Hello, you are jumping down on them for following a spec?
Not at all - it's great to follow the spec, but the fact is that MIDP1.0 on its own is unsuitable for games use (no transparency, no sound etc) and so savvy vendors have ADDED classes which can be used if required. This is not a bad thing - games are usually designed for a subset of phones anyway, due to differences with memory, processor speed and display type and size. It's impossible to design anything other than a simple game that will work and look good on ANY j2me phone, unless you just design for the worst case which is insulting to the people who have splashed out on a nice big colour screen.
Siemens were the only manufacturer who departed from the standard by altering the way certain methods worked in the Image class, but they've fixed this and their game API is very very close to the spec for MIDP2.0, which can only be a good thing.
Phones and games have a much shorter lifespan than websites - so it makes sense to design to a phone than design for technology over a year old when virtually all the meatspace implementations offer more.
I've been keeping an eye on the Ericsson developers site for a while now, being a j2me developer and to be honest I'm a bit disappointed with this new phone. I'm sure it's great technically, but Ericsson are doing the bare minimum to support java developers. Their "emulator" for the P800 was simply a skin for the reference emulators in Sun's Wireless Toolkit, and since their documentation is little more than sales pitch (that I've found at least) it appears they have no extended APIs to take advantage of sound or other phone specific features.
So what this means is that people buying this, hoping to be able to download whizz-bang games are going to be a bit disappointed. There's no way of knowing whether it even supports image transparency for christ's sake. If you're interested in Java apps, then Nokia or Siemens are the way to go as both have pretty good APIs and very good documentation (Sprint java phones apparently have their own classes for sound too).
As one concrete example, right this minute there's a network provider who was just assigned most of the 69.0.0.0/8 IP address space. Unfortunately, this was formerly a spam and DOS (denial-of-service) cesspool so many sites out there just block the whole 69.* address space.
So the new owners are making appeals to firewall managers asking them to please remove their blocks in the 69.* space on the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) list.
So what? An ISP has bought a netblock that they obviously knew was blocked by virtually everybody (or at least they should have), and now they're having to plead with everyone to unblock them. Call me cynical if you like, but I'm guessing they were fully aware of the problems, and this was a major factor in negatiating the price to buy this particular net block. It's like a real-estate firm paying bottom dollar for some slum neighbourhood, since they expect it to turn a tidy profit once they've cleaned it up.
So it looks a lot like XP, but dumbed down a bit more. I thought XP was the "Fischer Price toy" of OS', but this looks positively insulting to anyone with 2 braincells to run together. I couldn't access all the pages, and doubt it would mention, but I'm betting there's going to be the mother of all EULAs for this thing.
As far as I'm aware you can't recover the root password in any reasonable timespan (unless it's badly chosen, or you have a few Earth Simulators handy). You can however change it in a couple of minutes if you have physical access to the machine (reboot to single user, mount fs, passwd). Hardly stealthy though...
An open relay is different than the formmail.cgi vulnerability. Ok, so they can result in the same thing, but when people talk about open relays they usually mean production SMTP servers which accept mail from anywhere, instead of verifying the source domain first.
Well this isn't my interpretation. An open relay is an SMTP server that both accepts mail from anywhere (as many SMTP servers will for legitimate reasons) but also RELAYs in on to anywhere else. And SMTP server should only ever relay for trusted machines on a network, or (in the case of ISPs) from machines that can be identified, booted and the culprit possibly brought to court if they decide to spam.
reveals that spam has little to do with the issue. In fact, he provides two reasons why anti-spam tools cause more unnecessary queries to the root servers than spam emails...
So Spam has little to do with extra traffic, but the wealth of tools fighting against spam are adding to the load, right? But then since spam is the reason anti-spam tools exist, it's fair to say spam is the root cause of the problem!
