Not that I am a fan of outsourcing, but India's Rupee is not fixed, its value changes all the time against the dollar. The Chinese Yuan is, however, fixed.
WSJ is more than pro-market. They are the upmarket voice of the hardcore right-wing and the neocons. This is the place where the amoral and venal float trial balloons for their latest schemes.
In the past, the WSJ has supported child labor and indentured servitude, has railed against anti-discrimination laws and civil rights. Even twenty years ago, their editorial page has advocated positions that even the neocons of today would distance themselves from.
I'm very sorry that you have to go through such experiences. My brother is the same way. He is astronomically smart academically, but even the simplest of social situations confound him. We have tried everything he can think of to give him advice, and he tries really hard, but things don't come naturally to him and he always looks and sounds 'off' in social gatherings. People pick up on this within minutes of meeting him and start avoiding him like the plague.
If you abstract out enough, all you need is to eat, shit and sleep.
In practice, things are not that simple.
Have you any idea how much the dollar is falling w.r.t. international currencies? The pound is more than 2 dollars now. Do you know what the implications of this are?
Hint: In the short term, a weak dollar might help local manufacturers, but it will devastate the middle class because inflation will follow shortly.
T-Mobile's GSM/WiFi phones do not use SIP when they are on WiFi. Instead, they use a tunneling mechanism to tunnel back to the operator's core, and connect to their GSM MSC instead through translation layer called UMA (Universal Mobile Access).
GSM/UMTS has this concept of non-access-stratum signaling, which consists of messages that are tunneled between the MSC and the phone, which are completely transparent to the underlying transport technology. (BTW, the presense of these layers is partially what makes UMTS/GSM signaling so complicated, especially compared to competing equivalent technologies like CDMA).
So you are absolutely not offloading the operator's core network. You are offloading the RF network and the towers, however, which is why you get some price break.
Qualcomm has been aggressive in promoting their patent rights. But to say that they are unique in this field is completely ignoring one side of the story.
Every try to make something in the GSM/UMTS space? You will have about a dozen companies approach you with their hands out. Nokia, Qualcomm, Ericcson, Motorola, Lucent, Samsung and several others. CDMA royalties are about 5%, almost all paid to Qualcomm. GSM/UMTS royalties sum up to about 18%. The only difference is that if you are one of the big guys, you "cross-license" your patents so that you don't end up actually paying anything. If you are a new entrant... well, you are out of luck.
What is pissing off the Nokias, Ericcsons and Broadcomms of the world is that in the CDMA space, they have no patents at all. None. That is because they fought CDMA every step of the way until Qualcomm demonstrated conclusively that it is a commercially practical technology. Then they turned around and tried to claim it as their own, and tried to co-opt it by applying it with minor modifications to the UMTS space.
Actually, I am amazed that Broadcomm is getting away with this. Their sum total of contributions to the wireless space is close to zero. They have done some work in the wireline world in the early years, but they have contributed zip, zilch, nada in the development of wireless IP. They are not even a name in the industry. HOwever, it is possible that they have purchased some IPR of late.
I am quite happy to see cracks in the patent edifice as a whole, but making Qualcomm the villain in this is not correct. Qualcomm laid many of the foundations for modern wireless communications technology; Qualcomm corporate R&D is about as close as you can get to how Bell Labs used to be. Lots of Qualcomm's IPR consists of non-trivial, non-obvious, fundamental contributions to communications theory. Most other wireless companies, in particular Nokia, Motorola, Ericcson etc have done nothing fundamental in the past 15 years. They are product companies whose forte consists of taking old technologies and packaging them in crowd-pleasing form factors, or (in the case of Ericcson), maintaining relationships with behemoth carriers.
If you have never used an SLR before and have no investment in lenses etc, by all means, go ahead and buy a DSLR. You won't be disappointed by the image quality.
However, if you are a longtime film-SLR user and have an investment in SLR lenses for some platform, then watch out!
In a nutshell, most of the lenses in your collection will not be really usable with your shiny new DSLR! This is because most DSLR use an imaging sensor that has a different size than the 35 MM film size. What this means is that the effective focal lengths of all your lenses are going to be different from what they are when fixed to a film camera. Nikon has a multiplication factor of 1.5. Depending on the model, Canon has a multiplication factor of 1.5 or 1.6. [Some of Canon's Very Expensive cameras have a 35-mm size sensor and have no multiplication factor]
What this means is that your 50mm lens will have an effective focal length of75 mm, reducing its utility considerably. You will find that you will have to replace pretty much all your stock lenses with new "digital-ready" lenses, a pretty significant investment overall. I am surprised that the article did not mention it.
