...it's not that they migrated their customers to a branded version of gmail, it's that they *botched* the migration. as they botch everything technical.
We were hit with this: first an email advising that we needed to change the settings on a certain day. Did this, didn't work. Phoned sky on a non-free number, was on hold for an hour, was eventually advised that their entire mail infrastructure was out of action for the week: try later. This wasn't communicated to anyone - Sky support are appalling. They don't know what's going on in their own network, they employ people who don't know what a POP mailbox is to work tech support, and they routinely palm off customers. Fancy waiting 3 days for a password reset to get into your email, when it's not a password reset that's needed - instead they have broken synchronisation between your sky tv account and sky email account. Two separate accounts, but if you don't have the same password on both, it'll break email. 3 days of waiting - and the password reset doesn't work as that wasn't the bloody problem in the first place. Arggggh.
It's worth noting that Sky's broadband is "free" in that if you subscribe to their digital TV service, you can get limited broadband for free, not-so-limited broadband for 5UKP a month, and almost-unlimited broadband for a tenner. This probably explains why they're so poorly supported. Oh, and the sky-branded, custom-firmware version netgear router they supply falls over regularly and requires a reboot if you dare to turn on UPnP.
The iPhones are pretty integrated into certain carriers. Those carriers can map an IMEI number in use to a location, to a phone number or to the subscriber information.
I can quite easily see Apple/O2/AT&T offering a pseudo-GPS system based upon cell tower you're in range of, or offering a "where are my buddies?" service that did similar, for example.
They could spin this to say "Hey! Is your identity compromised because someone leaked your personal info? To stop this ever happening again, we're going to use unbreakable biometric encryption to identify you! Please come and have your RFID implant"
...you buy a SIM card for your favourite network, you put it in the phone. Job done. Other than subsidising handsets, what influence do the network have on your choice of phone?
ATI make a single driver that supports the vast majority of their video cards.
Nvidia make a single driver that supports the vast majority of their video cards, and another driver that supports the vast majority of their chipsets.
It wouldn't seem much of a stretch to come out with unified drivers for common hardware configs - barring peripherals, such as webcams etc (and how hard would it be to have a standard HCI driver for them?) you'd probably find that the majority of hardware would be supported by quite a small number of these "unified" drivers.
I've got spare cycles to cook nice food from scratch using ingredients I grew in my garden, rather than buying ready meals. I enjoy cooking, and further more can make my own recipes.
Your point?
...on many if not all it's considered "user serviceable". take the macbook for example: both HDD and RAM readily accessible. I admit that it's a ball ache that the MBP doesn't have a user accessible HDD, but it's not unique in the world of ultra-rammed laptops...
for older (think CPa era), sure. For modern ones, no. BIOS p/w held in EEPROM, so not affected by removing any battery backup. Needs a replacement bios chip, which is not trivial. It's possible, and I have done it back in field tech days, but many laptops would require a good surface soldering kit to do this.
I repeat IT IS NOT EASY TO REMOVE BIOS PASSWORDS ON MODERN LAPTOPS.
...this is categorically NOT possible on any significant number of laptops manufactured in the last 10 years. Modern BIOS passwords are secure enough to effectively brick any device where the password is lost, without significant expertise or specialist kit to bypass.
Ric
..and apple are free to brick it when they release a firmware update. Sure, you can decide not to apply the update, but you'll be missing out on new functionality. Eventually they may only allow updated phones to sync to iTunes...
I take your point, and as I said, I'm a Palm fan - but to take one example: the development resource that went into the Foleo. Spend that on a new OS (we're going to be based on ALPS now, right? I'm losing track of all the byzantine changes they had at Palm) and a manufacturing contract for a slightly thinner Treo with Wifi for HTC and you'd have had a winner.
As it is, WinMo's got entrenched, Nokia's got the alternative and Mac market, and Apple's got the sexy new multitouch. Palm seems stuck in a bit of an evolutionary dead end and needs to produce something a bit more impressive if it wants to continue to exist as otherwise market forces are goign to kill them.
"they've been putting out four smartphones per year for the last two years"
Come on. I'm a Palm fan, but they've not exactly been innovating in that time. Treo 650 added bluetooth and a better screen to the 600. Treo 680 removed the aerial and added a little memory. They got HTC to put out some WinMo phones based on the Treo hardware: god knows why as there's a load of more capable WinMo phones on the market, most of which are also made by HTC. They've just brought out the Centro, which is, well, a 680 in drag.
What they haven't done is bring out a new OS, with memory management that's crash resistant, or added Wifi, or brought out a sexy form factor.
By any measurement, they've been treading water the last few weeks whilst their geek cred is slowly but surely eroded by other platforms getting better, faster and sexier.
Yes, because we all know Palm are great at keeping ahead of the curve and regularly release innovative hardware that adds extra functionality to their older product lines. They don't, for example, keep trotting out the same tired hardware in a new case and refuse to add features people might actually want, like memory protection and wifi..
"Don't forget Storm's auto-dos on security researchers:
If you have a program following the URLs in a large spam feed, and visit a URL more than X times in Y seconds, Storm respnods with an ?automatic? DDoS attack.
Posted by: Nicholas Weaver at October 4, 2007 07:22 AM"
What motivation would the NSA, which is an orginization with almost limitless funds, have in creating a botnet of the scale of storm? If they did, why would they sell it off? shits and giggles, baby.
...I've put in two Vista boxes (Dell preloads, but *clean* preloads) and both have exhibited similar symptoms. One one, unzipping a 12mb zip file took *twenty seven minutes" to complete, which I'd expect to take around 5 seconds on XP. During this time whilst I was sitting there tapping my fingers the progress bar stuck on "estimating time to copy" for the majority of it.
Copying files from SMB network shares is similarly slow: incredibly slow to mount, and glacial to copy.
There's an MS hotfix available if you call PSS that purports to fix this, but I didn't notice an improvement. Turning off automatically generate file previews might speed it a little, but there's something very broken in the world of Vista file copying...
In the UK there's an outfit called http://www.thebunker.net/ - they've bought two old MOD command-and-control nuclear bunkers and fitted them out as datacenters and archives.
Slashdot Mirror
then what happens? Oh yes. Cheers George. Here's to WWIII.
unless you're using Leopard
We were hit with this: first an email advising that we needed to change the settings on a certain day. Did this, didn't work. Phoned sky on a non-free number, was on hold for an hour, was eventually advised that their entire mail infrastructure was out of action for the week: try later. This wasn't communicated to anyone - Sky support are appalling.
They don't know what's going on in their own network, they employ people who don't know what a POP mailbox is to work tech support, and they routinely palm off customers.
Fancy waiting 3 days for a password reset to get into your email, when it's not a password reset that's needed - instead they have broken synchronisation between your sky tv account and sky email account. Two separate accounts, but if you don't have the same password on both, it'll break email. 3 days of waiting - and the password reset doesn't work as that wasn't the bloody problem in the first place. Arggggh.
It's worth noting that Sky's broadband is "free" in that if you subscribe to their digital TV service, you can get limited broadband for free, not-so-limited broadband for 5UKP a month, and almost-unlimited broadband for a tenner. This probably explains why they're so poorly supported. Oh, and the sky-branded, custom-firmware version netgear router they supply falls over regularly and requires a reboot if you dare to turn on UPnP.
The iPhones are pretty integrated into certain carriers. Those carriers can map an IMEI number in use to a location, to a phone number or to the subscriber information. I can quite easily see Apple/O2/AT&T offering a pseudo-GPS system based upon cell tower you're in range of, or offering a "where are my buddies?" service that did similar, for example.
They could spin this to say "Hey! Is your identity compromised because someone leaked your personal info? To stop this ever happening again, we're going to use unbreakable biometric encryption to identify you! Please come and have your RFID implant"
...you buy a SIM card for your favourite network, you put it in the phone. Job done. Other than subsidising handsets, what influence do the network have on your choice of phone?
It's the "Christians" dropping democracy on Muslims from bombers at 40,000 feet right now...S
like the number of people wanting to do that is going to hurt apple.
Nvidia make a single driver that supports the vast majority of their video cards, and another driver that supports the vast majority of their chipsets.
It wouldn't seem much of a stretch to come out with unified drivers for common hardware configs - barring peripherals, such as webcams etc (and how hard would it be to have a standard HCI driver for them?) you'd probably find that the majority of hardware would be supported by quite a small number of these "unified" drivers.
I've got spare cycles to cook nice food from scratch using ingredients I grew in my garden, rather than buying ready meals. I enjoy cooking, and further more can make my own recipes.
Your point?
...on many if not all it's considered "user serviceable". take the macbook for example: both HDD and RAM readily accessible. I admit that it's a ball ache that the MBP doesn't have a user accessible HDD, but it's not unique in the world of ultra-rammed laptops...
...rather than a full version.
I repeat IT IS NOT EASY TO REMOVE BIOS PASSWORDS ON MODERN LAPTOPS.
...this is categorically NOT possible on any significant number of laptops manufactured in the last 10 years. Modern BIOS passwords are secure enough to effectively brick any device where the password is lost, without significant expertise or specialist kit to bypass. Ric
..and apple are free to brick it when they release a firmware update. Sure, you can decide not to apply the update, but you'll be missing out on new functionality. Eventually they may only allow updated phones to sync to iTunes...
As it is, WinMo's got entrenched, Nokia's got the alternative and Mac market, and Apple's got the sexy new multitouch. Palm seems stuck in a bit of an evolutionary dead end and needs to produce something a bit more impressive if it wants to continue to exist as otherwise market forces are goign to kill them.
Come on. I'm a Palm fan, but they've not exactly been innovating in that time. Treo 650 added bluetooth and a better screen to the 600. Treo 680 removed the aerial and added a little memory. They got HTC to put out some WinMo phones based on the Treo hardware: god knows why as there's a load of more capable WinMo phones on the market, most of which are also made by HTC.
They've just brought out the Centro, which is, well, a 680 in drag.
What they haven't done is bring out a new OS, with memory management that's crash resistant, or added Wifi, or brought out a sexy form factor.
By any measurement, they've been treading water the last few weeks whilst their geek cred is slowly but surely eroded by other platforms getting better, faster and sexier.
Yes, because we all know Palm are great at keeping ahead of the curve and regularly release innovative hardware that adds extra functionality to their older product lines. They don't, for example, keep trotting out the same tired hardware in a new case and refuse to add features people might actually want, like memory protection and wifi..
"Don't forget Storm's auto-dos on security researchers: If you have a program following the URLs in a large spam feed, and visit a URL more than X times in Y seconds, Storm respnods with an ?automatic? DDoS attack.
Posted by: Nicholas Weaver at October 4, 2007 07:22 AM"
...perfectly safe, here in our parent's basement.
...I've put in two Vista boxes (Dell preloads, but *clean* preloads) and both have exhibited similar symptoms. One one, unzipping a 12mb zip file took *twenty seven minutes" to complete, which I'd expect to take around 5 seconds on XP. During this time whilst I was sitting there tapping my fingers the progress bar stuck on "estimating time to copy" for the majority of it.
Copying files from SMB network shares is similarly slow: incredibly slow to mount, and glacial to copy. There's an MS hotfix available if you call PSS that purports to fix this, but I didn't notice an improvement. Turning off automatically generate file previews might speed it a little, but there's something very broken in the world of Vista file copying...
It's really not much of a stretch to imagine the military have something a little smaller, is it?
It's really not much of a stretch to imagine the military have something a little smaller, is it?
3m thick walls, TEMPEST shielding, fences, dogs, even frickin' EMP protection...