Sadly, we have known this was on the cards for a while, and one or two people who work in government in Canberra have mentioned it to me. Australia wants a free trade deal with the US, and particularly in agriculture. In return for this, we have to go along with what US trade negotiators want on issues like intellectual property, and the US government is in Hollywood's pocket on this.
Indeed. When the IMT-2000 standards process was being developed to define "3G", the Americans and Europeans couldn't agree, so we ended up with a "standard" that consisted of serveral incompatible technologies.
The Europeans came up with W-CDMA (which technically a subset of UMTS, but the two terms are often used interchangeably) which uses CDMA based technology based on wide (3.84 MHz) chunks of spectrum.
Qualcomm in the US proposed a two stage process to 3G: firstly a jump to what they call CDMA2000 1X, which uses spectrum chunks the same size (1.23MHz) as existing CDMA networks. (This provides faster data rates than 2G, but does not quite satisfy the full requirements of 3G). The second stage is a jump to what they call CDMA2000 3X, which uses spectrum chunks precisely three times the size (3.69MHz) of existing CDMA networks.
However, Qualcomm's engineers, who have had some years head start on the Europeans on CDMA technology, managed to develop a system capable of delivering the full 3G data speed requirements using the existing 1.23MHz chunks of spectrum. (They did this mainly be changing the modulation scheme and abandoning some of the overhead needed for voice - this is a data technology only ). This technology was initially called HDR, and has now been renamed 1xEV-DO. (DO for "Data Only"). The advantages of this over 3X are that it is more spectrum efficient, and it can sit alongside existing CDMA in the same spectrum band). This technology is new a key part of Qualcomm's CDMA2000 3G offering. In fact, 3X seems to have been largely abandoned, as 1xEV-DO can go everything it can do but more cheaply and more efficiently).
Qualcomm is also talking about another technology, 1xEV-DV (Data and Voice, rather that Data Only), which allows voice calls and uses the same modulation scheme as 1xEV-DO. I am not sure if they have this one working yet, however.
These are "Advanced Reader Not for Sale" copies of the book. These are given for free to reviewers, opinion makers, other writers, assorted famous people who might say something complimentary about the book etc. Once you give them away, the people you have given them to can do pretty much whatever they like with them, including sell them. As for the text, it is possible that it will change between these copies and the official first edition, but this is barely different from the situation between any two editions. New editions of books correct typographical errors, grammatical errers, the effects of violent disagreements between authors and editors and the like all the time, and getting a "correct" version of the text is an ongoing process, even for books that have been published for years. Read the Note on the Text at the start of a current edition of The Lord of the Rings for an (admittedly extreme) example.
Some channels will become subscription based. For those that do not, the advertising will work its way into the programming, be it in the form of "This program is sponsored by " (which is how television worked before the age of 30 second commercials", overt product placement and the like.
This works really well in things like reality programming and quiz shows, where the hosts of the program can repeatedly mention the sponsor, where the contestants can drink a particular brand of bottled water, and where you can put up signs in the background advertising products without difficulty. In sports programming, we will continue to see advertising all over the ground, on players clothing, "It is now time for the Coca-Cola score update" and the like.
Product placement is harder in drama, where yes, people do in fact use brand name products, but you don't want to overdo it. (Still, you can be much more interactive about it. If you like the sweater Jennifer Aniston is wearing, you will probably be able to click on it and buy one for yourself).
Because it is harder in drama, you may in fact see the best drama move to subscription based channels. (In fact, if you look at the Drama on HBO and the increased number of quiz programs and reality programs on network television, this may already be happening. Notice also the number of phone in contests and the like that this type of program has. (In Europe, there are lots of television programs that have contests you enter by sending premium rate SMS messages on your cellphone, and the television station gets a share of the telephone revenue). One of the main sources of revenue for "Who wants to be a millionaire?" was actually the 900 number people phoned to apply to be contestants on the show.
