I don't have a use for all the extra bloat features that just slow the browser down. All I want is tabs and popup blocking. Safari has both, as well as fast page rendering and a low memory footprint (until one opens 30 tabs per 4 windows as I generally do.)
For people like me, Safari is perfect.
Firefox has got too bloated and slow, it's like Netscape 4 all over again.
Let me know how to chip in for adding communications out in those remote areas and I'll chip in.;)
While we're at it, don't make the broad-sweeping naive assumption that people live in remote areas to have to go through them. I never lived in Death Valley, yet I drove through it and had cell service.
Conversely, try driving from Colorado through Utah to Arizona and plan yourself a route with coverage of some sort. One is limited in the routes one can take, regardless of living there or not.
Anyway, Joe Provider throwing up a network in such remote rural areas could have a goldmine of roaming charges from everybody else having to roam on the one existing network in the area. It could be a very profitable venture if done right.
Assuming that because something is done a certain way for a long time means one should continue to do so is false logic. Change can be good.
This is true that they pulse, in this case they could pick a rapid-pulse charger that wouldn't last as long on battery but make it harder to accomplish anything between pulses. A pulse can be annoying enough a deterrent to stop them from trying to short it out. Especially some of those "weed-snapper" models that have enough of a powerful zap to zap through growth around the wire.
Maybe they could just build moats around the cell sites and put dragons inside!
Miniature fission reactors at each site! Think of all the advantages, we can help them jump-start their rightful place in the nuclear arms race.
Maybe then they'll stop e-mailing me about their deceased grandpa and his grand fortune.
Some electric fence chargers can run a month or more on a single 12v car battery (we used to use some on horse pastures.)
Solar + wind + generator + battery backup = long long wait.
Would probably be easier to just catapult a cow through the fence ala Monty Python.
Or maybe just cover the entire installation in razorwire. The emergency road phones out on the remote highways between Arizona and California are all solar powered cell phones. The solar panels are individually wrapped in razorwire to prevent tampering. Not that this wouldn't stop an engineering fellow with another cowapult, or a big truck with reinforced bumper from knocking the pole over, but that has been covered.
Those bits of Utah where you drive a hundred miles just north of the AZ/UT border and there's no power, lights, phone, electricity, anything for seemingly forever. The only way to call for help out there is with a satphone.
Talk about no bars in no places!
They have enough sunlight out there in the deserts it should be relatively easy to implement a solar-only with generator-backup power system to keep the sites up, then use microwave point-to-point links between sites and dual uplinks on either side of the network for redundancy in the event sites in the middle fail.
Providers won't bother doing that though, they have no population out there to cover, and why would they care about public safety? They're too busy wasting resources deploying mobile TV and camera phones and video phones and all their other useless nonsense.
I've had nothing but bad experiences with that overpriced warranty.
I had an iBook that I received with stuck-on pixels, a lot of them, sent it into repair, came back with the same display even though they claimed they replaced it. They did a good job scratching it up though.
I had a PowerBook G4 that I sent in for the same issue, it came back with the display replaced, however their replacement display had a piece of the display actually CHIPPED OUT of the display surface, so there was this pitted hole in it that somehow still allowed the pixels around it to function. This one came back with nicks all over the metal.
(These were both brand new-out-of-box machines from store.apple.com)
My brother had a refurb iBook also from store.apple.com, his first time sending it back for the defective motherboard display video chip issue, they sent it back with the back of the display casing all scratched up with giant gashes through it. The display died 2 months later and he had to again send it back to them, they claiming it was the keyboard this time, replaced the keyboard. It came back again, and broke again 2 weeks later. He sent it back, they repaired it again. This time it worked until his AppleCare ran out, about 2 months after AppleCare ran out (about 4 months after the last time he had sent it in again) the display died, Apple wouldn't do anything because the repair was only warranted for 90 days, and without their warranty he was SOL, even though it was all caused - come to find out - by their defective video chip iBook bug, ta da! Apple didn't care though!
We ended up having to take his iBook apart and put a piece of metal on the video chip to hold it on place, and that magically fixed the problem that Apple replaced 2 displays and a keyboard to fix!
I have no confidence whatsoever in their ability to repair Macs and will never purchase AppleCare ever again. You're better off doing a flat return/exchange or fixing it yourself.
The OLPC has 128MB RAM, the 512MB flash = hard drive.
I did a minimum install of XP SP2 with all service packs (and removed the service pack updater files when done), with a minimum install of Office, minimum install of Visual C++ 2005, Visual Basic 2005, and a few others like Firefox, EditPad Lite, mIRC, etc. and I can barely jam that all into a 9GB hard drive partition. (This does count a 1GB swap file on there too.) I currently have approximately 300MB free space. This is also after shutting off system restore, REDUCING the size of the swap file, and removing a lot of "system" files that it was none too fond of having be deleted.
Conversely, I can do a full install of a Linux distro with all options, all documentation, etc. in the same space with room left over for user documents.
The bigger problem I see is security updates. Not that Linux is airtight, but Windows updates that have critical impact on systems happen more frequently, enough so that the target markets with no guaranteed consistent Internet connection could go some time without the ability to update. Couple this with the mesh networking between boxes, and we're looking at some all new Windows attacks that could go unfixed for a long period of time.
However, this doesn't work with CDMA handsets unless you are in a very weak signal area.
American GSM handsets transmit up to 1.6W output, Euro GSM at 2.0W output. Nextel handsets following the GSM spec to some degree on the backend but still requiring FCC licensed power output for user safety transmit somewhere in the range of 1.6 watts.
American CDMA handsets at 850MHz transmit at 200mW max, while 1900MHz transmit at 150mW max. (Verizon, Alltel, Sprint, etc.)
You can only pick up a CDMA handset's transceiver if you have cheap speakers, turned up very loud, in a very very weak signal area and the handset is screaming at maximum output power - otherwise they are ghostly silent.
Also, when you live or make most of your calls right next to a cell site, even a GSM handset's transceiver is so quiet that you can't easily pick it up without some work.
Not exactly the most foolproof method to detect if your handset is transmitting.
Near-field radio absorption will be less affected by a little dangling LED toy than it would a human skull full of soft tissue.
Also, as your assumptions are incorrect, microwave radiation's focus is primarily in a line-of-sight fashion although the omni antennas diffuse this outward to maximize reception in handsets.
I don't disagree that a device in close proximity to a wireless handset and/or within near-field could cause the handset to crank up it's transmitter power, such as a faraday cage, bucket of water or other signal-absorption device, but assuming any negligible amount of radio energy is being "sucked" away by these self-contained button battery powered LED sensors is lacking in factual proof other than some crazy hearsay. (The ones I am thinking of are these little goofy things that look like jewelry beads and are designed to hang from your antenna or from a lanyard on your phone, direct contact isn't even necessary, just a few inches of proximity.)
In an unofficial study of my own as I was curious at the time when one of my friends had one of these, with and without one of these devices under normal handset use, battery life differences were nil.
These devices are essentially passive collectors that detect RF energy in a specific frequency range in the magnitude of a few mW of output power and up. I've seen a CDMA handset with a maximum power output of 200mW sets off these keyfobs when the transceiver is running at just 5-10mW. For how they work, think of a toy boat in a pond when someone throws a 20 lb rock in. The ripples caused by the rock make the boat bob, that bobbing is our indicator that the water is moving. The ripple in the direct path of the boat would be affected by the boat's presence, but if you watch the rest of the ripple in the other 359.9 around where the rock landed, you'll notice the waves continue to behave the same. If you throw in a smaller rock, the boat will bob less, but as long as the tolerance of the sensor is set as such, it'll still activate the blinking LED.
Coupling this with all the other interference factors such as multipath fading (which technologies such as CDMA can use to their advantage with the use of rake receivers), doppler shift, and signal absorption, scattering or reflection due to glass, metal, leaves on trees, et. al., and you'll realize the little tiny keyfob LED makes little impact on a wireless handset's operations.
Sounds like Vista is to Windows XP/NT what Windows ME was to Windows 95/98 - a nice bloatware last version chock full of hard drive pwnership, insane hardware requirements and a total system slowdown at the price of "prettiness"...
There is some truth in their claim even if they are trolling for business however - if you poke around in the data stores of many handsets, almost any Verizon LG handset for example, rarely purges data. Even after deleting a contact they are still stored in memory fragments throughout the filesystem.
Oh yeah I'm joking! I think the practices Verizon continues to do are downright ridiculous. From the minor locking the phone themes hardcoded to Communist Red, to crippling bluetooth unnecessarily, to disabling mp3 player capabilities of their phones, to the ridiculous and stupid closed BREW system, to the incompatible-with-the-rest-of-the-world CDMA system, to billing of data plans on PDA and smartphones, to EV-DO deployment (or rather lack thereof) followed by charging customers in non-EV-DO markets for features that only work in EV-DO markets, to this GPS stalking issue - they just continue to become ever more ridiculous and nothing seems to stop their insane practices.
The worst part is, at least in my market, everyone hops on the Communist VZ train like a pack of migrating otters so they can be "IN" - because being "in" the communist party is where it's at yo.
Number forwarding won't change the ESN the GPS tracking is tied to. Also the phone Verizon is currently using (LG Migo) for the service doesn't support text messaging period, it only has 4 buttons for speed-dials.
So neither of those ideas will work, period. (Well the latter will probably start working once they release VZStalkerNet to be used on all their phones...but until then...)
Social engineering and creative solutions will certainly spring up.
I salute our Red Communist Verizon Brothers and the government control the offer us!
Speaking of it being on AT&T's network where most of the trouble lies - maybe it has to do with the NSA's snooping on Internet traffic on AT&T's network (courtesy AT&T) that is causing the issues..hmm.....
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I don't have a use for all the extra bloat features that just slow the browser down. All I want is tabs and popup blocking. Safari has both, as well as fast page rendering and a low memory footprint (until one opens 30 tabs per 4 windows as I generally do.) For people like me, Safari is perfect. Firefox has got too bloated and slow, it's like Netscape 4 all over again.
Let me know how to chip in for adding communications out in those remote areas and I'll chip in. ;)
While we're at it, don't make the broad-sweeping naive assumption that people live in remote areas to have to go through them. I never lived in Death Valley, yet I drove through it and had cell service.
Conversely, try driving from Colorado through Utah to Arizona and plan yourself a route with coverage of some sort. One is limited in the routes one can take, regardless of living there or not.
Anyway, Joe Provider throwing up a network in such remote rural areas could have a goldmine of roaming charges from everybody else having to roam on the one existing network in the area. It could be a very profitable venture if done right.
Assuming that because something is done a certain way for a long time means one should continue to do so is false logic. Change can be good.
This is true that they pulse, in this case they could pick a rapid-pulse charger that wouldn't last as long on battery but make it harder to accomplish anything between pulses. A pulse can be annoying enough a deterrent to stop them from trying to short it out. Especially some of those "weed-snapper" models that have enough of a powerful zap to zap through growth around the wire.
Maybe they could just build moats around the cell sites and put dragons inside!
Miniature fission reactors at each site! Think of all the advantages, we can help them jump-start their rightful place in the nuclear arms race. Maybe then they'll stop e-mailing me about their deceased grandpa and his grand fortune.
Some electric fence chargers can run a month or more on a single 12v car battery (we used to use some on horse pastures.) Solar + wind + generator + battery backup = long long wait. Would probably be easier to just catapult a cow through the fence ala Monty Python. Or maybe just cover the entire installation in razorwire. The emergency road phones out on the remote highways between Arizona and California are all solar powered cell phones. The solar panels are individually wrapped in razorwire to prevent tampering. Not that this wouldn't stop an engineering fellow with another cowapult, or a big truck with reinforced bumper from knocking the pole over, but that has been covered.
Those bits of Utah where you drive a hundred miles just north of the AZ/UT border and there's no power, lights, phone, electricity, anything for seemingly forever. The only way to call for help out there is with a satphone.
Talk about no bars in no places!
They have enough sunlight out there in the deserts it should be relatively easy to implement a solar-only with generator-backup power system to keep the sites up, then use microwave point-to-point links between sites and dual uplinks on either side of the network for redundancy in the event sites in the middle fail.
Providers won't bother doing that though, they have no population out there to cover, and why would they care about public safety? They're too busy wasting resources deploying mobile TV and camera phones and video phones and all their other useless nonsense.
I've had nothing but bad experiences with that overpriced warranty. I had an iBook that I received with stuck-on pixels, a lot of them, sent it into repair, came back with the same display even though they claimed they replaced it. They did a good job scratching it up though. I had a PowerBook G4 that I sent in for the same issue, it came back with the display replaced, however their replacement display had a piece of the display actually CHIPPED OUT of the display surface, so there was this pitted hole in it that somehow still allowed the pixels around it to function. This one came back with nicks all over the metal. (These were both brand new-out-of-box machines from store.apple.com) My brother had a refurb iBook also from store.apple.com, his first time sending it back for the defective motherboard display video chip issue, they sent it back with the back of the display casing all scratched up with giant gashes through it. The display died 2 months later and he had to again send it back to them, they claiming it was the keyboard this time, replaced the keyboard. It came back again, and broke again 2 weeks later. He sent it back, they repaired it again. This time it worked until his AppleCare ran out, about 2 months after AppleCare ran out (about 4 months after the last time he had sent it in again) the display died, Apple wouldn't do anything because the repair was only warranted for 90 days, and without their warranty he was SOL, even though it was all caused - come to find out - by their defective video chip iBook bug, ta da! Apple didn't care though! We ended up having to take his iBook apart and put a piece of metal on the video chip to hold it on place, and that magically fixed the problem that Apple replaced 2 displays and a keyboard to fix! I have no confidence whatsoever in their ability to repair Macs and will never purchase AppleCare ever again. You're better off doing a flat return/exchange or fixing it yourself.
The OLPC has 128MB RAM, the 512MB flash = hard drive. I did a minimum install of XP SP2 with all service packs (and removed the service pack updater files when done), with a minimum install of Office, minimum install of Visual C++ 2005, Visual Basic 2005, and a few others like Firefox, EditPad Lite, mIRC, etc. and I can barely jam that all into a 9GB hard drive partition. (This does count a 1GB swap file on there too.) I currently have approximately 300MB free space. This is also after shutting off system restore, REDUCING the size of the swap file, and removing a lot of "system" files that it was none too fond of having be deleted. Conversely, I can do a full install of a Linux distro with all options, all documentation, etc. in the same space with room left over for user documents.
The bigger problem I see is security updates. Not that Linux is airtight, but Windows updates that have critical impact on systems happen more frequently, enough so that the target markets with no guaranteed consistent Internet connection could go some time without the ability to update. Couple this with the mesh networking between boxes, and we're looking at some all new Windows attacks that could go unfixed for a long period of time.
However, this doesn't work with CDMA handsets unless you are in a very weak signal area.
American GSM handsets transmit up to 1.6W output, Euro GSM at 2.0W output. Nextel handsets following the GSM spec to some degree on the backend but still requiring FCC licensed power output for user safety transmit somewhere in the range of 1.6 watts.
American CDMA handsets at 850MHz transmit at 200mW max, while 1900MHz transmit at 150mW max. (Verizon, Alltel, Sprint, etc.)
You can only pick up a CDMA handset's transceiver if you have cheap speakers, turned up very loud, in a very very weak signal area and the handset is screaming at maximum output power - otherwise they are ghostly silent.
Also, when you live or make most of your calls right next to a cell site, even a GSM handset's transceiver is so quiet that you can't easily pick it up without some work.
Not exactly the most foolproof method to detect if your handset is transmitting.
Near-field radio absorption will be less affected by a little dangling LED toy than it would a human skull full of soft tissue.
Also, as your assumptions are incorrect, microwave radiation's focus is primarily in a line-of-sight fashion although the omni antennas diffuse this outward to maximize reception in handsets.
I don't disagree that a device in close proximity to a wireless handset and/or within near-field could cause the handset to crank up it's transmitter power, such as a faraday cage, bucket of water or other signal-absorption device, but assuming any negligible amount of radio energy is being "sucked" away by these self-contained button battery powered LED sensors is lacking in factual proof other than some crazy hearsay. (The ones I am thinking of are these little goofy things that look like jewelry beads and are designed to hang from your antenna or from a lanyard on your phone, direct contact isn't even necessary, just a few inches of proximity.)
In an unofficial study of my own as I was curious at the time when one of my friends had one of these, with and without one of these devices under normal handset use, battery life differences were nil.
These devices are essentially passive collectors that detect RF energy in a specific frequency range in the magnitude of a few mW of output power and up. I've seen a CDMA handset with a maximum power output of 200mW sets off these keyfobs when the transceiver is running at just 5-10mW. For how they work, think of a toy boat in a pond when someone throws a 20 lb rock in. The ripples caused by the rock make the boat bob, that bobbing is our indicator that the water is moving. The ripple in the direct path of the boat would be affected by the boat's presence, but if you watch the rest of the ripple in the other 359.9 around where the rock landed, you'll notice the waves continue to behave the same. If you throw in a smaller rock, the boat will bob less, but as long as the tolerance of the sensor is set as such, it'll still activate the blinking LED.
Coupling this with all the other interference factors such as multipath fading (which technologies such as CDMA can use to their advantage with the use of rake receivers), doppler shift, and signal absorption, scattering or reflection due to glass, metal, leaves on trees, et. al., and you'll realize the little tiny keyfob LED makes little impact on a wireless handset's operations.
No VoIP sounds like a Verizon ToS thing - most other providers aren't as gay as Verizon and actually allow users the true definition of "unlimited."
Sounds like Vista is to Windows XP/NT what Windows ME was to Windows 95/98 - a nice bloatware last version chock full of hard drive pwnership, insane hardware requirements and a total system slowdown at the price of "prettiness"...
Bluetooth 2.0 has been around for a while...
There is some truth in their claim even if they are trolling for business however - if you poke around in the data stores of many handsets, almost any Verizon LG handset for example, rarely purges data. Even after deleting a contact they are still stored in memory fragments throughout the filesystem.
Oh yeah I'm joking! I think the practices Verizon continues to do are downright ridiculous. From the minor locking the phone themes hardcoded to Communist Red, to crippling bluetooth unnecessarily, to disabling mp3 player capabilities of their phones, to the ridiculous and stupid closed BREW system, to the incompatible-with-the-rest-of-the-world CDMA system, to billing of data plans on PDA and smartphones, to EV-DO deployment (or rather lack thereof) followed by charging customers in non-EV-DO markets for features that only work in EV-DO markets, to this GPS stalking issue - they just continue to become ever more ridiculous and nothing seems to stop their insane practices.
The worst part is, at least in my market, everyone hops on the Communist VZ train like a pack of migrating otters so they can be "IN" - because being "in" the communist party is where it's at yo.
Number forwarding won't change the ESN the GPS tracking is tied to. Also the phone Verizon is currently using (LG Migo) for the service doesn't support text messaging period, it only has 4 buttons for speed-dials. So neither of those ideas will work, period. (Well the latter will probably start working once they release VZStalkerNet to be used on all their phones...but until then...) Social engineering and creative solutions will certainly spring up. I salute our Red Communist Verizon Brothers and the government control the offer us!
Speaking of it being on AT&T's network where most of the trouble lies - maybe it has to do with the NSA's snooping on Internet traffic on AT&T's network (courtesy AT&T) that is causing the issues..hmm.....