Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: GSM, Buffy, Wobble
Macrovision, everyone's favorite killjoy. byteCoder writes "Apparently Macrovision marketing is trying to put a good spin on Intuit's plan to eliminate the use of Macrovision's DRM software for pre-paid copies of TurboTax (as discussed last week here). This reminds me of the classic Monty Python line: "I'm not dead yet!""
That's got to be some spin -- An anonymous reader points to Eric Hellweg's Tech Investor on CNN, which suggests that the backlash which triggered Intuit's copy-protection reversal may have cost the company $100 million.
Can I use my Go Phone there? An anonymous reader writes ""In a follow-up to the Slashdot article 'CDMA vs GSM in Post-war Iraq,' The Reg has a story about how MCI has won the contract to rebuild the mobile phone system with GSM. This is a good thing for the people of Iraq that GSM is being used, GSM is the world standard and several U.S. companies (AT&T for one) are switching to GSM."
Adding Money to Insult. Neophytus writes "Remember the 'Star Wars Kid' that waxy.org found a couple of weeks ago? Well after over a million downloads the guy has been found. His name is Ghyslain, a 15-year-old tenth grader living in Quebec. Jish contacted him and got a brief, but interesting, interview."
No unlimited copy privileges in jail. the-dude-man writes "As reported here A 19-year-old pleaded guilty to costing DirectTV for leaking information about the secrets of DirectTV's most advanced anti-piracy technology to hacker websites. As part of the plea deal, Serebryany admitted to copying and distributing 800 megabytes of scanned documents from DirecTV, costing the company $68,000 in investigatory costs. Both sides stipulated to sentencing factors that carry six months to a year in prison under federal guidelines -- assuming no prior convictions. The sentencing court can depart from the guidelines only if the judge finds that the proposed sentence doesn't adequately reflect the facts of the case. According to court records affidavit, Serebryany's adventures began when he found himself with access to some of DirecTV's most coveted technological secrets while working for his uncle at a document imaging company at the office of a Los Angeles law firm, Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue. The firm was representing the satellite TV company in a lawsuit against NDS, the makers of the smart cards DirecTV uses to control access to its signal."
For every 11 discontented customers, there's one of these happy oddballs! RedWingsSuck writes "A few weeks ago, I asked /. users what they thought about the wobble my 12" Power Book has developed. Last week Apple Care told me that I could send my laptop off for repairs. I decided to drive to the local Apple Store, about 15 minutes away, and drop it off. They had my laptop for less than 3 days. When I went in to pick it up, they told me that it was sent in and the BC (bottom cover) was repaired. It doesn't wobble anymore, so I am happy. I was really surprised with how fast it was fixed. I didn't mean to sound like I regretted my AiBook purchase in the last post, and now I even happier."
Relax, it's a television show. HardcoreGamer writes "Buffy creator Joss Whedon responds to questions from New York Times readers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as it comes to the end of its 7 season run. He also discusses the now-canceled Firefly and concludes with one of the key reasons why the show is ending: 'I'm simply too tired.'"
If their encryption algorithm is really so secure and uncompromisable as they claim, they should have no qualms about letting the details out in public (where they could be presumably subject to peer review), just as is standard practice with other crypto algorithms and the crypto community.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
I consider myself somewhat an average geek and don't find him pitiful. Who hasn't grabbed a stick and pretended they were Darth Maul or any other Jedi badass? I laugh when I saw this because I was laughing at myself. I could have done the exact same thing and looked just as stupid. If it weren't for some kid at school who found the tape and posted it online this would be just another idiotic teenage fantasy that we've all lived in some form or another. I think the kid should be proud that he is now world renown and maybe gave a little chuckle to a bunch of nerds JUST LIKE HIM.
Consider the "First Evil" arc. They started that one over four years ago!!! Yeah, I know we you like the way he plants clues and goes for a slow buildup. So do I. But that buildup looks like the workers were drunk and AWOL half the time!