My point is that there are actually lots of ways that television stations can continue to get revenue, even if people no longer watch 30 second commercials. These might not all be good for programming quality, but commercial television isn't going away.
Napster was as much as anything a symptom that the music industry's 20 year old technology and even older business model . Was obsolete. If PVRs become the Napster of the television world, then this means much the same. The cable companies have to see what it is that customers actually want, and then give it to them.
Satellite companies seem to have no trouble with this concept. BSkyB in the UK is offering a combined Set Top Box / PVR, and charges an extra 10 pounds ($15) a month for customers who want this. DirecTV seems to offer something similar . Given that in the digital world cable and satellite are offering very similar things - essentially a box in your living room capable of decoding MPEG-2 signals, that also contains a CPU, some memory and maybe a hard disk, I cannot see why cable cannot also offer this, if it is what customers want.
As far as the cable companies are concerned, here we have an entrenched former monopoly that wants laws to be passed to protect an obsolete business model rather than attempting to find a new business model that works.
Re:Wasn't I, Robot a collection of short stories?
on
Will Smith as I, Robot
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· Score: 1
It was a book of short stories with a number of common characters (notably Susan Calvin) and a number of themes which developed chronologically through the stories. The stories were originally published in the sf magazines, but when they were put together as a book, Asimov added a framing device (Susan Calvin in retirement is being interviewed, and the stories are a series of flashbacks). Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay a few years back which was essentially an adaptation of the whole book. This does not sound like that though: more an adaptation of a single story.
Let me take that back about Tacoma Narrows. (Tacoma Narrows collapsed in 1940. The Sydney Harbour Bridge was completed in 1932. The SHB is still much more massive than it needs to be, however. Compare with the Bayonne Bridge in New York.
It's an badly designed and relatively uninteresting bridge, anyway. It is far too massive for the load it carries (a consequence of being built soon after Tacoma Narrows disaster, even though it's a completely different kind of bridge) and it has utterly ridiculous towers on either end of the bridge, although it is a steel arch and they perform no structural purpose. (This was because the designers believed that because suspension bridges were more common and they had towers, people would expect a large bridge to have towers, even if it was not a suspension bridge).
On the other hand, the next bridge across Sydney harbour (several miles upstream) is the Gladesville Bridge. This is a concrete arch bridge, where the roadway actually goes above the arch, and is the best example of that kind of bridge in the world and a really lovely piece of engineering.
It is very difficult to apply for a job without having a Microsoft Word copy of your CV. Plus there are millions of other times when people expect Word of Excel.
As far as the Web is concerned, I keep my copy of Mozilla handy and I quite like it, but once in a while I find a website that doesn't work without IE running on Windows, so I have to have IE around.
Using non-MS tools usually means having a copy of both the MS and non-MS tools around, for these sorts of reasons. And duplication like this often just isn't worth the hassle.
I have been thinking of moving from Blogger to somewhere else myself, given the various hassles that the site has had over the last few months. That said, has anyone else noticed that the the site has been particularly unstable over the past few days? I have noticed quite a few downs. Is this in any way related to the hack?
I'd like them to say on their front page what they have done, and mention there that it is only Google.fr and Google.de
That is, I think that it should (to the extent that the law will allow) make it as clear as possible that people should go to google.com and check there.
There was an article in the Economist on the same subject a couple of weeks ago, although with more of a focus on the developments of infrastructure for the region. The proposal to build a (Sunshine Skyway like) bridge from Hong Kong to Macau is particularly interesting. This one has a nice map, which shows the location of all the places in the Wired article. I also made some comments on my blog at the time.
