Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

“Unlimited” is the new black for mobile phone operators (at least until the iPhone Black is released in two weeks), but what are the implications for consumers?  After a surprise overage of $150 last month, I found out!  It seems that I’ve been burning up the airwaves with calls lately, and my rollover pool dried up.  Now I owed them the dough fair and square.

So I called AT&T and asked for a reprieve.  Surprisingly, the friendly (!) rep offered to remove the charges (!) and change my plan.  I could pay $10 or $30 more for a larger pool to chat in or $50 more for “unlimited calling.”  So I asked for details.

Turns out “Unlimited” actually feels kind of limiting, and I’m not alone in my reaction…

1. (On AT&T) only voice calls are unlimited for $99
2. The iPhone data plan (which is actually really nice and cheap) is $20 extra
3. Text messaging is still embarrassingly expensive and limited
4. This is the real kicker - additional family lines are not available with unlimited calling, so I would have to pay $30 or more extra to keep my wife’s line active, even though she used 8 minutes of talk time last month.

So no thanks, AT&T.  I don’t want to upgrade my calling plan to unlimited and pay $80 more per month.

It seems that there is another iPhone gremlin, this time in the interaction between the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store (as seen on the iPhone and iPod Touch) that can cause your purchases to vaporize.  This only seems to apply to folks who have unchecked “automatically sync” and have not previously clicked “Transfer Purchases From…” in iTunes.

Here’s the situation:  You are tired of iTunes syncing whenever you drop your phone into the dock, so you uncheck “automatically sync” in the iPhone Summary page.  While at your local Starbucks, you decide to download the latest from KT Tunstall.  Yup, it downloaded, and you can listen to it.  Later, you place your phone back in the dock and go about your business.  But, surprise surprise, Katie’s song is now gone from your world!  Somewhere, somehow, the iPhone deleted it! Continue Reading »

Update: I have created another page for custom drive icons in Mac OS X

If you’re like most people, you have accumulated a large number of removable USB storage devices over the years, from flash-based thumb drives to external hard disks.  I have seven of these things sitting on my desk or in by laptop bag right now!  But Windows XP and Vista uses the same icon for all of them, adding a few seconds of examination every time I try to select one.  Icon confusion can cause problems too, like the time I accidentally saved a presentation to my big desktop backup drive instead of the thumb drive I headed out of the office with!

Before: Everything looks like a generic external book type thing.

But I’ve stumbled on a great method to create easy to locate the right drive using free software and the power of Google.  I create a custom drive icon that looks like the physical drive in Windows, so I can see which is which at a glance.  Here’s how!

After: Aah, now I can see which removable drive is which.  Shame about that iPhone icon, though…

Continue Reading »

Watching the announcements coming out of EMC World today, one bit of jargon stuck out at me:  The EMC bloggers are starting to refer to “data deduplication” as “3D”.  I had never heard this terminology before yesterday, but the EMCers are all using it, so it must be a popular term inside that company.  So I’m just giving my readers a heads-up: 3D is deduplication, at least at EMC.

One of the surest of sure things in the storage industry right now is the potential for email archiving solutions.  There are literally dozens of products out there, with prices and functionality for pretty much any application.  And the growing demand for letigation hold and search has made this an essential technology for any organization - just ask the President!.

So how will you make your choice?  I previously talked about the essential differentiators, and now I’ve refined these into a more complete list I’m calling “The Eleven Essential Elements of Email Archiving”.  I capitalize this because it is the basis for much of my recent writing and speaking:  I just wrapped up an article for Storage magazine on the subject, to be published next month, and spoke on the topic at Storage Decisions in Chicago.

If you missed the show last week (or really really liked it!) and can’t wait for the magazine, may I suggest tuning in tomorrow for TechTarget’s Email and File Archiving Virtual Seminar?  You can catch my session at 1:30 Eastern, with a live Q&A session following.  Or you can tune in at 9 AM for the whole day-long extravaganza, featuring sessions from other good folks from Contoural and elsewhere.

I arrived in beautiful Chicago today for the Storage Decisions show at the Hilton here.  What a great event this is - loads of interested and committed storage users and some of the best minds in the business get together to talk about how we all do this thing we call storage!

I was glad to see Jon Toigo here - while I may not always agree with him, he certainly has vast experience in the storage industry.  And I appreciate his role as the iconoclast of storage.  We both agree that the real action in the industry happens at a whole different layer than just storing and moving bits.

Before sitting down with Jon, I was pleased to chat with my good friends, Curtis Preston and Bill Peldzus, both of whom have, over the years, proved themselves advocates of end user concerns.

I’ll also be looking for Greg Schulz, Mark Staimer, Arun Taneja, and Steve Duplessie and his crew from ESG.  See what I mean about the best minds in the industry?

Of course, the hotel is crawling with TechTarget’s staff, including Rich C and Rich F from Storage magazine, Dave Raffo from SearchStorage.com, and Amy, Lindsey and the folks who run the show.

If you’re here, please do come up and introduce yourself.  If not, there are three more shows scheduled for this year!