For as long as I've used SSH, OpenSSH was the SSH server. I didn't even know there was another until a few years after. On the client side there's PuTTY if your're stuck on windows but it's OpenSSH shipping on everything else... especially MacOS X, Linux and BSD.
That there are proprietary software SSH solutions out there making money comes as a surprise to me.
And why would anybody with half a brain trust encryption software they can't audit if need be? C'mon: the cryptosystem has to mathematically so whoopass that wether or not an attacker has the source makes no difference. Proprietary is talking the talk. FOSS is walking the walk.
It doesn't surprise me that these guys would use FUD to sell their wares. Have they any other choice?
I don't give a damn about hunting down porn. The FBI's #1 priority right now should be counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Second to that should be criminal organizations that create infrastructure that can also be useful to terrorists or other non-state actors. After that can be prioritized what with the politics and the stick-up-the-ass interference in the private lives of adult Americans.
Gonzales and Bush just don't have their priorities straight at DoJ. I move that they be forbidden from speaking the phrase "War on Terror" until it's given a higher priority at FBI than what private citizens do with their naughtybits.
Seriously, this is either lunacy, incompetance or both.
Game Performance Tweaker => nice Podcast creation utility => itunes online "Club" services => you can get music and videos from ITMS
It also came with a video editing suite, a DVD authoring utility, a photo management and touch-up app, a music composition tool, an IDE based on GCC and a nifty app that brings up a texas hold'em game when I press f-12.
Plus my shared libraries aren't a genetic mess like an appalacian family reunion. And my machine doesn't have more virii than the village whore.
Really... there was a policy regarding what proper use of the facilities were. The pervert in question decided to go against it. IMO, they should have pulled the guys library card or told him that since he didn't go by the policy, he wasn't to use the computers.
Our libraries are getting shafted at every turn. Lets not drive away good librarians too.
So, there's demand in the market for talented people. This is a good thing. I'm a talented people. Most people here are talented.
And CS enrollment is declining too. And interest rates are low.
This is better than a bubble. Companies in the black are in a bidding war for us and the competition 5 years out is evaporating. Interest rates are still at "OMG if we hike it we die" levels.
Good times man, Good times.
I survived the last bubble and I'd have to say that the waters are chummed. Prepare yourselves for some forced coding marches and invest the spoils for the long haul.
I make my living partly by deploying stuff on the web. We develop our codebase to W3C standards, then port it to the browsers if need be.
Mostly, our code runs great in Gecko and KHTML/WebKit. We have to spend the most time porting the sites to IE. Almost as much time as we spend writing the standards compliant codebase itself. This extra work has cost my company easily over $100,000 in the last year and a half.
So Microsoft: You don't get to tell me how to code until you give me my fucking money back. I don't care if UA string is a standard - I'm not going to let you push me around. If I implement it, I'll be doing it for my own reasons. I'm not going to listen to a word you say until your impotent boobery stops costing me extra money.
If you get business VoIP services from many ISP's, you still have to get a PRI (ISDN over a T1) to get your voice services and you're still getting it from a *LEC.
Sure, you're not paying long distance fees but you're still paying a telco for services. The same ones in some instances that you would for traditional services.
And on top of that, The business VoIP services charge per seat. One ISP in particular charges between 25$ and 60$ per seat per month, no matter how many of those people ever use the phone.
I just moved/upgraded our phone system to a new office. We're a 16 person shop plus conference rooms and other common phones. One ISP's business VoIP was going to cost us ~$1,300 a month. Similar prices across the industry. Turns out it was much cheaper to keep the traditional telephone infrastructure and use an asterisk based solution as our PBX. We're paying less than $500 a month for our PRI, plus calls. Still significantly less than what most VoIP solutions were going to cost.
I think what we're seeing here in regards to sticking it to the old guard has not very much to do with VoIP from the perspective of SME's. It's the legislation that's given us CLEC's that's the real revolution. I was able to get our PRI from XO, so we're divested of SBC. That's money that the old school telco's just lost. I think in time, wether your running traditional voice services over your connection or VoIP, it's this bleeding from a thousand cuts that CLEC's represent to the ILEC's that's really going to take down the old carriers.
To really get traction, these people are going to have to get people to encode video for their special system, get people to install their special system and get their friends to do the same.
However, there are pieces already out there for this sort of thing that people are already using. RSS to track a program for new episodes. Bittorrent to distribute. FFMpeg (and others) for codec/format support.
