Ah, they would, wouldn't they.

Yup. Looks like I failed to spot more ITTers than I thought, though...

Shoulda done my homework better - but I was in a kind of daze for two days (or is it the other way round ?

Thanks a lot for mentioning wyrd. Never heard about it, now its another sweet ncurses application I'll use.

There is a bug.
http://groups.google.com/group/linux...982fd85c4456aa

We should not forget that social networks are the drivers of revolutions (to say the very least). Clearly, Nokia makes fine stand-alone NITs, like my N800. But all current devices fall short in a key social feature necessary to drive a (capital "R") revolution: mobile device interconnectivity. By that I mean enabling two or more arbitrary NITs to selectively connect without requiring intermediating servers, routers and so on.

Nokia and Apple products are quite designerly, but it is more than mere rumor that people are inclined to connect in the local, physical space (as opposed to the dated concept of Internet space). Nokia, polished designs are not sufficient. Make them connectable, networkable. Do that well and you will witness a true Revolution!

Umm... what?

We have got ad-hoc wifi, you know. And technically speaking, it sucks. There's actual reasons you can save power if you've got a base station that can hold packets for other stations. As a result, people don't use it as much.

Most places, if you're in the same "local, physical space", and both have connectivity up to the internet, you're also in the same local network space; why kill battery life just so you can say you're connecting directly?

Then again, I'm no revolutionary WRT handheld computers; maybe I lack the vision to go get myself gloriously blown up by whoever it is I'm supposed to be revolting against.

iirc, one part of the rtcom beta can use bonjour/zeroconf to set up ad-hoc im within a subnet.

beyond that it would have been interesting if someone would come up with a kind of digital "bc" radio system for general broadcast data exchange.

it would be more like udp then tcp tho, and one would probably have to forgo ip fully, given the setup overhead.

same goes for ad-hoc wifi as i think its limited to 1 to
1 connections, much like a ethernet crossover cable...

I don't think you'd want to ditch IP altogether; perhaps you're thinking of normal DHCP for assigning IP addresses?

No, an ad-hoc network can have any number of nodes, and communications are only logically (addressing) restricted to the appropriate recipient; broadcast packets and sniffing work just like old-school shared-medium ethernet (with hubs, not switches).

well my main issues with ip is the pre-setup overhead needed for a "cb" like setup.

as in, you have to make sure everyone is on the same subnet with their own address...

and without a central server, like what dhcp uses, this can be a issue if all you want to do is turn on the radio, send some data, and turn off again.

still, now that i think about it, there was some kind of protocol developed for doing this, server-less. maybe baked into zeroconf, maybe not. could be interesting to look into.

btw, ad-hoc still needs one device to be a "master" device in the setup, no?

ok, i guess we could always bump all devices into "promiscuous" mode or something to get the desired effect

A N95 with 3G can serve as a WiFi hotspot, it can allow your NIT to connect to the Internet, even if the N95 isn't yours. The NIT cannot be a hotspot because it cannot be put in master mode (AP mode).