... the Mozilla developers added a special "Slashdotted" plugin you know. So you could launch a special tab that would keep hammering away at a site in the background until it did bloodywell load;-)
Actually since MS are the kings of the "buffer overflow", why not set up some absolutely enormous key/value pairs in the registry and see if the server at the other end falls over?;-) In fact, you could just write a script/program to connect to the update server and throw crap at it for a laugh...
but betraying a lack of understanding of modern web development techniques such as the use of XHTML/CSS in place of kludgy tables and the like...
I always find it funny when someone says that. There's nothing wrong with using tables - they are in fact the ideal, and obvious choice to set out tabular data, or to split a page up into rows and columns. Why the hell do web "experts" spend so much time working on ugly hacks to emulate tables in Netscape 4+/IE4+/Opera 4+ etc? I'm guessing it's to prove some sort of point since it's certainly not for reasons of efficiency or portability.
While there are still browsers out there that don't actually work with these hacks (NS4 is notorious) then why not use the technology that is proven to work? Using a technology for the sake of using a technology is ridiculous...
I'm sure that is/. changed over to using nothing but stylesheets there would be a tonne of complaints - the current layout works - why criticise?
At this point, there really isn't an excuse for Lemmings to NOT find what they need through pointing and clicking for it.
Well that's not quite true, is it? I mean, sure for the majority of hardware and software you can just use the GUI tools (depending upon the distro), but try to plug in a PCI ADSL card, or wireless LAN adapter and see how far the mouse will take you. I rarely use the GUI under linux - usually SSHing to headless boxes from a windows machine, and getting these two working on a server was no walk in the park. I seriously doubt any newbie would have the patience or knowhow to take it on...
There currently seems no real effort from governments to cure the disease of spam. In my opinion the only way to solve the problem is to make it too expensive for these scumbags to operate - as soon as they start losing money they will crawl off to start a new scam. Bandwidth costs money, so why not organise large numbers of people to "visit" the sites advertised in this way? If a site spends money to spam, then has to pay for a few hundred gigs of bandwidth a day with virtually no sales, I'm thinking they might* get the message their racket won't work out. What say you?
Not sure how anyone would think it pretty neat - I had to use one of the 320's for a year and a half and I'm not surprised they died a horrible death. It was a strange mixture of PC and non-PC components which made it not quite an SGi and not quite a PC (even the USB slots were non-standard)! So basically it was impossible to upgrade without spending sh*tloads of cash (even the RAM was some ridiculous price to upgrade from 128M to 256M with their wierd SIMMS - and after that upgrade it was impossible to upgrade any more unless you threw out the extra 128M as all 12 slots were used!!).
No, I think it's best to leave the OS' on the disk, and only the code that's motherboard specific on the motherboard - it just doesn't make sense to mix the two in a PC.
Personally, I'd like mine to boot up like that one out of the film "Alien", complete with flickery graphics and blipping as it writes to the display. I always thought that looked cool. I certainly don't need reminding who built the motherboard in 16 million colours every time I start up.
And another thing - what's to stop MS "embracing" a few MB makers and converting the boards to boot only one OS - say, for example, Windows? It would be trivial to add proprietary code to this, which prevented anything else booting - obviously then anyone adding the required code to boot, say, anything else would be violating our favourite law...
Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk, it can become the standard home for a whole set of utilities that have always had an awkward fit with the BIOS: things like disk partitioners, multiple OS boot controllers...
I'm guessing Microsoft is already adding code to windows to wipe out that last part from machines, as it might "confuse people"...
Honestly, this sounds very much like they're replacing the BIOS with something that works very much like a BIOS, but prettier...
Yeah, the different interpritations can be amusing... I've always wondered what the Americans thought of the first line of that Robbie Williams track "My breath smells of 1,000 fags"? Maybe that's what doomed his attempts to make it big in the US???
Admittedly this could be rather a processor-strain...
Yes, I'm thinking that since my home dir has over 30GB of data for a single user, it could take a little time to decrypt all that...
Maybe the filesystem could have an extra bit which, if set, would cause the file to be saved encrypted, and would only decrypt against the owner's password. So the owner would have transparent access (aside from a slight pause on large files as they decrypt/encrypt) while anyone else -even root - would have no access. Hey, you'd no longer even need directory access restrictions;-)
I can see them spending a lot of time in court issuing statements like that. Since the worm cost [insert random() x billion] dollars in lost business according to the press litigation seems inevitable.
