The BlackBerry 7100 does all that and it's also a nice phone. Vodafone sells a version for their network. I have the T-Mobile version in the U.S.
While not a full PDA in the sense of a PalmOS or WinCE device that can run hundreds or thousands of different applications, it has very good organizer applications. Calendar with different views, time zone awareness, reminders, recurrence, private bit (for syncing I guess), and a note field for each event. Task list with Status and Priority fields, time zone awareness, reminders, user configurable categories and a note field for each task. Memo pad with user configurable categories. Address book fields include title, name, multiple e-mail addresses, company name, job title, two work numbers, two home numbers, mobile number, pager number, fax number, other number, PIN (BlackBerry address), work street/mail address, home street/mail address, category, web page, 4 user-customizable fields and a note field. It also has a calculator and an alarm clock.
It has a web browser to get access to maps and such. You can save web pages and images to memory for later reference. And it has a compressed QWERTY keyboard (two letters on most keys etc.) with a very good predictive text capability.
You can go through a web page and set it up to download (IMAP or POP) and push your e-mail to the BlackBerry. You can even read document attachments! Sadly T-Mobile filters attached images but of course you can freely download images off the web so someone could e-mail you a link if desired.
If your employer has a BlackBerry Enterprise Server they can push your corporate e-mail to you. And of course you can also send e-mail through the same channel, whether corporate or personal. You can even have both your personal and corporate accounts on the same device, if you want - and if your employer allows that sort of thing.
This makes me doubly glad I picked the BlackBerry 7100t instead of waiting for the Treo 650. It has a removable battery and Bluetooth headset support, just like the 650. I find its collapsed QWERTY with predictive text *better* than a full thumbboard in virtually all scenarios. And it has a very nice form factor, especially compared to other BlackBerry devices - although I'll admit I've never actually used one, they seem too big to be used comfortably as a phone.
OK, so the Treo 650 has Bluetooth data/sync support. Yawn - seems pretty useless to me given the limited transfer rate. And it has a camera - which I actually think is a negative since I would never use it but I'd have to pay for it. And I know that they sell a Treo 600 with the camera disabled, but they charge the same for it. What a ripoff.
And yes, PalmOS has a selection of applications that is many orders of magnitude greater than the BlackBerry OS. Again, yawn. The BlackBerry has e-mail, web browser, address book, calendar, task list, photo album, calculator, alarm clock and a breakout game. More than enough for me. And I don't have to worry about bogus issues like this. They seem to go hand-in-hand with the platform complexity that enables people to write all those nifty yet useless apps. I have a PalmOS device, a Handspring Visor Platinum, and it doesn't do anything useful for me that my 7100t won't. Quite the opposite in fact.
Many new cell phones, especially smartphones, come with some kind of "true" IM capability in addition to SMS. For example I think pretty much every T-Mobile phone and device comes with AOL IM (blech). At least my new BlackBerry 7100t (sweeeet) did, and my wife's new Motorola V300. The 7100t's IM client also does Yahoo Messenger and ICQ, apparently, although I've never used it. So if you're into that sort of thing, it's available. I think Verizon phones have MSN IM capability. Not sure about Cingular or Sprint.
Besides that, Yahoo! has a WAP-to-IM gateway (on http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/) and I think they might have an SMS-to-IM gateway as well. Not sure about the other IM services.
As a new user of FastMail, I have to agree with this assessment. I have upgraded to the Enhanced account plan and it's just fantastic. The web interface is faster and cleaner than MailShell's. The spam filtering is comparable, maybe a little weaker but the speed and cleanliness of the interface makes it much easier to delete the few spams that make it into my inbox.
I might look into adding an alias system like spamgourmet if the spam were to get significantly worse, but I can't see dumping the fastmail interface for anything else.
Gmail is nice, but they don't let you use your own domain (at least directly) and FastMail has a lot more features overall. It also has a nice search engine, although it doesn't seem to let you search all of your mail at once. I still get my list mail at GMail for that reason, but I don't think I would want to commit my personal e-mail to a free account no matter how much storage or cool features it had. If GMail went to a paid-upgrade model and added features like use of personal domains, a privacy guarantee, IMAP, etc. I would definitely have to consider it.
