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The United States Losing "The Tech Edge?"
Ed Matthews writes " Yesterday's Wall Street Journal profiles the coolest gadgets that either aren't available in the USA or are slow to emerge. It questions whether the U.S.'s reliance on PCs is a ball and chain, and highlights the mistake made by the US in not adopting a single standard for wireless communication.
It also refers to the cell-phone carriers as "slow-moving, bureaucratic," and "having a chokehold on innovation."
The regular B section requires a paid login, but you can read Walter Mossberg's column for free." Having dealt with the US-cellular companies for the last two weeks, and been extraordinarily unhappy with one company that's sucked away fourteen off my life, I'm curious what everyone else thinks will be the emerging technology - and where it will be.
I seriously doubt it also, and for one thing which is sure, is that the first GSM network experiment was done under an IETF experimentation in paris. (in the 80s)
(IETF is the european telecommunication regulating body). . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Ah, I like Sweden... This is due to the fact that the Swedish government is using about 1$ billion dollars to make sure that everyone in Sweden has broadband in 2002. Even us poor bastards that live on the country. :)
Muahahah... Will work for bandwidth.
> Hmmm, I think the French and the Germans, and
> the Spaniards and the Italians, and the
> Austrians and the Poles and the Chechs and the
> Russians and the rest of the Europeans will be
> very happy to know that Europe == Scandinavia.
>
> Stick that in the hole in the theory.
I'm sorry, but it won't fit!
You see, the theory I was referring to basically said that cellular penetration was directly related to the quality/quantity of the POTS. To disprove this theory I used my country of birth as an example.
BTW, since I'm not from the US I am well aware of the fact that Scandinavia isn't the same as Europe. (Stereotypes suck, but this one is tragically true for a surprisingly high percentage of the general population.)
Free your mind!
You'd have to change the whole infrastructure overnight. It will never happen.
Yeah, I know... Here in Sweden practically everyone has a mobile phone (Oh, almost all of my friends do) Mobile phones are as ordinary as plastic bags are in USA... hahahahaa
In Europe, UMTS licenses are being "launched" at the moment.
UMTS should deliver 2Mbps wireless.
Geez, look at the toilet (seat) industry in Japan. There are so many types of toilets and seats available it will make your head spin, with heated seats, music, noisemakers, dryers, remote controls, etc.
I'm told that there's been a recent increase in death by toilet in Japan. Electrical toilets near a water supply don't go well together. I'd like to see that idea survive in a more litigation-happy country :)
How about 1.6Mb then. A German company called Symek makes a TNC they claim can go up to 1.6Mb
Speed: Modem-Baudrate: 0 to 1.2 Mbit/s per Modem, 1.6 Mbit/s total. RS232: 1200 to 115200 Baud
http://symek.com/tnc-g/tnc3.htm
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
Well, here in Holland we have one protocol (GSM), but 5 providers who all have a nation wide (well ok that's not much) network, so it is not uncommon to see 3 antennas on buildings here...
fff
How is the Province of Anacreon doing these days? I must remember to visit there some time.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
I'm unfamiliar with AirTouch so I can't comment on it's suckiness, but it's hard to imagine anything sucking more than BellAtlantic. I have noticed the customer service on BellAtlantic's Infospeed DSL service actually improve since the merger, but there wasn't really any other direction for it to go. I no longer have to look forward to a 4 hours on hold each day waiting for their tech support (they actually pick up quickly now) like I did for the first _two_ _months_ after installation when my connection was unusable, but then again my service went down again a week ago and they have yet to fix it so it would seem that only their customer service has improved and not their actual technical competency. Fortunately, I haven't had any serious problems with my BellAtlantic Mobile / Verizone Wireless service - based on Hemos' comment it sounds like their wireless support isn't any better than their DSL support.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
What happens is that innovative new technologies are invented in the UK, fail miserably because the financiers couldn't tell a good idea if it was rammed up their arse sideways.
Given the degree of taxation and regulation in the U.K., it's surprising anything innovative ever gets funded at all. The prevailing attitude seems to be, all activity not explicitly permitted is prohibited. Ok, a slight exaggeration, but when I worked for a small company trying to sell some new airline-reservation datacomm equipment over there, all we ever heard was that changing things had to be approved by such-and-such a government agency. In the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand we never got that reaction.
The UK is dragged into the new technology kicking and screaming that the bloody Europeans are trying to take over the world.
I recall being in England one time and heard a radio report that "the Continent has been cut off from Great Britain by intense fog." That pretty much sums up the Brit attitude (which, don't get me wrong, I find greatly amusing. The EU must love negotiating with them.).
In Europe my cell phone roams automatically when I change countries - used it without problem in the UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Of course, I pay through the nose for the calls.. Been digital here (UK) for about 5 years - don't think I've ever had an analog cell phone and I've had one for about 4 years. BTW we don't pay to receive calls normally - I think about 50% of the UK population now has a mobile. We're well behind some of the Scandinavian countries.
Nobody does studies of accidents caused by people changing radio stations.
Actually they have. You're 14 times more likely to have an accident when playing with the radio. 30some times more likely when talking on a cell phone.
One thing mentioned in the article I read was that navigation devices (GPS, etc) are even worse than cell phones.
Besides, I'm not worried about accidents. I drive a big Lexus SUV. God, I love consulting!
You're fine unless you hit some like me who drives an even bigger truck.There is also evidence that "hands free" mic/headphone combinations make things worse, because they make the users feel that they are driving more responsibly, when in fact they are not.
More empirically, I can say that from my experience as pedestrian and cyclist in Boulder, CO, people driving and using the phone do not see you, even when you have right of way. The problem is worse with people in SUVs driving and using phones, because the higher driver position removes you from their already limited road attention even further.
fff
Fine: I leave it to you.
In Europe OTOH they're more used to being told what to do by more socialist governments, and the idea of a standard is more easily applicable to the way they work within regulations anyway.
Then again...
-agl-
Athy, athier, athiest.
Everything I have read speaks like TDMA, IS-136, and GSM are going to converge to a very GSM like technology. At least that sounds like the best idea, then we end up with a very large GSM network in the US, albeit on the "wrong" frequency.
I work as a contractor for a major Cellular company who will remain nameless (Sprint PCS). The service sucks, but they have some kewl thigs i the works. I work on the side of the house that builds new networks, and it takes a lot of time and money to build them. Who has the right technology? Well that's very hard to say. Sprit and Verison (GTE, Airtouch, PrimeCo, Bell Atlantic) all chose CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). PacBell and a few others chose GSM (General Services Mobile) the European standard, and AT&T (Cellular One, Houston Cellular, etc) chose to use IS-95 (D-AMPS? Digital Adanced Mobile Phone System). Then Nextel chose Motorola's IDEN system (A TDMA derivitive. Time Division Multiple Access).
All have their advantages and disadvantages. CDMA is a very elegant and rather efficient way to interface with the air (radio spectrum), however the networks are a little trickier to set up and the technology is the newest. The derivitaves of TDMA require a lot more control centraly but do not require as much inteligence at the Cell Site or the hadset as CDMA.
The advantage of going for something like CDMA is that handoffs between Sectors and Cells is seamless as the phone may actualy chat with more than one Cell at a time, thus creating a form of redundancy. Also as the bandwidth is increased from say 1.5Mhz to 3Mhz the capacity and clarity are increased as CDMA uses spread spectrum. However CDMA suffers from one major problem, Interferance. CDMA is designed to work at the noise floor (The point where the squelch knob on your CB causes silence). When the noise floor is raised the handset must increase power, and if you are away from the site you may not have enough power, and will drop or the forward error correction will go through the roof, causing the lovely digital stutter.
TDMA on the other hand is designed more like the old analog systems, only digital with cooler features and greater capacity. My knowledge in this area is weak at the momet so feel free to correct. You can only chat with one site at a time and there are no soft handoffs, only hard ones (requireing a frequency hop). The problem here is that for a split second you do not exist on the network and your call is very voulerable to be dropped. Also the bandwidth is more fixed than CDMA and the scalability is not as linear. The good side of TDMA and such is that the equipment has been around longer is more tested and cheaper.
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
BTW, it has been ahuge debate in many countries in Europe about these auctions. Pretty much, the debate has been over the problem that if you auction, some currently huge companies might establish near-monopolies, criplling competition. Some countries has chosen not to auction off the frequencies, but release them for a fixed prize.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I think everybody's at fault.... Anyway, what we need is an objective data base of products, that lists product specifications, independent reviews, tests, benchmarks and so on. So that it is possible to make an informed decision. Nowadays, it is simply not possible to make an informed decision, because it will take you years to research everything you needed to know to buy a tube of toothpaste... :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Actually, those regulators are common practice,
installed in pretty much every device. Back in the 60s, they weren't.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
So why aren't programmers enjoying such a high income in Europe and Asia?
You need to consider the whole scenario. It's far easier for a programmer to form an internet startup and earn money in the US than it is in Europe. And when they make a profit, they hire more programmers, which is why you enjoy a better standard of living.
This applies not just to startups, but to general software companies as well. Which is why they hired you. It's easier to do business in the US and hire skilled immigrants.
w/m
Hmm... up to 45 conversations on the same frequency band. If I remember correctly IS-95 uses a little less than 1.2 MHz bandwidth for each set of channels. If this corresponds to a maximum of 45 simultaneous conversations and we compare with the situation in GSM where each set of channels uses 200 kHz and have 8 timeslots we get 8 * 1.2MHz/200kHz = 48 simultaneous full rate links. Where is the beef?
The number of active phones passed 30 million in June(?). And yes, there are less than 60 million people in the UK. I found it amusing reading national geographic a coupla months ago, where they were going on about how 1/3 of the population of London had a mobile. I know they have a long lead time on the mag, but that figure must be about 18 months old. I think you could safely double that percentage. The growth in mobile usage in the UK has been largely in pay-as-you-go phones with no credit check or bills. This means that kids can buy them, and they do, a lot.
The economist had a n article last week that is worth a read. Its about the mess with the 3g licences in the US, where the frequencies allocated will clash with dozens of local TV stations. You haven't a hope, from the looks of things!
But Australia has very good wireless communications systems, one of the highest uptake rates of mobile phones in the world. We use GSM and all the major European telecos have offices here, do research and development here, and get their products onto the market as soon as possible here.
Having a single technical standard for digital telecommunications helps enormously. And you wouldn't believe how powerful the whole system becomes when you are focused on a single standard. When Australia recently engaged in some military and aid action in East Timor, one of the telecos simply extended their national network into East Timor. My friend could talk to his girlfriend (who was doing aid work) from Melbourne to East Timor, and often it was free (standard evening free calls promotion).
Look on the map and see how far this is. Distances are not really the problem. Population density is not the problem. Existing landlines are not the problem (Australia has had untimed cheap local calls for decades).
In America the problems seem to be too many standards, too many players in the market, poor billing ideas (charging someone for receiving a call is just stupid), and perhaps some cultural differences. It's hard to say for sure. But mere geography alone is not enough to explain it.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing, though. If HDTV is so great, market forces will stimulate demand, stations will switch over a portion of their broadcast time as demand swells, and the transition can be fairly painless for consumers. Shutting down the entire legacy system on a set date without any provision for whether the new system works or not is not the right way to do a systems migration.
Of course, the real problem is that to most consumers, there is no advantage to HDTV. That's why adoption hasn't moved along - most people cared that CDs were better than tapes, but most people don't care about the improvement that HDTV brings. In fact, since most broadcasters are planning to just offer 6 current-quality channels in the bandwidth they are given for one HDTV channel, broadcasters will be far and away the primary beneficiaries of this change.
I've defended the FCC before, but their HDTV maneuvering has convinced me that they are not focused on the wishes of the citizenry.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The 800 and 1900 MHZ use both CDMA *and* TDMA, and the 800 also use analog.
The lack of standards in the US market has had the benefit to the world of allowing CDMA, a technology which would not have ever succeeded in a regulatory approach, to prove its value. Unfortunately, the rest of the world will go to it (in GSM) while the US continues with all sorts of different "standards." My carrier (Verizon) offers unlimited roaming (in their service areas, which doesn't help much when I am tornado chasing) - but ONLY if I have a 3 mode (yes, THREE mode) phone - that is, a phone that can do three standards!
The US has the following standards in use:
Analog 800
CDMA 800 (which I use)
TDMA 800 (I think this is in use)
CDMA 1900
TDMA 1900
GSM
Furthermore, in order to hold onto market share, the carriers make it difficult for one to use a COMPATIBLE phone if it isn't the same model that they sell. Thus they lock you in by your investment in hardware. I have an old CDMA 1900 phone laying around because I switched from Sprint to Verizon (to get a no longer offered true nationwide no roaming plan).
When you add in accessories you may buy (I have a speakerphone and an expensive Qualcomm modem card), it is quite a mess.
The only good weather is bad weather.
0.556 cats? I think this is an int scalar.
Ever heard of Schrödinger?
Anyone who thinks that the web was "invented" is either an idiot or someone who is massively naive.
... Uh, never mind.
Clearly you haven't been keeping up. Al Gore was the father of the internet, and he's not an
It's a commonly made mistake. The Internet is an evolution of various standards/protocols.
The world wide web, OTOH, is a specific protocol specifically invented by one person.
Read this Time magazine article which describes this in greater detail, and explains why he made their top 20 inventors of the century list.
"Unlike so many of the inventions that have
moved the world, this one truly was the work
of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for the
light bulb, but he had dozens of people in his
lab working on it. William Shockley may have
fathered the transistor, but two of his
research scientists actually built it. And if
there ever was a thing that was made by
committee, the Internet--with its protocols
and packet switching--is it. But the World
Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He
designed it. He loosed it on the world. And
he more than anyone else has fought to keep
it open, nonproprietary and free. "
Damn man, you must be drained. That's almost one and a half cats there, for christ's sake.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Your comments are poorly informed.
... I Better not make any comments...
The landline phone system is defintely *Expensive* , but "crap" not really. The quality of service, availability and reliability is excelent.
The reason we (Europeans) are ahead may be that there are actually more bright and technologically minded engineers, when constrasted with the US. "US" engineers are usually imported from Third-World countries or from European countries. As for the Native "US" engineers
(BTW, Im in favor of radio astronomy, however, dow we really think the benefits of radio astronomy outweight the benefits of such a large data channel?)
Yes.
One more drink, and I'll move on. --Dave Matthews Band
It's called "G3" in mobile circles and it strives to take the best features of TDMA, CDMA, and GSM and make one unified service. It's in the development stages right now, but all carriers are on the same page (Realize that one of the larger GSM providers in Europe and the larger providers of mobile services in the US are in bed together in the US in the form of a joint venture called, Verizon Wireless- do you think that they're going to NOT implement the system when it comes out of the labs?).
Not the first time I've seen that, IIRC about 10 years ago I saw some Sony portable stereo I couldn't get here.
I'm torqued about the differences between cell in the US and abroad. You'd think we'd have learned something from PAL-NTSC.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think that's a valid point. Japan leads in tech. Europe does pretty well finding real world, rational uses for the average bear, but no one seems to know it's available. The US, well, we can't come up with anything really, really cool and innovative, but we can market the shit outta anything and convince everyone here that they need it, even when we have no use for it except for the wow factor and to spend money (which is usually the case).
A small example is Microsoft vs everyone else. Most people agree that most MS products aren't all that great. But they're everywhere just because their marketing department can convice us that bathing in shit is good for our skin, and as soon as everyone else around starts doing it then you won't be as lonely anymore (that would be the US). Then there's IBM, who comes up with some really cool stuff that hardly anyone ever gets to hear about.(That would be Asia.) Then there's Apple, who makes some very useful and nice things that just about anyone can get a lot of work done but only has a slice of the market (that would be Europe).
That's my two cents.
Jason
Ha! Even the American cellphone firm you mention isn't a proper American. It's half US (The Bell part) and half European - AirTouch is owned by Vodaphone, a British wireless company.
From friend of mine who have visited Japan and/or are from there, they pretty much agree with me that big companies OWN the country. You work for one company your entire life, there are few startups there, and since you stay with your company, they also pay for your housing (which is really expensive).
The average japanese salary is equal to that of an american salary in the same feild, however (i read this somewhere) since some of the major living expenses, it allows for a larger amount of money to be spent on "entertainment" devices, such as nifty new laptops, super small minidisc players, computers with minidisc drives, etc. Also, the average work day is longer, so the other reason why some gadgets are small (apperantly) is to take them with you, since there isnt as much as "leisure time" as an american worker.
What exactly does this mean? Well, it means that companies that sell things in Japan can have a faster product life, since their customers can afford to upgrade, and that people will buy their newest niftiest gadgets, because they can afford too, and they really like them. (also, if my friend is someone to represent the japanese, he doesnt get rid of anything, so he has tons of gadgets, that he doesnt use).
I would love to be corrected by someone who is much more knowledgable, but this is what ive picked up.
-Pfhor
Welcome, Tasty Primate
Europe is ultra fudgepacked, they have a major city like every five feet, its no wonder they can afford to have full coverage cell phone service. Meanwhile, we sitting here in the states have to use ground wire connections. Too bad I guess, even though I see it as more than fair, because, us crazy Americans have more internet bandwidth than the rest of the world combined and doubled. So have fun flossing your cell phones Europe, because I'm sure having fun here at my oc3 connected job picking my nose and looking at porn.
-f
The Japanese public seem to really enjoy robotics and minaturization to a greater degree than in the US (just a few examples). Is this big business or cultural?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Sure, there are lots of "neat gadgets" for sale outside north america, but I don't neccessarily see that as a disadvantage. I think the main problem consumers face today is that companies still act as if they have little to no competition and you'll still keep coming back no matter how bad the service is. Lack of standards isn't causing difficulties in the marketplace, it's the fact that compainies still market and support their products poorly.
Actuaries - making accountants look interesting since 1949
well there is competition in the UK. 4 companies handle the handphone traffic between them. what we do have is one standard, GSM. therefore everything else becomes easier...
Of course, we have somewhat unique population distribution, so the phone companies can provide coverage along the east coast and a few other centers, and that's enough to get the 90% coverage they are talking about. OTOH, it is probably only about 20-25% land coverage, which I guess would be less than in the US. Our cellular system is mostly GSM, but you can get CDMA as well.
Has this level of phone penetarion made any difference? Socially, yes, and it has made big profits for phone service providers, but it hasn't made any difference to our technical capabilites. We have one phone manufacture. We have a few research labs (eg, Motorola), but that's about it. I'd guess our WAP take up is behide the US.
I wouldn't worry to much about the US being behind in Cellular usage. The techincal gap is pretty small, and insignificant.
The social change is pretty large, though. Now I expect all my friends to be available all the time, with their own number. It means, for instance, I can call one person in a two person household, and be sure of getting them, and not the other person. It means you can arrange meetings at anytime, anywhere. It's the social changes like those where the US may be behind - not techincally.