The whole series is full of stuff like that. My favorite villain in all of genre fiction is Glorificus, The Fashion Queen from Another Dimension. But I was only able to enjoy her arc by nodding at the plot inconsistencies you could drive a truck through. A willing fan can do that for a while (hence Star Trek), but Buffy fans have less patience.
I think if Joss Whedon is going to remain a major player (and I do hope he manages to revive Firefly) he's gonna have to rethink his working style. TV and movies are collaborative media, yet he insists that all the big insights be his and his alone. That prevents people from hijacking his vehicles (as happened with the Buffy movie) but also prevents people from telling him when his clothes are no invisible, but missing. No wonder Buffy got so far off track.
yea, sure. gsm is dead. yup. go build your own wcdma or cdma2000 network. go ahead. gsm is the standard, like it or not. there will be little consumer pressure for cmda as opposed to gsm. everyone wants gsm because its been the standard in europe/world and will now be the standard in the us as well.
being technically superior does not automagically grant you standard status. christ, by youre logic one should never deploy anything because there is always something almost ready thats almost better.
"The conveinences everyone claims that GSM has (eg SIM cards) are already being standardized in cdma2000, and will be here soon. "
..
Yea, because consumers have always waited for the perfect technology, rather than adopting a marginally worse technology that exists today.
Oh, wait, VHS was before Betamax and was worse. Oh, wait, the PC was before the Macintosh and had less usability. Oh, wait
I can go on and on. If CDMA was truly better enough today, it would've been standardized in every aspect like GSM, and we wouldn't even know about GSM because of it.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This is not wholly accurate. TDMA is old, obvious, and proven technology, requiring nothing more complicated than a uniform source of timing, and is possibly less demanding on the handset hardware than CDMA. Telecommunications carriers tend to be conservative, because the upfront investments are astronomical.
Secondly, according to Qualcomm's own information, CDMA by 1995 offered only 10x improvement (over analog cellular) of the bandwidth utilization. By contrast, TDMA offers somewhere from 3x to 8x, so the case for ripping out all your expensive network hardware is not as compelling back then.
Today in Iraq, starting from scratch, the equation is obviously different. When GSM's time comes, however, it should be remembered as a reliable workhorse, not something that was always inferior to CDMA except for patents. GSM was the first mobile phone system that offered global roaming, a feature taken for granted today, but causing so many problems back then that several horribly expensive satellite based solutions were built.
SIMM card
Only one "M". It stands for "Subscriber Identity Module".
Your choice for subject to that reply is also appropriate. Who went in and started that war in the first place? Of course you need to take full advantage of being in there, no question about it.
BUT, what if Saddam just would have stepped down, and let the so called democracy pour in, would US companies still have first say about re-building the country? Is that bias based solely on war-efforts? In this case, war efforts seem to make US tech bit more better by effect than european.
And the moneywise situation? US is not going to benefit hugely from Iraqi oil when it is effectively controlling the whole place, whose money is that?
Bit off the topic, but nice to change opinions about it anyhow.
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
but is it just me or are the trolls now masquerading as non-trolls? It seems that every topic now has a +5 thread from someone saying "just to pre-empt the trolls..." and then goes on to write junk...
Here is a thought - don't mod the trolls up, and don't mod the troll-watchers up either.
I'll try to keep this brief.
Even if CDMA is technically a better system its still not the one in use by the majority of the worlds population.
And while you might get better data rates using CDMA but GSM users still get all the cool phones to make use of it. Well ok, not all of the cool phones are GSM but if you've even been to Japan, Europe, Australia, etc you'd have to have seen the equipment everyone was using.
My family in the US think its odd that everyone in my family here (in Oz) has a mobile phone.
> I was absolutely astounded when FireFly got cancelled and the absolute mind-raping garbage that is John Doe stayed on the air.
But at least it gives you some insight into why the RIAA is publishing what it does these days.
For some, Sturgeon's Law isn't an observation, it's a marketing plan. Crap draws bigger audiences than stuff that challenges people.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Did anyone notice the reference to Trogdor the Burninator in Buffy? It was rad!
Wil
wiki
Look at Andrew talking about Faith attacking the Vulcanologist, or Buffy's funny bad joke about Caleb splitting. It's all still there.
