that would mean that you have to move to some sort of symbolic token language. The fact is, the problem is even greater with programming languages. If you program in C/C++, Pascal, COBOL etc, you're really programming in the English version of that language. That leads to very bizzare and sometimes funny code in languages other than English, where keywords are English but identifiers and comments are in some other language.
I think what's important to realize here is that we're not trying to find the meaning of life. XML is simply a standardized way of tagging information and it's not perfect. But the quest for perfection can sometimes prevent us from arriving at a solution at all. The whole struggle to standardize on various industry-specific markup languages is difficult enough and has led to enough feuds and confusion. Let's not make it even more difficult by obfuscating the whole issue with another order of complexity. Once XML has done its job well, we can worry about the finer points.
Well, I admit I might be thinking too much conspiracy into the whole thing. Your explanations make perfect sense, so I won't contest. Besides, like another poster noted, the number of break-detecting VCRs must be pretty small, so the stations probably wouldn't bother.
So you obviously haven't watched much TV lately. There have been numerous occasions that I've seen where the transition break was missing. Or even worse, they insert fake ones in between commercials. Local stations in particular usually insert their own advert for the evening news etc as the last "commercial" before going back to the show, and they very often insert a transition break before their ad. I don't think that's an accident, they probably do it deliberately to foil VCRs with commercial break detectors.
The only question is whether portable storage technology--solid state or magnetic/optical/etc--will ever catch up to those kinds of requirements. Let's see, 16.8Mpixels * 3 bytes/pixel = 48MB per image, uncompressed. A 1GB IBM MicroDrive will hold 20 pictures. Forget any kind of solid state, it's out of its league here. I guess DVD-RAM will have to become cheap and small really soon. Or we have to get over our hangups with lossy compression and just accept it as a necessity.
I admit I didn't read any article(s) in question, but rather only the Slashdot replies. It seems that readers took the notion of models and metaphors to mean pretty much anything, so I'll chime in as well.
We use models pretty much every waking moment. There are of course the obvious scientific models, where we try to model the physical "reality" around us and try to explain new unknown observations with these models, or try to predict as yet unobserved behaviours. This is what brought us from the dark ages of religiously-oppressed pseudo-science to where we are today.
Then there are the models that we use in everyday life. Typically we have different names for them: rules of thumb, old wisdoms, experience etc. All of these help us build a model of life around us in general that is supposed to make decisions easier. Once we've learned that fire burns, we don't have to find that out again and again, it's a safe assumption that it does. This carries over to interactions with other people, and we build models of certain types of people, the kinds of behaviours of adopt or avoid to be liked or not disliked etc. These accumulated models then make up a large part of one's personality. We all know how this or that friend will react if we do or say a certain thing.
While these model certainly make everyday life much easier and less stressful, I think models can become very limiting or even desctructive if relied upon to the exclusion of new learning. Take the old saying that you can't teach an old dog new tricks; while it seems that most people tend to follow this course with advancing age, many people adopt this rigid attitude much earlier.
The boss at my previous job was a classic example. He was a very conservative person, his entire life dictated by rules of thumb, generalizations, and only his own personal experiences. Unfortunately this carried over into his professional life of managing a software and hardware development team. While managers in general are served very well by their experience and a certain dose of cautious conservativism to prevent them from gallopping into every new direction they hear about, the almost complete exclusion of new approaches and the unknown can eventually transform them into dead wood. This is more true in the IT industry than almost anywhere else.
My boss would always try to make each new problem conform to his set of experiences, and if that didn't work, he would either dead-lock, or try to over-simplify it to where he felt it became a familiar problem. When he pulled out his bag of platitudes and wisdoms, and we tried to convince him that this problem was sufficiently different to warrant some new thinking, he would always ridicule us by saying that we always thought each new problem was unique. Eventually the standoff between the manager and the team became so debilitating that the team members started leaving the company one by one.
I guess the moral of stories like this is that while models and metaphors are vital in helping us deal with an ever more complex world, we have to follow the scientific world and discard models when they are proven wrong or inadequate by new observations. We can only make our models conform to reality, and not vice versa.
