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This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Tuesday, May 07, 2002The Register: EDS bans IM. Just about everywhere I have ever worked had a ban on chat software, and those bans were always routinely ignored. It was really laughable when I was working in Europe. What was I supposed to do, call America every time I needed an instant answer?
Why isn't AOL selling a corporate AIM server? Jabber clients are immature at best, Windows Messenger requires an Exchange server. There's room for AOL to capture a significant share of the corporate IM market. Not to mention that AOL's client is simpler to use than any of the alternatives.
Frank McPherson has the scoop on Good Technology, a company planning offer a RIM 957-like device in a smaller form. Noteworthy is that it will syncronize wirelessly. PDABuzz: Handspring offers trade-up program for Treo buyers, $100 for trading in your old PDA. Makes me wish that I had hung on to my old Palm Personal instead of giving it away... PDABuzz: HP to drop Jornada line in favor of the iPaq The Register: McDonald's serves WLAN broadband in Japan. Do you want fries with that? John Robb: Lots of corporate misbehavior in the news today. It seems that our business culture has sprung a leak that has drained out integrity and a sense of fairplay. PPCW: Coming soon: the first GPRS CF Card, from Audiovox. Sweet!allNetDevices: TDK Beefs Up Bluetooth Product Line. Three new applications for managing contact lists on mobile phones and making phone calls.
Where are the inexpensive Bluetooth adapters? Apple took the bold move of releasing a $50 USB adapter for Macs, where's the PC version? Where are the sub-$100 PC Card, Compact Flash, and SDIO versions?
NYTimes: How the Towers Collapsed
It should be possible to strengthen the most vulnerable parts of skyscrapers and their ability to withstand extremely hot fires and other extraordinary stresses.
But there's no such thing as "Fire-proof", materials have fire ratings for X amount of time at Y degrees. Can buildings be designed to withstand the temperatures of a jet fuel fire long enough for the fuel to exhaust itself? Long enough to withstand the temperatures of the continuing fire fueled by materials within the building? If the Towers had stood burning for several more hours, would it have been possible to extinguish the fire? Is it possible to design fire-supression systems that are sufficiently hardened and redundant to survive the impact of an airplane and the subsequent fire?
Safety is not an absolute.
Our country has pulled off some amazing engineering feats, but designing a building that could have withstood the 9/11 attacks may not be possible. The best that could be hoped for is a few more hours to evacuate. Large numbers of people would still die.
Besides, nobody is going to be able to successfully hijack an airplace again without sufficient manpower and fire-power to kill most of the passengers and crew. Hostages will no longer offer their passivity in exchange for the hope of survival.
Whatever our future terrorist threat is, it will not be hijacked airplanes crashing into buildings.
The Register: MMS take-up could disappoint.
PPCW: Option's GlobeTrotter PC Card hits the street. Tri-band GSM card with GPRS and voice support. Doesn't include a voice application for Pocket PCs, but supposedly Running Voice will support it. $360."MMS is quite high on the investment agenda of mobile operators... But SMS (short messaging services) took seven to eight years to really take off," he said. The problem is that mobile handset manufacturers have not even started seeding the market with MMS capable handsets. The first handsets will be available in volume from mid-2002, and even so not every phone will come with MMS capabilities from this time.
Infoworld: Sniffer Technologies announces WiFi sniffer for iPaq. [via Pocket PC Thoughts]
No information on the Sniffer Technologies website. Linux PDA users have Kismet, which is simple enough for a non-Linux person like me to use.
Apple to release rackmount servers next week. Can't figure out what to make of that. What's the value proposition? Looks don't count for much in the data center. Does Apple have some compelling OS X-only server apps up their sleeves?
