Actually, we once wrote an application server entirely in PostScript, including an object-oriented database, an object system with multiple inheritance, mod-loadable signed applications, an image processing library, and other goodies. It was in PostScript because it was designed to run inside devices that already ran PostScript.
We wrote some of the code directly in PostScript, but we wrote other parts of it in a language called PdB, which was a C++-like syntax to PostScript compiler. We worked with the guy who wrote the compiler, but eventually he quit the project and went to work for Sun on the Oak project and wrote their compiler -- startlingly similar syntax. The guy who wrote the compiler was named Arthur van Hoff... Eventually when Java came out we re-wrote the whole thing in Java.
As I remember it Mutlics went to insane lengths to get their rating -- first it was Mr. Secure Guy cannot set the system time because that would leak bits. Then it was weird stuff with trying to hide the paging behavior of Mr. Secure Guy from less secure people, since you could communicate bits down by paging in and out large amounts of memory and having someone at a less secure level monitor system resources. I can't remember how they camoflagued the paging behavior of the higher security levels, but it wasn't simple.
I have an X10 camera and a 2.4 GHz Siemens spread-spectrum phone. The phone makes the video from my X10 2.4 GHz camera unusable. I imagine that 802.11B would do the same.
Also, I agree that the X10 range is limited. It doesn't get 50 feet in my house, probably because the refrigerator is located at the core of the house and blocks everything.
Note that XHTML Basic is a stripped-down version of XHTML for phones, etc. It's meant to be the future of WML, not the future of Netscape (uh, IE, Opera, whatever).
As for tables, XHTML Basic includes tables, but simplified ones as necessary for reduced screen real-estate devices, not tables as are used to layout complex graphic designs in HTML.
Give XHTML a try -- as far as web authors go, it's pretty much just using lowercase tags and closing them all. Or try HTML Tidy with the "-clean -asxml" options to convert your HTML pretty effortlessly to XHTML. Current browsers will work fine with it.
Disclaimer: I am a member of the XML Forms committee, a descendent of XHTML, but I had nothing to do with XHTML Basic.
If you're not trying to file your own patent but are instead just trying to do something, then all that matters is the claims. The rest (the "teaching") is the price the inventor pays to educate the public about the claims. If you're doing something that's in the claims, then you have to worry about the patent. If you're doing something that's in the teaching but not covered in the claims, then the patent has no bearing. Someone else's might, of course.
See EBay, or just stroll in to Target and plunk down $299. It's a fine X terminal running Jailbait, or check out the Linux Terminal Server Project if you don't want to put a disk on it but do want more than what JailBait provides. Or check out the bboard ; ; at http://www.linux-hacker.net for details on everything necessary to turn an I-Opener into a standard Linux machine.
Sorry, I was a dolt. The I-Opener has a USB, a Parallel, and a a 56K modem. Some folks have reported success using the Intel Home RF USB device, which claims 1 Megabit but is said not to achieve it. I've so far not found any USB 802.11b devices, nor any parallel port ones as the original poster requested.
Tackhead, the hacked I-O community thanks you for all your hard work. Let's see if we can get organized on Ebay to make sure that they don't all get thrown in a landfill in New Jersey like the PC Jr's; the I-Opener is worth saving!
There are two more common problems in addition to the ones mention:
If you use MAIL FROM authentication, make sure you reply to the Reply-To: address, not the From: address. (And change to using CRYPT-PW authentication -- the MAIL FROM stuff is not secure as this thread shows.)
The default template generated for changes specifies MAIL FROM authentication, but that is in no way related to the actual authentication in use. If you've forgotten that you're using CRYPT-PW authentication, you will get no clue from the template or from the failure messages.
Note that the password is insecure as well since it's sent in the clear when used, twice in the clear if you let it generate the template and mail it to you. Also the encryption algorithm leaves quite a bit to be desired, but that's off topic.
I would recommend running a program such as Linux TCPDump, or WinDump, the Windows port and see what the traffic is. If it's NetBIOS or something of that ilk and you are running Windows, then not only are you inconvenienced, you are at risk of other folks exploring your network neighborhood, etc.
Here's my report on my DSL. I recently got 1040Kbits/sec up/down SDSL from MegaPath in Palo Alto (SF Bay Area). Overall, I'm getting happy with them, but I'm still in the installation hell phase. Once the basic wiring problem gets sorted out, I can see that things will be very good, because the company is responsive and committed, and the hardware and network seem basically sound. Still, the installation problems are trying and frustrating and I am trying to get through it whole.