These guys could sell the reader at Radio Shack for $20 and still make a tidy profit. I took one apart and checked the design, the bill of materials and manufacuring can't be more than $5 per device. And for $20 they could move A LOT of these suckers, if you compare that to the price of your average barcode reader.
What they're really after though is consumer behaviour. From what I understand about the way the software works, each time you scan something it sends the encoded string to their web site where it gets decoded and then sent back to you. They also create a log of the serial number of the reader, the barcode read, and who the reader is registered with. This gives them a nice log of consumer behaviour. THAT'S what they're really after, and that's how they can justify giving away millions of readers. In the end all they want to do is sell targeted mailing lists to third parties.
The argument to stick with commercial software because of the culpability is the biggest pile of horse shit ever served up. EVERY shrink-wrapped piece of software denies any responsibility for failure whatsoever, and that also applies to OEM or site licensed software. I would like to hear of a SINGLE case where a commercial software vendor was successfully sued.
The only exception is custom written software. If you contract a software project out, the boundaries for success and failure are usually very clearly defined and can lead to successful legal recourse. But that's not what open source detractors talk about. They're talking about shrink-wrapped software, or its functional equivalents.
Certainly much older than the hat he promised to eat if the Internet didn't collapse (or was it some other non-comestible?) He "invented" Ethernet while at Xerox, though it's being debated how much "inventing" it really took, since--as has been stated elsewhere--much of the technology was based on established principles. Since then he seems to pretty much have rested on his laurels, as befits one after so much hard work. I'm not aware of much further ground-breaking work he did after that.
Anyway, he wields his thusly-won fame to create the impression of much wider-reaching expertise and authority. He loves sitting on all sorts of panels and boards (watch those splinters now!) and taking his mouth for a spin. I've read his column at InfoWorld for years, and on average he has less to say than most of our development team members on a good day. He certainly is very fond of name dropping and all sorts of allusions to the lofty company he circulates in.
My favorite was his vitriolic article a couple of years ago or so to "impeach Clinton." He pretty much exposed himself as a troll and a person of little emotional consequence. He is in bed with Big Business, loves everything Big Business--as any good Republican should--and from that perspective he certainly has no love lost on Open Source. As far as the Internet is concerned, he'd probably much rather have it converted to one LARGE Ethernet network and do away with this pesky network-agnostic protocol called TCP/IP.
That's exactly what all the "everything is a file" defenders overlook. No inodes, no security settings, other than some all-or-nothing thing. Sure you can make everything LOOK like a file (heck, even Windows does that to some extent), but that doesn't MAKE it a file. If it really is a file, copy that socket to a floppy and let me put it on my machine. Hmm?
Thanks for the link, I went and downloaded it. To be honest, I've never been too concerned about the security of my own machine, since I usually have nothing invaluable on there that I couldn't loose. Most virus and such utilities can be a real pest and can get in your way at the worst times. But something like ZoneAlarm, if it does what I was talking about, would indeed be quite useful. Incidentally, is there any reason to go with the Pro version rather than the free one?
> Basically, Microsoft [...] often drops the ball when it comes to security.
True, true. Except when it comes to making file system security understandable to mere mortals. I'm still somewhat in the dark regarding file access privileges. The other week I couldn't share a folder on my drive out as read-only, no matter what I did other users couldn't see the contents of subfolders. Eventually it turned out that the subfolders of this folder had somehow received their own privileges and the parent folder's security settings weren't being inherited. I had to go through all the subfolders and files and reset the privileges on each one before it finally worked. Ok, somewhat off topic, but still regarding MS-and-security.
How about in a keyboard driver, like HP's latest? Any executable has the potential of networking, so people should slowly get used to this idea. One solution might be to have a kind of application firewall inside the OS, which lets you determine which apps should be allowed socket communications, and which not. And to be informed when an app tries to open a socket.
GSM uses 900 and 1800 MHz in Europe. But since GSM uses 1900 MHz in the US, that has led to the availability of tri-band phones in Europe that can do 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz. Still, they only talk GSM, so we're still waiting for multi-mode phones that can do GSM, CDMA, PCS etc. I think that will be a long time, since most US carriers are very adamant about locking you into their phones. I guess that gives them an extra revenue stream, I can't explain it any other way.
