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May 21, 2012

Off to Amsterdam next week

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 7:58 pm

[DANGER: NON TECHNICAL CONTENT BELOW]

Well next Saturday at least. The project kept getting delayed but I guess it’s finally here. Going to Amsterdam for a week to build out a little co-location for the company. Whenever I brought up the subject over the past 7-8 months or so people almost universally responded with jealousy, wanting to go themselves. I suppose this may be a shock but I really don’t want to go. I’m not fond of long trips especially on airplanes (don’t mind long road trips though, at least I can stop whenever and stretch, or take a scenic route and take pictures).

The more I looked at Amsterdam the less interested I was in going there – or Europe in general. It seems like a very old, quaint, cultured place. Really the polar opposite of what I’m interested in. I traveled a lot around Asia specifically growing up(lived in Asia for nearly six years), and had a quick trip down to Australia. So I feel that I can confidently say that I have traveled a bunch and really don’t feel like traveling more, I’ve seen a lot – a lot of things that I am not interested in and am not (yet) aware of other things that may interest me. I also don’t like big crowded cities either. I swear I’ve spent more time in Seattle than San Fransisco since I moved here almost a year ago (not that I enjoy Seattle – but I have a few specific destinations to go to there, where I really have none in SFO at this point).

People of course obviously bring up how certain things you can do in the Netherlands legally that you can’t do here legally at least (like that stops anybody from doing it here). So it’s really not a big deal to me. I actually looked quite a bit at the red light district, and didn’t see anything that got me excited.

The one thing I did sign up for when I was booking the trip on Orbitz (my friend’s site hipmunk.com directed me to Orbitz), was a canal pizza cruise, which seems up my alley – if only they served the only alcoholic drink I order. I really can’t stand the taste or smell even of things like wine or beer (or coffee or tea while I’m at it – I’m sure there’s something wrong with me in that dept…). I’ve looked around for other things but so much of it seems culture related and my attention span for that stuff lasts about 60 seconds. I also don’t know how much free time I may have there, maybe little. My two trips to Atlanta for the build out there I had a COMBINED maybe 7 hours between the two (total time there about 12 days), and many 15+ hour work days, with more than one dinner at a gas station well past midnight.

I would like to find a place like this over there, since it’s so close to Germany. I asked one guy that is over near Amsterdam (runs a VMware blog), though he didn’t have a whole lot of suggestions. I have a good friend from when I was a kid that lives in Denmark, which I thought was close – not close enough though (~700km away), haven’t seen that guy in maybe 17-18 years.

I emailed a two of my very well traveled friends who know me well, know what I like, and neither of them had any ideas either.

In the remote chance that any of the 9 readers I have knows of a good place(s) to visit or thing(s) to do in Amsterdam let me know.

So I suspect short of that little canal cruise I’ll spend all of my time at the Holiday Inn and at the data center. Save my cash for my next trip – I intend to spend a week in Seattle towards the end of next month. My company has a satellite office there so I plan to work during the day and have fun at night. Much celebration will ensue there. I’m obviously very excited to go back to my favorite places, neither of which I have not found replacements for in the Bay Area.

April 23, 2012

MS Shooting themselves in their mobile feet again?

Filed under: General,Random Thought — Tags: — Nate @ 10:03 am

I’ve started to feel sorry for Microsoft recently. Back in the 90s and early 00s I was firmly in the anti MS camp, but the past few years I have slowly moved out of that camp mainly because MS isn’t the beast that it used to be. It’s a company that just fumbles about at what it does now and doesn’t appear to be much of a threat anymore. It has a massive amount of cash still but for some reason can’t figure out how to use it. I suppose the potential is still there.

Anyways I was reading this article on slashdot just now about Skype on Windows phone 7. The most immediate complaint was the design of WP7 prevents skype from receiving calls while in the background because with few exceptions like streaming media and stuff any background app is suspended. There is no multi tasking on WP7? As some others I have seen notice – I haven’t seen a WP7 phone on anyone yet, so haven’t seen the platform in action. Back when what was Palm was gutted last year and the hardware divisions shut down many people were saying how WP7 was a good platform to go to from WebOS, especially the 7.5 release which was pretty new at the time.

I don’t multi task too much on my phone or tablets, but it’s certainly nice to have the option there. WebOS has a nice messaging interface with full skype integration so skype can run completely in the background. I don’t use it in this way mainly because the company I’m at uses Skype as a sort of full on chat client, so the device would be hammered by people talking (to other people) in group chats which is really distracting. Add to that the audible notifications for messaging on WebOS applies to all protocols, so I use a very loud panic alarm for SMS messages for my on call stuff, and having that sound off every couple of seconds when a skype discussion is going is not workable! So I keep it off unless I specifically need it. 99.9% of my skype activity is work related. Otherwise I wouldn’t even use the thing. Multi tasking has been one of the biggest selling points of WebOS since it was released several years ago, really seeming to be the first platform to support it (why it took even that long sort of baffles me).

