I'm sure Bit Boys Oy! will incorporate this technology into their upcoming videocard design to come out Real Soon Now, now with Bleeding Edge Vaporware Technology (tm).
But we are incompetent, so we want the rights to everything said by the mass hordes of 12 year old teenageers along with all the grown men pretending to be 12 year olds, oh and all the law enforcement officers pretending to be 12 year olds also.
You see, here at AOL we have this great plan for generating new compelling content for our subscribers. How does it work you might ask? Well, have you ever heard the story about how an infinite number of monkeys could produce the works of Shakespear given an infinte amount of time? Apply that to our stable of 12 year olds IMing and *BAM*, pure gold baby!
I've yet to see a single piece of WiMAX gear materilaize anywhere. I'll be surprised if any of it is out by years end. WiMAX is geared towards long distance, static location hauls. You might be able to make it work as a mesh network but you would be better served by a dense mesh network so you have redundancy and multiple antennas you can recieve and send to to help with radio contention.
Sysadmins need to setup their mail servers more carefully. This I grant you is true.
However, this doesn't get to the core reason of misconfigured email servers.
It's TOO FUCKING HARD TO CONFIGURE SECURELY.
What do I mean when I say this? Easy.
You have your own Linux box lets say. You get yourself a domain name and host it in a colo somewhere. Now you want to run an MTA. Sendmail? Postfix? Exim? Qmail? Something else? Are you going to use the precompiled version that came with your Mandrake install? Maybe you want to compile your own MTA because the prepackaged options don't fit what you are trying to do.
For example, I have an OpenBSD 3.6 box I run. I run a few small domains on it of which one has actual email accounts on it. I wanted to run a MTA on the box that was secure and would combat spam and viruses for me and the few other users. I've run other Linux and BSD boxen before and know what I am doing fairly well I think.
However, getting Postfix 2.1 installed along with Amavisd+ClamAV and DSPAM turned out to be too much for me to bite off in one fell swoop. There were some websites dedicated to configurations *similar* to what I wanted to do, but nary a one was *exactly* what I was looking for, forcing my to try and synthesize multiple howtos and other docs into something that would work for what I was trying to do.
Oh and on top of all of that I wanted TLS authentication along with SMTP AUTH and SSL encrypted POP3/IMAP services.
Setting all of that stuff up is a fucking garanteed trip to your medicine cabinet for some Excedrin to work out the kinks.
SASL2 is a fucking joke. It is poorly documented and quite frankly, needs to be rolled into the damn MTA provided doing so would make getting it to WORK *easier*. You end up having to troubleshoot problems between components of your MTA and filters that it gets so complex it will make you want to just throw your hands up into the air and say "FUCK IT" and just run the MTA without any of the fancy shit. Getting TLS installed was easy by comparison....getting a SSL secured POP3/IMAP was a bit harder due to having to dick around with OpenSSL and creating self-signed certificates for the services to use.
Then you had Amavis and ClamAV...which amazingly enough were easy to setup and use I thought compared to the rest of the stuff I was trying to accomplish.
Then came getting Amavis to feed into DSPAM (and no, not through Amavisd-new's own DSPAM mechanism, you loose all the flexibility of DSPAM with that method) which partially worked and then stuff started to really fall apart and fail for reasons that I couldnt troubleshoot properly due to not having a full understanding of how DSPAM is working (I had previously been using SA but I wanted to get away from Perl as much as possible as well as try to learn DSPAM). Throw in problems with delivery because Procmail seemed to be hardcoded to deliver to/var/mail/spool instead of Maildir format style in user homedirs along with some permissions errors and whatnot and I finally gave up on DSPAM and just resigned to using the rest of the tools while trying to figure out DSPAM on a test domain that doesnt carry important email for me so I dont get an ulcer while trying to make the whole solution work.
If its that hard for someone who generally knows what they are doing and WANTS to be secure and safe and spam free imagine how it is for the less knowledgeable people when they start to readup on how to do some of this stuff. It's going to sound like they are being asked to learn quantum physics just so they don't have to hear about Cilais and Viagra and Hot Teen Sluts anymore and they will just decide to live with the problem because its too hard to learn how to configure all this crap correctly AND securely because there is hardly any good single repository of known good spamfighting configs for the different MTAs.
If there is a site out there that acts as a repository of all the "Here is how to configure Postfix/S
I only do it to make the point of how silly the current PC trends are. Oh, and I am religous too to boot. Did you know people at NASA aren't supposedly allowed to say the actual words "Merry Christmas"?