You've got it reversed. Pacific Telesis wasn't split up to create AT&T et. al.
Here's a summary:
AT&T was split up in 1984. This created the "new" AT&T, which was a long distance company, and seven Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) which became the new local phone companies:
Ameritech Bell Atlantic Bell South Southwestern Bell NYNEX Pacific Telesis US West
And then there was GTE, which was independent from the Bell System all along. It was the largest independent phone company, but it was still regulated differently - for example they were able to provide both local and long distance even before deregulation.
Then came the 1996 Telecommunications Act which deregulated a bunch of things including the phone business. RBOCs were allowed to merge with each other in exchange for providing "unbundled" services to CLECs. They came to be called ILECs. See the Wikipedia article on the term ILEC for more details.
Pacific Telesis was by then known as Pacific Bell (aka "Pac Bell"). It soon merged with Southwestern Bell which had taken to calling itself SBC. The companies continued to operate under their old names for awhile but more recently it's all SBC regardless of where you go. In time SBC also absorbed Ameritech.
Bell Atlantic and NYNEX merged to become the "new" Bell Atlantic. This company then turned around and merged with GTE under the new name Verizon.
And finally the national dark fiber network company Qwest merged with (bought out) US West, and kept the Qwest name.
So now we have:
SBC (former Pacific Telesis/Bell, Southwestern Bell, and Ameritech) Verizon (former Bell Atlantic, NYNEX and GTE) Qwest (former US West) Bell South
Verizon's investor relations site has a Corporate History section that might also help explain some things.
Get OpenVPN if you are looking for an excellent, portable (Solaris, *BSD and Windows in addition to Linux) VPN package that supports shared secrets or pub/priv keys for authentication and has many, many other nice features.
Someone to lease servers to you and manage them ("managed hosting" or "managed servers")
To buy the hardware yourself, colocate it in someone's datacenter and manage it yourself ("colocation" or "colo")
Buy hardware that matches what the provider uses for managed servers and have them put it in their datacenter and manage it ("managed colo" or "molo")
Buy hardware that matches what the provider uses for managed servers, leave it at your site with a T1 or other connection and have the provider manage it ("managed onsite servers")
The company I work for, SAVVIS, does all four, but I recommend managed hosting.
Some more about managed hosting:
We manage Windows and Red Hat on Compaq hardware and Solaris on Sun. We can also help manage certain applications (not the custom code or data, but the configs, patches etc.) like Oracle, WebLogic, Apache, SunONE (iPlanet), MS SQL, IIS, etc.
The other issue is what kind of networking you want - we have some cool options on that end as well. Besides a great internet connection you can get a true private IP network (not just a VPN, although you could do that instead) to securely and reliably upload and manage your custom data and code. And of course either a virtualized or dedicated managed firewall, loadbalancing, EMC and/or dedicated external storage.
We have several very cool datacenters - the ~$82M flagship site in St. Louis has been cited by some in the industry as the best privately-owned datacenter in the world. We also have very nice spaces in Tokyo, London and SFO, and smaller facilities in Singapore and New York.
And the thing is, you can get a basic config like you're talking about fast and fairly cheap. Less than 10 days if your requirements fit into our standardized "Fast Pack multi-server" offering, up to 30 days otherwise but usually much less than that in reality. And since we own the hardware and all software licenses for the pieces we manage, and you just pay a monthly fee to use it, you're spreading out at least some of your your costs over time. And you get 24/7 proactive monitoring, operations and engineering staff, regular security and performance patches (coordinated with you of course), OS and supported app troubleshooting, etc. etc.
I can go into lots more detail if you're curious, but suffice to say we do a pretty good job. We have a lot of big financial customers who seem to think so anyway.
Re:Not-so-secure PDA
on
Secure PDAs
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you read the specs, it says it uses an encrypted VPN over the Bluetooth air interface. So they're not relying on Bluetooth's native "security".
It's really simple: redundancy is expensive. If you want redundancy, you have to pay for it. There are ISPs that have redundant POPs with redundant backup power, redundant telco access providing redundant backbone and local loop paths, redundant switches, redundant routers and redundant peering who will provide redundant tail circuits and redundant routers to their customers. But this all costs money. And of course, the beauty of the internet is that no matter how redundant your connection to it is, the connectivity of your destination may be totally unprotected and unreliable. Or their servers might be hosed. Or their database might be corrupted. Or whatever. For critical services, you need redundancy everywhere, and it can get obscenely expensive. Fortunately, people who rely heavily on such services are typically willing to pay through the nose for them.
