It's done and takes effect Monday. Here is the letter I sent to SBC (via their "Contact Us" link at their residential services website -- there is apparently no way to write them a letter short of reading SEC filings):
I am writing to explain the reason that my wife and I are switching our local service from SBC to ATT, effective Monday. The switch order is being handled by ATT and this message is NOT a request for you to take any action regarding my local service.
I am not motivated by cost in telephone services -- your rates are competitive and I am not sensitive to a few dollars per month.
I am, however, very concerned about the recent actions by SBC Intellectual Property in regards to U.S. Patent No. 5,933,841 and U.S. Patent No. 6,442,574, wherein SBC claims ownership of the concept of "structured documents" and in particular "HTML Frames," and has begun to sue small businesses such as Informal Educational Products, owners of WWW.MUSEUMTOUR.COM.
I used to trust PacBell and now SBC to provide telecommunications services. Now I see that your company is interesting in controlling what I say and think, and how I can say it, and is using its capital and political muscle to extract money from small businesses. I am no longer interested in doing business with your company.
You can thank Harlie D. Frost, president of SBC Intellectual Property, for destroying in my mind, and that of countless others, the goodwill that your company has built up over years of service.
This takes the cake. I'm not motivated by cost of telco services (as I used to tell the people trying to get me to switch long distance carriers), but I am motived by outrageous corporate behavior. I'm calling ATT right now to switch to their local calling service. Here is the link: ATT Local and here is a search for press releases that shows you get to keep your phone number (though it does say in most cases).
ATT may not be perfect either, but at least they're not trying to patent part of my life.
Why TCP over SSH is a bad idea
on
SSH or IPSec?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Eventually, the TCP over TCP factor will kick in, and your VPN will be slow
Last week Fry's had a Soyo board with DDR slots, an AMD Duron 1Ghz, case, and power supply for $59. That is what I would call a bargain upgrade. Any part in that you don't like, you throw it out and replace it. And to start off you have a working system to upgrade to, if you move your existing disk and cards over. Just gotta buy some DDR, but at $50 for 512MB it's pretty cheap.
I dunno, the perl intaller for XMLTV just did that all for me by itself.
Freevo, on the other hand, is a moving target with tons of documentation about how to solve obscure past problems for people deeply involved. Despite there runs at it with a WinTV card, a DVD drive, a Packard-Bell remote, and a Matrix G400 (at one time the recommended configuration), I've not been able to get it working. Once or twice I tried installing from RPMs hoping that would set more defaults up, but it failed in obvious ways. When I noted this to the list, I got back a polite "Please don't report bugs when installing the RPMs; use the.tar.gz file." Next time when I tried the.tar.gz file and provided a bug fix, I got back "Please use the CVS tree." Conclusion: Freevo is not for ready for me to try. And yes, I looked at it this week.
The Audrey is not an open system, and it is not based on Linux. It is based on Qnix, which is free for non-commercial use. The Audrey applications themselves are closed, and were developed by a third party (not 3COM). I am fairly certain that that at least the Address Book application uses GDBM, which is a GPL'd library (not LGPL) and as such they should have released the applications under GPL. There is (or was) an active Audrey hacking community, at http://www.audreyhacking.com.
Disclaimer: I have an Audrey, a Rio, and an I-Opener, plus a few other pieces of tech detritus I'm more embarrassed to mention. Not that I paid retail for any of them...
Try the T-Mobile Sidekick. Syncs with a web-based PIM (though I have a perl module that makes it work with Outlook, and real Outlook sync is coming), has a good web browser 240x160 gray (color this summer), smallish form factor, nice keyboard, PIM, SDK just released (though so far emulator only), $50 from Amazon after rebates, as good coverage as T-Mobile or Cingular (in California), unlimited meg/day transfer, under $40/mo, and 200 primetime/1000 weekend minutes or under $60 for 600/unlimited weekends.
It's odd that neither the original piece nor the comments (so far at least) mention the importance of browsers implementing interoperable standards. Instead there's much slinging of this methodology of developing non-standard extensions vs. that methodology of developing non-standard extensions.
If the vendors were committed to implementing standards rather than inventing their own, we wouldn't have so much division over which rendering engine is the One True Path.
I think the world-wide web would be much better served by browsers and rendering engines and user agents that properly implement standards like SVG, CSS, XHTML (and the wonderful new XML application XHTML 2) and XForms, rather than technologies that are tied to particular implementations.
If you're interested in XHTML and XML, take a look at XHTML 2.0. XHTML moves the presentation out into CSS completely, and so can be presented by an XML+CSS rendering engine; what's left in XHTML 2.0 is the semantics.