I believe Andy Rooney had a nice piece last year on the holidays and how literature referred to things more often as "Happy Holidays" or "Holiday Sale" instead of specifically mentioning Christmas.
Besides as if it isnt bad enough that you've got a show like "The OC" (ugh) doing their Happy CHrismukka deal. Sure sure, melting pot is great, but why not just decide on a holiday and stick to it? I have nothing against other religions or holidays. I just get tired of the commercialization of the holidays and how everything morphs into one mega shopping holiday.
Okay Gentoo people, here is how you make sure you don't screw up your beta curses/GUI installer.
Make sure that you include ALL documentation from the startup guide on the website on your install CD and make it possible to READ the documentation while going through the install. Sort of a read and install as you go kind of option.
For bonus points you could include third-party site content on correct march flags for proper CPU optimization.
I mention the quick install requirement for a worst case scenario where hardware has failed...backup hardware has failed and you've just had to go out and buy new hardware onthe spot to get *something* back up ASAP. I consider it the Murphy's Law reasoning. Assume everything goes to hell and you have to build a server from scratch to fix an outage. Do you want to be waiting for crap to emerge or complile? No, you just want it to install and be quick to configure. Debian meets these requirements nicely. Gentoo is nice to play/learn/tweak on, but aggrivating as all hell for a server environment.
"(I still would not recommend it for the server though.)"
And that is my biggest issue with Gentoo. I have no problem with people being able to customize their distros to their hearts content, but for a server there has to be consistency and it has to install quickly!
I've seen the Gentoo is Rice link. I would say I agree with some parts of their argument.
However, I am sure there will be people who would say "But a Stage 3 install isn't REALLY optimized to the FULLEST extent possible! It's *gasp* suboptimal!"
I love to get the most performance out of my hardware just like most others, however I don't want to do it at the cost of excessive use of my own time spent waiting for things to complie or emerge.
As for your "minor bug". I don't know about you, but if I was in Word and selected "Exit" and my work had not been saved rectly I would be very pissed had the program not at the very least reminded me to save the current open file before exiting. The "minor bug" would also have been fixed right away. This kind of attitude about UI experience and bugs on Linux is the kind of thing that keeps it from taking over the MS desktop. Granted, you could make the excuse that its not an app like Word and its output isn't necessarily losing you X man hours of work to the luminiferious aether, but its still time wasted on the end users part.
Computers were supposed to make us more productive, not waste more of our time.
Now as far as the kernel choices go....I'm not in agreement with you on this point. At the time I last installed Gentoo this page: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-kernel.xml didn't seem to exist in the current state (which helps clear stuff up). But when you are in the install on the system itself you don't have anything more then a very short one line text description that doesnt do much to convey what the hell the differences are.
Which gets me to my main point. If you try to install Gentoo linux with just the User Guide printed out, it can be done, but there will be a lot of questions you can't fully research without a second machine lying around to do various searchs on Google to fully understand the answers to some of Gentoo's questions. For example, according to a page outside of the Gnetoo Users guide my old Pentium III 667 CPU is considered a Klamath PII CPU for Gentoo march compile time flags. This was something I had to bang my head against the wall on for a while until I finally found a third party site that had a list of optimize flags based on specific CPU archs.
It just seemed to me in the end to be a big waste of my time to gain a small percentage of performance. Maybe the process has gotten better since I last tried it but who knows. I use mostly OpenBSD and Debian Sarge now.
When is the Fruit Fucker 2000 going to find love? Will he find it in a field somewhere in a Florida orange farm, or will it be some kind of mechanoid marriage with the Borg? Or perpahps something else entirely different?
Just curious...but isn't something giving a curses interface supposed to be making it EASIER for the end user? If that is the case, then how come accidentially exiting without saving is a common problem?
I'd venture that this is just symptomatic of Gentoo being for geeks and tinkerers and not really being ready to be a serious distro for people to use in a day to day basis.
I like the ideas behind Gentoo, but I do not like the current implementation of them nor how the end user is expected to configure them.
One example that comes to mind is selecting a kernel during Gentoo install. Last time I tried that I had something like 30+ different kernels to choose from and not all of them were very clear on just what the hell the differences were always.
USE flags is another big issue. If the Gentoo docs steers people towards using global USE flags, yet this results in not the smoothest experience for the end users then why hasn't the docs been updated to reflect this new thinking? Additionally because of USE flags you, the end user, now have to become a subject matter expert on what libraries and dependacies all programs you are ever going to complie/install on your system needs? This seems like asking a lot, even from knowledgeable geeks.
