The blog of a Leslie Wong
Hackers have been working on unlocking the iPhone since its release. Today Engadget is showing a video using iphonesimfree.com‘s software to unlock the iPhone.
What’s this mean? You’re no longer locked into a $1,389 first year cost (phone+minimum service plan) for an iPhone in the US. You can choose the provider you want and use any SIM card from any network provider in any country.
Justine Ezarik, who like, has her life streaming live on the internets, like a boring Truman Show, has posted this youtube video of her itemized everything iPhone AT&T bill.
You may have heard about the Skype outage last week. I guess as a gesture of good will, and because I pay Skype $US 29.95 per year for unlimited calls in the US and Canada, Skype sent me an email saying they would be “adding an additional seven days to your current subscription, free of charge.”
We don’t have a long distance service using POTS – Plain old telephone service, or more accurately the Public Switched Telephone Network – PSTN. Our only “home” long distance calling (except for our cell phone) uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – Skype. We even bought Cisco’s iPhone. The Linksys (Cisco) CIT400 has the ability to use a landline connection or Skype, without being connected to a computer.
I found out about the Skype outage because I was trying to call Godaddy, my web host. This blog, which is hosted on a shared server (who reads this anyway?), was taking minutes to load a page. But I couldn’t get through to them on Skype. By the time I figured out Skype had gone south, my web site was running normally…
What’s new in this release:
– Direct3D support on top of WGL instead of GLX for better portability.
– Many DirectSound fixes.
– Still more gdiplus functions.
– Many crypt32 improvements.
– Lots of bug fixes.
I signed up on Microsoft Connect to beta test Windows Home Server RC1 (WHS). For what it does, it’s a great piece of software. It’s based on Windows Server 2003 but with a very simple user interface for home users. Each PC (Vista or XP SP2) on the network gets the Windows Home Server Connector installed. The software finds the server and automates the backup of each PC.
The front-end on each client is Windows Home Server Console. It displays the computers on the network and their backup status, User Accounts, Shared Folders, Server Storage and Network Status.
During installation, WHS destructively formats all the disks used on the server and creates network shares, e.g., video, photos and music, that are all available to each client. Each user account has their own personal folder and basic permissions – Full, Read and None can be set on each folder. With at least two hard disks in the server, the ability to have redundancy for shared folders is available.
WHS also has the ability to share stored media with an Xbox 360, and does this very well also.
Remote access via the web is also available, and the WHS software will automatically configure PNP 2.0 routers.
The one application that’s missing in WHS that would make it a killer home app is Windows Media Center. The media hub software is built into Vista Home Premium and Ultimate Editions and XP Media Center Edition (MCE) but not in WHS. I have the WHS PC hooked up to our Sony KV-36FV1, so I want to use it as a Media Center. Unfortunately that means I can’t use Windows Home Server.