And that is exactly why the marketplace will decide the standard(s) that win. T-Mobile bills differently for data (as do most of the 2.5G options), but everyone looks for whover fits best their criteria.
In my case, I was looking for a plan that was fairly generous for 2 phones, allowed unlimited mobile-to-mobile, and didn't have roaming charges. I also wanted very good coverage in northeast metro areas (I live near Boston, and our family and friends are strung out along the whole Boston-DC megalopolis), and I wanted to be able to use it in other metro areas I occasionally go to on business. So I wanted a national plan.
What I gave up with T-Mobile versus Verizon was free nights and Vermont coverage (not that big a deal for us - we rarely go there). But I got everything else on my list, and a much bigger bucket of included minutes.
But that's the point. We shop for phones on features of the calling plan - not so much on features of the phone. I suspect Sprint's big "PCS Vision" push will flop here - most consumers aren't looking for a more expensive phone that sends pictures. They just want a good calling plan and coverage where they want to go. Cell phones really started to take off in the US when companies started including long distance at no extra charge with most plans. When they add caller pays pricing, that'll fuel the next big boom - not 2.5G or 3G.
It's the size and convenience of the network, and the cost of the calling plan. Most users could care less what technology their cell phone uses, so long as those criteria are met in the most convenient form possible.
That said, IMO CDMA is clearly a superior technology, with better scaling and more convenient data potential. Verizon's (the largest US CDMA player) network is large and pretty much nationwide with minimal gaps in coverage (most of the gaps are supported in AMPS mode, though). Sprint's network size is also pretty good in the metro areas, but without the suburban and rural coverage that Verizon gets. TDMA in the US is dead and moldering - companies can't get away from it fast enough. GSM is a growth area here, replacing "classic" TDMA and being built out new.
Despite my preference for CDMA technically, though, inside my pocket is a Motorola T193. And it's a GSM phone. Why? Not because I travel internationally - I rarely do, and when I do I don't really care about renting a phone (or using mine) and moving the SIM card. And it's not because I like GSM. I don't.
The reason I have a GSM phone is simple: T-Mobile (fr. Voicestream) had the best pricing option for two phones (my wife's and mine), and their coverage was good enough to meet my anticipated usage. Period. No other reasons. I gave up a nice StarTAC 7668 that I'd had with Verizon for the GSM phone - the StarTAC was great but the calling plan sucked.
Ultimately I think whoever wins the cell technology wars in this country will be whoever combines a reasonable per-minute price with caller-pays billing. That's what's generally missing here that many other countries do. If the company that comes out with that uses GSM, then GSM wins. The tech is irrelevant as a marketing decision, it's a behind-the-scenes thing that the consumer doesn't really care about.
Ever since 9/11, I've noticed that the heavily-trafficked sites cope with sudden floods of hits by switching over to static pages with minimal graphics. The NY Times, for instance, did this when the AA flight went down in Queens last November. CNN's done it a couple of times as well.
When we're looking at scale, though, it's useful for us to remember that these sites can handle way more traffic than even the typical slashdotting can deliver. Most breaking major news can be handled by them with only a little bit of slowdown. It's only the 9/11-scale events that can really bring the news sites to their knees - so lets hope that we don't have to see anything that brings on a overload scenario for the big news sites.
The other thing to consider is that most of the news providers are still investing some money in their infrastructure - just less than before. It's very well possible that a 9/11-scale event might not hammer the servers the way they were hammered last year. A lot of web sysadmins learned valuable lessons that day that I'm sure have been applied since then.
Okay - I haven't seen a real one yet, but it's reasonably small. It comes with an OK voice plan, and a very good data plan. The built-in applications are pretty slick-looking, and it can handle e-mail attachments. Battery life is allegedly decent. The screen appears to be pretty nice.
Not to mention I'm a gadget freak. I have a Palm Vx, a Zaurus, an old Newton MessagePad 2100 (got it used for cheap about a month ago), a couple of Macs, and a bunch o' PC's. I have an iPaq 3700 series that I got last year, and I use a Blackberry for work. I've got a nice little cellphone (A Moto T193), and I used to use OmniSky with my Palm when the service first started up, though I've since ditched it.
I ought to be the perfect target market for a gizmo like this.
But I don't want it. Here's why.
First off, there doesn't appear to be any real mechanism for extending it with more apps so far. Give me SSH, even, and I could get some good business use out of it.
Then, the phone functionality seems awkward. There's no way to dial with the screen closed.
Finally, the service plan they're offering is only a teaser. I want all-you-can-eat wireless data, even if it costs a little more to get it. Per-MB pricing sucks, since you don't have great control over how much data a given website will transfer, for instance. Data can't be metered by the end-user that effectively, especially on a mobile platform.
The biggest reason I won't get it, though, is that my wife would have me sleeping on the patio for the entire year of unlimited data! Not worth it at all...
Similar experience for me - I had my eyes zapped at the beginning of 1999, and I have no regrets at all. I can work in front of a screen all day comfortably, and I've noticed no significant change to my night vision. According to my wife, I have better night vision now than she does, and she has natural 20/20 vision.
The actual surgery was performed by the New England Eye Center (affiliated with Tufts), at their Boston facility. The eyes were done 2 weeks apart - my left (weaker) eye first and then my dominant eye. My right eye is corrected from close to 20/200 myopia to around 20/15 - my left eye was corrected to 20/20. I do have a insignificant amount of astigmatism in my left eye, which I was given the option to further correct if necessary but so far I haven't noticed it except on the eye tests themselves.
