If you're going to use terms like "all" to describe fact, then perhaps a little less extremism, a little more research. I have an N900, manual number 9216999, issue 1.0 - not a single reference anywhere on how or how not to hold the device. I have had dozens of phones over the years, few of those had guidelines on physical handling. None in particular had guidelines on handling in regard to reception or transmission. The usual FCC boilerplate on interference, or a few lines on needing a good signal for clear transmissions, but that's it. I can appreciate that some manuals and models do, but all? I think not good sir.
I can grip this bad boy in both hands tightly, run a script to poll the signal strength every few moments, make a hole big enough just to read the display, and it barely drops a couple of dB. This is only part of the story though. I am in the Philippines, we send 140 billion text messages a year, we get cell base stations for free in our breakfast cereal boxes, they are everywhere.:-) I don't remember having a dropped call for a few years now.
I remember the days of analogue in Australia, then GSM, coverage outside of major towns was spotty at best, but more usually non-existent. I get the impression that this is about where America is right now with GSM. It'll take time to improve things I guess.
I think the system runs at around 90GHz so about a 3mm wavelength. The holes need to be smaller than that by a little bit, so you could use a fairly fine metal mesh - maybe a tightly woven fly screen would do the trick reasonably effectively. I guess they'll outlaw all but plastic flyscreen next : )
I have one sitting in front of me, love it, unfortunately it never really took off for some reason. My speculation is simply that it doesn't do a lot of common things straight out of the box - MMS, in the past USSD, Video Calling - it can do this with Skype / Fring / etc, but not in the traditional way that other phones make video calls over 3G, and so on. Certainly there are solutions to all of these things. A couple of seconds in google or the software updater will have people up and running, but I think there is an expectation for spoon feeding and hand holding. People are even complaining that it doesn't support DRM at all - they want to be able to download music from traditional stores in the same way they can with other devices.
You need to be a little technically minded to set one up and have it work as a fairly standard phone. It's marketed as a tablet computer with phone features, people mostly get this back to front.
I don't think you actually even need JTAG. I've borked up many WRT54G's, I think I have pretty much every version kicking around in various places - Just hold a piece of wire on the antenna ground block, then run the other end of it across the flash chip - Some people preferred to short out a specific pin (I forget which one now) but I'd just run the wire over a few until the power light started blinking, TFTP mode, reflash. Never once has this method failed.
3G / 4G refer to cellular standards. What, exactly, are you talking about?
The iPhone 4 is a 3G phone. I would suggest you either prefix your G's with the word 'iPhone' - or simply understand that you don't really know what you are saying.
Firefox was release a few days ago on the N900. The user interface is indeed nice, very intuitive too, however the browser is still quite slow. If you enable flash (through about:config) it hangs the interface for long periods of time, particularly with video playback it stutters constantly - probably flash 10.1 will sort this out whenever they feel like releasing it - my understanding is that this version of flash will have hardware acceleration.
All in all it's nice, I would love to use it as my default browser, though the interface is a little unresponsive at the moment. Chromium suffers the same problem in a way.
I concur - myself working for one of these 3rd world charities I want to say "We do not want your junk!" If you don't want it, then very probably we don't either. As a charity we want to give the same experience to our beneficiaries as one would have in any relatively affluent society. We don't want to be a dumping ground for corporate waste, which is what some of you (maybe not you specifically) see as a nice, cheap, and handy alternative to the usual costly disposal process. Like other posters said, if we end up with it for whatever reason, we'll basically trash it too. Maybe we can recycle some of the plastics, but PCB's, not so much.
Re:Oh good! The trolls are out in full force!
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Given that it was only released 30 odd days ago, I think you can drop the bullshit.
This is how telephony providers have operated since day one. From a technology perspective the advances they've made are quite stunning, but they don't benefit you as an end user at all, every single advance is aimed at providing more profit for the telco while giving you less bandwidth.
Your average phone call now is digitized within a few hundred meters of your front door, multiplexed and shoved down digital circuit multiplication equipment (DCME) where they make use of the space while you are listening to stick yet more phone calls on the wire. It's a net win for the telco, free money in a lot of ways. About as offensive as actually charging money to send SMS over a signaling system that is already active (and mostly idling) 24/7 anyway.
Providing more bandwidth to the end user, for nearer to what it actually costs, goes against every single principle they've built their companies upon for the last several decades. They wont go down that path without a lot of kicking and screaming.
The handset uses repositories in the same way debian based stuff does - apt-get install whatever. Easy debian is also available so the handset can run pretty much everything you would find in your typical linux distro. Including stuff like open office, gimp, and on and on. Plus it's all free. For me this is better than the app store, but each to their own.
On paper it does actually have pretty decent specs - Seems to be a tad better than my N900, though the environment is too closed for my liking. I prefer the Meego / Maemo stuff better myself.
It can easily be fooled for sure, but it's just one tool that makes up a fairly comprehensive approach to the whole issue surrounding PV (positive vetting) - If you do the relaxation and zone out during the polygraph, there's a pretty good chance the examiner is going to notice this, but also your results are quite likely not going to mesh up with all the other information available.
An example: You did drugs during your high school years but you lie on your PV forms, the PV people go and interview a bunch of obscure friends of friends and get the dirt - it correlates pretty good amongst strangers, they ask you about it during the polygraph, you answer "no, never did drugs" and the polygraph flat lines (or whatever it does to show it thinks you are telling the truth)
Goodbye security clearance.
They don't care if you did drugs in the past, they just want to know you are truthful, actually playing the persona you say you have. So, anyone wanting to work at a secret 3 letter agency, honesty is probably the easiest way to get your foot in the door. You can still keep the inner sociopath, fear, paranoia, and so on, just don't tell anyone about it, ever.:-)
Serious question, how do they even know if you are tethering? I have a Nokia N900 that I simply set up as an access point any time I feel the need - not uncommon for me to have 4 or 5 computers connected. Before that I was using joikuspot on Symbian phones to do the same thing. I don't pay for tethering but I do it routinely.
Nothing much is going on other than one company carefully building a wall around their playground.
The market is significantly bigger than Apple though, so neither of those anti-competitive terms apply. Depending on which side of the fence you stand, you could easily argue that there are far more capable handsets on store shelves - some significantly more open than others. Quite a few Linux based handsets out there with little or nothing standing in the way of root access.
The only way the iAd thing could fall in to any of those categories is if there were no alternatives on the market. There are dozens of manufacturers, thousands of phone models to choose from - competition is fierce and healthy in this domain.
The police are only ~asking~ - Facebook can say no - and really, given how long the AFP have been banging away at this, it appears as if many are actually saying no. Now the AFP is acting like a big frigging baby, going to the press because "facebook wont do what we tell them, so we're going to make them look like they don't want to save the children"
I can't really figure out why it's the AFP pushing this - I would imagine there is a tad more to the story than just reporting crime, probably someone wants to figure out the guilt trail of association via friend links. Who knows.
Nokia N900 in addition to those posted by Mr2001 - there are loads 'dream phones' out there. Really, when your phone is quite a bit more powerful than desktops of only a hand full of years ago, things can only get better. Mine, I can ssh in to it, forward X, basically do everything available from within your average linux distro. It's all there.
Probably you know this already, apologies in advance...
In most metro areas these days you have small footprint systems, several per block. In larger buildings they are often placed on each floor, the antennas anyway. I'd be quite surprised if any single cell footprint had 5000 users at one time. Back when I was working in the field, this was more than 10 years ago now so things have probably progressed a bit, SS7 was almost always a 64kbps transmission going down one of the channels in the trunk. Overall the SS7 could handle maybe a maximum of 1000 concurrent users, I think the upper limit was 1024, but it's been a long time. Only a small fraction of this total are able to make actual voice calls. Bandwidth has always been pretty tight and likely always will be. Like you mentioned, the size of the cell site makes a big difference. Make that smaller and you can increase the available bandwidth to each user.
I bought a Nokia N900 the other day, mostly the same specifications but probably a tad more open than Android. I don't think it's a slippery slope but you are right about the blurred distinction. It's not really a phone, not a laptop, not a tablet, not a PDA... I think maybe it's all of them, only a lot smaller.
It was definitely useful to someone in google, you don't collect this stuff by accident. Not only that but if you can't understand how this is an utter gold mine for various governments around the world, then you need to soak up a few more conspiracy theories coupled with information published by groups like the Federation of American Scientists (fas.org) - that'll gain you a tremendous amount of insight in to the actual real life inner workings of various secret 3 letter agencies. Former 3 letter agency drone myself, so I speak from experience.
Traffic analysis, it's all part of the bigger picture. Less than a second can still yield interesting results. MAC addresses tied to latitude and longitude, secret rooms in major ISP's that have access to whatever they need, enough information that they can accurately deduce who you are and where you are, but even more scary, who you talk to, who they talk to, and on and on for as many layers as the data storage medium can log. This is, effectively, the same type of thing that facebook does. Facebook obviously figured out a commercial use for it. Governments have been doing the same thing for as long as they've existed.
It used to be in the Symbian S60V2 era. These days as a result of commercial entities wanting to eliminate piracy and others wanting to make wads of cash through sales of certificates, your average cell phone is pretty much locked down. If you want to install an application capable of doing anything more complex than "Hello World" you'll need to have it signed first.
That said, not all handsets are closed, the Nokia N900 comes with its own xterm right out of the box - root is just a 'sudo getroot' away : ) Applications are trivially simple to install. I don't believe Nokia has sold terribly many of them, so I can't imagine it's a popular target for crapware.
Possibly this is true in America - I have no idea, but in Australia and particularly Asia, almost all of those printers are 100% recycled and end up as your next razor blade, coke can, or spork, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you ever get the chance to pick through a dump site there is no 'treasure' there anymore - one persons trash really is just trash by the time it's tossed out on the pile.
To answer the question, NAS boxes. They are moderately cheap, come with numerous drive bays, they are usually small, quiet, and unobtrusive when you stick tape over the blue LED's.
Although I saw my first piece of digital porn on the commodore 64 (Samantha fox if I recall) - it wasn't until the Amiga came along that I ~really~ saw porn, with actual skin tone. (Sheds a tear) It certainly drove my collection forward.
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If you're going to use terms like "all" to describe fact, then perhaps a little less extremism, a little more research. I have an N900, manual number 9216999, issue 1.0 - not a single reference anywhere on how or how not to hold the device. I have had dozens of phones over the years, few of those had guidelines on physical handling. None in particular had guidelines on handling in regard to reception or transmission. The usual FCC boilerplate on interference, or a few lines on needing a good signal for clear transmissions, but that's it. I can appreciate that some manuals and models do, but all? I think not good sir.
I can grip this bad boy in both hands tightly, run a script to poll the signal strength every few moments, make a hole big enough just to read the display, and it barely drops a couple of dB. This is only part of the story though. I am in the Philippines, we send 140 billion text messages a year, we get cell base stations for free in our breakfast cereal boxes, they are everywhere. :-) I don't remember having a dropped call for a few years now.
I remember the days of analogue in Australia, then GSM, coverage outside of major towns was spotty at best, but more usually non-existent. I get the impression that this is about where America is right now with GSM. It'll take time to improve things I guess.
I think the system runs at around 90GHz so about a 3mm wavelength. The holes need to be smaller than that by a little bit, so you could use a fairly fine metal mesh - maybe a tightly woven fly screen would do the trick reasonably effectively. I guess they'll outlaw all but plastic flyscreen next : )
I have one sitting in front of me, love it, unfortunately it never really took off for some reason. My speculation is simply that it doesn't do a lot of common things straight out of the box - MMS, in the past USSD, Video Calling - it can do this with Skype / Fring / etc, but not in the traditional way that other phones make video calls over 3G, and so on. Certainly there are solutions to all of these things. A couple of seconds in google or the software updater will have people up and running, but I think there is an expectation for spoon feeding and hand holding. People are even complaining that it doesn't support DRM at all - they want to be able to download music from traditional stores in the same way they can with other devices.
You need to be a little technically minded to set one up and have it work as a fairly standard phone. It's marketed as a tablet computer with phone features, people mostly get this back to front.
I don't think you actually even need JTAG. I've borked up many WRT54G's, I think I have pretty much every version kicking around in various places - Just hold a piece of wire on the antenna ground block, then run the other end of it across the flash chip - Some people preferred to short out a specific pin (I forget which one now) but I'd just run the wire over a few until the power light started blinking, TFTP mode, reflash. Never once has this method failed.
3G / 4G refer to cellular standards. What, exactly, are you talking about?
The iPhone 4 is a 3G phone. I would suggest you either prefix your G's with the word 'iPhone' - or simply understand that you don't really know what you are saying.
Firefox was release a few days ago on the N900. The user interface is indeed nice, very intuitive too, however the browser is still quite slow. If you enable flash (through about:config) it hangs the interface for long periods of time, particularly with video playback it stutters constantly - probably flash 10.1 will sort this out whenever they feel like releasing it - my understanding is that this version of flash will have hardware acceleration.
All in all it's nice, I would love to use it as my default browser, though the interface is a little unresponsive at the moment. Chromium suffers the same problem in a way.
http://mokkori.com/ - I don't think this site has been updated in a while, but it'll get the idea across pretty quickly.
I concur - myself working for one of these 3rd world charities I want to say "We do not want your junk!" If you don't want it, then very probably we don't either. As a charity we want to give the same experience to our beneficiaries as one would have in any relatively affluent society. We don't want to be a dumping ground for corporate waste, which is what some of you (maybe not you specifically) see as a nice, cheap, and handy alternative to the usual costly disposal process. Like other posters said, if we end up with it for whatever reason, we'll basically trash it too. Maybe we can recycle some of the plastics, but PCB's, not so much.
Given that it was only released 30 odd days ago, I think you can drop the bullshit.
This is how telephony providers have operated since day one. From a technology perspective the advances they've made are quite stunning, but they don't benefit you as an end user at all, every single advance is aimed at providing more profit for the telco while giving you less bandwidth.
Your average phone call now is digitized within a few hundred meters of your front door, multiplexed and shoved down digital circuit multiplication equipment (DCME) where they make use of the space while you are listening to stick yet more phone calls on the wire. It's a net win for the telco, free money in a lot of ways. About as offensive as actually charging money to send SMS over a signaling system that is already active (and mostly idling) 24/7 anyway.
Providing more bandwidth to the end user, for nearer to what it actually costs, goes against every single principle they've built their companies upon for the last several decades. They wont go down that path without a lot of kicking and screaming.
The handset uses repositories in the same way debian based stuff does - apt-get install whatever. Easy debian is also available so the handset can run pretty much everything you would find in your typical linux distro. Including stuff like open office, gimp, and on and on. Plus it's all free. For me this is better than the app store, but each to their own.
On paper it does actually have pretty decent specs - Seems to be a tad better than my N900, though the environment is too closed for my liking. I prefer the Meego / Maemo stuff better myself.
It can easily be fooled for sure, but it's just one tool that makes up a fairly comprehensive approach to the whole issue surrounding PV (positive vetting) - If you do the relaxation and zone out during the polygraph, there's a pretty good chance the examiner is going to notice this, but also your results are quite likely not going to mesh up with all the other information available.
An example:
You did drugs during your high school years but you lie on your PV forms, the PV people go and interview a bunch of obscure friends of friends and get the dirt - it correlates pretty good amongst strangers, they ask you about it during the polygraph, you answer "no, never did drugs" and the polygraph flat lines (or whatever it does to show it thinks you are telling the truth)
Goodbye security clearance.
They don't care if you did drugs in the past, they just want to know you are truthful, actually playing the persona you say you have. So, anyone wanting to work at a secret 3 letter agency, honesty is probably the easiest way to get your foot in the door. You can still keep the inner sociopath, fear, paranoia, and so on, just don't tell anyone about it, ever. :-)
Serious question, how do they even know if you are tethering? I have a Nokia N900 that I simply set up as an access point any time I feel the need - not uncommon for me to have 4 or 5 computers connected. Before that I was using joikuspot on Symbian phones to do the same thing. I don't pay for tethering but I do it routinely.
Nothing much is going on other than one company carefully building a wall around their playground.
The market is significantly bigger than Apple though, so neither of those anti-competitive terms apply. Depending on which side of the fence you stand, you could easily argue that there are far more capable handsets on store shelves - some significantly more open than others. Quite a few Linux based handsets out there with little or nothing standing in the way of root access.
The only way the iAd thing could fall in to any of those categories is if there were no alternatives on the market. There are dozens of manufacturers, thousands of phone models to choose from - competition is fierce and healthy in this domain.
The police are only ~asking~ - Facebook can say no - and really, given how long the AFP have been banging away at this, it appears as if many are actually saying no. Now the AFP is acting like a big frigging baby, going to the press because "facebook wont do what we tell them, so we're going to make them look like they don't want to save the children"
I can't really figure out why it's the AFP pushing this - I would imagine there is a tad more to the story than just reporting crime, probably someone wants to figure out the guilt trail of association via friend links. Who knows.
Nokia N900 in addition to those posted by Mr2001 - there are loads 'dream phones' out there. Really, when your phone is quite a bit more powerful than desktops of only a hand full of years ago, things can only get better. Mine, I can ssh in to it, forward X, basically do everything available from within your average linux distro. It's all there.
Probably you know this already, apologies in advance...
In most metro areas these days you have small footprint systems, several per block. In larger buildings they are often placed on each floor, the antennas anyway. I'd be quite surprised if any single cell footprint had 5000 users at one time. Back when I was working in the field, this was more than 10 years ago now so things have probably progressed a bit, SS7 was almost always a 64kbps transmission going down one of the channels in the trunk. Overall the SS7 could handle maybe a maximum of 1000 concurrent users, I think the upper limit was 1024, but it's been a long time. Only a small fraction of this total are able to make actual voice calls. Bandwidth has always been pretty tight and likely always will be. Like you mentioned, the size of the cell site makes a big difference. Make that smaller and you can increase the available bandwidth to each user.
I bought a Nokia N900 the other day, mostly the same specifications but probably a tad more open than Android. I don't think it's a slippery slope but you are right about the blurred distinction. It's not really a phone, not a laptop, not a tablet, not a PDA... I think maybe it's all of them, only a lot smaller.
It was definitely useful to someone in google, you don't collect this stuff by accident. Not only that but if you can't understand how this is an utter gold mine for various governments around the world, then you need to soak up a few more conspiracy theories coupled with information published by groups like the Federation of American Scientists (fas.org) - that'll gain you a tremendous amount of insight in to the actual real life inner workings of various secret 3 letter agencies. Former 3 letter agency drone myself, so I speak from experience.
Traffic analysis, it's all part of the bigger picture. Less than a second can still yield interesting results. MAC addresses tied to latitude and longitude, secret rooms in major ISP's that have access to whatever they need, enough information that they can accurately deduce who you are and where you are, but even more scary, who you talk to, who they talk to, and on and on for as many layers as the data storage medium can log. This is, effectively, the same type of thing that facebook does. Facebook obviously figured out a commercial use for it. Governments have been doing the same thing for as long as they've existed.
It used to be in the Symbian S60V2 era. These days as a result of commercial entities wanting to eliminate piracy and others wanting to make wads of cash through sales of certificates, your average cell phone is pretty much locked down. If you want to install an application capable of doing anything more complex than "Hello World" you'll need to have it signed first.
That said, not all handsets are closed, the Nokia N900 comes with its own xterm right out of the box - root is just a 'sudo getroot' away : ) Applications are trivially simple to install. I don't believe Nokia has sold terribly many of them, so I can't imagine it's a popular target for crapware.
Possibly this is true in America - I have no idea, but in Australia and particularly Asia, almost all of those printers are 100% recycled and end up as your next razor blade, coke can, or spork, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you ever get the chance to pick through a dump site there is no 'treasure' there anymore - one persons trash really is just trash by the time it's tossed out on the pile.
For most people 1TB is pretty big.
To answer the question, NAS boxes. They are moderately cheap, come with numerous drive bays, they are usually small, quiet, and unobtrusive when you stick tape over the blue LED's.
Although I saw my first piece of digital porn on the commodore 64 (Samantha fox if I recall) - it wasn't until the Amiga came along that I ~really~ saw porn, with actual skin tone. (Sheds a tear) It certainly drove my collection forward.
Not at 60GHz, you'll be lucky if it makes it through your hair thick Japanese paper wall dividers : )