There is no practical reason to reinvent the wheel as far as these basic components. But there is a very practical reason NOT to do so. These video files are going to seep into other networks. People in this system are going to want to watch content they get from other networks. If we're looking to build a real alternative... a competitive alternative to the way TV works now, we can't have the distribution and viewing infrastructure fragmented. We need there to be a level of standardizatoin so content creators can export to a set of formats that everybody can play. We need a distribution channel that everybody can use. There needs to be a critical mass of regularly updated content people can "tune in" to before people will be motivated do so.
Machine/BlogTorrent are great examples. Different projects that both leverage the same technologies and in so doing, are compatible with the same distribution/discovery network. And you'll notice people are already downloading TV shows (albeit illegally) via BT and playing them on their desktops... so people are even willing to do this "manually" without the aid of a fancypants fron end.
This chain of tools is doing the job very well. There is no practical reason to fragment the distribution channel/audience when the infrastructure is already in place for grassroots TV distro to reach critical mass.
In short... Beta is already deployed, why introduce VHS? It's not about which technology is better. It's about stealing viewers from members of the MPAA. And the tech is already there.
I think that the technical bits that are still to be worked on are making the existing channel more user-friendly to install and operate. If you want to scratch the grassroots TV itch, there's plenty of work to do on the client side and the human interface bits. If you're more of a diplomat than a coder, take a stab at getting people to agree on a common file format for the vids.
I tell my users that if they do write down their password/creds that they should treat it in the same way they do their drivers license or passport. After all, those are credentials too and it provides a good analogy so people can better understand what their responsibilites are regarding them.
That's often not enough though. I also tell them the first time I see their creds in the open that I'll remind them of the policy. After that, their password documents will be destroyed immediately and without notice on sight if discovered in the open again... and that their password will be changed just as fast.
Call that a bit draconian if you will but I see it as a way to meet people in the middle. I can issue strong passwords without having to think about wether people will remember them, and as long as people treat their credentials like responsible adults I don't have to worry about adverse disclosures.
Truth is people are going to write down their passwords no matter what you tell them to do. Providing a climate where people aren't afraid of admitting it and setting an official policy regarding how that's handled can help you manage risks that otherwise would be hard to approach.
My mac, which before I was expecting I could use indefinitely, for years and years at least, now has a limited amount of time to live before it becomes useless.
This is why I bought my G5. I wanted a mac that would run 64 bit PPC apps when that's all people were compiling. I also wanted hardware that didn't have DRM hooks built in.
I thought it was a sage investment. I couldn't really afford it but my Macs last me 5 years at a stretch and the timing seemed right. But I guess I was wrong. The real kicker is there's no mention of Rosetta running the intel binaries on PPC. If all people bother making 2 years from now are intel binaries (like what happened in the 68k/ppc switch... ppc only for many apps) and there's no emulation environment for them on PPC then I've lost 2 years of value. What was a $540/year computer now becomes a $900/year computer. I have to upgrade 2 years earlier than planned and the resale values are all thrown out of whack.
And I speculate that the Intel CPU's in these future macs will have hardware DRM features.
So it looks like in a couple years I'll have a powermac G5 and a powerbook G4 running Linux and an Intel box running OS X.
Apple actually does work on GCC and it gives patches back to the project. The way they do this was actually used as a counterexample in the recent khtml/webcore spat.
I think that a better choice on OS X Tigger would have been GCC 4 for this test, as that's what the OS is built with and it's the native compiler for the OS.. IIRC.
We've had the tech for this stuff for decades and it hasn't really taken off in business because it's no replacement for 1 on 1 human interaction. It's just a phone conference you have to do your hair for.
Seriously, you can't get out of that stuffy breakout room and take the meeting to the bar if a change of scenery is required. You can't get a client to really open up to you regarding their needs if you're just a talking head.
The purpose of these 1 on 1 physical space meetings is interaction. Being able to play off each other. The only technological advance that will make this more efficient is teleporation. Maybe slacks that don't wrinkle.
Some advertisers up and pushed this stuff onto me. I never agreed to download these things. I was never asked if I would like to do so. I agree to banner ads like I agree with a brick wrapped in a note thrown through my window.
Just because you up and suggest there's a contract involved doesn't make it so. You gotta pay for bandwidth? Well, guess what: so do I. How about you have to look at banner ads when I download your site? Why is it ok for me to subsidize your connection when you don't subsidize mine?