Why is this? The camera companies say that full-frame sensors are expensive, and that they don't contribute much to image quality anyway. The former might be true, but not something that investment and time won't fix. The latter is completely bogus. They said the same thing about the APS system, but the marketplace quickly figured out that this was not right and rejected the system.
Here is the real reason: Companies like Canon and Nikon make far more money on their lenses than they do on their cameras. They are always looking for ways to make you buy more lenses. If their old-line lenses could work with the new DSLRs, they have lost a huge profit opportunity! But they cannot change the format of the camera-lens connector without a huge backlash from the customers. So this is a way by which they can force the adoption of an entirely new line of lenses, at the same time maintaining plausible deniability.
If you regularly use an external flash, you will have to buy a new external flash as well. The flashes that used to work with film cameras are not fully compatible with the DSLRs.
If the communications division is getting closed down, does it mean that Intel is dropping support for WiMax? The main marketing muscle behind Wimax is Intel, so if they drop out, WiMax could take a big hit.
Lots of mistakes mixed in with some bits of truth in the parent.
> Code Division Multiple Access is sort of a standard, except that it's not.
What does this mean? All CDMA protocols are standardized by the 3gpp2/TIA bodies, and are ratified by the international standards bodies. CDMA is every bit a standard as GSM.
> Unfortunately, they've put incompatible protocols on top of that such that they're unable to use one another's networks anymore
Incorrect. A VZW user may be unable to use a Sprint network, but that is due to the lack of roaming agreements between VzW and Sprint. There is nothing about CDMA that makes it network specific. I have used my VzW CDMA phone in Australia and India, where the CDMA carriers have roaming agreements with Verizon.
> Of course, all the data functionality is not part of the IS-95 spec,
Completely wrong. All CDMA functionality is covered by standards. Otherwise, no carrier would be dumb enough to deploy it.
> GSM is nice because it's made for easy portability of devices - you change SIMs and that's that.
This is true. Not a limitation of CDMA, but a deliberate choice made by the CDMA operators. There is nothing inherent about CDMA that prevents the use of SIM cards, I believe Qualcomm is developing a SIM-type phone for the Chinese market.
> CDMA may be "better" from a technical perspective (it seems to attract fanboy zealots), but it suffers from real world implementation issues.
This is like saying that a Honda accord may be "better" than a Yugo. The only reason why CDMA exists is because it is so overwhelmingly superior to GSM that it won against the combined opposition of the biggest vendors/carriers in the world. In Europe, they actually passed laws to prevent local carriers from deploying CDMA, to protect their GSM-only vendors like Nokia, Ericcson, Siemens and Alcatel.
> Plus, you gotta pay the Qualcomm tax.
This is another half-truth that appears to have been accepted because it is repeated so often. It is certainly true that you have to pay Qualcomm royalties for using CDMA. What is also true that if you are building GSM phones/networks, you have to pay royalties to about a dozen different companies. The only difference is that a lot of the GSM patents have expired, and so the royalties are less than the CDMA royalties at present. But a lot of the CDMA patents are set to expire next year, so that might level the playing field a little.
In the boston area, software salaries have been effectively capped. In the company where I work currently (which I shall be leaving soon), a raise that accompanies an excellent review is less than 3%. Complaints are met with the following justification: "You are getting paid about 10 times what someone from India gets for doing the same work. We cannot justify higher raises to the board/investors".
I recently found out that the following policy has been instituted. If an employee gets an offer from another company at a much higher salary, make no attempt to match the salary, just let him/her go. Hire someone else, if necessary at the higher salary. But do not give a big raise to any existing employee!
Unfortunately, this situation seems to be more and more prevalent, my friends who work in other companies have reported similar policies being instituted. I don't know where all this is going to end up.
I visited an ex-collegue of mine who lives in Singapore. He lives in a very fancy apartment complex over there, that openly advertizes "Flats available, Caucasians only."
I thought this was a joke, until my friend told me that this was the norm in Singapore. It is perfectly OK for employers/landlords etc to discriminiate based on anything they feel like.
In the middle east, professionals from various parts of the world are employed. Caucasians routinely earn 10-30 times the salaries earned by other races for doing the same work. For example, an American physician would be paid much more than an Indian one who does the same work.
Are you sure that you would like the US to have policies that look like this? I know I don't.
I don't know about the Indians in the US (sounds suspiciously like an NRA legend to me), but the reason why Germany did not invade Switzerland was simply because lots of Nazis had loot in the Swiss banks, and the last thing they wanted to do was to risk losing their money. Nothing to do with the Swiss possessing guns. Also, the proliferation of guns has caused lots more deaths and genocide than the converse, as is obvious to anyone who has an understanding of the recent history of many third-world countries.