It's more likely that their customers, since they must have some interest in security, had already installed firewalls and not left SQL server open to the entire internet though...
I'd buy a Motorola phone if I could get my hands on all the source and java classfiles (the decompiler is your fried, together with the global search-and-replace - think unobfuscation). However, I don't expect I'll get the source for the more nifty features of the phones....
Well if you go to Motorola's development site, you can get your hands on the SDK to develop Java apps to run on the phone just fine! I do (along with the Nokia, Sprint and Siemens toolkits for Java). In actual fact, most of the Motorola phones currently only support MIDP1.0, so you could just develop using the basic Sun toolkit.
If you want to develop Java I'd really suggest Nokia or Siemens though - as they have the best API extensions for accessing the phone-specific features (sound, vibration, media playback, extended image methods etc) - AND they are listening to developers! As mentioned, Nokia now have a dev environment for Linux, and Siemens have fixed the changes they made to the MIDP spec that caused so many problems (eg, the bug that caused images to re-scale if loaded using the standard API, but not if you used the Siemens-only extension).
Now if the UK gov't switched to Linux like other gov't of the world.. *drool*...
Yeah, that's going to happen anytime soon. Face it, we've got the staunchest fully paid up supporters of MS "running" our country. Blair and co do anything they can to ingraciate themselves with the US, and giving up MS software would surely cause problems. It's a little like the mafia really, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Hello, you are jumping down on them for following a spec?
Not at all - it's great to follow the spec, but the fact is that MIDP1.0 on its own is unsuitable for games use (no transparency, no sound etc) and so savvy vendors have ADDED classes which can be used if required. This is not a bad thing - games are usually designed for a subset of phones anyway, due to differences with memory, processor speed and display type and size. It's impossible to design anything other than a simple game that will work and look good on ANY j2me phone, unless you just design for the worst case which is insulting to the people who have splashed out on a nice big colour screen.
Siemens were the only manufacturer who departed from the standard by altering the way certain methods worked in the Image class, but they've fixed this and their game API is very very close to the spec for MIDP2.0, which can only be a good thing.
Phones and games have a much shorter lifespan than websites - so it makes sense to design to a phone than design for technology over a year old when virtually all the meatspace implementations offer more.
I've been keeping an eye on the Ericsson developers site for a while now, being a j2me developer and to be honest I'm a bit disappointed with this new phone. I'm sure it's great technically, but Ericsson are doing the bare minimum to support java developers. Their "emulator" for the P800 was simply a skin for the reference emulators in Sun's Wireless Toolkit, and since their documentation is little more than sales pitch (that I've found at least) it appears they have no extended APIs to take advantage of sound or other phone specific features.
So what this means is that people buying this, hoping to be able to download whizz-bang games are going to be a bit disappointed. There's no way of knowing whether it even supports image transparency for christ's sake. If you're interested in Java apps, then Nokia or Siemens are the way to go as both have pretty good APIs and very good documentation (Sprint java phones apparently have their own classes for sound too).
As one concrete example, right this minute there's a network provider who was just assigned most of the 69.0.0.0/8 IP address space. Unfortunately, this was formerly a spam and DOS (denial-of-service) cesspool so many sites out there just block the whole 69.* address space.
So the new owners are making appeals to firewall managers asking them to please remove their blocks in the 69.* space on the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) list.
So what? An ISP has bought a netblock that they obviously knew was blocked by virtually everybody (or at least they should have), and now they're having to plead with everyone to unblock them. Call me cynical if you like, but I'm guessing they were fully aware of the problems, and this was a major factor in negatiating the price to buy this particular net block. It's like a real-estate firm paying bottom dollar for some slum neighbourhood, since they expect it to turn a tidy profit once they've cleaned it up.
I'm suspicious of this story for 2 reasons:
1) How could anyone STUPID enough to buy this scam actually have acrued so much money to start with?