/.
Yes, and the show gets -10 points for reusing an old Running Man one-liner. But don't worry, I'll get a -1 for talking smack about Buffy on
The problem with the show as a "drama" is that it completely loses credibility with the amount of trite humor written in to each script. Drama, without a doubt, needs humor. A perfect example is the doorman in MacBeth, or Dogbury in Much Ado About Nothing. If you want to watch absolute mastery of this in modern times, look no further than Aaron Sorkin (West Wing) or most of the writing on Star Trek: TNG which, incedentally, is why that was considered the last great Star Trek series. But this show had too much of it. If it was a drama, then it had too much comedy for the actual dramatic aspects of the script to effectively come through. If it was a comedy, then it had too much drama to be substantially funy enough to make the grade.
I see three things that prevent Buffy from being anything more than another shite WB/UPN series, First and foremost is the acting. As much as I try to look past the teenage angst-ridden script, all I see is B-grade actors who are most likely never going to make it to an actual network TV show (not WB or UPN). Granted, much of the dialogue prohibits full realization of their acting skills, but you can't blame everything on the script. The fact of the matter is that I can't relate to anyone on the show.
Secondly, the show is convoluted. The movie, AFAIC, was a piece of art. It poked fun at the trashy valley-girl stigma attached to so-cal in the early 90's while at the same time bringing a fresh horror-spoof to the whole thing. I just wish I could have been in the pitch room for that one. The problem is that doesn't translate well to TV. The concept was obviously meant for the big screen as, once the vampires are removed from Sunnydale, the gimmick is over. The writers of the show, in order to keep people from fleeing like they were at a Great White concert, had to come up with some new and more enveloping angle with each passing season, which created a two-fold problem. 1 - everyone has to watch at least five or six episodes in a row before they "get" the plot (at least, this is what I have been told repeatedly). And 2 - it gets trite. Once the novelty of vampires wears off, you have to switch to witches, demons, godesses, and everything else your mother warned you about. That, my friend, is the mark of a show that didn't have a decent premise to begin with.
Lastly, the writing is just terrible. Everything the actors say seems to be geared toward impressing high-school students or allowing introverts to live vicariously through the show. As I said before, a perfect example is the "cookie dough" scene I sat impatiently through in the final episode. That had no place in a pre-armageddon spectacular complete with uber-demons and the death of cast regulars. I honestly don't think the writers of this show have ever given any thought to how real people would act in any of these situations. And I for one don't particularly care to watch drama that has no grounding in reality. It becomes corny and contrived which is, after all, what I feel this show was from the get go.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Read some radio manuals, and get back to us.
Just because GSM is mandated to exist in most parts of the world does not mean it is either superior or will be in existance forever (or maybe it can if you want 2.5G forever).
All future 3g standards are based on CDMA (UTMS,WCDMA, CDMA2K, etc.), if not direct decendents. Qualcomm owns most if not all patents on those technologies. Not only that, but a terrain as sparse as Iraq, should not use GSM, but CDMA.
I live in the countryside of North Carolina, and I can tell you all about the GSM vs. CDMA arguments in living color. GSM blows in large geographical expanses with sparse populations. The companies don't want to provide the coverage that GSM requires (GSM requires dense repeater coverage), while CDMA requires many fewer towers for the same area. GSM isn't even an option, and those fancy AT&T phones are only worth their solder and discrete components to any outside-of-the-city dweller. Sprint PCS phones however, have full net capabilities, text paging, and digital clarity in the middle of nowhere.
Now, MCI can backdate Iraq and put them on GSM if they want, but the truth of the matter is, the Iraqi people are getting ripped off. MCI is simply going to dump their GSM equipment they wanted to sell in the US market, on the Iraqis who currently have no choice. But its not the best network for Iraq. In fact, it sucks. It sucks so bad, I guarantee the venture will be basic failure except in the largest of cities in Iraq with the most income and highest population densities. The rest of Iraq will be left phoneless.
TurboD
EDGE isn't CDMA based, it's still TDMA but with better radio technology allowing more capacity in existing GSM/GPRS cells, and higher speeds.
