Electronic commerce has long way to go

After watching Ian Goldberg's demo of all the neat things one can do on an
US Robotics Palm Pilot PDA, I decided to purchase such a device.

I headed to USR's website. The Pilot Pro is listed for $399. Always looking
for a bargain, I headed to Yahoo and quickly found several "best deal"
search engines. Some were better, some were worse, but they all pointed me
to a number of suppliers selling the Pilot Pro for as little as $339. A $60
savings over list or my local CompUSA store. Below is my experience with
the sites. The sites are listed in increasing order of amount charged for
the same item.

1. No online ordering. Call us during regular East Cost business hours.
2. No online ordering. No times are given.
3. Has online ordering. CC# is sent unencrypted.
4. Has online ordering and a link to a secure server. Link is stale.
5. Has online ordering and a link to a secure server. Link times out.

Guess I'll just swing by the CompUSA in the morning.

This is pathetic,

> After watching Ian Goldberg's demo of all the neat things one can do on an
> US Robotics Palm Pilot PDA, I decided to purchase such a device.


Hm.  I have already sent out e-mails to on-line merchants 
asking if I can order a Newton, because I've heard from several
people that Newton has a superior user interface, and I know 
that its CPU is super fast.


Unfortunately there is not yet any PGP or Ecash for Newton 
publically available.


How about for Pilot?


Is there gcc or any other C compiler for Pilot?  (There is not,
yet, for Newton a publically available C compiler AFAIK.)


What _are_ the cool things Ian Goldberg can do with a Pilot, 
anyway?


Regards,

nobody in particular

Disclaimers follow:  I am not a crook.  NOT speaking for DigiCash 
or any other person or organization.  No PGP sig follows.

Bryce writes:
> 
> 
> > After watching Ian Goldberg's demo of all the neat things one can do on an
> > US Robotics Palm Pilot PDA, I decided to purchase such a device.
> 
> 
> Hm.  I have already sent out e-mails to on-line merchants 
> asking if I can order a Newton, because I've heard from several
> people that Newton has a superior user interface, and I know 
> that its CPU is super fast.
> 
> 
> Unfortunately there is not yet any PGP or Ecash for Newton 
> publically available.
> 
> 
> How about for Pilot?
> 
> 
> Is there gcc or any other C compiler for Pilot?  (There is not,
> yet, for Newton a publically available C compiler AFAIK.)


There's a GCC development environment for the Pilot that
runs under Linux.   Also packages for synching, logging in from
the Pilot to unix, perl tools, assemblers, disassemblers, and
about 400 other things.

Check out http://www.inforamp.net/~adam/pilot/ for info.

It's pretty cool how much stuff is available for the pilot.  It's
too bad that I need either a full workstation with all the trimmings, or
just a pen and a (paper) notebook.

 
> What _are_ the cool things Ian Goldberg can do with a Pilot, 
> anyway?

SSL, telnet, ssh, xcopilot, a POP mail client and some more stuff.
http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/pilot/



-- 
Eric Murray  ericm@lne.com  Security and cryptography applications consulting.
PGP keyid:E03F65E5 fingerprint:50 B0 A2 4C 7D 86 FC 03  92 E8 AC E6 7E 27 29 AF

>At 09:07 AM 7/15/97 -0700, Eric Murray wrote:
>>> What _are_ the cool things Ian Goldberg can do with a Pilot,
>>> anyway?
>>
>>SSL, telnet, ssh, xcopilot, a POP mail client and some more stuff.
>>http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/pilot/
>
>Even better, the Pilot is about the same size as the new Ricochet wireless
>modem. Keeping the modem in your pocket and the Pilot in your hand, you can
>run Emacs over SSH from anywhere in the Bay Area.

For those outside of Metricom's coverage areas, NovaTel Wireless
http://www.novatelwireless.com is introducing a CDPD modem specifically
designed for the Pilot.  Their Minstrel modem offers TCP/IP data rates up
to 19.2 kbps over analog cellular.  Coverage in most US metropolitan areas
is now available.  List price is expected to be $ 399. and deliveries are
scheduled to begin in late summer.

--Steve

PGP encrypted mail PREFERRED (See MIT/BAL servers for my PK)
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        God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
        The courage to change the things I can;
        The weapons that make the difference;
        And the wisdom to hide the bodies of the people that got in my way;-)

        "Surveilence is ultimately just another form of media, and thus,
        potential entertainment."
        --G. Beato

       "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million
        typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of
        Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is
        not true."                           -- Dr. Robert Silensky

>At 11:54 AM 7/15/97 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
>>For those outside of Metricom's coverage areas, NovaTel Wireless
>>http://www.novatelwireless.com is introducing a CDPD modem specifically
>>designed for the Pilot.  Their Minstrel modem offers TCP/IP data rates up
>>to 19.2 kbps over analog cellular.  Coverage in most US metropolitan areas
>
>On the other hand, CDPD is relatively expensive; Metricom charges flat rate,
>while CDPD is generally some pennies per KB, which may be more or less
>expensive than circuit-switched modem connections over cellular voice
>depending on your usage patterns.  But it's widely available.

Clearly CDPD is too expensive for Web surfing and large amounts of email
traffic.  As an electronic purse for ecash commerce (esp. funds transfer)
it just might be practical

--Steve


PGP mail preferred, see  http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html
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At 09:07 AM 7/15/97 -0700, Eric Murray wrote:
>> What _are_ the cool things Ian Goldberg can do with a Pilot, 
>> anyway?
>
>SSL, telnet, ssh, xcopilot, a POP mail client and some more stuff.
>http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/pilot/

Even better, the Pilot is about the same size as the new Ricochet wireless
modem. Keeping the modem in your pocket and the Pilot in your hand, you can
run Emacs over SSH from anywhere in the Bay Area.

For the GUI addicts, Ian's team just wrote a browser for the Pilot. In all
fairness, the browser for the Pilot does not interpret the HTML, but relies
on a proxy on the network to do much of the work.

But here is a device that is smaller and lighter than my wallet. A device
that gives me Emacs, a graphical web browser, and a contact manager and
scheduler that syncs with my scheduler at work. All wireless from anywhere
in the area. Did I mention that it has an Indiglo screen?

I'm sold,

--Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com>
  PGP encrypted mail preferred.
  DES is dead! Please join in breaking RC5-56.
  http://rc5.distributed.net/

At 11:54 AM 7/15/97 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
>For those outside of Metricom's coverage areas, NovaTel Wireless
>http://www.novatelwireless.com is introducing a CDPD modem specifically
>designed for the Pilot.  Their Minstrel modem offers TCP/IP data rates up
>to 19.2 kbps over analog cellular.  Coverage in most US metropolitan areas

On the other hand, CDPD is relatively expensive; Metricom charges flat rate,
while CDPD is generally some pennies per KB, which may be more or less
expensive than circuit-switched modem connections over cellular voice
depending on your usage patterns.  But it's widely available.

There are also services like ARDIS and RadioMail, and PCMCIA pager cards
offer some interesting options for sending encrypted messages to PDAs
even if it's just one-way.

Hand-helds are gradually adopting infrared ports, and I gather they're
even gradually standardizing on what kind.  My Psion is the earlier model
that uses wires for communication, as are some (all?) Pilots, but a 
friend who has the newer Psion3C connects its RS232 to a Metricom,
and uses Infrared to talk to his laser printer.  Back when Newtons were
the only PDA in town, two of them could talk IR to each other, and
there were some Cypherpunks discussions about how this would be nice
for ecash applications.  (The Psion also has audio input and output,
and there's a program that lets two Psions transfer data by growling
at each other, probably at 300bps.)

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)

At 3:53 AM -0700 7/15/97, Bryce wrote:
>Is there gcc or any other C compiler for Pilot?  (There is not,
>yet, for Newton a publically available C compiler AFAIK.)

I believe at least the Macintosh version of Metroworks supports C cross
compiles for the Pilot.


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