Cabbies threaten strike over GPS systems

NEW YORK (AP) -- A group representing thousands of taxi drivers said last week it will idle cabs in September if the city goes ahead with a plan to require installation of GPS tracking systems.

Starting October 1, as the city's 13,000 taxis come up for inspections they must have the GPS equipment along with touch-screen monitors that will let passengers pay by credit card, check on news stories and look up restaurant and entertainment information.



If the Taxi & Limousine Commission abandons the GPS part of the plan, "then there's room to sit down and talk," said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which counts more than 8,400 members.

But if the plan moves forward, she said, the group will specify the date, duration and other details of the potential work stoppage next month.

The Taxi Workers Alliance -- an advocacy group rather than a labor union -- said GPS devices would be an invasion of drivers' privacy because they could track cabs' movements.
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Taxi officials say the two systems could boost ridership and drivers' incomes by eliminating the need for cash, while giving drivers useful traffic tips and giving passengers a better chance of finding lost items.
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A spokesman for the taxi commission did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

The alliance organized a one-day strike in 1998 to protest plans to raise taxi owners' liability insurance requirements and other changes.

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Are gadgets, and the Internet, actually addictive?

(CNN) -- When the users of BlackBerries could not send or receive e-mails for 11 hours in April because of a glitch in the system, hospital administrator Paul Levy pronounced it a "national disaster" because of all the BlackBerry "addicts" forced into withdrawal.
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Technological gadgets have always fascinated many people, and the past decade has seen an explosion of personal technology.

Writing in his blog, Levy -- the president of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts -- proclaimed himself proud of the swift actions of his hospital.

"We set up our crisis center ... staffed by our Psychiatry Department," Levy wrote. "Cases of withdrawal were handled ... with a minimal use of antidepressant drugs." The one downside, he wrote, were the "damaged walls and broken windows" because of the "many devices ... vigorously thrown."

Levy was joking. There was no activity in his hospital as a result of the BlackBerry blackout, other than some whining from BlackBerry-obsessed colleagues.

But his satire could be said to be part of a serious current debate -- the debate over whether technology addiction, and especially Internet addiction, is a real mental disorder. At its annual conference last month, members of the American Medical Association considered a proposal to label excessive video and online game playing as an addiction, but decided to table it until further study.

It is common to take a comical approach to Americans' obsession with technological gadgets, and especially with the Internet. The very term "Internet addiction disorder" began as a joke on an Internet mailing list, a parody of psychiatric diagnoses coined a decade ago by Irving Goldberg, an Internet-savvy psychiatrist.

But had the 11-hour BlackBerry outage occurred six months earlier, Levy would surely not have thought it so funny. He was one of the device's 8 million subscribers. For years, he couldn't put it down.

"I was a 'Crackberry' addict," he says, using a common term intended only half facetiously. "I used it all the time." Knowing first-hand the result of such over-reliance -- "manners disappear ... relationships disappear" -- Levy late last year quit "BlackBerry cold turkey."
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* Little Addictions
* New gotta-have-it gadgets



Levy uses the language of addiction to describe his former habit; that is not a coincidence.

"I'm not a doctor; I'm not an expert on addiction," says Levy (speaking on a regular cell phone). "But this certainly looks like an addiction. It has all the characteristics -- people who are away from it have a craving to get back to it; it interrupts normal social intercourse, etc."

Shortly after giving up his BlackBerry, Levy wrote on his blog that he has "discovered marvelous things. The sun rises in the morning and sets at night. ... People in meetings pay more attention to you if you pay more attention to them."

Others have less of a sense of humor about the effect of tech toys on their lives.

"I have had people call me who were concerned about their college-age child playing too much of a video game," says Michael Craig Miller, a staff psychiatrist at Levy's hospital, "or worried about their husband always having their laptop with them."

That the digital world has had some unforeseen casualties is difficult to dispute. A doctor writing in The New England Journal of Medicine in June reported the first case of "Wii-itis" -- intense physical pain resulting from playing the Wii video game system. Physicians are already familiar with Nintendinitis.

But there is much debate over whether to label excessive use a mental illness.

On the one hand, technology addiction is not listed in the American Psychiatric Association's manual of disorders, and thus any treatment is not covered by health insurance.

A decade after he introduced the concept as a joke, Goldberg's view of it does not seem to have changed. "I've had people who found my name on the Internet, and come in saying 'Hey doc, I'm an Internet addict,' " he says. "I say, 'Tell me about the rest of your life.' Some are depressed; some of them have mood disorders. The disorder is not the overuse of the Internet. That's the symptom."

On the other hand, over the past decade there has grown a mostly cottage industry of therapists treating it, researchers studying it and journalists covering Internet addiction as a tangible and growing problem too new to be officially recognized.

"New studies indicate this is a global problem," says Kimberly Young, a clinical psychologist who wrote the first book on the subject of Internet addiction, "Caught in the Net," and founded the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pennsylvania. There are clinics for the treatment of Internet addiction in China and in Korea. One clinic director has estimated as many as 2.5 million Chinese suffer from the condition.

Young believes that when enthusiasm shades into addiction, there are signs that can be diagnosed, much like those of the official so-called impulse control disorders, such as gambling.

"You are looking for someone who is preoccupied with the Internet, hides or lies about their behavior, shows an inability to control their use, uses the Internet as a form of psychological escape, and continues to engage in the behavior despite the problems that it causes in one's life."

A survey conducted late last year by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine found that more than one out of every eight users of the Internet in the United States reported having at least one of these and other possible signs of "problematic Internet use." Almost 6 percent, for example, said that "their relationships suffered" as a result of their overuse of the Internet.

The researchers called for more study of this "little-studied, negative by-product of the Internet revolution of the last decade."

Miller, the psychiatrist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center -- who is also editor-in-chief of the Harvard Mental Health Letter -- seems to not care about labels.

"Computers are such an integral part of our life that in a certain sense we're all addicted to the technology," he says. "But we're 'addicted' in the same way that we're 'addicted' to automobiles.

"Parents were worried in the '60s about their kids being addicted to television; now they're worried about their kids being addicted to their computer screens," Miller says. "We don't need a new term in order to describe behavior that's been around for thousands of years -- the choices we make between pleasure and responsibility. We all have to struggle with putting aside things that are gratifying, but aren't satisfying over the long term."

Credit:: www.cnn.com

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ADSL2 , ADSL2+

ADSL2 has been specifically designed to improve the rate and
reach of ADSL largely by achieving better performance on long lines
in the presence of narrowband interference. ADSL2 accomplishes
this by improving modulation efficiency, reducing framing overhead,
achieving higher coding gain, improving the initialization state
machine, and providing enhanced signal processing algorithms. As a
result, ADSL2 mandates higher performance for all standard-compliant
devices.

ADSL systems, on long lines where the data rate is low (e. g. 128
kbps), a fixed 32 kbps (or 25% of the total data rate) is allocated to
overhead information. In ADSL2 systems, the overhead data rate
can be reduced to 4 kbps, which provides an additional 28 kbps for
payload data.
On long lines where data rates are lower, ADSL2 achieves higher
coding gain from the Reed-Solomon (RS) code. This is due to
improvements in the ADSL2 framers that improve flexibility
and programmability in the construction of the RS codewords.
Additionally, the initialization state machine has numerous improvements
that provide increased data rates in ADSL2 systems. Examples
include:

Power cutback capabilities at both ends of the line to reduce
near-end echo and the overall crosstalk levels in the binder.

Determination of the pilot tone location by the receiver
in order to avoid channel nulls from bridged taps or narrow
band interference from AM radio.
ADSL2 provides better modulation efficiency by mandating fourdimensional,
16-state trellis-coded and 1-bit quadrature amplitude
modulation (QAM) constellations, which provide higher data rates
on long lines where the signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) is low. In addition,
receiver-determined tone reordering enables the receiver to
spread out the non-stationary noise due to AM radio interference
to get better coding gain from the Viterbi decoder.
ADSL2 systems reduce framing overhead by providing a frame
with a programmable number of overhead bits. Therefore, unlike
the first-generation ADSL standards where the overhead bits per frame
are fixed and consume 32 kbps of actual payload data, in the ADSL2
standard the overhead bits per frame can be programmed from 4
to 32 kbps. In first-generation Control of certain key initialization
state lengths by the receiver and transmitter in order to
allow optimum training of receiver and transmitter signal
processing functions.

Determination of the carriers used for initialization messages
by the receiver in order to avoid channel nulls from
bridged taps or narrow band interference from AM radio.

Improvement in channel identification for training receiver
time domain equalizer with spectral shaping during
Channel Discovery and Transceiver Training phases
of initialization.

Tone blackout (disabling tones) during initialization to enable
radio frequency interference (RFI) cancellation schemes.

ADSL2+
ADSL2+ is a work in progress at the ITU to standardize a new
member in the family of ADSL2 standards.The ADSL2+ recommendation
doubles the downstream bandwidth, thereby increasing the
data rate on telephone lines shorter than 9 kilofeet. ADSL2+ is
expected to reach consent at the ITU in early 2003.
While the first two members of the ADSL2 standards family
G.992.3 (G.dmt.bis) and G.992.4 (G.lite.bis) specify a downstream
frequency band up to 1.1 MHz and 552 kHz respectively, ADSL2+
specifies a downstream frequency up to 2.2 MHzADSL2+ can also be used to
reduce crosstalk. ADSL2+ provides the capability to use only
tones between 1.1 MHz and 2.2 MHz by masking the downstream
frequencies below 1.1 MHz. This can be particularly useful when
ADSL services from both the central office (CO) and a remote terminal
(RT) are present in the same binder as they approach customers'
homes ADSL2+ can be used to correct this problem by using frequencies
below 1.1 MHz from the central office, and frequencies between
1.1 MHz and 2.2 MHz from the remote terminal to the customer
premise. This will eliminate most of the crosstalk between the services
and preserve data rates on the line from the central office.


Credit:: www.dslprime.com/

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TCP/IP Overview

Computer network protocols are formal rules of behavior that govern network communications.
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) are
just two of the data communication protocols encompassed by the Internet Protocol
Suite. This protocol suite is usually referred to as TCP/IP partly because TCP and IP
are two of the most important protocols of the collection. TCP/IP includes a set of standards
that specify how networked computers communicate and how data is routed
through the interconnected computers.
TCP/IP provides the application programmer with two primary services: connectionless
packet delivery and reliable stream transport.

TCP/IP has several distinguishing features that have led to its popularity,
including
Network Topology Independence. TCP/IP is used on bus, ring, and star
networks. It’s used in local-area networks as well as wide-area networks.
Physical Network Hardware Independence. TCP/IP can utilize Ethernet,
token ring, or any number of physical hardware variations.
Open Protocol Standard. The TCP/IP protocol suite standard is freely
available for independent implementation on any computer hardware platform
or operating system. TCP/IP’s wide acceptance and the fact that TCP/IP is
available on platforms ranging from supercomputers to desktop personal
computers makes it an ideal set of protocols to unite different hardware and
software.
Universal Addressing Scheme. Each computer on a TCP/IP network has an
address that uniquely identifies it so that any TCP/IP enabled device can
communicate with any other on the network. Each packet of data sent across a
TCP/IP network has a header that contains the address of the destination
computer as well as the address of the source computer.
Powerful Client-Server Framework. TCP/IP is the framework for powerful
and robust client-server applications that operate in local-area networks and
wide-area networks.
Application Protocol Standards. TCP/IP doesn’t just provide the programmer
with a method for moving data around a network among custom applications.
It also provides the underpinnings of many application-level protocols
that implement such common functionality as e-mail and file-transfer capabilities.
The current incarnation of the Windows Sockets library is built on TCP/IP, although
there’s nothing inherent in WinSock precluding it from utilizing an alternate protocol stack. In fact, work is in progress on the next version of WinSock, which will support
the use of Novell’s IPX/SPX, Apple’s Appletalk, and other popular network protocols.

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Winsock

The Windows Sockets Application Programming Interface (WinSock API) is a library
of functions that implements the socket interface as popularized by the Berkeley Software
Distribution of UNIX. WinSock augments the Berkeley socket implementation
by adding Windows-specific extensions to support the message-driven nature of the
Windows operating system.
WinSock version 1.1 is bound to the TCP/IP protocol suite. Although future versions
of WinSock are expected to support Novell’s IPX/SPX, Apple’s Appletalk, and other
popular network protocols, this book concentrates on the socket interface to the TCP/
IP protocol stack.


The WinSock specification allows TCP/IP stack vendors to provide a consistent interface
to their stacks so that application developers can write an application to the WinSock
specification and have that application run on any vendor’s WinSock-compatible TCP/
IP protocol stack. This is contrast to the days before the WinSock standard when software
developers had to link their applications with libraries specific to each TCP/IP
vendor’s implementation. This limited the number of stacks that most applications ran
on because of the difficulty in maintaining an application that used several different
implementations of Berkeley sockets. WinSock has removed that barrier. Application
programmers write to the WinSock API and link their applications with the
WINSOCK.LIB import library (or WSOCK32.LIB in the case of Win32). The application
can then be installed on a computer that has a WinSock TCP/IP stack, from any
number of vendors, and dynamically link to the WINSOCK.DLL (or WSOCK32.DLL)
provided by the vendor. Figure 3.1 is a block diagram of WSOCK32.DLL interaction
in a 32-bit program on Windows NT. Although the actual WINSOCK.DLL is specific
to each TCP/IP stack vendor, the interface into that dynamic link library remains consistent,
hence any program linked with the WinSock import library should work.

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First Technology

WiMax?

WiMAX is a standards-based technology enabling the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to wired broadband like cable and DSL. WiMAX provides fixed , nomadic, portable and, soon, mobile wireless broadband connectivity without the need for direct line-of-sight with a base station. In a typical cell radius deployment of three to ten kilometers, WiMAX Forum Certified™ systems can be expected to deliver capacity of up to 40 Mbps per channel, for fixed and portable access applications.


This is enough bandwidth to simultaneously support hundreds of businesses with T-1 speed connectivity and thousands of residences with DSL speed connectivity. Mobile network deployments are expected to provide up to 15 Mbps of capacity within a typical cell radius deployment of up to three kilometers. It is expected that WiMAX technology will be incorporated in notebook computers and PDAs by 2007, allowing for urban areas and cities to become “metro zones” for portable outdoor broadband wireless access.

Credit:: www.wimaxforum.org

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