Wu-hoo! Verizon, who has been a major opponent of forthcoming cell-phone number portability, has announced it will no longer be opposing the November implementation.

This New York Times article (free reg required), gives the details. My guess is Verizon was getting alot of bad press due to their opposition and by supporting it hopes to get some customers to switch to them come November. A paragraph from the article supports this supposition; “But the move may not be at all bad for Verizon, according to industry analysts. While the company has spent $50 million to prepare its system for portability, it may wind up gaining more customers than it loses, said Blake Bath, a wireless industry analyst with Lehman Brothers. Mr. Bath said Verizon had high customer satisfaction rates and was in “a great position” to capitalize on the dissatisfaction of customers who are signed up with its competitors and could be enticed to switch.”

I think Verizon will get alot of new customers, especially away from Sprint and AT&T where anecdotal evidence indicates customer dissatisfaction is rampant. AT&T and Cingular still oppose number portability.

Naturally I found this bit of news distressing. Basically, some computer manufacturers/retailers were finding it difficult to sell off their remaining USB 1.1 hardware. So last december the USB Forum announced “that henceforth USB 1.1 would be called USB 2 and USB 2 would continue to be called USB 2.”

Yes, you read that right. To further confuse things, the slower speed would be dubbed USB 2.0 “Full-Speed,” while the real USB 2.0 specification would be called USB 2.0 “Hi-Speed.” Un-frigging-believable. Really. Some would call this misleading, others, including myself, call it downright wrong. Some areas in life are a little grey, but this is just plain wrong. And furthermore, we are just now hearing about it, and not even from the American press. Un-frigging-believable.

Sony and Toshiba have both sold USB 1.1 laptops under the new USB 2.0 moniker. So if you bought a USB 2.0 machine lately and your speed doesn’t seem any faster than your old machine, thats why.

Wrong. Just wrong.

My loathing of Netscape 4.x increases daily. It is the only browser that requires extensive backward-compatible HTML code changes in order to render pages correctly. Microsoft has pretty successfully upgraded most users away from the IE 4.x branch, yet there are a couple percentage points of any site that still hang on to Netscape 4.x. C’mon people, you are holding up the works. Yahoo! and their <spacer> tags, table tags using HTML 3.2 coding, using tables for layout, all these things could be greatly mitigated if we could have a decent campaign to rid the world of Netscape 4.x. Maybe little ‘Netscape 4.x not welcome’ buttons? I am not advocating everyone use IE. Far from it. Upgrade to Netscape 7, or use the browser Netscape is derived from, Mozilla – both have built-in pop-up suppression, reason enough IMHO to upgrade. Or use Opera or if you are on OS X and haven’t installed Safari you better get on it because Microsoft ain’t makin’ IE for the Mac no more. If you like your browsers lean and mean, try Firebird (Win,Mac,Linux) or Camino (OS X), both offshoots of the same Mozilla code that make up Netscape 7. Netscape 4.x is five years old now folks. There are alot of nifty things that can be done with HTML that will enhance your Internet experience. So please, on behalf of web developers everywhere, UPGRADE!

Consumers scored a rare victory last Friday (6 June 2003) as the “US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the legality of a pending regulation from the Federal Communications Commission, known in the cell phone industry as ‘local number portability.'” Local number portability, to be implemented 24 November 2003, will allow you to switch your cell phone company while retaining your phone number. You won’t need to get new letterhead, business cards or go through the hassle of trying to contact the myriad of people who have your cell phone number.

As I mentioned earlier in my tirade about Sprint PCS, number portability was the main thing refraining me from switching to another carrier. The cell phone companies are against it, because they know that their years of customer disservice is going to now bite them in the ass. While all carriers have their downsides, and alot of switching may just be ‘grass is always greener’ syndrome, giving the consumer the ability to retain their number in a switch may actually improve carrier’s customer service. Perhaps they will now actually be empowered to actively retain existing customers and not just gear any new promotion to new customers.

Verizon is dead-set against number portability. Citing ‘huge costs’ and resource drains away from implementing enhanced 911 tracking (911 operators will be able to use GPS to determine a callers location), the carriers want yet another delay, and now that they have lost in the court they are lobbying Congress. In an amazing testament to campaign contributions, many lawmakers are actually falling for it. Nevermind that this rule was enacted in 1996 and that the carriers have had three delays since the original 1999 deadline; the carriers want to charge you for an implementation and then not implement it. If you look at your cell phone bill you will see a line-item charge for ‘Federal Telephone Number Pooling’ or something similar. Sprint has been charging customers since November 2002. All carriers have the charge and some may have been charging customers longer. Likewise for the enhanced 911 implementation. On my Sprint PCS bill, that line-item charge is ‘E911.’ So the carriers claims of high costs are nonsense, they are just passing the charges onto consumers, and if I’m paying for it, then I damn well want it!

I recently upgraded my main Win2k box to WinXP. When XP first arrived I figured I would stay with Win2k until Longhorn shipped. After all, Win2k and WinXP share essentially the same NT 5 engine, and Win2k is fairly stable and reliable and does not lack in support from vendors. Yet, I was getting bored with Win2k and was learning about some of the extras that WinXP includes, like ClearType. Anyone who has used a Mac knows about Apple’s font-smoothing features. Apple initiated this in OS 8.5 back in 1998, and vastly improved it with OS X. Microsoft also first touted ClearType in 1998, but did not introduce it until 2000 with the Microsoft Reader application. Mainstream introduction was with WinXP.

What is it? Essentially it is anti-aliasing for your screen — not just any screen — ClearType works best on LCD monitors and thus also laptop screens. A technical overview can be found here. The short of it? If you are running XP and have and LCD monitor or a laptop, visit the first link in this entry and turn it on. The effect is dramatic and should reduce eyestrain.

It would seem that Comcast will start to offer HDTV to about half their Bay Area customers within the next week. I guess my calls weren’t in vain. They plan to offer local ABC, NBC, PBS, HBO and Showtime. They are in negotiations with the local CBS affiliate, and I would expect that soon.

They will be charging an addtional $5/month for HDTV service which includes the rental of a new Motorola DCT5100 (336KB PDF) HD-capable digital cable box. Lot’s of nifty extras like usb, ethernet, firewire, smart card are all disabled, but it does come with a DVI connector for your TV as well as Optical SPDIF for better sound.

Looks like it may be time to go HDTV shopping …

B2 is now WordPress and development on this blog software continues. The upgrade/transition was painless and the Smarty Template Engine is on the way. Huzzah!