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Comment Re:Nothing? (Score 1) 303

AT&T bought Cingular, honored the contract and here we are today.

Actually, Cingular bought AT&T Wireless, then renamed itself AT&T Mobility. Even though they spent all that money to come up with "Cingular", "AT&T" still had more brand power.

Comment Re:On record that AT&T is exclusive until 2012 (Score 1) 251

Read the original Engadget post and the court documents are weaselly. They are simply saying that customers should not expect phone unlocks because USA Today made it public knowledge that there was a 5 year contract. They did NOT reveal the actual contract as part of the court documents, nor did they go on record confirming the contract. USA Today never said the contract started in 2007, that's just when they reported it. Lot's of assumptions being made.

Comment Re:More bullshit to drum up ad hits (Score 2, Informative) 251

I suspect the "5 year agreement" started earlier than 2007... say end of 2005 when Apple wanted to lock down a network/carrier to try out their new revenue system.

None of the previous rumors have involved Pegatron already tooling up for production of an iPhone. Granted, that leak was right before their IPO--so I'd says there's an even chance that someone made it up to boost the stock, or they really are producing an iPhone under secrecy and needed to leak the info to boost the stock.

I'd say if we're going to hear something official, it will be at the September iPod event. If Pegatron really is going to produce iPhones, it will be hard to keep it a secret, so I would be shocked if Apple didn't plan to reveal something until Nov-Jan timeframe (which would coincide with VZW's LTE announcements).

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100617PD215.html

Comment Re:Uh, Exclusive Deal (And GSM)? (Score 1) 251

How can anyone post this when we have the exclusive deal confirmed? http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/10/confirmed-apple-and-atandt-signed-five-year-iphone-exclusivity-de/

Show me the signatures on that contract and the date it was signed. Their "confirmation" is a referral to general knowledge of an exclusivity deal because USA Today published wording to that effect. Basically they're using weasel wording so they don't have to disclose the actual contract--which suggests the whole truth is missing. Further, who's to say the 5 year exclusivity deal started the day the iPhone went on sale, and not 18 months earlier when Apple was looking to lock a network? You think they designed, built, and shipped a phone with a contract that didn't start until they reached customer's hands?

And the other is that the last time I checked, Verizon doesn't have GSM. Why would Apple manufacture two different devices, and one that can't be used in all the other world markets? I'm not trying to start a GSM/CDMA holy war, just acknowledging that Apple is doing just fine with AT&T and GSM. Why would they go through all that trouble just to get Verizon customers?

Especially since Verizon seems to insist on branding all phones they offer--I don't see how Steve would accept that either.

Verizon has nearly 93 million subscribers, a large percentage of which have expressed interest in an iPhone. Apple is expected to sell 16 million iPhones this year to AT&T's 83 million subscribers, which is nearly half of their total sales. Why wouldn't Apple jump at the earliest opportunity to further increase sales by another 50%? It's not a big technical feat for them to design a CDMA iPhone, other manufacturers with much less money at stake than Apple produce multiple models on CDMA, GSM, euro-specific frequencies, AT&T frequencies, and T-Mobile frequencies. After Apple's done with VZW, there's also China and Canada, along with Sprint, Cricket, and MetroPCS in the US all with decent numbers of CDMA subscribers. In all, world CDMA subscribers are something like 462 million, even if that's only 14% of the mobile market.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/06/piper_15_8m_us_iphone_sales_in_2010_even_without_verizon.html
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/HONSHI/20070215/127796/

Comment Re:Blame Verizon (Score 1) 251

Can't see a CDMA iPhone at this late stage. It's been end-of-lifed for quite some time.

Yeah, because no one else makes new CDMA phones these days. It would be stupid to design something like a Droid X CDMA-only phone and try to sell that in this market... or a Samsung Galaxy S... etc.

Seriously, its not that hard for Apple to make a CDMA version of the iPhone--its more a matter of their exclusivity contract.

To say that CDMA is EOL, is just plain dumb. LTE is being deployed on 700 MHz, and not replacing CDMA on 850/1900 for MANY years. Consider that most people don't keep a smart phone for more than 2 years, often just 1, and Apple could release a couple generations of CDMA-only iPhones and still make bank on the sales.

I'll hope like everyone else that if VZW gets an iPhone in 2011 that it will support CDMA+LTE much like the EVO 4G support WiMax, but I wouldn't be surprised if they released a CDMA-only version and then caught everyone for an upgrade a year later to the 4G version. Was no one around in 2007 when they released the original iPhone with no 3G?

Comment Re:Lock-out after a certain number of attempts? (Score 1) 499

Absolutely! That is one of the major points TFA makes. The top 5 passwords account for 1.75% of all the accounts, and the top password alone accounts for 0.9% of accounts.

If a hacker would have used the list of the top 5000 passwords as a dictionary for brute force attack on Rockyou.
com users, it would take only one attempt (per account) to guess 0.9% of the users passwords or a rate of one
success per 111 attempts. Assuming an attacker with a DSL connection of 55KBPS upload rate and that each
attempt is 0.5KB in size, it means that the attacker can have 110 attempts per second. At this rate, a hacker will
gain access to one new account every second or just less than 17 minutes to compromise 1000 accounts. And the
problem is exponential. After the first wave of attacks, it would only take 116 attempts per account to compromise
5% of the accounts, 683 attempts to compromise 10% of accounts and about 5000 attempts to compromise 20%
of accounts.

Comment Re:If I ran a college (Score 1) 806

Anyone who spends any significant amount of time on that utter e-cesspool of amateur gossip queens attention seekers and other undesirable groups of society who for some reason can't or refuse to socialise in real life can't possibly have the bare minimum of intelligence required to be in college.

Facebook IS real life. It isn't any less real than emailing all the same people that live 300 miles away from me. And with FB, they can choose when to be assaulted by pictures of my kids rather than receiving them in their email, buried between their Amazon.com order confirmation, and an ad for some really good spyware remover. I'm certainly not going to go get prints made of the pictures and use the USPS to send a pack of 50 pictures to 300 people.

Seriously, why can't people realize their friends list is their ACL?

Comment Free and open standards (Score 1) 427

Ideally, you would create a new standard for your battery and it would get a number assigned. Then anyone who wanted to use your new battery would be able to grab the free specs and send you an order for 1000s of them. Then another manufacture would also get your specs and start producing their own version of the battery using their own technology, but perhaps offering 80% capacity for 70% price. You would be prompted to optimize your process, cut costs, etc, and voila, competition.

Instead, you'll produce your fancy technology in a copyrighted, trademarked, restricted form factor and charge an arm and a leg for it. You won't make any money until another manufacturer tries to produce one that fits and you sue them to hell. Meanwhile, a Chinese manufacturer will produce a cheap knockoff with 25% of the performance, but for pennies on the dollar and still make some change.

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