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Few FAQs for those BlueTooth newbies outthere...

BlueTooth Faq
Nokia BlueTooth Faq
Another BlueTooth Faq

I believe "Chiborashka" (I guess my spelling is wrong) used to be a Russian cartoon character who always manages to fal(incidentally also the nickname of the Mig-23 fighter plane among Russian pilots). Is that what your username is referring to?

Sorry for the off-topic question, just curious.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

As this bluetooth faq says:

• Bluetooth is intended to replace wires in small, personal communication devices; and does not support many of the features that a full-fledged wireless LAN technology needs in order to be used for corporate local area networks.

• Bluetooth's advantages are its very low power requirements and cost (target price is $5 per device). Technologies like IEEE 802.11 are the better choice for corporate LANs (and perhaps WAN connectivity with future improvements of the standards) while Bluetooth will be the better technology for connectivity between computers and small PDAs, digital cameras, cell phones and the like.

As far as I know, the ELF transmitters to communicate with the USN submarine force are located at Laurentian Shield, WI; and Clam Lake, WI. I haven't heard anything about Gertrude, though. Is this system currently operational?
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Both phones are GSM phones, and are available for sale in Europe. The phone in Matrix is even an outdated model (Nokia 8110, I believe).
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

MySQL excels in heavy read environments.
Web content management for example. No other database can compare to it.

Oh, really? Do you mean it's silly to use Oracle 8i Enterprise Server for managing data warehouses with more than 500 million rows; since no other database compares to MySQL?

MySQL is a good, free RDBMS without any of the nifty features that come with the likes of Oracle. It's very good for a lot of purposes, but claiming that "no other database compares to it" will be, umm, unintelligent. Did you spend any time with a real RDBMS, say, Oracle? Feel free to download and install it on a Linux box, and marvel at the cost based optimizer, materialized views, snapshots, and a host of other features that MySQL does not, and most probably will never have.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

If Linus walks away from Transmeta, he will very likely not wind up employed by a US company, as he would be asked, fairly shortly, to return to Finland.

Wrong. Having an H-1B doesn't mean that you're a poor peon at the mercy of your current boss.(I'm an H-1B myself) H-1B visas can get transferred between companies, and the process is relatively hassle-free. The only catch is that this has to be done in 10 days, and there are a lot of workarounds to remedy this, which I will not mention here.(Hint: How hard do you think it is to get a student visa?)

Linux wanting to work and not getting a job offer is quite simply impossible as you will very well know. Bay Area phone switch systems will come crashing down the minute he lets his availability be known.

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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

You do have a genuine need for multiple server architectures run the same code, when your Internet start-up starts working as a 5-person company with a handful of clients and all you can afford is a bunch of Linux x86 rackmount servers on the co-lo facility; and grows to a 120-person company with 400 clients, and x86 doesn't cut it anymore; as it happened to us.

Had we used some other language, we probably wouldn't be able to move to Solaris on SPARC easily. When our Sun Enterprise boxes are here, all we will have to do is to move our servlets. With Java servlets, you can go all the way from your puny AMD box to RS/6000s. When you're not a college kid designing a Web page for fun; and you're building a mission-critical Web application for a business; this really matters. The last thing you want to do is rewrite your application because ASP does not run on the new Solaris box you're getting.(To nitpickers: Yes, I do know that Cobalt bought ChiliSoft, and ASP does run on Solaris. It's just not the same thing unless you can port your accompanying COM objects to Solaris as easily)

We have thousands of lines of code working for a mission critical application, all written in Java. It's very fast and responsive, and a lot of very big, new sites are using servlets.

PHP and ColdFusion really do not stand up against Java servlets. These are server-side scripting tools for minor applications and Web designers. I don't mean to say that it's impossible to create big, extensive sites with these tools, since there obviously are a lot of such implementations. With PHP/CF you get the convenience of integrating the business logic and presentation logic in the same layer for easy maintenance (which is something you can not do with Java servlets unless you're using some kind of template engine like WebMacro, FreeMarker or an application server infrastructure like WebSphere, Enhydra or WebLogic); but you don't get the power of using Java, and a bunch of very well designed class libraries, RMI, JSSE, JavaSpaces, etc.

