Don't worry about a thing. We USians with our Droids (same hardware as a Milestone with a different radio, but without key-checking) are hard at work on making the platform the utmost of awesome. So if you guys ever figure out how to run your own kernel, the rest of the work will already have been done for you.
I have real, functional Wifi tethering on my 2.1 Droid, complete with basic or absolute access control, notification of new connections, et cetera. It works well.
Even though I have all access control and encryption disabled, so that anyone within earshot could use it freely, I leave it turned off unless I'm using it myself. This, despite the fact that I also carry an iPod Touch (which certainly benefits from having an always-on connection), and could easily lock the connection down to just the iPod and my laptop if I chose to do so.
Why? The answer is very practical: I don't care if anyone benefits from using my bandwidth, but as long as it impacts my battery life, I'm not game. Not even for myself.
That said, there's technical reasons why your idea won't work. A sea of miscellaneous open APs, moving about in cars and sidewalks (while you might also be doing the same) sounds like a good idea, until you realize that hopping from one to another kills any existing TCP connections, trashes any UDP sessions, and would be generally unreliable.
I currently pay $30 per month for unlimited data on my phone. And even in a world of free, cellular-backed mobile access points: I'd be very happy to continue paying that every month, just so I don't have to fuck with restarting connections (or wait while software takes care of it for me) every few dozen feet.
We'd need some new protocols, or better-tailored support from existing ones, before your idea would become useful for the sorts of things that people actually use this stuff for.
First, I read the comments. There were three. I modded them all up, because they all seemed useful within the confines of Slashdot's moderation parameters. I frequently have mod points, apparently because people think my moderation is fair. However, by posting this (I refuse to jump through hoops to post as AC), those moderations were undone. Sorry.
The reason is simple: After moderating, I read TFA. Therein, I see that about every third sentence ends with an exclamation point! This artificial excitement really annoying!
For instance:
With Android 2.2, the Chrome web browser will have full Adobe Flash Player 10.1 support to allow you to view flash-based websites, play flash games, and more! This is something that not even the iPhone is capable of doing!
See what I mean! It's a very loud article!
It's like there aren't any there any others to pick from!
That said, I might be qualified to be an Android fanboi! For instance, today at work, I used my phone to help me align and plumb two antenna systems! The day before that, it helped me cook a stew! And on Monday of this week, it even walked my dog!
But this quantity of exclamatory remarks is unsettling! Please, timothy, given your lineage here, I expect better editing!
So, basically: It's a lot like what Miro would be, if it only a tuner and some decent RSS feeds out-of-the-box. Except that the content is locked down a lot harder.
But most chain store clerks aren't obliged to actively chase you around and lie to you while doing hard sells on overpriced things that you don't bloody need. Best Buy, on the other hand... Yuck.
Genuinely local, mom-and-pop sort of stores are a completely different story, though. They're often staffed with very clued people who earn their keep honestly.
It only has to be rounded to the nearest cent when you're paying... and they could in fact round all transactions to the nearest 10c instead of to the nearest penny and as long as you both agreed on the goods and the price it'd be perfectly legal to do that.
That reminds me of a completely off-topic story from NPR about a office supply store in Berkeley that eliminated pennies. They simply round down to the nearest nickel.
From the article, they sound like they're pretty pleased with it, even though they stand to "lose" as much as 4 cents per transaction.
They don't need to store the card number. Something like an SHA-1 hash would be more than sufficient to keep track of how many items have been purchased with a given card, without ever keeping any details of the card itself on file or transferring them to an outside party.
Forget about all of that for a minute -- you folks are making things way too complicated.
If the intent is to resell 8 (or some other smallish number) of iPads:
Go to Wal-Mart. Buy 4 pre-paid Visa cards, at $3 each. Load each of them with enough money to procure 2 iPads (including taxes).
Then, just buy your iPads.
There's no ID, no address verification, no nothing. They, quite literally, anonymous and unique Visa cards. When you're finished with them, just throw them away.
I don't know if it's a nice read for someone not in the field (I've got some background in electronics), but the Wikipedia article seems to present a very accurate generalized overview. The article's section on economics references a book which looks like it offers a more in-depth view the topic of feedback in this exact context, which I have not read.
I've played Fallout 3 on both the PS3, and my reasonably-spec'd desktop system.
It's far prettier on the PC. Until it crashes, anyway. Why does it crash? Dunno - it only ever crashes with that game, otherwise the machine goes for weeks between (planned) reboots. It's not overclocked. It's appropriately cooled. So, I can research the problem on forums and/or play Driver Upgrade/Sidegrade/Downgrade Whack-a-Mole, and eventually it might get fixed (or it might get worse, or break something else that previously was working OK). Or, I guess I can learn to get used to saving my game frequently to avoid losing game progress when it crashes.
Better, though: I can step out to the living room, pop the Fallout 3 disc into the PS3, and just...you know, use it.
I sit before a 24" Asus 1080p "HDTV" (it does have a proper HDMI input, after all, though it's geared toward being a computer monitor). It looks fine.
I also sit before a ~20" 1600x1200 IPS-paneled LCD from NEC, which has a little bit higher DPI, and fantastic viewing angle.
Meanwhile, my 5-year-old Dell laptop has a 15.4" 1920x1200 display. In terms of DPI, it's a dream.
However, I'm not about to take the 52" Samsung 1080p LCD from my living room and put it on my desk, though I do use it from time to time for various things ranging from gaming to troubleshooting dead Windows boxes from the couch about 8 feet away.
It doesn't take that big of a boom to cause a plane to depressurize. A small charge, of the right shape and in the right spot (ie: up against the wall, and not directly under a window) is all it takes.
Now, I'm not at all any sort of chemist, but: 3 ounces of one part, plus 3 ounces of another, sounds like plenty of explosive material to rip a giant fucking hole in an airplane.
After that, terror ensues. And, since we're talking about terrorism (instead of hijacking or mass murder), that's all that matters.
Please mod parent up: He's completely correct, and his simple methodology is a good example of best practices.
However, there are more impromptu ways to accomplish similar feats:
One obvious possibility is the test mode built into many (perhaps all) cell phone handsets. These will typically display a number of different datapoints, such as signal strength and error rate. If the asker is troubleshooting only troubleshooting GSM or CDMA (so that switching carriers does not necessarily entail switching radios, antennas, etc), and isn't interested in the accuracy or automation of doing GPS-based maps of cellular coverage, this might work just fine -- perhaps even for free.
All it would take is a map, a pencil, a copilot, and (ideally) an external antenna, to chart this stuff the old fashioned way.
With a quick Google search, I found a concise list of procedures for entering field test mode on a number of handsets. Other handsets, past and present, are likely to have information available at places like HowardForums.
And, indeed: Good luck. I've charted my share of wireless systems, and it is (at best) tedious to get good results.
As far as I can tell (and I've been trying to follow this topic for about 15 years, though perhaps not very successfully) it's not always all that different.
The intensity might be different, looking at a monitor instead of a book lit by a lamp on a bedside stand. The color temperature might be different. It's polarized, while the light from a lamp isn't, but then sunlight is polarized under many conditions as well. And the lamp will tend to light up a whole area as well as a book, whereas a monitor mostly just lights itself up, so there's can be more of a difference in contrast of the object vs. ambient, depending on how the room is lit.
So, that's a whole lot of maybes. The specifics depend on how your particular gear is arranged, along with the rest of the room. It's completely possible to eliminate or drastically reduce all of the potential differences I listed (or, at least it is on a real computer -- not an iPad).
Very simply: If you set up a display to look like a book under whatever lighting you like, then (gasp!) it looks like a book.
However, most folks haven't done so. The color temperature is typically whatever it was set to out of the box, the brightness is somewhere between "ouch" and "surface of the sun," and so on. And, I think, most folks think they're happy with things that way.
Feh. Nobody's going to steal this car. It's old (1995!), high-mileage (176k!), low end (just a 325i), and difficult to steal for anyone but a knowledgeable professional (who does not know that there is a key buried in the dash).
And it isn't a high-dollar car. I gave $6,500 for it, about five years ago. People generally steal cars because they're convenient or have valuable parts. This has neither convenience nor value.
So, no: I was never worried about leaving the key in the car, since a thief with his brain turned on would never gotten that far anyway.
And I won't argue with you about insurance adjusters. They're all crooks. Even your friend: He's a crook, too.
That all said: As toddestan GUESSES, it might be the case that the M-B needs constant infrared communication with the key.
To which, as an engineer, I call bullshit. Unless there's some manner of external power available to the key, it's NOT going to be able to keep up a constant stream of infrared communication for any meaningful length of time. Otherwise, M-B owners everywhere would be all uptight about their cars NOT FUCKING WORKING after the battery goes dead in the key.
So, in retort to that guess, I guess that I'd guess myself that he's full of shit.
(Note, however, that I don't own a M-B, never have, have no intention to ever own one, and therefore have not researched their security at all.)
Which, of course, leaves my question: Why not just leave the key (or the electronic portion of it) someplace, and let that be that?
(Note, also: It's easy to flatbed a car even if the steering if locked, fucked, or otherwise off-cantor.)
I've been using GC and then GV for at least a few years.
Calling out with Google Voice is quite easy on my Android phone. So is SMS, which is free using the Voice app.
It's handy for me, because by communicating with GV exclusively, folks never know my actual cell phone number, but only my GV number. Which means that it never gets added to their phonebooks. Which means when they call me, they call GV, which is nice for all of the call-management stuff that GV offers. Also by keeping my actual number private, when people send me an SMS, I receive it as data (I have unlimited data) instead of being billed for it through my carrier (I don't have unlimited text).
And if I switch carriers, I don't have to worry about having any numbers ported. Hell, by using GV, it even makes it easier to switch providers for my home phone, since nobody has the number for that, either . . . All I have to do is plug the new number into GV, and people can reach me.
Remote start on my E36 BMW just required a magic box (consisting literally of a relay, a coil, and a box) into which a spare key was placed. The remote starter activates the relay in this box, which switched the coil near the ignition switch out of circuit, and replaced it with the one wrapped around the spare key inside the box.
Worked like a champ. I think I only had $90 in the whole kit, including the remote start, the spare key, and the magic box. I kept the key whole and buried the magic box and extra key deep inside the dashboard for security, though I could've easily cut off the metal portion of the key so that only the RFID-ish bits was with the car.
Is there some reason why you couldn't have gotten a spare M-B key, and done the same thing with IR instead of RF?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry about a thing. We USians with our Droids (same hardware as a Milestone with a different radio, but without key-checking) are hard at work on making the platform the utmost of awesome. So if you guys ever figure out how to run your own kernel, the rest of the work will already have been done for you.
I have real, functional Wifi tethering on my 2.1 Droid, complete with basic or absolute access control, notification of new connections, et cetera. It works well.
Even though I have all access control and encryption disabled, so that anyone within earshot could use it freely, I leave it turned off unless I'm using it myself. This, despite the fact that I also carry an iPod Touch (which certainly benefits from having an always-on connection), and could easily lock the connection down to just the iPod and my laptop if I chose to do so.
Why? The answer is very practical: I don't care if anyone benefits from using my bandwidth, but as long as it impacts my battery life, I'm not game. Not even for myself.
That said, there's technical reasons why your idea won't work. A sea of miscellaneous open APs, moving about in cars and sidewalks (while you might also be doing the same) sounds like a good idea, until you realize that hopping from one to another kills any existing TCP connections, trashes any UDP sessions, and would be generally unreliable.
I currently pay $30 per month for unlimited data on my phone. And even in a world of free, cellular-backed mobile access points: I'd be very happy to continue paying that every month, just so I don't have to fuck with restarting connections (or wait while software takes care of it for me) every few dozen feet.
We'd need some new protocols, or better-tailored support from existing ones, before your idea would become useful for the sorts of things that people actually use this stuff for.
First, I read the comments. There were three. I modded them all up, because they all seemed useful within the confines of Slashdot's moderation parameters. I frequently have mod points, apparently because people think my moderation is fair. However, by posting this (I refuse to jump through hoops to post as AC), those moderations were undone. Sorry.
The reason is simple: After moderating, I read TFA. Therein, I see that about every third sentence ends with an exclamation point! This artificial excitement really annoying!
For instance:
See what I mean! It's a very loud article!
It's like there aren't any there any others to pick from!
That said, I might be qualified to be an Android fanboi! For instance, today at work, I used my phone to help me align and plumb two antenna systems! The day before that, it helped me cook a stew! And on Monday of this week, it even walked my dog!
But this quantity of exclamatory remarks is unsettling! Please, timothy, given your lineage here, I expect better editing!
Sincerely!
adolf!
So, basically: It's a lot like what Miro would be, if it only a tuner and some decent RSS feeds out-of-the-box. Except that the content is locked down a lot harder.
Meh.
Well, sure. I agree.
But most chain store clerks aren't obliged to actively chase you around and lie to you while doing hard sells on overpriced things that you don't bloody need. Best Buy, on the other hand... Yuck.
Genuinely local, mom-and-pop sort of stores are a completely different story, though. They're often staffed with very clued people who earn their keep honestly.
The original Soundblaster 1.0 included their own CMS synthesis as well as Adlib compatibility. CMS supported stereo audio, while Adlib was mono.
IIRC, all of the Soundblasters included a stereo analog section, except perhaps the Microchannel version.
Oh.
So, basically: CPUs aren't getting faster in any useful capacity; they're just getting more complicated.
Thanks for clearing that up. :)
Ah. RealSound.
Good times. Computers smelled different back then.
I guess so, yes.
At least, that's the problem worth naming this week. It's certainly not the first issue I've ever experienced in more than twenty years of PC gaming.
It only has to be rounded to the nearest cent when you're paying... and they could in fact round all transactions to the nearest 10c instead of to the nearest penny and as long as you both agreed on the goods and the price it'd be perfectly legal to do that.
That reminds me of a completely off-topic story from NPR about a office supply store in Berkeley that eliminated pennies. They simply round down to the nearest nickel.
From the article, they sound like they're pretty pleased with it, even though they stand to "lose" as much as 4 cents per transaction.
They don't need to store the card number. Something like an SHA-1 hash would be more than sufficient to keep track of how many items have been purchased with a given card, without ever keeping any details of the card itself on file or transferring them to an outside party.
(Come on, Slashdot: I expect more from you.)
Forget about all of that for a minute -- you folks are making things way too complicated.
If the intent is to resell 8 (or some other smallish number) of iPads:
Go to Wal-Mart. Buy 4 pre-paid Visa cards, at $3 each. Load each of them with enough money to procure 2 iPads (including taxes).
Then, just buy your iPads.
There's no ID, no address verification, no nothing. They, quite literally, anonymous and unique Visa cards. When you're finished with them, just throw them away.
The end.
I don't know if it's a nice read for someone not in the field (I've got some background in electronics), but the Wikipedia article seems to present a very accurate generalized overview. The article's section on economics references a book which looks like it offers a more in-depth view the topic of feedback in this exact context, which I have not read.
FWIW.
I've played Fallout 3 on both the PS3, and my reasonably-spec'd desktop system.
It's far prettier on the PC. Until it crashes, anyway. Why does it crash? Dunno - it only ever crashes with that game, otherwise the machine goes for weeks between (planned) reboots. It's not overclocked. It's appropriately cooled. So, I can research the problem on forums and/or play Driver Upgrade/Sidegrade/Downgrade Whack-a-Mole, and eventually it might get fixed (or it might get worse, or break something else that previously was working OK). Or, I guess I can learn to get used to saving my game frequently to avoid losing game progress when it crashes.
Better, though: I can step out to the living room, pop the Fallout 3 disc into the PS3, and just...you know, use it.
Easy as pie.
Please define "HDTV."
I sit before a 24" Asus 1080p "HDTV" (it does have a proper HDMI input, after all, though it's geared toward being a computer monitor). It looks fine.
I also sit before a ~20" 1600x1200 IPS-paneled LCD from NEC, which has a little bit higher DPI, and fantastic viewing angle.
Meanwhile, my 5-year-old Dell laptop has a 15.4" 1920x1200 display. In terms of DPI, it's a dream.
However, I'm not about to take the 52" Samsung 1080p LCD from my living room and put it on my desk, though I do use it from time to time for various things ranging from gaming to troubleshooting dead Windows boxes from the couch about 8 feet away.
Size matters. Resolution matters. Distance matters.
"HDTV" doesn't matter.
(+5? The mods don't seem to have brains today...)
I guess I'll be on the list, too:
It doesn't take that big of a boom to cause a plane to depressurize. A small charge, of the right shape and in the right spot (ie: up against the wall, and not directly under a window) is all it takes.
Now, I'm not at all any sort of chemist, but: 3 ounces of one part, plus 3 ounces of another, sounds like plenty of explosive material to rip a giant fucking hole in an airplane.
After that, terror ensues. And, since we're talking about terrorism (instead of hijacking or mass murder), that's all that matters.
So. People in Denver are doomed?
Please mod parent up: He's completely correct, and his simple methodology is a good example of best practices.
However, there are more impromptu ways to accomplish similar feats:
One obvious possibility is the test mode built into many (perhaps all) cell phone handsets. These will typically display a number of different datapoints, such as signal strength and error rate. If the asker is troubleshooting only troubleshooting GSM or CDMA (so that switching carriers does not necessarily entail switching radios, antennas, etc), and isn't interested in the accuracy or automation of doing GPS-based maps of cellular coverage, this might work just fine -- perhaps even for free.
All it would take is a map, a pencil, a copilot, and (ideally) an external antenna, to chart this stuff the old fashioned way.
With a quick Google search, I found a concise list of procedures for entering field test mode on a number of handsets. Other handsets, past and present, are likely to have information available at places like HowardForums.
And, indeed: Good luck. I've charted my share of wireless systems, and it is (at best) tedious to get good results.
As far as I can tell (and I've been trying to follow this topic for about 15 years, though perhaps not very successfully) it's not always all that different.
The intensity might be different, looking at a monitor instead of a book lit by a lamp on a bedside stand. The color temperature might be different. It's polarized, while the light from a lamp isn't, but then sunlight is polarized under many conditions as well. And the lamp will tend to light up a whole area as well as a book, whereas a monitor mostly just lights itself up, so there's can be more of a difference in contrast of the object vs. ambient, depending on how the room is lit.
So, that's a whole lot of maybes. The specifics depend on how your particular gear is arranged, along with the rest of the room. It's completely possible to eliminate or drastically reduce all of the potential differences I listed (or, at least it is on a real computer -- not an iPad).
Very simply: If you set up a display to look like a book under whatever lighting you like, then (gasp!) it looks like a book.
However, most folks haven't done so. The color temperature is typically whatever it was set to out of the box, the brightness is somewhere between "ouch" and "surface of the sun," and so on. And, I think, most folks think they're happy with things that way.
Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
Feh. Nobody's going to steal this car. It's old (1995!), high-mileage (176k!), low end (just a 325i), and difficult to steal for anyone but a knowledgeable professional (who does not know that there is a key buried in the dash).
And it isn't a high-dollar car. I gave $6,500 for it, about five years ago. People generally steal cars because they're convenient or have valuable parts. This has neither convenience nor value.
So, no: I was never worried about leaving the key in the car, since a thief with his brain turned on would never gotten that far anyway.
And I won't argue with you about insurance adjusters. They're all crooks. Even your friend: He's a crook, too.
That all said: As toddestan GUESSES , it might be the case that the M-B needs constant infrared communication with the key.
To which, as an engineer, I call bullshit. Unless there's some manner of external power available to the key, it's NOT going to be able to keep up a constant stream of infrared communication for any meaningful length of time. Otherwise, M-B owners everywhere would be all uptight about their cars NOT FUCKING WORKING after the battery goes dead in the key.
So, in retort to that guess, I guess that I'd guess myself that he's full of shit.
(Note, however, that I don't own a M-B, never have, have no intention to ever own one, and therefore have not researched their security at all.)
Which, of course, leaves my question: Why not just leave the key (or the electronic portion of it) someplace, and let that be that?
(Note, also: It's easy to flatbed a car even if the steering if locked, fucked, or otherwise off-cantor.)
I've been using GC and then GV for at least a few years.
Calling out with Google Voice is quite easy on my Android phone. So is SMS, which is free using the Voice app.
It's handy for me, because by communicating with GV exclusively, folks never know my actual cell phone number, but only my GV number. Which means that it never gets added to their phonebooks. Which means when they call me, they call GV, which is nice for all of the call-management stuff that GV offers. Also by keeping my actual number private, when people send me an SMS, I receive it as data (I have unlimited data) instead of being billed for it through my carrier (I don't have unlimited text).
And if I switch carriers, I don't have to worry about having any numbers ported. Hell, by using GV, it even makes it easier to switch providers for my home phone, since nobody has the number for that, either . . . All I have to do is plug the new number into GV, and people can reach me.
Certain file systems, even with tons of free space, will fragment files that are in the low megabyte range.
[citation needed]
I suspect fragmentation gets even worse on the large files the OP is asking about.
Sadly, that is speculation on your part.
Hmm.
Remote start on my E36 BMW just required a magic box (consisting literally of a relay, a coil, and a box) into which a spare key was placed. The remote starter activates the relay in this box, which switched the coil near the ignition switch out of circuit, and replaced it with the one wrapped around the spare key inside the box.
Worked like a champ. I think I only had $90 in the whole kit, including the remote start, the spare key, and the magic box. I kept the key whole and buried the magic box and extra key deep inside the dashboard for security, though I could've easily cut off the metal portion of the key so that only the RFID-ish bits was with the car.
Is there some reason why you couldn't have gotten a spare M-B key, and done the same thing with IR instead of RF?
Baby steps.
Driving in circles on a track is also no fun at all if you want to, you know, eventually end up someplace else.
But I think I have a good compromise:
You keep riding the subway in $bigcity, and I'll keep driving my cars in rural Ohio for fun. These are not mutually-exclusive things.