So no multi tasking, and apparently no major upgrades coming either – I’ve come across a few articles like this one that say it is very unlikely that WP7 users will be able to upgrade to Windows 8/WP8. Though lack of mobile phone upgrades seems pretty common, Android in particular has had some investigations done to illustrate the varying degrees when or if the various handsets get upgrades. WebOS was in the same boat here, with the original phones not getting past version 1.4.5 or something, the next generation of phones not getting past 2.x, and only the Touchpad (with a mostly incompatible UI for phones apparently) having 3.x. For me, I don’t see anything in WebOS 3.x that I would need on my WebOS 2.x devices, and I remember when I was on WebOS 1.x I didn’t see anything in 2.x that made me really want to upgrade, the phone worked pretty well as it was. iOS seems to shine the best in this case providing longer term updates for what (has got to be) is a very mature OS at this point.

But for a company that has as much resources as Microsoft, especially given the fact that they seem to be maintaining tighter control over the hardware the phones run on, it’s really unfortunate that they may not be willing/able to provide the major update to WP8.

Then there was the apparent ban Microsoft put on all players, preventing them from releasing multi core phones in order to give Nokia time to make one themselves, instead of giving even more resources to making sure they could succeed they held the other players back, which not only hurts all of their partners (minus Nokia, or not?) but of course hurt the platform as a whole.

I’m stocked up on WebOS devices to last me a while on a GSM network. So I don’t have to think about what I may upgrade to in the future, I suspect my phones might outlive the network technologies they use.

To come back to the original topic – lack of multi tasking – specifically the inability for Skype to operate in the background is really sad. Perhaps the only thing worse is it took this long for Skype to show up on the platform in the first place. Even the zombie’d WebOS has had Skype for almost a year on the Touchpad, and if you happened to have a Verizon Pre2 phone at the time, Skype for that was released just over a year ago(again with full background support). I would of thought given Microsoft bought Skype about a year ago that they would of/ could of had a release for WP7 within a very short period of time(30 days?). But at least it’s here for the 8 people that use the phone, even if the version is crippled by the design of the OS. Even Linux has had Skype (which I use daily) for longer. There have been some big bugs in Skype on WebOS – most of them I think related to video/audio, doesn’t really impact me since most of my skype usage is for text chat.

While I’m here chatting about mobile I find it really funny, and ironic that apparently Microsoft makes more money off of Android than it does it’s own platform(estimated to be five times more last year), and Google apparently makes four times more money off of iOS than it’s own platform.

While there are no new plans for WebOS hardware at this point – it wouldn’t surprise me at all if people inside HP were working to make the new ARM-based WP8 tablets hackable in some way to get a future version of WebOS on them, even though MS is going to do everything they can to prevent that from happening.

April 6, 2012

Flash from the past – old game review

Filed under: General,Random Thought — Tags: — Nate @ 11:39 pm

I was talking to a friend that I’ve known for more than 20 years a few days ago (these posts really are making me feel old 🙂 ) and we were talking about games, Wing Commander Saga among them and he brought up an old game that we tried playing for a while he couldn’t remember the name, but I did. It was Outpost. A Sci-fi simcity or civilization style game from 1994. It has amazing visuals, being one of the earlier CDROM-based games. I bought it after seeing the visuals and really wanted to like it but no matter what I couldn’t get very far without losing the game, no matter what I did I would run out of resources, air, food water, whatever it was, all my people would die and I would have to start again. Rinse and repeat a few times and I gave up on it eventually. I really liked the concept being a long time sci fi fan (well hard core sci fi fans would probably refer to me as a space opera fan).

ANYWAYS, I hadn’t looked for anything about this game since well probably the mid 90s. I ran a basic search earlier today and came across this 10-minute video review from an interactive CDROM magazine published back in 1994. I had no idea how much of a mess the game really was, the review was incredibly funny to watch they rip the game apart. They are in awe of the visuals like I was but other than that the game was buggy and under finished. They make it sound like it was one of the most un finished games of all time. They talk about entire sections of the strategy guide that are completely left out of the game, functions that are mentioned that just don’t exist. In-game artificial intelligence that gives absolutely worthless data, no explanation on how to plan to play the game up front. It’s quite humorous! I’m going to go watch it again.

From Wikipedia

Initial reviews of Outpost were enthusiastic about the game. Most notoriously, the American version of PC Gamer rated the game at 93%, one of its highest ratings ever for the time. It was later made known that the reviewers had in fact played beta versions of the game, and had been promised certain features would be implemented, but never were.

[..]

