I've had one for a week now. It's great.. except it doesn't reliably connect to my Netgear router at home, and everything else does including a Nokia 9500 Communicator.
Sure, there's a lot of other traffic going on in the same frequency band with thing like the neighbour's wireless access points, DECT phones and the like but NOTHING seems to make this connect reliably.
At work, with less interference I can connect just fine to a bog standard access point. Also, no problem with any Bluetooth phones (I use a Sharp).
Despire the wireless connectivity issues - the 770 ROCKS. The 800 pixel wide screen is actually smaller than you'd think though, it's just very high resolution. The screen clarity is excellent. The web browser is excellent, plus there's a so-so RSS reader and an email client which I haven't used yet.
The interface is quite simple and easy to learn, although a few minutes studying the slim manuals that come with it is a good idea. Windows users shouldn't have much trouble adapting.
When I ordered mine I got a letter explaining that I was one of the first people to get a 770, and Nokia would like to have an interview with me to find out what I think, so I'll mention the wireless connectivity problems then. Other than that, it's great. Good quality web access no matter where you go, and it does a (limited) range of multimedia too.
One thing I can't figure out.. how can they make something this sophisticated for that much money? They can't be making a profit on it!
"In the end, it seems the only real winner after a hybrid purchase is the environment." That surely is the point, isn't it? Uh.. oh I get it.. it must be a troll!
Fundamentally, there is a problem with the way the US is underpricing fuel. In Europe prices are much higher (US$6 per gallon is typical) which provides a financial incentive to create cars with lower fuel consumption, primarily though making more efficient engines.
Until the US starts to tax gasoline products in order to encourage fuel efficiency, then the US will continue to drive around in inefficient gas guzzlers. Heck, they would in Europe too if the tax regime wasn't different.
Interesting that this ties in with last week's announcment of the Nokia N92 - a 3G phone with a built-in digital TV tuner. The tuner requires a DVB-H signal to receive broadcasts, which is a variation of the DVB-T system used for digital TV in Europe and almost everywhere in the world except the US and Canada. It's a good technical solution, in a large but very capable 3G handset.
The problem? Well, currently nobody really has a DVB-H network apart from a few trial areas in a handful a major cities. I understand that it's not too expensive to piggy-back DVB-H onto a DVB-T infrastructure, but it's still an expense.
Nokia are certainly taking a risk, but you know that's what business is about. Most consumers these days are demanding camera phones, for example, but a couple of years ago that wasn't even something that most handset manufacturers would have thought of. A lot of technlogies are like that - nobody really knows if the market wants them because they represent something new and untested.
Personally.. well, I'm the kind of geek who would sooner be surfing the web than watching TV, but I understand that watching TV is quite popular. Only the market can really decide if the concept is going to be a success.
Re:Highly suspectful site. Do NOT give any detail
on
Amazon's Mechanical Turk
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's hosted on 207.171.166.182 which is part of Amazon's netblock of 207.171.160.0 - 207.171.191.255.
Anyhow, I tried it. It recognised me and new my address. It's Amazon alright.
It's all very interesting and clever.. but I think Google are taking their eyes off the ball here. When Google stop concentrating on trying to search the web and start concentrating on rebuilding it then you're looking at a company playing a high risk game. People with long memories might remember that Microsoft tried to recreate the internet ten years ago with the launch of MSN.. and failed.
It would be nice if the PhDs at Google could concentrate on getting good, reliable and consistent results out of their search engine rather than playing around with features like because it "seemed like a good idea at the time". Remember Google Answers anyone? That was a white elephant. I think this is going to be a white elephant too.
As a commercial enterprise, it seems that Google is in danger of forgetting exactly what its core business really is.
Nasa state an intention to return to the moon by 2018 - by which time some of the underlying Apollo technology will have been around for 50 years. I wonder how the Apollo astronauts would have reacted if the design of parts of their craft has been designed back in 1918?
Old doesn't necessarily mean unreliable in design terms - after all, the Russian's workhorse Soyuz orbiter is based on a 1960s design too, but you'd hope that by 2018 we'd be using something.. a little more high-tech.
Just to give a reminder of how much momentum has been lost in the space program: I was born in the same year the movie 2001 came out - when that film was made it was absolutely believable that the sort of technology portrayed in the film could be in use by 2001. The (admittedly flawed) Shuttle was an obvious step towards this future - but somewhere everything went wrong. This is not the future we were promised. Where are the flying cars?.
Ah well, not much harm done. Of course, there's nothing to stop Microsoft putting it into MSN deliberately to break the browser, in much the same way they tried to nobble Opera some months back.
