I heard the 2.2 series had serious scaling problems under heavy load, but I can not remember the cause. Does anyone know if these problems have been addressed in the newer 2.4 series? This really worries me, considering 2.0 outperforms 2.2 under heavy load in many cases. Could someone a little more knowledgable about the situation reply...
From what I have read, most of sc2k was written by one man, will wright. I used to be obsessed with sc2k but I have to say 3000 is so much better. I'll admit, I liked the superfluous nature of sc2k, but it drove most users to frustration. Besides, it was a game filled with bugs. 3000 on the otherhand is a much more refined version without all of the rough edges of sc2k. Perhaps you just miss Wright's humor and his obsession with llamas, who knows. I do recommend everyone try The Sims though, if you havn't played this game, it rocks.
I posted about this a while back on slashdot and the implications of a network to track bluetooth devices, but know one seemed to be interested Do you always have a cell phone on you? Bluetooth negotiations are automated. Imagine a scenario of a building filled with bluetooth devices in certian locations like doorways ect. Every person carrying a phone has a unique identifier and could be tracked room to room in the building. You can take this to any level you want, I think it is pretty scary to say the least. As each person becomes networked, I'd say with almost any wireless scheme, not just bluetooth, there will be ways of tracking the devices. Triangulation comes to mind as a last resort, cell phone tracking ect. It's becoming easier and easier to do...
Does anyone else think all this knowledge maybe is NOT so good. AC is right, ignorance is bliss. What is so wrong with ignorance anyway? What's the point of knowledge? You learn a bunch of shit and then you die. I used to think I wanted to know things, pursuit of knowledge and all, but the world can a depressing place. Maybe Julius was right and I should just be a bum and wonder the earth (pulp fiction). Well, pulp fiction was really about how no one has it figured out but still, if that's the case, do what makes you happy and fuck everyone and everything else. Hm, I don't know what this post is about but I think my beliefs have changed ONCE again. Have my beliefs ever been right if they are always changing? Is there such a thing as right and wrong? Damn, I keep discovering nihilism and it scares me...
Check out dectweb.com. It is by far the best site I have found. DECT is a really cool standard allowing for multiple base stationsand multiple handsets plus a host of other features. The downside of DECT of course is that it is european only. It's also right in the middle of the sprint PCS band. I purchased one of these phones in holland (I believe it was holland) real cheap but it gets interference in the states, heh...
If we could always tune in at night and see what scientist were seeing, it would be awsome. They could have a little caption about what was happening or something along those lines. I think it would be great to sit, watch, and know whats going on as they move around the sky...
but that's not the way it is
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
All cars accept maybe fleet vehicles or something come with a radio, ALL of them, enough to be standard. Some people would argue for the necessity of a radio in their car, I know I would. What are you trying to say, maybe would should really limit ourselves and walk everywhere, because we don't NEED a car. Give me a break, give up the definition, peoples needs have changed, so the OS needs to change. Everything happens this way, I don't understand why so many people on here are so stuck on this old world view of an OS.
It is happening and there is no stopping integration. Things evolve over time. He should have said unix is not a so called modern OS or a desktop OS because it does not provide things that are standard on other desktops. Take the car example and stretch it a little. Say an embedded html browser is compared to the radio. When radio first came out, you couldnt get one standard in your car but slowly over time they became standard, along with a slew of other things. The fact is, OS's are not static, they are not model-T's stuck in time trying to hold on to their simplicity. Cars evolved as users needs evolved; as everything else in life does. There is no line you can draw, its just a progression driven by new necessities that must be incorporated to move on. If you don't like listening to the radio then don't turn it on. But there is no real reason to rip it out either.
