MSN search bots definetly are hostile to the internet.
On my server, I had this experimental php script that just prints new lines in a loop forever.
Well, a brilliant bot from MS address space (it didn't identyfy itself as anything else than IE) didn't read the robots.txt (which denies everything) and found its way to the script. When I later started wondering what was jamming my ADSL, I realized that the bot had hammered the script a bit over hundred times, each time timing out after downloading about ten megs...
Pretty much any freeware application that runs on Linux will run on Unixware.
Supposing you can get them compile against the aging unixware libraries. Oh yes, you can get get some OSS stuff as precompiled skunkware stuff, but often the chosen compilation options stink, so you end up compiling yourself anyway.
Unixware also has thousands of commercial applications that will run on it. Linux might beat it someday, but not today.
Welcome to 2003. The commercial software we used dropped openserver and unixware support some time ago and suggested customers to upgrade to Linux/Win32.
OK, A great commercial software example: How does one run oracle 9i on unixware? With Linux kernel personality.
Sounds pretty dead when you have to emulate another OS to run the latest version of the most popular commercial database.
Unethical? Hardly. The SCO company officers have a responsibility to the SCO shareholders to protect the company's intellectual property and attempt to make a profit
Distributing FUD is considered unethical. Bring us some evidence, please. If the OSI paper is biased, the SCO lawsuit includes LIES.
âoeThe primary purpose of the GNU organization is to create free software based on valuable commercial software.â
If that and similar claims unethical and immoral, I don't know what is.
SCO has been eyballing the Linux source for years by improving and distributing Linux as well as by adding Linux compatability to Unixware. And now we are soppused to believe that they didn't notice before?
> o [Bluetooth] Use very short disconnect timeout for SCO connections. > o [Bluetooth] Kill incoming SCO connection when SCO socket is closed. > o [Bluetooth] Support for SCO (voice) over HCI USB
You are smoking crack. Just look that the wGate/homerun pricing: EXPENSIVE page 5, wgate. 6.73e PER CONNECTION and in "public service area" 0.33e per MINUTE?! Comparing the free wife.ee services provided for user convinience at cafes and airports to the GREEDY Finnish business operators is just ludicrous. Oh, and ofcourse, wgate/homerun is not availbel for sonsumers, only for business users.
Flat rate GPRS? not anymore, dna is capped at 100Mb/month.
Finland is dropping from the pace of tech, looks like we will get 3G only after the rest of world has got it.
And I think that is somewhat arrogant to call Estonia little brother of Finland. Our president and foreign minister kept embarassingly their mouth shut when Estionia was struggling to get rid of Russia.
And finally it would make Novell a hero to release the whole UNIX under an opensource license, preferably GPL, since they're contemplating moving to Linux anyway
Cool. so now SCO is claiming that all IMPLEMENTATIONS of Intel Binary Compatibility Spec version 2 are their intellectual property.
Besides icbs2 is obsolete, nobody uses it anymore, it's not even anymore in the kernel. And it was not written by anyone at IBM, so I'd say that the SCO lawsuit is just pure FUD.
They are just rising the bet and hoping that they don't have to show the bluff.
Can't be true, as there is nothing in current sysvinit tools written by IBM.
The sysvinit tools used in current Linux distros are written by Miquel van Smoorenburg. Besides, the first comments in ChangeLog are from 1992 and for Minix.
Maybe SCO should sue themself for leaking "Trade secrets" in their sysvinit man pages from 1992? Reading the changelog makes it pretty obvious that Miguel read the man pages to make his sysvinit clone to match the original in functionality - If he would have stolen the original code, he would not have had to made compatibility fixes.
The SCO lawyers seem to have forgotten, that SCO was considered crap before Linux grew big. They distributed sysv code to universities ages ago and now think that sysv is their trade secret? This lawsuit is purely amusing..
recompiling actually involves a diffrent set of headaches...
Recompiling is actually a bigger problem to propierty programs than to Open Source programs, since anyone can fix a OSS program to work on itanium, while propierty software needs to be fixed by the actual vendor.
GCC hasn't (yet) been well tested with Itanium
This is the biggest problem at the moment, but Intel/HP engineers are free to fix and optimize the ia64 specific stuff on gcc, which they have AFAIK already done. Again, something one could not do with propierty code.
Itanium is 64 bits, whereas i386 is 32 bits. Most "Open Source" software is developed exclusively on i386 linux machines
32bit/64bit big/small-endian problems have been fixed for ages. You can't get a software to debian stable unless it compiles and works on everything from m68k and arm to alpha and itanium.
Everywhere else excpect America GSM has the same frequencies. Besides most new phones can do Both European and American frequencies.
CDMA really comes into its element when you are out in the countryside with few sites covering large expanses of land.
That is, unless the cdma cell is full of users. According to the cdma theory, the cell size shrinks when there is lots of users, why will suck to live on the edge of coverage area...
technologically speaking, it s actually a good decision to favor CDMA.
CDMA is at the moment technically more advanced, but in a developing country it also a drawback, as it is more expensive too. There is a lot more used, cheap GSM handsets available the poor citizens can actually afford.
Also, you have to remember that all the neibourghing countries have GSM networks, and having a incompatible network in one country would severy hinder it's usability.
I know this site is "news for nerds", but better technologity isn't always better for users.
Tune your cars headlights so that the point directly to the oncoming driver's eyes, and you will get fined. AFAIK lighting around airports is regulated too, so that the airport landing lights are more visible to pilots. I think however that the airport case only affects people designing anythin bigger, like lighting highways/stadiums.
However, the leds used in the article propably don't endanger anyones life, and light is not a scarce resource, so hard to believe using leds for data transmission will be regulated:)
Unless ofcourse someone decides it endangers existing profit infrastructures... DMCA wasn't the first law done to protect profit..
No problem: WirelessIRC for nokia 7650 (and 3650?) Symbian programs are out there, today, despise the fact that programming tools and API docs suck. Kudos for the coders!
N-gage isn't just a handheld console, it's a phone and pim tool as well. Thats a good excuse for spending more money into it, but phone operators will sell this thing half-free with a expensive calling plan.
Battery life is a bum, but as N-gage has a li-on recharchable battery instead of AAA alkaline batteries, like lynx had. You don't have to buy a new battery every time you run out of the old ones. Just recharge anytime you are near electricity:) And you can buy a car charger for those overlong car trips.
>unfortunately, there's quite a bit of misinformation in your post.
Unfortunatly your message quit a bit of misinformation too. I guess that a very few people have experience of both european and american mobile networks.
>2.5g in europe requires planting new basestations all over the place...
GPRS (2.5g) doesn't need any new basestations.
--cut long rant of anti-qualcomm--
There is always too sides needed for a fight. It is very true, that qualcomm did some spectacular work when researching cdma. However, qualcomm got greedy, and wanted simply "too much". Instead of creating a common 3G together with other players in the market, qualcomm kept pushing their own version. Other mobile phone makers didn't want to be reduced to qualcomm tech licensees the similar way pc makers are these days just wintel licencees.
Think about it - Is it better have multiple vendors create a standard and then compete with each others creating products based on the standard, or have a single vendor creating their own products others can use as a base for their own products?
If qualcomm would have been more open to co-operation (other mobile market players did want qualcomm to join wcdma development), we would not have this silly situation of two standards in UMTS.
On the other hand, you could say that if all the mobile phone makers would have accepted qualcomm as the microsoft of mobile market, we would have this silly situation...
You can do this J2ME too.. Operator justs blocks all but their (pay-per-play) apps at their wap gateway. most phones can install applications only over WAP, so the only games user will be able to get are the ones operator sells.
But most operators won't do that, if they have learned anything from the WAP fiasco. Nobody used WAP when you had to pay for everything. You had to pay for both traffic and content. Then operators slowly opened their wap gateways and allowed people to access any wap content in the net. As the result, people are starting use WAP, and the operators are starting to get money from the wap traffic.
charging people for using even the simplest games/apps is a great way to make people feel being ripped of.
mplayer plays quicktime( even sorensen ), wma, mpeg4, realaudio, just about everything I've tried.. (Fink support missing) Fullscreen, scaled, whatever you wish. And no annoying startcenters, spyware, "register this", "buy the pro version", DRM or any other shit realplayer/quicktime/ms media player player try to stuff in our throat.
Microsoft invested a lot in sendo, and for the last year or so sendo was the only mobile phone maker planning to launch a microsoft based smartphone, which was planned to be launched this month. All the microsoft smartphone OS marketing was based around the now never to be launched sendo z100. Sendo is saying like "thanks for the money" and choosing an competitor instead. Microsoft is really running out of partners in mobile phone business.
Nokia released six phones today.. Those models where he mentioned where released today. Triband is really not so important, as rather few people travel all the time from and back to states. But for travellers it's nice to have a standards based phone that works in most of the countries in the world.
Nokia and SEGA also announced the N-GAGE device, running symbian and series 60. Looks absolutely stunning.
Still very sketchy with hardware details, except that games are distributed on memory cards. And the only clue that the device is a phone and not just gameboy killer is the dial/hangup buttons!
The other press release also reveals that it has bluetooth, rising some intresting possibilities to use this gadget.
Afaik WCDMA cell can scale from 512 users at 8k/s to 2 users at 2mb/s. Sounds like too little? Well, the cell size for WCDMA is significantly smaller than on gsm, and as the voice calls will be mostly routed through the gsm network, the improvement should be pretty visible. But definetly no warezing channel.
What I'd like to know however, is the roundtrip time over different 3G technoligities. Even GPRS has adequate bandwith for browsing/mail/messaging, but the 1 second roundtrip time with The TCP 3-way handshake really kills the experience.
WCDMA is the non-qualcomm version of 3G, as qualcomm got too greedy with it's CDMA tecnology patents. Yet another case in to the "patent system needs to fixed" bucket. Someone else should write about how much users their CDMA2000 can handle. (The UMTS version, not the 1x version).
3G is just one step that provides extra wireless bandwidth. Next step would be roaming from high-speed WLAN networks to larger coverage 3G networks, and finally to The everywhere covering satellite network. The obstacles are mostly commercial, as everyone want's start billing everyone else for the roaming.
I don't think OSS Windows applications just contribute to the change eventually.
While you learn to use open source applications you will come slowly ready to start using a full open source desktop. And when you move, with wine you can keep using all the propierty applications/games still. So the key is smooth transition.
If there would be a killer app that forced people to move immideatly, It would come as a cultore shock and most people would move back.
Unfortunatly reality isn't that simple. First, the routing problems are a lot different from those in tradiotional ip or gsm networks. Suppose you would have 1000+ wifi node network in your city, how would you find the way hopping from node to node to your friend? Even worse, many of the nodes are moving in cars and busses, and just as you have found a nice route through the network some of the nodes have moved or went down.
I'm not saying routing dynamic mesh network is impossible, it's just very hard, and can easily consume most of the bandwidth available.
Besides, if a hop is aroung 100m, a packet travelling 100km would be a 1000 hops away! A user of mesh network will miss the low latency and reliability of gprs networks with the current technology.
The main problem with mesh networks is that they do not scale very well.
Hopefully, the java FUD of the 1990s is laid to rest, as java HotSpot and native binary compilers have really improved alot since the first-generation slow-ass JVMs.
This attitude wont help java anywhere. Even with hotspot, java is slow, especially the GUI stuff on Linux/Unix. Array handling sucks big time too. Tomcat jsp:s get wiped down with hacks like php. Setting up J2EE is a real pain in ass. Etc, Etc. Never done.net, but I am looking elswhere from the java world. Probably c++/QT.
If java want's to survive, sun needs to make it easier and faster, and show studies PROVING it. The "Pet shop is not a benchmark" cry needs to replaced by "Hey, this version beats.net version in both speed and implementation time".
how exectly are you going to tell your boss with POTS phone and desktop computer, that you just got jammed in a traffic jam and will be late from work?
mobile phone with camera: just take a pic of the jam and send it to your bosses email.
impliying that mobile phones just replace POTS is like 80's thinking. At least here in Finland. And yes, we have a excellent POTS network, people just find mobile phones more usefull.
Don't go netbeans - unless you have too much cpu + memory. Intellij IDEA is the far most kickass java IDE. The 3.0 beta builds are even better, available thru Early access program . On the other hand, it's not free, but well worth the price. For a free java IDE, people praise eclipse.
I used to think that Visual studio.net was the most intuitive and productive IDE around, but I was wrong. The only thing i miss from VS is it's speed - Sun really needs to fix the performance problems with java, especially the gui.
Slashdot Mirror
MSN search bots definetly are hostile to the internet.
On my server, I had this experimental php script that just prints new lines in a loop forever.
Well, a brilliant bot from MS address space (it didn't identyfy itself as anything else than IE) didn't read the robots.txt (which denies everything) and found its way to the script. When I later started wondering what was jamming my ADSL, I realized that the bot had hammered the script a bit over hundred times, each time timing out after downloading about ten megs...
Pretty much any freeware application that runs on Linux will run on Unixware.
Supposing you can get them compile against the aging unixware libraries. Oh yes, you can get get some OSS stuff as precompiled skunkware stuff, but often the chosen compilation options stink, so you end up compiling yourself anyway.
Unixware also has thousands of commercial applications that will run on it. Linux might beat it someday, but not today.
Welcome to 2003. The commercial software we used dropped openserver and unixware support some time ago and suggested customers to upgrade to Linux/Win32.
OK, A great commercial software example: How does one run oracle 9i on unixware? With Linux kernel personality.
Sounds pretty dead when you have to emulate another OS to run the latest version of the most popular commercial database.
Unethical? Hardly. The SCO company officers have a responsibility to the SCO shareholders to protect the company's intellectual property and attempt to make a profit
Distributing FUD is considered unethical. Bring us some evidence, please. If the OSI paper is biased, the SCO lawsuit includes LIES.
âoeThe primary purpose of the GNU organization is to create free software based on valuable commercial software.â
If that and similar claims unethical and immoral, I don't know what is.
SCO has been eyballing the Linux source for years by improving and distributing Linux as well as by adding Linux compatability to Unixware. And now we are soppused to believe that they didn't notice before?
From the Release notes:
> o [Bluetooth] Use very short disconnect timeout for SCO connections.
> o [Bluetooth] Kill incoming SCO connection when SCO socket is closed.
> o [Bluetooth] Support for SCO (voice) over HCI USB
Are these the lines SCO's bitching about?
Nope. SCO in the bluetooth world means Synchronous Connection Oriented link.
Used mostly with bluetooth wireless handsfree devices.
You are smoking crack. Just look that the wGate/homerun pricing: EXPENSIVE page 5, wgate. 6.73e PER CONNECTION and in "public service area" 0.33e per MINUTE?! Comparing the free wife.ee services provided for user convinience at cafes and airports to the GREEDY Finnish business operators is just ludicrous. Oh, and ofcourse, wgate/homerun is not availbel for sonsumers, only for business users.
Flat rate GPRS? not anymore, dna is capped at 100Mb/month.
Finland is dropping from the pace of tech, looks like we will get 3G only after the rest of world has got it.
And I think that is somewhat arrogant to call Estonia little brother of Finland. Our president and foreign minister kept embarassingly their mouth shut when Estionia was struggling to get rid of Russia.
And finally it would make Novell a hero to release the whole UNIX under an opensource license, preferably GPL, since they're contemplating moving to Linux anyway
Happened already: Caldera releases original unices under BSD license
Cool. so now SCO is claiming that all IMPLEMENTATIONS of Intel Binary Compatibility Spec version 2 are their intellectual property.
Besides icbs2 is obsolete, nobody uses it anymore, it's not even anymore in the kernel. And it was not written by anyone at IBM, so I'd say that the SCO lawsuit is just pure FUD.
They are just rising the bet and hoping that they don't have to show the bluff.
Can't be true, as there is nothing in current sysvinit tools written by IBM.
The sysvinit tools used in current Linux distros are written by Miquel van Smoorenburg. Besides, the first comments in ChangeLog are from 1992 and for Minix.
Maybe SCO should sue themself for leaking "Trade secrets" in their sysvinit man pages from 1992? Reading the changelog makes it pretty obvious that Miguel read the man pages to make his sysvinit clone to match the original in functionality - If he would have stolen the original code, he would not have had to made compatibility fixes.
The SCO lawyers seem to have forgotten, that SCO was considered crap before Linux grew big. They distributed sysv code to universities ages ago and now think that sysv is their trade secret? This lawsuit is purely amusing..
recompiling actually involves a diffrent set of headaches...
Recompiling is actually a bigger problem to propierty programs than to Open Source programs, since anyone can fix a OSS program to work on itanium, while propierty software needs to be fixed by the actual vendor.
GCC hasn't (yet) been well tested with Itanium
This is the biggest problem at the moment, but Intel/HP engineers are free to fix and optimize the ia64 specific stuff on gcc, which they have AFAIK already done. Again, something one could not do with propierty code.
Itanium is 64 bits, whereas i386 is 32 bits. Most "Open Source" software is developed exclusively on i386 linux machines
32bit/64bit big/small-endian problems have been fixed for ages. You can't get a software to debian stable unless it compiles and works on everything from m68k and arm to alpha and itanium.
