I'm still a loyal user of Mozilla on Linux and FreeBSD, because it as an enormous number of features which FireFox lacks (speaking of just the browser component, not News, Mail, or the Kitchen sink).
In my tests (launching the binary and killing it from the launch script), Firefox is about 1-2 seconds slower to launch than Mozilla (1.7.3 anyway) on my hardware, which is to say, a paltry Thinkpad T23 laptop.
I prefer Mozilla for speed, significanly more features, and the level of HTML and CSS it supports. Oddly, FireFox is based on the same Gecko engine, but lacks some very basic CSS and HTML support that causes pages and fonts under FireFox to render horribly, while they render to pefection under Mozilla.
As a full-time web-developer, knowing that I don't have to keep using 0.5em fonts to look "normal" under FireFox, and microscopically-small under every other browser, because FireFox's rendering is wrong, is key. I test under FireFox, as part of our 13-browser QA test suite, but I RELY on the output of Mozilla to tell me what is right.
FireFox has some bugs, but it does work for the basic web surfing users and home users. For real development, where the browser is an actual tool, I'll stick with Mozilla.
I've been using my laptop, an overheating Thinkpad T23 (its melted the black rubber from the bottom of my laptop 3 times, thank you IBM extended warrantee!) for 4-5 years now, every day, for about 20 hours a day... on my lap. It has onboard wireless, and I also keep a Bluetooth CF card in the pcmcia slot. I have 3 Linksys WRTs, all overclocked in power sitting about 15' away from me (one floor down).
We just had our first daughter 5 months ago, healthy, happy, and with all limbs, fingers, and toes intact.
This article is completly farsical... unless it takes 20 years of laptop-on-lap power to really do any damage.
Given the amount of extra RF going on around here (5.8Ghz phones, wireless headphones, 3x2.4Ghz WRTs, overheating laptop), I'm surprised I haven't grown a third arm.
"There is OBEX, which they use over Bluetooth and IrDA. I guess the wire protocol precedes the OBEX standard."
Yes, that is true, some of the Palm devices that support Bluetooth and IrDA support OBEX, but not all of them do.
There is a model or two of Zire device that are using the OMAP processor, and hence can't use OBEX, they use some hand-cooked protocol that is incompatible with several other IrDA compliant devices (cellphones, etc.) There are a few dozen reports of it on the Palm development and support mailing lists.
But the underlying communication protocol is locked-up, proprietary, and not easy to stay in lockstep with.
"Please, please, please, can I have Simulator on Linux? It doesn't run under Cedega or Crossover Office (though Cxoffice comes really close)."
I've had the Simulator running under a mostly-generic build of Wine for quite some time now, with varying degrees of success, depending on the nature of the code (pa1mOne Simulator vs. Palmsource simulator vs. TapWave Simulator, etc.)
It needs some work, and it could be made to run better, but it does function. I've got screenshots of it running, should you be interested.
"They are very conscious of the GPL and will make sure they are in compliance. I thought I had noticed a GPL violation and got two people there in a panic, only then to realize it was a false alarm. I am satisfied that they understand the problem."
Are you sure about that? I know Sony has been in violation of the GPL for at least 3 years with their infringing use of the PalmOS Emulator source code. I've reported it several times, and they basically said "Go ahead, sue us, we're Sony. Now go away."
Palm very recently released an IDE called "PODS", based on Eclipse, but neglected to properly adhere to the licensing with Eclipse, and the plugins associated with it, which were covered under the GPL, were of course, not shipped with source. Requests for the source were denied by several of my peers, pending "We're trying to release an update with some fixes" or some such response. Of course, this is ridiculous, since the plugins for the released version were already out there, sans source.
I haven't revisited the issue in a few months, and now there is a 1.1 release, but I certainly hope they've cleaned up that issue, and their other underlying internal issues with "borrowing" other parts of projects without proper adherence to the license.
As it stands, there are currently 5 commercial companies openly and knowingly violating the license of pilot-link for example, without any regard for the license or hard work that goes into making such a project function. Calls to those companies are met with failure or ignorance.
