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Steven den Beste, who blogs at USS Clueless, wrote a couple of related posts in the last couple of months, one on information-age military logistics and a somewhat more technical post on how a battlefield network would work.

Mark Erikson

Steven den Beste, who blogs at USS Clueless, wrote a couple of related posts in the last couple of months, one on information-age military logistics and a somewhat more technical post on how a battlefield network would work.

Mark Erikson

Steven den Beste, who blogs at USS Clueless, wrote a couple of related posts in the last couple of months, one on information-age military logistics and a somewhat more technical post on how a battlefield network would work.

Mark Erikson

WTF does market capitalization have to do with the health of a company?!

45 million dollars in my pocket would set me up for life.

45 million dollars for a multi-billion dollar company is operating expenses for a day or two.

The bigger you are, the more you need to keep you alive. And like an animal, a company can only "cut back" so much before it becomes untenable and simply dies. Unlike animals, portions of it can live on, but the point is that while the service may seem impressive, and it is, it should be considered in the context of a very large company that is facing serious challenges in the medium term, not an Internet startup that made 45 million in a little over two weeks.

Note, this is just perspective. I'm not really trying to draw conclusions. Might want to consider stuff like this, for instance. I'm not foolhardy enough to predict the death of Apple... but I'm not in a hurry to invest my money in them either.

The truth is that CDMA itself is not patented by Qualcomm. Yes, it was originally developed by the military. Qualcomm simply patents the way it is used by cell phones. The idea is that there's a right way and wrong way to use CDMA. The wrong way is to not have it be efficient and have it waste lots of power on the device. The right way is a patented process that Qualcomm owns.

Here's a much better explanation of the whole thing. Great reading if you're interested in cdma, gsm, wcdma, cdma2000, evdo, gprs, etc.

Also, there are more posts floating around on this article saying that the Qualcomm is evil because it's monopolistic. That is complete BS. If there is to be any finger pointing to be done it should be directed towards Europe and their protectionist laws. Several countries in Europe made laws years back that made cell technologies except for GSM illegal to operate. Wow, I wonder why. Qualcomm is from the U.S., and the other GSM companies were from Europe. Did the U.S. do the same thing? Obviously not. Hence the [healthy] competition between CDMA and GSM carriers. The link I gave above explains a lot of this.

There is obviously a large market for political writing, which is why such blogs are so popular. You don't have to read the same columnists over and over again, as political blogs contain many new voices and links to all sorts of news stories. Instapundit.com mainly contains links to other stories. But check out all the links to other blogs on the left side of the page. You have some blogs, like USS Clueless, that present lengthy analysis of the upcoming war. In the legal world, a blog about appeallate law, How Appealling is among the most popular blogs, but there are many legal blogs (sometimes called blawgs), as you can see from the compilation on Bag & Baggage. The key to these blogs I listed above isn't necessarily the content (and none of them are "what I did today" type blogs), it is the links to other stories.

I refer you to this article by Steven Den Beste talking about amounts of energy produced by various technologies. (He starts with biodiesel but moves on from there.)

Personally, I think nuclear energy is the only realistic way to go, but like Den Beste, I admit that nuclear power is politically dead. On average, nuclear waste is by far the most containable pollution compared to anything releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. IMHO, being an 'environmentalist' and being anti-nuclear power is nonsensical.

- Necron69

The meaning of Apple is changing from the best, to the slickest packaging.

Den Beste makes a good analogy, when he says Apple is appealing to the AOL consumer.

"The problem with all of them isn't that they can't be made to work, it's that the amount of power (energy per time) they can provide us is several orders of magnitude too small to make any real difference if our goal is to significantly reduce our consumption of petroleum. What you find is that most of them can generate really substantial amounts of power in short bursts, but the average power generation is tiny on the scale we're discussing."

You might also want to check out his other article on alternative fuels which covers solaris, geothermal, wind, fusion, tides, fission, and solar satellites.

