If only things were actually this funny. It's actually not at all funny. Luckily, the only version of linux I have hanging around is ancient and not one of the ones affected.
John Gruber (Daringfireball.net) writes about iPhone vs. Blackberry and says:
RIM doesn’t really have any lock-in other than user habits. The BlackBerry gimmick is that it works with the email system your company bought from Microsoft.
Which is not really true. I don't know what % of RIM's revenues come from their server products, but I do know the Blackberry -> Exchange integration is more complicated that just the user buying their own phone and hooking it up themselves.
The blackberry solution offers an "internet free" solution. Your exchange servers don't need to talk to the internet, they live buried in your firewall, passing messages to RIM's network, that sends them via the proper mobile carrier. That might not be the perfect description, but point is, there's network connections, server products, and support costs. I don't think the iPhone will be a drop-in replacement in large companies. Enterprises have built-in lock in. With the blackberry solution, the IT department is in charge of provisioning all the phones, and if I don't get the blessed, provisioned phone from them I can't even have a blackberry.
It remains to be seen exactly what the iPhone's solution is going to take to deploy. Or whether it will without a server be able to offer all the ticky-tacky big-brother things that enterprises love (disabling the web browser, or the camera, or the iPod, keeping logs on all calls, etc.). We'll know more once it's released.
In case it helps, here's the steps I used to setup my Airport Extreme in bridge mode behind the ATT Uverse RG 2wire gateway thing. I previously had the DSL modem with ethernet out, into the Airport, letting it act as the router. I like and would prefer that configuration I think, but the RG doesn't have bridge mode. So if you leave things set like this, you'll have two levels of Network Address Translation (NAT) going on. Which works fine for some things and terribly for others. That includes anything that needs to allow ports back in, like iChat or other A/V things, bit-torrent, etc. It's not that it can't be made to work in some cases with careful port forwarding, but it's a hassle.
So the way we want to configure things is such that the RG is the router; it will do all the DHCP stuff; get its IP from ATT, and then act as an internal DHCP server so things on your home network get IP addresses. Luckily, this is the immutable default configuration. :-) We'll probably also want to disable it's wireless network, just to avoid interference with your existing network, or your neighbors, etc. since we we prefer the Airport's wireless network.
For the Airport, we'll need to configure it in bridge mode. This disables its DHCP server, router and firewall. Now it's essentially just a dumb switch; it's just passing traffic between it's ethernet ports and the wireless network. So when a computer connects to the airport network, it will ask for an IP via DCHP. The airport will no longer answer that request from it's own pool, but instead pass it onto it's ethernet, where it will get to the ATT provided gateway. Then the gateway will give the wireless computer it's IP address and route traffic to it. We'll also want to set the Airport to get its IP via DHCP from the ATT gateway as well, so it can have an IP for printing or disk use, etc..
A word of caution before we begin, you will likely lose connectivity briefly during this procedure, so be prepared. Don't be 99% way through a 20GB download when you do this.
So let's get started. First the airport. Run "/Applications/Airport/Airport Utility". You should a screen showing all airports (I have an express and extreme). Select your desired Airport, and you should see this:
Click on manual setup at the bottom (circled in the above shot, then click "Internet" up at the top. You should see this:
On "configure IPv4", set it to "Using DHCP". This will give your airport an IP you can connect to. Then under connection sharing (highlighted), choose "Off (Bridge Mode)". Now click update. If I remember, I think it reboots, or does something that takes a few seconds. You'll probably lose your connection to it initially.
So now you might be a bit stuck, you may/may not be a bit stuck, since your computer probably has an IP that your airport gave you, but now you're talking straight to the RG for routing. No worries, you can either reboot your computer, or follow Apple's procedure for getting a new IP. Skip to the "Solution->Mac OS X instructions -> 1. Force reconfiguration of IP Settings" section. Or just reboot. Any other network hardware that got it's IP from the airport will need to be rebooted as well.
Now, any computers plugged into the Airport extreme ethernet ports or wireless networks should be getting their IP from the RG and using it properly. Before you started, if you looked at your RG configuration screen in the Home Network section, you would have just seen the airport extreme. Now you should see all your devices showing up.
You can get to this screen by trying this configuration URL (which is pointing at your router), or manually visiting http://192.168.1.254/ in your browser.
Now the final step if you don't want to use the RG's wireless networking at all, is to disable it. From the screen above, click Home Network and you should go here:
Notice the circled button on the right; "Disable" next to the wireless network. Click that. You'll get prompted for confirmation, and the device password. Once done, the button changes to "Enable", which you can click to re-enable the wireless should you ever choose to.
That's it; with the Apple acting in bridge mode, the RG is in charge. Seems to work fine for me so far, no complaints. Note you can still have the Airport participate in a WDS network even in bridge mode; I'm using it with my Airport Express that way.
Update 4:00PM PST Fixed broken image
Fortune thinks ATT wants to pick up $200 of your iPhone.
This could mean big, big things for Apple if it's true. I think this strategy makes the 10 million phones by the end of the year goal look like a drop in the bucket. Apple's not in the habit of selling anything at a loss though, but that's okay here since it's ATT that would pick up the tab.
The question is, why would they? And why wouldn't they at launch? Was it so calculated that ATT knew demand would drive 5-6 million phone sales that they could rake in bucks for, in return for taking the risk on the iPhone, and then after a year and version 2.0 they'd announce the subsidy, to go deeper into the market?
Brilliant strategy if true. For one it's obvious; it's just pricing things like the market will bear. Second, this makes the iPhone like an iPod; it puts it into kids' price ranges. Can you say "ubiquitous"? I knew you could.
So at the expense of some cash, ATT gets to own the market for what could be an iPhone-like domination of the phone market for the next 5-10 years. Bold.
Someone got a hold an old archive of all things Infocom. The post talks about a sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what I find really interesting is the e-mail tone. They read like letters, back and forth across a great divide. Today's version I suspect would look very different.
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