I think that you missed the point with this one. Qualcomm was able to get 153kbit/s with one person in a moving car. That's quite an accomplishment. This is part of their High Data Rate (HDR) portion of CDMA2000. That specification is aiming at providing 1MB/sec to a stationary person & 384 kbit/s to a walking person.
Although I don't care to start a holy war with the GSM folks (for those who don't know, the war between CDMA & GSM is almost as ferocious as Gnome vs. KDE, Macintosh vs. Windows, Ford vs. Chevy, etc), I will say that GSM will not get 144 kbit/s in the USA, because of the extremely limited bandwith provided by the FCC. Because of the way the FCC split the 800MHz band, Qualcomm was limited to design CDMA into a 1.25 MHz framework. (IMHO, the FCC did do a much better job allocating the 1900MHz (aka PCS) bandwidth, but we are still stuck with the 800MHz regulations) To get 153 kbit/s in 1.25MHz bandwith is pretty amazing, IMHO.
Maybe when the FCC auctions off the next frequency, they will take back the 800MHz frequencies and limit them to FDMA (frequency division multiple access, aka AMPS). That way, we would be able to take advantage of a wider spectrum for our data transfer.
If you want to learn more about CDMA, I recommend looking through the CDG (CDMA Development Group) website. (should I link to that, or is Judge Kaplan going to get mad =-) )
If I remember correctly, this was rumored that the NSA had found a way to break the PGP encryption. That's probably why they haven't discouraged the useage of it all of these years...
While I am an American, I do have a different view on politics than the average American.
Now politicians will have a tougher time side-stepping issues or just focusing on issues (or dirt) raised by the opponent. They'll now have to consider the real issues
IMHO, Politicians talk about issues just to play the role of Presidential Canidate. People rarely vote for people based on the issues that they bring up. For example, the tallest Presidential canidate has won every election since the advent of TV (and maybe longer than that...Oh, yea, George W. Bush is the tallest presidental canidate this year).
Also, when a Politician gets elected, they almost always try & implement the issues that they campaigned for during the election. Almost always, the Americans people get upset when the Government tries to change things. Case in point:
1) Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992. He promised a new Health Care System. He put his wife Hillary in charge of revamping the system, and after they spent millions of dollars on the research of the system, they tried to implement it. Americans complained how it was the worst idea ever, and as far as I know, it hasn't been implemented yet.
2) In 1996, the Republicans were elected to the House of Representives based on the "Contract w/ America." When they tried to implement many of the changes that they promised, Americans balked, and it cost several dozen congressman their jobs in the next election.
...And to talk about Katz's point about people not voting, the Republician party *wants* that. (FYI, I'm a Republican because I believe that we should strive for a smaller, more efficient govt, but that's my humble opinion & respect the beliefs of others, too) Anyway, election data has shown that as the number of people that vote increase, the more likley people are going to vote for the percieved liberal party. For example, there are a few countries where voting is almost mandatory, and in those elections, the most liberal party almost always wins.
Also, when the DeCSS code was written, I don't think that there were any DVD players being developed for Linux. These closed source versions are also likely to only be available for Linux86, not any of the hundreds of other varieties (including LinuxPPC, etc). Also, (as far as I know) there are no DVD players available/being developed for the BSDs.
This is why this case is such a big issue. The MPAA is blocking you from watching movies without a technological reason if you have an "unsupported" platform. In effect, they are taking away the rights for us to watch the movies how we choose to watch them!
Even though the phone company is required to open up their DSL lines to competitors, it doesn't mean that they won't find a way to enforce thier monopoly. I used to work for a company in Southern California that got their DSL lines through Pac Bell, and their service through Flashcom (I think?). Whenever the Pac Bell office had DSL problems of their own, they would "debug" their system by unplugging all of the non-PacBell customers DSL phone lines, effectivly ending our service. Sometimes, it would take 3-4 days to get the lines plugged back in & working again, so unless these incedents were isolated to our area (which I doubt), I can't imagine that the other providers would have a fair shot at providing good service.
I think that servers do *slightly* hurt the cable modem network more than surfers, because the limited amount of upload bandwith that you share with your neighbors will be saturated by you (hence the "web-hog" commercials that we saw here in California)
If I recall correctly, the download bandwith on the cable modems are like 10x greater than the upload bandwith...
I don't really recall where I said that only CDMA works on those frequencies? I just said that those are the frequencies available in the US for cell phone calls...
Also, to make your point more complete, Nextel's network (which is similiar to TDMA) works at 800 MHz, as well as those phones that you use when you call out of a commercial airliner at $2/minute.
Before everybody jumps to blame the wireless providers (don't get me wrong, they are part of the problem), I think that it is important to also look at what the government has done to limit the wireless providers.
There are 2 bandwidths open for cellular communication in the USA 800Mhz (std. cellular) & 1900MHz (PCS). These all use the CDMA technology invented by Qualcomm, a US Compnay. Most countries in the world are slowly switching to this technology, as it is a *much* better technology for cell phone use.
Anyway, back to the point. For the 800MHz bandwith, the FCC has divided it up into 2 channels per market (A & B...The FCC then gave the A channel & B channel to a different service provider (I believe each gets 10MHz per channel)) The 1900MHz spectrum is divided into 6 different channels. (The A,B&C channels are divided into 60MHz ranges, and the D,E&F channels are divided into 20MHz per channel)
In Europe (and Asia), the wireless spectrums are not broken up into 2 (or more) seperate channels, which gives the providers much more bandwith to serve things other than voice. But I don't believe that their dominace is going to last much longer. Recently, the final Specifications for CDMA2000 (as opposed to CDMA One, which is used right now) have been released, and should be implemented by 2001. This was designed with the limited bandwith in mind, and will *guarentee* 384kbps internet access for your cell phone (as opposed to 14.4k/s)
I totally agree with this comment above. Also, remember about a year ago when we were discussing the Porn-Filtering software available? I remember that several of those software manufacutres blocked several porn sites AND the sites that was critical of their software...
Yes, but Franklin didn't live in an era were innocent children are attacked and killed every day, where pornographers make twice as much money as the regular film industry, where Islamic fundamentalists want to destroy America and where crime and murder are so commonplace.
Don--
I am just curious where you got that iformation? Almost all of the information taht I've heard is that crime rates are at their all time lowest (I read an article about 3 months ago in the San Diego Union Tribune that even had statistics that gun-violence is at one of the lowest points in the last 50 years, despite what we may read in the newspaper). The reason that so many people think it is so high, is because the media focuses on crime, as focusing on crime increases their viewers.
Also, about the Islamic Fundamentalists, I think that your statement about them is very racist. I have friends that grew up in the middle east that don't want to blow up the US, and I'm sure that there are lots of non-Islamic people that wish to blow up the US...
I realize that this is a bit off topic, but I thought that I saw a one-handed "keyboard" a few years ago. I'm trying to remember who made it, but it was essentially something that you put your hand on, and then each finger was given a key & the thumb recieved 3 key. You got characters to appear by pressing combinations of those buttons. I don't know if it still exists, but it was interesting
I whole heartly agree. How would you feel if your life was endangered because someone posted a PDF with your name on it on their website? It's one thing to fight for freedom of information when some companies profit is involved (at least their employees go home and put food on their plates every night), but when human lives are involved, I feel that it is important to protect them at all costs. Granted, I agree whole-heartedly with the Open-Source, Free-Speech ideas, but I don't think that we should unneccesarly sacrafice people's lives because we believe that information should be free.
Yea, it will be at least 1.5 more years until M$ will be split up...maybe someone (Linux/BSD/Apple?) will be able to make inroads into the market for OS's before then!
This reminds me of that Simpons Episode where Homer doesn't allow Bart to go see that Itchy & Scraty movie. Homer tells Bart to watch TV instead, and Bart, who is upset at Homer for not letting him go says something like "TV Sucks".
Homer got really upset and said (in a growling voice) "Bart, I know your upset, but don't say anything you don't mean" or something like that...great episode!
Just a FYI, There is a semi-browsing function avaliable in Napster...If you go into a chat room and see all of the users, you can select one and see what music each has on their hard drives... Dan
This reminds me of when I moved into the dorms at College...I was so happy that I was able to live in a place with built-in high speed connections! I know what type of house I'm going to buy!
ummmm....I hate to break it to you, but that cell phone that you put against your head everyday releases quite a bit of microwave radiation...probably more than you'll get from Los Alamos...
Oh, trivial. But how hard to get people to run it?
I disagree with your logic. I don't think that it would be very hard to get people to run such a program. We all known people who have sent those email messages stating that "if you forward this to 10 people, then the Energizer Bunny will hop across your screen" A script like this could easily be executed that way (and in the process affect more than just linux users). I agree that it would be more difficult than double clicking on Outlook (maybe the KDE email reader is that simple? I wouldn't know, I still use mwm =-) )
This isn't a flame attack on you, but on the 1000's of Linux & Mac users out there that are proudly claiming that it couldn't happen on their platform. I realize that the damage would be much less (especially on a Unix based system), but it still is possible for something similiar to this to affect somebody other than windows...
Although I agree that I'd love to see Microsoft disappear, I'd also like to point out that I don't think that Linux/Macintosh machines are totally invunerable to this sort of attack. How hard would it be for me to write a simple shell script (Mac users replace shell script with AppleScript) that finds all of the email addresses in a users pine/elm folders (Mac users, again, replace this with Eudora, Look-out (oops, I mean outlook), Emailer, etc) and then mail a copy of the script to every one of those users and then execute a command such as "rm -rf *"
Granted, this would probably only affect a single user's directory (unless someone was really dumb enough to run everything as root), but there are tons of morons out there that will run anything they get from a friend.
I've never tried something like that, and it may be easier said than done, but I don't think that Linux/Mac users should be proclaiming that they are immune from such an attack. I do partially blame Microsoft for the ILOVEYOU virus, and I think that it might be excessive that a scripting language as access to modify the registry... Dan
My understand that RISC doesn't neccessary mean that there are less instrutions (it's a by product of the design -- I've heard that the "G4" (aka PPC 7400) has almost 2 times the instructions as the "G3" (PPC 740/750) because of its altivec unit) I thought that a loose definition of a RISC CPU was that all of the microcodes (instructions) were done in hardware, while a CISC CPU computes the microcodes in software. My knowledge in this field is pretty limited, so don't quote me, but I'm pretty certain that RISC vs. CISC is more of a design philiosphy vs the idea of reducing the number of instuctions...
I don't see what the national security problems were with the GPS system being off by 100m or so. To me, it seems that if I created a missle, and it landed within 100m of my prefered target, it would take out my target. Did the government finally come to this conclusion, too, or am I missing a point?
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Hey Jage,
I think that you missed the point with this one. Qualcomm was able to get 153kbit/s with one person in a moving car. That's quite an accomplishment. This is part of their High Data Rate (HDR) portion of CDMA2000. That specification is aiming at providing 1MB/sec to a stationary person & 384 kbit/s to a walking person.
Although I don't care to start a holy war with the GSM folks (for those who don't know, the war between CDMA & GSM is almost as ferocious as Gnome vs. KDE, Macintosh vs. Windows, Ford vs. Chevy, etc), I will say that GSM will not get 144 kbit/s in the USA, because of the extremely limited bandwith provided by the FCC. Because of the way the FCC split the 800MHz band, Qualcomm was limited to design CDMA into a 1.25 MHz framework. (IMHO, the FCC did do a much better job allocating the 1900MHz (aka PCS) bandwidth, but we are still stuck with the 800MHz regulations) To get 153 kbit/s in 1.25MHz bandwith is pretty amazing, IMHO.
Maybe when the FCC auctions off the next frequency, they will take back the 800MHz frequencies and limit them to FDMA (frequency division multiple access, aka AMPS). That way, we would be able to take advantage of a wider spectrum for our data transfer.
If you want to learn more about CDMA, I recommend looking through the CDG (CDMA Development Group) website. (should I link to that, or is Judge Kaplan going to get mad =-) )
Dan
If I remember correctly, this was rumored that the NSA had found a way to break the PGP encryption. That's probably why they haven't discouraged the useage of it all of these years...
Whoops, sorry, I forgot to close the italics tag =-)
While I am an American, I do have a different view on politics than the average American.
...And to talk about Katz's point about people not voting, the Republician party *wants* that. (FYI, I'm a Republican because I believe that we should strive for a smaller, more efficient govt, but that's my humble opinion & respect the beliefs of others, too) Anyway, election data has shown that as the number of people that vote increase, the more likley people are going to vote for the percieved liberal party. For example, there are a few countries where voting is almost mandatory, and in those elections, the most liberal party almost always wins.
Now politicians will have a tougher time side-stepping issues or just focusing on issues (or dirt) raised by the opponent. They'll now have to consider the real issues
IMHO, Politicians talk about issues just to play the role of Presidential Canidate. People rarely vote for people based on the issues that they bring up. For example, the tallest Presidential canidate has won every election since the advent of TV (and maybe longer than that...Oh, yea, George W. Bush is the tallest presidental canidate this year).
Also, when a Politician gets elected, they almost always try & implement the issues that they campaigned for during the election. Almost always, the Americans people get upset when the Government tries to change things. Case in point:
1) Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992. He promised a new Health Care System. He put his wife Hillary in charge of revamping the system, and after they spent millions of dollars on the research of the system, they tried to implement it. Americans complained how it was the worst idea ever, and as far as I know, it hasn't been implemented yet.
2) In 1996, the Republicans were elected to the House of Representives based on the "Contract w/ America." When they tried to implement many of the changes that they promised, Americans balked, and it cost several dozen congressman their jobs in the next election.
Also, when the DeCSS code was written, I don't think that there were any DVD players being developed for Linux. These closed source versions are also likely to only be available for Linux86, not any of the hundreds of other varieties (including LinuxPPC, etc). Also, (as far as I know) there are no DVD players available/being developed for the BSDs.
This is why this case is such a big issue. The MPAA is blocking you from watching movies without a technological reason if you have an "unsupported" platform. In effect, they are taking away the rights for us to watch the movies how we choose to watch them!
Even though the phone company is required to open up their DSL lines to competitors, it doesn't mean that they won't find a way to enforce thier monopoly. I used to work for a company in Southern California that got their DSL lines through Pac Bell, and their service through Flashcom (I think?). Whenever the Pac Bell office had DSL problems of their own, they would "debug" their system by unplugging all of the non-PacBell customers DSL phone lines, effectivly ending our service. Sometimes, it would take 3-4 days to get the lines plugged back in & working again, so unless these incedents were isolated to our area (which I doubt), I can't imagine that the other providers would have a fair shot at providing good service.
I think that servers do *slightly* hurt the cable modem network more than surfers, because the limited amount of upload bandwith that you share with your neighbors will be saturated by you (hence the "web-hog" commercials that we saw here in California)
If I recall correctly, the download bandwith on the cable modems are like 10x greater than the upload bandwith...
I don't really recall where I said that only CDMA works on those frequencies? I just said that those are the frequencies available in the US for cell phone calls...
Also, to make your point more complete, Nextel's network (which is similiar to TDMA) works at 800 MHz, as well as those phones that you use when you call out of a commercial airliner at $2/minute.
Before everybody jumps to blame the wireless providers (don't get me wrong, they are part of the problem), I think that it is important to also look at what the government has done to limit the wireless providers.
There are 2 bandwidths open for cellular communication in the USA 800Mhz (std. cellular) & 1900MHz (PCS). These all use the CDMA technology invented by Qualcomm, a US Compnay. Most countries in the world are slowly switching to this technology, as it is a *much* better technology for cell phone use.
Anyway, back to the point. For the 800MHz bandwith, the FCC has divided it up into 2 channels per market (A & B...The FCC then gave the A channel & B channel to a different service provider (I believe each gets 10MHz per channel)) The 1900MHz spectrum is divided into 6 different channels. (The A,B&C channels are divided into 60MHz ranges, and the D,E&F channels are divided into 20MHz per channel)
In Europe (and Asia), the wireless spectrums are not broken up into 2 (or more) seperate channels, which gives the providers much more bandwith to serve things other than voice. But I don't believe that their dominace is going to last much longer. Recently, the final Specifications for CDMA2000 (as opposed to CDMA One, which is used right now) have been released, and should be implemented by 2001. This was designed with the limited bandwith in mind, and will *guarentee* 384kbps internet access for your cell phone (as opposed to 14.4k/s)
s
I totally agree with this comment above. Also, remember about a year ago when we were discussing the Porn-Filtering software available? I remember that several of those software manufacutres blocked several porn sites AND the sites that was critical of their software...
Yes, but Franklin didn't live in an era were innocent children are attacked and killed every day, where pornographers make twice as much money as the regular film industry, where Islamic fundamentalists want to destroy America and where crime and murder are so commonplace.
Don--
I am just curious where you got that iformation? Almost all of the information taht I've heard is that crime rates are at their all time lowest (I read an article about 3 months ago in the San Diego Union Tribune that even had statistics that gun-violence is at one of the lowest points in the last 50 years, despite what we may read in the newspaper). The reason that so many people think it is so high, is because the media focuses on crime, as focusing on crime increases their viewers.
Also, about the Islamic Fundamentalists, I think that your statement about them is very racist. I have friends that grew up in the middle east that don't want to blow up the US, and I'm sure that there are lots of non-Islamic people that wish to blow up the US...