All in all, it was a very worthwhile experience. One thing to check - see if your emloyer has a flex spending plan for medical expenses. If they do, you can potentially contribute to the fund pre-tax, and then use the money to pay for the surgery. Depending on your bracket, you can potentially save as much as $1000 doing it that way (I did).
And reading glasses are pretty much a certainty by the time I'm in my mid-to-late forties (I'm 36 now). But I consider that to be no biggie, as I'd have probably needed bifocals eventually without the surgery.
I agree on finding a good surgeon. Preferably one affiliated with a real hospital rather than a free-standing opthamalogy center. And I'd say discount sushi and discount LASIK are two things to potentially avoid.
Problem is, it's a similar scenario to how Windows admins get burnt - it's just that there's usually a shorter interval between patch-exploit in the Windows admin world.
Any admin of either platform who uses best practices should be safe from most exploits. Shutdown unused services (and block the ports at your firewall if feasible), keep current on security patches, stay informed, and things should be manageable.
The catch is that just like there are clueless Windows admins, there are clueless Linux admins. And the clueless admins (for either platform) make their platform as a whole look bad.
Yes and no - they'd be less likely to have a problem if they secured it, but we all know that 802.11b isn't secure to begin with. That doesn't give someone the right to use it, though.
If I leave my door unlocked you don't have a right to enter my house and use things. You only have that right if I invite you in and grant you permission. IANAL, but there's no way you could have a legal link that equates not protecting your wireless LAN adequately with permission to use it.
Bandwidth is not free. I pay for x amount of bandwidth to my home or business. If someone mooches off that, they are taking a resource that I paid for and using it without my permission. That's theft.
It's not like cable TV, where your decoding a signal doesn't take away from the service I paid for for myself. It isn't legal, but it's not hurting me. Ironically, it's kind of the exact opposite - stealing my service hurts me, but it doesn't hurt my ISP, because they already allocated the bandwidth to me and they're being compensated for it. Stealing cable TV doesn't hurt me, but it does hurt the cable TV company (you're depriving them of the revenue they're entitled to for stringing the cable past your house and plugging you in).
As for my own wireless, I WEP it and keep the network closed. I have yet to see chalk in front of my house (I do see a lot of open networks in my neighborhood lately), but if I were sufficiently motivated to set up a firewall between my base station and LAN I'd proably open it up. I just lack the time or motivation. Having a 4-month-old has a strange ability to play havoc with your technical priorities...:-)
All it needs now is MacOS X support and then I can throw away my old Palm - right now I sync Palm to all platforms that I use and then sync Windows to the Zaurus. With OS X support I could use the Zaurus on all my platforms instead.
I know a USB/Ethernet driver for MacOS X is do-able, since the folks at IAA have done it for the PocketMac software (sync sotware for PocketPC machines).
I'm a network manager. I like the work, for the most part. If I had enough money to not care about working, I'd still work - but I'd probably cut back my hours a little and perhaps go off and do more fun stuff. I'd play a little more golf. Spend more time on my bicycle. I'd definitely spend a lot more time with my newborn son.
My all-time favorite job was when I worked as a bicycle mechanic (about 16 years ago), though it did not exactly pay the bills. But it was a lot of fun, and I was pretty good at it. If that wasn't a concern, I might well give thought to going back into it. But maybe as a sideline.
I think, ultimately, work should be fun, at least to a degree. If you enjoy what you do, there's no reason to not work even if you don't need to. In fact, it might be more fun then because all the financial pressure is off.
Working in the public sector (I assume federal, rather than state) gives you very good job security, reasonable pay, strong benefits, and the potential to retire young with a nice pension - allowing you to either live frugally and well or take another job afterwards with extra gravy courtesy of the feds. State governments are generally similar, but the workers are more prone to layoff if the budget crashes.
Public sector employees, though, often have fewer opportunities for advancement, no ability to get things like bonuses, and less flexibility in some of the "little things" you might encounter (like flex time , for instance). Also, if your boss is a moron in the private sector there's a chance they might get canned. If your incompetent boss is a civil servant, it's likelier that they'll stick around and make you miserable.
In the private sector, there's more opportunity for talented people to advance rapidly, more competitive and flexible pay scales, and in many cases, a workplace that's open to change.
But the downside is little to no job security, a less generous retirement plan (at most companies), and less time off.
So you need to decide what's more important to you. If you like stability, and/or aren't supremely confident in your abilities, then you can perhaps get on a career path with the feds and have a nice, solid, middle-class life. You'll probably get to keep working there through thick and thin so long as you're not a total screwup.
But if you think you really have the ability to go be a star, stick to the private sector. If you're really good, there's at least a chance of getting the appropriate reward. Just keep your resume up-to-date.
The DMCA was the wrong club to use in closing this loophole.
iDVD is a nifty, free application that you get from Apple as a "reward" for buying an Apple-supplied DVD burner (the Superdrive). It just so happens that you get the Superdrive by buying a Mac that includes one. They don't sell it as an aftermarket accessory.
That's no surprise - as we've all debated to death here, Apple is not a software company or a peripheral company. They're a hardware vendor, and selling computers is how they make enough money to justify writing cool apps like iDVD and high-octane operating systems like MacOS X. If you patch their software (and not all Apple software is Open Source, just the core OS) to allow it to work with hardware they didn't intend it to, you're looking at Apple losing potential hardware sales.
There are other DVD authoring programs on the market, I'm sure - just not free ones from Apple. Oh well. If you want to use iDVD, buy a Mac with a Superdrive. Otherwise, buy your authoring program separately - that doesn't bug me at all.
