It's debatable whether Phoenix-the-BIOS-vendor really had a good justification for requesting the name change in the first place. But, OK, so call it Butthead Bios Vendor (BBV).
Adding 128M to Palm doesn't make it the equivalent of even WinCE (which itself is nothing to write home about): Palm memory management is, and remains, pathetic.
Both Palm and Microsoft love churning out these messed up, non-standard APIs because it ties programmers to them and creates a market niche. The messier the API, the better, as long as a company has a captive developer population.
From a purely technical point of view, both systems should be relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced with a decent POSIX-compatible kernel (Linux, QNX, whatever).
With innovations like these, the future is truly bright. My, we haven't had this kind of creative thinking since people added extended memory hacks to DOS. World hunger is sure to end soon.
Presumably, accepting third party charges involves some kind of contractual agreement. Normally, that happens when you say "yes" to another person. Can my answering machine, on its own, make legally binding decisions for me now? I don't think so.
AT&T screwed up with deploying voice recognition for this purpose (and presumably continuing to charge operator assist rates); that's their problem. I hope the lawyers are going to have a field day with them.
Anybody see the unauthorized realistic but bootleg commercial advertising this phone on the Net? [...] Rumor had it that the commercial was put together by one of the ad firms in charge of (or denided) Nokia's account and leaked on to the Net from there.
Yeah, right, and you still believe in Santa Clause, too? More likely, this ad was paid for by Nokia, deliberately made a bit "controversial", and leaked onto the net. Welcome to the new world of marketing.
The Sidekick is a pretty good deal. And it's a no hassles way of getting mobile internet browsing and messaging, complete with web-based access.
But don't fool yourself into thinking that you get a high quality device for that. A significant fraction of the web pages I go to don't work: large pages, large images, JavaScript, and Java cause it to just fail and not display anything. And the proxying mechanism they use is quite slow (kind of like WAP browsers). The phone also has a fairly awkward shape, and the rotating, non-touch sensitive screen is also not all that convenient compared with a standard flip-PDA.
Right now, the Sidekick is probably still your best bet for mobile web and E-mail access: the alternatives from Palm and PPC have plenty of problems themselves and cost several times as much. Still, I wouldn't expect Sidekick to be able to make a long-term business out of this. Ultimately, it's cheaper and easier to put the intelligence on the handheld (and have users pay for it individually) than to build big server infrastructures.
But, frankly, something like the Nokia or the Sony P800 looks awfully attractive to this Sidekick user.
There are plenty of X applications designed to run on small screens. Take a look around handhelds.org. You can run those on your handheld, or you can run them on your desktop.
The translation of the "rebate" programs into natural language is something like: "We will pay you $30-$50 if you send us your address and get you onto lots of mailing lists. The average cost per customer is probably a few dollars, because most people don't send in their cards. And we actually make money on the sales of address databases. We also believe that we make money by resales to people who we send lots of marketing materials."
This obviously has to be a lie. Didn't you know? X11 cannot support high performance graphics, and there are no good drivers for XFree86. "Everybody" says so. ILM must be making all of this up. They probably really have an army of animators in little boxes doing the drawing in real time, and they want to keep them from unionizing by claiming that they are "Linux" boxes.
Our justice system is supposed to rehabilitate people, not put a scarlet letter on their forehead for life. Having a DOJ official brand offenders as criminals-for-life is just evil, and it speaks volumes about what is wrong with the US justice system.
Those kinds of attitudes are probably one of the reasons why the US is so remarkably ineffective in controlling crime: our crime fighters deep down assume that people are intrinsically good or evil and that their job is to discover which is which. That keeps them from pursuing policies that actually reduce crime by helping people remain in the mainstream of society.
Mitnick probably wants what most people want: respect, a certain degree of admiration, and a reasonable income. If he gets that out of a security-related job, he will not become a criminal. If he can't get good work in the area where he is good, he probably will become a criminal again.
First of all, this is unlikely to result in higher performance: many graphics cards already have built-in 2D acceleration that window systems take advantage of. That is specifically aimed at desktop use. Or did you think that it only occurred to graphics vendors and desktop developers in 2003 that accelerating 2D operations might be a good thing?
The 2D primitives in those cards may not have support for the latest fads, however, translucency and anti-aliased renderers. Those have been understood for decades (no, Apple didn't invent them), but they used to be considered gimmicks. But, hey, whatever it takes to get people to upgrade. The next gimmick after that will probably translucency with blurring (blur window content that is behind other windows), which also looks really nifty and requires yet more compute power.
Now, having said that, an X server with an OpenGL backend would be useful. But that's not because it may give you translucency or high performance, but because it could be easy to port to different platforms (Windows, MacOS) in windowed mode. But starting with the XFree86 sources, as this guy did, is probably not the way to go: if you go with an OpenGL backend, most of XFree86 can be thrown away because it's only going to support TrueColor and it doesn't need a generic driver infrastructure.
However, an OpenGL backend for X11 is unlikely ever to be fully conformant with the specification. X11 specifies (quite wisely) where every pixel needs to end up when you draw a line. That's necessary so that things meed up properly when they are drawn, and software relies on that. OpenGL implementations are not guaranteed to conform to those specifications.
But the power of DOS attacks is that they can be initiated easily by motivated *individuals*. As I said on another post, it would be easy to automate what happened to Ralsky such that a single person could initiate a flood of junk mail to any specified postal address. Or maybe you could flood a town's post office with junk mail to create a diversion and then send a real nasty letter (e.g. Anthrax) to the same place in an attempt to hide it. That is the real danger.
Come on, think about it: "someone might construct some script that then might cause lots of junk mail to be sent so that someone might be able to send through an anthrax-laced letter without anybody noticing it". You call that a "real danger"? A motivated individual could walk into a post office with a gun or bomb, and they do, albeit very, very rarely.
The "real danger" in our lives is that we trip and hit our heads, or that we crash in our cars, or that we fall down stairs, or that we eat too much greasy food and get a heart attack, or that we catch the flu. All this terrorism and cyber-attack stuff is just BS to scare people into reelecting politicians who don't know how to address the real problems that threaten us and kill us.
Sure, the Ralsky attack is funny and ironic and all, but imagine if it happened to you.
Well, if you piss off people, they may try to get back at you. The Ralsky attack is the result of Ralsky pissing off a lot of people an each person engaging in a small and individually harmless act. In comparison to the kind of disputes among neighbors and individuals that often occur in the real world, that seems both harmless and unprosecutable. Welcome to the real world.
If you piss off a lot of people for justifiable reasons (e.g., you are the author of Satanic Verses), then some concerned government may try to help you out. Otherwise, the solution is simple: don't piss off too many people.
I thought Apple's Inkwell handwriting technology was first in this area?
Well, they weren't. And while Apple used to do at least some research (aspects of their handwriting engine were, indeed, new), these days, they don't even have a research lab anymore.
Apple, however, does an excellent job at design, development, and systems integration, which is good. As your comments show, they also do an excellent job at marketing themselves as innovators, which is perhaps less good because it is rather misleading.
(previous post was incomplete due to unclosed tag)
In particular, sending the output of an app running on the slate to a large display for group presentation, similar to plugging a laptop into a VGA projector. Does anyone have something like this working?
Sure: you can send a live desktop to a projector using VNC. To do that, put a small Linux box on the projector, together with a WiFi or Bluetooth card (cost: <$200 total), and just have it run a VNC client with the "-listen" option on startup. Linux, Windows, MacOS, Palm, Zaurus, and other devices and portables can trivially connect to that and mirror their desktop.
If you like, you can also make it an open X11 display. Then, people can mirror individual applications to it, and there are a bunch of solutions for "typing" at the display without a physical keyboard connected to it (x2x, etc.). Linux users do this sort of thing all the time.
Alternatively, you can buy one of the WiFi-based presentation devices from Linksys and other companies; I don't know what protocol they are using, but it's probably less flexible.
In particular, sending the output of an app running on the slate to a large display for group presentation, similar to plugging a laptop into a VGA projector. Does anyone have something like this working?
Sure: you can send a live desktop to a projector using VNC. To do that, put a small Linux box on the projector, together with a WiFi or Bluetooth card (cost:
Alternatively, you can buy one of the WiFi-based presentation devices from Linksys and other companies; I don't know what protocol they are using, but it's probably less flexible.
VNC is nice (I use it daily), but it does not fulfill the same function. VNC is simply a remote desktop.
X windows manages to integrate remotely running applications seamlessly into a single desktop no matter where they run: you can drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, resize windows individually, etc. (Gnome and KDE break this to some degree, but that isn't X's fault.)
It's also wrong to say that "VNC is just plain faster". VNC is faster for some things and slower for others. They just do different things.
Overall, X and VNC fulfill different and complementary functions. And the reason why VNC works so well on UNIX systems in the first place is because XVNC can use the X protocol.
Who's living in a Hollywood dreamworld now, eh? I wonder if you'd ever hear an Iraqi common citizen use the term "subtle" or "implicit" when telling the story of how their 3 kids were locked in an unlit jail cell with [more drivel to follow]
Gosh, how illogical can you get? Just because there were/are police states that employ widespread physical violence doesn't mean that employing widespread physical violence is an intrinsic part of a police state.
And when police states perpetrate violence, it is usually against people who have been branded undesirable: enemies of the state, spies, "murderers", the mentally ill, and criminals. If you lived in a police state, you probably wouldn't even perceive most of the violence that does occur as violence, you'd probably just be glad that those undesirable elements are off the street and got their "just" punishment.
I'll let you in on a little secret. Education is only a free market to a small minority of the United States population. We can't "always transfer..." we dont have a "choice in what university [we] attend."
Sure we have a choice. Between financial aid, scholarships, loans, and work, we can and we do finance our educations, and different colleges and universities will try to work something out with you. I know because I have been there: I went to a college that cost more 15 years ago than Cornell costs today, and my family certainly wasn't wealthy enough to pay for it.
It's no different from buying a house: you have to work hard to buy a house and take out a big loan, but your choice of house is still a free market choice.
That is in contrast to some other nations where you don't pay much tuition, but you also don't get much of a choice about which university you attend. I make no judgement about which system is "better", but for better or worse, in the US, it is a free market choice.
If we lived in a police state, armed thugs would not tell you, [...]They'd just beat the living crap out of you and then go home,
Maybe that's how police states work in your native, ignorant, Hollywood view of the world. In real life, police states don't usually bother with beating people up--it's way too much effort--and it's not necessary. They control people through implicit and subtle threats to their liberty, livelihood, and privileges, as well as similar threats to their families. They only resort to force when people absolutely don't comply--but so does law enforcement everywhere.
You don't agree with the party line? Sorry, you or your kids can't go to college. You don't return from your trip abroad? Well, to compensate the state for your misdeeds, your home will be confiscated; too bad about your family. In some areas of US law enforcement, it's getting frighteningly close to that (drug seizures, computer seizures, etc.).
Police states aren't anarchies. They operate orderly and according to laws, they just happen to be laws that limit freedoms excessively. And it's very easy to move from the rule of law in a free society to the rule of law in a police state.
Let's implant GPS tracking devices into everybody at birth. Then, there will never be any ambiguity about who was where when. I mean, hell, all in the name of security and justice, right? After all, you (yes, I mean you) might go out and rape someone.
Slashdot Mirror
It's debatable whether Phoenix-the-BIOS-vendor really had a good justification for requesting the name change in the first place. But, OK, so call it Butthead Bios Vendor (BBV).
Both Palm and Microsoft love churning out these messed up, non-standard APIs because it ties programmers to them and creates a market niche. The messier the API, the better, as long as a company has a captive developer population.
From a purely technical point of view, both systems should be relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced with a decent POSIX-compatible kernel (Linux, QNX, whatever).
With innovations like these, the future is truly bright. My, we haven't had this kind of creative thinking since people added extended memory hacks to DOS. World hunger is sure to end soon.
AT&T screwed up with deploying voice recognition for this purpose (and presumably continuing to charge operator assist rates); that's their problem. I hope the lawyers are going to have a field day with them.
Yeah, right, and you still believe in Santa Clause, too? More likely, this ad was paid for by Nokia, deliberately made a bit "controversial", and leaked onto the net. Welcome to the new world of marketing.
But don't fool yourself into thinking that you get a high quality device for that. A significant fraction of the web pages I go to don't work: large pages, large images, JavaScript, and Java cause it to just fail and not display anything. And the proxying mechanism they use is quite slow (kind of like WAP browsers). The phone also has a fairly awkward shape, and the rotating, non-touch sensitive screen is also not all that convenient compared with a standard flip-PDA.
Right now, the Sidekick is probably still your best bet for mobile web and E-mail access: the alternatives from Palm and PPC have plenty of problems themselves and cost several times as much. Still, I wouldn't expect Sidekick to be able to make a long-term business out of this. Ultimately, it's cheaper and easier to put the intelligence on the handheld (and have users pay for it individually) than to build big server infrastructures.
But, frankly, something like the Nokia or the Sony P800 looks awfully attractive to this Sidekick user.
There are plenty of X applications designed to run on small screens. Take a look around handhelds.org. You can run those on your handheld, or you can run them on your desktop.
If you use a decent protocol compressor, it does. The raw X11 protocol, however, is optimized for local usage.
The translation of the "rebate" programs into natural language is something like: "We will pay you $30-$50 if you send us your address and get you onto lots of mailing lists. The average cost per customer is probably a few dollars, because most people don't send in their cards. And we actually make money on the sales of address databases. We also believe that we make money by resales to people who we send lots of marketing materials."
This obviously has to be a lie. Didn't you know? X11 cannot support high performance graphics, and there are no good drivers for XFree86. "Everybody" says so. ILM must be making all of this up. They probably really have an army of animators in little boxes doing the drawing in real time, and they want to keep them from unionizing by claiming that they are "Linux" boxes.
If you install some of the mods to games like Quake or Morrowind, you can have it right now...
Those kinds of attitudes are probably one of the reasons why the US is so remarkably ineffective in controlling crime: our crime fighters deep down assume that people are intrinsically good or evil and that their job is to discover which is which. That keeps them from pursuing policies that actually reduce crime by helping people remain in the mainstream of society.
Mitnick probably wants what most people want: respect, a certain degree of admiration, and a reasonable income. If he gets that out of a security-related job, he will not become a criminal. If he can't get good work in the area where he is good, he probably will become a criminal again.
XFree86 uses hardware acceleration already, and has done so since the first cards with hardware acceleration came out.
The 2D primitives in those cards may not have support for the latest fads, however, translucency and anti-aliased renderers. Those have been understood for decades (no, Apple didn't invent them), but they used to be considered gimmicks. But, hey, whatever it takes to get people to upgrade. The next gimmick after that will probably translucency with blurring (blur window content that is behind other windows), which also looks really nifty and requires yet more compute power.
Now, having said that, an X server with an OpenGL backend would be useful. But that's not because it may give you translucency or high performance, but because it could be easy to port to different platforms (Windows, MacOS) in windowed mode. But starting with the XFree86 sources, as this guy did, is probably not the way to go: if you go with an OpenGL backend, most of XFree86 can be thrown away because it's only going to support TrueColor and it doesn't need a generic driver infrastructure.
However, an OpenGL backend for X11 is unlikely ever to be fully conformant with the specification. X11 specifies (quite wisely) where every pixel needs to end up when you draw a line. That's necessary so that things meed up properly when they are drawn, and software relies on that. OpenGL implementations are not guaranteed to conform to those specifications.
Come on, think about it: "someone might construct some script that then might cause lots of junk mail to be sent so that someone might be able to send through an anthrax-laced letter without anybody noticing it". You call that a "real danger"? A motivated individual could walk into a post office with a gun or bomb, and they do, albeit very, very rarely.
The "real danger" in our lives is that we trip and hit our heads, or that we crash in our cars, or that we fall down stairs, or that we eat too much greasy food and get a heart attack, or that we catch the flu. All this terrorism and cyber-attack stuff is just BS to scare people into reelecting politicians who don't know how to address the real problems that threaten us and kill us.
Well, if you piss off people, they may try to get back at you. The Ralsky attack is the result of Ralsky pissing off a lot of people an each person engaging in a small and individually harmless act. In comparison to the kind of disputes among neighbors and individuals that often occur in the real world, that seems both harmless and unprosecutable. Welcome to the real world.