If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, all the nations (why, even individuals) should be allowed to possess Nuclear, Chemical and Biological weapons. Look at all the wars it would prevent! Why, lots of honest businessmen could make a good buck selling these things! I don't know why the US govt. gets its panties in a twist about this whole "Nuclear Non-proliferation" thing. The NRA should lobby to proliferate nuclear weapons far and wide.
Attitudes like this are precisely what makes most professional organizations recoil at the thought of using open-source software.
Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of GNU/Linux, have been using it personally and professionally since 1995. But Linus' comment comes across as naive and simplistic.
Not many practical projects can get out of the gate without having well-written specifications. Release planning, feature testing, multisite collaboration, maintainability etc are impossible without them.
Of course, it is always possible to take specs too far; they can also become powerful ammo in the day-to-day power struggles between program management/quality assurance/programmers.
However, to make a blanket statement to the effect of "specs are useless" is on the same vein as some of the other streams of thought on Slashdot like "Management is useless". It reflects a complete absense of big-picture knowledge, and anyone with real experience within an organization will discount anything else from that source immediately.
Always root for the guys who have more money. In this case, Google has more money than yahoo, but Google threatens MS, and MS is very dear to all the Wall-Street folks.
Actually, I watched a documentary about the celebrity publicity machine the other day. They mentioned Paris Hilton. Apparently, the public images of herself (as a party girl with loose morals and limited brains) and that of her sister (quiet and reserved) are carefully crafted creations of a PR firm. Real-life Paris is supposed to be very street smart, with an ability to add up figures with the speed and accuracy of a computer.
Why does she want to have such a seemingly "negative" public image? Well, without that, she would be just another anonymous rich kid. Now she is a world-famous "brand", with a name recognition that rivals that of the late Princess Di (at least among women). And surprisingly, most of her "target audience" admires her for having the will and ability to get what she wants when she wants it.
> That's the biggest amount of BS I've ever read. Are you a Qualcomm employee perchance?
No, but I do work in the CDMA industry... and used to work in the GSM industry before. I know what I am talking about, having had to mop up the problems with real deployments on either side.
> though in practice both find power levels end up having a bigger affect than GSM's timeslot protection imposed limits.
Absolutely incorrect. In GSM, it is theoretically impossible to have cell sizes larger than a few kilometers (I believe 16). There are working CDMA cells that provide commercial service and are 64 kilometers in radius. Boomer cells are planned now that are only limited by the curvature of the earth.
> larger cell sizes and coverage
Coverage has implications beyond cell size. Please refer a network-planning guide.
> More capacity and better frequency re-use?
There is more to having a frequency reuse of one than better capacity. Ease of cell planning is one. How do you add a cell to a congested area in a GSM network without having to re-plan your entire network?
I notice that you did not respond to CDMA's soft handoff, and essentially 4 times the capacity as compared to GSM.
> GSM is a fully integrated modern digital network designed to actually integrate with modern switching equipment
And CDMA networks are analog? Please do some basic reading before writing such nonsense.
FYI, W-CDMA is completely backwards-incompatible with GSM. There is nothing in common. None. Essentially, every upgrade is a forklift upgrade. There is as little in common between W-CDMA and GSM as there is between IS-95 and GSM.
> I'm still bemused by the huge one Nokia had to supply with the 6185 to give it the same life as the other TDMA and GSM based 61xx phones
Nokia does not use good CDMA chipsets (I believe they use TI's implementation). That is why their ass is getting kicked in the CDMA market. Take a look at phones from companies that use Qualcomm chipsets.
> To an end-user, it's pretty obvious which provides them with more freedom, a consistant experience, and more control.
In the US, it is pretty clear; that is why CDMA-based VzW is kicking the ass of the GSM-based operators. Cingular/ATT's coverage is a joke here.
> You're either on your "home" network or "Roaming". What fun to an end user!
And this is different for GSM operators exactly how? In the US, the GSM deployments work this way too! There are no SIM cards in the US for any technology. This is a deliberate decision made by the operators.
I can use my CDMA-phone whereever I go in pretty much any CDMA-market.
And nothing prevents SIM being used by CDMA phones, I believe the CDMA phones in china already use SIM cards.
Why is it that a de-facto monopoly is bad for operating systems, but wonderful for cell-phones?
