Quite a lot of mobile phones have these features already, at least in Europe - SMS (short message service, aka text messaging) is on every phone, and many phones have two-player games over infrared and calendars. The latest phones, e.g. Ericsson T68, have colour, Bluetooth for syncing and games, and can sync over the GPRS packet network as well.
The practice of a blank 'sa' password started with Sybase (MS SQL Server was originally a licensed version of Sybase). Oracle is no better, it has well known default passwords for the 'system' and 'sys' accounts. The real problem is installation tools that don't make it mandatory to set a password for all non-default accounts.
802.11b uses CDMA-style code division (termed DSSS, Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum), so it occupies a whole set of frequencies at once, rather than hopping around.
802.11 (the original low speed version) came in DSSS and FHSS variants - the latter does frequency hopping, as does Bluetooth.
This is true in the US, but strangely enough there are other countries in the world - many of them (e.g. Europe) have only licensed spectrum at 5 GHz. Please remember that the US != The World....
802.11b uses 2.4 GHz, as does.11g. 802.11a uses 5 GHz. Neither uses 900 MHz, of course.
I know about the 9210 running EPOC, I was just focusing on the different vendors - Nokia's EPOC phone/PDA is doing a lot better than Psion PDAs, which says something. WinCE smart phones may do quite well, since the OS has at least some real-time capabilities. I'm still waiting for PalmOS on a GSM smart phone... In the mean time I've bought an Ericsson T68, which is just a feature phone (i.e. phone format) but has a colour screen, calendar syncing, GPRS and (most importantly) Tetris.
You need to learn about smartphones (basically a PDA plus phone, e.g. Nokia 9210 Communicator) and stop being so US-centric...
The 9210 is now the market leading *PDA* in Europe, ahead of Palm, WinCE and Psion, due to some neat technology and Nokia's huge distribution channel. Another example from the PDA side is the Handspring Treo, and in Europe the BlackBerry (which will do GSM voice as well as data over GPRS). Screen sizes will vary, but the 9210 has a large screen, about the size of a PDA.
There are over 500 million GSM phone users in the world - if just 5% of them buy a smart phone, that's 25 million PDAs. Since PDA vendors are furiously adding wireless features, they will meet in the middle.
The biggest issue for freenets, IMO, is liability - if someone wanders past your access point and sends a huge amount of spam, or starts a DoS attack on remote sites, you may well find your ISP cuts off your access. In the worst case, you might be legally liable under various anti-spam or other laws.
Just as ISPs have contracts with their customers, and authenticate them, it may end up being necessary to have contracts with your freenet users and to authenticate them. Of course, if they are friends it may be enough to just authenticate them... IANAL but something that indemnifies you against lawsuits etc would be very useful.
This goes against the freenet ideal but unfortunately providing Internet access can be a legal minefield.
They are using CDMA2000, not 802.11b - initially 1x, with later upgrade to 1xEV-DO (2 Mbps). They are not doing fixed wireless - they are called Monet *Mobile* Networks. CDMA2000 is likely to be in existing licensed spectrum.
I think 3G will happen in some form (it's essential in Japan because their 2G cellular network has reached capacity). I agree that it's much more cost effective to download data in advance than to stream packets - the former just requires memory, which is cheap, and software, which is coming (Java phones will help). However, there will always be a demand for instant browsing, and wireless operators will need to charge for packets until technology improves a lot - you just can't get a lot of capacity per cell, even with 3G.
I suspect that non-videoconferencing applications will take off first, e.g. sending pictures in email, multiplayer gaming, etc.
Your $50 phone was clearly subsidised - a typical high-end phone in the UK or Scandinavia costs about $600, and your model with built-in digital camera might have been more than that without subsidy. Your US phone was probably quite basic, costing far less, so your comparison of tariffs is fairly useless - you need to look at the total cost over a fixed time, including handset costs as well as subscription costs and call charges.
Assuming $1 = 100 yen roughly, 2 yen (i.e. 2 cents) per message seems quite reasonable. Even if you send 100 messages a month, that's only $2... Paying for packets is obviously not as nice as flat rate, but wireless operators need to make money or go the way of flat-rate operators like Metricom/Ricochet. GPRS operators in Europe work on a packet-charging basis, but you can get a monthly 'Bundled Kbytes' for a flat fee. As long as you use a PDA or phone as the GPRS client, you won't run up a huge bill.
802.11b is a great technology for laptops and higher-end PDAs, but it's quite battery hungry, and it's not designed for wide coverage - it would be a pain to have this draining batteries very fast in a cell phone and still have very incomplete coverage. GPRS (packet mode GSM) is a lot slower than 802.11b, but it works well with a mobile phone (I still get 2 days battery life on my Ericsson T68 phone, even with colour screen, Bluetooth, and lots of game playing).
Bluetooth is a really key technology as it decouples your PDA, laptop or whatever from the wireless wide-area technology - in Europe, use a GPRS or 3G phone as your 'router' most of the time, then switch to a CDMA2000 phone in the US, and use an 802.11b device where you have coverage (e.g. turn your PDA with an 802.11b Compact Flash card into a Bluetooth to 802.11b router, and use your phone via your PDA/router).
Bluetooth is going to be in lots of devices, and is best viewed as the basic glue between these devices - 802.11b, GPRS, 3G, and so on are longer distance technologies that complement Bluetooth pretty well.
Bluetooth is a personal area network technology, so the US already has it - just buy a Bluetooth phone and PC/CF card and you have a Bluetooth network...
Japan is way more advanced in its use of wireless and many other technologies than Europe and the US. They've had packet-oriented (2.5G) wireless phones for over 2 years with i-mode, and have just deployed 3G. Britain is also way ahead of the US in its use of mobile phones - something like 75% of the population has a mobile phone, and we can use the same phones throughout Europe, Russia, Asia and Africa. Not bad for a 'less industrialised nation'...
One reason why the US doesn't have widespread use of mobile phones is that it has free local calls from wired phones, and that it didn't allocate new area codes for mobile phones - the result is that when calling from a wired phone to a mobile phone in the local calling area, it would be unreasonable to charge the caller extra for calling a mobile. Hence, mobile phone users have to pay for incoming calls, which doesn't happen anywhere outside North America, and they are understandably reluctant to give out their mobile numbers.
Near flat rate billing (i.e. huge number of bundled minutes) is the way US consumers seem to like things. Strangely enough, the same model applies to European mobile phones - you just buy bundled minutes. If you are really concerned about price, there are some very low cost options, down to a few US cents per minute for national calls.
Hint to the troll: your clueless xenophobia is showing - countries that do things differently from the US are not necessarily 'third world'.
Read the slashdot post - it referred to 'Transmeta's arch nemesis, Intel' (not enemy). Nowhere did it say anything about either of them being 'our' enemy...
This is exactly what has happened in the UK with 'phantom withdrawals' - one poor guy was on holiday with his bank card in a drawer at home (no-one else with access to house) when one withdrawal happened, and he was *still* accused of defrauding the bank.
The most important feature of any bank is the small print in their contract with you - check to see whether they assume that a fraud is nothing to do with you, and must prove that you committed it. For far too long, at least in the UK, banks assumed their customers guilty until proven innocent...
It's not so much the bias, it's that many stories are not even reported on either CNN or Fox News - e.g. the recent stories about civilians being killed in Afghanistan (aka the fuzzy sounding 'collateral damage').
At least satellite TV lets you choose from a variety of channels - Sky satellite TV in the UK even lets you watch Al Jazeera (unfortunately I don't speak Arabic, but the stories they include are quite different to the ones in Europe or the US - much more coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian situation).
Animated logos are appalling - I recorded a film and had to give up after ten minutes, because of the annoying movement in the corner of the screen. They have reached the UK, though I'm sure they started somewhere else:)
All I can say is that Europeans have fingers that work in a similar way to Americans and they have miraculously managed to adapt to two-way SMS keyboarding. At least two phone makers have released Qwerty keyboards, and in the US the Blackberry is very similar in keyboard to these devices.
Ditto for your statements that Americans aren't stupid enough to use SMS in the way I cited - clearly not everyone in Europe is stupid (or are you really that narrow minded?), and they are using SMS for this and many other reasons. I was only giving a couple of examples - SMSing in class is now banned in most UK schools (mobiles are handed in) but it's interesting that it even happened, and texting in night clubs is often used to hook up with other people later that night, so it's not exactly irrelevant.
A lot of what you are saying is a personal view expressed as an absolute - I'm sure they are true for you, but they probably aren't for many other people. Not everything that happens in Europe and elsewhere will take off in the US, but SMS may well do.
Interesting cultural generalisations, but email is incredibly popular in the US, and SMS is basically 'email in your pocket'. Maybe if the wireless operators made it easier to do SMSs, particularly across operators, it would take off, as it has done in the rest of the world, in cultures as diverse as Norway and the Philippines. I don't think the cultural argument really works, SMS already crosses far too many cultures - it's more a matter of making it available and easier in the US. SMS is already on a growth curve in the US, so it's only a matter of time IMO.
SMSs are often used when you simply can't talk on the phone - the classic example is school kids passing notes in class, but it's also useful in meetings and in nightclubs where it's too noisy to talk but you can text.
Why is this any different to reviewing a book? You have to pay for that, too, and this PDF is about the same price as some books - I suppose the expectation is just that anything online should be free.
It might be better if stories about for-pay content are done just like book reviews, with enough information that you can decide whether to buy it. Also, such stories should only be about really interesting topics - there are a lot of for-pay tech reports out there.
Many 3G phones are unlikely to let you install your own software - but in any case, you could just put your software on a laptop or PDA that is 3G-connected, so it's quite easy to use encryption on top of 3G as you say. However, this already applies to users of wireless LAN hotspots, and the former users of Ricochet - and GPRS and CDMA2000 1x, both 2.5G, will provide 100 Kbps or more eventually.
Anonymous 3G accounts are fairly unlikely - perhaps when 3G is very widespread and commoditised, but initially it will be for pay-monthly use only.
I don't see why it's so hard to disrupt 3G service - it's just a matter of causing the 3G network to disconnect that one phone (break any current network attachment [to the GPRS core netw\ork], and disable its account so it can't reconnect. Unlike some technologies, 3G is designed to let the provider bill for every packet that is transmitted, so it's may be as easy as just marking the account as 'invalid', causing the real-time billing system to prevent new connections.
Have a look at OpenBeOS, at http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/ - this is implementing the BeOS user-space programs on top of NewOS, which is written by an ex-Be engineer and apparently similar to the BeOS kernel. They are aiming for binary compatibility as far as possible, source compatibility where not.
Contrary to the update linking to the 2nd CNET story, which claimed the block would be lifed by end of Thursday, MSN.com is still blocking non-IE browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite a lot of mobile phones have these features already, at least in Europe - SMS (short message service, aka text messaging) is on every phone, and many phones have two-player games over infrared and calendars. The latest phones, e.g. Ericsson T68, have colour, Bluetooth for syncing and games, and can sync over the GPRS packet network as well.
The practice of a blank 'sa' password started with Sybase (MS SQL Server was originally a licensed version of Sybase). Oracle is no better, it has well known default passwords for the 'system' and 'sys' accounts. The real problem is installation tools that don't make it mandatory to set a password for all non-default accounts.
802.11b uses CDMA-style code division (termed DSSS, Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum), so it occupies a whole set of frequencies at once, rather than hopping around.
802.11 (the original low speed version) came in DSSS and FHSS variants - the latter does frequency hopping, as does Bluetooth.
This is true in the US, but strangely enough there are other countries in the world - many of them (e.g. Europe) have only licensed spectrum at 5 GHz. Please remember that the US != The World....
.11g. 802.11a uses 5 GHz. Neither uses 900 MHz, of course.
802.11b uses 2.4 GHz, as does
You did notice this RFC was dated April 1st, didn't you? It's poking fun at people who think tunnelling through firewalls is a good idea...
I know about the 9210 running EPOC, I was just focusing on the different vendors - Nokia's EPOC phone/PDA is doing a lot better than Psion PDAs, which says something. WinCE smart phones may do quite well, since the OS has at least some real-time capabilities. I'm still waiting for PalmOS on a GSM smart phone... In the mean time I've bought an Ericsson T68, which is just a feature phone (i.e. phone format) but has a colour screen, calendar syncing, GPRS and (most importantly) Tetris.
You need to learn about smartphones (basically a PDA plus phone, e.g. Nokia 9210 Communicator) and stop being so US-centric...
The 9210 is now the market leading *PDA* in Europe, ahead of Palm, WinCE and Psion, due to some neat technology and Nokia's huge distribution channel. Another example from the PDA side is the Handspring Treo, and in Europe the BlackBerry (which will do GSM voice as well as data over GPRS). Screen sizes will vary, but the 9210 has a large screen, about the size of a PDA.
There are over 500 million GSM phone users in the world - if just 5% of them buy a smart phone, that's 25 million PDAs. Since PDA vendors are furiously adding wireless features, they will meet in the middle.
The biggest issue for freenets, IMO, is liability - if someone wanders past your access point and sends a huge amount of spam, or starts a DoS attack on remote sites, you may well find your ISP cuts off your access. In the worst case, you might be legally liable under various anti-spam or other laws.
Just as ISPs have contracts with their customers, and authenticate them, it may end up being necessary to have contracts with your freenet users and to authenticate them. Of course, if they are friends it may be enough to just authenticate them... IANAL but something that indemnifies you against lawsuits etc would be very useful.
This goes against the freenet ideal but unfortunately providing Internet access can be a legal minefield.
They are using CDMA2000, not 802.11b - initially 1x, with later upgrade to 1xEV-DO (2 Mbps). They are not doing fixed wireless - they are called Monet *Mobile* Networks. CDMA2000 is likely to be in existing licensed spectrum.
I think 3G will happen in some form (it's essential in Japan because their 2G cellular network has reached capacity). I agree that it's much more cost effective to download data in advance than to stream packets - the former just requires memory, which is cheap, and software, which is coming (Java phones will help). However, there will always be a demand for instant browsing, and wireless operators will need to charge for packets until technology improves a lot - you just can't get a lot of capacity per cell, even with 3G.
I suspect that non-videoconferencing applications will take off first, e.g. sending pictures in email, multiplayer gaming, etc.
Your $50 phone was clearly subsidised - a typical high-end phone in the UK or Scandinavia costs about $600, and your model with built-in digital camera might have been more than that without subsidy. Your US phone was probably quite basic, costing far less, so your comparison of tariffs is fairly useless - you need to look at the total cost over a fixed time, including handset costs as well as subscription costs and call charges.
Assuming $1 = 100 yen roughly, 2 yen (i.e. 2 cents) per message seems quite reasonable. Even if you send 100 messages a month, that's only $2... Paying for packets is obviously not as nice as flat rate, but wireless operators need to make money or go the way of flat-rate operators like Metricom/Ricochet. GPRS operators in Europe work on a packet-charging basis, but you can get a monthly 'Bundled Kbytes' for a flat fee. As long as you use a PDA or phone as the GPRS client, you won't run up a huge bill.
802.11b is a great technology for laptops and higher-end PDAs, but it's quite battery hungry, and it's not designed for wide coverage - it would be a pain to have this draining batteries very fast in a cell phone and still have very incomplete coverage. GPRS (packet mode GSM) is a lot slower than 802.11b, but it works well with a mobile phone (I still get 2 days battery life on my Ericsson T68 phone, even with colour screen, Bluetooth, and lots of game playing).
Bluetooth is a really key technology as it decouples your PDA, laptop or whatever from the wireless wide-area technology - in Europe, use a GPRS or 3G phone as your 'router' most of the time, then switch to a CDMA2000 phone in the US, and use an 802.11b device where you have coverage (e.g. turn your PDA with an 802.11b Compact Flash card into a Bluetooth to 802.11b router, and use your phone via your PDA/router).
Bluetooth is going to be in lots of devices, and is best viewed as the basic glue between these devices - 802.11b, GPRS, 3G, and so on are longer distance technologies that complement Bluetooth pretty well.
Bluetooth is a personal area network technology, so the US already has it - just buy a Bluetooth phone and PC/CF card and you have a Bluetooth network...
...
Japan is way more advanced in its use of wireless and many other technologies than Europe and the US. They've had packet-oriented (2.5G) wireless phones for over 2 years with i-mode, and have just deployed 3G. Britain is also way ahead of the US in its use of mobile phones - something like 75% of the population has a mobile phone, and we can use the same phones throughout Europe, Russia, Asia and Africa. Not bad for a 'less industrialised nation'
One reason why the US doesn't have widespread use of mobile phones is that it has free local calls from wired phones, and that it didn't allocate new area codes for mobile phones - the result is that when calling from a wired phone to a mobile phone in the local calling area, it would be unreasonable to charge the caller extra for calling a mobile. Hence, mobile phone users have to pay for incoming calls, which doesn't happen anywhere outside North America, and they are understandably reluctant to give out their mobile numbers.
Near flat rate billing (i.e. huge number of bundled minutes) is the way US consumers seem to like things. Strangely enough, the same model applies to European mobile phones - you just buy bundled minutes. If you are really concerned about price, there are some very low cost options, down to a few US cents per minute for national calls.
Hint to the troll: your clueless xenophobia is showing - countries that do things differently from the US are not necessarily 'third world'.
Read the slashdot post - it referred to 'Transmeta's arch nemesis, Intel' (not enemy). Nowhere did it say anything about either of them being 'our' enemy...
This is exactly what has happened in the UK with 'phantom withdrawals' - one poor guy was on holiday with his bank card in a drawer at home (no-one else with access to house) when one withdrawal happened, and he was *still* accused of defrauding the bank.
The most important feature of any bank is the small print in their contract with you - check to see whether they assume that a fraud is nothing to do with you, and must prove that you committed it. For far too long, at least in the UK, banks assumed their customers guilty until proven innocent...
It's not so much the bias, it's that many stories are not even reported on either CNN or Fox News - e.g. the recent stories about civilians being killed in Afghanistan (aka the fuzzy sounding 'collateral damage').
At least satellite TV lets you choose from a variety of channels - Sky satellite TV in the UK even lets you watch Al Jazeera (unfortunately I don't speak Arabic, but the stories they include are quite different to the ones in Europe or the US - much more coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian situation).
Animated logos are appalling - I recorded a film and had to give up after ten minutes, because of the annoying movement in the corner of the screen. They have reached the UK, though I'm sure they started somewhere else :)
All I can say is that Europeans have fingers that work in a similar way to Americans and they have miraculously managed to adapt to two-way SMS keyboarding. At least two phone makers have released Qwerty keyboards, and in the US the Blackberry is very similar in keyboard to these devices.
Ditto for your statements that Americans aren't stupid enough to use SMS in the way I cited - clearly not everyone in Europe is stupid (or are you really that narrow minded?), and they are using SMS for this and many other reasons. I was only giving a couple of examples - SMSing in class is now banned in most UK schools (mobiles are handed in) but it's interesting that it even happened, and texting in night clubs is often used to hook up with other people later that night, so it's not exactly irrelevant.
A lot of what you are saying is a personal view expressed as an absolute - I'm sure they are true for you, but they probably aren't for many other people. Not everything that happens in Europe and elsewhere will take off in the US, but SMS may well do.
Interesting cultural generalisations, but email is incredibly popular in the US, and SMS is basically 'email in your pocket'. Maybe if the wireless operators made it easier to do SMSs, particularly across operators, it would take off, as it has done in the rest of the world, in cultures as diverse as Norway and the Philippines. I don't think the cultural argument really works, SMS already crosses far too many cultures - it's more a matter of making it available and easier in the US. SMS is already on a growth curve in the US, so it's only a matter of time IMO.
SMSs are often used when you simply can't talk on the phone - the classic example is school kids passing notes in class, but it's also useful in meetings and in nightclubs where it's too noisy to talk but you can text.
I agree, that's why I suggested such stories are done exactly like book reviews...
Lots of technical books are a lot more than $24, and Slashdot reviews them as well.
Why is this any different to reviewing a book? You have to pay for that, too, and this PDF is about the same price as some books - I suppose the expectation is just that anything online should be free.
It might be better if stories about for-pay content are done just like book reviews, with enough information that you can decide whether to buy it. Also, such stories should only be about really interesting topics - there are a lot of for-pay tech reports out there.
Many 3G phones are unlikely to let you install your own software - but in any case, you could just put your software on a laptop or PDA that is 3G-connected, so it's quite easy to use encryption on top of 3G as you say. However, this already applies to users of wireless LAN hotspots, and the former users of Ricochet - and GPRS and CDMA2000 1x, both 2.5G, will provide 100 Kbps or more eventually.
Anonymous 3G accounts are fairly unlikely - perhaps when 3G is very widespread and commoditised, but initially it will be for pay-monthly use only.
I don't see why it's so hard to disrupt 3G service - it's just a matter of causing the 3G network to disconnect that one phone (break any current network attachment [to the GPRS core netw\ork], and disable its account so it can't reconnect. Unlike some technologies, 3G is designed to let the provider bill for every packet that is transmitted, so it's may be as easy as just marking the account as 'invalid', causing the real-time billing system to prevent new connections.
Have a look at OpenBeOS, at http://open-beos.sourceforge.net/ - this is implementing the BeOS user-space programs on top of NewOS, which is written by an ex-Be engineer and apparently similar to the BeOS kernel. They are aiming for binary compatibility as far as possible, source compatibility where not.
Just send a fax - ideally from a piece of paper so it has your signature at least, which looks more personal than a mass fax mailing.
Contrary to the update linking to the 2nd CNET story, which claimed the block would be lifed by end of Thursday, MSN.com is still blocking non-IE browsers.