> This is one huge advantage the GSM has. It could be implemented in the US, but the cell
> phone companies have been reluctant to implement something like that more infavor of
> Nationwide roaming.
Of course it could be implemented, but it probably offers no added revenue possibilities. On the other hand, roaming is "long distance on steroids", huge profitability there. I think that's self-explanatory.
> Some of the fundamental ideas of CDMA (including digital spread spectrum) were
> originally created by the military to prevent radio jamming. Also, the US government is really
> sensitive about protecting the technology created in this country
True, but the spread spectrum technology is quite old now, and even if international pantents ever existed (which I'm not sure they did), they must have long elapsed. Besides, it's one of those things where, once the concept becomes clear, implementations can be arrived at independently quite easily. Same thing with CDMA, while a certain company (Qualcomm?) may hold certain concrete patents regarding a code division technology, it's relatively easy for other companies to say, hmm, code division multiplexing, neat idea, let's see what we can do. And if the implementations were sufficiently different from the original patent holder's, they would probably have a lot of difficulties to enforce their patents, especially internationally. In other words, unless it's a case where a company copied a technology lock, stock and barrel, including serial numbers and all,it's hard to do anything about copycats.
> On an off-topic note, I want to say I really apprecate you keeping this discussion civil. Too
> often on Slashdot discussions often turn into shouting matches
Well, to paraphrase some famous person, name calling is the last resort of the feeble-minded. At worst I would try to put you down in what I would consider an understated way, and then probably leave the thread.
But GSM/CDMA et al is hardly anything to get too excited about. I really don't care what the technology is, as long as it's universally accepted. Currently I think GSM is the favorite, but who knows, that may change. Personally I think the ideal would be a global packet switched network along the lines of 802.11 or so, a seamless "ether" of connectivity. Run everything on TCP/IP, and forget about emulating old circuit switched technology. But that will be a while.
Incidentally, on a related note, in Germany several states have tried to initiate digital radio broadcasting for many years now. Several technologies are market ready but have stopped short of being implemented. The major objection to all of them is that they rely on an old paradigm, the broadcast. Many opponents argue that today, in the age of the Internet and on-demand data, that paradigm is simply too antiquated. What we really need is a packet switched "radio system" that essentially streams the audio into your car, and can deliver much more than just radio shows. Rather than pre-defining what the digital channels can carry (80% voice + 20% miscellaneous such as text, data, etc), make it so general purpose that it's up to the user what he uses the bandwidth for.
That's pretty much also my vision of what the ideal cell phone is all about, rather than extending the old dial-up paradign into the wireless realm. Of course, all this has done in Germany is to muddle things up and take the steam out of the existing initiatives. So now it will be even longer before we see digital radio. Oh well...
Sure, but it won't be overnight. I believe UMTS uses CDMA, basically picking the goodies from all the current technologies. But UMTS is still far off in the future, they're still auctioning frequencies. I doubt it will replace GSM before 2005 or even much later.
Let's clarify the difference between a technology and an implementation. Many different systems could be based on the principle of code division multiplexing, but that doesn't mean they'll interoperate. CDMA as in use in the US is no standard at all, if I'm not mistaken there are several CDMA implementations even in the US. I seriously doubt you can take a Qualcomm phone, go to Asia or wherever else CDMA is popular, and start using it.
Anyway, people keep missing the bigger picture when advocating newer and better technology: it's all about standardization and interoperability. It doesn't matter that you have the best technology if not everyone is using it. That simply leads to islands of technology like in the US. It's better to have somewhat inferior technology--but that is still GOOD ENOUGH--which everyone commits to.
This is hard to explain to Americans that have never experienced GSM in action. It's not that the quality is superior, or the power requirements less, or the data rate higher. But a Brit can take his cell phone with him on holiday to Greece, buy a prepaid $25 card locally, stick it in the phone, and for the next two weeks he can make local calls just like he bought the phone locally. Try doing that in the US.
> The only real downside to CDMA is the US Government. They consider it as a "weapon"
> (just like encryption), so exporting it is really inconvient.