You would prefer it if the whole world adopts a mediocre, rushed-out standard whose only advantage is its installed base (GSM), over a well-thought out, high-performance technology (CDMA) that beats it hands down in every conceivable technological aspect, like support for much larger cell sizes, coverage, battery life, ease of deployment, capacity, frequency reuse and inter-cell handoff?
Are you aware that the GSM community has been forced to adopt a CDMA-based technology (Wideband CDMA) as the basis for its third generation, at the expense of accumulating considerable amounts of egg on its face?
As for your comments about CDMA not working outside Northern America... please educate yourself before spouting such nonsense. CDMA is widely deployed in Brazil, India, China, Russia, Australia, and dozens of other non-American countries. It has tens of millions of subscribers outside North America. I have used my American CDMA phone in India and Brazil. It works as long as your service provider has roaming arrangements with the one in the visiting country. The only geographic area where CDMA does not have a foothold is Western Europe (big surprise), where the various governments have passed rules to ban non-GSM technologies! Various operators who would otherwise have gladly chosen CDMA have been FORCED to adopt GSM. But CDMA is making an entrance now, through the 450 MHz band, and various politicians in Western Europe are scurrying around trying to pass rules to ban it in that band also.
Or have you simply bought into the myth that "GSM is an open standard, CDMA is controlled by Qualcomm?" Let me educate you: if you are a small vendor trying to build a CDMA system, you indeed have to pay royalties to Qualcomm. If you want to build a GSM system, you have to pay royalties to more than one company (mostly Nokia and Ericsson), who collectively own patents that affect almost every aspect of GSM operation. This is because GSM is a "standards by committee" technology, adopted precisely because it enabled the dominant companies of the time to ensure that their patents were represented in the standard.
Ever been to Britain? Indians and Pakistanis occupy the social status that African Americans occupy in the US. They dwell mostly in inner cities. They are poor. They do most of the shit-work. They are derogatorily referred to as "Pakis" by the white mainstream. They form street gangs. The liberals and conservatives debate ad-infinitum about the causes of their backwardness. Of course, the few that break the mould to become professionals/businessmen are considered to be the exceptions that break the rule.
Go to the US. What a difference! Most of the Indians and Pakistanis are well-educated. They are affluent and live in posh suburbs. They may not be accepted by the mainstream, but nobody really considers them inferior in any way. The tech companies are full of them.
If that is not an argument for environment over heredity, I don't know what is.
Yes, if you become an international star, you do get a lot of attention in other countries. But the class retard with the big shoulders who can throw the ball really hard, and who likes beating up the more academically inclined students does not get anywhere with the girls.
Having an independent election at present is unfair; I understand that, over the past 20 years, the Kashmiri terrorists have systematically driven out all the Hindus and most of the moderate Muslims, so the region is predominantly Muslim right now. Any election will result in Kashmir voting to join Pakistan.
This would be like if, in the US, the right wing and neocons drove out all the democrats, non-christians and all left-leaning folks, and subsequently conducted a referendum to decide whether or not the US should be a theocracy.
The other issue is this: most of the terrorists fighting in Kashmir are not Kashmiris. They are Islamic fundamentalists from other countries funded, trained and politically backed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Many of them have publicly declared that Kashmir is only the first step, and they will not stop until they have planted the Islamic flag in Delhi.
Are you in the telecomm industry? If so, you would have heard of the so-called "CLEC"s (Competive Local Exchange Carriers) that were to compete with the big telecom boys. As soon as Bush was elected, they went out of business... because the smart money knew that Bush would support the incumbent big firms against them... just like he sabotaged the Microsoft antitrust trial. As went the CLECs, so went the telecomm infrastructure startups who were building innovative equipment that the CLECs would have bought, but that the ILECs have no interest in buying, because they have a monopoly anyway.
It is no accident that the bust coincided with Bush's election. Without Bush, there still would have been a dot-com bust, but other sectors would not have been as badly affected.
It is also no accident that oil prices, after stagnating for pretty much the entire Clinton years, started skyrocketing after Bush's election. It is his priority to keep gas prices high. For every cent in gas price hikes, the Oil industry makes millions of dollars. And guess which industry forms Bush's personal financial base.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the one thing that has no linux support at this time.
Not that I am a fan of outsourcing, but India's Rupee is not fixed, its value changes all the time against the dollar. The Chinese Yuan is, however, fixed.
Magnus
WSJ is more than pro-market. They are the upmarket voice of the hardcore right-wing and the neocons. This is the place where the amoral and venal float trial balloons for their latest schemes.
In the past, the WSJ has supported child labor and indentured servitude, has railed against anti-discrimination laws and civil rights. Even twenty years ago, their editorial page has advocated positions that even the neocons of today would distance themselves from.
