www.2Fatdads.com Finally Launched

After an incredible 133 posts in BETA. This blog has finally taken it's rightful place on the top level domain of http://www.2fatdads.com.

Please come join us there.

Making the PHP Switch... Hello WordPress!

The 2 Fat Dads sites are going to be down this weekend with the slight exception of this blog which is hosted by Blogger (for the moment).

This is because we are making a move over to PHP after a very long relationship with ASP which became ASP 3 and eventually ASP Classic. Yes it means losing out on the awesome power of a very solid MS SQL server, but as all the sites ran off of the same database, it was becoming a real chore to manage the tables.

On the upside it will mean finally being able to adopt the awesome power of a superior PHP object oriented platform. It also means customised WordPress template and playing with the new generation of LAMP tools.

We hope to only be down for a short period over the course of the weekend, we apologise for the inconvenience and please don't remove us from your Delicious bookmarks, blog rolls and Follow list.

We'll Be Right  Back After This.

OK! NOW you have my attention!

October 14th is the date. http://store.apple.com/ca/ 

Bell GPS-Gate Update

It would appear that Bell has decided to back off it's initial plan to thwart 3rd party access to the GPS radio on it's BlackBerry units. Who knows if this blog, The Boy Genius Reports or the insane amount of negative posts on Howard Forums had anything to do with it. Maybe the Bell legal team finally realised that what they were about to do was most definitely anti-competitive.  Whatever is was fuelled this stupid idea to cripple it's own devices, somebody at Bell decided to put a stop to it.

The telecoms industry would like nothing more than for us all to leave our laptops, iPods, GPS units and camera's at home and walk around with only our Star Trek Communicator devices to guide us along. And I'm sure that most of us would be more than happy to do so if it wasn't for the fact that the current devices still don't work anywhere near as well as the power devices we already own.  On top of this it seems that the Telcos want to charge you top dollar for the privilege of using these new standard features. Remember when the camera-phone erupted onto the scene and the only way to get your fuzzy 0.3 mega pixel mugs of your friends in the pub was to send them as MMS or buy $50 cables and $40 software to download them to a PC. Of course no one could figure out how to load the phone as a USB drive and the whole thing fell apart. So phone makers started using Bluetooth's Object Push and FTP to send pictures to a Bluetooth enabled computer, the first thing the Telcos did here was cripple the Bluetooth for voice only functions. Again, the phone makers, Palm mainly, added card slots so users could put there pictures on the card and swap things around. Telcos resisted this for a long time as they had no clue how to monetize the new phone feature. Never once did they stop to think about making the user's life easier, their main concern was to find new ways of making money, or as a fellow blogger puts it: raping the users.  At first the Telcos would only allow these features on the smart phones with the narrow minded view that the added data costs would make up for any lost revenue that the devices hardware and software specs took aways for telco features such as picture transfers or cheap emails instead of premium priced MMS & SMS. Let's not forget that smart phones now sync over the air instead or via USB back up to Outlook, no longer did you need to buy expensive cables and software or and pay the Telco dealer to transfer your data form one device to another.  Admittedly, the price of data usage was not cheap, and often the Telco will charge a you a much larger rate if you are using a smart phone over the regular WAP browser on a clam shell.  The cost per MB is insane, on the most basic data plan you will pay close to $10 a megabyte of data transfer. Imagine download a $3 song on your smart phone, you are now looking at a  $40-$50 song. The artist is still getting only $ 0,10 form the deal but now the Telco is making $49.90 for you to listen to something you could of bought on iTunes for $0,99 had you bee able to resist the urge and stupidity.

This is what the Telcos are banking on, they have set up there entire business model on the hope that you will simply pay your bill and not look into the details too much. Have you ever stopped to think why they charge you a system access fee ? Contrary to what the "guy in the store" might have told you, it's not a government tax or an imposed contribution for the CRTC. The infamous System Access Fee is a $10 stupidity tax that you can only get out of if you are one of their most loyal customers or on some special promotional plan.  Think about it, you are offed a free phone if you sign up for a 2 to 3 year contract and then offered this great sound plan for only $25, you might get call display and voice mail, but you'll have to pay extra for text messages, access to the Internet, and in some case a GPS navigation feature. Suddenly your $25 plan is now up to $45 if you get the basic phone Internet, but it's not over yet, you still haven't added the Stupidity Access Fee and the actually taxes. So enough you are staring down the barrel of a $70 phone bill for the next 36 months. That equates to $2520 over 3 years, did you know that your cable service cost you less than that? And guess what for only another $75 you could be leasing a car. Breathe... Breathe... it'll be alright. The Canadian government has opened up the airwaves  a little more and is allowing others to finally come and play with the Tri-factor of Evil which is the current state of telecoms in The Great White North. Soon these new boys  will come and offer all kinds of new services and devices, which should drive down the price of your  monthly bill. As it stands, all have vowed to abolish the system access fee and  some are even talking of not charging you for the privilege of receiving phone calls and text message. This European model of selling phones should start to level the playing field, at least we hope.

