One thing to think about is that it's not like PalmSource has been all that good at keeping Mac sync up to speed with Windows in the past.
The first version of Palm Desktop for Mac was terrible. Then they bought Claris Organizer when Apple no longer needed it after killing the Newton and de-emphasizing Claris products other than FMPro. At that point things were OK, but really Palm just picked up Claris Organizer for cheap. It wasn't a real commitment on their part.
From then until OS X they really did nothing for the Mac desktop. Then they came out with an OS X version, but no new features (no network sync, no WiFi sync, etc...). Now they've given up altogether.
Mark/Space makes pretty good stuff so far, and their support has been very good. There's some question of whether or not they can handle the scale, but I'm sure they'll make a greater effort at pushing the Mac 'Palm' desktop forward than PalmSource has. In fact their first release will have more improvements than PalmSource has given us in years (WiFi sync, Ethernet sync).
The longer term issue is whether or not third party conduit makers stop supporting the Mac because of this move, even though Mark/Space has said they will make a conduit manager that works with everyone's conduits.
But in terms of development focus on the desktop and conduit manager itself, I'd expect Mark/Space to make more progress than PalmSource ever has.
This is the point, perhaps there's zero incremental time involved in picking up a CD at a grocery store which most people go to frequently, but the selection is pitiful.
On the other hand a month or so ago I heard a clip from Son House singing John the Revelator on NPR. I loved it, so I left the a message for myself on my voice mail and picked it up from the iTunes store in 30 seconds after getting to my computer.
I would have had to drive all over town to find that song, or more likely search Amazon. And in those cases I would have needed to figure out which album to buy. At 99 cents it was an easy choice to just grab the song.
I've bought more stuff from the ITMS in the last few months than record stores in the last three years because of this.
13. There should be an option to turn disk images into folders (this is what users normally want to do with downloaded images).
If you option-drag a mounted disk image to another location it becomes a folder containing the disk image contents. It could be easier if you could do this without mounting the image, but since Safari mounts the images on download it's not so bad.
Regardless what you call it, Microsoft giving away their OS is different than any other company giving away their's.
Microsoft has been shown to be a monopoly, and that ruling was never over turned. It's not illegal to be a monopoly, but it is illegal to take certain actions in order to protect your monopoly.
One of the actions a monopolist cannot take is predatory pricing...pricing your product below variable cost in order to maintain or increase your share. Clearly giving away the OS is below variable cost, and if it's done to keep out another OS (or even to keep out another word processor, server, IM client, browser, etc... as it becomes part of an illegal tying arrangement) it's illegal.
The same thing done by another company is not illegal, b/c they do not have a monopoly.
So people on Slashdot react differently, and the courts react differently, because it's against the law.
I've been wondering what this would mean for the MySQL/SAP deal announced a week or so ago.
To date SAP has wanted to be agnostic to the underlying database that their software runs on, so you could view the MySQL deal as a nice headline but not really something that was going to have SAP's salesforce pushing MySQL into enterprise customers.... They'd be just as happy if those customers ran Oracle as long as they ran SAP on top of it.
However, if Oracle owns PeopleSoft they suddenly become SAP's largest competitor. As soon as that happens a major SAP infrastructure provider is now the enemy, and SAP might suddenly have reason to push another solution vs. allowing the customer to choose. After the deal with MySQL that solution might well be MySQL.
While this is true, the keychain is somewhat more secure.
By default, the keychain takes the login password, but it uses the full length, not just the first 8 characters. If you have a 15 character login and make a mistake in the 10th character, you will be logged in. However, you will have to reinter your password (all 15 characters) to access the keychain.
This is good b/c the keychain protects a lot of stuff but it still would be nice to know that your login password is only 8 characthers long.
I had Omnisky for a year, using Blazer (which is great). Problem was that Omnisky was never consistent enought to rely upon. The connection would be unavailable in many downtown areas, and it would drop all the time in moving cars/trains which was the time when I would have liked it the most.