Magnus
I'm very sorry that you have to go through such experiences. My brother is the same way. He is astronomically smart academically, but even the simplest of social situations confound him. We have tried everything he can think of to give him advice, and he tries really hard, but things don't come naturally to him and he always looks and sounds 'off' in social gatherings. People pick up on this within minutes of meeting him and start avoiding him like the plague.
Christian values are responsible for "humanity"?
So the civilizations that existed in Greece, China, Japan, India before Christianity existed were devoid of any humanity, I presume.
When I read comments like this, I understand why Bush and his neocons keep getting elected in the US.
Magnus.
If you abstract out enough, all you need is to eat, shit and sleep.
In practice, things are not that simple.
Have you any idea how much the dollar is falling w.r.t. international currencies? The pound is more than 2 dollars now. Do you know what the implications of this are?
Hint: In the short term, a weak dollar might help local manufacturers, but it will devastate the middle class because inflation will follow shortly.
Magnus
T-Mobile's GSM/WiFi phones do not use SIP when they are on WiFi. Instead, they
use a tunneling mechanism to tunnel back to the operator's core, and connect
to their GSM MSC instead through translation layer called UMA (Universal
Mobile Access).
GSM/UMTS has this concept of non-access-stratum
signaling, which consists of messages that are tunneled between the MSC
and the phone, which are completely transparent to the underlying
transport technology. (BTW, the presense of these layers is partially
what makes UMTS/GSM signaling so complicated, especially compared to
competing equivalent technologies like CDMA).
So you are absolutely not offloading the operator's core network. You
are offloading the RF network and the towers, however, which is why
you get some price break.
Magnus.
Qualcomm has been aggressive in promoting their patent rights. But to say
that they are unique in this field is completely ignoring one side of the story.
Every try to make something in the GSM/UMTS space? You will have about a dozen companies
approach you with their hands out. Nokia, Qualcomm, Ericcson, Motorola, Lucent, Samsung
and several others. CDMA royalties are about 5%, almost all paid to Qualcomm. GSM/UMTS
royalties sum up to about 18%. The only difference is that if you are one of the big guys,
you "cross-license" your patents so that you don't end up actually paying anything. If you
are a new entrant... well, you are out of luck.
What is pissing off the Nokias, Ericcsons and Broadcomms of the world is that in the CDMA space,
they have no patents at all. None. That is because they fought CDMA every step of the way until Qualcomm
demonstrated conclusively that it is a commercially practical technology. Then they
turned around and tried to claim it as their own, and tried to co-opt it by applying it with minor
modifications to the UMTS space.
Actually, I am amazed that Broadcomm is getting away with this. Their sum total of contributions to
the wireless space is close to zero. They have done some work in the wireline world in the early
years, but they have contributed zip, zilch, nada in the development of wireless IP. They are not
even a name in the industry. HOwever, it is possible that they have purchased some IPR of late.
I am quite happy to see cracks in the patent edifice as a whole, but making Qualcomm the villain in
this is not correct. Qualcomm laid many of the foundations for modern wireless communications technology;
Qualcomm corporate R&D is about as close as you can get to how Bell Labs used to be.
Lots of Qualcomm's IPR consists of non-trivial, non-obvious, fundamental contributions to communications
theory. Most other wireless companies, in particular Nokia, Motorola, Ericcson etc have done nothing
fundamental in the past 15 years. They are product companies whose forte consists of taking old technologies
and packaging them in crowd-pleasing form factors, or (in the case of Ericcson), maintaining relationships
with behemoth carriers.
Magnus
If you have never used an SLR before and have no investment in lenses etc, by all means, go ahead and buy a DSLR. You won't be disappointed by the image quality.
However, if you are a longtime film-SLR user and have an investment in SLR lenses for some platform, then watch out!
In a nutshell, most of the lenses in your collection will not be really usable with your shiny new DSLR! This is because most DSLR use an imaging sensor that has a different size than the 35 MM film size. What this means is that the effective focal lengths of all your lenses are going to be different from what they are when fixed to a film camera. Nikon has a multiplication factor of 1.5. Depending on the model, Canon has a multiplication factor of 1.5 or 1.6. [Some of Canon's Very Expensive cameras have a 35-mm size sensor and have no multiplication factor]
What this means is that your 50mm lens will have an effective focal length of75 mm, reducing its utility considerably. You will find that you will have to replace pretty much all your stock lenses with new "digital-ready" lenses, a pretty significant investment overall. I am surprised that the article did not mention it.
