This is true I don't disagree that it's good. Just at the moment its a large shift from what is there in the market place. I tried the old trick of giving both the Canary and the Nokia 7650 to my parents to play around with. As you would expect they were able to use the Nokia almost straight away as the interface is much closer to their existing mobile phones and is less threatning to them. The MS interface is much closer to what people expect on their computers and they found this quite confusing, both being virtually computer illiterate.
IMHO I think that the smartphone interface is actually no where near as usable as the Symbian interface is and hope that the major manufacturers stay with symbian for their devices. The smartphone interface is actually substantially different from the pocket PC/phone interface that the Canary / XDA devices have, and the Pocket PC interface is by far the best of the three and I see this as where the phone/PDA will end up. I have held the opinion since the early days of WAP (Nokia 7110 etc) that the best mobile device would be a Palm like device that can do voice. Those devices are now here in the form of the XDA etc and they are very good.
I have to agree the Canary does very nicely on Battery life. I like this device alot, full IE on a phone and IMAP, real video, windows media, IM, java etc etc this is a great prospect.
IMHO I think this is where the mobile phone market is going to end up when 3G is viable. What else are you going to be able to do with 10 Mbps, The sendo device with the cut down smart phone OS is actually no where near as nice as the Canary in fact in my experience it really is just about the same as Symbian.
The big difference in the mobile phone market is that the devices running symbian are far better than the device that runs Microsoft smart phone. The Nokia 7650 has a Camera and does MMS, where as Sendo at this stage does not do this. You can download third party apps to do this but it is still missing the camera. As far as I can tell all the upcoming Symbian phones will either have integrated camera or attachable cameras and that will be what will make the difference for the user not the OS.
Microsoft has had little impact in the phone marcket until now and I don't see that it is going to expand greatly in the next couple of years. Nokia, Sony-Ericsson etc especially here in Aus (where nokia == > 60%) and Europe have a huge stranglehold on the sale of phones and I don't see any of them planning on MS devices in the near future.
Lots of games available fo J2ME. Checkout midlet.org for a sample of whats available.
All the stuff there is available free of charge and of course there are a heap of comercial applications available as well. The coolest IMHO yet are Prince of persia on the Siemens and Doom for the Nokia 7650.
I also remember having some serious problems in the early years, but the wait has been more than worth it. I have been using mozilla as my primary browser since about 0.9.2, and there have been little annoyances etc etc since but the thing has been stable, reliable and most of all the performance is now fantastic.
There are so many nice things about mozilla that make it so much easier and enjoyable to use than any other browser... probably the most significant thing for me is tabbed browsing man one window multiple web pages, where has this feature been, must admit it makes older versions of netscape and ie seem almost impossible to use.
Another really sweet features of mozilla is UI pleasing to the eye and intuitive to boot, if you don't like it download an alternative theme, don't like any of these roll your own. I know, I know not a new idea but it has been done well.
All in all a fantastic product. Much thanks and much respect to all involved in producing such a great product, and one thats free too:)
My understanding and I may well be wrong about this so feel free to correct me...
Here in Australia there were privacy laws passed regarding the nature of SMS spam, with the goal of stopping unsolicited SMS spam. SMS spam is opt-in ONLY, you have to give the company permission to send you the SMS span. They are not allowed to compile lists and then on-sell the information to other spammers, or to send spam on behalf of other companies.
The emphasis here was that the consumer had to give explicit permission to the company to send them spam, and also giving us an avenue to report these companies to, the ACCC or whoever is responsible for policing privacy issues here in Oz.
Did anyone in the nanosecond that this geocities site actually had free bandwidth actually manage to get a mirror of the page?
<grumble>
I suppose it would be possible for editors to realise geocities sites don't go well on the front page
</grumble>
the rant that CmdrTaco mentioned ....
on
Themes.org Cracked
·
· Score: 2
This guy seems to have a little chip on his shoulder.... seems that he wants to get a little more notice than he got from the previous slashdot story on the exploits to the source forge networks. See for yourself
The site's "shell server" was compromised May 22 after a SourceForge employee logged on to an outside Internet service provider that had already been taken over by the intruder, said Pat McGovern, site director of SourceForge.net.