Social contract my ass. I pay full price to watch AND I have to watch ads? If that was a TV channel idea the investors would laugh you out of the room and you'd be stuck on that french fryer for another year.
I call shenanigans. You don't get to double-dip. You want me to stop blocking ads, pay for my connection. Otherwise shut up and deal with reality.
So with volume production runs of hardware aes implementations I guess buying crypto asics will get much cheaper. This might get fun... well, unless you're the fbi or the nsa.
After hollowing out the volcanic core of skull mountain, relocating the henchmen, the cadre of doom and baroness pain, reinstalling the death ray and the sub pen those yuppies opened a club med on the beach. A freakin' club med! I wouldn't mind so much as good test subjects are hard to come by, but the crew for the boat that brings them and their families back home knowing where they went... bad news. I already had to exterminate the construction crew for the skull island project to keep that secret. Last time I leave a job to the Evil Scouts. That's for sure.
So I relocated everything to the top few floors of a corporate tower. Lets see those yuppies open a resort THERE...hahaha. One note for the aspiring supervillain: do not sublease from the MPAA. For one thing, they poached half the cadre of doom for their paramilitary litigation division. What's up with that? It took years to comb the henchman ranks for decent CoD recruits. And that doesn't even figure in the millions I spent in genetic engineering and cybernetics. Jerks. And it's fairly hard to blackmail the Senate from your secret lair when they all hang out in your building to collect their bribes. Some secret.
So yeah, we've been running shop from the moon for a couple years and these guys are right. It is a fine crater. It'll be a shame having to move again. After building a subterranian bullet train to get cargo to the equatorial launch facility and micrgravitational nookie with baroness pain. I sure will miss the place. I mean, the death ray mk2 orbiting the earth was a nice perk and I'd hate to give up the helium 3 fusion power facility.
I don't even want to think about it. Who knows where we'll have to move now. Good lairs are hard to come by.
Yeah, even given the argument that they didn't want to have the gimp look like pshop, they should have at least fixed the interface they DO have.
It's BAD. I've been trying out GIMP on and off for many years and I always left with a very bad "if I have to work this way every day for the next X years until they fix it, I'll go totally mad" feeling.
The job of running this project is not to hold it back, it's to maintain and improve it. If you say no to things out of stubborn personal preference you're not doing your job: You're getting in the way of people who want to do the work.
I feel the same way about this fork as I do about x11.org. It was a long time coming.
Clients send out a request for proposals that many agencies answer. Then the client picks the agency who's idea they feel is best.
That being said, the requirements specified dictate which technologies will be used. If it makes sense to do something in flash it will be done in flash. If the client requires the site to work on a mobile device, it will work on a mobile device.
Design doesn't even start until you win the account. There are no rollovers for a PHB to look at. No flash. Just a pdf or doc attatched to an email that describes what you plan to do, why, how and how much it's going to cost. Sure, you could put mobile support in there for every RFP you answer, but if the client didn't ask for it, they're not going to pay for it and you lose the account.
Now when companies that hire shops to make a website for them make an RFP, they look in their server logs and see what their customers are viewing and at other web metrics to see what potential customers are using. Those are how they determine the client side requirements. So if mobile devices showed up in the logs enough to merit a business case for supporting them, you'd see a lot more mobile-friendly sites.
But for now, these businesses see noting but IE, Mozilla and KHTML engines in their logs. People are viewing at 800x600 or 1024x768. There's no business case from thier perspective to give a damn about PDA's and Phones so they sure as hell aren't going to spend money to support them. That's just the way the business world works. It has nothing to do with mouseovers and whiz bang flashy bits.
If your presonal experience dealing with web development actually IS people making decisions based on flashy shiniy things and not solid business reasons quit and get a real job. You work with idiots and deserve better.
My shop supports IE, Moz and khtml engines and only w3c dom. We test on multiple platforms. Generally during a build the pages work in all derivitave browsers in all platforms except bugs that pop up in IE, which we later fix.
If anybody else is in the same boat all we have to do is save that version of a site that works in everything except IE and submit it. No need to create a special version.
Slashdot Mirror
the pure water will be in the bucket. the sludge will be in the area around it. You could recycle your urine into drinking water with this method.
SSH Communications still exitsts!?!?!?
For as long as I've used SSH, OpenSSH was the SSH server. I didn't even know there was another until a few years after. On the client side there's PuTTY if your're stuck on windows but it's OpenSSH shipping on everything else... especially MacOS X, Linux and BSD.