The definition means nothing, and it is not the point. There has never been one defining OS, its just a collection of standard resources that programmers can rely on to do some of the work. This applies from fopen all the way to an embedded html renderer. Try to think a little outside the box. Os's have been moving to a higher level of abstration with every release. You can either program a feature yourself or let the OS provide it for you. If its a standard feature shared by many programs then maybe it should be standardized and inlcluded with the OS. What do you think gnome/bonobo(sp?) ect is trying to do. He is right on, because unix by itself does not provide a standard set of software for many of the new web resources, integration/component software ect. Just look at embeded IE, media player ect that he was talking about. emebeded IE is starting to show up everywhere and its turning out to be extremly useful. Imagine that, after all the work MS has put in to component software, a standard set of resources and components and the registry. It was a real messy start but its starting to solidify. I personally think w2k kicks ass in many ways besided memory usage and the current UI. There were/are bugs for sure but many many things have been centralized and standardized. People can complain about the registry ect, but what does linux have?/etc, each file with its own syntax to memorize, no consistency. Unix is more powerful, sure, but power, usability and abstraction must all be taken in to account. I have the most power with no OS at all and accessing the hardware directly, but I wouldn't consider that to be the best method.
It's not optimized for speed yet. And there's a bunch of debug stuff going on.
From my experience, the phrase it's not optimized for speed yet usually is just a programmers excuse. In the real world, without a major rewrite of some of the subsystems, optimization combined with the removal of the debugging code will yeild about a 30-40% speed increase. If its a game we're talking, thats one thing, but a browser? Even if speed increased 100%, mozilla would still feel slow in a LOT of places. I have found that the speed problems in mozilla are an order of a magnitude greater. Mozilla has certainly caused me to rethink the whole supposed OOP/component future. Mozilla is supposed to represent large scale programming projects of the future and this is it? I think the debugging and optimization excuse just buys more time...
It is truly the interface to the computer. Desktops may organize it as shortcuts, ect, but it is the main responsibility of the UI side of the OS, the interface to the filesystem, to the programs installed. The OS is more, but this is its primary task and everyone that uses the CL knows it. If not, even the notion of a working directory would be meaningless. GUI filers need a lot of work to be useful over the CLI for sure. One I am using right now, ROX-Filer is based on the RiscOS filer (I think thats right). Anyway, it is leaps ahead of all GUI filemanagers I've seen. I used to be a huge member of the CLI is more efficient crowd but now Im not so sure. rox mixes the GUI and CL so well and it is so efficient and configurable, I now think GUI's are the future of file managers ect. If anything, this is a good example of what could be done if advance users were kept in mind while still keeping it simple.
You can check out the latest source code through anonymous (pserver) CVS:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.agendacomputing.com:/cvsr oot/linuxvr login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.agendacomputing.com:/cvsr oot/linuxvr co linux
Just press Enter for the password (leave it blank).
This creates a "linux" directory right under wherever you were when you did the checkout command.
This could probably be done in no time. The only thing I can think of is the resolution difference, but moving some widgets or something, perhaps adding a dock of some sort and a few things to take advantage of the more powerful iPaq. I'm thinking about buying one myself and getting to work on this...
The most likely reason was because they were at a LINUX expo. This thing is not being marketed as a linux users PDA, from the web page it looks as if it only syncs with Outlook. On the other hand, unlike the iPaq, it has some professionallay done PIM apps specifically for that size PDA. Besides, it uses X and the entire OS and all apps are open source. I bet the iPaq developers could just lift the work done on the agenda and make the more powerful iPaq actually useful as a PDA and keep linux on it + xmms+ram+color.
CD players are also much larger in size though. I forgot to mention that I was looking for portable non-skipping hardware. Portable CD players are just too large to slip in your pocket and tend to skip way too much. I seriously doubt these types of players will be popular. The only advantage of them is more songs per disc, but since as you mentioned, CD's are so cheap, songs per disc is negligable unless you were worried about bulk in which case I wouldn't recommend a CD player at all.
I went out and bought a minidisc player for about $200. It is a dream since discs are only $1.50 a piece and hold as much as a CD. It supports digital recording and is smaller than almost all mp3 players except maybe that mp3 player in a pen from sony. Anyway, it will save you on flash costs and on long trips, having ALL of your music instead of 32 megs worth is a real plus. Only downside that I have found, realtime recording, but you only record once so it hasn't been a hassle. Check out minidisc.org if you are interested. Some players even support text transfer from the computer ect, and it saves so much on media costs.
