to the 2G iPhone. This makes it an impulse buy much more than the iPhone. What the label is on the phone won't matter - by then phone hardware will be even more of a commodity hardware than today, basically just a big screen, and the vendors will differ based on software.

The 99$ market is not where I expect Apple to go, they'll probably stay with their current market, which is limited to what, the richest 10% of the world?

As an aside: By 2012 I expect a high end phone for the European market will have a 5" 1024x480 screen (the same resolution you find on high end Japanese phones today, but lower dot pitch), 2Ghz main cpu with multiple specialized cores, and a 10mp camera which can record 1080p HD. The screen will probably be borderless on two sides, the phone itself will be even thinner than today's phones. I've not seen many signs that Apple are planing to extend their platform to the next generations of hardware, but Android certainly is. (Things like resolution independence and APIs for social media and close integration with web services are really important imho.)

What I would like for myself is a phone where I can boot Windows (Mobile), Apple OS (iPhone), and Linux (such as Android), much like you can do with a modern PC if you really want to. Something similar to this: http://intruders.tv/inqtv/2009/04/20/nvidias-tegra-demo-dual-boot-to-boot/.

Telenor operates over much of Europe and Asia these days, through subsidiaries and such.

My point was just that enforcing competition is a good thing in the long term, even if the companies involved will complain a lot in the short term. The operators complained a lot when the reforms were implemented, but I don't think they would have been where they are today without being kicked away from their complacent near-monopoly status. Both the companies involved and the consumers (citizens) made a profit from the reforms. IMHO the same would have been true for the banking industry, even if they would have had to hire a lot of cobol programmers to implement bank account portability :P

I forgot to mention the website, it is http://www.telepriser.no./ Oh, and a more accessible site (English, worldwide) is http://www.yr.no/ probably the best weather forecast site on the net.

Since 2002 the "Norwegian Post and Telecommunication Authority" has had a calculator offering much of the same for the Norwegian market. In addition to mobile phones it also covers telephony and broadband. Basically, all providers are required by law to provide their pricing structures to the authority, so that the services can be compared. For mobile phones this will involve entering your typical number of minutes (to other mobile phones and landlines), text messages, mms messages and kilobytes.

I'm sure someone will moan that this is socialism, since it is a service that could be offered by the market, or that people could do themselves, or that services such as this can never be efficient anyway. There are some arguments against this: The Norwegian market is small (4.5 million people), with lots of mountains and a low population density, and strict rules about required coverage by the licensees. Manpower is also extremely expensive, and most workers are members of a union. So, clearly, Norway should have really high prices, right?

Wrong - according to the calculator my mobile phone costs should be about 0,- every month, with a 0,- establishment fee for the contract. (About 100 outgoing text messages, 100 minutes outgoing, and 1mb. No mms messages)

Why is this? It is of course hard to find the "perfect truth", but here are some informed guesses: The market is very regulated, in order to enforce competition. Perhaps the most important (to the consumer) point of this is that you can move your phone number to any other operator, either for free or for some very small cost. While there are only three GSM licensees there are 16 or so "virtual operators", who operate by putting a box inside the switches of the GSM licensees, and basically resell their bandwidth. The authority is also able to punish any collusion between the operators, and to require changes in price structures between the operators.

Clearly, all this (regulated) competition is good for the Norwegian consumer, but is it good for the telecom companies? The biggest Norwegian operator (Telenor) has according to wikipedia 143 million subscribers, so clearly all this competition does something to the companies, which can't be all bad. Telenor used to be a state-owned monopoly, which was well known for being hugely inefficient and slow. In markets where there can only be a limited number of providers (such as bandwidth in the GSM bands) there is no natural encouragement for companies to become more efficient, if you want to make more money it is easy to just add another hidden fee. Only by allowing for virtual operators and implementing the pricing calculator the benefits of having a market was realized.

(The same system was implemented for electrical power providers, but it failed for the banking system - allowing people to move their account numbers between banks was evidently too expensive..)

On my last trip to South-East Asia I flew by way of Moscow. The longest leg was from Moscow to Bangkok, in some old Russian plane. I'm not sure which model, but it had something like 3 rows of seats, in a 3/4/3 configuration, with no overhead compartments above the middle row. During the flight I was wondering why the roof plates looked like they were crooked and not particularly regular, but I didn't think much of it.

That changed when the plane was landing. At first I thought people were applauding, which was a bit surprising, but then I realized that the sound was that of the entire roof shaking, you could actually see the roof plates moving against each other. The flight was certainly simple enough anyway, no entertainment and seats which could be folded forward.

Aeroflot, at least the international trips, is less scary than say Nepal Air though.. A few weeks after I flew Nepal Air out of Kathmandu I saw this quite believable story: http://news.airwise.com/story/view/1189004157.html

With 32gb cards weighting 0.5 grams one terabyte should require 32 cards, or 16 grams. 1024 terabytes should then weight 16384 grams, or a bit more than 16kg.

I don't think there is a storage media with higher density available commercially right now - and probably not until the 64GB microsd cards becomes available.

Clearly the right answer to this is to buy a combined shaver and mobile phone! (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.23065 is one example)

Sadly, so far the mobile phones with built in shaves have had two batteries, but they do seem to charge from USB.

Now, if only the shaverphone had wireless and ran say Android.. This is clearly a missed opportunity for the mobile phone makers.

In Northern Europe the telecoms are forced (by regulation) to rent out space in the switches so that competitors can place their own equipment there. If you're not buying your internet from the "owner" of the telephone cable you pay less than $10 as a line rental fee in addition to whatever your provider charges.

It is the same with mobile phone services - the telecoms must share their network with competitors, and allow them to put their services on the network. This means that if you're a customer of a "virtual phone company" you might use the bandwidth of "big telecom X" until some box in their network, from there it is the virtual phone company which controls your call.

In addition, all providers of internet, mobile phone services and landline phone services (including IP telephony) have to provide their pricing and coverage information to a government run web site, so that it is really simple to check if there is a better deal on the market.

Of course all the providers are endlessly complaining, but the effect is that the market works, you get lots of providers, low prices and lots of services to differentiate, even out in the really really remote areas.

With working competition you only see transfer caps on services where it makes some sense, like during the daytime for internet by 3g. (And I could get up to 50mbit/10mbit for $60 a month if bothered to switch it seems.. I hadn't checked the pricing site in a few months.)

Sun has been making quite a bit of noise in the storage architecture world with their use of SSDs as intermediate cache to improve reading and writing speeds.

http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test has some background information, and http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/l2arc_screenshots and http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/my_sun_storage_7410_perf has some performance numbers.

Basically, what Sun is claiming is that by adding a SSD cache layer you can improve IOPS by about 5x, for what amounts to a really small amount of money for say a 100tb system. This is being marketed quite heavily by Sun as well. (The numbers look convincing, and the prices for the Sun Storage servers are certainly very competitive, well, compared to say NetApp.)

IMHO this is just a repeat of the well known Microsoft tactic of spreading massive amounts of FUD about any competing technology that you can't reproduce yourself - you'll have to wait until Windows Server 2013 for this.

From the file "protip.txt" in the rapidshare archive:

account recognizes
b-day 2/11/64
ZIP code 99687
for password change.

The zip code is of course that of Wasilla, Alaska.

It would seem that the republican VP candidate is at least twice as security aware as Paris Hilton. Paris' had just one security question, the name of her dog (Tinkerbell), while Palin had two extremely obvious security questions.

Of course, two times "nothing much" is not a lot at all..