I’m writing this while waiting for some work to be done on my car; but if anything I am sitting here reminded how over the last 2 days or so, I have been reclaiming my original setup due to the disastrous OTA by AT&T for my Samsung Captivate.

And celebrating how the Android communities helped me out in more than just a few ways.

So what happened? While out and about, I noticed that the phone was communicating with AT&T and downloading something. Since I am on that ultra-restrictive 200mb data plan per month, I canceled it. Bad thing to do.  According to MANY reports at the XDA-Developers forums, that is the last thing you want to do. In fact that is one action that will actually brick your phone. Not the lag fix, not gaining root access to your phone, not overclocking to 1.2ghz, nor flashing community sourced firmware.

No. Canceling an OTA update may brick your phone. And is there a warning? Nope.

So after a few hours of frantic searching and research, I used Odin to flash back to JF6, obtained root again, installed ROM Manager, used the Clockwork Mod to flash the Cognition 2.1.1 update that included the JH7 OTA update, applied the Voodoo lag fix, recovered from my Titanium Backup of my apps and fine tuned the settings and contacts.

And speaking of the contacts; that service from AT&T sucks. It will overwrite instead of merge each and everytime. Not cool AT&T. Y’all already on my bad side. Due to the restrictive data and a healthy fear of getting overcharged for data of all things.
AT&T… I cannot say that I’m happy with you. Android community; you’re the true heroes in my book.

If the Android community has helped you out, I insist that you donate to them. I have.

Frontier Communications, fresh off their $8.5 billion acquisition of millions of Verizon DSL and landline customers, has been downplaying the fact the company isn’t offering speeds that can successfully compete with cable in most markets. While Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter has been promising these customers a “fast future,” the company really isn’t in a financial or technical position to actually offer it. In an interview with the Oregonian, Wilderotter continues along this vein, insisting the company offers fiber to the home “all across the country”:

Oregonian: Frontier wasn’t heavily in this kind of cable TV, super-fast Internet business before the transaction. Why did you want these markets?

Wilderotter: Oh, nonsense. We deploy fiber to the home all across the country. We don’t call it FiOS. We call it high-speed Internet. For our customers, the technology doesn’t matter. What matters is access, speed and capacity.

Which sounds great, except for the fact that it’s not true. Frontier doesn’t offer fiber to the home anywhere, outside of the 100,000 or so Verizon FiOS customers they acquired in the Pacific Northwest. In fact, the fastest speed Frontier’s capable of offering is 10 Mbps, though many users are closer to 1.5 Mbps. Frontier could follow in Verizon’s footsteps and offer bonded ADSL2+ to some users, but those speeds are distance-constrained, and for many users will top out at 15 Mbps downstream.

In other words, the technology very much matters, and pretending that DSL and fiber are the same thing (which for whatever reason the Oregonian doesn’t feel the need to challenge) is downright bizarre. That said, at least somebody wants to serve these previously neglected Verizon customers, and Wilderotter proceeds to insist they won’t be continually hiking prices on users like Verizon or Comcast. Of course if your network upgrades are going to be of the make believe variety, that’s an easier promise to keep.

Link to the original article…

AOL continues an interesting trip that took them from one of the largest and most powerful ISPs on the Internet, to a fractured and financially-troubled company with dreams of becoming an advertising giant. Of course most of their problems were caused by their inability to adapt to (or really in some cases even recognize) the broadband market – something that was at least in part caused by former executive Lisa Hook, who went on to do amazing things with VoIP carrier SunRocket as well. With its spin off from Time Warner, the company this fall has undergone its latest in an endless line of evolution efforts, but has announced those changes will come with pink slips for about one third of AOL’s employees, or about 2,300 workers.

Link to the original article…