I'm not saying he's 100% correct, but he definitely brings up some points that need to be considered when having an intelligent conversation about alternative fuels.

"The problem with all of them isn't that they can't be made to work, it's that the amount of power (energy per time) they can provide us is several orders of magnitude too small to make any real difference if our goal is to significantly reduce our consumption of petroleum. What you find is that most of them can generate really substantial amounts of power in short bursts, but the average power generation is tiny on the scale we're discussing."

You might also want to check out his other article on alternative fuels which covers solaris, geothermal, wind, fusion, tides, fission, and solar satellites.

I'm not saying he's 100% correct, but he definitely brings up some points that need to be considered when having an intelligent conversation about alternative fuels.

The first version of FlatStack, which is now released, still has to be wired to the equipment but with standards like Bluetooth and wireless lan arriving, the next release of FlatStack will also support various types of wireless connection.

Wake me up when the US follows the rest of the world standards... oh wait I might as well be dead..

Wake me when W-CDMA actually works properly..

That's the problem when you legislate broken technology...

Not to defend the US mishmash, but we seem to be doing technically with 3G that we did technically with HDTV..

Here's a traffic plot from denbeste.nu's recent clobering...

I couldn't find a website critical of the ICC,

Try USS Clueless. Yeah, it's a weblog, but the guy has many well-thought out arguments against the ICC.

The gist? The 1.25ghz machines use overclocked 1ghz chips. The same for 1ghz--they use overclocked 867's. And the fact that Apple put development resources into making this hack work possibly spells bad things for the future of the G4/G5 program at Motorola.

...what of slashdot? on the future of VA software...

800 MHz cellular has a wavelength of approximately 37 centimeters, about 15 inches. So an ideal antenna would be half that, about seven and a half inches. This refers to the dipole, the distance from the tip of the antenna to the opposite end of the antenna buried inside the phone somewhere (usually near the bottom). 1900 MHz PCS has a wavelength of approximately 16 centimeters, about six inches. So the ideal antenna dipole is about 3 inches.

The ideal antenna performs best if it is exactly perpendicular to the impinging waveform. In practice the orientation of the phone is somewhat random; the antenna will be pointed approximately upward, but probably at a slant. So cell phone manufacturers generally try to make the antenna 5/8's of a waveform, because if the antenna is at a slant, its cross-section relative to the impinging waveform will be near to the ideal half a wavelength. For a dual-band phone, one which operates at both 1900 and at 800 MHz, it's obvious that determining the antenna length is a bit of a problem. (But not insoluble; it's just a compromise. Since digital is usually more resilient than AMPS, usually the length is optimized for 800 MHz.)

Making the antenna shorter will both decrease the amount of incoming signal the phone receives, and will make the phone's transmitter less efficient. But CDMA operates over a very wide range of effective powers, and it can usually compensate. That's why the phone will usually work with the antenna down. And because it's digital, if it is working it will sound exactly the same. This has lead some people to conclude that the antenna is not actually doing anything for them, which is not quite correct. While the phone can operate with the antenna down, it's easier on the phone if you raise the antenna; it has more signal ceiling to work with and will be less likely to drop the call. Also, it will use somewhat less transmit power, and your battery will last somewhat longer.

Making it longer with some sort of extension is worse than useless; it actually degrades the signal. If the antenna is exactly one wavelength long and is exactly perpendicular to the impinging waveform, it will pick up essentially no signal at all.

When it reaches one and a half wavelengths, signal strength is again maximized, but for physical reasons it's a bit lower than the strength with a half-wavelength antenna. (The physical reason is that the antenna is not an ideal conductor.)

[stolen directly from the CDMA FAQ

You're on the right track, but not quite...

I was reading up on this yesterday. A quick search for something like "sickle cell resistance to malaria" in google produced a good number of documents. One of the best, in language easy to understand for non-specialists, is this one.

The point is that a person who is heterozygous with the sickle gene is more resistant to malaria, which is not normally of itself a killer disease (although in conjunction with other pathologies, it kills).