TechVirtuoso

Have HTC and AT&T gone nuts?

September 6th, 2011 at 9:35 AM 2 Comments Frank Owen

I do not understand the thinking behind this. It makes absolutely no sense to me. $849.00 for a Android Dual Core tablet? $149.00 subsidy from AT&T? What were they thinking?! I realize that these decisions were made long before the HP TouchPad firesale started, but don’t you think someone should have said “wait a second, we should look at this again” and postpone the launch?

The HTC Jetstream is no low end tablet, but it is nothing unique. 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, an 8-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, 10.1-inch display, and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. In today’s world, the majority of tablets (including this one) is a add-on device. Why are they charging the price of a low to mid-range laptop? At this price point I can almost buy a Lenovo Thinkpad and a lower end Android Tablet.

The other piece that is puzzling to me is why is AT&T only offering a $149.00 discount for a 2 year contract? Who would sign up for that deal? With Sprint’s recently announced ETF Change is this a new pattern? Low subsidies and high ETF’s? Lets hope not.

Hopefully this is just a case of “too late to change” and doesn’t show a trend to things to come from HTC. If it does, I don’t see the once great smart device manufacturer continuing on with their legacy.

Can you have too much security?

August 29th, 2011 at 8:35 AM No Comments Frank Owen

I started a new position this year and have many challenges to overcome. There are a lot of things that have been neglected and many changes to be made. One of the changes I was looking at implementing is enabling Windows Firewall locally. I started on a few new servers that I was rolling out and the regional IT staff that support some of our internal systems started to disable these firewalls. When I brought this up they thought I was nuts. Just wait until I start restricting services by IP.

Fast Forward to today and the “Morto” internet worm is spreading via RDP. We don’t have any RDP hosts local that are open to the dangerous world we know as the internet but I can’t vouch for the other dozen sites that are connected at the other end of our MPLS. Now, most of our PC’s don’t have RDP enabled, but PC’s used by management and more importantly the majority of our servers may be susceptible if one PC out of thousands are infected.

I realize more security means more administrative overhead and makes admin jobs harder, but what happens when something like this hits and all of these machines are infected? how much work is that going to take to remedy?

So, what are your thoughts? How far do you go to keep your infrastructure safe?

A few days with a dead tablet

August 28th, 2011 at 9:12 AM No Comments Frank Owen

Like many others the announcement that HP would discontinue all current WebOS devices surprised me. I knew it wasn’t selling as well as HP expected (especially with the Rumors about Best Buy wanting to return a huge chunk of their stock) but I didn’t think they would give up this easily.

I went on the hunt to get one after the $99/$149 fire sale started. Since I was traveling that Saturday I didn’t get my hands on one until this past Wednesday. I am not a complete newb to WebOS. My wife used the original Pre on Sprint for a year and after she upgraded to the Evo I swapped it to my account as my primary device a couple of times. I really like WebOS but the Pre’s hardware killed the experience for me. I was exited to see how WebOS had evolved since version 1 as well as the experience on a piece of quality hardware.

Overall the WebOS interface hasn’t changed much, but it seemed much more polished over version 1.45. The hardware seemed solid but I was surprised to experience a little lag when doing some basic tasks. I would think the Dual Core Snapdragon system wouldn’t have small performance issues like this. Even with the performance shortcomings I didn’t use my laptop for three days after bringing the tablet home which surprised me.

The HP Touchpad had potential to be a great device, but with the previous price point I can understand why it wasn’t selling as well as it’s competitors. VPN Functionality and LAN Printing are great features but without apps like Remote Desktop, no support to access network files (CIFS Support is available in a Homebrew kernal, but no file manager supports it yet) and the crazy limitation to only be able to print to HP Printers it almost renders these features useless. There were also a number of applications in the HP Market that I was surprised not to see. No Google Voice (there was an app to send SMS messages through your Google Voice account), no LogMeIn and no Dropbox just to name a few.

Overall I am happy with my purchase. Would I have paid $499+ for the device? Absolutely not but I don’t think I would pay that much for an iPad even with it’s ever mounting list of applications. Will my Touchpad force me to leave my trusty Thinkpad on the charger? I am not sure, but after using the Touchpad I do know some tablet (not sure which at this point) will.

Tech Field Day 7 is on!

August 11th, 2011 at 5:00 AM No Comments Frank Owen

Tech Field Day 7 starts this morning and I am excited to get to our first presenter, Solarwinds (they have Tacos!). After we eat our Tacos and hear about Solarwinds we will move onto Symantec and then to Dell. You can follow the action on twitter or watch it live, right after the break!

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Austin isn’t ready for this!

August 10th, 2011 at 12:49 AM 3 Comments Frank Owen

Photo by Steven Foskett at TFD4

When you have 13 geeks (plus a Foskett, not sure what to classify him as) transcending on a city at the same time there will be shenanigans. This is exactly what is going to happen tomorrow!

