You are almost certainly heavily NATted when using a GPRS mobile phone (in fact almost any phone using IPv4) - this is due to the sheer number of such phones, many of which are connected at any one time. There is typically a firewall between the GPRS network and the main IP network, which will also block things such as port 80 inbound.
This may also explain why another poster couldn't get SSH to work outbound.
What do you do about new zero-day exploits (e.g. the first I Love You worm), for which there are no anti-virus signatures? Even the best run Windows environments get hit by this and other worms, which are increasingly destructive. Only through forcing Office and Windows to be more secure, which Microsoft is slowly beginning to support, can you begin to make this more robust.
The fundamental problem is design decisions such as 'let the email tool execute code embedded in an email', 'preview HTML emails without even opening them', and 'auto-execute macros when opening a Word document'. Until Microsoft chooses security over ease of use, it is likely to continue to make the wrong decisions, requiring painful security hacks to paper over them.
Windows may be easier to administer at a basic level than Linux, but ONLY if you discount the huge expertise needed to set up a scalable anti-virus system (including server-based email scanning) and you're able to make sure everyone runs virus updates frequently (including Fred who just got back from 2 weeks' vacation and plugs in his laptop for the first time).
If the T68i is anything like the T68, rock-steady is the last description that should be used... I suspect the T610 or P800 are a lot better in Bluetooth usability.
My point is that the kernel should not let an app crash it - if it's possible to crash the kernel, it's a kernel bug or a hardware issue. If the kernel bug is known and open for a long time (perhaps it's very hard to fix), it's reasonable to expect RH to work around this, but it's far better just to fix the bug (or hardware).
It's quite possible the bug only occurred on your system, and of course it only happened with RH update because the Debian app code is different.
This is a great way of explaining a key benefit open source - use the Red Hat 'hood/bonnet on car welded shut' example, then say 'what if the manufacturer goes out of business and you have nowhere to get the car serviced?'.
This sounds like a serious kernel bug or a hardware issue - in either case, it's not RH update's fault, and could have been caused by something else happening on the machine at the same time.
Malware includes viruses and worms, which certainly infest Microsoft Office programs - having just seen a friend spend almost $500 US on Office 2003, this is hardly freeware...
Some Wikis, e.g. TWiki (http://twiki.org) already have authentication and full version control, so it's easy to reverse any abuse. TWiki also has forms, so it's possible to build whatever workflow you want without writing Perl code, just by creating forms etc.
In fact, most Wikis just use human intelligence to do this and that works pretty well.
Re:Ahh.... Forgetting the main thing...
on
Death of the PDA?
·
· Score: 1
There are mobile phones in Europe that sell for as little as US $100 retail, without a subsidy (i.e. true hardware only price) - while they aren't currently smartphones, it shows that the mass market for phones enables this price point, and I'm sure that sub-$100 smartphones will arrive soon. There are already many 'basic' phones in Europe that have colour screens, GPRS, Java downloadable games, polyphonic ring tones, WAP browsers, etc - even very basic pay-as-you-go phones often have these features now (e.g. the Nokia 3510i).
At least in Europe you can buy GSM/GPRS phones as 'off net', i.e. you supply your own SIM card to actually use the phone.
Of course, if you don't want phone service on your PDA/smartphone you might as well get a PDA, and for the next year or two it may still be cheaper to buy a low end PDA, but the trend is quite clear.
This formulation is quite logical, like Perl REs. You seem to be using the word 'illogical' to mean 'requires me to learn syntax and semantics' - a bit like expecting knowledge of how to cook to leap fully formed from book to brain... Not everything in this world is intuitive at first glance, but having used REs for a long time, I find they actually *are* quite intuitive now.
Different issue, but annoyingly enough my employer's firewall IP address has been banned somehow from using Google Groups. Other Google services are OK, and emails to the address provided have not helped. Any ideas on why this is done, and how to get it reversed?
Try a SonyEricsson P800 - it's a pretty good phone + PDA and it has the smaller-format Memory Stick Duo slot. Not HD-based for MP3s but it does have built-in and third party MP3 players and the memory stick can be up to 128 MB or more. Not really enough for a lot of music though...