I see this time and time again. Instead of working with us, they directly work against us. I just don't understand that business acumen.
We've been down this road already with the GPL case for Plucker v. "Bluefish Wireless" with Wendy, and I really don't want to have to deal with ignorant, incompetent companies like that again (incidentally, that case may be expanding exponentially, since Bluefish is now apparently shipping a suspisciously-compatible version of an app that we found them in violation of the GPL in ROM on these new PalmOS devices. If that turns out to be true, pa1mOne, Palmsource, and Bluefish Wireless are in an enormous world of hurt. We're still investigating the matter.)
"Previously there had been some rumors of PalmOne, the maker of the Palm PDAs and the Treo smartphone, doing Windows Mobile-powered Treo.
All this pretty much feels like PalmOS is having its days counted."
Wow, you've never actually been in business before, have you?
Palm, Inc. split into pa1mOne and Palmsource for a very specific reason: to remove the conflict of interest between hardware and software. Just because it still has 'pa1m' in the name, doesn't mean they have to only continue to use PalmOS (a product from Palmsource) on their hardware.
As a hardware manufacturer like pa1mOne is, you would be wise to seek out and find partners who provide software to leverage the use and sale of your hardware, whatever that might be.
Being ignorant of the product-enhancement opportunities that many different software vendors (such as Palmsource, Microsoft, Symbian, and others) can bring to your hardware platform, is a sure sign of a business plan gone bad.
Seriously, pa1mOne is a hardware company now. They make hardware, period.
Palmsource is a software company. They make software, period. Their software runs on pa1mOne's hardware, but it doesn't have to.
pa1mOne's hardware currently runs PalmOS, but it doesn't have to.
While I don't agree with the need to run Microsoft anything on a mobile device, I can definately agree with their decision to support other OEM partners, licensees, and vendors, to leverage Microsoft products on their hardware.
"You know, multisync on Linux handles the Palm fine, and the Palm protocols are standards-based."
I'm not sure what Palm devices you're referring to here, but they certainly can't be the ones running PalmOS. Palm's protocol is absolutely, most-definately, NOT standards-based, unless you include that to mean developed using proprietary, undocumented APIs. Everything has to be reverse-engineered using wire-level traces and actual physical devices (the Emulator and Simulator aren't enough, they don't model exactly how certain chipsets deal with packets and framing).
But thanks to our hard work with pilot-link, projects like Multisync can continue to function and talk to Palm devices.
The more we continue to reverse-engineer, the more PalmOS-based devices these kinds of projects can continue to support.
I only hope that this move from Palmsource, includes opening up the bits of their protocol that can enable us to better support them without having to violate the DMCA or tear apart their devices on the wire to do it.
"Hopefully it will mean a sane development environment for new apps (threads!), while still providing a backwards compatible mode for existing apps."
Palm's OS has support for threading, but they have been restricted from using it, by license. The KADAK kernel PalmOS uses restricts Palm from exposing more than one thread to the OS itself.
This is not a technical limitation, its a licensing limitation.
"That would be great but could you please come up with full support for syncing with Linux as well? I mean open source solutions are good but not good enough (I can't sync birthdays and install to the SD card) I didn't rtfa so I apologise if that's addressed in it."
Since Palmsource neglects to document ANY of their changed APIs in the applications, every byte has to be reverse-engineered from scratch. I think we've done a pretty amazing job at creating what exists today, given that we've had NO help, NO docs, and FEW devices to work with.
This kind of reverse-engineering requires real devices, the simulators (which are Windows only, forcing us to buy Windows licenses, just to reverse-engineer an undocumented protocol, so users can sync their Palm devices on Linux).
These devices cost money, lots of money, since every vendor has proprietary extensions which require special handling (Sony has photos in the Addressbook, Palm has cross-midnight calendar functionality, etc.) Since none of us get paid for our pilot-link work, or any Palm synchronization work on Linux for that matter, there isn't a lot of incentive to fund these $400 devices every few months.
And if you had actually read our mailing list, you would see that SD cards work fine now, but Birthdays aren't supported yet, because there are bigger things to address in the codebase first, like working around the chip-level bugs in the T5 and Zire31 devices.
The code for the new Contacts API is already in CVS, but there is nothing in userland to talk to it yet. Its coming, just not right now. I'm not going to introduce any new functionality until we figure out all of the bugs and issues with existing functionality first.
And lastly, pilot-link is the project that comes up with all of this code, from scratch, with the help of some very talented developers. Anyone else who claims compatibility with these devices on these platforms, is using our code in their projects. Period.
"On the flip side, I'd love to see a Palm-created synch tool for my home machine which runs almost exclusively on SuSE. Right now I have to use the sometimes flaky KPilot and I get issues with AvantGo."
I think we've done a FINE job providing you with some tools you can use to synchronize your Palm on SuSE, considering we get ZERO support, ZERO documentation, and ZERO help from Palm regarding their underlying synchronization protocols.
In fact, we support more devices, operating systems, and connection types, at much faster speeds, than Palm themselves. We're doing a pretty miraculous job, considering every byte was reverse-engineered from scratch.
Why am I not surprised that Microsoft is (once again) trying to cash in on the successes of others, for their own profit?
They haven't invented a single unique thing out of Redmond or had a single independent thought in at least a decade now. They simply wait for someone to do something they can't do themselves, and they either buy them out, claim it as their own invention through patents filed after-the-fact, or they liquidate the originator into submission.
"I'm getting a bunch of ssh brute force attacks from asia too, check your logs everyone."
I too, was getting these about 2 months ago, a few hundred per-hour, until I decided to lock sshd down to known IPs that I regularly ssh from:
sshhosts="10.0.1.0/24 12.34.56.78 your.host.here"; for host in $sshhosts; do iptables -A INPUT -j ACCEPT -p tcp -s $host --dport 22 done iptables -A INPUT -j DROP -p tcp --dport 22
Problem solved. I'm going to be moving this to portknocking soon, so that'll open it back up a bit for my partners and clients to ssh in from, while they're on the road.
"It has one huge benefit over VMWare, it is extremely fast. The virtual machine has so close to the performance of the host that it would be reasonable to do such things as: implement a 100% reliable server on your computer and then implement an up-to-date desktop machine inside it. Implement virtual hosting on cheap x86 hardware. Run two distros simultaneously, etc."
Obviously you haven't run VMWare lately.
Anything running in the version 4 series of VMWare (now up to 4.5.2) runs as fast (and faster in some cases, because of the wonderful memory management of a Linux host) than the same OS on the bare metal. Version 5 (now in beta), is even faster.
Of course, you have to plan your virtual machine build accordingly, and optimize based on your needs. I have over 40GiB of vmware workstation images here on my laptop that I use on a regular basis, and I would never want to run these on the bare metal anymore.
With the right RAM configuration (changeable in the global VMWare prefs, to run exclusively in RAM, swap some, or swap all), I can run up to 4 virtual machines, each with 256M of RAM dedicated to them, at the same time, and fast. They're really snappy when running full-screen, but that's not necessary.
It supports all of my peripherals, including my dozen-or-so Palm devices, USB, native pcmcia and wireless (no more faux-NAT required), and many other things. Nothing else even comes close.
Seriously, you should give VMWare 4.x or 5.x a try again, they've made enormous leaps in performance from the version 3.x builds.
"3) A camera would be nice. 1.3 Mpix would be nice. A flash would be nice. Seems to be the emerging standard. Short video clips with audio would be nice. I can see the utility of camera features and probably wouldn't buy a new phone without them."
Unfortunately for the rest of us that work in the real world, in real industry, camera phones are a serious liability; a terminatable offense in most companies.
Once these phone vendors get out of the middle-school crowd they're catering to, and see how real-world people use real-world devices to complete real-world tasks, they'll see that the phone is a problem, and ditch it.
At the very least, make it a clip-on/snap-on adapter, not built into the phone itself. I'd rather keep my job than worry about whether or not someone knows my phone has a camera on it, and find myself without a job at the end of the day.
"Even if, somehow, we find out later that Kerry won, does he REALLY want to clean up Bush's mess?"
I'd rather have 4 years of trying to clean it up, rather than 4 more years to make it worse.
Did you see the recent news how Bush signed into law, the new $800B (billion!) dollar cap on the defecit. This is the third increase in the spending cap Bush has passed in his first term as president.
"Great. So now this'll just further fuel the movement of the extremely large file-sharers to move to those P2P networks that are completely anonymous, like GNUNet or Freenet."
..which will then provoke ISPs to be forced to block the ports required by those applications..
..which will then cause the authors of those applications to start tunnelling across port 80..
..which will then cause ISPs to start blocking port 80 inbound (most do anyway, but it will become a mandate).
..which will force users to get dedicated lines to host their p2p resources, and now with the new ICANN regulations, you can no longer hide your identity by using anonymous or false information in your domain record. This means the MPAA/RIAA/PA/DHS have you by the balls anyway.
..and so on. This only spirals downward into an ugly path.
Re:Would like to go to gmails party....
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· Score: 1
"Join the gmail-invite-board on Google Groups 2 (groups-beta.google.com)."
Or better yet, use the GMail-o-Matic automatic GMail invite and provisioning system. I am not affiliated with it, but I've had great luck with it.
Re:The entire 1 gigabyte size issue....
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The Webmail Wars
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"Since google is already good at indexing web pages and caching stuff, if they applied the same sort of index/cache issue to emails and your gmail account was just really a list of references to the stashed messages, I bet they could reduce the space even further."
In fact, this is almost precisely how they do it. They take each incoming message, hash it, and store that hash and original message on their shards in their data management system, with a very fast lookup. Every time a new message is received or delivered, and matches an existing hash, the pointer to the original message is put into the user's mailbox. If a user deletes the message, the pointer to that message is removed from that user's mailbox.
This means if 30 people subscribe to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (notorious for being incredibly high-traffic), and 1,000 messages are received in a day.. only 1,000 messages are stored, not 30,000. This not-only saves space, but it saves mailbox lookup time and increases speed of the system overall.
Now, apply this to the spam problem. Spam email to one person (such as shopping advertisements for Sears) may not be spam to another person ("Hey, I need a new lawnmower at Sears!"). So those who mark it as spam, get the spam heuristic scoring weighted higher and applied to their incoming message hashes, and those who do not mark those same messages as spam, get a lower weighting.
The system is actually pretty brilliant.
Now, in response to the other person who claims that their 3MiB email sent to their sister and friends created copies of the message in their "Sent" folder, that makes perfect sense, because the message is different if you send it on different days or with different contents ("Hey Sally, check out these pictures!" "Here's some pictures for you, Bob."). They should be treated differently in the sending user's mailbox. But to the recipient, the attachment itself, is not getting duplicated.
The precise reason Google can offer 1GiB mailboxes for every user, is because that 1GiB is "over-provisioned" across thousands of other users, much like how an ISP oversells their own bandwidth, knowing that all their customers won't saturate the entire pipe 24x7.
"For instance, Pocket Word tends to screw up formatted tables, inline images, formatting, the like, while Docs to Go has repeatably demonstrated in the past that their product does not. Sames goes for things like Pocket Excel, Powerpoint, etc. Walt Mossberg had a great article on this a while ago. What's more, DTG practically comes with every Palm product nowadays."
Unfortunately, Microsoft Office and DTG do not support my documents in OpenOffice.org format, and they have absolutely no excuse not to.
The OpenOffice.org file formats are open, the code is available, and there is an SDK specifically designed to help companies like DTG and Microsoft begin supporting these file formats. They have absolutely no excuse, they have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. They're severely restricting their market by ignoring the other 5 platforms that desktop office users are using.
Microsoft, for example, consistently asserts that OpenOffice.org isn't 100% compatible with its closed, proprietary file formats, but Microsoft isn't compatible with OpenOffice.org file formats either, and they're openly documented for use.
How ironic.
Until DTG/Microsoft begins supporting the OpenOffice.org formats (which includes significantly more formats and options than Microsoft and DTG combined), there is no compelling reason to support them. They're ignoring an enormous community of users on Solaris, OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, and yes, even Windows.
This goes for Open Source software as well. The "Trust Factor(tm)" exists, but do you really know what every single application you're running is doing and sending? Have you audited them all yourself? If the upstream source is clean, are the packages made by distribution package maintainers also clean? Can you be sure their "patches" applied to upstream source aren't opening holes, or adding back doors?
"I'm using firefox 0.9.1, and that link does nothing. If I type it into the address bar manually, it works.:)"
It works perfectly here though, in Mozilla 1.8.3 and Firefox 1.0RC1.
I much prefer Mozilla over Firefox though, because Firefox is lacking in a LOT of features that Mozilla has right out of the box (speaking specifically about the browser component, not the other kitchen-sink add-ons that Mozilla also has).
"And as you point out, the idea of 3 separate, _competing_ companies collaborating together to defraud the Florida electorate is pretty much completely laughable."
Considering that the top two vendors are run by two brothers, and the third was formerly owned by Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, who then resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software, I don't find it unreasonable that this was rigged at a very high level to send a few votes here, a few votes there. Just enough to be undetectable.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still a loyal user of Mozilla on Linux and FreeBSD, because it as an enormous number of features which FireFox lacks (speaking of just the browser component, not News, Mail, or the Kitchen sink).
In my tests (launching the binary and killing it from the launch script), Firefox is about 1-2 seconds slower to launch than Mozilla (1.7.3 anyway) on my hardware, which is to say, a paltry Thinkpad T23 laptop.
I prefer Mozilla for speed, significanly more features, and the level of HTML and CSS it supports. Oddly, FireFox is based on the same Gecko engine, but lacks some very basic CSS and HTML support that causes pages and fonts under FireFox to render horribly, while they render to pefection under Mozilla.
As a full-time web-developer, knowing that I don't have to keep using 0.5em fonts to look "normal" under FireFox, and microscopically-small under every other browser, because FireFox's rendering is wrong, is key. I test under FireFox, as part of our 13-browser QA test suite, but I RELY on the output of Mozilla to tell me what is right.
FireFox has some bugs, but it does work for the basic web surfing users and home users. For real development, where the browser is an actual tool, I'll stick with Mozilla.
I've been using my laptop, an overheating Thinkpad T23 (its melted the black rubber from the bottom of my laptop 3 times, thank you IBM extended warrantee!) for 4-5 years now, every day, for about 20 hours a day... on my lap. It has onboard wireless, and I also keep a Bluetooth CF card in the pcmcia slot. I have 3 Linksys WRTs, all overclocked in power sitting about 15' away from me (one floor down).
We just had our first daughter 5 months ago, healthy, happy, and with all limbs, fingers, and toes intact.
This article is completly farsical... unless it takes 20 years of laptop-on-lap power to really do any damage.
Given the amount of extra RF going on around here (5.8Ghz phones, wireless headphones, 3x2.4Ghz WRTs, overheating laptop), I'm surprised I haven't grown a third arm.
I just tried this on 5 different Mozilla machines here, all running various flavors of Linux, and it doesn't affect any of them.
Clicking on the link indicated pops up a Citibank window that explains how to avoid fraulent clicks.
Once again, Mozilla reigns supreme.
Yes, that is true, some of the Palm devices that support Bluetooth and IrDA support OBEX, but not all of them do.
There is a model or two of Zire device that are using the OMAP processor, and hence can't use OBEX, they use some hand-cooked protocol that is incompatible with several other IrDA compliant devices (cellphones, etc.) There are a few dozen reports of it on the Palm development and support mailing lists. But the underlying communication protocol is locked-up, proprietary, and not easy to stay in lockstep with.
I've had the Simulator running under a mostly-generic build of Wine for quite some time now, with varying degrees of success, depending on the nature of the code (pa1mOne Simulator vs. Palmsource simulator vs. TapWave Simulator, etc.)
It needs some work, and it could be made to run better, but it does function. I've got screenshots of it running, should you be interested.
Just a correction: The Simulator only runs on Windows, and will never run on Linux.
The PalmOS Emulator (POSE), runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
The Emulator will emulate devices using anything up to, but not-including, OS5.
The Simulator will run an x86 application emulating an ARM device, for OS5 and above.
There are no plans to provide an Emulator that can model OS5 or OS6 devices at this point. Maybe this move by Palmsource will change that decision.
Are you sure about that? I know Sony has been in violation of the GPL for at least 3 years with their infringing use of the PalmOS Emulator source code. I've reported it several times, and they basically said "Go ahead, sue us, we're Sony. Now go away."
Palm very recently released an IDE called "PODS", based on Eclipse, but neglected to properly adhere to the licensing with Eclipse, and the plugins associated with it, which were covered under the GPL, were of course, not shipped with source. Requests for the source were denied by several of my peers, pending "We're trying to release an update with some fixes" or some such response. Of course, this is ridiculous, since the plugins for the released version were already out there, sans source.
I haven't revisited the issue in a few months, and now there is a 1.1 release, but I certainly hope they've cleaned up that issue, and their other underlying internal issues with "borrowing" other parts of projects without proper adherence to the license.
As it stands, there are currently 5 commercial companies openly and knowingly violating the license of pilot-link for example, without any regard for the license or hard work that goes into making such a project function. Calls to those companies are met with failure or ignorance.
I see this time and time again. Instead of working with us, they directly work against us. I just don't understand that business acumen.
We've been down this road already with the GPL case for Plucker v. "Bluefish Wireless" with Wendy, and I really don't want to have to deal with ignorant, incompetent companies like that again (incidentally, that case may be expanding exponentially, since Bluefish is now apparently shipping a suspisciously-compatible version of an app that we found them in violation of the GPL in ROM on these new PalmOS devices. If that turns out to be true, pa1mOne, Palmsource, and Bluefish Wireless are in an enormous world of hurt. We're still investigating the matter.)
Wow, you've never actually been in business before, have you?
Palm, Inc. split into pa1mOne and Palmsource for a very specific reason: to remove the conflict of interest between hardware and software. Just because it still has 'pa1m' in the name, doesn't mean they have to only continue to use PalmOS (a product from Palmsource) on their hardware.
As a hardware manufacturer like pa1mOne is, you would be wise to seek out and find partners who provide software to leverage the use and sale of your hardware, whatever that might be.
Being ignorant of the product-enhancement opportunities that many different software vendors (such as Palmsource, Microsoft, Symbian, and others) can bring to your hardware platform, is a sure sign of a business plan gone bad.
Seriously, pa1mOne is a hardware company now. They make hardware, period.
Palmsource is a software company. They make software, period. Their software runs on pa1mOne's hardware, but it doesn't have to.
pa1mOne's hardware currently runs PalmOS, but it doesn't have to.
While I don't agree with the need to run Microsoft anything on a mobile device, I can definately agree with their decision to support other OEM partners, licensees, and vendors, to leverage Microsoft products on their hardware.
I'm not sure what Palm devices you're referring to here, but they certainly can't be the ones running PalmOS. Palm's protocol is absolutely, most-definately, NOT standards-based, unless you include that to mean developed using proprietary, undocumented APIs. Everything has to be reverse-engineered using wire-level traces and actual physical devices (the Emulator and Simulator aren't enough, they don't model exactly how certain chipsets deal with packets and framing).
But thanks to our hard work with pilot-link, projects like Multisync can continue to function and talk to Palm devices.
The more we continue to reverse-engineer, the more PalmOS-based devices these kinds of projects can continue to support.
I only hope that this move from Palmsource, includes opening up the bits of their protocol that can enable us to better support them without having to violate the DMCA or tear apart their devices on the wire to do it.
Palm's OS has support for threading, but they have been restricted from using it, by license. The KADAK kernel PalmOS uses restricts Palm from exposing more than one thread to the OS itself.
This is not a technical limitation, its a licensing limitation.
Since Palmsource neglects to document ANY of their changed APIs in the applications, every byte has to be reverse-engineered from scratch. I think we've done a pretty amazing job at creating what exists today, given that we've had NO help, NO docs, and FEW devices to work with.
This kind of reverse-engineering requires real devices, the simulators (which are Windows only, forcing us to buy Windows licenses, just to reverse-engineer an undocumented protocol, so users can sync their Palm devices on Linux).
These devices cost money, lots of money, since every vendor has proprietary extensions which require special handling (Sony has photos in the Addressbook, Palm has cross-midnight calendar functionality, etc.) Since none of us get paid for our pilot-link work, or any Palm synchronization work on Linux for that matter, there isn't a lot of incentive to fund these $400 devices every few months.
And if you had actually read our mailing list, you would see that SD cards work fine now, but Birthdays aren't supported yet, because there are bigger things to address in the codebase first, like working around the chip-level bugs in the T5 and Zire31 devices.
The code for the new Contacts API is already in CVS, but there is nothing in userland to talk to it yet. Its coming, just not right now. I'm not going to introduce any new functionality until we figure out all of the bugs and issues with existing functionality first.
And lastly, pilot-link is the project that comes up with all of this code, from scratch, with the help of some very talented developers. Anyone else who claims compatibility with these devices on these platforms, is using our code in their projects. Period.
I think we've done a FINE job providing you with some tools you can use to synchronize your Palm on SuSE, considering we get ZERO support, ZERO documentation, and ZERO help from Palm regarding their underlying synchronization protocols.
In fact, we support more devices, operating systems, and connection types, at much faster speeds, than Palm themselves. We're doing a pretty miraculous job, considering every byte was reverse-engineered from scratch.
They haven't invented a single unique thing out of Redmond or had a single independent thought in at least a decade now. They simply wait for someone to do something they can't do themselves, and they either buy them out, claim it as their own invention through patents filed after-the-fact, or they liquidate the originator into submission.
SSSM (Same Shit, Same Microsoft) here.
I too, was getting these about 2 months ago, a few hundred per-hour, until I decided to lock sshd down to known IPs that I regularly ssh from:
Problem solved. I'm going to be moving this to portknocking soon, so that'll open it back up a bit for my partners and clients to ssh in from, while they're on the road.
Obviously you haven't run VMWare lately.
Anything running in the version 4 series of VMWare (now up to 4.5.2) runs as fast (and faster in some cases, because of the wonderful memory management of a Linux host) than the same OS on the bare metal. Version 5 (now in beta), is even faster.
Of course, you have to plan your virtual machine build accordingly, and optimize based on your needs. I have over 40GiB of vmware workstation images here on my laptop that I use on a regular basis, and I would never want to run these on the bare metal anymore.
With the right RAM configuration (changeable in the global VMWare prefs, to run exclusively in RAM, swap some, or swap all), I can run up to 4 virtual machines, each with 256M of RAM dedicated to them, at the same time, and fast. They're really snappy when running full-screen, but that's not necessary.
It supports all of my peripherals, including my dozen-or-so Palm devices, USB, native pcmcia and wireless (no more faux-NAT required), and many other things. Nothing else even comes close.
Seriously, you should give VMWare 4.x or 5.x a try again, they've made enormous leaps in performance from the version 3.x builds.
Unfortunately for the rest of us that work in the real world, in real industry, camera phones are a serious liability; a terminatable offense in most companies.
Once these phone vendors get out of the middle-school crowd they're catering to, and see how real-world people use real-world devices to complete real-world tasks, they'll see that the phone is a problem, and ditch it.