Why is this? The camera companies say that full-frame sensors are expensive, and that they don't contribute much to image quality anyway. The former might be true, but not something that investment and time won't fix. The latter is completely bogus. They said the same thing about the APS system, but the marketplace quickly figured out that this was not right and rejected the system.
Here is the real reason: Companies like Canon and Nikon make far more money on their lenses than they do on their cameras. They are always looking for ways to make you buy more lenses. If their old-line lenses could work with the new DSLRs, they have lost a huge profit opportunity! But they cannot change the format of the camera-lens connector without a huge backlash from the customers. So this is a way by which they can force the adoption of an entirely new line of lenses, at the same time maintaining plausible deniability.
If you regularly use an external flash, you will have to buy a new external flash as well. The flashes that used to work with film cameras are not fully compatible with the DSLRs.
Magnus
Not to pick upon your other comments but...
GSM technically superior to CDMA?
Excuse me while I laugh.
If by technically superior, you mean "more people use it", I agree.
Hari.
If the communications division is getting closed down, does it mean that Intel is dropping support for WiMax? The main marketing muscle behind Wimax is Intel, so if they drop out, WiMax could take a big hit.
Magnus.
Lots of mistakes mixed in with some bits of truth in the parent.
> Code Division Multiple Access is sort of a standard, except that it's not.
What does this mean? All CDMA protocols are standardized by the 3gpp2/TIA bodies, and are ratified by the international standards bodies. CDMA is every bit a standard as GSM.
> Unfortunately, they've put incompatible protocols on top of that such that they're unable to use one another's networks anymore
Incorrect. A VZW user may be unable to use a Sprint network, but that is due to the lack of roaming agreements between VzW and Sprint. There is nothing about CDMA that makes it network specific. I have used my VzW CDMA phone in Australia and India, where the CDMA carriers have roaming agreements with Verizon.
> Of course, all the data functionality is not part of the IS-95 spec,
Completely wrong. All CDMA functionality is covered by standards. Otherwise, no carrier would be dumb enough to deploy it.
> GSM is nice because it's made for easy portability of devices - you change SIMs and that's that.
This is true. Not a limitation of CDMA, but a deliberate choice made by the CDMA operators. There is nothing inherent about CDMA that prevents the use of SIM cards, I believe Qualcomm is developing a SIM-type phone for the Chinese market.
> CDMA may be "better" from a technical perspective (it seems to attract fanboy zealots), but it suffers from real world implementation issues.
This is like saying that a Honda accord may be "better" than a Yugo. The only reason why CDMA exists is because it is so overwhelmingly superior to GSM that it won against the combined opposition of the biggest vendors/carriers in the world. In Europe, they actually passed laws to prevent local carriers from deploying CDMA, to protect their GSM-only vendors like Nokia, Ericcson, Siemens and Alcatel.
> Plus, you gotta pay the Qualcomm tax.
This is another half-truth that appears to have been accepted because it is repeated so often. It is certainly true that you have to pay Qualcomm royalties for using CDMA. What is also true that if you are building GSM phones/networks, you have to pay royalties to about a dozen different companies. The only difference is that a lot of the GSM patents have expired, and so the royalties are less than the CDMA royalties at present. But a lot of the CDMA patents are set to expire next year, so that might level the playing field a little.
Magnus.
In the boston area, software salaries have been effectively capped. In the company where I work currently (which I shall be leaving soon), a raise that accompanies an excellent review is less than 3%. Complaints are met with the following justification: "You are getting paid about 10 times what someone from India gets for doing the same work. We cannot justify higher raises to the board/investors".
I recently found out that the following policy has been instituted. If an employee gets an offer from another company at a much higher salary, make no attempt to match the salary, just let him/her go. Hire someone else, if necessary at the higher salary. But do not give a big raise to any existing employee!
Unfortunately, this situation seems to be more and more prevalent, my friends who work in other companies have reported similar policies being instituted. I don't know where all this is going to end up.
Magnus.
I visited an ex-collegue of mine who lives in Singapore.
He lives in a very fancy apartment complex over there,
that openly advertizes "Flats available, Caucasians only."
I thought this was a joke, until my friend told me that
this was the norm in Singapore. It is perfectly OK for
employers/landlords etc to discriminiate based on anything
they feel like.
In the middle east, professionals from various parts
of the world are employed. Caucasians routinely earn
10-30 times the salaries earned by other races
for doing the same work. For example, an American
physician would be paid much more than an Indian
one who does the same work.
Are you sure that you would like the US to have
policies that look like this? I know I don't.
