DISQUS

Congrats to you and Fiona, Paul. What a beautiful baby.

What a fantastic picture. The composition. The moment captured on the faces. The detail in the background of other soldiers interacting with people. The colouring.

Absolutely brilliant.

Jeez. Tibet is the tip of the iceberg. What about the Chinese political prisoners, the lack of respect for free compeition and intellectual property laws, lack of freedom of expression and democracy, the Chinese subsidisation of dictators in return for preferential trade and the horrific animal abuse perpetuated around the world to feed the Chinese market?

40-odd people in Tibet? What about the thousands that may have died in Chinese gulags?

What a crock. Google controls 75% of profits in the online ad market. While Microsoft might be viewed as the original IT oligopolist, Google has created a similar position in a different market.

Wow! Congrats!

Must be something in the air.

One of the drives in my server's RAID failed spectacularly last week, corrupting the entire data set until I isolated it. Thank God for ReiserFS and RAID 5. Rolled back the journal operating on 5 drives instead of 6 and continuing that way until I find a replacement on eBay.

Second time this year...

Hey

A lot of these features are Linux features available in KDE and Gnome.

Interesting. Although OSX is apparently built on Linux, it seems to taken a few more features from the Linux GUIs.

Happy Birthday Paul!!

When I saw this headline, I thought you'd made the SA press! (And then I thought, "But he's not a teen..")

Teen 'unlocks' iPhone

http://www.fin24.co.za/articles/default/display...

Aug 26 2007 02:07

New York - Armed with a soldering iron and a large supply of energy drinks, a teenager has developed a way to make the iPhone, arguably the gadget of the year, available to a much wider audience.

George Hotz of New Jersey spent his last summer before college figuring out how to "unlock" the iPhone, freeing it from being restricted to a single carrier, AT&T Inc.

The procedure, which the 17-year-old posted on his blog on Thursday, raises the possibility of a small industry springing up to buy iPhones, unlocking them and then selling them to people who do not want AT&T service or cannot get it, particularly overseas.

The phone, which combines an innovative touch-screen interface with the media-playing abilities of the iPod, is currently sold only in the US.

An AP reporter was able to verify that an iPhone Hotz brought to the AP's headquarters on Friday was unlocked. Hotz placed the reporter's T-Mobile SIM card, a small chip that identifies a phone to the network, in the iPhone. It then connected to T-Mobile's network and placed calls using the reporter's account.

Complicated hack

T-Mobile is the only major US carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology, but smaller carriers also use the technology, known as GSM. In Europe and Asia, GSM is the dominant network technology.

The hack is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software, and missteps may result in the iPhone becoming useless, so few people will be able to follow the instructions.

"But that's the simplest I could make them," Hotz said. The next step, he said, would be for someone to develop a way to unlock the phone using only software.

Technology blog Engadget on Friday reported successfully unlocking an iPhone using a different method that required no tinkering with the hardware. The software was supplied by an anonymous group of hackers that apparently plans to charge for it.

AT&T spokesperson Mark Siegel and Apple spokesperson Jennifer Bowcock said their companies had no comment. Hotz said the companies had not been in touch with him.

Apple shares rose $4.23 to close at $135.30 on Friday. AT&T shares gained 26 cents to close at $40.36.

SIM-chip method

The iPhone has already been made to work on overseas networks using another method, which involves copying information from the SIM chip, or Subscriber Identity Module.

The SIM-chip method does not involve any soldering, but does require special equipment, and it does not unlock the phone - each new SIM chip has to be reprogrammed for use on a particular iPhone.

Both hacks leave intact the iPhone's many functions, including a built-in camera and the ability to access WiFi networks. The only thing that will not work is the "visual voicemail" feature, which lists voice messages as if they were incoming e-mail.

Since the details of both hacks are public, Apple may be able to modify the iPhone production line to make new phones invulnerable.

Analysts said it is unlikely Apple would overhaul the iPhone's wiring to thwart the new hack because the difficulty of the procedure is likely to keep it confined to hardcore hobbyists.

Unlocking phone took 500 hours

There is apparently no US law against unlocking cellphones. Last year, the Library of Congress specifically excluded cellphone unlocking from coverage under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Among other things, the law has been used to prosecute people who modify game consoles to play a wider variety of games.

Hotz collaborated online with a large number of people to develop the unlocking process. Of the smaller core group, two were in Russia.

Hotz himself spent about 500 hours on the project since the iPhone went on sale. On Thursday, he put the unlocked iPhone up for sale on eBay, where the high bid was at $12 600 late on Friday. The model, with 4 gigabytes of memory, sells for $499 new.

"Some of my friends think I wasted my summer but I think it was worth it," he told The Record of Bergen County, which reported Hotz's hack on Friday.

Hotz heads for college on Saturday. He plans to major in neuroscience - or "hacking the brain" as he puts it - at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

- Sapa-AP

The iPhone uses Linux?

Seems like a few of us ravers have been reminiscing...

http://itisthequestion.blogspot.com/2007/01/do-...

Jeez, you're a long way from photography now baby.

Uh, this is also the company that brought us the Newton...

Seems to be the week for Java hassles.

I got out of IT ages ago but still run my own Debian setup which I'm now using as my new business' server.

I spent over a week trying to get two Java apps running on Java System Application Server or Tomcat. I finally managed on Tomcat.

While there is tonnes of stuff available through open source, the installation process is still fraught. This is partly due to the number of possible platforms and configurations.

But that might be the silver bullet open source is waiting for - deploying configuration managers (registries?) that applications can standardise their installtion process by. The Open Standards project is one attempt at this, but there is a very long way to go.

Sorry, just wanted to share my rant about a lost week I did not have.

Bllody hell dude. You're getting an Irish accent already.

Stoppit.

Did you get my comments on Linux or have I been censored???!!!

Oh, and - if you want to try Linux, get hold of / download a copy of Knoppix.

Knoppix is also a Debian fork and is a LiveCD version of Linux. You can boot and run Linux off the CD. It is renowned for being the easiest Linux to get running on a PC an recognises lots of hardware without hassles.

It is also a great way to test hardware for compatibility issues, or to find out settingthat are auto-configured through Knoppix, that will allow your Linux installation to work with your hardware.

Finally, take a look at "Linux Format" and "Linux Magazine." Both are from the UK and come with a DVD carrying the latest version of some flavour of Linux (e.g. Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Knoppix, etc) each month.

Hey Paul

I'm running three systems on Debian Linux.

I run my main laptop as a dual boot windows / debian combo.

I'm getting loads out of linux due to the thousands of esoteric applications that are high-end but free (such as statistics and development packages).

It really is brilliant for development with tonnes of IDEs and languages available through a point and click package update (Debian's brilliant APT software update tool).

For web development, it alo allows you to create a high-end test envirnoment on your workstation / laptop mimicking your production environment, which can be useful if you're away from your production test environment.

However, I run the "testing release" to get access to the latest material and be aware that there are bugs and installation hassles. If you roll back to the "stable" release, things are obviously much better, but you wait longer for the latest versions.

Ubuntu is based on Debian (it is a "fork" meaning it inherits from Debian and contributes back to it per the GPL). A lot of effort goes into standardising Ubuntu and easing installtion hassles.

Before buying a laptop, check out the net for linux support - a non-standard unsupported piece of hardware such as a wireless networking card can drive you mad!!!!

Cheers

IITQ

Wow.

I hypothesised about what was behind my procrastination in this post after seeing an Oprah show.

The article summarises it nicely.