I'm confused here now. Are you arguing that US companies are the only ones capable of implementing CDMA technology, and that they have to be able to export it in order to "spread the word"? GSM was developed at a time when CDMA wasn't a glint in anyone's eye--or maybe it was, but the processing power wasn't available to do it cheaply. GSM and CDMA aren't contemporaries, CDMA is much more recent. As mentioned by others, given time, GSM will eventually subsume the better CDMA technology. That's partly what UMTS is all about.
I'm sorry to say, but your story reinforces what I said. If there weren't endlessly competing systems, providers wouldn't be switching back and forth all the time, and people's investments in phones might actually be worth something. As is stands, GTE recently merged with Verizon, and I hear my Sony phone (barely a year old) might soon be useless. I hear stories like this all the time. In the US it means: change provider, change phone, as simple as that. Even if they might use the same technology, most providers will ensure one way or another that you buy their phone.
GSM is also far from irrelevant in America for the reasons I listed in the original post. It's nobody's technology so to speak, while CDMA is Qualcomm's or whatever. It's easier to rally around a neutral technology than to give up your own and embrace your competitor's. While your provider might have dumped GSM, I wouldn't look for that trend to continue forever. GSM is the only standard that has consistently grown worldwide. Eventually even the US will follow the trend, sooner or later.
Heh, in a way. Except that with infrastructure standards are even more important than with OSs. A phone without infrastructure is about as useful as giving Bach a fancy radio, while a limited OS can still be servicable.
I congratulate the 5% of the US population who will have access to this technology. For their sake I hope they're only occasional travelers, so they won't miss their blessing when on the road.
Me, I'm waiting for GSM to finally take hold in the US. Which of course will be a very long time, because naturally CDMA is the better technology, so we must push hard to adopt that instead. The sooner the US wireless companies realize that GSM is inevitable, the better off everyone will be. It's inevitable because everyone else uses it, save for a few traditionally isolationist countries such as the USA and Japan. No other technology has the same chance for universal adoption in the US because each technology has some corporate parent with a vested interest in seeing it succeed. This fact alone will prevent the competing companies from adopting each other's technologies. Sure, we'll end up with dual- and tri-band phones eventually, with the ability to mostly roam through the country--but what will have changed then from the analog days?
The consumer cares less about what technology the phone uses than whether it will work when turned on. Most consumers have no idea what wireless system their local provider uses, neither do most of the employees of those companies--just call them up and ask. But most people sure as heck know the service boundaries of their cells.
> the war between CDMA & GSM is almost as ferocious as Gnome vs. KDE
What war? GSM is the norm, the rest are also-rans. To preempt any inevitable claims to the superiority of CDMA, it's true, it's all true. However, it doesn't matter, as exemplified by the scores of countries with almost complete GSM coverage. It's more important to have a mediocre widely adopted standard than the best--but poorly adopted--technology. But that's old news, so I'll stop.
I just went to RS and got a couple at noon. They're very light and almost insubstantial. I'm going to take one apart tonight, but my guess is that they used some proprietary hardware and firmware for the scanning. All it takes is a PIC, an LED, a photo transistor and some firmware, for a basic barcode reader. It only decodes a couple of code types anyway, so the firmware can be relatively simple. The whole reader probably costs $3 or less to manufacture, so I doubt they used off the shelf barcoding chipsets.
Hear, hear, finally the words were uttered, the greed verbalized. Until now it was the sin that no one dared mention (no, not that one!), tacitly accepted by everyone, yet never acknowledged. Now Sony finally came out shouting it, screaming it at the masses: we're making shitloads of money off you, and we're gonna keep doing it forever, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you try to do anything about it, we'll beat you with a big stick and still take your money.
Yet the masses are sheep, they bleet in an uproar of protest, then get back to their herd and forget. Soon they will line up again at Sony's trough, and everybody will be happy again.
The thing is, as outraged as people might get about the open contempt of a company for their customers, the track record of making a company pay is not good. Most of the time they get away with it, because people simply don't care enough.
Slashdot Mirror
...is it just me, or does Tulatin sound suspiciously much like Too-Late-in? Just a thought...
that would mean that you have to move to some sort of symbolic token language. The fact is, the problem is even greater with programming languages. If you program in C/C++, Pascal, COBOL etc, you're really programming in the English version of that language. That leads to very bizzare and sometimes funny code in languages other than English, where keywords are English but identifiers and comments are in some other language.