Over the last two weeks I've dumped Omnisky and went with the relatively low tech wired connection to my cell phone. Despite concerns about inconvenience and slow speeds, overall it's a lot better than Omnisky. Coverage is totall predictable, if voice coverage works I can make a data call. Speed is much faster, particularly b/c it never drops even when moving.
Given that I use OS X and AvantGo isn't an option, this is really the best way for me to go. The only downside is the wire, which makes me anxious for Bluetooth. It's one of those things that has a bad rep as vaporware, but given how much more effective it will make wireless data I think it's got a real future.
30 second choice is there, but hidden in the latest OS. Stolen from the Tivo AVS forum:
"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip.
This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However,
this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including
skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of
buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip
off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after
any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
I hadn't heard it until I went to Handspring's web site after reading the article, but a color version is due "mid 2002." It's the Treo 270. No real details other than it has a color screen and will be $599.
I have to say that security on the grounds isn't all that bad. I went to the World Cup in France in '98 which is obviously a decent target, and the security was quite tight (everyone was frisked at least once at every stadium, at the US-Iran game everyone was frisked twice).
The thing is, the French were incredibly efficient about it. Every stadium had a several block area around it cordoned off where only ticket holders could go. To get into the stadium itself you were frisked. They had a set of male and female military types that exceeded the number of lines, so there was no backlogged to be frisked. The people doing the work were unbelievably efficient...I repeatedly saw the smallest Swiss Army knives (the keychain type) caught, and they were given to a booth where they could be retrieved after the game.
It added no time to getting into the game, and it really added a sense of safety within the stadium. Certainly there were games that were tough to control (England/Tunisia, the game where a German hooligan attacked a police officer), but I thought the French did an incredible job.
My point is, done well the extra security is no burden and allows you to enjoy the game. Further, I felt no lack of privacy or violation of basic rights at not being allowed to carry a knife into a game, particularly since I could just pick it up at the booth afterwards.
With all the stories on how bad WEP is and how most 802.11 networks aren't secured, I haven't found an answer to this question about securing a home 802.11 network (I'm not claiming to be an expert on this, so maybe this is a simple question).
I'm assuming most home users don't have the equipment/skills to set up the access point outside of a firewall and use VPN/SSH. Given that, how risky is the following:
1) Consumer base station (Airport)
2) WEP password enabled
3) Access restricted to specific MAC addresses (not possible w/Apple's configurator, but doable with the 3rd party Java version)
4) Airport plugged into home LAN, no other machines running any servers or file sharing (none are Windows boxes, 2 OS X, 2 OS 9.2)
I understand all the actual 802.11 traffic is basically open. I assume if the web site I'm using has effective encryption then that data is safe, but my POP3 password could be grabbed assuming it isn't encrypted by something other than WEP.
What I'm wondering is would this setup effectively prevent someone from setting up a laptop outside my house and getting at the files on my LAN.
This seems to me a reasonable set up for a home user, but if it leaves the family Quicken file vulnerable to any kid on the block then 802.11 seems to be destined to never be mainstream. If on the other hand a home user can put at least basic security in place (e.g. they can see your web pages but they can't trash your entire drive) then it has a chance.
I think there's an even longer term problem than the big ones that people have pointed out. Most people have mentioned the obvious ones:
1) I pay my ISP. But I pay DirecTV for the monthly service and then extra for PPV
2) No easy mechanism exists. Surely one could be created
3) I'm cheap. If only pay content existed many would get over this.
The problem that seems likely to persist is the way many people use the Internet. It's a process of looking at a lot of things, and then finding small bits of information that are useful. You'll read an article on a site that you check every day, that suggests a subject you care about, you search the web and Usenet on the subject, you find a user group, you search their archive, you find an article that covers the FAQs of that subject, you bookmark or copy the article, you move on to the next subject....
