Cell carriers used scheduled access to the wireless channel, which provides guarantees on bandwidth and latency so that your speech is understandable. 802.11 provides random access, which is great for bursty Web traffic but terrible for voice when multiple people use it simultaneously (and undoubtedly you would not be the only one using VOIP over your WiMax AP).
For example, an 802.11b network can handle ~140 simultaneous Skype calls in theory, but only about 6 in practice. For a more detailed analysis, see this paper
A satellite can't observe a solar flare from space and warn us 15 minutes before it arrives at earth... any warning that the satellite sends to earth would arrive at the same time (or later) as the radiation it detected.
So, the satellite must be able to detect the solar flare well before it happens, but anything the satellite sees 15 minutes before the flare, we also see on earth 15 minutes before the flare. Maybe the satellite has a clearer view of the sun, but that just means it is a better warning system than instruments on earth, not really an early warning system.
This is not really true: the aptera provides all three. The egg-shaped cab is extremely safe and light, the list price is around $20K, and it supposed to get 300mpg. It is also high off the ground to be a good height relative to the bumper of a high SUV or truck.
No, what I meant was that the DMV could act as a certificate authority, ie. I would generate my keys and the DMV would verify my identity and digitally sign (certify) my public key as mine.
This would address the problem that verisign and the like do not have branch offices in every city. Of course, nothing (even the DMV) is foolproof, but it would be much more difficult to steal identities if you have to show up at a physical location, e.g. a hacker in russia cannot simply hack my machine and steal my identify.
>> Weigh up the benefits of an internet "with less asshats" vs an internet with "complete
>> government and corporate control"
>>
>> Which one do you choose?
This is a false choice; there is no reason why we can't have both.
It would be simple enough to give each individual a public/private RSA key to authenticate or digitally sign documents. This could even be done at the DMV, and would allow you to do things that you couldn't otherwise do on the Internet. You could also log in to a site anonymously.
>> Anonymity begets freedom.
Yes, but the choice to be anonymous or to be authenticated begets even more freedom.
has been distributing malware over physical media for years, in the form of floppy disks and CDs that install the AOL "service" on your computer... and through our own postal service, no less!
this may be a huge win for consumers. My biggest problem with my cell phone is that I can't write applications for it. When other companies like linksys adopted linux for their embedded systems, it allowed entire communities to be created around, for example, the NSLU2, allowing me for example to load programs onto it.
Admittedly, cell providers want to control what services are run on the device, which probably means they will keep the platform as closed as possible, ie. closed drivers and applications. However, since their main goal is to facilitate third-party application development, as they state, it must be open to _some_ developers. Since they also want to reduce costs, they may make it open to open-source developers too, who can offer said applications at no cost. If I can develop my own apps to run on a cell phone, I would be happy enough, even if I can't reinstall the OS.
A sample application I've been wanting somebody to write: a voice menu for my calendar since the UIs on cell phones stink. For example: "calendar" -> "new todo" -> "this sunday" -> "call dad for father's day". The cell-phone calendar is synched with my computer and on sunday morning I would get a voice reminder from whichever device I am using.
The technology will be tested on humans within the next year.
This sounds like a wild claim, especially in the next year if it has only been shown to work once on dogs. Any technique with such a high risk of fatality can only be tested on people who are going to die anyway, and even then only if it might help them (eg testing a new artificial heart). This technique cannot help anybody in a little 10 minute experiment, so who would volunteer?
IBM has been saying this for a long time, but I still haven't been able to go to their website and download linux drivers or tools for my thinkpad hardware.
A search on the website for
T30 drivers with linux gives only 9 hits. Some of them are XP drivers and the rest are general tools like bios updates, etc.
granted, everything works with generic drivers, but writing a doc to suggest which generic drivers or how to configure, for example, their dual-head video card (nice feature) is the least they could do.
>WiMAX will certainly find success in many >environments. Urban is one.
This is not suitable for urban environments at all. Even if one tower could give access the the entire new york area despite interference from buildings, that would mean we are sharing a 70MBs channel with 11 million people. That leaves about.006KBps per person.
Short-range radios like Wifi would be much more suitable, because of what's called "spatial reuse". But then we don't have ability to cover 90% of the population with $3 billion. The claims in this article are largely overstated.
>WiMAX will certainly find success in many
>environments. Urban is one.
This is not suitable for urban environments at all. Even if one tower could give access the the entire new york area despite interference from buildings, that would mean we are sharing a 70MBs channel with 11 million people. That leaves about.006KBps per person.
Short-range radios like Wifi would be much more suitable, because of what's called "spatial reuse". But then we don't have ability to cover 90% of the population with $3 billion. The claims in this article are largely overstated.
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Cell carriers used scheduled access to the wireless channel, which provides guarantees on bandwidth and latency so that your speech is understandable. 802.11 provides random access, which is great for bursty Web traffic but terrible for voice when multiple people use it simultaneously (and undoubtedly you would not be the only one using VOIP over your WiMax AP).
For example, an 802.11b network can handle ~140 simultaneous Skype calls in theory, but only about 6 in practice. For a more detailed analysis, see this paper
A satellite can't observe a solar flare from space and warn us 15 minutes before it arrives at earth... any warning that the satellite sends to earth would arrive at the same time (or later) as the radiation it detected.
So, the satellite must be able to detect the solar flare well before it happens, but anything the satellite sees 15 minutes before the flare, we also see on earth 15 minutes before the flare. Maybe the satellite has a clearer view of the sun, but that just means it is a better warning system than instruments on earth, not really an early warning system.
>> -light, -safe, -cheap: Pick any two.
This is not really true: the aptera provides all three. The egg-shaped cab is extremely safe and light, the list price is around $20K, and it supposed to get 300mpg. It is also high off the ground to be a good height relative to the bumper of a high SUV or truck.
your clothes and suitcase before carrying that bomb on board.
No, what I meant was that the DMV could act as a certificate authority, ie. I would generate my keys and the DMV would verify my identity and digitally sign (certify) my public key as mine.
This would address the problem that verisign and the like do not have branch offices in every city. Of course, nothing (even the DMV) is foolproof, but it would be much more difficult to steal identities if you have to show up at a physical location, e.g. a hacker in russia cannot simply hack my machine and steal my identify.
>> Weigh up the benefits of an internet "with less asshats" vs an internet with "complete
>> government and corporate control"
>>
>> Which one do you choose?
This is a false choice; there is no reason why we can't have both.
It would be simple enough to give each individual a public/private RSA key to authenticate or digitally sign documents. This could even be done at the DMV, and would allow you to do things that you couldn't otherwise do on the Internet. You could also log in to a site anonymously.
>> Anonymity begets freedom.
Yes, but the choice to be anonymous or to be authenticated begets even more freedom.
has been distributing malware over physical media for years, in the form of floppy disks and CDs that install the AOL "service" on your computer... and through our own postal service, no less!
...at least in prototype form? http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/lizzy/index.htm l
The article doesn't articulate how the new technology is different from previous projector-based systems.
this may be a huge win for consumers. My biggest problem with my cell phone is that I can't write applications for it. When other companies like linksys adopted linux for their embedded systems, it allowed entire communities to be created around, for example, the NSLU2, allowing me for example to load programs onto it. Admittedly, cell providers want to control what services are run on the device, which probably means they will keep the platform as closed as possible, ie. closed drivers and applications. However, since their main goal is to facilitate third-party application development, as they state, it must be open to _some_ developers. Since they also want to reduce costs, they may make it open to open-source developers too, who can offer said applications at no cost. If I can develop my own apps to run on a cell phone, I would be happy enough, even if I can't reinstall the OS. A sample application I've been wanting somebody to write: a voice menu for my calendar since the UIs on cell phones stink. For example: "calendar" -> "new todo" -> "this sunday" -> "call dad for father's day". The cell-phone calendar is synched with my computer and on sunday morning I would get a voice reminder from whichever device I am using.
The technology will be tested on humans within the next year.
This sounds like a wild claim, especially in the next year if it has only been shown to work once on dogs. Any technique with such a high risk of fatality can only be tested on people who are going to die anyway, and even then only if it might help them (eg testing a new artificial heart). This technique cannot help anybody in a little 10 minute experiment, so who would volunteer?
which is easier: carrying an extra battery or a pound of apples?
Tools like "svn blame" or "cvs annotate" are much more useful; they tell you who added each line of text in your file, when they checked it in, etc.).
Still, these tools don't let you see the history of text that has been *deleted*. A visualization like "historyflow" could be useful there
IBM has been saying this for a long time, but I still haven't been able to go to their website and download linux drivers or tools for my thinkpad hardware.
A search on the website for T30 drivers with linux gives only 9 hits. Some of them are XP drivers and the rest are general tools like bios updates, etc.
granted, everything works with generic drivers, but writing a doc to suggest which generic drivers or how to configure, for example, their dual-head video card (nice feature) is the least they could do.
>WiMAX will certainly find success in many
.006KBps per person.
>environments. Urban is one.
This is not suitable for urban environments at all. Even if one tower could give access the the entire new york area despite interference from buildings, that would mean we are sharing a 70MBs channel with 11 million people. That leaves about
Short-range radios like Wifi would be much more suitable, because of what's called "spatial reuse". But then we don't have ability to cover 90% of the population with $3 billion. The claims in this article are largely overstated.
>WiMAX will certainly find success in many >environments. Urban is one. This is not suitable for urban environments at all. Even if one tower could give access the the entire new york area despite interference from buildings, that would mean we are sharing a 70MBs channel with 11 million people. That leaves about .006KBps per person.
Short-range radios like Wifi would be much more suitable, because of what's called "spatial reuse". But then we don't have ability to cover 90% of the population with $3 billion. The claims in this article are largely overstated.