At the very least, make it a clip-on/snap-on adapter, not built into the phone itself. I'd rather keep my job than worry about whether or not someone knows my phone has a camera on it, and find myself without a job at the end of the day.
I'd rather have 4 years of trying to clean it up, rather than 4 more years to make it worse.
Did you see the recent news how Bush signed into law, the new $800B (billion!) dollar cap on the defecit. This is the third increase in the spending cap Bush has passed in his first term as president.
..which will then provoke ISPs to be forced to block the ports required by those applications..
..which will then cause the authors of those applications to start tunnelling across port 80..
..which will then cause ISPs to start blocking port 80 inbound (most do anyway, but it will become a mandate).
..which will force users to get dedicated lines to host their p2p resources, and now with the new ICANN regulations, you can no longer hide your identity by using anonymous or false information in your domain record. This means the MPAA/RIAA/PA/DHS have you by the balls anyway.
..and so on. This only spirals downward into an ugly path.
Or better yet, use the GMail-o-Matic automatic GMail invite and provisioning system. I am not affiliated with it, but I've had great luck with it.
In fact, this is almost precisely how they do it. They take each incoming message, hash it, and store that hash and original message on their shards in their data management system, with a very fast lookup. Every time a new message is received or delivered, and matches an existing hash, the pointer to the original message is put into the user's mailbox. If a user deletes the message, the pointer to that message is removed from that user's mailbox.
This means if 30 people subscribe to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (notorious for being incredibly high-traffic), and 1,000 messages are received in a day.. only 1,000 messages are stored, not 30,000. This not-only saves space, but it saves mailbox lookup time and increases speed of the system overall.
Now, apply this to the spam problem. Spam email to one person (such as shopping advertisements for Sears) may not be spam to another person ("Hey, I need a new lawnmower at Sears!"). So those who mark it as spam, get the spam heuristic scoring weighted higher and applied to their incoming message hashes, and those who do not mark those same messages as spam, get a lower weighting.
The system is actually pretty brilliant.
Now, in response to the other person who claims that their 3MiB email sent to their sister and friends created copies of the message in their "Sent" folder, that makes perfect sense, because the message is different if you send it on different days or with different contents ("Hey Sally, check out these pictures!" "Here's some pictures for you, Bob."). They should be treated differently in the sending user's mailbox. But to the recipient, the attachment itself, is not getting duplicated.
The precise reason Google can offer 1GiB mailboxes for every user, is because that 1GiB is "over-provisioned" across thousands of other users, much like how an ISP oversells their own bandwidth, knowing that all their customers won't saturate the entire pipe 24x7.
PocketPC is not PalmOS, so this still doesn't solve the problem.
Unfortunately, Microsoft Office and DTG do not support my documents in OpenOffice.org format, and they have absolutely no excuse not to.
The OpenOffice.org file formats are open, the code is available, and there is an SDK specifically designed to help companies like DTG and Microsoft begin supporting these file formats. They have absolutely no excuse, they have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. They're severely restricting their market by ignoring the other 5 platforms that desktop office users are using.
Microsoft, for example, consistently asserts that OpenOffice.org isn't 100% compatible with its closed, proprietary file formats, but Microsoft isn't compatible with OpenOffice.org file formats either, and they're openly documented for use.
How ironic.
Until DTG/Microsoft begins supporting the OpenOffice.org formats (which includes significantly more formats and options than Microsoft and DTG combined), there is no compelling reason to support them. They're ignoring an enormous community of users on Solaris, OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, and yes, even Windows.
You can't be sure, unless you audit it yourself.
It works perfectly here though, in Mozilla 1.8.3 and Firefox 1.0RC1.
I much prefer Mozilla over Firefox though, because Firefox is lacking in a LOT of features that Mozilla has right out of the box (speaking specifically about the browser component, not the other kitchen-sink add-ons that Mozilla also has).
Considering that the top two vendors are run by two brothers, and the third was formerly owned by Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, who then resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software, I don't find it unreasonable that this was rigged at a very high level to send a few votes here, a few votes there. Just enough to be undetectable.