Following the release of the game, the game’s general bugginess and perceived mediocre gameplay, along with the lack of features described in most of the game’s reviews and the game’s own documentation led to a minor backlash against the computer game magazines of the time by consumers who bought the game based on their reviews.

April 1, 2012

Wing Commander Saga: The Darkest Dawn

Filed under: General,Random Thought — Tags: — Nate @ 11:00 pm

I don’t write very often about games, since I don’t play too many of them. Somehow I missed the release of Wing Commander Saga: The Darkest Dawn when it was announced(did not even know it existed), fortunately one of my friends pointed it out and I played it a bit over the past few days.

Here is a trailer for Wing Commander Saga: The Darkest Dawn.

Wing Commander Saga is 10 years in the making(!), an open source project – they were able to take (fortunately without pissing people off) a lot of content from the original series and re-use it including sounds, music, ships, tons of stuff. They put all of that along with an open source 3D engine from the Descent 2: Freespace a ton of new content, voice acting, story lines to make what seems to me the best Wing Commander yet.

They had 50,000 downloads in the first 24 hours of launch (which was on March 22nd).

I really can’t put into words how amazing this game is. I was there about 20 years ago playing the first Wing Commander on an HP 286 12Mhz. I was talking with a friend of mine who played it with me at the time and we both recall using a keyboard to fly at least initially – didn’t get a joystick until later.

It is one of my favorite games of all time, I remember so much of it even today (played it through again about two years ago). The missions, the story, the attention to detail that was put into the game was just awesome. Then came Wing Commander 2 with more advanced AI – I struggled with that one. Later came Wing Commander 3 and it’s breakthrough video sequences that could be run on ordinary computers, the level of quality was just outstanding, I remember playing it on a 486 DX 33MHz, with, if I remember right was a Cirrus Logic VLB video card.  Later Wing Commander 4 and Wing Commander Prophecy (wasn’t a big fan of the last one).

From Wikipedia on Wing Commander 3:

The game made the transition from animated cut-scenes to full motion video, one of the first computer games to do so; it was frequently marketed as the world’s first interactive movie. It pioneered the use of CGI backgrounds and greenscreen work; all sets were added digitally during post-production, nearly a decade before George Lucas would use the same tactic in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

To given an example of attention to detail, take a look at the manual (16MB), more than a hundred pages (the vast, vast majority of which are not directly related to playing the actual game but rather history and stories and stuff).

The original Wing Commander series to some extent was limited as to what they could put on the screen by the hardware. Wing Commander Saga seems to have no limits, massive dogfights with tons of fighters, multiple capital ships engaging each other head on things that I never recalled seeing in the original Wing Commander series (Though to be honest my memory of things other than WC1 are kind of fuzzy it was a long time ago). The last mission I played tonight I barely escaped with my life (had to try the mission twice since the first time I was shot down), limped away with 36 kills — a number far higher than any other WC game that I can recall.

I’ve played probably 8-10 missions at this point. In those missions I already have war stories to talk about .

Beyond the added visuals comes the really excellent voices, story, smalltalk etc. It adds an amazing level of realism to the game.

Confederation Strike force going to their target

The controls are quite advanced as well, quite similar to those available in the X-Wing series of flight simulators. Again my memory of WC:4 and WC:P are fuzzy at best those very well may of been available then too I don’t remember.

If I had one complaint it is the game is too strict in the rules, I get in trouble quite often when all I want to do is go in and skin some cats. One mission I was ordered to retreat, but I didn’t want to I turned around and watched some action, I never engaged or got close to the enemy, at the end of the scene they abandoned me.

It’s really amazing this team of people were able to hold together for a decade and release such a quality product, I really still have no words for how incredible of a game this is. If you haven’t tried the Wing Commander series this is something you should check out — in order to play it properly you will need a joystick though. I use a trusty old CH Flightstick Pro which works pretty good. I re-bought it about two years ago when I went and re-bought the original WC series (excluding Prophecy). I had intended to play the series through but haven’t had as much time as I would of liked so didn’t get past part way into WC2. The games play well in DOS Box so when I get time in the future I can go back to them again.

I don’t see any way to donate to them on their site, I read some speculation that they would probably get in trouble with the content owners (Electronic Arts I think) if they did take any money for the game.

February 3, 2012

Don’t push code on a Friday damnit

Filed under: General,Random Thought — Tags: — Nate @ 9:35 pm

I hate it when people want to push code on a Friday. Here it is, Friday, I was working to wind up a few last tasks before going home when my phone went off saying part of my company’s site was not working right.

After some investigation with a developer we discovered it was an issue with Facebook (ugh, how I hate thee) and their code was breaking because Facebook was broken (they were not aware this would happen I am sure they will fix it going forward).

So while they are working to work around the issue I ran a search for it, and it seems to be a more wide spread problem caused by a Facebook software deployment done today, Friday at nearly 7PM!

