No, the worst that can happen is that the poor sods who make their living making these phones will be fired and the design/manufacturing will be shifted to third-world labor.
You could be describing my life' reading habits! I think there is another reason as to why I don't find fiction entertaining any more; specifically, all the plots are the same! If you have read a few hundred books, you have read them all! There is nothing new in most genres, just re-hashing. Occasionally, a new author comes out with something fresh, but his/her subsequent books are more of the same! For people who are "fact-oriented" as opposed to "process-oriented", this is a showstopper.
As an example, I put forth P. G. Wodehouse. Wonderful author. But you have to admit that he has a handful of basic plots that he rehashes. You read those books for the "process", for the clever sentence construction and use of language. I have friends who can read the same P. G. Wodehouse book again and again. For me, the fun stops after the first read.
How did you verify that the fradulent orders from the UK were made by Indians?
Presumably, you are running an online store and you don't actually see your customers directly. So you have to make a mapping between some info they provide and their race.
What is that mapping? Name to Race? If so, how did you verify that the name provided is genuine?
I am not necessarily doubting you, I just want to know. I have been in England, and I have a few British friends. The level of contempt that they have for anybody from India/Pakistan/Bangladesh (whom they refer to as Pakis) is staggering. Just curious to see if that is based on anything other than old-fashioned racism.
The interesting thing is that these so-called think tanks are taken seriously at all.
Here is the history of Think Tanks. In the sixties, the conservatives in the US realized that advances in science were undermining the core of their beliefs. They set up these think tanks like the Heritage Foundation to generate pseudoscience promoting their agendas. Of late, liberals have got into the act as well.
Every think tank, by definition, is set up by some entity/corporation to further their position in the face of independent scientific research that might undermine them. These think tanks, or foundations, are chock-full of "scientists/researchers" who have sold out long ago to the almighty dollar.
1) Verizon already offers high-speed mobile data access to customers in San Diego and Washington. This is based on CDMA EV-DO. This technology gets 2.4Mbps peak (500Kbps average) on the downlink, and 153Kbps peak (80Kbps average) on the uplink. A nationwide rollout is expected later this year.
2) Sprint announced that they are going to do the same thing yesterday. They expect to have service later this year/early next year.
3) CDMA EVDO has been successfully deployed for the last 2 years in Korea (6 million subs) and for about 9 months in Japan (subs not known). Dozens of devices/phones are available.
4) Cingular's service is NOT based on GSM. This is the next generation of GSM (3G) which is based on CDMA technology. The complexities of this upgrade are much more than that of going from CDMA to EV-DO. W-CDMA will give you about 2Mbps peak (500 Kbps average) on the downlink, and far less on the uplink. This is over 3 times the bandwidth used by CDMA EV-DO.
I agree with you. This does not match my experience at all. The Java programs I have used (especially anything with a GUI) have been bloated and much slower than programs in C++ that do 10 times as much. I would be curious to see if these benchmarks included things like opening windows, pulling down menus etc.
I cannot imagine how anyone in his right mind can ignore the obvious connection. Obviously, there is no official "proof", and probably no written documents exist anywhere, just a quiet understanding that if Darl plays his cards right, his children will never have to worry about going hungry ever again.
I have had conversations with many folks from various countries about Stallman. My feeling is that he is held in VERY high regard by both the technical and political classes in every country except his own. The unfortunate fact is that in the USA, (which, BTW, is my home country) most people are anti-intellectual, and do not have the capacity to comprehend the magnitude of his accomplishments. Even most technical folks in the USA are so decidedly one-dimensional that their frame of reference in worldly matters is like a postage stamp.
In almost any other country, a man who has sacrificed his earning potential to pursue a larger cause is revered. In the USA, that is considered the sign of a loser or a crank. This is the root cause of the differences in perceptions.
I grabbed the SRPMs from kicker and compiled it on my mdk9.2 box. Not for the faint-of heart, I admit, but the end result is good.
BTW, if you are not planning to use the version for multiple architectures, I suggest compiling with optimizations for the specific processor you are running it on. Compiling qt, kdelibs and kdebase with -mcpu=athlon -O3 (as opposed to -O2) has resulted in at least a 30% speedup on my box.
You can automate this by changing the file/usr/lib/rpm/rmprc
to change the optflags of the i586 line to optflags: i586 -mcpu=athlon -03 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe %{debugcflags}
if you are on an athlon box
and optflags: i586 -mcpu=i686 -03 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe %{debugcflags}
on a PentiumII/III/IV box.
This will work for kdelibs and kdebase. Compiling qt with the opts will take more work and involves hacking the spec file.
The other libraries that you might want to recompile to see dramatic speed improvements are:
1) jpeglib 2) pnglib 3) libc
And for gnome apps 4) gtklib
For the life of me, I don't know why mandrake does not at least set the default optimization levels to -O3. I can understand them not wanting to specify an architecture.
It is just a matter of getting the audience to adjust their expectations.
The fact is, people expect that music played live, especially by a good-looking musician with a "life-story" would sound better than the "soulless" music produced by a machine.
