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Delays and Problems for India's New CDMA Network
securitas writes "The NY Times and Bloomberg are reporting that Qualcomm is touting an expected 6 million Indian subscribers using CDMA by year end. But the facts seem to fly in the face of that with Reliance experiencing technical problems and delays with the launch of India's first CDMA network, covered on Slashdot late last year. Part of the problem is that the GSM operators won't allow Reliance's traffic on their networks, not to mention a court challenge and no approval by regulators. Is this just a hopeful diversion from the loss of the Iraq contract, where MCI chose GSM? How does a country where the per capita annual income is $390-$420 (depending on whose number you use) expect people other than the elite to afford mobile phone service, even if the handsets and service charges are heavily subsidized? Forbes discussed the problem of affordable mobile phone service in Africa where incomes are similar. Is this another wireless/fibre optic bubble akin to the one we saw a few years ago?"
Recently I've had a chance to do some web design with PHP. Previously
I'd used Perl because I'd heard from many people that Perl was the end
all and be all of scripting languages for the web. Imagine my suprise
to discover that PHP was vastly superior! I know this is a bold
statement, but I have solid arguements to support it.
Before I begin, let me just clarify something. I'm not arguing that
PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use
for Perl. Also, PHP isn't perfect but it does manage to fix many of
the shortcomings I've had with Perl. Here are a few of the things I've
noticed about PHP. Finally, I'm not the most talented Perl programmer
out there. I generally prefer to use the vastly superior Python, but
can use Perl if I have to.
* Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of
both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable
website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl
took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP.
I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with
Perl.
* The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk.
We all know that Perl's OO still needs work (whether or not OO is all
that great is another discussion.) Hopefully Perl will be patched up
so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection,
reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
* Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under
the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems
limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the
later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl
though.
* Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it
won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in
almost every case, particularly in regex which has long been Perl's
strongest point. I'm sure there are cases where Perl is equal to PHP,
but I can't think of any at the moment.
* Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto
an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it
run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this
with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires
that much rewriting.
* Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I
wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice)
its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a
substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library
of any kind.
* Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure
you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse
Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc. Under Perl you're extremely
limited in what you can do. This is because Perl isn't OO (so you
can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and
because it lacks pointers. Some of you may notice that PHP lacks
pointers, but look deeper! Behind the scenes, hidden from the user
pointers are used. Because of this, PHP can support complex data
structures.
Again this is just my experience. I don't mean to offend any Perl
coders because Perl was an excellent language. However, in certain
cases it may behoove one to write the back end in PHP instead of Perl.
Merry Kwanza!
I'm not Seth.
not like the other two loozers down ther. yeah, baby!
Hope you don't live in one of those big ugly cities full of pollution. Because that's where the European nukes and neutron bombs will strike first.
nazis are cool. i wish the krauts had won ww2. at least the fuhrer admitted that he's outright evil and hates them fucking jews. he didn't pretend to be "fighting for the good and for god" or some shit like that wussie bush.
Of course! It's what women are for! Fucking dumbass. How desperate must a guy be to support feminism?
lolololo u koqsuker
suk mah fat koq
plz
k?
screw the curry heads, they've taken enough of our IT jobs