OT: More iPhone madness - the "fix"

[Fairlight]

Y'all catch dis heeyah?  J. P. Radley been jivin' 'bout like:
> 
> On NPR's "Car Talk", Click and Clack suggest taking care of an annoying
> warning light on a car's dashboard with black electrical tape. :-)

That's how I "fix" the cobalt-blue LEDs from hell on the front of my PC.  It
sits like 2-2.5 feet in front of my face, and while I'm not epileptic (my
wife is), it gives even -me- a headache from the brightness/intensity.  Add
flashing for the HD indicator...first thing I did when I installed it was
tape over both lights with black electrical tape, seriously.

I love those LEDs, and there are more in the sides behind black mesh.  But
the front panel ones straight in the eye, not so much.

> Apple is now suggesting that the shorting of the two antennas by a human
> touch has no particular consequence beyond being badly represented in the
> five-bar display. :-(

It's at this point that they become architects, not engineers.  Talk to any
engineer if you doubt the difference.  Architects are the ones that think
cantelevers are sane design.  :)

> Is Apple under attack because the signal-strength indicator has been
> flawed through several generations of the iPhone, or is there actually
> some serious annoying degradation in the quality of a connection when
> one's fingers touch the "sweet" spot?

Both, supposedly.  Originally, there were tests with video running on CNN
and other blog sites, demonstrating the issue.  It appears that touching
the magic spot is still an issue, but now they confess to having the wrong
formula in pretty much all past generations of iPhone.  Unfortunately,
they're not getting blamed for that so much as AT&T is, because people are
seizing on that as representative of "further proof" of how bad AT&T
service is.  

For my part, I don't know why people complain about AT&T service.  I had
Cingular, and people complained.  Never had a problem.  AT&T bought them
as part of their acquisition cycle that effectively made them bigger than
they were post-antitrust-breakup, and I -still- don't have any problems.
And I don't have an iPhone.  My signal is usually 4 bars, dropping to 3
if I'm in a heavily shielded building.  Considering I consider Kentucky
to pretty much be "the sticks", one has to wonder how it is that New York
and California supposedly have infrastructure so much worse off. -- Audio
panton, cogito singularis,

Where Apple will probably catch hell is not so much for misrepresentation
of the signal strength, but rather that when the signal strength is overall
adjusted downwards visibly when all the OS updates are pushed, the cry for
them to open up iPhone to more carriers will go from the present loud din
to a deafening roar.  (Was that all one sentence?  Good grief...)  They
pretty much just fed the biggest complaint about iPhones prior to the
new antenna issue.  Like water on a grease fire...

mark->