How would you pay the sites you come across. Maybe you'd be happy to subscribe to the few sites you check every day, but would you pay the hundreds of sites you come across in a week? If you search on Google how do you know who to pay? If you can't read the article you won't pay b/c you don't know if it's any good. If you read the article you already have what you need. Why pay then, other than a sense of fairness.
In a bookstore you can flip through a book, but it's tough to read the entire thing. The full value is off limits until you pay. On the net the information comes in much smaller chunks. You won't be willing to pay until you've already received the full value. At that point few will pay.
Particularly for the uses the net is the most valuable for (e.g. not the stuff covered by mass media) it's tough to find a way around this. The small percentage of big sites will get subscriptions, but the individual site on how to add antennas to various 802.11 base stations won't.
While non-RBOC DSL companies do have it tough, they are no longer paying out anywhere close to 75% of DSL revenue to lease the loop.
This was largely true when the RBOCs would not allow them to add non-RBOC DSL service on a copper pair already providing RBOC telephony service. At that point the Covads of the world had to lease an entire new pair and put just data over it. This was both more expensive and much slower as it required the testing (and sometimes pulling) of a new pair.
In the last year the FCC has ruled that RBOCs must allow competitive DSL providers to add DSL service to existing pairs already providing voice service. The regulated tariff (and true incremental cost) for this is much cheaper, less than $10 per month.
So at this point the loop lease is much more reasonable. This doesn't mean it's easy to be a competitor to the RBOCs as they appear to make it as difficult as possible to share their facilities, but the 75% problem has gone away.
What really should be done is to split the RBOCs up further. Create a regulated facilities company that owns and maintains the physical copper pairs and today's switches. The deregulated RBOC and competitors would provide services over those facilities, and over time the switches would be replaced by deregulated IP services.
That way no one who controls the scarce facilities would have any preference for which company provides the service.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually there are a lot more than just Ford http://sirius.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=S irius/CachedPage&c=Gateway&cid=10668573982 86
One thing to think about is that it's not like PalmSource has been all that good at keeping Mac sync up to speed with Windows in the past.
The first version of Palm Desktop for Mac was terrible. Then they bought Claris Organizer when Apple no longer needed it after killing the Newton and de-emphasizing Claris products other than FMPro. At that point things were OK, but really Palm just picked up Claris Organizer for cheap. It wasn't a real commitment on their part.
From then until OS X they really did nothing for the Mac desktop. Then they came out with an OS X version, but no new features (no network sync, no WiFi sync, etc...). Now they've given up altogether.
Mark/Space makes pretty good stuff so far, and their support has been very good. There's some question of whether or not they can handle the scale, but I'm sure they'll make a greater effort at pushing the Mac 'Palm' desktop forward than PalmSource has. In fact their first release will have more improvements than PalmSource has given us in years (WiFi sync, Ethernet sync).
The longer term issue is whether or not third party conduit makers stop supporting the Mac because of this move, even though Mark/Space has said they will make a conduit manager that works with everyone's conduits.
But in terms of development focus on the desktop and conduit manager itself, I'd expect Mark/Space to make more progress than PalmSource ever has.
This is the point, perhaps there's zero incremental time involved in picking up a CD at a grocery store which most people go to frequently, but the selection is pitiful.
On the other hand a month or so ago I heard a clip from Son House singing John the Revelator on NPR. I loved it, so I left the a message for myself on my voice mail and picked it up from the iTunes store in 30 seconds after getting to my computer.
I would have had to drive all over town to find that song, or more likely search Amazon. And in those cases I would have needed to figure out which album to buy. At 99 cents it was an easy choice to just grab the song.
I've bought more stuff from the ITMS in the last few months than record stores in the last three years because of this.
13. There should be an option to turn disk images into folders (this is what users normally want to do with downloaded images).
If you option-drag a mounted disk image to another location it becomes a folder containing the disk image contents. It could be easier if you could do this without mounting the image, but since Safari mounts the images on download it's not so bad.
Regardless what you call it, Microsoft giving away their OS is different than any other company giving away their's.
Microsoft has been shown to be a monopoly, and that ruling was never over turned. It's not illegal to be a monopoly, but it is illegal to take certain actions in order to protect your monopoly.
One of the actions a monopolist cannot take is predatory pricing...pricing your product below variable cost in order to maintain or increase your share. Clearly giving away the OS is below variable cost, and if it's done to keep out another OS (or even to keep out another word processor, server, IM client, browser, etc... as it becomes part of an illegal tying arrangement) it's illegal.
The same thing done by another company is not illegal, b/c they do not have a monopoly.
So people on Slashdot react differently, and the courts react differently, because it's against the law.
I've been wondering what this would mean for the MySQL/SAP deal announced a week or so ago.
To date SAP has wanted to be agnostic to the underlying database that their software runs on, so you could view the MySQL deal as a nice headline but not really something that was going to have SAP's salesforce pushing MySQL into enterprise customers.... They'd be just as happy if those customers ran Oracle as long as they ran SAP on top of it.
However, if Oracle owns PeopleSoft they suddenly become SAP's largest competitor. As soon as that happens a major SAP infrastructure provider is now the enemy, and SAP might suddenly have reason to push another solution vs. allowing the customer to choose. After the deal with MySQL that solution might well be MySQL.
While this is true, the keychain is somewhat more secure.
By default, the keychain takes the login password, but it uses the full length, not just the first 8 characters. If you have a 15 character login and make a mistake in the 10th character, you will be logged in. However, you will have to reinter your password (all 15 characters) to access the keychain.
This is good b/c the keychain protects a lot of stuff but it still would be nice to know that your login password is only 8 characthers long.
I had Omnisky for a year, using Blazer (which is great). Problem was that Omnisky was never consistent enought to rely upon. The connection would be unavailable in many downtown areas, and it would drop all the time in moving cars/trains which was the time when I would have liked it the most.
Over the last two weeks I've dumped Omnisky and went with the relatively low tech wired connection to my cell phone. Despite concerns about inconvenience and slow speeds, overall it's a lot better than Omnisky. Coverage is totall predictable, if voice coverage works I can make a data call. Speed is much faster, particularly b/c it never drops even when moving.
Given that I use OS X and AvantGo isn't an option, this is really the best way for me to go. The only downside is the wire, which makes me anxious for Bluetooth. It's one of those things that has a bad rep as vaporware, but given how much more effective it will make wireless data I think it's got a real future.
30 second choice is there, but hidden in the latest OS. Stolen from the Tivo AVS forum:
"In 2.5, there is a unofficial, undocumented way to turn on 30 second skip.
This will turn the "skip to end" (->|) button into 30 second skip. However,
this means you will lose the current functionality of that button, including
skip to tickmark while in RW/FF. To try it, enter the following sequence of
buttons: Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select. The code will toggle 30 second skip
off/on so enter it again to switch back if you don't like it. Also, after
any reboot, the button will revert to original standard functionality."
I hadn't heard it until I went to Handspring's web site after reading the article, but a color version is due "mid 2002." It's the Treo 270. No real details other than it has a color screen and will be $599.
I have to say that security on the grounds isn't all that bad. I went to the World Cup in France in '98 which is obviously a decent target, and the security was quite tight (everyone was frisked at least once at every stadium, at the US-Iran game everyone was frisked twice).
The thing is, the French were incredibly efficient about it. Every stadium had a several block area around it cordoned off where only ticket holders could go. To get into the stadium itself you were frisked. They had a set of male and female military types that exceeded the number of lines, so there was no backlogged to be frisked. The people doing the work were unbelievably efficient...I repeatedly saw the smallest Swiss Army knives (the keychain type) caught, and they were given to a booth where they could be retrieved after the game.
It added no time to getting into the game, and it really added a sense of safety within the stadium. Certainly there were games that were tough to control (England/Tunisia, the game where a German hooligan attacked a police officer), but I thought the French did an incredible job.