That there are proprietary software SSH solutions out there making money comes as a surprise to me.
And why would anybody with half a brain trust encryption software they can't audit if need be? C'mon: the cryptosystem has to mathematically so whoopass that wether or not an attacker has the source makes no difference. Proprietary is talking the talk. FOSS is walking the walk.
It doesn't surprise me that these guys would use FUD to sell their wares. Have they any other choice?
I don't give a damn about hunting down porn. The FBI's #1 priority right now should be counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Second to that should be criminal organizations that create infrastructure that can also be useful to terrorists or other non-state actors. After that can be prioritized what with the politics and the stick-up-the-ass interference in the private lives of adult Americans.
Gonzales and Bush just don't have their priorities straight at DoJ. I move that they be forbidden from speaking the phrase "War on Terror" until it's given a higher priority at FBI than what private citizens do with their naughtybits.
Seriously, this is either lunacy, incompetance or both.
Game Performance Tweaker => nice
Podcast creation utility => itunes
online "Club" services => you can get music and videos from ITMS
It also came with a video editing suite, a DVD authoring utility, a photo management and touch-up app, a music composition tool, an IDE based on GCC and a nifty app that brings up a texas hold'em game when I press f-12.
Plus my shared libraries aren't a genetic mess like an appalacian family reunion. And my machine doesn't have more virii than the village whore.
What, there's a game other than Battlefield 2?
Really... there was a policy regarding what proper use of the facilities were. The pervert in question decided to go against it. IMO, they should have pulled the guys library card or told him that since he didn't go by the policy, he wasn't to use the computers.
Our libraries are getting shafted at every turn. Lets not drive away good librarians too.
So, there's demand in the market for talented people. This is a good thing. I'm a talented people. Most people here are talented.
And CS enrollment is declining too. And interest rates are low.
This is better than a bubble. Companies in the black are in a bidding war for us and the competition 5 years out is evaporating. Interest rates are still at "OMG if we hike it we die" levels.
Good times man, Good times.
I survived the last bubble and I'd have to say that the waters are chummed. Prepare yourselves for some forced coding marches and invest the spoils for the long haul.
I make my living partly by deploying stuff on the web. We develop our codebase to W3C standards, then port it to the browsers if need be.
Mostly, our code runs great in Gecko and KHTML/WebKit. We have to spend the most time porting the sites to IE. Almost as much time as we spend writing the standards compliant codebase itself. This extra work has cost my company easily over $100,000 in the last year and a half.
So Microsoft: You don't get to tell me how to code until you give me my fucking money back. I don't care if UA string is a standard - I'm not going to let you push me around. If I implement it, I'll be doing it for my own reasons. I'm not going to listen to a word you say until your impotent boobery stops costing me extra money.
http://www.capturedbyrobots.com/gtrbot.htm
GTRBOT666 has been doing this for years.
If you get business VoIP services from many ISP's, you still have to get a PRI (ISDN over a T1) to get your voice services and you're still getting it from a *LEC.
Sure, you're not paying long distance fees but you're still paying a telco for services. The same ones in some instances that you would for traditional services.
And on top of that, The business VoIP services charge per seat. One ISP in particular charges between 25$ and 60$ per seat per month, no matter how many of those people ever use the phone.
I just moved/upgraded our phone system to a new office. We're a 16 person shop plus conference rooms and other common phones. One ISP's business VoIP was going to cost us ~$1,300 a month. Similar prices across the industry. Turns out it was much cheaper to keep the traditional telephone infrastructure and use an asterisk based solution as our PBX. We're paying less than $500 a month for our PRI, plus calls. Still significantly less than what most VoIP solutions were going to cost.
I think what we're seeing here in regards to sticking it to the old guard has not very much to do with VoIP from the perspective of SME's. It's the legislation that's given us CLEC's that's the real revolution. I was able to get our PRI from XO, so we're divested of SBC. That's money that the old school telco's just lost. I think in time, wether your running traditional voice services over your connection or VoIP, it's this bleeding from a thousand cuts that CLEC's represent to the ILEC's that's really going to take down the old carriers.
whoops.
"Machine/BlogTorrent" should read "MythTV/Torrentocracy - Broadcast Machine/BlogTorrent"
To really get traction, these people are going to have to get people to encode video for their special system, get people to install their special system and get their friends to do the same.
