Technologists Notes

Sprint has an “Everything Data” plan that is widely touted on TV, on sprint.com and in paper media. “Our Everything Data plans give you unlimited data, …”

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It’s been almost 5 weeks now. It’s been a good experience, even better than I anticipated. Having a real computer that fits in my pocket is what I wanted, and the Evo meets that desire well. My wife thinks I enjoy the Evo more than any acquisition in recent memory.

The most-publicized caution, battery life, has been a non-issue for me.

The most-publicized feature, 4G via WiMAX, has also been a non-issue, because the coverage isn’t quite what I hoped.

Other than that, my concerns and anticipations of problems had been needless, and the surprises have been good. I’ve come to think of the Evo as the best (for me) pocket computer I can imagine in today’s marketplace, and a good mobile phone, as well.

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Not all that long ago I expressed optimism about hosting VMWare on Fedora (Virtual satisfaction with VMware Server and kernel 2.6.31). I should have seen the writing on the wall, but I didn’t.

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A few days ago I was passing by the neighborhood RadioShack and thought “Maybe I could get an Evo from RadioShack faster than directly from Sprint?”.  I walked in, asked a few questions, and a few minutes later I was pre-ordering an Evo, only my second “smartphone”, my first being a Samsung SPH-i300 purchased in late 2001.

I think the i300 was the 2^nd Palm OS (3.5.2) phone on the market (soon after a monochrome phone from Kyocera). I loaded it up with SSH, VNC, a PDF reader, Java ME, Java apps of my own devising and probably some less used apps I’ve forgotten. Using the i300 changed my thinking about email, about web browsing, and application development. But ultimately, the hardware and network weren’t up to what I wanted — I wanted much more screen area in both pixels and physical size, faster processing, and faster transfers.

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The machine hosting this post is going on 11 years old. The original 8G disk has been displaced by three PATA drives totalling 340G. The memory is maxed out at 768M. Otherwise, the Optiplex GX1 with a 450MHz Pentium II is pretty much the same as when I bought it at the (then bricks and mortar) Dell Factory Outlet. When first put into production in ’99 as a mail/web/name server, I think it was running Red Hat 5 (4? 6?). Now it runs Fedora 11. Unless/until it needs to handle dramatically more traffic, performance should be more than adequate — load average is usually less than 1, and right now it is using only 64M of swap space. Xvnc & GNOME stuff are always running and perform OK when needed.

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