A lack of standards makes unix both good and bad. While infinatly extendable and configurable, you must relearn the conventions used by every different program. Use emacs, then try to use vi.
Unix may be modular but that does not matter, it is not standardized. Every single configuration file has its own syntax, every text editor their own key bindings. Besides, command line tools can not do the type of integration needed. The real advantages of COM are just starting to show up in windows. It was a rough road getting there (which is the scariest part for linux I think) but w2k is really getting its act together. Once the bugs are worked out, w2k is almost there, it is going to be incredible what you can do. Miguels example of ie and COM should make it clear to anyone, any program can use any renderer ect that ie has to offer, or any other program in windows. With open source, it could be even better. Imagine taking only the best parts from existing applications and actually have it work with minimal effort. Piped text is great and all but its limitations are obvious. MS bit the bullet and moved everything over to COM, and its just starting to pay off.
PS: Check out ROX-Filer. It is the first gui file manager that Ive liked better than strait cli. Maybe it's because of how well it integrates with the cl, but I encourage people to give it a try. It is the fastest one I've seen, up there with ls;) Very well thought out efficient, I'm amazed.
I heard from a friend that ie for mac was not a port at all but written from scratch for the mac by a different group. I have no idea about the legitimacy of this but it was what I heard.
There is absolutly no standard when it comes to unix programs. Every programmer has to come up with their own strange syntax. Think about it, we have vi, emacs and all the other editors. Everyone has to memorize different switches for each program and none of them have much of any relation. I know there are loose standards but still, sometimes -v displays version, sometimes verbose. -h might get you help, -help or --help. Then you have to memorize each programs UI and strange config file syntax. Part of this makes unix great, a lot of it sucks. Just thnink how many different syntax's there are for configuration files. No wonder every new linux user is confused.
As far as GUI's go, most suck. I have to say windows is by far the easiest to use at first. Enlightenment looks nice and all but its confusing as hell to configure. Ever try to configure it by hand, wtf kind of syntax did they use. And besides, I would rather see some standards to computers rather than just another new geek interface that is totally original. There needs to be a consistent simple standard for people to follow that should carry over to all programs. Every UI in unix is like a whole different world, I wonder how much time people waste adjusting to each one?
I believe in the future that wireless will be a mix of both small bases on every telephone pole in congested areas and large power towers in rural area like parks. The phones themselves can adjust their own wattage after syncing with the tower. This also prolongs battery life in the congested areas but still allows communication in rural areas. This will happen almost for sure and is allready happening to an extent, small bases in airports and subways ect. Good enough solution?
Here is the deal with GSM, PCS and all of those other acronyms. There are basically two types of cellular networks being built now. They are TDMA - time division something access and CDMA - code division whatever. GSM is TDMA as are a lot of other cellular networks. Qualcomm(sp) developed CDMA as a successor to TDMA and it truly is surperior. Instead being able to only put one call on a frequency at a time as with AMPS or 3 at a time with TDMA, CDMA allows 20 calls per frequency. This is one way to solve the wireless bandwidth shortage I guess but I have read that the limit for voice or data is 14.4k I think, could be wrong but its close.
As far as all of standards, most are just GSM or similiar modified to work with frequency allocations in the US. The only exception to this that I know of is Sprint PCS which is CDMA. I hear that many new cell networks are on hold waiting for new technology that is supposed to replace CDMA in 2 years. Expect this to have better data capability also. I just happened to hear this from an article on Chinese cell networks and why that huge deal with qualcomm fell through. The only drawback to CDMA that I know of is expensive equipment.
As far as how to regulate bandwidth, I have a feeling it will be a mix of low power towers and high power towers in rural areas with adjustable wattage on the phones themselves. Anyone know of the company that is installing those boxes in subways and airports to allow phones to work there? Same kind of concept. Anyway, I hope that clears some things up. Oh yea, and PCS is just a generic term in the US for digital networks.
Think about it, most of the people on napster are college students. I know there are a lot of others on there too but most of the users tend to be young and poor. They are also the ones who tend to love music the most, but they are also the ones with the most limited income in general. I would never go out and buy most of the music I download, I'll admit it, but the reason is I can't afford $15+ for each piece of music I want to hear. I may only want to hear it once. I have a totally different taste of music now thanks to napster. I have been exposed to almost every different type of music there is and it is great; it's the way it should be. I guess I have to admit, I have not bought a cd since I started using napster, but I have gone to see a lot more bands in concert than I would ever had. Whenever I hear of a band coming to town the first thing I do is get on napster and check them out. Anyone else who does this knows how great it is.
The point is, piracy is great and you are never going to be able to convince people otherwise. We all know how awsome free information is, just look at all we get off the internet for free. Why do pay services not work on the internet? People do not want to pay for things they can get for free from somewhere else. It's a sad fact but it is so true. In the end, music will not die, it will just change. Just look at the bands that support trading of theor music between fans, bands like phish, the grateful dead, and marley among others. Look how well they have done. They make their money from performing for their fans. If bands are serious about their music and not money, this is how it should be. No one would agree that money is not nice to have, but how much do they deserve and how much does the industry deserve. I would not mind at all paying 50cents for a song, they get less than that anyway. Perhaps a pay per use to a certain extent would be good also. Listen once for free, 5 cents for each use after that until you hit 50 cents then you own it. I know people do not like these schemes and of course there will be ways around it, but if you really want to support the bands directly and not get screwed by bad music it's a descent plan. You must be able to listen once for free though. The only problem is, schemes like this must be accepted by all as fair. There will always be mp3's or a way around any copy protection scheme. The system has to be accepted by the users to make it work. Anything else is doomed. Forgive my speeling mistakes, I spent way to long typing this and must go before proofreading.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard the 2.2 series had serious scaling problems under heavy load, but I can not remember the cause. Does anyone know if these problems have been addressed in the newer 2.4 series? This really worries me, considering 2.0 outperforms 2.2 under heavy load in many cases. Could someone a little more knowledgable about the situation reply...
From what I have read, most of sc2k was written by one man, will wright. I used to be obsessed with sc2k but I have to say 3000 is so much better. I'll admit, I liked the superfluous nature of sc2k, but it drove most users to frustration. Besides, it was a game filled with bugs. 3000 on the otherhand is a much more refined version without all of the rough edges of sc2k. Perhaps you just miss Wright's humor and his obsession with llamas, who knows. I do recommend everyone try The Sims though, if you havn't played this game, it rocks.
I posted about this a while back on slashdot and the implications of a network to track bluetooth devices, but know one seemed to be interested Do you always have a cell phone on you? Bluetooth negotiations are automated. Imagine a scenario of a building filled with bluetooth devices in certian locations like doorways ect. Every person carrying a phone has a unique identifier and could be tracked room to room in the building. You can take this to any level you want, I think it is pretty scary to say the least. As each person becomes networked, I'd say with almost any wireless scheme, not just bluetooth, there will be ways of tracking the devices. Triangulation comes to mind as a last resort, cell phone tracking ect. It's becoming easier and easier to do...
Does anyone else think all this knowledge maybe is NOT so good. AC is right, ignorance is bliss. What is so wrong with ignorance anyway? What's the point of knowledge? You learn a bunch of shit and then you die. I used to think I wanted to know things, pursuit of knowledge and all, but the world can a depressing place. Maybe Julius was right and I should just be a bum and wonder the earth (pulp fiction). Well, pulp fiction was really about how no one has it figured out but still, if that's the case, do what makes you happy and fuck everyone and everything else. Hm, I don't know what this post is about but I think my beliefs have changed ONCE again. Have my beliefs ever been right if they are always changing? Is there such a thing as right and wrong? Damn, I keep discovering nihilism and it scares me...
Check out dectweb.com. It is by far the best site I have found. DECT is a really cool standard allowing for multiple base stationsand multiple handsets plus a host of other features. The downside of DECT of course is that it is european only. It's also right in the middle of the sprint PCS band. I purchased one of these phones in holland (I believe it was holland) real cheap but it gets interference in the states, heh...
If we could always tune in at night and see what scientist were seeing, it would be awsome. They could have a little caption about what was happening or something along those lines. I think it would be great to sit, watch, and know whats going on as they move around the sky...
All cars accept maybe fleet vehicles or something come with a radio, ALL of them, enough to be standard. Some people would argue for the necessity of a radio in their car, I know I would. What are you trying to say, maybe would should really limit ourselves and walk everywhere, because we don't NEED a car. Give me a break, give up the definition, peoples needs have changed, so the OS needs to change. Everything happens this way, I don't understand why so many people on here are so stuck on this old world view of an OS.
It is happening and there is no stopping integration. Things evolve over time. He should have said unix is not a so called modern OS or a desktop OS because it does not provide things that are standard on other desktops. Take the car example and stretch it a little. Say an embedded html browser is compared to the radio. When radio first came out, you couldnt get one standard in your car but slowly over time they became standard, along with a slew of other things. The fact is, OS's are not static, they are not model-T's stuck in time trying to hold on to their simplicity. Cars evolved as users needs evolved; as everything else in life does. There is no line you can draw, its just a progression driven by new necessities that must be incorporated to move on. If you don't like listening to the radio then don't turn it on. But there is no real reason to rip it out either.
The definition means nothing, and it is not the point. There has never been one defining OS, its just a collection of standard resources that programmers can rely on to do some of the work. This applies from fopen all the way to an embedded html renderer. Try to think a little outside the box. Os's have been moving to a higher level of abstration with every release. You can either program a feature yourself or let the OS provide it for you. If its a standard feature shared by many programs then maybe it should be standardized and inlcluded with the OS. What do you think gnome/bonobo(sp?) ect is trying to do. He is right on, because unix by itself does not provide a standard set of software for many of the new web resources, integration/component software ect. Just look at embeded IE, media player ect that he was talking about. emebeded IE is starting to show up everywhere and its turning out to be extremly useful. Imagine that, after all the work MS has put in to component software, a standard set of resources and components and the registry. It was a real messy start but its starting to solidify. I personally think w2k kicks ass in many ways besided memory usage and the current UI. There were/are bugs for sure but many many things have been centralized and standardized. People can complain about the registry ect, but what does linux have? /etc, each file with its own syntax to memorize, no consistency. Unix is more powerful, sure, but power, usability and abstraction must all be taken in to account. I have the most power with no OS at all and accessing the hardware directly, but I wouldn't consider that to be the best method.
It's not optimized for speed yet. And there's a bunch of debug stuff going on.
From my experience, the phrase it's not optimized for speed yet usually is just a programmers excuse. In the real world, without a major rewrite of some of the subsystems, optimization combined with the removal of the debugging code will yeild about a 30-40% speed increase. If its a game we're talking, thats one thing, but a browser? Even if speed increased 100%, mozilla would still feel slow in a LOT of places. I have found that the speed problems in mozilla are an order of a magnitude greater. Mozilla has certainly caused me to rethink the whole supposed OOP/component future. Mozilla is supposed to represent large scale programming projects of the future and this is it? I think the debugging and optimization excuse just buys more time...
It is truly the interface to the computer. Desktops may organize it as shortcuts, ect, but it is the main responsibility of the UI side of the OS, the interface to the filesystem, to the programs installed. The OS is more, but this is its primary task and everyone that uses the CL knows it. If not, even the notion of a working directory would be meaningless.
GUI filers need a lot of work to be useful over the CLI for sure. One I am using right now, ROX-Filer is based on the RiscOS filer (I think thats right). Anyway, it is leaps ahead of all GUI filemanagers I've seen. I used to be a huge member of the CLI is more efficient crowd but now Im not so sure. rox mixes the GUI and CL so well and it is so efficient and configurable, I now think GUI's are the future of file managers ect. If anything, this is a good example of what could be done if advance users were kept in mind while still keeping it simple.