I will be joining a great group of tech bloggers at Tech Field Day 7. It will be two days of amazing information and discussions revolving around data center technologies. Sponsoring the event will be SolarWinds (@SolarWinds_Inc), Symantec (@Symantec), Veeam (@Veeam) and Dell (@Dell_Storage). My fellow TFD 7 deleates are below!

Scott Cochran	ScottCochran.org vCTC	@ScottCochran
Theron Conrey	Conrey.org VMunderground	@TheronConrey
Scott Lowe	TechRepublic VirtualizationAdmin	@OtherScottLowe
Roger Lund	vRoger vBrainstorm	@RogerLund
Frank Owen	TechVirtuoso	@FOwen
Bob Plankers	The Lone Sysadmin	@Plankers
W. Curtis Preston	Backup Central Truth in IT	@WCPreston
Fabio Rapposelli	Juku P2V It!	@FabioRapposelli
Brandon Riley	virtual insanity	@BrandonJRiley
Reed Robins	Truth in IT Backup Central	@TheReedRobins
Derek Schauland	Technically Speaking	@WebJunkie
Matt Simmons	Standalone Sysadmin	@standaloneSA
Matt Vogt	Virtualization, Storage, Community	@MattVogt

Keep an eye out on Twitter and my fellow blogger/tweeters above for information throughout this great event. We will also have a live feed posted on the forum tomorrow for anyone who wants to join in.

Disclaimer: Travel and accommodations are being provided by the sponsors of Tech Field Day 7 (which are listed above). My posts, and my opinions will always be my own. I am not required to post any material to participate in this event.

Edit: I can’t believe I left Dell out! Thanks gminks for pointing it out!

Fun with AT&T U-verse

April 27th, 2011 at 9:07 PM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

I’ve had AT&T’s U-verse service since October 2009, the day we moved into our house. At it’s heart, it’s really a fantastic service offering… IPTV, whole home DVR, advanced DSL, all wrapped up into a nice package. But for the last 6 months I’ve been struggling with a lot of different issues ranging from broken DVRs, freezing TV signal to Internet connections that go away at random. While the issues have not been persistent enough to track down an exact cause, they’ve been frustrating.

The other day, after watching Face Off on HBO (for the first time, I know) and getting right to the climax of the movie, the whole TV signal froze and wouldn’t come back. It was 1AM and my wife was already sleeping, so I muted by frustration and went to be deciding to look into alternatives the next day.

Monday, I called up the two traditional cable providers in the area looking for pricing. Then, I hit Twitter with my plan: (more…)

No LTE iPhone is coming in the near future

April 21st, 2011 at 2:34 PM No Comments Michael Stanclift

Another one of predictions for the next iPhone that seems to be coming true, was confirmed by Apple COO Tim Cook yesterday during their quarterly report conference call. The next generation iPhone will not have support for LTE wireless data technology.

From Forbes:

“The first generation of LTE chip-sets force a lot of design compromises with the handset, and some of those we are just not willing to make.”

Adding LTE into the next generation iPhone would mean adding more complexity by needing both a 3G and a 4G chip, that would only work on one provider, and require more power. Currently only one LTE mobile phone is on the market right now, the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon, which has been the only US carrier so far to roll out any LTE service. In addition to lack of real LTE coverage in most of the country, even on Verizon’s network, the Thunderbold has been plagued with horrendous battery life.

The next iPhone will probably feature HSPA+, as the Qualcomm chip that is making its way into it, supports it already. It just needs to be enabled in the firmware.

Next iPhone to be GSM/CDMA ‘world phone’, says Verizon CFO

April 21st, 2011 at 1:45 PM 3 Comments Michael Stanclift

During a conference call with investors and the press to discuss quarterly results, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo let loose what most of us already assumed… that the next version of the Apple iPhone will be a ‘world phone’ meaning one device that is capable of running on both GSM and CDMA networks.

From Barron’s:

… when a new device from Apple is launched, whenever that may be, and that we will be, on the first time, on equal footing with our competitors on a new phone hitting the market, which will also be a global device.

GSM is the network technology used by AT&T and T-Mobile in the United States and every other mobile provider on the planet that has the iPhone for sale. CDMA is used by Verizon and Sprint in the United States, Bell and Telus in Canada, and a handful of other major providers around the world.

Currently, the iPhone 4 is sold in two different flavors, the GSM version and the Verizon specific version. Each version has different radios and internal layouts, and currently run different versions of iOS. A unified phone would allow Apple to engineer one device for every provider on the planet, allowing them to sell the iPhone in more markets on more providers.

A unified GSM/CDMA phone was one of my five predictions for the next iPhone.

image via iFixit, iPhone 4 teardown

Apologies for the lack of updates

March 21st, 2011 at 1:11 PM 2 Comments Michael Stanclift

I’d just like to apologize for the lack of regular updates over the last month or so, I could make up excuses but I won’t. We are lazy, and quite frankly I’ve been too busy playing with my new iPad. But new updates will be coming soon, including a review of said iPad.

Thanks,
Michael

Sent from my iPad 2, because I can.

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