My fiance works for the biggest pharmaceutical in the world, and they just recently sent out a company-wide communication that said that any employee, friend-of-employee, visitor, contractor, or vendor found onsite using, carrying, or possessing a cellular phone with a camera will be immediately terminated, no questions asked.
For the employee friends, visitors, vendors and contractors, this means they are immediately banned from any and all sites for a duration of 3 years. The employee who has friends onsite using a cameraphone is immediately terminated.
They are being very harsh, but these are the rules. Having someone walking around with a miniature camera in their hands inside labs, through buildings, etc. is an ENORMOUS risk to them.
Check with your employer first, before you invest in one of these phones, or you could find yourself out on the curb without a job.
Cellphone vendors need to be very careful with their product lines, and includes phones that do NOT include these features, so that they can continue to sell product. Don't just cater to the teenagers who think having a camera and a phone is "cool". Cater to the people who actually have to pay for those cellphone bills... the parents, and the businesspersons who actually use the devices for what they are.. a phone.
I can help you with this, and with design. Hit me up privately (contact info on the gnu-designs site) and maybe we can work something out that mutually benefits both of us. As you've seen, I have a very strong sense of design, site quality, and work with very rigid standards.
Part of the layout, is "quietly" placing the ads where they fit the best, in a manner which isn't annoying or in the user's way. Color, placement, and ad style are important.
Another important point is that these ads are text-based, and they generate enough to cover a significant portion of our bandwidth bill.
I tried the graphical banner ads for 3 months, which weren't really targeted (OfficeMax, Staples, battery companies, etc.), and hadn't earned a penny. 2 nights after I put up the Google ads, we had covered that month's bandwidth bill.
They work, they aren't annoying, and they are targeted to the audience of my users. It works out all around.
I've been using Google Ads for 145 days on several sites I host (mostly HOWTO documents, Palm-related projects and so on). According to their system, and we're averaging 0.7%. It has gradually increased over time, but that is the overall average.
Maybe you are doing something wrong, that keeps your rate so low.
I started going through my weblogs for all the domains I host, looking for 404's, and correcting them. Many of the domains we host have updated their pages, moved files around, etc. and other sites and servers and users still point to the old files and content. Those were easy to fix with a bit of mod_rewrite and mod_redir hackery, and it keeps the users happy and logs nice and clean.
But as I was parsing out the logs, I noticed quite a few other curious things, which led me to poke through the referer logs and start tracing some interesting hits.
Both of these domains are registered in completely different states, by two completely different people, and yet... other than page color, they are identical, even down to the "testimonials" page. Whomever ripped this off from whom, can't possibly be that stupid... or can they?
It's a good thing I already have prior art on something very similar to this, going back to 1998, when I was working on biometric-enabled tabled-based PC units, running Citrix ICA over wireless at $PHARMA.
My idea at the time, was to have a card, ONE card, that contained the "personalities" of your other cards (Bank, ATM, credit card, shopping club card, etc.) on the same card.
For example, you walk up to the counter, tap a button that "sets" the card as your credit card, and are prompted for a pin code. You enter it with the little keypad on the card (the older SecureID cards did this, and were wafer-thin). Then you are prompted to "verify" the pin you enter, by pushing your thumb onto a spot on the card, "unlocking" the personality. Now you can slide/swipe the card and use it as a normal credit card.
You walk over the ATM machine, and decide you want some cash. Tap the "ATM" button on the card, enter the pin, push your thumb onto the pad, unlock the card, and slide it into the ATM machine. It is now an ATM card.
CFR 21.11 has all the details on how to make this meet government guidelines for security and authorization. Basically to ensure something is "secure", and to meet their criteria for biometrics, you have to meet 2 out of 3 of the criteria:
Something you know (password, pin number, passphrase)
Something you have (key, keycard, physical device), and
Something you are (fingerprint, retinal scan, voiceprint [the least secure is voice])
Using my design, described above, you can meet all three of these criteria:
Knowledge of the pin code, used to authorize the transaction (meets criteria 1 above)
Possession of the card (meets criteria 2 above)
Possession of the biometric token (meets criteria 3 above)
The technology is there, or very close to it, we just have to find a way to miniaturize the components a bit more (make the cards flexible, so they can be put in a wallet), and make it low-cost, so it isn't prohibitive to own one.
phpiCalendar is read-only, and does not allow modification of the iCal calendar files without significant restructuring of the back-end (i.e. adding MySQL, adding hooks to all of the PHP code to allow edits, locking, and so on).
