Adding to tenman's comment above. They are competing with Xybernaut - who charges even more obscene prices for the very similar hardware. Indeed, this is a wearable commercial market, not geek's market. Any geek can make very similar wearable from any PDA, like Zaurus.
Strength of this offering is in industrial grade ruggedness, modularity and completeness - businesses are not likely to buy a one-of-a-kind wearable from a geek next door; they want volume, reliability, FCC, CE and UL approvals, repairs and support, and much more - something that only a stable business can offer.
There are however MANY people here that insist that P2P network are very useful for non-illegal means, although I've not really heard a lot of good examples...
An example you want? Here is one, judge for yourself how good it is.
There are countries other than United States, and those other countries often have sane copyright laws (probably because they didn't have legislature as corrupt as US one). In those countries music and other works of art fall into public domain much faster than in USA.
Some works were always in public domain. Take, for example, songs of Vladimir Vysotsky, even when he was alive. Other works, of other artists, were copyrighted but became public domain long ago, according to laws of that country.
It is a big mistake to treat the whole world as an extension of USA. The world is much larger, and it is not obeying the same insane laws that americans do. Most of the world does not even care about american "top 40" or whatever it is called. Most people on the planet would not listen to those sounds even if they are paid to do so. Finally, most artists in the world have nothing to do with RIAA.
UWB sends very brief signals over the entire radio specturm but jamming no part of it for any more than a tiny fraction of a second.
That is not correct. A filter (which is present in any conventional radio) will delay and expand the signal to match the filter's own pulse response. This will result in output pulse being wider and lower in amplitude, but with the same energy. Basically, any receiver subjected to UWB will receive whatever signal it was designed to receive, as defined by its filters and the demodulator.
As I understand it, from all EE points of view, UWB is evil.
>> in Canada a good driver gets away with CDN$ 600-800 per year.
> BULLSHIT!
No, it is true. My friend has this insurance, and he lived in Mississauga (now in Richmond Hill). Those are all places around Toronto. I lived there too (before I moved), and I paid a little bit more (with Progressive), but still below CDN $1K. If you pay much more than that, you need to look for another insurance company - or to move to a cheaper place.
Anyone who is considered legally blind can't drive and we get around just fine.
I lived in a large city and did not need a car at all. Buses, streetcars & subway were all too convenient.
Then I moved to suburbs (because company built its own building there and moved). No subway, of course. Buses were available on schedule (every 30 minutes or so), unless it was snowing - then no buses until the morning. If I had to work late then the transportation problem was all on my own shoulders - last bus departed at something like 9:30pm, and after that good luck walking. BTW, there were no good sidewalks, and several times I had to make my way through piles of construction materials, steel rods and other hazards. In the winter there were no sidewalks at all (too much snow), and then one has to walk on the road - did I mention that the road was icy and slippery? I am not sure how I survived that period.
Then I bought a car, and since then I never had to worry about a bus or snow or cold. True, the car needs repairs on occasion, but that is a scheduled work usually, and is very simple (leave it with the nearby mechanic, then pick it up later).
Why do you need a drivers licence anyway?
How about paying for groceries with a personal cheque? There are more examples, of course.
find a car pool
This is a good idea - if you work from 9:00:00am to 5:00:00pm. But if your schedule is flexible, as most engineers know, you'll never catch that carpool. The life of an assembly line worker or a government's clerk is indeed simpler. Life of an ant is even simpler, but do we need to go there?
You will have many less expences in your life also, no car insurance ($2000 a year)
This $2000 figure is ridiculous. Even in Canada a good driver gets away with CDN$ 600-800 per year. In USA $300/yr is all it takes.
no car payments ($20,000 over 5 to 10 years)
I don't understand what "payments" you are talking about. I bought my last car - Mercedes 190E - for $5000, paid in full right there, and that's it. The car, BTW, works great.
no vehicle taxes (amount unknown)
USD $50/yr, FYI. Hardly a problem. But do you know how expensive subway and bus is? Dollars per trip, in each direction, and consider yourself lucky if you can use transfer slips. When I used public transportation (TTC) I had to buy a monthly pass, CDN $30 IIRC. This amounted to CDN $360/yr, with no guarantee that a bus will actually arrive.
no wondering if your car will be stolen, or if that is your alarm going off at 3:00 am waking the neiborhood.
That is a non-issue. People with cheap cars (like me) sleep well knowing that nobody will want our cars. People with expensive cars buy theft insurance and sleep well too.
Despite of all that, I would be much happier if I don't need a car. I drive only when I must. Unfortunately, even the nearest grocery store is beyond the walking range (2 miles).