Magnus
I don't know about the Indians in the US (sounds suspiciously like an NRA legend to me), but the reason why Germany did not invade Switzerland was simply because lots of Nazis had loot in the Swiss banks, and the last thing they wanted to do was to risk losing their money. Nothing to do with the Swiss possessing guns. Also, the proliferation of guns has caused lots more deaths and genocide than the converse, as is obvious to anyone who has an understanding of the recent history of many third-world countries.
If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, all the nations (why, even individuals) should be allowed to possess Nuclear, Chemical and Biological weapons. Look at all the wars it would prevent! Why, lots of honest businessmen could make a good buck selling these things! I don't know why the US govt. gets its panties in a twist about this whole "Nuclear Non-proliferation" thing. The NRA should lobby to proliferate nuclear weapons far and wide.
Magnus.
Attitudes like this are precisely what makes most professional organizations recoil at the thought of using open-source software.
Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of GNU/Linux, have been using it personally and professionally since 1995. But Linus' comment comes across as naive and simplistic.
Not many practical projects can get out of the gate without having well-written specifications. Release planning, feature testing, multisite collaboration, maintainability etc are impossible without them.
Of course, it is always possible to take specs too far; they can also become powerful ammo in the day-to-day power struggles between program management/quality assurance/programmers.
However, to make a blanket statement to the effect of "specs are useless" is on the same vein as some of the other streams of thought on Slashdot like "Management is useless". It reflects a complete absense of big-picture knowledge, and anyone with real experience within an organization will discount anything else from that source immediately.
Magnus.
Always root for the guys who have more money. In this case, Google has more money than yahoo, but Google threatens MS, and MS is very dear to all the Wall-Street folks.
Magnus.
Actually, I watched a documentary about the celebrity publicity machine the other day. They mentioned Paris Hilton. Apparently, the public images of herself (as a party girl with loose morals and limited brains) and that of her sister (quiet and reserved) are carefully crafted creations of a PR firm. Real-life Paris is supposed to be very street smart, with an ability to add up figures with the speed and accuracy of a computer.
Why does she want to have such a seemingly "negative" public image? Well, without that, she would be just another anonymous rich kid. Now she is a world-famous "brand", with a name recognition that rivals that of the late Princess Di (at least among women). And surprisingly, most of her "target audience" admires her for having the will and ability to get what she wants when she wants it.
Magnus.
> That's the biggest amount of BS I've ever read. Are you a Qualcomm employee perchance?
No, but I do work in the CDMA industry... and used to work in the GSM industry before. I know what I am talking about, having had to mop up the problems with real deployments on either side.
> though in practice both find power levels end up having a bigger affect than GSM's timeslot protection imposed limits.
Absolutely incorrect. In GSM, it is theoretically impossible to have cell sizes larger than a few kilometers (I believe 16). There are working CDMA cells that provide commercial service and are 64 kilometers in radius. Boomer cells are planned now that are only limited by the curvature of the earth.
> larger cell sizes and coverage
Coverage has implications beyond cell size. Please refer a network-planning guide.
> More capacity and better frequency re-use?
There is more to having a frequency reuse of one than better capacity. Ease of cell planning is one. How do you add a cell to a congested area in a GSM network without having to re-plan your entire network?
I notice that you did not respond to CDMA's soft handoff, and essentially 4 times the capacity as compared to GSM.
> GSM is a fully integrated modern digital network designed to actually integrate with modern switching equipment
And CDMA networks are analog? Please do some basic reading before writing such nonsense.
FYI, W-CDMA is completely backwards-incompatible with GSM. There is nothing in common. None. Essentially, every upgrade is a forklift upgrade. There is as little in common between W-CDMA and GSM as there is between IS-95 and GSM.
> I'm still bemused by the huge one Nokia had to supply with the 6185 to give it the same life as the other TDMA and GSM based 61xx phones
Nokia does not use good CDMA chipsets (I believe they use TI's implementation). That is why their ass is getting kicked in the CDMA market. Take a look at phones from companies that use Qualcomm chipsets.
> To an end-user, it's pretty obvious which provides them with more freedom, a consistant experience, and more control.
In the US, it is pretty clear; that is why CDMA-based VzW is kicking the ass of the GSM-based operators. Cingular/ATT's coverage is a joke here.
> You're either on your "home" network or "Roaming". What fun to an end user!
And this is different for GSM operators exactly how? In the US, the GSM deployments work this way too! There are no SIM cards in the US for any technology. This is a deliberate decision made by the operators.
I can use my CDMA-phone whereever I go in pretty much any CDMA-market.
And nothing prevents SIM being used by CDMA phones, I believe the CDMA phones in china already use SIM cards.
