The last time I heard of an engine powered by the "magnetic energy" of permanent magnets was from a guy that is now selling alkaline water. Magnets seem to attract crackpots like fire flies.
Another issue about security:
on
USB Going Wireless
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> Higher levels of security involving encryption > should be implemented at the application level.
Basically this means that secure communications will be up to the vendors, since it's not part of the standard. What that means is that you can forget widespread compatibility. While BT has had its teething problems with compatibility, theoretically at least any headset should work with any phone. Using WUSB however that wouldn't be guaranteed at all, since each vendor could offer their own encryption implementation.
The article is also glossing over authentication, only stating that WUSB will use the same authentication as wired USB. What authentication?! AFAIK standard USB uses the tried-and-true authentication method of assuming that if it can talk to a device, it obviously must be connected to the bus, and since it's a physical local area bus, the person who plugged it in obviously had physical access to it and was thus "authorized". This particular chicken won't fly with WUSB, though.
Warping and wobble. A paper disc has much less structural rigidity than a plastic disc, and bending or exposure to moisture (even just high air humidity) would be serious problems. Spinning an even just slightly warped disc at DVD speeds could easily ruin the lens assembly of the player in the long run, and would most likely instantly corrupt the data layer of the disc with concentric scratches.
I agree. Besides, how many writers can spend entire pages on a mathematical analysis of the productivity vs. frequency of sex graphs--both the manual override and the one-on-one variety--and still show their face at the book signing?
> In the long run the biggest cost involved is the number > of already-deployed sites and phones that are using the > older standard
I'd say it's mostly the infrastructure, not so much the phones. People seem to be upgrading their phones reflexively every year anyway. Regarding infrastructure upgrades, I'd say a not insignificant part of the cost is upgrading the back-end lines to support the higher bandwidth, and that cost should be similar for both UMTS and CDMA2000.
And most of the high precision milling machines and instruments used to make these are made in Germany and Japan. Go figure. It's a global market out there, nationalism and borders have little to do with bottom lines anymore.
> Guess what's 3G? WCDMA (wideband-CDMA) and CDMA-2000. > So CDMA is definitely not on its way out.
And guess that's based on W-CDMA? That's right, UMTS, the successor to GSM. Let's compare the latest in both camps, shall we? As someone else said, GSM is much more than a PHY specification, it's an entire cellular architecture. It can grow with the times and adopt the latest technologies for its various components without invalidating the rest of its standards.
What you have to realize is that when GSM was designed, TDMA was the best that could be done with the silicon of the day at an affordable price. The principles of CDMA were well understood, but CDMA takes A LOT more signal processing than TDMA and wasn't feasible in the late 80s. Don't think that Qualcomm all of a sudden pulled out some shiny alien technology from its sleeve with CDMA.
When it comes to superior technology versus widespread standards, the standards win anyday. What use is having that swell 802.11a card in your laptop when all the hotspots are WiFi? GSM has fostered a level of network transparency, international roaming, handset portability, and carrier competition that the CDMA world can only dream of. In fact, in many respects GSM can be viewed as a customer centric standard, while CDMA is vendor focused. GSM has technologically and legally been crafted to serve the end-user with carrier independence, while all current CDMA technologies are deployed to lock the user in to each specific vendor.
> We'll hopefully continue the trend of network standardization > with a solid featureset and a SIM-like identity mechanism, > but with an upgraded (CDMA-based) radio protocol.
UMTS, the completely mismanaged and seriously pre- and overhyped successor to GSM, is based on W-CDMA.
Uh, at least compare CDMA2000 to its contemporary, UMTS. Suddenly you're not talking "orders of magnitude" anymore. And they've both got about the same pathetic level of deployment.
> AS long as terrorists are convinced the > pullout was a direct result of the attack
This really had nothing to do with the terrorists and everything with Bush. This was ALL about sending a message to Bush, that things are going to be different from now on, and that the "coalition of the willing" can be considered history. It is unfortunate that Al Quaida can interpret the withdrawal as giving in to terrorism, but Spain really doesn't have all that many options for sending a strong message to Washington. What else can they do--tell Bush that he's not welcome at Club Med anymore? Pulling back the troops is the only message a subtlety-agnostic George "I don't do nuance" Bush understands. Removing the false impressions this creates for the terrorists can be countered in various other ways, such as a much stronger and publicly visible engagement in European and homeland security.
> The new Spanish leader thinks that by removing troops > from the middleast his country will be safer.
Bull, bull, bull! Will you quit beating up this oh-so-convenient strawman? That is NOT why he is planning on pulling the troops back, but rather because he (and the Spanish majority) opposed putting them in on principle from the start. Now he gets a chance to act on his principles. The media and their willing followers can spin this whichever way they want, but this straw ain't gonna turn to gold.
> Did you actually think the pr people were interviewing the ceo for a press release?
And did you actually think anyone reads those press releases? Given the realities of the process, a more productive use of time would be to count grains of sand at the beach with a boxing glove.
My wife has been using Endnote for her dissertation and hates it. While it is very feature-packed and comprehensive, the integration into Word is buggy as hell. She's had Word crash on her so often because of the Endnote plugin that she has stopped using it that way. If OOo had something even remotely comparable, I'd have no problem getting her to switch. What also makes OOo attractive is its built-in PDF generation. I already got her using Firefox after she became utterly disgusted with IE's popup vulnerability.
> all the samba work is based on specifications which > were either released publicly or which were > independently reverse-engineered
Thank you very much. Samba exists today no thanks to Microsoft in any particular fashion. Microsoft has never cared for the project anyway, they just didn't do much about it until now. All this whining that this means the death knell for Samba is just an utter load of crap, even if it comes from the horse's mouth.
> Don't be fooled by "word phones" offered by various US carriers. > These phones are locked tri-band phones that roam on European > GSM networks, but which are charged at outrageous rates by the > US company.
Best bet in the US is to buy an unlocked or never-locked European import of some last-year model. The prices are much better, the phone is most likely tri-band (since it obviously has to work in the US), and it's not locked. The US GSM phone market is still in its infancy. People are not used to the notion of cross-carrier phones and don't understand their appeal just yet.
> MATERIALS being KEY for ALL the major russian victories
Whatever. I'm sure it was Shermans that won the battle of Kursk. What won the Russians their victory in the end was their superior numbers and a willingness to send out five guys with one rifle, losses be damned. There's also something about being with your back against a wall that brings out that extra determination.
> Spoke [...] Latin all fluently
Must have come in real handy there.
No offense, but your post fairly smacks of that good ole' Yankee superiority complex. You must be sleeping with both hands around your massive balls at night.
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The last time I heard of an engine powered by the "magnetic energy" of permanent magnets was from a guy that is now selling alkaline water. Magnets seem to attract crackpots like fire flies.
> Higher levels of security involving encryption
> should be implemented at the application level.
Basically this means that secure communications will be up to the vendors, since it's not part of the standard. What that means is that you can forget widespread compatibility. While BT has had its teething problems with compatibility, theoretically at least any headset should work with any phone. Using WUSB however that wouldn't be guaranteed at all, since each vendor could offer their own encryption implementation.
The article is also glossing over authentication, only stating that WUSB will use the same authentication as wired USB. What authentication?! AFAIK standard USB uses the tried-and-true authentication method of assuming that if it can talk to a device, it obviously must be connected to the bus, and since it's a physical local area bus, the person who plugged it in obviously had physical access to it and was thus "authorized". This particular chicken won't fly with WUSB, though.
Which would still be susceptible to moisture wicking and bloating.
Warping and wobble. A paper disc has much less structural rigidity than a plastic disc, and bending or exposure to moisture (even just high air humidity) would be serious problems. Spinning an even just slightly warped disc at DVD speeds could easily ruin the lens assembly of the player in the long run, and would most likely instantly corrupt the data layer of the disc with concentric scratches.
I agree. Besides, how many writers can spend entire pages on a mathematical analysis of the productivity vs. frequency of sex graphs--both the manual override and the one-on-one variety--and still show their face at the book signing?
Well, I got bored half-way through your second paragraph. Not enough character development.
> In the long run the biggest cost involved is the number
> of already-deployed sites and phones that are using the
> older standard
I'd say it's mostly the infrastructure, not so much the phones. People seem to be upgrading their phones reflexively every year anyway. Regarding infrastructure upgrades, I'd say a not insignificant part of the cost is upgrading the back-end lines to support the higher bandwidth, and that cost should be similar for both UMTS and CDMA2000.
And most of the high precision milling machines and instruments used to make these are made in Germany and Japan. Go figure. It's a global market out there, nationalism and borders have little to do with bottom lines anymore.
> Serious enough to start a war, in fact.
You mean ANOTHER one?!
> Guess what's 3G? WCDMA (wideband-CDMA) and CDMA-2000.
> So CDMA is definitely not on its way out.
And guess that's based on W-CDMA? That's right, UMTS, the successor to GSM. Let's compare the latest in both camps, shall we? As someone else said, GSM is much more than a PHY specification, it's an entire cellular architecture. It can grow with the times and adopt the latest technologies for its various components without invalidating the rest of its standards.
What you have to realize is that when GSM was designed, TDMA was the best that could be done with the silicon of the day at an affordable price. The principles of CDMA were well understood, but CDMA takes A LOT more signal processing than TDMA and wasn't feasible in the late 80s. Don't think that Qualcomm all of a sudden pulled out some shiny alien technology from its sleeve with CDMA.
When it comes to superior technology versus widespread standards, the standards win anyday. What use is having that swell 802.11a card in your laptop when all the hotspots are WiFi? GSM has fostered a level of network transparency, international roaming, handset portability, and carrier competition that the CDMA world can only dream of. In fact, in many respects GSM can be viewed as a customer centric standard, while CDMA is vendor focused. GSM has technologically and legally been crafted to serve the end-user with carrier independence, while all current CDMA technologies are deployed to lock the user in to each specific vendor.
> We'll hopefully continue the trend of network standardization
> with a solid featureset and a SIM-like identity mechanism,
> but with an upgraded (CDMA-based) radio protocol.
UMTS, the completely mismanaged and seriously pre- and overhyped successor to GSM, is based on W-CDMA.
> GSM 56Kbps
> CDMA2000 2Mbps
Uh, at least compare CDMA2000 to its contemporary, UMTS. Suddenly you're not talking "orders of magnitude" anymore. And they've both got about the same pathetic level of deployment.
> AS long as terrorists are convinced the
> pullout was a direct result of the attack
This really had nothing to do with the terrorists and everything with Bush. This was ALL about sending a message to Bush, that things are going to be different from now on, and that the "coalition of the willing" can be considered history. It is unfortunate that Al Quaida can interpret the withdrawal as giving in to terrorism, but Spain really doesn't have all that many options for sending a strong message to Washington. What else can they do--tell Bush that he's not welcome at Club Med anymore? Pulling back the troops is the only message a subtlety-agnostic George "I don't do nuance" Bush understands. Removing the false impressions this creates for the terrorists can be countered in various other ways, such as a much stronger and publicly visible engagement in European and homeland security.
> The new Spanish leader thinks that by removing troops
> from the middleast his country will be safer.
Bull, bull, bull! Will you quit beating up this oh-so-convenient strawman? That is NOT why he is planning on pulling the troops back, but rather because he (and the Spanish majority) opposed putting them in on principle from the start. Now he gets a chance to act on his principles. The media and their willing followers can spin this whichever way they want, but this straw ain't gonna turn to gold.
Of course, she in turn could skip giving the old Johnson a good home for the rest of her life, so YMMV.
> Did you actually think the pr people were interviewing the ceo for a press release?
And did you actually think anyone reads those press releases? Given the realities of the process, a more productive use of time would be to count grains of sand at the beach with a boxing glove.
My wife has been using Endnote for her dissertation and hates it. While it is very feature-packed and comprehensive, the integration into Word is buggy as hell. She's had Word crash on her so often because of the Endnote plugin that she has stopped using it that way. If OOo had something even remotely comparable, I'd have no problem getting her to switch. What also makes OOo attractive is its built-in PDF generation. I already got her using Firefox after she became utterly disgusted with IE's popup vulnerability.
Don't forget that BBC1 is just him telling you what's on BBC2, BBC3 and BBC4.
> He remembers one time when it broke and the whole neighborhood pitched in to fix it...
In my neighborhood they'd have beaten him up for being so inconsiderate.
> all the samba work is based on specifications which
> were either released publicly or which were
> independently reverse-engineered
Thank you very much. Samba exists today no thanks to Microsoft in any particular fashion. Microsoft has never cared for the project anyway, they just didn't do much about it until now. All this whining that this means the death knell for Samba is just an utter load of crap, even if it comes from the horse's mouth.
> Don't be fooled by "word phones" offered by various US carriers.
> These phones are locked tri-band phones that roam on European
> GSM networks, but which are charged at outrageous rates by the
> US company.
Best bet in the US is to buy an unlocked or never-locked European import of some last-year model. The prices are much better, the phone is most likely tri-band (since it obviously has to work in the US), and it's not locked. The US GSM phone market is still in its infancy. People are not used to the notion of cross-carrier phones and don't understand their appeal just yet.
Even geekier is that you can get unlimited web and email via WAP using any standard plan. They block most other ports, but for free who can complain?
> Unlocked phones *will* work with US carrier SIMs.
Otherwise me using my Ericsson R520m would be just an illusion.
> MATERIALS being KEY for ALL the major russian victories
Whatever. I'm sure it was Shermans that won the battle of Kursk. What won the Russians their victory in the end was their superior numbers and a willingness to send out five guys with one rifle, losses be damned. There's also something about being with your back against a wall that brings out that extra determination.
> Spoke [...] Latin all fluently
Must have come in real handy there.
No offense, but your post fairly smacks of that good ole' Yankee superiority complex. You must be sleeping with both hands around your massive balls at night.
I think they will also slip on a peel.