Go to the part about Wimax Phones. There are also Wimax video IP phones and wimax based surveillance systems shown there, see a product announcement here from Feb.
Samsung was also present displaying a number of devices with embedded Wimax chipsets in them, intended to use VoIP as part of the connectivity, such as the PDA (SCH-M830 and M8200), an UMPC or 2 (all of which were Windows based devices), and some standard laptops with wimax chipsets in them.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem still, since the devices will become more common when there's more coverage, more markets, and more possible subscribers, but people will fund the growth of the network when there are devices available which use it. It seems pretty obvious from investments that Intel/Motorola et al are both trying hard to lock in a future where many devices will have embedded wimax chipsets simply included as bluetooth and wifi chipsets are today. And not just laptops, but cars, washing machines, refrigerators, anything that would benefit from network access.
Wow, I'm really touched by both this story and your offer. It makes a wonderful counterpoint to all the people on this thread who are complaining about the "curmudgeons" on Ham Bands... I'm glad to know that the spirit of Open Source positively impacts more than just one's choice of operating systems.
I had decided right before Thanksgiving to start studying for my Tech class license, and I anticipate taking the test next week or so, at the next local test I could find in Tacoma. Now there's icing on the cake!
playing anything "well" is a commitment, I suppose I was trying to say that teaching the rules to somebody takes very little time.
As with most pursuits, as more people participate, the effort required to play at the top levels becomes more competitive. Go language and study is more widespread in Japan than China because they institutionalized it, and organized a professional society that gets paid to encourage the growth of this game. Any society that chose to do so as well or for as long would gain most of the same advantages.
May I humbly suggest a game which has withstood the tests of time and remained a vibrant growing community of players, uses commonly available materials and requires very little resources to play and study? I speak of the oriental game of Go (or baduk or weiqi, depending on where you are from).
There are free java clients (such as KGS) you can download and play any of the thousands of constantly online players. I also work on an open source server to allow people to play Go as a turn based game, similar to old chess-by-mail setups but adapted for the internet, which is optimized for display on mobile phones such as the iPhone.
Go takes little time to learn the rules, but can be a lifelong pursuit. It costs almost nothing to play other amateurs, and I love to play people at my server, David's Go Dojo. Feel free to come and register for an account and start playing a few games, or download KGS and get access to thousands and thousands more players around the world.
They aren't locked to AT&T at all... Once you purchase the device, you are allowed by exemption of the librarian of congress to the DMCA to unlock the phone and use it on another network if you like.
I personally have unlocked more than a few for friends and family, the demand in the seattle area for the iPhone is pretty big, and not all of them are people who want AT&T service. most folks seem to be unlocking and sticking with T-Mobile. I had to unlock because AT&T wont allow my work to pick up the tab for my phone, so I had to unlock to swap the AT&T sim in there with one from my work phone. Simple idea, but why should it have had to be so hard?
So, you are completely and totally wrong that WiMAX is some marketing dream. There are significant market deployments of thousands and thousands of people using pre-WiMAX or WiMAX ready gear today, right now, in over 50 cities in the United States alone (http://clearwire.com). There are beta services based on the absolute latest IEEE standard happening overseas in many countries that are already cash-flow positive. There are successful true WiMAX trials happening RIGHT NOW (which means gear is on the poles) in some metropolitan areas that are service large populations as we speak.
This isn't vaporware, WiMAX is for reals; If you don't realize it's coming down like a freight train on the currently limited choice broadband situation in the US, you're going to be surprised in a year or two.
I think the FakeSteve blog posting about this was absolutely spot on: http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/09/were-thrilled-about-this-nbc-download.html
"So, fair enough. Bring on the big media cluster fuck. Roll out all the different systems that don't work together. Bring on all the different kinds of software, none of which will work as well as iTunes. Bring on a zillion different user interfaces, a zillion accounts you need to set up, a zillion new usernames and passwords and a list of which services can work on which devices in which format. Right. When you're good and tired of that, we'll be here waiting for you."
Whether or not RSJ actually thinks like this, what FSJ is saying is correct. The studios have painted themselves into a corner and will likely come back begging when their implementation fails to deliver as well as the iTunes sales were doing
Some people misunderstand the problems that must be solved by a computer Go-playing program, and the scale of those problems as the board increases in size. The continual references to Go as a difficult or interesting computational problem are what drew me into the game in the first place. Now I write a go-blog for beginners and spend as much time as possible learning and studying the game at the nearby Go center I am fortunate to live proximal with.
the phone works well after the update, and does actually already show signs of improvement in performance. To some extent, I got around the crashing with reboots and recharges, or just used it in different ways. In the time spent this evening, it has not dropped to the main screen once. More remains to be seen, but this is what I was waiting for. The first proof that Apple is going to follow a proper release and update cycle.
It's obvious when you use the iPhone for a while that there are unfinished features or placeholders. Apple as a company has a history of this type of behavior with OSX, as-of-yet unrevealed features will be played out when it suits them to stoke demand and news coverage. Ringtones, anyone?
Does this break the current hacks out in the wild, how will the response from the community go, these types of questions will take time to properly answer. I look forward to it!
make your own ringtone with your own song, slice it up anywhere you like and download it to your phone. problem solved, costs about the same after you try it free as a song on itunes.
In fact, I'm wondering if this will work with the iPhone and thus just solve that missing feature problem.
Since you mention it, do notice that one part of the keynote was about the intellectual property and the patents that Apple Inc had on the iphone. They are staking out a claim and view this as an exclusive window of opportunity to market their vision of this type of interface. And they know people are going to keep thinking of the iPod while they do it.
Um, you know there are people out there that sell unbundled data lines like adsl right? like speakeasy. So yeah, it still costs like $60-$70, but the other points people are making are valid. A circuit you pay for has to stay up, anything else is entirely as-is.
IE's biggest freaking problem is the fact that it introduces a primary vector for viruses, spyware, malware, and worms. Even reasonably protected, well educated people are now being infected by spyware they can't reasonably avoid anymore, for the sole reason that they use the number one target: IE.
sorry, but as corporate IT support personnel, my perspective is that IE sucks freakin arse.
YMMV, of course. My feelings are indicative of my experience and others I have known.
I wish the open source consumer products like mozilla/firefox and their numerous developers the best! their karma will greatly expanded, and IE's days are surely numbered. only one way down....
Some of what they say HAS to be right, as it says in the interview, you don't make it long by making lots of mistakes. you have to get it right, most of the time. and every time that it counts.
the reason, you might notice if you read the article, that she is quoted in a media source and then later introduced to Linus, Perens, et al is because she holds POWER. she has a position of advising the people who spend _very_ large sums of money. And when they ask for some fancy high-priced advice, this is who they call. they don't poll the head of IT, they dont ask the people answering the phones, and they sure as hell don't get Commander Taco to post up an article and see what Slashdot readers think....
they call this lady. and other people like her. so remember who gets paid to give their opinion for a living, and who spends their freetime cruising a website for geeks making posts about "industry analysts".
yeah, a segway. the local meter maids use em to collect the city's take, and I've seen a few on the burke gillman trail at the uw in seattle. fits into a backseat and charges from electric instead of using gas...
actually, speakeasy uses a few different different CLECs, including Worldcom. You can call and ask their sales department, but this allows them to play vendors against each other just like any other competitive market. I think they also have services through New Edge Networks, as well.
I wish, I wish, I wish that legislation like this had a chance here across the border.
Speakeasy specifically allows routers and servers in their Terms of Service, its part of what you're paying them for, in their mind. I've had several friends on Speakeasy who finally convinced me to upgrade from the overcrowded cable in my area. They specifically tell you if you ask that they heartily approve of people doing these things. The stupid laws they are making up elsewhere wouldn't apply because of Speakeasy's TOS.
You got one too? Geez, that had to have been their biggest promo in years, I know tons of people who just got their xboxen for free like that. I talked to one of their support staff who said that even though they had free XBOX and free PS2, the XBOX uptake was waay way higher.
Love my Speakeasy. Love my XBOX. This takes it over the edge, I'm modchipping mine.
They are doing very well, actually. Listed last year as a "fastest growing company", the promo's and services they have been offering indicate that they are doing well. Evidence is that after last year, they are still around. I certainly like em, and they're getting a whole lot better than everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
I was at CTIA this year looking for Wimax enabled devices and release schedules, here are some relevant links from people I saw on the show floor:
http://www.runcom.com/sitefiles/1/3310/19046.asp
Go to the part about Wimax Phones. There are also Wimax video IP phones and wimax based surveillance systems shown there, see a product announcement here from Feb.
https://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/3042555
I don't see details on their site, but the handset I have a flyer for was called the Sting, and was dual mode Wimax/GSM.
Also saw one called the wiofone: http://www.wimax.com/commentary/blog/blog-2008/wimax-blog-wimax-desktop-phone
Placeholder website here: http://wioline.com/
Samsung was also present displaying a number of devices with embedded Wimax chipsets in them, intended to use VoIP as part of the connectivity, such as the PDA (SCH-M830 and M8200), an UMPC or 2 (all of which were Windows based devices), and some standard laptops with wimax chipsets in them.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem still, since the devices will become more common when there's more coverage, more markets, and more possible subscribers, but people will fund the growth of the network when there are devices available which use it. It seems pretty obvious from investments that Intel/Motorola et al are both trying hard to lock in a future where many devices will have embedded wimax chipsets simply included as bluetooth and wifi chipsets are today. And not just laptops, but cars, washing machines, refrigerators, anything that would benefit from network access.
Man I wish I had mod points...
++insightful
Wow, I'm really touched by both this story and your offer. It makes a wonderful counterpoint to all the people on this thread who are complaining about the "curmudgeons" on Ham Bands... I'm glad to know that the spirit of Open Source positively impacts more than just one's choice of operating systems.
I had decided right before Thanksgiving to start studying for my Tech class license, and I anticipate taking the test next week or so, at the next local test I could find in Tacoma. Now there's icing on the cake!
Thank you.
playing anything "well" is a commitment, I suppose I was trying to say that teaching the rules to somebody takes very little time.
As with most pursuits, as more people participate, the effort required to play at the top levels becomes more competitive. Go language and study is more widespread in Japan than China because they institutionalized it, and organized a professional society that gets paid to encourage the growth of this game. Any society that chose to do so as well or for as long would gain most of the same advantages.
May I humbly suggest a game which has withstood the tests of time and remained a vibrant growing community of players, uses commonly available materials and requires very little resources to play and study? I speak of the oriental game of Go (or baduk or weiqi, depending on where you are from).
There are free java clients (such as KGS) you can download and play any of the thousands of constantly online players. I also work on an open source server to allow people to play Go as a turn based game, similar to old chess-by-mail setups but adapted for the internet, which is optimized for display on mobile phones such as the iPhone.
Go takes little time to learn the rules, but can be a lifelong pursuit. It costs almost nothing to play other amateurs, and I love to play people at my server, David's Go Dojo. Feel free to come and register for an account and start playing a few games, or download KGS and get access to thousands and thousands more players around the world.
Play here: http://go.intellectualpirate.com/
iShudan project page: http://code.google.com/p/ishudan
They aren't locked to AT&T at all... Once you purchase the device, you are allowed by exemption of the librarian of congress to the DMCA to unlock the phone and use it on another network if you like.
I personally have unlocked more than a few for friends and family, the demand in the seattle area for the iPhone is pretty big, and not all of them are people who want AT&T service. most folks seem to be unlocking and sticking with T-Mobile. I had to unlock because AT&T wont allow my work to pick up the tab for my phone, so I had to unlock to swap the AT&T sim in there with one from my work phone. Simple idea, but why should it have had to be so hard?
So, you are completely and totally wrong that WiMAX is some marketing dream. There are significant market deployments of thousands and thousands of people using pre-WiMAX or WiMAX ready gear today, right now, in over 50 cities in the United States alone (http://clearwire.com). There are beta services based on the absolute latest IEEE standard happening overseas in many countries that are already cash-flow positive. There are successful true WiMAX trials happening RIGHT NOW (which means gear is on the poles) in some metropolitan areas that are service large populations as we speak.
This isn't vaporware, WiMAX is for reals; If you don't realize it's coming down like a freight train on the currently limited choice broadband situation in the US, you're going to be surprised in a year or two.
I think the FakeSteve blog posting about this was absolutely spot on:
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/09/were-thrilled-about-this-nbc-download.html
"So, fair enough. Bring on the big media cluster fuck. Roll out all the different systems that don't work together. Bring on all the different kinds of software, none of which will work as well as iTunes. Bring on a zillion different user interfaces, a zillion accounts you need to set up, a zillion new usernames and passwords and a list of which services can work on which devices in which format. Right. When you're good and tired of that, we'll be here waiting for you."
Whether or not RSJ actually thinks like this, what FSJ is saying is correct. The studios have painted themselves into a corner and will likely come back begging when their implementation fails to deliver as well as the iTunes sales were doing
Some people misunderstand the problems that must be solved by a computer Go-playing program, and the scale of those problems as the board increases in size. The continual references to Go as a difficult or interesting computational problem are what drew me into the game in the first place. Now I write a go-blog for beginners and spend as much time as possible learning and studying the game at the nearby Go center I am fortunate to live proximal with.
Check out the blog at the link above, or my Go-related open source project for iPhones: http://code.google.com/p/ishudan/
the phone works well after the update, and does actually already show signs of improvement in performance. To some extent, I got around the crashing with reboots and recharges, or just used it in different ways. In the time spent this evening, it has not dropped to the main screen once. More remains to be seen, but this is what I was waiting for. The first proof that Apple is going to follow a proper release and update cycle.
It's obvious when you use the iPhone for a while that there are unfinished features or placeholders. Apple as a company has a history of this type of behavior with OSX, as-of-yet unrevealed features will be played out when it suits them to stoke demand and news coverage. Ringtones, anyone?
Does this break the current hacks out in the wild, how will the response from the community go, these types of questions will take time to properly answer. I look forward to it!
there is one out already, i forget the name but someone was using this service for dialing internationally. Oh here it is: Talketyh one.voip/
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/06/28/talkety.ip
if the rate is cheaper than the long distance charges AT&T charges, it may make sense to use. Its not Skype, but its close.
it doesnt have to be like that:
http://ownyourphone.com/
make your own ringtone with your own song, slice it up anywhere you like and download it to your phone. problem solved, costs about the same after you try it free as a song on itunes.
In fact, I'm wondering if this will work with the iPhone and thus just solve that missing feature problem.
Since you mention it, do notice that one part of the keynote was about the intellectual property and the patents that Apple Inc had on the iphone. They are staking out a claim and view this as an exclusive window of opportunity to market their vision of this type of interface. And they know people are going to keep thinking of the iPod while they do it.
Um, you know there are people out there that sell unbundled data lines like adsl right? like speakeasy. So yeah, it still costs like $60-$70, but the other points people are making are valid. A circuit you pay for has to stay up, anything else is entirely as-is.
myth, my ass.
IE's biggest freaking problem is the fact that it introduces a primary vector for viruses, spyware, malware, and worms. Even reasonably protected, well educated people are now being infected by spyware they can't reasonably avoid anymore, for the sole reason that they use the number one target: IE.
sorry, but as corporate IT support personnel, my perspective is that IE sucks freakin arse.
YMMV, of course. My feelings are indicative of my experience and others I have known.
I wish the open source consumer products like mozilla/firefox and their numerous developers the best! their karma will greatly expanded, and IE's days are surely numbered. only one way down....
how about this... /me checks user number.
yep.
I have 4 words for you.
You
Are
So
Cool.
That is all. Thank you.
Or you can change your ISP to someone with more Liberating Policies .
TOS: http://speakeasy.net/tos
say what you will about the analysts.
all over-generalizations are wrong.
Some of what they say HAS to be right, as it says in the interview, you don't make it long by making lots of mistakes. you have to get it right, most of the time. and every time that it counts.
the reason, you might notice if you read the article, that she is quoted in a media source and then later introduced to Linus, Perens, et al is because she holds POWER. she has a position of advising the people who spend _very_ large sums of money. And when they ask for some fancy high-priced advice, this is who they call. they don't poll the head of IT, they dont ask the people answering the phones, and they sure as hell don't get Commander Taco to post up an article and see what Slashdot readers think....
they call this lady. and other people like her. so remember who gets paid to give their opinion for a living, and who spends their freetime cruising a website for geeks making posts about "industry analysts".
yeah, a segway. the local meter maids use em to collect the city's take, and I've seen a few on the burke gillman trail at the uw in seattle. fits into a backseat and charges from electric instead of using gas...
actually, speakeasy uses a few different different CLECs, including Worldcom. You can call and ask their sales department, but this allows them to play vendors against each other just like any other competitive market. I think they also have services through New Edge Networks, as well.
I wish, I wish, I wish that legislation like this had a chance here across the border.
Speakeasy specifically allows routers and servers in their Terms of Service, its part of what you're paying them for, in their mind. I've had several friends on Speakeasy who finally convinced me to upgrade from the overcrowded cable in my area. They specifically tell you if you ask that they heartily approve of people doing these things. The stupid laws they are making up elsewhere wouldn't apply because of Speakeasy's TOS.
as noted on an ad i saw somewheres:
"uhaul.com, dude."
If you live in new york and cant get a good working pair, then move.
You got one too? Geez, that had to have been their biggest promo in years, I know tons of people who just got their xboxen for free like that. I talked to one of their support staff who said that even though they had free XBOX and free PS2, the XBOX uptake was waay way higher.
Love my Speakeasy. Love my XBOX. This takes it over the edge, I'm modchipping mine.
They are doing very well, actually. Listed last year as a "fastest growing company", the promo's and services they have been offering indicate that they are doing well. Evidence is that after last year, they are still around. I certainly like em, and they're getting a whole lot better than everyone else.