Magnus.
Why is it that a de-facto monopoly is bad for operating systems, but wonderful for cell-phones?
You would prefer it if the whole world adopts a mediocre, rushed-out standard whose only advantage is its installed base (GSM), over a well-thought out, high-performance technology (CDMA) that beats it hands down in every conceivable technological aspect, like support for much larger cell sizes, coverage, battery life, ease of deployment, capacity, frequency reuse and inter-cell handoff?
Are you aware that the GSM community has been forced to adopt a CDMA-based technology (Wideband CDMA) as the basis for its third generation, at the expense of accumulating considerable amounts of egg on its face?
As for your comments about CDMA not working outside Northern America... please educate yourself before spouting such nonsense. CDMA is widely deployed in Brazil, India, China, Russia, Australia, and dozens of other non-American countries. It has tens of millions of subscribers outside North America. I have used my American CDMA phone in India and Brazil. It works as long as your service provider has roaming arrangements with the one in the visiting country. The only geographic area where CDMA does not have a foothold is Western Europe (big surprise), where the various governments have passed rules to ban non-GSM technologies! Various operators who would otherwise have gladly chosen CDMA have been FORCED to adopt GSM. But CDMA is making an entrance now, through the 450 MHz band, and various politicians in Western Europe are scurrying around trying to pass rules to ban it in that band also.
Or have you simply bought into the myth that "GSM is an open standard, CDMA is controlled by Qualcomm?" Let me educate you: if you are a small vendor trying to build a CDMA system, you indeed have to pay royalties to Qualcomm. If you want to build a GSM system, you have to pay royalties to more than one company (mostly Nokia and Ericsson), who collectively own patents that affect almost every aspect of GSM operation. This is because GSM is a "standards by committee" technology, adopted precisely because it enabled the dominant companies of the time to ensure that their patents were represented in the standard.
Magnus.
Here is a counterexample to your arguments.
Ever been to Britain? Indians and Pakistanis occupy the social status that African Americans occupy in the US. They dwell mostly in inner cities. They are poor. They do most of the shit-work. They are derogatorily referred to as "Pakis" by the white mainstream. They form street gangs. The liberals and conservatives debate ad-infinitum about the causes of their backwardness. Of course, the few that break the mould to become professionals/businessmen are considered to be the exceptions that break the rule.
Go to the US. What a difference! Most of the Indians and Pakistanis are well-educated. They are affluent and live in posh suburbs. They may not be accepted by the mainstream, but nobody really considers them inferior in any way. The tech companies are full of them.
If that is not an argument for environment over heredity, I don't know what is.
Magnus.
Yes, if you become an international star, you do get a lot of attention in other countries. But the class retard with the big shoulders who can throw the ball really hard, and who likes beating up the more academically inclined students does not get anywhere with the girls.
And that makes all the difference.
Magnus.
Having an independent election at present is unfair; I understand that, over the past 20 years, the Kashmiri terrorists have systematically driven out all the Hindus and most of the moderate Muslims, so the region is predominantly Muslim right now. Any election will result in Kashmir voting to join Pakistan.
This would be like if, in the US, the right wing and neocons drove out all the democrats, non-christians and all left-leaning folks, and subsequently conducted a referendum to decide whether or not the US should be a theocracy.
The other issue is this: most of the terrorists fighting in Kashmir are not Kashmiris. They are Islamic fundamentalists from other countries funded, trained and politically backed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Many of them have publicly declared that Kashmir is only the first step, and they will not stop until they have planted the Islamic flag in Delhi.
Magnus.
Yup. Lost your house and all your worldly possessions? Don't worry, just convert to christianity and the Salvation Army will help you.
Magnus.
Are you in the telecomm industry? If so, you would have heard of the so-called "CLEC"s (Competive Local Exchange Carriers) that were to compete with the big telecom boys. As soon as Bush was elected, they went out of business... because the smart money knew that Bush would support the incumbent big firms against them... just like he sabotaged the Microsoft antitrust trial. As went the CLECs, so went the telecomm infrastructure startups who were building innovative equipment that the CLECs would have bought, but that the ILECs have no interest in buying, because they have a monopoly anyway.
It is no accident that the bust coincided with Bush's election. Without Bush, there still would have been a dot-com bust, but other sectors would not have been as badly affected.
It is also no accident that oil prices, after stagnating for pretty much the entire Clinton years, started skyrocketing after Bush's election. It is his priority to keep gas prices high. For every cent in gas price hikes, the Oil industry makes millions of dollars. And guess which industry forms Bush's personal financial base.
Magnus.