Corporate Mistakes

I just read an article on engadget about sprint. It turns out they lost more money than they are worth. It really is remarkable. The sprint nextel merger seems to be the culprit.

Why would they merge? I have no idea. Their services are incompatible so it would not expand sprint's network (iDEN and CDMA). Nextel got worse after the merger as their phone selection was barely updated. Spring suffered because it lost a lot of Nextel custumers in the merger. It amazes me how companies with vast amounts of employees can even make mistakes, but a mistake as big as this? I honestly cannot think of a single benefit to either of these companies from the merger.

Unrelated to the article, I don't see Sprint and Verizon going anywhere but down. Sprint seems to be dropping out already and pretty soon Verizon will be alone in the CDMA world. Phone companies will not want to make a special CDMA version just for one cellular service provider. This proprietary technology will not last no matter how many arguments you make about how it is better. To the end-user the only difference is not being able to transfer their contact to a new phone using a SIM card. I enjoy not having to turn off my phone at concerts (no dit--dit-dit-dit--dit-dit-dit noise), but other than that there is no difference. If speaker companies shielded their products properly there would be no benefit to CDMA.

I happen to have sprint and as I haven't had another cellular service I have none to compare to, but cellular service companies seem just plain evil here in the US. They don't allow unlocked models for the most part. It is more expensive to buy a SIM card alone than to buy one of those "free phones" and just take the card out. They install proprietary operating systems, restrict bluetooth transfers, make it hard to connect your laptop to the phone and the list goes on and on... It costs me $.30 just to receive a text!! Anyone with an "unlimited" plan could make me broke on a whim.

Why has this happened? I believe it is the contracts that people sign. With these contracts, no matter how bad your cellular service provider is, its not worth the $300 to switch.

If sprint could change all this, they could renew themselves, people would be flooding toward sprint. Or would they? Once again the $300 that it costs just to switch would outweigh the benefits.

If sprint could provide cheap, contractless phones and make their service way better than anyones, they wouldn't need a contract to enctice people to stay. People would stay without contracts and they would get many new customers in the process.

Cellphone ballons/Lolcats

I just read a very interesting article on gizmodo about using balloons as cell phone towers. The balloons are cheaper to deploy and cover a wider area than cell phone towers. The downside is, they only last 24 hours. Google is considering using these to deploy its wireless network on the 700mhz spectrum. Read the full story here.
For those of you living in caves, lolcats are basically funny pictures of cats. They aren't just funny, they are hilarious, I can't believe i didn't find this website earlier: icanhascheezburger.com has pretty much every lolcat picture there is plus a cool lolcat builder.

First Post

I just created my blog, and this is my first post! I created it to share my personal opinions about tech happenings and personal tips.

I am using the firefox 3.0 nightly builds and I love them. The new icons are welcome since the old ones were outdated. There isn't much new besides minor UI adjustments. Firefox complies with the acid2 web standards test. Page rendering is also much faster. The biggest change is the UI doesn't bother you with pop-up windows. Instead of pop-ups, it uses that bar that appears at under your toolbars. Instead of asking you to remember the password in a pop-up, it asks you in that bar. I LOVE THAT! Now it wont remember your wrong passwords because you tell it to remember your password after the page has been loaded (I am not good at explaining things). When you drag selected items you can see them being moved like the macs have always had. I have been testing it since alpha 1 and I have never had any serious problems. Most of my problems stem from quicktime crashing firefox. If you want to help make firefox a better browser go download it now. I was very sad when they removed the home button, I use it a lot because I have all my rss feeds on my igoogle page and I check them regularly. There should be an option to add it back (there probably is one but I haven't found it). Firefox rules!

The non-nightly version can be downloaded here. Nightly is available here.

Tip: If you want to block ads in firefox or any other type of image, right click on the image and click the button that says block ads from (url). This only works for images and not flash ads.