I live in an area with fairly bad mobile signal - I'm always trying to look things up on Wikipedia but finding I can't. Fortunately my Treo 680 smartphone can take 8GB SDHC cards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_680), so I could fit this on with room to spare for MP3s and photos, and future growth of Wikipedia. Very tempting, though I'd need to port it to something like Lua and GCC - obviously the porting would be fairly trivial by the time Palm releases its Linux-based Treos in early 2008...
At least in the UK, you can easily buy 100% renewable-energy electricity for not much more than standard rates. So if I had a plugin hybrid a huge amount of my car use could be based on renewable energy.
The Treo 680 is quite recent - shipping since Nov 06, so not such a surprise that it supports SDHC. The Palm OS is long in the tooth, and first Treo was a long time ago, but there are some recent Treo models, including quite a few CDMA PalmOS ones and Windows Mobile ones. UMTS PalmOS Treos don't exist, which is a pain for us Europeans...
Because I have terrible mobile coverage at home and in many local pubs (although that will improve with 3G femtocells, and also the fact that two major mobile phone operators are merging their radio access [cell tower] networks) - yes, I do live in the sticks...
I do frequently look up things on the Net from my phone, but it would be quicker to have Wikipedia online rather than waiting 5-10 seconds or longer for each page to load (Opera Mini is pretty good at compressing data to speed transfer over GPRS but it's still not as fast as being off-net, and it's not a native app).
The issue isn't really CPU speed - my Treo 680 has an Intel XScale (ARM) at 312 MHz, so it's easily capable of uncompressing a single page (ideal case but might lose too much compression efficiency) or 100-1000 pages in a cluster (with index) fairly quickly. I've used desktop PCs that were slower, and uncompressing from SD Card will be way faster than using the slow GPRS.
The main issue is compressing the Wikipedia data in a form that's randomly accessible and ideally has a searchable index. At a pinch, and index of page titles only would be OK, but you really want a full keyword index, at which point the overall size goes up quite a lot.
The friendliness and overall competence of the Ubuntu forums is incredibly important to the popularity of Ubuntu - everyone will sooner run into issues, or just want to ask "how do I do X" questions, and the Ubuntu forums are great at providing answers. Another important point is the sheer volume of traffic and the provision of HOWTO threads - it's pretty easy to find another user who's had the same problem. Having said that, the general rise of forums for Linux is a great help - sometimes a MEPIS forum provides the answer.
Another reason why Ubuntu is successful is because it actually encourages derivative distros and helps with some official ones such as Xubuntu (XFCE, lighter weight), Kubuntu (KDE), Edubuntu, etc. People who want a completely free (libre) distro can use the GNU derivative (forget the name), people who want lots of proprietary codecs/drivers can use Linux MINT, all while benefiting from the basic Ubuntu core.
Or more usefully, compress Wikipedia onto a single SD card in my mobile phone (Palm Treo) - with SDHC format cards, it can do 8 GB today.
Compression format would need to make it possible to randomly access pages, of course, and an efficient search index would be needed as well, so it's not quite that simple.
I used to have a Treo 600 where the battery was not user-replaceable - had it for three years and now my mother's using it, and it's still going strong, without a replacement battery. Since the Treo doesn't use much power, the battery would easily last for a day or two with reasonable usage, which is not bad considering the touch screen, SD card, GPRS, etc.
This isn't really normal VoIP - what happens is that the phone runs the normal GSM protocols over UMA (universal/unlicensed mobile access - see http://www.umatoday.com/umaOverview.php for more info), from the phone, over the WiFi access point and broadband router, up to a UNC server (Universal Network Controller) - this is somewhat like a base station controller (Google for BSC+BTS+GSM for more info) that controls the UMA+WiFi access boxes in a large number of homes.
So... GSM voice runs over UMA which runs over IP, as far as the UNC, which then converts it back into normal voice protocols (SS7 switching basically) to the MSC (GSM voice switch) - not sure if that link is over TDM (conventional GSM) or IP. Anyway, the UNC box doesn't actually do any VoIP, all voice switching is done by the MSC, exactly as for normal GSM phone calls.
The benefits of all this are:
1. In-home mobile coverage - I could really do with this at home, as my coverage is very poor - buying a generic powered radio booster (antenna x 2 plus amplifier) is expensive, and doesn't help if there's absolutely no coverage. For some people in rural areas, this may be only way to get mobile coverage at home.
2. Lower cost calls - depending on subscription costs of course, and installation costs, but price should really be lower (see point 4.)
3. (For the mobile operator) More precise 'home zone' tariffs - subscriber gets low cost or free calls from home via UMA, rather than in wider area based on zipcode/postcode. Good when you are at home, less good if nearby.
4. (For mobile operator) Reduce load on normal base station network, and the aggregation network from base stations to the voice/data switches in Mobile core (MSC etc)
5. (For mobile operator) Encourage people to use their mobile phone for all calls, instead of landline - a.k.a. fixed-mobile substitution - and to use the mobile for everything including Internet surfing, email, etc. The controversial Palm Foleo could help here, by letting you use a large keyboard and screen with your single smartphone device, but that's not essential to this idea.
6. (For mobile operator) Harder to switch to another mobile operator due to hassle/cost of going to another similar setup, or losing benefits 1 and 2.
The other way to do this 'fixed-mobile convergence' (FMC) is called femtocells - rather than using WiFi, use a 3G mini-basestation (known as a femtocell), so that you can choose any 3G phone, not just the WiFi Dual-Mode Handsets (DMH) which have poorer battery life and are much less common. So you can get exactly the handset you want, probably at lower cost and with longer battery life. Sprint is doing similar things with its data-oriented 4G/WiMax service, according to http://lightreading.com/
The QoS (latency, jitter, bandwidth and packet loss) for your broadband may well affect voice calls, just like true VoIP - if someone does a big download, you may find call quality suffers or call is dropped. The world *really* needs Packeteer-style TCP rate shaping (and generic DiffServ type IP QoS) in the broadband router, and ideally in the broadband network - but that gets into the whole net neutrality issue, as the mobile operator would need to pay broadband telco to do this...
Caveat: I'm not a UMA/GSM expert, so the detailed architecture comments may need some clarification/correction, but I believe they are correct.
Not too surprising then that the iPhone is locked to AT&T, despite it being sold without subsidy - possibly the only GSM phone ever sold at full price while remaining locked, which is a nice earner for Apple but really doesn't help customers. Anyone who travels outside the US will soon realise the pain of not being able to swap in a cheaper GSM SIM card (just a few dollars for prepaid accounts in most countries) to make cheaper calls outside the US...
We already have an infrastructure to deliver power to plug-in hybrid cars - it's called the electricity network. The price of electricity is probably higher than petrol/gasoline, but it's quite feasible to deliver clean power to plug-ins over the current network.
One really key point about plug-in hybrids is that their large batteries provide an enormous energy storage resource across a national electricity grid - if people keep them plugged in when they're not driving them, it's possible for the car owner to sell electricity back to the grid at peak times. This in turns means you can use highly bursty green energy sources (windmills, solar panels, tidal barriers, etc) effectively, smoothing out their energy delivery to match demand.
This requires careful management by smart software so you have enough energy stored in your car when you need it, and perhaps some network changes, but people can already sell electricity from their own windmills/solar panels back to the electricity companies in the UK, so the only new part is plugging in those hybrids.
Patents are involved, but they are Microsoft's not Xandros', since Xandros is quite a small company that clearly has no patents of interest - that's why it says MS is not licensing patents FROM Xandros. Another part of this article says:
"The agreement with Xandros, to be announced Monday, includes a promise by Microsoft to refrain from pursuing patent claims against users of Xandros software."
I agree about the market being people who want to avoid carrying heavy laptops around on trips.
The Foleo does have VGA out - I see a big part of its market being sales people and managers who travel a lot and need to make Powerpoint presentations. The only question is how good Dataviz's Powerpoint support is, but they've had many years to work on this so I expect it's pretty good.
I just talked to a colleague of mine who's been on a business trip all over Latin America and Central America recently - he's seriously tempted by this, purely to be able to leave his heavy laptop behind and make travelling a lot easier. He's even willing to buy a large SD card and sync his laptop's key data files onto the Foleo to enable this. And this is not a Linux geek, but a technical manager who travels a lot.
I think Palm has hit the spot just right here - there's a definite trend for people to dump laptops for smartphones, and this will make it a lot easier. Just having a sub-laptop that is instant-on and never needs antivirus updates is very attractive. My main Windows laptop, provided by employer, spends a huge amount of its time and disk throughput just running antivirus scans, software updates, etc, and Windows needs defragging and lots of general maintenance to keep it reasonably fast and secure (everyone should really run Secunia inspector to ensure non-MS apps are updated btw).
Making it Linux-based was very smart too - it enables them to do better instant-on with a platform they can fully customize, and use more power-efficient hardware, and of course the open source community will start porting apps and improving the platform for free, enabling the techier business users to get more done.
The more Windows bloat is on your heavy laptop, the better the Foleo looks...
As long as it supports SD cards with SDHC, which goes from 8 GB to 32 GB, the mass storage would not be an issue. A bigger issue is the lack of ported media players that work on its ARM processor, but that should be solved in time. If Palm ensures that the APIs and development kit are open enough, the open source community will no doubt port some apps, as this is a lightweight instant-on Linux laptop that will be very attractive to geeks like me who don't want a Windows laptop for non-work use.
I think Palm have been quite smart on the market for this: email is the niche that will pull some discretionary business users (the sort who buy their own phone or other gizmos if not too expensive) that travel a LOT and don't need a full laptop - mostly execs, meaning it's critical that Palm connects the Foleo to Blackberry very quickly. The Linux base and openness are what will pull in the geek community to provide open source apps and make the platform more capable. And commercial developers from the Palm world will see this as a good way to expand their market, covering a number of different smartphone platforms.
One other interesting thing: Palm recently bought the developers of Chatteremail, a great push email app for Palm OS that uses IMAP IDLE to enable instant email delivery from most IMAP servers. This is great for people who want Blackberry style instant email delivery, without the cost of a Blackberry subscription and the clunky Blackberry OS and hardware.
Another smart decision is to work with all types of smartphone - the smartphone market is very fragmented so this could be a great way to maximise market.
Bottom line: Real road warriors hate the weight of "real laptops" and the delay in getting email, waking up the laptop, poor battery life, etc. Given a light power brick (apparently more like a phone charger than a laptop's), I think the Foleo is a real winner.
Comcast has already deployed IPv6 in its core network and will deploy it to homes, simply because it's already gone beyond the available 10.x addresses and is now on public IPv4 space - it needs about 100 million devices for its IP voice/video/net customers. So the other incentive to use IPv6 is simply that you won't get Comcast service at some future date without having IPv6. Of course, this will be largely transparent to the customer as they'll use native IPv6 within Comcast and then be converted to and from IPv4 on the IPv4 Internet - but it will create a base of users who are IPv6. These users won't have IPv4 at all in their home (otherwise you don't solve the address scarcity issue).
Also, if Comcast ever decides to serve their video content outwards to Internet users who don't have Comcast access, it would be easy to provide it over IPv6 as well as v4. This doesn't mean exclusive IPv6 content, but it shows one step in the process of wider IPv6 usage.
The other thing I've seen, working in the telco industry, is that IPv6 support requirements are now moving into the management software (operational support system) space, and of course the federal government mandate for IPv6 is driving things too. I'm now much more confident than a few years ago that IPv6 will happen.
I use Andrews and Arnold - http://www.aaisp.net.uk/. They give you 8-16 static IPv4 addresses for free, support IPv6 out of the box, are very reliable, and even text (SMS) me when the line goes down. They have lots of latency and loss tracking web reports, and online fault tracking, status blog, etc. Their techie-oriented page mentions some more nice features: URL:http://www.aaisp.net.uk/tech.html.
Most importantly, you can get through to a real techie in about 30 seconds typically if you have a real problem. I'm on a usage-based tariff (unfortunately very common in UK) but this only applies during working days, not after 6pm or weekends, so I never go over 2 GB (don't do music/video stuff during the day).
A colleague switched from Pipex to Andrews and Arnold and is quite impressed with them. And no, I don't get commission or own shares etc:)
Exactly - and now I have to enable JavaScript for the whole of Google.com, or the entire menu bar vanishes! Not hard to do with Firefox's NoScript extension, but Google needs to have a sensible fallback when JavaScript is disabled.
Getting something this basic and visible so badly wrong is not a good sign - it's hardly rocket science to provide fallbacks...
Comcast's plans show that some homes will be IPv6 only, simply because they can't rely on getting enough IPv4 address space for 100 million IP endpoints (including set top boxes, VoIP ATAs, and cable modems) - they already have well over 16 million addresses.
There's not much point having v6 to the cable modems if you then need v4 within the home - complex NAT makes it harder to reach all the endpoints that you need to monitor and configure (if you're Comcast) in order to quickly determine the answer to "why isn't my TV working" (answer could be "because your room-mate's PC is using all your bandwidth" or "your IPTV STB has a damaged ethernet port" or "CMTS port has failed" etc). Managing only to the cable modem is not enough, and going from v6 to v4 is an unnecessary barrier...
DOCSIS 3.0 mandates both IPv6 and IPv4 support in cable modems, as well as the other improvements. See http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/06mar/slides/v6op s-4/v6ops-4.ppt for a presentation about why cable MSOs (operators) are deploying IPv6 (Comcast already has IPv6 in its core network and plans to roll out to homes, because it's exhausted the 10.x address space already in IPv4, and is now onto public IPv4). So this means that DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems will really be the first mass deployed IPv6 capable devices, and some cable operators will turn IPv6 on, certainly Comcast.
Agree completely - IPv6 has almost identical QoS/CoS features (DiffServ code points aka DSCP, which supersede the old TOS byte but are used in similar way), and is really not at all relevant to net neutrality or QoS. IPv6 is really about avoiding the need for NAT, and will primarily be taken up for very large IPTV / Cable TV deployments, e.g. Comcast which is already IPv6 in core IP network and going IPv6 for the home networks as well, due to sheer number of addresses required (beyond what you can fit behind a 10.x address - 100 million needed). Other IPv6 early adopters are US federal agencies, AsiaPac (esp. China and Japan), and IMS (possibly, can be used with IPv4).
I don't think router performance is really an IPv6 issue - most core routers already do hardware-based forwarding and are IPv6 enabled, and many network cores are now MPLS based, in which case you just tag the IPv6 packets with an MPLS label on the provider edge (PE router), on ingress to core, and MPLS switch them across the core, just like IPv4 on top of MPLS today. So any MPLS-enabled cores (e.g. BT's 21CN, where they are replacing the whole legacy PSTN phone network with IP core and VoIP/IMS) can adopt IPv6 very easily, without any real performance hit.
The real issue is adoption and chicken/egg issues as you say - this is why Comcast is important, as it provides its own content servers for IPTV, as well as the whole core and aggregation network, and manages the home network equipment (set top box, cable mode, VoIP adapter, etc) - so their decision to go IPv6 a while back will act as a model for other large IPTV deployments and help move the equipment vendors across a wider range of kit, as well as driving IPv6 support in software such as NMSs, OSSs (operational support systems, e.g. inventory and activation), etc.
Windows managed to become "a legitimate OS for the average computer user" just fine, while still losing hardware support on some major upgrades (including release of both XP and Vista). If Feisty is breaking hardware support, that's annoying, but having spent almost a day trying to get a simple Ethernet card working on an old WinME PC recently, it's not just the Linux world that has this problem...
Who are these "most analysts" exactly? OLPC shows every sign of becoming a long-term success, in the sense of delivering a valuable educational tool supporting independent learning as well as school work. The fact that this tool happens to be an innovative laptop is secondary.
You are really very wrong about IPv6, and deployments on the ground back this up - the cost of config is real but most core equipment already comes with IPv6 supported, so you just have to enable it.
The largest US cable operator, Comcast, has already enabled IPv6 alongside IPv4 in its core network and has plans to deploy it all the way to the edge, largely because it needs 100 million IP addresses for its customers and has already used up 16 million addresses (the whole of the 10.x address space, it's having to use public IPv4 space already). See http://www.6journal.org/archive/00000265/01/alain- durand.pdf for some details - they will go dual-stack in most parts of network but IPv6 only for new set top boxes (STBs) and other home network kit such as cable modems (CMs) and VoIP MTAs.
I agree that IPv6 doesn't solve all the problems mentioned, but then it was never meant to. Its enablement of end to end services without the innovation-hostile NAT does mean that you have a better chance of clean solutions to problems such as QoS. IPv6 does address Mobile IP much better than IPv4, so you can keep the same IP address as you roam from one mobile network to another, without inefficient triangular routing of all traffic via a home agent.
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I live in an area with fairly bad mobile signal - I'm always trying to look things up on Wikipedia but finding I can't. Fortunately my Treo 680 smartphone can take 8GB SDHC cards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_680), so I could fit this on with room to spare for MP3s and photos, and future growth of Wikipedia. Very tempting, though I'd need to port it to something like Lua and GCC - obviously the porting would be fairly trivial by the time Palm releases its Linux-based Treos in early 2008...
At least in the UK, you can easily buy 100% renewable-energy electricity for not much more than standard rates. So if I had a plugin hybrid a huge amount of my car use could be based on renewable energy.
The Treo 680 is quite recent - shipping since Nov 06, so not such a surprise that it supports SDHC. The Palm OS is long in the tooth, and first Treo was a long time ago, but there are some recent Treo models, including quite a few CDMA PalmOS ones and Windows Mobile ones. UMTS PalmOS Treos don't exist, which is a pain for us Europeans...
Because I have terrible mobile coverage at home and in many local pubs (although that will improve with 3G femtocells, and also the fact that two major mobile phone operators are merging their radio access [cell tower] networks) - yes, I do live in the sticks...
I do frequently look up things on the Net from my phone, but it would be quicker to have Wikipedia online rather than waiting 5-10 seconds or longer for each page to load (Opera Mini is pretty good at compressing data to speed transfer over GPRS but it's still not as fast as being off-net, and it's not a native app).
The issue isn't really CPU speed - my Treo 680 has an Intel XScale (ARM) at 312 MHz, so it's easily capable of uncompressing a single page (ideal case but might lose too much compression efficiency) or 100-1000 pages in a cluster (with index) fairly quickly. I've used desktop PCs that were slower, and uncompressing from SD Card will be way faster than using the slow GPRS.
The main issue is compressing the Wikipedia data in a form that's randomly accessible and ideally has a searchable index. At a pinch, and index of page titles only would be OK, but you really want a full keyword index, at which point the overall size goes up quite a lot.
The friendliness and overall competence of the Ubuntu forums is incredibly important to the popularity of Ubuntu - everyone will sooner run into issues, or just want to ask "how do I do X" questions, and the Ubuntu forums are great at providing answers. Another important point is the sheer volume of traffic and the provision of HOWTO threads - it's pretty easy to find another user who's had the same problem. Having said that, the general rise of forums for Linux is a great help - sometimes a MEPIS forum provides the answer.
Another reason why Ubuntu is successful is because it actually encourages derivative distros and helps with some official ones such as Xubuntu (XFCE, lighter weight), Kubuntu (KDE), Edubuntu, etc. People who want a completely free (libre) distro can use the GNU derivative (forget the name), people who want lots of proprietary codecs/drivers can use Linux MINT, all while benefiting from the basic Ubuntu core.
Or more usefully, compress Wikipedia onto a single SD card in my mobile phone (Palm Treo) - with SDHC format cards, it can do 8 GB today.
Compression format would need to make it possible to randomly access pages, of course, and an efficient search index would be needed as well, so it's not quite that simple.
I used to have a Treo 600 where the battery was not user-replaceable - had it for three years and now my mother's using it, and it's still going strong, without a replacement battery. Since the Treo doesn't use much power, the battery would easily last for a day or two with reasonable usage, which is not bad considering the touch screen, SD card, GPRS, etc.
It all depends on how quickly the battery ages.
This isn't really normal VoIP - what happens is that the phone runs the normal GSM protocols over UMA (universal/unlicensed mobile access - see http://www.umatoday.com/umaOverview.php for more info), from the phone, over the WiFi access point and broadband router, up to a UNC server (Universal Network Controller) - this is somewhat like a base station controller (Google for BSC+BTS+GSM for more info) that controls the UMA+WiFi access boxes in a large number of homes.
So... GSM voice runs over UMA which runs over IP, as far as the UNC, which then converts it back into normal voice protocols (SS7 switching basically) to the MSC (GSM voice switch) - not sure if that link is over TDM (conventional GSM) or IP. Anyway, the UNC box doesn't actually do any VoIP, all voice switching is done by the MSC, exactly as for normal GSM phone calls.
The benefits of all this are:
1. In-home mobile coverage - I could really do with this at home, as my coverage is very poor - buying a generic powered radio booster (antenna x 2 plus amplifier) is expensive, and doesn't help if there's absolutely no coverage. For some people in rural areas, this may be only way to get mobile coverage at home.
2. Lower cost calls - depending on subscription costs of course, and installation costs, but price should really be lower (see point 4.)
3. (For the mobile operator) More precise 'home zone' tariffs - subscriber gets low cost or free calls from home via UMA, rather than in wider area based on zipcode/postcode. Good when you are at home, less good if nearby.
4. (For mobile operator) Reduce load on normal base station network, and the aggregation network from base stations to the voice/data switches in Mobile core (MSC etc)
5. (For mobile operator) Encourage people to use their mobile phone for all calls, instead of landline - a.k.a. fixed-mobile substitution - and to use the mobile for everything including Internet surfing, email, etc. The controversial Palm Foleo could help here, by letting you use a large keyboard and screen with your single smartphone device, but that's not essential to this idea.
6. (For mobile operator) Harder to switch to another mobile operator due to hassle/cost of going to another similar setup, or losing benefits 1 and 2.
The other way to do this 'fixed-mobile convergence' (FMC) is called femtocells - rather than using WiFi, use a 3G mini-basestation (known as a femtocell), so that you can choose any 3G phone, not just the WiFi Dual-Mode Handsets (DMH) which have poorer battery life and are much less common. So you can get exactly the handset you want, probably at lower cost and with longer battery life. Sprint is doing similar things with its data-oriented 4G/WiMax service, according to http://lightreading.com/
The QoS (latency, jitter, bandwidth and packet loss) for your broadband may well affect voice calls, just like true VoIP - if someone does a big download, you may find call quality suffers or call is dropped. The world *really* needs Packeteer-style TCP rate shaping (and generic DiffServ type IP QoS) in the broadband router, and ideally in the broadband network - but that gets into the whole net neutrality issue, as the mobile operator would need to pay broadband telco to do this...
Caveat: I'm not a UMA/GSM expert, so the detailed architecture comments may need some clarification/correction, but I believe they are correct.
http://www.macrumors.com/2007/05/07/atandt-brandin g-iphone-and-revenue-sharing/ talks about a rumour that Apple demanded a share of monthly AT&T revenues from iPhone subscribers, and is getting this - apparently Verizon refused this.
Not too surprising then that the iPhone is locked to AT&T, despite it being sold without subsidy - possibly the only GSM phone ever sold at full price while remaining locked, which is a nice earner for Apple but really doesn't help customers. Anyone who travels outside the US will soon realise the pain of not being able to swap in a cheaper GSM SIM card (just a few dollars for prepaid accounts in most countries) to make cheaper calls outside the US...
This story is from 4th June... Another great bit of Slashdot editing.
We already have an infrastructure to deliver power to plug-in hybrid cars - it's called the electricity network. The price of electricity is probably higher than petrol/gasoline, but it's quite feasible to deliver clean power to plug-ins over the current network.
One really key point about plug-in hybrids is that their large batteries provide an enormous energy storage resource across a national electricity grid - if people keep them plugged in when they're not driving them, it's possible for the car owner to sell electricity back to the grid at peak times. This in turns means you can use highly bursty green energy sources (windmills, solar panels, tidal barriers, etc) effectively, smoothing out their energy delivery to match demand.
This requires careful management by smart software so you have enough energy stored in your car when you need it, and perhaps some network changes, but people can already sell electricity from their own windmills/solar panels back to the electricity companies in the UK, so the only new part is plugging in those hybrids.
Patents are involved, but they are Microsoft's not Xandros', since Xandros is quite a small company that clearly has no patents of interest - that's why it says MS is not licensing patents FROM Xandros. Another part of this article says:
"The agreement with Xandros, to be announced Monday, includes a promise by Microsoft to refrain from pursuing patent claims against users of Xandros software."
I agree about the market being people who want to avoid carrying heavy laptops around on trips.
The Foleo does have VGA out - I see a big part of its market being sales people and managers who travel a lot and need to make Powerpoint presentations. The only question is how good Dataviz's Powerpoint support is, but they've had many years to work on this so I expect it's pretty good.
I just talked to a colleague of mine who's been on a business trip all over Latin America and Central America recently - he's seriously tempted by this, purely to be able to leave his heavy laptop behind and make travelling a lot easier. He's even willing to buy a large SD card and sync his laptop's key data files onto the Foleo to enable this. And this is not a Linux geek, but a technical manager who travels a lot.
I think Palm has hit the spot just right here - there's a definite trend for people to dump laptops for smartphones, and this will make it a lot easier. Just having a sub-laptop that is instant-on and never needs antivirus updates is very attractive. My main Windows laptop, provided by employer, spends a huge amount of its time and disk throughput just running antivirus scans, software updates, etc, and Windows needs defragging and lots of general maintenance to keep it reasonably fast and secure (everyone should really run Secunia inspector to ensure non-MS apps are updated btw).
Making it Linux-based was very smart too - it enables them to do better instant-on with a platform they can fully customize, and use more power-efficient hardware, and of course the open source community will start porting apps and improving the platform for free, enabling the techier business users to get more done.
The more Windows bloat is on your heavy laptop, the better the Foleo looks...
As long as it supports SD cards with SDHC, which goes from 8 GB to 32 GB, the mass storage would not be an issue. A bigger issue is the lack of ported media players that work on its ARM processor, but that should be solved in time. If Palm ensures that the APIs and development kit are open enough, the open source community will no doubt port some apps, as this is a lightweight instant-on Linux laptop that will be very attractive to geeks like me who don't want a Windows laptop for non-work use.
I think Palm have been quite smart on the market for this: email is the niche that will pull some discretionary business users (the sort who buy their own phone or other gizmos if not too expensive) that travel a LOT and don't need a full laptop - mostly execs, meaning it's critical that Palm connects the Foleo to Blackberry very quickly. The Linux base and openness are what will pull in the geek community to provide open source apps and make the platform more capable. And commercial developers from the Palm world will see this as a good way to expand their market, covering a number of different smartphone platforms.
One other interesting thing: Palm recently bought the developers of Chatteremail, a great push email app for Palm OS that uses IMAP IDLE to enable instant email delivery from most IMAP servers. This is great for people who want Blackberry style instant email delivery, without the cost of a Blackberry subscription and the clunky Blackberry OS and hardware.
Another smart decision is to work with all types of smartphone - the smartphone market is very fragmented so this could be a great way to maximise market.
Bottom line: Real road warriors hate the weight of "real laptops" and the delay in getting email, waking up the laptop, poor battery life, etc. Given a light power brick (apparently more like a phone charger than a laptop's), I think the Foleo is a real winner.
Comcast has already deployed IPv6 in its core network and will deploy it to homes, simply because it's already gone beyond the available 10.x addresses and is now on public IPv4 space - it needs about 100 million devices for its IP voice/video/net customers. So the other incentive to use IPv6 is simply that you won't get Comcast service at some future date without having IPv6. Of course, this will be largely transparent to the customer as they'll use native IPv6 within Comcast and then be converted to and from IPv4 on the IPv4 Internet - but it will create a base of users who are IPv6. These users won't have IPv4 at all in their home (otherwise you don't solve the address scarcity issue).
= 19052065 for link to a presentation by Comcast on this.
Also, if Comcast ever decides to serve their video content outwards to Internet users who don't have Comcast access, it would be easy to provide it over IPv6 as well as v4. This doesn't mean exclusive IPv6 content, but it shows one step in the process of wider IPv6 usage.
The other thing I've seen, working in the telco industry, is that IPv6 support requirements are now moving into the management software (operational support system) space, and of course the federal government mandate for IPv6 is driving things too. I'm now much more confident than a few years ago that IPv6 will happen.
See http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234063&cid
I use Andrews and Arnold - http://www.aaisp.net.uk/. They give you 8-16 static IPv4 addresses for free, support IPv6 out of the box, are very reliable, and even text (SMS) me when the line goes down. They have lots of latency and loss tracking web reports, and online fault tracking, status blog, etc. Their techie-oriented page mentions some more nice features: URL:http://www.aaisp.net.uk/tech.html.
:)
Most importantly, you can get through to a real techie in about 30 seconds typically if you have a real problem. I'm on a usage-based tariff (unfortunately very common in UK) but this only applies during working days, not after 6pm or weekends, so I never go over 2 GB (don't do music/video stuff during the day).
A colleague switched from Pipex to Andrews and Arnold and is quite impressed with them. And no, I don't get commission or own shares etc
Exactly - and now I have to enable JavaScript for the whole of Google.com, or the entire menu bar vanishes! Not hard to do with Firefox's NoScript extension, but Google needs to have a sensible fallback when JavaScript is disabled.
Getting something this basic and visible so badly wrong is not a good sign - it's hardly rocket science to provide fallbacks...
Comcast's plans show that some homes will be IPv6 only, simply because they can't rely on getting enough IPv4 address space for 100 million IP endpoints (including set top boxes, VoIP ATAs, and cable modems) - they already have well over 16 million addresses.
There's not much point having v6 to the cable modems if you then need v4 within the home - complex NAT makes it harder to reach all the endpoints that you need to monitor and configure (if you're Comcast) in order to quickly determine the answer to "why isn't my TV working" (answer could be "because your room-mate's PC is using all your bandwidth" or "your IPTV STB has a damaged ethernet port" or "CMTS port has failed" etc). Managing only to the cable modem is not enough, and going from v6 to v4 is an unnecessary barrier...
DOCSIS 3.0 mandates both IPv6 and IPv4 support in cable modems, as well as the other improvements. See http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/06mar/slides/v6op s-4/v6ops-4.ppt for a presentation about why cable MSOs (operators) are deploying IPv6 (Comcast already has IPv6 in its core network and plans to roll out to homes, because it's exhausted the 10.x address space already in IPv4, and is now onto public IPv4). So this means that DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems will really be the first mass deployed IPv6 capable devices, and some cable operators will turn IPv6 on, certainly Comcast.
Agree completely - IPv6 has almost identical QoS/CoS features (DiffServ code points aka DSCP, which supersede the old TOS byte but are used in similar way), and is really not at all relevant to net neutrality or QoS. IPv6 is really about avoiding the need for NAT, and will primarily be taken up for very large IPTV / Cable TV deployments, e.g. Comcast which is already IPv6 in core IP network and going IPv6 for the home networks as well, due to sheer number of addresses required (beyond what you can fit behind a 10.x address - 100 million needed). Other IPv6 early adopters are US federal agencies, AsiaPac (esp. China and Japan), and IMS (possibly, can be used with IPv4).
I don't think router performance is really an IPv6 issue - most core routers already do hardware-based forwarding and are IPv6 enabled, and many network cores are now MPLS based, in which case you just tag the IPv6 packets with an MPLS label on the provider edge (PE router), on ingress to core, and MPLS switch them across the core, just like IPv4 on top of MPLS today. So any MPLS-enabled cores (e.g. BT's 21CN, where they are replacing the whole legacy PSTN phone network with IP core and VoIP/IMS) can adopt IPv6 very easily, without any real performance hit.
The real issue is adoption and chicken/egg issues as you say - this is why Comcast is important, as it provides its own content servers for IPTV, as well as the whole core and aggregation network, and manages the home network equipment (set top box, cable mode, VoIP adapter, etc) - so their decision to go IPv6 a while back will act as a model for other large IPTV deployments and help move the equipment vendors across a wider range of kit, as well as driving IPv6 support in software such as NMSs, OSSs (operational support systems, e.g. inventory and activation), etc.
Windows managed to become "a legitimate OS for the average computer user" just fine, while still losing hardware support on some major upgrades (including release of both XP and Vista). If Feisty is breaking hardware support, that's annoying, but having spent almost a day trying to get a simple Ethernet card working on an old WinME PC recently, it's not just the Linux world that has this problem...
Who are these "most analysts" exactly? OLPC shows every sign of becoming a long-term success, in the sense of delivering a valuable educational tool supporting independent learning as well as school work. The fact that this tool happens to be an innovative laptop is secondary.
You are really very wrong about IPv6, and deployments on the ground back this up - the cost of config is real but most core equipment already comes with IPv6 supported, so you just have to enable it.
- durand.pdf for some details - they will go dual-stack in most parts of network but IPv6 only for new set top boxes (STBs) and other home network kit such as cable modems (CMs) and VoIP MTAs.
The largest US cable operator, Comcast, has already enabled IPv6 alongside IPv4 in its core network and has plans to deploy it all the way to the edge, largely because it needs 100 million IP addresses for its customers and has already used up 16 million addresses (the whole of the 10.x address space, it's having to use public IPv4 space already). See http://www.6journal.org/archive/00000265/01/alain
I agree that IPv6 doesn't solve all the problems mentioned, but then it was never meant to. Its enablement of end to end services without the innovation-hostile NAT does mean that you have a better chance of clean solutions to problems such as QoS. IPv6 does address Mobile IP much better than IPv4, so you can keep the same IP address as you roam from one mobile network to another, without inefficient triangular routing of all traffic via a home agent.