Wires:
The Pac Bell wire from my house to the phone company is about 9000 feet, and runs Frame Relay
to NorthPoint. There's been a problem from day 1 with the line going up and down, but given that it took Pac Bell only 3 weeks to hook it up and it's only been up 1 month, I'm still well within the range of startup time problems that people have, and am expecting smooth sailing once the MegaPath/NorthPoint/PacBell menage a trois is done. Knock on wood!
Installation:
A disadvantage of not going with Pac Bell directly is that there are three companies involved and they all have to coordinate. An advantage of not going with Pac Bell directly is that because of the competitive/cooperative relationship, NorthPoint has much more clout with Pac Bell than I do, and MegaPath has clout with NorthPoint, and MegaPath is very responsive by e-mail and phone, so I don't have to spend hours on hold or wade through levels of official sympathizers before I get to talk to someone who can understand my problem. Every person I talked to was well informed, well versed in networking, and very polite. Conversely, I think they expect some level of technical sophistication in their users, but I haven't tested this hypothesis.
Service:
As I said, the support and tech people are all very smart and pleasant. They never talked down to me, and they were able to diagnose problems I'd caused myself. They are persistent in trying to get my installation problem straightened out and I am confident that the process will work. I often here of people with DSL installation problems who despair or give up because it appears that the process will not converge. I don't get that feeling, but I do see that it's going to take some time, because all three companies have process that they follow, and when you have a 2-sigma or 3-sigmal problem, there are a lot of steps to go through (replacing house wiring, monitoring etc., etc., etc.)
Connection:
MegaPath sells you a DSL WAN/Router/hub, and the only traffic you see on your wire is traffic to or from your house. With many other DSL and cable services, you get a "Modem/Bridge" device, wherein you see other people's traffic (and vice versa). The size of this "local" netwok varies with the provider, but I read on dslreports.com about a Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) customer who saw a broadcast storm every 15 minutes. He was able to see the ethernet address (shows you right there that it's really a shared ethernet!) and found it was an iMac. The tech support folks turned a deaf ear and told him not to use a network sniffer (reportedly). Another guy on dslreports read this, did the same, and saw that he could see it as well, and they were 30 miles apart! Again, I'm just quoting: here's the link. This kind of issue was a major reason for my going with MegaPath, since they don't have a large bridged network.
Security:
Not having other home users see your traffic and vice versa is a big deal in security, and if your provider uses a router instead of a bridge, then this happens. The router I got from MegaPath (a Netopia 7100R) has a firewall built in, and it comes with a NetBIOS blocker and a no-incoming-connections-at-all blocker, and you get to pick which one you want, or customize it (which I have done).
Performance: Throughput and Latency
Throughput DSL Reports has test tools, and my 1040/1040 connection shows up at about 940/920, if memory serves me correctly. Given the TCP/IP and Frame Relay overhead, this seems fine. Other providers who offer "nominal" 1.5Mb/384Kb often lag behind by a greater margin, especially on the uplink. I've seen in particular that cable modems often offer in regular modem ranges for uplink. (As a side note, I found this way the USB ethernet adapter on my I-Opener
only gets 20Kb/sec up!)
Latency
Most of the time I get <8ms from my house to www.yahoo.com, and less than 6ms from my house to www.megapath.net. Through VPN hardware and into my company at work is about 25ms, most of which is going from one backbone to another on the Internet. Occasionally, however, something in the local San Jose abovenet backbone screws up and I get terrible throughput, at night, for an hour or two, and then it mysteriously repairs itself. MegaPath is aware of this problem and is working with their backbone provider to get it rectified. It's not a usage problem -- it goes from fine to wretched in 10 seconds, and back again (after an hour or two) in another 10 seconds. Again, I'm confident that this is a transient problem I'm seeing and that it's not due to chronic oversubscription or poor network management.
If your dead battery is a Lithium Ion battery, then perhaps it has a problem as my Laptop battery on my DEC Hinote Ultra II -- a software problem in the battery!
The Revision A battery had the problem that once it was dead, it went dead. The Rev B. problem fixed this somehow, but in order to revive it you needed the "Battery Revive Utility" available from http://www4.servi ce.digital.com/support_database/index/epid73.htm which is, presumably, a Vax or something that Compaq forgot to turn off.
Anyway, the theory I've heard is that Li+ batteries are charged heuristically, and there's some RAM or something in the battery that records its charging history, and once that goes dead, the battery loses its mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we once wrote an application server entirely in PostScript, including an object-oriented database, an object system with multiple inheritance, mod-loadable signed applications, an image processing library, and other goodies. It was in PostScript because it was designed to run inside devices that already ran PostScript.
We wrote some of the code directly in PostScript, but we wrote other parts of it in a language called PdB, which was a C++-like syntax to PostScript compiler. We worked with the guy who wrote the compiler, but eventually he quit the project and went to work for Sun on the Oak project and wrote their compiler -- startlingly similar syntax. The guy who wrote the compiler was named Arthur van Hoff... Eventually when Java came out we re-wrote the whole thing in Java.
As I remember it Mutlics went to insane lengths to get their rating -- first it was Mr. Secure Guy cannot set the system time because that would leak bits. Then it was weird stuff with trying to hide the paging behavior of Mr. Secure Guy from less secure people, since you could communicate bits down by paging in and out large amounts of memory and having someone at a less secure level monitor system resources. I can't remember how they camoflagued the paging behavior of the higher security levels, but it wasn't simple.
I have an X10 camera and a 2.4 GHz Siemens spread-spectrum phone. The phone makes the video from my X10 2.4 GHz camera unusable. I imagine that 802.11B would do the same.
Also, I agree that the X10 range is limited. It doesn't get 50 feet in my house, probably because the refrigerator is located at the core of the house and blocks everything.
The recommendation for compatibility -- and what tidy does -- is to use the XML notation for a tag that closes itself:/>
Note the space.
Note that XHTML Basic is a stripped-down version of XHTML for phones, etc. It's meant to be the future of WML, not the future of Netscape (uh, IE, Opera, whatever).
As for tables, XHTML Basic includes tables, but simplified ones as necessary for reduced screen real-estate devices, not tables as are used to layout complex graphic designs in HTML.
Give XHTML a try -- as far as web authors go, it's pretty much just using lowercase tags and closing them all. Or try HTML Tidy with the "-clean -asxml" options to convert your HTML pretty effortlessly to XHTML. Current browsers will work fine with it.
Disclaimer: I am a member of the XML Forms committee, a descendent of XHTML, but I had nothing to do with XHTML Basic.
If you're not trying to file your own patent but are instead just trying to do something, then all that matters is the claims. The rest (the "teaching") is the price the inventor pays to educate the public about the claims. If you're doing something that's in the claims, then you have to worry about the patent. If you're doing something that's in the teaching but not covered in the claims, then the patent has no bearing. Someone else's might, of course.
It's CTRL-F5 in IE, not Shift-Reload!
See EBay, or just stroll in to Target and plunk down $299. It's a fine X terminal running Jailbait, or check out the Linux Terminal Server Project if you don't want to put a disk on it but do want more than what JailBait provides. Or check out the bboard ; ; at http://www.linux-hacker.net for details on everything necessary to turn an I-Opener into a standard Linux machine.
Sorry, I was a dolt. The I-Opener has a USB, a Parallel, and a a 56K modem. Some folks have reported success using the Intel Home RF USB device, which claims 1 Megabit but is said not to achieve it. I've so far not found any USB 802.11b devices, nor any parallel port ones as the original poster requested.
See http://www.linux-hacker.net and read the I-Appliance Discussion Forum BBS . You can use an SMC 10/100 or similar USB Ethernet adapter (be careful, not all work).
Tackhead, the hacked I-O community thanks you for all your hard work. Let's see if we can get organized on Ebay to make sure that they don't all get thrown in a landfill in New Jersey like the PC Jr's; the I-Opener is worth saving!
There are two more common problems in addition to the ones mention:
Note that the password is insecure as well since it's sent in the clear when used, twice in the clear if you let it generate the template and mail it to you. Also the encryption algorithm leaves quite a bit to be desired, but that's off topic.
I would recommend running a program such as Linux TCPDump, or WinDump, the Windows port and see what the traffic is. If it's NetBIOS or something of that ilk and you are running Windows, then not only are you inconvenienced, you are at risk of other folks exploring your network neighborhood, etc.
Here's my report on my DSL. I recently got 1040Kbits/sec up/down SDSL from MegaPath in Palo Alto (SF Bay Area). Overall, I'm getting happy with them, but I'm still in the installation hell phase. Once the basic wiring problem gets sorted out, I can see that things will be very good, because the company is responsive and committed, and the hardware and network seem basically sound. Still, the installation problems are trying and frustrating and I am trying to get through it whole.
Wires:
The Pac Bell wire from my house to the phone company is about 9000 feet, and runs Frame Relay to NorthPoint. There's been a problem from day 1 with the line going up and down, but given that it took Pac Bell only 3 weeks to hook it up and it's only been up 1 month, I'm still well within the range of startup time problems that people have, and am expecting smooth sailing once the MegaPath/NorthPoint/PacBell menage a trois is done. Knock on wood!
Installation:
A disadvantage of not going with Pac Bell directly is that there are three companies involved and they all have to coordinate. An advantage of not going with Pac Bell directly is that because of the competitive/cooperative relationship, NorthPoint has much more clout with Pac Bell than I do, and MegaPath has clout with NorthPoint, and MegaPath is very responsive by e-mail and phone, so I don't have to spend hours on hold or wade through levels of official sympathizers before I get to talk to someone who can understand my problem. Every person I talked to was well informed, well versed in networking, and very polite. Conversely, I think they expect some level of technical sophistication in their users, but I haven't tested this hypothesis.
Service:
As I said, the support and tech people are all very smart and pleasant. They never talked down to me, and they were able to diagnose problems I'd caused myself. They are persistent in trying to get my installation problem straightened out and I am confident that the process will work. I often here of people with DSL installation problems who despair or give up because it appears that the process will not converge. I don't get that feeling, but I do see that it's going to take some time, because all three companies have process that they follow, and when you have a 2-sigma or 3-sigmal problem, there are a lot of steps to go through (replacing house wiring, monitoring etc., etc., etc.)
Connection:
MegaPath sells you a DSL WAN/Router/hub, and the only traffic you see on your wire is traffic to or from your house. With many other DSL and cable services, you get a "Modem/Bridge" device, wherein you see other people's traffic (and vice versa). The size of this "local" netwok varies with the provider, but I read on dslreports.com about a Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) customer who saw a broadcast storm every 15 minutes. He was able to see the ethernet address (shows you right there that it's really a shared ethernet!) and found it was an iMac. The tech support folks turned a deaf ear and told him not to use a network sniffer (reportedly). Another guy on dslreports read this, did the same, and saw that he could see it as well, and they were 30 miles apart! Again, I'm just quoting: here's the link. This kind of issue was a major reason for my going with MegaPath, since they don't have a large bridged network.
Security:
Not having other home users see your traffic and vice versa is a big deal in security, and if your provider uses a router instead of a bridge, then this happens. The router I got from MegaPath (a Netopia 7100R) has a firewall built in, and it comes with a NetBIOS blocker and a no-incoming-connections-at-all blocker, and you get to pick which one you want, or customize it (which I have done).
Performance: Throughput and Latency
Throughput
DSL Reports has test tools, and my 1040/1040 connection shows up at about 940/920, if memory serves me correctly. Given the TCP/IP and Frame Relay overhead, this seems fine. Other providers who offer "nominal" 1.5Mb/384Kb often lag behind by a greater margin, especially on the uplink. I've seen in particular that cable modems often offer in regular modem ranges for uplink. (As a side note, I found this way the USB ethernet adapter on my I-Opener only gets 20Kb/sec up!)
Latency
Most of the time I get <8ms from my house to www.yahoo.com, and less than 6ms from my house to www.megapath.net. Through VPN hardware and into my company at work is about 25ms, most of which is going from one backbone to another on the Internet. Occasionally, however, something in the local San Jose abovenet backbone screws up and I get terrible throughput, at night, for an hour or two, and then it mysteriously repairs itself. MegaPath is aware of this problem and is working with their backbone provider to get it rectified. It's not a usage problem -- it goes from fine to wretched in 10 seconds, and back again (after an hour or two) in another 10 seconds. Again, I'm confident that this is a transient problem I'm seeing and that it's not due to chronic oversubscription or poor network management.
The SCovery looks nice, but it's not $129.
There's a minimum shipping of $19.95 from Egghead, for UPS ground, so it's $148.95.
I didn't see the disk option priced.
If your dead battery is a Lithium Ion battery, then perhaps it has a problem as my Laptop battery on my DEC Hinote Ultra II -- a software problem in the battery!
The Revision A battery had the problem that once it was dead, it went dead. The Rev B. problem fixed this somehow, but in order to revive it you needed the "Battery Revive Utility" available from http://www4.servi ce.digital.com/support_database/index/epid73.htm which is, presumably, a Vax or something that Compaq forgot to turn off.
Anyway, the theory I've heard is that Li+ batteries are charged heuristically, and there's some RAM or something in the battery that records its charging history, and once that goes dead, the battery loses its mind.
I gave up on mine and bought a new one on Ebay.