My point is, done well the extra security is no burden and allows you to enjoy the game. Further, I felt no lack of privacy or violation of basic rights at not being allowed to carry a knife into a game, particularly since I could just pick it up at the booth afterwards.
With all the stories on how bad WEP is and how most 802.11 networks aren't secured, I haven't found an answer to this question about securing a home 802.11 network (I'm not claiming to be an expert on this, so maybe this is a simple question).
I'm assuming most home users don't have the equipment/skills to set up the access point outside of a firewall and use VPN/SSH. Given that, how risky is the following:
1) Consumer base station (Airport)
2) WEP password enabled
3) Access restricted to specific MAC addresses (not possible w/Apple's configurator, but doable with the 3rd party Java version)
4) Airport plugged into home LAN, no other machines running any servers or file sharing (none are Windows boxes, 2 OS X, 2 OS 9.2)
I understand all the actual 802.11 traffic is basically open. I assume if the web site I'm using has effective encryption then that data is safe, but my POP3 password could be grabbed assuming it isn't encrypted by something other than WEP.
What I'm wondering is would this setup effectively prevent someone from setting up a laptop outside my house and getting at the files on my LAN.
This seems to me a reasonable set up for a home user, but if it leaves the family Quicken file vulnerable to any kid on the block then 802.11 seems to be destined to never be mainstream. If on the other hand a home user can put at least basic security in place (e.g. they can see your web pages but they can't trash your entire drive) then it has a chance.
Thanks.
I think there's an even longer term problem than the big ones that people have pointed out. Most people have mentioned the obvious ones:
1) I pay my ISP. But I pay DirecTV for the monthly service and then extra for PPV
2) No easy mechanism exists. Surely one could be created
3) I'm cheap. If only pay content existed many would get over this.
The problem that seems likely to persist is the way many people use the Internet. It's a process of looking at a lot of things, and then finding small bits of information that are useful. You'll read an article on a site that you check every day, that suggests a subject you care about, you search the web and Usenet on the subject, you find a user group, you search their archive, you find an article that covers the FAQs of that subject, you bookmark or copy the article, you move on to the next subject....
How would you pay the sites you come across. Maybe you'd be happy to subscribe to the few sites you check every day, but would you pay the hundreds of sites you come across in a week? If you search on Google how do you know who to pay? If you can't read the article you won't pay b/c you don't know if it's any good. If you read the article you already have what you need. Why pay then, other than a sense of fairness.
In a bookstore you can flip through a book, but it's tough to read the entire thing. The full value is off limits until you pay. On the net the information comes in much smaller chunks. You won't be willing to pay until you've already received the full value. At that point few will pay.
Particularly for the uses the net is the most valuable for (e.g. not the stuff covered by mass media) it's tough to find a way around this. The small percentage of big sites will get subscriptions, but the individual site on how to add antennas to various 802.11 base stations won't.
While non-RBOC DSL companies do have it tough, they are no longer paying out anywhere close to 75% of DSL revenue to lease the loop. This was largely true when the RBOCs would not allow them to add non-RBOC DSL service on a copper pair already providing RBOC telephony service. At that point the Covads of the world had to lease an entire new pair and put just data over it. This was both more expensive and much slower as it required the testing (and sometimes pulling) of a new pair. In the last year the FCC has ruled that RBOCs must allow competitive DSL providers to add DSL service to existing pairs already providing voice service. The regulated tariff (and true incremental cost) for this is much cheaper, less than $10 per month. So at this point the loop lease is much more reasonable. This doesn't mean it's easy to be a competitor to the RBOCs as they appear to make it as difficult as possible to share their facilities, but the 75% problem has gone away. What really should be done is to split the RBOCs up further. Create a regulated facilities company that owns and maintains the physical copper pairs and today's switches. The deregulated RBOC and competitors would provide services over those facilities, and over time the switches would be replaced by deregulated IP services. That way no one who controls the scarce facilities would have any preference for which company provides the service.