Mailing List os2-wireless_users@2rosenthals.com Archived Message #1308

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On 09/08/06 06:47 am, Dave Saville thus wrote :
> On Fri, 8 Sep 2006 01:57:37 -0700 (PDT), Rick R. wrote:
>
>
>> At least on my PDA and my GPS device.
>>
>
> That was why I was asking really - I am looking at a new GPS which has USB &
> BT. However the USB is very restricted, but people have found that BT
> connectivity gets you into the GPS file system.
>
>
Configured correctly, BT is quite "private" (though not encrypted).
Devices must be "paired" to each other, and it is up to the user to tell
a device to make its presence known to other devices. The original BT
devices didn't have much flexibility in the realm of privacy, and were
indeed quite chatty. Nowadays, though, these limitations have been
somewhat overcome. I don't worry that people will be hacking into my
Sony Ericsson P910i phone, just because I leave the BT on. And insofar
as power consumption is concerned, this depends greatly upon the BT
device itself. My phone is rather stingy on power when the BT is
enabled, and I find that my battery takes a bigger hit from letting my
email app "idle" (not even checking for mail every so often, but just
running in the background!) than from leaving my BT enabled.

In short, for PANs (Personal Area Networks), Bluetooth is just great.
For headsets, headphones, and file transfers between PDAs, BT excels far
beyond 802.11 in ease of use and compatibility (try sending data from
your sound card via 802.11...huh????) :-) The right (sized) tool for
the right (sized) job!

Anyway, we still need a working stack, and for that, I would probably
lean toward a port of BlueZ: http://www.bluez.org/ . IBM has its own
*nix BT stack, called BlueDrekar, but this is not OpenSource AFAIK. I
have no idea what it would take to port BlueZ to OS/2, but as it's the
most popular *nix BT stack, I figure that's the best place to start
(unless we start from scratch).

--
Lewis
------------------------------------------------------------
Lewis G Rosenthal, CNA, CLP, CLE
Rosenthal & Rosenthal, LLC
Accountants / Network Consultants
New York / Northern Virginia www.2rosenthals.com
eComStation Consultants www.ecomstation.com
Novell Users Int'l www.novell.com/openenterpriseserver
Need a managed Wi-Fi hotspot? www.hautspot.com
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