I'm not implying that you intentionally tied the ad to the story, but I am implying that perhaps you were more inclined to run the story because of the ad. In the future you might want to consider checking to see if you have an ad running which is directly related to a story you're planning to post, and adding a brief disclosure statement ("Slashdot is currently running an ad for the book 'Peer-to-Peer' which is published by O'Reilly") if there is such an ad.
The last line of the article sums it up nicely - this is all inevitable, not revolutionary or even particularly noteworthy. Cogent, Yipes et. al. are just taking advantage of a few relatively recent developments - the increased availability and affordability of dark fiber and Gigabit Ethernet hardware, and the maturation of DWDM. There's nothing terribly proprietary about that, aside from hundreds of millions of VC dollars and vendor financing plus the balls to build a very expensive network with a relatively small (albeit potential-customer-rich) footprint in the last mile.
Even if fiber deployment is on the way to solving the last mile problem (at least for business), it still doesn't solve the problem that really impacts the speed and reliability of internet service for most people: lack of fast, highly-distributed peering between networks. The speed of your backbone and tail circuits matters little if only a certain percentage of the entire internet is directly connected to them, unless you also have fast peering with other networks wherever possible. If there are dozens of "OC-192-or-greater-per-wavelength on DWDM on dark fiber" backbones, with Ethernet (regular, Fast and Gigabit) tails, each of which has only maybe a handful of OC-3 or even OC-12 peering connections to most of the others, the problem will still not be solved. If anything, it will get worse, because the users with faster last miles attached to faster backbones will expect proportionally faster service, and they won't get it.
There are people working to solve this problem, in various ways - running neutral peering facilities, aggressively seeking peering arrangements (although mostly in a few locations, unfortunately), buying lots of transit bandwidth from major providers (again, mostly in a few locations), etc. There are only a few who are truly solving the distribution aspect of the problem, though, by obtaining peering and transit connections to other networks in many locations evenly distributed around the country, in a mostly rational and consistent manner based on traffic analysis and other factors.
This is only one step in building a public internet infrastructure we can all depend on, but it is a crucial one.
Have you ever actually been to a trade show? I've personally never seen or heard of one that I would consider an "investment" for my employer to make in me. I'd rather go to something like the Black Hat Briefings or even a vendor training program. It's a chance to hang out and pick up swag. It's barely fun, and definitely not enriching.
Unlike the dotcommers getting laid off in Silicon Valley (including those who never had a real job in the first place), some of us folks in flyover country have to work for a living and can't go to trade shows on a weekday. If I didn't have to work tomorrow and run errands Sunday, I'd probably road trip out there from St. Louis. If the event was promoted well enough around KC, you'll probably get higher attendance tomorrow.
Elsewhere in the Heart of America(tm), MLUG (http://mlug.missouri.edu/) has held some pretty successful Linux/OpenSource events in Columbia, MO. They had Eric Raymond as a keynote speaker last year, and they've had a couple of great installfests. Maybe if there were more events like that in KC or STL, in addition to or in lieu of more tradeshows, there'd be greater attendance. Of course unless someone is willing to put forth the necessary effort and resources to get it together without expectation of smashing success on the first try, it may be a chicken-and-egg problem (i.e. how to attract speakers without guaranteed attendance).
This makes me wonder if any operating systems currently have signed executables and automatic verification of an executable's signature before execution. This could require the system administrator to sign an executable with his secret key passphrase before it would execute at a privileged level (i.e. root), for example.
Slashdot Mirror
The BlackBerry 7100 does all that and it's also a nice phone. Vodafone sells a version for their network. I have the T-Mobile version in the U.S.