F F S

My monitor first detected the failure at 6:49 PM so they weren’t even done deploying by the time it failed. It was intermittant for a few minutes then went hard down at around 7:11PM.

@$#$ facebook. Thanks for screwing me, and who knows how many others by deploying code on a Friday night.

Of course the developers on our end deserve some of the heat as well. But I am nit picking about code deployments on a Friday, not code bugs..

November 14, 2011

AMD Launches Opteron 6200s

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — Nate @ 9:06 am

UPDATED I have three words:

About damn time.

I’ve been waiting for a long time for these, was expecting them months ago, had to put in orders with Opteron 6100s a few weeks ago because I couldn’t wait any longer for the 6200s. Sigh. I’m half hoping I can get HP to exchange my 6100s for 6200s since the 6100s are still sitting in boxes. Though that may be being too hopeful given my time line for deployment. One thing’s for sure though, if HP can pull it off they’ll make my decision on which version of vSphere to go with pretty easy since vSphere 4 tops out at 12 cores.

AMD has finally launched the 6200, which everyone knows is the world’s first 16-core x86-64 processor, and is socket compatible with the 6100 processor which launched over a year ago providing an easy upgrade path.

I’m just running through some of the new stuff now, one feature which is nice and I believe I mentioned it a while ago is the TDP Cap, which allows a user to set the maximum power usage of the processor, basically more granular control than technologies that were used previous to it. I don’t believe it has the ability to dynamically turn cores on and off based on this value though which is unfortunate – maybe next time. Excluding the new turbo core support which is different technology.

AMD Turbo Core

I thought this was pretty cool, I was just reading about it in their slide deck. I thought, at first it was going to be similar to the Intel Turbo or IBM Turbo technology where, if I recall right (don’t quote me), the system can more or less shut off all the other cores on the socket and turbo charge a single core to super sonic speeds. AMD Turbo core operates on all cores simultaneously by between 300-500Mhz if the workload fits the power envelope of the processor. It can do the same for half of the on board cores but instead of 300-500Mhz boost the frequency by up to 1Ghz.

Memory Enhancements

It also supports higher performance memory as well as something called LR-DIMMs, which I had never heard of before. Load Reduced DIMMs seem they allow you to add more memory to the system. Even after reading the stuff on Micron’s site I’m not sure of the advantage.

I recall on the 6100 there was a memory performance hit when you utilized all 12 memory slots per CPU socket (vs using only 8/socket). I don’t see whether this is different on the 6200 or not.

Power and Performance

The highest end, lowest power Opteron 6100 seems to be the 6176 (not to be confused with the 6176 SE). The 6176 (by itself) is not even mentioned on AMD’s site (though it is on HP’s site and my recent servers have it). It is a 2.3Ghz 12-core 80W (115W TDP) processor. It seems AMD has changed their power ratings from the ACP they were using before to the TDP (what Intel uses). If I recall right ACP was something like average processor power usage, vs TDP is peak usage(?).

The 6276 is the new high end lower power option, which is a 16-core 2.3Ghz processor with the same power usage. So they managed to squeeze in an extra 9.2Ghz worth of processing power in the same power envelope. That’s pretty impressive.

There’s not a lot of performance metrics out at this stage, but here’s something I found on AMD’s site:

SPEC Int rate_base2006 Mainstream CPUs

That’s a very good price/performance ratio. This graph is for “mainstream CPUs” that is CPUs with “normal” power usage, not ultra high end CPUs which consume a lot more power. Those are four socket systems so for the CPUs alone on the high end from Intel would run $8,236, and from AMD $3,152. Then there is the motherboard+chipset from Intel which will carry a premium over AMD as well since Intel has different price/scalability bands for their processors between their two socket and four socket systems (where AMD does not, though with Intel you can now get two socket versions of servers with the latest Intel processors they still seem to carry a decent premium since I believe they use the same chipsets as the four socket boxes the two socket versions are made more for memory capacity bound workloads rather than CPU bound).

They have floating point performance too though for the stuff I do floating point doesn’t really matter, more useful probably for SGI and Cray and their super computers.

It’s not the 3.5Ghz that AMD was talking about but I trust that is coming..at some point. AMD has been having some manufacturing issues recently which probably was the main cause for the delays of the 6200, hopefully they get those worked out in short order.

HP has already updated their stuff to reflect support for the latest processors in their existing platforms.

