...The 3G phones can be rate throttled to take care of congestion, resulting in ass-quality calls...
...calls are "free," but only to the folks willing to put up with sounding as though they're calling from a reverberating sewer tunnel...
...get a business plan. These get preferential bandwidth...
Any celluar engineers out there that can validate Darl's claims that during peak congestion periods a lower quality of service is provided in order to allow more calls to be terminated? I was under the impression that GSM used TDMA (Time Division Multiplexing) as the physical carrier, and as a result there are a finite number of sessions established at the same time; one per timeslot, correct?
If AT&T is able to throttle bandwidth (wait, voice is circuit switched...) do they really offer higher quality service to businesses? I'd like to get confirmation of this from an actual accredited engineer rather than taking Darl's speculation as fact.
I too am on a dedicated dialup. My ISP routes a/24 and/26 to me over it.
Ok, I'll bite:
What do you do with 316 IP addresses? One IP is typically sufficient for a single PC, so I can't imagine that you're hosting Internet-accessible servers or providing Internet access for hundreds of hosts through a dial-up connection.
They show a brief glimpse of a guy using the hardware itself. He's holding it so that the screen is landscape... Looks like a layout similar to the origninal GBA, with Dpad and action buttons on either side of the screen. Plus there are clips from a couple of games. They look like they're in 3d. There is a Spy Hunter and a Tony Hawk game... Graphics appear to be as good as a Gamecube. Beats the hell out of the GBA's Super Nintendo-style graphics.
The picture in the Forbes article is of the Measura handheld... The one that was mentioned as a scientific platform. AFAIK, there are no pictures of the Helix available yet.
The following abridged list of features is from a Palminfocenter article
Analog controller, integrated triggers and a full complement of action buttons
High-resolution 480 x 320 pixel screen, with portrait or landscape-mode display
All-inclusive gaming environment with the Fathammer X-Forge 3D Game Engine
Rumble effects
Don't worry, it's a gaming platform. And unless they're stupid, they'll have a D-pad on the left and buttons on the right, like a real controller.
Re:Cable company competition
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I subscribe to Time Warner digital cable... Looks like their PVR will do season passes, along with the regular PVR stuff (pause live TV, record on a schedule).
Everyone is missing the point. You keep your wireless harddrive in your backpack/pocket/purse/briefcase/whatever.
Not sure that you're getting the point either. Why not just stick a touchscreen on it, call it a PDA with massive storage capabilities, and not have to screw with dragging your PDA along all the time to veiw data on your "personal server".
PDA killer, my ass. More likely, massive storage will become the next built-in PDA feature.
As far as WiFi goes, it seems like the airline industry is already planning on providing WiFi internet access on the plane. See this Yahoo business article. cached by Google.
Relevant quote:
And travelers may soon get WiFi while on the airplane, if recent trials in Europe and the United States are successful
If people care that much then they'll find another way.
I disagree. Just because it's possible to circumvent security measures doesn't mean that no precaution should be taken at all.
Look at it this way: Once that key is compromised, the attacker has access to your network. Furthermore, they can have access to your network without neccesarily having physical access into the building. At that point, as a node on the LAN, you can observe people's cleartext (telnet, FTP, POP3) passwords, attack internal systems, or just snoop around. Is that still acceptable?
Until a standard emerges that fixes the security problems with WEP, I'll be using an IPSec VPN to protect my internal network.
I didn't see any technical specifications, but I would assume that it supports WEP... However, none of the appliances like these (WiFi cordless phones, barcode scanners, POS equipment) support 802.1x, so once that WEP key is cracked, all of that data might as well be sent in the clear. Single purpose devices (unlike multipurpose devices such as laptops and handhelds) generally don't support modern key-rotating protocols like EAP, so you have to assume that any data you're sending from your WiFi enabled phone is being compromised.
Just to balance out the mostly negative posts so far... I think that there is real value in having a full desktop OS in my pocket (WinXP or Linux) for 1) maximizing downtime and 2) permitting me to leave my apartment when I'm on call.
I tried Palm OS - great PIM, great battery life, small form factor, large software library... But extremely limited in processing power and networking options.
Pocket PC - Poor battery life, poor software library, but excellent wifi and cellular data connectivity options.
Linux on iPaq (Familiar, Opie, GPE) - Cool to have a shell prompt, but EXTREMELY limited in storage space. Otherwise, Opie and GPE are maturing nicely, and I can get a good deal of work done when I have the right programs installed
Unfortunately, the best solution I've found so far is an iPaq running Pocket PC with wifi connectivity, running JSLandscape at 640 x 480, running terminal services to my WinXP desktop. Yeah it's slow and sucks battery life like a pig, but at least I can run real applications...
This Vulcan Handheld PC would let me run my VPN and full mail program (Lotus Notes - sux but that's what my company uses) along with the entire library of X86 windows/linux software.
you couldn't remotely do these updates except by using SSH to run CLI programs(which in turn still limits you, as you're still virtually visiting every machine).
I've heard that MacOS X is built on a Unix-like operating system which will allow you to use something called "scripting" to handle repetitive tasks. Evidently, Unix admins have been using this technique to manage workstations since before Microsoft SMS was even available.
"button or touch sensitive area on the side to 'lock' the display"
I suspect that you would want to view the currently selected "peephole" window more often than you wanted to move it around. Perhaps it would be better if the button was used to unlock the display. IOW, you hold the button down when you want to move the peephole.
Step 1 - Have a meeting to discuss how important Six Sigma is. Use buzzwords, diagrams and sleight-of-hand to confuse everyone in the room. Step 2 - Wait for an IT group to complete a project... For example, wait until the network staff has completed migration to a new network infrastructure. Step 3 - Claim real and imaginary (don't be afraid to invent the figures) cost savings as a Six Sigma savings.
The limiting factor will always be the cable modem.
For Pudge (the Editor) the Internet connection will not be the bottleneck. The conversation that is described in the posting is from a Tivo which would be on the same LAN as the Mac that's hosting the media. Due to the fact that 802.11b only provides 4-5 mbit of real world throughput, and the fact that wireless is half duplex, the WLAN become a bottleneck, while dragging down performance of any other WLAN devices.
But by the same token, these systems run full duplex (transmit and recieve at the same time)
No, 802.11b is not full duplex. You transmit and receive on the same channel in the 2.4 GHz spectrum. For example, if you are using channel 6 within the 2.4 GHz spectrum (one of three non-overlapping channels), you are Tx and Rx on the 2.437 GHZ frequency.
In many ways, 802.11b Access Points give you similar performance to what you would find in a 10BaseT hub, which were very common in Enterprise networks 5-10 years ago. Some of the same caveats apply... At a certain point, adding additional hosts to the same collision domain really decreases the available bandwitdth to each host.
The protocol has a lot of overhead- data that is transmitted for servicing the connection.
The 802.11b protocol overhead doesn't drag down performance. Rather, half-duplex communication and the HUGE percentage of retransmissions that occur is what limits the actual performance to less than half of maximum throughput. As soon as you put some additional hosts on the wireless network and/or the Access Point is in a different room than the wireless client, performance is going to go into the pooper.
Slashdot Mirror
Check this out in IE.
l
http://www.virtualapple.org/neuromancergsdisk.htm
Runs the game in an activeX Apple II emulator. Otherwise, you can just download the ROM.
symbiotic parasitic life-forms
Is the MacBook the first widely-available laptop with ExpressCard/34? That's the long-overdue successor to PCMCIA, right?
won't somebody bring back the Sega Genesis
Still working on the Dreamcast.
The article doesn't mention a damn thing about the next generation consoles...
Any celluar engineers out there that can validate Darl's claims that during peak congestion periods a lower quality of service is provided in order to allow more calls to be terminated? I was under the impression that GSM used TDMA (Time Division Multiplexing) as the physical carrier, and as a result there are a finite number of sessions established at the same time; one per timeslot, correct?
If AT&T is able to throttle bandwidth (wait, voice is circuit switched...) do they really offer higher quality service to businesses? I'd like to get confirmation of this from an actual accredited engineer rather than taking Darl's speculation as fact.
I too am on a dedicated dialup. My ISP routes a /24 and /26 to me over it.
Ok, I'll bite:
What do you do with 316 IP addresses? One IP is typically sufficient for a single PC, so I can't imagine that you're hosting Internet-accessible servers or providing Internet access for hundreds of hosts through a dial-up connection.
Are you?
Actually, check out the video at the following URL:
http://www.godoplay.com/tapwave2.html
They show a brief glimpse of a guy using the hardware itself. He's holding it so that the screen is landscape... Looks like a layout similar to the origninal GBA, with Dpad and action buttons on either side of the screen. Plus there are clips from a couple of games. They look like they're in 3d. There is a Spy Hunter and a Tony Hawk game... Graphics appear to be as good as a Gamecube. Beats the hell out of the GBA's Super Nintendo-style graphics.
The following abridged list of features is from a Palminfocenter article
Don't worry, it's a gaming platform. And unless they're stupid, they'll have a D-pad on the left and buttons on the right, like a real controller.
I subscribe to Time Warner digital cable... Looks like their PVR will do season passes, along with the regular PVR stuff (pause live TV, record on a schedule).
More info here.
And if it's only $5 per month and I don't have to buy any hardware up front, how is Tivo going to stay in business?
Everyone is missing the point. You keep your wireless harddrive in your backpack/pocket/purse/briefcase/whatever.
Not sure that you're getting the point either. Why not just stick a touchscreen on it, call it a PDA with massive storage capabilities, and not have to screw with dragging your PDA along all the time to veiw data on your "personal server".
PDA killer, my ass. More likely, massive storage will become the next built-in PDA feature.
As far as WiFi goes, it seems like the airline industry is already planning on providing WiFi internet access on the plane. See this Yahoo business article. cached by Google.
Relevant quote:
And travelers may soon get WiFi while on the airplane, if recent trials in Europe and the United States are successful
It did do a lockup/reboot on me once though.
Ha ha... You had to reboot a phone!
If people care that much then they'll find another way.
I disagree. Just because it's possible to circumvent security measures doesn't mean that no precaution should be taken at all.
Look at it this way: Once that key is compromised, the attacker has access to your network. Furthermore, they can have access to your network without neccesarily having physical access into the building. At that point, as a node on the LAN, you can observe people's cleartext (telnet, FTP, POP3) passwords, attack internal systems, or just snoop around. Is that still acceptable?
Until a standard emerges that fixes the security problems with WEP, I'll be using an IPSec VPN to protect my internal network.
I didn't see any technical specifications, but I would assume that it supports WEP... However, none of the appliances like these (WiFi cordless phones, barcode scanners, POS equipment) support 802.1x, so once that WEP key is cracked, all of that data might as well be sent in the clear. Single purpose devices (unlike multipurpose devices such as laptops and handhelds) generally don't support modern key-rotating protocols like EAP, so you have to assume that any data you're sending from your WiFi enabled phone is being compromised.
Just to balance out the mostly negative posts so far... I think that there is real value in having a full desktop OS in my pocket (WinXP or Linux) for 1) maximizing downtime and 2) permitting me to leave my apartment when I'm on call.
I tried Palm OS - great PIM, great battery life, small form factor, large software library... But extremely limited in processing power and networking options.
Pocket PC - Poor battery life, poor software library, but excellent wifi and cellular data connectivity options.
Linux on iPaq (Familiar, Opie, GPE) - Cool to have a shell prompt, but EXTREMELY limited in storage space. Otherwise, Opie and GPE are maturing nicely, and I can get a good deal of work done when I have the right programs installed
Unfortunately, the best solution I've found so far is an iPaq running Pocket PC with wifi connectivity, running JSLandscape at 640 x 480, running terminal services to my WinXP desktop. Yeah it's slow and sucks battery life like a pig, but at least I can run real applications...
This Vulcan Handheld PC would let me run my VPN and full mail program (Lotus Notes - sux but that's what my company uses) along with the entire library of X86 windows/linux software.
you couldn't remotely do these updates except by using SSH to run CLI programs(which in turn still limits you, as you're still virtually visiting every machine).
I've heard that MacOS X is built on a Unix-like operating system which will allow you to use something called "scripting" to handle repetitive tasks. Evidently, Unix admins have been using this technique to manage workstations since before Microsoft SMS was even available.
they mutually consider each other to be interference
No, they're on different freqencies, so they don't see each other.
What is the merit of A over G.
802.11a runs in licensed band. So you don't have to worry about your cordless phone, microwave or garage door opener stepping on your wireless LAN.
Also do A or G do anything to address weak WEP security?
802.11i will improve encryption.
"button or touch sensitive area on the side to 'lock' the display"
I suspect that you would want to view the currently selected "peephole" window more often than you wanted to move it around. Perhaps it would be better if the button was used to unlock the display. IOW, you hold the button down when you want to move the peephole.
Step 1 - Have a meeting to discuss how important Six Sigma is. Use buzzwords, diagrams and sleight-of-hand to confuse everyone in the room.
Step 2 - Wait for an IT group to complete a project... For example, wait until the network staff has completed migration to a new network infrastructure.
Step 3 - Claim real and imaginary (don't be afraid to invent the figures) cost savings as a Six Sigma savings.
This device + a recliner = (drool...) laziness. Then all you need is this and this, and you won't have to move for days.
The limiting factor will always be the cable modem.
For Pudge (the Editor) the Internet connection will not be the bottleneck. The conversation that is described in the posting is from a Tivo which would be on the same LAN as the Mac that's hosting the media. Due to the fact that 802.11b only provides 4-5 mbit of real world throughput, and the fact that wireless is half duplex, the WLAN become a bottleneck, while dragging down performance of any other WLAN devices.
But by the same token, these systems run full duplex (transmit and recieve at the same time)
No, 802.11b is not full duplex. You transmit and receive on the same channel in the 2.4 GHz spectrum. For example, if you are using channel 6 within the 2.4 GHz spectrum (one of three non-overlapping channels), you are Tx and Rx on the 2.437 GHZ frequency.
In many ways, 802.11b Access Points give you similar performance to what you would find in a 10BaseT hub, which were very common in Enterprise networks 5-10 years ago. Some of the same caveats apply... At a certain point, adding additional hosts to the same collision domain really decreases the available bandwitdth to each host.
The protocol has a lot of overhead- data that is transmitted for servicing the connection.
The 802.11b protocol overhead doesn't drag down performance. Rather, half-duplex communication and the HUGE percentage of retransmissions that occur is what limits the actual performance to less than half of maximum throughput. As soon as you put some additional hosts on the wireless network and/or the Access Point is in a different room than the wireless client, performance is going to go into the pooper.