I mean - cable modems? DSL? I can only dream!
However, there is 100% coverage for mobile phones across the entire country. Anywhere that people actually live has GSM, and usually multiple carriers (all using the same technical standard) are available.
Phones are cheap (free phone, US $10 per month plans are common). Usage rates are very close to the hot-spots in Europe. People who called mobile users "yuppies" 10 years ago are now swearing by the latest phones.
Rail has never worked in Australia very well. But wireless communications has worked fine, in fact it's an enormous industry, and a completely accepted fact of life. I've been to the USA several times recently and the difference in lifestyle as a result is quite incredible.
First of all I havent experienced that GSM breaks up in crowded areas. I have gotten a message of "Network Busy" in such situations and I would assume that any digital system would give such an indication if you reach the systems capacity limits. I have used GSM without problems in North America as well as in Europe and it is very seldom that I have had problems with capacity.
Secondly GSM have always had closed loop power control. The basestation request each handset to adjust its transmitted power so it is just strong enough for the basestation to do the decoding. Likewise the GSM basestation will adjust its power level according to the feedback from the handset so it will "keep its voice down" when it is talking to a handset close to the basestation. That way the frequency can be re-used by neighboring cells faster, adding to the capacity of the network. A CDMA basestation will have to shout loud enough to be heard by the handset with the poorest reception.
A GSM handset receives from the basestation a list of frequencies used by neighboring basestations and the handset reports to the network during conversation the received signal strength of each of these frequencies. If the local cell is heavily loaded with traffic or if the reception in neighboring cells are seen to be better, the handset is ordered by the basestation to switch to one of the adjacent cells. This is off course transparent to the user.
If they know their intended victims may be carrying guns, they go looking for easier targets. And law-abiding citizens carrying guns are not prone to random violence (which is why they're known as law-abiding, duh). This has been shown time and time again by FBI crime statistics, but this fact is very inconvenient for gun control advocates.
They hit easier targets? Like pregnant women, elderly people, people who dont want a gun (or geeks that dont do sports)? Well to a non-US-citizen this sounds like an argument FOR gun control! If all those dangerous guns in the hands of the law-abiding people just serve to have other people vicitmized instead of themselves, and not to reduce the amount of vicitims, then this is a severe blow to the arguments of the NRA.
GSM is superior to CDMA. IS-95 is hot air and marketing. The voice quality depends on the speech codec and not on the method of transmitting the digital data. Data is just data. I dont know about IS-95 but in GSM you can use many different voice codecs. The network and the handset negotiates what codec to use very much like your old analogue modem. Off the top of my head I remember full rate, half rate and enhanced full rate. Your operator may or may not support all of these depending on the make and age of his infrastructure, and your handset may or may not support all of these depending on the age of the handset.
Voicestream sells two such phones in the Northeast, and more are coming. So does Pacif ic Bell.
That is one cool price-plan. Ericsson has a telephone that tries to do this .. it's a gsm phone but when you get home BAM its a DECT cordless phone. It's not at all as convenient as having that functionality in the cell system itself.
Hella Cool.. this is something i will ask from my local provider.
It's funny that slashdot should bring this up today, the same day that my newspaper ( Dagens Nyheter 5 August 2000 page A2 ) brought me the short guide to history behind the swedish advantage on telecommunications.
.. Lars Magnus Ericsson
1877 - Henrik Cedergren builds the first phoneline in Sweden for practical purposes from his fathers Jeweler store to his home.
1880 - Stockholm Bell (an american company) starts the first local phonesystem in Stockholm, Cedergren finds that their prices are too high and founds his own telecom business SAT (Stockholms allmänna telefonaktiebolag)
Mid 1880 there are over 5000 working telephones in stockholm, more than in any other city in the whole world.
Bell did not let Cedergren to buy their telephones for his company so SAT made a swedish engineer their main supplier
One hundred years later we are still in a top position.
And the cellphone changed our lifes again. Thanks to the monopoly of Televerket and Ericsson , both companies could develop in complete safety. Now we have the edge tho, and to keep the prices down we need more competition.
btw.. i am now about 300 meters from the house were Anders Celsius invented the Celsius scale for measuring temperature... another thing that the whole wide world uses, except the US.
cheers!
Absolutely. I remember when media outlets like the NYT were raving about Minitel and wondering why the U.S. was getting left behind by France.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Vodaphone merged with AirTouch. Then Vodaphone set up a joint venture with Bell Atlantic - Verizone. Vodaphone gave the baby Bell a majority position, but it still has a huge chunk (something like 40%).
:)
Vodaphone then merged with Mannessman. Not only did they not bite the dust, BUT at one point they were worth more than Microsoft. Currently, if you include their percentage stake in Verizone, they are the world's largest wireless firm.
All this means one thing: you're wrong-o, friend
I can't refer you to any particular statistics offhand, but it is generally well known. Previous generations simply didn't feel the need. They didn't have these pop psychogists and the like telling them how they should parent. Furthermore, whether or not people today admit it, their lives were tougher--they had less time to commit in that fashion. You certainly didn't see nearly as many parents at sports events in the past as you do today. This insistence on parents becoming involved in their kids lives is a new thing, which previous generations simply didn't feel the need for. This was certainly true for fathers. It was the rare father of my father's generation and older which were closely involved in their kids lives.
That being said, I do feel that in truely poor communities there is little to no involvement of parents in their kids lives. While I suspect few people on slashdot are truely in the thick of this environment, and thus they're really not referring to problems there, I certainly do feel this is contributory to the many problems exibited amongst the poor. However, it'd be less than honest to pin the blame squarly on too much work/not enough free time. For one, I don't believe involvement is strictly a function of a parent's time--as much as it is an emphasis on what is important. i.e., the necessity to get good grades. Secondly the professionals with which I'm mostly familiar with work longer hours on average (a well documented fact. This is not to say that things are "fair" though)
The reason that smartcards are ahead in Europe is in fact the telcos, but it's not the cost of a call: it's the fact that lines suck. Here in the US, all of our credit card machines are hooked up to regular old phone lines and dial into a bank computer to make a transaction. No information besides the account number is kept on the card; the machine verifies the checksum on the card, calls the bank, and asks if the account can handle the new purchase. This seems simple but presupposes:
1. You can always get an open line.
2. The open line will have a reasonable (i.e. you can correct for it) amount of line noise.
In much of Europe you can't count on one of those things (or couldn't until the nineties, and by then the smart card infrastructure was there). The answer? Make all credit cards smart, so that all account information is kept on them locally. Then you don't have to deal with some sketchy phone line. The smart card readers just talk to the chip on the smart card, asking it if there's enough money left on the card.
electricity
Duh ? That was invented in Europe, and well over 200 centuries ago. Of course guys like Edison were very good at STEALING others idea. In a way Edison was like modern America : not good at inventing or research, but very good at making money out of others research (look at recent US Nobel prices, and then count how many were born and raised in ANOTHER country).
innovative networks are springing up. What we need in America is far less socialism and government interference and more freedom.
You, "innovative" like "a copy of what Japan and Europe has been doing for a while, but with incompatible standards" ? Yeah, great...
The rest of the world can follow socialist utopianism for all I care, but America should remain the last bastion of freedom in the world.
Yes - a free nation where you learn creationism in school, where the RIAA and MPAA decide for you what you should watch and listen, where you can't go anywhere whithout being assaulted by commercials and advertisement, where everyone is free to carry a gun but many still can't afford a doctor. Where the CIA store all your personnal emails and the FBI pretends to be underage minor on chat rooms, etc...
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-post to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door !" by Emma Lazarus, New York City, 1883
Why did they come? Freedom
Most of them came in hope of getting a few dollars out of a shitty job, and then use the vast monetary difference with their country to turn what is a shitty salary here into a honest salary in their home country. Most people who travel a lot will tell you US is certainly not a free country. If there's really a free country, it is probably something more like Holland.
Any hardware innovator wishing to sell mobile wireless phones or other devices in the U.S., must make them in three varieties and court the slow-moving, bureaucratic cellular-phone carriers, such as AT&T and Verizon, who have a chokehold on innovation.
A chokehold doesn't even BEGIN to describe what they have on the market and innovation. more like a camel clutch on industry. I hate seeing how big business pushes most technology back here in the United States. It's sad when a company like Pepsi or Disney could control so much of products not even semi-related to their original repitore.
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
Look at the percentage of the population in Japan that has cell/PHS/pagers compared to the US. Go to Japan and look at all the gadgets the stuff they have. Stuff that takes years to get to North America. Look at their flatscreen HDTVs, digital cameras, video cameras, mini disc players, DVD players (and recorders), etc. etc. that the population buys over there, not really because they need it, but because its fashionable. Geez, look at the toilet (seat) industry in Japan. There are so many types of toilets and seats available it will make your head spin, with heated seats, music, noisemakers, dryers, remote controls, etc. No one needs a remote control toilet, but they sell and it's big business in Japan... Walk around akihabara and see some of the gadgets available that are cool, but you sure as hell don't need. Yet the gadgets sell...
But, yes, we are taking a bit too long to get a digital standard for cell phones here. What would be nice is if the US adopted GSM, so you could go back and forth over the pond with the same phone.
Oh well...
Articles about the "U.S. losing its edge" are continually retreaded in the media by alarmists who are looking for a story where one doesn't exist. I remember hearing over and over about how we were cooked because the Japaneese had a much better work ethic and were so focused on technology and business strategy. Us poor lazy Americans couldn't compete. That was 15 years ago. The United States is doomed to dissapoint because of the amount of wasted potential we squander every day, but the beauty of it is that what potential we do put to good use is usually strong enough to toast the competition in the long run anyway.
Capitalism dictates that if there is a market for these cool gadgets, they will come.
Look at Linux? This text was originally posted by Shoeboy, who has stated he works for Microsoft. The original comment was "Sorry to do this you CmdrTaco", and can be found archived in this thread (Just Say No to Reading About Drugs).
--
You do have a right to emergency hospital treatment to save your life. If you are unable to pay, it comes out of the state and federal budget slices set aside for this very purpose. If I shoot you, they will cart you off to the hospital and patch you up.
Many other facets of basic health care are available as well, but only to those without the means to pay for it themselves. In my opinion, if you can pay you'd damn well better.
.sig: Now legally binding!
What's this got to do with him? The cat is both alive and dead, not somewhere in between.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
European goverments are as socialistic as the earth is flat. Having stricter regulation for some aspects doesn't mean you are socialistic.
At the beginning was at.
There is no monopolies on wireless in Europe. In fact, in most country, that's the first part of the telecom industry that got freed from government monopoly. In France alone we have 3 GSM providers, and going to have a dozen wireless loop operators.
CDMA is also heavily patented by Qualcomm and is very unattractive to companies seeking an unencumbered, open standard for 3G wireless networks.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Didn't Al Gore invent the Web? It's part of the internet right?
If they didn't mandate that broadcasters had to switch, in six years we'd have people whining that there are no HDTV stations. It wouldn't justify the cost of an HDTV set.
Pick one: either stick with old tech and don't whine about other countries leaping ahead, or jump to new tech and don't complain about the expenses you have to pay.
For more information, click here.
Based on my personally having seen some the items mentioned in the WSJ article for sale in the U.S., I'm suspicious that they may have exaggerated the issue. Their point about the fragmented wireless market is well taken however. On the other hand, while having a unified standard such as GSM in Europe is good for mass-production and quick adoption of wireless devices, the U.S. might benefit by a combination of intense competition among the three technologies in use here, plus the benefits of not being 'first-mover'. Europe was a little slower to adopt television than the U.S. and consequently ended up with the higher picture resolution of the PAL standard, while the U.S. got stuck with NTSC. Long-term, the U.S. might benefit by being slower off the mark. Or not (hey, I'm flexible).
So in Europe you don't have any of these things ?
Oh please! :-) so personally I wonder who you are that you would even consider it? The rest of us are all just bitching that the local loop is still held by the (now private greedy shareholder feeding) Eircom and NTL have p*ssed in the wind since buying Cablelink who were p*ssing in the wind talking about cable modems to make sure they could screw whoever was buying them for the maximum amount, and hence left them without the ability to actually do anything with any urgency. If NTL had bought Cablelink for a realistic amount of money, I would suspect they would have tens of thousands of cable modems around Ireland right now and Eircom would be rolling out ADSL because the new era would have begun.
I have been here to long to hold any hope for that to be worthwhile! The digital TV revolution has already been stalled in Ireland to assist the potential of RTE to make more money (hence they crippled the ability for Sky to sell their service here). The Cable-modem possibility is still waiting in the wings with at best guess another 2 years or so to go before maybe half the people with cable would be able to avail of internet access (and nobody knows how fast or slow etc this will be). ADSL etc. may save us because it is not crippled by preceeding legaslation.....oh sh*t it is hence we don't have it yet (but the local loop should open up in the next year, though at what price).
Considering the possibility of the terrestrial digital broadcasting you mention, do you expect it to have a decent amount of bandwidth? How do you expect it to be shared (multicast or encrypted to stop people sniffing), and what sort oif filtering do you think they will install on the backend to make sure the kiddies cant find out how to make bombs?
We are failing to legaslate at a rapid rate and I would regard the terrestrial broadcast system as the least likely to provide any real bandwidth and serious expansion of internet presence. We have a few years to wait......and thats not talking about the SYNCHRONOUS higher speed (I'm not even talking mbits) mobile access (i.e. higher bandwidth mobile phones).
To be honest I have NEVER heard a single Irish person dying for bandwidth mention the digital broadcasting scheme once (if you can supply some links I'll eat them
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
That's actually not that far off. Numerous British groups back in the 60s found out lousy and variable our voltage systems are when half their instruments wouldn't work without voltage regulators. Robert Fripp (King Crimson) has described how the Mellotron (which works by playing an analog tape at variable speed to control pitch; effectively an analog sampler) would get disasterously out of tune due to American power fluctuations.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Verizon == Bell Atlantic == The sorriest excuse for a competitive company in existence. I've completely boycotted them. I no longer have phone line and just use my cell. I highly suggest others do the same.
I'm a little confused. What, precisely, is the point here?
Are you trying to say that the US military is incapable of setting reasonable standards, or that the US military is so anarchistic that they will not follow standards regardless of quality?
The brass should have learned to hire a few MSFT marketers. Then they wouldn't have had any problems. At least until someone attacked.
The american economy is built around get rich quick schemes. True there are engineers and inventors which do some remarkable work, however these ideas will never see main stream until there is a reasonable quick profit to be made. take the electric car for instance. this will never take off because one, it's not economically feasable ( kills oil companies, and the muscle image) matter of fact we are going the other way, we are taking cars and putting SUV bodie son them all for what purpose to market it, thats what people want, or think they want. The company which I work for at one point was renowned as an innovator in it smarket,m however for teh past ten years they have reinvented the same technology in the every size and shape you could imagine. Why it's economically feasable (to the close minded)
Western Europe alone has about 400 million people; 25% more than the U.S. alone. Add in Eastern Europe and the difference is even greater.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Unfortunately, the infrastructure for flat-rate cellular calls is not there, and is almost cost prohibitive. The current call capacity per tower is a finite number (depending upon the technology). If local calls were free, then there would be a huge inrush of new cell phone customers. Which means that there will be more potential customers per square mile. Which means that the cell density must skyrocket to meet potential demand. Which means new towers must be built much closer to each other (and between existing ones) in metropolitan areas. Which means that new frequencies must be allocated. I don't know how much it actually costs to run a cell tower (electrical power, computing power, connections to land lines, etc.) but I believe that the costs would go through the roof. Not to mention the fact that we would all be flooded with even more the cell phone radiation that everyone is in a panic about...
--guru
insert short-term before profit, and you're right. Unfortunately, they seem to forget that the short term may look good, but the long term can kill you (they'd rather have a large slice of today's tiny pie than a small slice of tomorrow's giant, monster, humongous, extra-extra-extra large pie, even though that small slice is bigger than that big slice of today's tiny pie. Comes from that Harvard Business School mentality. Of course, if Harvard were built according to HBS principles, it would have been a collection of tar paper shacks.
If Canada is so bad why do we have Blackberrys out here first and those Sprint PCS ads from Buffalo are hyping a product that's been out a long time in Canada. Not to mention a higher availabilty of cable and DSL lines.
Ask the original poster. I was referring to the difficulties of installing and maintaining a wireless infrastructure over vast tracts of land, vs. the relatively compact geography of the UK and Japan.
I doubt your SprintPCS is going to do you much good in the Northwest Territories, or in vast portions of northern Qeubec, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, or British Columbia.
As for higher availability of DSL lines, do you have hard numbers to back up that allegation?
It wouldn't surprise me if it were true, as most of Canada's population is concentrated in relatively small corners of the country, but you don't really expect anyone to take your blanket assertions without some evidence to back them up, do you?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
And why can they get more money? Because we have a more efficient system (capitalism) than the socialist systems of their homelands. So, not only does competition with little/no government interference usually (not always I will admit, but usually) yield a better product/standard in the end; it also allows those innovators/risk takers to reap the rewards of their work. Something that is robbed from them in a socialist system.
SUVs are 4 times more likely to cause fatalities in an accident.
Not for the people driving them. That's the point.
This is just sociopathic behaviour and indicates a personality defect.
My pet goat likes my personality is just fine, thank you very much.
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
Mossberg makes some valid criticisms. The lack of a wireless standard has been a big handicap to innovation here. He doesn't, however, take into account our geographical and cultural disadvantages.
When I decided on which PCS phone to buy, I had to see what areas were covered and try to pick the one that covered most of the placed I'd be. The US has a fairly low popluation density compared to Europe or Japan. That means that more wireless towers have to be built to cover more real estate but with fewer subscribers to pay back those costs.
Tokyo has millions of people within a few square miles. You could say the same about a few major metropolitan areas in the US, but most of the people in the US don't live in NYC, LA or Chicago. Try getting really cool wireless stuff in Wisconsin. I wanted to get a Sprint or Primeco phone but they had gaps where I needed coverage. Instead I bought a PCS from a local carrier that doesn't have a hell of a lot of coverage, but covers the spots I really need. Oh, and I can get stock quotes or sports score off my Nokia. Ho, hum. I want broadband wireless data, dammit.
I have to agree that the lack of a standard is a big problem. Unfortunately our culture seems to incorporate a strange amalgamation of anarchy and fascism. We want absolutes but can't agree on what those absolutes are. We have software companies that "embrace and extend" standards until you can't get a decent web browser anymore. It's not surprising that wireless data is a fragmented mess.
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
good road system
Yeah... Like Americans decided "let's make highways" before they saw the German ones.
And then all those highways were made to sell more personal cars than to build a good transport infrastructure.
And this good road system brings a good ozone hole.
"I'm curious what everyone else thinks will be the emerging technology - and where it will be."
hmmm.
i read the original article in yesterday's WSJ and it was typical WSJ - half of it was to pull you in (wow! Swatches that act as ski passes!) and half was actually good stuff (smart cards.) of the items mentioned i think 2 stand out:
Smart Cards - Yeah Amex finally got one out to the public, but until i can use it in the soda machine at work, ride the L with it, and then eat dinner using it, it's not really the same. Smart Cards have been shunned by the powers that be in the US (read: banks) and the chance that they will come about in the next few years is slim and none. During job interviews at college Wells Fargo sent one of their supra-geeks to woo us. He talked about their programming depts and projects they work on and one adept student (from Europe) asked about Smart Cards. Wells representative said that they had tried it in Calf. and it failed b/c the people didn't like it. i think truth be told Wells didn't like it and wanted it dead. that's fine, but the possibilities of carrying a card that can carry hospital info or a card that has cash on it and can be transfered to person or business easily is very desirous to me. i would think that Smart Cards would/could be used in some very liberating and helpful ways, but are being ignored b/c large banks see it as difficult to implement or worse a threat to their bottom line. but outside of the US Smart Cards will continue to grow in use and importance.
Cell Phones - this may be the single liberating force in the next few years. wanna see how liberating? goto Nokia's home town and see all the uses they have dreamed up: use it with a vending machine, buy lunch, send money to a pal, rent bikes, ride the public trams, etc. they are way ahead. i know, i know, these are small things, but they build. no one built linux without unix - consider all the things being done now as ground work. couple this with PDAs, global postioning (for maps, directions, etc.) and anything else you can - wow! cells phones have so many uses and opportunities. but yes, Europe/Asia seem far ahead on this. hopefully they will transfer something to the US if we can pull our heads out and figure out that we don't need global phones that cost $5/min (thanks motorola, but no thanks.)
all in all, i am hopeful, but as some of the posters have (tongue and cheek) pointed out, we do better with marketing than with creation. oh, we buy a lot of stuff too!
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
Growing up in the 80's I remember all sorts of stuff that you heard about 'over in Japan' It wasn't until I got into computers in a big way that I realized we [usa] were actually better than them at electronics in some departments... I think they still have some of the best consumer electronics though--and honestly i have no idea what the current status of computing is over in japan. My only frame of reference on this is Serial Experiment Lain, which is really just a joke.
mov ax, 13h
int 10h
Agreed. There's just no substitute for (insert your favorite PC type here) when you're in the mood for the latest game. Sheer computing power is always a bonus.
And, yes, while other neat little devices exist out there... devices that can do almost everything the PC can do (only BETTER)... the fact is that having everything in one handy box is a nice factor to consider. There's better stuff out there that can keep track of meetings, design web sites, trade stocks, take incoming faxes, play online games, etc., but my already-overworked trusty backpack would be worn through trying to carry everything around.
I don't h4x0r to bake bread. I h4x0r to crush!
This is true but look how people react when anyone proposes the fed moderate business or any other standard. the internet for example. not only that when a compnay gets large enough to set a standard we break em up ( yea I said it) the truth is you can't have yoru cake and eat it
My point is that the United States should be the country with the most freedom in the world. Not that it is. There was more freedom here in the past than there is now. It would be a mistake to try to emulate the socialist and statist governments. Freedom is worth more than better cell phone, or any other technology. And I define freedom as being able to do what you want as long as it doesn't harm others, with government only existing to protect the rights to life, liberty, and property.
Damn straight. It's not every nation that can brag about having a part in burning the white house to the ground, eh? But I won't debate history. :) A lot of the tech that telcos use in the USA gets developed and tested here in Canada, either by Aliant (The company I work for is partially owned by Aliant, so, I'm biased, of course) or Nortel. (Formerly Northern Telecom and Bell Northern Research). Companies love it here because engineers are dirt cheap compared to their southern counterparts.
Kinda interesting the article is about the USA losing it's tech edge, though. *grin*
..don't panic
ok, why does your nokia link to mot.com, are you trying to make a funny, or what dude?
-f
They keep piling all these systems on each other...they will all crash soon enuf.
we are seriously behind in the communications industry...thats where the next gates and jobs are coming out of.
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
Most innovations in the last 200 years has developed out of this lassiez-faire country. The telegraph, electricity, the mass produced automobile, the transistor, integrated circuits, all came as a result of a free society and free markets.
Errm, I think at least some of those weren't developed in the US at all. Electricity? I think that was around long before the US.
Until a few years ago, due to regulation, there wasn't much competition in cell phones. Now that there is, innovative networks are springing up. What we need in America is far less socialism and government interference and more freedom.
And that's the trouble - there's all of these "innovative networks" springing up which aren't interoperating in any useful way that benefits their users, and their innovations are as of yet catch-up attempts with Europe and Japan.
The rest of the world can follow socialist utopianism for all I care, but America should remain the last bastion of freedom in the world.
Except, as stories on /. every day show, it's not really as free as the Consitution would indicate is it? With cunning tricks like hiding riders in unrelated bills the Government is managing to circumvent every Consitutional restriction upon it every time Congress meets.
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-post to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door !" by Emma Lazarus, New York City, 1883
Except that poverty is as much a fact of life in USia as it is in any socialist country. Except that there they at least get health care and some form of welfare to keep them going.
Why did they come? Freedom.
Blanket assertions like that fail to convince me. Many came to USia for freedom I'm sure, but I'm also sure many came for other, less noble reasons.
Here in the UK I have only ever met one person who had 'switched' to a mobile from a landline. But almost everyone I know has got a mobile as well as a landline. There are a lot of mobile 'phones over here. The last figure I saw was that 56% of the population have _at least one_ (yes some people have more than one, even though all the networks have near 100% coverage), and that includes children and the elderly! I have a landline and a mobile. I have a WAP 'phone, but I find it's built-in modem, connected over IR to my laptop a lot more useful, and no slower once you turn images off.
Trying to find one but no luck.
I got a B.A. degree in Economics (to go along with my Comp. Sci degree, strange I know) and it's in one of my old Econ books(one of those facts you don't forget. FYI, Australia became part of the British Empire in 1901) Before that they were just british criminals. I thought the same think that you did when I first read that, but it was proven to me to be correct.
If I was home and not at work I could give you the book, page #, etc. I have not found published World GDP data on the web, but it's probably there somewhere. I'm not trying to pull your chain or anything like that (I prefer written facts too)
I'll get back to you.
Okay, by definition, the largest economy is the one with the highest GDP (Gross Domestic Product). In 1900, Argentina had the Highest GDP of any nation in the world.
Probably Mexico. Already Mexico and Central America are starting to shift their economy towards low-margin tech commodity manufacturing.
J.
Information wants to be Free. Useful Information will cost you.
Do you have any actual evidence that the economic turnaround in France has anything to do with the limited workweek? It seems to me France has been due for a turnaround for some time now due to purely cyclical factors. Even if you don't believe that, there are an entire range of other things which could easily have contributed to an economic turnaround:
Those are just a few I came up with off the top of my head. The 35 hour work week is obviously going to lower un-employment because it divides the same amount of work up among more people. It obviously lowers efficiency too, though, which I still think will hurt the french economy in the long run. You didn't really show any connection between it and economic growth other than saying there is one, so I still remain unconvinced of its utiltiy.
And the working at McDonald's thing is a stereotype and you know it. I have finished only one year of college so far and I can already get jobs paying very good wages, which often come with full medical benefits and even stock options. Lest you think this applies only to the computer industry, my friend has been working with disabled children all summer and gets full health benefits, decent pay, and the satisfaction of helping out kids. And her job doesn't even require any education beyond HS so it's not like only rich and priveledged people could get it...
Another thing you have to ask is how many of these other countries have invested as much in the Land based telecomunications industry as the US??? Some of these places have skipped a whole generation of technology and moved right into the wireless age. How much will it cost someone in Europe or Asia to get broadband access to their home.??? (not that it's totaly available in the US yet) I bet it's a lot more expensive than the US.
Well, it turned out that the Japanese adopted a crappy analog standard and the US digital HDTV standard is probably going to win out in the marketplace after all.
What US digital HDTV standard? You mean, something like DirecTV? Trivia: who designed this. Eh eh eh.
I'm not getting into the political flame-war that is sure to erupt here, but...
there are still many places in USia that don't even have electricity yet!
Like where, the Ozarks and the Grand Canyon?? Las Vegas, fer crissakes, is in the middle of the freaking desert, and is the biggest single consumer of electric power in the world.
Ok, look here. It may not be worthwhile to pull electric cables to every nook and cranny of the US, but I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that there are many more residential areas in Europe than in the US that are still short on power, plumbing and pavement. But they do have Cellular coverage. Here's why.
The wired-telephone infrastructure is so pitifully BAD in many areas of Europe, that putting in a Cell tower is much more cost effective. In the US, the post-WWII boom in the economy enabled running phone-lines to everywhere; while in Europe, whatever money was available was spent on rebuilding HOUSES.
Hell, these same criteria are almost certain to result in the invention of the teleporter in either Asia or Africa; not because their scientists are more brilliant than the US or European ones, but simply because they do not have a good road system out that way, and so would get more bang for the buck out of the technology. Necessity is the mother of invention; not Socialism.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Hey, let's stop the whining and look at why we're last on the tech toy food chain:
1. We use English(American) measurements. The entire world, every single country, is now on metric. To sell to us, they have to convert the manuals, go through QA on the new verbiage, and go through our silly tech rules.
Answer: GO METRIC (except for perishable groceries and gas pumps, which is what people hate being converted the most).
2. We have ridiculous legal constraints. Face it, we're sue happy. We have 70 times per capita the lawyers of most Westernized countries. We elect them to office, even, which is the height of idiocy. So, to sell to the US, you need to make sure you can't be sued for product liability and unintential usage issues that no other country has to worry about. Man, talk about wasting time and dollars. Cheaper to do it in other countries first.
Answer: Shoot The Lawyers (not my brother or uncle, though)
3. We insist on retesting everything ourselves, instead of taking the tests of the EU and Canada and other countries into consideration. Seriously, we're talking an extra year right there. What we need to do is allow for certain tests by trusted countries to just be accepted right off the bat and then only insist on tests that we have stronger requirements on. Like EM emissions - if it passes Northern European standards, it's automatically way better than our tests, so skip the retest!
Answer: Dump the members of congress and the senate who resist this (hint, they're almost all Republicans).
4. We insist on stupid standards. Look at HDTV or Wireless. The entire world is using GSM and we insist on another standard for wireless. And don't get me started on HDTV.
Answer: Tie Pat Buchanan up with baling wire and dip him in a shark tank. No, this won't stop it, but I'd find it really amusing.
Will in Seattle
The point is that attempting to dictate unusable standards at some remove from those of us in the trenches resulted in us having to use our ingenuity to get around them in order to turn out maintainable products on time and within budget. When finally left to our own devices, we used standards (yes, we actually used some) that made sense. Contrary to what is commonly believed, the military (at least the U.S.) is surprisingly adaptive; when an approach is clearly not working, they'll generally recognize it and make changes. There are a few well-known counter-examples, but that's my experience.
I am not going to flame other forms of government, all have their downsides with the exception of making me Supreme Emperor of the Universe. I don't see how a socialist government can help encourage technology. One of the advantages to a capitalist government is that it allows many different people to come up with ideas to do the same thing. Eventually, for various reasons, most of the products dissapear and leave us with a few choices. Unfortunately this can often lead to situations like Microsoft, but ideally it allows the consumer to pick the best product, which will then become the standard. We may take longer to adopt the standards in the U.S. and often they end up being different than Europe and other parts of the world. Sometimes it's good, sometimes bad but at least we as consumers have more choice and can impact what technology becomes the standard by using our money, and talking to our friends and families to get them to do the same.
I do agree that there are some problems with how big companies operate here. Organizations like the MPAA do have too much power and I think the federal government should be able to do something to prevent that, but for the most part trade should be free from governmental influence so that the consumer, a member of the public, can make the decisions on what they buy, rather than depending on some stupid old men to decide for them. Unfortunately in the U.S. it appears that we are going towards taking on the flaws of socialism, and extending the flaws of capitalism. Oh well, the people are still not quite as rude as the French. :oD
If there are typos in this message it is probably because my "A" key is screwed up.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
I don't really recall where I said that only CDMA works on those frequencies? I just said that those are the frequencies available in the US for cell phone calls...
Also, to make your point more complete, Nextel's network (which is similiar to TDMA) works at 800 MHz, as well as those phones that you use when you call out of a commercial airliner at $2/minute.
Doh!
This particular "best mind" flocked to the US because of the ridiculously high material standard of living available to computer programmers. No bureaucrat was telling what to do (apart from when I was on government projects - I have heard that isn't to different here).
<flamebait>
As much as I like it here, I often wonder about the overall sanity of a country where the shooter has a right to carry his gun, but the shootee does not have a right to hospital treatment.
</flamebait>
Only two years until I move back. I wonder what I'll miss most?
--
--
E_NOSIG
(1) Portable MP3 players (esp players that play MP3s directly off of CD)
(1a) This must be PRIMARILY a "pirate device". Other legitimate uses are irrelevant.
(2) DVD-R burners.
(2a) Another pirate device that cannot be released to mainstream public ($10,000+ players exempt since joe movie goer won't pay that) until anti-copy methods are well established.
(3) High speed wireless data WANs.
(3a) Anonymous surfing, downloading of kiddie pr0n/warez? Can't allow that. Ban the tech or at least keep it slow and useless and expensive.
(4) Satellite cell phones that let you make calls from anywhere on the planet.
(4a) Bypass local PTT monopolies in most nations? Be untrackable by law-enforcement (other than to nearest hemisphere)? Iridium was ordered burned into ashes by TPTB.
(5) New game systems (Dreamcast, PS2, etc.)
(5a) More shake down testing to keep games un piratable, introduce region lockout bullshit, etc. Same with DVD players too.
(6) Non-petroleum based cars.
(6a) Big oil company conspiracy to keep these expensive to buy, expensive to operate, limit vehicle range, draw attention to toxicity (lead in batteries, etc.) and make sure fueling stations exist only in about 5 places in the nation.
(7) Any small xmitter. Watch/pen sized cellphone, etc.
(7a) This must be a "spy device". Even radio shack quit selling their 3x1.5x1.5cm wireless FM transmitter after negative publicity (sponsored by gov't, no doubt).
(8) Any telephone tech.
(8a) Why is LD $.10-$.20/min? Convention. Comm equipment and fiber and sats and cell towers have long since paid for thmselves. Actual per min cost is a fraction of $0.01. A "tech shortage" or "IT shortage" is an EXCUSE to do price gouging.
The list is endless. Gov't is deathly afraid of high tech far exceeding the legislation to regulate its use. It's as simple as that.
Half-funny, half-troll, mostly sarcasm about the fact that the US developed cell phone systems. I wasn't aware that so many people were clueless about where the first cell phone system actually was (here in the great county of Schaumburg) or who developed it (Motorola). I guess when it got an "Informative" I felt bad for the moderator who now thinks that Nokia developed the first cell phone system.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
Well, tell that to Linus. Obviously he finds work in US more interesting. BTW. McDonald jobs are filled by teenagers for whom this kind of work is a perfect way to make some pocket money.
SBC and Cisco is a good bussiness combination; However, if either lose customer focus, then the customers should relocate their connections. SBC and Cisco together have a greater potential than most to provide NG- internet to the home and small bussiness. Packaging of all communications (HDTV, V&D, Distance Learning, Home Entertainment, ...) services and billing into one source/line/connection Wireless a/o cable will dominate the future ... Customers and Media companies will want and eventually receive the antimonop rights to access each other across owned, leased, ... proprietary connections/domains. The future will be one that the small customers control due to the finacial clout of the many. Intel PCs, MS Software, and others that provided the greatest freedom and lowest cost to their customers in the past dominate the market today. I would expect SBC and Cisco could dominate the future, because no one is providing more cost effective features to their customers with the freedom to checkout the competition for a few months/years and leave the rest to return to the best. Technology and Services can be a no brainer, no problem, customer satisfaction ideal ... maybe SBC and Cisco could grow even closer to provide the happy customer of the future. Today many customers are becoming stressed by being blamed for bad network performance, buggy software applications, lame excusses for providing poor services, .... The customer is never the problem ... business needs to understand and learn from the customer what is required (Yep, I know some don't know where the power switch is ..., but most of US do know.). Yep, I posted this last week at another site ..., but applies to the screw the customer attitude by US bussiness in these times of plenty. Vengence will be the consumers in the future ... if the FCC will get off its dead ass.
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Amen to this. Having done a lot of work for the military, I can attest to what happens when somebody in the upper stratosphere of the ranks decides on some 'standard'. For the most part, we spent our time either subverting them by creative labeling of what we were doing (for example, if embedded systems are exempt, suddenly everything we produced was an embedded system), or applying for waivers. Not exactly a productive use of our time. Thankfully, even the brass figured out that this wasn't going according to plan and have greatly lessened their attempts to impose standards from on high.
Now that's downright unfair... regardless of whether or not this post got moderated as funny, it seems to be echoing a lot of sentiments expressed overall in this discussion.
The reason why so many of these technologies "suck" in the US is that the US paid the penalty of early adoption. When AC electricity started up (in the US), they only had technology to transfer things effectively at 110 Volts. By the time the tech came to transfer electricity at higher voltages (220, for example), enough of the US had already been tied down to 110 to make switching it a difficult proposition at best.
With TV's originally gaining widespread use in the US under the NTSC standard, when PAL came out, too many people were watching and broadcasting in NTSC in the US to make it worthwhile to switch (viz the problems we're having making the switch over to HDTV).
Computer Operating systems that suck. Now, there's something funny... if they suck so much, that the US is stuck using them, how come the rest of the world uses them too?
my two cents, with a dollar loan thrown in.
I tried going with Flashcom (which re-sells Covad's service) before BellAtlantic offered their Infospeed service. The problem was that Covad sub-contracted through BellAtlantic to do the initial line work, and BellAtlantic was once again the weak link in the chain. BellAtlantic made some sort of attempt at installing the necessary line related materials, but then they told me that the installation could not be completed as-is (I forget what reasons they gave) and they proceeded to conveniently push back the date of when they could make the "necessary" adjustments until after the date when BellAtlantic's own Infospeed DSL service became available in my area. Well, when Infospeed became available I figured I might as well cut out two layers of sub-contracting by going straight to BellAtlantic and I cancelled my order with Flashcom. Little did I know that I would have such an enormous amount of problems with their service. My service has gone out for an extended period of time at least 3 or 4 times now, they charged me 6 times for my >$100 DSL modem, I have spent literally days (perhaps weeks) on hold all totalled up, and my service has been down for the past week despite my daily calls to tech support. I don't think any of the problems were line problems, so when I move in September I'm definitely going with Covad or Shorenet (or RCN if they have cabel modems in Boston now).