From HP’s site, here are the newest 16 core processors:

  • 6282SE (2.6GHz/16-core/16MB/140W TDP) Processor
  • 6276 (2.3GHz/16-core/16MB/115W TDP) Processor
  • 6274 (2.2GHz/16-core/16MB/115W TDP) Processor
  • 6272 (2.1GHz/16-core/16MB/115W TDP) Processor
  • 6262HE (1.6GHz/16-core/16MB/85W TDP) Processor

Few more stats –

  • L1 CPU Cache slashed from 128kB to 48kB (total 1,536kB to 768kB)
  • L2 CPU Cache increased from 512kB to 1,000 kB (total 6,144kB to 12,000kB)
  • L3 CPU Cache increased from 12,288 kB to 16,384 kB (1,024kB per core for both procs)
  • Memory controller clock speed increased from 1.8Ghz to 2Ghz
  • CMOS process shrunk from 45nm to 32nm

Interesting how they shifted focus away from the L1 cache to the L2 cache.

Anyone know how many transistors are on this thing? And how many were on the 6100 ? How about on some of the recent Intel chips?

Now to go figure out how much these things actually cost and what the lead times are.

UPDATE – I know pricing at least now, the new 16 core procs are, as the above graph implies actually cheaper than the 12-core versions! That’s just insane, how often does that happen?!?!

Bottom line

With so many things driving virtualization these days, and with such high consolidation ratios, especially with workloads that are not CPU constrained(which are most), myself I like the value that the 6000-series AMD chips give, especially the number of raw cores without hyperthreading. The AMD 6000 platform is the first AMD platform I have really, truly liked I want to say going back a long, long ways. I’ll admit I was mistaken in my ways for a few years when I was on the Intel bandwagon. Though I have been on the ‘give me more cores’ bandwagon ever since the first Intel quad core processor. Now that AMD has the most cores, on a highly efficient platform, I suppose I gravitate towards them now. There are limits to how far you go to get cores of course, I’m not sure what my limit is. I’ve mentioned in the past I wouldn’t be interested in something like a 48x200Mhz CPU for example. The Opteron 6000 has a nice balance of per-core performance (certainly can’t match Intel’s per core performance but it’s halfway decent especially given the price), and many, many cores.

Three blog posts in one morning, busy morning!

November 3, 2011

Virtualization Surveys, and insights from Xen creator

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — Nate @ 7:06 pm

Two different stories caught my eye today, one from our friends at The Register about a survey by Veeam Software which surveyed several hundred companies with more than 1,000 employees which came to the conclusion that the average consolidation ratio was 5.1:1.

Across the four geographic regions and all the companies surveyed, the perceived consolidation ratio was 9.8 virtual machines per physical machine. But if you do the math and calculate the actual penetration ration, companies are actually squeezing only 5.1 virtual machines per host on average.

It could just be that some IT managers garbled their responses and have screwed up the data, but perhaps Veeam is on to something.

I saw that and did a virtual face palm. 5.1:1 ? Even 9.8:1 ? I think I was doing about 7-9:1 back in 2007 with my first ESX 3.0 systems on HP DL380 G5s with 8 cores and 16GB of ram. I came across a screen shot of one of those systems a couple weeks ago, brought back some good memories! (oh how iSCSI sucked on ESX 3! Speaking of which that brought up another memory I was at a dinner thrown by Dell I think a year or two ago, and they were pushing iSCSI for Vmware via some 3rd party storage/vmware consultants or something. The presenter kept trying to emphasize at the time how good iSCSI was and how there’s no reason not to use it in Vmware and I kept reminding him(in front of the group) how much iSCSI sucked in ESX 3, which is why people were still hesitant to use it even shortly after vSphere came out, he didn’t take it well, it was funny to watch)

My last VMware projects, always memory constrained of course were at the low end 14:1, and higher end maybe 24:1(64GB ram on hardware circa ~2006 – HP DL585 G1). This was without any benefits from transparent page sharing since that stuff never worked for me on Linux anyways, no swapping either. Just right sizing the VMs to the workloads, even if it meant as little as 96MB of memory for the VM.

My next project I’ll be surprised if we can’t get at least 30-40:1.

Seeing numbers like 5:1 makes me think back to when Vmware went around to their customers and saw what they were actually using before announcing their new price hikes for memory, and they set the license limits to what their typical customer was using.

5:1 ? Sad. Unless your really running a CPU bound application then that’s fine, not many of those out there though.

Second article was this one, where one of the “Godfathers” of Xen said one of the great things about virtualization is improving security with workload isolation.

Isolation — the ability to restrict what computing goes on in a given context — is a fundamental characteristic of virtualization that can be exploited to improve trustworthiness of processes on a physical system even if other processes have been compromised, says Crosby, a creator of the open source hypervisor and a founder of startup Bromium, which is looking to use Xen features to boost security.

I couldn’t agree more, which is why per-VM licensing strategies really piss me off, because it works direct opposition to that strategy. At the very least have dual licensing so customers can license based on VM or based on hardware.