Java is really the best server-side Web development tool out there for big applications, when used as part of a well-designed application server platform. When we started out there weren't any application servers, so we ended up writing a lot of stuff for database connection pooling, template engines etc., but now this stuff is available. I recommend you throw away your prejudice, and give a serious consideration to Java servlets.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Only that the X-Box has the backing of the company with the highest valuation in the US stock market, and with billions of cash at the bank; and "Tight" is coming from a company which nobody has heard of.

Wake up. I'm not a fan of Microsoft either, but the cash they have is very real. I'm pretty sure they have mobilized a lot of people for X-Box, and they should be able to pull it off rather easily. The problem is whether the consumers will like the thing or not.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Bluetooth is designed for very low power use, and the transmission range will only be 10m, about 30ft. High-powered Bluetooth devices will enable ranges up to 100m (300ft). Considering the design philosophy behind Bluetooth, even the 10m range is adequate for the purposes Bluetooth is intended for. Later versions of the Bluetooth spec may allow longer ranges.

Given the range limitations noted above, I find it doubtfull that bluetooth can be employed as a wide area access solution. I think bluetooth will be a replacement for the IR port, and may help get rid of the sync cradle, but it is hardly a "confirm the-fedex-shipment-from-the-back-of-a-cab" kinda thing.
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"Web clipping" is nonstandard, and simply sucks. Palm should provide standard TCP/IP and/or WAP; and a lot of very innovative applications will pop up in no time.

The success of wireless Internet is pretty much a given, considering the success of i-mode in Japan and the WAP wave hitting Europe as we speak. I hope Palm chooses a better technology this time around, rather than the lame "Web clipping" that I could only stand using for about two weeks.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

I fail to understand the relevance of this to my post, which was a humorous follow-up to humorous analogy. Nevertheless, what Amnesty International is claiming is bullshit, but I don't see the point of continuing this offtopic thread for any longer.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

When you take a tour of a Istanbul, do they show you what goes on in a Turkish prison? I'm sure it's a fine place to visit if they want something from you

Similarly I haven't been able to hear any mention of US prisons during my life here. On the other hand, I've had the chance to see a Turkish prison for a LAN installation, and I can assure you it's a much neater place than the movie depictions of US prisons.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Yes, a lot. A whole bunch of peripherals that are not available for USB are available for PCMCIA, plus if they opt to implement a CardBus interface at relatively low additional cost, it's a huge bandwidth improvement over USB as well. I don't see why anyone would want to connect an IEEE 1394 adapter to a thin client, but it's possible with PCMCIA, not USB (at least not at the maximum transfer rate).

The lack of a PCMCIA port is the only reason why I didn't rush out to Circuit City and buy an i-opener that same day when this hack was announced on Slashdot-I wouldn't be able to put a wireless LAN adapter into it.


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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

talk in the article about how the entire system is digital - i.e. you don't have a spinning disk or any mechanical pieces.

Sorry for being a nit-picker, but "digital" does not mean "without mechanical pieces". I assume you mean solid-state, or completely electronic in some other way.

One can always devise a digital device which is entirely mechanical.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

The military is more concerned with TEMPEST than they are with "anti-magnetic field" protection. The electromagnetic shielding on military comms and computing gear is a) protection against EMP, or electromagnetic pulse; b) protection against remote eavesdropping.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

You really don't think that a wireless LAN standard that would support 3-4 nodes would be ratified by the IEEE, do you?

IEEE 802.11 comes in two flavors: DSSS, and FHSS; which stand for direct sequence and frequency hopping spread spectrum, respectively. Both are very efficient methods of utilizing narrow bandwidth, and the bandwidth is divided into channels which are controlled by the protocol and the MAC in these cards. The WaveLAN (Orinoco) cards use DSSS, and my favorite cheap IEEE 802.11 card, Webgear Aviator 2.4 uses FHSS.

You can precisely calculate the number of simultaneous nodes with help from a grad level telecommunications textbook, but you can be sure that it's much higher than 3 or 4; or 50 for that matter, which I know the Aviator supports.

On a seperate note, few people know that spread spectrum, the technology that enables the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN, was invented by the Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful women of her time.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

I also have an extensive Aviator 2.4 setup at home.