Agree about the ugliness, like the 3650, but have a look at http://www.mphone.co.uk/Ericsson/z1010.html for a SonyEricsson phone that at least doesn't look too bad.
I use the P800 and I find its handwriting recognition a pain - longer strokes are needed than with Graffiti on Palm. It also crashes more than my Palm does, ironically enough - even though Symbian is a better OS for multi-tasking etc, it does seem to be possible for an app to take it down (Opera is particularly bad at this). I also sometimes have to reboot my P800 to get enough memory to launch Opera (I thought Symbian would automatically close processes if this happened).
However, Opera on P800 is really impressive on almost any site, and includes SSL, JavaScript, HTML 4.0, etc. Shame that I can't work out how to delete a bookmark, though...
It's a lot more complex than 'PalmOS sucks and Symbian rules' - Palm has far more applications and requires fewer taps to get things done, while Symbian is better for a phone (e.g. shows you battery level and signal at all times, whatever the app).
When the Treo 600 comes out I'll get one, because it has a keyboard and I really want to be able to do email and Wiki updates without being tied to a PC. The P800's email is not bad, but sending email is tedious due to the handwriting input.
I believe that UMTS (3G standard using W-CDMA) does specify a new codec (AAC, I think it's called), with improved quality, and in the longer term UMTS is talking about stereo etc.
I use the P800 and it's not bad, but the handwriting required is much more verbose than original Graffiti (more like Graffiti 2, I hear). It is generally stable, but friends who use the calendar/to-do features a lot find it crashes a fair bit (the OS, not just the apps).
The killer app for the P800 is Opera, which is free and has an amazing small-screen rendering feature that ensures you *never* need to scroll horizontally. I find myself using Opera all the time, far more than I expected.
The P800 is bulky and the flip keypad is not very nice to use - fortunately(?) it breaks on most people's P800s within a few months and then you have to use the touch screen keypad, which is not very good for dialling numbers. It also doesn't have an auto-lock in the keypad-flipped-down mode, so I frequently call people from my pocket if I don't remember to lock it.
However, I'm buying a Treo 600 for my mother and if I like it enough I may get one for myself even though I only bought the P800 in May - while Symbian is nice, I have a lot of useful software for the Palm, having used it since 1997 or so, and the syncing is really good. Also, the P800's backup system is separate to syncing and takes a long time, whereas a PalmOS device just backs up all changes as it syncs.
The sheer range and quality of Palm software is hard to give up - even simple things such as Find across all apps are apparently missing in Symbian smartphones. I just hope the web browsers improve - last time I tried them they were just about OK but nothing like as good as Opera, and Symbian is generally much better at IP.
The one thing that's essential for me on a Treo 600 is that it keeps a GPRS connection open for a configurable time (e.g. 5 to 60 minutes) - that way you aren't always re-connecting every few minutes. This was broken on Palms that talked to separate GPRS phones (they dropped the GPRS connection when the Palm power saving kicked in, for no good reason). P800s do have configurable GPRS timeout, but they also have a bug whereby you intermittently lose incoming phone calls when GPRS is enabled - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so I'm back to 5 minute timeout...
One day someone will really sort out smartphones but they aren't yet.
For a month or two, I've found that referring to non-existent domain names via my employer's Internet connection (PSInet) resulted in an ultimatesearch.com page popping up in a similar way to the new Verisign page. I tried quite hard to figure out if I had some IE spyware doing this but didn't manage to find anything - so perhaps ultimatesearch.com had a deal with PSInet to do something similar to Verisign's setup.
Does anyone know if ISPs are also doing this, or is this more likely to be spyware?
A minor point - a Reality Distortion Field refers to charismatic entrepreneurs who make *other people* believe their visions, no matter how unlikely. Darl McBride has almost the opposite - his own reality is distorted but he barely manages to convince anyone...
Large population means the largest middle class in the world, who have enough money for tech products. For example, there are *250 million* mobile phone subscribers in China right now... see http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/664 8761.htm for the story.
Re your astonishing comment: "[China] has a large population, and there are currently no mobile phones." - which planet are you on? Aren't you remotely aware that China is developing very fast and has a huge mobile market?
There are in fact 250 million mobile phone subscribers in China as of end Aug 2003, which is far more than any other country including the US. See http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/664 8761.htm for the details. I expect China to have more subscribers than the US or Europe within a few years, given its population and rate of development.
I agree that nobody using Symbian is going to switch to Linux in a hurry though - only when the $7 per phone royalty from Symbian becomes an issue (maybe when phones cost $50 or so to build vs the $300 plus that I guess they cost now).
I have news for you - IP and Frame Relay don't do per-packet error checking either, and that's a *feature*. One big innovation introduced by Frame Relay when it superseded X.25 was precisely this dropping of link level error checking - the point being that digital lines were reliable enough that it wasn't a problem to only do error checking end to end. X.25 people still say it's better to do this but it proved expensive and slowed down the switch hardware.
ATM has many issues including complexity, switches that drop on a per cell basis not per frame (i.e. you lose one 53 byte cell but forward all the other cells from the packet all the way across the network), and so on. These days, many carriers are not investing in more ATM infrastructure, but are doing ATM traffic over Juniper or Cisco type routers, using 'MPLS Layer 2 VPNs' to carry the traffic. MPLS is not quite up to ATM QoS and traffic engineering (for resilience and network utilisation) but it's getting quite close.
I don't believe Linux does everything that Packeteer does (TCP rate shaping etc, which is per-flow based and fiddles with ACKs etc). However, if you want the equivalent of what most people use Cisco routers for, including full routing and QoS, you should be fine. A suitable routing oriented distro would be best - or you can just buy Imagestream routers which are 'like Cisco' in capabilities but fully Linux based.
Slashdot Mirror
You are almost certainly heavily NATted when using a GPRS mobile phone (in fact almost any phone using IPv4) - this is due to the sheer number of such phones, many of which are connected at any one time. There is typically a firewall between the GPRS network and the main IP network, which will also block things such as port 80 inbound.
This may also explain why another poster couldn't get SSH to work outbound.
What do you do about new zero-day exploits (e.g. the first I Love You worm), for which there are no anti-virus signatures? Even the best run Windows environments get hit by this and other worms, which are increasingly destructive. Only through forcing Office and Windows to be more secure, which Microsoft is slowly beginning to support, can you begin to make this more robust.
The fundamental problem is design decisions such as 'let the email tool execute code embedded in an email', 'preview HTML emails without even opening them', and 'auto-execute macros when opening a Word document'. Until Microsoft chooses security over ease of use, it is likely to continue to make the wrong decisions, requiring painful security hacks to paper over them.
Windows may be easier to administer at a basic level than Linux, but ONLY if you discount the huge expertise needed to set up a scalable anti-virus system (including server-based email scanning) and you're able to make sure everyone runs virus updates frequently (including Fred who just got back from 2 weeks' vacation and plugs in his laptop for the first time).
My Win2K laptop crashes frequently, and more frequently just locks up so I have to reboot...
If the T68i is anything like the T68, rock-steady is the last description that should be used... I suspect the T610 or P800 are a lot better in Bluetooth usability.
My point is that the kernel should not let an app crash it - if it's possible to crash the kernel, it's a kernel bug or a hardware issue. If the kernel bug is known and open for a long time (perhaps it's very hard to fix), it's reasonable to expect RH to work around this, but it's far better just to fix the bug (or hardware).
It's quite possible the bug only occurred on your system, and of course it only happened with RH update because the Debian app code is different.
This is a great way of explaining a key benefit open source - use the Red Hat 'hood/bonnet on car welded shut' example, then say 'what if the manufacturer goes out of business and you have nowhere to get the car serviced?'.
This sounds like a serious kernel bug or a hardware issue - in either case, it's not RH update's fault, and could have been caused by something else happening on the machine at the same time.
Malware includes viruses and worms, which certainly infest Microsoft Office programs - having just seen a friend spend almost $500 US on Office 2003, this is hardly freeware...
Some Wikis, e.g. TWiki (http://twiki.org) already have authentication and full version control, so it's easy to reverse any abuse. TWiki also has forms, so it's possible to build whatever workflow you want without writing Perl code, just by creating forms etc.
In fact, most Wikis just use human intelligence to do this and that works pretty well.
There are mobile phones in Europe that sell for as little as US $100 retail, without a subsidy (i.e. true hardware only price) - while they aren't currently smartphones, it shows that the mass market for phones enables this price point, and I'm sure that sub-$100 smartphones will arrive soon. There are already many 'basic' phones in Europe that have colour screens, GPRS, Java downloadable games, polyphonic ring tones, WAP browsers, etc - even very basic pay-as-you-go phones often have these features now (e.g. the Nokia 3510i).
At least in Europe you can buy GSM/GPRS phones as 'off net', i.e. you supply your own SIM card to actually use the phone.
Of course, if you don't want phone service on your PDA/smartphone you might as well get a PDA, and for the next year or two it may still be cheaper to buy a low end PDA, but the trend is quite clear.
This formulation is quite logical, like Perl REs. You seem to be using the word 'illogical' to mean 'requires me to learn syntax and semantics' - a bit like expecting knowledge of how to cook to leap fully formed from book to brain... Not everything in this world is intuitive at first glance, but having used REs for a long time, I find they actually *are* quite intuitive now.
Different issue, but annoyingly enough my employer's firewall IP address has been banned somehow from using Google Groups. Other Google services are OK, and emails to the address provided have not helped. Any ideas on why this is done, and how to get it reversed?
Try a SonyEricsson P800 - it's a pretty good phone + PDA and it has the smaller-format Memory Stick Duo slot. Not HD-based for MP3s but it does have built-in and third party MP3 players and the memory stick can be up to 128 MB or more. Not really enough for a lot of music though...
Agree about the ugliness, like the 3650, but have a look at http://www.mphone.co.uk/Ericsson/z1010.html for a SonyEricsson phone that at least doesn't look too bad.
I use the P800 and I find its handwriting recognition a pain - longer strokes are needed than with Graffiti on Palm. It also crashes more than my Palm does, ironically enough - even though Symbian is a better OS for multi-tasking etc, it does seem to be possible for an app to take it down (Opera is particularly bad at this). I also sometimes have to reboot my P800 to get enough memory to launch Opera (I thought Symbian would automatically close processes if this happened).
However, Opera on P800 is really impressive on almost any site, and includes SSL, JavaScript, HTML 4.0, etc. Shame that I can't work out how to delete a bookmark, though...
It's a lot more complex than 'PalmOS sucks and Symbian rules' - Palm has far more applications and requires fewer taps to get things done, while Symbian is better for a phone (e.g. shows you battery level and signal at all times, whatever the app).
When the Treo 600 comes out I'll get one, because it has a keyboard and I really want to be able to do email and Wiki updates without being tied to a PC. The P800's email is not bad, but sending email is tedious due to the handwriting input.
I believe that UMTS (3G standard using W-CDMA) does specify a new codec (AAC, I think it's called), with improved quality, and in the longer term UMTS is talking about stereo etc.
This is a bit US-centric - amost everywhere in the world other than the US is already all-digital...
I use the P800 and it's not bad, but the handwriting required is much more verbose than original Graffiti (more like Graffiti 2, I hear). It is generally stable, but friends who use the calendar/to-do features a lot find it crashes a fair bit (the OS, not just the apps).
The killer app for the P800 is Opera, which is free and has an amazing small-screen rendering feature that ensures you *never* need to scroll horizontally. I find myself using Opera all the time, far more than I expected.
The P800 is bulky and the flip keypad is not very nice to use - fortunately(?) it breaks on most people's P800s within a few months and then you have to use the touch screen keypad, which is not very good for dialling numbers. It also doesn't have an auto-lock in the keypad-flipped-down mode, so I frequently call people from my pocket if I don't remember to lock it.
However, I'm buying a Treo 600 for my mother and if I like it enough I may get one for myself even though I only bought the P800 in May - while Symbian is nice, I have a lot of useful software for the Palm, having used it since 1997 or so, and the syncing is really good. Also, the P800's backup system is separate to syncing and takes a long time, whereas a PalmOS device just backs up all changes as it syncs.
The sheer range and quality of Palm software is hard to give up - even simple things such as Find across all apps are apparently missing in Symbian smartphones. I just hope the web browsers improve - last time I tried them they were just about OK but nothing like as good as Opera, and Symbian is generally much better at IP.
The one thing that's essential for me on a Treo 600 is that it keeps a GPRS connection open for a configurable time (e.g. 5 to 60 minutes) - that way you aren't always re-connecting every few minutes. This was broken on Palms that talked to separate GPRS phones (they dropped the GPRS connection when the Palm power saving kicked in, for no good reason). P800s do have configurable GPRS timeout, but they also have a bug whereby you intermittently lose incoming phone calls when GPRS is enabled - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so I'm back to 5 minute timeout...
One day someone will really sort out smartphones but they aren't yet.
Cheers,
Richard
For a month or two, I've found that referring to non-existent domain names via my employer's Internet connection (PSInet) resulted in an ultimatesearch.com page popping up in a similar way to the new Verisign page. I tried quite hard to figure out if I had some IE spyware doing this but didn't manage to find anything - so perhaps ultimatesearch.com had a deal with PSInet to do something similar to Verisign's setup.
Does anyone know if ISPs are also doing this, or is this more likely to be spyware?
A minor point - a Reality Distortion Field refers to charismatic entrepreneurs who make *other people* believe their visions, no matter how unlikely. Darl McBride has almost the opposite - his own reality is distorted but he barely manages to convince anyone...
Seems like you do need their SDK as a base, but GnuPOC makes it easy enough to develop on Linux using GCC etc - see http://gnupoc.sourceforge.net/
Large population means the largest middle class in the world, who have enough money for tech products. For example, there are *250 million* mobile phone subscribers in China right now... see http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/664 8761.htm for the story.
Re your astonishing comment: "[China] has a large population, and there are currently no mobile phones." - which planet are you on? Aren't you remotely aware that China is developing very fast and has a huge mobile market?
4 8761.htm for the details. I expect China to have more subscribers than the US or Europe within a few years, given its population and rate of development.
There are in fact 250 million mobile phone subscribers in China as of end Aug 2003, which is far more than any other country including the US. See http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/66
I agree that nobody using Symbian is going to switch to Linux in a hurry though - only when the $7 per phone royalty from Symbian becomes an issue (maybe when phones cost $50 or so to build vs the $300 plus that I guess they cost now).
I have news for you - IP and Frame Relay don't do per-packet error checking either, and that's a *feature*. One big innovation introduced by Frame Relay when it superseded X.25 was precisely this dropping of link level error checking - the point being that digital lines were reliable enough that it wasn't a problem to only do error checking end to end. X.25 people still say it's better to do this but it proved expensive and slowed down the switch hardware.
ATM has many issues including complexity, switches that drop on a per cell basis not per frame (i.e. you lose one 53 byte cell but forward all the other cells from the packet all the way across the network), and so on. These days, many carriers are not investing in more ATM infrastructure, but are doing ATM traffic over Juniper or Cisco type routers, using 'MPLS Layer 2 VPNs' to carry the traffic. MPLS is not quite up to ATM QoS and traffic engineering (for resilience and network utilisation) but it's getting quite close.
I don't believe Linux does everything that Packeteer does (TCP rate shaping etc, which is per-flow based and fiddles with ACKs etc). However, if you want the equivalent of what most people use Cisco routers for, including full routing and QoS, you should be fine. A suitable routing oriented distro would be best - or you can just buy Imagestream routers which are 'like Cisco' in capabilities but fully Linux based.