Ralksy isn't the worst of the bunch.. perhaps his BIGGEST mistake is actually having some sort of media profile. There are plenty of spammers out there who are even more despicable than him, but it seems that Ralsky is an easy target. Perhaps they should consider going after Robert Soloway or Alec Defrawy next?
What if RIM was a US company and NTP was Canadian. Do you think that the judgement would have been different? Consider also that Microsoft has been found guilty of patent infringments many, many times and yet it has never had an outright ban on those products being sold or used.
Exactly what has NTP done with these patents? The USPTO keeps striking them down (see here). Did NTP actually use or license the patents to make a product? I can't think of any.
RIM vs NTP is a complicated case.. many patent cases are. But when it boils down to it, the approach doesn't not appear to be consistent between different cases. If the judgement remains, then RIM's revenues will take a huge hit, US Blackberry users will not be able to use their devices and I can't see any product on a comparable quality anywhere on the horizon.
I have to question the whole buzz about the Video iPod, and indeed any other similar portable video player (such as those made by iRiver and others). It's an much small niche market than audio, because unlike music playback, video demands your full attention. You can't reasonably watch a video while out walking, jogging, riding a bike or working away at your desk. Plus, the small screens don't exactly do justice to most of the things you are watching.
So, I think the lack of a Video iPod is no great loss. What Apple are missing out on is a decent iPod-style phone. According to The Register, the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone isn't shifting in any significant quantity. Perhaps if Apple and Motorola had come up with something more like the (admittedly flawed) Bang & Olufsen Serene then it would be a real seller. That's the kind of unified gadget there's a market for.. a good mobile/music player hybrid. B&O showed that it's possible. But Apple have either missed the boat on this one, or perhaps they do have something in development in-house.
Really though.. if I want to watch a film while I'm away.. I stick a DVD in my laptop. That has a nice big screen and I've never run into DRM issues with that. Yet.
There are a couple of likely contenders out now or coming soon.. at least in Europe. The HTC Universal is a Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard, 3G, WiFi and a VGA resolution display. It's a pretty nifty device.. although it's very heavy.
Prefer Linux? Well, maybe check out the Nokia 770 internet tablet. Despite the "Nokia" label, it's not a phone, but a compact internet tablet that you can use with a compatible Bluetooth phone or a WiFi connection. The screen is 800 pixels wide, which is pretty good for web browsing. I'm pretty sure that they'll be a keyboard available for it in 2006 when it gets its first software update. The Nokia 770 should be hitting the streets very soon for a rumoured $300 or so.
Of these two competing products, the Nokia is perhaps the more interesting as it has a modular approach and it means that you don't have to lug a half-pound handset around just to make calls. Just how much access to get to the Linux innards is unknown, but really it's just an appliance rather than a full blown computer. You can betcha that I'm going to get one though!
Well, I'm glad *someone* said it. It is exactly the same as the two-year-old E398 with a different software build. Motorola couldn't even be bothered to remould the plastic or bolt on a better camera. And you'll notice that Apple didn't want *their* logo anywhere on it.
Remember folks - if you work for any large organisation, your external firewall will ONLY protect you as long as some freaking idiot doesn't bring an infected laptop in. From my experience a perimiter firewall will maybe buy you 1-2 days MAXIMUM in this situation if you have a large number of mobile users. In our case, we do not allow users to connect laptops to non-company networks at all.. but they still do.
What's worse is that today is Sunday, so there's a greater chance of those laptops being used on an unprotected internet connection.
Shucks, the patch for this is only four days old. There goes my Sunday afternoon!
A Yellow alert at the ISC is pretty rare, and it has been several months at least since the last one. Generally even a worm outbreak such as Blaster only elevates the threat level to Yellow. Orange is even rarer.. I think that maybe has happened just a couple of times with Code Red and Slammer. There has never been a Red alert level.
In other words.. the alert level tends to stay stubbornly at green unless there is a real issue - the ISC is usually extremely conservative about threat assessments. If they've raised the alert level as a precaution then it's definitely time to take notice.
As for me.. I check the ISC at least once every day to see what emergent threat are out there. There are also a number of tools you can use such as a small Windows app that can help to inform you when the threat level changes.
It's worth having these tools - when Sasser came out I'm pretty sure they saved my backside.. because in that case the short amount of time between the vulnerability being announced and the worm coming out was so short that many organisations hadn't even started patching. Thanks to the ISC we managed to get almost everything secured in a day, so when the inevitable rogue laptop user physically brought a worm infected machine into the office, then we managed to contain the outbreak effectively.