On a side note, I just saw an interesting interview on CNBC, where someone was talking about the IPO of Groupon which I believe is supposed to go live tomorrow. Groupon is apparently trying to raise about $510M in a very paltry offering of something like less than 5% of their company. The funny part is apparently they owe about $505M in short term liabilities to vendors and stuff. The person being interviewed says if Groupon doesn’t pull this off soon they’ll go broke practically overnight.

They are also reporting there are 11 book runners on the deal, more than any other US IPO in history. I don’t know what a book runner is but it sounds fishy to have so many runners for such a small allocation of stock.

Burn, baby, burn.

 

October 23, 2011

That was fast

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 8:58 pm

This isn’t really what I expected when I said Sprint would likely take away it’s unlimited data plans, in fact I explicitly thought they would not touch their 4G service because iPhones don’t do Wimax, and I figure it’s fairly uncommon for iPhone people to get Mifis.

Sprint Nextel is ending unlimited data plans for all devices except smartphones, bringing the era of all-you-can-eat mobile data in the U.S. nearer to a close.

[..]

However, Sprint will continue to offer its plans for unlimited data use on phones, including on the Apple iPhone, which Sprint introduced just last week.

I wonder what prompted this move, it’s not as if you can incur roaming charges on their 4G network, is there even such a thing as roaming on Wimax ? I’m sure it’s theoretically possible but am quite confident it just doesn’t happen to Sprint 4G/Clearwire customers. Sprint owns a majority in Clearwire, and has invested billions on it.

For Mobile Hotspot plans on phones, data usage will be capped at 5GB per month of either 3G or combined 3G/4G service, depending on whether the phone can use 4G. Use above that cap will be charged at $0.05 per megabyte.

It is very unfortunate, and surprising move, maybe the executive who came up with this idea came from Netflix.

Their excess charges are well, excessive. AT&T I believe charges $10/GB for going over, which to me is reasonable, Sprint would charge, at a 1GB rate $51 for 1GB over the limit.

The AT&T excess charge is very similar to getting a higher plan which was nice to see, I mean when I signed up, I got the 2GB plan, and if I happened to use 3-4GB, the charges for that would be no different than if I had signed up for a larger plan.

It would be less bad if the devices had an automatic cutoff once you hit the limit, but of course there isn’t. My Mifi is nice enough to tell me how much data I use in a particular session but has no aggregation features. Which I’ve always found strange why phones and other devices don’t have functionality to keep track of that kind of stuff, I suppose it could be intentional, if it were, it would be even more unfortunate.

Luckily for me this change won’t impact me much at all I don’t believe, but still, very unfortunate for all round.

I came across a post from someone who has kept much closer track as to the changes Sprint has implemented than I have:

  • Removal of the Sprint Premiere Membership Program and the removal of all its benefits
  • Using your phone as a Mobile Hotspot no longer has unlimited data but is now capped. It still costs the same $30.
  • Adding a $10 a month 4g charge to every 4g line on an account regardless of whether you get 4g reception or not. This charge was then expanded to include all smartphones on the Sprint network, even if they weren’t capable of 4g.
  • No more Billing to Account.
  • An increase in administrative fees per line.
  • Raising the Early Termination Fee on an account by $150 to $350 for each phone line.
  • Changing the arbitration rules for settling customer disputes in a way that heavily favors Sprint.
  • Stopping people from leaving Sprint because of the arbitration changes without being charged the ETF, even though Federal Courts have ruled that changes in arbitration rules are a material change in the contract.
  • Eliminating unlimited 4g data from it’s Mobile Broadband plans.
  • Dropping WIMAX for their new LTE 4g network. This not only means that if you do not have 4g currently, you will never have it for your current 4g phone but also that all Sprint 4g phones being sold today, even if you are within a current 4g area, will stop operating as 4g at the end of next year because they will not work on Sprint’s new network.

Sprint your not doing me any favors encouraging me to use your service, even after charging what seemed to be a $50 fee to terminate my phone service even though I have not been on a contract for over a year(and having been a customer for 10 years), now eliminating my unlimited data on my remaining service with you. I recently purchased a AT&T 3G/4G mifi from dailysteals for $60. It’s unlocked, I thought I’d keep it handy as a backup, now it looks like it may be a a full time replacement for my Mifi when my contract is up next year.

Someone else mentioned a federal law saying with such a material change in the contract existing users have the legal right to terminate the contract without penalty, I may just do that. Even if I have to return the Mifi I have, it’s not as if I need it anyways.

September 21, 2011

HP considering replacing CEO

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 8:53 am

This would be great news if it happens, seems HP is considering replacing their CEO. I don’t know if Meg Whitman would be a good candidate or not that’s not really my area of expertise, but Leo’s reign has been a disaster to-date, not only for the company, but the customers, and their stock price.

Not that the previous CEO was good, he was terrible too, being known for slashing budgets, cutting corners for short term profits, and killing morale across the company. HP execs seem to be doing everything they can to kill the company.

I’m seeing on CNBC “Significant number of HP board members want to replace Apotheker”. Which is somewhat ironic considering people believed that Leo recently rebuilt the board around people that would support him. I guess they may not be so loyal after all.

If the CEO goes hopefully goes the bid for that UK software company Autonomy – HP should re-invest in their own stuff, several folks have pointed out the lack of HP’s R&D in recent years has almost forced HP to acquire a lot of companies and in the end they pay a much higher premium for that vs doing things themselves, just look at how much HP has spent on acquisitions vs IBM (the data for both is incomplete but the trend shows HP running at about double the rate of IBM for what data is available.

HP has Vertica, they have 3PAR, they could use some more advanced networking stuff 3COM just isn’t there, nor is Procurve (I still believe HP bought 3COM for nothing more than market presence in China).

August 31, 2011

WebOS device sales still hectic

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 9:28 am

HP announced recently they are going to manufacture another round of Touchpads to meet more demand, and limit one TP per customer. Best Buy has also been selling TPs with a limit of one per customer.

You can see in the Precentral Forums as well as the Palm Developer forums the frustration by the existing user base that many are not able to get their hands on hardware.

The limit per customer should help get TPs in to more hands without having to resort to the scalping market, though many folks wanted to buy a couple extras as gifts. One is better than none..

While the Touchpad continues to make headlines with the fire sale what hasn’t made any headlines is the desperate struggle many users are going through to try to get their hands on the HP Pre3 which was released in Europe mere days before the big HP announcement that they were getting out of hardware.

My own experience mimics that of many others, I put in an order to a UK reseller on the 20th whom appeared to have stock on hand. It took a few days to get past their security checks but I got past them, and then they went to go to their distributor to get stock (they apparently had none at the time), and their distributor told them they couldn’t have any stock, someone upstream (maybe HP, maybe another carrier the speculation runs wild) has blocked it. So the company refunded my money and that of many others who ordered. Unfortunately this took until Thursday of last week to find out I was not going to be getting Pre3s from this company.

So I set out on a quest to find Pre3s from someone else, every place I came across said no stock, there was talk about the Palm Eurostore selling Pre3s, BUT they only require both that your billing and shipping addresses are in Europe. No shipping to the US.

There is a UK reseller mobiles.co.uk which is requiring all orders be shipped to the UK. They accept US billing and shipping addresses but have canceled every order that had one after the order was placed.

There are people trying to order from expansys.fr over in France whom have a stock of AZERTY based Pre3s (I had never heard of AZERTY until then), but their shipping forms do not list U.S. as an option (I think people have tried anyways not sure of results). I have seen other stories of people in Asia getting their orders canceled by expansys.fr with the company directing those users to the Asian version of the site (which has no Pre3s of course). While it’s apparently not hard to change the keyboard layout in the phone itself, there is still the physical keyboard where the keys won’t be right once the mapping is changed. But users are willing to make the compromise in order to get their hands on the device (I would too if they’d ship to the US). I was about to order from them when I saw the billing address had no place to put a state. Only City, Country, and street address. Also no mention of U.S. shipping options, so it seemed pretty clear to me that they weren’t going to ship my order so I didn’t submit it.

So I began searching Ebay and came across another company KICK MOBILE over in the UK and I ordered a pair of Pre3s from them last Thursday morning. I emailed them later asking if they really did have stock because the last place did not, they said they are sold out *right now* but are 99.9% confident they will get 100 units the following day. The people/person at Kick Mobile has been very nice and friendly. Unfortunately Friday came and mostly went and Kick Mobile sent out an update saying they have not gotten stock yet but have confirmed their upstream supplier has 100 units set aside for them (out of 1500 units on hand), and they are still highly confident they will get them because Kick Mobiles is doing them a favor in buying a couple hundred older Blackberry phones to liquidate. They said they won’t know for certain until the end of this month or maybe the 1st or 2nd of September. The upstream supplier was waiting for authorization to release the units to the resellers.

I haven’t gotten an update directly yet (have not asked) but did see someone else post an update from them saying that Kick Mobiles no longer has confidence they will get that stock, though the final nail is not in the coffin yet (probably will be in the next 24 hours though).

What’s more frustrating is that Kick Mobile mentioned if I had placed the order a mere 24 hours earlier I would of gotten the phones. Getting the bad news back from the first reseller took too long!

I don’t blame any of the resellers they are all doing everything (or have done) they can to try to get the product to the desperate customers and have done a great job.

So yesterday I went on Ebay again and found a pair of Pre3s from what appears to be an end user who had two of them, and I immediately hit the buy it now button to buy one. I’m normally not one who likes to use auction sites I don’t know why I just don’t feel comfortable doing it but at the moment if I want a Pre3 (and I want one as you can clearly see) I have little choice at this point, it seems as time goes on there are fewer and fewer available, even though there is good information that says there are at least hundreds to thousands being held up in warehouses with an uncertain future. You can probably bet there are hundreds to thousands of AT&T and Verizon branded Pre3s as well which people speculate may just be outright destroyed rather than sold.