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Over here in Germany, you are usually referred to as "US Americans", which neatly resolves the problem.
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You may like my a cappella music
GPRS is what is known as 2.5G as it is a bolt on to existing GSM networks, and offers about 128Kbps per cell (note, not per user) the bandwidth is shared between all users.
UMTS is 3G, and is going to be based on (ironically American) CDMA (aka Could have Done More Arithmetic) technology. It will offer 384Kbps per USER, say in your car on the motorway, or 2Mbps in a microcell say in a town centre or in your house (picocell).
It is worthy to note that the view of most American cellular providers is that EDGE/(IDEN?) which offers 384Kbps max, is 3G tech, and anything after that as 4G.
The net effect of this is that American mobile infrastructure will require 2 rounds of upgrades to get to UMTS equivalent. Because of this 3G view, interim solutions like EDGE will be around for at least 3-4 years, by which time, Europe and Japan will be riding high on UMTS (or equivalent) technlogy.
I have eaten the sun so my tongue has be burned of the taste - Alice in Chains
I can't see us losing the "Edge" when we haven't really had it.
i just put in
Unless this issue were forced through the Government, employers would pay the same amount. Guess what? This issue was forced through the government. And you know what that means. :)
Not to be negative.. but It seems to me that the churn rate on cellphones is huge. Poeple just don't keep their phones for years and years.
So.. if people have single band phones now, so what... they will have n-band phones that take advantage of the current architectures available.
I dunno about the US, I always assumed it was this way, but in Canada, tri-band phones are not uncommon.
Maybe we don't need all of these fancy-schmancy gadgets because we've got an outstanding computer network and great computers that render those gadgets obsolete before they even get here.
:)
Well it's not like the countries who are big on the fancy-schmancy gadgets (like Japan and the Scandinavian countries) are lacking in the computer network or great computers area either. They're on par hardware wise. Yet the small, light and mobile phones are much much more popular than your average dull looking PC ever was.
Why would I want a web-browsing cell-phone? I have a web-browser at work, free local phone calls for my ISP at home, cheap good computers, and I actually have a cable modem at home.
You're not roaming, you're not mobile. You're very tied to your location. That tends to be the problem with non wireless technology.
Maybe we don't have them because neither need nor want them.
Uhm, right
The project is still being in the engineering phase, but there have already have been a few stories (check out New Scientist's article in 29 May 1999 issue (you may have to sign up for a free trial registration to their archive)). I know about the project because I know one of the planners. Here's two para's from the article:
Ireland's public broadcaster RTE is developing the technology, called the Wireless Interactive Network for Digital Services (WINDS), with cash from the European Union. Signals broadcast from the main transmitter follow the Digital Video Broadcasting standard used throughout Europe for terrestrial digital TV. The innovation is to make the set-top box that decodes incoming signals also work as a low-power transmitter, sending data signals to the normal roof-top or set-top aerial, which transmits them back to the broadcaster's mast.
The Irish government has allocated 1-megahertz slices of the UHF spectrum to carry the return-path signals, and each slice is split into 1000 channels that are 1 kilohertz wide. The receiver hops between channels until it finds one in its area that is clear.
I may not be resident in Ireland any more, but I do try to keep up :)
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
The EU is far far worse. Try Germany, France....
Then explain why, for YEARS, I laughed my ass off when some American in a movie took 30 seconds to trace a call. Must have had something to do with the fact that I knew who was calling before I picked up the phone.
The landline telecom industry in Canada (okay, Ontario) is usually about five years ahead of the States. Now that Ma Bell has competition, I don't know how the numbers are affected, but while she had her monopoly we got *all* the cool landline toys.
But, yeah, we could really use some wireless gadgets. Probably has something to do with the fact that we need millions of those little cell towers to cover the country (I still can't get more than Bell Mobility and Cantel AT&T in my area - I'm more than five km from the 400 (read expressway)).
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
I could be mistaken here.. but let me have a stab at this. 'Spread Spectrum' and 'CDMA' are not analogous. Yes, CDMA is a type of spread spectrum technology, but only one type. CDMA is basically an extension of DSSS (Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum) in which various funky things happen to a signal so it is spread across the whole band at once. What was invented back in the war was FHSS (Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum) which is where the carrier frequency is shifted around constantly so the signal jumps all over. This wa sthe first (I believe) type of spread radio ever used, and it is *very* different than CDMA/DSSS.(CDMA, for one, requires DSPs and much more digital technology not available during the great war)
Second, there's GSM and it was developed way before Americans really were clued in to the game. The standard prevails in Europe and has spread to the rest of the world. Why *would* you try to develop something else to compete with this monstrous cellular force? Unfortunately, Americans have realized that too late.
A word on the wireless Internet...it's not that great at this stage. There's a joke floating around Europe that WAP stood for "Where are the phones?" At least in the U.S. (in major metro areas), we've gotten the goods as the same time that we got the service. Granted, it's gonna be big...but again, the U.S. phones use older HDML while European sites and phones use WML. Japan uses CHTML. These 3 technologies are fueling the debate right now in the industry.
I believe that NTT Docomo owns most of the market in Japan. But one thing to note about Japan's wireless scene is that, while iMode and all those tenny little phones are the rage in Japan, they are also not compatible with anything else in the world...much like the USA's 3 different prevailing standards (analog, CDMA, TDMA...only 2-3 carriers use GSM).
Also, in the U.S., right now, there is a lot of consolidation among carriers. We're building up so that there are only 3-4 companies w/ which to reckon, rather than the 50 or so that exist now under various names. Verizon Wireless or Sprint PCS may have crappy service, but isn't nice to be able to roam around the country without being charged? That's the advantage that GSM gives, too. However, I don't think whining about it will help--although, god knows, I have questioned that myself. I think everyone in the industry has questioned that, but it's kind of hard to change things in a space the size of the U.S. GSM World is working on transplatform compatability, which would mean everyone could roam in and out of the U.S. Let's hope it happens soon!
Well why don't you just hop over the Atlantic and see for yourself? ... too low if anything.
Granted, I'm not a Brit, but (even though technically I'm not) I'm Scandinavian and the 50% number sounds about right
This is very much like what I see when I visit the UK and the rest of Europe...
I consider this 'near-sightedness' in business to be the Number 1 problem with business for everyone concerned with business. The people who are going after the short term gains and sacrificing the long term are screwing themselves and everybody else; such non-logic seems to be the prime reason given for producing shoddy, overpriced products.
Didn't know this theory was propagating from Harvard, though. Never liked Harvard. Now I know why....
Heard about a famous Harvard MBA the other day... hmmm... what was that name again...
"The Internet is made of cats."
Common misconception.
It isn't the best technology that survives in the US. It's the best marketed technology which survives in the US.
That's why you have:
Hell, even your electricity sucks. :)
And that's just off the top of my head.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
As for higher availability of DSL lines, do you have hard numbers to back up that allegation?
I don't have any hard numbers either, but my experiences tend to support the first poster's statement.
I lived in Ottawa, Canada in 1996 and both cable modems and ADSL were freely available. It wasn't like the American system where you pay for the capacity of the line, either. If you subscribed to ADSL you got a 2.2M line for about $70 Can a month (about $45 US a month).
I had a friend who had a cable modem in Hamilton, Ontario in 1994. It was part of a test market, though.
So on the whole I think the Canadians were a little faster in rolling out broadband than the Americans.
This mistake here is to assume that in order for there to be winners, there must be losers. That just ain't so. When we get new tech we all win, whether we're yankee or not.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Wireless internet access via cellular networks isn't happening in my area. We're only just getting digital service rolled out this summer (it's only available on a trial basis now, and only in the two cities of the province).
Europe, on the other hand, has all sorts of neat wireless toys. I wonder if the reason for this is the high tariffs on the use of local phone calls - if people are used to paying big bucks, then maybe the wireless service isn't so bad? (I'd love to have it, but I know it'll be costing a pretty penny).
We've got competition rules here to make sure the well funded Telcos don't stomp the other company (Cantel/AT&T/Whoever owns it this month) into the ground (NBTel does all sorts of nifty new things - pioneered CallerID and other digital services in the early 90's, is a major developer on cable-over-phone tech (plug, I work doing that :), but we don't have wireless internet. And anything under 56k doesn't count (my ham radio can do 9600 :).
Open up the airwaves and let's see some blood. If telcos won't do it, then let a third party.
..don't panic
Aside from the quite valid points you make, I would like to add one more.
As quoted above, the ideal is for consumers to complain and/or take their trade elsewhere. Aside from ideal, it is also sensible and logical.
The trouble is that in cases like MSFT, many of the "consumers" are actually corporate entities. And corporate entities buy a lot of MSFT products.
Worse, most corporate entities don't operate by the same principles of logic and common sense that real people do, so they wouldn't fit the ideal of voting with your feet as described above. Hell, they're the sort of "people" who find this sort of thing reasonable.
We can't actually get behind either. Americans are as techno-hungry as any people on the planet. If they see their European buddies playing with a workable, cool technology, they will have it if they have to pay twice as much and completely re-engineer it to fit their country's freqency band plan. As for the lack of penetration for things like net appliances, do consider how many of us already purchased more computer than we can possibly use, and that next year, we'll buy even more, and give our current ones to people who might otherwise buy net appliances. The world may have Quake 3, but where is it most played at 1600x1200/72fps :).
How could you possibly expect us to standardize anything else worth a crap?
The thing with wireless is, your country doesn't need to be densely populated. You can just make cells bigger if they're not used that often. And you can have cells in places where people are most likely to be (Dutch operators always put cells next to highways before putting them in smaller towns for example).
Finally you don't need any landlines to connect the cells, you just use micro-wave tranceivers.
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SCO employee? Check out the bounty
This will be very interesting in light of Bluetooth's potential and early test runs. If it takes off there will be a literal explosion of new Bluetooth filled gadgets (hardware) but with the need to properly communicate and talk to everyone else (software).
I wonder which markets will benefit most and show most growth? I'm betting on Japan with it's fanatical focus on miniaturization and near over-teching.
One other thing I was interested in was whether it's really just at the consumer level that we experience this wireless 'lag'. After all most of the major players in the production markets (not service markets) have large presence in the US. Something may be made for Europe or Japan but completely dropped in the US for marketing/technical/legal reasons. A decent examples is Japans audio industry: I would say from personal experience that the electronics in Japan are routinely a year or two 'ahead' of whatever crops up in America. Sony, Aiwa, Panasonic, etc. all have large market presence in America but we don't seem to get these gadgets (discman, walkman, steros, mp3 players, etc). Do the marketers think we won't buy them? I guess so.
Anyways, I tihnk the lack of American dominance is not really a bad thing. As the world grows 'closer' through this instant communications having lopsided relationships can become less and less 'acceptable' to others.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Don't complain. I live in australia. We have the highest percentile mobile phone usage in the entire world. We invent half of the technology you use. Telstra sets up ISDN and ADSL for other countries' infrastructure.
.19/mb.
Americans laugh at what we pay for internet. Cable and ADSL is not an option for me, and I live in one of the nicer suburbs in the capital city. ISDN is thousands to set up, about $100/month, and
You guys have it made compared to us.
But the states... Man, what I would live to move to the states and be paid what I'm worth, and not have to trade in my car on a broadband net connection.
Gfunk007
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Technology in fact consists not only of the PC:
- cars were invented in Europe and still leading car-makers reside in Germany (known for quality) and Italy (known for design)
- who invented the aeroplane, helicopter or zeppelin?
- radio and TV were not invented in the US too (US TV and radio stations still don't know how to use teletext or RDS)
- the computer was invented by a german (Konrad Zuse)
- for 20 years the Internet was hardly known, until the Web was invented at CERN
- cutting-edge cellphones come from Skandinavia (Finland and Sweden)
- the CD was invented by Philips
- hi-fi and electronic gadgets usually are made in Japan
- ... (I could go on and on!)
Well, the only thing the US does know how to do: pay us europeans well to convince us to head over the pond and bring you the expertise, you don't have. The USA is a rich country. But it's usually european know-how! From Cristoforo Colombo to Linus Torvalds: dear Americans don't foget your roots!ms
There's a european magazine, T3 (like the line), that focuses on IMHO, babes, cars, and toys. Apart from all the toys that are availible to them in the UK, they have a section for stuff still stuck in Japan. I think the flow is Japan -> Europe -> USA. It's a bit pricy, but well worth it.
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Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Obviously these illegal workers find it profitable to do what they do in US instead staying in their native country.
People vote with their legs.
The big difference between American fascination with technology and European adoption of technology is language.
USA has one language in all 50 states. Europe many different languages. Europeans knew early-on that technology would have to the bridge between people, borders, and cultures.
Success in Europe hinged on the adoption of not technology but services to make technology useful. Contrast that with the US duopoly system of granting twin market monopoly. There's no incentivation for bridging areas and few services beyond billing and phone sales.
In So. Cal. it is so bad that a phone purchased in San Diego will not work in LA. You are better finding a phone in LA that works in the area. And if you go to NYC, forget about taking any services that come with your phone.
I recall a interesting point from a discussion about this same subject some time ago. One of the primary reasons that Cellular technology and infrastructure has grown faster in Europe is that normal landline phone services are billed differently in the US. In the US a local call is basically free instead of paying per minute as is done in europe. Because of this Europeans are used to paying for their phone service on a per minute basis, so cell phones aren't that big a step. In the US many people have a problem with a per minute charge for local calls on a cell phone. Maybe the best way for the US to catch up is to start charging a flat fee for local calls, this has been shown to be a proven payment model that Americans accept as evidenced by the growth of the internet once flat fee unlimited use plans became the norm.
One tower near me has SIX sets of cellular antennas. Most have at least four.
:-)
You can't go 50 miles without the ROAM light coming on (and the cost doubling).
AMPS, CDMA, TDMA, GSM and whatever else.
This is insane! Wouldn't it be nice if the US had
ONE, nationwide, cellular network? Flat rate no
matter where you are?
Oh well, I can dream, but the "free market" won't
get us there any time soon. What a colossal screw-up.
Ma Bell wouldn't have let this happen
The laissez-faire capitalism has given the U.S. unpressidented economic growth for the past 100 years. In 1900, the largest economy in the world was Argentina(sp?).
As pointed by another posters, this is nonsense. Argentina has never been at the top of the biggest economies.
In Europe, while they might have one standard for such things as mobile phones(thanks to the government), they also have 10%+ unemployment(also thanks to the government). I know France is hovering around 11% right now.
No, it is dropping below 10% now, thanks to 2 things :
- economic growth
- work now limited to 35 hours a week
YES ! The work limitation that made all US laugh a year ago, calling France "backward" etc... is indeed working. People get paid the same, they have more free time for themselves AND the economy is getting better and the unemployement dropping. So much for the "backward communist" critics...
I'd rather have a job an fight with standards than be unemployed and know that my cellular phone network is "standard"
I'd rather not have a job in Europe than work in the US on a shitty job at McDonald, not even earning enough money to buy myself an health insurance.
--a mind is like a parachute, it only functions when open.
Well, your's not open enough I think, go live abroad for a while, then you will be allowed to comment on other countries politics.
I'd never thought about the term 'american' much until some Columbians pointed out to me at SigGraph once that they were Americans too (just like Germans are Europeans)and they resented the 'USians' (for lack of a better term) taking over their self identity.
After a while it dawned on me - we here in the US are the only people in the world who don't have name that uniquely represents ourselves.
Personally I knind of like the on-line equivalent 'merkins it only because of the double-entndre :-)
Let me first point out that the French un-employment rate, while perhaps dropping, is still at least twice the US rate...
...IIRC, when adjusted to use the same criteria, the French and American rates are about 10% apart.
You know that the American unemployment rate is measured differently than many other countries', right? And that comparing unemployment rates *between* countries isn't usually much of an indication of the employment situation?
Maybe you can't believe it, but cellphones aren't bought for surfing. They're bought for voice conversation and Short Message Service! Most of the people I know (in Europe) pay 90% of their bill for sending SMS, even if they could send it via the Internet for free. :).
wap sucks and I didn't ever see anybody surfing the web from a phone, but I do see people who use their cellphone in the tram every day.
In my driving license course, out of about 40 people only 2 (including me) didn't own a cellphone!
Some friends of mine even think about buying me one because they want to call me (no way!
Check out this to read about Verizon/BAM.
I have to ay this in caps
DOESN'T THIS COME DOWN TO SCHOOL AND EDUCATION ?
we invest so little in our educational system that half our population remains in the dark (ages) what portion of our poplation actually gets to go to school, or are able to afford it. why is it that our high schools our filled with archaic equipment backed by close minded school boards ? not to mention the current shortage of teachers especially in technological fields. without these there will never be a good input of smart minds into the economic system, and not only that there will be even less people looking forward to purchasing that technology.
and quite frankly I would much rather check my e-mail on something with a screen large enough to display more than 3 or 4 lines of text
It's not the email that's driving it, it's the short message service (SMS). Think not in terms of your email client, think of messaging services like AIM, or ICQ. That's where the buzz is at.
I would be uncomfortable with the notion of buying stocks on(wireless)line if I was unable to fit more than the ticker symbol on my screen.
Why?
but we do have things like webTV, which would look just fine next to the Cable box
But those are just boxes sitting in your living room. Nothing mobile. Nothing I'd want to take with me while going down to the mall.
In today's world I don't think that there are many of us who are on the go so much that we need to access our e-mail from anywhere and everywhere all the time.
Really?? I have to disagree.
I live in the Netherlands, and with the exchange rates as they are, the US is definately no longer 'cheapo city' for worshipping the great god 'Consumer Electronics'.
;)
But I still buy suff when I'm there because in my experience you can walk into a store and get instant satisfaction on cool new stuff about 6 months earlier than over here (unless you can wait for Mail-Order, which I can't, dammit I want stuff NOW)
I'm in Philly next month, and my credit card is cleared and ready to go again
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
its about DRIVING.
when you have a cell phone in your hand, you have at MOST one hand on the wheel and are generally splitting your concentration between paying attention to what you are doing on the road and what you are conversing about.
if the phone call comes, pull into the breakdown lane or park it.
i have personally witnessed 3 accidents caused by cell phone users. either drive or get off the road.