Off the developers site
You can check out the latest source code through anonymous (pserver) CVS: cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.agendacomputing.com:/cvsr oot/linuxvr login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.agendacomputing.com:/cvsr oot/linuxvr co linux
Just press Enter for the password (leave it blank).
This creates a "linux" directory right under wherever you were when you did the checkout command.
This could probably be done in no time. The only thing I can think of is the resolution difference, but moving some widgets or something, perhaps adding a dock of some sort and a few things to take advantage of the more powerful iPaq. I'm thinking about buying one myself and getting to work on this...
The most likely reason was because they were at a LINUX expo. This thing is not being marketed as a linux users PDA, from the web page it looks as if it only syncs with Outlook. On the other hand, unlike the iPaq, it has some professionallay done PIM apps specifically for that size PDA. Besides, it uses X and the entire OS and all apps are open source. I bet the iPaq developers could just lift the work done on the agenda and make the more powerful iPaq actually useful as a PDA and keep linux on it + xmms+ram+color.
CD players are also much larger in size though. I forgot to mention that I was looking for portable non-skipping hardware. Portable CD players are just too large to slip in your pocket and tend to skip way too much. I seriously doubt these types of players will be popular. The only advantage of them is more songs per disc, but since as you mentioned, CD's are so cheap, songs per disc is negligable unless you were worried about bulk in which case I wouldn't recommend a CD player at all.
I went out and bought a minidisc player for about $200. It is a dream since discs are only $1.50 a piece and hold as much as a CD. It supports digital recording and is smaller than almost all mp3 players except maybe that mp3 player in a pen from sony. Anyway, it will save you on flash costs and on long trips, having ALL of your music instead of 32 megs worth is a real plus. Only downside that I have found, realtime recording, but you only record once so it hasn't been a hassle. Check out minidisc.org if you are interested. Some players even support text transfer from the computer ect, and it saves so much on media costs.
A lack of standards makes unix both good and bad. While infinatly extendable and configurable, you must relearn the conventions used by every different program. Use emacs, then try to use vi.
Unix may be modular but that does not matter, it is not standardized. Every single configuration file has its own syntax, every text editor their own key bindings. Besides, command line tools can not do the type of integration needed. The real advantages of COM are just starting to show up in windows. It was a rough road getting there (which is the scariest part for linux I think) but w2k is really getting its act together. Once the bugs are worked out, w2k is almost there, it is going to be incredible what you can do. Miguels example of ie and COM should make it clear to anyone, any program can use any renderer ect that ie has to offer, or any other program in windows. With open source, it could be even better. Imagine taking only the best parts from existing applications and actually have it work with minimal effort. Piped text is great and all but its limitations are obvious. MS bit the bullet and moved everything over to COM, and its just starting to pay off.
PS: Check out ROX-Filer. It is the first gui file manager that Ive liked better than strait cli. Maybe it's because of how well it integrates with the cl, but I encourage people to give it a try. It is the fastest one I've seen, up there with ls ;) Very well thought out efficient, I'm amazed.
I heard from a friend that ie for mac was not a port at all but written from scratch for the mac by a different group. I have no idea about the legitimacy of this but it was what I heard.
People like you just suck.
There is absolutly no standard when it comes to unix programs. Every programmer has to come up with their own strange syntax. Think about it, we have vi, emacs and all the other editors. Everyone has to memorize different switches for each program and none of them have much of any relation. I know there are loose standards but still, sometimes -v displays version, sometimes verbose. -h might get you help, -help or --help. Then you have to memorize each programs UI and strange config file syntax. Part of this makes unix great, a lot of it sucks. Just thnink how many different syntax's there are for configuration files. No wonder every new linux user is confused.
As far as GUI's go, most suck. I have to say windows is by far the easiest to use at first. Enlightenment looks nice and all but its confusing as hell to configure. Ever try to configure it by hand, wtf kind of syntax did they use. And besides, I would rather see some standards to computers rather than just another new geek interface that is totally original. There needs to be a consistent simple standard for people to follow that should carry over to all programs. Every UI in unix is like a whole different world, I wonder how much time people waste adjusting to each one?
My mp3 files are on portman@grits:/home/ender/music/mp3s/annoyingmusi
I think what he was trying to say is that cars are going away. I hope cars go away, they have ruined city life. WTF was all of that about anyway?
I believe in the future that wireless will be a mix of both small bases on every telephone pole in congested areas and large power towers in rural area like parks. The phones themselves can adjust their own wattage after syncing with the tower. This also prolongs battery life in the congested areas but still allows communication in rural areas. This will happen almost for sure and is allready happening to an extent, small bases in airports and subways ect. Good enough solution?
Here is the deal with GSM, PCS and all of those other acronyms. There are basically two types of cellular networks being built now. They are TDMA - time division something access and CDMA - code division whatever. GSM is TDMA as are a lot of other cellular networks. Qualcomm(sp) developed CDMA as a successor to TDMA and it truly is surperior. Instead being able to only put one call on a frequency at a time as with AMPS or 3 at a time with TDMA, CDMA allows 20 calls per frequency. This is one way to solve the wireless bandwidth shortage I guess but I have read that the limit for voice or data is 14.4k I think, could be wrong but its close.
As far as all of standards, most are just GSM or similiar modified to work with frequency allocations in the US. The only exception to this that I know of is Sprint PCS which is CDMA. I hear that many new cell networks are on hold waiting for new technology that is supposed to replace CDMA in 2 years. Expect this to have better data capability also. I just happened to hear this from an article on Chinese cell networks and why that huge deal with qualcomm fell through. The only drawback to CDMA that I know of is expensive equipment.
As far as how to regulate bandwidth, I have a feeling it will be a mix of low power towers and high power towers in rural areas with adjustable wattage on the phones themselves. Anyone know of the company that is installing those boxes in subways and airports to allow phones to work there? Same kind of concept. Anyway, I hope that clears some things up. Oh yea, and PCS is just a generic term in the US for digital networks.
Think about it, most of the people on napster are college students. I know there are a lot of others on there too but most of the users tend to be young and poor. They are also the ones who tend to love music the most, but they are also the ones with the most limited income in general. I would never go out and buy most of the music I download, I'll admit it, but the reason is I can't afford $15+ for each piece of music I want to hear. I may only want to hear it once. I have a totally different taste of music now thanks to napster. I have been exposed to almost every different type of music there is and it is great; it's the way it should be. I guess I have to admit, I have not bought a cd since I started using napster, but I have gone to see a lot more bands in concert than I would ever had. Whenever I hear of a band coming to town the first thing I do is get on napster and check them out. Anyone else who does this knows how great it is.
The point is, piracy is great and you are never going to be able to convince people otherwise. We all know how awsome free information is, just look at all we get off the internet for free. Why do pay services not work on the internet? People do not want to pay for things they can get for free from somewhere else. It's a sad fact but it is so true. In the end, music will not die, it will just change. Just look at the bands that support trading of theor music between fans, bands like phish, the grateful dead, and marley among others. Look how well they have done. They make their money from performing for their fans. If bands are serious about their music and not money, this is how it should be. No one would agree that money is not nice to have, but how much do they deserve and how much does the industry deserve. I would not mind at all paying 50cents for a song, they get less than that anyway. Perhaps a pay per use to a certain extent would be good also. Listen once for free, 5 cents for each use after that until you hit 50 cents then you own it. I know people do not like these schemes and of course there will be ways around it, but if you really want to support the bands directly and not get screwed by bad music it's a descent plan. You must be able to listen once for free though. The only problem is, schemes like this must be accepted by all as fair. There will always be mp3's or a way around any copy protection scheme. The system has to be accepted by the users to make it work. Anything else is doomed. Forgive my speeling mistakes, I spent way to long typing this and must go before proofreading.