However, using the DMCA warclub was stupid on their part. While effective, the DMCA is just the tool that pisses off folks like the Slashdot community - and in Apple's quest to boost market share and gain presence in the geek community those are good people to have on your side. OWC is a Apple dealer - a quick "come to Jesus" call from their Apple sales rep over the issue probably would have been sufficient to shut it down.
We had a pizza chain here in Boston back in the '80s (and before, I presume) that did "English pizza". It was a small, thin-crust pizza with a very tangy sauce and a mild white cheddar cheese on top.
It was very yummy. They had a couple of Boston locations, and quite a few others.
However, I find the idea of olives on my pizza to be repugnant.
The problem here that I see is that human life is a precious thing. And when I apply my values and philosophies to other places, I am appalled that people in China are so poor that they have to subsist by stripping old, dangerous electronic equipment.
Unfortunately, there's a flip side of that which makes things even more tragic:
there's places in the world so desperately poor that stripping old, dangerous electronic equipment is actually a step up for them.
This is the heart of the problem, and why I can't condemn what happens in China (or the Indian ship-breakers). Our wealthy society discards these materials because they no longer have value to us. However, they have sufficient value as to advance the lives of some poor souls overseas, where their lives are so wretched as to make scrap-sifting a viable living.
Despite all the hazardous material that can lower life expectancy through exposure, a lot of these people are so poorly fed and cared for that it makes virtually no difference what sort of danger they face - they'll die young regardless. It's awful, but it's reality. And projecting our standards onto their lives won't help them, really - it'll just make us feel less guilty about the reality.
Western civilization went through a period like this - it was called the Industrial Revolution, and it lasted almost a century. Now it's happening elsewhere, and the people who are suffering now are doing so so that the generations that come after them may have a better chance of success. I'm not saying things are identical today, but the privileged life we Westerners live today (and especially we North Americans) was built on the backs of our ancestors who worked as essentially conscript labor and died young.
Think about it. I may be horrified by the life these people in China are living, but for many of them it's their only chance at a better life. That's not our fault. I'm not saying we should waste more to give them something to do. I'm just saying they are part of the system, and if for some reason we're all able to stop disposing of monitors someday they'll find another job that nobody else in the global economy wants to do. It may be a safer job. But then again, it may not.
I still use 'em - but it's inertia responsible. I registered my first domain back when domains were free, and I've just stuck with the defaults ever since. The dollars I'd save (I do multi-year renewals) is only marginally worth the pain in the ass it would be to transfer registrars.
But if I do any new ones, they sure as heck won't be with Verisign.
If you think about it, Macs running MacOS X are really pretty close to ideal scientific platforms for most users in the category. Despite all the (mostly justified) bashing Apple gets for a host of other reasons, a Mac rocks for scientific computing for the following reasons (among others, but these jump out first):
1: MacOS X is Unix. Yeah, so is Linux, but Apple has put the prettiest, easiest to use face on a desktop Unix to date, period. I know and use both KDE and GNOME, and as good as they are, they don't compare in the usability area at all to Aqua.
2: The G4, though it can't keep up on raw clock speed with Intel, is in it's element when we're talking about a lot of the operations needed by people doing scientific number crunching. Write your code to be Altivec-aware (like Apple did when they ported BLAST), and it'll haul butt.
3: Apple provides nice development tools, Cocoa is a blast once people make the adjustment, AppleScript Studio is a really nice way to do GUI programming, and you can still use all the classic development tools. You can build apps for good old standard Unix, MacOS Classic, Carbon, Cocoa, or Java, and they'll all pretty much just work. And all the tools you need are either included or a free download away.
4: The PowerBook G4. It's pricey, and it's "only" 800 MHz, but it's about as nice as you can get for a portable Unix workstation. I haven't seen a comparable Intel laptop with battery life even close to what I get on my TiBook 667.
Granted, Apple's not playing in the 64-bit space (yet), but in the 32-bit world I'd have to say they're the desktop Unix of choice for most users, especially technical/scientific users.
The idea of using a Gnutella honeypot and then using access logs to "spot the fed" is terrific - it'd be nice to see more ISP's stand up to the RIAA this way.
I used to think the balkanization of the Internet would be a Bad Thing, but I'm not so sure now given the kind of tactics we're seeing the record and movie giants use.
Because it counts as "opening" - they can't tell if you read it, but they can tell if you opened it. So that's the relevant metric to the junk-mailers. It's kind of like the way people who send postal junkmail know if the resident got the mail (because it doesn't get returned), but don't know if you actually read it or not.
By the way, all my junkmail that includes postage-paid return envelopes gets shredded and inserted back into the envelope for a return trip. I suggest others do the same. One friend of mine has taken it a little further - he's inserted little "gifts" produced by his baby in some of the return envelopes. Too bad there's no effective way to do that digitally...
Back to the topic at hand, ironically, MS' Mac folks got it right in a big way - Entourage gives you separate options to disable complex HTML and to block network access by the mail messages.
Yep, we will. They've announced that PGP 8.0 for OS X will be available within a couple of months, and it's fully Cocoa based. It'll include plug-ins for Apple Mail and Entourage, and it'll have a version of PGP Disk that'll work with older images and run in OS X.
There's also going to be new Personal versions of all the apps, as well. PGP Net will be a separate application under OS X, rather than being bundled in the base product. The Windows PGP VPN product will continue to be sold by NAI.
(Of course, had they posted this when I submitted it 3 hours ago, you would have known this already...)
You raise an interesting point. The obvious answer is that there should be a market for people who know how to do net marketing responsibly and effectively to earn a living teaching this to companies. One would hope that most companies want to be responsible netizens.
I fear the reality is that most companies fall into one of two categories: either they're so big that they have all their own people doing whatever they see fit (or worse, they've just dumped it into either the marketing or IT areas with no guidelines), or they're so small as to not be able to tell the difference between a legitimate marketing advisor and a spamhaus.
If you were running a smaller company, and two people came to see you with net marketing proposals, which would you be inclined to listen to?
The one who says "We need to collect only opt-in e-mail addresses from existing customers, and offer some sort of a incentive to get those addresses. We can't share them with anyone, so it's not a saleable list. Pop-up ads may log good numbers, but people hate them. It may take a while to build your business on-line, and it may cost some money, but you'll be doing business the Right Way".
Or would you listen to the person who tells you "for only $1000 I can get your message to over a million interested customers?"
The problem is, that without a well-developed clue people are inclined to listen to the second salesman, and not the first. Hence the drumbeat of spam keeps pounding on.
I got a 3rd party spam a few weeks ago on behalf of a company that sells retail women's clothing. Needless to say, since I am not a woman there was no way I had signed up for mail from them. Just another spam, right? Well, it's a company that my mother is a huge fan of, and is actually on a friendly basis with the owners (though they're public now - she bought a healthy-sized chunk when they went public and has done nicely) going way back. So I mentioned it to her, and how I was disappointed that they had resorted to using a spamhaus.
A couple of days later, I got a very apologetic call at work from their head of marketing. It seems they really didn't understand the difference between opt-in mailing, self-managed lists, and spamhauses. We talked about how to manage a mail list for nearly an hour - I wound up answering a _lot_ of questions (I made some suggestions as well), and got a promise on her behalf that they would try to be good netizens going forward. We also talked about things like banner advertising, the best sites to do reciprocal banners as well as purchased ads, and a lot more.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that I really think there are companies out there that are clueless about electronic marketing in general. So they listen to a spammer who can sound like a legitimate businessman, look at the numbers that get handed to them, and say, "why not", without realizing the damage that can get done to their reputations.
Then again, a lot of folks who get this crap in their inboxes don't even realize that it's wrong. Unfortunately, folks are starting to get accustomed to tons of junk mail, and only a relative few of us are vocal about it.
One interesting point in the article - one mailer supposedly had statistics showing that 70% of their e-mails were opened. Well, that means they were using webbugs - proof that everyone should use mailer agents that either can disable network access or refuse to display HTML.
Seems to me that both Macromedia Director [macromedia.com] and Revolution [runrev.com] are offspring of the original Hypercard.
Actually, Director predates HyperCard by some time - it was introduced at roughly the same time as the original color Mac (the Mac II), in early 1987. It was descended from MacroMind Videoworks, which may well have been the very first real multimedia application anywhere.
HyperCard was unveiled at the Boston MacWorld Expo (I was there), I believe it was in '87. That's still the only environment in which I've ever successfully written a releasable application. I wrote a lotto picker that could be customized for various state games, and I wrote a guitar trainer. They were crude, but nifty.
I also used it to do a multimedia resume which I used to send to prospective employers on a floppy disc - there were a lot more Mac-based offices back then.
What you'd be best off doing is looking into the organizations you are interested in, and support the ones who's views most closely match your own. That's better than taking our word for it. With most organizations you can obtain information as to the general breakdown of their finances - and I would suggest avoiding groups that don't give that info out.
Another thing is to consider groups that are primarily local to you. Here in MA, for instance, there's an organization called The Trustees of Reservations, a private group that buys, manages, and preserves properties all across the state, and maintains them for public use. That's one I support, though they're not an environmental group first and formost, they mesh pretty well with my interests. There are other groups I support as well, most of which are local/regional in orientation.
The other shoe that dropped today was that they've now gone full-tilt with the eMac, adding a Superdrive and running it at 800 MHz for the same price ($1499) as the 15" Combo drive iMac.
Meaning that unless you really like the cool look of the iMac, you can save a couple of hundred dollars by getting an eMac instead, without giving anything else up (I believe they're based on the same motherboard spec) besides the cool screen. And the eMac has a pretty decent screen.
I've been leaning towards getting an iMac in the fall to replace my wife's old iMac DV 450 (we could use the DVD burner to make movies of the baby), but assuming no other drastic changes I'd be inclined to go with the eMac now instead. And Apple is steadily returning the CRT to it's place as the lower-end anchor even though LCD prices are starting to drop again (they also reduced the prices of all the other iMac configs). That's interesting.
Basically, I'm going to be watching the early fall with great interest - once these new configs are well-established there'll probably be some speedbumping of the whole line around October or so. My guess is that the iMac and eMac could hit 1 GHz, the PowerMac towers will start at 1 GHz and go to either 1.4 or maybe as high as 1.6 (Moto is supposedly sampling the 1.6 part now), and the PowerBook will probably get a speedbump to, say, 933 MHz at that point, too. They may not all be at once, but those are the next logical steps, and I'd expect to see them all before years' end (and before Christmas season, in particular).
Unfortunately, Apple only pre-loads AppleWorks on their "consumer" Macs (iMac, eMac, and iBook), and not any of their Pro line (PowerMac G4 and PowerBook). AppleWorks would be a lot nicer if it was installed by default on every Mac - but then again that would hurt Microsoft's ability to sell Office.
Then again, that might not be such a bad thing, the way their relationship seems to be heading right now. Office is a nice package on the Mac, actually, but MS could use a good kick in the pants to inspire them to cut prices to the point where Apple users are more willing to buy it.
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And that is exactly why the marketplace will decide the standard(s) that win. T-Mobile bills differently for data (as do most of the 2.5G options), but everyone looks for whover fits best their criteria.
In my case, I was looking for a plan that was fairly generous for 2 phones, allowed unlimited mobile-to-mobile, and didn't have roaming charges. I also wanted very good coverage in northeast metro areas (I live near Boston, and our family and friends are strung out along the whole Boston-DC megalopolis), and I wanted to be able to use it in other metro areas I occasionally go to on business. So I wanted a national plan.
What I gave up with T-Mobile versus Verizon was free nights and Vermont coverage (not that big a deal for us - we rarely go there). But I got everything else on my list, and a much bigger bucket of included minutes.
But that's the point. We shop for phones on features of the calling plan - not so much on features of the phone. I suspect Sprint's big "PCS Vision" push will flop here - most consumers aren't looking for a more expensive phone that sends pictures. They just want a good calling plan and coverage where they want to go. Cell phones really started to take off in the US when companies started including long distance at no extra charge with most plans. When they add caller pays pricing, that'll fuel the next big boom - not 2.5G or 3G.
It's the size and convenience of the network, and the cost of the calling plan. Most users could care less what technology their cell phone uses, so long as those criteria are met in the most convenient form possible.
That said, IMO CDMA is clearly a superior technology, with better scaling and more convenient data potential. Verizon's (the largest US CDMA player) network is large and pretty much nationwide with minimal gaps in coverage (most of the gaps are supported in AMPS mode, though). Sprint's network size is also pretty good in the metro areas, but without the suburban and rural coverage that Verizon gets. TDMA in the US is dead and moldering - companies can't get away from it fast enough. GSM is a growth area here, replacing "classic" TDMA and being built out new.
Despite my preference for CDMA technically, though, inside my pocket is a Motorola T193. And it's a GSM phone. Why? Not because I travel internationally - I rarely do, and when I do I don't really care about renting a phone (or using mine) and moving the SIM card. And it's not because I like GSM. I don't.
The reason I have a GSM phone is simple: T-Mobile (fr. Voicestream) had the best pricing option for two phones (my wife's and mine), and their coverage was good enough to meet my anticipated usage. Period. No other reasons. I gave up a nice StarTAC 7668 that I'd had with Verizon for the GSM phone - the StarTAC was great but the calling plan sucked.
Ultimately I think whoever wins the cell technology wars in this country will be whoever combines a reasonable per-minute price with caller-pays billing. That's what's generally missing here that many other countries do. If the company that comes out with that uses GSM, then GSM wins. The tech is irrelevant as a marketing decision, it's a behind-the-scenes thing that the consumer doesn't really care about.
Ever since 9/11, I've noticed that the heavily-trafficked sites cope with sudden floods of hits by switching over to static pages with minimal graphics. The NY Times, for instance, did this when the AA flight went down in Queens last November. CNN's done it a couple of times as well.
When we're looking at scale, though, it's useful for us to remember that these sites can handle way more traffic than even the typical slashdotting can deliver. Most breaking major news can be handled by them with only a little bit of slowdown. It's only the 9/11-scale events that can really bring the news sites to their knees - so lets hope that we don't have to see anything that brings on a overload scenario for the big news sites.
The other thing to consider is that most of the news providers are still investing some money in their infrastructure - just less than before. It's very well possible that a 9/11-scale event might not hammer the servers the way they were hammered last year. A lot of web sysadmins learned valuable lessons that day that I'm sure have been applied since then.
Okay - I haven't seen a real one yet, but it's reasonably small. It comes with an OK voice plan, and a very good data plan. The built-in applications are pretty slick-looking, and it can handle e-mail attachments. Battery life is allegedly decent. The screen appears to be pretty nice.
Not to mention I'm a gadget freak. I have a Palm Vx, a Zaurus, an old Newton MessagePad 2100 (got it used for cheap about a month ago), a couple of Macs, and a bunch o' PC's. I have an iPaq 3700 series that I got last year, and I use a Blackberry for work. I've got a nice little cellphone (A Moto T193), and I used to use OmniSky with my Palm when the service first started up, though I've since ditched it.
I ought to be the perfect target market for a gizmo like this.
But I don't want it. Here's why.
First off, there doesn't appear to be any real mechanism for extending it with more apps so far. Give me SSH, even, and I could get some good business use out of it.
Then, the phone functionality seems awkward. There's no way to dial with the screen closed.
Finally, the service plan they're offering is only a teaser. I want all-you-can-eat wireless data, even if it costs a little more to get it. Per-MB pricing sucks, since you don't have great control over how much data a given website will transfer, for instance. Data can't be metered by the end-user that effectively, especially on a mobile platform.
The biggest reason I won't get it, though, is that my wife would have me sleeping on the patio for the entire year of unlimited data! Not worth it at all...
Similar experience for me - I had my eyes zapped at the beginning of 1999, and I have no regrets at all. I can work in front of a screen all day comfortably, and I've noticed no significant change to my night vision. According to my wife, I have better night vision now than she does, and she has natural 20/20 vision.
The actual surgery was performed by the New England Eye Center (affiliated with Tufts), at their Boston facility. The eyes were done 2 weeks apart - my left (weaker) eye first and then my dominant eye. My right eye is corrected from close to 20/200 myopia to around 20/15 - my left eye was corrected to 20/20. I do have a insignificant amount of astigmatism in my left eye, which I was given the option to further correct if necessary but so far I haven't noticed it except on the eye tests themselves.
All in all, it was a very worthwhile experience. One thing to check - see if your emloyer has a flex spending plan for medical expenses. If they do, you can potentially contribute to the fund pre-tax, and then use the money to pay for the surgery. Depending on your bracket, you can potentially save as much as $1000 doing it that way (I did).
And reading glasses are pretty much a certainty by the time I'm in my mid-to-late forties (I'm 36 now). But I consider that to be no biggie, as I'd have probably needed bifocals eventually without the surgery.
I agree on finding a good surgeon. Preferably one affiliated with a real hospital rather than a free-standing opthamalogy center. And I'd say discount sushi and discount LASIK are two things to potentially avoid.
Problem is, it's a similar scenario to how Windows admins get burnt - it's just that there's usually a shorter interval between patch-exploit in the Windows admin world.
Any admin of either platform who uses best practices should be safe from most exploits. Shutdown unused services (and block the ports at your firewall if feasible), keep current on security patches, stay informed, and things should be manageable.
The catch is that just like there are clueless Windows admins, there are clueless Linux admins. And the clueless admins (for either platform) make their platform as a whole look bad.
Yes and no - they'd be less likely to have a problem if they secured it, but we all know that 802.11b isn't secure to begin with. That doesn't give someone the right to use it, though.
If I leave my door unlocked you don't have a right to enter my house and use things. You only have that right if I invite you in and grant you permission. IANAL, but there's no way you could have a legal link that equates not protecting your wireless LAN adequately with permission to use it.
Bandwidth is not free. I pay for x amount of bandwidth to my home or business. If someone mooches off that, they are taking a resource that I paid for and using it without my permission. That's theft.
:-)
It's not like cable TV, where your decoding a signal doesn't take away from the service I paid for for myself. It isn't legal, but it's not hurting me. Ironically, it's kind of the exact opposite - stealing my service hurts me, but it doesn't hurt my ISP, because they already allocated the bandwidth to me and they're being compensated for it. Stealing cable TV doesn't hurt me, but it does hurt the cable TV company (you're depriving them of the revenue they're entitled to for stringing the cable past your house and plugging you in).
As for my own wireless, I WEP it and keep the network closed. I have yet to see chalk in front of my house (I do see a lot of open networks in my neighborhood lately), but if I were sufficiently motivated to set up a firewall between my base station and LAN I'd proably open it up. I just lack the time or motivation. Having a 4-month-old has a strange ability to play havoc with your technical priorities...
All it needs now is MacOS X support and then I can throw away my old Palm - right now I sync Palm to all platforms that I use and then sync Windows to the Zaurus. With OS X support I could use the Zaurus on all my platforms instead.
I know a USB/Ethernet driver for MacOS X is do-able, since the folks at IAA have done it for the PocketMac software (sync sotware for PocketPC machines).
I'm a network manager. I like the work, for the most part. If I had enough money to not care about working, I'd still work - but I'd probably cut back my hours a little and perhaps go off and do more fun stuff. I'd play a little more golf. Spend more time on my bicycle. I'd definitely spend a lot more time with my newborn son.
My all-time favorite job was when I worked as a bicycle mechanic (about 16 years ago), though it did not exactly pay the bills. But it was a lot of fun, and I was pretty good at it. If that wasn't a concern, I might well give thought to going back into it. But maybe as a sideline.
I think, ultimately, work should be fun, at least to a degree. If you enjoy what you do, there's no reason to not work even if you don't need to. In fact, it might be more fun then because all the financial pressure is off.
Working in the public sector (I assume federal, rather than state) gives you very good job security, reasonable pay, strong benefits, and the potential to retire young with a nice pension - allowing you to either live frugally and well or take another job afterwards with extra gravy courtesy of the feds. State governments are generally similar, but the workers are more prone to layoff if the budget crashes.
Public sector employees, though, often have fewer opportunities for advancement, no ability to get things like bonuses, and less flexibility in some of the "little things" you might encounter (like flex time , for instance). Also, if your boss is a moron in the private sector there's a chance they might get canned. If your incompetent boss is a civil servant, it's likelier that they'll stick around and make you miserable.
In the private sector, there's more opportunity for talented people to advance rapidly, more competitive and flexible pay scales, and in many cases, a workplace that's open to change.
But the downside is little to no job security, a less generous retirement plan (at most companies), and less time off.
So you need to decide what's more important to you. If you like stability, and/or aren't supremely confident in your abilities, then you can perhaps get on a career path with the feds and have a nice, solid, middle-class life. You'll probably get to keep working there through thick and thin so long as you're not a total screwup.
But if you think you really have the ability to go be a star, stick to the private sector. If you're really good, there's at least a chance of getting the appropriate reward. Just keep your resume up-to-date.
The DMCA was the wrong club to use in closing this loophole.
iDVD is a nifty, free application that you get from Apple as a "reward" for buying an Apple-supplied DVD burner (the Superdrive). It just so happens that you get the Superdrive by buying a Mac that includes one. They don't sell it as an aftermarket accessory.
That's no surprise - as we've all debated to death here, Apple is not a software company or a peripheral company. They're a hardware vendor, and selling computers is how they make enough money to justify writing cool apps like iDVD and high-octane operating systems like MacOS X. If you patch their software (and not all Apple software is Open Source, just the core OS) to allow it to work with hardware they didn't intend it to, you're looking at Apple losing potential hardware sales.
There are other DVD authoring programs on the market, I'm sure - just not free ones from Apple. Oh well. If you want to use iDVD, buy a Mac with a Superdrive. Otherwise, buy your authoring program separately - that doesn't bug me at all.
However, using the DMCA warclub was stupid on their part. While effective, the DMCA is just the tool that pisses off folks like the Slashdot community - and in Apple's quest to boost market share and gain presence in the geek community those are good people to have on your side. OWC is a Apple dealer - a quick "come to Jesus" call from their Apple sales rep over the issue probably would have been sufficient to shut it down.
Bad PR move, Apple.
We had a pizza chain here in Boston back in the '80s (and before, I presume) that did "English pizza". It was a small, thin-crust pizza with a very tangy sauce and a mild white cheddar cheese on top.
It was very yummy. They had a couple of Boston locations, and quite a few others.
However, I find the idea of olives on my pizza to be repugnant.
The problem here that I see is that human life is a precious thing. And when I apply my values and philosophies to other places, I am appalled that people in China are so poor that they have to subsist by stripping old, dangerous electronic equipment.
Unfortunately, there's a flip side of that which makes things even more tragic:
there's places in the world so desperately poor that stripping old, dangerous electronic equipment is actually a step up for them.
This is the heart of the problem, and why I can't condemn what happens in China (or the Indian ship-breakers). Our wealthy society discards these materials because they no longer have value to us. However, they have sufficient value as to advance the lives of some poor souls overseas, where their lives are so wretched as to make scrap-sifting a viable living.
Despite all the hazardous material that can lower life expectancy through exposure, a lot of these people are so poorly fed and cared for that it makes virtually no difference what sort of danger they face - they'll die young regardless. It's awful, but it's reality. And projecting our standards onto their lives won't help them, really - it'll just make us feel less guilty about the reality.
Western civilization went through a period like this - it was called the Industrial Revolution, and it lasted almost a century. Now it's happening elsewhere, and the people who are suffering now are doing so so that the generations that come after them may have a better chance of success. I'm not saying things are identical today, but the privileged life we Westerners live today (and especially we North Americans) was built on the backs of our ancestors who worked as essentially conscript labor and died young.
Think about it. I may be horrified by the life these people in China are living, but for many of them it's their only chance at a better life. That's not our fault. I'm not saying we should waste more to give them something to do. I'm just saying they are part of the system, and if for some reason we're all able to stop disposing of monitors someday they'll find another job that nobody else in the global economy wants to do. It may be a safer job. But then again, it may not.
I still use 'em - but it's inertia responsible. I registered my first domain back when domains were free, and I've just stuck with the defaults ever since. The dollars I'd save (I do multi-year renewals) is only marginally worth the pain in the ass it would be to transfer registrars.
But if I do any new ones, they sure as heck won't be with Verisign.
If you think about it, Macs running MacOS X are really pretty close to ideal scientific platforms for most users in the category. Despite all the (mostly justified) bashing Apple gets for a host of other reasons, a Mac rocks for scientific computing for the following reasons (among others, but these jump out first):
1: MacOS X is Unix. Yeah, so is Linux, but Apple has put the prettiest, easiest to use face on a desktop Unix to date, period. I know and use both KDE and GNOME, and as good as they are, they don't compare in the usability area at all to Aqua.
2: The G4, though it can't keep up on raw clock speed with Intel, is in it's element when we're talking about a lot of the operations needed by people doing scientific number crunching. Write your code to be Altivec-aware (like Apple did when they ported BLAST), and it'll haul butt.
3: Apple provides nice development tools, Cocoa is a blast once people make the adjustment, AppleScript Studio is a really nice way to do GUI programming, and you can still use all the classic development tools. You can build apps for good old standard Unix, MacOS Classic, Carbon, Cocoa, or Java, and they'll all pretty much just work. And all the tools you need are either included or a free download away.
4: The PowerBook G4. It's pricey, and it's "only" 800 MHz, but it's about as nice as you can get for a portable Unix workstation. I haven't seen a comparable Intel laptop with battery life even close to what I get on my TiBook 667.
Granted, Apple's not playing in the 64-bit space (yet), but in the 32-bit world I'd have to say they're the desktop Unix of choice for most users, especially technical/scientific users.
The idea of using a Gnutella honeypot and then using access logs to "spot the fed" is terrific - it'd be nice to see more ISP's stand up to the RIAA this way.
I used to think the balkanization of the Internet would be a Bad Thing, but I'm not so sure now given the kind of tactics we're seeing the record and movie giants use.
Because it counts as "opening" - they can't tell if you read it, but they can tell if you opened it. So that's the relevant metric to the junk-mailers. It's kind of like the way people who send postal junkmail know if the resident got the mail (because it doesn't get returned), but don't know if you actually read it or not.
By the way, all my junkmail that includes postage-paid return envelopes gets shredded and inserted back into the envelope for a return trip. I suggest others do the same. One friend of mine has taken it a little further - he's inserted little "gifts" produced by his baby in some of the return envelopes. Too bad there's no effective way to do that digitally...
Back to the topic at hand, ironically, MS' Mac folks got it right in a big way - Entourage gives you separate options to disable complex HTML and to block network access by the mail messages.
Yep, we will. They've announced that PGP 8.0 for OS X will be available within a couple of months, and it's fully Cocoa based. It'll include plug-ins for Apple Mail and Entourage, and it'll have a version of PGP Disk that'll work with older images and run in OS X.
There's also going to be new Personal versions of all the apps, as well. PGP Net will be a separate application under OS X, rather than being bundled in the base product. The Windows PGP VPN product will continue to be sold by NAI.
(Of course, had they posted this when I submitted it 3 hours ago, you would have known this already...)
You raise an interesting point. The obvious answer is that there should be a market for people who know how to do net marketing responsibly and effectively to earn a living teaching this to companies. One would hope that most companies want to be responsible netizens.
I fear the reality is that most companies fall into one of two categories: either they're so big that they have all their own people doing whatever they see fit (or worse, they've just dumped it into either the marketing or IT areas with no guidelines), or they're so small as to not be able to tell the difference between a legitimate marketing advisor and a spamhaus.
If you were running a smaller company, and two people came to see you with net marketing proposals, which would you be inclined to listen to?
The one who says "We need to collect only opt-in e-mail addresses from existing customers, and offer some sort of a incentive to get those addresses. We can't share them with anyone, so it's not a saleable list. Pop-up ads may log good numbers, but people hate them. It may take a while to build your business on-line, and it may cost some money, but you'll be doing business the Right Way".
Or would you listen to the person who tells you "for only $1000 I can get your message to over a million interested customers?"
The problem is, that without a well-developed clue people are inclined to listen to the second salesman, and not the first. Hence the drumbeat of spam keeps pounding on.
I got a 3rd party spam a few weeks ago on behalf of a company that sells retail women's clothing. Needless to say, since I am not a woman there was no way I had signed up for mail from them. Just another spam, right? Well, it's a company that my mother is a huge fan of, and is actually on a friendly basis with the owners (though they're public now - she bought a healthy-sized chunk when they went public and has done nicely) going way back. So I mentioned it to her, and how I was disappointed that they had resorted to using a spamhaus.
A couple of days later, I got a very apologetic call at work from their head of marketing. It seems they really didn't understand the difference between opt-in mailing, self-managed lists, and spamhauses. We talked about how to manage a mail list for nearly an hour - I wound up answering a _lot_ of questions (I made some suggestions as well), and got a promise on her behalf that they would try to be good netizens going forward. We also talked about things like banner advertising, the best sites to do reciprocal banners as well as purchased ads, and a lot more.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that I really think there are companies out there that are clueless about electronic marketing in general. So they listen to a spammer who can sound like a legitimate businessman, look at the numbers that get handed to them, and say, "why not", without realizing the damage that can get done to their reputations.
Then again, a lot of folks who get this crap in their inboxes don't even realize that it's wrong. Unfortunately, folks are starting to get accustomed to tons of junk mail, and only a relative few of us are vocal about it.
One interesting point in the article - one mailer supposedly had statistics showing that 70% of their e-mails were opened. Well, that means they were using webbugs - proof that everyone should use mailer agents that either can disable network access or refuse to display HTML.
HyperCard was unveiled at the Boston MacWorld Expo (I was there), I believe it was in '87. That's still the only environment in which I've ever successfully written a releasable application. I wrote a lotto picker that could be customized for various state games, and I wrote a guitar trainer. They were crude, but nifty.
I also used it to do a multimedia resume which I used to send to prospective employers on a floppy disc - there were a lot more Mac-based offices back then.
What you'd be best off doing is looking into the organizations you are interested in, and support the ones who's views most closely match your own. That's better than taking our word for it. With most organizations you can obtain information as to the general breakdown of their finances - and I would suggest avoiding groups that don't give that info out.
Another thing is to consider groups that are primarily local to you. Here in MA, for instance, there's an organization called The Trustees of Reservations, a private group that buys, manages, and preserves properties all across the state, and maintains them for public use. That's one I support, though they're not an environmental group first and formost, they mesh pretty well with my interests. There are other groups I support as well, most of which are local/regional in orientation.
The other shoe that dropped today was that they've now gone full-tilt with the eMac, adding a Superdrive and running it at 800 MHz for the same price ($1499) as the 15" Combo drive iMac.
Meaning that unless you really like the cool look of the iMac, you can save a couple of hundred dollars by getting an eMac instead, without giving anything else up (I believe they're based on the same motherboard spec) besides the cool screen. And the eMac has a pretty decent screen.
I've been leaning towards getting an iMac in the fall to replace my wife's old iMac DV 450 (we could use the DVD burner to make movies of the baby), but assuming no other drastic changes I'd be inclined to go with the eMac now instead. And Apple is steadily returning the CRT to it's place as the lower-end anchor even though LCD prices are starting to drop again (they also reduced the prices of all the other iMac configs). That's interesting.
Basically, I'm going to be watching the early fall with great interest - once these new configs are well-established there'll probably be some speedbumping of the whole line around October or so. My guess is that the iMac and eMac could hit 1 GHz, the PowerMac towers will start at 1 GHz and go to either 1.4 or maybe as high as 1.6 (Moto is supposedly sampling the 1.6 part now), and the PowerBook will probably get a speedbump to, say, 933 MHz at that point, too. They may not all be at once, but those are the next logical steps, and I'd expect to see them all before years' end (and before Christmas season, in particular).
Unfortunately, Apple only pre-loads AppleWorks on their "consumer" Macs (iMac, eMac, and iBook), and not any of their Pro line (PowerMac G4 and PowerBook). AppleWorks would be a lot nicer if it was installed by default on every Mac - but then again that would hurt Microsoft's ability to sell Office.
Then again, that might not be such a bad thing, the way their relationship seems to be heading right now. Office is a nice package on the Mac, actually, but MS could use a good kick in the pants to inspire them to cut prices to the point where Apple users are more willing to buy it.