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here's the link for the qualcomm chip http://www.qualcomm.com/press/pr/releases2002/pres s678.html

there is a huge chunk of products to do this.

qualcomm

The dome ones are satellite (2 way), they also have ones that use the cell network.

hehe 'terrestrial' youve GOT to work for qualcomm. surprised you didnt call it a tcu :)

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.

(a) Both GSM and CDMA encryption are flawed and can be broken.

I'm not sure which CDMA encryption you are talking about, but using a phone like this would make breaking its encryption a hard feat to accomplish.

Is it a coincidence that Darrell Issa is the rep from the 49th district in California which is home to CDMA developer Qualcomm?

While the standard is part of CDMA2000, and part of the uplink from the cell phone to the base station uses CDMA, the downlink uses TDMA exclusively to increase the total throughput. The downlink is transmitting to only ONE user at a time.

You are correct in that the base station only transmits to one user at a time. This paper by A. Jalali, R. Padovani and R. Pankaj of Qualcomm even stated that this data is sent "in a TDM fassion", but calling the forward link TDMA instead of CDMA is incorrect. The forward link baseband waveform (made up of the various channels) is made up of the normal CDMA I and Q channels. From the RF, modulation, and spectrum usage standpoints, this is still CDMA.

While the standard is part of CDMA2000, and part of the uplink from the cell phone to the base station uses CDMA, the downlink uses TDMA exclusively to increase the total throughput. The downlink is transmitting to only ONE user at a time.

You are correct in that the base station only transmits to one user at a time. This paper by A. Jalali, R. Padovani and R. Pankaj of Qualcomm even stated that this data is sent "in a TDM fassion", but calling the forward link TDMA instead of CDMA is incorrect. The forward link baseband waveform (made up of the various channels) is made up of the normal CDMA I and Q channels. From the RF, modulation, and spectrum usage standpoints, this is still CDMA.

This is in fact not even CDMA - the voice technology used by Verizon. It is a TDMA technique which uses the fact that data is NOT delay-sensitive to increase the data-rate by waiting out 'bad times'.

The second link in the post clearly states that 1xEV-DO is CDMA. Qualcomm also agrees. Traditional CDMA was standardized as IS-95 and 1xEV-DO has been standardized as IS-856 if you want to read more about the technology.

Also note that it is 2.4Mbps peak per cell sector, per cell carrier. So if you and your ten buddies are sucking down data from the same base station cell, the 2.4Mbps peak data rate is split between all of the users.

The 1xEV-DO forward link rate ranges from 38.4kb/s to about 2.4 Mb/s. The reverse link ranges from 9.6kb/s to 153.6 kb/s. Both rates change dynamically according to what the link can support. The overall capacity is greater than IS-95 because stronger error correction coding is used.

The Qualcomm website has quite a bit of detailed technical info. See http://www.qualcomm.com/cdma/1xEV/.

If Qualcomm were to offer a Linux port of Eudora, I'd be hard pressed to think of a reason not to switch to a Linux desktop. I've tried Evolution; it's too much like Outlook. Eudora isn't perfect (in particular, I need more sophisticated filtering abilities), but I've been using it for ten years, so only something spectacularly more powerful would make me switch. (I've only used two email programs in my life, the first was unix Berkeley mail, the second was Eudora.)

The only other application I use constantly is bbedit, but I suppose I could learn to love vim or emacs. Web browsing is already handled quite well by Mozilla and its derivatives.

I'm ready, even eager, to switch, as soon as the software is ready. Until then, MacOS X.

At least to us professional truck drivers.
We use OmniTracs and virtually almost every fleet owner does the same.
It does much more then positioning tracking, allowing us 2way communications and email anywhere in the world, but it does the same thing.

It's a love-hate relationship. On one hand you hate it because they know where you are at all times, at other times I love it, as the computer guesstimates when I'm going to get somewhere and dispatches me a new load before I even deliver this one.

