And of course, there are always so many cabs with their lights on wherever you are in London, particularly late at night when it's raining... The point of this is that there may be many cabs that you can't see, only 5-10 streets away - this service lets you easily contact them.
The next step is that cabs can bid for your business, and the website acts as your agent to negotiate which one to go with, based on price, reputation, etc... But I'd settle for being able to easily get a cab even without this.
Knoppix is a Linux distro that pretty much does what you want - it tries hard to detect almost any hardware and seems to succeed pretty well. You can try it out just by burning or buying a CD, no need to install on your hard disk until you're happy it does what you want. It's also Debian-based so 'apt-get' will get you the latest packages and figure out dependencies. Not so easy to install on an HDD but overall I'm very impressed - the closest I've seen to a plug-and-play Linux CD. See http://www.knoppix.net/ for more information, but beware that the site is not as polished as the distro.
If you have DHCP on your network, it auto-configures everything, so within a few minutes (takes time to boot KDE from CD) you have a working Linux workstation even if the PC normally runs Windows.
Even my phone supports IPv6 - it's a Symbian 7.0 smartphone, the SonyEricsson P800, and is widely available in Europe and Asia. See http://www.sonyericsson.com/ for details.
However, Cisco routers deployed in networks today typically run IOS versions that are pre-IPv6 and the IPv6 IOSes are somewhat less stable than the preferred 'S' train (the 12.2T train is the place for IPv6 at present) and upgrading a whole network is a fairly large undertaking even though it can be done step by step.
Upgrades will happen incrementally - once European/Asian companies start requiring IPv6, they'll request this of their US ISPs. However, probably the biggest driver is wireless (3G in UMTS R5 in a few years) followed by broadband and home networking, so this may be something that consumer goods manufacturers will get together to drive adoption.
802.x can use Mobile IP to keep same IP address - admittedly there are problems when you roam fast enough, so 3G/2.5G are ahead here.
3G, like GPRS, using a tunnelling protocol (GTP) to a wireless operator node called the GGSN. This sits within the operator's network not the corporate network, so there are companies (including mine) that provide MPLS VPN technologies to bridge that gap.
3G has similar issues with encryption - there is encryption through radio access network, and probably across GTP, but not necessarily to your end system. Also, 'lawful interception' means that the authorities can get access to your data anyway, so there's still a need for end to end crypto.
3G has generally better roaming (both technical and billing agreements) than WiFi, but that may change as cellular/mobile operators start to run WiFi hotspots (and in the future 802.16 perhaps) with GSM-style SIM cards (smartcards) for seamless roaming across 3G, GPRS, WiFi, 802.16, etc. As someone else said, 3G is good for mobility, and 802.16 isn't.
GSM is widely available in the US from Voicestream/T-Mobile, Cingular and AT&T Wireless. It's not available in Japan, but that's just about the only country where it isn't. There are two GSM operators in South Korea, see http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/cou_kr.sht ml.
You can do the dial-from-PDA-talk-on-headset thing today with a T68, Palm, Bluetooth card and Bluetooth headset. It can be quite convenient, but only works for outgoing calls so it's not very practical.
Patents are *always* publicly disclosed, by definition - the inventor discloses the patent for public good and advancement of state of the art, with the caveat that they get a monopoly on use of patent for lifetime of the patent.
Trade secrets are entirely different which is what you may be thinking of. Try googling for 'patent':)
Exactly - if someone is getting paid to do customer support it's fair enough to hold newbies by the hand. In all other cases, RTFM is a completely appropriate response to basic questions that are in the manual.
'Customer service', eh... How exactly are you a customer of the open source developers doing this in their free time and why should they give you this 'service'? Of course, you are not a customer, and few open source projects are set up for 'customer service'.
If there's someone who is willing to do bug triage or work on better bug categorisation systems that can help without requiring per-bug work, that's fine, but don't expect customer service from open source projects. If you want service, pay a company or individual to do the support of whatever open source program you are using.
I agree with some of this, I upgraded the T68 s/w and it's still very slow. I had to have it repaired twice in the summer as well, after it stopped being able to make calls.
The really annoying thing is that the joystick is near broken and won't work in some directions, and there are no keyboard equivalents...
I've never had a problem with T68 reception in the UK or Europe, or even India. I did find reception in Florida (Tampa area) and Texas (North Dallas) was very flaky, but I assumed that was just the state of US GSM networks (mainly Voicestream/T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless).
There are also people who buy cars on their reliability pr safety - that's why Toyota and Volvo do well. Not everyone buys cars based on cup holders. So, by analogy, there is a segment of the Windows-user market who would really like more reliable TCP/IP as well as the general reliability of Linux. Probably TCP/IP is not enough to make anyone switch, but crash-reduction would be - there are still about 25% Win98 users out there, according to Google Zeitgeist.
The success of Linux doesn't owe much to Intel - the point is that PCs were able to run a variety of OSs from the word go, due to the IBM PC architecture being fairly open and shipping with several OSs. Recent moves away from Microsoft have had only marginal effects on Linux uptake.
That's like saying 'having a faster, more reliable car won't make a driver happy', while having an extra cup-holder will. There are plenty of people who would benefit from the less obvious advantages of a stable TCP/IP stack in quite visible ways - fewer dropped connections and broken web pages, faster downloads, etc.
CDMA2000 1x-EvDO (to give it its full name) is a 3G technology - other 3G technologies include UMTS/W-CDMA (will be almost everywhere that GSM exists today) and a Chinese variant pushed by Siemens and the Chinese government.
EvDO is already rolled out in Korea I think, and plain 1x is already available in many countries, including the US, Korea and Japan. W-CDMA is rolled out in Japan but is not at all successful at present due to lack of coverage, no seamless roaming to 2G cells, first-gen phones, etc.
My GPRS phone gives me about 10-12 Kbps of FTP bandwidth, measured a few times on Orange's UK network. I don't call this high-speed... Even though GPRS should get faster over time, the real benefit is that it supports always-on services - e.g. you can send a photo message via MMS without waiting for dialup.
The real issue for UMTS is that smart phones can access a lot of interesting services using GPRS alone. CDMA2000 in its various flavours seems more debugged at present, but UMTS has the benefit of seamless roaming to GSM (which should have about 1 billion users worldwide by end 2003).
Actually I have had SMS spam (on Orange in the UK, i.e. inbound SMSs are free), but only two or three times, starting in 2002. The mobile operators seem happy enough to stomp on SMS spammers, and of course it costs the spammer money per spam sent, so it's unlikely to reach the same levels as email spam.
I'd hope that in the US the operators will be even keener to stop SMS spam since it is costing their customers money...
There are really only two rules in networking - Ethernet always wins, and IP always wins. In fact, that's just one rule - open, standard technology always wins.
The reason is of course that innovation and competition is maximised when there is a common standard on which the market is based - wired Ethernet has gone from 3 meg, via 10/100/1000 to 10 Gig, and changed media from thick coax to thin coax to UTP to fibre, and expanded its range to WANs (in the 10G incarnation).
WiFi is going the same way, and since Ricochet is proprietary there is no way it can keep up - early WiFi was LAN only and 2 meg, and is now 11 meg, 22 meg or 54 meg. There are now point-to-point long range implementations of WiFi, and point-to-multipoint to cover a few square miles (like DSL). Some companies are producing QoS-enabled versions of WiFi, and using it for VoIP service. Arraycomm is doing smart antennas that track individual users with a narrow beam as they move around, improving bandwidth. Mesh networks companies are adapting WiFi to Ricochet style deployments where packets bounce between poletop radios, or other customers' nodes, before hitting a wire.
None of this is happening for Ricochet, because the technology is proprietary, hence there's no competition and little innovation going on. It probably is better at covering a whole city than WiFi, but it doesn't matter, because WiFi will evolve to solve these problems - probably via mesh network technology, which is highly efficient since it can route around foliage or building blockage, and very scalable since crowds bring their own capacity with them.
Roaming and billing are happening as well, which are essential so that increased usage of popular hotspots can drive more investment in better kit to support more users. As much as people dislike bandwidth caps and time-based billing, this is one reason why mobile/cellular operators are still in business and Metricom isn't. It should still be possible for heavy users to get reasonable-cost packages that enable them to use a lot of bandwidth, and of course when they are at home or work they can use the same kit on a no-billing basis to access local WiFi networks.
Applications are coming along as well, due to this flexibility, including drive-by downloading, location-based apps (where's the closest Italian restaurant?), etc - whereas Ricochet was tied to the short-hop between poles model, providing very high latency that prevents VoIP, WiFi can be implemented in different ways, allowing someone to make VoIP calls when in a conventional hotspot. Although it's debatable if VoIP will be a real application for public WiFi, it is very useful for people with smart PDA/phone kit in a large retailer - just carry one device to check stock and make phone calls in-store.
The only question in my mind is how all this works with 3G, GPRS and so on - probably they will co-exist, with WiFi as the high-bandwidth option when in range and 3G/GPRS as the low-bandwidth option. Wireless kit will tend to support both WiFi and mobile/cellular standards (Nokia and others already sell WiFi/GPRS PC Cards), with seamless roaming and a single bill (which all the vendors are working on).
AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile are unlikely to merge all their base stations - they have already built them, it's just a matter of adding GSM kit to the existing TDMA setup. The main use of infrastructure sharing is in 3G networks in Europe, where everyone massively overpaid for 3G licenses and is therefore desperate to save money.
Cingular and AT&T started out as TDMA providers, and still have TDMA coverage, but are now moving to GSM because it is technically similar but supports SIM cards, text messaging, cheaper phones, etc...
If an LTSP / thin terminal model works for your organisation, it can give huge TCO reductions (see www.winface.com for a book that is largely based on lowering TCO through thin clients, although focused on Unix).
Although thin client models are probably good for the business, quite a lot of PC desktop users would get upset... It's therefore a good idea to budget for SOME power users (tech consultants, developers, people with laptops) to have a less locked-down thick-client setup. Particularly when using Linux clients, it can be quite safe to let users install their own software under their home directory.
Q: Do any Linux distros have support for a per-user package database, i.e. use rpm or apt-get to install packages just for that user even though they are not root? Would be very useful to make use of.rpm and.deb type packages without having to give root to laptop/desktop users.
See www.winface.com for a book some ideas from the Unix world on TCO of Unix vs. Windows. Most of the arguments and calculations will work, and the TCO will be lower because you are likely to use x86 hardware with Linux, giving similar hardware costs to Windows.
There are some annoying errors in this book, but it is worth the $35 - I got a copy and it is quite thought provoking.
In XP, the test scripts should be written first (test-first programming) before the code features they test. These are (sort of) requirements specs, because 'if it's not in the tests, it shouldn't be in the code'.
Of course, a requirements spec is not the same as a set of test scripts, but then XP also has user stories for a more user-comprehensible outline of what's being delivered.
It will be a cold day in hell before CCIEs stop using a command line interface. Being able to use config files and command lines has many advantages that will be familiar to *nix users.
Various web-based GUIs exist for Cisco routers (some of them are built in), as well as larger-scale provisioning/activation systems for QoS, IP VPNs, etc, which include GUIs as well as APIs. The latter don't replace CCIEs but they make it possible to use less skilled provisioning staff to do certain complex and repetitive configuration actions using the CLI.
There have been various efforts to provide a better protocol for provisioning systems to configure devices (e.g. COPS and now XMLCONF), but none of them has really taken off.
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And of course, there are always so many cabs with their lights on wherever you are in London, particularly late at night when it's raining... The point of this is that there may be many cabs that you can't see, only 5-10 streets away - this service lets you easily contact them.
The next step is that cabs can bid for your business, and the website acts as your agent to negotiate which one to go with, based on price, reputation, etc... But I'd settle for being able to easily get a cab even without this.
Knoppix is a Linux distro that pretty much does what you want - it tries hard to detect almost any hardware and seems to succeed pretty well. You can try it out just by burning or buying a CD, no need to install on your hard disk until you're happy it does what you want. It's also Debian-based so 'apt-get' will get you the latest packages and figure out dependencies. Not so easy to install on an HDD but overall I'm very impressed - the closest I've seen to a plug-and-play Linux CD. See http://www.knoppix.net/ for more information, but beware that the site is not as polished as the distro.
If you have DHCP on your network, it auto-configures everything, so within a few minutes (takes time to boot KDE from CD) you have a working Linux workstation even if the PC normally runs Windows.
Even my phone supports IPv6 - it's a Symbian 7.0 smartphone, the SonyEricsson P800, and is widely available in Europe and Asia. See http://www.sonyericsson.com/ for details.
However, Cisco routers deployed in networks today typically run IOS versions that are pre-IPv6 and the IPv6 IOSes are somewhat less stable than the preferred 'S' train (the 12.2T train is the place for IPv6 at present) and upgrading a whole network is a fairly large undertaking even though it can be done step by step.
Upgrades will happen incrementally - once European/Asian companies start requiring IPv6, they'll request this of their US ISPs. However, probably the biggest driver is wireless (3G in UMTS R5 in a few years) followed by broadband and home networking, so this may be something that consumer goods manufacturers will get together to drive adoption.
802.x can use Mobile IP to keep same IP address - admittedly there are problems when you roam fast enough, so 3G/2.5G are ahead here.
3G, like GPRS, using a tunnelling protocol (GTP) to a wireless operator node called the GGSN. This sits within the operator's network not the corporate network, so there are companies (including mine) that provide MPLS VPN technologies to bridge that gap.
3G has similar issues with encryption - there is encryption through radio access network, and probably across GTP, but not necessarily to your end system. Also, 'lawful interception' means that the authorities can get access to your data anyway, so there's still a need for end to end crypto.
3G has generally better roaming (both technical and billing agreements) than WiFi, but that may change as cellular/mobile operators start to run WiFi hotspots (and in the future 802.16 perhaps) with GSM-style SIM cards (smartcards) for seamless roaming across 3G, GPRS, WiFi, 802.16, etc. As someone else said, 3G is good for mobility, and 802.16 isn't.
GSM is widely available in the US from Voicestream/T-Mobile, Cingular and AT&T Wireless. It's not available in Japan, but that's just about the only country where it isn't. There are two GSM operators in South Korea, see http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/cou_kr.sht ml.
You can do the dial-from-PDA-talk-on-headset thing today with a T68, Palm, Bluetooth card and Bluetooth headset. It can be quite convenient, but only works for outgoing calls so it's not very practical.
Patents are *always* publicly disclosed, by definition - the inventor discloses the patent for public good and advancement of state of the art, with the caveat that they get a monopoly on use of patent for lifetime of the patent.
:)
Trade secrets are entirely different which is what you may be thinking of. Try googling for 'patent'
Exactly - if someone is getting paid to do customer support it's fair enough to hold newbies by the hand. In all other cases, RTFM is a completely appropriate response to basic questions that are in the manual.
'Customer service', eh... How exactly are you a customer of the open source developers doing this in their free time and why should they give you this 'service'? Of course, you are not a customer, and few open source projects are set up for 'customer service'.
If there's someone who is willing to do bug triage or work on better bug categorisation systems that can help without requiring per-bug work, that's fine, but don't expect customer service from open source projects. If you want service, pay a company or individual to do the support of whatever open source program you are using.
I agree with some of this, I upgraded the T68 s/w and it's still very slow. I had to have it repaired twice in the summer as well, after it stopped being able to make calls.
The really annoying thing is that the joystick is near broken and won't work in some directions, and there are no keyboard equivalents...
I've never had a problem with T68 reception in the UK or Europe, or even India. I did find reception in Florida (Tampa area) and Texas (North Dallas) was very flaky, but I assumed that was just the state of US GSM networks (mainly Voicestream/T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless).
There are also people who buy cars on their reliability pr safety - that's why Toyota and Volvo do well. Not everyone buys cars based on cup holders. So, by analogy, there is a segment of the Windows-user market who would really like more reliable TCP/IP as well as the general reliability of Linux. Probably TCP/IP is not enough to make anyone switch, but crash-reduction would be - there are still about 25% Win98 users out there, according to Google Zeitgeist.
The success of Linux doesn't owe much to Intel - the point is that PCs were able to run a variety of OSs from the word go, due to the IBM PC architecture being fairly open and shipping with several OSs. Recent moves away from Microsoft have had only marginal effects on Linux uptake.
That's like saying 'having a faster, more reliable car won't make a driver happy', while having an extra cup-holder will. There are plenty of people who would benefit from the less obvious advantages of a stable TCP/IP stack in quite visible ways - fewer dropped connections and broken web pages, faster downloads, etc.
See http://aa.nu/ - on their ADSL service at least, you just check a box to get an IPv6 allocation alongside your IPv4 addresses.
CDMA2000 1x-EvDO (to give it its full name) is a 3G technology - other 3G technologies include UMTS/W-CDMA (will be almost everywhere that GSM exists today) and a Chinese variant pushed by Siemens and the Chinese government.
EvDO is already rolled out in Korea I think, and plain 1x is already available in many countries, including the US, Korea and Japan. W-CDMA is rolled out in Japan but is not at all successful at present due to lack of coverage, no seamless roaming to 2G cells, first-gen phones, etc.
My GPRS phone gives me about 10-12 Kbps of FTP bandwidth, measured a few times on Orange's UK network. I don't call this high-speed... Even though GPRS should get faster over time, the real benefit is that it supports always-on services - e.g. you can send a photo message via MMS without waiting for dialup.
The real issue for UMTS is that smart phones can access a lot of interesting services using GPRS alone. CDMA2000 in its various flavours seems more debugged at present, but UMTS has the benefit of seamless roaming to GSM (which should have about 1 billion users worldwide by end 2003).
Actually I have had SMS spam (on Orange in the UK, i.e. inbound SMSs are free), but only two or three times, starting in 2002. The mobile operators seem happy enough to stomp on SMS spammers, and of course it costs the spammer money per spam sent, so it's unlikely to reach the same levels as email spam.
I'd hope that in the US the operators will be even keener to stop SMS spam since it is costing their customers money...
There are really only two rules in networking - Ethernet always wins, and IP always wins. In fact, that's just one rule - open, standard technology always wins.
The reason is of course that innovation and competition is maximised when there is a common standard on which the market is based - wired Ethernet has gone from 3 meg, via 10/100/1000 to 10 Gig, and changed media from thick coax to thin coax to UTP to fibre, and expanded its range to WANs (in the 10G incarnation).
WiFi is going the same way, and since Ricochet is proprietary there is no way it can keep up - early WiFi was LAN only and 2 meg, and is now 11 meg, 22 meg or 54 meg. There are now point-to-point long range implementations of WiFi, and point-to-multipoint to cover a few square miles (like DSL). Some companies are producing QoS-enabled versions of WiFi, and using it for VoIP service. Arraycomm is doing smart antennas that track individual users with a narrow beam as they move around, improving bandwidth. Mesh networks companies are adapting WiFi to Ricochet style deployments where packets bounce between poletop radios, or other customers' nodes, before hitting a wire.
None of this is happening for Ricochet, because the technology is proprietary, hence there's no competition and little innovation going on. It probably is better at covering a whole city than WiFi, but it doesn't matter, because WiFi will evolve to solve these problems - probably via mesh network technology, which is highly efficient since it can route around foliage or building blockage, and very scalable since crowds bring their own capacity with them.
Roaming and billing are happening as well, which are essential so that increased usage of popular hotspots can drive more investment in better kit to support more users. As much as people dislike bandwidth caps and time-based billing, this is one reason why mobile/cellular operators are still in business and Metricom isn't. It should still be possible for heavy users to get reasonable-cost packages that enable them to use a lot of bandwidth, and of course when they are at home or work they can use the same kit on a no-billing basis to access local WiFi networks.
Applications are coming along as well, due to this flexibility, including drive-by downloading, location-based apps (where's the closest Italian restaurant?), etc - whereas Ricochet was tied to the short-hop between poles model, providing very high latency that prevents VoIP, WiFi can be implemented in different ways, allowing someone to make VoIP calls when in a conventional hotspot. Although it's debatable if VoIP will be a real application for public WiFi, it is very useful for people with smart PDA/phone kit in a large retailer - just carry one device to check stock and make phone calls in-store.
The only question in my mind is how all this works with 3G, GPRS and so on - probably they will co-exist, with WiFi as the high-bandwidth option when in range and 3G/GPRS as the low-bandwidth option. Wireless kit will tend to support both WiFi and mobile/cellular standards (Nokia and others already sell WiFi/GPRS PC Cards), with seamless roaming and a single bill (which all the vendors are working on).
AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile are unlikely to merge all their base stations - they have already built them, it's just a matter of adding GSM kit to the existing TDMA setup. The main use of infrastructure sharing is in 3G networks in Europe, where everyone massively overpaid for 3G licenses and is therefore desperate to save money.
Cingular and AT&T started out as TDMA providers, and still have TDMA coverage, but are now moving to GSM because it is technically similar but supports SIM cards, text messaging, cheaper phones, etc...
If an LTSP / thin terminal model works for your organisation, it can give huge TCO reductions (see www.winface.com for a book that is largely based on lowering TCO through thin clients, although focused on Unix).
.rpm and .deb type packages without having to give root to laptop/desktop users.
Although thin client models are probably good for the business, quite a lot of PC desktop users would get upset... It's therefore a good idea to budget for SOME power users (tech consultants, developers, people with laptops) to have a less locked-down thick-client setup. Particularly when using Linux clients, it can be quite safe to let users install their own software under their home directory.
Q: Do any Linux distros have support for a per-user package database, i.e. use rpm or apt-get to install packages just for that user even though they are not root? Would be very useful to make use of
See www.winface.com for a book some ideas from the Unix world on TCO of Unix vs. Windows. Most of the arguments and calculations will work, and the TCO will be lower because you are likely to use x86 hardware with Linux, giving similar hardware costs to Windows.
There are some annoying errors in this book, but it is worth the $35 - I got a copy and it is quite thought provoking.
In XP, the test scripts should be written first (test-first programming) before the code features they test. These are (sort of) requirements specs, because 'if it's not in the tests, it shouldn't be in the code'.
Of course, a requirements spec is not the same as a set of test scripts, but then XP also has user stories for a more user-comprehensible outline of what's being delivered.
It will be a cold day in hell before CCIEs stop using a command line interface. Being able to use config files and command lines has many advantages that will be familiar to *nix users.
Various web-based GUIs exist for Cisco routers (some of them are built in), as well as larger-scale provisioning/activation systems for QoS, IP VPNs, etc, which include GUIs as well as APIs. The latter don't replace CCIEs but they make it possible to use less skilled provisioning staff to do certain complex and repetitive configuration actions using the CLI.
There have been various efforts to provide a better protocol for provisioning systems to configure devices (e.g. COPS and now XMLCONF), but none of them has really taken off.