When the staff member logged on to SourceForge remotely, the intruder captured the password.
Well some of that is true, I mean I did trojan ssh but I did it about 5 months a go, so kudos to the admin you sir are awesome..
"What happened was the (ISP) was compromised and had not known it," McGovern said, adding that the site's administrator quickly noticed the intruder and shut systems down. "Basically we had to go through and rebuild the machine, and then we checked the log file of everyone who used the machine."
hrm I guess that could also be considered true, if by true you mean, finding out every box on your network is owned 5 months after the fact and only due to my own boredom that consisted of me ircing it infront of the admin, by the way good job of auditing your network, wait thats just too much sarcasm for one sentence..
After the attack, VA removed the shell service until workers could reinstall the software and data on the server.The shell server allowed SourceForge members to type commands into the system remotely. On Thursday, the company posted an alert that the shell server couldn't be used because of an "unscheduled maintenance event."
It also allowed me to sniff my way onto apache.org and sourceforge webserver and leave all sorts of goodies in the code..
In this case, they only got into a shell server," McGovern said.
Hey, theres no disputing that, I mean.. wait.. Whats this I'm defacing ?
The company also decided to shut down its "compile farm," a collection of computers running different operating systems on which SourceForge developers can test their software.
Why would they shut down other boxes, if only the shell server was hacked ?
Although illicit modifications to the programming projects are a concern, McGovern said the intruder didn't get that far.
oh come now, you're just being silly..
Its ok thought I dont blame you guys, I mean atleast you admited to being schooled, thats more then I can say for akamai, but thats a different story all together.. But never the less, I'd like to thank valinux.. apache.. akamai and ofcourse exodus without their poor security and refusal to make security breaches known to the public I wouldnt be sitting atop a mountain of roots and oodles of proprietary software.. This is the fluffy bunny signing of.. beep..
-fluffy@#blackpanthers on efnet(the scourge of efnet)
"Motorola has devised a way to stop televisions, cell phones and VCRs working if they have been bought on the "grey" market"
This would seem to put a stop to the normal practice in countries that have GSM mobile networks. ie global roaming would cease to exist. The forsight of these companies really amazes me. I mean Motorola see themselves as THE premiere seller of mobile phones world wide and most of the world uses GSM and if you travel from Australia to Europe its nice to be able to take the phone with you.
On the upside how bout they put the GPS into the chip they make for landmines. Bingo problem solved as soon as it gets sold onto the next terrorist poof it refuses to work. Now that I can see as useful
After having read some of the posts here already but not all and if I repeat something already said well tough.The crux of the matter seems to be that there is no one PERFECT UI.
The question was asked What are the inherent problems with MacOS, Windows, Gnome, KDE? in my humble opinion they all suffer from the same problem.... they are trying to be all things to all people. This is a big problem. What we really need is not so much the perfect UI but a series of specialised UI for specific types of users and before you say you can't pidgeon-hole every user you are right but for the expert user that wants more the higher end UI's become highly configurable.
A prime example of this will be the difference between my mother who I have set up a winblows box for where all the applications that she needs or wants to use are easily accessable on the desktop, point and click easy hey..... the thing was it took me longer to set that up for her than it did for me to install my fav linux distro download latest windowmaker, eterm and xscreensaver, in hindsight it would have been easier to set up gnome with the right icons on the desktop for my mum ahhhh well next time:). The point you ask is that I don't want a desktop OS I don't use Gnome or KDE, I don't have the need for it.
What it all boils down to is that everyone has unique and specific needs for their computer interface and there is never going to be one perfect UI interface, all you really need is a way of registering what you are telling the computer to do. In this the console may well be the perfect UI you can see exactly what is happening the problem is the level of user required to use a console effectively but at the base level it is all that is required.
If you are shopping for a specific new fancy bit of hardware do you go to the local supermarket or department store . . . I don't I go to several specialist computer stores. Why should the UI be any different I don't want all the bells and whistles of windows give me a terminal and and a web browser and I am happy. Hell a console will let me do everything I need to.:)
There seem to be two issues raised here by the ACCC the launching of a Wholesale ADSL which is great if you are a business or have LOTS of money to spend on internet access. The launching of a retail ADSL "around the same time" in Telstra speak means sometime in the next decade.