While not a full PDA in the sense of a PalmOS or WinCE device that can run hundreds or thousands of different applications, it has very good organizer applications. Calendar with different views, time zone awareness, reminders, recurrence, private bit (for syncing I guess), and a note field for each event. Task list with Status and Priority fields, time zone awareness, reminders, user configurable categories and a note field for each task. Memo pad with user configurable categories. Address book fields include title, name, multiple e-mail addresses, company name, job title, two work numbers, two home numbers, mobile number, pager number, fax number, other number, PIN (BlackBerry address), work street/mail address, home street/mail address, category, web page, 4 user-customizable fields and a note field. It also has a calculator and an alarm clock.
It has a web browser to get access to maps and such. You can save web pages and images to memory for later reference. And it has a compressed QWERTY keyboard (two letters on most keys etc.) with a very good predictive text capability.
You can go through a web page and set it up to download (IMAP or POP) and push your e-mail to the BlackBerry. You can even read document attachments! Sadly T-Mobile filters attached images but of course you can freely download images off the web so someone could e-mail you a link if desired.
If your employer has a BlackBerry Enterprise Server they can push your corporate e-mail to you. And of course you can also send e-mail through the same channel, whether corporate or personal. You can even have both your personal and corporate accounts on the same device, if you want - and if your employer allows that sort of thing.
This makes me doubly glad I picked the BlackBerry 7100t instead of waiting for the Treo 650. It has a removable battery and Bluetooth headset support, just like the 650. I find its collapsed QWERTY with predictive text *better* than a full thumbboard in virtually all scenarios. And it has a very nice form factor, especially compared to other BlackBerry devices - although I'll admit I've never actually used one, they seem too big to be used comfortably as a phone.
OK, so the Treo 650 has Bluetooth data/sync support. Yawn - seems pretty useless to me given the limited transfer rate. And it has a camera - which I actually think is a negative since I would never use it but I'd have to pay for it. And I know that they sell a Treo 600 with the camera disabled, but they charge the same for it. What a ripoff.
And yes, PalmOS has a selection of applications that is many orders of magnitude greater than the BlackBerry OS. Again, yawn. The BlackBerry has e-mail, web browser, address book, calendar, task list, photo album, calculator, alarm clock and a breakout game. More than enough for me. And I don't have to worry about bogus issues like this. They seem to go hand-in-hand with the platform complexity that enables people to write all those nifty yet useless apps. I have a PalmOS device, a Handspring Visor Platinum, and it doesn't do anything useful for me that my 7100t won't. Quite the opposite in fact.
So I only carry the BlackBerry now.
YMMV.
Many new cell phones, especially smartphones, come with some kind of "true" IM capability in addition to SMS. For example I think pretty much every T-Mobile phone and device comes with AOL IM (blech). At least my new BlackBerry 7100t (sweeeet) did, and my wife's new Motorola V300. The 7100t's IM client also does Yahoo Messenger and ICQ, apparently, although I've never used it. So if you're into that sort of thing, it's available. I think Verizon phones have MSN IM capability. Not sure about Cingular or Sprint. Besides that, Yahoo! has a WAP-to-IM gateway (on http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/) and I think they might have an SMS-to-IM gateway as well. Not sure about the other IM services.
OpenBSD.
Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
But what if you had this hammer?
As a new user of FastMail, I have to agree with this assessment. I have upgraded to the Enhanced account plan and it's just fantastic. The web interface is faster and cleaner than MailShell's. The spam filtering is comparable, maybe a little weaker but the speed and cleanliness of the interface makes it much easier to delete the few spams that make it into my inbox.
I might look into adding an alias system like spamgourmet if the spam were to get significantly worse, but I can't see dumping the fastmail interface for anything else.
Gmail is nice, but they don't let you use your own domain (at least directly) and FastMail has a lot more features overall. It also has a nice search engine, although it doesn't seem to let you search all of your mail at once. I still get my list mail at GMail for that reason, but I don't think I would want to commit my personal e-mail to a free account no matter how much storage or cool features it had. If GMail went to a paid-upgrade model and added features like use of personal domains, a privacy guarantee, IMAP, etc. I would definitely have to consider it.
use x0rfbserver instead. it lets you connect to an existing X session with VNC, instead of having to spawn a new Xvnc session from vncserver.
It's available as part of a Dag Wieers RPM, so if you're running Red Hat or Fedora Core you're set. And of course the source is a google away.
You've got it reversed. Pacific Telesis wasn't split up to create AT&T et. al.