When the Europeans were deciding what their 3G telco standards would be, there was a division between Siemens (who wanted to use a Time Division Duplexing System called TD-CDMA) and Nokia and Ericsson (who wanted to use an Frequency Division Duplexing system called W-CDMA). Rather than choosing a winner, the European Telecommunications Standards Institude (ETSI) adopted both standards, and technically UMTS supports both, although W-CDMA has got all the publicity. Spectrum bands were allocated for both, paired (for W-CDMA) and unpaired (for TD-CDMA). In Europe, telcos are required to use these standards, but there certainly have been allocations of unpaired spectrum. Australia decided to auction the same spectrum bands that were auctioned in Europe, but put no restrictions on the technology they were used for. 3G licences were sold in Australia for not much money, as the number of licences and number of players were the same. Arraycom bought some unpaired spectrum for not much money, and always said that it would use the spectrum for its i-Burst technology. This is now happening. (The article is false when it said that Australia uniquely allocated unpaired spectrum. Most of the world did. Australia merely put uncommonly few restrictions on its use. This was not unique either, as other countries (eg New Zealand) did the same.
I don't think i-Bust is technically '3G', but it does use '3G' spectrum.
I don't see any future for a TiVo or similar as a separate unit, to be honest. It seems to make sense to integrate the TiVo like device and the set top box for your cable/satellite/digital terrestrial service into one machine. For one thing, I don't see the point of receiving separate program information from TiVo when a digital television service is already sending an electronic program guide. For another, there is a certain amount of redundancy in the hardware (MPEG-2 decoding etc) and money can be saved by building one box only. For a third thing, a common user interface for the STB and the PVR is surely a good thing. (Hopefully this can be DVB-MHP based, and common to all networks, too). Finally, your cable or satellite provider already has a billing system with which to charge you a monthly fee, and money can be saved by getting rid of the duplication. (It may be easier to persuade people to pay a few dollars extra for "deluxe" satellite service that includes a PVR than to get them to pay money to a different company too).
BSkyB in the UK already does this. I suspect other providers do too.
GSM is the only standard allowed in Europe. It is the most common standard in Asia, Australia, and Africa. It is widely used in various other places. Australia's regulations allow carriers to use whatever standard they want, and there are both GSM and IS-95 CDMA networks in use.
However, there are other standards in all of these places. There are also IS-95 CDMA networks in Japan and China. South Korea uses IS-95 exclusively). In most of these places the GSM networks have more users and a higher profile, but if there were strong reasons for customers to favour IS-95, the infrastructure is there for the switch to take place extremely quickly. The key development of the last few months is that IS-95 carriers in Japan and Korea have upgraded their networks to the 3G version of IS-95 (called 1xRTT - there is a further variant called 1xEV which will be seen soon), and customer takeup rates have been tremendous. The question is how quickly this will spread to other countries.
I agree that this is so, and it bothers me a great deal. Corporations write contracts that give themselves all sorts of rights that they do not actually have, because there are laws limiting what can and cannot be put in contracts. However, the companies will refuse to do business with you unless you sign the contract. Many people simply accept it when the company says "It is in the contract so we have this right" because they do not understand the law, and others accept it because to challenge the contract you have to fight a court case and doing so is difficult and expensive, especially when you are just some guy, and the other litigant is a large corporation. Therefore, the company in effect gets its unreasonable conditions because challenging them is too hard.
It should be strictly illegal to provide a contract or a user agreement that tries to reserve conditions that the company should reasonably understand are illegal. I think there should be both criminal and civil remedies. (Actually, I find it hard to see how it is not illegal at the moment - surely it is a form of fraud)
Quite. This is the key experiment that spelled the end of classical physics. I think the arguments are pretty strong for putting it first in the list. Leaving it out of the top ten seems ridiculous. (I think the demonstration of the photoelectric effect needs to be in there somewhere, too)
Dunno. I saw it in digital, and I saw a few pixels and didn't think it was anywhere near film in quality. In any event, the properties of the DLP projection are not relevant.
There are two 'digital' issues here. Firstly, the film was shot on a Sony HDCAM 24p camera with 1920x1080 resolution. Then for digital projection this was downconverted to 1280x1024 resolution and then projected using DLP hardware. For film projection (and presumably for this large format IMAX presentation as well) the original 1920x1080 image was blown up onto film and then projected in the normal way, and the DLP projection process (and its abilities to soften the lines) was not involved at any stage and has no relevance.
The simple fact is that the lack of resolution of a movie filmed in this way is going to look crap in IMAX. Whether or not the lines are straight, there is just not going to be enough detail. AOTC was filmed with 1080 lines of resolution. 35mm film has the equivalent of about 2000 lines, although there can be no direct comparison between digital and analogue. The large format processes normally used for IMAX have the equivalent of upwards of 4000 lines. You can tell the difference, even on an ordinary sized screen. On a huge IMAX screen it will be much more dramatic. To such an extent that I am wondering what George Lucas has been smoking.
I'd argue that GSM is significantly worse than CDMA. One problem with GSM is that when you get 30-40km from the base-station, the time it takes for the signal to get from the base-station to the handset and back becomes comparable with the length of the timeslot (due to GSM's TDMA nature) and GSM stops working. GSM is therefore lousy for situations with a low density population.
In my native land of Australia, we have both CDMA and GSM networks. GSM has by far the highest market share, because the majority of Australians live in large cities and they like buying nifty little Nokia cellphones. However, once you are out of the cities, GSM coverage sucks, and you suddenly find that everyone who lives there uses CDMA. Yes, the Europeans were smart to come up with a single common standard for digital cellphones, and yes, the companies (notably Nokia) that support this standard have marketed the technology very well, and Qualcomm has marketed CDMA much worse, but purely from a technical point of view, GSM isn't so hot.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, we have known this was on the cards for a while, and one or two people who work in government in Canberra have mentioned it to me. Australia wants a free trade deal with the US, and particularly in agriculture. In return for this, we have to go along with what US trade negotiators want on issues like intellectual property, and the US government is in Hollywood's pocket on this.
>EVDO is part of American 3G.
Indeed. When the IMT-2000 standards process was being developed to define "3G", the Americans and Europeans couldn't agree, so we ended up with a "standard" that consisted of serveral incompatible technologies.
The Europeans came up with W-CDMA (which technically a subset of UMTS, but the two terms are often used interchangeably) which uses CDMA based technology based on wide (3.84 MHz) chunks of spectrum.
Qualcomm in the US proposed a two stage process to 3G: firstly a jump to what they call CDMA2000 1X, which uses spectrum chunks the same size (1.23MHz) as existing CDMA networks. (This provides faster data rates than 2G, but does not quite satisfy the full requirements of 3G). The second stage is a jump to what they call CDMA2000 3X, which uses spectrum chunks precisely three times the size (3.69MHz) of existing CDMA networks.
However, Qualcomm's engineers, who have had some years head start on the Europeans on CDMA technology, managed to develop a system capable of delivering the full 3G data speed requirements using the existing 1.23MHz chunks of spectrum. (They did this mainly be changing the modulation scheme and abandoning some of the overhead needed for voice - this is a data technology only ). This technology was initially called HDR, and has now been renamed 1xEV-DO. (DO for "Data Only"). The advantages of this over 3X are that it is more spectrum efficient, and it can sit alongside existing CDMA in the same spectrum band). This technology is new a key part of Qualcomm's CDMA2000 3G offering. In fact, 3X seems to have been largely abandoned, as 1xEV-DO can go everything it can do but more cheaply and more efficiently).
Qualcomm is also talking about another technology, 1xEV-DV (Data and Voice, rather that Data Only), which allows voice calls and uses the same modulation scheme as 1xEV-DO. I am not sure if they have this one working yet, however.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. (And I don't care if this post costs me karma. This is just awful).
There is a paragraph on Pattern Recognition from someone who sounds like he might have read it towards the end of this article in the Guardian.