However, there are pieces already out there for this sort of thing that people are already using. RSS to track a program for new episodes. Bittorrent to distribute. FFMpeg (and others) for codec/format support.
There is no practical reason to reinvent the wheel as far as these basic components. But there is a very practical reason NOT to do so. These video files are going to seep into other networks. People in this system are going to want to watch content they get from other networks. If we're looking to build a real alternative... a competitive alternative to the way TV works now, we can't have the distribution and viewing infrastructure fragmented. We need there to be a level of standardizatoin so content creators can export to a set of formats that everybody can play. We need a distribution channel that everybody can use. There needs to be a critical mass of regularly updated content people can "tune in" to before people will be motivated do so.
Machine/BlogTorrent are great examples. Different projects that both leverage the same technologies and in so doing, are compatible with the same distribution/discovery network. And you'll notice people are already downloading TV shows (albeit illegally) via BT and playing them on their desktops... so people are even willing to do this "manually" without the aid of a fancypants fron end.
This chain of tools is doing the job very well. There is no practical reason to fragment the distribution channel/audience when the infrastructure is already in place for grassroots TV distro to reach critical mass.
In short... Beta is already deployed, why introduce VHS? It's not about which technology is better. It's about stealing viewers from members of the MPAA. And the tech is already there.
I think that the technical bits that are still to be worked on are making the existing channel more user-friendly to install and operate. If you want to scratch the grassroots TV itch, there's plenty of work to do on the client side and the human interface bits. If you're more of a diplomat than a coder, take a stab at getting people to agree on a common file format for the vids.
I tell my users that if they do write down their password/creds that they should treat it in the same way they do their drivers license or passport. After all, those are credentials too and it provides a good analogy so people can better understand what their responsibilites are regarding them.
That's often not enough though. I also tell them the first time I see their creds in the open that I'll remind them of the policy. After that, their password documents will be destroyed immediately and without notice on sight if discovered in the open again... and that their password will be changed just as fast.
Call that a bit draconian if you will but I see it as a way to meet people in the middle. I can issue strong passwords without having to think about wether people will remember them, and as long as people treat their credentials like responsible adults I don't have to worry about adverse disclosures.
Truth is people are going to write down their passwords no matter what you tell them to do. Providing a climate where people aren't afraid of admitting it and setting an official policy regarding how that's handled can help you manage risks that otherwise would be hard to approach.
This is why I bought my G5. I wanted a mac that would run 64 bit PPC apps when that's all people were compiling. I also wanted hardware that didn't have DRM hooks built in.
I thought it was a sage investment. I couldn't really afford it but my Macs last me 5 years at a stretch and the timing seemed right. But I guess I was wrong. The real kicker is there's no mention of Rosetta running the intel binaries on PPC. If all people bother making 2 years from now are intel binaries (like what happened in the 68k/ppc switch... ppc only for many apps) and there's no emulation environment for them on PPC then I've lost 2 years of value. What was a $540/year computer now becomes a $900/year computer. I have to upgrade 2 years earlier than planned and the resale values are all thrown out of whack.
And I speculate that the Intel CPU's in these future macs will have hardware DRM features.
So it looks like in a couple years I'll have a powermac G5 and a powerbook G4 running Linux and an Intel box running OS X.
Bizzarro world man. Bizzarro!!!
Apple actually does work on GCC and it gives patches back to the project. The way they do this was actually used as a counterexample in the recent khtml/webcore spat.
I think that a better choice on OS X Tigger would have been GCC 4 for this test, as that's what the OS is built with and it's the native compiler for the OS.. IIRC.
We've had the tech for this stuff for decades and it hasn't really taken off in business because it's no replacement for 1 on 1 human interaction. It's just a phone conference you have to do your hair for.
Seriously, you can't get out of that stuffy breakout room and take the meeting to the bar if a change of scenery is required. You can't get a client to really open up to you regarding their needs if you're just a talking head.
The purpose of these 1 on 1 physical space meetings is interaction. Being able to play off each other. The only technological advance that will make this more efficient is teleporation. Maybe slacks that don't wrinkle.
"Data Suggests Early Universe was Superfly"
This is what they get for having Dmitry Sklyarov arrested. They get no sympathy from me.
I didn't enter into any contract.
Some advertisers up and pushed this stuff onto me. I never agreed to download these things. I was never asked if I would like to do so. I agree to banner ads like I agree with a brick wrapped in a note thrown through my window.