I think what's important to realize here is that we're not trying to find the meaning of life. XML is simply a standardized way of tagging information and it's not perfect. But the quest for perfection can sometimes prevent us from arriving at a solution at all. The whole struggle to standardize on various industry-specific markup languages is difficult enough and has led to enough feuds and confusion. Let's not make it even more difficult by obfuscating the whole issue with another order of complexity. Once XML has done its job well, we can worry about the finer points.
Well, I admit I might be thinking too much conspiracy into the whole thing. Your explanations make perfect sense, so I won't contest. Besides, like another poster noted, the number of break-detecting VCRs must be pretty small, so the stations probably wouldn't bother.
So you obviously haven't watched much TV lately. There have been numerous occasions that I've seen where the transition break was missing. Or even worse, they insert fake ones in between commercials. Local stations in particular usually insert their own advert for the evening news etc as the last "commercial" before going back to the show, and they very often insert a transition break before their ad. I don't think that's an accident, they probably do it deliberately to foil VCRs with commercial break detectors.
Your cover is blown. You can come out now...
> A guy a work with wrote 100 words and got one.
I guess it couldn't have been you, though.
The only question is whether portable storage technology--solid state or magnetic/optical/etc--will ever catch up to those kinds of requirements. Let's see, 16.8Mpixels * 3 bytes/pixel = 48MB per image, uncompressed. A 1GB IBM MicroDrive will hold 20 pictures. Forget any kind of solid state, it's out of its league here. I guess DVD-RAM will have to become cheap and small really soon. Or we have to get over our hangups with lossy compression and just accept it as a necessity.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I admit I didn't read any article(s) in question, but rather only the Slashdot replies. It seems that readers took the notion of models and metaphors to mean pretty much anything, so I'll chime in as well.
We use models pretty much every waking moment. There are of course the obvious scientific models, where we try to model the physical "reality" around us and try to explain new unknown observations with these models, or try to predict as yet unobserved behaviours. This is what brought us from the dark ages of religiously-oppressed pseudo-science to where we are today.
Then there are the models that we use in everyday life. Typically we have different names for them: rules of thumb, old wisdoms, experience etc. All of these help us build a model of life around us in general that is supposed to make decisions easier. Once we've learned that fire burns, we don't have to find that out again and again, it's a safe assumption that it does. This carries over to interactions with other people, and we build models of certain types of people, the kinds of behaviours of adopt or avoid to be liked or not disliked etc. These accumulated models then make up a large part of one's personality. We all know how this or that friend will react if we do or say a certain thing.
While these model certainly make everyday life much easier and less stressful, I think models can become very limiting or even desctructive if relied upon to the exclusion of new learning. Take the old saying that you can't teach an old dog new tricks; while it seems that most people tend to follow this course with advancing age, many people adopt this rigid attitude much earlier.
The boss at my previous job was a classic example. He was a very conservative person, his entire life dictated by rules of thumb, generalizations, and only his own personal experiences. Unfortunately this carried over into his professional life of managing a software and hardware development team. While managers in general are served very well by their experience and a certain dose of cautious conservativism to prevent them from gallopping into every new direction they hear about, the almost complete exclusion of new approaches and the unknown can eventually transform them into dead wood. This is more true in the IT industry than almost anywhere else.
My boss would always try to make each new problem conform to his set of experiences, and if that didn't work, he would either dead-lock, or try to over-simplify it to where he felt it became a familiar problem. When he pulled out his bag of platitudes and wisdoms, and we tried to convince him that this problem was sufficiently different to warrant some new thinking, he would always ridicule us by saying that we always thought each new problem was unique. Eventually the standoff between the manager and the team became so debilitating that the team members started leaving the company one by one.
I guess the moral of stories like this is that while models and metaphors are vital in helping us deal with an ever more complex world, we have to follow the scientific world and discard models when they are proven wrong or inadequate by new observations. We can only make our models conform to reality, and not vice versa.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
These guys could sell the reader at Radio Shack for $20 and still make a tidy profit. I took one apart and checked the design, the bill of materials and manufacuring can't be more than $5 per device. And for $20 they could move A LOT of these suckers, if you compare that to the price of your average barcode reader.