If someone could come up with reasonable way to talor USE flags without having to become a SME on library deps in all programs then that would be a boon to Gentoo.
But I have to say, installing OpenBSD takes usually less then 15 minutes and afterwards, installing packages from the ports works rather well. Why can't Gentoo mimic that kind of success?
Its closer to $75 USD but its been a awesome laptop backpack and it doesnt stick out like a sore thumb target for thieves. I have a 12" AlBook in my STM Sports backpack in its laptop pouch and its worked great. You could fit a regualr sized laptop in the pouch as well.
http://www.standardtm.com.au/backpacks_sports.cf m
http://www.laptoptravel.com/Product.aspx?ID=2025
The pack also has straps for hiking and whatnot. Its been a pretty good backpack for the last 2 years. Check it out.
I think it's obvious people have wanted a small nearly full-functioned computer in this kind of form factor. It reminds me of the Psion 5 series, just smaller and updated for current tech. I mean, I would rather have something like this then have a PDA because then I would have access to a much larger library of software to run on it. But thats just me, I don't claim to be everyone.
You obviously haven't held an OQO in your hand and used it. I have.
Yes the screen is small, but its got a better resolution then any PDA screen I have seen. The screen is transflective too and works well in sunlight. More then I can say for a LOT of the PDAs out there.
Underpowered CPU compared to what? Your O/C'ed desktop? Yeah, that would work really well for a PORTABLE device. Have fun carrying around your backpack full of lead-acid batteries to power your device.
20GB is too small only if you intend on loading it up with your entire MP3 collection. However 20GB is just fine for putting on a copy of Office, your entire Outlook PST and other apps and some e-books and some music. You're not going to play games on this so thats not something to worry about either.
As for the battery life, I'd like to see a lighteight notebook that fits in your pants pocket and has all the features of this device.
A tablet PC is not a complementary device. Its a freaking laptop. It does everything a regular laptop does and then a bit more. More people are buying laptops as their only computer today then they ever have been. While yes you could argue that a laptop doesnt provide the full performance experience of a desktop the percentage of that experience you get with laptops today is enough that most average users are more then happy with the laptop and could care less about owning a desktop.
As far as your comments to pricing goes, seriously do you have any idea how expensive it is to make a laptop? Yes there are some components that are modular and inexpensive to get but most things that go into a laptop cost much more because of their reduced size or their low power focus, or worse are custom desgined just for that laptop. The smaller you make something the more customized any piece of hardware going into it must be and therefore more expensive it will be.
When I ran into Jory Bell earlier this year at CES he said that some folks had Linux running on their OQO's. The screen and keyboard on that device is really what makes the magic happen in my opinion as they make for good input devices in that small a constranied area.
Ricochet modems could connect from the Golden Gate bridge to the wired APs across the bay at UC Berkley at a better data rate then this modem, and that was just using the "rambo" +5dB gain antenna. The 2nd gen ricochets also could do 128-bit RC4 encryption with little loss of effective transmitted data rate.
And why oh why is Slashdot now the website of PR champions everywhere? It seems like every 3rd submission is a damn advertisement now. WTF? I want moderation for story submissions, seriously. Like RIGHT NOW.
A phone like the Treo 600 I think was considered an exception? I'm not as familiar anymore since I dumped Sprint like a bad habit and went over to T-Mobile. I couldn't stand waiting for that god damnned T608 bluetooth phone and jumped ship. Later on I find out the T608 has all kinds of fucked up problems and Sprint dicked with data plans for the users of that phone so I am so happy I am now with a provider that has an option I want and doesn't treat me like ass. I just wish T-Mobiles coverage was a little bit better but its the features I needed more then the absolute blanket coverage, plus I can use my phone in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure Bit Boys Oy! will incorporate this technology into their upcoming videocard design to come out Real Soon Now, now with Bleeding Edge Vaporware Technology (tm).
We're eeeeeeevil.
But we are incompetent, so we want the rights to everything said by the mass hordes of 12 year old teenageers along with all the grown men pretending to be 12 year olds, oh and all the law enforcement officers pretending to be 12 year olds also.
You see, here at AOL we have this great plan for generating new compelling content for our subscribers. How does it work you might ask? Well, have you ever heard the story about how an infinite number of monkeys could produce the works of Shakespear given an infinte amount of time? Apply that to our stable of 12 year olds IMing and *BAM*, pure gold baby!