If you piss off a lot of people for justifiable reasons (e.g., you are the author of Satanic Verses), then some concerned government may try to help you out. Otherwise, the solution is simple: don't piss off too many people.
Only a dozen a day? You are so lucky. I'm up to about 100 per day on my main inbox.
Well, they weren't. And while Apple used to do at least some research (aspects of their handwriting engine were, indeed, new), these days, they don't even have a research lab anymore.
Apple, however, does an excellent job at design, development, and systems integration, which is good. As your comments show, they also do an excellent job at marketing themselves as innovators, which is perhaps less good because it is rather misleading.
In particular, sending the output of an app running on the slate to a large display for group presentation, similar to plugging a laptop into a VGA projector. Does anyone have something like this working?
Sure: you can send a live desktop to a projector using VNC. To do that, put a small Linux box on the projector, together with a WiFi or Bluetooth card (cost: <$200 total), and just have it run a VNC client with the "-listen" option on startup. Linux, Windows, MacOS, Palm, Zaurus, and other devices and portables can trivially connect to that and mirror their desktop.
If you like, you can also make it an open X11 display. Then, people can mirror individual applications to it, and there are a bunch of solutions for "typing" at the display without a physical keyboard connected to it (x2x, etc.). Linux users do this sort of thing all the time.
Alternatively, you can buy one of the WiFi-based presentation devices from Linksys and other companies; I don't know what protocol they are using, but it's probably less flexible.
Sure: you can send a live desktop to a projector using VNC. To do that, put a small Linux box on the projector, together with a WiFi or Bluetooth card (cost: Alternatively, you can buy one of the WiFi-based presentation devices from Linksys and other companies; I don't know what protocol they are using, but it's probably less flexible.
X windows manages to integrate remotely running applications seamlessly into a single desktop no matter where they run: you can drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, resize windows individually, etc. (Gnome and KDE break this to some degree, but that isn't X's fault.)
It's also wrong to say that "VNC is just plain faster". VNC is faster for some things and slower for others. They just do different things.
Overall, X and VNC fulfill different and complementary functions. And the reason why VNC works so well on UNIX systems in the first place is because XVNC can use the X protocol.
Gosh, how illogical can you get? Just because there were/are police states that employ widespread physical violence doesn't mean that employing widespread physical violence is an intrinsic part of a police state.
And when police states perpetrate violence, it is usually against people who have been branded undesirable: enemies of the state, spies, "murderers", the mentally ill, and criminals. If you lived in a police state, you probably wouldn't even perceive most of the violence that does occur as violence, you'd probably just be glad that those undesirable elements are off the street and got their "just" punishment.
Sure we have a choice. Between financial aid, scholarships, loans, and work, we can and we do finance our educations, and different colleges and universities will try to work something out with you. I know because I have been there: I went to a college that cost more 15 years ago than Cornell costs today, and my family certainly wasn't wealthy enough to pay for it.
It's no different from buying a house: you have to work hard to buy a house and take out a big loan, but your choice of house is still a free market choice.
That is in contrast to some other nations where you don't pay much tuition, but you also don't get much of a choice about which university you attend. I make no judgement about which system is "better", but for better or worse, in the US, it is a free market choice.
Maybe that's how police states work in your native, ignorant, Hollywood view of the world. In real life, police states don't usually bother with beating people up--it's way too much effort--and it's not necessary. They control people through implicit and subtle threats to their liberty, livelihood, and privileges, as well as similar threats to their families. They only resort to force when people absolutely don't comply--but so does law enforcement everywhere.
You don't agree with the party line? Sorry, you or your kids can't go to college. You don't return from your trip abroad? Well, to compensate the state for your misdeeds, your home will be confiscated; too bad about your family. In some areas of US law enforcement, it's getting frighteningly close to that (drug seizures, computer seizures, etc.).
Police states aren't anarchies. They operate orderly and according to laws, they just happen to be laws that limit freedoms excessively. And it's very easy to move from the rule of law in a free society to the rule of law in a police state.
Let's implant GPS tracking devices into everybody at birth. Then, there will never be any ambiguity about who was where when. I mean, hell, all in the name of security and justice, right? After all, you (yes, I mean you) might go out and rape someone.