I live in Sweden, and yes, it's been a few years since the papers here wrote that we had much less 'net than the US, and france, and... then things changed. But not everywhere: I live 22 km from one of Swedens larger cities, and the only broadband service available there is... ADSL at 500kbps DL/400 kpbs UL.
You should be aware of the fact that the cell-phone itself has an ID number, EIN (Equipment Identity Number), which is stored in a database in the GSM system. Until 1999, it was rare that a GSM operator used this, but in 1999, a large db was created on Ireland. Since then, it is common to have one.
This db is used to keep track of stolen and faulty cellphones (well, terminals, really), refusing service to those classes of equipment. However, nothing stops the operator from using this information instead of the IMSI on the SIM card for tracking purposes.
Also, in modern GSM O&M software, it's a builtin feature: you tell the system that you wish tp keep track of all movements and calls of this IMSI number, or EIN. It's then logged to file.
It gets even better: you can of course record when the EIN is changed; moving the SIM card then just means another EIN will be tracked (as well as the old one...), and of course the SIM-card that is next put into the phone you just monitored might get monitored too...
It's all just a few clicks in the GUI away. Disk space is cheap. Welcome, Brave New World.
That 'we will support all future format' is the kind of marketing hype you should never believe. Look at that combo: 'all' and 'future'. The future is infinite, so is 'all', and companies come and go within a finite time period. Thus, such a text should never appear on a product box, and if it does, you are well advised not to buy it.
As everyone who works in testing, for example in system test of telecom systems (me!), knows, no amount of testing will find all the bugs. In the system release, documents will tell what features work, and how far. The documentation will cover things that have been tested, and worked, only. That is one reason why the features of a delivered product might differ from the marketing hype.
But there will still be areas which haven't been covered. Take long term stability. You have to settle for a limit on how long to perform a long-term stability test. It is not going to be 1 year, because of this first-to-market-takes-it-all.
You can expect reasonable working features of a new product, and improvements in updates. Perfect adherance to initial market hype, you can never expect.
> Hate 'em as much as I do, the one thing MS has done well is ensure compatability.
I have to disagree with you. In every single new version of excel, my old macros stopped working.
The infamous bit-rates quoted, like 11Mbit/s for the 802.11b, are measured at the air interface. That means that some 60-70%, at best, is user data. That means that your pr0n-download will be at rates of 7Mbit/s - at most, under ideal conditions. Avoid fogs.
In my experience, you get less than half the bandwidth compared to the announced. 11Mbit/s gives 5Mbit/s, provided you're all alone using the node. That is still nice, but I always pack a nework cable, a modem cable when I go travelling with my laptop.
In northern Sweden, some year ago, you could subscribe to a service where you'd get commercials in SMS messages as you moved around. It was somewhat popular. But then, it was an opt-in service.
Of course, those pop-ups are a bit different, as it's not opt-in. I am sure it won't be text only; modern cell-phones can handle graphics... Your operator will sell you the service 'Be able to filter what popups are allowed', and you will buy it, because life without will be annoying. As everyone knows, it's on the services the operators make their money.
I work in the telecom industry. I have been doing so for quite som time. Back in 1999, we did system test on locating in GSM.
At that time, locating was based on using several measurements:
+ signal strengths measured at two or more towers,
+ the so-called timing advance measurements,
+ measurements done over several frequencies (GSM uses frequency hopping).
Usually, in urban areas, we'd get the location within 10 meters. In rural areas, it was more like 100 meter. It was a bit of a hassle to order the system to start the tracking, and there was no nice user interface for the resulting trace data. We made a few hacks to make our lives easier. Some of those hacks still lives...
Today, the radio base stations comes with the option of a built-in GPS. That makes the position of the base statio very well known (that was a problem back in 1999). You can still use the measurement reports from the cell-phone to get the current location (cell-phones have to make measurement reports, or they won't work in the system). You don't need to have GPS capability in the cell-phone. But if you do, and it reports coordinates that doesn't agree with known data frpm the base stations, the cell-phones data will be ignored, and real measurements will be used. The user interfaces of today are mcu better. Using the IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) or even the equipment identity number, you can order the system to log all movements of the cell-phone.
The only way to avoid this, is to keep the battery out of the cell-phone, and only put it in when you need the service.
Thus, mainframe labor future is fuzzy. But, insn't the future of ANY technology somewhat fuzzy? Do you really think Java is the final word on programming languages or the final fad?
In this business, the event horizon appears to be 3 years away. Beyond that, everything is guesswork and astrology.
I believe that COBOL will still be running strong when.NET is dead.
If you are looking for your own test-bed for slow connections, have a look at the eminent program 'Trelay' at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~tab/erlang/trelay/index.html
Basically, data over GSM is a bad idea. The max speed is 9600 kbit/s. There are other alternatives, such as HSCSD (High Speed Circuit Switched Data) which will provide 56.6kbit/s, and GPRS (General packet Radio Service) which will give up to 384kbit/s (if using EDGE). Then, we have the 3G standards, CDMA2000 and WCDMA, with up to 2Mbit/s (close to the base station, and only if you're almost alone in the cell...)
While the 3G isn't much available, GPRS is. Why you'd like to use the GSM for data is beyond me.
> elecoms bankrupted themselves to pay the gov't billions for the 3G spectrum, don't expect them to give it away for free or cheap
You know, there are countries where the operators didn't pay a dime for the spectrum. In those countries it is at least possible to argue that the rates should be lower.
Kudos, man, for checking the caltech site and getting some real info, and then presenting it here, instead of the usual 'I think I have heard about this'-thing.
> Use the proper [mozilla.org] tools [spamassassin.org].
Unfortunately, the 'proper tools' doesn't stop all spam. I still get spam in the accounts behind the 'proper tools'. Then, of course, Spam Assassin doesn't stop the viruses I get in the mail on a daily basis. (But since I am not using MS Outlock to read my mail, the viruses don't matter much.)
On my mail account behind the 'white list', I get no spam whatsoever.
> By now if you're still swamped in spam/popups/adware, then you're an idiot.
You mean, like, ifconfig on Linux? Of course my Linux box acts as a NATed FW. The MAC address of the Linux box has very little to do with the windows box I run behind it...
Hehe, I know two friends who used a bottle of LN2 to cool their office. They put the bottle on a high shelf, and after a while it got cooler in the office. Then, they got a headache when the oxygen levels started to drop, and then they opened the window to flush out the nitrogen and get in the oxygen - together with the 40C warm outside air. Then, they refilled the bottle...
Sure, pure water is a bad conducting media, but that is offset by all those dust particles and soluble chemicals on the components. You can perform an experiment: Get a bottle of RO-water (reversed osmosis, much cleaner than distilled water) and pour in on your moderboard while running the computer. Se it short out.
This particluar experiment has been carried out a few years ago. It is possible that the motherboards have become much cleaner since then, but I doubt it.
Sweden didn't have an auction on the 3G license. Those who got them didn't pay for them. That didn't help, however, they are now trying to back down on what they promised to do when they got the license...
I have, since the spring of 2002, a cordless optical mouse made by Maxxtor, with re-chargable batteries that get charged when I put the mouse into the cradle. The only thing I'm not that happy with is the USB connection it uses, which makes for some problems when installing a new Linux.
Yes, use f90. It is much better than f77, and it has many good features, such as the possibility to require certain precision of variables.
In a study of performance of f77, f90, C, and C++ on a CRAY T3E, a few years back, there was no performance difference between f77 and f90, C was 10% slower than f77/90, and C++ was 100% slower. Of course, the C++ compilers have become better, but so have the fortran compilers. For scientific computations, fortran is still alive, and prodding buttock galore.
You don't need a GPS to pinpoint the location of your cell phone. The so-called timing advance used by GSM to deliver messages, like paging calls for cell updates, is in most urban areas enough to find you within 4 feet. Of course, you need more than one base station for this, but there are usually more than 3 within close enough range.
In older GSM systems, the triangulation had to be done manually, which is costly. Today, it can be done using a simple command. If you like to avoid this, move out of California now, because there is where Cingular West is now rolling out GSM 9.1.
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I live in Sweden, and yes, it's been a few years since the papers here wrote that we had much less 'net than the US, and france, and ... then things changed. But not everywhere: I live 22 km from one of Swedens larger cities, and the only broadband service available there is ... ADSL at 500kbps DL/400 kpbs UL.
You should be aware of the fact that the cell-phone itself has an ID number, EIN (Equipment Identity Number), which is stored in a database in the GSM system. Until 1999, it was rare that a GSM operator used this, but in 1999, a large db was created on Ireland. Since then, it is common to have one.
This db is used to keep track of stolen and faulty cellphones (well, terminals, really), refusing service to those classes of equipment. However, nothing stops the operator from using this information instead of the IMSI on the SIM card for tracking purposes.
Also, in modern GSM O&M software, it's a builtin feature: you tell the system that you wish tp keep track of all movements and calls of this IMSI number, or EIN. It's then logged to file.
It gets even better: you can of course record when the EIN is changed; moving the SIM card then just means another EIN will be tracked (as well as the old one...), and of course the SIM-card that is next put into the phone you just monitored might get monitored too...
It's all just a few clicks in the GUI away. Disk space is cheap. Welcome, Brave New World.
> it's only a matter of time before you are sued.
./ don't live in the USA; suing someone over non-included features in a product in, say, Sweden, isn't all that worthwhile.
Really? I don't see Microsoft being sued for their non-working windows versions. Do you?
Also, many of us on
That 'we will support all future format' is the kind of marketing hype you should never believe. Look at that combo: 'all' and 'future'. The future is infinite, so is 'all', and companies come and go within a finite time period. Thus, such a text should never appear on a product box, and if it does, you are well advised not to buy it.
As everyone who works in testing, for example in system test of telecom systems (me!), knows, no amount of testing will find all the bugs. In the system release, documents will tell what features work, and how far. The documentation will cover things that have been tested, and worked, only. That is one reason why the features of a delivered product might differ from the marketing hype. But there will still be areas which haven't been covered. Take long term stability. You have to settle for a limit on how long to perform a long-term stability test. It is not going to be 1 year, because of this first-to-market-takes-it-all. You can expect reasonable working features of a new product, and improvements in updates. Perfect adherance to initial market hype, you can never expect.
> Hate 'em as much as I do, the one thing MS has done well is ensure compatability. I have to disagree with you. In every single new version of excel, my old macros stopped working.
Alas, the sun has set over the Empire! :)
The infamous bit-rates quoted, like 11Mbit/s for the 802.11b, are measured at the air interface. That means that some 60-70%, at best, is user data. That means that your pr0n-download will be at rates of 7Mbit/s - at most, under ideal conditions. Avoid fogs.
In my experience, you get less than half the bandwidth compared to the announced. 11Mbit/s gives 5Mbit/s, provided you're all alone using the node. That is still nice, but I always pack a nework cable, a modem cable when I go travelling with my laptop.
In northern Sweden, some year ago, you could subscribe to a service where you'd get commercials in SMS messages as you moved around. It was somewhat popular. But then, it was an opt-in service.
Of course, those pop-ups are a bit different, as it's not opt-in. I am sure it won't be text only; modern cell-phones can handle graphics... Your operator will sell you the service 'Be able to filter what popups are allowed', and you will buy it, because life without will be annoying. As everyone knows, it's on the services the operators make their money.
I work in the telecom industry. I have been doing so for quite som time. Back in 1999, we did system test on locating in GSM. At that time, locating was based on using several measurements:
+ signal strengths measured at two or more towers,
+ the so-called timing advance measurements,
+ measurements done over several frequencies (GSM uses frequency hopping).
Usually, in urban areas, we'd get the location within 10 meters. In rural areas, it was more like 100 meter. It was a bit of a hassle to order the system to start the tracking, and there was no nice user interface for the resulting trace data. We made a few hacks to make our lives easier. Some of those hacks still lives... Today, the radio base stations comes with the option of a built-in GPS. That makes the position of the base statio very well known (that was a problem back in 1999). You can still use the measurement reports from the cell-phone to get the current location (cell-phones have to make measurement reports, or they won't work in the system). You don't need to have GPS capability in the cell-phone. But if you do, and it reports coordinates that doesn't agree with known data frpm the base stations, the cell-phones data will be ignored, and real measurements will be used. The user interfaces of today are mcu better. Using the IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) or even the equipment identity number, you can order the system to log all movements of the cell-phone. The only way to avoid this, is to keep the battery out of the cell-phone, and only put it in when you need the service.
Bah. All that, and more, can be found in Sony-Ericsson P900, which you can buy RIGHT NOW.
In this business, the event horizon appears to be 3 years away. Beyond that, everything is guesswork and astrology.
I believe that COBOL will still be running strong when .NET is dead.
If you are looking for your own test-bed for slow connections, have a look at the eminent program 'Trelay' at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~tab/erlang/trelay/index .html
Basically, data over GSM is a bad idea. The max speed is 9600 kbit/s. There are other alternatives, such as HSCSD (High Speed Circuit Switched Data) which will provide 56.6kbit/s, and GPRS (General packet Radio Service) which will give up to 384kbit/s (if using EDGE). Then, we have the 3G standards, CDMA2000 and WCDMA, with up to 2Mbit/s (close to the base station, and only if you're almost alone in the cell...) While the 3G isn't much available, GPRS is. Why you'd like to use the GSM for data is beyond me.
> elecoms bankrupted themselves to pay the gov't billions for the 3G spectrum, don't expect them to give it away for free or cheap You know, there are countries where the operators didn't pay a dime for the spectrum. In those countries it is at least possible to argue that the rates should be lower.
Kudos, man, for checking the caltech site and getting some real info, and then presenting it here, instead of the usual 'I think I have heard about this'-thing.
> Use the proper [mozilla.org] tools [spamassassin.org].
:)
Unfortunately, the 'proper tools' doesn't stop all spam. I still get spam in the accounts behind the 'proper tools'. Then, of course, Spam Assassin doesn't stop the viruses I get in the mail on a daily basis. (But since I am not using MS Outlock to read my mail, the viruses don't matter much.)
On my mail account behind the 'white list', I get no spam whatsoever.
> By now if you're still swamped in spam/popups/adware, then you're an idiot.
Is this a flame bait I see before me?
You mean, like, ifconfig on Linux? Of course my Linux box acts as a NATed FW. The MAC address of the Linux box has very little to do with the windows box I run behind it...
Hehe, I know two friends who used a bottle of LN2 to cool their office. They put the bottle on a high shelf, and after a while it got cooler in the office. Then, they got a headache when the oxygen levels started to drop, and then they opened the window to flush out the nitrogen and get in the oxygen - together with the 40C warm outside air. Then, they refilled the bottle...
Sure, pure water is a bad conducting media, but that is offset by all those dust particles and soluble chemicals on the components. You can perform an experiment: Get a bottle of RO-water (reversed osmosis, much cleaner than distilled water) and pour in on your moderboard while running the computer. Se it short out. This particluar experiment has been carried out a few years ago. It is possible that the motherboards have become much cleaner since then, but I doubt it.
Sweden didn't have an auction on the 3G license. Those who got them didn't pay for them. That didn't help, however, they are now trying to back down on what they promised to do when they got the license...
I have, since the spring of 2002, a cordless optical mouse made by Maxxtor, with re-chargable batteries that get charged when I put the mouse into the cradle. The only thing I'm not that happy with is the USB connection it uses, which makes for some problems when installing a new Linux.
Two words for you: IMPLICIT NONE
Yes, use f90. It is much better than f77, and it has many good features, such as the possibility to require certain precision of variables. In a study of performance of f77, f90, C, and C++ on a CRAY T3E, a few years back, there was no performance difference between f77 and f90, C was 10% slower than f77/90, and C++ was 100% slower. Of course, the C++ compilers have become better, but so have the fortran compilers. For scientific computations, fortran is still alive, and prodding buttock galore.
You don't need a GPS to pinpoint the location of your cell phone. The so-called timing advance used by GSM to deliver messages, like paging calls for cell updates, is in most urban areas enough to find you within 4 feet. Of course, you need more than one base station for this, but there are usually more than 3 within close enough range.
In older GSM systems, the triangulation had to be done manually, which is costly. Today, it can be done using a simple command. If you like to avoid this, move out of California now, because there is where Cingular West is now rolling out GSM 9.1.