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An old essay on "Internet vs Interweb" access, which only seems to get more relevant with time.

Comcast agreed to provide internet access to their users for a monthly fee, which technically means that comcast will forward traffic from their users towards the rest of the internet and vica versa.

http://web.ivy.net/~carton/academia/java_languageo ftomorrow.html
You might like to read all of these things about the Newton (and all of why Java stinks) and consider that maybe running NetBSD won't get the most out of it. The Newton is [according to this] an engineering marvel and NetBSD on it would just make it any other ARM rig.

All machines on the 'net are peers, aren't they?


That was once the case, but sadly, 'tis no longer.

Perhaps you all would greatly benefit from reading the essay titled "Java, the chicken of tomorrow".

Here: http://web.ivy.net/~carton/academia/java_languageo ftomorrow.html

Just try saturating your cable modem's bandwidth solid for a month or two, and see how the provider likes it. Most DSL providers frown on this too, despite their infrastructure being much better equipped to handle it.

Cable might burst 100x faster than dialup, but it's certainly not capable of sustaining that.

I've never found a dialup ISP who cared one way or the other about usage. Back in the day they might've gotten antsy about connect time, but that's moot now too.

Dialup ISPs also don't care what services you run or what ports you open.

The reason TV sucks is that there's a clear division between broadcaster and viewer. The internet was supposed to change all that, so that anyone can publish, every node is equal to every other node except maybe for speed. Peer to peer is what makes the network so cool. By preventing you from running servers, the cable ISPs (who are mostly owned by big media companies) are turning the internet into TV all over again.

Personally I think it should be illegal to call something "internet access" if it restricts what ports you can open or what services you can run. That's not the real internet.

Don't just swallow all the hype. Think twice before bying in to child of marketing that is Java.

Java: Language of Tommorow
Java: Failure or Crime
many anti-Java rants on The Bile Blog
Sun itself won't use Java internally

Amen.

/. Java fanatics wake up and smell the coffee, namely:

Java: Language of Tommorow
Java: Failure or Crime
the many rants on bileblog

The funny thing about 802.11b is that it's not spread spectrum in any sense of the word I'm familiar with. It's not resistant to interference, it's not compatible with other transmitters on the same band, and it certainly doesn't appear as "background" to another device. Witness 802.11b versus X10 video cameras. If these were truly spread spectrum, they'd never even notice each other except for a bump in the noise floor.

Read the article Resisting 802.11 zealotry and tell me what you think.. This raises a lot of good points about why 802.11b is a bad example for a lot of what's being discussed here.

I agree that implementing these ideas in the existing unlicensed spectrum is the only sensible way to prove that we deserve access to more. It's a neat coincidence that this makes true wideband SDR totally unnecessary, since we already have transceivers that work happily in all the part-15 bands, and many implementations are just a radio front end coupled to a DSP. (Ricochet comes to mind. Anyone wanna reverse engineer some poletops?)

The real hurdle I see is protocol problems. Look at the 802.11b hotspot disaster. Look at the cacophony of incompatible cell phone standards! Think of what happens when arbitrary numbers of monkeys write HTML with proprietary extensions, and try to tell me with a straight face that developers will be able to cooperatively share spectrum.

To solve the channel problem, consider this:

Use a single 802.11a AP on the roof above the MDF with a decent omni on it. Then, at your other locations around the complex, use more .11a gear with directional panels pointed back at the master. Set them to bridge the wireless side to their ethernet jacks. Now you've essentially got "wire" to all your locations, without stepping on the 2.4GHz spectrum.

Then at each location, connect one or more 802.11b/g APs to the ethernet. I say "or more", because you may wish to use several APs with narrow sector antennae, to provide stronger signal to a broad area.

Another poster pointed out, you'll have to make people swear not to use 2.4GHz cordless phones. Since 802.11b isn't really spread spectrum, it doesn't handle interference well.

People in their apartments will need to realize, they're not aiming for the AP on their own building, they're aiming for the building across the way. Explain that 2.4GHz is line-of-sight, so if they can't visually see the AP, they might have problems. Consider marking the rooftop locations with flags.