W-CDMA is the 'true 3G' step after GPRS/EDGE, which is CDMA based.
GSM has something like 80% market share world-wide, and is heavily used in the Middle East as well as Africa, Europe, Asia and has some market share in North and South America. So the real reason it's desirable is that it's the standard, just like VHS, not that it has the best possible technology. CDMA2000 should be compared with W-CDMA, where it looks like the former is much more mature and currently deployable.
GSM is far from dead. Maybe in the US, its dead, but then in most parts of the world its quite alive.
Its all a matter of numbers. Asia and Europe have a much higher subscriber based and churn rate for cell phones than the US. Some numbers as of 2002.
GSM subscribers in China: 160 million accounts
CDMA subscribers in China: 500,000 accounts
GSM subscribers in Indonesia: 9 million accounts
CDMA subscribers in Indonesia: 50,000 accounts
Given that with the exception of Japan and Korea the other countries in Asia are all using GSM, I really highly doubt GSM is gonna bite the dust. Pretty sure the user ratios situation is similar in Europe
BTW the rate at which people buy new cell phones in Asia is quite close to Moore's Law. Most white-collared types in Asia get a new phone every 6-8 months.
When i lived in NYC and Boston, I never saw the kind of cell phone churn rates nor ever saw evidence that cell phone usage is as pervalent as in Europe or Asia. Highly doubt any country comes close to China's 160 million GSM subscriber accounts.
Far as I understand UTMS is a descendant or an evolution of GSM. When it comes to business, it all comes down to numbers, not which technology is better, how many units you can sell. Windows, VHS are just 2 examples of sub-par tech winning over due to sheer volume of sales alone.
Pretty sure the US will be dominated by CDMA as for the rest of the world I'm hedging my bets on UTMS
The Ministry of Oil is intact. The Museum is not. Even where bombs were not dropped, there are consequences when you invade a country. These are well known. Looting and riots are high up the list. Was no planning done here?
The US said the same about Afghanistan. I repeat: how are they doing these days? And for the record: Saudi Arabia is stable and has good oil output. If you think that is a good thing, try living under the Sauds. Stability and oil -- feh! What about hospitals? What about classrooms? What about restoring power and water supplies?
And also for the record, Iraq has been a haven for education and civilisation for a thousand years. The Iraqi people are still, by-and-large, intelligent, educated, cultured and cosmopolitan. Where is maintaining that tradition in the list of what-must-be-done? Because without it you have just another fundamentalist theocracy. Without careful and thoughtful help right now that still could happen, as the mullahs and imams make their claims to the rights to secular power.
He was making a reductio ad absurdum argument, by taking an argument and applying it with the same force but the opposite intent. This is a useful technique. It can be used to highlight all sorts of internalised bias. e.g., "The US was justified in invading Vietnam in order to protect it from itself" vs. "Vietnam would be justified in invading the US in order to protect it from itself". See how it works? Try it yourself on what comes out of Fox News sometime.
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
GSM is cheap because its old. Cheap GSM stations and cheap GSM phones. I might be able to pay $1000 for a PDA CDMA phone but an Iraqi might only have $50 for his basic GSM (I'm sure he'd love to have the phone I threw away 4 years ago because it was getting tacky)
GSM is implemented throughout the Middle East - allowing roaming and phone exports/transfers over the border.
GSM is well known to technicians.
GSM works well in environments like Iraq. You might live in some isolated part of the huge US of A where GSM sucks but Iraq is an urban and concentrated country. Most people live near the cities or the river valleys.
GSM does not suck. It allows clear voice transmissions and gives an acceptable data transfer rate (not for internet browsing but for email okay).
Iraq does not need an expensive data network with bells on it. It needs one that works. And GSM works excellently - as Europe can testify.
GSM is not the future. But its the working present.
Do you actually read the news?
The US taxpayer is not footing the bill!
1) Iraq has a mountain of debt to pay because as a result of the end of the war everyone is coming in with their bills. INCLUDING the US.
2) The money laid out now by the US is coming back from oil revenue.
3) The GSM standard is not just a French standard, but a worldwide standard. CDMA could have been a worldwide standard, but Qualcomm has its head stuck up its butt.
Do you want to know what the main concern now is? That Iraq will be crushed under their debt. They did some stats and found out that when Iraq is pumping oil at its peak, that will only account for 20 billion dollars. That is not even close to being enough money to pay back everybody. And the concern is that it could turn into a world war 1 fiasco.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
If it's such an undesireable trait, then why do we keep electing them to office?
You forgot a scene:
Xander: Where's Anya?
Andrew: She's dead.
Xander: Oh, just wanted to know.
Am I the only one bothered by the fact that no one, not even Xander seems to care that Anya's dead?
He was a lot more upset about the death of Tara, Joyce, and even Jenny Calendar that he was about Anya. He barely showed any reaction to Anya's death.
I don't think that season 6 was much darker than its predecessors, though it did hurt that they tried to carry off the humor element of the season with the season antagonist, the Trio, who could have worked well as a monster of the week but who were grating rather than amusing when their antics were repeated week after week.
Continuity with prior seasons was abandoned, both in terms of character and in setting. The most egregrious example was magic becoming addictive. Wouldn't Tara or Giles have ever mentioned that magic is the equivalent of crack to Willow, especially since there are "dealers" and magic crack houses? The magic addiction arc is especially frustrating as it not only hijacked the promising power corrupts arc for Willow, but it was completely useless as part of the dark Willow arc since it was Tara's death, not magic crack, that made Willow the nemesis in the final episodes.
The writing has many other flaws such as Buffy coming to an epiphany every week about her depression then ignoring it the following week and Spike going to get his chip out (which not only the dialog implies but the actor was told was to happen) but ends up with a soul. Let's take a quick look at the dialog. Some of the worst dialog ever on the show again comes from the addiction arc, especially in the final episodes when Willow's saying things like "I'm so juiced," and at the very end, Xander saving the world with his yellow crayon speech was just embarrassing.
There were many ideas with great potential in season six like the dark Willow arc we almost saw, but the execution was so poor that it's almost impossible to enjoy them. It's not the issues they brought up, such as depression, bad boyfriends, or even addiction that were the problem, but how they handled them compared to earlier seasons.
Look at how they handled the deaths of Joyce or Miss Calendar compared to Tara. Both of the prior deaths carried so much more meaning and emotion for the characters. The ending also lacks originality. We just saw Willow go off for revenge after Tara was hurt at the end of last season, and we saw Giles do the same when Miss Calendar died before that. The "dead lesbian/evil lesbian (saved by the good man)" ending has been done dozens of time in other books and movies, with Alyson Hannigan not only playing that ending in Buffy that year, but she also played that in the movie Rip It Off just before that. And of course, Willow has to destroy the world; we're not quite sure how that comes out of her character, but Buffy villains do that so she has to do that too. Why couldn't they have done something remotely original?
Goddamit 16 better stay the age of consent. After all, if the girl can drive a car... Also, who needs to re-live the realities of menial jobs and real life disillusionment? Its TV- Its suppose to be fantasy and escape- Morality and Social commentary should be given in small, digestible portions The last thing America needs is a show preaching self-righteously to the great unwashed masses. Give me clever, irreverent humor any day- after all, the show was born out of a simple joke- a horror movie genre with a 'slayer' named 'Buffy?' ;]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
a news service which is not American. Because no-one could accuse USAtoday or the Wall Street Journal of being partisan.
That infrastructure would not have needed to be rebuilt overnight if it had not been targeted in the first place. (a war crime by international convention, by the way. Not that that has ever stopped the US army.) As things like water treatment plants and power stations were deliberately targeted, all civilian deaths as a result of their lack are the direct responsiblity of the army who destroyed them.
Unlike the UK (Ireland, India, Australia, great chunks of Africa) or the USA? (Mexico, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Hawaii, the Phillipines, just from the top of my head, and in no particular order). Pot: meet Kettle.
Oh, really ?
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife