I've got an access point at home - no WEP - so what? The hassle of setting it up and the fact that the rate goes down is too much of a bother. And I don't care if someone uses my internet link, and if they try to hack my linux box - good luck! At work we use VPN's so WEP is enabled purely to prevent unrestricted access to the internet via our T1. If folks are running a work AP without using VPN's and not using WEP then they are vunrable but other than that - give me a break. Besides, isn't the whole idea of this hobo war-chalking thing to get free wifi access to the net?
I'd like to see a modem speed chart to see the comparison between games and when they became accessible to more than just the university students who wrote them. I played my first MUD on the Essex Computer (Richard Bartlet's one) by dialing into the UK's JANET (Joint Academic Network) at 4am in the morning on a Pace Nightingale 300 baud modem. This must have been 1980 or so. It had to be in the morning because the MUD was only allowed to run from 11pm to 6am to conserve computing resources! Playing this game inspired me to write my own MUD for the BBC computer running over an ECONET network. It was a wonderful combination of BASIC and assembler but supported 10 or 20 users and ran on a massively expanded 128k RAM BBC Master with a 2nd 6502 processor and a 1 megabyte Winchester harddrive. Those were the days. Cliff
Your quoting the wrong wording of the patent - it's the patent claims that count, not the abstract or spec. Okay, okay, the spec is useful I know when it comes to litigation but first and foremost it is the claims that establish what is being claimed as the invention. Hey, that's why they're called "claims".
Read Claim #1 - it clearly states that this invention pertains to a bot that must sign into IM using a screen name and that screen name must be an authorized user on the buddy list of another user. Any system that doesn't do any part of that isn't covered by that claim, period. IRC, Ask jeeves - they don't do that do they? They're not prior art for this invention but they're not even covered by this patent.
There isn't an application to set it up as a webcam. You can take pictures, send them, receive them but it's all manually done. To approximate a web cam you'd have to take a snap and email it to a box that'd put the attachment on a web site. Don't think that'll happen too often.
The wheel's colors are just for fun as far as I can tell. The colors are apparently tied to a track on the MIDI files that are used for the ringtones. When I saw one the biggest comment in the group watching was "WOW! DISCO!"
The earlier devices worked with multiple IM systems but T-Mobile has a thing going with AOL so it became an AOL client.
The camera quality is fine, it's just the resolution that is very low. It's really just for fun.
Hacking this device is going to be tough IMO. Danger run the back-end so they can control who gets what if they want. It's like WebTV with their proxy system - look at the mgmt bios for indications on why! Danger have mentioned an open developer's program being available in the future but nothing yet except and email address for interested parties. I heard they have a Java based OS.
That's the problem with the XDA IMO, too expensive. $500 with the huge GPRS fee is just too much. Also, let's face it, the XDA hardware is showing its age. An XScale, 64Meg version would have been better but they hit delays too.
Two years ago - JUMPtec AMD 486 DIMM PC 66MHz running a Slackware with apache and pppd, getty etc. and ccam (connectix camera capture software) INSIDE a Omnipoint Redhawk 2000 GSM modem hooked up to a Connectix Quickcam bought on eBay for $40. Linked up to mobilewebcam.com (I let it drop so someone else has got it now). Unfortunately, most of this hardware is end of lifed but it was good while it lasted. The whole lot spent time between the dashboard of my car and being nailed to a tree looking at my house being built. The aim was to build a totally autonomous web cam capable of working anywhere. To avoid slashdotting (even a few hits maxed out the connection) we had it uploading JPEGs to a server but it could be accessed directly, no problemo. The only issue we had was the 9.6k circuit switched connection to the ISP would drop every so often, indeed there were telephone numbers that wouldn't even accept 9.6k connections! Nowadays, we'd use a miniscule GPRS module like this one to get a 33k uplink always-on Internet connection. One other problem was that the picture took quite a long time to scan - it was a parallel port connection. So if you moved the camera, like when I was driving, the picture washed out to white fairly quickly. When stationary it worked fine though.
Personally, I'm waiting for the Sony Ericsson P800. The P800 features a 208 x 320 colour touch screen and an integrated digital camera. It occupies a form factor similar to that of a traditional mobile telephone, using a flip cover to protect the screen and house the dialing buttons. Available Q3 of 2002.
I've spoken to PDA manufacturers about this and there is a growing movement to put the speaker and the mic on the back of the device. The iPAQ GSM/GPRS sleeve does this too. Ben
Just saw this patent grant recently on stopping spam: Patent #6,356,935. Similar to TMDA but it gets rid of the white list maintenance by putting the authority to send in the email address itself. Results in email addresses being non-transferable.
I can see a few issues with it but I still like the idea though.
Dunno why the Danger device is called a convergence device between a PDA and Cellphone. IMO it's not a PDA at all. It's a messaging device plain and simple. Some messages will be in text, some by voice but as for PDA functions, calendar, to do list, note taker, etc. fergetaboutit. I don't think the Hiptop will replace a PDA if you use it for email synch and calendar etc. It's more likely to replace your mobile phone, although if you like phones to be smaller than an APS camera, you'll probably won't like it.
I used to be a big fan of Terry Pratchet, hey I even ran a Discworld MUD in Oz circa 1991 but I gave up reading his books when he ran out of jokes and started recycling too much! Dunno when that happened exactly but "Carpe Jugulum" sucked big time.
Corporations can be multinational and operate with legal rights throughout the world but it's really tough trying to do that as an individual. Why? Citizenship. There isn't a global right for people to travel, live and work anywhere they want to. We're all penned in to places, mostly defined by where we were born.
I've made it my life's passion to work and travel anywhere I can and clocked up a fair bunch of countries. Most of the time my work visa has been temporary but I do have the right now to work anywhere in the European Community and USA (with an option for Kenya). My kids can do that and also work/live in Japan. But not for long. When they reach 20, they'll have to decide if they want to be Japanese or not. If they do, at least in theory, Japan will be their one and only domicile and work zone. What a waste.
So, what's the deal? Well, why isn't there a global citizenship? Are we ever going to get to that point? Are countries an outmoded repressive system? Are we in a transition period away from countries where people can belong to meta groups instead of countries? There are a number of these groups than span country borders:
For example, as a highly educated individual, (cough) if I worked for a large multinational corporation I could quite easily be posted to virtually any country by that company and work there with little problem. Most countries allow intra-company transfer visas, sometimes with strings attached but if my company existed for the benefit of employees or if I just had a good manager then that could be my ticket to global working freedom.
Alternatively, another meta group is religion. Love it or hate it, reglious affiliation spans countries and can often be the glue that binds ex-pats, from all faiths when they're abroad. Belonging to the "kingdom of heaven" might well have a stronger resonance with a global worker abroad than the fact they were born in a dusty African country with a GDP less than Microsoft. Missionary visas also seem quite easy to get but obviously restrict your work possibilities and depending on your religion, the countries that'll accept you.
Culture also is a deep meta-country. Derived from countries but not necessarily tied to them, cultural affiliation can span the globe. Cultures don't even have to be the same to still be shared. Does a Brit feel closer to an Aussie in the USA than an American? Conversely, does a Kenyan feel closer to a Tansanian when in Chicago? I would say so (speaking from experience). To hell with the fact we're from different countries, we're 80% same culture and that's more than the other guy. (You'll have to pick your own affilitation, they're not universal but the rule still stands).
So, I envisage a world where countries will try and try to keep control and just keep on sticking it in the neck of the growing global citizenship. We might collect passports because we have to, and we might swear allegence here and then when we must, but we know we don't belong to old fashioned countries anymore. We're a new breed and hopefully, one day we'll be accepted as such.
IS didn't mind so long as they DIDN'T NOT HAVE TO SUPPORT THEM IN ANY WAY. They even gave us our own "outside the firewall" network connections just to make sure.
They also do regular audits to make sure we haven't "accidentally" hooked up a router or bridge to the corporate LAN. But this works great. We have all sorts of machines, Sun's, Linux boxes, ancient servers and top of the line stuff behind our own firewall. I have two PC's in my cube, a dev box and a word processor/email machine.
Basically, being developers and the heart of the company it was tough for IS to do anything else, after all they are a SUPPORT organization not a PRODUCT organization. However, in some companies I know that IS gets too big for their boots in the same way that so called "civil servants" can.
Flash Enabled has a link to a great macromedia Flash HP calculator app that looks and acts exactly like an HP. You'll need to download flash for the Pocket PC here.
There's a stack load of other cool Flash stuff there too.
Hope that helps.
Yeah, my house was built "wireless ready". In fact, so was my whole yard, and way down the street and a whole load of other places, except for the faraday cage room;-)
For good peer to peer mobile phone systems it's best to use systems based on Time Division Duplexing rather than Frequency Division Duplexing. TDD is used in Japan's Personal HandyPhone System (PHS) and the early models had peer to peer voice. FDD is used mostly on all other digital networks (GSM/CDMA/TDMA etc.), this means that the base station talks to mobiles on one band and all mobiles talk back to the base on another. They're not designed in hardware to support transmissions in bands they don't normally use. Further, the base sends out all kinds of extra data to mobiles: timing control, paging info, frequency channel allocation, etc. It'd take WAY more than a software upgrade to support that.
Also, mobile phones get away with small antennas and relatively low power transmissions because the place they're talking to is usually a HUGE antenna sitting on top of a hill somewhere, high up or on top of a building. That system gives you reasonable cell size. If you had to have mobile to mobile it'd shrink the distance that you could send to quite considerably.
Finally, sad to say it but in North America you basically have 3 different and incompatible digital systems, in addition to the analog one. That'd cut down the possible intermediate hop hosts.
I'm not saying this is a bad idea but given the current cellular technology it is infeasible. Didn't the cell sites for the most part stay up in NY though? Heard on the radio this morning how there's been a huge increase in cell phone sales since then.
I was reading a news site recently when the whole screen faded out and a mummy (Egyptian kind) came on the screen and wandered around a bit. I think the advert was for the film but I'm not sure. Then the whole of my browser unfaded and the page was back up. I've never seen anything like this - it was impossible to miss! Has anyone else seen this? I couldn't find out how they did it. Java? DHTML?
A GSM/GPRS sleeve is available and will provide full cell phone capability in addition to packet data. This means that you can be always on the Internet. Also you are billed for the data transfered, not the time. Most operators will charge a typical bucket of bits, e.g., $10 for 10Megbytes/month.
I tell you this device kicks ass.
GSM = Global System for Mobiles
GPRS = General Packet Radio Service
Slashdot Mirror
I've got an access point at home - no WEP - so what? The hassle of setting it up and the fact that the rate goes down is too much of a bother. And I don't care if someone uses my internet link, and if they try to hack my linux box - good luck!
At work we use VPN's so WEP is enabled purely to prevent unrestricted access to the internet via our T1.
If folks are running a work AP without using VPN's and not using WEP then they are vunrable but other than that - give me a break. Besides, isn't the whole idea of this hobo war-chalking thing to get free wifi access to the net?
Cliff
I'd like to see a modem speed chart to see the comparison between games and when they became accessible to more than just the university students who wrote them.
I played my first MUD on the Essex Computer (Richard Bartlet's one) by dialing into the UK's JANET (Joint Academic Network) at 4am in the morning on a Pace Nightingale 300 baud modem. This must have been 1980 or so. It had to be in the morning because the MUD was only allowed to run from 11pm to 6am to conserve computing resources!
Playing this game inspired me to write my own MUD for the BBC computer running over an ECONET network. It was a wonderful combination of BASIC and assembler but supported 10 or 20 users and ran on a massively expanded 128k RAM BBC Master with a 2nd 6502 processor and a 1 megabyte Winchester harddrive. Those were the days.
Cliff
Your quoting the wrong wording of the patent - it's the patent claims that count, not the abstract or spec. Okay, okay, the spec is useful I know when it comes to litigation but first and foremost it is the claims that establish what is being claimed as the invention. Hey, that's why they're called "claims".
:-)
Read Claim #1 - it clearly states that this invention pertains to a bot that must sign into IM using a screen name and that screen name must be an authorized user on the buddy list of another user. Any system that doesn't do any part of that isn't covered by that claim, period. IRC, Ask jeeves - they don't do that do they? They're not prior art for this invention but they're not even covered by this patent.
Cliff. IANAL but I do have a lot of patents
If you want to check the availability of the device in the USA the link to T-Mobile is here or here.
Cliff
There isn't an application to set it up as a webcam. You can take pictures, send them, receive them but it's all manually done. To approximate a web cam you'd have to take a snap and email it to a box that'd put the attachment on a web site. Don't think that'll happen too often.
The wheel's colors are just for fun as far as I can tell. The colors are apparently tied to a track on the MIDI files that are used for the ringtones. When I saw one the biggest comment in the group watching was "WOW! DISCO!"
The earlier devices worked with multiple IM systems but T-Mobile has a thing going with AOL so it became an AOL client.
The camera quality is fine, it's just the resolution that is very low. It's really just for fun.
Hacking this device is going to be tough IMO. Danger run the back-end so they can control who gets what if they want. It's like WebTV with their proxy system - look at the mgmt bios for indications on why! Danger have mentioned an open developer's program being available in the future but nothing yet except and email address for interested parties. I heard they have a Java based OS.
Cliff
That's the problem with the XDA IMO, too expensive. $500 with the huge GPRS fee is just too much. Also, let's face it, the XDA hardware is showing its age. An XScale, 64Meg version would have been better but they hit delays too.
Er.. okay calling Eric Cartman...you did mention Starbucks right?
T-Mobile Boradband has this.
And their unlimited plans start at $29.99 per month, not $40.
What next?
Two years ago -
JUMPtec AMD 486 DIMM PC 66MHz running a Slackware with apache and pppd, getty etc. and ccam (connectix camera capture software) INSIDE a Omnipoint Redhawk 2000 GSM modem hooked up to a Connectix Quickcam bought on eBay for $40. Linked up to mobilewebcam.com (I let it drop so someone else has got it now). Unfortunately, most of this hardware is end of lifed but it was good while it lasted.
The whole lot spent time between the dashboard of my car and being nailed to a tree looking at my house being built.
The aim was to build a totally autonomous web cam capable of working anywhere. To avoid slashdotting (even a few hits maxed out the connection) we had it uploading JPEGs to a server but it could be accessed directly, no problemo. The only issue we had was the 9.6k circuit switched connection to the ISP would drop every so often, indeed there were telephone numbers that wouldn't even accept 9.6k connections! Nowadays, we'd use a miniscule GPRS module like this one to get a 33k uplink always-on Internet connection.
One other problem was that the picture took quite a long time to scan - it was a parallel port connection. So if you moved the camera, like when I was driving, the picture washed out to white fairly quickly. When stationary it worked fine though.
Ben
I've spoken to PDA manufacturers about this and there is a growing movement to put the speaker and the mic on the back of the device. The iPAQ GSM/GPRS sleeve does this too.
Ben
Um "July" aparently. Well that's what the Voicestream sales rep said:t .asp
http://www.voicestream.com/pocketpc/defaul
FWIW, Intel's started to call these type of devices Persional Information Devices (PIDs).
Similar to TMDA but it gets rid of the white list maintenance by putting the authority to send in the email address itself. Results in email addresses being non-transferable.
I can see a few issues with it but I still like the idea though.
Dunno why the Danger device is called a convergence device between a PDA and Cellphone. IMO it's not a PDA at all. It's a messaging device plain and simple. Some messages will be in text, some by voice but as for PDA functions, calendar, to do list, note taker, etc. fergetaboutit. I don't think the Hiptop will replace a PDA if you use it for email synch and calendar etc. It's more likely to replace your mobile phone, although if you like phones to be smaller than an APS camera, you'll probably won't like it.
I used to be a big fan of Terry Pratchet, hey I even ran a Discworld MUD in Oz circa 1991 but I gave up reading his books when he ran out of jokes and started recycling too much! Dunno when that happened exactly but "Carpe Jugulum" sucked big time.
Corporations can be multinational and operate with legal rights throughout the world but it's really tough trying to do that as an individual. Why? Citizenship. There isn't a global right for people to travel, live and work anywhere they want to. We're all penned in to places, mostly defined by where we were born.
I've made it my life's passion to work and travel anywhere I can and clocked up a fair bunch of countries. Most of the time my work visa has been temporary but I do have the right now to work anywhere in the European Community and USA (with an option for Kenya). My kids can do that and also work/live in Japan. But not for long. When they reach 20, they'll have to decide if they want to be Japanese or not. If they do, at least in theory, Japan will be their one and only domicile and work zone. What a waste.
So, what's the deal? Well, why isn't there a global citizenship? Are we ever going to get to that point? Are countries an outmoded repressive system? Are we in a transition period away from countries where people can belong to meta groups instead of countries? There are a number of these groups than span country borders:
For example, as a highly educated individual, (cough) if I worked for a large multinational corporation I could quite easily be posted to virtually any country by that company and work there with little problem. Most countries allow intra-company transfer visas, sometimes with strings attached but if my company existed for the benefit of employees or if I just had a good manager then that could be my ticket to global working freedom.
Alternatively, another meta group is religion. Love it or hate it, reglious affiliation spans countries and can often be the glue that binds ex-pats, from all faiths when they're abroad. Belonging to the "kingdom of heaven" might well have a stronger resonance with a global worker abroad than the fact they were born in a dusty African country with a GDP less than Microsoft. Missionary visas also seem quite easy to get but obviously restrict your work possibilities and depending on your religion, the countries that'll accept you.
Culture also is a deep meta-country. Derived from countries but not necessarily tied to them, cultural affiliation can span the globe. Cultures don't even have to be the same to still be shared. Does a Brit feel closer to an Aussie in the USA than an American? Conversely, does a Kenyan feel closer to a Tansanian when in Chicago? I would say so (speaking from experience). To hell with the fact we're from different countries, we're 80% same culture and that's more than the other guy. (You'll have to pick your own affilitation, they're not universal but the rule still stands).
So, I envisage a world where countries will try and try to keep control and just keep on sticking it in the neck of the growing global citizenship. We might collect passports because we have to, and we might swear allegence here and then when we must, but we know we don't belong to old fashioned countries anymore. We're a new breed and hopefully, one day we'll be accepted as such.
This is what my company does and it works great.
IS didn't mind so long as they DIDN'T NOT HAVE TO SUPPORT THEM IN ANY WAY. They even gave us our own "outside the firewall" network connections just to make sure.
They also do regular audits to make sure we haven't "accidentally" hooked up a router or bridge to the corporate LAN. But this works great. We have all sorts of machines, Sun's, Linux boxes, ancient servers and top of the line stuff behind our own firewall. I have two PC's in my cube, a dev box and a word processor/email machine.
Basically, being developers and the heart of the company it was tough for IS to do anything else, after all they are a SUPPORT organization not a PRODUCT organization. However, in some companies I know that IS gets too big for their boots in the same way that so called "civil servants" can.
Flash Enabled has a link to a great macromedia Flash HP calculator app that looks and acts exactly like an HP. You'll need to download flash for the Pocket PC here.
There's a stack load of other cool Flash stuff there too. Hope that helps.
Yeah, my house was built "wireless ready". In fact, so was my whole yard, and way down the street and a whole load of other places, except for the faraday cage room ;-)
Cliff
For good peer to peer mobile phone systems it's best to use systems based on Time Division Duplexing rather than Frequency Division Duplexing. TDD is used in Japan's Personal HandyPhone System (PHS) and the early models had peer to peer voice. FDD is used mostly on all other digital networks (GSM/CDMA/TDMA etc.), this means that the base station talks to mobiles on one band and all mobiles talk back to the base on another. They're not designed in hardware to support transmissions in bands they don't normally use. Further, the base sends out all kinds of extra data to mobiles: timing control, paging info, frequency channel allocation, etc. It'd take WAY more than a software upgrade to support that.
Also, mobile phones get away with small antennas and relatively low power transmissions because the place they're talking to is usually a HUGE antenna sitting on top of a hill somewhere, high up or on top of a building. That system gives you reasonable cell size. If you had to have mobile to mobile it'd shrink the distance that you could send to quite considerably.
Finally, sad to say it but in North America you basically have 3 different and incompatible digital systems, in addition to the analog one. That'd cut down the possible intermediate hop hosts.
I'm not saying this is a bad idea but given the current cellular technology it is infeasible. Didn't the cell sites for the most part stay up in NY though? Heard on the radio this morning how there's been a huge increase in cell phone sales since then.
I was reading a news site recently when the whole screen faded out and a mummy (Egyptian kind) came on the screen and wandered around a bit. I think the advert was for the film but I'm not sure. Then the whole of my browser unfaded and the page was back up. I've never seen anything like this - it was impossible to miss! Has anyone else seen this? I couldn't find out how they did it. Java? DHTML?
A GSM/GPRS sleeve is available and will provide full cell phone capability in addition to packet data. This means that you can be always on the Internet. Also you are billed for the data transfered, not the time. Most operators will charge a typical bucket of bits, e.g., $10 for 10Megbytes/month.
I tell you this device kicks ass.
GSM = Global System for Mobiles
GPRS = General Packet Radio Service