January 28, 2008 | 8 Comments
It’s time for the Carnival, and we’ve got plenty of freshly popped mobile insights for you.
This has been yet another big week for mobile, with the 700 mhz auction kicking off last Thursday and a number of the big carriers (Verizon, ATT) announcing strong growth in their wireless businesses.
So without delay, lets get to the stories, starting with my pick for this week’s best post.
The 700 mhz auction began last Thursday, and has the potential to change the game of wireless as we know it. In our best post this week, John Puterbaugh from Nellymoser lays down a concise yet thorough review of the 700 mhz auction that defines (more…)
Posted by: Dan
Categories: Mobile Market, Featured
January 24, 2008 | 1 Comment
AT&T’s new SIM-only option is a positive step towards open access, and opens a new chapter in the US cell phone service market. However, it also highlights just how far behind the US is compared to the rest of the world.
A few days ago AT&T began offering customers the option to purchase cell phone service online without buying a phone, but the deal made no sense. The service-only SIM cost $5 ($10 minus $5 online rebate), but required you to commit to a standard 2-year contract. Elsewhere on the site you can get a free phone in return for signing a 2-year contract. There’s nothing to stop you from selling the phone on eBay and keeping the SIM. Why pay $5 to NOT get a free phone?
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Posted by: Dan
Categories: Mobile Market, Featured
January 18, 2008 | 5 Comments
Network World reports today that “consumers value customer service and price over open access.”
According to a new survey by Compete Inc., “93% of respondents said that getting a phone at a reasonable price was either important or very important to them,” while only 65% said the same about being able to switch carriers without buying a new phone.
I can’t find the original research online, but there are several problems with this article. One is math, but I’ll save that for a footnote.
The big problem is a hidden assumption: you can have cheap phones or you can have open access, but you can’t have both, so consumers will choose price.
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Posted by: Jason
Categories: Mobile Market, Featured
January 7, 2008 | Be the first to comment
This month’s BayFP meeting is Wednesday, January 9th. We’re fortunate to be overlapping POPL 2008, and have arranged for Philip Wadler to repeat a talk on “Well typed programs can’t be blamed“. The talk will be held at 7:30pm in the Nob Hill Room at The Stanford Court Hotel, San Francisco.
This joint paper with Robby Findler introduces blame — from contracts — to a type system with casts. The authors then show that any failure of a cast from a dynamically-typed term to a well-typed context must be blamed on the dynamically typed term (they call this positive blame). Similarly, any cast from a more-precisely-typed term to a less-precisely-typed context must be blamed on the less-precisely-typed context (negative blame). Thus, the title of the talk: well-typed programs can’t be blamed.
The paper concludes with the observation that programming languages with libraries, development tools, user communities and other network effects often get adopted faster regardless of technical superiority. The authors propose that integrating dynamic and static typing into a single language may form a better basis for comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each.
This talk is not just for type theorists and functional programming enthusiasts; many professional programmers work with both static and dynamic types every day. As the authors point out, Visual Basic already supports both static and dynamic typing, and similar integration is planned for Perl 6 and Javascript. One way or another, if you program for a living then you’re probably already switching between the designs, although usually not within a single language.
Several of us from Skydeck will be there on Wednesday and we’d love to see you there. The talk is free, even though it’s being held in the same hotel as the ACM conference. Speaking of the conference, drop us a line if you’ll be in San Francisco for it. Some of us will be attending affiliated events earlier in the week.
Posted by: Mike
Categories: Technology, Programming
January 2, 2008 | 1 Comment
Following up on our earlier patch, here is a patch to show backtraces in the OCaml top level and for dynamically-loaded code (this patch subsumes the previous one). This feature is often requested on the OCaml mailing list, and we have found it very useful in development to get a quick idea of where something is breaking.
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Posted by: Jake
Categories: Programming, ocaml
