3270s were (and are) frequently connected over WANs, so it's unlikely they normally had 4.5 Mbps to the mainframe, even shared with the cluster controller, except in few cases where the terminals were just about in the data centre.
That's Gossiptel for those Googling. Also, http://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwatch/2004/10/uk _voip_player.html has a set of links to UK VoIP companies in one of the comments.
Subject says it all really - as long as you have a monthly contract on Orange of £15-20 or so (less than US$30-40) the Treo 600 is just £100 ($180), which is pretty cheap for a smartphone.
Palm has free as in beer and speech development kits (GCC toolchain) and free emulators, so you could even develop for Treo without having a Treo, though it would be harder to ensure it really worked well on Treo and you'd need one for final testing and support.
I used to use Lookout and it was OK, but much slower (probably because it uses.NET Framework) than Google Desktop (GDS). The main benefit of Lookout is that it makes it easy to search for specific attachment types etc.
Our IT dept claimed Lookout was hitting the Exchange server very hard, which seems unlikely given its indexes are on the client PC, but who knows...
GDS is not bad overall, but it doesn't have any way of picking up file renaming, emails moved to another folder, and so on. The result is the frustration of 'finding' a useful document and not being able to open it after all, because it has moved or been renamed.
GDS does hook into new file events, and often manages to index a new file within a minute of its being created, so I don't see why this shouldn't be possible. I suggested all this to the Google team but they probably have other priorities.
Copernic does manage to do re-indexing, and generally gets more hits, and has many other useful features, but I'd prefer GDS to just work better due to its integration with Google.
Sounds like the community should get together a list of requests for PalmSource - interoperability specs for syncing should be right at the top. I don't use Linux to sync with Palm, but I really appreciate the work you are doing - as a developer on another open source project, sometimes people are quick to criticise and slow to praise.
This is good for Linux, even if you never use Palm OS, because the Palm OS licensees (hardware makers) will port Linux to all sorts of weird and wonderful phones, PDAs, portable gaming devices, and so on, as well as doing optimisations for small embedded devices generally - power management, Bluetooth, infrared, and in the future things like software radio (downloadable modules for WiMax, WiFi, GSM, CDMA, 3G/W-CDMA, and any other radio protocol...)
And it's good for me because I've been using Palm devices for ages, now have a Treo phone, and want Linux apps on my phone. The Treo is already pretty good, with nice clients for email, Jabber, IRC, web, and so on, but it could be improved a lot (for geeks) with Linux stuff too.
For the non-geeks, how about an incremental backup/syncing tool that runs all the time and makes sure you *never* lose any data? Boring but the sort of thing Linux is good at, not to mention all the development tools etc. The fact that Palm's 300,000 registered developers (really - check http://www.searchmobilecomputing.com/originalConte nt/0,289142,sid40_gci949950,00.html ) are coming to Linux can only be good.
Finally, back in geekland since this is Slashdot - you can run *one* operating system on mainframes, HPC clusters, servers, desktops and phones. Any tool you develop can, within reason, port across all those platforms, but more importantly for developers, your skills will be more portable.
Apple were once in a very similar situation to PalmSource - MacOS 9 was optimised for 680x0 processors, used Windows 3.x style cooperative multi-tasking, and so on. They managed to make the transition while not keeping and even growing their customer base, largely due to clever emulation for their older 680x0 applications.
PalmSource is doing many of the same things: binary emulation, migration to Unix/Linux base etc. Not sure if they are doing everything as well but they are travelling the same road, and it's a good idea to be moving to a Linux base to reduce their costs and improve the OS infrastructure.
Personally, I just hope they make a native Linux mode available in some way to take advantage of standard apps - can't wait to run Apache, Perl and TWiki on my Treo phone!