Just because you up and suggest there's a contract involved doesn't make it so. You gotta pay for bandwidth? Well, guess what: so do I. How about you have to look at banner ads when I download your site? Why is it ok for me to subsidize your connection when you don't subsidize mine?
Social contract my ass. I pay full price to watch AND I have to watch ads? If that was a TV channel idea the investors would laugh you out of the room and you'd be stuck on that french fryer for another year.
I call shenanigans. You don't get to double-dip. You want me to stop blocking ads, pay for my connection. Otherwise shut up and deal with reality.
So with volume production runs of hardware aes implementations I guess buying crypto asics will get much cheaper. This might get fun... well, unless you're the fbi or the nsa.
How many times must my henchmen and I move?
After hollowing out the volcanic core of skull mountain, relocating the henchmen, the cadre of doom and baroness pain, reinstalling the death ray and the sub pen those yuppies opened a club med on the beach. A freakin' club med! I wouldn't mind so much as good test subjects are hard to come by, but the crew for the boat that brings them and their families back home knowing where they went... bad news. I already had to exterminate the construction crew for the skull island project to keep that secret. Last time I leave a job to the Evil Scouts. That's for sure.
So I relocated everything to the top few floors of a corporate tower. Lets see those yuppies open a resort THERE...hahaha. One note for the aspiring supervillain: do not sublease from the MPAA. For one thing, they poached half the cadre of doom for their paramilitary litigation division. What's up with that? It took years to comb the henchman ranks for decent CoD recruits. And that doesn't even figure in the millions I spent in genetic engineering and cybernetics. Jerks. And it's fairly hard to blackmail the Senate from your secret lair when they all hang out in your building to collect their bribes. Some secret.
So yeah, we've been running shop from the moon for a couple years and these guys are right. It is a fine crater. It'll be a shame having to move again. After building a subterranian bullet train to get cargo to the equatorial launch facility and micrgravitational nookie with baroness pain. I sure will miss the place. I mean, the death ray mk2 orbiting the earth was a nice perk and I'd hate to give up the helium 3 fusion power facility.
I don't even want to think about it. Who knows where we'll have to move now. Good lairs are hard to come by.
Yeah, even given the argument that they didn't want to have the gimp look like pshop, they should have at least fixed the interface they DO have.
It's BAD. I've been trying out GIMP on and off for many years and I always left with a very bad "if I have to work this way every day for the next X years until they fix it, I'll go totally mad" feeling.
The job of running this project is not to hold it back, it's to maintain and improve it. If you say no to things out of stubborn personal preference you're not doing your job: You're getting in the way of people who want to do the work.
I feel the same way about this fork as I do about x11.org. It was a long time coming.
Not so.
Clients send out a request for proposals that many agencies answer. Then the client picks the agency who's idea they feel is best.
That being said, the requirements specified dictate which technologies will be used. If it makes sense to do something in flash it will be done in flash. If the client requires the site to work on a mobile device, it will work on a mobile device.
Design doesn't even start until you win the account. There are no rollovers for a PHB to look at. No flash. Just a pdf or doc attatched to an email that describes what you plan to do, why, how and how much it's going to cost. Sure, you could put mobile support in there for every RFP you answer, but if the client didn't ask for it, they're not going to pay for it and you lose the account.
Now when companies that hire shops to make a website for them make an RFP, they look in their server logs and see what their customers are viewing and at other web metrics to see what potential customers are using. Those are how they determine the client side requirements. So if mobile devices showed up in the logs enough to merit a business case for supporting them, you'd see a lot more mobile-friendly sites.
But for now, these businesses see noting but IE, Mozilla and KHTML engines in their logs. People are viewing at 800x600 or 1024x768. There's no business case from thier perspective to give a damn about PDA's and Phones so they sure as hell aren't going to spend money to support them. That's just the way the business world works. It has nothing to do with mouseovers and whiz bang flashy bits.
If your presonal experience dealing with web development actually IS people making decisions based on flashy shiniy things and not solid business reasons quit and get a real job. You work with idiots and deserve better.
My shop supports IE, Moz and khtml engines and only w3c dom. We test on multiple platforms. Generally during a build the pages work in all derivitave browsers in all platforms except bugs that pop up in IE, which we later fix.
If anybody else is in the same boat all we have to do is save that version of a site that works in everything except IE and submit it. No need to create a special version.
What have they been smoking up there? oh wait...