If I were trying to hide my SMB traffic from the NSA, then I'd be out of luck without WEP, though ;-)

You can tunnel SMB over SSH between two Linux boxen. I understand your Windows system mounts the SMB shares directly from the Linux box, and since there are no SSH SMB clients for Windows easily available, you're right. In my setup, I have a Windows box upstairs which needs to access the Linux box downstairs, but there also happens to be a Linux box upstairs too. The Linux boxes are connected with a wireless link, and all SMB traffic is tunneled over SSH, with sslproxy. The connection between the Linux and Windows boxes is plain Ethernet, so no unencrypted SMB traffic goes over the wireless line.

I'm pretty sure this will not thwart the NSA, but if you want to secure your SMB traffic from the other %99.9 of the population, you might just slap a cheap Linux box next to your Windows system, connect them via Ethernet, and install sslproxy. Then you can tunnel your Samba traffic with SSH.

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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Not that there's anything wrong with being non-white, but "white" people do not stand out in Istanbul, or in any Turkish city for that matter, for the simple fact that Turks who live in Turkey are Caucasian.

As for clean underwear, I have no clue, since I don't go checking people's underwear around. People with a nice smell, however, stand out in the Washington D.C. metro too, which I have to ride every morining in wee hours.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Kurzweil has always written stuf like that, but seems like Bill Joy has a lor of spare time on his hands in Aspen recently. After the Wired article, he has instantly been transformed into an expert on the subject.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

He has a new company called Loudcloud which is getting a lot of positive buzz. I also believe he's overrated, but his name means money to VCs. If you don't like Andreessen, sorry; you will have to go through the pain of seeing him become even richer in a couple of years when Loudcloud has its own IPO or is acquired.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

The VIA chipset used in i-opener doesn't have provision for AMR. It is either ISA or PCMCIA; or connected directly to a serial port.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

• They decided to stick with the x86 and proven PC architecture to cut down their costs. So far, great. But the IDE port is plainly out there on the board, and it seems they wanted to have the possibility of adding IDE peripherals in the future. What's wrong with opening one up and adding a hard drive?
  
• They decided to resort to "security through obscurity" by devising an idiotic "mirrored IDE port" scheme(read the hack page if you don't know what this is) What a strike of genius. I would like to hereby congratulate the Netpliance engineer who invented this. It would be too bad if he went back to flipping burgers just weeks before the IPO.
  
• I understand Netpliance's original business model was to sell the idea to big ISPs. Now they are trying to operate their own ISP, which gives me the impression that they failed in their original attempt. This business model sucks, and they would probably have survived until AOL came up with their own appliance. MSN's appliances are coming soon.
  

• The box uses a Winchip 180MHz processor.
  
• The chipset consists of Trident Cyberglade i7, which is a mobile version of VIA's MVP4 northbridge + integrated UMA video chip. It's fully supported by XFree86, and the person who hacked the i-opener first was kind enough to email me the Xconfig file. The other component of the chipset is a VIA southbridge. The northbridge has the PCI bus interface, and the southbridge has an ISA bus.
  
• The modem is an add-on daughterboard, and sits on an interface that nobody has been able to identify yet. If I were one of the engineers of i-opener, I would have used the ISA bus along with a PC/104 type connector. I haven't seen the board myself yet, but I'm hoping it is either some kind of custom connector for the ISA bus, or PC/104, or some kind of PCMCIA connector.
  
• If the modem is really on an ISA bus, the modem daughterboard can be removed, and an ISA PCMCIA adapter card can be connected here with the help of a custom cable assembly/an ISA slot from an old motherboard. My plan is to use the card that comes with the Webgear Aviator 2.4 IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN kit. Then you can plug any PCMCIA card to this adapter, Ethernet, your choice of a IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN card, etc. (I recommend the $70 Aviator 2.4)
  
• If the modem is connected to a PCMCIA connector(which doesn't make any sense really-the ISA bus is already there, and if they really wanted ISA extensibility, why didn't they just add a proper PCMCIA connector?); then provided that the PCMCIA controller is supported by Linux, it should be easy to connect your choice of PCMCIA card there.
  
  Will anyone who has seen the actual board, or who knows anything about it, please comment on my idea? If anyone can identify the connection of the modem daughterboard to the motherboard, it's even better. Some people suggested that it was PCMCIA, in this case, does anyone know which PCMCIA controller is used?
  
  If this can be done, and we have access to the ISA bus or a PCMCIA connector on the i-opener, possibilities are endless. The i-opener has barely enough space inside to house a small ISA card with the metal bracket removed. With an ISA Ethernet board with a boot ROM, you can build a diskless X terminal; or you can try adding a wireless LAN card like me.
  
  If I can pull this off, I will post it as an article on my Bluetooth Central to share.

• The box uses a Winchip 180MHz processor.
  
• The chipset consists of Trident Cyberglade i7, which is a mobile version of VIA's MVP4 northbridge + integrated UMA video chip. It's fully supported by XFree86, and the person who hacked the i-opener first was kind enough to email me the Xconfig file. The other component of the chipset is a VIA southbridge. The northbridge has the PCI bus interface, and the southbridge has an ISA bus.
  
• The modem is an add-on daughterboard, and sits on an interface that nobody has been able to identify yet. If I were one of the engineers of i-opener, I would have used the ISA bus along with a PC/104 type connector. I haven't seen the board myself yet, but I'm hoping it is either some kind of custom connector for the ISA bus, or PC/104, or some kind of PCMCIA connector.
  
• If the modem is really on an ISA bus, the modem daughterboard can be removed, and an ISA PCMCIA adapter card can be connected here with the help of a custom cable assembly/an ISA slot from an old motherboard. My plan is to use the card that comes with the Webgear Aviator 2.4 IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN kit. Then you can plug any PCMCIA card to this adapter, Ethernet, your choice of a IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN card, etc. (I recommend the $70 Aviator 2.4)
  
• If the modem is connected to a PCMCIA connector(which doesn't make any sense really-the ISA bus is already there, and if they really wanted ISA extensibility, why didn't they just add a proper PCMCIA connector?); then provided that the PCMCIA controller is supported by Linux, it should be easy to connect your choice of PCMCIA card there.
  
  Will anyone who has seen the actual board, or who knows anything about it, please comment on my idea? If anyone can identify the connection of the modem daughterboard to the motherboard, it's even better. Some people suggested that it was PCMCIA, in this case, does anyone know which PCMCIA controller is used?
  
  If this can be done, and we have access to the ISA bus or a PCMCIA connector on the i-opener, possibilities are endless. The i-opener has barely enough space inside to house a small ISA card with the metal bracket removed. With an ISA Ethernet board with a boot ROM, you can build a diskless X terminal; or you can try adding a wireless LAN card like me.
  
  If I can pull this off, I will post it as an article on my Bluetooth Central to share.

I would have moderated this post up, but I already posted. Why isn't this a Slashdot article? Or did I miss it? I think this hack deserves to be a seperate Slashdot article more than the Promise UltraATA/RAID hack.

If only the i-opener had a PCMCIA slot! An i-opener for $99 + a $70 Aviator 2.4 IEEE 802.11 wireless card + a small 2.5" laptop HD = wireless LCD net terminal running Linux for under $300!! If any parallel-to-Ethernet adapters are working well with Linux, I will buy one and give this a try.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Can you post some pointers to info on running Linux with the i-opener? I-opener comes with the service, and I believe you have to pay the monthly fee to be able to keep the system.

If this is true, I would gladly pay $99 to get an LCD X-terminal of sorts.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

So you have doubts about plausibility of Internet access with cell phones? Go to Japan to see what they have been doing with i-mode. It's a craze sweeping the country, and there are many useful applications, along with lots of utter stupidity.

Similarly, WAP is going to be a huge success in Europe. Access to corporate e-mail or other corporate resources will be a killer-app. I don't get your point about "text links not good ROI", too. WAP phones can display small bitmaps (WBMP), and it's quite possible to make interesting ads for use with WAP-even if you only have to use text.

I strongly recommend you to go read the Independent WAP FAQ. Europeans were ahead of US with the GSM technology, they are still ahead with WAP. My digital cell phone here in the US still can't do many of the cool stuff I had on my GSM phone back in Turkey three years ago.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Here is the link to the optical computer that I mentioned. The paper has a description of the optical memory system and logic structures.

Stored Program Optical Computer(SPOC)
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

>It just isn't practical to come up with a type >of memory that is based on storing light.

No, it is practical to come up with the idea. It's just not practical building and using it effectively.

Researchers at University of Colorado, Boulder designed an optical computer several years ago. There are several systems in existence where computation is partially or fully done optically, but this was the first (and the only, if memory serves me right) system to do everything optically-i.e. it had a memory system based on storing values optically.

The system essentially stored pulses in a loop of fiber optic cable several miles long. I think the principle is analogous to very early electronic memory systems were bits were stored in forms of waves on tanks of mercury.

Extensive info on this was published in some IEEE publications back then. I don't have the time to look for the URL now, but it will be helpful if someone can find the reference to it.

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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Bluetooth specs allow for overlapping piconets, and a member of a piconet (Bluetooth spec's terminology for an ad-hoc Bluetooth network)can also be a member of another piconet. This is called a scatternet and gives you a lot of room to grow. 8 is the maximum number of ACTIVE members in the piconet, some nodes might be parked (up to 255); and it only makes sense that you can have up to 8 active members since the capacity is about 721k anyway.

Please read this good article about Bluetooth to learn more about the technology, I'm sure it will make lots of things clear.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

No, you will be able to set up Bluetooth devices to be "parked" in piconets, the term for small ad-hoc networks formed by Bluetooth devices. You will also have the capability to change security settings so your Bluetooth device will not interact with all devices within the range.

Bluetooth output will initially be 0dbm or 20dbm, which respectively correspond to ranges of 10 and 100m. With a 10m range and power in the range of milliwatts, I doubt Bluetooth will interfere with anything else that uses the ISM band. There is quite a lot of speculation on how Bluetooth will interfere with IEEE 802.11; but nobody knows that yet; since there is no Bluetooth hardware around to test.

Oh, and please make sure to bookmark my Bluetooth site so you can visit it when I'm finally ready to launch it..

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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

No, you will be able to set up Bluetooth devices to be "parked" in piconets, the term for small ad-hoc networks formed by Bluetooth devices. You will also have the capability to change security settings so your Bluetooth device will not interact with all devices within the range.

Bluetooth output will initially be 0dbm or 20dbm, which respectively correspond to ranges of 10 and 100m. With a 10m range and power in the range of milliwatts, I doubt Bluetooth will interfere with anything else that uses the ISM band. There is quite a lot of speculation on how Bluetooth will interfere with IEEE 802.11; but nobody knows that yet; since there is no Bluetooth hardware around to test.

Oh, and please make sure to bookmark my Bluetooth site so you can visit it when I'm finally ready to launch it..

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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

OK, color Palm is cool. I don't believe the battery claims, but I may actually might want to buy one. What I need is the Springboard slot though, and/or Bluetooth when available. When will Handspring follow? Did they announce any color products?


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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Umm, I would like to contribute with a shameless plug: BluetoothCentral will be up real soon now-it's been in my .sig for a while, but I will definitely finish the site this week, so anyone who would like to learn more about Bluetooth can check it out next week. Please bookmark it; and meanwhile you can visit the URL for a couple of useful Bluetooth links.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Umm, I would like to contribute with a shameless plug: BluetoothCentral will be up real soon now-it's been in my .sig for a while, but I will definitely finish the site this week, so anyone who would like to learn more about Bluetooth can check it out next week. Please bookmark it; and meanwhile you can visit the URL for a couple of useful Bluetooth links.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

This is not very different from what you can accomplish with a subnotebook like Sony PictureBook or the bunch of competitors that are not available outside Japan. (Dynamism sells them, go to the site to drool over what Japan has to offer.) PictureBook has a built-in webcam, if you're in Europe there are PCMCIA form-factor GSM phones available from several vendors (i.e. Option FirstFone). Ditto for GPS receivers. With the exception of the 8-hour battery, all are available with the current PC technology, and the resulting device would still be very compact, considering that you want a DVD player which imposes a size limitation.

So why all the hype about the PC being dead? Perhaps all we need is cheaper Sony PictureBooks.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Give me a break. The Mig-21 design originated in the late 1950s-early 1960s; has been used in Vietnam and Middle East wars, and has been beaten badly in all cases. A Mig-21 is in no way comparable to an F-16A/B, let alone later F-16C/D's.

Shenyang F-7 is a different beast than the Mig-21 though, and later models have improved different wing structures, powerplant and avionics; but they are still no match for F-16s since they don't have BVR(beyond visual range) missile capabilities; like the F-16s have recently gained with AIM-120 AMRAAM.

I think it just suffices to say the Mig-21 was replaced in early 1970s with the Mig-23 in Soviet service; which in turn was replaced by the Mig-29 in early 1980s. Which means the Mig-21 is now two generations back.

Still, the Chinese can produce weaponry at incredibly cheap costs; and they have millions of people who they will easily sacrifice for the People's good. The Germans definitely had the technological edge in WWII in the Russian front, but ultimately Russian "human-wave" tactics got them. Nobody knows if a modern fleet of F-16s have any chance against, say, 2,500 ancient Migs.

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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Give me a break. The Mig-21 design originated in the late 1950s-early 1960s; has been used in Vietnam and Middle East wars, and has been beaten badly in all cases. A Mig-21 is in no way comparable to an F-16A/B, let alone later F-16C/D's.

Shenyang F-7 is a different beast than the Mig-21 though, and later models have improved different wing structures, powerplant and avionics; but they are still no match for F-16s since they don't have BVR(beyond visual range) missile capabilities; like the F-16s have recently gained with AIM-120 AMRAAM.

I think it just suffices to say the Mig-21 was replaced in early 1970s with the Mig-23 in Soviet service; which in turn was replaced by the Mig-29 in early 1980s. Which means the Mig-21 is now two generations back.

Still, the Chinese can produce weaponry at incredibly cheap costs; and they have millions of people who they will easily sacrifice for the People's good. The Germans definitely had the technological edge in WWII in the Russian front, but ultimately Russian "human-wave" tactics got them. Nobody knows if a modern fleet of 160 F-16s have any chance against, say, 2,500 ancient Migs.

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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

The Taiwanese have a significant aircraft production capability-they designed and flew the Ching-Kuo indigenuous fighter successfully; and they produce their own missiles, too. On the other hand; Chinese Air Force is equipped with mostly outdated equipment; which is only changing recently with the addition of Su-27s to the inventory. Still, the majority of Chinese Air Force is Shenyang F-7s (Mig-21 variant) and F-6s (Mig-19 variant). Where little is known about the capabilities of the sepcimens in Chinese service; export versions of these fighters have not proven to be good performers.

The Taiwanese definitely have the better technology in their armed forces. In their previous aerial clashes; ROCAF's kill rates were phenomenal. I would tend to say that the situation is much like Israel and the Arab nations: Israel has kicked, and will indefinitely continue to kick, the asses of any combination of Arab air forces imaginable. Similarly Taiwan has proven to have an advantage in the skies; it is unfortunately a different matter on sea and land.

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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

The name of the book is "High St@kes, No Prisoners" by Charles H. Ferguson. I recommend everyone involved in a startup to go and read it. It is one of the best books I've read recently, and lots of the information and lessons there are relevant for anybody starting a company.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

>Can you have more than 2 cards on a network w/o >an AP?

You can have up to 60 nodes. I have 4 on my home network and 11 at work; without an access point.

>And are the Aviator cards compatible with >AirPort?

Aviator 2.4 cards work at 2Mb/s; whereas the AirPort is 11Mb/s; but they're both IEEE 802.11 and yes, they should work together in theory. Some IEEE 802.11 cards use frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) as opposed to direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS); and I guess Aviator 2.4 is one of the former. I have used Aviator 2.4 cards with Lucent WaveLAN IEEE cards; and since AirPort uses the WaveLAN circuitry; I suppose they must work.

Beware: WebGear has an older line of products called the Aviator-they are not IEEE 802.11 compatible. The IEEE 802.11 product is called Aviator 2.4, referring to the frequency band. I've seen some people jump on the Aviator cards on Ebay or elsewhere on several occasions; only to find out they are old, lame proprietary technologies.