What they're really after though is consumer behaviour. From what I understand about the way the software works, each time you scan something it sends the encoded string to their web site where it gets decoded and then sent back to you. They also create a log of the serial number of the reader, the barcode read, and who the reader is registered with. This gives them a nice log of consumer behaviour. THAT'S what they're really after, and that's how they can justify giving away millions of readers. In the end all they want to do is sell targeted mailing lists to third parties.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
The argument to stick with commercial software because of the culpability is the biggest pile of horse shit ever served up. EVERY shrink-wrapped piece of software denies any responsibility for failure whatsoever, and that also applies to OEM or site licensed software. I would like to hear of a SINGLE case where a commercial software vendor was successfully sued.
The only exception is custom written software. If you contract a software project out, the boundaries for success and failure are usually very clearly defined and can lead to successful legal recourse. But that's not what open source detractors talk about. They're talking about shrink-wrapped software, or its functional equivalents.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Certainly much older than the hat he promised to eat if the Internet didn't collapse (or was it some other non-comestible?) He "invented" Ethernet while at Xerox, though it's being debated how much "inventing" it really took, since--as has been stated elsewhere--much of the technology was based on established principles. Since then he seems to pretty much have rested on his laurels, as befits one after so much hard work. I'm not aware of much further ground-breaking work he did after that.
Anyway, he wields his thusly-won fame to create the impression of much wider-reaching expertise and authority. He loves sitting on all sorts of panels and boards (watch those splinters now!) and taking his mouth for a spin. I've read his column at InfoWorld for years, and on average he has less to say than most of our development team members on a good day. He certainly is very fond of name dropping and all sorts of allusions to the lofty company he circulates in.
My favorite was his vitriolic article a couple of years ago or so to "impeach Clinton." He pretty much exposed himself as a troll and a person of little emotional consequence. He is in bed with Big Business, loves everything Big Business--as any good Republican should--and from that perspective he certainly has no love lost on Open Source. As far as the Internet is concerned, he'd probably much rather have it converted to one LARGE Ethernet network and do away with this pesky network-agnostic protocol called TCP/IP.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
That's exactly what all the "everything is a file" defenders overlook. No inodes, no security settings, other than some all-or-nothing thing. Sure you can make everything LOOK like a file (heck, even Windows does that to some extent), but that doesn't MAKE it a file. If it really is a file, copy that socket to a floppy and let me put it on my machine. Hmm?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Thanks for the link, I went and downloaded it. To be honest, I've never been too concerned about the security of my own machine, since I usually have nothing invaluable on there that I couldn't loose. Most virus and such utilities can be a real pest and can get in your way at the worst times. But something like ZoneAlarm, if it does what I was talking about, would indeed be quite useful. Incidentally, is there any reason to go with the Pro version rather than the free one?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
> Basically, Microsoft [...] often drops the ball when it comes to security.
True, true. Except when it comes to making file system security understandable to mere mortals. I'm still somewhat in the dark regarding file access privileges. The other week I couldn't share a folder on my drive out as read-only, no matter what I did other users couldn't see the contents of subfolders. Eventually it turned out that the subfolders of this folder had somehow received their own privileges and the parent folder's security settings weren't being inherited. I had to go through all the subfolders and files and reset the privileges on each one before it finally worked. Ok, somewhat off topic, but still regarding MS-and-security.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
How about in a keyboard driver, like HP's latest? Any executable has the potential of networking, so people should slowly get used to this idea. One solution might be to have a kind of application firewall inside the OS, which lets you determine which apps should be allowed socket communications, and which not. And to be informed when an app tries to open a socket.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
GSM uses 900 and 1800 MHz in Europe. But since GSM uses 1900 MHz in the US, that has led to the availability of tri-band phones in Europe that can do 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz. Still, they only talk GSM, so we're still waiting for multi-mode phones that can do GSM, CDMA, PCS etc. I think that will be a long time, since most US carriers are very adamant about locking you into their phones. I guess that gives them an extra revenue stream, I can't explain it any other way.