GSM? WHICH GSM? Africa, US or European frequency?
Everywhere else excpect America GSM has the same frequencies. Besides most new phones can do Both European and American frequencies.
CDMA really comes into its element when you are out in the countryside with few sites covering large expanses of land.
That is, unless the cdma cell is full of users. According to the cdma theory, the cell size shrinks when there is lots of users, why will suck to live on the edge of coverage area...
technologically speaking, it s actually a good decision to favor CDMA.
CDMA is at the moment technically more advanced, but in a developing country it also a drawback, as it is more expensive too. There is a lot more used, cheap GSM handsets available the poor citizens can actually afford.
Also, you have to remember that all the neibourghing countries have GSM networks, and having a incompatible network in one country would severy hinder it's usability.
I know this site is "news for nerds", but better technologity isn't always better for users.
People will use headlights for another 50 years
:)
Tune your cars headlights so that the point directly to the oncoming driver's eyes, and you will get fined. AFAIK lighting around airports is regulated too, so that the airport landing lights are more visible to pilots. I think however that the airport case only affects people designing anythin bigger, like lighting highways/stadiums.
However, the leds used in the article propably don't endanger anyones life, and light is not a scarce resource, so hard to believe using leds for data transmission will be regulated
Unless ofcourse someone decides it endangers existing profit infrastructures... DMCA wasn't the first law done to protect profit..
No problem: WirelessIRC for nokia 7650 (and 3650?) Symbian programs are out there, today, despise the fact that programming tools and API docs suck. Kudos for the coders!
You are forgetting something:
:) And you can buy a car charger for those overlong car trips.
N-gage isn't just a handheld console, it's a phone and pim tool as well. Thats a good excuse for spending more money into it, but phone operators will sell this thing half-free with a expensive calling plan.
Battery life is a bum, but as N-gage has a li-on recharchable battery instead of AAA alkaline batteries, like lynx had. You don't have to buy a new battery every time you run out of the old ones. Just recharge anytime you are near electricity
>unfortunately, there's quite a bit of misinformation in your post.
...
Unfortunatly your message quit a bit of misinformation too. I guess that a very few people have experience of both european and american mobile networks.
>2.5g in europe requires planting new basestations all over the place
GPRS (2.5g) doesn't need any new basestations.
--cut long rant of anti-qualcomm--
There is always too sides needed for a fight. It is very true, that qualcomm did some spectacular work when researching cdma. However, qualcomm got greedy, and wanted simply "too much". Instead of creating a common 3G together with other players in the market, qualcomm kept pushing their own version. Other mobile phone makers didn't want to be reduced to qualcomm tech licensees the similar way pc makers are these days just wintel licencees.
Think about it - Is it better have multiple vendors create a standard and then compete with each others creating products based on the standard, or have a single vendor creating their own products others can use as a base for their own products?
If qualcomm would have been more open to co-operation (other mobile market players did want qualcomm to join wcdma development), we would not have this silly situation of two standards in UMTS.
On the other hand, you could say that if all the mobile phone makers would have accepted qualcomm as the microsoft of mobile market, we would have this silly situation...
You can do this J2ME too.. Operator justs blocks all but their (pay-per-play) apps at their wap gateway. most phones can install applications only over WAP, so the only games user will be able to get are the ones operator sells.
But most operators won't do that, if they have learned anything from the WAP fiasco. Nobody used WAP when you had to pay for everything. You had to pay for both traffic and content. Then operators slowly opened their wap gateways and allowed people to access any wap content in the net. As the result, people are starting use WAP, and the operators are starting to get money from the wap traffic.
charging people for using even the simplest games/apps is a great way to make people feel being ripped of.
Incredibly off-topic, bot:
just have your cake and eat it
mplayer plays quicktime( even sorensen ), wma, mpeg4, realaudio, just about everything I've tried.. (Fink support missing) Fullscreen, scaled, whatever you wish. And no annoying startcenters, spyware, "register this", "buy the pro version", DRM or any other shit realplayer/quicktime/ms media player player try to stuff in our throat.
Still missing the fink support...
Microsoft invested a lot in sendo, and for the last year or so sendo was the only mobile phone maker planning to launch a microsoft based smartphone, which was planned to be launched this month. All the microsoft smartphone OS marketing was based around the now never to be launched sendo z100. Sendo is saying like "thanks for the money" and choosing an competitor instead. Microsoft is really running out of partners in mobile phone business.
Nokia released six phones today.. Those models where he mentioned where released today. Triband is really not so important, as rather few people travel all the time from and back to states. But for travellers it's nice to have a standards based phone that works in most of the countries in the world.
Nokia and SEGA also announced the N-GAGE device, running symbian and series 60. Looks absolutely stunning.
Still very sketchy with hardware details, except that games are distributed on memory cards. And the only clue that the device is a phone and not just gameboy killer is the dial/hangup buttons!
The other press release also reveals that it has bluetooth, rising some intresting possibilities to use this gadget.
not a teleco person, but let me answer still.
Afaik WCDMA cell can scale from 512 users at 8k/s to 2 users at 2mb/s. Sounds like too little? Well, the cell size for WCDMA is significantly smaller than on gsm, and as the voice calls will be mostly routed through the gsm network, the improvement should be pretty visible. But definetly no warezing channel.
What I'd like to know however, is the roundtrip time over different 3G technoligities. Even GPRS has adequate bandwith for browsing/mail/messaging, but the 1 second roundtrip time with The TCP 3-way handshake really kills the experience.
WCDMA is the non-qualcomm version of 3G, as qualcomm got too greedy with it's CDMA tecnology patents. Yet another case in to the "patent system needs to fixed" bucket. Someone else should write about how much users their CDMA2000 can handle. (The UMTS version, not the 1x version).
3G is just one step that provides extra wireless bandwidth. Next step would be roaming from high-speed WLAN networks to larger coverage 3G networks, and finally to The everywhere covering satellite network. The obstacles are mostly commercial, as everyone want's start billing everyone else for the roaming.
I got this with Microsoft SQL server Enterprise Manager..
screenshot here.
Scared the hell out of me turned out to mean "I just lost the connection to database". Someone really thought of usefull error messages..
I don't think OSS Windows applications just contribute to the change eventually.
While you learn to use open source applications you will come slowly ready to start using a full open source desktop. And when you move, with wine you can keep using all the propierty applications/games still. So the key is smooth transition.
If there would be a killer app that forced people to move immideatly, It would come as a cultore shock and most people would move back.
Nice idea..
Unfortunatly reality isn't that simple. First, the routing problems are a lot different from those in tradiotional ip or gsm networks. Suppose you would have 1000+ wifi node network in your city, how would you find the way hopping from node to node to your friend? Even worse, many of the nodes are moving in cars and busses, and just as you have found a nice route through the network some of the nodes have moved or went down.
I'm not saying routing dynamic mesh network is impossible, it's just very hard, and can easily consume most of the bandwidth available.
Besides, if a hop is aroung 100m, a packet travelling 100km would be a 1000 hops away! A user of mesh network will miss the low latency and reliability of gprs networks with the current technology.
The main problem with mesh networks is that they do not scale very well.
Hopefully, the java FUD of the 1990s is laid to rest, as java HotSpot and native binary compilers have really improved alot since the first-generation slow-ass JVMs.
.net, but I am looking elswhere from the java world. Probably c++/QT.
.net version in both speed and implementation time".
This attitude wont help java anywhere. Even with hotspot, java is slow, especially the GUI stuff on Linux/Unix. Array handling sucks big time too. Tomcat jsp:s get wiped down with hacks like php. Setting up J2EE is a real pain in ass. Etc, Etc. Never done
If java want's to survive, sun needs to make it easier and faster, and show studies PROVING it. The "Pet shop is not a benchmark" cry needs to replaced by "Hey, this version beats
err
how exectly are you going to tell your boss with POTS phone and desktop computer, that you just got jammed in a traffic jam and will be late from work?
mobile phone with camera: just take a pic of the jam and send it to your bosses email.
impliying that mobile phones just replace POTS is like 80's thinking. At least here in Finland. And yes, we have a excellent POTS network, people just find mobile phones more usefull.
* java IDE
Don't go netbeans - unless you have too much cpu + memory. Intellij IDEA is the far most kickass java IDE. The 3.0 beta builds are even better, available thru Early access program . On the other hand, it's not free, but well worth the price. For a free java IDE, people praise eclipse.
I used to think that Visual studio.net was the most intuitive and productive IDE around, but I was wrong. The only thing i miss from VS is it's speed - Sun really needs to fix the performance problems with java, especially the gui.