Scratch that…WinPhone users get the coolest device of them all…Google’s Android OS makes a good showing though…

Flash (superthin Android bar phone, 3.5″ screen)
Smoke (Pixi-like Android bar phone, 2.8″ screen)
Thunder (Android bar phone, 4.1″ screen)
Lightning (Windows Phone 7 vertical slider, 4.1″ screen)

The Lightning and Smoke are unique form-factor-wise for phones of their caliber…definitely not enough to get me to change carriers from my beloved Sprint but if the Lightning showed up with WiMAX and Android it would be a very serious contender to the HTC Evo 4G, set to launch this summer.

However the silence must be broken to note a rather rocking web application: Schedule Miner.

Made by one of Mines’s own, a freshman-plus-a-ridiculous-amount-of-transfer-credit in the Computer Science program, the web app takes the Boring, rather difficult to use Trailhead course scheduling system and condenses its information into a clean, fast, easy-to-use course discovery and selection engine.

For example here’s part of my schedule for next semester, though it doesn’t include the online-only Web Programming course that brings my credit hour load to a whopping 15 (gotta love graduation semester).

On addition to creating good-looking schedules, the site allows drilling down by department, instructor and even classroom building, if you want to pick an NHV seminar section close to the (more difficult) class you have afterward. The professor page even shows the prof’s weekly teaching schedule; apparently Roman Tankelevich teaches two back-to-back morning classes (mine being one of them), then takes an hour break, then teaches one more, on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule.

The tool doesn’t integrate with Banner/Trailhead, so you can’t register for your courses directly. However it does spit out CRN numbers, which are the next best thing; input the numbers into the registration screen and you’re now in those classes, provided they’re not full or otherwise closed.

Only time will tell whether the upcoming Trailhead refresh and Banner upgrade will render Schedule Miner useless when next semester rolls around. However it’s a great resource for anyone making last-minute schedules before registering this semester…and that’s always a good thing.

Or if you would rather back your stuff up with an ISP-branded solution than Mozy, Qwest offers that too.

Below is a rather exhaustive bunch of photos describing every piece of the pack. Sorry about the photo quality…apparently my twelve-megapixel camera does horribly in low light. If anyone wants me to reshoot a picture or two, that’s no problem Click on any picture for the full, huge, 12-megapixel version.

The box is colorful but nothing out of the ordinary. No, you can't know where I live without asking me first.

Here's what the box looked like when I first opened it. That's my bed by the way, in case you were wondering.

This is all of the smaller stuff in the package, as I got it, plastic wrap (iff applicable) intact.

The white thing at left is the rather large Windows 7 poster. The colorful thing on the right is, as it turns out, party bags.

More after the break…

Here's the poster. To give you an idea of the scale, its length is nearly the width of my twin-sized bed.

Here's the poster, horizontally.

Here are all the various promo fliers that came in the package. Ten each. This picture shows all possible sides of the promo cards (front, back and inside for the Corel one).

Same thing, but with flash. Maybe this one's more readable if you want to read exactly what the fliers say.

As I said, there were ten of each item. Ten Windows 7 promo cards, ten Corel cards...

...ten Norton promo cards, ten Kaspersky proo cards, ten Zune promo cards...

So here you've got balloons (three red, FOUR yellow, three blue, three green), some balloon tie thingies (?) and ten Nero cards. Yes, some are upside-down; it's not just you.

Here you have ten psychadelic-looking Windows 7 party favor bags. Hey, at least they're roomy enough to be used s a grocery bag...oh wait, nobody would do that. Or would they?

Three jokers, poker rules and larger-than-usual graphics. Otherwise the deck of cards isn't out of the ordinary (Steve Ballmer is NOT the ace of spades or the king of hearts).

The front of the card box is semi-glossy, as you can see by the reflection of my camera in the picture. Also, the backs of the playing cards are just as crazy as the design on the handbags. And, if you so choose, on your Windows 7 desktop.

Unfortunately, this shot is too also too blurry to read the poker sheet (cool idea, not unique to this since it's just a Bicycle deck). The back of the card box has the same back-of-card image on it. The 64-bit CD has "GENUINE" and "Microsoft" holographics on it. Steve Ballmer's signature is slightly embossed, but definitely just a copy.

You know the X-shaped foldy thingies you have on restaurant tables? That's what is at the top of this picture. The next picture shows the opposite side of the right card. The left card is the same on both sides.

This picture doesn't show it, ut both of the items shown (not the newspaper) are on the glossy side. That's the back of the Windows 7 Signature Edition package by the way.

