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In the past I have had parents ask for advice on buying a digital camera for a young child. For some years there have been digital cameras on sale for much less than $100 – cheap enough that no-one will be THAT bothered if the child breaks it, so digital photography is a good hobby for a young child. Such cameras are however quite bulky and require AA batteries – which often don’t last that long between charges. Some of the cheap phones are large enough that a 3yo child can have trouble carrying them.
I recently gave an old LG U8110 phone to a young child for use as a camera. The phone has a 640*480 resolution camera and a display that is a few centimeters wide. It’s no good for any remotely serious photography, and among other problems I never managed to get it’s USB connection to work so the only way I ever managed to get a photograph off it was to MMS it to a newer camera. But it’s quite adequate for a child to play with, it’s small, light, and the battery stays charged for ages. Also the phone has a clock built in which is a handy feature – it seems that nowadays the trend in society is away from wearing a watch and towards using a mobile phone to discover the time.
Also a phone is a fairly capable computer, I think that the first two computers that I owned had significantly less CPU power and RAM than an LG U8110 and lots of newer phones compare well to PCs that were manufactured in the mid 90’s. The trend has been towards having an increasing number of applications and games on phones which of course gives more things for a child to play with. I believe that playing with computers that have a variety of different user interfaces and sets of applications is good for the education of young children.
Now to make a phone work you need to have a SIM. If a phone was designed by someone who was intelligent and who was acting on behalf of the owner of the phone then it would support the camera etc without a SIM. But it seems that mobile phones are either designed by idiots or they are designed to act on behalf of the phone companies to the exclusion of the customer’s interests, so I haven’t seen a camera-phone that is usable for any purpose other than calling the emergency services when there is no SIM installed. Fortunately it is possible to get old SIMs, I had one that was replaced due to an intermittent fault that caused calls to drop out. I also have some SIMs from other telcos that would probably work (I’m not sure whether a phone that is locked to one carrier will take photos if a SIM from another carrier is installed).
Update: It seems that there is a range of phones that operate without a SIM, a Nokia N900 (if you consider it to be a phone rather than an Internet tablet), an Android, or a phone running the Symbian OS. I suspect that the majority of phones that are currently in use and due to be replaced soon will require a SIM though.
One final notable aspect of giving a phone to a child is the possibility of it being used to call emergency services (which will work even when there is no SIM or a SIM that is not associated with an account). If you are planning to give a phone to someone else’s child then you should ask the parents first, some parents believe (either correctly or incorrectly) that the chance of their child making prank calls to the emergency services is too great. A present that a child receives which is undesired by their parents will probably get lost or broken quickly…
When such a phone gets broken by a child (they are tough, but almost everything that is used without restriction by a child gets broken) the next thing to do is to disassemble it. With modern design and manufacturing probably all that a child could really learn from a phone is how the keyboard works – and not even that for a touch-screen phone. But it’s still a good experience for a child to take apart old machines. When I was young my father gave me many old machines to take apart, I had a lot of fun and learned some interesting things.
I find it really sad to see those boxes for recycling old phones at the mobile phone stores which are full of 2yo phones that are mostly in good condition. Almost everyone has some young relatives or friends who have children who could find a good use for that stuff. Send the bits to be recycled AFTER the children nearest to you have finished doing things to the old phone!
The following was written by Stefano Cosentino in regard to the ongoing efforts of the Australian government to censor the Internet with “protecting the children” as an excuse.
All these Internet filtering ideas that have been in the news lately has made me voice my own opinion on the matter as a non-expert. I’m an IT advisor. I take someone’s problem and help them fix it.
I have a few clients who provide laptops to their students, everything is done with these laptops. The students have no books. The school provides laptops to their primary school students as well as their high school students. They have done this long before the public system started to hand out laptops to a select number of high school students.
When you provide a child with anything, there are always areas where a child will find that you may have overlooked. In fact, a young kid will probably find a host of things that you might have totally missed or didn’t ever know about. One of these things is the inappropriate nature of information you may find that are associated with computers. This can be anything. But specifically, what the filtering argument has been about has been leaning towards Internet pornography and I would imagine, more specifically content of a pedophiliac nature.
I’m not against child pornography being banned or filtered. I personally think this is one of the most cruel, inconsiderate, disrespectful and self centered behaviors a person could display. Their psychological makeup isn’t the scope of this article. However these ideas must be conveyed when discussing the Internet as a modern technological device that can be used for both good and bad.
The primary school students that I attend to aren’t very interested in this stuff and as it has been mentioned long ago by others who have joined this argument, are more interested in online flash games that include characters such as Ben 10, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. When I’m called in to scan these computers during the school holidays and hand the laptops back to the kids or when they get handed back after 3 years for new ones, I find that the older primary school kids computers are usually more prone to the adult orientated content. To me this is the first sign of a filter’s failure. This customer of mine spends more money on the filtering devices they use on campus than I charge them for a few days of work.
Does it work?
Sadly, I hate to report that no, it does not. It’s completely useless. The kids still have files and traces of files on their computers that isn’t suitable for young children. Not only pornography but also content of a violent or morbid nature. As young and impressionable people, everything they read, see and hear is absorbed. This shapes the way society will become in years to come. Since no one can realistically tell the future, wouldn’t it be nice if we could make sure that the people looking after us and our lives forty or fifty years from now have a sane mind free of blemish?
It’s a different story for the high school children. While scanning their laptops I have to contact the police on a daily basis because of the nature of the content I find during my day. Some things you can let slip, today’s version of a pinup girl, or a provocative pic of whatever skimpy clad girl the record companies are flogging off these days as musicians. But sadly that’s rare. I won’t go into detail of what I find on these laptops of 14 year old boys, but it ranges from some innocent growing up curiosity right to perverted, sick and most if not all of the time, illegal content. The filters fail again. The kids find a way around it. And they find it easily.
I’ve seen filters work and not work at all with young kids right through to young adults. All the filters do is either hinder the poor kids actually trying to do research of scholastic nature or prolong the inevitable and temporarily block a determined child’s interest in the search for some adult related material. The filter might prevent accidental viewing but it doesn’t stop the deliberate finding of pornography and other illegal content.
How does a filter stop this from happening? How does a filter stop a child taking their parents adult videos and copying them to their laptop or finding dad’s stash of Penthouse? How does it stop a school mate bringing this stuff to school to show everyone at lunch time or to trade for other content they found by other means. Remember back to when you were their age and caught a glimpse of your big brother’s room wall. How many times did you try and catch a peak at that Samantha Fox poster hanging off the wall?
Where’s the filter now? Here’s some thing to think about.
The filter shouldn’t be a thing, it should be a person. They’re called “responsible”. They’re called parents.
What priorities do parents have if their child feels that what they look at online that is of an adult nature is acceptable? Or maybe the kid knows better, knows it isn’t acceptable but still goes out of their way to get the stuff on their computer? Sneaker Net still exists, USB memory sticks are cheap and can now have two or three straight DVD rips on them, or perhaps five or six encoded films on there. Hundreds and thousands of images and so on. Filter failure again.
When the kids go online, they know of the technology used to block them from gaining access to what they want to see. Chances are, they’ll know what a proxy server is and does. Then they’ll figure out what they need to do to get around the filter. I, myself did this back in high school and TAFE when I couldn’t find photographs of a particular device I was researching. Turns out the name is also a form of sexual activity, in another language, but still. The filter stopped me from not only looking the offending content but also to look at the legitimate data that I needed to complete an assignment.
I got around the problem by researching some more information and the following day I was breaking through firewalls and proxy servers with easy. Filter failure.
How do I get around this issue when speaking to younger kids that need guidance and knowledge on how to deal with this situation? I hold talks at the school I provide my services to. I talk to the parents, no kids. The talk costs less than a broken filter they keep throwing money at keep up-to-date. The school puts these filters in place to appear responsible, because while the kids are attending their school, the school is in fact responsible. In fact, there is nothing more the school can do. They could educate the children, but you can tell someone what to do, and the chances of them doing it are pretty dismal. Music is not allowed on their computers either. Yet we constantly find iTunes on there and a host of music that traces to certain peer to peer applications where they acquired the stolen music.
If a kid can learn how to do that, imagine what sort of influence can be placed on them from a more positive angle. Like maybe parents providing an explanation for starters of what it is they’re looking at. What it is they’ll find online. What material is inappropriate. What material should you tell an adult about. Why do I get stupid emails with Russian girls wanting to marry me.
Kids absorb everything. Parents have relegated responsibility but not delegated it. This filter idea might help slow down a child’s enthusiasm to learn about everything, both good and bad. But educating the kids from an early stage in life about morals and the modern world where lets think about it, we have absolutely everything we need and want at our finger tips will be more valuable than any filter. But the fact that we have so much available makes it difficult to say what is and isn’t appropriate for a child to see. It is up to us to inform the children of what’s out there is the world. It may or may not stop them from seeing the adult related content, but it will help them respond to it in a mature and adult manner. We all know, kids aren’t stupid.
So, if the filters worked, why am I called in once a year, every year to give my talk to parents?
Bruce Everiss who is famous for being threatened with legal action by Evony has been writing about the supposed losses from game piracy, in his latest missive he copies the text from a number of blog comments without citing the original authors [1]. He copied my text without citing me as the author (which is at best shoddy journalism and by a fundamentalist attitude such as his could be considered as piracy). He also copied my text in with a bunch of other comments which he attributes to “The thieves“.
It’s unfortunate that Bruce doesn’t seem capable of understanding irony, he wrote “There is no doubt whatsoever that downloading and playing a game that should have been paid for is theft” and then copied part of the text of my comment where I provided a dictionary definition of theft that directly contradicts his claim. If he was at all interested in quality writing he would cite his references and then when a dictionary is cited which disagrees with his opinion he would at least try to find a dictionary with a more agreeable definition. It shouldn’t be THAT difficult to find a dictionary that has multiple definitions of theft of which one is agreeable to the MAFIAA [2].
Now if Bruce had properly read my comment he would have seen “I’ve started watching content from sites such as blip.tv (in the little time I have for such things) and I only play games that are part of the Debian distribution of Linux (free software)” which makes it very clear to any reasonable interpretation that I am not a game pirate and probably not even a movie pirate.
I did mention in a comment on Bruce’s blog that the DVD experience of being forced to sit through a whinge about piracy was a factor that made buying a DVD a worse experience than downloading it, a concept that I expanded into a blog post on the relative technical merits of DVDs and pirate MP4 files [3]. That post received a number of interesting comments including one from Josselin Mouette which had some useful technical detail about subtitles and audio track storage. I had believed that there were some real technical advantages of DVDs but Josselin corrected me on this matter.
Also one thing that is noteworthy is that Bruce seems to use a copyright picture in almost every post but he doesn’t attribute any of them. It does seem unusual for someone to use commercial artwork without any copyright or trademark notices attached. This usually isn’t a big deal for a blogger, a liberal interpretation of copyright and trademark law is usually expected in terms of blogging – corporations will tend to be hesitant to invoke the Streisand effect by suing a blogger (EG Bruce’ blog came to fame when he was sued by Evony). But when a blogger is writing about the importance of not pirating anything it would seem sensible to go to the effort of citing trademark and copyright references and also mentioning the licence agreements under which the IP was used.
I believe that any loss of customers and revenue by the MAFIAA and the gaming industry is due to the actions of the companies involved. They should just try to make their customers happy, otherwise they lose the customers.
The same goes for bloggers. I read blogs written by people who disagree with me, and sometimes by people who offend me on occasion. But Bruce is making baseless claims while deliberately ignoring evidence. He is calling for strong anti-piracy measures while doing what could be considered as pirating my work. He uses words in ways that conflict with dictionary definitions, and he calls for an end to our current legal system by demanding punishment based on three accusations rather than any legal process. I even pointed out to Bruce that if there was a “three strikes” law regarding accusations of copyright infringement then his blog would be offline after three accusations by Evony.
Sorry Bruce, if I was looking for irrational rants about copyright then I would look at what the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) are doing [4]. The SFWA people demonstrate as much knowledge of computers and the Internet as Bruce does, but they are at least really good writers. If it was just me unsubscribing from Bruce’s RSS feed then it wouldn’t matter (I’m one of tens of thousands of readers). But I expect that a large portion of the new readers Bruce acquired after being attacked by Evony will disappear when they see Bruce as the attacker and everyone who uses the Internet as a potential victim of the “Three Strikes” law.
Three
This afternoon I tried to unlock my old Three mobile phones for the purpose of getting cheap net access as described in my previous post [1]. I wanted to use Dodo 3G Internet (via the Optus network) for my parents which would cost them $139 per year and I wanted to use my old Three phone tethered to their PC as the 3G modem (cheaper than buying a new 3G modem). I took in 3 Three phones to the Three store to get unlocked, I actually have 4 old Three phones (my wife and I are each on our third Three phone) but I seem to have misplaced one. It turned out that the two newer phones (LG U890) can’t be unlocked as they are permanently locked to the Three network. The older LG U8110 can be unlocked, doing this took 30 minutes of the Three employee speaking to other Three employees on the phone and I will now have to wait 4 days to receive an SMS with the unlock code.
So the Three anti-competitive behavior of making it unreasonably difficult to get a phone unlocked and of selling phones that (supposedly) can never be unlocked wasted them 30 minutes of store employee time when other potential customers were queuing up as well as 30 minutes of employee time in their call center. If the call-center employee was based in Australia then as the minimum wage is $14.31 per hour [2] that would have cost them at least $14.31 for 2*30min of work, as a rule of thumb it’s generally regarded that the costs of employing people are twice the salary (including costs of maintaining office/shop space, paying managers, doing paperwork, etc). So it probably cost Three about $29 to unlock one of my phones and tell me that the others can’t be unlocked, when I find phone 4 it will cost them another $29. As $29 is my typical monthly bill this has got to make an impact on the profitability of Three. If they were smart they would have sent me an SMS when I got a new phone telling me whether the old phone can be unlocked and if so giving me the code to do so. For phones that can be unlocked I doubt that would make anyone unlock their phone who wouldn’t do so anyway, and for phones that can’t be unlocked they could encourage the owner to give the phone to someone who wants a phone for pre-paid use (thus locking in a new customer).
It probably won’t be worth the effort of cracking an LG U890 phone to save my parents $10 per annum. As I couldn’t get the LG U8110 to talk to my laptop I guess that forces my parents to eventually use Three for 3G net access. But they could have just matched the Dodo price and got the same result without having me spend half an hour in their store.
Update: I just enquired about ending my Three contract for 3G net access ($15 per month for 1G of data) in favor of the yearly prepaid option of $149 per annum for 12G. The prepaid option would save me $31 per annum and allow me to use more than 1G in the busy months. But it seems that I subscribed to a two year contract for that one and I have 6 months to go. Over those 6 months they will make about $15 extra in revenue from me while annoying me in the process, this probably isn’t a good deal. As my 3G modem is locked to the Three network even if I didn’t have a contract I would still be unable to use a different provider.
Optus
My mother phoned Optus about her Internet connection and discovered that she had supposedly renewed her Optus cable Internet contract in September last year. Presumably someone from Optus phoned my parents and asked what seemed like a routine “do you want to keep using the Internet?” question but was really a “do you agree to a 2 year contract with a $250 penalty clause for exiting early?”. This isn’t the first time that Oprus has scammed my parents (previously they charged them rental for a phone that they never supplied), I guess that they have a practice of pulling such stunts on pensioners. I guess I’ll have to call the TIO, which will end up costing them more than the $250 penalty clause.
The irony here is that as Dodo uses the Optus network I would have used Optus by choice for my parents, but now that they are being scum I will willingly pay the extra $10 per annum to use Three (which while annoying aren’t actually hostile).
Google
Finally while Google is admirably living up to their “don’t be evil” motto in regards to China [3] their conduct regarding Google Talk leaves a lot to be desired. Two employees of a company I work for use Google Talk for their instant messaging, this has a Windows client but also allows general access via the Jabber protocol. So these two guys wanted to talk to me via Jabber but Google would just send me email saying “X has invited you to sign up for Google Talk so you can talk to each other for free over your computers“, I received 5 such messages from a colleague who was particularly persistent. It seems impossible for the Google Talk server to send a chat request to my personal Jabber server (which works well with a variety of other Jabber servers).
So I have now started using my Gmail address to talk via the Jabber protocol to other Gmail users. This means that I have a TCP connection to the Google servers open most of the time and Google can boast of having one more active Gmail user. But it doesn’t seem to really provide them a benefit. I am going to keep using my main email address as my primary Jabber ID and only use my Gmail address for talking to Google Talk users – and only when paid to do so.
But as a result of this I recommend that everyone avoid Google Talk as much as possible. Use open Jabber servers such as the ones run by Jabber.org.
It seems to me that none of these companies are really gaining anything from trying to lock customers in. They would be better off spending their efforts on being friendly to people and making them want to be repeat users/customers.
I’ve been having some cooling problems with my Thinkpad recently. It’s an old model T41p which is outside the service period so IBM/Lenovo won’t help me (at least not unless I give them more money). If I run it for a few minutes at maximum CPU when the ambient temperature is about 20C then it gets to 90C, apparently 93C is the temperature at which it turns itself off, so obviously I need to do something to keep it cool. On the really hot days of summer my air-conditioners can’t keep any part of my house below 30C, so on such days I can’t do any compiles on my Thinkpad or watch videos.
My Thinkpad seems to idle at a temperature that is about 35C higher than the ambient temperature.  At this rate the system could get close to it’s maximum temperature on a 45C day by just idling! Not that I plan to have a warm Thinkpad on my lap if I ever happen to be outside on such a hot day.
I suspect that a large part of the problem is the dust that has accumulated inside the machine. I asked about this on the LUV mailing list and Andrew Chalmers suggested The Chaos Manor review of taking a Thinkpad T41p apart [1]. The Chaos Manor guy wanted to replace his CPU with a faster one so he had to get access to all the same bits.
I followed the instructions until I got to the stage of prying the heatsink off the video chip. I figured that I will never be able to attach it as well as it is currently attached so I will get different cooling problems if I go any further. Taking it apart to that degree was a moderate amount of work, getting the keyboard bezel off was the most difficult part, and taking the palm-rest off required removing bits of plastic that were stuck in place to cover screw holes – which will probably fall off in a week or two.
Probably everyone who owns a T41p that they regularly use has a similar problem to me as all such machines have been out of support long enough to have accumulated a lot of dust. So I recommend that other T41p owners not disassemble their machine as much as I did, but instead go for my plan B which is to blow compressed air through the CPU cooling system. Doing this merely requires removing the keyboard. One tip that I have heard is that you should hold the fan in place when blowing compressed air as the pressure of the air may spin the fan fast enough to generate enough electricity to damage the motherboard or damage it’s bearings. But you might want to wait until I’ve got my Thinkpad done before you blow compressed air through yours, it could very well be destroyed.
The other option is to try and use software to control the temperature. Patricia Fraser suggested controlling the fan speed [2]. I did some experiments and found that increasing the fan speed dramatically slowed the increase in the temperature. A 10 minute build is almost certain to bring the temperature to dangerous levels in a default configuration, but it seems that if I set the fan to maximum speed before starting the build then I can mitigate this problem. Most programs that I work on will compile in significantly less than 10 minutes.
Another possibility that occurred to me is that of limiting the speed of the system. It seems that ACPI has support for reducing the CPU frequency when the temperature rises too much, but Matthew Garrett has pointed out that this effectively increases the amount of energy used (and heat dissipated) for any given quantity of work [3]. So what I want to do is to cause the CPU to idle periodically when it gets too hot. I’ve been idly considering writing a program that uses SIGSTOP and SIGCONT to control the operation of programs such as make, or writing a program that creates a new pty (like script) and pauses the output whenever the CPU gets too hot.
Of course the easy option would be to figure out how to set the threshold temperature where the CPU speed is limited. Which is made slightly more complicated by my choice of kernel 2.6.30 for Ext4 support. Now the kernel doesn’t work with my acpid and I’m starting to get forced into an upgrade to Debian/Testing.
Does anyone have any ideas?
In a comment on my post about (relatively) Cheap Net Access in Australia [1] sin from Romania said “Somebody needs to whack the aussie ISP in the head with a cluebat. The prices that you pay are insane“.
In Eastern Europe you have optic fibers from Germany and other western European countries that carry vast amounts of data. As the demand for capacity increases it’s not THAT difficult to lay more fibers. You also have competition between different companies that lay fiber. To get data to Australia you must lay cables under the sea, this is expensive and can’t be done quickly. Therefore all international data transfers are expensive to cover the expense of laying the cables. I don’t think that we have any real competition in the market for International connectivity from Australia either.
Now the links between Europe and the US aren’t cheap either, but I believe that there are economies of scale (as well as shorter distances) that make them significantly cheaper than the links to Australia.
Also a good portion of the traffic that you generate as a customer of a European ISP will stay within Europe as there are heaps of good sites in Europe. The number of people living in Europe who speak English as their first language is more than twice that of Australia. The number of Europeans who communicate in English almost as fluently as the native speakers (such as about half the population of the Netherlands) is also quite significant. I expect that the amount of English-language material on the net that is published from the EU is more than three times greater than the quantity published from Australia. People who speak languages that have a more limited geographic spread (IE anything other than English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) will have a higher portion of local traffic which is therefore cheaper for their ISP. So based on the relative population sizes we should expect to have Australians making a higher portion of their Internet bandwidth be expensive international data transfers than that of Europeans.
Then of course there is the issue of server costs. Running servers in Australia is horribly expensive, while user access to the net is merely annoyingly expensive, the costs of hosting servers are significant – and usually the offers have slower hardware and slower transfers (particularly to the important US and EU markets). My blog is hosted in Germany because the company that was offering me free hosting in Australia encouraged me to host it elsewhere due to the price. Also hosting in Germany gives me slightly lower ping times to the US and significantly lower ping times to Europe. As about half the readers of my blog are based in the US, a significant quantity of the readers are based in the EU, and Australia only contains a small portion of the readers the overall experience for readers of my blog is improved by having it hosted outside Australia. It would be better to have it hosted in the US (where most of my readers are located) but I was offered free hosting in the EU.
It would be nice if there was a cheap and easy way of getting a mirror of my blog running in Australia with Geo-DNS so that people using Australian IP addresses would get a local server. Putting the static images on an Australian server would be trivial, setting up Geo-DNs would be painful and probably increase reliability issues later on but isn’t insurmountable (I have root on both DNS servers). The Debian blog gives some basic information on how to setup GeoDNS [2]. Then I would need to set up a MySQL slave for WordPress data and modify WordPress to send it’s writes to the master server – which is probably impossible for me unless someone else has already written a WordPress plugin for this, I’m really not good at PHP programming. Another possibility would be one of the WordPress cache plugins that maintain static files to avoid needless database lookups.
Until/unless I do such things, every Australian reader of my web site (and those of my friends who do similar things to me regarding hosting) will slightly tilt the balance of Internet transfers in favor of expensive data from foreign servers instead of cheap content from local servers.
Sometimes it just sucks to live on an island.
The cheapest ADSL or Cable net access in Australia seems to be about $30 per month. I’ve been using 3G net access by the “Three” phone company for 18 months now and it’s been working well [1]. I recently bought a new 3G modem because the old one broke, so it has cost me $250 in modems plus $15 per month for the connection which compares well to $100 (or more) for an ADSL or Cable installation plus $30 per month.
My Three net access gives me 1G of data per month. I have just noticed that they have pre-paid net access that gives 12G of data that must be used within one year which costs $149 per year [2] – that is $12.41 per month or 83% the price of the plan access plus it means that any bandwidth quota that isn’t used in one month can be used the next month (so you can save up for upgrading to a newer distribution of Linux).
Dodo has pre-paid mobile net access on the Optus network for $139 which gives 15G of data that must be used within one year [3]. So that’s equivalent to $11.58 per month or $9.20 per gig.
A member of my local LUG mentioned that Exetel has a 3G plan which is good value if you don’t use much data transfer – but which has per-megabyte charges for excess data transfer. I couldn’t recommend it for my parents as I never know when they will do something that may transfer a lot of data, I could just imagine them saying “loading web pages was really slow for a week and then I got a big bill”.
Ross Barkman’s GPRS/UMTS page gives some critical information on using a 3G phone with a tether [4]. Using that information I discovered that I need to use “AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","3netaccess"” in my chatscript to get ppp going with my old LG U890 mobile phone (with “3netaccess” being the important word).
I plan to give my old mobile phone to my parents and let them use prepaid 3G net access to reduce their net access bill by more than 1/3 while also giving them more data transfer quota for times when they need to transfer a lot (EG when my sister visits them). At this stage I’m not sure whether I will get them to use Three or Dodo. One advantage of Three is that I’ve used them a lot and know exactly how to get it all working, the other is that my old mobile phone is locked to Three – they agreed to unlock it on demand after the contract is ended (which happened over a year ago) but it will be a hassle to get it done. Saving the hassle of getting an old phone unlocked may be worth the $10 per year cost. Also I have used my 3G modem at my parents house on a few occasions and know that the reception is quite good, while the reception for Dodo (Optus) 3G is unknown
One extra benefit with doing this is that my parents will have some freedom to move their PC. If they decide that the computer room is too hot in summer and want to move their PC to below their air-conditioner they will be able to do so without needing a long Ethernet cable to connect their PC to the cable modem.
For my personal 3G net access (which I require for fixing servers on occasion) I am stuck with Three. When I bought a new 3G modem I decided to save about $20 by getting a device that’s locked to Three. 12G per year is more than enough for sshing to servers and checking email and if I had paid extra for the unlocked modem it would it would probably have died before the savings on net access made up for the higher purchase price.
Update:
Crazy John has a good deal, $129 for 7.5G which expires in a year [5]. I won’t use that for my parents though, the probability of them going over 7.5G is too high to make it worth the risk for a $10 saving.
Magnus Larsson gave an interesting TED talk about using bacteria to transform dunes into architecture [1]. The concept of making a wall across Africa to stop sand dunes from overtaking farm land is obviously a good one, the idea of using bacteria to convert sand into sandstone to do so cheaply is also good. But making that into houses seems a little risky. I wouldn’t want to live under shifting sand with only bacteria generated sandstone to protect me.
Cory Doctorow gave an interesting speech titled “How to Destroy the Book”, here is the transcript [2]. He talks about how much he loves books and described his opposition to the DRM people who want to destroy the book culture.
Sendmail has a DKIM Wizard for generating ADSP (Domain Signing Policy) records [3]. If I knew that ADSP records were so easy to implement then I would have used them a year ago!
Loretta Napoleoni gave an insightful TED talk about the economics of terrorism [4]. Apparently the US dollar used to be THE currency for international crime, when the PATRIOT act was passed it’s anti-money-laundering provisions encouraged many shady people to invest in Euros instead and thus led to the devaluation of the US currency. It’s also interesting to note that terrorist organisations are driven by economics, if only we could prevent them from making money…
Ryan Lobo gave an interesting TED talk about his photographic work [5]. The effectiveness of the all-women peace-keeping force is noteworthy. The part about the Liberian war criminal who has become an evangelical Christian and who now tours Liberia begging forgiveness from his victims (and their relatives in the case of the people he murdered). Should someone like that be permitted to remain free if his victims forgive him?
Charles Stross has an appealing vision for how Apple and Google can destroy the current mobile telephony market [6]. I can’t wait for the mobile phone market to be entirely replaced by mobile VOIP devices!
James Geary gave an interesting TED talk about metaphors [7]. The benefits of metaphors in poetry are well known (particularly in lyrics), but the impact of metaphors in influencing stock market predictions surprised me.
Shaffi Mather gave an interesting TED talk about his company that makes money from fighting corruption [8]. Instead of paying a bribe you can pay his company to force the official(s) in question to do the right thing. Apparently the cost of doing so tends to be less than 10% the cost of the bribe if you know what you are doing. His previous company was an ambulance service that charges what the patient can afford is also interesting.
John Robb wrote an interesting article about lottery winners and griefers [9]. He suggests that publishing the names, addresses, etc of rich people will be a new trend in Griefing. One thing I’ve been wondering about is the value of the HR database at a typical corporation. A single database typically contains the home addresses, phone numbers, and salaries of all the employees. It would be very easy to do an SQL dump and store it on a USB flash device to carry out of the office. Then it could be sold to the highest bidder. They could probably make a market in the private data about rich people in the same way that there is currently a market for credit card data – maybe they have already done this but it’s kept quiet to stop others from implementing the same idea.
Michael Smith wrote an interesting article for the Washington Times about home schooling and socialisation [10]. It seems that people who were home schooled as children tend to be more academically successful and involved in civic life as well as being happier and having career success.
Richard Seager wrote an interesting article for American Scientist about ocean currents and heat transfer from the tropics [11]. It seems that when the ocean currents shut down the UK and other parts of northern Europe won’t be getting a mini ice-age.
Ian Lance Taylor (most known for the “gold” linker) has written a good summary of the situation in regard to climate change and what must be done about it [12].
The Wrath of the Killdozer – article about how one angry man converted a bulldozer into a tank [13]. This wasn’t a big bulldozer (every mining company has bigger ones) and he didn’t have any serious weapons (only rifles). Imagine what terrorists could do if they started with a mining vehicle and serious weapons…
Simon Singh has written about being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association [14]. The BCA didn’t like his article criticising chiropractors for claiming to be able to treat many conditions unrelated to the spine. Remember, chiropractors are not doctors – all they can do is alleviate some back problems. See a GP if you have any medical condition that doesn’t involve a sore back or neck. Avoid uppity chiropracters who claim to be able to cure all ills.
Nicholas D. Kristof wrote an interesting article for the New York times about how happy the people in Costa Rica are [15]. He claims that the Costa Rican government’s decision in 1949 to dissolve it’s armed forces and invest the money in education is the root cause of the happy population. Maybe if the US government would scale back military spending the US population could be as happy as the Costa Ricans. While there are good arguments for having some sort of military, there are no good arguments for spending more money on the military than the rest of the world combined (as the US does).
I have direct knowledge (through observation or first-hand reports) of the following use cases for Netbooks:
- System administrator’s emergency workstation – something light to carry when you might get an SMS about a problem.
- A really small laptop for a serious technical user, can be used for programming and other serious tasks. Only someone who is really dedicated to the hobby of computing would choose a system with a tiny screen for their main computer so that they can take it everywhere.
- A computer for a child. Children are less demanding about some aspects of their computer experience, no-one wants to buy a really expensive toy for a young child, and children find it difficult to carry full size laptops.
1 and 2 are the options that interest me. But it would be good if the extensive children’s toy market could drive economies of scale and reduce the expenses of my hobby and profession. I have found my EeePC 701 to provide adequate CPU performance (Celeron-M 630MHz) for light compiling tasks and I have used it for some Debian development work. The SSD that is built in is very fast and OpenOffice load times compare well to my Thinkpad T41p because of it.
The main problems I have with my EeePC for sysadmin and coding tasks are the small keyboard (which can’t be fixed – the overall size of the machine needs to remain small), the small screen (which could be expanded without changing the case size), the low resolution screen (which has been fixed in newer netbooks), and the fact that my 3G dongle sticks out and is likely to get broken. More recent Netbooks address these issues – while having the trade-off of being heavier and larger.
There are also some tasks which are generally not performed on a Netbook but that could be if it was properly designed. Here are some examples of things that I think should be done on a Netbook:
- Basic image editing and blogging – something that a lot of people do on smart-phones nowadays. It can be done more effectively and with less effort on a general purpose computer – I can’t imagine the GIMP or Inkscape running on a smart-phone.
- Reading electronic books. The number of people who want a Netbook but don’t want to read electronic books would be quite small as would the number of people who only want to read electronic books and never want to use a general purpose computer while travelling. No-one really wants to carry both a Netbook and an ebook reader at the same time.
- Watching movies.
- Everything that you might want to do on a terminal in an Internet cafe – those machines are always 0wned, just say no for security reasons.
- Games. The Nintendo DS has two ARM CPUs running at 66MHz and 33MHz and a combined screen resolution of 256*384*18bpp [1] and the Sony PSP has a 333MHz MIPS R4000 CPU and a screen resolution of 480*272*24bpp [2]. The original EeePC had more CPU power and more screen resolution than the DS and the PSP so it IS suitable for games – even though it won’t run the latest 3D games. There are lots of great games like Wesnoth that don’t require much video performance.
- Educational Software. Portable educational devices include the awful V.smile system for young children [3] and the educational software for the DS (I’ve seen a demonstration of a training program in rapid completion of basic maths problems for elderly people and presume it’s not the only educational software on that platform).
Image editing requires a color screen of high resolution. Effective blogging requires a platform with a resolution that compares to the typical web user – according to Hitslink 1024*768 is the most popular resolution of web browsing systems at 28.34% and the most popular resolution that is less than 1024*768 is 800*600 at 3.28% [4]. So even the most casual blogger will have an incentive to get a screen that is of higher resolution than all but the latest Netbooks. The recently released EeePC 1201 has a screen resolution of 1366*768 which should be barely adequate for those tasks.
Reading electronic books requires a reasonable resolution. Based on my experience with the 1400*1050 display in my Thinkpad it seems that a resolution of 1366*768 would be barely adequate for reading an academic paper that has two columns in a small font. But as the original Kindle had a resolution of 600*800 and the latest Kindle has a resolution of 824*1200 [5] it seems that perhaps the epaper displays are good enough to allow reading the text at a lower resolution. A display that can draw little or no power when idling (as epaper does) is simply required for an ebook. The Pixel-Qi hybrid displays are claimed to offer the best features of TFT and epaper displays [6] but they haven’t been released yet. I think it’s reasonable to assume that someone will achieve that Pixel-Qi is attempting and that it will become the standard display for a Netbook.
Watching movies and playing games (even games like Wesnoth) requires better video performance than epaper can deliver, we just have to hope that Pixel-Qi release something soon.
Watching movies and reading ebooks are both things that are best done without a keyboard in the way. The Always Innovating “Touch Book” [7] seems like a good solution to this problem. It’s a tablet PC that can be connected to a keyboard base if/when you desire. It should also be good for web browsing and reading email while on the move, I find that my EeePC is unreasonably heavy and awkward for typing email while walking.
Intel CPUs are not particularly energy efficient. As there are ARM CPUs with clock speeds as high as 2GHz and with as many as four CPU cores it seems that the ARM architecture can provide as much CPU power as is required. Debian currently supports two versions of the ARM CPU, if another one became commonly used it wouldn’t be that difficult to run Debian build servers for it.
Given a screen resolution equal to the latest Kindle, CPU power greater than the early Netbooks, and the ability to run a free software OS the range of educational and gaming software should be adequate.
So it seems that the ideal netbook would have a detachable keyboard and base and a touch-screen in the computer part. It would have a Pixel-Qi display (or equivalent) with a resolution of 1400*1050 or better. It would have USB, Gig-E, Wifi, and Bluetooth connectivity and the ability to have an internally mounted USB dongle (as the Always Innovating Touch Book does). I think that this is not overly difficult to achieve – it is basically an Always Innovating system with a better display.
Update: Another criteria is the ability to start operating quickly when requested. Even mobile phones are often limited in their utility by the time that is taken to activate them (I can’t get my mobile phone to take a photo in much less than 7 seconds after removing it from my pocket). The Always Innovating system is apparently always in suspend to RAM mode when it’s not being used so that it can start quickly. That combined with fast application load times and a good menu system could allow turning the system on and launching an application in less than 2 seconds.
If I was buying a Netbook right now the only thing that would stop me from buying an Always Innovating device is the shipping delay. But as my EeePC is working quite well I’m not going to buy another system unless I am going to get significant benefits – such as a high resolution PixelQi display.
Always Innovating have an interesting netbook that can be detached from it’s keyboard [1]. It provides features which are a close match for the tablet PC with optional keyboard that I advocated in my post about the Lenovo U1 [2]. Such devices are deemed to be in a new category of computer called the Smartbook – which is regarded as being like a cross between a Netbook and a smart-phone [3].
The AI system is always idling, so there is no boot up required – like a mobile phone it will respond immediately to input. It has no fans which will be a good improvement over the EeePC – my EeePC 701 is annoyingly loud at times. It is designed to replace Netbooks not desktops, the screen resolution of 1024*600 is reasonable by Netbook standards but is really poor by desktop standards, it also lacks a VGA port.
The company has a stated policy of being friendly to free software, so hopefully a community of developers will form around it. Of course this partly depends on how they develop their new systems. If they make new systems vastly incompatible with older systems then it will fracture the community and make things difficult for everyone. There have been problems in this regard in the past with ARM as the instruction set has changed.
One interesting thing about the Always Innovating “Touch Book” is that you can order the keyboard and extra battery part separately from the main computer/display unit. This means that if you break one part you can replace it without replacing the entire system (handy if you break the keyboard (the cheaper part). It’s interesting to note that their web site offers to sell me as many as 558 complete systems, as many as 896 tablets, or as many as 992 keyboards. So according to the web site anyone who wanted to buy more than 558 systems would have to order the tablets separately from the keyboards. This wouldn’t be a bad thing as the complete unit costs $399, the tablet costs $299, and the keyboard costs $99. So ordering the keyboard and tablet separately would save $1 per unit! Of course anyone who really wanted to buy 600 computers wouldn’t use a web site, they would call the sales people and get a discount that is significantly greater than $1 per unit. But these limits for the web sales seem strange enough to be worthy of comment.
It’s an interesting system, it would be handy for reading documents when on the move and for light sysadmin work (basic login to server and restart crashed daemon stuff). If I was after a new system I would probably buy one.
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