I work for a company that's large enough to have a clueless IT department and an purchasing bureaucracy that works at desks and never goes out in the field. We're only allowed one machine per person (which meant that the person who built our lab had to do deep bureaucratic magic), so we can't do the "desktop plus lightweight laptop" or even "departmental server plus laptops". A number of years ago our bureaucrats decided to standardize on overweight laptops with built-in floppies and CD drives, and while my shoulders think this was a terrible decision, at least I finally had a machine that had the parts I need instead of needing to beg and whine to get external CDROM drives for a machine that wasn't built for it. On the other hand, they decided to go with the "high-end" graphics option, which had 24-bit color and 800x600, instead of 8-bit color and 1024x768 (sigh.)
These days USB2 means that we're finally not limited to vendor-proprietary peripherals - so I can use my own external disk drive to do backups, and use my external DVD burner if I want to burn DVDs (the latest work laptops have DVD-ROM/CD-RW, but at least it's thin and lightweight), and if for some reason I needed a floppy drive, I could go buy a USB version, but so far there's been no need. One the other hand, the display adapter still doesn't support more than 1024x768, so I'm still stuck with a resolution lower than the Sun-3 I used ~20 years ago (pictures look better, but I use text 99% of the time, and I'd rather have 4-bit 1600x1200:-)
Gamers need high-end machines - almost nobody else does. If you're a gamer, laptops aren't good enough unless you're in the really high-priced heavy-duty heavy-weight game, and it's probably cheaper to buy a fast desktop and a lightweight laptop. For non-gamers, a $400 PC is more than good enough, and you can hide it under the desk if you don't want to see it, and then use whatever laptop makes sense for your portability needs. If you're depending on a laptop as your only machine, you desperately need an external disk drive for backups (even though DVD burners for laptops are finally available), and you might want an external DVD burner on USB2/Firewire anyway.
Lots of photocopier machines support 2-sided copying (and 1->2, 2->1), and sometimes you can get your bureaucrats to let you buy one of those even if they won't do something clueful with the printer.
You can get a good inflatable mattress for about $50, and it makes sleeping on the floor *much* nicer. When I've moved across country, I've driven one car and taken some vacation time, so we were able to bring the air mattress, cats, a few houseplants, folding chairs, important financial records, vet paperwork for the cats (drove through Canada on the way), some cooking pots and supplies, stereo (this was pre-PC), etc., so we were all set when the moving vans were late. If you're flying, you've got more control over timing, but need to get a car at your destination.
You either need to find a place to live _before_ you move, or else deal with a moving company that also does storage. I've done the moving bit when working for a large company, where this was standard procedure, but it's probably tougher these days, especially with small companies. One of the times, my wife drove out with me and I lived in a hotel for a month while starting work, and she flew back and got the house ready for sale, but we already had a buyer lined up who was flexible about timing.
All of the wireless devices I've owned or borrowed have had appallingly useless manuals:-) I want to set up encryption to keep my traffic private, but I don't mind having the device open for my neighbors or guests to borrow occasionally, and I've occasionally borrowed access from neighbors when my DSL was down. Is there a way to do that, or if you set the password to a publicly obvious password like "guest", does that still leave you with useful encryption?
One of my friends says he used to leave his wireless access point open so the neighbor's kid could surf without parental supervision, but eventually somebody started doing enough filesharing that his performance was unusable, so he shut it off.
Siteadvisor was described and demoed at CodeCon in 2006. Cool stuff - they track a lot of virus and phisher sites and warn you when you're at one of them.
The two places I've used "free" bikes are Copenhagen in ~2000 and Livermore Labs. Both are big flat areas wonderful for biking in. Livermore Labs is the easy case - it's a square mile campus surrounded by fences and armed guards:-) In Copenhagen, the bikes aren't exactly free - you put a ~4Euro coin in the slot to get the bike, and you get your coin back when you put the bike back on the appropriate bike racks, and as the guidebook says "If you don't feel like returning your bike, some local person will be happy to do it for you" (which proved to be true for a bike parked in a dark alley for 15 minutes:-) The bikes are made in the local prison using a weird design that makes the parts not useful on regular bikes, but I guess teenagers doing stunts don't care much - as long as the coinbox mechanism on the handlebars still works, you'll get your coins back.