It's not very accurate (sometimes it tracks me 250 miles away from where I am) and a tree, bridge, or other obstruction will render it inoperable for a good minute or 2 whilst it attempts to find the satellite, but overall it's not to bad.

It's interesting to note that Cingular (nee Cellular One) and AT&T are converting their services to GSM. T-Mobile and Nextel are already GSM.

The voice quality is higher, but it is still the older TDMA-derived system. People who use the CDMA services (Sprint, Verizon) seem to be the worst off, as the voice quality gets worse and worse in congested cells where in TDMA the quality stays the same but the ability to make and receive calls is limited.

I think it's very telling that the two largest providers are converting their networks to GSM/TDMA and are totally eschewing CDMA.

Don't get me wrong - I do not have an opinion as to whether CDMA or GSM is the best technology, but just don't be too quickly fooled into thinking that network performance is the only factor here - something tells me that dollars and cents play a major factor here. :)

Your phone needs to be flashed as a development version in order for you to install application directly.

You might be able to convince a Verizon store to do this for you (if you say you're developing brew apps).

However, the phone becomes much less stable in general. Don't use it as your only phone!

I don't think there's a practical way around dropping cash to get into brew development.

However the ARM compiler is available for a 30 day trial, so you should be able to get all the tools together (for free) just to see if it's something you're interested in.

Of course the best source for information is Qualcomm's Brew Development Page

I talked to the Qualcomm folks about this at the BREW developers conference in June. They said they have GCC working and would post the details to their developer site. I haven't seen this yet, so I guess they ran into trouble or this is a low priority.

Some folks on the BREW developer discussion board have tried to figure out for themselves how to get GCC to work. According to them, GCC will not work because it does not compile position independent code that uses the ARM procedure call standard (ie: it doesn't implement the -mapcs-reentrant command line option).

Harvey Mudd College had a student project last year to get GCC working for BREW. Unfortunately they never posted their results to the web.

Visual C++ produces win32/x86 code. But, you don't wannna spend money getting VC++. Not even the educational version that comes pretty cheap. So why can't you use any other compiler that produces win32/x86 code? Such as say, gcc.

There's sample apps that come with the SDK. Why don't you try to compile it with gcc.

At the expense of sounding like a troll. It seems you haven't done your homework. Google is your friend. Usenet is your friend. Such as this thread

Plagerism

The URL is http://people.qualcomm.com/karn/pv/daylife.html

Essentially, BREW does much of the heavy lifting that wireless carriers prefer not to tackle. It is also an open standard that supports multiple languages including the Java platform -- which means game developers don't have to worry about writing multiple versions for different devices.

This statement is misleading. BREW is a "Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless" by Qualcomm. It is just a friggin' API for phones with an ARM CPU! The only reason they claim Java - which does not ship by the way - is that is is conceivable to port and run Java under any environment. Putting a JVM on top of BREW is totally useless since the JVM does not need BREW whatsoever to run on an ARM - it's all marketing hype promoting the false associating with Write-Once Run-Anywhere. BREW competes with Java and locks you into the Qualcomm licensing machine. BREW is not open (or maybe it is, check for yourself here), not cross-platform (ARM only), and does about as much for reducing the need for different software versions as Win32 - or any other proprietary "environment" - does for the desktop.

Essentially, BREW does much of the heavy lifting that wireless carriers prefer not to tackle. It is also an open standard that supports multiple languages including the Java platform -- which means game developers don't have to worry about writing multiple versions for different devices.

This statement is misleading. BREW is a "Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless" by Qualcomm. It is just a friggin' API for phones with an ARM CPU! The only reason they claim Java - which does not ship by the way - is that is is conceivable to port and run Java under any environment. Putting a JVM on top of BREW is totally useless since the JVM does not need BREW whatsoever to run on an ARM - it's all marketing hype promoting the false associating with Write-Once Run-Anywhere. BREW competes with Java and locks you into the Qualcomm licensing machine. BREW is not open (or maybe it is, check for yourself here), not cross-platform (ARM only), and does about as much for reducing the need for different software versions as Win32 - or any other proprietary "environment" - does for the desktop.

• $400 - fee for 100 authentications with VeriSign, required for becoming an "Authenticated Developer," which you need to do to obtain a ClassID and get the rest of the developer tools.
• $1500 - cost of ARM BREW Builder, required to build your applet for a phone
• $unknown - Microsoft Visual Studio

If you have time to implement, Phil Karn (KA9Q) has a wonderful way to get some goods from telemarketing firms here.

Have fun,

Edésio

The standard reference, incidentally, is

Phil Karn, "MACA - A New Channel Access Method for Packet Radio". Proceedings of the 9th ARRL Computer Networking Conference, London, Ontario, Canada, 1990.

There are four multihop routing protocols currently under consideration at the IETF MANET WG.

POP3is a lovely protocol but it has one terrible disadvantage: It's a download only process. Oh sure email can be left on the server but there's no flagging, folders, etc. possible.

IMAP4 is an interesting protocol. Many developers (Steve Dorner of Eudora being a notable one) complain that IMAP makes too many assumptions about how folks are implementing it, the underlying system, etc. On the other hand it works well at this point for managing remote mailboxes, setting flags, folders, partially downloading messages, etc.

So why one over the other? POP is fine for tied-to-one machine folks. You get your mail, you download it, it's your problem. IMAP is suited to those who work from multiple machines or prefer the security of their email being kept on a server.

Guess which population is growing? More importantly guess which population corporate types are part of?

As an email administrator which would you prefer to work with:

Every person having a mail file on their own computer where it can get damaged, stolen, lost along with the laptop, etc.

or

One server holding all of the mail safely & securely, backed up nightly, easy for you to trouble-shoot, folks able to access it from any machine?

Now you see why MS supports IMAP: Their customers really pushed hard for it. Is it part of some big MS-conspiracy? Possibly but there's no good evidence and certianly no rationale.

Furthermore IMAP doesn't give a whit about "Mailer Type" (if it even has such a thing as an option in it's protocol which I doubt.) MS is using their encrypted login as a means to enforce this, nothing so trivially hackable as a client ID string.

Actually encrypted logins are a Good Thing. It's just unfortunate MS is using them as a club to force folks to use only their email products and not supporting industry standard login strategies.

So now we have AOL, the largest ISP requiring their email client (there were trials years ago with opening it up, indeed Claris Emailer still does so though the application was EOL'd 3 years ago by Apple) and now MSN doing the same. Indeed in spite of the fact that there are now perfecty good clients and secure ways of working these folks want to go back to the old "lock 'em in" strategy.

First, free BSD-type licenses. Obviously using a completely free license like BSD would scare people off (see, look how everybody has stopped using Apache these days because it isn't GPL?).

And obviously, the huge number of developers makes the normal version of the second worthwhile license a little difficult to work with. I mean, how on earth are you meant to send beer to that many people? Fortunately, there is an alternative.

Probably the best license in the world.

FYI, more info on the GSP-1620 Satellite Packet Data Modem that is on the NASA page is here.
Just in case any of you wanna build you own datahaven node in orbit.

The electric car I used for comparison is the GM EV1. This is not a "tiny little car crawling along at 5 mph"; it's a sports car that does 0-60 in under 8 seconds, with a top end of 80mph. I use mine for nearly all of my driving.

As for EVs making more power available for other uses, I tried to explain that in my first note. Here's an example. Suppose that by driving an EV1 for 100 miles I cause a generating plant to emit 2.8 grams of nitrogen oxides. If I had driven those 100 miles in an average gasoline car, I would have emitted 249 grams of nitrogen oxides, nearly 100 times as much. Now suppose I could sell that emission "credit" to the power plant operators. That would let them produce nearly 100 times as much energy as it would take to charge my car.

This is not just an abstract idea. There are power plants shut down right now because they have run out of nitrogen oxide emission credits.

Didn't Qualcomm already announced that they were going to make a phone (pdQ SmartPhone, a CDMA phone) to use PalmOS on it too? Here is the Press Release from Sept 29, 1999.

Didn't Qualcomm already announced that they were going to make a phone (pdQ SmartPhone, a CDMA phone) to use PalmOS on it too? Here is the Press Release from Sept 29, 1999.

The one charger I regularly use away from home is the one at work.

So called zero emissions vehicles simply shift the pollution source from the tailpipe to the power plants.

If you do the numbers, you will find that the power plant emissions attributable to each mile of EV driving are about 3% of those of conventional internal combustion engine cars. The actual percentages depend on the pollutant in question. See the detailed analysis of this exact issue on my website.

"But power plants make power more efficiently!" Ever study thermodynamics? Energy is always always always lost when it's converted from one form to another.

You then proceed to list all the conversion steps in the electric vehicle fuel cycle, claiming that because there are more steps, EVs are necessarily less efficient. You should know that it's not the number of steps, but the product of the efficiencies at each step.

If you do the numbers, you'll find that current production EVs are typically at least twice as efficient, in primary energy consumed per mile, as conventional ICE cars. Modern combined-cycle gas turbine generating plants can exceed 50% efficiency, vs perhaps 20% peak for an ICE. The power grid is typically 95% efficient (that's the figure for SDG&E). The charger & battery are typically 70-80% efficient, though this depends on the technology. The inverter and motor are usually well over 90% efficient.

To be more specific, the measured AC consumption for the PbA version of the 1997 EV1 is 248 Wh/mile. It's 373 Wh/mile for the 1999 NiMH version, mainly because of the battery pack cooling required in warm weather. There is definite room for improvement here, btw.

Then there's the fact that EVs are the only practical way to use certain primary energy sources, such as hydro, solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear -- all sources that pollute far less than fossil fuels.

And the current power grid could not handle the increased load should the public switch to electric vehicles.

Southern California Edison has calculated that California could easily support several million EVs with existing plants and transmission lines -- despite our well-publicized shortages -- as long as they're charged at night. Right now, as my EV1 is charging in my garage shortly past midnight PDT, the load on the California ISO-controlled grid is 23067 MW. The load at which they start to have trouble is around 40000MW. That's a lot of slack for nighttime EV charging.

Electric vehicles also shift pollution to the landfills. Depending on the type of battery, they are made up of lead, sulphuric acid, mercury, lithium, cadmium, and other nasty chemicals. We ignore this problem. NiCd batteries say "dispose of properly at an approved facility". Ever actually tried this? Trashing them is illegal, yet no recycling facility in the Los Angeles phone book officially accepts cadmium!

No production EV I know of uses NiCd batteries. They all use lead-acid, nickel metal-hydride or lithium ion. There's a well-established recycling infrastructure for lead-acid batteries, and nickel is also far too valuable to just throw away.

Vehicle range. What fool even thinks of vacationing in an EV? It can't be done. Insufficient range before batteries run dry. 100+ miles with no gas stations and no civilization at all *and* over hilly terrain? It's like this all over the western US.

Several people I know regularly drive their EV1s on cross-country trips. The first went from LA to Troy, Michigan. Another went from LA to Florida. Yes, it takes them a lot longer than in an ordinary car. They do it for fun. They spent some time arranging for 240V outlets to be available, but it was possible.

That said, no one really argues that EVs can now replace every ICE vehicle application. But they don't have to! The vast majority of daily commuting is well within the range capability of existing EVs, so if we reserved ICE vehicles for when they were really needed we could cut total vehicle emissions enormously.

My EV1 is my only car. Most of my trips out of town are by air, and my EV1 gets me to the airport quite easily. On the very rare occasion I/we need to take a road trip that exceeds its capabilities, I either take my fiancee's car, or we rent an ICE. This happens very, very rarely. Maybe once or twice a year.

Power? EVs can barely move themselves and some passengers about. A camper? A trailer? Cargo? Forget it.

My EV1 does 0 to 60 in less than 8 seconds. Does that count as "barely move themselves"? That said, see the previous paragraph about it not being necessary to replace every ICE, only most of them. If I ever need to tow a boat, I'll rent a SUV with a big engine -- something I hardly need to commute to work every day.

And stupid lazy drivers who don't recharge.

I recharge every night in my garage. Takes me 10 seconds to plug in the paddle, and it's full by morning. Second nature, I have yet to forget.

What about in winter when it's cold outside? Electric heating? There goes your battery. And of course, bateries tend to get weak and have problems when it's cold anyway. Double handicap.

My EV1 actually has a pretty good heat pump, augmented with an electric heating element. Works great in both heating and cooling modes, but then again I do live in San Diego.

NiMH batteries actually work pretty well in cold weather.

Charge time sucks too. I can refuel a gas/diesel engine in a few minutes and be good for another 500 miles. With electric? How many hours to recharge?

This is, in my opinion, the one valid concern about the present generation of EVs. The standard 6kW charger for the EV1 gives you about 25-30 miles of range for every hour of charge. On days when my total driving is less than a full charge (which is almost always true), charging occurs at night when I sleep, so as long as it's done by morning it doesn't matter how long it takes.

That said, I do believe we need high power public charging stations for those occasions when you need to drive more than a single charge will take you in a single day, and you don't have the time to spend at one of the public 6kW charging stations. GM is supposedly testing a 50kW charger now on a fleet of electric S-10 pickups. I'd very much like to see it publicly available.

And yes... the costs. EVs are currently sold at a loss

Any car made by hand in batches of 500 (like the EV1) is bound to be expensive. They'd get much cheaper in volume production, but even if they remain more expensive than comparable ICE cars you have to trade that off against significantly lower operating and energy costs.

What more needs to be said? The EV is nothing less than snake oil.

See my EV web page for another side to the story.

There's no question that we'll all be driving EVs some day. The only question is when -- before or after the oil runs dry, or before people are born and live their whole lives in LA without ever having seen the mountains.

Phil Karn

So called zero emissions vehicles simply shift the pollution source from the tailpipe to the power plants.

If you do the numbers, you will find that the power plant emissions attributable to each mile of EV driving are about 3% of those of conventional internal combustion engine cars. The actual percentages depend on the pollutant in question. See the detailed analysis of this exact issue on my website.

"But power plants make power more efficiently!" Ever study thermodynamics? Energy is always always always lost when it's converted from one form to another.

You then proceed to list all the conversion steps in the electric vehicle fuel cycle, claiming that because there are more steps, EVs are necessarily less efficient. You should know that it's not the number of steps, but the product of the efficiencies at each step.

If you do the numbers, you'll find that current production EVs are typically at least twice as efficient, in primary energy consumed per mile, as conventional ICE cars. Modern combined-cycle gas turbine generating plants can exceed 50% efficiency, vs perhaps 20% peak for an ICE. The power grid is typically 95% efficient (that's the figure for SDG&E). The charger & battery are typically 70-80% efficient, though this depends on the technology. The inverter and motor are usually well over 90% efficient.

To be more specific, the measured AC consumption for the PbA version of the 1997 EV1 is 248 Wh/mile. It's 373 Wh/mile for the 1999 NiMH version, mainly because of the battery pack cooling required in warm weather. There is definite room for improvement here, btw.

Then there's the fact that EVs are the only practical way to use certain primary energy sources, such as hydro, solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear -- all sources that pollute far less than fossil fuels.

And the current power grid could not handle the increased load should the public switch to electric vehicles.

Southern California Edison has calculated that California could easily support several million EVs with existing plants and transmission lines -- despite our well-publicized shortages -- as long as they're charged at night. Right now, as my EV1 is charging in my garage shortly past midnight PDT, the load on the California ISO-controlled grid is 23067 MW. The load at which they start to have trouble is around 40000MW. That's a lot of slack for nighttime EV charging.

Electric vehicles also shift pollution to the landfills. Depending on the type of battery, they are made up of lead, sulphuric acid, mercury, lithium, cadmium, and other nasty chemicals. We ignore this problem. NiCd batteries say "dispose of properly at an approved facility". Ever actually tried this? Trashing them is illegal, yet no recycling facility in the Los Angeles phone book officially accepts cadmium!

No production EV I know of uses NiCd batteries. They all use lead-acid, nickel metal-hydride or lithium ion. There's a well-established recycling infrastructure for lead-acid batteries, and nickel is also far too valuable to just throw away.

Vehicle range. What fool even thinks of vacationing in an EV? It can't be done. Insufficient range before batteries run dry. 100+ miles with no gas stations and no civilization at all *and* over hilly terrain? It's like this all over the western US.

Several people I know regularly drive their EV1s on cross-country trips. The first went from LA to Troy, Michigan. Another went from LA to Florida. Yes, it takes them a lot longer than in an ordinary car. They do it for fun. They spent some time arranging for 240V outlets to be available, but it was possible.

That said, no one really argues that EVs can now replace every ICE vehicle application. But they don't have to! The vast majority of daily commuting is well within the range capability of existing EVs, so if we reserved ICE vehicles for when they were really needed we could cut total vehicle emissions enormously.

My EV1 is my only car. Most of my trips out of town are by air, and my EV1 gets me to the airport quite easily. On the very rare occasion I/we need to take a road trip that exceeds its capabilities, I either take my fiancee's car, or we rent an ICE. This happens very, very rarely. Maybe once or twice a year.

Power? EVs can barely move themselves and some passengers about. A camper? A trailer? Cargo? Forget it.

My EV1 does 0 to 60 in less than 8 seconds. Does that count as "barely move themselves"? That said, see the previous paragraph about it not being necessary to replace every ICE, only most of them. If I ever need to tow a boat, I'll rent a SUV with a big engine -- something I hardly need to commute to work every day.

And stupid lazy drivers who don't recharge.

I recharge every night in my garage. Takes me 10 seconds to plug in the paddle, and it's full by morning. Second nature, I have yet to forget.

What about in winter when it's cold outside? Electric heating? There goes your battery. And of course, bateries tend to get weak and have problems when it's cold anyway. Double handicap.

My EV1 actually has a pretty good heat pump, augmented with an electric heating element. Works great in both heating and cooling modes, but then again I do live in San Diego.

NiMH batteries actually work pretty well in cold weather.

Charge time sucks too. I can refuel a gas/diesel engine in a few minutes and be good for another 500 miles. With electric? How many hours to recharge?

This is, in my opinion, the one valid concern about the present generation of EVs. The standard 6kW charger for the EV1 gives you about 25-30 miles of range for every hour of charge. On days when my total driving is less than a full charge (which is almost always true), charging occurs at night when I sleep, so as long as it's done by morning it doesn't matter how long it takes.

That said, I do believe we need high power public charging stations for those occasions when you need to drive more than a single charge will take you in a single day, and you don't have the time to spend at one of the public 6kW charging stations. GM is supposedly testing a 50kW charger now on a fleet of electric S-10 pickups. I'd very much like to see it publicly available.

And yes... the costs. EVs are currently sold at a loss

Any car made by hand in batches of 500 (like the EV1) is bound to be expensive. They'd get much cheaper in volume production, but even if they remain more expensive than comparable ICE cars you have to trade that off against significantly lower operating and energy costs.

What more needs to be said? The EV is nothing less than snake oil.

See my EV web page for another side to the story.

There's no question that we'll all be driving EVs some day. The only question is when -- before or after the oil runs dry, or before people are born and live their whole lives in LA without ever having seen the mountains.

Phil Karn

See my EV1 web page or the EV1 club web page.

Second, even assuming that DeCSS runs under Linux, it concededly runs under Windows---a far more widely used operating system---as well. It therefore cannot reasonably be said that DeCSS was developed "for the sole purpose'' of achieving interoperability between Linux and DVDs.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, Memorandum Opinion granting the MPAA's motion to enjoin the publication of the DeCSS source code on the Internet. [There was a time when judges were appointed on the basis of fairness and intellect. I guess those times have passed.]

http://people.qualcomm.com/karn/rr/linux.html

Good luck.

How about Qualcomm's PDQ. It does analog+PCS phone and has a Palm (III I think) built in. Lets you use the palm address book to dial numbers, etc. I'm pretty sure you can use the net over the cellular coverage. No MP3 though, but I think you could hook up a serial GPS module. It's also about $800 :)

Before everybody jumps to blame the wireless providers (don't get me wrong, they are part of the problem), I think that it is important to also look at what the government has done to limit the wireless providers.

There are 2 bandwidths open for cellular communication in the USA 800Mhz (std. cellular) & 1900MHz (PCS). These all use the CDMA technology invented by Qualcomm, a US Compnay. Most countries in the world are slowly switching to this technology, as it is a *much* better technology for cell phone use.

Anyway, back to the point. For the 800MHz bandwith, the FCC has divided it up into 2 channels per market (A & B...The FCC then gave the A channel & B channel to a different service provider (I believe each gets 10MHz per channel)) The 1900MHz spectrum is divided into 6 different channels. (The A,B&C channels are divided into 60MHz ranges, and the D,E&F channels are divided into 20MHz per channel)

In Europe (and Asia), the wireless spectrums are not broken up into 2 (or more) seperate channels, which gives the providers much more bandwith to serve things other than voice. But I don't believe that their dominace is going to last much longer. Recently, the final Specifications for CDMA2000 (as opposed to CDMA One, which is used right now) have been released, and should be implemented by 2001. This was designed with the limited bandwith in mind, and will *guarentee* 384kbps internet access for your cell phone (as opposed to 14.4k/s)

s

Being developed by Qualcomm, just part of what HDR offers:

• Air link provides up to 2.4 Mbps in a dedicated 1.25 MHz channel
• Packet data design results in greatest spectral efficiency
• Flexible, IP-based architecture enables multiple implementation methods
• Compatible with existing CDMA Networks

More here: http://www.qualcomm.com/hdr/about.html

PoC

• All telephone modems over 9600 baud
  
• Hard disk read channel on modern hard disks
  
• All digital cellular phones
  
• Digital satellite TV receivers
  
• Microwave line-of-sight links (between phone exchanges)
  
• GPS receivers
  
• ADSL modems
  
• Cable modems
  
• and much more
  

An introduction to the Viterbi Algorithm

Technically speaking, it is an efficient implementation of the Maximum Likelyhood Sequence (MLS) detector, just like the FFT is an efficient implementation of the discrete fourier transform.

----

There are still very few theatres that even have digital projectors. This movie will probably open up to something like 2500 - 3000 screens. There are maybe a hundred or so digital screens at most. I would love to see it in digital, and living in the Los Angeles Metro I will have the opportunity if I want to, but most of us are still going to be stuck with film. The only relevant liks I can find is Qualcomm's digital cinema site. Does anyone know a site that lists digital theatres?

The convergence in the handheld market is really fun to watch. This is the first mobile phone + MP3 combination I've seen. Elsewhere, we've seen the mobile phone + Palm OS from Qualcomm. And we've seen the Palm OS + MP3 combination from Handspring and Innogear Now each combination of two of the three technologies has been comercialized.

The next step is clear: we'll see a mobile phone + mp3 player + handheld OS combination unit. I hesitate to say Palm OS (though I have some personal preferences there) because Microsoft seem interested in a CE system along these lines. A Linux based system seems an unlikely dark horse. At the rate this market has been developing, we could see this mobile + mp3 + Palm OS combo by Christmas - but I suspect 2001 is more likely.

It sounds like you are looking for something like spread spectrum technology. In terms of transmission via radio, traditionally we use narrowband methods. FM 102.1 has a big bunch of energy that is easily visible around 102.1 MHz. Even if you encrypt it you know something is there.

Spread spectrum disperses the signal across a larger bandwidth so unless you know where to look, it appears that there is only background noise. It appears there is no data at all. The receiver needs a code that matches the transmitter so the receiver can know where to find the transmitted signal.

This is the technology that is used in CDMA - Code division multiple access. The method that Qualcomm uses for PCS. There are a lot of interesting advantages that this method has over TDMA and FDMA (Time, Frequency).

Palm already has a cell-phone. Qualcomm makes a phone that runs PalmOS and runs Palm-apps, it's called the pdQ smartphone.

Check it out here.

Cheers.

Does anybody have any comments on the pdQ? The pdQ is a qualcomm phone with a palm pilot built in. It seems really cool and has similar services.

Here is a link to some pdQ info.

Then there was a long hiatus in the mid to late 1980s during which all the networking players tried to push proprietary PC LANs on everybody. During this period, TCP/IP was considered sort of a wierdo protocol used in academia and the military. The LAN wars continued for years, until only Novell and Microsoft were left standing. Meanwhile, the UNIX workstation crowd clanked along, mostly using TCP/IP (there were exceptions, notably Apollo), incompatible with the PC world.

It wasn't until Windows 3.1 that TCP/IP started to make serious inroads into the PC world, and the commercialization of the Internet got going. The rest is history.

One of the first widely used TCP/IP stacks was an open source stack by Phil Karn, the famous K9AQ stack, developed for packet ham radio. Among other things, it's the guts of MacTCP, once Apple's official TCP/IP stack. It may have influenced more implementations than BSD, especially since it was a long time before you could freely use the BSD code. Early BSD versions required a UNIX license from AT&T, and that license cost roughly $20,000 per CPU for non-academic sites.

UNIX isn't the world.

• Union for the Public Domain: their page on Business Practice Patents.
• The League for Programming Freedom: their page on Software Patents
• freepatents.org for activism in the EU
• Phil Karn: his "The US Patent System is Out of Control"

FYI, if anyone is interested, the only cell company I know that offers unmetered ($10/Month) internet access, VoiceStream, won't be selling or connecting these little beauties, because the VS technology requires those pesky little SmartCards. [Most] of the other digital providers use the required process called CDMA, which is supposed to lend well to full-blown internet, as opposed to those text pager features. I got a quote from a tech guy at Sprint who said that they were expecting to have full internet support by 3/99 and would finally start pushing the pdQ's. (There's an analog model, for all you folks in the boonies.) He implied that there would be an entirely new billing format to account for the web access. Hmmm.

FYI, if anyone is interested, the only cell company I know that offers unmetered ($10/Month) internet access, VoiceStream, won't be selling or connecting these little beauties, because the VS technology requires those pesky little SmartCards. [Most] of the other digital providers use the required process called CDMA, which is supposed to lend well to full-blown internet, as opposed to those text pager features. I got a quote from a tech guy at Sprint who said that they were expecting to have full internet support by 3/99 and would finally start pushing the pdQ's. (There's an analog model, for all you folks in the boonies.) He implied that there would be an entirely new billing format to account for the web access. Hmmm.

I wonder if a program like this, combined with a phone like the Qualcomm pdQ Smartphone could make a fully portable secure wireless phone?

If the pdQ doesn't have the right hardware connections to do that, is there another phone out there that does (preferably one that can run Linux or an OS of similar power).

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for those of you copy/pasting impaired...

http://www.qualcomm.com/hdr/hdr99/wha tis.html

Why indeed, there is digital cinema from Qualcomm. The idea is to have a digital projector project a feature film that is sent digitally in encrypted form from a central hub and locally stored.

One of my professors at HMC worked on the project and said the result is quite impressive. There have been some demonstrations including screenings of the Phantom Menance, but no wide commercial release yet.

Something like this is clearly the wave of the future, since film duplication and distribution is so expensive. It remains to be seen whether it's Qualcomm or some other technology that prevails.
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