Centerpiece. That's what you call that thing. Anyway, here it is assembled, with the 64-bit Windows 7 install disc.

Here are the two Windows 7 discs side-by-side. 32-bit was/is in the Signature Edition holder. As if the disc actually mattered...I'm betting Windows 7 will be ofered for download when it comes out.

Here's what it looks like inside the Windows 7 Ultimate Signature Edition DVD holder. The photo was taken from my desk, about three inches away from my iMac, which will get a copy of Win7 installed soon enough. No, you can't have my key.

As others have pointed out, there isn’t a ton of branding on the party pack, though there’s a decent amount. The cards are a nice touch, as is the simple DVD holder, which is a welcome change from the Windows Vista Ultimate Edition box I bought two and a half years ago.

If you’re in the Golden area, drop me a line (ilittman@mymail) if you want to come to the party, though I’ll probably run out of swag to give away. Also, if you have any questions or comments, that’s what the comments section is for!

One thing to note is that Symantec’s corporate product is not the consumer-grade Norton Antivirus. As such, the system doesn’t get in the way or hog resources like PC manufacturers’ two favorite crapwares (Norton and McAFee). If it did, Mines’s offering the product would be a non-event and I’d simply recommend that everyone grab a copy of AVG for their computer(s). But this is actually better.

One big use of MultiPass is for the Mines VPN, used for accessing on-campus resources from off-campus. Geekier folks will choose to just SSH into imagine.mines.edu with their username and multipass password, however if you want to route your internet traffic through the Mines campus the VPN, available at secure.mines.edu, is the way to go.

One cool thing about the latest VPN update, which also improves compatibility with next-generation operating systems like Snow Leopard and 64-bit versions of Windows, is that you can now log into the VPN from on-campus. If you’re wondering why you would ever want to do such a thing, note that the Mines wireless networks (CSMWireless, ResNetWireless, etc.) are unsecured, so normally any data sent over a wireless link is up for grabs for anyone with the right software.

Of course, banks and online stores have SSL webpages to keep traffic secure, however if you want to get the equivalent of running your computer on a secured wireless network (and then some) just log into the VPN. In my experience your speeds won’t suffer on a reasonably modern machine (the ailing Mines wireless network is the bottleneck these days) and you can rest assured that the weakest link of the SSL tunneled connection is your MultiPass.

The crux of this week’s ‘cast: GSM, the voice and data standard used the world over for mobile phones, is hopelessly flawed in a security sense and can be cracked in several different ways. The cost for the correct apparatus to crack the encryption: just a few thousand dollars. The expertise required: minimal. Read for yourself. Or here.

Granted, you probably won’t get your conversations spied upon, unless some enterprising Mines student with a wad of cash has nothing better to do and your T-Mobile or AT&T phone is not running in 3G mode at the time (though the latter can be forced). Still, it’s best not to have sensitive conversations over your non-3G phone (which includes the first-generation iPhone) if that non-3G phone is running off of AT&T or T-Mobile.

Of course, you need a beefy backbone when you’re running the third-largest DSL provider in the US, and when said DSL provider ust launched VDSL2 tiers to compete with cable providers’ DOCSIS 3 rollouts. There are rumblings that Qwest in some areas hasn’t allowed customers to purchase more than 12 Mbps down and 896 kbps up on their VDSL2 service even for people chose enough to the remote terminal to get more, due to lack of bandwidth availability. Then again, this is more likely due to the back of “middle mile” connectivity between Qwest remotes and the backbone; the speed limitation seems to suggest that the affected boxes are fed with copper T3s (45 megabits each way) rather than 100-megabit-plus fiber.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Qwest’s offerings, particularly on the high-end side, due to this backbone upgrade. It might mean cheaper bandwidth to large Qwest customers (like the FRGP, of which Mines is a member) or it might just mean that Qwest will be at 20% network utilization rather than 70%. The backbone upgrade probably won’t make the difference between getting faster DSL service in any given location at any point in time, but who knows?

If you want to hear my call, it’s at about 16:07 (minutes:seconds) into the video, a bit earlier in the audio. My question was simply whether Qwest, with their new VDSL2 technology, was able to reach as far as the last-generation (ADSL2+) technology. Or, put another way, would this next-gen technology mean that less people would get internet above 7 Mbps than if Qwest had just stuck with ADSL2+. The answer: VDSL2, on newer equipment, will fall back to ADSL2+ on longer loop (wire) lengths. Fun stuff.