I also like physical objects, generally for music. Whilst I have downloaded a couple of games on Xbox and PS3 and I don't have the same fear of something going wrong, there is a huge downside.
I can't lend it to a friend. I can't sell it on or even give it away when I'm done with it.
This sucks. I don't mind the suckage on low-value items like Flower or Noby Noby Boy, or Xbox Live Arcade bits and pieces, but on full games?
"I could verify that by looking it up online and getting a verification in the mail."
No, you couldn't.
ANY ability to check after the fact can be subverted so that your employer can check how you voted, so your abusive spouse can check how you voted, so the local mob-boss can check how you voted etc etc.
There are a plethora of good reasons why this is a very bad idea
"Maybe my vote was bit-flipped for the other guy? How would I ever know that without being able to audit my own vote?"
Same way you can with paper - you can't. And that's a good thing.
I thought it originated (in its current incarnation, not the Psion one) in the tech press and tech community, not as a marketing term from Intel or Dell.
Also, are Asus not involved and if not, why not? They kicked this thing off.
Maybe you should stick to reading what I actually type instead of things I "imply."
"Actually, and surprisingly, the Xbox 360 has outsold the Wii and the PS3 for the past 4 weeks. That could simply be explained away by every gamer in Japan already owning a Wii, and nobody anywhere being particularly excited for the PS3, but it's still a pretty interesting development."
Hmm, we're talking about sales figures and you're postulating the reason for the xbox being ahead is that everyone owns a wii and nobody is interested in owning a PS3. It's pretty clear.
"("Imply" in this case meaning, apparently, "stuff I made up then attributed to you.")
With the exception of controlling a media center, I had a phone that could do all that in 2005, that the network gave me for free on ~$50 contract. Plus it had a second camera and 3G.
And I could load whatever I wanted onto it. I had it running MAME, because I'm a terrible geek. It also had an FM receiver and some sort of tv function I never used.
The iPhone *does* have a good interface. But it's behind the times in terms of what it can do. And no, IMHO these things don't actually cancel each other out. You might think differently, good for you. Me, if I'm paying that much I want something spectacular to use that also has all the latest comms technology in.
Android on FR is not a hack to install, if you've played with the Trimarchi images. Standard 2M kernel and rootfs.
Koolu I'm not so sure about. Michael's images are far more functional than any of the OM stuff, in my opinion.
What's more, android apps targeted at the G1 (AndNav2, text to speech engine) work on the FR due to the java nature of it all.
The FR is, IMHO, totally inadequate as a hardware platform after this year too. Something which they wwillnot be addressing in their next revision. The 1973 and the Fr are not that different. It's already last year's phone, the next release will be open but years behind the market.
And yes, the company is ridiculous. Made one distribution, panicked and ported another (Qtopia) to X, taking them months. Then they abandoned it in a broken, unresponsive, unusable state. And now it's all about frameworks...
I agree with all you said basically. I went through the same "I'll forgive it for now" and then I lost my other phone and used the FR exclusively for a month. I nearly threw it onto some train tracks or out the window several times.
Give Android on FR another month or so and it'll be a worthwhile use for the handset. Michael and Sean are working on GPRS right now. Bluetooth scanning and pairing works (a bit, I can pair a headset and pick up a call with it, sound isn't there...)
Anyway, yeah, for something supposedly open they've taken fucking years and the kernel still isn't right, let alone the abandonment of any responsibility to their users in terms of phone functions.
And what the hell is with them saying "We're not going to put so much effort into the FR display chip, we're concentrating on the GTA03"? Who do they think is going to buy the damn thing if they piss off the current users so much?
Yeah, rant over.
I hope Android works out. For now I have a cheap sony-ericcson doing the actual phone work.
Most of all what I'd like from my Freerunner is a phone that works. Bells and whistles can come later.
Android has a well put together set of phone apps and has a great UI that was made for a phone. It *just works* a lot better than any of the FR stacks I've tried.
And as for the App store... well I haven't used it, as it's not available. But if/when it works that gives you access to a whole load of apps, FOSS or commercial, developed by a wider set of folks than just OM.
Thinking about it, I'd be happiest if I could install android as a set of packages on top of a debian base system. X strictly optional.
Minor point of interest - OpenMoko is the software company, AFAICT, and FIC are the hardware company. FIC span off OM about a year ago.
I have android running on my openmoko. Compared to the OM software it's a joy to use. The port is not yet complete but is in *very* active development by a number of different people, som part of OM, some part of Koolu and some independent. Already it's streets ahead of OM in terms of usability, UI responsiveness, UI completeness and ease of use (i.e. no command line for wifi/bluetooth) and reliability. Hopefully, hopefully, google will open source their gears library (and apparently they have made positive noises about that) so that FR users can use the app store.
It pains me to say that sort of stuff, because the OM team have a good FOSS ethos and have clearly put in a lot of work. It's just the management of the whole thing, the constant changes in direction and the insistence by some that the next hardware iteration will be the production model and so working too hard on better Freerunner hardware utilisation is a waste of time that have led to it being the shambles it is right now.
So, anyway, Android on Freerunner looks like a great thing. Not tied to a network and as wide open as you want it. Just a shame there's no 3G
"That doesn't change the fact that I was doing quite NOT fine prior to then"
I went to an all male school, so pre-college I didn't encounter any females. Whilst an all male educational environment was probably not healthy, at the age of 18 when I went into university, I was fine.
I don't quite see how it proves your point. I think some people are just creepy but I don't think geeks have to be. I think geeks are largely single through a combination of no confidence and no tolerance of other people. If you were creepy, well you were creepy but most really weren't.
Sorry dude, but it's just you. Not all of us geeks are incompetent with females, and even those that are are not all creepy.
Weird, perhaps, but that didn't stop me being a ladies favourite in my early 20s, despite being incredibly geeky and a goth.
Maybe you just needed confidence. And a shower.
Re: Ah, the era of homepages
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 1
The midi!
Yes, I'd forgotten about the embedded midi.
Yeah, guest books and counters were all the rage back then ("Wow! I got ten hits this week and I feel the need to share it with you!"). Dreambook, IIRC was a popular one to use.
I actually like frames even though I know that makes me evil somehow. Yeah, I program in C...
Ah, the era of homepages
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 5, Informative
With terrible blinking text and eyesore backgrounds.
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
It was a nicer, gentler internet. Less advertising, less malware. Less crap and less people too... e-Commerce was a rarity. Naive users and online shops would transact via card-detail containing emails.
There was still all the porn you could imagine though.
"I'm just not quite sure what I could use it for. It's too underpowered for video encoding/decoding,"
It could probably do a bit of that, transcoding and serving anyway.
This sounds like an absolutely perfect replacement for my Linksys NSLU2. It's only 266MHz and has 32MB of RAM. At the moment I have one doing mail/web server duty and one running torrentflux-b4rt and mediatomb, streaming music and video to my PS3 and to my machine at work.
That second one is straining to keep up, this little box sounds like it fits the bill perfectly. Similarly powered NAS boxes cost multiple hundreds.
Yeah, I get the portability thing, and it is a big deal for a lot of people. I'm trying to get my mother away from AOL at the moment, the mail address is a big sticking point. (I think there are ways to keep it with aol, but it's a hassle)
Yes, I do point my own domain name at the server. I've had the name for a while now. You need to point an MX record at the server (A records afre what we use for web. MX for mail)
OK, step by step...
Well I used debian but I'm sure Ubuntu would work just as well. Broadly speaking you need -
1. An MTA (to send and receive mail to other systems) 2. An IMAP/POP server (get mail from server to client 3. Anti spam measures and your own "I'm not spam" measures. 4. Optional extras
For an MTA you'll want to choose between exim4, postfix, sendmail or qmail. There are probably others. I chose postfix because it's quite light and not too tricky on the config. Sendmail has a reputation for being very complex. The others I don't know much about. apt-get install postfix...
For an IMAP/POP server I chose dovecot, also because it's light and easy. Can't remember what config I did. Was pretty simple and well documented online. At this point (and with DNS sorted and port 25 forwarded from the router to the server) you're kinda ready to go.
Anti-spam is where it gets interesting. You have SPF, rDNS and DNSBL(s). SPF is a record you set with the same guys that do your A and MX. It basically says "These addresses are allowed to send mail from my domain", you can find generators for the record online. You may need to mail the registrar to get it set up as the web-admin consoles often won't give you the option. Once in place it allows other admins to check people aren't faking mail from zombies that pretends to be from your domain.
rDNS is a reverse DNS record so that when someone gets mail from your server they can do a reverse lookup on the IP and match it to the domain name you claim to be sending mail from. Another online record generator and a quick mail to your ISP should be all it takes to get them to set this up, if they're the sort of ISP that will allow that sort of thing. If you don't have rDNS and SPF set up other folks may reject your mail as spam.
Once you've got those set up you want to set up your MTA to be able to check them so you're protected from incoming spam the same way that you're helping protect others. Postfix required an add-on python process (postfix-policyd-spf-python) to do SPF, it passes the mail to the other program which performs the check and passes it back if OK. Google is your friend to find that. Don't think I ever got around to setting up rDNS checking.
DNSBLs are places like spamhaus that keep a DNS-style record of known-spamming IP addresses. When a connection comes in you do a lookup of the IP address on there and if there's a hit you drop the connection. Postfix config file can take the address (zen.spamhaus.org) and do this. Spamhaus also provide a way to test it.
OK, so optional extras...
I'm an SSL geek so I set up an SSL certificate chain so I can encrypt comms between the server and my client machines. Securely within my own house. Totally unnecessary:)
I have alpine on the server, which is a rewrite of pine, so I can ssh in to the box and read mail in the terminal. If I want to use a real mail program (thunderbird) outside my own network I use an SSH SOCKS tunnel.
Err. I dunno if you wanted all that, but I hope it helps, and happy hacking.
Been running lenny on my 901 for months now. Works great.
That wiki has enough info to get going fast. Only issue with mine was that I had to build the wireless driver manually. Which is not as scary as it sounds, apt-get install the source, m-a it and a-i the result. All given in plain English in that wiki.
Debian ++
(not that your favourite linux is any less valid, dear reader, I just like this one.)
Yeah I know, I was being sarcastic about it being easy.
Squirrelmail is not something I've ever used in anger, I don't really do webmail. For remote access I either use an ssh tunnel with thunderbird or just ssh in and use alpine from the command line.
I don't like the idea of trusting your email to a third party with advertising as the major profit driver, and with little to no promises on availability. That said, for most folks I guess it outweighs the hassle of changing email address constantly.
No. Grab a small box like a linksys nslu2 or a nano-itx board, ADSL with a static IP (I pay an extra £1 permonth for the IP) and a domain name.
Difficult?
No, easy! You just need to install linux (pref. debian) set up an MTA like Postfix or exim, make sure to hook it up to a DNSBL or two, maybe spam-assassin for filtering, rDNS and SPF checks, header validation etc, open port 25 incoming on your router, add in dovecot for IMAP, make sure to set up your own trusted root certificates so you can connect in securely, consider a FOSS webmail solution (squirrelmail?), expose port 80 for that, make sure your passwords are good and strong, continually check for and apply security updates...
I do it. My mailserver runs off an NSLU with a 4GB USB flash stick. I don't think it's for everyone though. Whatever happened to ISPs providing email?
Slashdot Mirror
I also like physical objects, generally for music. Whilst I have downloaded a couple of games on Xbox and PS3 and I don't have the same fear of something going wrong, there is a huge downside.
I can't lend it to a friend.
I can't sell it on or even give it away when I'm done with it.
This sucks.
I don't mind the suckage on low-value items like Flower or Noby Noby Boy, or Xbox Live Arcade bits and pieces, but on full games?
No thanks.
"I could verify that by looking it up online and getting a verification in the mail."
No, you couldn't.
ANY ability to check after the fact can be subverted so that your employer can check how you voted, so your abusive spouse can check how you voted, so the local mob-boss can check how you voted etc etc.
There are a plethora of good reasons why this is a very bad idea
"Maybe my vote was bit-flipped for the other guy? How would I ever know that without being able to audit my own vote?"
Same way you can with paper - you can't. And that's a good thing.
I thought it originated (in its current incarnation, not the Psion one) in the tech press and tech community, not as a marketing term from Intel or Dell.
Also, are Asus not involved and if not, why not? They kicked this thing off.
It did, and then dropped back to near zero as people said "that's pretty good" and then went back to their regular browsers.
Maybe you should stick to reading what I actually type instead of things I "imply."
"Actually, and surprisingly, the Xbox 360 has outsold the Wii and the PS3 for the past 4 weeks. That could simply be explained away by every gamer in Japan already owning a Wii, and nobody anywhere being particularly excited for the PS3, but it's still a pretty interesting development."
Hmm, we're talking about sales figures and you're postulating the reason for the xbox being ahead is that everyone owns a wii and nobody is interested in owning a PS3. It's pretty clear.
"("Imply" in this case meaning, apparently, "stuff I made up then attributed to you.")
Fucking pompous git.
Sony Ericcson T303? I got one of those when the OM pissed me off to the point of extreme anger once too many times and I couldn't face using it again.
Give the Android effort a couple of months. I'd be surprised if OM *ever* get anything together, but the Android effort is looking very good.
"That could simply be explained away by every gamer in Japan already owning a Wii, and nobody anywhere being particularly excited for the PS3"
You implied nobody was buying it. Not quite the case.
Also, as I say, there are some exciting developments. Noby Noby Boy for instance. Though personally I don't care for it.
With the exception of controlling a media center, I had a phone that could do all that in 2005, that the network gave me for free on ~$50 contract. Plus it had a second camera and 3G.
And I could load whatever I wanted onto it. I had it running MAME, because I'm a terrible geek. It also had an FM receiver and some sort of tv function I never used.
The iPhone *does* have a good interface. But it's behind the times in terms of what it can do. And no, IMHO these things don't actually cancel each other out. You might think differently, good for you. Me, if I'm paying that much I want something spectacular to use that also has all the latest comms technology in.
Umm, PS3 has shifted several million units now, just FYI.
No, not as many as Xbox, but it has shifted a lot. And we're seeing some really interesting stuff (e.g. Flower) come out on it.
(Also it's a lot shinier and quieter...)
Anyway, I have all three so I'm not going to say "OMG!!! Ur so wrong xbox suxx!!!", but the PS3 is not a failed product by any means.
So I'm allowed to hate other people?
I don't enable these activities and I sure as hell don't buy crappy products like some sort of addict. Masses of other people seem to though.
HERE is the problem with democracy - most human beings are stupid, lazy and violent.
Android on FR is not a hack to install, if you've played with the Trimarchi images. Standard 2M kernel and rootfs.
Koolu I'm not so sure about. Michael's images are far more functional than any of the OM stuff, in my opinion.
What's more, android apps targeted at the G1 (AndNav2, text to speech engine) work on the FR due to the java nature of it all.
The FR is, IMHO, totally inadequate as a hardware platform after this year too. Something which they wwillnot be addressing in their next revision. The 1973 and the Fr are not that different. It's already last year's phone, the next release will be open but years behind the market.
And yes, the company is ridiculous. Made one distribution, panicked and ported another (Qtopia) to X, taking them months. Then they abandoned it in a broken, unresponsive, unusable state. And now it's all about frameworks...
I agree with all you said basically. I went through the same "I'll forgive it for now" and then I lost my other phone and used the FR exclusively for a month. I nearly threw it onto some train tracks or out the window several times.
Give Android on FR another month or so and it'll be a worthwhile use for the handset. Michael and Sean are working on GPRS right now. Bluetooth scanning and pairing works (a bit, I can pair a headset and pick up a call with it, sound isn't there...)
Anyway, yeah, for something supposedly open they've taken fucking years and the kernel still isn't right, let alone the abandonment of any responsibility to their users in terms of phone functions.
And what the hell is with them saying "We're not going to put so much effort into the FR display chip, we're concentrating on the GTA03"? Who do they think is going to buy the damn thing if they piss off the current users so much?
Yeah, rant over.
I hope Android works out. For now I have a cheap sony-ericcson doing the actual phone work.
It's the constant changing direction that got to me.
Were you affected by the GSM buzz problem (when you say faulty hardware) ?
I was lucky enough not to get that. Only hardware problem I have is that they screwed up the cap values on the headphone output so there's zero bass.
If you still have the phone then you might want to check out android, in a few weeks/couple of months when the port gets more stable.
Most of all what I'd like from my Freerunner is a phone that works. Bells and whistles can come later.
Android has a well put together set of phone apps and has a great UI that was made for a phone. It *just works* a lot better than any of the FR stacks I've tried.
And as for the App store... well I haven't used it, as it's not available. But if/when it works that gives you access to a whole load of apps, FOSS or commercial, developed by a wider set of folks than just OM.
Thinking about it, I'd be happiest if I could install android as a set of packages on top of a debian base system. X strictly optional.
The G1 isn't much of an open platform.
Android itself, sure, and I have it on my freerunner. But I really doubt that they'd get many of the networks on board if they couldn't SIM-lock it.
They aren't. I'd go further and say that management have proven themselves to be less than competent.
Minor point of interest - OpenMoko is the software company, AFAICT, and FIC are the hardware company. FIC span off OM about a year ago.
I have android running on my openmoko. Compared to the OM software it's a joy to use. The port is not yet complete but is in *very* active development by a number of different people, som part of OM, some part of Koolu and some independent. Already it's streets ahead of OM in terms of usability, UI responsiveness, UI completeness and ease of use (i.e. no command line for wifi/bluetooth) and reliability. Hopefully, hopefully, google will open source their gears library (and apparently they have made positive noises about that) so that FR users can use the app store.
It pains me to say that sort of stuff, because the OM team have a good FOSS ethos and have clearly put in a lot of work. It's just the management of the whole thing, the constant changes in direction and the insistence by some that the next hardware iteration will be the production model and so working too hard on better Freerunner hardware utilisation is a waste of time that have led to it being the shambles it is right now.
So, anyway, Android on Freerunner looks like a great thing. Not tied to a network and as wide open as you want it. Just a shame there's no 3G
"That doesn't change the fact that I was doing quite NOT fine prior to then"
I went to an all male school, so pre-college I didn't encounter any females. Whilst an all male educational environment was probably not healthy, at the age of 18 when I went into university, I was fine.
I don't quite see how it proves your point. I think some people are just creepy but I don't think geeks have to be. I think geeks are largely single through a combination of no confidence and no tolerance of other people. If you were creepy, well you were creepy but most really weren't.
Sorry dude, but it's just you. Not all of us geeks are incompetent with females, and even those that are are not all creepy.
Weird, perhaps, but that didn't stop me being a ladies favourite in my early 20s, despite being incredibly geeky and a goth.
Maybe you just needed confidence. And a shower.
The midi!
Yes, I'd forgotten about the embedded midi.
Yeah, guest books and counters were all the rage back then ("Wow! I got ten hits this week and I feel the need to share it with you!"). Dreambook, IIRC was a popular one to use.
I actually like frames even though I know that makes me evil somehow. Yeah, I program in C...
With terrible blinking text and eyesore backgrounds.
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
It was a nicer, gentler internet. Less advertising, less malware. Less crap and less people too... e-Commerce was a rarity. Naive users and online shops would transact via card-detail containing emails.
There was still all the porn you could imagine though.
"I'm just not quite sure what I could use it for. It's too underpowered for video encoding/decoding,"
It could probably do a bit of that, transcoding and serving anyway.
This sounds like an absolutely perfect replacement for my Linksys NSLU2. It's only 266MHz and has 32MB of RAM. At the moment I have one doing mail/web server duty and one running torrentflux-b4rt and mediatomb, streaming music and video to my PS3 and to my machine at work.
That second one is straining to keep up, this little box sounds like it fits the bill perfectly. Similarly powered NAS boxes cost multiple hundreds.
Yeah, I get the portability thing, and it is a big deal for a lot of people. I'm trying to get my mother away from AOL at the moment, the mail address is a big sticking point. (I think there are ways to keep it with aol, but it's a hassle)
Yes, I do point my own domain name at the server. I've had the name for a while now. You need to point an MX record at the server (A records afre what we use for web. MX for mail)
OK, step by step...
Well I used debian but I'm sure Ubuntu would work just as well. Broadly speaking you need -
1. An MTA (to send and receive mail to other systems)
2. An IMAP/POP server (get mail from server to client
3. Anti spam measures and your own "I'm not spam" measures.
4. Optional extras
For an MTA you'll want to choose between exim4, postfix, sendmail or qmail. There are probably others. I chose postfix because it's quite light and not too tricky on the config. Sendmail has a reputation for being very complex. The others I don't know much about. apt-get install postfix...
For an IMAP/POP server I chose dovecot, also because it's light and easy. Can't remember what config I did. Was pretty simple and well documented online. At this point (and with DNS sorted and port 25 forwarded from the router to the server) you're kinda ready to go.
Anti-spam is where it gets interesting. You have SPF, rDNS and DNSBL(s). SPF is a record you set with the same guys that do your A and MX. It basically says "These addresses are allowed to send mail from my domain", you can find generators for the record online. You may need to mail the registrar to get it set up as the web-admin consoles often won't give you the option. Once in place it allows other admins to check people aren't faking mail from zombies that pretends to be from your domain.
rDNS is a reverse DNS record so that when someone gets mail from your server they can do a reverse lookup on the IP and match it to the domain name you claim to be sending mail from. Another online record generator and a quick mail to your ISP should be all it takes to get them to set this up, if they're the sort of ISP that will allow that sort of thing. If you don't have rDNS and SPF set up other folks may reject your mail as spam.
Once you've got those set up you want to set up your MTA to be able to check them so you're protected from incoming spam the same way that you're helping protect others. Postfix required an add-on python process (postfix-policyd-spf-python) to do SPF, it passes the mail to the other program which performs the check and passes it back if OK. Google is your friend to find that. Don't think I ever got around to setting up rDNS checking.
DNSBLs are places like spamhaus that keep a DNS-style record of known-spamming IP addresses. When a connection comes in you do a lookup of the IP address on there and if there's a hit you drop the connection. Postfix config file can take the address (zen.spamhaus.org) and do this. Spamhaus also provide a way to test it.
OK, so optional extras...
I'm an SSL geek so I set up an SSL certificate chain so I can encrypt comms between the server and my client machines. Securely within my own house. Totally unnecessary :)
I have alpine on the server, which is a rewrite of pine, so I can ssh in to the box and read mail in the terminal. If I want to use a real mail program (thunderbird) outside my own network I use an SSH SOCKS tunnel.
Err. I dunno if you wanted all that, but I hope it helps, and happy hacking.
Thirded/fourthed/whatever.
Been running lenny on my 901 for months now. Works great.
That wiki has enough info to get going fast. Only issue with mine was that I had to build the wireless driver manually. Which is not as scary as it sounds, apt-get install the source, m-a it and a-i the result. All given in plain English in that wiki.
Debian ++
(not that your favourite linux is any less valid, dear reader, I just like this one.)
Yeah I know, I was being sarcastic about it being easy.
Squirrelmail is not something I've ever used in anger, I don't really do webmail. For remote access I either use an ssh tunnel with thunderbird or just ssh in and use alpine from the command line.
I don't like the idea of trusting your email to a third party with advertising as the major profit driver, and with little to no promises on availability. That said, for most folks I guess it outweighs the hassle of changing email address constantly.
Expensive?
No. Grab a small box like a linksys nslu2 or a nano-itx board, ADSL with a static IP (I pay an extra £1 permonth for the IP) and a domain name.
Difficult?
No, easy! You just need to install linux (pref. debian) set up an MTA like Postfix or exim, make sure to hook it up to a DNSBL or two, maybe spam-assassin for filtering, rDNS and SPF checks, header validation etc, open port 25 incoming on your router, add in dovecot for IMAP, make sure to set up your own trusted root certificates so you can connect in securely, consider a FOSS webmail solution (squirrelmail?), expose port 80 for that, make sure your passwords are good and strong, continually check for and apply security updates...
I do it. My mailserver runs off an NSLU with a 4GB USB flash stick. I don't think it's for everyone though. Whatever happened to ISPs providing email?