This is a little surprising to me. Why would they go after the end user companies that produce computers rather than the much bigger fish that rely on this technology for their core bread and butter?

Cisco, Foundry, Juniper, F5 and so on all make a lot more sense to go after given that they're less likely to want to risk the chance of losing and more likely to settle the issue out of court.

Companies like Dell, Apple, Acer, HP and the beige box boys can simply just ignore the patent and say "Talk to Intel/nVidia/chipset vendor X" or simply not include onboard NIC machines and switch to using PCI/USB cards instead.

Theres not a lot of hope for this suit even at the best of circumstances, but the companies its going after are potentially shielded by the fact they themselves are not likely to produce the chips that handle Ethernet. Merely include chips from someone else (such as Intel) in their products.

Or am I completely missing something?

No more likely to bite you than a bumble bee will bite you. Just don't piss them off and you can handle them without issue. Problem is they look pretty scary to most people. Huge grasshopper type bug with huge thorns over its legs and body that lives in dark places like caves and hollowed trees. Still, as long as you don't piss them off, you can pick them up without fear. Just hope no one before you came along and pissed it off before you got there. ;-)

Not really quite the case. Maori and the British fought tooth and nail for most of the 19th century. In fact, some British officers wanted nothing more than to completely wipe Maori off the face of the planet, and in some areas pretty much succeeded.

NZ's history as far as the colony is concerned is far from peaceful. Maori didn't stop fighting each other, maybe. But they didn't just ignore the British either. They used the British technology against each other, and also against the British.

The major issue with the Treaty of Waitangi is that the Maori version and the English version are not identical. The translations were pretty rough. So even after it was signed by all the tribal leaders across the country, there are still disputes going on between the Crown and many of the Maori tribes today. The only difference is that the weapon of choice is now money and land. Or the expenditure of former, and prolonged occupation of the latter.

http://www.newzealandwars.co.nz/ is a good place to find out about the wars that raged in the 19th century.

As a work around, Google has said they are going to release an iPhone Safari specific version to run as a webapp on the iPhone. The different Google Voice apps (across all platforms) are just a significantly improved and platform-native GUI to the service.

The GV app is still just an app. It doesn't replace any of the Apple apps. They're still there and still fully functional. What it does do is make them redundant.

Instead of giving people your cell number, you give them your Google number. At that point, all your voicemail is kept on the Google service, all your calls are routed through the Google service to whatever phone(s) you choose to have the calls go to. You are no longer tied to Apple's Visual Voicemail (which by most people's accounts hasn't worked properly in quite a while anyway) nor are you limited to AT&T's network anymore. The same applies to SMS and so on as well. Use your Google number instead of your iPhone number and you can get the messages on any/all your phones rather than just your iPhone.

The GV app also allows you to make calls out through Google's network. Your phone dials Google, then dials out from Google to where ever. With the apps on the various platforms, this is essentially transparent. You just use the dialer in the GV app instead of the Apple dialer. It doesn't sync your contacts to the Google servers as such. Like all apps on an iPhone, it has access to your contacts directly, so doesn't need to store them on the server. Not that it matters much given you can use Google Sync to do it, or even us iTunes itself.

Having said all that, the Apple phone apps are still all there and you can use those as well if you want. But if you do, CallerID will show your cell # instead of your Google number. If people call that number, you lose things like voicemail transcription features and so on.

I am basing this on the functionality in the applications on other platforms such as Android and Blackberry. I doubt the app for the iPhone would be any different in functionality, only in appearance.

But no, the app doesn't replace the Apple ones. It merely supersedes them and essentially makes them redundant.

I agree... I had a similar issue at a school a few years back. Windows + Mac clients on the network. Rather than try to run two directories, we just used Novell eDirectory with (then available) Novell dirXML which allowed all the clients to use a single directory without realising they weren't native Active Directory or OpenDirectory platforms they were talking to. It saved a lot of effort down the line and proved extremely scalable. Also had the benefit of allowing the network to integrate other platforms in the future without much effort if the school wanted to. I'm sure there are plenty of great FOSS solutions out there, but eDirectory make it so much easier and reduced the cost of implementation significantly, even taking into account licensing costs. Sometimes you do just have to weigh up all the angles.

Look out for Symbian phones. Most Nokia N or E-series phones have many different applications available that allow you to do all sorts of things with SMS. From spam filtering to conversation management and more.

I use a Nokia E90 and find that its probably the most powerful cellphone I have ever used. I have an iTouch and can't imagine trying to use it for anything beyond music/video and the occasional browsing. If the browser on my E90 isn't enough, I can use an application called Joiku Spot to share the HSDPA connection on the E90 with the iTouch via wifi, or just connect to a PC/Laptop via Bluetooth, USB or even InfraRed and use HSDPA that way.

The E-Series phones all offer a free application from Nokia called MfE (Mail for Exchange) that allows you to access Exchange 2000 through to 2007. There are other companies out there offering their own versions that offer even more feature than the basic MfE from Nokia.

There are Blackberry client for the Nokia E series phones so if you currently have push services from Blackberry, you can continue to use them on your Nokia. Probably the most significant difference would be the cameras. N-Series tend to have better cameras at higher resolutions (anywhere up to 8MP) where as the E-series average 3.2MP cameras.

Many of the phones have built in GPS and include Nokia Maps, but it also works equally well with Google Maps for Mobile. Right down to turn by turn route assistance using the GPS.

Symbian based cell phones have been around since 2001 when Nokia released the first 7650. The Symbian platform is a direct descendant of the old Psion devices. It is mature. It is stable. It has years of user feedback. It just works. There is a very large application base available for it out there.

Oh, and the best feature for me has been the version of Python Nokia released for their E and N-series phones along with an API that allows you to hook in to nearly every aspect of the phone, from the GPS, camera, OpenGL, through to pulling data from the calendar or the messaging platforms among others.

The most paranoid, yet strangely compelling, Python script I like is one that works as a kind of panic button. You load the app and it immediately takes a photo of whatever the camera is aimed at, sends a MMS message (or email, or SMS) with your current location from the cell tower while it waits till it has a GPS lock and includes that photo if possible. Once it has GPS lock, it will send GPS coords via SMS every X (edit the script to set, defaults to 180) seconds and then will also call a designated number to play back a pre-recorded message, then use text-to-speech to give the GPS coordinates on that call. It can then call emergency services and play that same message for them. If it can't get GPS lock (say you're in a building or whatever) then it will just use cell towers it can detect so that there is at least some method of tracing you.

All from a python script running on a cellphone. You can find it on the Nokia developer forums wiki. Because its a script, you can modify it to suit your needs and location if you want. Nokia's Python API is so straight forward that you can easily add features of your own.

You could probably even write a Python script to manage your SMS messages exactly as you want them to be dealt with if you know even a small amount of Python.

Good places to start are community sites like allaboutsymbian.com or my-symbian.com. Or you can check out the S60.com blogs and sites.

There are a lot of devices from Nokia now. E-series are targetted more at Enterprise users where as the N-series are more consumer market devices, but can still do everything an E-series device can do.