________ ________ / \/ \ Here you can see how this thing works. //\ 2 \ The base station one knows that you / / \ \ are within the range of the circle / . / \ . \ around it away from it. it knows it by \ 1 A \____/_A_ / measuring the strength of your phone's \/\XX/ \ / signal. \ / \/ \ / The same way, base station 2 knows \____/___/\_______\/ your distance from it, too and can draw / . \ a circle, as well. Now, with these two \ A / base stations we know that the phone \ / user is in one of the two intersections \ 3 / of the circles around base stations one \________/ and two. Then there is the base station three. It only needs to know that its signal is not strong enough to reach the northern intersection of circles of base stations 1 and 2. That way we know that the user must be in the southern one of the intersections of circles drawn by base stations 1 and 2. Please note that in this drawing base station 3's circle doesn't tell the distance from the phone user, but the maximum possible range it can reach. (Because I didn't think when I drew the pic.)
Even if the distance info isn't that accurate (meaning that you're using an old crappy analog cell phone most of you americans use), we can still plot your location quite exactly. If we just know that the phone is within the maximum ranges of all three base stations pictured here, the phone must be in the area I've marked with X letters. Often there are even more than three base stations around you. That makes getting the location info even more accurate. So, in a city you can be located with an error marging of only few tens of meters. In suburbs the error margin is at least here in Finland some 500m. (Actually less, but this distance is used by the cell phone company to make sure the phone is 100% surely in the area shown.
Here it just became legal to see where your kids' phones are going if you've signed a contract in advance. You go to internet and give your username and password. Then the site will plot your kid's location on a map.
I'm really surprised that this many of the/. people didn't this in advance. Here in Europe right about everyone knows that. And has known since something like 1995 or so. Tracking people by their cell phones has been possible as long as there has been cell phones. Guess your government and media hasn't for some "odd" reason wanted its servants to know too much of what is possible.
I don't see what damn problem it is if you can be located if you're dying in a pit. I remember seeing in the TV program 911 how one woman almost died when she didn't know where she was while she called the 911 from a landlined phone. I didn't understand why they didn't just look where she was calling from and send an ambulance there. It only takes about 0,0000000(and so on)0001 seconds to find out that info, not a minute like in the hollywood movies. The info about who's calling can be asked from a telephone company. It has to know it to be able to bill someone for calling. Before you had to know where you are to get an ambulance. If you didn't know, you died. Cute. Now you just need to call 911 or 112 depending on what continent you're in and say "I'm dying. Get me to hospital." and the ambulance will come.
Remember that 5510 is just a tweak. If you open it's back to get access to the battery and so on, you see that it's actually a 3310 with another pile of plastic around it. Yes, it actually has another phone in it. It's just a software update (with as minor as possible hardware adjustments) for 3310. And that can be seen whatever you do with the phone. For example the keylock function. Of course they couldn't make the keylock work by menu+asterisk anymore, as asterisk is behind Shift key. So, it's now menu+space. But they coded it only halfway. Now you can hold down the menu button and press space. What will happen? The voice regonizing applet launches and the keys get locked. So, you only hear a sound "de-daa-de" and then you're asked "Name not found. Wanna try again?" and can't press any key. Hallelujah.
The mp3 player and the qwerty are just addons to 3310, that's why they don't work too well. The phone design has been done as quickly as possible because the teenagers needed a qwerty machine. For a cheap price.
And the reason why I bought a 5510 is that it was the cheapest phone I could find. I paid only 45e for it. Which is not much at all for an mp3 player and phone.
A thing I forgot to mention in my post above:.dk and.uk haven't had to promise to join the euroland because they already were in EU when the contracts were signed and could thus legally opt out from the contract.
Please note that Sweden has already promised to join the euroland. They had to do that when they joined the EU. What they're doing now is just trying to stay out as long as possible. Staying out for a while and then joining later is the worst they can do (and the thing they WILL do;)) as they first lose benefits of euro and then when they join too late, their companies have hard time becoming part of the euroland, as other countries' companies have adapted to it loong before.
But I don't complain. As a Finn I'm just happy for Swedes being dumbasses. European tourists come to Finland instead of Sweden because they don't want to change their currency. And companies like us more than Swedes, because we use euro. So, we're now going to leave Sweden far behind us in our infinite race with them;)
I'd like to point out that the post was against racism, not for it.
He/she said that Turkish people may have problems getting through Schengen borders and clearly pointed out that it's a bad thing. Right?
Where on earth did they do the comparison? Sounds a bit stupid to compare quality of companies by sending about 5 to 20 times less messages than a normal user would. Other interesting thing is that although I speak a lot less in phone than average people, my cell phone's statistics tell that I've spoken 96 hours, 42 minutes and 58 seconds since May 2002. That makes about 6,5 hours/month. If a person who doesn't his phone much can come to such numbers, then how on earth is the average number supposed to be even less?
I'm sure that the mobile owning people use their mobiles more than the numbers stated in the article.
To me it sounds that CNN has done the article with far too small amount of test subjects. Or maybe they're all some sort of shy and quiet housewives. Who knows.
It's always funny how we from the Northern Countries seem to bark to the people of USA about their lack of knowledge about our countries.
Yes, they don't know about us. Now tell me where is Nebraska, what's it's capital, what kind of culture they have there, who's their (what do they call their leader? Governor?) and so on. Oh? You don't know? How ignorant can an European be? Got the point? It should be enough for them to know that there is such a thing as EU with Bruxelles as it's capital and so on. Yes, I have personally found many Americans spoiled by the nationalist propaganda they're flooded with, but that doesn't make all of the Americans actually stupid. Their only problem is that their leaders are empty warheads.
I'm very sorry for the rudeness of this post. I just couldn't find any better ways to clearly tell what I was thinking.
Ok. Thanks for correction.
I can't actually speak Japanese at all. All I know about that language is form one (1) Japanese lesson I had a few years ago and kanasensei,sourceforge.net .
And the words in the box of printer paper made by sony actually were something like that "purinta peepa". Don't know why they used English word for paper there, though.
I'd like to point out that the Japanese people write in 3 different alphabetics. They are katakana, hiragana and kanji.
Kanji is the "defaul" alphabetic. It's done the chinese way, so each letter represents a whole word.
Hiragana is then a "backup alphabetic" with each letter meaning one syllable, for example ka, ke, ki, ko, ku, tsu, chi, n, a, e, to, te.
Hiragana is used when the writer doesn't know the right kanji letter for the word he wants to write or when there isn't such kanji letter at all.
Katakana is the alphabetic Japanese people use when they want express words taken from foreign languages. I guess you can guess what means "printo piipir", which reads in the side of a box filled with unused paper.. BTW, Japanese people seem to love using unchanged English words in their language. Most of the text written in katakana is in fact English written the Japanese way and can therefore be understood by anyone who has a bit of imagination and can speak English. (Imagination, because the words change a bit because katakana isn't about writing the word sound by sound but syllable by syllable. For example my name, Tuukka Ryyppö, turns into "Tsuukka Riuppo" when written in katakana)
I do agree that over-complication has really made Linux hard. When I run one of the loopbacking distros on my Windows system, the prospect of adding software is just horrific, since you have to compile it, blah blah blah...
"apt-get install programname" is hard? IMO it's harder when you must actually go to internet and download the program, then double click this and that and click next next.
Of course installing programs can also be done graphically by opening the program installation program and selecting the program from the list, then double clicking the program you want to install and tzadamm - it get's the program from internet and installs it.
If Linux people took a clue from Microsoft and made an more organized directory structure (I'm a newb, I probably just haven't noticed) that contains binaries for each program, and created a special archive-installer that checks for a script to install stuff, so you just download whatever.tar.gz and tell it to install and it finds the install script and runs it.
This is what dpkg and RPM do:)
Also, I have a gigantic idea that probably won't work. Someone should create a cross-platform, XML-driven driver format so you don't end up with piles of useless hardware since it only works on Windows.
Yup.It won't work. Programming drivers is much more complicated than just saying "I'm a driver."
The code is operating system specific. What you just requested was that the drivers would be compiled every time you want to install them.
Hmm. My comment lacked half of it's text. No thanks to slashdot being buggy and not letting me send my message.
So here I go again:
It's always funny seeing text like this being written in slashdot.
What's up woth americans being 5 years late in everything that has anything to with mobile phones? Can't you just go somewhere else, look what they've got and then coipy the technology? "Inventing" a thing like this is a waste of money.
I've had my cell phone listed for years. It's always been there, it'll always be there. It's very damsn good thing to be able to just call to number service and ask a name for a number or a number for a name. Or address, for that matter.
Of course I can also send a SMS with text "GSM LastName FirstName, City" to a specific number and get the info back as SMS.
Remember that cell phones are not like the old style wirephones. They don't lay in middle of your living room. They can be put to silent mode. And so on.
Unknown people often call to cells and send SMS. When you answer, you DO want to know who sent the message.
And: It's of course possible to prohibit the telephone company from telling your number or name by simply writing a little mark in a checkbox in the contract.
Of course I can also send a SMS with text "GSM LastName FirstName, City" to a specific number and get the info back as SMS.
Remember that cell phones are not like the old style wirephones. They don't lay in middle of your living room. They can be put to silent mode. And so on.
Unknown people often call to cells and send SMS. When you answer, you DO want to know who sent the message.
And: It's of course possible to prohibit the telephone company from telling your number or name by simply writing a little mark in a checkbox in the contract.
Now what am I gonna do when I go buying my next mobile? As a Finn I should of course buy a Nokia, since doing that won't send all my money abroad. But in the other hand I want to have Linux in my phone. Buying it would of course send my money even out from the EU, which is a bad thing. And knowing the current political situation with NATO, Germany and all I'd rather not buy anything from USA.. But even though Nokias Series 60 -plaform is/somewhat/ open, I'd like the idea of truly free OS in my phone very much. And if I could get a console on that motorola.. *drool*
Wonder if this has anything to do with Nokia's N-Gage which is supposed to compete with Game Boy Advance?
While Nokia has been trying to turn their phone (which has many PDA-like thingies and much multimedia-capabilities) into something more GBA-ish, Nintendo is turning it's GBA into something more multimediaish. (I know. That word doesn't exist.)
Nokia will (hopefully..) have better multiplayer-capabilities. It also has an already existing big brand which might make it somewhat scary for Nintendo.
Just wondering...
SIM cards don't make it impossible to lock the client in one operator. In Europe cell phones are often sold so that they can't be used with "wrong operator's" sim card. If you buy a cell phone which is locked to Vodafone, you can't use Orange's card with it.
Luckily it's illegal to bundle cell phone account and cell phone in Finland as it makes changing operators quite expensive (must buy a new phone). Of course it IS possible to buy a non-locked version of the phone but then again it costs more than a phone in countries were locking is illegal.
And when operators pay part of the phone's price, it causes the phone bills to be much bigger than in countries where locking doesn't happen.
And to say something about Europe going to UMTS. It's now clear that at least Germany, France, Spain and UK - if I may say - "fucked up" the whole technology by selling the licences in auction instead of giving them to those who were the best. Now I'm proud to be a Finn as we were (at least nearly) the only ones who had enough brains to give the licences to those who had the best possibilities to build a network.
But.. Unluckily the stupidness of of other European countries affected also Finland because Sonera (which is owned by the country) took part in Germany's licence auction with a Spanish operator [was it Telefonica?]. Now Sonera has had to mark those 4,3 billion euros as plain loss. We bought German air for 4,3 billion euros, damnit. And the Finnish government hadn't actually given it's permission as the owner of the company to flush that money down the toilet..
Now with linux 2.5 kernel you could give each ircer an own parallel thread in just two seconds.
Think about it!
And imagine a be.. Oh.. Nothing.. Well.. No!.. I won't say it, I won't, I won't! Won't I?
Slashdot Mirror
.
/\ 2 \ The base station one knows that you /\XX/ \ / signal.
/. people didn't this in
A <== A cell phone base station.
________ ________
/ \/ \ Here you can see how this thing works.
/
/ / \ \ are within the range of the circle
/ . / \ . \ around it away from it. it knows it by
\ 1 A \____/_A_ / measuring the strength of your phone's
\
\ / \/ \ / The same way, base station 2 knows
\____/___/\_______\/ your distance from it, too and can draw
/ . \ a circle, as well. Now, with these two
\ A / base stations we know that the phone
\ / user is in one of the two intersections
\ 3 / of the circles around base stations one
\________/ and two.
Then there is the base station three. It
only needs to know that its signal is not strong enough to reach the
northern intersection of circles of base stations 1 and 2. That way we
know that the user must be in the southern one of the intersections of
circles drawn by base stations 1 and 2. Please note that in this drawing
base station 3's circle doesn't tell the distance from the phone user,
but the maximum possible range it can reach. (Because I didn't think
when I drew the pic.)
Even if the distance info isn't that accurate (meaning that you're using
an old crappy analog cell phone most of you americans use), we can still
plot your location quite exactly. If we just know that the phone is
within the maximum ranges of all three base stations pictured here, the
phone must be in the area I've marked with X letters. Often there are
even more than three base stations around you. That makes getting the
location info even more accurate. So, in a city you can be located with
an error marging of only few tens of meters. In suburbs the error
margin is at least here in Finland some 500m. (Actually less, but this
distance is used by the cell phone company to make sure the phone is
100% surely in the area shown.
Here it just became legal to see where your kids' phones are going if
you've signed a contract in advance. You go to internet and give your
username and password. Then the site will plot your kid's location on
a map.
I'm really surprised that this many of the
advance. Here in Europe right about everyone knows that. And has known
since something like 1995 or so. Tracking people by their cell phones
has been possible as long as there has been cell phones.
Guess your government and media hasn't for some "odd" reason wanted its
servants to know too much of what is possible.
I don't see what damn problem it is if you can be located if you're
dying in a pit. I remember seeing in the TV program 911 how one woman
almost died when she didn't know where she was while she called the 911
from a landlined phone. I didn't understand why they didn't just look
where she was calling from and send an ambulance there. It only takes
about 0,0000000(and so on)0001 seconds to find out that info, not a
minute like in the hollywood movies.
The info about who's calling can be asked from a telephone company. It
has to know it to be able to bill someone for calling.
Before you had to know where you are to get an ambulance. If you didn't
know, you died. Cute. Now you just need to call 911 or 112 depending on
what continent you're in and say "I'm dying. Get me to hospital." and
the ambulance will come.
Remember that 5510 is just a tweak. If you open it's back to get access to the battery and so on, you see that it's actually a 3310 with another pile of plastic around it. Yes, it actually has another phone in it. It's just a software update (with as minor as possible hardware adjustments) for 3310. And that can be seen whatever you do with the phone. For example the keylock function. Of course they couldn't make the keylock work by menu+asterisk anymore, as asterisk is behind Shift key. So, it's now menu+space. But they coded it only halfway. Now you can hold down the menu button and press space. What will happen? The voice regonizing applet launches and the keys get locked. So, you only hear a sound "de-daa-de" and then you're asked "Name not found. Wanna try again?" and can't press any key. Hallelujah.
The mp3 player and the qwerty are just addons to 3310, that's why they don't work too well. The phone design has been done as quickly as possible because the teenagers needed a qwerty machine. For a cheap price.
And the reason why I bought a 5510 is that it was the cheapest phone I could find. I paid only 45e for it. Which is not much at all for an mp3 player and phone.
It appears that you may just have slashdotted the EU. The link just sends a server error :)
Cute.
A thing I forgot to mention in my post above: .dk and .uk haven't had to promise to join the euroland because they already were in EU when the contracts were signed and could thus legally opt out from the contract.
Please note that Sweden has already promised to join the euroland. They had to do that when they joined the EU. What they're doing now is just trying to stay out as long as possible. ;)) as they first lose benefits of euro and then when they join too late, their companies have hard time becoming part of the euroland, as other countries' companies have adapted to it loong before.
;)
Staying out for a while and then joining later is the worst they can do (and the thing they WILL do
But I don't complain. As a Finn I'm just happy for Swedes being dumbasses. European tourists come to Finland instead of Sweden because they don't want to change their currency. And companies like us more than Swedes, because we use euro. So, we're now going to leave Sweden far behind us in our infinite race with them
I'd like to point out that the post was against racism, not for it. He/she said that Turkish people may have problems getting through Schengen borders and clearly pointed out that it's a bad thing. Right?
Where on earth did they do the comparison? Sounds a bit stupid to compare quality of companies by sending about 5 to 20 times less messages than a normal user would.
Other interesting thing is that although I speak a lot less in phone than average people, my cell phone's statistics tell that I've spoken 96 hours, 42 minutes and 58 seconds since May 2002. That makes about 6,5 hours/month. If a person who doesn't his phone much can come to such numbers, then how on earth is the average number supposed to be even less?
I'm sure that the mobile owning people use their mobiles more than the numbers stated in the article.
To me it sounds that CNN has done the article with far too small amount of test subjects. Or maybe they're all some sort of shy and quiet housewives. Who knows.
It's always funny how we from the Northern Countries seem to bark to the people of USA about their lack of knowledge about our countries.
Yes, they don't know about us. Now tell me where is Nebraska, what's it's capital, what kind of culture they have there, who's their (what do they call their leader? Governor?) and so on. Oh? You don't know? How ignorant can an European be? Got the point? It should be enough for them to know that there is such a thing as EU with Bruxelles as it's capital and so on.
Yes, I have personally found many Americans spoiled by the nationalist propaganda they're flooded with, but that doesn't make all of the Americans actually stupid. Their only problem is that their leaders are empty warheads.
I'm very sorry for the rudeness of this post. I just couldn't find any better ways to clearly tell what I was thinking.
s/t\ (/t\\\ (/
Ok. Thanks for correction. I can't actually speak Japanese at all. All I know about that language is form one (1) Japanese lesson I had a few years ago and kanasensei,sourceforge.net . And the words in the box of printer paper made by sony actually were something like that "purinta peepa". Don't know why they used English word for paper there, though.
I'd like to point out that the Japanese people write in 3 different alphabetics. They are katakana, hiragana and kanji.
Kanji is the "defaul" alphabetic. It's done the chinese way, so each letter represents a whole word.
Hiragana is then a "backup alphabetic" with each letter meaning one syllable, for example ka, ke, ki, ko, ku, tsu, chi, n, a, e, to, te.
Hiragana is used when the writer doesn't know the right kanji letter for the word he wants to write or when there isn't such kanji letter at all.
Katakana is the alphabetic Japanese people use when they want express words taken from foreign languages. I guess you can guess what means "printo piipir", which reads in the side of a box filled with unused paper.. BTW, Japanese people seem to love using unchanged English words in their language. Most of the text written in katakana is in fact English written the Japanese way and can therefore be understood by anyone who has a bit of imagination and can speak English.
(Imagination, because the words change a bit because katakana isn't about writing the word sound by sound but syllable by syllable. For example my name, Tuukka Ryyppö, turns into "Tsuukka Riuppo" when written in katakana)
I'm sorry, people but this was news years ago. Nowadays this is only a part of history..
"apt-get install programname" is hard? IMO it's harder when you must actually go to internet and download the program, then double click this and that and click next next.
Of course installing programs can also be done graphically by opening the program installation program and selecting the program from the list, then double clicking the program you want to install and tzadamm - it get's the program from internet and installs it.
This is what dpkg and RPM do
Also, I have a gigantic idea that probably won't work. Someone should create a cross-platform, XML-driven driver format so you don't end up with piles of useless hardware since it only works on Windows.
Yup.It won't work. Programming drivers is much more complicated than just saying "I'm a driver."
The code is operating system specific. What you just requested was that the drivers would be compiled every time you want to install them.
Hmm. My comment lacked half of it's text. No thanks to slashdot being buggy and not letting me send my message.
So here I go again:
It's always funny seeing text like this being written in slashdot.
What's up woth americans being 5 years late in everything that has anything to with mobile phones? Can't you just go somewhere else, look what they've got and then coipy the technology? "Inventing" a thing like this is a waste of money.
I've had my cell phone listed for years. It's always been there, it'll always be there. It's very damsn good thing to be able to just call to number service and ask a name for a number or a number for a name. Or address, for that matter.
Of course I can also send a SMS with text "GSM LastName FirstName, City" to a specific number and get the info back as SMS.
Remember that cell phones are not like the old style wirephones. They don't lay in middle of your living room. They can be put to silent mode. And so on.
Unknown people often call to cells and send SMS. When you answer, you DO want to know who sent the message.
And: It's of course possible to prohibit the telephone company from telling your number or name by simply writing a little mark in a checkbox in the contract.
Good morning America. Learn things. Stop the war.
Of course I can also send a SMS with text "GSM LastName FirstName, City" to a specific number and get the info back as SMS.
Remember that cell phones are not like the old style wirephones. They don't lay in middle of your living room. They can be put to silent mode. And so on.
Unknown people often call to cells and send SMS. When you answer, you DO want to know who sent the message.
And: It's of course possible to prohibit the telephone company from telling your number or name by simply writing a little mark in a checkbox in the contract.
Good morning America. Learn things. Stop the war.
Wouldn't fdisk /mbr , /sbin/lilo or something like that be a little bit better than that format /mbr of yours?
Now what am I gonna do when I go buying my next mobile? As a Finn I should of course buy a Nokia, since doing that won't send all my money abroad. But in the other hand I want to have Linux in my phone. Buying it would of course send my money even out from the EU, which is a bad thing. And knowing the current political situation with NATO, Germany and all I'd rather not buy anything from USA.. But even though Nokias Series 60 -plaform is /somewhat/ open, I'd like the idea of truly free OS in my phone very much. And if I could get a console on that motorola.. *drool*
Now what am I going to do?
Wonder if this has anything to do with Nokia's N-Gage which is supposed to compete with Game Boy Advance?
While Nokia has been trying to turn their phone (which has many PDA-like thingies and much multimedia-capabilities) into something more GBA-ish, Nintendo is turning it's GBA into something more multimediaish. (I know. That word doesn't exist.) Nokia will (hopefully..) have better multiplayer-capabilities. It also has an already existing big brand which might make it somewhat scary for Nintendo.
Just wondering...
Norway isn't part of the EU, so for him this is neutral.
Metric == SI
SIM cards don't make it impossible to lock the client in one operator. In Europe cell phones are often sold so that they can't be used with "wrong operator's" sim card. If you buy a cell phone which is locked to Vodafone, you can't use Orange's card with it. Luckily it's illegal to bundle cell phone account and cell phone in Finland as it makes changing operators quite expensive (must buy a new phone). Of course it IS possible to buy a non-locked version of the phone but then again it costs more than a phone in countries were locking is illegal. And when operators pay part of the phone's price, it causes the phone bills to be much bigger than in countries where locking doesn't happen.
And to say something about Europe going to UMTS. It's now clear that at least Germany, France, Spain and UK - if I may say - "fucked up" the whole technology by selling the licences in auction instead of giving them to those who were the best. Now I'm proud to be a Finn as we were (at least nearly) the only ones who had enough brains to give the licences to those who had the best possibilities to build a network.
But.. Unluckily the stupidness of of other European countries affected also Finland because Sonera (which is owned by the country) took part in Germany's licence auction with a Spanish operator [was it Telefonica?]. Now Sonera has had to mark those 4,3 billion euros as plain loss. We bought German air for 4,3 billion euros, damnit. And the Finnish government hadn't actually given it's permission as the owner of the company to flush that money down the toilet..
Ever heard of MacOS X?
It's dumby-proof but still not as lame as windows.
In fact it's actually been said to be the best OS around. Many linux-users have converted to OSX-users when they've tried it for a while.
ACtually I know absolutely nothing about threading. Not about it's good nor about it's bad sides
Of course you'll write your own ircd to be able to give each ircer his/her own thread :)
Now with linux 2.5 kernel you could give each ircer an own parallel thread in just two seconds.
Think about it!
And imagine a be.. Oh.. Nothing.. Well.. No!.. I won't say it, I won't, I won't! Won't I?