However I don't see this as the biggest gain from this announcement as all users of the Telstra Cable Modem service will agree the pricing structure that Telstra will likely employ as a monopoly will be so high as to be restrictive. Remember the Charging fiasco of recent times. The real gain for the Australian net community is the access to the local loop for Telstra's competition.
Historically in the Australian Teleco industry it is almost impossible for ANYONE to compete with Telstra on a country wide scale. This being directly related to the fact that Australia is a BIG place. Sydney to Perth is what 4,000 km(?) and there is not all that much in that space. The major competitor to Telstra Cable & Wireless Optus is still suffering from massive costs incurred in both building a fiber network that covers lots of the country as well as covering the cost of buying out the other half of a joint venture that went bankrupt trying to install an HFC network only in Aus larger cities Optus Vision. Yes I hear all you Australian's saying there the same company . . . well they are NOW after CWO payed $400 million to buy out it's other parteners to stop liquidation.
The way I see it is that Australians need need to have more of the community efforts like those that are going on in Canberra and I see now other centres in Aus like this one where communities get together to set up wireless or other types of networks.
My understanding of the issue is that previously you were only charged for traffic that went outside of the Telstra network. This meaning that if your traffic was between other Telstra cable modem users there was no charge for that traffic.
This has led to an extended intranet of Cable users on the Telstra network. The users have banded together to supply ftp mirrors, peering cache servers, newsgroups, game servers, bulletin boards etc. etc. were they share the load of the traffic that goes outside of the network and then sharing the fruits with the whole community therebye sharing the cost of the outside traffic accross the community.
By charging for this internal traffic Telstra are then going to make money from the traffic that is effectively traversing there this intranet. From what I have heared from users of this service most of them use MUCH MORE than the extra 150MB on the internal traffic that they are now going to get charged for. One user has stated that they had 4GB of internal traffic last month at 29c/MB thats $1160 quite a nice little gain for Telstra but not affordable for most users.
At the base level OS X is a unix derivative but scratch the surface and you find that there is still a place for linux on the PPC architecture.
OS X will basically only run on Apple G3 hardware which is only a small part of the overall PPC hardware that is there already. It is in no way POSIX compliant - even apple have said that it will not be made to be so, therefore you can't just use the source luke.
This means that OS X is set up as a commercial venture.... you have to pay for the software you want to run. Sure apache compiles out of the box... now... only after the apache group ported it accross. In my experience it looks good runs well but it is not an open-source solution.
The other point about OS X is that it is based on the mach kernel so it inherently has the same performance issues as MK.
Still my intro to Linux was MkLinux and I think that Mac OS will be inherently improved by having a full multitasking kernel.
Have you tried the new HotJava version 3.0. It looks great, OK its a little clunky but it hasn'y crashed on me yet. The only problem is it doesn't seem to deal with css properly, but it now does JavaScript. Well worth a look.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I swear I hit preview ?? try here
So the phone/pda combo that people are after is really more like the O2 XDA then?? As seen here
It'd be like patenting giving stock quotes over the phone.
Looks like someone already did !
What is the world coming too ??
IMHO I think that the smartphone interface is actually no where near as usable as the Symbian interface is and hope that the major manufacturers stay with symbian for their devices. The smartphone interface is actually substantially different from the pocket PC/phone interface that the Canary / XDA devices have, and the Pocket PC interface is by far the best of the three and I see this as where the phone/PDA will end up. I have held the opinion since the early days of WAP (Nokia 7110 etc) that the best mobile device would be a Palm like device that can do voice. Those devices are now here in the form of the XDA etc and they are very good.
IMHO I think this is where the mobile phone market is going to end up when 3G is viable. What else are you going to be able to do with 10 Mbps, The sendo device with the cut down smart phone OS is actually no where near as nice as the Canary in fact in my experience it really is just about the same as Symbian.
The big difference in the mobile phone market is that the devices running symbian are far better than the device that runs Microsoft smart phone. The Nokia 7650 has a Camera and does MMS, where as Sendo at this stage does not do this. You can download third party apps to do this but it is still missing the camera. As far as I can tell all the upcoming Symbian phones will either have integrated camera or attachable cameras and that will be what will make the difference for the user not the OS.
Microsoft has had little impact in the phone marcket until now and I don't see that it is going to expand greatly in the next couple of years. Nokia, Sony-Ericsson etc especially here in Aus (where nokia == > 60%) and Europe have a huge stranglehold on the sale of phones and I don't see any of them planning on MS devices in the near future.
All the stuff there is available free of charge and of course there are a heap of comercial applications available as well. The coolest IMHO yet are Prince of persia on the Siemens and Doom for the Nokia 7650.
There are so many nice things about mozilla that make it so much easier and enjoyable to use than any other browser ... probably the most significant thing for me is tabbed browsing man one window multiple web pages, where has this feature been, must admit it makes older versions of netscape and ie seem almost impossible to use.
Another really sweet features of mozilla is UI pleasing to the eye and intuitive to boot, if you don't like it download an alternative theme, don't like any of these roll your own. I know, I know not a new idea but it has been done well.
All in all a fantastic product. Much thanks and much respect to all involved in producing such a great product, and one thats free too :)
Still for us unfortunates that have a timezone set to Sydney this story was posted on April 2nd .....
Here in Australia there were privacy laws passed regarding the nature of SMS spam, with the goal of stopping unsolicited SMS spam. SMS spam is opt-in ONLY, you have to give the company permission to send you the SMS span. They are not allowed to compile lists and then on-sell the information to other spammers, or to send spam on behalf of other companies.
The emphasis here was that the consumer had to give explicit permission to the company to send them spam, and also giving us an avenue to report these companies to, the ACCC or whoever is responsible for policing privacy issues here in Oz.
trolling has just taken on a whole new meaning. maybee the lameness filter needs updating
<grumble>
I suppose it would be possible for editors to realise geocities sites don't go well on the front page
</grumble>
The site's "shell server" was compromised May 22 after a SourceForge employee logged on to an outside Internet service provider that had already been taken over by the intruder, said Pat McGovern, site director of SourceForge.net. When the staff member logged on to SourceForge remotely, the intruder captured the password.
Well some of that is true, I mean I did trojan ssh but I did it about 5 months a go, so kudos to the admin you sir are awesome..
"What happened was the (ISP) was compromised and had not known it," McGovern said, adding that the site's administrator quickly noticed the intruder and shut systems down. "Basically we had to go through and rebuild the machine, and then we checked the log file of everyone who used the machine."
hrm I guess that could also be considered true, if by true you mean, finding out every box on your network is owned 5 months after the fact and only due to my own boredom that consisted of me ircing it infront of the admin, by the way good job of auditing your network, wait thats just too much sarcasm for one sentence..
After the attack, VA removed the shell service until workers could reinstall the software and data on the server.The shell server allowed SourceForge members to type commands into the system remotely. On Thursday, the company posted an alert that the shell server couldn't be used because of an "unscheduled maintenance event."
It also allowed me to sniff my way onto apache.org and sourceforge webserver and leave all sorts of goodies in the code..
In this case, they only got into a shell server," McGovern said.
Hey, theres no disputing that, I mean.. wait.. Whats this I'm defacing ?
The company also decided to shut down its "compile farm," a collection of computers running different operating systems on which SourceForge developers can test their software.
Why would they shut down other boxes, if only the shell server was hacked ?
Although illicit modifications to the programming projects are a concern, McGovern said the intruder didn't get that far.
oh come now, you're just being silly..
Its ok thought I dont blame you guys, I mean atleast you admited to being schooled, thats more then I can say for akamai, but thats a different story all together.. But never the less, I'd like to thank valinux.. apache.. akamai and ofcourse exodus without their poor security and refusal to make security breaches known to the public I wouldnt be sitting atop a mountain of roots and oodles of proprietary software.. This is the fluffy bunny signing of.. beep..
-fluffy@#blackpanthers on efnet(the scourge of efnet)
This would seem to put a stop to the normal practice in countries that have GSM mobile networks. ie global roaming would cease to exist. The forsight of these companies really amazes me. I mean Motorola see themselves as THE premiere seller of mobile phones world wide and most of the world uses GSM and if you travel from Australia to Europe its nice to be able to take the phone with you.
