Yes, CDMA phones can be moved to other carriers. But this is for voice alone. When you start talking about features such as Picture/video Mail, WAP browsing, Push-To-Talk services, Downloadable Games, and Ringtones, then you start running into problems.
In order to bring, say a SprintPCS CDMA phone to Verizon CDMA, you will need to obtain something called a Master Subsidy Lock code or MSL. This code is required for phone programming. This can actually be found by using bitpim and sifting through binary files stored on the handset's file system. A pain...but possible with USB cable.
Now assuming you could find a rep stupid enough to activate this phone. Countless people have tried this in failed, only one or two people I know have actually done this. This through social engineering or them having access to the provisioning system to do so. Ok, so after all this hell, you are left with a voice phone. No data. Yippie.
CDMA carriers customize their phone's firmware to meet their needs. One major difference being, SprintPCS uses J2ME and Verizon uses BREW. A lot of data service offerings are also heavily tailored for specific environments.
With no SIM, and fundimental differences between carriers, you will simply end up with a crippled piece of junk. And I bet you the "free phone" would have more features than that.
The CDMA spec actually has something for SIM-like functionality, but this has really only been popular in asia. Currently, no US carriers have deployed the technology. Very little benefit..honestly.
So why give people the ability to take their phones to the other carrier? Sprint and Verizon eat it when you purchase a phone -- they subsidize the price of handsets. And thats why a Master Subsidy Lock is in place.
Lastly, this lawsuit against Verizon is pure silliness. Lets see here, Verizon lets you return your handset after 15-30 days if it does not work out -- no questions asked. If you do not like their bluetooth offering, return the phone. How can you sue over that? Maybe OBEX and OPP are buggy? These types of firmware lockouts happen all the time due to pressing release dates and buggy features.
I dont understand how a camera phone is *any* different than a traditional camera or digital camera.
I can find very small, compact, quiet digital cameras in the shape of watches and pens at the local Walmart. Some film cameras are also very small. I'd much rather do this than the ass 320x240 blurromatic I have on my Sanyo 8100.
Oh well, downloading porn at 100Mbps is worth a few thousand gallons of sewage in my yard. Hopefully I can also total one of my cars in a sinkhole, because im just going to get nailed on trade-in anyway.
You may really want to consider hiring a Network Engineer consultant. In particular, someone well versed in Cisco products. My load balacing product of choice is the F5 BigIP, but a Cisco CSM would work too. You can hire a "CCIE", but these guys are always way overpaid and perform just as well as a non-certified seasoned engineer.
I am not sure how much traffic you actually are looking to handle in terms of megabits or gigabits per second, but lets just assume you need something less than 100 megs. I will also assume there is no need for geographic redundancy.
Secure a good colocation facility that you will have physical access to. I like colos ran by large internet carriers which also provide cheap 100/1000 meg ethernet connectivity to the internet. This is typically cheaper to terminate than bringing SONET out to the suburbs.
Hire or consult a network engineer. Unless you really want to becoming a makeshift expert overnight in switching and routing, do not tread here by yourself.
Think about the future. Your network will need to scale, so make sure the swtiching and routing can grow as you grow.
Think about redundancy. Don't just drop in a single router and switch because "its cheaper". Don't just bring in one circuit because "its cheaper". But don't go too crazy on redundancy -- compare the financial impact to an outage vs. cost of equipment. If you lose a million dollars for each outage minute during peak hours, that lousy extra $50,000 for an additional 7206 doesn't look so bad after all.
Avoid homebrew equipment where possible. Yea, you could save thousands by not using an F5 BigIP load balancer or making your own VPN box, but when things go wrong, who's going to support it? Is it really worth it? Only purchase hardware that you have extensively tested in your lab environment. Make sure you buy that support contract. Yea, they likely make a profit off of each one, but when things go down, its their ass, not yours!
More technically speaking, I would throw a pair of routers on the edge. Create at least two major network segments, external and internal. Use internal non-routable addressing for your internal segment. Put a BigIP between the two segments for load balancing. You can build a "VIP" which contains many different hosts that are dynamically load balanced based on specifications. Boxes can be taken out of load balancing if they do not respond properly to specified requests, or go down. Cisco's CSM can do the same. Stay away from Local Director.
You probably dont need a firewall in your network, unless you are restricting backchannel access. Use ACL's on the router and your load balancing layer between public and privately addressed segments will act as a natural barrier.
If you are serving web traffic to a lot of slower clients, and want to decrease download time, check out some of the web compression products. It turned some of our 18 second page load times (over dialup) into 4 second load times...
I am not a DBA, so I cannot advise you on how you can scale above 1 DB machine. Im sure there is some sort of clustering facility.
My (Internet) company provides "merit increases" once a year, on a routine basis, for all employees.
Usually this includes a 4-5% increase in salary, depending on performance. We also are given a very modest grant of common stock options, but I dont preceive this as in lieu of compensation. The strike is the closing price of that day.
The stock options have been more beneicial than my 4% raise, because frankly, our stock has gone up over 120% over the last year.
However, its merely a "gee that would be nice" perk...as we are already seeing industry standard raises.
I don't understand why pirates get off on broadcasting material that otherwise would get no air time. There is usually a pretty good reason why its unprofitable --- no one wants to listen to it!
There are only 200 FM channels in the USA, similar to other countries. A significant amount of those are rendered useless by adjacent stations. This is a rare resource and I am glad the FCC keeps little kids from gobbling up spectrum, leaving it to the professionals. Especially when you have enough bandwidth on your DSL line to serve the 4 1/2 people that actually want to listen to it.
Don't get me wrong, I love pirate radio, but the "free speech" argument just doesn't work.
While the idea isn't new, its great to see some active work on this again. Computer/device technology is completely outpacing battery technology, and its about time.
Its gonna take a lot of batteries to grind down before you would have any usable material for a dirty bomb, but I suspect that a lot of undereducated hippies will be protesting the usage of such marvels, and it will never see the light of day.
Yea, because, uh, i like it how articles from Korean News (media outlet of DPRK) pop up on the Google News "top story" section. Its such a credible news agency....
Not to mention the specifications for a "Level 6" PC would change every 4 months. I'd need a pile full of slide rules to figure out the CPU speed of a box built in Jan 2004 vs. August 2004.
1080p @ 30fps is in the ATSC standards. No one has really adopted it, and good luck finding a display that supports this mode!
Its hard enough finding a plasma or LCD that supports 720p, with all that 852x480 junk on the market. Do we really need to pay $4k USD for something that can't even do HDTV?
Back in the day, there was a weird program for the Amiga computer called "Algoplayer". This program used some crazy AI code to generate random MOD-like songs, based on a seed number. Of course, the genre is techno/house!
A few years back, I brushed the dust off of my old Amiga, powered it on, and recorded a few good songs produced from this generator.
I have posted several MP3's of sample output on this website, and some of it rivals some of the garbage coming out of the Dance Top 40 as of late.
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In order to bring, say a SprintPCS CDMA phone to Verizon CDMA, you will need to obtain something called a Master Subsidy Lock code or MSL. This code is required for phone programming. This can actually be found by using bitpim and sifting through binary files stored on the handset's file system. A pain...but possible with USB cable.
Now assuming you could find a rep stupid enough to activate this phone. Countless people have tried this in failed, only one or two people I know have actually done this. This through social engineering or them having access to the provisioning system to do so. Ok, so after all this hell, you are left with a voice phone. No data. Yippie.
CDMA carriers customize their phone's firmware to meet their needs. One major difference being, SprintPCS uses J2ME and Verizon uses BREW. A lot of data service offerings are also heavily tailored for specific environments.
With no SIM, and fundimental differences between carriers, you will simply end up with a crippled piece of junk. And I bet you the "free phone" would have more features than that.
The CDMA spec actually has something for SIM-like functionality, but this has really only been popular in asia. Currently, no US carriers have deployed the technology. Very little benefit..honestly.
So why give people the ability to take their phones to the other carrier? Sprint and Verizon eat it when you purchase a phone -- they subsidize the price of handsets. And thats why a Master Subsidy Lock is in place.
Lastly, this lawsuit against Verizon is pure silliness. Lets see here, Verizon lets you return your handset after 15-30 days if it does not work out -- no questions asked. If you do not like their bluetooth offering, return the phone. How can you sue over that? Maybe OBEX and OPP are buggy? These types of firmware lockouts happen all the time due to pressing release dates and buggy features.
Now that makes a whole lot of sense to me.
I can find very small, compact, quiet digital cameras in the shape of watches and pens at the local Walmart. Some film cameras are also very small. I'd much rather do this than the ass 320x240 blurromatic I have on my Sanyo 8100.
Oh well, downloading porn at 100Mbps is worth a few thousand gallons of sewage in my yard. Hopefully I can also total one of my cars in a sinkhole, because im just going to get nailed on trade-in anyway.
You may really want to consider hiring a Network Engineer consultant. In particular, someone well versed in Cisco products. My load balacing product of choice is the F5 BigIP, but a Cisco CSM would work too. You can hire a "CCIE", but these guys are always way overpaid and perform just as well as a non-certified seasoned engineer.
I am not sure how much traffic you actually are looking to handle in terms of megabits or gigabits per second, but lets just assume you need something less than 100 megs. I will also assume there is no need for geographic redundancy.
Secure a good colocation facility that you will have physical access to. I like colos ran by large internet carriers which also provide cheap 100/1000 meg ethernet connectivity to the internet. This is typically cheaper to terminate than bringing SONET out to the suburbs.
Hire or consult a network engineer. Unless you really want to becoming a makeshift expert overnight in switching and routing, do not tread here by yourself.
Think about the future. Your network will need to scale, so make sure the swtiching and routing can grow as you grow.
Think about redundancy. Don't just drop in a single router and switch because "its cheaper". Don't just bring in one circuit because "its cheaper". But don't go too crazy on redundancy -- compare the financial impact to an outage vs. cost of equipment. If you lose a million dollars for each outage minute during peak hours, that lousy extra $50,000 for an additional 7206 doesn't look so bad after all.
Avoid homebrew equipment where possible. Yea, you could save thousands by not using an F5 BigIP load balancer or making your own VPN box, but when things go wrong, who's going to support it? Is it really worth it? Only purchase hardware that you have extensively tested in your lab environment. Make sure you buy that support contract. Yea, they likely make a profit off of each one, but when things go down, its their ass, not yours!
More technically speaking, I would throw a pair of routers on the edge. Create at least two major network segments, external and internal. Use internal non-routable addressing for your internal segment. Put a BigIP between the two segments for load balancing. You can build a "VIP" which contains many different hosts that are dynamically load balanced based on specifications. Boxes can be taken out of load balancing if they do not respond properly to specified requests, or go down. Cisco's CSM can do the same. Stay away from Local Director.
You probably dont need a firewall in your network, unless you are restricting backchannel access. Use ACL's on the router and your load balancing layer between public and privately addressed segments will act as a natural barrier.
If you are serving web traffic to a lot of slower clients, and want to decrease download time, check out some of the web compression products. It turned some of our 18 second page load times (over dialup) into 4 second load times...
I am not a DBA, so I cannot advise you on how you can scale above 1 DB machine. Im sure there is some sort of clustering facility.
Good luck, and don't do it by yourself.
My (Internet) company provides "merit increases" once a year, on a routine basis, for all employees. Usually this includes a 4-5% increase in salary, depending on performance. We also are given a very modest grant of common stock options, but I dont preceive this as in lieu of compensation. The strike is the closing price of that day. The stock options have been more beneicial than my 4% raise, because frankly, our stock has gone up over 120% over the last year. However, its merely a "gee that would be nice" perk...as we are already seeing industry standard raises.
There are only 200 FM channels in the USA, similar to other countries. A significant amount of those are rendered useless by adjacent stations. This is a rare resource and I am glad the FCC keeps little kids from gobbling up spectrum, leaving it to the professionals. Especially when you have enough bandwidth on your DSL line to serve the 4 1/2 people that actually want to listen to it.
Don't get me wrong, I love pirate radio, but the "free speech" argument just doesn't work.
http://www.siemens-mobile.com/repository/676/67657 /MULTIHOP1_72dpi.jpg .....with 10 meter range, using 500MHz of spectrum.
How is this technology practical? Good luck getting licenses in any industrialized nation!
http://www.king5.com is currently offering a live helicopter stream of the scene, along with misc. USGS commentary.
Its gonna take a lot of batteries to grind down before you would have any usable material for a dirty bomb, but I suspect that a lot of undereducated hippies will be protesting the usage of such marvels, and it will never see the light of day.
Oh well, we can dream!
Yea, because, uh, i like it how articles from Korean News (media outlet of DPRK) pop up on the Google News "top story" section. Its such a credible news agency....
Not to mention the specifications for a "Level 6" PC would change every 4 months. I'd need a pile full of slide rules to figure out the CPU speed of a box built in Jan 2004 vs. August 2004.
1080p @ 30fps is in the ATSC standards. No one has really adopted it, and good luck finding a display that supports this mode! Its hard enough finding a plasma or LCD that supports 720p, with all that 852x480 junk on the market. Do we really need to pay $4k USD for something that can't even do HDTV?
A few years back, I brushed the dust off of my old Amiga, powered it on, and recorded a few good songs produced from this generator.
I have posted several MP3's of sample output on this website, and some of it rivals some of the garbage coming out of the Dance Top 40 as of late.
http://www.maokhian.com/music/