The argument is as bogus as the DeBeer's argument about "fake" diamonds.
It is only a matter of time before the bulk of all music created/played will be by machines. The number of musicians will plummet.
1xEV-DO, which is part of the CDMA-2000 family, has already been deployed on a large scale in Korea and Japan. If reports are to be believed, it is a smashing success. Verizon wireless is offering it in 2 cities right now in the US, and will roll it out nationally by the end of this year.
1xEV-DO, is a mature, commercially proven technology that is supported by dozens of Vendors. Several dozen phones/PDAs etc are available from several manufacturers.
I have friends who are using this in San Diego. Depending on where they are, they get speeds of 200Kbps-600Kbps downstream, and 40-100Kbps upstream. Round-trip ping times are 100-140ms. This is on a real, commercial network with presumeably thousands of users.
I have not seen any corresponding "real-life" numbers on OFDM anywhere. Not to say that it is worse than 1xEV-DO, but Nextel definitely gets no credit for this, they are late to the party.
1xEV-DO, that Verizon has commercially available in 2 cities and plans to have available nationwide by the end of the year, is definitely not a 2-G or 2.5G technology. It is a CDMA-based technology that provides 2.4Mbps/153Kbps peak upstream and downstream, and 300-500Kbps/40-80Kbps upstream. Round-trip ping-times are reputed to be about 100-130 ms.
EVDO has been rolled out massively in Korea in 2002 and Japan in 2003. It has more than 1.6million subs in Korea alone.
Nextel is really late to the party. I presume that the reason why this gets big coverage on Slashdot is due to the "WiFi" connection, though this is no more WiFi than a cellphone.
Someone predicts that a new standard will be available in 2005, with equipment presumeably following a year after, and it makes headlines on slashdot. In the meantime, hardcore 3G makes it to the United States and nary a peep out of the slashdot editors.
The most exciting telecomm development that I have seen in the last year is Verizon's announcement that they are going to roll out EV-DO in the US. This has already had serious consequences in the cellular industry, with AT&T/Cingular being forced to accelerate merger talks to compete with the offering.
I think the problem is that the slashdot editors are PC geeks who have played around with WLANs and so understand the technology somewhat, but have no clue as to the kind of technology uber-cooolness that goes into making a 3-G system. From a comm-theory standpoint, WiFi is a joke compared to the theoretical and technological miracle that allows you to make a call over a digital cell-phone.
WiFi technologies are simply this: a desperate effort by the traditional "datacomm" companies to grab a piece of the lucrative cell-phone business. WiFi is their lever, and they are trying their best to use it to muscle into the business, by making wild claims and even wilder technological predictions. These datacomm companies do not have the technological knowhow to make real competitors to cell-phone systems, and they have latched on to WiFi as a drowning man to a piece of wood. Maybe when Flarion's product matures, they will have a better story.
While I sympathize with the objectives of the Ciscos, Broadcoms and Intels of the world, I can still see through their rather transparent claims.
Slashdot seems to have bought the WiFi line hook, line and sinker.
Dude, if you steal a million and give ten thousand to charity, that does not make you "noble". Robber barons and thieves like Gates have been giving money to charity for hundreds of years. This serves many purposes:
1) Confuse and cloud the issue in simple minds (like yours, apparantly).
2) Deflect criticism by re-directing it (insurance).
3) A way to "legitimize" your enterprise.
The money that Billy gives away is peanuts compared to what he would lose if the laws of the land were justly applied to his pack of thieves.
Magnus.
Re:Coolest announcement at CES: Fast cellular data
on
CES 2004 Coverage
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No idea, but EVDO latencies are said to be far less than latencies of 1xRTT, GPRS or EDGE networks.
Magnus.
Coolest announcement at CES: Fast cellular data
on
CES 2004 Coverage
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Verizon is launching 1xEV-DO nationwide. This is a cellular (fully mobile) data technology that delivers 300-500 kbps average downstream thoughput, and 30-70kbps upstream. Peak rates are 2.4Mbps downstream and 153.6 Kbps upstream. The service is already operational in San Diego and Washington D.C and is marketed as Broadband Access.
Think Richochet on steroids. The US has caught up with and surpassed Europe on wireless with this one.
I tried to submit this story yesterday thinking this will of high interest to the slashot audience, but it was rejected. Oh well.
The other story (deal b/w republican campaign and major corporations) is in the Wall Street Journal in December. Unfortunately, their archives are not online. I'll try to dig up the date from the library and post it here.
If you think times are bad, just wait till the election is over. The Republicans have struck deals with several dozens of corporations to postpone their outsourcing decisions till the 2004 elections are over. Expect to see wave after wave of US layoffs in the wake of the elections... especially if Bush wins again.
There was an article in the WSJ last month about exactly this. Apparantly, huge companies like IBM and Microsoft are keeping a low profile in India. MS has gone so far as to remove their names from the buses that they use in India to ferry programmers back and forth to work.
