Why the iPhone Doesn't Have 3G: Battery Life

Anandtech has a pretty good set of tests showing the compromises Apple had to make with the iPhone. Steve said it was due to size and battery life. These tests show that pretty clearly. The iPhone may have only 3 hours of talk time if it used 3G. That just wouldn't be acceptable.

Bye PlantSix

I started PlantSix some time in 2002 when I was working at InfoSpace and very bored. These were the days before Xen, when if you had to pay several hundred dollars a month for real dedicated hardware if you wanted root. I figured we could spread the cost, I'd buy a 1U server, ship it to California and get it collocated. I signed up a few people I knew, and we got it going with some handy paypal subscriptions to help cover my costs.

Hurricane Electric had a pretty decent colo deal (at least for the time) letting me put in just a single 1U server. I picked up a Supermicro 1U server with 1GB of RAM, 2 120GB SATA drives, and a 2.4Ghz P4. I loaded up FreeBSD 4.8 or something from that era, and mirrored the disks with Vinum. It's ran without a hitch for 5 years. Running PHP, Java, perl, and even Rails apps later on.

In the end I got sick of making sure I was getting payed, too lazy to do any tech support, and with my new job, just too busy to deal. So I moved my own stuff to Slicehost and let everyone know they should start looking elsewhere.

Today I ended a 2.6 year uptime. The server will be packed and shipped back to me, so it can live in a closet, powered off.

AT&T Caller ID Voice Mail Security

Ohh look, AT&T *still* uses Caller ID for Voice Mail security.

It's too bad that Caller ID provides NO SECURITY AT ALL. The caller ID info you see is sent by the callers phone system. Their system can tell you what ever the hell they want, and your system will show it to you. In this case, if they send your phone number, and you don't pickup, they just get right into your voice mail. Wonderful.

Nero or Microsoft English, Nice.

I'm not sure who's responsible, either Nero or Microsoft, but I went to update my Nero 7 install and got this fun box along the way: