[Cu-wireless] sputnik: www.sputnik.com

[David Young]

Mark & Zach,

You are right that Sputnik does not serve our purposes, but they have
thought of two smart things that we have not. (Nevertheless, I think
they've put their idea into practice poorly, but that is neither here
nor there.)

Sputnik's good idea #1:

Sputnik uses a bootable CD-ROM to transform a stock PC to a wireless
gateway. All this time we have been talking about expensive nonvolatile
memories and stuff, we have overlooked this simple plan: put our software
(up to 700MB of it!) onto a CD-ROM. Put a cheap CD-ROM drive ($20-$40,
I reckon) into every router. Boot from CD-ROM, and henceforth run from
128MB of cheap RAM. Write logs to the network or a ring buffer in RAM.
We waste some space with the great big CD-ROM, but we get off the ground
really quickly, and we don't take much power or reliability penalty
because we run the CD-ROM once at boot. Media are cheap and plentiful.

Sputnik's good idea #2:

Sputnik's product essentially transforms your PC to an appliance.
Granted, it is an appliance from which you can get a root prompt (which
is dumb), but I presume that if you leave it alone, it figures out most
things for you, without your intervention.

Dave

On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 03:00:39AM +0200, niteshad at whopper.de wrote:
> I have to agree with Zach on this one.  While Sputnik is kinda cool,
> insofar as it goes, it's not a custom made solution for our application.  
> 	In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I was biased
> against it from the first.  Ziff-Davis Publications is notorious for their
> incredibly biased reporting on technology matters. In the mid-nineties they were
> so pro-Microsoft that not even _Computer_Shopper's_ "The Hard Edge" column
> for "hard core techno-geeks" mentioned Linux--at all.  In a similar vein,
> LinuxCare (created by the same people as Sputnik) was largely irrelevant in the
> Linux community, due to the fact that anyone who was interested in Linux
> very quickly found out that the best "service and support" was available for
> free on the Web and Usenet.  My suspicion is that these same LinuxCare guys
> are trying to cash in on the enthusiasm surrounding 802.11b, the same way
> that they tried to cash in on the enthusiam surrounding Linux in the
> mid-to-late Nineties.
> 	That said, I have no compunction whatsoever about downloading their
> OpenSource code to appropriate whatever perls of wireless wisdom the code may
> contain.  (Yes, the misspelling was intentional. ;)
> 
> 
> regards, 
> 
> Mark
> 
> -- 
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-- 
David Young             OJC Art & Technology
dyoung at onthejob.net     Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933