These are "Advanced Reader Not for Sale" copies of the book. These are given for free to reviewers, opinion makers, other writers, assorted famous people who might say something complimentary about the book etc. Once you give them away, the people you have given them to can do pretty much whatever they like with them, including sell them. As for the text, it is possible that it will change between these copies and the official first edition, but this is barely different from the situation between any two editions. New editions of books correct typographical errors, grammatical errers, the effects of violent disagreements between authors and editors and the like all the time, and getting a "correct" version of the text is an ongoing process, even for books that have been published for years. Read the Note on the Text at the start of a current edition of The Lord of the Rings for an (admittedly extreme) example.
Some channels will become subscription based. For those that do not, the advertising will work its way into the programming, be it in the form of "This program is sponsored by " (which is how television worked before the age of 30 second commercials", overt product placement and the like.
This works really well in things like reality programming and quiz shows, where the hosts of the program can repeatedly mention the sponsor, where the contestants can drink a particular brand of bottled water, and where you can put up signs in the background advertising products without difficulty. In sports programming, we will continue to see advertising all over the ground, on players clothing, "It is now time for the Coca-Cola score update" and the like.
Product placement is harder in drama, where yes, people do in fact use brand name products, but you don't want to overdo it. (Still, you can be much more interactive about it. If you like the sweater Jennifer Aniston is wearing, you will probably be able to click on it and buy one for yourself).
Because it is harder in drama, you may in fact see the best drama move to subscription based channels. (In fact, if you look at the Drama on HBO and the increased number of quiz programs and reality programs on network television, this may already be happening. Notice also the number of phone in contests and the like that this type of program has. (In Europe, there are lots of television programs that have contests you enter by sending premium rate SMS messages on your cellphone, and the television station gets a share of the telephone revenue). One of the main sources of revenue for "Who wants to be a millionaire?" was actually the 900 number people phoned to apply to be contestants on the show.
My point is that there are actually lots of ways that television stations can continue to get revenue, even if people no longer watch 30 second commercials. These might not all be good for programming quality, but commercial television isn't going away.
Napster was as much as anything a symptom that the music industry's 20 year old technology and even older business model . Was obsolete. If PVRs become the Napster of the television world, then this means much the same. The cable companies have to see what it is that customers actually want, and then give it to them.
Satellite companies seem to have no trouble with this concept. BSkyB in the UK is offering a combined Set Top Box / PVR, and charges an extra 10 pounds ($15) a month for customers who want this. DirecTV seems to offer something similar . Given that in the digital world cable and satellite are offering very similar things - essentially a box in your living room capable of decoding MPEG-2 signals, that also contains a CPU, some memory and maybe a hard disk, I cannot see why cable cannot also offer this, if it is what customers want.
As far as the cable companies are concerned, here we have an entrenched former monopoly that wants laws to be passed to protect an obsolete business model rather than attempting to find a new business model that works.
It was a book of short stories with a number of common characters (notably Susan Calvin) and a number of themes which developed chronologically through the stories. The stories were originally published in the sf magazines, but when they were put together as a book, Asimov added a framing device (Susan Calvin in retirement is being interviewed, and the stories are a series of flashbacks). Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay a few years back which was essentially an adaptation of the whole book. This does not sound like that though: more an adaptation of a single story.
Let me take that back about Tacoma Narrows. (Tacoma Narrows collapsed in 1940. The Sydney Harbour Bridge was completed in 1932. The SHB is still much more massive than it needs to be, however. Compare with the Bayonne Bridge in New York.
It's an badly designed and relatively uninteresting bridge, anyway. It is far too massive for the load it carries (a consequence of being built soon after Tacoma Narrows disaster, even though it's a completely different kind of bridge) and it has utterly ridiculous towers on either end of the bridge, although it is a steel arch and they perform no structural purpose. (This was because the designers believed that because suspension bridges were more common and they had towers, people would expect a large bridge to have towers, even if it was not a suspension bridge).
On the other hand, the next bridge across Sydney harbour (several miles upstream) is the Gladesville Bridge. This is a concrete arch bridge, where the roadway actually goes above the arch, and is the best example of that kind of bridge in the world and a really lovely piece of engineering.
