Date: Mon, 08 May 2000 18:18:01 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Alex Stamos <stamos@cs.berkeley.edu> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [OT] Finding people with GSM phones (was Re: GPS heads up ) Message-ID: <39175939.5F6208C9@softweyr.com> References: <200005061850.MAA18384@nomad.yogotech.com> <200005061907.MAA07403@mass.cdrom.com> <200005061939.NAA18540@nomad.yogotech.com> <391479C4.2784A121@cs.berkeley.edu>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Alex Stamos wrote:
>
> >
> > > What's the actual background behind this?
> >
> > Being able to track 911 calls in the case of emergency.
>
> While some people may find this a convenient excuse for more Big Brother tactics,
> I once spoke to a paramedic friend about 911 cell phone tracking after it was first
> announced. She said that she couldn't overestimate the problems caused by people
> giving bad directions or locations over cell phones. Apparently, its not uncommon
> for a person, still dazed from an accident, to report their location as "Somewhere
> on Interstate 80". -For those non-Americans, I-80 is a 3,000 mile freeway that
> starts in San Francisco and ends in Boston.-
Well, New York. It also includes some of the emptiest parts of the continental
USA, mostly in Nevada and Utah.
The problem is a lot worse in the empty places, where you have thousands of miles
of unpaved roads that still manage to get some mobile phone coverage. The analog
cell tower in Callao, Utah, for instance, covers a fixed population of about 100
people, and an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.
> On another topic, I recently read an article on Ace's Hardware comparing the
> performance of standard benchmarks, on a Alpha 21264 under Linux, compiled with the
> GCC and Compaq's proprietary compiler. Compaq's C compiler kicked GCC's ass in
> almost every metric. My questions: Is such a compiler available for *BSD? Why is
> GCC so bad at Alpha optimization when it does so well on x86? Is somebody asleep
> at the wheel here?
Who said it's any good at X86 optimization?
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?39175939.5F6208C9>