It's possible to use most of XHTML 2.0 in today's modern browsers, though crafting the style sheets to make it work is a job for serious experts. Here is a sample weblog page converted to XHTML 2.0 and it should display properly in most modern browsers: http://w3future.com/weblog/gems/xhtml2.xml
The big missing pieces are XForms, which abstracts the form data model and operations out of XHTML into its own module, and XML Events, which does the same for events (though it is compatible with recent DOM events). There is aplugin for Internet Explorer that make XForms work seamlessly inside XHTML documents, so I suspect that if you are so inclined, in a month or two you can be targeting to the draft of XHTML 2.0 with support for most of its features, and get cross-browser standards-based support for the same kinds of features you're writing back-end ASP hacks and browser-specific JavaScript and ActiveX controls for today. (No, it won't work in IE 4.0 or Netscape 4.62, but neither will most of the hacks and ActiveX controls.)
The new XHTML 2.0 introduces XForms integration, navigation lists, linking on every element, unordered section headings, and an expanded role for the object element.
Try this page instead. It shows that it's 50,300 yen. Put a '1' in the box at the end of the line and press the oval red and yellow button to put it in your cart. Then press the next to last button at the bottom (bright yellow instead of orange) to place your order. Have fun filling out the address fields, though.
A civil engineer, and electrical engineer, and a computer scientist are discussing the relative merits of their professions, and citing examples of great inventions.
The civil engineer says, "The nation's highway system is the greatest invention because lets people go from place to place , whenever they want to go."
The electrical engineer, says, "The telephone system is the greatest invention because it lets people communicate from place to place, instantly."
The computer scientist is puzzled for a while, and says, "The world's greatest invention bar none is the Thermos."
"The Thermos?" asks the electrical engineer.
"You put hot coffee in it in the morning and in the afternoon, it's still hot. You put cold lemonade in it in the morning, and in the afternoon, it's still cold."
"But why is that the world's greatest invention?" asks the incredulous civil engineer.
The computer scientist replies earnestly, "How does it know?"
I use Megapath and I have 5 that are usually on, 2 that are sometimes on, plus at least 1 wireless laptop, for a total of 8. Some are tiny (like my 3Com Audrey and my Sonic Blue Rio) and some are fairly low power (like my Fujitsu Scovery secondary DNS and SMTP server), but they are on and connected to the Internet, some through NAT and some routable. I'm not counting the Airport hub or the VPN box as a computer, but they are (both have 586's in them and both get IP addresses, one public and one NAT).
Oops -- I'd forgotten that GPRS worked only with T-Mobile and not Cingular.
If you really do want $39.95/mo flat-rate always-on and all the possibilities that brings with it (instant email, always-on AOL IM, immediate web browsing) the Sidekick is the way to go. It's definitely not a device for people who talk on the phone a lot, either in the plan or ergonomically.
If you want a PalmOS device with all the compatibility that provides, and want a slimmer device with a more ergonomic phone and your choice of yak-time plans and providers, get a Treo.
Note that in California T-Mobile's cell sites are actually Cingular's cell sites (though T-Mobile has its own spectrum allocation so congestion on Cingular's network isn't an issue). So, if you are in California and get a Treo with GPRS through Cingular, you'll get exactly the same data coverage as a Sidekick with GPRS through T-Mobile.
Speaking of built-in pressure gates in tires, when I was 7 I gave my father for father's day 4 screw caps with built-in pressure gates that I got from a catalog. He put them on and the next morning all 4 tires were flat. I found one of them in a box when I visited him over Christmas...I guess he kept it.
Mark is missing -- or perhaps deliberately obscuring -- the point of XHTML 2.0.
XHTML 1.0 made HTML 4.0 into an XML language, by requring that you close all tags you open and quote all attributes, and that's pretty much it. Anyone who has ever tried to write code to manipulate HTML in middleware or on the client end will see the point of making sure that the markup is syntactically well-formed.
XHTML 1.1 with modularization breaks XHTML up into modules; modularization is a key idea in building extensible systems of any type, and it is put to good use in HTML. You get a tables module, a forms module, etc. There is now modularization for both DTD-based XML and XML Schema-based XML, so you can get your job done either way.
But the real goal is to make the modules well enough defined and have the semantics and the presentation and the underlying infrastructure (what is a link, when does it get followed, what are events, etc) all well enough separated so that HTML can become just another application of XML, without a lot of special knowledge hard-coded into browsers about what "i m g" or "b r" or "r e l" means. In other words, the goal is to define modules of functionality in XML, and then be able to use those together with other modules (things like SVG ) in kind of the same way that people can use class libraries in PHP and Java and other systems, without having to have someone write a new browser for every possible combination.
Remember how years ago during the browser wars, vendors kept inventing their own tags and writing browsers that understood the tags? Well, now we've got enough of all that figured out to be able to factor the web and its interfaces into a bunch of different parts, and then let you mix and match those parts together to make your own cogent language. You use CSS for presentation styling, XML Events for events, and markup for semantically describing the content. If you have to build your own language for displaying your weblog and call it RSS, well you just go do that and you put your tags in a namespace named by your favorite URI, and you go off. You and your friends (and enemies) can write CSS style sheets or XSLT transformations or what-have-you to display the resulting pointy bracket file in a browser, and it will look and act indistinguishable from today's HTML, but will offer other advantages -- blind people will be able to use their style sheets for reading it, and programs will be able to parse the format without having to screen-scrape the HTML, and you won't have to have six versions of it around for different devices and so on.
So after we move all of the essential stuffness of the web (events, hyperlinks, object embedding, forms, styling) into their own standards and get browsers and other user agents have to hard-code those implementations, what you're left with is a need for a common semantic markup language where things are clearly expressed and easy to write.
That's where tags like <section> and <h> come from, and why they make perfect sense as transitions from <h*>.
In summary, XHTML 2.0 is just the meaning-laden parts of web pages that are left over after all of the plumbing has been moved out to other specs, where it can be shared.
Yes, everybody uses SMS in Europe. And it has a charge model and a 160 (or 255)character limit. In the US, people use instant messaging, which is trying to develop a business model, but at least it's not a per-click charge. Plus it interoperaes with desktop systems that people already use. So, if GPRS and its competition do become the norm in the US, then I predict that IM will win over SMS.
I have a Danger Hiptop / T-MobileSidekick and I don't think it's 5 years behind Japanese phones. It has a real keyboard, which is not as important in Japan, but is important here if you actually want to do e-mail or web searches or IM. Yes, it can do SMS if you can find one of the other 3 people in the US who can use it, but it also does AOL IM and thus you can talk to just about anybody. It's also $40/mo for unlimited data, plus more phone minutes that I can use (though if you yammer you will probably want to upgrade to the $60 plan).
Drawbacks: grayscale screen instead of color. Although it's done in Java, the SDK is not open -- blame Deutchse Telekom, though, not the US industry, for that one.
I think the device fares quite well compared to Japan's Java-enabled color phones, because it has a real keyboard and real applications that are useful. If I want to play Tetris in color, I'd get a game boy.
And yes, it has Beatnik 12-voice polyphonic ringtones that sound great.
Slashdot Mirror
This takes the cake. I'm not motivated by cost of telco services (as I used to tell the people trying to get me to switch long distance carriers), but I am motived by outrageous corporate behavior. I'm calling ATT right now to switch to their local calling service. Here is the link: ATT Local and here is a search for press releases that shows you get to keep your phone number (though it does say in most cases).
ATT may not be perfect either, but at least they're not trying to patent part of my life.
Eventually, the TCP over TCP factor will kick in, and your VPN will be slow
Here's what he means:
Last week Fry's had a Soyo board with DDR slots, an AMD Duron 1Ghz, case, and power supply for $59. That is what I would call a bargain upgrade. Any part in that you don't like, you throw it out and replace it. And to start off you have a working system to upgrade to, if you move your existing disk and cards over. Just gotta buy some DDR, but at $50 for 512MB it's pretty cheap.
I dunno, the perl intaller for XMLTV just did that all for me by itself.
.tar.gz file." Next time when I tried the .tar.gz file and provided a bug fix, I got back "Please use the CVS tree." Conclusion: Freevo is not for ready for me to try. And yes, I looked at it this week.
Freevo, on the other hand, is a moving target with tons of documentation about how to solve obscure past problems for people deeply involved. Despite there runs at it with a WinTV card, a DVD drive, a Packard-Bell remote, and a Matrix G400 (at one time the recommended configuration), I've not been able to get it working. Once or twice I tried installing from RPMs hoping that would set more defaults up, but it failed in obvious ways. When I noted this to the list, I got back a polite "Please don't report bugs when installing the RPMs; use the
Don't forget to put drive1 and drive2 as primary master on different IDE controllers, or use SCSI.
The Danger Hiptop / T-Mobile Sidekick looks like it will have Japanese IME support, at least as a developer tool.
The Audrey is not an open system, and it is not based on Linux. It is based on Qnix, which is free for non-commercial use. The Audrey applications themselves are closed, and were developed by a third party (not 3COM). I am fairly certain that that at least the Address Book application uses GDBM, which is a GPL'd library (not LGPL) and as such they should have released the applications under GPL. There is (or was) an active Audrey hacking community, at http://www.audreyhacking.com.
Disclaimer: I have an Audrey, a Rio, and an I-Opener, plus a few other pieces of tech detritus I'm more embarrassed to mention. Not that I paid retail for any of them...
Try the T-Mobile Sidekick. Syncs with a web-based PIM (though I have a perl module that makes it work with Outlook, and real Outlook sync is coming), has a good web browser 240x160 gray (color this summer), smallish form factor, nice keyboard, PIM, SDK just released (though so far emulator only), $50 from Amazon after rebates, as good coverage as T-Mobile or Cingular (in California), unlimited meg/day transfer, under $40/mo, and 200 primetime/1000 weekend minutes or under $60 for 600/unlimited weekends.
Scott invented :-) so maybe his computational challenge idea will gain wide acceptance as well.
It's odd that neither the original piece nor the comments (so far at least) mention the importance of browsers implementing interoperable standards. Instead there's much slinging of this methodology of developing non-standard extensions vs. that methodology of developing non-standard extensions.
If the vendors were committed to implementing standards rather than inventing their own, we wouldn't have so much division over which rendering engine is the One True Path.
I think the world-wide web would be much better served by browsers and rendering engines and user agents that properly implement standards like SVG, CSS, XHTML (and the wonderful new XML application XHTML 2) and XForms, rather than technologies that are tied to particular implementations.
XHTML moves the presentation out into CSS completely, and so can be presented by an XML+CSS rendering engine; what's left in XHTML 2.0 is the semantics.
It's possible to use most of XHTML 2.0 in today's modern browsers, though crafting the style sheets to make it work is a job for serious experts. Here is a sample weblog page converted to XHTML 2.0 and it should display properly in most modern browsers: http://w3future.com/weblog/gems/xhtml2.xml
The big missing pieces are XForms, which abstracts the form data model and operations out of XHTML into its own module, and XML Events, which does the same for events (though it is compatible with recent DOM events). There is aplugin for Internet Explorer that make XForms work seamlessly inside XHTML documents, so I suspect that if you are so inclined, in a month or two you can be targeting to the draft of XHTML 2.0 with support for most of its features, and get cross-browser standards-based support for the same kinds of features you're writing back-end ASP hacks and browser-specific JavaScript and ActiveX controls for today. (No, it won't work in IE 4.0 or Netscape 4.62, but neither will most of the hacks and ActiveX controls.)
Here is an article on XHTML 2.0: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/08/07/deviant.html
Here is an XMLHack article by Simon St. Laurent: http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1741 who writes
Try this page instead. It shows that it's 50,300 yen. Put a '1' in the box at the end of the line and press the oval red and yellow button to put it in your cart. Then press the next to last button at the bottom (bright yellow instead of orange) to place your order. Have fun filling out the address fields, though.
A civil engineer, and electrical engineer, and a computer scientist are discussing the relative merits of their professions, and citing examples of great inventions.
The civil engineer says, "The nation's highway system is the greatest invention because lets people go from place to place , whenever they want to go."
The electrical engineer, says, "The telephone system is the greatest invention because it lets people communicate from place to place, instantly."
The computer scientist is puzzled for a while, and says, "The world's greatest invention bar none is the Thermos."
"The Thermos?" asks the electrical engineer.
"You put hot coffee in it in the morning and in the afternoon, it's still hot. You put cold lemonade in it in the morning, and in the afternoon, it's still cold."
"But why is that the world's greatest invention?" asks the incredulous civil engineer.
The computer scientist replies earnestly, "How does it know?"
Isn't this called Vindigo?
I use Megapath and I have 5 that are usually on, 2 that are sometimes on, plus at least 1 wireless laptop, for a total of 8. Some are tiny (like my 3Com Audrey and my Sonic Blue Rio) and some are fairly low power (like my Fujitsu Scovery secondary DNS and SMTP server), but they are on and connected to the Internet, some through NAT and some routable. I'm not counting the Airport hub or the VPN box as a computer, but they are (both have 586's in them and both get IP addresses, one public and one NAT).
No, not Curl, curl which is free, and in many cases works better than wget.
Oops -- I'd forgotten that GPRS worked only with T-Mobile and not Cingular.
If you really do want $39.95/mo flat-rate always-on and all the possibilities that brings with it (instant email, always-on AOL IM, immediate web browsing) the Sidekick is the way to go. It's definitely not a device for people who talk on the phone a lot, either in the plan or ergonomically.
If you want a PalmOS device with all the compatibility that provides, and want a slimmer device with a more ergonomic phone and your choice of yak-time plans and providers, get a Treo.
Note that in California T-Mobile's cell sites are actually Cingular's cell sites (though T-Mobile has its own spectrum allocation so congestion on Cingular's network isn't an issue). So, if you are in California and get a Treo with GPRS through Cingular, you'll get exactly the same data coverage as a Sidekick with GPRS through T-Mobile.
I can assure you -- Wall Street and Redmond are completely safe from any attacks involving lorries. London, of course, is at risk.
Speaking of built-in pressure gates in tires, when I was 7 I gave my father for father's day 4 screw caps with built-in pressure gates that I got from a catalog. He put them on and the next morning all 4 tires were flat. I found one of them in a box when I visited him over Christmas...I guess he kept it.
Mark is missing -- or perhaps deliberately obscuring -- the point of XHTML 2.0.
XHTML 1.0 made HTML 4.0 into an XML language, by requring that you close all tags you open and quote all attributes, and that's pretty much it. Anyone who has ever tried to write code to manipulate HTML in middleware or on the client end will see the point of making sure that the markup is syntactically well-formed.
XHTML 1.1 with modularization breaks XHTML up into modules; modularization is a key idea in building extensible systems of any type, and it is put to good use in HTML. You get a tables module, a forms module, etc. There is now modularization for both DTD-based XML and XML Schema-based XML, so you can get your job done either way.
But the real goal is to make the modules well enough defined and have the semantics and the presentation and the underlying infrastructure (what is a link, when does it get followed, what are events, etc) all well enough separated so that HTML can become just another application of XML, without a lot of special knowledge hard-coded into browsers about what "i m g" or "b r" or "r e l" means. In other words, the goal is to define modules of functionality in XML, and then be able to use those together with other modules (things like SVG ) in kind of the same way that people can use class libraries in PHP and Java and other systems, without having to have someone write a new browser for every possible combination.
Remember how years ago during the browser wars, vendors kept inventing their own tags and writing browsers that understood the tags? Well, now we've got enough of all that figured out to be able to factor the web and its interfaces into a bunch of different parts, and then let you mix and match those parts together to make your own cogent language. You use CSS for presentation styling, XML Events for events, and markup for semantically describing the content. If you have to build your own language for displaying your weblog and call it RSS, well you just go do that and you put your tags in a namespace named by your favorite URI, and you go off. You and your friends (and enemies) can write CSS style sheets or XSLT transformations or what-have-you to display the resulting pointy bracket file in a browser, and it will look and act indistinguishable from today's HTML, but will offer other advantages -- blind people will be able to use their style sheets for reading it, and programs will be able to parse the format without having to screen-scrape the HTML, and you won't have to have six versions of it around for different devices and so on.
So after we move all of the essential stuffness of the web (events, hyperlinks, object embedding, forms, styling) into their own standards and get browsers and other user agents have to hard-code those implementations, what you're left with is a need for a common semantic markup language where things are clearly expressed and easy to write.
That's where tags like <section> and <h> come from, and why they make perfect sense as transitions from <h*>.
In summary, XHTML 2.0 is just the meaning-laden parts of web pages that are left over after all of the plumbing has been moved out to other specs, where it can be shared.
I wrote an email-to-blogger interface for my Hiptop.
It could easily be extended to use LiveJournal or any other XML-RPC based weblog because the Perl libraries already support it.
See http://hipme.com/software/blogrouter.
Yes, everybody uses SMS in Europe. And it has a charge model and a 160 (or 255)character limit. In the US, people use instant messaging, which is trying to develop a business model, but at least it's not a per-click charge. Plus it interoperaes with desktop systems that people already use. So, if GPRS and its competition do become the norm in the US, then I predict that IM will win over SMS.
I have a Danger Hiptop / T-Mobile Sidekick and I don't think it's 5 years behind Japanese phones. It has a real keyboard, which is not as important in Japan, but is important here if you actually want to do e-mail or web searches or IM. Yes, it can do SMS if you can find one of the other 3 people in the US who can use it, but it also does AOL IM and thus you can talk to just about anybody. It's also $40/mo for unlimited data, plus more phone minutes that I can use (though if you yammer you will probably want to upgrade to the $60 plan).
Drawbacks: grayscale screen instead of color. Although it's done in Java, the SDK is not open -- blame Deutchse Telekom, though, not the US industry, for that one.
I think the device fares quite well compared to Japan's Java-enabled color phones, because it has a real keyboard and real applications that are useful. If I want to play Tetris in color, I'd get a game boy.
And yes, it has Beatnik 12-voice polyphonic ringtones that sound great.