In the meantime, most of us are biding our time in month 18 of our 36 month contracts and trying not to buy an iPhone or a G1  that would force us to renew for another 3 years of hard time in stupidity hell. As we wait, I'm sure there will be a few more GPSGate types of scandalous behaviour as the big three scramble to rape their existing user base.

The Reality of Gaming

Another great realism from XKCD

Bell is now crippling GPS on BlackBerry

This is a story that is making it way around the tech crowd a lot this but has not gotten a lot and lot of media attention elsewhere yet. The Boy Genius Report Blog reports that:

Over the next few weeks, Bell may be increasing the GPS lock time (2-10 minutes) and resolution (1-2.5KM) of Third Party applications while maintaining the speed (10-15s) and accuracy (10-25m) of their own GPS Nav program.

What this means is that from now on, unless you are using Bell's $10/month GPS application GPSNav, your precise location will be greatly disabled and you will most likely be look for the Bell Centre somewhere the Old Forum. Justin case you still don't quite get it. You buy a $600 BlackBerry with a built-in GPS receiver like the Pearl 2, the Curve or the World Edition and then you sign up for a $30/month voice and as well and a $25-60 per month data feature and then one time you get lost, Bell wants to charge you anyhwere between $3.50 per day to $10 per month rather than let you use the BlackBerry's Free as in Beer maps icon that is right there on the home screen waiting for you to click on . Ahh now you get it and you're thinking that Bell Sucks right? Of course they do, because they are already throttling your data connection whenever you use your device as a modem for the very handsome fee of $12 per Mb when you bust out of your HUGE 4Mb cap. That is right I said MEGABYTE and not GIGABYE! You want a Gig, Bell will hit you up for a nice brown note every month for the priviledge.

I seem to rant about Bell far too often but they really are infuriating. They have complete and utter disregard for their user base and only ever act on any complaint when the user demands to speak to cancellations (retentions), at which point they either remind you that you will have a to pay a penalty ranging anywhere up to and perhaps beyond $400 in order to cancel your line. If you are very luck or angry enough they offer you some amazing deal they would never offer even their most loyal customer in order fo you to re-sign you to a contract and allow you to sell your soul for another 36 months. ...Breathe... ...breathe... But don't worry too much Phalus, Robbers are all the same even in their Mutt and Voodoo incarnations.

Getting back to the GPS issue at hand. Bell have really shot themselves in the foot here, especially as Robbers now have the iPhone which not only has MS Exchange support for push email but also has a far superior GPS/Wireless triangulation chip onthe device than the BlackBerry. This week also saw the launch of the Android G1 phone from HTC and T-Mobile which also heavily promotes the Google Maps 2.3.1 release with added Street View. Although Street view is not yet available in Canada, it does allow for some awesome landmark "point of view visionning" for those times when you are staring at the Maps screen and can't makes sense of your location even in sattelite mode. All these tools are very powerfull and best of all free to use, so disabling their precision is not only anti-competitive on Bell's behalf but is also just a complete lack vision. The way that Google, BlackBerry and Apple have designed their GPS applications is so that they still rely on your data connection to download the bits of the maps or street view images from the Cloud (yeah I just said cloud) rather than storing all the data on your device. This not only saves you room on the device but it also allows for the user to always have the most up to date location aware data as possible. It also allows the carrier to make make quite a mint on your data usage, especially the way Bell offers it's extremely low cap data plans. One afternoon lost in Toronto or Vancouver could very easily see me exceed a 4Mb cap and be into the $12/Mb premium usage. So by scrambling your position, they are making your device useless, since you'll hail a cab for a fiver rather pay $3.50 per day plus data transfer fees.

The most frustrating part of this proposed GPS scramble is that no one will ever develop a Timmies application for the BlackBerry like the one for the iPhone. Timmies let's you know with one click where the nearest Tim Hortons is, if you are aready off by 2.5 Km you could
end up driving further than you need to, end up late for your meeting or interview and possibly even lose your job. Well done Bell for throwing an already fragile economy into even more turmoil and angst.

Once again Bell, I award you with this week's "YOU SUCK" award!

ChannelFlip's Wil Harris Probes Leo Laporte

The Aristocrats!

This by far the funniest Leo Laporte video I have ever seen. Thanks to Wil Harris video. Make sure you sign up their Net/Podcasts on iTunes as well!