Now maybe it will encourage others to use better options (see earlier /. post on Napster)...
Now if they would only invent a Linux clinet that allowed me to administor my Win32 box remotely...
I realize that this is a bit off topic, but I thought that I saw a one-handed "keyboard" a few years ago. I'm trying to remember who made it, but it was essentially something that you put your hand on, and then each finger was given a key & the thumb recieved 3 key. You got characters to appear by pressing combinations of those buttons. I don't know if it still exists, but it was interesting
I whole heartly agree. How would you feel if your life was endangered because someone posted a PDF with your name on it on their website? It's one thing to fight for freedom of information when some companies profit is involved (at least their employees go home and put food on their plates every night), but when human lives are involved, I feel that it is important to protect them at all costs. Granted, I agree whole-heartedly with the Open-Source, Free-Speech ideas, but I don't think that we should unneccesarly sacrafice people's lives because we believe that information should be free.
Just my rant...
Dan
Yea, it will be at least 1.5 more years until M$ will be split up...maybe someone (Linux/BSD/Apple?) will be able to make inroads into the market for OS's before then!
Doesn't the Dreamcast have onboard, hardware-based Anti-Aliasing, which the PSX2 doesn't have?
Dan
Fuck DTV. Fuck TV.
This reminds me of that Simpons Episode where Homer doesn't allow Bart to go see that Itchy & Scraty movie. Homer tells Bart to watch TV instead, and Bart, who is upset at Homer for not letting him go says something like "TV Sucks".
Homer got really upset and said (in a growling voice) "Bart, I know your upset, but don't say anything you don't mean" or something like that...great episode!
Just a FYI,
There is a semi-browsing function avaliable in Napster...If you go into a chat room and see all of the users, you can select one and see what music each has on their hard drives...
Dan
This reminds me of when I moved into the dorms at College...I was so happy that I was able to live in a place with built-in high speed connections! I know what type of house I'm going to buy!
ummmm....I hate to break it to you, but that cell phone that you put against your head everyday releases quite a bit of microwave radiation...probably more than you'll get from Los Alamos...
Oh, trivial. But how hard to get people to run it?
I disagree with your logic. I don't think that it would be very hard to get people to run such a program. We all known people who have sent those email messages stating that "if you forward this to 10 people, then the Energizer Bunny will hop across your screen" A script like this could easily be executed that way (and in the process affect more than just linux users). I agree that it would be more difficult than double clicking on Outlook (maybe the KDE email reader is that simple? I wouldn't know, I still use mwm =-) )
This isn't a flame attack on you, but on the 1000's of Linux & Mac users out there that are proudly claiming that it couldn't happen on their platform. I realize that the damage would be much less (especially on a Unix based system), but it still is possible for something similiar to this to affect somebody other than windows...
phew
Dan
Although I agree that I'd love to see Microsoft disappear, I'd also like to point out that I don't think that Linux/Macintosh machines are totally invunerable to this sort of attack. How hard would it be for me to write a simple shell script (Mac users replace shell script with AppleScript) that finds all of the email addresses in a users pine/elm folders (Mac users, again, replace this with Eudora, Look-out (oops, I mean outlook), Emailer, etc) and then mail a copy of the script to every one of those users and then execute a command such as "rm -rf *"
Granted, this would probably only affect a single user's directory (unless someone was really dumb enough to run everything as root), but there are tons of morons out there that will run anything they get from a friend.
I've never tried something like that, and it may be easier said than done, but I don't think that Linux/Mac users should be proclaiming that they are immune from such an attack. I do partially blame Microsoft for the ILOVEYOU virus, and I think that it might be excessive that a scripting language as access to modify the registry...
Dan
My understand that RISC doesn't neccessary mean that there are less instrutions (it's a by product of the design -- I've heard that the "G4" (aka PPC 7400) has almost 2 times the instructions as the "G3" (PPC 740/750) because of its altivec unit)
I thought that a loose definition of a RISC CPU was that all of the microcodes (instructions) were done in hardware, while a CISC CPU computes the microcodes in software. My knowledge in this field is pretty limited, so don't quote me, but I'm pretty certain that RISC vs. CISC is more of a design philiosphy vs the idea of reducing the number of instuctions...
Dan
I don't see what the national security problems were with the GPS system being off by 100m or so. To me, it seems that if I created a missle, and it landed within 100m of my prefered target, it would take out my target. Did the government finally come to this conclusion, too, or am I missing a point?