On Sep 17, 2005, at 2:53 AM, LN wrote:
I'm feeling a bit lost on this one. Can someone either give me a
simple explanation or
point me to a good educational link to understand the Airport concept?
First confusion, regarding internet connectivity: My neice has an
airport card in her
laptop and was able to connect at my parent's condo. Does this mean
that if my parents
get an airport card in their computer they will no longer have to buy
internet access?
An Airport card is a way to connect to an Airport hub wirelessly. A
simple analogy is your regular phone in your house. You can have either
a phone that plugs into the wall jack or a wireless handset that you
can carry around.
To use an Airport card, you need an Airport hub to connect to and that
Airport hub has to be connected to the internet, either via a modem or
high speed (cable or DSL) method. Wether it uses a modem or high speed,
you still need to buy access.
Airports and other wireless hubs can broadcast signals for 100 feet or
more through walls, floors and such. What happened is that someone else
in your parent's condo building has a wireless network set up and your
niece was able to connect to their network and use what they paid for
to surf the net. Many people set up their networks with no security
either because they want to invite other people to use their network,
or they do not know that other people can connect through their
network.
While many people think that it is great to share access this way, it
is against the Terms of Service that you agree to when you sign up for
internet access. There was a case recently, iirc, in Florida where
someone was actually arrested for connecting to someone else's wireless
network.
Second confusion, regarding other uses of airport: How does this idea
eliminate the need
for me to buy cds? I went to the Apple site and they were suggesting
hooking up my stereo
to the airport and ????
What you saw at the Apple store was the Airport Express with AirTunes.
You set this up near your stereo system and run a wire from the Airport
to your stereo's input. You can then "stream" songs that are in your
Mac's iTunes library to your stereo and listen to them that way. You
still need to rip the CDs onto your Mac, but once they are there you
can put the CDs away and play them from your Mac, in theory.
If you do this remember a couple of things.
1) rip the CDs in a high quality format, not MP3. While MP3s may sound
fine over lower end equipment, there is a big difference in sound
quality between them and the original on the CD.
2) CDs normally hold between 600-700 megabytes, and if you rip at the
highest setting, you will need that much space on your HD for each CD.
50 CDs can take up 30 Gigabytes of HD space, so make sure you have
enough room.
3) You still need to keep the CDs incase your hard disk dies, or the
RIAA comes knocking at your door and you need to prove that you own the
music on your computer.
It suddenly occurred to me that I don't understand what this airport
thing is really about.
Please, can someone point me to a good educational overview of the
concept?
Here is a good overview of networking:
http://www.atpm.com/network/index.html
and the page for wireless and airport info:
http://www.atpm.com/network/setup/airport.html
HTH,
Len
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