Take Microsoft as an example for how good it is to not be the first coming up with the technology first. Why start pushing technology that isn't succesfull enough? In that article they are talking about the Nokia cell phones accessing the internet. First why do you need internet on a small phone with a stupid small monochrome display when the color PDA market is booming in US? Secondly, it's slow and because of the non-standard technology it uses, it has low availability, it's hard to write an e-mail on it and is very slow. GSM is a nice digital technology that can be implemented cheap but I'd rather have low orbit satelites service my full color, multi feature, standardized PDA because a 14400 connection is annoying. Then they talk about Sony and PlayStation II. Another annoying machine that will get you connected by displaying everything on your TV (320x300 resolution) by using a slow modem. If I want WebTV I can get WebTV from a lot of american companies. Nice downgrade! Playstation II will be popular because it's a sequel of the old playstation not because of the features it has. What were they thinking about writing that article?
For all the stuff I've heard from europeans in the US about how great GSM is, I have to say it's not all that great. I live in NY and go to school in MN and I have a SprintPCS phone that works great in both zones. However, I am in Paris now and I can say that I have never heard so many people say "hello? hello? I can't hear you" and have their conversations cut off. Sure, the sound is decent, but the service ends up sucking. Secondly, GSM isn't popular because of how good it is, it is because it is necessary. The whole plan, at least in France, is a pyramid scheme. Once you try to call someone who has a cell phone from a land line, the connection fee is 4 francs, and then you pay a huge per minute fee. So the only solution is to get your own cell phone so you don't get raped. But then the rates aren't even that good. Even with the great exchange rate, they still pay about 15 cents per minute. I am on SprintPCS and I pay 6 cents per minute for 400 mintues, and people dont' have to pay to call me. Sure, it would be great to have a global cell phone standard, but as long as it works, that's all that matters to me.
I've been noticing that out here in SoCal (perhaps this is everywhere) that when some shows air they have a "True HDTV" message or something similar to that at the bottle of the screen during the intro. I'm assuming some stations are starting to multicast and send both signals. This could ease the switch to HDTV.
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Rob Flynn
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Rob Flynn
Pidgin
Of course, our marketing frenzies occasionally produce antitrust violations, and we have to live with more advertising per square inch than any other industrialized nation, but who cares? It's the all-important Digital Age! Go, USA! Whoo!
Now, where's that flag for the back of my pickup truck?
I'm still trying to figure out what the hell the PC has to do with cell phones? I can't imagine anyone but the dumbest columnist (Katz comes to mind) confusing wide acceptance of the PC with setting a standard for interoperability between cell phone systems. More likely than not, the lack of standard in cell phones has to do with the fact that the US is very large, and a lack of a coherent standard permits multiple vendors to compete against each other yet still turn enough of a profit to make their little island of interoperability still make economic sense.
Suggesting that there is a lack of cell phone standards because of our "love affair" with PCs is sort of like saying that the lack of standardization between Linux window managers is because of the relatively low price of bananas at the grocery store...
"And BTW every cell phone in the US falls back on a common analog standard to allow universal roaming if need be."
Bollocks. AMPS roaming isn't even close to what GSM provides. I grew up in California and I remember driving acros the US in the late 1980's and having to call the providers in every state to ask if I could roam. This ain't roaming. With GSM I am reachable in _any_ Western (and most Eastern) European countries with no interaction on my part. True roaming.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Happens in NY too... in fact, many CBS affiliates now show "simulcast in HDTV" on many programs, and the simulcast is underwritten by a manufacturer of HDTV sets. This is more like a commercial for the manufacturer, as it wasn't wholly CBS's decision to make the switch.
The MSG cable network, which is owned by television giant Cablevision and broadcasts Yankees, Knicks and Rangers (hockey) games, also does HDTV. They frequently advertise HDTV sets on sale at The Wiz, a chain of electronics stores owned by (surprise!) Cablevision.
Corporations will definitely buy their way into the public mindset wrt HDTV, but it'll be a few years before even upper-middle-class consumers decide to buy a 40" HDTV set instead of a 60" projection TV for the same price.
For more information, click here.
This shows one of the main limitations of the laissez-faire capitalism that USia endorses over the more rational policies implemented in the rest of the world. When corporations are as unfettered as they are in USia, getting them to agree on things like standards is a herculean task - each corporation is assured that it has the One True path.
In Europe OTOH they're more used to being told what to do by more socialist governments, and the idea of a standard is more easily applicable to the way they work within regulations anyway.
Also, you have to remember that USia is such a huge place that establishing the kind of mobile phone networks that are seen in Europe is extremely difficult - after all, there are still many places in USia that don't even have electricity yet! I'd say that was a priority over the wireless revolution.
You forgot:
Microsoft then embraces, and extends, and finally proprietizes it when they include it in the next version of Windows.
Is this thing on? Hello?
The Web was invented in Switzerland by a British scientist
Anyone who thinks that the web was "invented" is either an idiot or someone who is massively naive.
The web was not something that someone sat in a lab and came out 6 months later with. It was an evloution of the existing Internet standards and protocols and was based on papers that discussed the linking technology.
It was also not developed in a vacuum. It was developed in concert with fellow researchers. It is a shame that most so-called inventions are credited to just a few deserving people.
Why would I want a web-browsing cell-phone? I have a web-browser at work, free local phone calls for my ISP at home, cheap good computers, and I actually have a cable modem at home. The amount of time I'd actually want to use a thing with an vanishingly tiny screen to browse the web or use e-mail is quite small.
Maybe we don't have them because neither need nor want them. Goodness knows there's nothing that special about the technology... they don't have some sooper-secret chip-making process that produces 100 GHz Pentium Pros... then I would be worried. The power of desktop computers lies with their generality.
I don't think we really need fingernails that blink when your phone rings, Europe *is* way ahead in wireless and smartcards. They claim it's because there's a single standard, and I think the US did screw up in not going GSM, but the main reason for both of those is the continued monopoly of the wired telcos. Landlines are phenomenally expensive in Europe, but the cell carriers have to compete and as a result are a lot cheaper and people have switched in droves. I think the same thing has driven smart cards, as with those, you don't need the phone line to call in and verify the card.
Cell phone manufacturers hate the fact that they can produce nice GSM products that work anywhere in the world, but then they have to turn around and come up with CDMA and TDMA versions for the various wacky US cellular systems. They don't like the R&D costs to make the US versions of the equipment, they don't like the manufacturing costs of having to manufacture multiple versions of the equipment, and they don't like the long delays in being able to bring innovative technology to the US market. Also, some of the US cellular systems are so bad that they can't make some features available here, or if they do they work poorly. (For example, the long lag time it takes to retrieve a WAP/WML document over TDMA, as opposed to the short lag on GSM.)
So, given that the phone manufacturers would find it much less expensive and much better for marketing to be able to just use GSM everywhere, I expect that they will push hard for some GSM variant to become the global standard. (Which is to say, I think they will push hard for 3G to be implemented, and using primarily GSM-based technology.)
With my GSM phone, which cost only $70 and is smaller than a Motorola Star-Tac, I can send and receive email and make conference calls, and that's without WAP. It has, in the year and a half I have been on the GSM system, worked beautifully everywhere I happen to have traveled to. The sound quality is always superb, unless I find a spot that's a poor coverage area and it cuts out entirely. Why would I want anything else?
-Tom
EVERY cellular service provider does this, not just BAM/Verizon. Why? Because contrary to the ubiquity of cell phones and cell phone users in this country, cell phones are still classifed as "luxury items." Nevermind the fact that Harry Newton's kid was using his cell phone to cheat on exams before I ever had one to read CNN from on the train. But, I agree, it sucks.
This was funny the first time...
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%46%55%43%4B !
Besides, if you take out a 12-month contract, or renew it, operators will give you a brand spanking new phone for almost no money at all.. ;-)
I've got a nokia 3210 with T9 predictive text-input (yay!) which is being repaired at the moment (grrr).. My next phone (in slightly less than a year's time from now) will probably be (the succesor to) the Ericsoon T28s, or something like that.. That flip is just too cool, and it has Tetris... ;-)
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SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I don't know the correct English term for it but it's known as "wet van de remmende voorsprong" in Dutch. If you are the first with a big (technological) innovation, you will be left behind in the second generation of that innovation. Minitel -> Internet (or in general Videotext -> Internet) is the big example for me. Analog cell phones never made it big in the Netherlands and died out by themselves when GSM became available and now they are gone and the frequencies available again (no more listening to those phone calls on the scanner).
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
Make that 12 and below. Yes, sounds about right. I think you yankees really don't realize how commonplace cell phones are in Europe. There just is no such thing as status attached to these things anymore; practically everybody has them! From the children in the elementary school to grannies. Many even have two; one for work, one for fun.
Latest projections show that cdma2000 will come out before EDGE. They are comparable 2.5 generation technologies. It is interesting that 3G standards are most likely to be based on CDMA. That will leave GSM in the history books.
I dont care how a national standard is reached, I just hope its CDMA instead of TDMA. CDMA is digital spread spectrum with a unique ID for each phone on the network. TDMA is timesharing. In crowded areas TDMA gets a noticable waver in the sound or breaks up repeatedly. CDMA can allow up to 45 conversations over the same frequency band.
I Don't Work Here
Even US marketing would do better in Japan. Our cards say Pokemon, theirs say Pocket Monsters, because pretty much anything American (or in English) is 'kewl' there...whereas we just want their Anime. ;-)
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Even where foreign innovators struck first, or at the same time as Americans, it was America that exploited the technology best. For instance, one of the best-known early PCs, the Sinclair, was a British invention, but it lost out because of poor marketing and follow-through.
For every non-US story of this type there are 10 US stories of this type. I was involved in one of them at the University of Illinois, Jack Stifle's 8080-based Plato terminal, that came out with a color display and floppy disk AND modem (a 9600bps POTS modem was invented in the lab there) AND multiuser games on a 500 simultaneous user system before the Apple I was a gleam in the Woz's eye. It didn't go anywhere mainly because the head of the lab, Don Bitzer, had visions of his plasma display displacing CRT displays for the network revolution.
France pioneered the mass online community with its Minitel terminals
Again, it was the Plato IV system out of the University of Illinois that had the first large scale online community involving mass numbers of students as well as corporations. Some of this sordid history of how Plato's potential got squandered is sitting around in the Slashdot archives although I don't think the public has access to them.
In fact, liberal immigration policies and easy capital have lured brilliant engineers and entrepreneurs to the U.S. from Europe, India, Israel and elsewhere.
As a result, nearly everything cool in consumer digital technology, whether it was hardware, software or an online innovation, showed up first in the U.S.
Yeah, right, and Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Schockley, Brattain, Bardeen, Noyce... were all sons of east european immigrants who arrived penniless at Ellis Island...
Not with a bang but a revision...
Seastead this.
Culturally, this can be seen most clearly in the Meiji period (look it up). Technologically, the dramatic abandonment of firearms in the early Tokugawa days. The latter is rather impressive, being the only case where a nation has given up en masse a superior piece of military technology in favour of more archaic (but more well-understood and familiar) tech.
Wow, four buzz words that quickly... Anyway, I do see that as the direction it's going. ARS has an article about a FLEXABLE LED-like screen that, if implemented, I believe could be the new wave of the future. Especially, implement that with some sort of satelite internet access, and there's one friggin huge world of possiblities.
Daniel
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Bad spellers of the world, untie!
How much innovation is there, really? It seems like everyone just competes and builds on other's ideas. When was the last time a truly original and earth-shattering idea came out that was successfull? I am personally not to worried that we are not on the 'edge' on technology. We still have Microsoft, the most innovative company in the world. And, Al Gore invented the internet, and he might become president! Move out of the way, Japan, we're coming through!
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
There are more peole in the EU than in the US. They all use GSM. Even those European countries outside the EU use GSM. How easy do you think it is to get a Brit to agree with a German and a Frenchman? I don't think size has much to do with it.
I have noticed that Verizon's service in the Washington, DC area has deteriorated in the last year or so.
The other day while complaining to customer service, I asked to speak to their president. I was informed that one cannot call him, the implication was that he did not have a phone!
Try Canada.. I can't get *any* cool gadgets here. I mean we're still *years* behind the States in respects to gadgets. The UK kicks all of our ass in wireless technology/cool stuff to have. And I'm not even going to talk about Japan, that stuff makes me want to cry...
</rant>
1.556 or so. (See, there's a reason I'm called GeekLife)
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You can give money to people. They not only will refuse to take it, when you get them to agree they'll make it as difficult as possible.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Hell, I even spoke to a manager in their DSL division who told me, "Hey bud, to be honest, just between you and me, cancel your circuit. Go with Covad or Northpoint. We're just way saturated right now."
Bell Titanic: "The Heart of Communication".. needs a triple-bypass operation.
i have freedom speech, other countries can have all the cool technology they want, i'll sit here and write poetry about girls who are attracted to stuffed pokémon but not the owner of said plush toys...
bitchbitchBITCHbitchbitch about how europe has cellular this and infrastructure that, we can't even get good rpgs at the same time as the japanese! obviously, a tech divide is nothing new.
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Ok, so now we have seen claims to that both Ireland and Australia have the highest penetration of mobile phones in the world. It is difficult to find statistics (freely available, that is) but according to an EMC press release february, Finland is at the head of the pack, passing 70%: http://www.emc-database.com/Website.nsf/index/pr_c annes and if you search around a bit, you can find 1999 stats that rank Finland at 60%, Sweden 53%, Norway 49%. Ireland and Australia both around 30. Sorry if I hurt any national pride here.
"I think that everyone here knows that no company has a monopoly, virtual or otherwise, on either food or clothing."
Do you know where your food *really* comes from? Do you know the policies of the global supplier of soy beans for instance? How can you as a consumer possibly make an intelligent decision on what food products you buy when they all get their raw materials from nameless faceless multibillion dollar corporation whose policies and behavior you are unaware of?
"Even if every petrol company in the world did get together and raise their prices to the same level, it would simply spur innovation in alternative energy sources. That's exactly what happened in the 1970's OPEC oil crisis. The whole country started getting into alternative energy sources. There were ads everywhere for solar panels, wind-powered generators, etc. That's also when automakers started paying attention to fuel-efficiency."
They've been doing it for *decades*. So where they hell are all the solar and wind generators? Where is all this "research" and "innovation" in alternative forms of energy? It's bogus. Monopolies will never "spur innovation" as long as they control government.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Just visited LibertyBoard and the first ad I saw was: "Boycott Anheuser-Busch for Open Debates". That should give you a clue how much vested interest big corporations have in politics, and the myth of voting with your wallet.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I think that everyone here knows that no company has a monopoly, virtual or otherwise, on either food or clothing.
Clothing, yes. Food? In the US, you could make a good argument that Monsanto effectively has a monopoly on certain types of seed, and that therefore they have a monopoly (of sorts) on the food produced by those seeds.
Or that Archer Daniels Midland *effectively* has a monopoly on the growing of certain grains.
You could also make a case that they don't --- but it's close, either way.
SMS-type services are available here.. skytell has them on pagers, Nextell and most other cell-phones include them as well. My main problem with them is attempting to use a 10-12 key keypad to write in a language with 26 letters and puntuation. Toss in a QWERTY keyboard like a few of the flip open-horizontally phones (or a touchpad like the palms) and it'd be a lot more practical. Why type at 2-5 wpm when you can talk at 80?
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
. I am not a potsmoker, or anything remotely similar.
... but really poor parents generally *aren't*, and poorer people, statistically speaking, have more children.
Granted, this is mildly OT, but most of my social circle consists of pot smokers (including me), and most of my social circle are successful programmers --- and every one of them who have children are good parents, too.
The fact of the matter is that, contrary to popular belief, parents have become MORE involved (especially amongst middle/upper-middle/upper class parents) in their kids lives than ever before.
What statistics are you using for the comparison in time spent with children between today and the past? I'd be interested to see the study.
Nevertheless, what you are saying *in and of itself* suggests a problem --- middle/upper-middle/upper class parents are involved in their children's lives
Yes, the French economy is so good that hardly anything gets built without illegal/immigrant labor.
Same's true in California; in both cases the immigration happens because it's better for the immigrant to live in the destination country, and it's cheaper to pay people who are working illegally and are more exploitable (they can't complain about working conditions, etc).
This isn't necessarily a reflection of the tax structure of the state in question --- it will *always* be cheaper to pay immigrants from a country whose standard of living is lower, and are afraid to complain if you are mistreating them.
Incidentally, Courtney Love mentioned this bit in her speech, transcribed on Salon.com here (the Snow Crash ref is here).
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Europeans and Japanese, not Americans, are first to get all the cool new wireless stuff. Their wireless voice and data networks are more extensive and will soon be much faster than those in the U.S. Their wireless-device companies are the leaders. Teenagers in Tokyo have far more versatile digital mobile phones than power users in New York do, and they use them for e-mail, games and a whole lot more. A potent consortium called Symbian, dominated by British and Scandinavian companies, is planning even more wireless innovation.
Not only are these foreign companies doing a good job developing the technology, they are doing a good job of testing too.
Think about the market differences between the U.S. and most other countries. Generally, we will produce a larger market because of our extremely capitalistic views. Deploying the technology in other countries is good for testing, both on the technical and the business side. However, these companies know that once this technology is released in the United State, revenues will grow (although sometimes it is more of a long-term investment instead of an immediate get-rich-quick response).
MunITioN
MunITioN
"A mind is a terrible thing to lose"
More like singed around the edges. It's still standing, dude.
After a while it dawned on me - we here in the US are the only people in the world who don't have name that uniquely represents ourselves.
Depends. I tend to call myself a Californian (which obviously doesn't describe the entire country); another trick which often works is to describe yourself as a yankee.
Let's face it, even though print media was invented over 500 years ago, there are still billions of people who read print media from time to time. The glib catch phrase that it is *so* 20th century (for example) when applied to print media makes it sound that there are maybe three people left on the planet would read print media. When in fact the people on the cutting edge are not the majority by any means.
Long ago, and far away, when I lived on another planet and worked in retail repair shop, I would often tell customers hungry for the latest gadget that "If you can buy it, it is already obsolete".
Point being that 1) you can get into an endless treadmill trying to keep uyp with the technology and every new toy; and 2) even tho plenty of new tech toys will being coming out, the vast majority of technologies will stay around in some form for a very long time to come. Alot of folks will not change out a working solution to a problem just because of razzle by a technology spin doctor. Yes, there are problems in waiting too long, but on the other hand there are still lots of businesses who are **still** running on a paper system, never mind something as archaic as a dos boook keeping system on a 286
So this worry about the technology edge has some truth, but it is not nearly as dire as panic would suggest.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Havin' fun!
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
The oil companies at least in the United States aren't capable of supressing anything. If they were they'd also be allowed to drill offshore, which they aren't except in the Gulf of Mexico.
The funny thing is that oil exploration is hindered here, but oil usage isn't. I don't think there are any 100 mpg car designs out there; there are electric cars, but they plug into the power grid which _really does_ use oil and coal (which is worse!) to generate most of its power; hydroelectric power is at the saturation level, and California had to tear down a lot of their windmills because of bird kills and the repair costs from said bird kills. The electric cars just produce the illusion of ecological correctness because the power plant is belching CO2 in another state.
Blaming an oil industry which isn't allowed to drill for your inability to use carbon-based-fuel- generated grid power in your car is stupid. Unless, of course, you want to say that they've been suppressing nuclear energy...
(currently testing something about signatures here)
A good example of a government standard is the French Minitel system. They built up a framework for consumers by putting telephone information on a terminal made available to everyone. Then they let private industry develop value-added services upon it,in cost and concept much like our 900 and 976 numbers.
This technology was made obsolete by the Internet, but I believe the French are only just making the transition now.
So the problem with a government-backed standard is that it avoids the vigourous competition that generates continuous improvement. That's the strength our system has; however bad Microsoft is, it's impossible to deny that they do continuously improve their products in the face of what they perceive as a competitive threat.
The biggest strength of our system is that consumers can defy bad standards and select alternatives, whether Apple or Linux or just sticking with what they have.
The biggest weakness is that, as you say, consumers just want to get their job done, and often don't care about how good their tools are, as long as they exist. This is the mentality that buys an e-Machines computer, say, simply because it's the cheapest available.
I'm not sure how this could be dealt with. Better education in the nature of the alternatives is obviously part of the solution. But on the whole, the unsettling truth is that the Microsoft standard serves many people adequately, and they don't have the burning desire we have to get rid of it.
This is where Microsoft's underhanded tactics work. If, for example, an OEM could have loaded BeOS alongside Windows without being sued by Microsoft, BeOS might well have gained strength. Microsoft knew this would be extremely bad news for them, and they behaved accordingly -- even though Be was and is a tiny, almost pathetic, competitor.
It is my view that the reason for Microsoft's hyper-competitive nature is that inside their bunkers in Redmond, they know perfectly well they have a lousy product. They know that anything even close to competition would be horrible for them.
So far, quite honestly, I think they've been more lucky than smart. It is Microsoft's blessing that every time they've faced competition since the birth of Windows, they've either held all the cards (secret Windows APIs, marketing advantages, anti-competitive agreements with OEMs) or confronted inferior competition that made numerous strategic errors (Lotus, WordPerfect).
So, how to improve matters? I don't know. Obviously using competing products in your personal life is step one, and supporting alternative OS vendors is step two. I bought my version of BeOS R5 Pro last weekend not because I needed it, but because I wanted to show the company my support. If you like what Be's done, you should too. If you're a Linux fan, buy a packaged distribution or two (as I have as well). Support the nascent alternative OS industry, and maybe - just maybe - it will become big and strong enough to fight.
I have my doubts, personally -- but really, if a world exists where you personally don't need to use Windows, is that not a major victory? I'd say we're at that point right now, and that's undoubtably a Good Thing.
With a government-promulgated standard, guess what? Nothing but Windows would exist - and that's reason enough for me to support as free a world as we can find.
D
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Wireless isn't the only huge screw-up in North America either. Just take a look at the whole DTV/HDTV mess. Take a simple idea, and then let way too many corporations screw around with it until you have a system that doesn't work half as well as the existing system elsewhere on the planet.
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
I think this is mainly an issue because we are such a big country. Our country is bigger than almost the entire Europe, and our states are usually bigger than most countries there. Because of that it adds many problems to the situation. I mean its much easier to provide access to a country the size of New York than to provide for a country the size of Europe.
Hmmm.... My experience with BellAtlantic. Where do I begin?
First of all, I thought I would be able to just call, give them billing information, and be ready to go. Wrong. They wanted to run a full credit check. They actually wanted my social security number. I'm a customer and I don't appreciate being subjected to a wireless anal probe.
After they removed the latex gloves, they activated my service.
I don't know about the pager service. I went full bore unlimited cellular service (I talk a LOT when I'm driving). Generally, it works ok, but there are a couple of dropout spots between home and the office. Very annoying. I've asked them if they are planning to improve the coverage, but they said I'm the only person who has complained so far. Of course, I don't take that with a smile and I ask for a supervisor. Turns out the real reason is because of interference from a nearby police-band repeater. Why couldn't they just say that?
My bills come regularly and I haven't found any errors yet, but I usually just pay the total without reviewing all the 1-900 calls my kid makes when he gets a hold of my phone. Some things I just don't want to know about.
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
It's fun to look over the stuff, anyway. Someday I'll have one of these NEC Simplem machines...Mmm, they've got interchangable "skins" (including a beer one!).
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"Ideally, if consumers are abused, they will take it out on the company by complaining, or just moving to another product. Then the abusing company either rights their ways or dies."
And how exactly can a consumer complain or boycott companies which are virtual monopolies on necessities? You just can't. You have to eat, you have to have some sort of clothes, you pretty much need electricity and hot water. Also, voting with your wallet just means that the rich get a bigger vote. Boycott all you want, your vote doesn't count.
"I don't think it's the system that is broken so much as the consumer these days. This, I feel, is one of the biggest problems in America today. People don't accept their responsibility as consumers. I think that a lot of people are just too taken in by marketing to sit down and rationally consider their choices."
I think it's both. Corporations feed the consumers what they think they want to hear, and the consumers overloaded with pandering, just pick the ritziest presentation. Something is wrong when companies start spending considerable, if not more, money on advertisement and packaging, than actual product. If there were actually choice, then it would be the consumer's fault. But I think in many cases there is no choice, or the choices are just equally bad (so, how exactly are you going to *choose* the company with saner gasoline prices? you can't, they're all fixed the same).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
people saying we should ditch PC's, I just have to stop and laugh. Sure there a a ton of other devices out there that can do some pretty cool stuff. What all these reporters and self-proclaimed "experts" always fail to think about, is the software. Somebody has to program the software that will control all the fun little gadgets out there, and I'm really not up to the task of programming with a stylus on a palm pilot! Sure, the average user may not need the full power of a PC, all they need to do is keep track of their meetings, or get the weather or something else simple like that. For those people, palm pilots, cell phones, and a plethora of ather devices are great, but for all of the hackers and gamers and other power users out there, a PC is pretty vital.
The advantage that Europe and Japan have over the US is that they have greater population density, making technologies that can take advantage of it, such as wireless and public rail transportation, much more cost-effective. It's a simple matter of geography, nothing more.
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At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
How many of you bought this wonderful piece of technology and innovation invented in the US??
http://store.yahoo.com/strouds/gfbillybass.html
This
The quality of service, availability and reliability is excelent.
That *definitely* depends on the country. Landline service is poor in spain and italy, and next to useless in eastern europe.
Europe has achieved some success with their unified stance of GSM, but this is not to be mistaken for technical achievement or innovation. Yes, they have more people using the Internet on cell phones than the US, but the demographics are simply not relevant for comparison. Many in Europe do not surf for an extended period of time on their PCs because they are charged by the minute for their land lines. Lo and Behold, along comes flat fee pricing for wireless phones and web surfing -- of course they are going to use their cell phones!
There are several reasons for a slower adoption rate in the US:
- 1) A minute by minute charge for web surfing on a phone (yes, there are flat rate, but it *is* an additional rate many don't want to pay)
Fortunately, it is these faults that will drive the US to dominate the wireless space in the future. Because of the high premiums phone companies are making on mobile phone, they are building bigger and better networks like mad. Because of the competing standards, the US company Qualcomm has created the CDMA standard to be used for 3G (in it's CDMA2000 or W-CDMA incarnation) -- leading the world to higher bandwidth for wireless. Because of the US citizen demand for a better product and service, I sit and code applications for the Palm Vx and VII that are not only functional, but more interesting, usable, entertaining -- and more appealing to an American audience than kereoke lyrics.2) US citizens are more accustomed to richer content. Many other nations are viewing the Internet for the first time using their cell phone and are more willing to settle for an inferior web service over a PC because they've never been exposed to more.
3) Competing standards with telephone companies.
Jayson Pifer
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
Do we really need more gadgets? I'd like to see more tools and less toys produced by the tech sector. Anyhow, my $.02 is that we'll see more well targetted, limitted scope devices and less do-everything (i.e., PC) devices in the near future. (And of course, we'll all have digital radio in the near future.)
Your monitor is staring at you.
The differences between US technological development and other countries stems from the philosophical/cultural differences. In the US, it is a basic cultural tenet that the strongest survive. This is born out in cell technologies, the various 'standards' are allowed start out life in an attempt to let the market and natural forces determine which process is best. In many other countries, the best is determined in a smoky room by a table full of cheese heads(ok, maybe this is an embelleshment, but the point is made). I am willing to accept frictional incompatabilities and system failures because the cost for this is still lower than the long term cost of the government setting one standard and maintaining it far beyond its useful life, eg France's Minitel. In the US, we are always moving toward a better system. Just imagine if Gates had the backing of the US gov't making Windows the US standard for computing. let the market decide. The more you scare people, the more they will pay you...
The more you scare people.....the more they will pay.
yeah well - the rest of the world calls us 'yanks' but that doesn't sit so well with the southern redneck contingent
Not to mention that in the Europe, cell phone technology was developed first. In fact the first ever deployment of a cell phone system happened in the Britian, with the help of phone giant Nokia.
It's true that the US is losing it's traditional technical lead to the upstarts like Linux and Nokia.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
Marketing and advertising also have an effect. First of all, they exploit the fact that humans operate heuristically, not algorithmicly, for decisions (for the reasons of limited bandwidth I mentioned above, and also because of the reality of how human minds are constructed.) After all, only a tiny percentage of our mind's processes are conscious and thus amenable to pure rational analysis - the process of rational analysis relies on the pre-rational, pre-conscious acts of perception by which we mentally create the 'facts' that we are analyzing.
Obviously, if you couldn't sell cars and computers with images of sex and power, there wouldn't be a several hundred-million dollar advertising industry that thrives by doing so.
Additionally, even for the theoretically rational consumer, there are always time limit - ultimately, our mortality, and realistically, the constraints on how much time we can go without deciding.
Here in Norway, we have a really hard time convicing policy-makers it is worth doing research that has a horizon before it is profitable of more than three years. The situation for research is really bad. OTOH, we have some groups that are highly influential. For example, the GSM system was greatly influenced by Norwegian Engineers, with the result that it fits perfectly to Norwegian topography and demographics. The place is so hilly we would need an antenna everywhere anyway, so the GSM system requires antennas everywhere. Also, people are conscious about using technology (not developing it), so technologies are easily accepted. There is also a certain amount of consciousness about public responsibility in building high-tech infrastructure, e.g. the minister of communication has said that a national broadband-net is as important as roads. A recent non-governmental report predicted that 35% of Norwegian homes will be connected by a link better than 10MBits/s by 2005.
I have a friend studying at Cornell, and when he got over there, the two things that he noticed at once, was first that the cell phone net was so crappy, pretty much all over New York State, that it was totally useless. In Norway (and Finland and Sweden), everybody has a cellphone, the kids get a cellphone before they're twelve and are among the most frequent users. The second thing was that people still use cheques (you know, those things made from dead trees?). They're gone in Norway. Most banks doesn't issue them anymore, and very few shops accept them. Some shops does accept them, but only from senior citizens... It's all cards. I seldom have more than 200NOK (=~ $25) in my wallet. My bank is offering a card with no charges for making payments.
Now, when talking to people, I get the impression that you have two problems: First, the corps are more concerned with fighting each other than making useful products and compete on that basis. Instead, they sue for the smallest thing, all the resources available for developing better products go to legal costs, or to marketing to cover up the fact that their product sucks. Like in Ithaca, were there are a bunch of companies offering cell phone networks, one should think that the competition would drive the development so that you get some services at least as good as in the Nordic countries. Not so. They all suck, but since the market is stupid, consumers are unaware that they are not given good services. RMS has a good point that capitalism does a good job in advancing development as long as the companies are actually competing, but it fails when they start attacking each other.
The other problem is excessive, privatized beaurocracy. One friend who had been around a lot in communist countries told me that the governmental beaurocracy in those countries is nothing compared to the private beaurocracy in the US. Another friend had $250000 on an account in Norway, but he couldn't get a house because you have to have an insurance on the house, but you can't get an insurance if you haven't got a credit history in an american bank... He did meet one bank clerk who thought the whole system was stupid, but he couldn't do anything because of the fear of getting fired and/or sued... It ended with him paying in cash... Hell, that's primitive. That's just one of the stories I've heard.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I like Verizon. $35/mo for 200 minutes anywhere from Maine to VA (I live outside Boston and travel frequently to upstate NY). Customer service is pretty good, the regular phones are crappy though - I got a Qualcomm 820. The car charger I had broke (damn custom connectors), but Verizon said there was a lifetime warranty on them, so I exchanged it for free.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
With globalization and cheap assembly farming, having an edge in hardware doesn't do much in the long run.
Nobody questions that the japanese have been really good at gadgets and electronics, but over the decades, the shift has been away from the hardware (which becomes a commodity) to the software, which is the key. Apps have been growing more intelligent and complex, and the software that drives them makes the difference. Both Europe and Asia have been far behind the US in software innovation. This is primarily cultural - teenage mavericks are celebrated in the US and viewed with alarm or contempt in traditional, bureaucratic societies like those of Europe or Japan.
When the industry is new, the focus is on who makes innovative, cheap devices. For example, in the early days of the PC industry, the debate was about the IBM clones and who would win the manufacturing marketshare. However, in hindsight, making PCs is a commodity industry, like bottling coke. The key industry became the software.
The handheld/mobile industry is very new, so people are worried about who is making the coolest gadgets, but it's what drives those gadgets that will count in the end. And for some reason, Americans are really good at software. The culture of non-conformity, lack of bureaucracy, unregulated teenage hackers running wild, spawns the most exciting stuff that comes out on the web.
the quality control and solid manufacturing base of Europe and Asia makes it good for hardware/electronics, not software. Kinda like a repeat of the PC era.
w/m.
Pricing was awful; US$0.14/minute and up. "Premium" services were over a dollar a minute. A typical premium service was an online index of French businesses and their products, searchable by product.
Basic problem: micropayments suck when you're paying them.
Ok... this debuted in the 60s. We've had the technology for quite some time now, but I've yet to see any marketing for...
The Shoe Phone.
You know what I'm talking about, the kind of a shoe that makes you do a funny dance when it rings, that has the rotary dial in the heel?
Think of the convenience! People are always losing thier cell phones in restaurants, theaters, etc. but who loses a shoe? You could have your pager in the other shoe! The only problem I could see is accidently stepping in dog poo before you get a call, now that would be messy...
"Please hold, I have shoe waiting... " - Maxwell Smart
--
nice troll, but Australia hardly "invents half the technology" that others use. They jumped later than average on the GSM bandwagon, they were still reveling in good old analog and priding themselves of the seamless coverage from Melbourne to Cairns along the east coast when I left in 1992. Yeah, things have changed since then, but only relatively recently. When I lived in Brisbane ISDN was only a glint in someone's eye there, Australian PC magazine used to always write about all the great services you could one day get via ISDN, and that was already in the 90'. At which time ISDN was quite common in Europe.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I agree, cellular service is really crappy over here in the US. I was much happier with the service in Europe. The US cellular companies are determined to squeeze more profits out of their crappy old Analog networks by selling dual-mode phones. This kills battery life and slows rollout of Digital service. This sprung out of the American government's obsession with competition. European companies tend to have 3 or 4 big players that compete against each other. Europe also adheres to a standard (GSM) so digital roaming is almost assured in most other countries. When the cellular network was built in the US the licences were sold to hundreds of "Mom and Pop" providers who all rolled out different technology in their tiny little areas of service. A certain San Diego based comms firm and their buddies have hijacked the 3rd generation (3G) standards for their own purposes. They claim to have invented Spread Spectrum (CDMA) which is bollocks, it's been around since WWII. They are simply trying to protect their investment in technology. The US firms should get over their fear of standards bodies and try putting long term interoperability and ease of use over short term earnings reports and shareholder satisfaction.
He was talking about a global wireless internet and was trying some long term strategic things to control it. (about 3-4 years ago) We were all going to have watch sized computer/cell phones hooked up 24/7 to the net no matter where we were- But all he really did was close off all the others who would go into that area, then fumble the execution himself. So in the US it's a big empty space. However, it seems pretty silly in a way to talk about "US loses it's edge"- I mean it's not the code war, and it is no longer country vs. country it's big multinationals vs. each of us, even if (espcially if) you work for one.
And how exactly can a consumer complain or boycott companies which are virtual monopolies on necessities? You just can't. You have to eat, you have to have some sort of clothes, you pretty much need electricity and hot water.
I think that everyone here knows that no company has a monopoly, virtual or otherwise, on either food or clothing.
I will give you that electricity and water are monopolized in most areas, either because the government owns the utility, or because the state PSCs grant an exclusive artificial monopoly to one company.
But I think in many cases there is no choice, or the choices are just equally bad (so, how exactly are you going to *choose* the company with saner gasoline prices? you can't, they're all fixed the same).
Even if every petrol company in the world did get together and raise their prices to the same level, it would simply spur innovation in alternative energy sources. That's exactly what happened in the 1970's OPEC oil crisis. The whole country started getting into alternative energy sources. There were ads everywhere for solar panels, wind-powered generators, etc. That's also when automakers started paying attention to fuel-efficiency.
--
Every time i get within a block of the Verizon Building at 42nd Street and 6th Ave in Manhattan NYC my Voicestream/Omnipoint GSM Phone (Ericcson i888) goes dead and refuses to pick up a network connection untill i leave the area and power cycle it. Aside from their exorbatant rates and crappy phones, this is about all I know about Verizon. ...Voicestream's Customer Service doesnt seem to give a damn about this issue either.
This communication is secured using Rot-26 Encryption Algorithm, Unauthorized decryption will be subject to laughter.
Perhaps if big companies were more concerned about actually producing good high quality products instead of trying to sue single entity on the friggin' planet...
If you want to be rich by crushing the middle and lower classes, USA is good. If you want high quality product from mulitple vendors, try another country. Innovation might as well not exist in the USA, because it is constantly being attacked and crushed by companies with trigger happy lawers.
High Tech. is not a priority. What is? Shutting down Napster, spying on email, censoring libraries, suing your neighbor (stiffling innovation), and bitching about communism.
Blah blah land of the free blah blech...
Battle of the airwaves
your "8a" is kinda flawed. From what i understand most european nations have to pay per each local call. where here in the US we pay a flat monthly rate for unlimited local calls/length of call. So its really just like the ISP business, they are not making money this way. They have to find other ways to profit, and i dont know many people (including people on irc) who regularly call long distance anyhow. So this is to be expected.
Uh no. California doesn't even begin to approach France here. France's problems are due to government interference, not a direct economic problem. In France you see this in many industries--even for relatively skilled jobs. Many of these illegals get paid relatively well, the difference is that the employer avoids the numerous government taxes and restrictions. In a market where you see such high unemployment, you would expect to see people fill those jobs, but the government prevents that.
What little problems of this order that California has has very little to do with government involvement (perhaps the lack of it to some degree). It is primarily due to social and economic considerations at the very bottom rung of employment. I.e., picking strawberries and other agricultural functions. The job sucks. The pay sucks because the market isn't willing to pay that much for strawberries. This encourages the use of immigrants.
The difference between the two is not that subtle. On these same types of construction jobs in the US it is rare to see illegal labor. The benefits are slim--because the government doesn't make employment artificially costly to the employer. The risks are great.
The subcontinent of Europe, stretching from Portugal to the western edge of Russia, is larger than the U.S. If that entire area, run by over a dozens different federal governments, has settled on a single standard, then the U.S., a comparable area run by a single federal government, can sure do it.
- I agree, fear of litigation may be holding this field back. On the other hand, companies may be making so much money on those overpriced flash-based players that they don't want to touch the cheaper CD-based ones.
- Alright, I'll grant that one too. DVD-RW is cheap per GB, but nobody's made one that can write true DVD's. Though I suspect suitable lasers are still expensive.
- Is any wireless network fast? I haven't seen any that can hold a candle to my cable modem.
- You're sounding like a government conspirist here
... Most everybody is well-served by current technologies and those cute little phones ... Iridium was too expensive for such a small increase in useful coverage.
- Media protection is due to intellectual property rights as well as greed. Sony's not even based in the US.
- Another conspiracy? Non-gas cars are never as fun as gas ones. (Guess what I drive? =^) I've also never seen a study that electric cars are actually cleaner; around here, 75% of our power is from coal. I'm not doubting the claims, I've just never seen an analysis.
- [transmitters] No idea, but I don't think Mr. Mike had any trouble.
- [phone pricing] Simple supply and demand, dude
... LD is 10-50 cents/min (seen those prepaid cards??) because people are willing to pay that much.
-BOrange are providing a "wireless home phone".
A mobile phone (aka cellphone), which is charged at normal landline rates in your nominated home cell. In other cells, it's a normal mobile phone, charged at mobile rates. Two different numbers.
...Monsanto effectively has a monopoly on certain types of seed...
Certain types of seed? You might as well complain that Nabisco has a monopoly on Fig Newtons and Oreos. Alternatives are absolutely available. By some measures, they may not be as good -- but then again, I may not like Hydrox cookies. So what?
Or that Archer Daniels Midland *effectively* has a monopoly on the growing of certain grains.
Name the grain and maybe we can have a discussion. Otherwise, you've said zilch. And I bet that the 'certain grains' is a tiny category, such as a specific strain, not something substantial like 'rye' or 'wheat'.
A monopoly per se is not necessarily bad. In theoretical terms, you have a monopoly on sleeping with your spouse. It's when it interferes with a legitimate free market that we object. If you can't buy a Mercedes from Ford, that's not a monopoly because there are alternatives to Mercedes. When MS deliberately engineers its products to 'break' compatibility with its competitors, that's anti-competitive. When Monsanto engineers a new grain and says, use it for it's advantages, or use something else -- well that's expected practice, and the basis of commercial innovation.
The truth about trolls: They're just spammers, wasting our time/bandwidth and calling it 'free speech'
Why type at 2-5 wpm when you can talk at 80?
I don't know, you'll have to ask the millions of people who are spending more money on their SMS than voice calls.
Go figure.
Here are links to some economic data which you and others may find very interesting:
1) The Economic Freedom of the World 2000 annual report, which rates the world's economies according to how free they are. (spoiler: the U.S. is 4th, and a laundry list of African nations make up the bottom of the list)
http://www.fraseri nstitute.ca/publications/books/econ_free_2000/
2) Within this report is a section which correlates different measures of social welfare against different levels of economic freedom:
htt p://www.fraserinstitute.ca/publications/books/econ _free_2000/section_09.html
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No, compare the US market with (say) Finland, the UK or Japan. The US lags behind in cellphone technlogy.
AFAIK, the way it works is that in the Federal Govt., only certain organizations are authorized to use your SSN. Outside the Federal Govt., any private company is allowed to use it. If you don't want to give it to the private org, your only recourse is not do business with them.
Not according to the Columbians I met - they claimed to be "Americans" - that's how their culture sees themselves - but then I don't see many people running around claiming to be "North Americans" either .....
Well stated. As a Brazilian, I've got to agree with you. I believe everyone in South America would agree with you.
However, there's one point for improvement left: the nationality you've mentioned is spelled colombian (with an O). I suppose 99,9% of USians (but a much smaller percentage of Americans) get it wrong.
Flavio
Couldn't agree more about WAP...
;-)
;-)
But I have got a lot of use out of this Nokia gizmo.
It's about three years old, resembles a housebrick, and data connections are slow and relatively expensive.
Handy for tech stuff (often server admin) on the move, as it supports Telnet, FTP, HTTP, POP3, and SMTP. Just installed a VNC client on it too...
Not incredibly practical, but sometimes bloody useful.
I don't know whether they're going to develop the phone much further, because models these days have to be about the size of a box of matches, come with sixty lurid snap-on covers, and have a gazillion annoying ring-tones...
Information wants to be beer.
Eastern Europa could easily take over most taiwanese products.
The education in technology was always quite strong in eastern europa, very obviously back in socialist times, because its a very unpolitical and secure education, and after some years of break they are back and investing respectable amounts of money into their education system.
I`ve met bulgarians, ukrainians and russians, which came to germany to earn money by working as a low-rank worker by building roads and houses, but after work they discussed technology of 8051-based computers, ham-radio and aeronautics. And they know what they are talking about.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
The main reason they're ahead of us on cellphone is because their landline phone service is such crap (and so expensive).
It's not BAs fault. It's the Mans!
Well not quite, but the amount of amazing pieces of kit in there every month makes me want to be earning a lot more than I am now just to buy them. I've stopped reading the magazine at the moment, it was just winding me up :)
I know how "cost effective" the US government is at doing things(er, wait - those $5000 hammers really fund Area 51!) I suspect European goverments are just as bad.
While the US may be sliding away from the cutting edge of technology, we have one definate advantage over some other high-tech, industrialized nations:
Unmetered local telephone service.
I know that at least UK and Singapore still practice the barbaric practice of charging by the minute on local telephone calls; wheras there are places in the US where you can get your long distance at a flat rate.
So what if the rest of the world's got cell phones that let you read the news, have entire symphonies stored for the ringer, and let you play Quake. So what if they have fuzzy-logic washing machines. So what if they've got USB back-scratchers.
I'd much rather live in a country where I don't have to pay by the minute for the priviledge of being put on hold while trying to order Pizza on a friday night.
Oh yeah, M$ sucks. Linux rules. You wanna mod this up.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Of course there is a certain tendance among the wireless carriers to not take any risks ("stick with the tried and true").
I don't think that the situation will remain this way for too much longer however. With the advent of technologies like Bluetooth, Breezenet, Palm Vii, and other wireless/mobile solutions (coupled with the incredible shriking die size and power requirements of CPUs) I think that the Cell phone is going to be one of those 'transition' technologies. It'll be around for years, but it will rapidly become a legacy technology - replaced by more appropriate and advanced solutions.
I can't wait for the day that I can make a phone call on my PDA. =)
An interesting tale over at 2600 about how Verizon have been aware of their suckiness for some time now.
I'm fairly certain that they cannot legally require you to give them your social security number. There are relatively few organizations that can, and they're all connected with the fedgov.
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END OF LINE
There's a basic assumption in this article that offends me. That being the only thing people use PC's for are email and games. Ok, for the home environment there is an argument to be made for this. However, in the business environment I just don't buy it. In the future will we going to be doing software and database development on our cell phones? I don't think so! As for playing games, can you compare playing a game on your cell phone's 2 inch LCD to a 19in high resolution monitor? Then let's look at the vaunted Sony Playstation. Sure it's a powerful computer in it's own right. However, to that powerful computer lets add a modem and some software so that you can access the internet. Hey, let's add a few more bells and whistles to it so that it can do even *more* things. What do you have then? Why, it sounds like a PC to me! (Fricken Brain trusts. This guy writes for the NY Times? Wow, must be a quality column.)
This seems to be heresy at the moment, but: why does wireless matter ?
At the moment, the wireless technology in Europe consists of cellphone access to email and the web. Email I can see, but the web ? why ? Who wants to book railway tickets from the bus, or order books from the middle lane of the M25 ? Let alone read some random person's ramblings on their home page on a screen smaller than my fingernails.
I'm not saying wireless is useless. Wireless web access on devices with large enoungh screens to be usable, or access from cellphones to services that would be useful while on the move would both be handy. Cellphone applications especially, but it would rely on having phones with positioning technology.
Applications range from a map showing my current position, to the timetable for the railway station I'm currently standing in, to the location of the nearest McDonalds, or a list of movies showing in town tonight.
None of these things can be done yet. The usefulness of a WML browser on a unadorned cellphone is about nil. You Americans aren't missing anything.
Ideally, if consumers are abused, they will take it out on the company by complaining, or just moving to another product. Then the abusing company either rights their ways or dies. This same reasoning can apply to standards acceptance and environmental issues. The consumers have the ultimate power (and, in fact, responsibility) in correcting corporate behavior. This is the system, and it all seems reasonable to me.
So why does it break down? I don't think it's the system that is broken so much as the consumer these days. This, I feel, is one of the biggest problems in America today. People don't accept their responsibility as consumers. I think that a lot of people are just too taken in by marketing to sit down and rationally consider their choices. In the case of MS, I think companies have been too short sighted to realize that they'd be better off telling Gates to take a hike. Maybe then MS would shape up. Instead, companies take the short-term easier route of sticking with Windows, and MS continues to get away with murder. A very good point -- and one that I think is often ignored. There are some real disadvantages to being big. American infrastructure simply can not adjust as quickly as that of smaller nations.
--Lenny
New stuff always comes out in Japan first, many video games and the PSX2 for example. They do this cause it's a much smaller market there, and then they'll be able to predict what happens when they release their product to a much bigger market, US. Also, most of the companies that actually make the cool new stuff are based in Japan, or have some tie to it. Technology is starting to head towards Europe before the US these days, probably cause they are a smaller market too. It's easier for them to upgrade their wireless broadcasting antennae or whatever the hell they do. I still think we got some pretty nifty crap here. Besides, when it heads to Japan and Europe first, they get to experience the big bugs in the product, and then they're ironed out for us. This is the way it should be!
"0101100101? It's just jibberish. *looks in mirror, gasps* 1010011010@!? AHHHHHH!!"
they have been slow to notice that web surfing on a cell phone sucks
Remember Dick Tracy's Two-Way Wrist TV? Ever wonder why these didn't catch on once the technology was there? You're there.
I chuckle everytime I hear/read some visionary, in glowing terms, describe such things as advances in technology. After all these centuries, a fire is probably still the best way to roast a marshmallow.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Japanese life tends to revolve around the office a lot more than in the US and a lot of the changes you see happening relate to that.
The 'keitai', or portable phone has become popular because it gives people the opportunity to make a personal call.
There is really no such opportunity from your desk phone, since you sit next to and across from co-workers.
Your boss sits overseeing everything and within earshot. There is no real privacy, the way you get with cubicles and closed offices.
Now, people can go to the balcony or the fire escape and make a personal call on a smoke break.
As for all of the G3 features, save your money - People don't use them.
It simply comes down to the fact that no matter how you optimize HTML, it still sucks on a tiny screen. A few people at my office got DoCoMo iMode phones with color screens and web browsers.
After a month, I asked them if they use those features at all. Both said no. These were both I.T. geeks who wanted to like these features, yet it was too much of a pain in the ass, since typing letters on the number pad is a pain.
Now, of course, these people had access to real computers.
In the Phillipines, text messaging, or 'Texting' is a HUGE fad, but that doesn't even require a special phone system - I think theirs is much like the US.
I bought a PHS (Personal Handy System) portable phone, because it was supposed to have the best data transfer rate (64Kbps)when hooked to a laptop, but the ISPs are reluctant to support this - I never managed more than 14.4. I can send and receive email, but never bother.
In effect, the 'Killer App' for the portable phone is the phone call.
(But it does that very well - My PHS is the size of a snickers bar, weighs less and the battery goes 2 weeks without a charge and normal use.{A couple of short calls a day.})
The point of a portable is that you are doing something else - You don't want to stop what you are doing to spend 20 minutes typing in "i aM at kitanomaru park rollerblading having a great time. See U 2morrow." You'll just call.
But don't worry - there are other places for the web to show up. As a feature on GPS guidance systems, perhaps.
They are very sophisticated here out of necessity. No-one can really get around without a map.
A good percentage of cars and taxis have 'Navi' systems with DVD drives and 8 inch color screens.
When taxi drivers are not driving, the often park and watch a baseball game. Maybe they'll be browsing the web next year.
Maybe it will take off on the 'famicon' (Corruption of 'Family Computer', which is really a game console,) such as the PS2, which already shows DVDs. You might think that doing internet on a TV screen is unpleasant, like WebTV, but more and more people are getting Flat panel LCD tvs. They are getting cheaper every month. I am starting to see them in the stores that will take a computer input. Add a keyboard and you have quite a versatile setup.
Net access is a real problem. There is very limited broadband and it costs more than the US. Dialup is only an option for limited amounts of time, since NTT charges 10 yen (US0.09) for 3 minutes for a local call. Three cents a minute can really add up.
Plus getting a second phone line installed costs hundreds of dollars. I would put my money on the cable company offering the first widely-used good access.
When it hits, it will be huge, though. It will be a part of peoples lives and it will be fairly ubiquitous.
But it will have very little to do with the US version of the internet. Like television, though Japan could make or import American-style TV programs, they don't. There are no sit-coms that I know of, fewer dramas.
Coming from America, it is amazing to me to turn on the TV during 'Prime Time' to see NHK showing a program on Daikon (Japanese radishes) and the other networks showing cheezy variety shows and nature programs. But that's what people like.
The only American shows I see here are odd picks: 'Bewitched' reruns from the 60's, 'Beverly Hills, 90210' and 'Party of Five'. Bewitched is probably the most popular. Understand that and you begin to understand other things...
Oh, well, I'm digressing as usual. I'll wrap this up.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
hell no. GSM phones can be cloned and eavesdropped since the encryption was broken since 98. http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/isaac/gsm-faq.htm l
Not population. The problem with wireless is providing coverage over a large area.
I think people also forget that the new DoCoMo cellphones now coming out in Japan may look great, but their functionality is going to be nowhere near as flexible as the CDMA2000 specification phones that Verizon, Cellular One, and Sprint are working on (these three companies pretty much cover the whole USA).
Given that CDMA2000 can do 384 kilobits data transfer rate bidirectional, it now makes it possible to do surprisingly good quality real-time video over cellular in addition to very fast Internet access.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
> In term of 'Net appliances, we're way far behind
> in some irrelevant ways: I don't know if anybody
> remembers but I think that there was a
> service by which people in Japan could access
> news, purchace stocks (maybe), and do other
> simalar things using their Nintendo (remember
> that 8-bit thing, we had as kids?) And the
> French have had something similar to that for
> decades.
You are talking about btx, which in various variations was used in western europa since 1984 and is definitly a ancestor of todays internet.
Nowaday the once biggest btx-service-providers are the biggest internet-service-providers.
Actually I heared the term "to surf" the first time in 1989, when in a scientific tv-show the moderator surfed in btx-pages with a digital isdn-64kBit-dialup-line.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I agree: FCC and congressional screw-ups have made it the US unable to move wireless forward as fast as technology and consumer demand would have it. This Economist article discusses the spectrum shortage that is the main problem.
I have to admit that over the last few years I have heard about technologies that have retarded (read slow) migration from their home countries because of policies. The DAT was prevented from making an earlier debut in America because of the recording industries fear of pirating... hrmm... they seems to prevent a lot of audio innovation, but I digress. Wireless technology is insanely more advanced in Europe because of their standard for GSM. Toyko is entirely wired with ISDN and they have really nice gadgets for ISDN but they don't have nearly as much territory to cover as the US and EU. I think Japans size makes it much easier for the entire nation to adopt a new technological standard than anywhere else. They also have a much deeper facination with tech toys than the US.
First, Lets define what edge is. It can be one of three things. Development of these gadgets, the marketing of these gadgets, or the inovation that happens after the gadgets reach the the market.
The U.S. hasn't developed or invented a whole lot in the past 20 years (there are exceptions). The reason that we generate so much wealth is that we can inovate existing products and market them effectively.
Let them create the stuff and send it to the U.S. I'll make money off of someone elses invention anyday!
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but the big three phone makers are Nokia, Ericson, and Motorola. They all sell there phones in the U.S. but who sells the service? THAT is where the money is, in the service, not in the hardware. We all know that hardware is cheap. Also, who is doing the major development for Wireless Applications? I bet if you looked into it you'd find American owned companies pouring in the investment dollars and reasearch.
I've heard those arguments before and they just don't wash with me.
Nobody does studies of accidents caused by people changing radio stations. Nobody does studies of accidents that happen when people are YELLING AT THEIR STUPID KIDS.
It's all about class envy. The have-nots and the luddites are scared because anyone with half a brain cell owns a cellphone now. I don't even know what my home number is anymore. I have to look it up in my Palm.
Besides, I'm not worried about accidents. I drive a big Lexus SUV. God, I love consulting!
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
-Elendale (blah blah)
Karma burn coming
As i meta-troll again
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
And, talking about digital techniques, you forgot to mention John von Neumann (Neumann János), who also has Eastern European root.
> The world may have Quake 3, but where is it most :).
:-) Those Parties are normally filled up withhin some hours after opening the registrationsystem and have three times more people on waiting-lists :-)
> played at 1600x1200/72fps
At european lan-parties, which gather up to 7.000 - in words: seventhousand - guests
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
It's funny you bring this up now. I work for a large cell phone manufacturer and I was speaking with a representative of a nationwide cell carrier yesterday. We were talking about the different technologies and where we're heading in the US. TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) is the hands-down digital favorite in the US. TDMA's cousin GSM is the hands-down favorite globally. TDMA (and GSM) allows multiple users to basically occupy the same bandwidth space by splitting the calls up into time slices. Much more efficient than analog. But it does have it's problems. My area in particular is wreaked with problems due mostly to an overburdened network. Yet they continue to sell more phones and add more users to the system. Personally, and this is just my personal opinion, I don't think the cellular engineers in the US are that good at creating cellular networks capable of handling large numbers of users. The representative I spoke with talked of their engineers 'overlaying' additional bandwidth from the 1900 Mhz(PCS) spectrum to the 850 Mhz spectrum here in the local area to essentially give more bandwidth to users in that range and hopefully relieve it's bandwidth problems. Sounds like a band-aid to me. One that doesn't really address the issue properly. They're still going to run out of bandwidth because of the high volume of phones that are being sold. What happens then? CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) is a little better at handling bandwidth than TDMA or GSM because users aren't assigned a specific frequency. Instead, it uses spread spectrum technology to place them anywhere in it's allocated range of frequencies that is necessary. CDMA has it's own set of problems though... like having less coverage from it's cell sites so more have to be built. And as the number of users on a particular cell site goes up, so does the noise floor. So if you're the only one on that cell, your call is crystal clear. But if the cell is loaded, then you're likely to hear noise in the background. As CDMA is used more I imagine other issues may come out. As we move forward towards broadband data access over wireless networks with technologies like TDMA EDGE and WCDMA, I can't help but wonder what will happen to the US's already overburdened cell networks. Hopefully the wonderful minds at the large cellular manufacturers and carriers will be able to address this before we go much farther down the road.
Computer networks and cheap PCs. That's about it.
What happens is that innovative new technologies are invented in the UK, fail miserably because the financiers couldn't tell a good idea if it was rammed up their arse sideways.
The Japs grab the idea with both hands and run with it, make a fortune.
Progressive European countries import idea and technology from Japan to Europe.
The UK is dragged into the new technology kicking and screaming that the bloody Europeans are trying to take over the world.
The UK inventor dies unknown and penniless with enormous debts which cause his family to be cast into the streets and have his house reposessed.
Americans re-invent the technology but make it incompatible. Claim they invented it first.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
to worry, if your single band cell phone dosen't work, then upgrade to the latest model for the low price of only $100! Wait, is M$ in on this?
Quite possibly. What I want to know is when I can start playing Quake III on my StarTac.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I would tend to disagree with Walter Mossberg's column. There are certainly a lot of things available overseas that have yet to migrate to the US (I ocasionally have a friend of mine form Hong Kong bring me the latest things.) And granted that our cellular phone infrastructure is inferior and inefficient compared to Europe's. But I don't know that we are really all that far behind. To my mind, Mossberg failed to site any real examples of technologies where the US has been surpassed.
Regarding wireless interent access I would argue that Americans have the edge, with the Palm VII, and the OmniSky adaptation for the Palm V/Vx, and with the HandSpring (assuming they ever release any non-vapourware cards...). I don't know anyone who uses their Cellphone for wireless 'Net access, and quite frankly I would much rather check my e-mail on something with a screen large enough to display more than 3 or 4 lines of text, I would be uncomfortable with the notion of buying stocks on(wireless)line if I was unable to fit more than the ticker symbol on my screen. For me it seems that the ability to access the internet with something as small as a cell phone, will be little more than an gimick until they have a much better way to present data.
In term of 'Net appliances, we're way far behind in some irrelevant ways: I don't know if anybody remembers but I think that there was a service by which people in Japan could access news, purchace stocks (maybe), and do other simalar things using their Nintendo (remember that 8-bit thing, we had as kids?) And the French have had something similar to that for decades.
Nonetheless Mossberg seems to have forgotten that the idea of web appliaces has been tried here. It won't play cool games but we do have things like webTV, which would look just fine next to the Cable box on the TV in your kitchen.
The thing about PC's (why American's still love them and why I believe that they'll be around for many years to come) is their versility. People want something that they can surf the 'Net on, and keep track of their finances with, and write documents with, and play games on, and securely and privately store lots of information on (read mp3s these days). It is the great versility of the PC that makes it such a staple of technology. Compared to other web appliances it's a much more open option - we don't even think of putting a new hard-drive into a PC as "hacking" but doing that with a web appliance is a major achievement.
In today's world I don't think that there are many of us who are on the go so much that we need to access our e-mail from anywhere and everywhere all the time. Nor does there appear to be much demand for the limited (web surfing) capabilities of current info appliances. As for the future, we'll see but for right now I would argue that the US is not behind where it counts.
credo quia absurdum
Good grief! NO FUCKING DUH! I've been screaming that ever since 1989 when I needed more RAM that MS-DOS would give me and I started trying to learn how to access LIM EMS and I realized it what a sick joke it was and I started cursing like a sailor at the fucking computer and I looked over at the 68k machines that were around at the time (Mac, ST, Amiga) and started slobbering and then I got to watch those platforms all die slow painful deaths and the PeeCee somehow unjustly survived and I have been writing one big run-on sentence for the last 11 excruciating years!
May be holding us back? This is one of those understatements like, "Jason Vorhees hacked at the screaming formerly-horny teenager. The teenager was getting scared." Oh please.
I guess I should read the article, but the headline made me go a little nuts. It's Friday night, I need a beer.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Haven't you been watching TV? There's almost 20 DeVry campuses all across the US! They're serious about America's success!
J
What are the feature similarities / differences between PCS, CDMA (same thing, I thought?!), TDMA, and GSM? I can't figure out which of these acronyms are actual designations of digital communications standards and which are just industry buzzwords. Do they all have the same features but different implementations?
Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
You seem very knowledgable about this so I'll ask you - why don't we have two-way text messaging in the States (Wireless Web to the email-pager-number of a phone doesn't count)?
Email me.
Don't trust anyone over 90000.
+++ATH0
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
Doh!
Yes, the French economy is so good that hardly anything gets built without illegal/immigrant labor. Why else do you think it is that every large construction project in Paris is performed by a multitude of sub-contractors...at the bottom of which the illegals work? Because these corporations can just "evaporate" when they run affoul of the government!
The costs put on the employer are completely intolerable. Not because France is overemployed (unemployment is still very high), but because your beloved psuedo-socialist government makes such projects prohibitely expensive. You tax the employer horribly. You tie them up in all sorts of red tape. You won't let the employer hire and fire employees reasonably....
Furthermore, France's nominal improvements have been proportional and largely correlated to the decrease in protectionist and socialist policies.
A socialist France (both in government and in mind) will never be a world leader. Period.
so?
while you dream about unclonable phones the japanese are creating the next version of the internet. You can moan and groan about the clonability - they've still got broadband phones with 65K+ colours +200 hours of standby for a 100$. And thats today. I could go on ranting if it wasn't for the fact that I'm to drunk. Waddafuck - its friday night over here...
Europe has done it right with GSM. The personal information is stored in a chip and can be inserted into any GSM capable phone. The foresight that went into that planning is amazing.
That's the boot to the head, really. Where'd modularity go? Why can't I have a cell phone which I can simply yank out the xcvr part and pop in another for, say, europe? Better still, have both standards built in? Ok, this adds to the price, but I didn't buy a StarTac to save money (It's great for skipping like a stone, let's see your Nokia do that!)
Is it too late to set aside some internationally agreed upon frequency and protocol so we can get true World Phones?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
- you just need one single WAP-gateway in the states to reach the WAP-services available in Europe since the connection is done over public internet - the 1900 band is available in the states. WAP sux though.
Why then, here in Manhatten, is Sixth Avenue called "The Avenue of the Americas" and has flags of all the American countries, North and South? (And yes, they are all explicity referred to as "American" countries in the city blurb). It's not called "The Avenue of the North and South Americas" y'know. If you won't let the Columbians identify as just "Americans", you can't either, because by that logic of exclusion, you would be "North American" and nobody could call themselves just American!
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
What the hell does "what-hell" from "what-hell-does-tech-edge-mean" mean?
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
US + Asia?
cpeterso
I would be happy if I could get a two cable modem here. As of now you have to have a standard dial-up for upstream. Dont move to central VA, hell they passed UCITA here that would be reason enough.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
In the US, a new technology is likely to be immediately introduced into the market, in order to return a profit on the investment as soon as possible and bring a benefit to the current consumers. The fact that future generations could be saddled with a suboptimal legacy that they have to endure (since other technologies will be built upon them, like we have our apparata using 110 v. power) is not a consideration.
The slower rate of introduction in Europe means that it may take longer for the return on investment to come in, and that they current generation of consumers may have to wait longer before they see the benefits of the new technology. However, their children will then benefit from a more mature and considered technology.
The question is whether the lead that the US approach creates is a net advantage or a net disadvantage. We really don't have enough history to come to any conclusions about it yet.
its us that didnt want to accept european gsm standard. so its entirely us fault....
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Remember HDTV? The US was supposedly so far behind in HDTV. The Japanese already adopted a standard, blah, blah, blah. Well, it turned out that the Japanese adopted a crappy analog standard and the US digital HDTV standard is probably going to win out in the marketplace after all.
As for cellular, in Finland everybody has a cellphone, and this is somehow bad for this US? Who wants to access the Internet through a stupid cell phone with a numeric keypad? WAP sucks and everybody in the know, knows it. Americans will adopt wireless Internet technology in droves when it actually has something to offer them. Don't be surprised to see it turn out just like HDTV. We'll see what the third generation wireless stuff has to offer and go from there. I for one don't think we should push wireless just because some jealous Europundit told us to.
Competing wireless standards? Sure, we got 'em. That's called the marketplace. And BTW every cell phone in the US falls back on a common analog standard to allow universal roaming if need be.
The US is a stagnant pond when it comes to technology. The American public is partly to blame, since the general public is scared when presented with a new way to do something, kinda like when the caveman first saw fire. Just take a look at any company's Japan mirror and look at all the cool products that they offer over there. The americans are treated as stupid and lazy and scared of innovation, and for the most part it is correct. How we got in this state is another matter, whether we've always been like this or just because that's what we're used to.
== www.FreeBSD.org == The Power To Serve. ==
This fellow Mossberg is confusing infrastructure problems with the real tech-edge. The US leads the world research and development in technology by such a wide margin it is ridiculous. MIT alone is probably responsible for more innovation than almost any other foreign country. (This is not a troll, I honestly believe it, for example consider that Bell Labs of the 20th century probably achieved more in computer science than any foreign nation. One reason the US can do this is that we suck up all the foreign talent, but the point is that we have the international best and brightest here.)
Certainly, other countries will be able to leapfrog over American infrastructures to get the newest technologies set up, but the US still has amazing technological inertia. The whole world led the US in cellular communication (including places like Brazil). However, that doesn't mean that the US is not going to replace this with a better technology in the near future.
Although wireless technology is big, it is only a tiny piece of the technological pie. Indeed in some ways it is an "old technology".
Also do I need to say it here on Slashdot what mandated standardization does? What if M$ was the mandated operating system (which if the US gov was to have mandated an OS, it certainly would have chosen M$, indeed one reason for the rise of the PC and M$ was its choice as a government standard in the US). The reason people much smarter than we are (ie Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin) made the United States this way, is because it is the best system there is.
"Politics is for the moment, an equation lasts eternity" -A. Einstein
We can't be called USians because, well, that would piss off people in other countries as well since the U.S.A. is not the only country that is made up of states. An example is directly to the south. Estados Unidos de Mexico.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
understandable. but when in rome ...
There's a very, very simple reason why wireless isn't the huge hit in the US it is in most other countries..
We don't need it.
Yes, wireless is wonderful. We all like it, it's cool, it's new, it's the wave of the future. But for companies to want to sell it, it's gotta have demand. Wireless simply isn't nearly as necessary in the US as it is in other countries. Look at saudi arabia for example. Here you have thousands of miles of desert, with no phones in sight. Which do you want to do, run miles and miles of cable through uninhabited, hostile terrain or pop up a microwave tower every here and there or a couple of satellite dishes?
In the US we have infrastructure out the wazoo for landline phones. There are dozens of reasons why, and i refuse to go into them, read a history book. But the point is that you can't turn around in probably 80% of populated areas in the US without finding a telephone, or at least a telephone line you can plug into. Wireless in the US is basically a toy. Yeah, it's nice for people to be able to get ahold of each other, but why pay for all that wireless stuff when you can just get a pager and call them back from essentially Anywhere?
The US will catch up eventually, but our wireless expansion is Bound to be slower.
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
You, sir, are very right.
In my opinion, this is a consequence of the so-called "science" of (mainstream) economics being nothing but a religion to justify the wealth of the privileged few.
I think there is a more deep point that can be made, that's behind your argument, and the point concerns Game Theory and its unsuitability as a model of the workings of a free market.
Modern economic "theory" makes extensive use of Game Theory to model economic phenomena. One of the fundamental assumptions behind Game Theory is that the actors ("players") in a game are rational, in a very particular theoretical sense. Game-theoretic rationality means that the actors in a game will choose the moves that lead towards the Nash equilibrium, that is, the maximum payoff that can be achieved without risking a smaller payoff. This assumption of rationality is fundamental to most economic theorizing. ("Perfect information", however, is not a fundamental assumption. You can design games where actors have imperfect information about the state of the game.)
Of course, you point out very correctly that making choices actually comes at a cost, which is a problem for most economic models. But still, one could argue it is not a fundamental problem-- you could incorporate the costs of decision making into the game-theoretic models. So you could penalize actors that take too much time to consider their moves, even though their move might have been the rational one in the earlier, simpler games.
This does not solve the problem for two reasons:
I can't think right now if it would be possible for a game to incorporate the calculations of the cost of making a move in itself-- my guess is no, but I haven't even bothered to think about it, because of the next point.
And even when the rational strategy for a game is decidable, the problem of finding it may be in an intractable complexity class. This is a fundamental problem that no amount of fiddling around the design of your models will solve you.
I think this all is a fine illustration of why all the thinking about "free markets" and their potential for "optimal distribution of resources" spouted by the typical Randian/Libertarian religious g**k from slashbot.borg, and for that matter mainstream economics, is a load of bullshit. The whole way of thinking embodied in capitalist economic theory just doesn't stand up to serious theoretical or empirical examination. The fact that it is the orthodox thinking shows more about the power that a privileged few hold in society than about anything else.
Are you adequate?
Is the PC a ball and chain? In general yes. It's architecture is the lowest common denominator of those available.
Is windows a ball and chain? Yes. It ties people to the PC architecture, and a whole lot of ancient cruft we'd rather be rid of.
What does Linux bring to this mess? Basically it gives you a short term loss (lack of immediately useable applications) for a powerful long term gain (lack of vendor lock-in -- i.e. not being heavily tied to one architecture and the problems that go with it --- in particular, it is easy to change).
John
John_Chalisque
Much of the non-US tech advantage comes from the absolutely ridiculous power-games American companies play. All the IPOcraze, patent frenzy and sue-your-ass mentality should atleast in some ways make room for other players.. like European or Japanese companies. When technology is allowed to develop more freely the results also get there faster now don't they?
Some other points to make:
There's a lot of money coming into the system in Europe now from former government run retirement funds. A lot of that money is put in emerging markets. But it can also be removed as fast as it got in.
There is an extensive advertising campaign being run by the Swedish Department of Commerce which is apparently working quite well in getting media attention to Sweden and in general to Scandinavian/European companies, technology, media, art and design.
So don't believe everything you read on the issue.
The ongoing deregulation of the European telecommunications market
The EU is finally getting its behind out of the wagon in certain areas and taking some decisions good for high-tech, but the forth-coming expansion into eastern Europe might stall the whole process.
WAP is becoming more and more of vapourware..
University areas are still a basis for solid growth in high-tech, and in this the US still leads.
Not many new high-tech wizbang companies besides telco's and phone manufacturers are showing profit, or any tendency of ever getting one.
Japan will IMO most likely be the one who makes the best out of it in the end. It's good though that America, and the US especially is getting aware atleast that there exists a world outside its geographical borders, in tech too....
Both my parents worked. What's more, both of them worked very very hard starting up their own companies. While my situation is unusual, in that my parents are/were highly succesfull, I know I am not alone when I tell you that I did not suffer from lack of love. I am not a potsmoker, or anything remotely similar.
Granted, my parent's never played the role of soccer mom/dad, but I really don't feel I'm lesser for it. They attended my games and social functions that counted. In fact, I've observed something of the opposite phenemon. Parents with too much time on their hands, with nothing going for them other than their kids, tend to become overinvolved in their kids lives.
The fact of the matter is that, contrary to popular belief, parents have become MORE involved (especially amongst middle/upper-middle/upper class parents) in their kids lives than ever before.
While I agree that there has been an increase in "bratty" and selfish kids, I disagree with your leveling the blame on this economic arrangement. Realistically, the problem has less to do with the amount of time spent with the kids, then the quality of that time, both around the parents and not, and how the parents used it.
I view the growth of the consumer culture, MTV, radio, TV, nintendo, etc as being far far more destructive. Kids need to be bored sometimes. They need to find ways to entertain themselves, rather than have this elaborate program. These problems are by no means monopolized by your stressed out dual income family; rather, they appear to be distributed across many walks of society.
I agree totally with the subject line. I have a Palm Pilot IIIC and a Nokia 6190 phone. In Europe the phone has an IR port. In the US the IR port is disabled. In Europe I could have the Palm "talk" to the cell phone and surf the Internet to my hearts content. In the USA I have to buy a serial cable to connect the two in order to surf the net via the Palm. Uggg.
Early adaptors have a vested interest in their status quo, so someone else adopts the next cycle, then they are the ones stuck with an existing tech when the 3rd generation comes out, and so on. Capitalism vs socialism my ass. If Europe is more predisposed to standards, then why did so many standards originate in the US?
Politics has nothing to do with it, it's just absolutely ordinary everyday everycentury phenomena.
--
Infuriate left and right
I just returned from Nagoya, where I saw the true state of wireless communication first hand. The cell phones are truly pocket sized, and of excellent quality, weigh almost nothing, and vitrate etc out of the box (with a free cradle charger included) I had a phone made my Kenwood (yes the stereo people) and it was excellent. Instant messaging to any other phone made by any of the three major companies, order buttons, movie times, etc, etc, etc it even surfed the web and did email. You could by a little foldup keyboard to plug into the STANDARD port in the bottom of the phone for email. There are vending machines all around that you plug your phone into and download cool ring tunes to your phone for 100 yen. (roughly 1.00 American buck). EVeryone is equiped with a phone. EVERYONE. I miss Japan :-( But Toronto's nice too I guess.
Ever hear the term "market driven"???? This word appears in the business plans of many many companies who would normally be in the position of releasing very cool stuff (including my own).
To them, it means "we do what the customer wants us to do". To me it means "we are scared shitless to do anything unless a customer tells us its OK".
Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't listen to our customers, thats just stupid. But we should not be scared to try and release stuff that is unproven and pushing the envelope. Why???? Because we are the guys who think this stuff up!! The customer might think its really cool, but he really doesn't have a clue. I mean he could say, "it would be nice if I could take a dump and write an e-mail and watch the Matrix on a flat screen in my bathroom that doubles as a web appliance", but more often than not, its us, the nuts and bolts of research and development that are required to come up with a new product.
So kudos to those few companies that actually come up with new products that are not market proven. Not only do you give us our "cool shit" fix, it also provides more work for those of us who work in companies that wait until a customer says "jump".
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