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8 years of R&D and having fixed wifi thoroughly with work shipping in both linux and OSX? BQL+ RFC8290/fq _codel for ethernet , SQM/or sch_cake for linux on cable, dsl & fiber, fq_codel + ATF for wifi: https://www.usenix.org/system/... In wifi, now, at least, uplinks are easily controlled at the user device (phone), which is what I was mostly measuring. Same principles apply to lte and 5g. In lte, for downlinks, you need help at the enode b and backhaul. Those suck too, but "only" to about 600ms max latency under load. https://www.ericsson.com/en/er...

2007: It won't be the case in a few years, when 3G is deployed broadly enough. 2011: It won't be the case in a few years, when LTE is deployed broadly enough. 2017: It won't be the case in a few years, when 5G rolls out.

You are clearly uneducated about 5G. It's not like the old protocols and some incremental improvement. Most people do everything in their residence with wireless (Wi-Fi) anyway, including streaming video and stuff.

here is a quick primer on the services going into trial, and Verizon is planning something similar.

You can look at some more detail to whet your appetite right here. 5G might be a mobile broadband service in the distant future, but the real promise is for fixed wireless, providing lots more competition and options for last-mile Internet access. You have to license the spectrum from the FCC, and this may be where the FCC can really enable a lot more competitiveness in the market.

Could it fizzle? Sure. But your out-of-hand dismissal is pure ignorance.

They have automated the driving of mining trucks. The human drivers are now located in air-conditioned offices, ready to take over if something goes wrong:

https://www.oemoffhighway.com/...

They are making mining equipment like drills and rock crushers remotely operated. Same with the cranes used to load containers into ships
https://www.ericsson.com/asset...

https://www.ericsson.com/en/pu...

They have automated the driving of mining trucks. The human drivers are now located in air-conditioned offices, ready to take over if something goes wrong:

https://www.oemoffhighway.com/...

They are making mining equipment like drills and rock crushers remotely operated. Same with the cranes used to load containers into ships
https://www.ericsson.com/asset...

https://www.ericsson.com/en/pu...

There was an article with photo showing a huge and horrible looking mass of lines and cables strung around utility poles in some town in China or India. Mayor got totally pissed at so many poles of all these ugly cables he ordered city crews to tear them all down to beautify the city streets. Result was town was delivered to the Sixth century.

Welcome to the telephone tower of Stockholm 1887-1913:
http://hugelolcdn.com/hugewoah...
http://www.ericsson.com/thinki...
https://i.imgur.com/pWidlce.jp...

New York:
http://static.messynessychic.c...
Pratt, Kansas:
http://static.messynessychic.c...
"The railway station at Pearl Street, Boston, Massachusetts, after a hurricane in January 1881":
http://static.messynessychic.c...

Their comment about the tower in Stockholm:
"A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, with 5000 connected lines. It was used between 1887 and 1913, but the tower stood there until 1953, when it fell down after a fire."

"An 1880s postcard of Broadway, New York":
http://static.messynessychic.c...

"Power lines and supporting structure in a lane west of Main Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, March 1914":
http://static.messynessychic.c...

Later pictures and texts taken from: http://www.messynessychic.com/...

I think it's this http://www.ericsson.com/thecom...

that is, the network ericsson, splitted away from the phone biz long time ago. they sell networks to network operators.

basically, it's pretty probable that you can't do a 3g phone without infringing. that's kinda shitty of course, since if you want to make a mobile phone that works on standard networks.... but its not just a patent troll as such. however, the india court probably should have just said that they're standard essential and fucked them over.

and all the big traditional players have cross license agreements, so this shit doesn't apply to them. it's only to keep new manufacturers away from the markets.

"To this end, the 5G solution will not consist of a single technology but rather an integrated combination of radio-access technologies. This includes existing mobile-broadband technologies such as HSPA and LTE that will continue to evolve and will provide the backbone of the overall radio-access solution beyond 2020. But it also includes new complementary radio-access technologies for specific use cases. Smart antennas, expanded spectrum – including higher frequencies – and improved coordination between base stations will all be crucial to fulfilling the requirements of the future" See http://www.ericsson.com/news/1...

I've been doing it once every couple years for at least the last ten years. Every single time, I end up annoyed and switch back to OS X and Windows. I don't have an infinite amount of time to spend getting my OS to work, and I have no desire to make a hobby out of OS configuration; I'd rather just install it, and have it get the hell out of the way.

Mind you, in the server space Windows Server just pisses me right off and I'm far more comfortable with Linuxes.

To my way of thinking it is entirely possible to create a really great audio server that will respond as well as linux does as an internet server. My particular interest is creating internet coffee houses for performers where at least the audio of their performances could be broadcast in a similar fashion to a pod cast but in real time and at high bit rate. It comes down to the fact that the coffee house type performance venue that once helped musicians to hone their craft desperately need to be revived. After all JS Bach and his second wife actually ran one and in doing so promoted musicianship and musical literacy to a greater extent than we currently do today!

The software to do this in realtime does not exist, sorry Skype and other social networking interfaces do not cut the mustard with audio and there is nothing out there that can do broadcast high quality RT streaming audio on the net as of yet.

This idea could work because the broadcasts could be by subscription for RT and could become locally popular. This could also be used to promote the venue locally. The stream from the venue could be available in lower bit rate at any time and the performance venue could also sell musical instruments, recordings or even coffee and food for that matter. Doing things a little differently by making venue website only locally available for high bit rate real time would reduce bandwidth needs for the server and facilitate the targeted promotion of a local business.

As I stated a linux audio and then eventually full a/v server could create something really interesting in as much as being low in cost to a new form of smaller localized ip broadcast venues.

Somehow I do not think the costs of using any of the commercially available like MediaRoom is a solution. Microsoft ditched MediaRoom because they do not see the real possibilities of internet provided entertainment. All I am saying is that to take real advantage of the possibilities created by the internet and customized Linux servers one needs to think of the net as a local commodity not just the entire WWW concept. Essentially it comes down to the old saw of the developers not seeing the forest for the trees.

SteamOS at the same time could easily become a local game platform for small real time local game servers in the same way. Gamers will always want to play someone that they can frag locally over some unknown from Timbuktu with distance latency issues. The internet is changing and the change will be to a more realistic expectation of what is possible, expensive WWW streaming broadcast solutions are not the answer, local specialized nodes are the wave of the future.

A new report, conducted jointly by Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), Arthur D. Little and Chalmers University of Technology in 33 OECD countries, quantifies the isolated impact of broadband speed, showing that doubling the broadband speed for an economy increases GDP by 0.3%.*

A 0.3 percent GDP growth in the OECD region is equivalent to USD 126 billion. This corresponds to more than one seventh of the average annual OECD growth rate in the last decade.

A 100x increase in broadband speed should pay itself back in about 1 year.

Numbers out of context are a dangerous thing.

The BusinessWeek number is for year-over-year change (as you'll see if you check Ericsson's Q3 2012 financial report, so of course their net income dropped by 43%: they were still in the handset business at that time the previous year. Yet if you check their quarter-over-quarter change, you'll see that they're up 81% in terms of net income in just the last three months, indicating that they're recovering nicely from the restructuring involved with divesting themselves of their handset business, and even the analyst quoted in the BusinessWeek article agrees that they're in a good position right now, saying:

Still, the company has a good foundation and once the business mix improves, with the rising use of smartphones around the world, margins and profits will rebound.

I'll grant that they're not as profitable as they were when they were in the handset business, but that doesn't change the fact that they're doing just fine and making billions in profit, just as I said. As for the WSJ article, I can't load it for some reason, but since it's dated earlier and they've been steadily improving, I assume the issue is the same, in that it likely used year-over-year numbers that come from when they were still in another business.

I find this to be highly unlikely since the majority of Ericsson products are using Linux as a platform today

Absolute unadulterated bullshit. The only Ericsson products with Linux at their core are Telecom Server Platform, Integrated Site concept, APZ, Connectivity Packet Platform, Enterprise Media Gateway, and MX-ONE Telephony System. Mere tokens compared to the once vast but now shrinking array of networking equipment they manufacture and deploy with their Global Services unit. Furthermore, most of these are in full "Tivo-ised" mode so you can forget running your custom unsigned kernel on unhacked hardware that you supposedly own.

Face it, Ericsson is a has-been company when it comes to hardware. Out-competed and out-financed whre they formerly led, their hapless, thoroughly uninspired, management have no choice but to follow the common business-sense trope of pushing the company into the "support and service" bankruptcy anteroom. By their own statements, they are making most of their money and seeing the most "growth" in the "Global Services" and "Support Solutions" branches of the company (nevermind that they nosedived negative 42 percent in net income the latest quarter vs. last year's figures).

Guess what, skippy? Intellectual Property is now the name of the game for Ericsson. A tiny company throwing their lot with the likes of MS, Apple, et al, doesn't come free. Believe that bag of freshly minted 30 shekels of silver came with a very thorough reeducation on the finer points of patents and competitive realities vis a vis all things Linux and free/open source software. The plans were already in place long before they came knocking on the devils' door. Like the dogs they have been reduced to, the Ericcson hound will come hunting for whatever crumbs it can scavenge and trophies it can hold up for its master. Already, the wait to see who the first target they had picked for them has come to an end. Hopefully, world courts will see this latest farce for what it is, e.g., the crackle of the first grasped for branch by a once great company now hurtling over the cliff doomed by an obsolete business model, over-paid workers, a cost of production that the Asian companies laugh at between canine sharpenings, and a pathetic zombie existence seen all too often before. Goodbye Ericsson.

They've certainly not been idle with the times...
Ericsson products

Definitely geared more towards business / infrastructure, than the S3's market, oh well.

Erlang is an Ericsson product, and they've released or assisted on a number of other products. Sony - well, they're famous for closed products, rootkits and the walkman. I'm not overly convinced I trust those guys to honour prior license agreements (there are plenty of products that were GPL that have been made proprietary with the open source variant deleted from the catalogue completely). I am very concerned.

Ericsson had done so in 2010:

https://labs.ericsson.com/developer-community/blog/beyond-html5-implementing-device-and-stream-management-webkit

The "Device API" however has been replaced with "Video conferencing and peer-to-peer communication":

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/video-conferencing-and-peer-to-peer-communication.html#introduction-10

  I'm not aware of anyone that supports it currently.

Well like the Swedish company called Ericsson who has been working on technology like this for about or over a year. See Ericsson Labs and https://labs.ericsson.com/developer-community/blog/omg-camera-still for mor information on this.

For those that do not know of Ericsson, they are very large within telecom infrastructure, and if they still do, also owns the Ericsson part in phone manufacturer Sony Ericsson.)

This is an awesome solution compared to most countries where you are a thief if you make a mixed tape for a friend.

It's a rather common "solution" in the EU. But it isn't that awesome: copyright levies are so wrong, for so many reasons - for one, they violate presumption of innocence. We shouldn't have to choose between criminalized copying and copyright levies. We should consider abolishing the levy, like the Netherlands' government is doing, and that doesn't mean unlicensed copies have to become a "crime".

How about the Ericcson AXD301 ATM switching system, with over a million lines of Erlang?

Or...how about RabbitMQ?

Or...how about Facebook's Chat backend?

There's quite a bit more than you think and the three I referred to were using Erlang- there's loads more with some of the other functional languages.

How many cell phone users are there. Well lets see. A billion+?

While, technically, saying "billion+" gives a wide margin of error ;) - the actual number is 5+ billion

As it is now, developing countries can afford moderately decent cellular networks and large part of their population can afford to use them. Comparable coverage with satphones would probably cost trillions...

That said, I guess a bit more than 1000-2000 people might need satphone coverage. After all, the business plan for Iridium was basically "1) go bankrupt building a network which, in the meantime, gets appreciated by gov/military, 2) get bailed out"

Or, to put it another way, if you know you'll win the case no matter what court you go to, you don't gain anything by going to Eastern Texas.

But, as I explained, that's not true. There are lots of advantages to Texas Eastern that apply to all kinds of patentees (e.g., the docket moves quickly and the judges are experienced).

For example, Ericsson and LG recently filed suits in Texas Eastern, and they're hardly examples of trolls.

Anyway, the courts have gotten wise to the abuse of venues like Texas Eastern by parties that have essentially no connection to the district and have started becoming more favorable toward motions to transfer.

"The amateur radio operators are absolutely essential in a place where most of the communications structure has failed"

I dont know, maybe in the 70's they where. Ericsson pretty quickly sent a team (Ericsson Response) to restore the GSM network and distributed 5000 GSM phones among help works.

http://www.ericsson.com/article/100121_haiti_20100121111142

Cisco is behind the telecom giant Ericsson here, they already have a blade system delivered to Telstra:

http://www.ericsson.com/solutions/news/2008/q4/081121_telstras_network.shtml

Cisco, behind old and boring telecom? :)

"Speeds represented are peak network downlink speeds. Actual customer download speeds will be less and will vary due to network configuration, congestion, distance from the cell, local conditions, hardware, software and other factors."

The 21Mbit/s number is pure grandstanding and PR puff. The Ericsson press release, of which TFA is basically a clueless rewrite, doesn't include the disclaimer since Ericsson isn't actually providing a service and so cannot be hauled before an Australian court for misrepresentation under the Trade Practises Act, like Telstra can.

Don't forget that there is an army of PR-people working for iPhone competitors in Scandinavia as well as in Japan. There's been a lot of weird articles in Sweden with headlines like "The iPhone Fiasko" and such, and in every single article there has only been anonymous sources but no hard numbers or any facts what so ever. Of course, that might be surprise to no one. After all, this is still Ericsson County

Actually Ericsson does do hotspots: http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/press/releases/20040921-961341.shtml Also I've seen them live at various locations around Sweden.

Here's an even better Article about Latency in the wireless networks.

http://www.ericsson.com/hr/about/events/mipro_2007/mipro_1137.pdf

Ericsson uses erlang to write massively parallel systems (e.g.):http://www.ericsson.com/products/hp/AXD_301 _305_MultiService_Switch_Rel_7_1_TAG_MSG_MGW_pos.s html/

Most likely, a small cellular base station will be installed on board, creating a "nanocell" inside the plane. Given the difference on power levels, mobiles will attach to it and not to the cell towers on the ground.

An example

The main problem I see is that there is lack of focus in the functional arena.

Whoa whoa whoa! You may not like Erlang's implementation, but you can hardly attribute it to a lack of focus. The whole language was built with concurrency in mind. Heck, the concurrency even has built-in network awareness. And Erlang's been multi-core since last May.

Erlang goes multi-core

Yeah, that doesn't say anything about your VM worries. I don't have those, though. Seamless multi-threading and a language paradigms designed for concurrency more than make up for the VM performance hit, imo. When I have to write non-trivial concurrent systems, I reach for the language that already has the plumbing excellently implemented. I'm sure it's better done than anything I could implement myself, and since the system is concurrent, cheap hardware is easily added to improve performance.

Man, this is the second time this week I've had to stick up for Erlang around here.

The mobile telephony part of Sony Ericsson phones is supplied by EMP (Ericsson Mobile Platforms, a unit of Ericsson, see here for some info). Other phone manufacturers use the platform from EMP. So maybe EMP has negotiated some deal with these guys in order not to be sued?

"Hopefully we'll get IPv6 going so we can speed up cost savers such as this.

Although maybe the cell companies will see this and sabotage the IPv6 process."

Huh? There are at least Nokia and SonyEricsson phones with IPv6 support. TeliaSonera and Ericsson demonstrated IPv6 over GPRS three years ago.

"The only problem I see with this is taking off from the house while in a call. Cell phone latencies for connect are in the multi-second range."

GPRS has latency about 800-900ms, 3G has latency about 200-300ms. That's definitely isn't in "multi-second range".

http://www.ericsson.com/mobilityworld/sub/articles /success_stories/parking_wap_sms I cut an paste a little too quickly in my last post!

Probably the magic of GSM repeaters. That's how the subways of Stockholm get their (imo excellent) GSM coverage, at least. I seem to recall that people back in the day said "we're about to enter a tunnel, I might disappear", but nowadays there's no need to care. It just works, and would probably work just as well in a Polish salt mine too, if there is general coverage in the area surrounding the mine...

From Ericsson's website:
Ericsson reorganizes its Bluetooth operations

Ericsson will discontinue its design and development of new Bluetooth
solutions for the semiconductor industry. A dedicated Bluetooth unit will
be created to support existing customers. In addition, Bluetooth
technology will be offered within Ericsson's offer for mobile platforms.

Ericsson invented the Bluetooth standard, which now is successfully
established worldwide. The standard has now reached a mature state and
Bluetooth products are being produced in large volumes. However, even
though large volumes are manufactured the business case for Ericsson's
design of new Bluetooth solutions is not strong enough.
Ericsson has decided to reorganize its Bluetooth operation and the current
operation for design and development of Bluetooth solutions, Ericsson
Technology Licensing, is going to be discontinued.

Instead, Ericsson will form a dedicated Bluetooth unit to maintain its current
customers. The customer list includes several leading semiconductor
manufacturers. Ericsson's Bluetooth knowledge will be integrated into
Ericsson Mobile Platforms, who will offer Bluetooth software as a part of
their offering.

Ericsson strongly believes in the power and opportunities of Bluetooth as a
technology and will continue to support the technology as a Bluetooth SIG
promoter.
-----
Also, Swedish IT newspaper Computer Swedenquotes Johan Åkesson as saying that '...[Bluetooth] licensing doesn't pay off anymore.' and that future Ericsson efforts will be in Bluetooth software development, in the company Ericsson Mobile Platforms.

From Ericsson's website:
Ericsson reorganizes its Bluetooth operations

Ericsson will discontinue its design and development of new Bluetooth
solutions for the semiconductor industry. A dedicated Bluetooth unit will
be created to support existing customers. In addition, Bluetooth
technology will be offered within Ericsson's offer for mobile platforms.

Ericsson invented the Bluetooth standard, which now is successfully
established worldwide. The standard has now reached a mature state and
Bluetooth products are being produced in large volumes. However, even
though large volumes are manufactured the business case for Ericsson's
design of new Bluetooth solutions is not strong enough.
Ericsson has decided to reorganize its Bluetooth operation and the current
operation for design and development of Bluetooth solutions, Ericsson
Technology Licensing, is going to be discontinued.

Instead, Ericsson will form a dedicated Bluetooth unit to maintain its current
customers. The customer list includes several leading semiconductor
manufacturers. Ericsson's Bluetooth knowledge will be integrated into
Ericsson Mobile Platforms, who will offer Bluetooth software as a part of
their offering.

Ericsson strongly believes in the power and opportunities of Bluetooth as a
technology and will continue to support the technology as a Bluetooth SIG
promoter.
-----
Also, Swedish IT newspaper Computer Swedenquotes Johan Åkesson as saying that '...[Bluetooth] licensing doesn't pay off anymore.' and that future Ericsson efforts will be in Bluetooth software development, in the company Ericsson Mobile Platforms.

The European Patent Office has been granting stupid software patents for years, even though they'll remain impossible to enforce pending the new legislation. For example, see some of Ericsson's patents here.

As you would expect, the average European is just as clueless about software patents as the average American. I wish this was not true but it is. It's possible that there's a higher awareness within the political parties, but not necessarily in favour of the free software position. At least the European greens in the parliament seem to have some clue.

Regards,

/ A EUropean who will take this opportunity to help vote in representatives this weekend with a favourable view on this matter.

"While in the USA, multiple different companies went off and developed multiple, incompatible systems (which weren't particularly future-proof) [...] the Europeans got together and developed GSM [...] They actually bothered to implement things like inter-network and overseas roaming, and anticipate the need for an upgrade path for future requirements. They also assigned and reserved radio spectrum across Europe, and much of Asia followed suit."

Hmm... upgrade path? You mean like the one from cdmaOne to CDMA2000 1xRTT to 1xEV-DO to 1xEV-DV? The one that lets 2G phones work with 3G towers, and 3G phones work with 2G towers, using the same frequencies?

The free wireless market in the U.S. has not been detrimental to consumers. True, it has taken longer to get to a stable market here than it did in Europe, because Europe mandated a standard at the very beginning. But there's a very strong case to be made that the standards we've arrived upon in the U.S. are superior, and that Europe painted itself into a corner by mandating GSM instead of exploring other options. European 3G networks are now based on the same CDMA technology that GSM advocates scoffed at years ago, but of course GSM equipment isn't compatible with it!

In other parts of the world, wireless carriers had been forced to implement number portability, years before it was decided in the US.

Telecom equipment vendors have been offering standardized solution packages to allow number portability. Some examples: Ericsson, Alcatel, Siemens.

• VOVIDA
• RFC 3261 -- Session Initiation Protocol
• RFC 3263 -- Location of SIP Services
• The SIP Working Group Charter
• Additional SIP WG Info

• The SIPPING Working Group
• Additional SIPPING information

• VOVIDA
• RFC 3261 -- Session Initiation Protocol
• RFC 3263 -- Location of SIP Services
• The SIP Working Group Charter
• Additional SIP WG Info

• The SIPPING Working Group
• Additional SIPPING information

The person mentions a few technical details that aren't quite correct. From the article, "The Edge service works by giving up to four time slots of GPRS service to a single user. The four time slots, each good for about 30K of bandwidth, thus can add up to around 120K or so."

This isn't quite accurate. GPRS itself ranges from using 2-8 timeslots based on the class of the device. Classes 10-12 typically have 4 timeslots for download which gives you about 32-48Kbps (you can effectively get 8-12Kpbs per timeslot with GPRS). See here for some specifics.

EDGE is, more or less, an upgrade to GPRS just to push more bits of data through. A quote from Ericsson's info page about EDGE: "EDGE uses the same TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) frame structure, logic channel and 200kHz carrier bandwidth as today's GSM networks, which allows existing cell plans to remain intact." Of course, there is a white paper linked off of that page that gives more technical details for eany who are interested. Note: It's not about using any more time slots than GPRS.

For carriers choosing the GSM route, the upgrade path is GSM -> Add GPRS -> Upgrade to EDGE -> Upgrade to WCDMA (aka UMTS). It is a little ironic that the eventual 3G network of GSM carriers will be a CDMA type technology (though with a massively huge spectrum requirement compared to CDMA2000). Only time will tell which turns out to be the better technology, though the CDMA carriers seem to be jumping ahead of the GSM ones. Of course, some might argue that almost the rest of the world uses GSM so it should be the logical choice. But then again, most /.ers should know that everyone is not always right. ^_-

Erricson F221M . I've used it before and it works well (for voice). I've used it for data, but that requires a serial cable (it acts like a modem). I would think about setting up a remote server or something. In my experience, Powertec has always been friendly and helpful. I live in the US and they have helped a few times with similar projects - they understand North American cell networks, etc.

Getting anything onto a handset takes a very close relationship with the handset maker. That real estate is extremely limited and every bit is accounted for. I'd bet that MS is subsidizing their phone OS to gain traction and that's a dangerous gift for the handset makers to fall for. If MS does manage to capture a majority of the handset market, handset makers can expect them to raise prices and eat into their profit margins.

That said, Nokia is the big fish to contend with in handsets. Due to Symbian, MS won't get Nokia to buy in unless they can get everybody else to buy in first. MS has gotten Samsung, Siemens and now Motorola to at least try their OS. They've even gotten Ericsson to dabble in portions of it. Although they've yet to make quantifiable inroads, the relationships required to turn up the heat are well established and cannot be taken lightly by the remaining of the Big 8, namely Nokia, LGE, Panasonic, and NEC. Keep you eye on the Japanese handset market, they (not Europe or the Americas) dictate the direction of the handset market. If the Embedded Linux Consortium holds together, it could pose the single most significant barrier to the MS Smartphone ever gaining traction.

the killer feature that hasn't emerged is a single, high speed, world-wide data standard.

You mean 3G aka 3GPP or UMTS.

Except it has been subverted by business interests and stakes such as W-CDMA, and CDMA2000, and patents held by Qualcomm.

the killer feature that hasn't emerged is a single, high speed, world-wide data standard.

You mean 3G aka 3GPP or UMTS.

Except it has been subverted by business interests and stakes such as W-CDMA, and CDMA2000, and patents held by Qualcomm.

It's usually Engine from Ericcson. Atleast thats what most european telecom companies buy at this time. (Telenor here in Norway is about to deploy it, and send voice/signalling over ATM, and later on (a few years) IP.)

Then why is Ericsson developing CDMA systems?

It's interesting that you mention these qualities of Java as being important, and I think they are. But as you mention, Java does have competitors in those fields. I'm not too keen on .NET (although it really is inevitable that it will become a popular language/environment), but Erlang makes a good alternative in all the points you mention. It's really growing phenomenally fast in the past couple of years (especially considering where everything else is heading economically), and of course it does have Ericsson supporting it (at least for telecom applications).

For one, Erlang handles code replacement in the runtime -- no dependence on the underlying OS implementation. What happens when you try to reload a shared library with the same symbols? What if module A is in the middle of module B's routines, while you reload B's shared library? What if you just changed a data structure in a few modules and need a system-wide reload? I sure wouldn't want to have to handle synchronising that in C or C++.

The mechanisms to handle these situations are already present in Erlang; There's no need to reinvent the wheel here.

I have a P800 but to obtain the phone easy, I bought the development kit. I did so, partially because it's fun to have the development kit and partially because it was a way I could get the phone without having to wait:

P800 Developer's Bundle

They used to ship pre-release phones but you'll note on that site, that in the last week they have changed to shipping commerical phones, which makes me think that the consumer release of the phones will happen very soon.

It's a very nice phone. I really like it a lot and don't regret the purchase at all.

I was a tester on Ericsson's first smart phone project.

Although they approached the problem of enabling easy translation of displayed strings by using resource files, etc (this was enabled by the Symbion OS, which strongly encourages such practice), we ran into two major problems:

1. Buffer over/underruns -- if a programmer had created a string (e.g., menu), they would allocate four characters to store that string, but often the German equivalent would be, say, 50 characters, which would cause a crash.

2. The smart phone had a relatively small screen (compared to a PC). The UI designers were working in English and designed the entire UI using English words. They didn't pay enough attention to the fact that translation would be required. For languages that tend to have longer words than English (e.g. German), this caused significant problems. These translations wouldn't fit in the allocated space, and the screen would be cluttered with text.

It would be nice to see software engineers working on UI toolkits to take problems like this into account. Ideally, applications (and GUI toolkits) should be designed in a language-neutral way. Application programmers, who typically think in terms of logic and who strive for elegance, aren't really the best sort of people to be considering language translation. It would be desirable for GUI toolkits to degrade gracefully when presented with text that doesn't fit the UI design and which does not let programmers make the buffer over/underrun mistake. It would seem likely that such a framework exists, but it doesn't seem to be ubiquitous.