So for in-house use, run a file server with Samba or some Microsoftish protocol that employees can mount on their machines - you can walk out of Fry's with a 1TB server for around $700, and you can waste a lot more employee time by not doing it:-) To deal with the external world, you'll probably want an FTP (actually one of the SSH variants) or web server - there are various tools that let people drag&drop files using http to store things.
I've been using Microsoft email products for over a decade (and they're much much better now than 12 years ago:-) They do encourage bloatware, and encourage people to mail around Word files instead of writing text, or Powerpoint instead of Word which should have been text, and cut& paste often explodes into huge files for no apparent reason, and there's something non-obvious about the Calendar system that takes a lot of space, and all of these things are of course sloppy and bad programming practice, and my Eudora mailboxes are about 100MB for far more messages, but so what.
Employee Productivity Matters far more than IT Staff Productivity. Being able to dredge up material from the last couple of years and look up meeting notes from meetings 3 years ago is sometimes really valuable. Wasting my time (as a non-IT worker) trying to use Microsoft products in a vaguely IT-department-efficient way is not productive (as well as being a lost cause.)
My company resolves the problem by having employees keep their mailboxes on their PCs, which most of us need to do anyway because we're using laptops out in the field. Anything that fits on my disk drive is my problem, and about 2-3 years ago, laptop disk drives hit the part of the Moore's Law curve where they're simply Big Enough. We also get about 35MB/employee of online quota, which is a useful buffer for a week of laptop repair time. (They actually allow a lot more than that, because blocking non-spam email is a really bad idea, but you can't send email if you're above the quota, so you're pretty much forced to clean it up as soon as you can.)
Outlook tends to self-destruct when your.pst mailfile reaches somewhere between 1.5 and 2GB, so it's important to keep file sizes below that - I used to try to keep them down to 700MB so I could burn backup CDs, but now I've got an external USB2 disk and a DVD burner so I don't have those problems. I still try to keep the file down to the 1GB range because otherwise searching tends to be too slow.
UDP does use IP, but it's fairly common for UDP to blast away with a bunch of small packets that don't have the flow-control behaviour of TCP. Cisco uses specialized hardware partly because ASICs are cheap and partly because they've never used fast enough CPUs. Some of the AIM modules do make sense - 3DES is heavy-duty bit-twiddling which wasn't designed for modern CPUs, but as AES becomes more popular, you really won't need accelerators, and a cheap Intel CPU can still handle a couple of T1s worth of IPSEC without any help.
This router's hardware platform currently supports a small set of serial interface cards - T1/E1 (1.5-2 Mbps) and 56/64kbps - which are targeting the Wide Area Network market, and Ethernets for LAN use (where you mainly use routers as glue for external firewalls, so you're still mostly limited by the external WAN speeds.) It really doesn't require that much speed.
If you're running T1/E1 in channelized mode, it used to require hardware help for HDLC encapsulation, but it's basically not much trouble on a modern CPU, and if you're running Ethernet-to-Ethernet, the Wiki showed they maxed out 100 Mbps for big packets and could fill a T3 with 128-byte packets, though you'd still want a faster machine if you're running full-blast VOIP-only traffic on a T3.
Telco switches normally ran on 48V DC back in the electromechanical days, and standard telco offices have rooms full of big honkin' batteries to act as a UPS for the building. And yes, power gets distributed on fat copper busses that you don't want to drop wrenches on. As electronic switching systems replaced the old mechanical ones, the capacity increased rapidly while the floor space for electronics decreased, but there's been enough opportunity to fill it back up again.
Dude, maybe you didn't notice, but the Nigerian part's being played by an American in his joke, including not knowing to say 3 crore rupees instead of 30 million...
"nobody" is a standard user in SunOS and various other Unix flavors, so mail to "nobody@some-machine-running-sunos.domain.com" will generally go to whoever gets "nobody"'s mail, generally root or a large file named [your mail spool here]/nobody . It's not official from an SMTP standards perspective, but it's a more likely target for random mail than "bin", "usr", etc.
Hey, at least he's just "null" and not "nobody", which is a bit more canonical in the Unix world. And he's not Joe, or "joe user" or Alice or Bob (popular with cryptographers and protocol designers) or "user" or "login" or "example".
Creating their own Chinese-character TLDs for.cn and creating Chinese-character version of.mil.cn are fine, and creating Chinese-character versions of.com.cn etc. would be fine. Creating a Chinese-character version of.com is annoying, because it's in more direct conflict, and risks causing trouble to anybody with an internationalized DNS resolver.
This is about DNS servers - nothing to do with IP address assignment. It may be that in a couple of years they'll get tired of ICANN foot-dragging on the IPv6 issue and declare another fiat answer, but that's a problem for another day.
This doesn't end the globally interoperable Internet - as long as IP packets go end-to-end, it's still just fine. Depending on exactly how they've implemented this, it may be cleanly interoperable with the rest of DNS (except that the Global Roots have to get around to including China's extra CC_TLDs), or it may be interoperable for anybody using a compatible Chinese character-set handler client (which shouldn't be a big problem, since the reason for Chinese-Character CCTLDs is to include Chinese-character content). On the other hand, it could be implemented in a way that horribly breaks any 7-bit-ASCII DNS client. It shouldn't do that - DNS is hierarchical, so the worst it should do is botch lookups to the section because the DNS server's responding in Unicode and the client doesn't understand them.
I can't tell from the original posting whether the client is trying to replace the hub site or protect the remotes or both, and I can't tell if the remote-site equipment is being used for other applications or only for the camera, which makes a *huge* difference in your threat model.
Basic firewall routers cost $29, and you can set them up to only allow connections from your headquarters location, or even to do IPSEC tunnels if your video application doesn't get into PMTU-discovery problems. Installing them at existing locations costs significantly more than $29, but for new locations it's just an extra couple of minutes to plug in the box when you're plugging in the camera.
Basic PCs cost $250, so if you need a headquarters firewall or IPSEC tunnel server, that's basically free - certainly less than you'd charge your client for the amount of time you're reading Slashdot responses \\\\\\\ \\\\ \\\\\\\ researching solutions. And you can run ClamAV on it to protect outgoing traffic.
If your remote sites are using the video box as a general-purpose PC to surf the net and read email, then you need to run an anti-virus application on it and either run a basic firewall box (wimpy, but a good start), or use the firewall to tunnel all your browsing traffic back to a server at headquarters, where you're running Squid and ClamAV and some decent Linux firewalling, and give them an email server that does some anti-virus and spam blocking and an email client that doesn't come from Microsoft. (If this weren't a real estate company, I'd recommend a text-only email system like Pine, but realistically your real estate people need to send pictures to their clients.) Another choice would be to run VNC, in one of its tighter forms, and run any applications on the headquarters server, wiht appropriate anti-virusing there.
Some of my older lab machines had enough disk space, but some of them had two 500MB drives, and it's amazing how much trouble it was installing Linux on it back when that meant RedHat 5 or 6. The problem was that the distro either wanted to split the disk up into various partitions, some of which were too large for one drive and others didn't fill the other drive, or else it wanted to treat everything as one large root file system which didn't do the job either. I'd constantly have installs choke because one drive was 1/3 full and the other needed to be 1.5x full, and there wasn't a convenient way to tell it where to fit packages. I suppose today you can probably do things with RAID to stripe the partitions across disks or something, but a union filesystem of some sort would probably be easier, especially if it could include the CDROM as part of a partition.
386/33 with Unix SVR4 and X10.? worked just fine
on
Linux On Older Hardware
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I _think_ it was SVR4, but the late 80s are fairly old memory by now so it could have been SVR2, and maybe it was X11.* by then. Sure, it wasn't as fast as a Sun4, much less the HP graphics workstation we had which had 48MB of video RAM, but basically it worked pretty well.
Non-CD Booting Options and Distro Support
on
Linux On Older Hardware
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I don't consider a machine that can boot from CDROM to be old:-) (And I especially don't consider any machine that supports USB to be old...)
Machines that have to boot from floppy or HD are old, and laptops with random pre-Cardbus PCMCIA Ethernet cards are old, and working with them requires distro support for booting from floppy into a system with the right Ethernet drivers and/or support for booting from MS-DOS file systems that you loaded before the first Linux boot. Many of the distros out there _could_ do it, but don't necessarily give you the documentation to figure out how:-)
One trick I'm planning to try soon is putting the laptop disk into an external USB shoebox so I can load it from one of my larger computers, side-stepping the whole problem. That still requires a sufficiently small distro, but at least it's a start.
The only data formats I have that aren't likely to become way obsolete fairly quickly are things like ASCII text, tab-delimited ASCII data, Unix mbox, and basic HTML (with no Javascript or other cruft.) Unicode's barking at the heels of all the ASCII formats, and of course you always need to fix up line-break codes. Binary formats are harder to preserve good software for, though GIF is still readable by many things. Media formats go dead much faster than data formats (9 Track Tape was pretty much the gold standard, and it's long dead, and floppy formats other than 3.5" vanilla non-copy-protected MSDOS 8.3-named file systems are also dead.)
Anything that's not open source or easily re-engineered will die quickly.
Ok, it's probably a medium-length shell script if you want to keep all your metadata, and it's probably a pain to put together all the utilities you need to do the job, and you'll probably want to run them on Linux.
I haven't done it yet because I'm running Windows and it's been mumblety-long since I've played with Cygwin so I don't know if all the Linux-based tools can be built over there or not. But every time I find a tool that looks like it's got the capabilities I need, it's either for Linux or Mac, and my newer Mac is a decade-old 7100 that doesn't support OSX:-)
Unlimited? You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means.
Sure, they put out lots of hype about 3G, but for most of them the "unlimited" plans really mean "all the bits your cellphone screen can display and you're not allowed to Bluetooth/Cable/IR to your laptop", plus there's a much more expensive "unlimited" plan that lets you actually connect a computer, though there's probably fine print in the contract that limits you to a few hundred megabytes of unlimitedness.
So if I pay a few hundred dollars for a locked Treo/etc., I can get some use of their limited unlimited service, but with a smaller-screen phone, the performance difference between ~9600-baud CDPD and 200kbps or 2 Mbps 2.5G/3G/3.5G/etc. isn't significant except for uploading camera pictures, and I'd much rather upload pictures to my PC using USB or Bluetooth, because my PC is where I want to use them.
Slashdot Mirror
These days USB2 means that we're finally not limited to vendor-proprietary peripherals - so I can use my own external disk drive to do backups, and use my external DVD burner if I want to burn DVDs (the latest work laptops have DVD-ROM/CD-RW, but at least it's thin and lightweight), and if for some reason I needed a floppy drive, I could go buy a USB version, but so far there's been no need. One the other hand, the display adapter still doesn't support more than 1024x768, so I'm still stuck with a resolution lower than the Sun-3 I used ~20 years ago (pictures look better, but I use text 99% of the time, and I'd rather have 4-bit 1600x1200 :-)
Gamers need high-end machines - almost nobody else does. If you're a gamer, laptops aren't good enough unless you're in the really high-priced heavy-duty heavy-weight game, and it's probably cheaper to buy a fast desktop and a lightweight laptop. For non-gamers, a $400 PC is more than good enough, and you can hide it under the desk if you don't want to see it, and then use whatever laptop makes sense for your portability needs. If you're depending on a laptop as your only machine, you desperately need an external disk drive for backups (even though DVD burners for laptops are finally available), and you might want an external DVD burner on USB2/Firewire anyway.
Lots of photocopier machines support 2-sided copying (and 1->2, 2->1), and sometimes you can get your bureaucrats to let you buy one of those even if they won't do something clueful with the printer.
You either need to find a place to live _before_ you move, or else deal with a moving company that also does storage. I've done the moving bit when working for a large company, where this was standard procedure, but it's probably tougher these days, especially with small companies. One of the times, my wife drove out with me and I lived in a hotel for a month while starting work, and she flew back and got the house ready for sale, but we already had a buyer lined up who was flexible about timing.
One of my friends says he used to leave his wireless access point open so the neighbor's kid could surf without parental supervision, but eventually somebody started doing enough filesharing that his performance was unusable, so he shut it off.
Siteadvisor was described and demoed at CodeCon in 2006. Cool stuff - they track a lot of virus and phisher sites and warn you when you're at one of them.
The two places I've used "free" bikes are Copenhagen in ~2000 and Livermore Labs. Both are big flat areas wonderful for biking in. Livermore Labs is the easy case - it's a square mile campus surrounded by fences and armed guards :-) In Copenhagen, the bikes aren't exactly free - you put a ~4Euro coin in the slot to get the bike, and you get your coin back when you put the bike back on the appropriate bike racks, and as the guidebook says "If you don't feel like returning your bike, some local person will be happy to do it for you" (which proved to be true for a bike parked in a dark alley for 15 minutes :-) The bikes are made in the local prison using a weird design that makes the parts not useful on regular bikes, but I guess teenagers doing stunts don't care much - as long as the coinbox mechanism on the handlebars still works, you'll get your coins back.
So for in-house use, run a file server with Samba or some Microsoftish protocol that employees can mount on their machines - you can walk out of Fry's with a 1TB server for around $700, and you can waste a lot more employee time by not doing it :-) To deal with the external world, you'll probably want an FTP (actually one of the SSH variants) or web server - there are various tools that let people drag&drop files using http to store things.
Employee Productivity Matters far more than IT Staff Productivity. Being able to dredge up material from the last couple of years and look up meeting notes from meetings 3 years ago is sometimes really valuable. Wasting my time (as a non-IT worker) trying to use Microsoft products in a vaguely IT-department-efficient way is not productive (as well as being a lost cause.)
My company resolves the problem by having employees keep their mailboxes on their PCs, which most of us need to do anyway because we're using laptops out in the field. Anything that fits on my disk drive is my problem, and about 2-3 years ago, laptop disk drives hit the part of the Moore's Law curve where they're simply Big Enough. We also get about 35MB/employee of online quota, which is a useful buffer for a week of laptop repair time. (They actually allow a lot more than that, because blocking non-spam email is a really bad idea, but you can't send email if you're above the quota, so you're pretty much forced to clean it up as soon as you can.)
Outlook tends to self-destruct when your .pst mailfile reaches somewhere between 1.5 and 2GB, so it's important to keep file sizes below that - I used to try to keep them down to 700MB so I could burn backup CDs, but now I've got an external USB2 disk and a DVD burner so I don't have those problems.
I still try to keep the file down to the 1GB range because otherwise searching tends to be too slow.
UDP does use IP, but it's fairly common for UDP to blast away with a bunch of small packets that don't have the flow-control behaviour of TCP. Cisco uses specialized hardware partly because ASICs are cheap and partly because they've never used fast enough CPUs. Some of the AIM modules do make sense - 3DES is heavy-duty bit-twiddling which wasn't designed for modern CPUs, but as AES becomes more popular, you really won't need accelerators, and a cheap Intel CPU can still handle a couple of T1s worth of IPSEC without any help.
If you're running T1/E1 in channelized mode, it used to require hardware help for HDLC encapsulation, but it's basically not much trouble on a modern CPU, and if you're running Ethernet-to-Ethernet, the Wiki showed they maxed out 100 Mbps for big packets and could fill a T3 with 128-byte packets, though you'd still want a faster machine if you're running full-blast VOIP-only traffic on a T3.
Telco switches normally ran on 48V DC back in the electromechanical days, and standard telco offices have rooms full of big honkin' batteries to act as a UPS for the building. And yes, power gets distributed on fat copper busses that you don't want to drop wrenches on. As electronic switching systems replaced the old mechanical ones, the capacity increased rapidly while the floor space for electronics decreased, but there's been enough opportunity to fill it back up again.
Dude, maybe you didn't notice, but the Nigerian part's being played by an American in his joke, including not knowing to say 3 crore rupees instead of 30 million ...
"nobody" is a standard user in SunOS and various other Unix flavors, so mail to "nobody@some-machine-running-sunos.domain.com" will generally go to whoever gets "nobody"'s mail, generally root or a large file named [your mail spool here]/nobody . It's not official from an SMTP standards perspective, but it's a more likely target for random mail than "bin", "usr", etc.
Hey, at least he's just "null" and not "nobody", which is a bit more canonical in the Unix world. And he's not Joe, or "joe user" or Alice or Bob (popular with cryptographers and protocol designers) or "user" or "login" or "example".
Creating their own Chinese-character TLDs for .cn and creating Chinese-character version of .mil.cn are fine, and creating Chinese-character versions of .com.cn etc. would be fine. Creating a Chinese-character version of .com is annoying, because it's in more direct conflict, and risks causing trouble to anybody with an internationalized DNS resolver.
This is about DNS servers - nothing to do with IP address assignment. It may be that in a couple of years they'll get tired of ICANN foot-dragging on the IPv6 issue and declare another fiat answer, but that's a problem for another day.
This doesn't end the globally interoperable Internet - as long as IP packets go end-to-end, it's still just fine. Depending on exactly how they've implemented this, it may be cleanly interoperable with the rest of DNS (except that the Global Roots have to get around to including China's extra CC_TLDs), or it may be interoperable for anybody using a compatible Chinese character-set handler client (which shouldn't be a big problem, since the reason for Chinese-Character CCTLDs is to include Chinese-character content). On the other hand, it could be implemented in a way that horribly breaks any 7-bit-ASCII DNS client. It shouldn't do that - DNS is hierarchical, so the worst it should do is botch lookups to the section because the DNS server's responding in Unicode and the client doesn't understand them.
Basic firewall routers cost $29, and you can set them up to only allow connections from your headquarters location, or even to do IPSEC tunnels if your video application doesn't get into PMTU-discovery problems. Installing them at existing locations costs significantly more than $29, but for new locations it's just an extra couple of minutes to plug in the box when you're plugging in the camera.
Basic PCs cost $250, so if you need a headquarters firewall or IPSEC tunnel server, that's basically free - certainly less than you'd charge your client for the amount of time you're reading Slashdot responses \\\\\\\ \\\\ \\\\\\\ researching solutions. And you can run ClamAV on it to protect outgoing traffic.
If your remote sites are using the video box as a general-purpose PC to surf the net and read email, then you need to run an anti-virus application on it and either run a basic firewall box (wimpy, but a good start), or use the firewall to tunnel all your browsing traffic back to a server at headquarters, where you're running Squid and ClamAV and some decent Linux firewalling, and give them an email server that does some anti-virus and spam blocking and an email client that doesn't come from Microsoft. (If this weren't a real estate company, I'd recommend a text-only email system like Pine, but realistically your real estate people need to send pictures to their clients.) Another choice would be to run VNC, in one of its tighter forms, and run any applications on the headquarters server, wiht appropriate anti-virusing there.
Some of my older lab machines had enough disk space, but some of them had two 500MB drives, and it's amazing how much trouble it was installing Linux on it back when that meant RedHat 5 or 6. The problem was that the distro either wanted to split the disk up into various partitions, some of which were too large for one drive and others didn't fill the other drive, or else it wanted to treat everything as one large root file system which didn't do the job either. I'd constantly have installs choke because one drive was 1/3 full and the other needed to be 1.5x full, and there wasn't a convenient way to tell it where to fit packages. I suppose today you can probably do things with RAID to stripe the partitions across disks or something, but a union filesystem of some sort would probably be easier, especially if it could include the CDROM as part of a partition.
I _think_ it was SVR4, but the late 80s are fairly old memory by now so it could have been SVR2, and maybe it was X11.* by then. Sure, it wasn't as fast as a Sun4, much less the HP graphics workstation we had which had 48MB of video RAM, but basically it worked pretty well.
Machines that have to boot from floppy or HD are old, and laptops with random pre-Cardbus PCMCIA Ethernet cards are old, and working with them requires distro support for booting from floppy into a system with the right Ethernet drivers and/or support for booting from MS-DOS file systems that you loaded before the first Linux boot. Many of the distros out there _could_ do it, but don't necessarily give you the documentation to figure out how :-)
One trick I'm planning to try soon is putting the laptop disk into an external USB shoebox so I can load it from one of my larger computers, side-stepping the whole problem. That still requires a sufficiently small distro, but at least it's a start.
Anything that's not open source or easily re-engineered will die quickly.
I haven't done it yet because I'm running Windows and it's been mumblety-long since I've played with Cygwin so I don't know if all the Linux-based tools can be built over there or not. But every time I find a tool that looks like it's got the capabilities I need, it's either for Linux or Mac, and my newer Mac is a decade-old 7100 that doesn't support OSX :-)
Sure, they put out lots of hype about 3G, but for most of them the "unlimited" plans really mean "all the bits your cellphone screen can display and you're not allowed to Bluetooth/Cable/IR to your laptop", plus there's a much more expensive "unlimited" plan that lets you actually connect a computer, though there's probably fine print in the contract that limits you to a few hundred megabytes of unlimitedness.
So if I pay a few hundred dollars for a locked Treo/etc., I can get some use of their limited unlimited service, but with a smaller-screen phone, the performance difference between ~9600-baud CDPD and 200kbps or 2 Mbps 2.5G/3G/3.5G/etc. isn't significant except for uploading camera pictures, and I'd much rather upload pictures to my PC using USB or Bluetooth, because my PC is where I want to use them.