I have a Treo 600 which is quad-band GSM (i.e. every GSM band that exists, including South America's 850 MHz), has great support for email, IRC, Jabber, web, etc, and is very pocketable (not much bigger than a normal phone). Since you may be travelling in third world countries, it's worth noting that it looks much like a normal phone, so perhaps is less likely to attract unwelcome attention. The GPRS is pretty good, and I have used it in much of Europe with no problems. It runs Palm OS so there is a huge amount of software, including a lot of freeware - e.g. several IRC clients including the excellent upIRC, many email clients (one built in), lots of databases, etc. It comes with CityTime built in, a nice world clock that knows about timezones and DST all round the world.
The 600 doesn't have Bluetooth - the newer 650 does, though you should make sure the potential voice clipping issue discussed on treocentral.com is not happening or fixable (seems to be related to how high the ringer volume is set).
We use SpamAssassin here with Exchange - desktop and most servers are all-Windows. Don't know the details, but it is definitely possible and much better than the home grown solution.
This guy is benefiting from the switch to SMS - so of course he's going to say email is less useful. I'm amazed nobody has said that email, IM and SMS are just different mediums with different strengths. Email is much easier to read later, particularly if threaded. IM could really do with thread marking to make it easier to see which reply message relates to which sent message from yourself - often not obvious.
SMS has the huge benefit that it's delivered right to the phone and beeps someone, so you are pretty sure they have got it (as long as their phone is on).
Treo 600s and 650s don't support WiFi in the SDIO slot largely because of the power draw, even though there is an SDIO card already available with Palm drivers. Unfortunate but not a conspiracy by the big bad telcos...
Some mobile operators don't have any infrastructure at all, e.g. Virgin in UK and US, and many others in rest of Europe - these are the ones who will buy WiFi+GSM phones. However, without seamless handover from WiFi to/from GSM, they'll find it difficult to really sell a lot of VoIP over WiFi. The biggest initial selling point will be just having faster rates and lower cost when in WiFi range, without having to re-connect (easier to do for data than for voice, since interruption on voice call may drop the call).
"IE's stability and speed" - can't remember the last time Firefox crashed, but IE used to crash all the time when I used it, and Firefox feels a lot faster... Maybe your system (if it's Windows) needs re-installing - for me, IE is more stable on a new laptop running WinXP than a 3 year old Win2000 laptop.
I use the Internet on my mobile phone all the time, for general surfing etc, and it would be handy to be able to view movie trailers on it as well when deciding which movie to rent (or get on-demand from satellite TV). Multimedia is not something I do a lot of on PCs either, but occasionally it's fun or simply convenient.
On one PC that I use, SP2 worked fine and enabled access to it via a VNC server. On another, getting SP2 to allow VNC was a complete nightmare, despite disabling firewall, installing another firewall, trying many different VNC variants, disabling multiple concurrent logins, and so on. In the end I reverted to SP1, but I'm still not sure exactly what made VNC start working again. VNC was working perfectly on my mother's Windows NT previously, so it wasn't ISP firewalling.
Has anyone else had problems or success with VNC on SP2? Without VNC it's virtually useless. Most other remote control apps, even commercial trials, failed to work as well.
Cygwin is a recommended requirement of that cookbook only, not of TWiki itself. Also, the cookbook does point out where you may need to make changes in TWiki.cfg etc for use of ActiveState Perl, though it does assume Cygwin for ease of installation of ls, grep and some CPAN modules.
As long as you have working RCS, ls, grep, and so on, TWiki will be quite happy (and latest version eliminates need for ls). For an alternative approach, see the this mod_perl cookbook for TWiki on Windows, which only requires a few Cygwin files (ZIPped up on the same page) and also gives you great performance on Windows (where fork is more expensive so CGI typically performs badly).
There's a list of known configurations of TWiki on Windows, with quite a few non-Cygwin Perl ones. Personally I'm a Cygwin fan but I do like ActiveState Perl as it avoids some weird Cygwin Perl behaviour sometimes. There are even people who have installed TWiki on IIS and Microsoft's Services For Unix product...
Finally, the sample TWiki.cfg file includes detaile comments and sample paths to help people install on ActiveState Perl, and the testenv post-installation check tool diagnoses some issues with ActiveState installs and provides recommended setup changes if possible.
I agree to some extent with both of your points - WikiWords do get in the way for quite a lot of things and should probably be optional these days. There's also work in progress to do a simpler distribution of TWiki with fewer default pages - though some people like the default information as it lets them get started quickly with full help text etc.
TWiki does authentication - it can use.htpasswd but people have done plugins for LDAP and so on. The sections you refer to are done as 'Webs' within TWiki - different user groups or users can have different permissions per web or even per page. See TWiki.org.
I've yet to see this happen anywhere, and of course the same could happen with Lotus Notes - the reason it doesn't happen is the same reason why employees don't put graffiti on the walls of their offices.
If tracking who does what is a concern, go for a Wiki that lets you require authentication and has good revision tracking, e.g. TWiki.
TWiki does work fine on Windows, in fact I wrote the install cookbook and others have written installers. Quite a lot of people run TWiki on Windows laptop as a personal notebook and for development purposes.
If you really don't want Apache for some reason, you can use IIS but it will be much more painful (and probably less secure, see stats for Apache vs IIS vulnerabiilties). If you don't want Cygwin, you can quite easily use ActiveState Perl, which some people prefer to Cygwin Perl on Windows.
The traditional TWiki skin was quite ugly, it's true, but the new default skin, recently released, is really nice, with a modern CSS-based design that was created by a web design / usability specialist. See any TWiki.org page for an example.
TWiki's development is moving to a new model that is much more 'bazaar' than 'cathedral', which should also speed up development of the core. Plugins are already developed with great speed and there are over 100 of them.
I have a lot of respect for MediaWiki, given its nice UI and feature set, and am probably biased since I'm a TWiki developer, but I prefer a Perl-based Wiki for ease of hacking. TWiki is widely deployed for intranet Wikis that need security, attachments, and so on, as well as 'pure Wiki' features.
Slashdot Mirror
3270s were (and are) frequently connected over WANs, so it's unlikely they normally had 4.5 Mbps to the mainframe, even shared with the cluster controller, except in few cases where the terminals were just about in the data centre.
That's Gossiptel for those Googling. Also, http://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwatch/2004/10/uk _voip_player.html has a set of links to UK VoIP companies in one of the comments.
Subject says it all really - as long as you have a monthly contract on Orange of £15-20 or so (less than US$30-40) the Treo 600 is just £100 ($180), which is pretty cheap for a smartphone.
Palm has free as in beer and speech development kits (GCC toolchain) and free emulators, so you could even develop for Treo without having a Treo, though it would be harder to ensure it really worked well on Treo and you'd need one for final testing and support.
I used to use Lookout and it was OK, but much slower (probably because it uses .NET Framework) than Google Desktop (GDS). The main benefit of Lookout is that it makes it easy to search for specific attachment types etc.
Our IT dept claimed Lookout was hitting the Exchange server very hard, which seems unlikely given its indexes are on the client PC, but who knows...
GDS is not bad overall, but it doesn't have any way of picking up file renaming, emails moved to another folder, and so on. The result is the frustration of 'finding' a useful document and not being able to open it after all, because it has moved or been renamed.
GDS does hook into new file events, and often manages to index a new file within a minute of its being created, so I don't see why this shouldn't be possible. I suggested all this to the Google team but they probably have other priorities.
Copernic does manage to do re-indexing, and generally gets more hits, and has many other useful features, but I'd prefer GDS to just work better due to its integration with Google.
I believe this is fixed by a Sims 2 update downloadable from the EA website.
Sounds like the community should get together a list of requests for PalmSource - interoperability specs for syncing should be right at the top. I don't use Linux to sync with Palm, but I really appreciate the work you are doing - as a developer on another open source project, sometimes people are quick to criticise and slow to praise.
This is good for Linux, even if you never use Palm OS, because the Palm OS licensees (hardware makers) will port Linux to all sorts of weird and wonderful phones, PDAs, portable gaming devices, and so on, as well as doing optimisations for small embedded devices generally - power management, Bluetooth, infrared, and in the future things like software radio (downloadable modules for WiMax, WiFi, GSM, CDMA, 3G/W-CDMA, and any other radio protocol...)
e nt/0,289142,sid40_gci949950,00.html ) are coming to Linux can only be good.
And it's good for me because I've been using Palm devices for ages, now have a Treo phone, and want Linux apps on my phone. The Treo is already pretty good, with nice clients for email, Jabber, IRC, web, and so on, but it could be improved a lot (for geeks) with Linux stuff too.
For the non-geeks, how about an incremental backup/syncing tool that runs all the time and makes sure you *never* lose any data? Boring but the sort of thing Linux is good at, not to mention all the development tools etc. The fact that Palm's 300,000 registered developers (really - check http://www.searchmobilecomputing.com/originalCont
Finally, back in geekland since this is Slashdot - you can run *one* operating system on mainframes, HPC clusters, servers, desktops and phones. Any tool you develop can, within reason, port across all those platforms, but more importantly for developers, your skills will be more portable.
Apple were once in a very similar situation to PalmSource - MacOS 9 was optimised for 680x0 processors, used Windows 3.x style cooperative multi-tasking, and so on. They managed to make the transition while not keeping and even growing their customer base, largely due to clever emulation for their older 680x0 applications.
PalmSource is doing many of the same things: binary emulation, migration to Unix/Linux base etc. Not sure if they are doing everything as well but they are travelling the same road, and it's a good idea to be moving to a Linux base to reduce their costs and improve the OS infrastructure.
Personally, I just hope they make a native Linux mode available in some way to take advantage of standard apps - can't wait to run Apache, Perl and TWiki on my Treo phone!
Agreed - as others have pointed out, they have won the patent suit with Xerox so there's no reason not to include Graffiti 1 as an option.
Mind you, I use a Treo 600 so using Graffiti is a very rare thing for me, despite my rushing out and installing Graffiti 2 soon after buying it.
I have a Treo 600 which is quad-band GSM (i.e. every GSM band that exists, including South America's 850 MHz), has great support for email, IRC, Jabber, web, etc, and is very pocketable (not much bigger than a normal phone). Since you may be travelling in third world countries, it's worth noting that it looks much like a normal phone, so perhaps is less likely to attract unwelcome attention. The GPRS is pretty good, and I have used it in much of Europe with no problems. It runs Palm OS so there is a huge amount of software, including a lot of freeware - e.g. several IRC clients including the excellent upIRC, many email clients (one built in), lots of databases, etc. It comes with CityTime built in, a nice world clock that knows about timezones and DST all round the world.
The 600 doesn't have Bluetooth - the newer 650 does, though you should make sure the potential voice clipping issue discussed on treocentral.com is not happening or fixable (seems to be related to how high the ringer volume is set).
We use SpamAssassin here with Exchange - desktop and most servers are all-Windows. Don't know the details, but it is definitely possible and much better than the home grown solution.
Actually it's very easy to fake the SMS From phone number - apps exist to do this for Symbian phones such as SonyEricsson P800/P900.
Email is lagging in authentication, but SMS isn't that good either.
This guy is benefiting from the switch to SMS - so of course he's going to say email is less useful. I'm amazed nobody has said that email, IM and SMS are just different mediums with different strengths. Email is much easier to read later, particularly if threaded. IM could really do with thread marking to make it easier to see which reply message relates to which sent message from yourself - often not obvious.
SMS has the huge benefit that it's delivered right to the phone and beeps someone, so you are pretty sure they have got it (as long as their phone is on).
Treo 600s and 650s don't support WiFi in the SDIO slot largely because of the power draw, even though there is an SDIO card already available with Palm drivers. Unfortunate but not a conspiracy by the big bad telcos...
Some mobile operators don't have any infrastructure at all, e.g. Virgin in UK and US, and many others in rest of Europe - these are the ones who will buy WiFi+GSM phones. However, without seamless handover from WiFi to/from GSM, they'll find it difficult to really sell a lot of VoIP over WiFi. The biggest initial selling point will be just having faster rates and lower cost when in WiFi range, without having to re-connect (easier to do for data than for voice, since interruption on voice call may drop the call).
"IE's stability and speed" - can't remember the last time Firefox crashed, but IE used to crash all the time when I used it, and Firefox feels a lot faster... Maybe your system (if it's Windows) needs re-installing - for me, IE is more stable on a new laptop running WinXP than a 3 year old Win2000 laptop.
I use the Internet on my mobile phone all the time, for general surfing etc, and it would be handy to be able to view movie trailers on it as well when deciding which movie to rent (or get on-demand from satellite TV). Multimedia is not something I do a lot of on PCs either, but occasionally it's fun or simply convenient.
On one PC that I use, SP2 worked fine and enabled access to it via a VNC server. On another, getting SP2 to allow VNC was a complete nightmare, despite disabling firewall, installing another firewall, trying many different VNC variants, disabling multiple concurrent logins, and so on. In the end I reverted to SP1, but I'm still not sure exactly what made VNC start working again. VNC was working perfectly on my mother's Windows NT previously, so it wasn't ISP firewalling.
Has anyone else had problems or success with VNC on SP2? Without VNC it's virtually useless. Most other remote control apps, even commercial trials, failed to work as well.
As long as you have working RCS, ls, grep, and so on, TWiki will be quite happy (and latest version eliminates need for ls). For an alternative approach, see the this mod_perl cookbook for TWiki on Windows, which only requires a few Cygwin files (ZIPped up on the same page) and also gives you great performance on Windows (where fork is more expensive so CGI typically performs badly).
There's a list of known configurations of TWiki on Windows, with quite a few non-Cygwin Perl ones. Personally I'm a Cygwin fan but I do like ActiveState Perl as it avoids some weird Cygwin Perl behaviour sometimes. There are even people who have installed TWiki on IIS and Microsoft's Services For Unix product...
Finally, the sample TWiki.cfg file includes detaile comments and sample paths to help people install on ActiveState Perl, and the testenv post-installation check tool diagnoses some issues with ActiveState installs and provides recommended setup changes if possible.
I agree to some extent with both of your points - WikiWords do get in the way for quite a lot of things and should probably be optional these days. There's also work in progress to do a simpler distribution of TWiki with fewer default pages - though some people like the default information as it lets them get started quickly with full help text etc.
TWiki does authentication - it can use .htpasswd but people have done plugins for LDAP and so on. The sections you refer to are done as 'Webs' within TWiki - different user groups or users can have different permissions per web or even per page. See TWiki.org.
I've yet to see this happen anywhere, and of course the same could happen with Lotus Notes - the reason it doesn't happen is the same reason why employees don't put graffiti on the walls of their offices.
If tracking who does what is a concern, go for a Wiki that lets you require authentication and has good revision tracking, e.g. TWiki.
TWiki does work fine on Windows, in fact I wrote the install cookbook and others have written installers. Quite a lot of people run TWiki on Windows laptop as a personal notebook and for development purposes.
If you really don't want Apache for some reason, you can use IIS but it will be much more painful (and probably less secure, see stats for Apache vs IIS vulnerabiilties). If you don't want Cygwin, you can quite easily use ActiveState Perl, which some people prefer to Cygwin Perl on Windows.
TWiki's development is moving to a new model that is much more 'bazaar' than 'cathedral', which should also speed up development of the core. Plugins are already developed with great speed and there are over 100 of them.
I have a lot of respect for MediaWiki, given its nice UI and feature set, and am probably biased since I'm a TWiki developer, but I prefer a Perl-based Wiki for ease of hacking. TWiki is widely deployed for intranet Wikis that need security, attachments, and so on, as well as 'pure Wiki' features.
Oops, should have previewed... see this TWiki page and this one on how best to edit pages in general.