> This is one huge advantage the GSM has. It could be implemented in the US, but the cell
> phone companies have been reluctant to implement something like that more infavor of
> Nationwide roaming.
Of course it could be implemented, but it probably offers no added revenue possibilities. On the other hand, roaming is "long distance on steroids", huge profitability there. I think that's self-explanatory.
> Some of the fundamental ideas of CDMA (including digital spread spectrum) were
> originally created by the military to prevent radio jamming. Also, the US government is really
> sensitive about protecting the technology created in this country
True, but the spread spectrum technology is quite old now, and even if international pantents ever existed (which I'm not sure they did), they must have long elapsed. Besides, it's one of those things where, once the concept becomes clear, implementations can be arrived at independently quite easily. Same thing with CDMA, while a certain company (Qualcomm?) may hold certain concrete patents regarding a code division technology, it's relatively easy for other companies to say, hmm, code division multiplexing, neat idea, let's see what we can do. And if the implementations were sufficiently different from the original patent holder's, they would probably have a lot of difficulties to enforce their patents, especially internationally. In other words, unless it's a case where a company copied a technology lock, stock and barrel, including serial numbers and all,it's hard to do anything about copycats.
> On an off-topic note, I want to say I really apprecate you keeping this discussion civil. Too
> often on Slashdot discussions often turn into shouting matches
Well, to paraphrase some famous person, name calling is the last resort of the feeble-minded. At worst I would try to put you down in what I would consider an understated way, and then probably leave the thread.
But GSM/CDMA et al is hardly anything to get too excited about. I really don't care what the technology is, as long as it's universally accepted. Currently I think GSM is the favorite, but who knows, that may change. Personally I think the ideal would be a global packet switched network along the lines of 802.11 or so, a seamless "ether" of connectivity. Run everything on TCP/IP, and forget about emulating old circuit switched technology. But that will be a while.
Incidentally, on a related note, in Germany several states have tried to initiate digital radio broadcasting for many years now. Several technologies are market ready but have stopped short of being implemented. The major objection to all of them is that they rely on an old paradigm, the broadcast. Many opponents argue that today, in the age of the Internet and on-demand data, that paradigm is simply too antiquated. What we really need is a packet switched "radio system" that essentially streams the audio into your car, and can deliver much more than just radio shows. Rather than pre-defining what the digital channels can carry (80% voice + 20% miscellaneous such as text, data, etc), make it so general purpose that it's up to the user what he uses the bandwidth for.
That's pretty much also my vision of what the ideal cell phone is all about, rather than extending the old dial-up paradign into the wireless realm. Of course, all this has done in Germany is to muddle things up and take the steam out of the existing initiatives. So now it will be even longer before we see digital radio. Oh well...
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
> The *entire* world is slowly switching to CDMA
Sure, but it won't be overnight. I believe UMTS uses CDMA, basically picking the goodies from all the current technologies. But UMTS is still far off in the future, they're still auctioning frequencies. I doubt it will replace GSM before 2005 or even much later.
Let's clarify the difference between a technology and an implementation. Many different systems could be based on the principle of code division multiplexing, but that doesn't mean they'll interoperate. CDMA as in use in the US is no standard at all, if I'm not mistaken there are several CDMA implementations even in the US. I seriously doubt you can take a Qualcomm phone, go to Asia or wherever else CDMA is popular, and start using it.
Anyway, people keep missing the bigger picture when advocating newer and better technology: it's all about standardization and interoperability. It doesn't matter that you have the best technology if not everyone is using it. That simply leads to islands of technology like in the US. It's better to have somewhat inferior technology--but that is still GOOD ENOUGH--which everyone commits to.
This is hard to explain to Americans that have never experienced GSM in action. It's not that the quality is superior, or the power requirements less, or the data rate higher. But a Brit can take his cell phone with him on holiday to Greece, buy a prepaid $25 card locally, stick it in the phone, and for the next two weeks he can make local calls just like he bought the phone locally. Try doing that in the US.
> The only real downside to CDMA is the US Government. They consider it as a "weapon"
> (just like encryption), so exporting it is really inconvient.
I'm confused here now. Are you arguing that US companies are the only ones capable of implementing CDMA technology, and that they have to be able to export it in order to "spread the word"? GSM was developed at a time when CDMA wasn't a glint in anyone's eye--or maybe it was, but the processing power wasn't available to do it cheaply. GSM and CDMA aren't contemporaries, CDMA is much more recent. As mentioned by others, given time, GSM will eventually subsume the better CDMA technology. That's partly what UMTS is all about.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I'm sorry to say, but your story reinforces what I said. If there weren't endlessly competing systems, providers wouldn't be switching back and forth all the time, and people's investments in phones might actually be worth something. As is stands, GTE recently merged with Verizon, and I hear my Sony phone (barely a year old) might soon be useless. I hear stories like this all the time. In the US it means: change provider, change phone, as simple as that. Even if they might use the same technology, most providers will ensure one way or another that you buy their phone.
GSM is also far from irrelevant in America for the reasons I listed in the original post. It's nobody's technology so to speak, while CDMA is Qualcomm's or whatever. It's easier to rally around a neutral technology than to give up your own and embrace your competitor's. While your provider might have dumped GSM, I wouldn't look for that trend to continue forever. GSM is the only standard that has consistently grown worldwide. Eventually even the US will follow the trend, sooner or later.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Heh, in a way. Except that with infrastructure standards are even more important than with OSs. A phone without infrastructure is about as useful as giving Bach a fancy radio, while a limited OS can still be servicable.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I congratulate the 5% of the US population who will have access to this technology. For their sake I hope they're only occasional travelers, so they won't miss their blessing when on the road.
Me, I'm waiting for GSM to finally take hold in the US. Which of course will be a very long time, because naturally CDMA is the better technology, so we must push hard to adopt that instead. The sooner the US wireless companies realize that GSM is inevitable, the better off everyone will be. It's inevitable because everyone else uses it, save for a few traditionally isolationist countries such as the USA and Japan. No other technology has the same chance for universal adoption in the US because each technology has some corporate parent with a vested interest in seeing it succeed. This fact alone will prevent the competing companies from adopting each other's technologies. Sure, we'll end up with dual- and tri-band phones eventually, with the ability to mostly roam through the country--but what will have changed then from the analog days?
The consumer cares less about what technology the phone uses than whether it will work when turned on. Most consumers have no idea what wireless system their local provider uses, neither do most of the employees of those companies--just call them up and ask. But most people sure as heck know the service boundaries of their cells.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
> the war between CDMA & GSM is almost as ferocious as Gnome vs. KDE
What war? GSM is the norm, the rest are also-rans. To preempt any inevitable claims to the superiority of CDMA, it's true, it's all true. However, it doesn't matter, as exemplified by the scores of countries with almost complete GSM coverage. It's more important to have a mediocre widely adopted standard than the best--but poorly adopted--technology. But that's old news, so I'll stop.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I thought we're talking about MS Office here. There's no requirement to ship Office with a new PC, the stranglehold was mainly on Windows.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I just went to RS and got a couple at noon. They're very light and almost insubstantial. I'm going to take one apart tonight, but my guess is that they used some proprietary hardware and firmware for the scanning. All it takes is a PIC, an LED, a photo transistor and some firmware, for a basic barcode reader. It only decodes a couple of code types anyway, so the firmware can be relatively simple. The whole reader probably costs $3 or less to manufacture, so I doubt they used off the shelf barcoding chipsets.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
No, never, never! It's 248 on DirecTV, BTW. I was too young to see the original series (and laugh, that is), so I have to make up for lost time.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Hear, hear, finally the words were uttered, the greed verbalized. Until now it was the sin that no one dared mention (no, not that one!), tacitly accepted by everyone, yet never acknowledged. Now Sony finally came out shouting it, screaming it at the masses: we're making shitloads of money off you, and we're gonna keep doing it forever, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you try to do anything about it, we'll beat you with a big stick and still take your money.
Yet the masses are sheep, they bleet in an uproar of protest, then get back to their herd and forget. Soon they will line up again at Sony's trough, and everybody will be happy again.
The thing is, as outraged as people might get about the open contempt of a company for their customers, the track record of making a company pay is not good. Most of the time they get away with it, because people simply don't care enough.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu