When you go through the inventory of "how to wire your house for < $20,000" and you've got less than $3,000 to spend before you complete the set.
To think I could have got the bathroom done, an extension, new windows (which my new SO dreams about) and all I have is Web / WAP DSL X10 WiFi Multimedia mp3 DVD Divx Video-on-Demand VOIP 100 Mbps heaven. Oh, plus a further $$$ on a few credit cards.
Hold on a moment..... None of those so-called chic-geeks didn't even mention VOIP
The thing that I think that can sell it to Joe Pub could be along the following scenario (and damn me to hell if MS / AOL TW / Hollywood haven't thought of it and I just gave them the idea) :
Here's your new Hollywood(r) compliant computer, and as a special, it's already got pre-installed 20 DVD quality films released this month, plus the latest 1000 CD quality albums that we think you'll love.
Obviously, all the media is super-crypto'd that you'll only be able to get when you register - and then the license to view / listen is limited to a specific timeframe / counter. With 80 gig disks common place, this wouldn't be too hard to put on a data partition that is DRM compliant and abides strictly by MSs rules. Joe Public does the maths (hmmm. 20 DVDs + 100 CDs (he only likes 10%) = 20 x 15 + 100 x 10 bucks = grand "saving" of 1300 dollars.
Now someone please tell me that this kind of thing wouldn't close a sale ? AND it doesn't have to retail at a loss.
This is definitely a very frightening era we are entering into.
OMG. How did you find that !!? Moderators - this is worth a +5. Funny, interesting, very relevant.
Re:My first warwalk...
on
Wartrapping?
·
· Score: 2
I agree - but how about if you get the SSID "Wireless" or "tsunami" - that hardly gives you a clue about who owns it !! Then, even if you did manage to get the company name, if it did have an IT department, there's no way on earth that the receptionist / operator will know who to connect you to - if you were to start nmapping to find details about the real IT department - that would definitely be a breach of legalities. n'est pas ?
I recently purchased a zaurus + dcf650 and loaded kismet + the qt kismet app. Plugged it in, cycled to my local shop and back and had a look - no signals. None whatsover.
Anyway, tinkered around with the settings, rebooted a coupla times, ifconfiged up and down (you get the idea) and before you knew it, 2 APs detected from within my lounge. Walked outside, another 2. Next day, on the way to the the train station - another 6. From the station to work ( a ten minute walk), another 30. Around 50% of these bothered using encryption and when I put the kismet packet logs into ethereal, I didn't have a lot of stuff, but I did get a few web pages browsed and even a few pop3 account emails and passwords.
Now I'm no hacker - I did this warwalk just as I read so damn much about it (on sites like this), but either these companies / individuals want there bandwidth used or they really have completely clueless admins who have no idea what their unleashing on there networks. I feel like emailing the addys I did get with a "please secure your network", but that'd probably go to the poor users who have no idea what they're doing but have been given a neat tool by their IT dept.
I have trouble finding decent FAQs for SWAN. For example, I want to set up a simple "Road Warrior" connection to my Zaurus via a floating IP (e.g. a Starbucks!) and through my NATing firewall - all I've read is that SWAN (or more correctly, IpSec) has difficulty in understanding NATs due to the contruction of the AH / ESP(sic?) packets. Please tell me I'm wrong - and send a link as to where I can find out how to do this....
I used a Psion Netbook as well for about 2 years. Thought it was the absolute bees knees.... I just wanted them to publish decent network drivers.
Two years later, I gave up all hope and went for an ebay purchased Zaurus. Yes I loved the full keyboard combo with the touchscreen of the netbook. Yes I thought the fact that it never needed a hard reset (apart from once) and that all the apps appeared automagically depending on what CF card you had in (and the fact that it had both a CF slot and PC slot - WOW !). But the bottom line for me was that it DIDN'T NETWORK !!
How ironic, of course, that when I finally gave up hope with Psion, they release "production" network drivers.
My lesson learnt ? If it doesn't ALREADY do what it says that it might be able to do, then don't buy it until it does.
Gotta agree with the LDAP thing. I use to spend hours trying to sync and keep everything in check. Now I have an LDAP database which I can access from the web (via www.horde.org) which integrates with my email (horde again) and also any other imap4 clients I use, like my Mac or PC, or even my Psion now they've finally bought out network drivers for it.
I wrote a coupla noddy data entry screens as well for the ldap server so I can add anybodies email / phone number via a few web pages, I can dump it out as a text format for easy backup (it's human readable too). The only thing I haven't done it figure out how to write WAP pages in a syncML kinda way to replicate back to my mobile - if anyones's done that, I'd appreciate some links.
Bottom line: Go LDAP / IMAP4 for all your email and address and weblink needs. It's a real existing support protocol that just about all clients have to support. I grant you setting it up is a bit of a bitch, but when it's working you'll never figure out why you had so many other disparate data stores again. Promise !!
I've spent weeks looking for a US (pref NYC) based VOIP provider and finally on slashdot I find a recommendation. Two questions : How did they respond when you said you were UK based and how did you get the voip router over here ?
Whitelisting : automated I thought about implementing something along these lines, (upon receiving an email from an unidentified source) just sending a simple message like "I've never received email from you before - please confirm that it's for me by clicking 'reply' to this" (and then maybe something a little bit more detailed about spam at the end - but nothing too complicated to scare off your auntie etc etc )
You could then include either an identifiable header etc which would both automatically add that user to your whitelist and allow the first message through. The only problem is that any of those pesky mailing lists you sign up to, or other automated things (i.e. bank / credit card etc ) wouldn't get through. It wouldn't take long though to put any "maybes" in another folder. Also, by issuing an 'auto reply' you'll probably kill 99.9% of your spam dead, as which spammer ever mailed from a real account ?
If you ever saw one of these things move, you'd be scared. I reckon it could travel 10m in the flash of an eye.... that is if your eye flashes take about a minute.
I know you're probably not referring to this version of the Aibo, coz you'd probably have more chance of dying of laughter if one of these tried to turn ferocious, but I get your point...
I wrote to them. I didn't mention scientology or xenu, but just if they were censoring sites that they believed were in violation of the DMCA. If they bother replying, I post whatever it was here.
Damnit I jumped too at the page. Did you think of the idea yourself ? If so, very clever.... I think we may start to see a number of these cropping up...
I've got some time on my hands.... what do you think we'd need to start this up ? Obviously a couple of hundred DVDs, and a web site to process the orders, but after that - how difficult could it be ? If anybodies interested in talking about this, drop me a reply or a mail. ( richardagreen@yahoo.com ).
Hell, if it succeeds, you get rich. If it doesn't you get to keep 1000 DVDs....
Shafted by Psion, but probably not there fault...
on
PSION Resurrected By Linux
·
· Score: 5, Informative
My personal experience with Psion is that had a great history of leading edge technology PDA's that worked, but when I jumped on the bandwagon with a netbook (or notbook - see later), I was less than impressed with their promises of continued development
The netbook is an awesome machine - it still gets 'oohs' and 'aahs' from co-workers who haven't seen it. It's got a 640x480 touchscreen screen with full keyboard in a clamshell type design. I've got the 64Mb version with a 340Mb microdrive for any rubbish that I need. Here are the things that I absolutely love about it:
* Instant on - i.e. within a second. Beats the hell out of booting a laptop, even from sleep mode.
* The bundled apps, although minimal, are perfectly functional. Wanna write a doc, do a spreadsheet, read / write email ? Absolutely no problem
* It stops me tinkering. It just does the job
* 6 hour battery life. speaks for itself.
The things I despise:
* It's called a netbook. It's networking drivers are still 0.1, support the barest minimum of devices and frequently crash. How can you call something a netbook if it doesn't network ???!!!
* It's TCP/IP over the Irda is shockingly bad. Probably goes back to comment 1.
* Minimal, some say none, Mac support. Oh well.
* Lastly, FORGET about any further development about Epoc 6. Oh yeah I was an idiot to believe the rumours about that !!
To have a usable *nix ported to a netbook would be an absolute godsend. I could code here, code there, email, etc etc. Man I would *pay* (and I mean pay) at least 100 GBP to get my netbook running a reasonable X with just the simplest apps working.
Anyway, please keep up the great work linux -> psion porters. PLEASE !!
This is a terrible day. I've just read the K5 stuff about it, and I have to agree that a site is supposed to be a "community" site, then it should be run by the community, (as it is suggests), and not by the eds. deciding to -1 you all the time. I guess this post will live for a few seconds before I start burning karma. FWIW, this may be my last post. Goodbye/.
Fantastic quotes if you follow the links - see the above post. I just had to quote them here. [ Don't critise ME as I didn't write them - but some people actually believe this stuff.... ]
"VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast"
"Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it"
"Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc"
And the last one's a killer :
"Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable. Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult position"
So US Judge rules that Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese (et. al.) BIOS and moby manufacturers abide by his rule ? Hmmm. Now that's something I'd like to see (well at the least the reaction by the Chinese govy anyway...)
Slashdot Mirror
When you go through the inventory of "how to wire your house for < $20,000" and you've got less than $3,000 to spend before you complete the set.
To think I could have got the bathroom done, an extension, new windows (which my new SO dreams about) and all I have is Web / WAP DSL X10 WiFi Multimedia mp3 DVD Divx Video-on-Demand VOIP 100 Mbps heaven. Oh, plus a further $$$ on a few credit cards.
Hold on a moment..... None of those so-called chic-geeks didn't even mention VOIP
I WIN !!
The thing that I think that can sell it to Joe Pub could be along the following scenario (and damn me to hell if MS / AOL TW / Hollywood haven't thought of it and I just gave them the idea) :
Here's your new Hollywood(r) compliant computer, and as a special, it's already got pre-installed 20 DVD quality films released this month, plus the latest 1000 CD quality albums that we think you'll love.
Obviously, all the media is super-crypto'd that you'll only be able to get when you register - and then the license to view / listen is limited to a specific timeframe / counter. With 80 gig disks common place, this wouldn't be too hard to put on a data partition that is DRM compliant and abides strictly by MSs rules. Joe Public does the maths (hmmm. 20 DVDs + 100 CDs (he only likes 10%) = 20 x 15 + 100 x 10 bucks = grand "saving" of 1300 dollars.
Now someone please tell me that this kind of thing wouldn't close a sale ? AND it doesn't have to retail at a loss.
This is definitely a very frightening era we are entering into.
OMG. How did you find that !!? Moderators - this is worth a +5. Funny, interesting, very relevant.
I agree - but how about if you get the SSID "Wireless" or "tsunami" - that hardly gives you a clue about who owns it !! Then, even if you did manage to get the company name, if it did have an IT department, there's no way on earth that the receptionist / operator will know who to connect you to - if you were to start nmapping to find details about the real IT department - that would definitely be a breach of legalities. n'est pas ?
I recently purchased a zaurus + dcf650 and loaded kismet + the qt kismet app. Plugged it in, cycled to my local shop and back and had a look - no signals. None whatsover.
Anyway, tinkered around with the settings, rebooted a coupla times, ifconfiged up and down (you get the idea) and before you knew it, 2 APs detected from within my lounge. Walked outside, another 2. Next day, on the way to the the train station - another 6. From the station to work ( a ten minute walk), another 30. Around 50% of these bothered using encryption and when I put the kismet packet logs into ethereal, I didn't have a lot of stuff, but I did get a few web pages browsed and even a few pop3 account emails and passwords.
Now I'm no hacker - I did this warwalk just as I read so damn much about it (on sites like this), but either these companies / individuals want there bandwidth used or they really have completely clueless admins who have no idea what their unleashing on there networks. I feel like emailing the addys I did get with a "please secure your network", but that'd probably go to the poor users who have no idea what they're doing but have been given a neat tool by their IT dept.
So what to do ?
I have trouble finding decent FAQs for SWAN. For example, I want to set up a simple "Road Warrior" connection to my Zaurus via a floating IP (e.g. a Starbucks!) and through my NATing firewall - all I've read is that SWAN (or more correctly, IpSec) has difficulty in understanding NATs due to the contruction of the AH / ESP(sic?) packets. Please tell me I'm wrong - and send a link as to where I can find out how to do this....
I used a Psion Netbook as well for about 2 years. Thought it was the absolute bees knees .... I just wanted them to publish decent network drivers.
Two years later, I gave up all hope and went for an ebay purchased Zaurus. Yes I loved the full keyboard combo with the touchscreen of the netbook. Yes I thought the fact that it never needed a hard reset (apart from once) and that all the apps appeared automagically depending on what CF card you had in (and the fact that it had both a CF slot and PC slot - WOW !). But the bottom line for me was that it DIDN'T NETWORK !!
How ironic, of course, that when I finally gave up hope with Psion, they release "production" network drivers.
My lesson learnt ? If it doesn't ALREADY do what it says that it might be able to do, then don't buy it until it does.
Gotta agree with the LDAP thing. I use to spend hours trying to sync and keep everything in check. Now I have an LDAP database which I can access from the web (via www.horde.org) which integrates with my email (horde again) and also any other imap4 clients I use, like my Mac or PC, or even my Psion now they've finally bought out network drivers for it.
I wrote a coupla noddy data entry screens as well for the ldap server so I can add anybodies email / phone number via a few web pages, I can dump it out as a text format for easy backup (it's human readable too). The only thing I haven't done it figure out how to write WAP pages in a syncML kinda way to replicate back to my mobile - if anyones's done that, I'd appreciate some links.
Bottom line: Go LDAP / IMAP4 for all your email and address and weblink needs. It's a real existing support protocol that just about all clients have to support. I grant you setting it up is a bit of a bitch, but when it's working you'll never figure out why you had so many other disparate data stores again. Promise !!
Holy Potato !
I've spent weeks looking for a US (pref NYC) based VOIP provider and finally on slashdot I find a recommendation. Two questions : How did they respond when you said you were UK based and how did you get the voip router over here ?
Consider the $40 on the way !! I'll email later.
insert into permissions values ("All","Copy / Rip","DVDs")
delete permissions where user = "billg"
delete permissions where company = "microsoft"
Whitelisting : automated I thought about implementing something along these lines, (upon receiving an email from an unidentified source) just sending a simple message like "I've never received email from you before - please confirm that it's for me by clicking 'reply' to this" (and then maybe something a little bit more detailed about spam at the end - but nothing too complicated to scare off your auntie etc etc )
You could then include either an identifiable header etc which would both automatically add that user to your whitelist and allow the first message through. The only problem is that any of those pesky mailing lists you sign up to, or other automated things (i.e. bank / credit card etc ) wouldn't get through. It wouldn't take long though to put any "maybes" in another folder. Also, by issuing an 'auto reply' you'll probably kill 99.9% of your spam dead, as which spammer ever mailed from a real account ?
poke 144,15 if memory serves me right.... made the machine crash as a "security measure" (but no flames....)
i got the reference. made me laugh anyways.....
If you ever saw one of these things move, you'd be scared. I reckon it could travel 10m in the flash of an eye .... that is if your eye flashes take about a minute.
I know you're probably not referring to this version of the Aibo, coz you'd probably have more chance of dying of laughter if one of these tried to turn ferocious, but I get your point...
Pay not to see adverts ? That'll never take off. ... err. oh dear.
Thanks for writing to Google.
We read all of the email we receive and try to send personal responses to each message.
This note is just to let you know that we've received your letter, and you'll hear from us soon. We appreciate your taking the time to contact us.
Keep on Googlin',
The Google Team
I wrote to them. I didn't mention scientology or xenu, but just if they were censoring sites that they believed were in violation of the DMCA. If they bother replying, I post whatever it was here.
Damnit I jumped too at the page. Did you think of the idea yourself ? If so, very clever.... I think we may start to see a number of these cropping up...
Hey slashdotters...
.... what do you think we'd need to start this up ? Obviously a couple of hundred DVDs, and a web site to process the orders, but after that - how difficult could it be ? If anybodies interested in talking about this, drop me a reply or a mail. ( richardagreen@yahoo.com ).
I've got some time on my hands
Hell, if it succeeds, you get rich. If it doesn't you get to keep 1000 DVDs....
My personal experience with Psion is that had a great history of leading edge technology PDA's that worked, but when I jumped on the bandwagon with a netbook (or notbook - see later), I was less than impressed with their promises of continued development : :
The netbook is an awesome machine - it still gets 'oohs' and 'aahs' from co-workers who haven't seen it. It's got a 640x480 touchscreen screen with full keyboard in a clamshell type design. I've got the 64Mb version with a 340Mb microdrive for any rubbish that I need. Here are the things that I absolutely love about it
* Instant on - i.e. within a second. Beats the hell out of booting a laptop, even from sleep mode.
* The bundled apps, although minimal, are perfectly functional. Wanna write a doc, do a spreadsheet, read / write email ? Absolutely no problem
* It stops me tinkering. It just does the job
* 6 hour battery life. speaks for itself.
The things I despise
* It's called a netbook. It's networking drivers are still 0.1, support the barest minimum of devices and frequently crash. How can you call something a netbook if it doesn't network ???!!!
* It's TCP/IP over the Irda is shockingly bad. Probably goes back to comment 1.
* Minimal, some say none, Mac support. Oh well.
* Lastly, FORGET about any further development about Epoc 6. Oh yeah I was an idiot to believe the rumours about that !!
To have a usable *nix ported to a netbook would be an absolute godsend. I could code here, code there, email, etc etc. Man I would *pay* (and I mean pay) at least 100 GBP to get my netbook running a reasonable X with just the simplest apps working.
Anyway, please keep up the great work linux -> psion porters. PLEASE !!
On the other hand, the most valuable data on the box in question are my saved game files, so I'm not that worried about hosing it occasionally
;-)
Man, you don't play enough Baldur's Gate then....
You have to visit the posters website... He slates off Apache as a complete shambles, but guess who'se hosting his website ? I'll give you a clue ...
his server @
Oh doncha just love the power of the internet sometimes...
This is a terrible day. I've just read the K5 stuff about it, and I have to agree that a site is supposed to be a "community" site, then it should be run by the community, (as it is suggests), and not by the eds. deciding to -1 you all the time. I guess this post will live for a few seconds before I start burning karma. FWIW, this may be my last post. /.
Goodbye
Fantastic quotes if you follow the links - see the above post. I just had to quote them here. [ Don't critise ME as I didn't write them - but some people actually believe this stuff.... ]
"VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast"
"Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it"
"Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc"
And the last one's a killer :
"Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable. Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult position"
So US Judge rules that Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese (et. al.) BIOS and moby manufacturers abide by his rule ? Hmmm. Now that's something I'd like to see (well at the least the reaction by the Chinese govy anyway...)