It is very difficult to apply for a job without having a Microsoft Word copy of your CV. Plus there are millions of other times when people expect Word of Excel.
As far as the Web is concerned, I keep my copy of Mozilla handy and I quite like it, but once in a while I find a website that doesn't work without IE running on Windows, so I have to have IE around.
Using non-MS tools usually means having a copy of both the MS and non-MS tools around, for these sorts of reasons. And duplication like this often just isn't worth the hassle.
I have been thinking of moving from Blogger to somewhere else myself, given the various hassles that the site has had over the last few months. That said, has anyone else noticed that the the site has been particularly unstable over the past few days? I have noticed quite a few downs. Is this in any way related to the hack?
I'd like them to say on their front page what they have done, and mention there that it is only Google.fr and Google.de
That is, I think that it should (to the extent that the law will allow) make it as clear as possible that people should go to google.com and check there.
>P.S. Gotta love my 4-digit slashdot account ID. :)
Yes, you must have registered the day before I did. This is deeply irritating.
There was an article in the Economist on the same subject a couple of weeks ago, although with more of a focus on the developments of infrastructure for the region. The proposal to build a (Sunshine Skyway like) bridge from Hong Kong to Macau is particularly interesting. This one has a nice map, which shows the location of all the places in the Wired article. I also made some comments on my blog at the time.
When the Europeans were deciding what their 3G telco standards would be, there was a division between Siemens (who wanted to use a Time Division Duplexing System called TD-CDMA) and Nokia and Ericsson (who wanted to use an Frequency Division Duplexing system called W-CDMA). Rather than choosing a winner, the European Telecommunications Standards Institude (ETSI) adopted both standards, and technically UMTS supports both, although W-CDMA has got all the publicity. Spectrum bands were allocated for both, paired (for W-CDMA) and unpaired (for TD-CDMA). In Europe, telcos are required to use these standards, but there certainly have been allocations of unpaired spectrum. Australia decided to auction the same spectrum bands that were auctioned in Europe, but put no restrictions on the technology they were used for. 3G licences were sold in Australia for not much money, as the number of licences and number of players were the same. Arraycom bought some unpaired spectrum for not much money, and always said that it would use the spectrum for its i-Burst technology. This is now happening. (The article is false when it said that Australia uniquely allocated unpaired spectrum. Most of the world did. Australia merely put uncommonly few restrictions on its use. This was not unique either, as other countries (eg New Zealand) did the same.
I don't think i-Bust is technically '3G', but it does use '3G' spectrum.
Michael.
I don't see any future for a TiVo or similar as a separate unit, to be honest. It seems to make sense to integrate the TiVo like device and the set top box for your cable/satellite/digital terrestrial service into one machine. For one thing, I don't see the point of receiving separate program information from TiVo when a digital television service is already sending an electronic program guide. For another, there is a certain amount of redundancy in the hardware (MPEG-2 decoding etc) and money can be saved by building one box only. For a third thing, a common user interface for the STB and the PVR is surely a good thing. (Hopefully this can be DVB-MHP based, and common to all networks, too). Finally, your cable or satellite provider already has a billing system with which to charge you a monthly fee, and money can be saved by getting rid of the duplication. (It may be easier to persuade people to pay a few dollars extra for "deluxe" satellite service that includes a PVR than to get them to pay money to a different company too).
BSkyB in the UK already does this. I suspect other providers do too.
Michael.
GSM is the only standard allowed in Europe. It is the most common standard in Asia, Australia, and Africa. It is widely used in various other places. Australia's regulations allow carriers to use whatever standard they want, and there are both GSM and IS-95 CDMA networks in use.
However, there are other standards in all of these places. There are also IS-95 CDMA networks in Japan and China. South Korea uses IS-95 exclusively). In most of these places the GSM networks have more users and a higher profile, but if there were strong reasons for customers to favour IS-95, the infrastructure is there for the switch to take place extremely quickly. The key development of the last few months is that IS-95 carriers in Japan and Korea have upgraded their networks to the 3G version of IS-95 (called 1xRTT - there is a further variant called 1xEV which will be seen soon), and customer takeup rates have been tremendous. The question is how quickly this will spread to other countries.
What speed film are you talking about? Something typically used like 100ASA, or something close the limits of film resolution like Kodachrome 12?
I agree that this is so, and it bothers me a great deal. Corporations write contracts that give themselves all sorts of rights that they do not actually have, because there are laws limiting what can and cannot be put in contracts. However, the companies will refuse to do business with you unless you sign the contract. Many people simply accept it when the company says "It is in the contract so we have this right" because they do not understand the law, and others accept it because to challenge the contract you have to fight a court case and doing so is difficult and expensive, especially when you are just some guy, and the other litigant is a large corporation. Therefore, the company in effect gets its unreasonable conditions because challenging them is too hard.
It should be strictly illegal to provide a contract or a user agreement that tries to reserve conditions that the company should reasonably understand are illegal. I think there should be both criminal and civil remedies. (Actually, I find it hard to see how it is not illegal at the moment - surely it is a form of fraud)
I am sure it is going to be illegal under (Australian) Federal law as well. The Trade Practices Act must come into play in a few places, too.
Michael.
Quite. This is the key experiment that spelled the end of classical physics. I think the arguments are pretty strong for putting it first in the list. Leaving it out of the top ten seems ridiculous. (I think the demonstration of the photoelectric effect needs to be in there somewhere, too)
The Enterprise visits a remote outpost of scientists and they are all OK.
Captain Picard has to make a difficult decision about a less advanced people, but the Prime Directive makes it easy.
The crew of the Enterprise are struck by a strange alien plague, for which the cure is found in the well-stocked sick-bay.
The Enterprise is involved in a bizarre time-warp phenomenon, which is in some way unconnected with the 20th century.
A power surge on the Bridge is rapidly and correctly diagnosed as a faulty capacitor by the highly-trained and competent engineering staff.
Dunno. I saw it in digital, and I saw a few pixels and didn't think it was anywhere near film in quality. In any event, the properties of the DLP projection are not relevant.
There are two 'digital' issues here. Firstly, the film was shot on a Sony HDCAM 24p camera with 1920x1080 resolution. Then for digital projection this was downconverted to 1280x1024 resolution and then projected using DLP hardware. For film projection (and presumably for this large format IMAX presentation as well) the original 1920x1080 image was blown up onto film and then projected in the normal way, and the DLP projection process (and its abilities to soften the lines) was not involved at any stage and has no relevance.
The simple fact is that the lack of resolution of a movie filmed in this way is going to look crap in IMAX. Whether or not the lines are straight, there is just not going to be enough detail. AOTC was filmed with 1080 lines of resolution. 35mm film has the equivalent of about 2000 lines, although there can be no direct comparison between digital and analogue. The large format processes normally used for IMAX have the equivalent of upwards of 4000 lines. You can tell the difference, even on an ordinary sized screen. On a huge IMAX screen it will be much more dramatic. To such an extent that I am wondering what George Lucas has been smoking.
I'd argue that GSM is significantly worse than CDMA. One problem with GSM is that when you get 30-40km from the base-station, the time it takes for the signal to get from the base-station to the handset and back becomes comparable with the length of the timeslot (due to GSM's TDMA nature) and GSM stops working. GSM is therefore lousy for situations with a low density population.
In my native land of Australia, we have both CDMA and GSM networks. GSM has by far the highest market share, because the majority of Australians live in large cities and they like buying nifty little Nokia cellphones. However, once you are out of the cities, GSM coverage sucks, and you suddenly find that everyone who lives there uses CDMA. Yes, the Europeans were smart to come up with a single common standard for digital cellphones, and yes, the companies (notably Nokia) that support this standard have marketed the technology very well, and Qualcomm has marketed CDMA much worse, but purely from a technical point of view, GSM isn't so hot.