Slashdot Mirror
Verizon PCMCIA Card Just Works
Apple God writes "I was a friend's house and he showed me his Verizion PCMCIA card for internet access. On a whim, I put it in my PowerBook, and it recognized the card and prompted me for authorization to configure the system for use with the card. I entered my password, and was surprised to see an icon in the menu bar for it. I clicked on this icon and selected connect, it worked! I had internet access. Here is a picture of the card that I used. When we checked Verizon's page, they only listed Windows compatibility. To make matters sweeter, my friend was shocked that it 'just worked' because he had to install drivers in XP before it would work."
Apple provides some pretty versatile generic drivers with the OS. If your hardware is somewhat standards based, there's a pretty decent chance it will just work weather it's officially supported or not.
I know my USB card, my mouse, and 2 of my ethernet cards are not officially mac-compatible, but that didn't stop them from working beautifully as soon as I pluged them in and powered on.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
I've found that I rarely have to actually install a drive on OS X, but it's not imediatly recognized I usually have a hard timefinding one. Same thing for Linux
If you don't use the cdma carriers, one of the gsm ones also have cards for OSX, and apple drivers included.
http://www.whateversclever.net/sereview.php
Its nice when you can have a choice on Apple, you dont have to be locked down to 1 carrier and hardware.
Good to hear about the VZW cards. I use one on my Windoze lappy (my work made me take THAT computer!) and have also played with it on Linux. As for OS X I love the fact that most handsets, CDMA or GSM, seem to work over bluetooth or data cables right out of the box. They do a really good job on the seamless syncing too. Now if they will just get on the ball with SyncML then all will be well. Hell, world peace may even ensue, starvation and poverty could become a thing of the past and, um, ok perhaps not. But it would be nice ;-)
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/verizonbroa dbandaccesssupport.html
Were you running 10.3.5? Since those drivers were released a month before 10.3.5, I suspect they were included in it, and that would explain the card "just work"ing.
FWIW
I believe the Verizon drivers (/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Verizon.menu, /System/Library/Extensions/IOSerialFamily.kext/Con tents/PlugIns/AppleVerizonSupport.kext) first were included in 10.2, but don't recall for sure. (AC 'cause I'm Apple.)
I plug in my digital photo camera to my iBook, and iPhoto already has the drivers for it, and it just works. I plug in my friend's brand new digital video camera through firewire, and iMovie accepts it just fine, and it just works.
On Windows I have to install a crapload of drivers to get these things to 'just work' on there. And Apple's iPhoto and iMovie actually work easier than the software that I have to install by the product makers on Windows.
A lot of hardware also "just works" with Linux and BSD. In fact, I suspect a lot more hardware "just works" with Linux than with Macintosh because Linux includes so many drivers out of the box.
The reason for why hardware "just works" on all those non-Windows platfoms is simple: if OS vendors don't ship drivers with the hardware, you have to ship drivers with the OS.
Note that a lot of "driver CDs" contain a lot more than drivers: they contain documentation, setup utilities, etc. So, built-in support, whether on Macintosh or Linux or BSD, is often not as good as what you get from vendors. (OTOH, vendor CDs often install lots of garbage in addition to what you need.)
In the long run, we need more standard hardware interfaces, so that the low-level suff works for all hardware out of the box, but we also need to get vendors to support non-Windows platforms more.
You're better off getting a data cable for the Vision phone you probably already have. The cable for my Sanyo 8100 was $20 (plus mandatory $20 for the shitty SnapSync software). When I plugged the phone into my iBook, it detected it and Internet Connect asked for all of the authorization info and I was up and running at 250 kbps in less than 5 minutes. I'd like to see Windows do that!
Verizon. Two different service levels, nation wide right now, 80-133kbps inbound 44kbps outbound. EV-DO service in DC, Vegas and San Diego, 300-500kbps inbound unsure on the outbound. '05 national for EV-DO Performance is much enhanced with a good 800/1900 dual band antenna and 3 watt amp like the digital antenna DA4000. Using this setup I've done some long drives while listening to stream audio (voice programs not music) in the car , like Austin to Dallas, nonstop audio streaming. It's cool. Latency on these connections SUCKS though, it's all over the map from 400 to 800ms. So forget out getting the $80 unlimited plan and making unlimited calls. And it is no shocker that this just works on the Mac. It just works BETTER on a Mac than on my PC's supported or not. I much prefer this kind of connectivity to Wifi because it does not tie me down to one location. Using a crank up 3' mount on my camper with a yagi on top I get the most insane coverage area you've ever seen. 40 miles outside of the regular VZ coverage area is easy. Haven't even had a chance to try a mountain top location yet but I bet it's going to have signal.
Windows makes use of many generic drivers. When I plug my Archos jukebox into the USB2 port in my Windows computer, it uses all generic drivers. The USB2 controller in my nForce2 south bridge is seen as a "Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Contoller" that uses usbehci.sys, usbhub.sys, usbport.sys, hccoin.dll, usbui.dll. On top of that, the USB root hub uses usbd.sys, usbhub.sys. Then the USB mass storage device uses usbstor.sys. At the end is the volume which uses disk.sys and partmgr.sys. All of those drivers are generic drivers written by Microsoft; there is nothing from nVidia, Archos or Hitatchi (the hardware manufacturers). Below the USB controller, a standard PCI bus from pci.sys, an ACPI bus enumerator from acpi.sys, also all generic MS drivers.
.inf files. inf files match drivers to device IDs. If a new product comes out, even if it is supported by a generic driver, the .inf files won't know about it; some driver disks just provide a new .inf file. Anyways, you are right that Windows may have the binaries to support a new device but doesn't know it. That's why you can force installation of a driver over an unknown device ;)
I have 6 devices that don't use all generic drivers: the ATA controller, network card, sound, AGP bridge and video card all from nVidia, and the Realtek NIC. Of those, I could use generic drivers for 3 of them, albeit with some loss of speed or functionaility.
NT has always had a layered architecture of class and port drivers; class drivers, provided my MS, implement the common functions for similar devices while port drivers handle communication with a specific device. A third-party video driver still depends on the generic video port driver. AFAIK, video cards support the VGA standard and that's about it; a standard VGA driver is the only generic video driver.
There are two ways to figure out which drivers go to which devices: the old way of loading possible drivers and asking each one if it sees any devices it supports, and plug and play which uses device IDs and