Stores are supposed to be places that sell you anything that you are willing to buy. At least, capitalism and market economy gently suggest that.
But this "Best Buy" entity, instead of being a good store, decided to meddle with politics. Now it dictates what the customers should buy! This is one efficient way to go out of business. Who do they think they are, The State? God? Where is demand, there is supply, and people will -easily- find the supply, especially when Internet makes it so easy.
This is, I presume, just another step in the life cycle of a company. Companies start young and aggressive, then become middle-aged and conservative, then become old and senile. Then they die. No reward for guessing correctly which step of its life Best Buy is at.
your new 8ghz box will have DRM embedded cause of CBDTPA/SSSCA, so those MP3s you rip on your old box wont be allowed to play on your new box because they wont be digitally signed.
And what then would be the reason for a consumer to buy a very expensive boat anchor?
Regular people buy PCs because they want to listen to music, watch movies, browse Net and have email. Take away first two, and most consumers will settle on a kitchen appliance for $100, and PC industry will suffer serious losses.
But they can't dial unless they turn on the light, and that would be bad for the driver. So this Treo is lose-lose proposition for someone who drives a lot, either as a driver or as a passenger.
The difference is *very* subtle. To counter your example about buying an original Mondrian painting [...] deciding that the white background doesn't match the living room, and painting the white parts sea foam green.: that's exactly what composers do when they make different arrangements of the same piece for different instruments, different performers, different audience. This would be very close to changing colors in the painting.
Arnold Schwarzenegger got $75,000 to do the audio commentary for the Total Recall "Special Limited Edition" DVD.
Actually, I don't think it is even expensive. He probably had something to say about the movie - it was quite a big one when it was made.
It should be also taken into account that actors are not on monthly salary. They live job to job, if they get the job *and* if they have enough health left to do the job.
On an artistic level, it is disrespectful to the original artist to alter his or her work to better suit your taste.
In arts, new is usually based on old. A new dance is a variation of old dance; a new song borrows something from the old one; a new movie relies upon somebody's else plot, and so on. It is normal, it is expected, and that's how arts progress. In music, for example, a special name - potpourri - is used for new compositions that mostly consist of old, well known pieces, put together into one new work of art. In movies, the name remake is used for a movie that uses the same plot as the older, known movie, but adds something new (like better acting, better effects, better scripts etc. - or nothing at all:-)
Of course, the original author might think that the derived art is not as good as his own original work. Beethoven, for example, would wince hearing a techno remix of his 5th Symphony - well, too bad, he can't stop people from listening if they like the new piece.
You realize you could be violating the DMCA by saying that?
Just imagine, a crowd of university graduates in EE cheerfully leaves the ceremony of graduation, and... everyone gets arrested right there, on the spot, for posession of information that might be used for copyright infringement!
Or another one, even better. A professor gets arrested in the middle of the class for teaching "too well". But I am afraid, that would not be new. A tyrant always kills educated people, lest they interfere with his plans.
With 9-11, there are rumors they may impose the restriction again, but that's assuming any primary threats have missiles capable of using GPS.
Cruise missiles guide[d] themselves not with GPS, but just using a machine vision systems. They compare actual land beneath them to a map stored in the missile, and generate corrections this way. Does not work well at night, but totally self-contained and jam-proof.
Besides, there are many other solutions to the "last 100 meters" problem. An infrared laser, for example, can highlight the target, and the missile locks onto the bright spot. This one is used for many years (so-called "laser-guided bombs").
Surface of Earth is 148,326,000 sq.km., or 1.48326e+14 sq.meters. If the resolution of the GPS is 10x10 meters (100 sq. meters), the GPS can yield 1.48326e+12 keys, which is equivalent to a 40-bit key (2^40 = 1.1e+12). This is one easily breakable key. But if such a system is really used, the grid must be much rougher because of usability concerns (many households are longer/larger than 10 meters). Then the strength of the key drops significantly.
Another important defect of this system is that in modern society most people live in cities, and as such the keys are not randomly distributed, but very much clustered. To find a movie key, for example, one just needs to try GPS locations of few big cities (SF, LA, NYC etc.) to hit the paydirt.
But likely, this key search won't be needed at all, because whoever posts the material on Usenet will put the necessary serialz ^W GPS code into the accompanying note. The only problem is to apply the key to get the raw contents, and that is not too difficult because all the strength of the crypto is in the key, not in the algorithm.
An even better one is 'how obviously on an article should the date 1st April be printed in order to trick the greatest amount of people'?