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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

I have sold a similar problem (a bunch of Suns on a different floor) by buying an old 486 from a nearby college surplus store for something like $15; and I installed Linux along with an ISA Ethernet and the Aviator on it.

In my case, a 486 SX-25 with 8MB of RAM works flawlessly as an Ethernet-to-wireless bridge. I recommend you get a cheap, old 486 powerful enough to run Linux, do a minimal Linux installation, and either set up kernel bridging or use masquerading to connect your Win98 box to your VAXen or what you have at your home. I have mine on a small UPS; and it just runs away from sight in the depths of a cabinet. The whole thing should cost about $30 with the exception of the Aviator card.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Bluetooth bandwidth is about 741 Kb/s; not very close to high-end DSL; but very adequate. I agree Bluetooth is the future; and will be something that we can't live without; when it finally reaches the market. It will be big especially in Palm form-factor PDAs and cell phones.

2.4GHz is the ISM (industrial-scientific-medical) frequency band that doesn't require licencing by the FCC; and is allocated for similar use in most countries, except perhaps in France; where the military seems to be obsessed with using the most obscure frequencies possible.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Bluetooth products are about to show up pretty soon, and I agree it will be a hugely successful technology for things like you listed. Since the eventual target price for Bluetooth is $5/node; if they manage to meet that price target in two or three years, we might have $10 Bluetooth LAN cards that work for very short range (~50ft) at a rate acceptable for basic tasks (741 Kb/s).

Do you think Bluetooth might be successful in this role? It is definitely not something Bluetooth is designed for; but it will be so inexpensive that inevitably this will be an application.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Check out my post about the Aviator WebGear 2.4, which is IEEE 802.11 compatible (2Mb/s). At $139.99 for a 2-card kit (at CompUSA), it is a very good value. Works with Linux like a charm, problem-free (on both laptops on desktops with the included ISA PCMCIA adapters).

Once you go wireless, there really is no going back.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

I've been using Aviator Webgear 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11 cards for a while. You can buy a 2-pack for only $139.99 at the nearest CompUSA; and the kit includes 2 ISA adapters as well as the two PCMCIA cards. They work great with Linux, too. I recommend Aviator 2.4 cards to everyone instead of proprietary stuff like Diamond HomeFree; which do not work with Linux at all(well not really, but the drivers work in a non-FCC approved way and can't talk to Windows drivers)

Now that we have affordable IEEE 802.11 cards that work with Linux, I guess the next step is to have IEEE 802.11 access point capability for Linux. I guess having an access point is the easiest way to bridge seamlessly between an Ethernet and wireless; I did not have the time to deal with finding an alternative solution; so my wireless LAN is just another segment with its own non-routable class C; and I use masquerading at the gateway. I've been checking out the Absolute Value site for a while, but they seem to be concentrating on cards with the Intersil chipset.





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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Let's assume that the government actually decrypted the contents of Mitnick's data. The announcement of this success would give out too much about the government's crypto capabilities, so it's definitely not in the best interest of US national security. In other words, the fact that this encryption can be broken by the government could well be a more valuable secret than the contents of Mitnick's hard drives.

I tend to believe that the government had not really bothered to break the encryption. But then, even if they could, they would most certainly keep it a secret.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

Oops, I screwed up in the first posting. Here is a corrected one:

I agree such a test would be interesting. Just a quick correction, though: AltiVec is also SIMD, the Flynn classification which is used as a generic term in the literature.(Flynn's seminal paper is where the terms SIMD, MIMD etc. were coined first) AltiVec and SSE, MMX, 3DNow!, MIPSV, VIS etc. are SIMD implementations.

Also, Motorola has a bunch of very nice C libraries and modified compilers which take advantage of the new instructions, and I'm sure some other SIMD extensions have similar C libraries; so it's not exclusively accessible from assembly language. What's probably needed is some very smart compilers to choose when to use the SIMD extensions.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.

I agree such a test would be interesting. Just a quick correction, though: AltiVec is also SIMD, the Flynn classification which is used as a generic term in the literature.( AltiVec and SSE, MMX, 3DNow!, MIPSV, VIS and whatnot are SIMD implementations
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.