Fake Bill Gates

You know who fucking sucks? AT&T fucking sucks. You know who sucks with them? Apple. These whiny ass douchebags are bitching and complaining about netshare. What is netshare? Well here’s a little back story.

Everyone bitched about the iPhone 1.0 because you couldn’t install pretty much any software for it. Jobs and all those whiny bastards were hyping all the glassy web 2.0 apps (which often make no sense without mouseovers), but the lack of any real syncing solutions pissed everyone off (like give us fucking samba morons — and if they try and patent samba for the iPhone, I will personally come hunt all those dumbasses down and beat their heads in with a brick). Then with iPhone 2.0, you could install software, but it had to go through the iPhone store, thus controlling both piracy and guaranteeing that Apple could take their ridiculously high 30% cut on all software sold. Of course, the same bastards wanted so much control that apparently they can

1. terminate your contract for having unapproved software installed,
2. and demand you pay the ETF for violating your ToS.

What software is so nasty that they can disconnect you and charge you an ETF? That would be netshare. And what does netshare do? Does it send out spam messages? Does it DDOS infrastructure? Is it a distributed bittorrent client and tracker? Nope. It’s simple routing software. CS undergrads write this shit. It lets you connect your laptop or PC to your iPhone to use the wireless broadband connection (their buzzword for it is tethering). And guess what, AT&T and Apple hate you:

The iPhone is not intended to be used as a tethering device and we have no plans to offer separate tethering plans for it.

Tethering is even banned in the ToS:

Furthermore, plans(unless specifically designated for tethering usage) cannot be used for any applications that tether the device (through use of, including without limitation, connection kits, other phone/PDA-to computer accessories, Bluetooth® or any other wireless technology) to Personal Computers (including without limitation, laptops), or other equipment for any purpose.

These crybabies are getting pissy for no good reason. Maybe they are worried that people who tether their iPhones will just hook their laptop and iPhone together to only pay for 1 wireless data plan (instead of two). God forbid anyone doesn’t pay $70+/mo just for wireless data. Fucking money grubbing bastards. A data connection is a data connection. These are the same morons who cried foul when people were trying to use home routers. I understand that these guys are still suck on the “if value, then right” mentality, but

1. They’re not the ones adding value. Independent developers are.
2. They’re trying VERY hard to keep independent developers from adding value.

The worst part is that AT&T/Apple won’t even refund buyers of the software which they sold (and took a 30% cut from) after they approved it, and then they banned. But the piss in their Cheerios is apparently even more sour than that. These chodes yanked a nice little app for ganking movie times called BoxOffice. The app simply grabs movie times, and it does so from sources that allow grabbing for non-commercial use. Well, it got yanked from the iPhone store, and the bastards won’t even explain to the devs why.

Walled garden? Not even. I was tempted to buy an iPhone and turn off my Nokia E61 (opera + putty + wifi + rsync = fucking sexy), but fuck that shit. Apple and AT&T are not getting my money, especially when they act like whiny little crybabies. I can’t wait until Google comes out with Android and embarrasses these retards. And when you look at the iPhone’s TCO ($1975, and that’s not even with the taxes and fees that’ll easily be another $240 over the 2 years for the contract), you’ll be floored. Think about it this way. Right now, my plan is, by todays standards, amazing:

1. 7pm-7am unlimited nights/weekends,
2. unlimited mobile to mobile,
3. 400 anytime minutes,
4. and 50 rollover minutes,

(my plan is from the pre-merger days even before Cingular was on the map), and I pay $40 (which after taxes and fees is always a little over $50). Slap on a $20 unlimited data plan and I can buy a $700 phone, and I’ll still be WAY ahead of buying an iPhone money-wise, and I’ll get to play on the Google side.

And for the record, if you pay for SMS when you have an unlimited data connection, congratulations. You’re the exact kind of moron that AT&T likes to have. It’s cheaper to send a message from outer fucking space than it is to send a text message.  Fuck AT&T and Apple. And this has nothing to do with the fact that Apple is winning the handheld market (actually, they’re not, Blackberry/RIM is still spanking Palm, Apple, and lesser knowns like HTC/O2). All the telecoms and handheld manufacturers are little crybabies about what people can put on handhelds because when they open it up, they’ll miss out on a huge stream of prospective monetizable value. But this whole ordeal about “play by our rules or don’t play at all” is so lame. They wonder why customer satisfaction is so piss poor. They’re like the kid in elementary school who would only play ball in his own back yard, and any time he scored it’d count for 2 points because it’s his yard. I will personally see to it that Google buries them.

People ask what my take is on net neutrality and I keep thinking that net neutrality is basically a guarantee on innovation, for now. The problem is that with the traditional system, the cable company is blasting every single channel into your home, regardless of whether you’re watching it or not. The upside is that changing channels is merely a process of adjusting the frequency the TV listens on, and you get a nearly instantaneous channel change. This is ridiculously wasteful. IPTV saves so much bandwidth by only transferring the data for the channel that you’re tuned into. Even if we used the ridiculously wasteful Blu-ray codec, and the cable industry’s low estimate of coax bandwidth, IPTV could allow you to watch 46 HD channels at once.

I have outlined signals analysis below. The only caveat is that I did not specialize in e-signals, but I took tons of physics and software engineering courses and can set up mythtv with an analog tuner blindfolded, with my hands tied behind my back (okay, maybe not both hands… I still have to type). Please correct me anywhere that I’m wrong.

Data Rates

At 1080x, Blu-ray’s data rate is 54Mbps (~6.75 MBps). Comparatively, HD television providers (namely Verizon and Comcast) regularly transmit 1080x at 10-18 Mbps. Supposedly, Blu-ray sends so much extraneous data for error handling, but something tells me that encryption (which is apparently to protect you from yourself) helps put that overhead up there too.

Coax

Typical coax’s total bandwidth is a total of 672 MHz. The data rate for coax is 6 MHz per 50 Mbps (~6.25 MBps). Slapping down some quick dimensional analysis leaves us with:

672 MHz * 50 Mbps = 5600 Mbps (~700 MBps)

           6 MHz

Now, since IEEE sometimes works in vacuum of theory and formulas that don’t work with such exactitude in the real world, one trade group claims that coax total bandwidth is only 300 MHz. At that rate, we’re still talking 2500 Mbps (~312 MBps, which is pretty close to the new DOCSIS rates). Thus, even if we use Blu-ray’s ridiculously redundant and encrypted codec at 6.75 MBps, and the trade group’s bandwidth estimate (that is half of IEEE’s estimate), you could watch 46 HD channels at once.

To mitigate the channel changing issues, you could easily receive a background signal that transmits a reduced signal resolution which includes every channel. Also, as the new generations grow up where DVRs are standard, live TV will undoubtedly make way for on-demand TV, which dumps channel changing for menus. It will only become further unnecessary to have data constantly blasted into your home that was blasted in just a few hours ago. For example, the Daily Show and Colbert Report are channeled into your home AT LEAST 4 times per day on weekdays. Even then, re-runs and syndication account for a ridiculous portion of data beamed into your home. The result is that you’re “downloading” stuff that you’ve downloaded tens if not hundreds of times. With on-demand TV, loading of data could easily start while on menu screens. Trailers (and beginnings of shows) and video art would quickly be downloaded in the background and then the regular video could be downloaded in real time.

Back to Neutrality

So the moral of the story is that if we require net neutrality, we require innovation, and it’s only a matter of time before we get amazing pipes into our homes that blast ridiculous speeds and tens of concurrent HD signals. Without net neutrality, the incentives are not to make a better system, but to make a system full of more rules and nickel/dime rates.