TechVirtuoso

I can’t wait for the iPhone to come to Verizon, so you’ll all shut up about it

January 9th, 2011 at 10:49 AM  4 Comments

The boys who cried wolf (AKA The Wall Street Journal, et al) are all indicating that Tuesday will be the announcement of the long awaited iPhone 4 on Verizon. I hope they’re finally right.

Not because I’m going to switch, no, I’m actually pretty satisfied with my AT&T service, having been a customer for a long while before the launch of the first iPhone. I’ll just be glad when the noise makers and complainers can have another option. I hope that Verizon’s network works better for them than AT&T (although I kinda also hope it’s just as bad) so that they’ll shut up. I also look forward to another network getting some of the load so that my service will be even more reliable than it already is.

I can’t be alone in this thinking, if AT&T’s network is so god damn horrible across the entire country as the people in San Fransisco and New York make it out to be, no one would use it. Fact is, myself and millions of other subscribers made the choice to use it long before the iPhone. I even used to live down the street from the world headquarters of Sprint, and still used AT&T because I got better service.

I’m not discounting that there are people with horrible AT&T service. I’ve been places where that is the case, I know people who have this problem on a regular basis. It sucks, but chances are no has one forced you to use an iPhone this whole time.

I’ll also be glad when this golden phone finally does arrive, so we can stop obsessing about it. The phone will come out, AT&T’s subscriber numbers will slightly decrease, Verizon will see an increase, Apple’s profits will go up. The sun will still rise in the east and set in the west. Choice is good, but the tech world needs to stop treating this like we’re awaiting the second coming of Christ, and treat this like what it is, like what happens all around the world with the iPhone on multiple carriers. The same phone, on another network.

(Image credit to Gizmodo, from back in 2005, proof people hated them before the iPhone)

Google releases Chrome 8

December 3rd, 2010 at 2:01 PM  4 Comments

Google has released the latest major (stable) version of their Chrome browser to the public, version 8.0.552.215. Along with 800+ bug fixes, Chrome now also includes a PDF viewer built into the browser inside a sandbox. One less reason to install Adobe Reader!

The version 9 (dev) branch of Chrome now also includes Adobe Flash running inside a browser sandbox. It was released on Wednesday and also includes improvements to the GPU acceleration features, and fixes some problems with Google Instant search.

You can download Google Chrome from their servers, or if you want to live on the edge adjust your update settings to get access to the beta or dev channels here.

Fedora 14 released, brings polish and feature updates

November 6th, 2010 at 5:28 PM  No Comments


Linux distribution Fedora released their latest version this week. Fedora 14 was released Tuesday and brings along with it some new interesting features.

  • Framework software for Spice, a rapidly advancing infrastructure for desktop virtualization
  • New debugging features for developers, such as support for dynamic/unplanned memory usage tracking and faster launch thanks to pre-generated indexes
  • Powerful remote and out-of-band management capabilities with Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) support
  • Updated tech preview of the GNOME shell environment, part of the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release
  • A subset of new and innovative software from the MeeGo™ community for an enhanced experience on netbooks and small devices
  • OpenSCAP, an open-source framework for the Security Content Automation Protocol, which provides a framework and approach to maintaining system security backed by NIST standards
  • Support for emergent programming languages like D, and refreshed versions of popular languages such as Python 2.7, Erlang R14, and the Rakudo Star implementation of Perl 6

While not as popular as Ubuntu, Fedora is still one of the more popular distributions, targeted more towards system administrators and developers than Ubuntu. RedHat says there are approximatively 25 million Fedora users.

Also updated was the fedoraproject.org website, which now is a little more user friendly and provides more information about the release. You can download the release at the project website.