Copenhagen, Denmark is a tiny town in the US. Or at least it will be after the troops show up today. Microsoft is just a little ahead of the game here.
It's OK, we've been assured they will be greeted as liberators!
In my very humble opinion, if the problem you can think to exemplify the non-readiness of the Linux Desktop (tm) is that an alpha release, intended only for developers, of Firefox is not behaving as a end-user-targetted released version of Firefox, well, I have to admit that I for one do not worry much.
You've completely missed my point.
My issue had nothing to do with the fact that I was using an alpha developer release of Firefox. There are tons of applications I've installed on Ubuntu that do not create panel icons. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the ones that are well-behaved and set things up properly are outnumbered by the ones that aren't.
Now, compare this to the situation on Win32, where even the most trivial shareware knows to set up a Start menu folder.
So, seeing that, let me boil down what I was getting at for you:
Users expect apps to add themselves to the appropriate panel menus when they are installed
This does not happen consistently on Linux (at least Ubuntu and Fedora, the two desktop distros I've worked with most)
Given that, there should be an easy way (i.e. no editing.desktop files) to manually add shortcuts to apps to a given panel menu
There isn't.
If it helps, swap in "application Foo" for "Deer Park" in my original post -- none of what I was talking about was DP-specific, beyond the initial failure to update the panel (which, as noted above, is hardly only a Deer Park thing).
Unsurprisingly there's already a lot of "bah, this guy wants Linux dumbed down for n00bs" comments on this thread. Which totally misses the point:
Linux-on-the-desktop isn't just too complicated for n00bs -- it's too complicated for reasonably sharp users, too. And that's the problem.
I offer myself as an example. I am not the God of All Things Computing. But I've been tinkering with PCs since MS-DOS 3 days, I've used Windows, Macs, Linux and even CP/M for pete's sake. Today my primary desktop at home runs Ubuntu Linux. I'm comfortable compiling software from source tarballs and rooting through Google for HOWTOs and FAQs.
In short, I know my way around a computer -- and yet Ubuntu still manages to throw me for a loop more frequently than I'd like.
Example. The other day I installed the new Deer Park preview of Firefox. For some reason, its installer (bonus points to it for even having a graphical installer, btw) didn't add a shortcut for launching it to my GNOME panel. So I wanted to add one myself.
Easy? Right? Bzzt.
On Windows, here's the steps for adding a new item to the Start menu:
Click Start menu button
Navigate to folder where you'd like to add shortcut
Right-click folder name
Select "New Shortcut"
Wizard launches that walks you through finding the program you want the shortcut to point to, and giving the shortcut a name.
I figured there must be a way to manipulate the GNOME panel in a similar fashion. Nope. There is no direct way in Ubuntu Hoary to add a panel item to the menus through the GUI. Instead you have to open a shell, find/usr/share/applications, and create a.desktop file in there for your application.
But! You don't have permission to do that by default, so you have to use sudo to create the file. ("You do know how to use sudo, right Mom?")
And then -- once you figure out that you need to create a.desktop file, and where this file needs to go, and what format this file needs to be in, and you actually go and create it -- nothing happens! That's right, you don't see the item in your panel until the next time you log in, unless you manually restart the X server with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE.
(Yes, you have to restart the window manager, or else it will appear that all your work was for naught. "Just restart the X server, Mom. Mom? Hello? Noob.")
The icing on the cake is that to find this answer, you have to go through three levels of redirection:
Ubuntu tells you to refer to GNOME, since it's their desktop, Ubuntu's just distributing it
GNOME tells you to refer to FreeDesktop.org, since it's their standard for panel items, GNOME is just packaging it
FreeDesktop.org hides the instructions on how to write a.desktop file deep in a standards document.
("You do read standards documents, right Mom?")
I went through all that and finally got my shortcut added to the panel. But how many average users are gonna put up with that? (And Ubuntu does better at this stuff than most others.)
With all the spit and polish issues that Linux has, Asa is not the only Mozillian to find fault with it; former Moz UI gadfly Matthew Thomas (aka mpt), who's now with Ubuntu sponsor Canonical, recently posted a list of 69 usability flaws in Ubuntu Hoary, and old skooler Jamie Zawinski gave up Linux for OS X for good.
My case was not a case of "user who could not snap out of Windows-ism". I'm more than willing to embrace a better approach when I see it. But this is not a better approach fo
People did get to 'see the Apache Web server in action'...
That must have been useful. I mean, considering how you can't download Apache installer packages for Win32 and try it out right on your own Windows desktop, I can see how people would clamor to see this hard-to-get product do its thing.
Matter of fact, the Americans allowed IRA fundraising (they eventually outlawed them because their criminal activity was becoming an inconvenience). This is the same IRA that tried to kill the British Prime Minister around that time (Margaret Thatcher).....
The more I think about this, the more damn crack-headed it seems. An anti-democratic terrorist organisation comes close to killing the leader of one of America's closest allies, and they *still* allow them to raise funds on their soil?!
If:
American Muslims were as large a voting bloc as Irish-Americans;
al Qaeda had limited its attacks to foreign countries, avoiding killing Americans;
... I daresay we'd probably allow fundraising for al Qaeda here.
Pretty? No. But that's how democratic societies work. As long as the threat is distant, and some significant percentage of the voting public identifies with the people behind it, all the incentives politicians care about point them towards just ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away.
I think Steve saw this among a number of other bits in a meeting with Big Blue, saw it was a very weak pipeline, didn't get what he wanted in terms of pricing and development cost sharing, and was still pissed off over the 3ghz fiasco... So IBM's trying to save a little face, but the horse has already won the Kentucky Derby and they're just now closing the barn door?
You make it sound like Apple was the one with the leverage in that relationship. Apple was a tiny tiny fraction of IBM's PowerPC business. They've got all three major game consoles locked up on the PPC platform now -- and that's not counting embedded processors, weird workstations, and every other place a PPC shows up.
If IBM decided they wanted to take PPC in a different direction than Apple wanted to go, that's bad for Apple, not IBM. The only person who had any "face" to save was Steve Jobs for having bet his company on a platform that didn't grow in the direction Apple wished it would.
Ballmer and MSN should take a page from Yahoo, who have been busy actually competing with Google rather than just talking about competing with Google.
Lately I've found that Yahoo's search engine is better at putting the 'canonical' result for a search in the number 1 position than Google is. Google's results frequently put blog postings, etc. higher than the page those postings are talking about. Yahoo does not seem to have this problem.
Yahoo is integrating with Firefox. Google is not, as far as anyone outside the company can tell.
All of these things have caused a 180 degree turnaround in my perception of Yahoo of late. They have quietly become real contenders again in search and related services -- and without all the "we're gonna kill Google! Just watch us!" noise we keep getting every month from MS. I might take Ballmer & co. more seriously if they followed Yahoo's lead and started delivering rather than just making promises.
It's called "Gnomedex" because it's organized by Chris Perillo of Lockergnome.com. It's not a Microsoft event; Microsoft is just sponsoring it this year.
Email is routinely ignored by congressional staffers. Signing a paper petition is a little more useful. A phone call is better still. A written letter is far superiour.
This was true, until Capitol Hill was hit by letters containing anthrax back in 2001-2. Nowadays snail-mail letters get a lot less personal attention than they used to (for obvious reasons).
I suspect most of the Slashdot readers currently whining about how "why does everything have to be based on real facts" would turn the TV off in disgust if the next episode of "24" featured a nuclear bomb stolen by leprechauns...
I suspect you don't watch 24:-) Its actual plots are not much more plausible than that. At least leprechauns would add a welcome Celtic note of diversity.
Antivirus software, malware removers, spam-reducing solutions.... these are not designed around users?
Nope. No, they're not. They're palliatives to problems that we have inflicted upon users, not systems designed with users in mind. How many users understand what "malware" is -- even those that run Spybot? Is a malware remover something that a user would choose to run, if they weren't forced to by imminent threat from exploitation of broken systems by malicious parties?
(None of which is to belittle the heroic work that people have done on products like Spybot to help patch these holes. It's hugely important. But can we depend forever on heroes?)
A person who has any idea that a computer is a general purpose machine... Why should anyone be surprised when it does something new or malicious?
See, this is the problem. The average user does not see their computer as a general purpose Turing device -- they see it through the prism of whatever application they happen to be using at that moment. If they're reading e-mail, the computer is an e-mail terminal. If they're browsing the Web, it's a Web terminal. If they're in Word, it's a word processor.
You and I know that the computer is a general purpose machine, infinitely reprogrammable, but the average person does not think that way. They approach the computer through a series of metaphors ("desktop", "mail", "pages"), and the vast majority expect it to follow those metaphors as closely as possible. When it doesn't -- when the abstractions start leaking -- it creates opportunites for malicious parties to exploit the user's resulting confusion.
Which is exactly what has happened with e-mail -- in certain cases it can behave in a very un-mail-like way. This behavior is being exploited to confuse users into doing the wrong thing. You can try to educate people into not doing the wrong thing, but as long as the underlying metaphor is "mail" it will be very hard to make significant progress.
Why must the responsibility be placed solely on the software developer... ruling out one possible angle that you can't disprove and blaming a group of people who, by and large, strive to produce workable solutions is an insult to the good work many among us have done.
Don't look at it as placing blame (my apologies, I didn't mean to come across as blaming you for the problem) -- look at it as opportunity. Apple's recent success in taming UNIX, and Firefox's success in taming Mozilla, should be a lesson to developers everywhere that you can really make it big by reducing complexity, locking down unnecessary options, and streamlining the user experience.
These kinds of stories, while making the majority among us cringe at the stupidity of the user that falls for this, underlies an important point.
THIS IS WHAT YOUR IT DEPARTMENT HAS TO DEAL WITH!
... at some point, we will have to stop the patchwork of protecting the users from themselves and engage in the proactive education from these people so they don't hurt themselves and cost their companies, ISPs, and our economy in lost man hours and dollars.
You're talking about educating human nature out of people. Good luck with that.
The lesson of stories like this one are not that we need to somehow engineer smarter users -- it's that modern information systems are not designed around users to begin with. They're designed around lists of features and ship-by dates.
A system should behave in a way that one would expect it to. Certain operations -- deleting things, say -- are obviously risky, and I've never met any user who didn't get that. But who would expect opening an e-mail to be a risky proposition? The fact that it undeniably is (in some environments) doesn't mean that people are stupid for not knowing which e-mails to leave closed, it means that e-mail is broken for many millions of users. The fact that e-mail as a medium can be exploited like that is a weakness of the medium, not the user.
You can lament human nature all you want, but it is what it is. A well-designed system should be able to deal with that. Having to train users to do alien things should be taken as a sign that your system may not be so well-designed, not as a sign that we need to get cracking on Human Being 2.0.
I was in Ohio on 9/11 after many years of living in Washington, DC (a city to which I have since returned). When the attacks began to unfold I was dreadfully worried about all the friends I had back in Washington. The "professional journalists" you are so enamored with weren't helping -- I remember breathless reports from CNN of helicopters crashing on the National Mall, and NPR reporting a car bomb taking out the State Department.
Like most people who were far from the scene of the attack, I was hitting as many news sources as I could to try and figure out what was true and what was BS. Scripting News was incredibly helpful in that effort. There's some stuff in there that turned out to be false (rumors of a fifth and sixth hijacked plane), but overall the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty good, all things considered.
And this is what you're missing -- "blogs" are not a monolithic entity. The world is not made up of professional journalists who meticulously check every last fact, opposed by dropout bloggers who post anything that comes over the transom. There are good bloggers and bad bloggers, just as there are responsible and irresponsible journalists. The methods to figure out which are which are the same regardless of format.
Not that they document this anywhere you might see it before you buy a plan -- it's just "unlimited data!!! unlimited Mobile Web!!! " with the caveats buried deep in the fine print.
Macromedia announced that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation and plans to deliver a next-generation rich Internet application (RIA) development tool code-named Zorn based on the popular open-source IDE."
I suppose you could wait for that. Or you could be using Eclipse today to build rich Internet apps to be delivered via Flash by getting into OpenLaszlo.
But, you know, if you'd rather wait an indefinite amount of time and pay Adobe/Macromedia an unspecified amount of money to get essentially the same stuff, "Zorn" is probably just what you've been waiting for...
The best part is the label in tiny print on the thing, which looks like a small desk fan:
"Zalman Quiet CPU Cooler"
Oh yeah! I bet that thing is just whisper-quiet when it revs up to full speed, causing your PC to launch out the window and slip the surly bonds of earth.
That small antenna is an outboard backup, to be used to boost the signal when the MyFi's internal antenna can't cut it.
I own a MyFi and I've found the reception with the internal antenna to be good enough that I don't bother carrying the outboard antenna with me. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
There's one important fact that Mr. Goodger forgets... less than 24 hours after the initial Netscape v8.0 was posted, AOL made available version 8.01 which is based in Firefox 1.04 and hence fixes the three vulnerabilities present in Firefox 1.03. In fact, when I clicked the "download Netscape 8.0" link on early Friday in order to test it and write my review, I already got the fixed version 8.01.
Would there have been a fixed version 8.01 so quickly if Goodger and co. hadn't blown the whistle?
It's not like Firefox 1.04 wasn't released before Netscape 8 -- and the exploit that 1.04 resolved had been known for at least a week before that. AOL made the choice to launch with a product based on a version of Firefox they knew to be exploitable. Why not hold it until they could get it on the 1.04 level -- especially when the work can be done in a day?
Someone at AOL had to have been presented with the fact that their browser was based on an exploitable version of Firefox -- and that person decided that hitting the ship date was more important than shipping a secure product. Had that decision not been called into the media spotlight, would there have been any particular rush to get that 8.01 patch out? What in AOL/Netscape's storied history of bungled releases makes you think so?
I understand where the submitter is coming from completely -- this type of device has been my Holy Grail for a long time too.
The closest I ever came to the perfect solution was pulling together the following kit:
Handspring Visor PDA. Nothing special about this device, it was just a cheap PalmOS device with a good amount of memory (8MB) for not much money (around $150-200 new). You can't get Visors anymore, but a roughly equivalent device, the Zire 21, can be found on the street for less than $80 new -- or you can pick up someone's used device off EBay, as others have mentioned.
WordSmith word processing software. Provides an amazingly robust editing environment right on any PalmOS device. This is not just a viewer for docs created on your desktop -- it's a full featured word processor that interoperates seamlessly with your desktop copy of MS Office (I know, I know). Free to try, $30 to register.
PrintBoy -- amaze people by printing to any printer straight from your Palm device, over infrared or Bluetooth. $30.
Stowaway keyboard -- a tiny folding keyboard that nonetheless has decent typing "feel". I had the original model; the new one, the XT, is even smaller and more portable. $50.
Total cost: approximately $200-250. Others have pointed out that there are devices that wrap all this functionality into one unit (the much-loved Psion devices such as the Revo and the 5mx spring to mind), but with the PalmOS solution you're at least dealing with stuff that's all still currently manufactured and supported, so you won't have to futz with hunting down obscure software and strange replacement parts just to get things done. And if the device dies, big whoop, at $80 it's not the end of the world.
(If you're into this sort of thing, Jeff Kirvin's blog Writing on Your Palm is a good source for advice on mobile writing.)
Slashdot Mirror
Copenhagen, Denmark is a tiny town in the US. Or at least it will be after the troops show up today. Microsoft is just a little ahead of the game here.
It's OK, we've been assured they will be greeted as liberators!
:-)
You've completely missed my point.
My issue had nothing to do with the fact that I was using an alpha developer release of Firefox. There are tons of applications I've installed on Ubuntu that do not create panel icons. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the ones that are well-behaved and set things up properly are outnumbered by the ones that aren't.
Now, compare this to the situation on Win32, where even the most trivial shareware knows to set up a Start menu folder.
So, seeing that, let me boil down what I was getting at for you:
If it helps, swap in "application Foo" for "Deer Park" in my original post -- none of what I was talking about was DP-specific, beyond the initial failure to update the panel (which, as noted above, is hardly only a Deer Park thing).
Unsurprisingly there's already a lot of "bah, this guy wants Linux dumbed down for n00bs" comments on this thread. Which totally misses the point:
Linux-on-the-desktop isn't just too complicated for n00bs -- it's too complicated for reasonably sharp users, too. And that's the problem.
I offer myself as an example. I am not the God of All Things Computing. But I've been tinkering with PCs since MS-DOS 3 days, I've used Windows, Macs, Linux and even CP/M for pete's sake. Today my primary desktop at home runs Ubuntu Linux. I'm comfortable compiling software from source tarballs and rooting through Google for HOWTOs and FAQs.
In short, I know my way around a computer -- and yet Ubuntu still manages to throw me for a loop more frequently than I'd like.
Example. The other day I installed the new Deer Park preview of Firefox. For some reason, its installer (bonus points to it for even having a graphical installer, btw) didn't add a shortcut for launching it to my GNOME panel. So I wanted to add one myself.
Easy? Right? Bzzt.
On Windows, here's the steps for adding a new item to the Start menu:
I figured there must be a way to manipulate the GNOME panel in a similar fashion. Nope. There is no direct way in Ubuntu Hoary to add a panel item to the menus through the GUI. Instead you have to open a shell, find /usr/share/applications, and create a .desktop file in there for your application.
But! You don't have permission to do that by default, so you have to use sudo to create the file. ("You do know how to use sudo, right Mom?")
And then -- once you figure out that you need to create a .desktop file, and where this file needs to go, and what format this file needs to be in, and you actually go and create it -- nothing happens! That's right, you don't see the item in your panel until the next time you log in, unless you manually restart the X server with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE.
(Yes, you have to restart the window manager, or else it will appear that all your work was for naught. "Just restart the X server, Mom. Mom? Hello? Noob.")
The icing on the cake is that to find this answer, you have to go through three levels of redirection:
("You do read standards documents, right Mom?")
I went through all that and finally got my shortcut added to the panel. But how many average users are gonna put up with that? (And Ubuntu does better at this stuff than most others.)
With all the spit and polish issues that Linux has, Asa is not the only Mozillian to find fault with it; former Moz UI gadfly Matthew Thomas (aka mpt), who's now with Ubuntu sponsor Canonical, recently posted a list of 69 usability flaws in Ubuntu Hoary, and old skooler Jamie Zawinski gave up Linux for OS X for good.
My case was not a case of "user who could not snap out of Windows-ism". I'm more than willing to embrace a better approach when I see it. But this is not a better approach fo
That must have been useful. I mean, considering how you can't download Apache installer packages for Win32 and try it out right on your own Windows desktop, I can see how people would clamor to see this hard-to-get product do its thing.
Oh, wait...
If:
... I daresay we'd probably allow fundraising for al Qaeda here.
Pretty? No. But that's how democratic societies work. As long as the threat is distant, and some significant percentage of the voting public identifies with the people behind it, all the incentives politicians care about point them towards just ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away.
It's not like "most secure version of Windows ever" is a high bar to clear.
You make it sound like Apple was the one with the leverage in that relationship. Apple was a tiny tiny fraction of IBM's PowerPC business. They've got all three major game consoles locked up on the PPC platform now -- and that's not counting embedded processors, weird workstations, and every other place a PPC shows up.
If IBM decided they wanted to take PPC in a different direction than Apple wanted to go, that's bad for Apple, not IBM. The only person who had any "face" to save was Steve Jobs for having bet his company on a platform that didn't grow in the direction Apple wished it would.
I nominate Paris Hilton! Who better to rule on issues of privacy rights and data security?
"Swing vote? That's hot!"
Ballmer and MSN should take a page from Yahoo, who have been busy actually competing with Google rather than just talking about competing with Google.
Lately I've found that Yahoo's search engine is better at putting the 'canonical' result for a search in the number 1 position than Google is. Google's results frequently put blog postings, etc. higher than the page those postings are talking about. Yahoo does not seem to have this problem.
Yahoo has been rolling out several innovative search services lately.
Yahoo has actively developing and improving APIs for a range of their services. Google's API has not changed since its rollout in 2002.
Yahoo is integrating with Firefox. Google is not, as far as anyone outside the company can tell.
All of these things have caused a 180 degree turnaround in my perception of Yahoo of late. They have quietly become real contenders again in search and related services -- and without all the "we're gonna kill Google! Just watch us!" noise we keep getting every month from MS. I might take Ballmer & co. more seriously if they followed Yahoo's lead and started delivering rather than just making promises.
It's called "Gnomedex" because it's organized by Chris Perillo of Lockergnome.com. It's not a Microsoft event; Microsoft is just sponsoring it this year.
This was true, until Capitol Hill was hit by letters containing anthrax back in 2001-2. Nowadays snail-mail letters get a lot less personal attention than they used to (for obvious reasons).
I suspect you don't watch 24 :-) Its actual plots are not much more plausible than that. At least leprechauns would add a welcome Celtic note of diversity.
Ask and ye shall receive!
Good points... a few thoughts:
Nope. No, they're not. They're palliatives to problems that we have inflicted upon users, not systems designed with users in mind. How many users understand what "malware" is -- even those that run Spybot? Is a malware remover something that a user would choose to run, if they weren't forced to by imminent threat from exploitation of broken systems by malicious parties?
(None of which is to belittle the heroic work that people have done on products like Spybot to help patch these holes. It's hugely important. But can we depend forever on heroes?)
See, this is the problem. The average user does not see their computer as a general purpose Turing device -- they see it through the prism of whatever application they happen to be using at that moment. If they're reading e-mail, the computer is an e-mail terminal. If they're browsing the Web, it's a Web terminal. If they're in Word, it's a word processor.
You and I know that the computer is a general purpose machine, infinitely reprogrammable, but the average person does not think that way. They approach the computer through a series of metaphors ("desktop", "mail", "pages"), and the vast majority expect it to follow those metaphors as closely as possible. When it doesn't -- when the abstractions start leaking -- it creates opportunites for malicious parties to exploit the user's resulting confusion.
Which is exactly what has happened with e-mail -- in certain cases it can behave in a very un-mail-like way. This behavior is being exploited to confuse users into doing the wrong thing. You can try to educate people into not doing the wrong thing, but as long as the underlying metaphor is "mail" it will be very hard to make significant progress.
Don't look at it as placing blame (my apologies, I didn't mean to come across as blaming you for the problem) -- look at it as opportunity. Apple's recent success in taming UNIX, and Firefox's success in taming Mozilla, should be a lesson to developers everywhere that you can really make it big by reducing complexity, locking down unnecessary options, and streamlining the user experience.
You're talking about educating human nature out of people. Good luck with that.
The lesson of stories like this one are not that we need to somehow engineer smarter users -- it's that modern information systems are not designed around users to begin with. They're designed around lists of features and ship-by dates.
A system should behave in a way that one would expect it to. Certain operations -- deleting things, say -- are obviously risky, and I've never met any user who didn't get that. But who would expect opening an e-mail to be a risky proposition? The fact that it undeniably is (in some environments) doesn't mean that people are stupid for not knowing which e-mails to leave closed, it means that e-mail is broken for many millions of users. The fact that e-mail as a medium can be exploited like that is a weakness of the medium, not the user.
You can lament human nature all you want, but it is what it is. A well-designed system should be able to deal with that. Having to train users to do alien things should be taken as a sign that your system may not be so well-designed, not as a sign that we need to get cracking on Human Being 2.0.
Here's the archive of Dave Winer's Scripting News blog from September 11. Read it starting from the bottom and scrolling up and it's like watching the day happen all over again.
I was in Ohio on 9/11 after many years of living in Washington, DC (a city to which I have since returned). When the attacks began to unfold I was dreadfully worried about all the friends I had back in Washington. The "professional journalists" you are so enamored with weren't helping -- I remember breathless reports from CNN of helicopters crashing on the National Mall, and NPR reporting a car bomb taking out the State Department.
Like most people who were far from the scene of the attack, I was hitting as many news sources as I could to try and figure out what was true and what was BS. Scripting News was incredibly helpful in that effort. There's some stuff in there that turned out to be false (rumors of a fifth and sixth hijacked plane), but overall the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty good, all things considered.
And this is what you're missing -- "blogs" are not a monolithic entity. The world is not made up of professional journalists who meticulously check every last fact, opposed by dropout bloggers who post anything that comes over the transom. There are good bloggers and bad bloggers, just as there are responsible and irresponsible journalists. The methods to figure out which are which are the same regardless of format.
You're supposed to be in hiding, Agent Bauer.
... unlimited data use through the apps provided by T-Mobile, that is (i.e. their cruddy web browser and e-mail client).
Try to load up your own apps like Opera Mobile, Agile Messenger, etc. and you find that the dirt-cheap all you can eat plan blocks your service. You have to shell out $20/month to be able to bring your own apps.
Not that they document this anywhere you might see it before you buy a plan -- it's just "unlimited data!!! unlimited Mobile Web!!! " with the caveats buried deep in the fine print.
(Yes, I'm a bitter T-Mobile customer :-) )
Tor very happy to win award. Make Tor happy. Tor not smash now.
I suppose you could wait for that. Or you could be using Eclipse today to build rich Internet apps to be delivered via Flash by getting into OpenLaszlo.
OpenLaszlo is here today, it's free, it's open source (CPL), and there's a free IDE on the Eclipse platform courtesy of IBM.
But, you know, if you'd rather wait an indefinite amount of time and pay Adobe/Macromedia an unspecified amount of money to get essentially the same stuff, "Zorn" is probably just what you've been waiting for...
The best part is the label in tiny print on the thing, which looks like a small desk fan:
"Zalman Quiet CPU Cooler"
Oh yeah! I bet that thing is just whisper-quiet when it revs up to full speed, causing your PC to launch out the window and slip the surly bonds of earth.
That small antenna is an outboard backup, to be used to boost the signal when the MyFi's internal antenna can't cut it.
I own a MyFi and I've found the reception with the internal antenna to be good enough that I don't bother carrying the outboard antenna with me. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
Would there have been a fixed version 8.01 so quickly if Goodger and co. hadn't blown the whistle?
It's not like Firefox 1.04 wasn't released before Netscape 8 -- and the exploit that 1.04 resolved had been known for at least a week before that. AOL made the choice to launch with a product based on a version of Firefox they knew to be exploitable. Why not hold it until they could get it on the 1.04 level -- especially when the work can be done in a day?
Someone at AOL had to have been presented with the fact that their browser was based on an exploitable version of Firefox -- and that person decided that hitting the ship date was more important than shipping a secure product. Had that decision not been called into the media spotlight, would there have been any particular rush to get that 8.01 patch out? What in AOL/Netscape's storied history of bungled releases makes you think so?
I understand where the submitter is coming from completely -- this type of device has been my Holy Grail for a long time too.
The closest I ever came to the perfect solution was pulling together the following kit:
Total cost: approximately $200-250. Others have pointed out that there are devices that wrap all this functionality into one unit (the much-loved Psion devices such as the Revo and the 5mx spring to mind), but with the PalmOS solution you're at least dealing with stuff that's all still currently manufactured and supported, so you won't have to futz with hunting down obscure software and strange replacement parts just to get things done. And if the device dies, big whoop, at $80 it's not the end of the world.
(If you're into this sort of thing, Jeff Kirvin's blog Writing on Your Palm is a good source for advice on mobile writing.)
I liked this story better when it was posted a week ago.
C'mon, "editors". This has to be getting embarrassing. Right?