While access to e-mail, calendar, contacts, notes, and to-dos are all useful functions of a blackberry that's connected to a corporate Exchange server, I can see a couple of issues:
1) Microsoft isn't exactly known for security. To my knowledge there have been very few hacks of the RIM BES product because of its' nature - it establishes outbound-only connections to the RIM servers which then link back to the wireless providers.
2) MDS. The BES allows (via this same set of secured connections) access to the corporate intranet servers (assuming it's configured to do so). I personally have found this to be a very, very useful feature. Lots of stuff in our daily business does not live in the realm of Exchange, but might live in the realm of our intranet servers. RIM made this easy by allowing admins to avoid worrying about VPN tunnels or SSL connections. Set it up, and it just works. I have a feeling that this product offering might not compete in this arena.
The contract was probably written and approved long before the study was made available... So why try and stir up yet another controversy with such a starkly contrasting headline?
From personal experience, government contracts like that can often take years to design and bid.
dyndns is pretty good in that with a custom domain, you can set an 'offline' redirect URI. However, this has to be done manually with an internet connection - kind of a problem if the dedicated public connection is unavailable, although you could always revert to some sort of dialup to get onto their web site and update it.
They will let you configure custom TTL values on A (host) records. I set mine to 5 minutes and it works just fine.
There are some automated engines out there which will update the dyndns service automatically, but I have not seen any which will automatically set the unavailable URI if the primary internet connection isn't available.
dyndns is more oriented at people who want to host but their address changes frequently, whether for black-hat, white-hat or ISP DHCP reasons. However, while reliability has never been a problem with their service, it may not suit the needs of a more commercial customer.
That makes sense. Run a contest during business hours to encourage people to chat with each other instead of... getting work done. The majority of the winners will be housewives, stay-at-home-for-the-summer kids, and whoever else can run the software through their firewalls...
IANAP (I am not a player) but I thought the whole point and appeal of the Sims was to be semi-realistic (which basically means that people can be who they really want to be with no tangible consequences). But really. Magic spells? Next we'll be seeing Age of Sims: Post-Industrial War Expansion pack.
It's not just a walkie-talkie replacement. You can use them for phone service, web browsing, etc, etc. All in one device, which aside from anything else certainly makes the cancer-critics a little happier. (and me, since I would have to carry more stuff)
By the way, another really heavy user of Nextel service is the government. In my agency, most of the people are field-based and roving, so Nextels are next to invaluable. Not to mention that quite a few people I know have Nextels for personal use, because they've offered reasonably good family plans. Good for field trips, and keeping in touch with your teenager kids - who then use it to keep in touch with each other.
I'll agree that a Nextel is a little more expensive, though. But when you want more services, you do indeed pay for them.
How about a good network reason why email should be relayed instead of sent directly?
Sure: bandwidth. If you use their SMTP server as a smarthost, you are not tying up all your limited (in most residential DSL situations) upstream bandwidth trying to push mailing lists. One SMTP exchange (if your own MTA is wise enough to understand 'smart host') will take care of a whole bulk mailing. Of course, for single-destination use, there really is no solid reason.
This isn't a rant at you particularly, but I don't understand why most people can't see that the Internet is a constantly fluid environment. New protocols and rules come and go amongst the truly experimental in very short amounts of time. Because business needs now drive the ISP model, much of that dynamic has slowed down, resulting in the current situation we have today: a mail protocol with plenty of ways to circumvent trust. But then, when SMTP was designed, no one worried about spam. Has anyone actually bothered to develop the rules for a TCP-session based protocol which would provide more inherent security than SMTP relays with rules for acceptance of messages?
So not only are they charging $7 more per month for users to get better performance via a transparent proxy, but are they going to make money from advertising companies on selling usage statistics without them ever having to work tricks with a web browser.
Sounds like a win-win situation for Earthlink and possibly an invasion of privacy for the users, especially if their identity is linked with the service. (which it would have to be if Earthlink is doing it transparently.)
Where's the innovation in doing this? Wouldn't the logical extension of arcade games be to bring an experience to a player which they couldn't experience in their home or at their friends' houses?
Maybe they should think about longer, RPG/movie style games where the state can be saved between plays and picked up again later, say by putting in a passcode or something? I'm not sure how you could break up a game into chunks like that.
Obviously arcades are dying out in the US (although the last time I went to the southern UK coast, they were in quite full force) - I think the only way Microsoft could pull this off is to find a way to unglue people from their home screens and get them out of their houses - and if they can, this is not a bad thing!
The only other benefit I can see is making the cost of an arcade machine cheaper for construction and maybe deployment.
Actually it's mpeg4. Your folks had to pay the licensing fee as part of the hospital bill when you were born. Unless, of course, you are pirated, in which case you'd better close your eyes before some mean people start coming after you.:-)
I'm a little off-topic in my reply, but you raise an interesting point which isn't just limited to the legal world.
What if you think about the "lawyer-speak" as a common language by which things get done? Such language is intended so that little to no room is left for any abiguities. In this way, it's very similar to any programming language, which have relatively rigid structures and conventions. Of course, you can comment your code as well - but in the legal senses, having a "plain language" description leaves the document subject to interpretation on the part of the reader - which is exactly the sort of thing that the legal system spends a lot of time trying to resolve.
So on the one hand, I agree with you that it would be cool to comment your code and your laws. But on the other, I think it presents problems of clarity and conciseness (is that a word?) which are exactly what is trying to be avoided. Remember, even a plain language comment in your code can introduce ambiguity. But show your code to another programmer who speaks the same language, and they will immediately understand the function, methodology, and limitations inherent.
Well, be a lot afraid. Microsoft is tricking you into writing native apps for GNU/Linux and making them dependent on the WINDOWS API (Windows.Forms are part of the new Windows API). . . and the mono guys have fallen for it hook line and sinker (and are helping).
What a load of crap. A major advantage of.NET is to remove the coder from the direct need for API's but still override & add functionality as necessary. The inside activity of the platform doesn't matter as long as the results are the same. That's the whole purpose of object oriented coding with classes. If Microsoft puts together a new API to replace the existing User32+ functionality, all the Mono developers will have to do is provide the same level of support in their parallel code. None of the overlaying applications will need to change at all.
GNU/Linux is already competing and is kicking Microsoft's ass (and everyone elses for that matter)! Microsoft started with a huge lead on the desktop and server and GNU/Linux has had a faster adoption rate than any OS in history.
Linux is a good product, BUT it does not meet the needs of enterprise-level developments -- yet. As a person who oversees application development, I see Mono as an excellent opportunity for Linux to rise to those demands.
What great apps and what converts? There aren't many.NET programmers, folks. . . Is the platform even out of beta on windows?
What great RAD tools exist for Linux?.NET is not yet a mature enough platform for people to move to, but make no mistake that they will move to it; it is already well-past the beta testing stages.
I don't like Microsoft's marketing strategies, but they *do* make good products. Windows XP, the.NET platform are both good examples. Should every future development be based upon.NET? Of course not.
Should I be able to run.NET applications on Linux, possibly without even having to recompile them? Hell yeah! Thanks to Mono, that's actually possible.
Ximian has the right approach: develop a clone open-source platform while it is still in the infancy stages - so that it can keep pace with (and possibly even outperform) the behemoth. Even the Microsoft implementation of.NET can only stand to benefit from such efforts. Not to mention that the security from such a product would be far better than anything MS turns out these days.
Besides, MS would love it when all their.NET applications (read: nextgen office applications) run on Linux & Macs. Their market share will get that much bigger.
Actually, that's not entirely accurate, because there are the US-wide notable exceptions such as
411 - Information 611 - Telephone Company (service) 711 - (we always need to know where the nearest one is) 911 - Emergency
Now, NYC wants to add 311 as a goverment services number. I don't know if other places have that too. But naturally, that's at least 40,000,000 (exclude the joke and include the 311) numbers that you can't use unless you ensure the '1' prefix. (ok my math is probably off too, and I'm sure it's not true just because phone systems are probably much more modern than they used to be.)
Not that I agree with having to dial the extra '1' anyway. I've also heard through Verizon (the major NYC phone provider) that although they are advertising a '1' is mandatory, it will actually possible to just dial 10 digits instead of the full 11. I tried dialing it just now, and it worked. But who knows what my phone system is up to before the call reaches the public network?
Many people seem to be concentrating on the idea that Solaris is an attempt at homage to Kubrick, and in some senses, I can understand how that could be seen. Take this movie on its' own, however, and it's a very interesting piece of cinematic work.
What if it's not about the science fiction? What if it's not about man's failure to relate to fellow man or even the rest of the universe? What if it's not about greiving over a long-lost woman?
What if it's about an unusual problem, and the possible solutions? The movie presents quite a number of different solutions to the same problem, through each of the characters on board the space station - even several times through the same character. I think that the film proposes that there are so many possibilities and outcomes - and each one of them is valid and successful in its' own right. I left the movie feeling very dissatisfied, but not because of the acting or the special effects. It was because there wasn't solid closure to the film like there is in so many other mainstream films. I definitely like a movie which doesn't leave me feeling the same way as every other movie when I walk out of the theater. I also completely saw the twist coming at the end of the movie (if you can call it that), and it didn't bother me one bit that I could predict it.
It's like Lord of the Rings - everyone knows or can figure out the end of the story; how you get there is of tremendous importance. I think Solaris did a good job of taking me on that journey, and leaving me three hours after the credits thinking about it.
Having read the book, I can say that Crichton is just churning out yet another book in his series of pulp semi-sci-fi novels. His writing style is simplistic and requires little intelligence or thought; very few (if any) questions are asked of the reader. And all his books carry the same theme: do we take our ideas of technology too far without thinking? Crichton always says that we do, but somehow we muddle through anyway. Doesn't that imply that we really should just keep doing what we're doing?
If you actually like to have a challenging text and interesting things to think about, check out Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash.
The problem with having a mobile phone only is that many companies perform county/state address verification against the area code of the telephone number you provide. Credit card companies, etc. In fact, when I went to get my SprintPCS phone over a year ago, I had this exact problem; I had just moved into a new home and didn't want the landline, so I simply never ordered it.
Not having a home phone when you order a mobile phone was just something that the SprintPCS people just didn't seem to understand. I had to jump through quite a few hoops to finally explain everything to them, including providing them with the number of a neighbor's landline.
I think there needs to be a little reconciling before we can truly exist on mobile phones alone. Really what we should be aiming for is a phone identity (like a DNS name) that never changes no matter what form of connection you use (landline / wireless / IP / etc). But maybe people in the telecomm industry and FCC don't think that far ahead.
I can't imagine how clean it will get a room when the dogs and cats are chasing after it and knocking them around. Maybe you have to up the room size in order to compensate.
Then again, a $200 interactive cat toy might be a good thing, if they never get tired of it like every other one they get.:-)
This will probably develop a market for alternate bodies from non-GM companies, like there is for cellphone batteries and faceplates. The PC market has already proven modularity quite successful - if it weren't for PCI buses and the like, we'd never be able to pull our computers apart and make them more usable in the ways we'd like.
GM's patents on the modular car means they will have a lock on profit for years to come when everyone is making parts which are compatible with the standards they set - IF they are the first people to successfully market the product when hydrogen fuel cell technology matures enough.
And, for all the Digital Rights Management people: since a large portion of the systems in the vehicle are going to be controlled by a central "brain", GM can easily enforce a type of DRM on their intellectual property by rendering non-authorized plug-in components to be unusable. Although, it would be a tremendously bad marketing decision for the first five years or so. Then again, auto makers have never seemed to want the kind of locks on things that PC & software makers are trying to have. But something like this could change the automotive landscape too.
I don't see that. Jabber's AIM link isn't all that great, I'll admit, mostly because it lacks a lot of features, and many of the jabber XML functions don't translate too well into AOL's IM protocol.
But it's never had a problem with too many users, simply because AOL sees it the same way it sees all the connections which come from a firewall or port address-translated LAN. We have been testing it at my office for months and never been blocked, except when AOL changes their protocol rules - and less than a day later a new copy of the Jabber AIM gateway gets released.
I can't help but be reminded of that scene from the Matrix with the Smith explaining to Morpheus that AI is the cure to the human beings who are the disease/virus of the earth... like being told you are nothing more than a common cold.
Why would that be true? If the light passing worked in all three dimentions, it should just cast the appropriate shadows normally. I could see a shadowing problem if any sides of the cloaking equipment touched against a surface (but this might not be as unworkable as it seems). So, the ground under a cloaked person might be a little funny. Maybe a little software correction would be necessary.:-)
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While access to e-mail, calendar, contacts, notes, and to-dos are all useful functions of a blackberry that's connected to a corporate Exchange server, I can see a couple of issues:
1) Microsoft isn't exactly known for security. To my knowledge there have been very few hacks of the RIM BES product because of its' nature - it establishes outbound-only connections to the RIM servers which then link back to the wireless providers.
2) MDS. The BES allows (via this same set of secured connections) access to the corporate intranet servers (assuming it's configured to do so). I personally have found this to be a very, very useful feature. Lots of stuff in our daily business does not live in the realm of Exchange, but might live in the realm of our intranet servers. RIM made this easy by allowing admins to avoid worrying about VPN tunnels or SSL connections. Set it up, and it just works. I have a feeling that this product offering might not compete in this arena.
The contract was probably written and approved long before the study was made available... So why try and stir up yet another controversy with such a starkly contrasting headline?
From personal experience, government contracts like that can often take years to design and bid.
dyndns is pretty good in that with a custom domain, you can set an 'offline' redirect URI. However, this has to be done manually with an internet connection - kind of a problem if the dedicated public connection is unavailable, although you could always revert to some sort of dialup to get onto their web site and update it.
They will let you configure custom TTL values on A (host) records. I set mine to 5 minutes and it works just fine.
There are some automated engines out there which will update the dyndns service automatically, but I have not seen any which will automatically set the unavailable URI if the primary internet connection isn't available.
dyndns is more oriented at people who want to host but their address changes frequently, whether for black-hat, white-hat or ISP DHCP reasons. However, while reliability has never been a problem with their service, it may not suit the needs of a more commercial customer.
Just my two cents as a happy user.
That makes sense. Run a contest during business hours to encourage people to chat with each other instead of... getting work done. The majority of the winners will be housewives, stay-at-home-for-the-summer kids, and whoever else can run the software through their firewalls...
the Sims meets Harry Potter?
IANAP (I am not a player) but I thought the whole point and appeal of the Sims was to be semi-realistic (which basically means that people can be who they really want to be with no tangible consequences). But really. Magic spells? Next we'll be seeing Age of Sims: Post-Industrial War Expansion pack.
It's not just a walkie-talkie replacement. You can use them for phone service, web browsing, etc, etc. All in one device, which aside from anything else certainly makes the cancer-critics a little happier. (and me, since I would have to carry more stuff)
By the way, another really heavy user of Nextel service is the government. In my agency, most of the people are field-based and roving, so Nextels are next to invaluable. Not to mention that quite a few people I know have Nextels for personal use, because they've offered reasonably good family plans. Good for field trips, and keeping in touch with your teenager kids - who then use it to keep in touch with each other.
I'll agree that a Nextel is a little more expensive, though. But when you want more services, you do indeed pay for them.
This isn't a rant at you particularly, but I don't understand why most people can't see that the Internet is a constantly fluid environment. New protocols and rules come and go amongst the truly experimental in very short amounts of time. Because business needs now drive the ISP model, much of that dynamic has slowed down, resulting in the current situation we have today: a mail protocol with plenty of ways to circumvent trust. But then, when SMTP was designed, no one worried about spam. Has anyone actually bothered to develop the rules for a TCP-session based protocol which would provide more inherent security than SMTP relays with rules for acceptance of messages?
So not only are they charging $7 more per month for users to get better performance via a transparent proxy, but are they going to make money from advertising companies on selling usage statistics without them ever having to work tricks with a web browser.
Sounds like a win-win situation for Earthlink and possibly an invasion of privacy for the users, especially if their identity is linked with the service. (which it would have to be if Earthlink is doing it transparently.)
Or, at least a medical school. :-)
Where's the innovation in doing this? Wouldn't the logical extension of arcade games be to bring an experience to a player which they couldn't experience in their home or at their friends' houses?
Maybe they should think about longer, RPG/movie style games where the state can be saved between plays and picked up again later, say by putting in a passcode or something? I'm not sure how you could break up a game into chunks like that.
Obviously arcades are dying out in the US (although the last time I went to the southern UK coast, they were in quite full force) - I think the only way Microsoft could pull this off is to find a way to unglue people from their home screens and get them out of their houses - and if they can, this is not a bad thing!
The only other benefit I can see is making the cost of an arcade machine cheaper for construction and maybe deployment.
Actually it's mpeg4. Your folks had to pay the licensing fee as part of the hospital bill when you were born. Unless, of course, you are pirated, in which case you'd better close your eyes before some mean people start coming after you. :-)
I'm a little off-topic in my reply, but you raise an interesting point which isn't just limited to the legal world.
:-)
What if you think about the "lawyer-speak" as a common language by which things get done? Such language is intended so that little to no room is left for any abiguities. In this way, it's very similar to any programming language, which have relatively rigid structures and conventions. Of course, you can comment your code as well - but in the legal senses, having a "plain language" description leaves the document subject to interpretation on the part of the reader - which is exactly the sort of thing that the legal system spends a lot of time trying to resolve.
So on the one hand, I agree with you that it would be cool to comment your code and your laws. But on the other, I think it presents problems of clarity and conciseness (is that a word?) which are exactly what is trying to be avoided. Remember, even a plain language comment in your code can introduce ambiguity. But show your code to another programmer who speaks the same language, and they will immediately understand the function, methodology, and limitations inherent.
Just my $0.02.
Maybe they should have simulated the release of the game in The Sims to see what the outcome would have been. :-)
Actually, that's not entirely accurate, because there are the US-wide notable exceptions such as
411 - Information
611 - Telephone Company (service)
711 - (we always need to know where the nearest one is)
911 - Emergency
Now, NYC wants to add 311 as a goverment services number. I don't know if other places have that too. But naturally, that's at least 40,000,000 (exclude the joke and include the 311) numbers that you can't use unless you ensure the '1' prefix. (ok my math is probably off too, and I'm sure it's not true just because phone systems are probably much more modern than they used to be.)
Not that I agree with having to dial the extra '1' anyway. I've also heard through Verizon (the major NYC phone provider) that although they are advertising a '1' is mandatory, it will actually possible to just dial 10 digits instead of the full 11. I tried dialing it just now, and it worked. But who knows what my phone system is up to before the call reaches the public network?
I don't disagree with you. My question was simply whether that is what Crichton is implying by the sum collection of his many books of narrow escape.
Many people seem to be concentrating on the idea that Solaris is an attempt at homage to Kubrick, and in some senses, I can understand how that could be seen. Take this movie on its' own, however, and it's a very interesting piece of cinematic work.
What if it's not about the science fiction? What if it's not about man's failure to relate to fellow man or even the rest of the universe? What if it's not about greiving over a long-lost woman?
What if it's about an unusual problem, and the possible solutions? The movie presents quite a number of different solutions to the same problem, through each of the characters on board the space station - even several times through the same character. I think that the film proposes that there are so many possibilities and outcomes - and each one of them is valid and successful in its' own right. I left the movie feeling very dissatisfied, but not because of the acting or the special effects. It was because there wasn't solid closure to the film like there is in so many other mainstream films. I definitely like a movie which doesn't leave me feeling the same way as every other movie when I walk out of the theater. I also completely saw the twist coming at the end of the movie (if you can call it that), and it didn't bother me one bit that I could predict it.
It's like Lord of the Rings - everyone knows or can figure out the end of the story; how you get there is of tremendous importance. I think Solaris did a good job of taking me on that journey, and leaving me three hours after the credits thinking about it.
Having read the book, I can say that Crichton is just churning out yet another book in his series of pulp semi-sci-fi novels. His writing style is simplistic and requires little intelligence or thought; very few (if any) questions are asked of the reader. And all his books carry the same theme: do we take our ideas of technology too far without thinking? Crichton always says that we do, but somehow we muddle through anyway. Doesn't that imply that we really should just keep doing what we're doing?
If you actually like to have a challenging text and interesting things to think about, check out Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash.
The problem with having a mobile phone only is that many companies perform county/state address verification against the area code of the telephone number you provide. Credit card companies, etc. In fact, when I went to get my SprintPCS phone over a year ago, I had this exact problem; I had just moved into a new home and didn't want the landline, so I simply never ordered it.
Not having a home phone when you order a mobile phone was just something that the SprintPCS people just didn't seem to understand. I had to jump through quite a few hoops to finally explain everything to them, including providing them with the number of a neighbor's landline.
I think there needs to be a little reconciling before we can truly exist on mobile phones alone. Really what we should be aiming for is a phone identity (like a DNS name) that never changes no matter what form of connection you use (landline / wireless / IP / etc). But maybe people in the telecomm industry and FCC don't think that far ahead.
I can't imagine how clean it will get a room when the dogs and cats are chasing after it and knocking them around. Maybe you have to up the room size in order to compensate.
:-)
Then again, a $200 interactive cat toy might be a good thing, if they never get tired of it like every other one they get.
This will probably develop a market for alternate bodies from non-GM companies, like there is for cellphone batteries and faceplates. The PC market has already proven modularity quite successful - if it weren't for PCI buses and the like, we'd never be able to pull our computers apart and make them more usable in the ways we'd like.
GM's patents on the modular car means they will have a lock on profit for years to come when everyone is making parts which are compatible with the standards they set - IF they are the first people to successfully market the product when hydrogen fuel cell technology matures enough.
And, for all the Digital Rights Management people: since a large portion of the systems in the vehicle are going to be controlled by a central "brain", GM can easily enforce a type of DRM on their intellectual property by rendering non-authorized plug-in components to be unusable. Although, it would be a tremendously bad marketing decision for the first five years or so. Then again, auto makers have never seemed to want the kind of locks on things that PC & software makers are trying to have. But something like this could change the automotive landscape too.
I don't see that. Jabber's AIM link isn't all that great, I'll admit, mostly because it lacks a lot of features, and many of the jabber XML functions don't translate too well into AOL's IM protocol.
But it's never had a problem with too many users, simply because AOL sees it the same way it sees all the connections which come from a firewall or port address-translated LAN. We have been testing it at my office for months and never been blocked, except when AOL changes their protocol rules - and less than a day later a new copy of the Jabber AIM gateway gets released.
I can't help but be reminded of that scene from the Matrix with the Smith explaining to Morpheus that AI is the cure to the human beings who are the disease/virus of the earth... like being told you are nothing more than a common cold.
Why would that be true? If the light passing worked in all three dimentions, it should just cast the appropriate shadows normally. I could see a shadowing problem if any sides of the cloaking equipment touched against a surface (but this might not be as unworkable as it seems). So, the ground under a cloaked person might be a little funny. Maybe a little software correction would be necessary. :-)
Isn't this the same as IP Multicasting?