2) How could they work a computer with webbed fingers and plankton in place of their brains?
Oh yeah... 3) Profit!
So it looks a lot like XP, but dumbed down a bit more. I thought XP was the "Fischer Price toy" of OS', but this looks positively insulting to anyone with 2 braincells to run together. I couldn't access all the pages, and doubt it would mention, but I'm betting there's going to be the mother of all EULAs for this thing.
As far as I'm aware you can't recover the root password in any reasonable timespan (unless it's badly chosen, or you have a few Earth Simulators handy). You can however change it in a couple of minutes if you have physical access to the machine (reboot to single user, mount fs, passwd). Hardly stealthy though...
An open relay is different than the formmail.cgi vulnerability. Ok, so they can result in the same thing, but when people talk about open relays they usually mean production SMTP servers which accept mail from anywhere, instead of verifying the source domain first.
Well this isn't my interpretation. An open relay is an SMTP server that both accepts mail from anywhere (as many SMTP servers will for legitimate reasons) but also RELAYs in on to anywhere else. And SMTP server should only ever relay for trusted machines on a network, or (in the case of ISPs) from machines that can be identified, booted and the culprit possibly brought to court if they decide to spam.
This sounds interesting but what's a root server query?
Oh, I know thing one... erm, "a gay guy that works in a vegetable shop?"... um... never mind...
reveals that spam has little to do with the issue. In fact, he provides two reasons why anti-spam tools cause more unnecessary queries to the root servers than spam emails...
So Spam has little to do with extra traffic, but the wealth of tools fighting against spam are adding to the load, right? But then since spam is the reason anti-spam tools exist, it's fair to say spam is the root cause of the problem!
... the Mozilla developers added a special "Slashdotted" plugin you know. So you could launch a special tab that would keep hammering away at a site in the background until it did bloodywell load ;-)
Actually since MS are the kings of the "buffer overflow", why not set up some absolutely enormous key/value pairs in the registry and see if the server at the other end falls over? ;-) In fact, you could just write a script/program to connect to the update server and throw crap at it for a laugh...
but betraying a lack of understanding of modern web development techniques such as the use of XHTML/CSS in place of kludgy tables and the like...
/. changed over to using nothing but stylesheets there would be a tonne of complaints - the current layout works - why criticise?
I always find it funny when someone says that. There's nothing wrong with using tables - they are in fact the ideal, and obvious choice to set out tabular data, or to split a page up into rows and columns. Why the hell do web "experts" spend so much time working on ugly hacks to emulate tables in Netscape 4+/IE4+/Opera 4+ etc? I'm guessing it's to prove some sort of point since it's certainly not for reasons of efficiency or portability.
While there are still browsers out there that don't actually work with these hacks (NS4 is notorious) then why not use the technology that is proven to work? Using a technology for the sake of using a technology is ridiculous...
I'm sure that is
At this point, there really isn't an excuse for Lemmings to NOT find what they need through pointing and clicking for it.
Well that's not quite true, is it? I mean, sure for the majority of hardware and software you can just use the GUI tools (depending upon the distro), but try to plug in a PCI ADSL card, or wireless LAN adapter and see how far the mouse will take you. I rarely use the GUI under linux - usually SSHing to headless boxes from a windows machine, and getting these two working on a server was no walk in the park. I seriously doubt any newbie would have the patience or knowhow to take it on...
There currently seems no real effort from governments to cure the disease of spam. In my opinion the only way to solve the problem is to make it too expensive for these scumbags to operate - as soon as they start losing money they will crawl off to start a new scam. Bandwidth costs money, so why not organise large numbers of people to "visit" the sites advertised in this way? If a site spends money to spam, then has to pay for a few hundred gigs of bandwidth a day with virtually no sales, I'm thinking they might* get the message their racket won't work out. What say you?
*spammers are stupid.
So if you are in Japan and you are as nerdy as me, email me and I will give you her contact address.
For the majority of people here, this would be the first female entry in their email client's contact list!
Man is she in for a bad time!
Not sure how anyone would think it pretty neat - I had to use one of the 320's for a year and a half and I'm not surprised they died a horrible death. It was a strange mixture of PC and non-PC components which made it not quite an SGi and not quite a PC (even the USB slots were non-standard)! So basically it was impossible to upgrade without spending sh*tloads of cash (even the RAM was some ridiculous price to upgrade from 128M to 256M with their wierd SIMMS - and after that upgrade it was impossible to upgrade any more unless you threw out the extra 128M as all 12 slots were used!!).
No, I think it's best to leave the OS' on the disk, and only the code that's motherboard specific on the motherboard - it just doesn't make sense to mix the two in a PC.
Personally, I'd like mine to boot up like that one out of the film "Alien", complete with flickery graphics and blipping as it writes to the display. I always thought that looked cool. I certainly don't need reminding who built the motherboard in 16 million colours every time I start up.
And another thing - what's to stop MS "embracing" a few MB makers and converting the boards to boot only one OS - say, for example, Windows? It would be trivial to add proprietary code to this, which prevented anything else booting - obviously then anyone adding the required code to boot, say, anything else would be violating our favourite law...
Because EFI has its own filing system that lives on a reserved part of the hard disk, it can become the standard home for a whole set of utilities that have always had an awkward fit with the BIOS: things like disk partitioners, multiple OS boot controllers...
I'm guessing Microsoft is already adding code to windows to wipe out that last part from machines, as it might "confuse people"...
Honestly, this sounds very much like they're replacing the BIOS with something that works very much like a BIOS, but prettier...
Yeah, the different interpritations can be amusing... I've always wondered what the Americans thought of the first line of that Robbie Williams track "My breath smells of 1,000 fags"? Maybe that's what doomed his attempts to make it big in the US???
Admittedly this could be rather a processor-strain...
;-)
Yes, I'm thinking that since my home dir has over 30GB of data for a single user, it could take a little time to decrypt all that...
Maybe the filesystem could have an extra bit which, if set, would cause the file to be saved encrypted, and would only decrypt against the owner's password. So the owner would have transparent access (aside from a slight pause on large files as they decrypt/encrypt) while anyone else -even root - would have no access. Hey, you'd no longer even need directory access restrictions
I can see them spending a lot of time in court issuing statements like that. Since the worm cost [insert random() x billion] dollars in lost business according to the press litigation seems inevitable.
It's more likely that their customers, since they must have some interest in security, had already installed firewalls and not left SQL server open to the entire internet though...
"The frozen throne" - what is this then, the quest for the Eskimo's toilet???
I'd buy a Motorola phone if I could get my hands on all the source and java classfiles (the decompiler is your fried, together with the global search-and-replace - think unobfuscation). However, I don't expect I'll get the source for the more nifty features of the phones....
Well if you go to Motorola's development site, you can get your hands on the SDK to develop Java apps to run on the phone just fine! I do (along with the Nokia, Sprint and Siemens toolkits for Java). In actual fact, most of the Motorola phones currently only support MIDP1.0, so you could just develop using the basic Sun toolkit.
If you want to develop Java I'd really suggest Nokia or Siemens though - as they have the best API extensions for accessing the phone-specific features (sound, vibration, media playback, extended image methods etc) - AND they are listening to developers! As mentioned, Nokia now have a dev environment for Linux, and Siemens have fixed the changes they made to the MIDP spec that caused so many problems (eg, the bug that caused images to re-scale if loaded using the standard API, but not if you used the Siemens-only extension).
What was Microsoft done that warrents so much hate?
[...]
Face it folks, we would not be where we are today if not for Microsoft...
You see, you just answered your own question!
Now if the UK gov't switched to Linux like other gov't of the world.. *drool*...
Yeah, that's going to happen anytime soon. Face it, we've got the staunchest fully paid up supporters of MS "running" our country. Blair and co do anything they can to ingraciate themselves with the US, and giving up MS software would surely cause problems. It's a little like the mafia really, isn't it?