With each attempt to buy a Pre3 the unit price has gone up by roughly $125. There’s one report of someone paying over $900 for one.

There have been rumors of a fire sale of Pre3s as well but so far very few have been able to get them at those prices, even the official Palm Eurostore says they were not able to resell at those prices and in fact is unable to get more stock and is canceling all outstanding orders and not accepting new orders. Not a good sign. Contrary to initial beliefs the Eurostore is not directly affiliated with HP or Palm but is a 3rd party reseller like most others. From their web site

Update Wed 31st Aug 15:00 :
From the contacts we initiated since last Friday ;
– We have cancelled and refunded all orders where we received notification to cancel.
– We have shipped all orders for those people we had contacted and who accepted the order for a single unit at the standard/agreed price.
– We are still awaiting response from some of the people we contacted
We are now going to set a deadline of midday (BST) on Thursday 1st Sep. A final reminder email has gone out to these people. We will have no option but to cancel those orders after that point if we have not heard back from them.

The European Pre3 only works on one of the two AT&T 3G frequencies, so will be crippled to some degree(mainly when used in doors), by contrast I read that the way T-mobile uses their frequencies the Pre3 would have no 3G coverage at all. T-mobile apparently uses one frequency for upstream and one for downstream, AT&T has both frequencies available for up and down.

I’ll take what I can get though, assuming I can get the Pre3. I got a Pre2 in yesterday (can’t use it yet because I don’t have a SIM card). Was supposed to get a Veer (with AT&T SIM) yesterday, but fedex screwed me on the delivery claiming my address was wrong and before I could pick the package up at the local facility shipped it back to AT&T.  I have another Fedex package coming from HP today with a Touchpad and some accessories in it, will see if they screw up again. I’ve recieved a lot of UPS and USPS packages at my address so I know it’s right, it is a new address, the building has only existed for about 1.5 years but hard to believe Fedex hasn’t delivered a package here before, there’s a couple hundred people living here.

While the initial reviews of the Pre3 are very positive at least from the WebOS community(which is biased of course), they are not suitable devices for the general public in the U.S. as you will have to jump through hoops and stuff to use them due to the frequency differences and general lack of support. But for more hard core technical users it’s clear it’s by far the best phone to come out of Palm since the first Pre launched back in 2009.

In case your wondering why I have been trying so hard to get my hands on a Pre 3. Well part of it as I have mentioned in the past is, for several different personal reasons (won’t elaborate again here), I won’t really go near a Android, iOS or Windows mobile device for myself at least. The Pre2 and Pre3 will keep me on a platform I like for a while to come until I need to make a decision about where to go at that point. I’ve been using a feature phone from Sanyo for the past 8 months while I waited for the Pre3 to be released. It’s an OK phone, I like that I don’t have to charge it often, though it’s not as nice as the Sanyo phones I used to have, the software is quite different, and in general not as good.  It may be because the phone might just be Sanyo in name since they were bought by Kyocera (the phone itself says Sanyo by Kyrocera) Though I guess one thing I will be able to finally test without being too paranoid is how rugged this rugged phone really is, your supposed to be able to completely submerge it in water and have it be OK. I’ll finally test that out!

Meanwhile my order for 4 Touchpad 16GBs which was accepted by HP’s systems on August 21st at 2AM (26 hours before their cutoff period for canceling orders) is still pending shipment, I assume they are out of stock now. The order status page says it is in an “Admin” state. My 2nd order  was processed before my first which I thought was unusual. My 2nd order is the 5th Touchpad with accessories, in order to secure a discount on accessories I had to buy another TP. I was in such a hurry to buy the original Touchpads I did not pay attention to accessories or discounts on the 21st as I was busy fighting server errors on HP’s side.

My original Palm Pre, which has been disconnected from the Sprint network for 8 months did something unusual on Monday – it showed I had a new voice mail. I checked my normal Sprint phone it too said I had a voice mail. I would not of expected the Pre to show that (it never has before). Just because I was curious I tried to check the voice mail on the Pre and got a message from Sprint saying my account could not be verified. So clearly the phone wasn’t authorized to operate on Sprint anymore, must’ve been some sort of temporary hole opened in the Sprint network which allowed the phone to log in for a moment and detect the new voice mail.

I only wish management at HP cared enough to handle this whole situation better in the first place. I do feel sorry for the entire WebOS division (hardware+software), including the leadership who were just as blindsided by this as everyone else. I can’t imagine the stress the leadership is under to try to maintain morale at this point.

Over 2,000 words for this post, not bad.

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