The promise of T-Mobile 4G. Just about that: a promise

This post should have been written two months ago when, of necessity, not having other choice and simply because I like T-Mobile, I decided to purchase the services of T-Mobile broadband. The customer service representative in the store was very helpful and knew her lines, but she did not give me straight answers to whether this wireless broadband service was in fact 4G-capable, that is, fourth generation wireless. Not at the moment of signing a 2-year contract and not a month later when I brought up, once again, the issue of slowness and not being able to watch YouTube videos and video news clips without a hiccup. Even with the best broadband modem or "laptop stick", in their parlance, the T-Mobile® Rocket 2.0 4G Laptop Stick, I get ridiculous download speeds, how about 6 kilobytes or maximum 30 kilobytes per second? (!), and that's in Manhattan, not in the middle of nowhere,  not to mention that watching an online video is frankly frustrating because the signal keeps "buffering" (20%...30%...). This post was motivated by reading an article at ZDNet where the authors state that "T-Mobile is actually fourth among the big four in the US when it comes to maximum network speeds, and explain how T-Mobile and AT & T "conjured 4G networks out of thin air." There, they have an explanation for what I perceived from the very beginning. Oh, and if you go to a store of T-Mobile or AT&T and even Verizon, they invariably, and by coincidence (?) don't have a live demo of the 4G capabilities, go figure. The answer, however, is pretty simple: they don't have much to show for it. Period. Not in my experience.

Vista brand is alive. The New York Times was perhaps wrong

Some time back on late October 2008, the NYT claimed, in an article reviewing the pre-release of Windows 7, that Microsot "unceremoniously [dropped] the brand name Vista for the new product" only to add in the second paragraph that "the new version will instead be branded Windows 7..." All right, let's see. First of all, is debatable to say that Microsoft "ended" the Vista brand, when it is alive and kicking and will continue to be around for some years to come (look, for instance, at Windows XP). Brands are not dropped, they evolve. Vista is just a step in the Windows saga and a new OS architecture on which the future versions of Windows will most likely be based. So I would have to disagree with the NYT. Secondly, the new version will not "instead" be branded Windows 7, rather the new version is the next logical and consecutive version of this OS. Check the chart above. It shows the MAJOR Windows versions, and milestones. Note that XP does not appear, since it is simply an enhancement to 2000 and as such it was marked as version 5.1.2600. Now, whether Windows 7 is just an update of Vista is just another issue.