Here's a summary:
AT&T was split up in 1984. This created the "new" AT&T, which was a long distance company, and seven Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) which became the new local phone companies:
Ameritech
Bell Atlantic
Bell South
Southwestern Bell
NYNEX
Pacific Telesis
US West
And then there was GTE, which was independent from the Bell System all along. It was the largest independent phone company, but it was still regulated differently - for example they were able to provide both local and long distance even before deregulation.
Then came the 1996 Telecommunications Act which deregulated a bunch of things including the phone business. RBOCs were allowed to merge with each other in exchange for providing "unbundled" services to CLECs. They came to be called ILECs. See the Wikipedia article on the term ILEC for more details.
Pacific Telesis was by then known as Pacific Bell (aka "Pac Bell"). It soon merged with Southwestern Bell which had taken to calling itself SBC. The companies continued to operate under their old names for awhile but more recently it's all SBC regardless of where you go. In time SBC also absorbed Ameritech.
Bell Atlantic and NYNEX merged to become the "new" Bell Atlantic. This company then turned around and merged with GTE under the new name Verizon.
And finally the national dark fiber network company Qwest merged with (bought out) US West, and kept the Qwest name.
So now we have:
SBC (former Pacific Telesis/Bell, Southwestern Bell, and Ameritech)
Verizon (former Bell Atlantic, NYNEX and GTE)
Qwest (former US West)
Bell South
Verizon's investor relations site has a Corporate History section that might also help explain some things.
Get OpenVPN if you are looking for an excellent, portable (Solaris, *BSD and Windows in addition to Linux) VPN package that supports shared secrets or pub/priv keys for authentication and has many, many other nice features.
actually, they're not /16s
Someone to lease servers to you and manage them ("managed hosting" or "managed servers")
To buy the hardware yourself, colocate it in someone's datacenter and manage it yourself ("colocation" or "colo")
Buy hardware that matches what the provider uses for managed servers and have them put it in their datacenter and manage it ("managed colo" or "molo")
Buy hardware that matches what the provider uses for managed servers, leave it at your site with a T1 or other connection and have the provider manage it ("managed onsite servers")
The company I work for, SAVVIS, does all four, but I recommend managed hosting.
Some more about managed hosting:
We manage Windows and Red Hat on Compaq hardware and Solaris on Sun. We can also help manage certain applications (not the custom code or data, but the configs, patches etc.) like Oracle, WebLogic, Apache, SunONE (iPlanet), MS SQL, IIS, etc.
The other issue is what kind of networking you want - we have some cool options on that end as well. Besides a great internet connection you can get a true private IP network (not just a VPN, although you could do that instead) to securely and reliably upload and manage your custom data and code. And of course either a virtualized or dedicated managed firewall, loadbalancing, EMC and/or dedicated external storage.
We have several very cool datacenters - the ~$82M flagship site in St. Louis has been cited by some in the industry as the best privately-owned datacenter in the world. We also have very nice spaces in Tokyo, London and SFO, and smaller facilities in Singapore and New York.
And the thing is, you can get a basic config like you're talking about fast and fairly cheap. Less than 10 days if your requirements fit into our standardized "Fast Pack multi-server" offering, up to 30 days otherwise but usually much less than that in reality. And since we own the hardware and all software licenses for the pieces we manage, and you just pay a monthly fee to use it, you're spreading out at least some of your your costs over time. And you get 24/7 proactive monitoring, operations and engineering staff, regular security and performance patches (coordinated with you of course), OS and supported app troubleshooting, etc. etc.
I can go into lots more detail if you're curious, but suffice to say we do a pretty good job. We have a lot of big financial customers who seem to think so anyway.
If you read the specs, it says it uses an encrypted VPN over the Bluetooth air interface. So they're not relying on Bluetooth's native "security".
It's really simple: redundancy is expensive. If you want redundancy, you have to pay for it. There are ISPs that have redundant POPs with redundant backup power, redundant telco access providing redundant backbone and local loop paths, redundant switches, redundant routers and redundant peering who will provide redundant tail circuits and redundant routers to their customers. But this all costs money. And of course, the beauty of the internet is that no matter how redundant your connection to it is, the connectivity of your destination may be totally unprotected and unreliable. Or their servers might be hosed. Or their database might be corrupted. Or whatever. For critical services, you need redundancy everywhere, and it can get obscenely expensive. Fortunately, people who rely heavily on such services are typically willing to pay through the nose for them.
fnord.
I'm not implying that you intentionally tied the ad to the story, but I am implying that perhaps you were more inclined to run the story because of the ad. In the future you might want to consider checking to see if you have an ad running which is directly related to a story you're planning to post, and adding a brief disclosure statement ("Slashdot is currently running an ad for the book 'Peer-to-Peer' which is published by O'Reilly") if there is such an ad.
fnord.
http://investor.verizon.com/profile/wireless.html
h tm l
"Verizon Wireless is the largest provider of wireless communications services in the United States."
http://www.bellsouthcorp.com/newco/new_service.
SBC and BellSouth merged their wireless assets to create the nation's second largest wireless carrier.
Several other top wireless players like Sprint, AT&T and AllTell are also landline companies.
fnord.
The last line of the article sums it up nicely - this is all inevitable, not revolutionary or even particularly noteworthy. Cogent, Yipes et. al. are just taking advantage of a few relatively recent developments - the increased availability and affordability of dark fiber and Gigabit Ethernet hardware, and the maturation of DWDM. There's nothing terribly proprietary about that, aside from hundreds of millions of VC dollars and vendor financing plus the balls to build a very expensive network with a relatively small (albeit potential-customer-rich) footprint in the last mile.
Even if fiber deployment is on the way to solving the last mile problem (at least for business), it still doesn't solve the problem that really impacts the speed and reliability of internet service for most people: lack of fast, highly-distributed peering between networks. The speed of your backbone and tail circuits matters little if only a certain percentage of the entire internet is directly connected to them, unless you also have fast peering with other networks wherever possible. If there are dozens of "OC-192-or-greater-per-wavelength on DWDM on dark fiber" backbones, with Ethernet (regular, Fast and Gigabit) tails, each of which has only maybe a handful of OC-3 or even OC-12 peering connections to most of the others, the problem will still not be solved. If anything, it will get worse, because the users with faster last miles attached to faster backbones will expect proportionally faster service, and they won't get it.
There are people working to solve this problem, in various ways - running neutral peering facilities, aggressively seeking peering arrangements (although mostly in a few locations, unfortunately), buying lots of transit bandwidth from major providers (again, mostly in a few locations), etc. There are only a few who are truly solving the distribution aspect of the problem, though, by obtaining peering and transit connections to other networks in many locations evenly distributed around the country, in a mostly rational and consistent manner based on traffic analysis and other factors.
This is only one step in building a public internet infrastructure we can all depend on, but it is a crucial one.
fnord.
Have you ever actually been to a trade show? I've personally never seen or heard of one that I would consider an "investment" for my employer to make in me. I'd rather go to something like the Black Hat Briefings or even a vendor training program. It's a chance to hang out and pick up swag. It's barely fun, and definitely not enriching.
Unlike the dotcommers getting laid off in Silicon Valley (including those who never had a real job in the first place), some of us folks in flyover country have to work for a living and can't go to trade shows on a weekday. If I didn't have to work tomorrow and run errands Sunday, I'd probably road trip out there from St. Louis. If the event was promoted well enough around KC, you'll probably get higher attendance tomorrow.
Elsewhere in the Heart of America(tm), MLUG (http://mlug.missouri.edu/) has held some pretty successful Linux/OpenSource events in Columbia, MO. They had Eric Raymond as a keynote speaker last year, and they've had a couple of great installfests. Maybe if there were more events like that in KC or STL, in addition to or in lieu of more tradeshows, there'd be greater attendance. Of course unless someone is willing to put forth the necessary effort and resources to get it together without expectation of smashing success on the first try, it may be a chicken-and-egg problem (i.e. how to attract speakers without guaranteed attendance).
This makes me wonder if any operating systems currently have signed executables and automatic verification of an executable's signature before execution. This could require the system administrator to sign an executable with his secret key passphrase before it would execute at a privileged level (i.e. root), for example.
fnord.
Not at all. The advertised price is what you pay, *period*, at least in the U.S. This is to protect against false advertising, "bait and switch", etc.