Regardless of AFD, most replies so far talk about technical merits of the proposed scheme, and indeed there are some. For example, there are *very many* unique coordinates on Earth, this makes the key quite long. On the other hand, the key is not very random (because most people live on land, and majority of those live in cities). So this makes for an interesting theoretical discussion, even if it is not for real.
It has not only to resist to direct attacks trying to get to the data, it also has to deal with jamming of the gps signals, or more specifically putting the device in a faraday cage and sending it signals imitating the gps satellites in the appropriate position. Too bad the article has zero information on their methods.
Methods are irrelevant. As soon as you put the receiver into a Faraday cage, you are the master of the Universe (inside of the cage). You are free to simulate as many satellites, and in as many positions as you wish, and nothing inside the device can detect your simulations, except if the real signals have a digital signature.
You don't even need to bother with a Faraday cage. Just use strong enough signals from your simulator, and they will jam the AGC inside the receiver, so that only your signals are received correctly.
So this "cryptosystem" uses the GPS location as a key. Big deal. It's just Yet Another Key Generator. All it takes to defeat this scheme is a hack in the player, which asks "Enter GPS coordinates which came in this movie's NFO file", like serialz work. Alternatively, the unmodified player can be used, serially connected to another application that simulates the GPS receiver, asking the same question. Only if the decoder hardware is tamper-proof, then the known attacks against the key may be necessary.
This is only how to defeat the system... I don't even mention what consumers will think of it... how would {RI,MP}AA justify licensing the material to a physical coordinates rather than a paying customer? It is not likely to work. GPS does not work inside buildings, BTW, and very few people go in a park to watch DVDs:-)
Today the faulty or poorly supported hardware is much more likely reason for a crash. I have quite a few K6-2 and K6-3 boxes around, and they die like flies, after 1 or 2 years of continuous use; most often the motherboard fails. I had a Linux box that crashed once in 2 weeks; I moved the HDDs into another computer, moved most of cards and it now averages 150 days of uptime, interrupted only by power outages (no UPS there). Another K6-3 box sometimes fails in BIOS, during memory test in POST routine! I gave up on this one; it is not worth of my time. Needless to say, this box had all sorts of weird crashes in all OSes that I ran on it; NetBSD didn't even boot from the boot floppy, mumbling something about "garbage IDE DMA":-)
I don't know if Linux does this sort of stuff for you
On Linux, the kernel prints the backtrace on the console, and into the syslog if it can. Later you can run ksymoops on this backtrace to match it to the symbolic names. This requires no preparation, but since I never saw FreeBSD backtraces I can't say if it is of a similar detail level.
You are wise; but there are many trusting people. Even worse, there are many experienced con artists who can easily invent a believable scenario when the victim's moves are forced (as in chess, when the player has only one way to respond.) Even if the victim receives a "contact phone number" in the email, there is no guarantee that this phone number is really what it purports to be.
For example, someone is injured in a road accident, transported into private hospital X, but this hospital X requires $10,000 for admission, as security deposit, and if no money is sent within 20 minutes they will bounce the patient to another hospital, with great risk to his life. The phone number is provided, and a hospital's receptionist answers it, and confirms the story. What would a normal person do in this case? I guess, he'd break out his Visa card, while his relative is still alive; there is simply no time to investigate, no time to ask for hospital's license, no time to call the state and check that the license really exists, and all the time later to wonder why the hospital's bank is in Nigeria.
Slashdot Mirror
Strength of this offering is in industrial grade ruggedness, modularity and completeness - businesses are not likely to buy a one-of-a-kind wearable from a geek next door; they want volume, reliability, FCC, CE and UL approvals, repairs and support, and much more - something that only a stable business can offer.
An example you want? Here is one, judge for yourself how good it is.
There are countries other than United States, and those other countries often have sane copyright laws (probably because they didn't have legislature as corrupt as US one). In those countries music and other works of art fall into public domain much faster than in USA.
Some works were always in public domain. Take, for example, songs of Vladimir Vysotsky, even when he was alive. Other works, of other artists, were copyrighted but became public domain long ago, according to laws of that country.
It is a big mistake to treat the whole world as an extension of USA. The world is much larger, and it is not obeying the same insane laws that americans do. Most of the world does not even care about american "top 40" or whatever it is called. Most people on the planet would not listen to those sounds even if they are paid to do so. Finally, most artists in the world have nothing to do with RIAA.
That is not correct. A filter (which is present in any conventional radio) will delay and expand the signal to match the filter's own pulse response. This will result in output pulse being wider and lower in amplitude, but with the same energy. Basically, any receiver subjected to UWB will receive whatever signal it was designed to receive, as defined by its filters and the demodulator.
As I understand it, from all EE points of view, UWB is evil.
> BULLSHIT!
No, it is true. My friend has this insurance, and he lived in Mississauga (now in Richmond Hill). Those are all places around Toronto. I lived there too (before I moved), and I paid a little bit more (with Progressive), but still below CDN $1K. If you pay much more than that, you need to look for another insurance company - or to move to a cheaper place.
I lived in a large city and did not need a car at all. Buses, streetcars & subway were all too convenient.
Then I moved to suburbs (because company built its own building there and moved). No subway, of course. Buses were available on schedule (every 30 minutes or so), unless it was snowing - then no buses until the morning. If I had to work late then the transportation problem was all on my own shoulders - last bus departed at something like 9:30pm, and after that good luck walking. BTW, there were no good sidewalks, and several times I had to make my way through piles of construction materials, steel rods and other hazards. In the winter there were no sidewalks at all (too much snow), and then one has to walk on the road - did I mention that the road was icy and slippery? I am not sure how I survived that period.
Then I bought a car, and since then I never had to worry about a bus or snow or cold. True, the car needs repairs on occasion, but that is a scheduled work usually, and is very simple (leave it with the nearby mechanic, then pick it up later).
Why do you need a drivers licence anyway?
How about paying for groceries with a personal cheque? There are more examples, of course.
find a car pool
This is a good idea - if you work from 9:00:00am to 5:00:00pm. But if your schedule is flexible, as most engineers know, you'll never catch that carpool. The life of an assembly line worker or a government's clerk is indeed simpler. Life of an ant is even simpler, but do we need to go there?
You will have many less expences in your life also, no car insurance ($2000 a year)
This $2000 figure is ridiculous. Even in Canada a good driver gets away with CDN$ 600-800 per year. In USA $300/yr is all it takes.
no car payments ($20,000 over 5 to 10 years)
I don't understand what "payments" you are talking about. I bought my last car - Mercedes 190E - for $5000, paid in full right there, and that's it. The car, BTW, works great.
no vehicle taxes (amount unknown)
USD $50/yr, FYI. Hardly a problem. But do you know how expensive subway and bus is? Dollars per trip, in each direction, and consider yourself lucky if you can use transfer slips. When I used public transportation (TTC) I had to buy a monthly pass, CDN $30 IIRC. This amounted to CDN $360/yr, with no guarantee that a bus will actually arrive.
no wondering if your car will be stolen, or if that is your alarm going off at 3:00 am waking the neiborhood.
That is a non-issue. People with cheap cars (like me) sleep well knowing that nobody will want our cars. People with expensive cars buy theft insurance and sleep well too.
Despite of all that, I would be much happier if I don't need a car. I drive only when I must. Unfortunately, even the nearest grocery store is beyond the walking range (2 miles).
Cameras can be avoided. But you can not effectively live in USA without having a driver's license or its non-driving equivalent.
no Bill of Rights
There is little left of it in USA anyway.
I know which country's government is less intrusive.
Bermuda?
But this "Best Buy" entity, instead of being a good store, decided to meddle with politics. Now it dictates what the customers should buy! This is one efficient way to go out of business. Who do they think they are, The State? God? Where is demand, there is supply, and people will -easily- find the supply, especially when Internet makes it so easy.
This is, I presume, just another step in the life cycle of a company. Companies start young and aggressive, then become middle-aged and conservative, then become old and senile. Then they die. No reward for guessing correctly which step of its life Best Buy is at.
And what then would be the reason for a consumer to buy a very expensive boat anchor?
Regular people buy PCs because they want to listen to music, watch movies, browse Net and have email. Take away first two, and most consumers will settle on a kitchen appliance for $100, and PC industry will suffer serious losses.
Q: Why all your UNIX administrators enter and leave the company building through the loading dock instead of front door?
A: Because...
But they can't dial unless they turn on the light, and that would be bad for the driver. So this Treo is lose-lose proposition for someone who drives a lot, either as a driver or as a passenger.
Sprint has SMS, and it is accessible as yourphonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com.
The difference is *very* subtle. To counter your example about buying an original Mondrian painting [...] deciding that the white background doesn't match the living room, and painting the white parts sea foam green.: that's exactly what composers do when they make different arrangements of the same piece for different instruments, different performers, different audience. This would be very close to changing colors in the painting.
Actually, I don't think it is even expensive. He probably had something to say about the movie - it was quite a big one when it was made.
It should be also taken into account that actors are not on monthly salary. They live job to job, if they get the job *and* if they have enough health left to do the job.
In arts, new is usually based on old. A new dance is a variation of old dance; a new song borrows something from the old one; a new movie relies upon somebody's else plot, and so on. It is normal, it is expected, and that's how arts progress. In music, for example, a special name - potpourri - is used for new compositions that mostly consist of old, well known pieces, put together into one new work of art. In movies, the name remake is used for a movie that uses the same plot as the older, known movie, but adds something new (like better acting, better effects, better scripts etc. - or nothing at all :-)
Of course, the original author might think that the derived art is not as good as his own original work. Beethoven, for example, would wince hearing a techno remix of his 5th Symphony - well, too bad, he can't stop people from listening if they like the new piece.
Most people would fail to notice a new guest at a decent party, let alone a new traveler in the whole huge universe :-)
Just imagine, a crowd of university graduates in EE cheerfully leaves the ceremony of graduation, and ... everyone gets arrested right there, on the spot, for posession of information that might be used for copyright infringement!
Or another one, even better. A professor gets arrested in the middle of the class for teaching "too well". But I am afraid, that would not be new. A tyrant always kills educated people, lest they interfere with his plans.
Cruise missiles guide[d] themselves not with GPS, but just using a machine vision systems. They compare actual land beneath them to a map stored in the missile, and generate corrections this way. Does not work well at night, but totally self-contained and jam-proof.
Besides, there are many other solutions to the "last 100 meters" problem. An infrared laser, for example, can highlight the target, and the missile locks onto the bright spot. This one is used for many years (so-called "laser-guided bombs").
Another important defect of this system is that in modern society most people live in cities, and as such the keys are not randomly distributed, but very much clustered. To find a movie key, for example, one just needs to try GPS locations of few big cities (SF, LA, NYC etc.) to hit the paydirt.
But likely, this key search won't be needed at all, because whoever posts the material on Usenet will put the necessary serialz ^W GPS code into the accompanying note. The only problem is to apply the key to get the raw contents, and that is not too difficult because all the strength of the crypto is in the key, not in the algorithm.
Regardless of AFD, most replies so far talk about technical merits of the proposed scheme, and indeed there are some. For example, there are *very many* unique coordinates on Earth, this makes the key quite long. On the other hand, the key is not very random (because most people live on land, and majority of those live in cities). So this makes for an interesting theoretical discussion, even if it is not for real.
Methods are irrelevant. As soon as you put the receiver into a Faraday cage, you are the master of the Universe (inside of the cage). You are free to simulate as many satellites, and in as many positions as you wish, and nothing inside the device can detect your simulations, except if the real signals have a digital signature.
You don't even need to bother with a Faraday cage. Just use strong enough signals from your simulator, and they will jam the AGC inside the receiver, so that only your signals are received correctly.
This is only how to defeat the system... I don't even mention what consumers will think of it... how would {RI,MP}AA justify licensing the material to a physical coordinates rather than a paying customer? It is not likely to work. GPS does not work inside buildings, BTW, and very few people go in a park to watch DVDs :-)
Today the faulty or poorly supported hardware is much more likely reason for a crash. I have quite a few K6-2 and K6-3 boxes around, and they die like flies, after 1 or 2 years of continuous use; most often the motherboard fails. I had a Linux box that crashed once in 2 weeks; I moved the HDDs into another computer, moved most of cards and it now averages 150 days of uptime, interrupted only by power outages (no UPS there). Another K6-3 box sometimes fails in BIOS, during memory test in POST routine! I gave up on this one; it is not worth of my time. Needless to say, this box had all sorts of weird crashes in all OSes that I ran on it; NetBSD didn't even boot from the boot floppy, mumbling something about "garbage IDE DMA" :-)
On Linux, the kernel prints the backtrace on the console, and into the syslog if it can. Later you can run ksymoops on this backtrace to match it to the symbolic names. This requires no preparation, but since I never saw FreeBSD backtraces I can't say if it is of a similar detail level.
For example, someone is injured in a road accident, transported into private hospital X, but this hospital X requires $10,000 for admission, as security deposit, and if no money is sent within 20 minutes they will bounce the patient to another hospital, with great risk to his life. The phone number is provided, and a hospital's receptionist answers it, and confirms the story. What would a normal person do in this case? I guess, he'd break out his Visa card, while his relative is still alive; there is simply no time to investigate, no time to ask for hospital's license, no time to call the state and check that the license really exists, and all the time later to wonder why the hospital's bank is in Nigeria.
But the SSL/TLS uses the same ciphers and the same technologies, only in a different "wrapper".