Actually.. there is a Windows-based tool that sits in the taskbar called ISCAlert which you can download from LaBrea Technologies. No security vulnerabilities in that tool that I know of!
CoolWebSearch is one of the very most spyware apps that I have to deal with.. it's a pig to remove (sometimes it's just easier to nuke the infected machine and start over) and it installs an alarming amount of Slimeware.
Quite apart from the issue of identity theft.. the installation of the software itself is done illegally according to the laws of most countries. Silent drive-by downloads constitute unauthorised access.
HOWEVER.. CoolWebSearch have claimed in the past that these silent drive-by installations were the work of "affiliates" and not CoolWebSearch itself. Personally, I have always suspected that the affiliates were working in this way with the tacit approval of CoolWebSearch.
It's about time somebody got sent to jail for a LONG time for this kind of crap.
How many people secure their wireless networks anyway? Well, from my own personal experience.. not a lot.
While I'm at home, I can see just one wireless network.. mine. But step outside and I can see eight other ones, only one of which is secured. About half are set to the default network name (so I guess default IP addresses and passwords), all of them except mine use the same channel. And some of them stupidly have the owner's names for the network (stupid.. because a burglar could use that to find out who had kit worth nicking).
So are these people being stupid or what? Errr well.. no, they're just being normal people who expect the kit to work out of the box. But really, who many non-geeks understand WEP, SSIDs, MAC addresses and all the other jargon?
The probably is made worse by "leakage". If you are inside then you'll rarely pick up someone else's wireless connection.. but these things leak out all over the place when you go outside. The perception of the typical user then is that if they can't see someone else's network from inside, then nobody else can see theirs. Alas, this isn't the case.
I think the bottom line is that WiFi is incredibly dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. Most products do work straight out of the box, but crucially they are not secure out of the box. Even Microsoft eventually learned that lesson with its operating systems - early versions of XP didn't even have the firewall enabled and were wide open to attack.
In this particular case the issue of intent is important. Given the proliferation of insecure networks, it must be trivially easy to accidentally connect to some else's wireless point. How you can prove intent is more difficult though.
..the rumoured Motorola E790 which is at least *white*.
Look closely though at the two handsets and they are both a very similar layout, apart from the "rotator blob" on the new picture which seems to clash with the keypad.
The "E790" pictured is basically the E390/E398 platform that has been remixed onto several different handsets already.
BT has sunk millions of pounds into coming up with a solution which might have been really cool two years ago, but now looks dated.
Quite apart from the Motorola V560 which is beginning to look like a bit of a relic, the system itself has lots of rough edges, is extremely restrictive and looks like a product in search of a market, not the other way around.
Oh there's nothing like a kook who gets annoyed because they host with a spam-friendly outfit like Yahoo!
Take for example hostingprod.com, which is Yahoo's most bulletproof and spam-friendly hosting outfit. Check out that spam! When this person (who seems to have his own fan club, heck I expect there are some kooks amongst them too) stops bleating and moves his hosting to a less spam-friendly hosting outfit then perhaps that will be a small victory. But the bottom line is that if you host your site with bottom-feeding scummy spammers then you can expect some blowback.
But it gets worse. He clearly has zero idea about the SBL and this concept of "power corrupting them" sounds like the petulant complaining of a teenager. The SBL makes a positive contribution to the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of internet users. That's far more use than the pathetic drivel you see on Paul Graham's site.
The key thing, as others have said, is to enable the software firewall and make sure that file and print sharing is disabled. A second CD with SP2 and a decent firewall like ZoneAlarm is usually enough too.
Slashdot Mirror
64Mb is *included*, it's not the *maximum*.
Incidentally, the 770 supports WPA-PSK which is probably the level of security you need.
Sure, there's a lot of other traffic going on in the same frequency band with thing like the neighbour's wireless access points, DECT phones and the like but NOTHING seems to make this connect reliably.
At work, with less interference I can connect just fine to a bog standard access point. Also, no problem with any Bluetooth phones (I use a Sharp).
Despire the wireless connectivity issues - the 770 ROCKS. The 800 pixel wide screen is actually smaller than you'd think though, it's just very high resolution. The screen clarity is excellent. The web browser is excellent, plus there's a so-so RSS reader and an email client which I haven't used yet.
The interface is quite simple and easy to learn, although a few minutes studying the slim manuals that come with it is a good idea. Windows users shouldn't have much trouble adapting.
When I ordered mine I got a letter explaining that I was one of the first people to get a 770, and Nokia would like to have an interview with me to find out what I think, so I'll mention the wireless connectivity problems then. Other than that, it's great. Good quality web access no matter where you go, and it does a (limited) range of multimedia too.
One thing I can't figure out.. how can they make something this sophisticated for that much money? They can't be making a profit on it!
Fundamentally, there is a problem with the way the US is underpricing fuel. In Europe prices are much higher (US$6 per gallon is typical) which provides a financial incentive to create cars with lower fuel consumption, primarily though making more efficient engines.
Until the US starts to tax gasoline products in order to encourage fuel efficiency, then the US will continue to drive around in inefficient gas guzzlers. Heck, they would in Europe too if the tax regime wasn't different.
The problem? Well, currently nobody really has a DVB-H network apart from a few trial areas in a handful a major cities. I understand that it's not too expensive to piggy-back DVB-H onto a DVB-T infrastructure, but it's still an expense.
Nokia are certainly taking a risk, but you know that's what business is about. Most consumers these days are demanding camera phones, for example, but a couple of years ago that wasn't even something that most handset manufacturers would have thought of. A lot of technlogies are like that - nobody really knows if the market wants them because they represent something new and untested.
Personally.. well, I'm the kind of geek who would sooner be surfing the web than watching TV, but I understand that watching TV is quite popular. Only the market can really decide if the concept is going to be a success.
Anyhow, I tried it. It recognised me and new my address. It's Amazon alright.
It would be nice if the PhDs at Google could concentrate on getting good, reliable and consistent results out of their search engine rather than playing around with features like because it "seemed like a good idea at the time". Remember Google Answers anyone? That was a white elephant. I think this is going to be a white elephant too.
As a commercial enterprise, it seems that Google is in danger of forgetting exactly what its core business really is.
Old doesn't necessarily mean unreliable in design terms - after all, the Russian's workhorse Soyuz orbiter is based on a 1960s design too, but you'd hope that by 2018 we'd be using something.. a little more high-tech.
Just to give a reminder of how much momentum has been lost in the space program: I was born in the same year the movie 2001 came out - when that film was made it was absolutely believable that the sort of technology portrayed in the film could be in use by 2001. The (admittedly flawed) Shuttle was an obvious step towards this future - but somewhere everything went wrong. This is not the future we were promised. Where are the flying cars?.
Still, it's all progress of a sort, I suppose.
There's not much to it though:
Ah well, not much harm done. Of course, there's nothing to stop Microsoft putting it into MSN deliberately to break the browser, in much the same way they tried to nobble Opera some months back.
Ralksy isn't the worst of the bunch.. perhaps his BIGGEST mistake is actually having some sort of media profile. There are plenty of spammers out there who are even more despicable than him, but it seems that Ralsky is an easy target. Perhaps they should consider going after Robert Soloway or Alec Defrawy next?
Exactly what has NTP done with these patents? The USPTO keeps striking them down (see here). Did NTP actually use or license the patents to make a product? I can't think of any.
Of course, this was nearly all settled but seems to have fallen apart.
RIM vs NTP is a complicated case.. many patent cases are. But when it boils down to it, the approach doesn't not appear to be consistent between different cases. If the judgement remains, then RIM's revenues will take a huge hit, US Blackberry users will not be able to use their devices and I can't see any product on a comparable quality anywhere on the horizon.
So, I think the lack of a Video iPod is no great loss. What Apple are missing out on is a decent iPod-style phone. According to The Register, the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone isn't shifting in any significant quantity. Perhaps if Apple and Motorola had come up with something more like the (admittedly flawed) Bang & Olufsen Serene then it would be a real seller. That's the kind of unified gadget there's a market for.. a good mobile/music player hybrid. B&O showed that it's possible. But Apple have either missed the boat on this one, or perhaps they do have something in development in-house.
Really though.. if I want to watch a film while I'm away.. I stick a DVD in my laptop. That has a nice big screen and I've never run into DRM issues with that. Yet.
Prefer Linux? Well, maybe check out the Nokia 770 internet tablet. Despite the "Nokia" label, it's not a phone, but a compact internet tablet that you can use with a compatible Bluetooth phone or a WiFi connection. The screen is 800 pixels wide, which is pretty good for web browsing. I'm pretty sure that they'll be a keyboard available for it in 2006 when it gets its first software update. The Nokia 770 should be hitting the streets very soon for a rumoured $300 or so.
Of these two competing products, the Nokia is perhaps the more interesting as it has a modular approach and it means that you don't have to lug a half-pound handset around just to make calls. Just how much access to get to the Linux innards is unknown, but really it's just an appliance rather than a full blown computer. You can betcha that I'm going to get one though!
Well, I'm glad *someone* said it. It is exactly the same as the two-year-old E398 with a different software build. Motorola couldn't even be bothered to remould the plastic or bolt on a better camera. And you'll notice that Apple didn't want *their* logo anywhere on it.
Shucks.. I think even the comments are pretty much the same. What is this.. some sort of backup copy of the original article? ;)
Well.. our VPN client comes with a builtin firewall. As long it's *working* of course.
What's worse is that today is Sunday, so there's a greater chance of those laptops being used on an unprotected internet connection.
Shucks, the patch for this is only four days old. There goes my Sunday afternoon!
In other words.. the alert level tends to stay stubbornly at green unless there is a real issue - the ISC is usually extremely conservative about threat assessments. If they've raised the alert level as a precaution then it's definitely time to take notice.
As for me.. I check the ISC at least once every day to see what emergent threat are out there. There are also a number of tools you can use such as a small Windows app that can help to inform you when the threat level changes.
It's worth having these tools - when Sasser came out I'm pretty sure they saved my backside.. because in that case the short amount of time between the vulnerability being announced and the worm coming out was so short that many organisations hadn't even started patching. Thanks to the ISC we managed to get almost everything secured in a day, so when the inevitable rogue laptop user physically brought a worm infected machine into the office, then we managed to contain the outbreak effectively.
Actually.. there is a Windows-based tool that sits in the taskbar called ISCAlert which you can download from LaBrea Technologies. No security vulnerabilities in that tool that I know of!
Quite apart from the issue of identity theft.. the installation of the software itself is done illegally according to the laws of most countries. Silent drive-by downloads constitute unauthorised access.
HOWEVER.. CoolWebSearch have claimed in the past that these silent drive-by installations were the work of "affiliates" and not CoolWebSearch itself. Personally, I have always suspected that the affiliates were working in this way with the tacit approval of CoolWebSearch.
It's about time somebody got sent to jail for a LONG time for this kind of crap.
While I'm at home, I can see just one wireless network.. mine. But step outside and I can see eight other ones, only one of which is secured. About half are set to the default network name (so I guess default IP addresses and passwords), all of them except mine use the same channel. And some of them stupidly have the owner's names for the network (stupid.. because a burglar could use that to find out who had kit worth nicking).
So are these people being stupid or what? Errr well.. no, they're just being normal people who expect the kit to work out of the box. But really, who many non-geeks understand WEP, SSIDs, MAC addresses and all the other jargon?
The probably is made worse by "leakage". If you are inside then you'll rarely pick up someone else's wireless connection.. but these things leak out all over the place when you go outside. The perception of the typical user then is that if they can't see someone else's network from inside, then nobody else can see theirs. Alas, this isn't the case.
I think the bottom line is that WiFi is incredibly dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. Most products do work straight out of the box, but crucially they are not secure out of the box. Even Microsoft eventually learned that lesson with its operating systems - early versions of XP didn't even have the firewall enabled and were wide open to attack.
In this particular case the issue of intent is important. Given the proliferation of insecure networks, it must be trivially easy to accidentally connect to some else's wireless point. How you can prove intent is more difficult though.
Look closely though at the two handsets and they are both a very similar layout, apart from the "rotator blob" on the new picture which seems to clash with the keypad.
The "E790" pictured is basically the E390/E398 platform that has been remixed onto several different handsets already.
Quite apart from the Motorola V560 which is beginning to look like a bit of a relic, the system itself has lots of rough edges, is extremely restrictive and looks like a product in search of a market, not the other way around.
Here's a different take on the BT Fusion / Motorola V560 / Bluephone thing. Not pretty.
Take for example hostingprod.com, which is Yahoo's most bulletproof and spam-friendly hosting outfit. Check out that spam! When this person (who seems to have his own fan club, heck I expect there are some kooks amongst them too) stops bleating and moves his hosting to a less spam-friendly hosting outfit then perhaps that will be a small victory. But the bottom line is that if you host your site with bottom-feeding scummy spammers then you can expect some blowback.
But it gets worse. He clearly has zero idea about the SBL and this concept of "power corrupting them" sounds like the petulant complaining of a teenager. The SBL makes a positive contribution to the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of internet users. That's far more use than the pathetic drivel you see on Paul Graham's site.
The key thing, as others have said, is to enable the software firewall and make sure that file and print sharing is disabled. A second CD with SP2 and a decent firewall like ZoneAlarm is usually enough too.