It is great, for a static "events" calendar, but it really isn't remotely close to a solution for an interactive web-based calendaring/PIM solution.
They let you synchronize contacts and calendar for free.
The SyncML backend of Mobical is Tactel Blues, which is fairly arcane (and nowhere to be found). They apparently developed a SyncML client for Palm about 2 years ago, but it is probably wildly out of date, and won't work on current Palm handheld devices (OS5+ API, larger screens, smaller fonts, network capabilities, etc.).
Trust me, I've looked into a lot of these solutions VERY heavily (as mentioned in my original article submission). I didn't just try a bunch of projects from Sourceforge. I really did some digging and tried out these alternative products.
I'm still very unimpressed with the playing field. Nobody seems to get it right.. yet.
Unfortunately, this does not work with tasks. I've emailed the primary Yahoo! contact within the Calendar project group, and will see what his take on it is.
As you can see in this Outlook task entry, everything looks kosher. That hash in the Note field is for DateBk5's icons.
When I sync to Yahoo!'s Calendar, I see something that looks like this. Opening the Tasks form, I see this output. No titles for any tasks.
Let's focus in on the 9/18 task. Opening that one, shows this form, where you can see the Note field is in the Title field of the Task. That's a problem. It showed an empty title in the main Tasks screen, but now shows the Note field instead of the Title.
It works fine in Outlook. It works fine in J-Pilot. Why does Yahoo!'s Calendar screw it up? (I await the reply from their maintainer).
If they had an API that was public, I could write a conduit to sync directly to it, from Linux. Judging by the fact that Intellisync is a Pumasoft product, and Pumasoft holds many patents on SyncML technologies (some of which have recently been rejected by the USPTO), I can assume that this is SyncML + authentication.
I'd rather write the conduit using a documented API, than a sniffer, however.
Unfortunately, it can't import the standard Palm data. I have 697 events in my calendar, which show up in Linux under Evolution and J-Pilot and with a Perl dump of DatebookDB.pdb. They also show up in Windows under Outlook and Palm Desktop.
Following the instructions in Webcalendar, to import the datebook/datebook.dat file from the Palm Desktop setup, only imports 53 entries, mostly holidays.
If it can't handle the format supplied, it should not advertise that it can. Clearly nobody tested this capability (and yes, I'll be reporting the bug with the Webcalendar maintainers).
That's a blocker for me, so I stopped testing it right there.
Not if you configure your tracker properly. That's what the --allowed_dir option is for.
Anyone who runs a production BitTorrent tracker should be very familiar with the options, source code, design, and limitations of the project, before they open the ports for public access.
"Clues to the source code's origin lie in a "core dump" file, which is left by the Linux operating system to record the memory a program is using when it crashes."
What would the Microsoft source code be doing on a Linux machine? Mainsoft ports applications from Windows to Unix, not Linux. IE and WinAmp are two examples that they've ported.
What would a "core dump" file be doing with a directory list of files inside it, especially Microsoft source code files. What application dumped that included this file list? It is highly unlikely that they were building code with Microsoft Windows 2000 source code ON Linux, so what was it doing there?
Core files don't contain "lists of files or directories" on Linux. That information is completely irrelevant to the purpose of a core file... diagnosing the reason for a crash. Lists of files in a directory or on the filesystem are completely irrelevant to WHY the app involved crashed.
Core files on Linux are set to 0 bytes by default. The only reason this would have been changed, is so that you can debug crashes. If this is the case, Mainsoft was porting Windows applications to Linux as well as Unix.
Lastly, if they were not porting to Linux, perhaps the media is once-again confusing Unix with Linux. On FreeBSD/etc. coredumps are not disabled by default. It is entirely possible that some flavor of Unix was used to hold the Microsoft source code, which makes sense. It doesn't, however, implicate the underlying OS holding this directory of files as guilty of the crime.
I think this is FUD within FUD, to try to generate some ill-will towards Linux, as if the computer running Linux had something to do with the code being put on the Internet by a HUMAN process.
What if this code was leaked, in an effort to ENCOURAGE people to find flaws, report on them, or exploit them, so that Microsoft can know exactly where people go first, to attack the OS itself?
What if they're using this as a means to find their own bugs, the ones their "talented staff" is unable to find or fix themselves?
What if they're using the "eyes" of the Open Source community to audit their own code? Free Q&A support from a community who hates Microsoft to the core, due to the damage Microsoft has done to them over the years.
pilot-link has Python bindings which may jumpstart you towards making it work well. You might have to make changes to the core C sources to support these new devices, but the baseline working code is already there.
"The standard is SYNC-ML. Not only because it is proposed as one, but also in terms of installed base: there are more cell phones out there using SyncML than Palms."
The spelling is actually "SyncML", but that definately isn't the standard. SyncML is a non-free implementation of a proprietary protocol, riddled with patents from Pumasoft.
Check the yahoo/egroups lists on it, people are moving away from it, because of the costs associated with joining their consortium (not necessary to use their implementation), and the patents behind the implementation.
"Please cite examples if you are going to make statements like the above."
Palm HotSync Protocol/API: undocumented
Palm core application file formats: undocumented
Palm desktop conduit API: undocumented
Just because they use gcc/POSE/etc. does not mean they "support" Open Source development. In fact, quite the opposite. They tried to absorb those projects, and failed, because of the huge number of Free Software users and developers supporting them in their absense. In fact, Palm has been using OUR hard work for their own profitous gain. Now that has stopped.
We're already replacing the need for their tools, step-by-step, because they refuse to help us and cooperate with us. We're not asking for the source code to the OS, just the API to the subsystems they use, so we can extend them into other areas, thus reinforcing their market and their device sales.
They don't seem to want to help us, so our motivation to keep helping them, is significantly lower.
The solution, support a different vendor, one who does support our goals and our hard work.
You could always help us with pilot-link to get it working properly for these devices. It builds fine, it works with serial devices on OSX, and it supports these newer Palm devices. The only piece missing is the IOKit changes to make it work with the OSX'ish USB device notification.
"It doesn't do preemptive multitasking, so multiple tasks don't run simultaneously very well."
PalmOS' kernel (AMX) is actually licensed from Kadak. Under the terms of that license they are seriously limited for upgrades: they're restricted from preemptive multitasking or using it on different/multiple processors, BY LICENSE, not by design.
So you move to India, taking your $40k in savings with you, and live like a king for a year or two, making $8k in salary, tops.
Then the market in India raises a bit in a few years, and competition increases, making it unfeasible to stay there any longer.
You decide to move back to the US, with your $2k in savings and... live in a cardboard box, with frequent bathroom trips to the sewer grate on the corner, and the food at the soup kitchen.
Seriously, if you move there, and live like a king, and ever want to move back, you're screwed.
Camera phones are getting people fired!
on
KISS
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Not only are these "gadgets" annoying and confusing, especially when you have to navigate 12 button presses of a phone just to get to the point where you can CALL someone, but the devices themselves, are getting people fired.
My girlfriend works at $BIG_PHARMACEUTICAL in CT, and they just sent out a memo last week that anyone, employee, contractor, visitor or otherwise, found carrying, using, or visibly displaying a PDA or cellphone with a camera attached or integrated, will be immediately terminated, no questions asked.
If you bring a visitor into work with you, or are eating lunch with a vendor who happens to have one of these, you will be immediately terminated.
Maybe these companies will get the message, that having a camera in a cellphone, while "cool for teens", does not make the phone more marketable to those people who actually pay their own cellphone bills (as opposed to the teens and pre-teens with phones, whose parents pay the bills for them).
Cameras on phones are a liability and a security risk, in many situations. The unemployment rate is high enough, let's not let these cellphone and handheld companies "bully" us into believing that we "need" these features. We don't.
Slashdot Mirror
For the employee friends, visitors, vendors and contractors, this means they are immediately banned from any and all sites for a duration of 3 years. The employee who has friends onsite using a cameraphone is immediately terminated.
They are being very harsh, but these are the rules. Having someone walking around with a miniature camera in their hands inside labs, through buildings, etc. is an ENORMOUS risk to them.
Check with your employer first, before you invest in one of these phones, or you could find yourself out on the curb without a job.
Cellphone vendors need to be very careful with their product lines, and includes phones that do NOT include these features, so that they can continue to sell product. Don't just cater to the teenagers who think having a camera and a phone is "cool". Cater to the people who actually have to pay for those cellphone bills... the parents, and the businesspersons who actually use the devices for what they are.. a phone.
Part of the layout, is "quietly" placing the ads where they fit the best, in a manner which isn't annoying or in the user's way. Color, placement, and ad style are important.
Another important point is that these ads are text-based , and they generate enough to cover a significant portion of our bandwidth bill.
I tried the graphical banner ads for 3 months, which weren't really targeted (OfficeMax, Staples, battery companies, etc.), and hadn't earned a penny. 2 nights after I put up the Google ads, we had covered that month's bandwidth bill.
They work, they aren't annoying, and they are targeted to the audience of my users. It works out all around.
Project Sites
Plucker
Plucker Wiki
OpenURLs PDA Portal
pilot-link
pilot-link Portal
J-Pilot
J-Pilot Wiki
HOWTO Documents
Synchronize your PalmOS(R) Handheld over Bluetooth in Linux
Syncronizing your PalmOS(R) handheld device over Infrared (IrDA)
Connecting your PalmOS(R) handheld device to the Internet via PPP
Maybe you are doing something wrong, that keeps your rate so low.
It looks like they corrected it. Maybe someone saw the hits coming from slashdot in the logs, and scrambled to cover their screwups.
http://www.nevermindus.com/nevermindus/images/th isissueonda.gif
http://www.digitalabstracts.com/thisissueonda.gi f
Same filename, and I can only guess that 'onda' stands for On Digital Abstracts, as the second one suggests in its text.
But as I was parsing out the logs, I noticed quite a few other curious things, which led me to poke through the referer logs and start tracing some interesting hits.
..which led me to these two sites:
Both of these domains are registered in completely different states, by two completely different people, and yet... other than page color, they are identical, even down to the "testimonials" page. Whomever ripped this off from whom, can't possibly be that stupid... or can they?
My idea at the time, was to have a card, ONE card, that contained the "personalities" of your other cards (Bank, ATM, credit card, shopping club card, etc.) on the same card.
For example, you walk up to the counter, tap a button that "sets" the card as your credit card, and are prompted for a pin code. You enter it with the little keypad on the card (the older SecureID cards did this, and were wafer-thin). Then you are prompted to "verify" the pin you enter, by pushing your thumb onto a spot on the card, "unlocking" the personality. Now you can slide/swipe the card and use it as a normal credit card.
You walk over the ATM machine, and decide you want some cash. Tap the "ATM" button on the card, enter the pin, push your thumb onto the pad, unlock the card, and slide it into the ATM machine. It is now an ATM card.
CFR 21.11 has all the details on how to make this meet government guidelines for security and authorization. Basically to ensure something is "secure", and to meet their criteria for biometrics, you have to meet 2 out of 3 of the criteria:
Using my design, described above, you can meet all three of these criteria:
The technology is there, or very close to it, we just have to find a way to miniaturize the components a bit more (make the cards flexible, so they can be put in a wallet), and make it low-cost, so it isn't prohibitive to own one.
It is great, for a static "events" calendar, but it really isn't remotely close to a solution for an interactive web-based calendaring/PIM solution.
The SyncML backend of Mobical is Tactel Blues, which is fairly arcane (and nowhere to be found). They apparently developed a SyncML client for Palm about 2 years ago, but it is probably wildly out of date, and won't work on current Palm handheld devices (OS5+ API, larger screens, smaller fonts, network capabilities, etc.).
Trust me, I've looked into a lot of these solutions VERY heavily (as mentioned in my original article submission). I didn't just try a bunch of projects from Sourceforge. I really did some digging and tried out these alternative products.
I'm still very unimpressed with the playing field. Nobody seems to get it right.. yet.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
As you can see in this Outlook task entry, everything looks kosher. That hash in the Note field is for DateBk5's icons.
When I sync to Yahoo!'s Calendar, I see something that looks like this. Opening the Tasks form, I see this output. No titles for any tasks.
Let's focus in on the 9/18 task. Opening that one, shows this form, where you can see the Note field is in the Title field of the Task. That's a problem. It showed an empty title in the main Tasks screen, but now shows the Note field instead of the Title.
It works fine in Outlook. It works fine in J-Pilot. Why does Yahoo!'s Calendar screw it up? (I await the reply from their maintainer).
If they had an API that was public, I could write a conduit to sync directly to it, from Linux. Judging by the fact that Intellisync is a Pumasoft product, and Pumasoft holds many patents on SyncML technologies (some of which have recently been rejected by the USPTO), I can assume that this is SyncML + authentication.
I'd rather write the conduit using a documented API, than a sniffer, however.
So you see, all is not as easy as it seems.
Unfortunately, it can't import the standard Palm data. I have 697 events in my calendar, which show up in Linux under Evolution and J-Pilot and with a Perl dump of DatebookDB.pdb. They also show up in Windows under Outlook and Palm Desktop.
Following the instructions in Webcalendar, to import the datebook/datebook.dat file from the Palm Desktop setup, only imports 53 entries, mostly holidays.
If it can't handle the format supplied, it should not advertise that it can. Clearly nobody tested this capability (and yes, I'll be reporting the bug with the Webcalendar maintainers).
That's a blocker for me, so I stopped testing it right there.
These things happen.
Anyone who runs a production BitTorrent tracker should be very familiar with the options, source code, design, and limitations of the project, before they open the ports for public access.
I think this is FUD within FUD, to try to generate some ill-will towards Linux, as if the computer running Linux had something to do with the code being put on the Internet by a HUMAN process.
What if this code was leaked, in an effort to ENCOURAGE people to find flaws, report on them, or exploit them, so that Microsoft can know exactly where people go first, to attack the OS itself?
What if they're using this as a means to find their own bugs, the ones their "talented staff" is unable to find or fix themselves?
What if they're using the "eyes" of the Open Source community to audit their own code? Free Q&A support from a community who hates Microsoft to the core, due to the damage Microsoft has done to them over the years.
</conspiracy mode="off">
pilot-link has Python bindings which may jumpstart you towards making it work well. You might have to make changes to the core C sources to support these new devices, but the baseline working code is already there.
Check the yahoo/egroups lists on it, people are moving away from it, because of the costs associated with joining their consortium (not necessary to use their implementation), and the patents behind the implementation.
Just because they use gcc/POSE/etc. does not mean they "support" Open Source development. In fact, quite the opposite. They tried to absorb those projects, and failed, because of the huge number of Free Software users and developers supporting them in their absense. In fact, Palm has been using OUR hard work for their own profitous gain. Now that has stopped.
We're already replacing the need for their tools, step-by-step, because they refuse to help us and cooperate with us. We're not asking for the source code to the OS, just the API to the subsystems they use, so we can extend them into other areas, thus reinforcing their market and their device sales.
They don't seem to want to help us, so our motivation to keep helping them, is significantly lower.
The solution, support a different vendor, one who does support our goals and our hard work.
You could always help us with pilot-link to get it working properly for these devices. It builds fine, it works with serial devices on OSX, and it supports these newer Palm devices. The only piece missing is the IOKit changes to make it work with the OSX'ish USB device notification.
Sorry, while still "cool", this is nothing at all like a dedicated, solid-state hardware router.
So you move to India, taking your $40k in savings with you, and live like a king for a year or two, making $8k in salary, tops.
Then the market in India raises a bit in a few years, and competition increases, making it unfeasible to stay there any longer.
You decide to move back to the US, with your $2k in savings and... live in a cardboard box, with frequent bathroom trips to the sewer grate on the corner, and the food at the soup kitchen.
Seriously, if you move there, and live like a king, and ever want to move back, you're screwed.
Not only are these "gadgets" annoying and confusing, especially when you have to navigate 12 button presses of a phone just to get to the point where you can CALL someone, but the devices themselves, are getting people fired.
My girlfriend works at $BIG_PHARMACEUTICAL in CT, and they just sent out a memo last week that anyone, employee, contractor, visitor or otherwise, found carrying, using, or visibly displaying a PDA or cellphone with a camera attached or integrated, will be immediately terminated, no questions asked.
If you bring a visitor into work with you, or are eating lunch with a vendor who happens to have one of these, you will be immediately terminated.
Maybe these companies will get the message, that having a camera in a cellphone, while "cool for teens", does not make the phone more marketable to those people who actually pay their own cellphone bills (as opposed to the teens and pre-teens with phones, whose parents pay the bills for them).
Cameras on phones are a liability and a security risk, in many situations. The unemployment rate is high enough, let's not let these cellphone and handheld companies "bully" us into believing that we "need" these features. We don't.