On the upside how bout they put the GPS into the chip they make for landmines. Bingo problem solved as soon as it gets sold onto the next terrorist poof it refuses to work. Now that I can see as useful
The question was asked What are the inherent problems with MacOS, Windows, Gnome, KDE? in my humble opinion they all suffer from the same problem .... they are trying to be all things to all people. This is a big problem. What we really need is not so much the perfect UI but a series of specialised UI for specific types of users and before you say you can't pidgeon-hole every user you are right but for the expert user that wants more the higher end UI's become highly configurable.
A prime example of this will be the difference between my mother who I have set up a winblows box for where all the applications that she needs or wants to use are easily accessable on the desktop, point and click easy hey ..... the thing was it took me longer to set that up for her than it did for me to install my fav linux distro download latest windowmaker, eterm and xscreensaver, in hindsight it would have been easier to set up gnome with the right icons on the desktop for my mum ahhhh well next time:). The point you ask is that I don't want a desktop OS I don't use Gnome or KDE, I don't have the need for it.
What it all boils down to is that everyone has unique and specific needs for their computer interface and there is never going to be one perfect UI interface, all you really need is a way of registering what you are telling the computer to do. In this the console may well be the perfect UI you can see exactly what is happening the problem is the level of user required to use a console effectively but at the base level it is all that is required.
If you are shopping for a specific new fancy bit of hardware do you go to the local supermarket or department store . . . I don't I go to several specialist computer stores. Why should the UI be any different I don't want all the bells and whistles of windows give me a terminal and and a web browser and I am happy. Hell a console will let me do everything I need to. :)
However I don't see this as the biggest gain from this announcement as all users of the Telstra Cable Modem service will agree the pricing structure that Telstra will likely employ as a monopoly will be so high as to be restrictive. Remember the Charging fiasco of recent times. The real gain for the Australian net community is the access to the local loop for Telstra's competition.
Historically in the Australian Teleco industry it is almost impossible for ANYONE to compete with Telstra on a country wide scale. This being directly related to the fact that Australia is a BIG place. Sydney to Perth is what 4,000 km(?) and there is not all that much in that space. The major competitor to Telstra Cable & Wireless Optus is still suffering from massive costs incurred in both building a fiber network that covers lots of the country as well as covering the cost of buying out the other half of a joint venture that went bankrupt trying to install an HFC network only in Aus larger cities Optus Vision. Yes I hear all you Australian's saying there the same company . . . well they are NOW after CWO payed $400 million to buy out it's other parteners to stop liquidation.
The way I see it is that Australians need need to have more of the community efforts like those that are going on in Canberra and I see now other centres in Aus like this one where communities get together to set up wireless or other types of networks.
This has led to an extended intranet of Cable users on the Telstra network. The users have banded together to supply ftp mirrors, peering cache servers, newsgroups, game servers, bulletin boards etc. etc. were they share the load of the traffic that goes outside of the network and then sharing the fruits with the whole community therebye sharing the cost of the outside traffic accross the community.
By charging for this internal traffic Telstra are then going to make money from the traffic that is effectively traversing there this intranet. From what I have heared from users of this service most of them use MUCH MORE than the extra 150MB on the internal traffic that they are now going to get charged for. One user has stated that they had 4GB of internal traffic last month at 29c/MB thats $1160 quite a nice little gain for Telstra but not affordable for most users.
OS X will basically only run on Apple G3 hardware which is only a small part of the overall PPC hardware that is there already. It is in no way POSIX compliant - even apple have said that it will not be made to be so, therefore you can't just use the source luke.
This means that OS X is set up as a commercial venture .... you have to pay for the software you want to run. Sure apache compiles out of the box ... now ... only after the apache group ported it accross. In my experience it looks good runs well but it is not an open-source solution.
The other point about OS X is that it is based on the mach kernel so it inherently has the same performance issues as MK.
Still my intro to Linux was MkLinux and I think that Mac OS will be inherently improved by having a full multitasking kernel.
Have you tried the new HotJava version 3.0. It looks great, OK its a little clunky but it hasn'y crashed on me yet. The only problem is it doesn't seem to deal with css properly, but it now does JavaScript. Well worth a look. :)