Less Slashdot readers getting laid....let alone knowing what a woman looks like in the flesh.
What on Earth does Rimmer's Bronze Swimming Certificate have to do with job opportunities you smegging gimboid novelty condom?
I've yet to see a single piece of WiMAX gear materilaize anywhere. I'll be surprised if any of it is out by years end. WiMAX is geared towards long distance, static location hauls. You might be able to make it work as a mesh network but you would be better served by a dense mesh network so you have redundancy and multiple antennas you can recieve and send to to help with radio contention.
Somebody call the WHAAAAmbulance for crybaby China, stat!
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
* 2005-02-24 11:37:48 LokiTorrent MPAA Lawsuit a Scam? (Index,The Almighty Buck) (rejected)
Anyways, I find the scam/hoax to be interesting. However why did it take this long for people to catch on to the possiblity?
Yeah I dont know of any extended beta that took on a life of its own *cough*Slashdot*cough*.
It's something I am working on, but I can't post it until I've got all the kinks worked out.
Sysadmins need to setup their mail servers more carefully. This I grant you is true.
/var/mail/spool instead of Maildir format style in user homedirs along with some permissions errors and whatnot and I finally gave up on DSPAM and just resigned to using the rest of the tools while trying to figure out DSPAM on a test domain that doesnt carry important email for me so I dont get an ulcer while trying to make the whole solution work.
However, this doesn't get to the core reason of misconfigured email servers.
It's TOO FUCKING HARD TO CONFIGURE SECURELY.
What do I mean when I say this? Easy.
You have your own Linux box lets say. You get yourself a domain name and host it in a colo somewhere. Now you want to run an MTA. Sendmail? Postfix? Exim? Qmail? Something else? Are you going to use the precompiled version that came with your Mandrake install? Maybe you want to compile your own MTA because the prepackaged options don't fit what you are trying to do.
For example, I have an OpenBSD 3.6 box I run. I run a few small domains on it of which one has actual email accounts on it. I wanted to run a MTA on the box that was secure and would combat spam and viruses for me and the few other users. I've run other Linux and BSD boxen before and know what I am doing fairly well I think.
However, getting Postfix 2.1 installed along with Amavisd+ClamAV and DSPAM turned out to be too much for me to bite off in one fell swoop. There were some websites dedicated to configurations *similar* to what I wanted to do, but nary a one was *exactly* what I was looking for, forcing my to try and synthesize multiple howtos and other docs into something that would work for what I was trying to do.
Oh and on top of all of that I wanted TLS authentication along with SMTP AUTH and SSL encrypted POP3/IMAP services.
Setting all of that stuff up is a fucking garanteed trip to your medicine cabinet for some Excedrin to work out the kinks.
SASL2 is a fucking joke. It is poorly documented and quite frankly, needs to be rolled into the damn MTA provided doing so would make getting it to WORK *easier*. You end up having to troubleshoot problems between components of your MTA and filters that it gets so complex it will make you want to just throw your hands up into the air and say "FUCK IT" and just run the MTA without any of the fancy shit. Getting TLS installed was easy by comparison....getting a SSL secured POP3/IMAP was a bit harder due to having to dick around with OpenSSL and creating self-signed certificates for the services to use.
Then you had Amavis and ClamAV...which amazingly enough were easy to setup and use I thought compared to the rest of the stuff I was trying to accomplish.
Then came getting Amavis to feed into DSPAM (and no, not through Amavisd-new's own DSPAM mechanism, you loose all the flexibility of DSPAM with that method) which partially worked and then stuff started to really fall apart and fail for reasons that I couldnt troubleshoot properly due to not having a full understanding of how DSPAM is working (I had previously been using SA but I wanted to get away from Perl as much as possible as well as try to learn DSPAM). Throw in problems with delivery because Procmail seemed to be hardcoded to deliver to
If its that hard for someone who generally knows what they are doing and WANTS to be secure and safe and spam free imagine how it is for the less knowledgeable people when they start to readup on how to do some of this stuff. It's going to sound like they are being asked to learn quantum physics just so they don't have to hear about Cilais and Viagra and Hot Teen Sluts anymore and they will just decide to live with the problem because its too hard to learn how to configure all this crap correctly AND securely because there is hardly any good single repository of known good spamfighting configs for the different MTAs.
If there is a site out there that acts as a repository of all the "Here is how to configure Postfix/S
the old man is hurling four-football-field-long rocks at us!
I only do it to make the point of how silly the current PC trends are. Oh, and I am religous too to boot. Did you know people at NASA aren't supposedly allowed to say the actual words "Merry Christmas"?
:)
I believe Andy Rooney had a nice piece last year on the holidays and how literature referred to things more often as "Happy Holidays" or "Holiday Sale" instead of specifically mentioning Christmas.
Christmas Christmas Christmas Christmas Christmas!
Take that PC patrol!
Besides as if it isnt bad enough that you've got a show like "The OC" (ugh) doing their Happy CHrismukka deal. Sure sure, melting pot is great, but why not just decide on a holiday and stick to it? I have nothing against other religions or holidays. I just get tired of the commercialization of the holidays and how everything morphs into one mega shopping holiday.
Now he has his own server slashdotted just before [Insert Religous Denomination Holiday Here]. Yup, he sure is the space geek who has EVERYTHING now!
Take that those doing with less!
Okay Gentoo people, here is how you make sure you don't screw up your beta curses/GUI installer.
Make sure that you include ALL documentation from the startup guide on the website on your install CD and make it possible to READ the documentation while going through the install. Sort of a read and install as you go kind of option.
For bonus points you could include third-party site content on correct march flags for proper CPU optimization.
I mention the quick install requirement for a worst case scenario where hardware has failed...backup hardware has failed and you've just had to go out and buy new hardware onthe spot to get *something* back up ASAP. I consider it the Murphy's Law reasoning. Assume everything goes to hell and you have to build a server from scratch to fix an outage. Do you want to be waiting for crap to emerge or complile? No, you just want it to install and be quick to configure. Debian meets these requirements nicely. Gentoo is nice to play/learn/tweak on, but aggrivating as all hell for a server environment.
"(I still would not recommend it for the server though.)"
And that is my biggest issue with Gentoo. I have no problem with people being able to customize their distros to their hearts content, but for a server there has to be consistency and it has to install quickly!
I've seen the Gentoo is Rice link. I would say I agree with some parts of their argument.
However, I am sure there will be people who would say "But a Stage 3 install isn't REALLY optimized to the FULLEST extent possible! It's *gasp* suboptimal!"
I love to get the most performance out of my hardware just like most others, however I don't want to do it at the cost of excessive use of my own time spent waiting for things to complie or emerge.
As for your "minor bug". I don't know about you, but if I was in Word and selected "Exit" and my work had not been saved rectly I would be very pissed had the program not at the very least reminded me to save the current open file before exiting. The "minor bug" would also have been fixed right away. This kind of attitude about UI experience and bugs on Linux is the kind of thing that keeps it from taking over the MS desktop. Granted, you could make the excuse that its not an app like Word and its output isn't necessarily losing you X man hours of work to the luminiferious aether, but its still time wasted on the end users part.
Computers were supposed to make us more productive, not waste more of our time.
Now as far as the kernel choices go....I'm not in agreement with you on this point. At the time I last installed Gentoo this page: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-kernel.xml didn't seem to exist in the current state (which helps clear stuff up). But when you are in the install on the system itself you don't have anything more then a very short one line text description that doesnt do much to convey what the hell the differences are.
Which gets me to my main point. If you try to install Gentoo linux with just the User Guide printed out, it can be done, but there will be a lot of questions you can't fully research without a second machine lying around to do various searchs on Google to fully understand the answers to some of Gentoo's questions. For example, according to a page outside of the Gnetoo Users guide my old Pentium III 667 CPU is considered a Klamath PII CPU for Gentoo march compile time flags. This was something I had to bang my head against the wall on for a while until I finally found a third party site that had a list of optimize flags based on specific CPU archs.
It just seemed to me in the end to be a big waste of my time to gain a small percentage of performance. Maybe the process has gotten better since I last tried it but who knows. I use mostly OpenBSD and Debian Sarge now.
When is the Fruit Fucker 2000 going to find love? Will he find it in a field somewhere in a Florida orange farm, or will it be some kind of mechanoid marriage with the Borg? Or perpahps something else entirely different?
Just curious...but isn't something giving a curses interface supposed to be making it EASIER for the end user? If that is the case, then how come accidentially exiting without saving is a common problem?
I'd venture that this is just symptomatic of Gentoo being for geeks and tinkerers and not really being ready to be a serious distro for people to use in a day to day basis.
I like the ideas behind Gentoo, but I do not like the current implementation of them nor how the end user is expected to configure them.
One example that comes to mind is selecting a kernel during Gentoo install. Last time I tried that I had something like 30+ different kernels to choose from and not all of them were very clear on just what the hell the differences were always.
USE flags is another big issue. If the Gentoo docs steers people towards using global USE flags, yet this results in not the smoothest experience for the end users then why hasn't the docs been updated to reflect this new thinking? Additionally because of USE flags you, the end user, now have to become a subject matter expert on what libraries and dependacies all programs you are ever going to complie/install on your system needs? This seems like asking a lot, even from knowledgeable geeks.
If someone could come up with reasonable way to talor USE flags without having to become a SME on library deps in all programs then that would be a boon to Gentoo.
But I have to say, installing OpenBSD takes usually less then 15 minutes and afterwards, installing packages from the ports works rather well. Why can't Gentoo mimic that kind of success?
Fess up. You are obviously Jon Katz. I can sense it. You're just trying to hide from us by not tying Ricers with Columbine somehow!
Its closer to $75 USD but its been a awesome laptop backpack and it doesnt stick out like a sore thumb target for thieves. I have a 12" AlBook in my STM Sports backpack in its laptop pouch and its worked great. You could fit a regualr sized laptop in the pouch as well.
f m
5
http://www.standardtm.com.au/backpacks_sports.c
http://www.laptoptravel.com/Product.aspx?ID=202
The pack also has straps for hiking and whatnot. Its been a pretty good backpack for the last 2 years. Check it out.
I think it's obvious people have wanted a small nearly full-functioned computer in this kind of form factor. It reminds me of the Psion 5 series, just smaller and updated for current tech. I mean, I would rather have something like this then have a PDA because then I would have access to a much larger library of software to run on it. But thats just me, I don't claim to be everyone.
You obviously haven't held an OQO in your hand and used it. I have.
Yes the screen is small, but its got a better resolution then any PDA screen I have seen. The screen is transflective too and works well in sunlight. More then I can say for a LOT of the PDAs out there.
Underpowered CPU compared to what? Your O/C'ed desktop? Yeah, that would work really well for a PORTABLE device. Have fun carrying around your backpack full of lead-acid batteries to power your device.
20GB is too small only if you intend on loading it up with your entire MP3 collection. However 20GB is just fine for putting on a copy of Office, your entire Outlook PST and other apps and some e-books and some music. You're not going to play games on this so thats not something to worry about either.
As for the battery life, I'd like to see a lighteight notebook that fits in your pants pocket and has all the features of this device.
A tablet PC is not a complementary device. Its a freaking laptop. It does everything a regular laptop does and then a bit more. More people are buying laptops as their only computer today then they ever have been. While yes you could argue that a laptop doesnt provide the full performance experience of a desktop the percentage of that experience you get with laptops today is enough that most average users are more then happy with the laptop and could care less about owning a desktop.
As far as your comments to pricing goes, seriously do you have any idea how expensive it is to make a laptop? Yes there are some components that are modular and inexpensive to get but most things that go into a laptop cost much more because of their reduced size or their low power focus, or worse are custom desgined just for that laptop. The smaller you make something the more customized any piece of hardware going into it must be and therefore more expensive it will be.
When I ran into Jory Bell earlier this year at CES he said that some folks had Linux running on their OQO's. The screen and keyboard on that device is really what makes the magic happen in my opinion as they make for good input devices in that small a constranied area.
Give me a break!
Ricochet modems could connect from the Golden Gate bridge to the wired APs across the bay at UC Berkley at a better data rate then this modem, and that was just using the "rambo" +5dB gain antenna. The 2nd gen ricochets also could do 128-bit RC4 encryption with little loss of effective transmitted data rate.
And why oh why is Slashdot now the website of PR champions everywhere? It seems like every 3rd submission is a damn advertisement now. WTF? I want moderation for story submissions, seriously. Like RIGHT NOW.
A phone like the Treo 600 I think was considered an exception? I'm not as familiar anymore since I dumped Sprint like a bad habit and went over to T-Mobile. I couldn't stand waiting for that god damnned T608 bluetooth phone and jumped ship. Later on I find out the T608 has all kinds of fucked up problems and Sprint dicked with data plans for the users of that phone so I am so happy I am now with a provider that has an option I want and doesn't treat me like ass. I just wish T-Mobiles coverage was a little bit better but its the features I needed more then the absolute blanket coverage, plus I can use my phone in Europe.