Most slashdotters do not really understand what they are up against when it comes to outsourcing.
Yes, right now, Indian programmers are not so great at design. However, nobody is really handing "design" jobs over.
What the programming model is evolving to is this: companies will employ a handful of highly experienced, expert individuals in the US to do the design part. When a new project is scoped, these individuals will design the software down to the last detail, such that each individual component is simple enough to be handled by a reasonably bright, inexperienced "outsource".
The in-house designers will also design comprehensive and sophisticated test suites to test the compliance of whatever the outsources deliver.
To aid their efforts, the in-house designers will use sophisticated code design/development packages that are currently being developed by all the major software design houses. I understand that Microsoft and IBM, among others, are working on such tools. Think of tools that can turn very high-level UML diagrams into code, drag and drop algorithms into the right places etc, and generate testsuites to test the compliance of each module and subcomponent. The outsources will test the code that they generate against the same tools before delivering it to the parent corp.
There is too much financial incentive to do this. Even if companies experience initial hassles, they will keep plugging away until all the holes are plugged, just like how they moved manufacturing abroad.
So don't expect the complexity of our jobs to save us. Migrate up the ladder or prepare to be laid off.
I'm not kidding, have you seen any? Atrocious acting, bizarre themes, songs all over the place, fat, overweight actors/actresses playing characters 30 years younger than their real ages. Music blatantly copied from western movies. These movies make Gigli look like The Godfather.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of the media is to attract your attention so that it can distract, redirect or focus it as required by its master.
Magnus.
No, the worst that can happen is that the poor sods who make their living making these phones will be fired and the design/manufacturing will be shifted to third-world labor.
Magnus.
You could be describing my life' reading habits! I think there is another reason as to why I don't find fiction entertaining any more; specifically, all the plots are the same! If you have read a few hundred books, you have read them all! There is nothing new in most genres, just re-hashing. Occasionally, a new author comes out with something fresh, but his/her subsequent books are more of the same! For people who are "fact-oriented" as opposed to "process-oriented", this is a showstopper.
As an example, I put forth P. G. Wodehouse. Wonderful author. But you have to admit that he has a handful of basic plots that he rehashes. You read those books for the "process", for the clever sentence construction and use of language. I have friends who can read the same P. G. Wodehouse book again and again. For me, the fun stops after the first read.
Magnus.
Just curious...
How did you verify that the fradulent orders from the UK were made by Indians?
Presumably, you are running an online store and you don't actually see your customers directly. So you have to make a mapping between some info they provide and their race.
What is that mapping? Name to Race? If so, how did you verify that the name provided is genuine?
I am not necessarily doubting you, I just want to know. I have been in England, and I have a few British friends. The level of contempt that they have for anybody from India/Pakistan/Bangladesh (whom they refer to as Pakis) is staggering. Just curious to see if that is based on anything other than old-fashioned racism.
Magnus.
The interesting thing is that these so-called think tanks are taken seriously at all.
Here is the history of Think Tanks. In the sixties, the conservatives in the US realized that advances in science were undermining the core of their beliefs. They set up these think tanks like the Heritage Foundation to generate pseudoscience promoting their agendas. Of late, liberals have got into the act as well.
Every think tank, by definition, is set up by some entity/corporation to further their position in the face of independent scientific research that might undermine them. These think tanks, or foundations, are chock-full of "scientists/researchers" who have sold out long ago to the almighty dollar.
Magnus.
1) Verizon already offers high-speed mobile data access to customers in San Diego and Washington.
This is based on CDMA EV-DO. This technology gets 2.4Mbps peak (500Kbps average) on the downlink, and 153Kbps peak (80Kbps average) on the uplink. A nationwide rollout is expected later this year.
2) Sprint announced that they are going to do the same thing yesterday. They expect to have service later this year/early next year.
3) CDMA EVDO has been successfully deployed for the last 2 years in Korea (6 million subs) and for about 9 months in Japan (subs not known). Dozens of devices/phones are available.
4) Cingular's service is NOT based on GSM. This is the next generation of GSM (3G) which is based on CDMA technology. The complexities of this upgrade are much more than that of going from CDMA to EV-DO. W-CDMA will give you about 2Mbps peak (500 Kbps average) on the downlink, and far less on the uplink. This is over 3 times the bandwidth used by CDMA EV-DO.
Magnus.
I agree with you. This does not match my experience at all. The Java programs I have used (especially anything with a GUI) have been bloated and much slower than programs in C++ that do 10 times as much. I would be curious to see if these benchmarks included things like opening windows, pulling down menus etc.
Magnus.
read what the Indians think of their own abilities here.
BTW, "Coolie" is a word that roughly translates into menial laborer.
Magnus.
You aren't the only one to have thought of this.
I cannot imagine how anyone in his right mind can ignore the obvious connection. Obviously, there is no official "proof", and probably no written documents exist anywhere, just a quiet understanding that if Darl plays his cards right, his children will never have to worry about going hungry ever again.
Magnus.
I have had conversations with many folks from various countries about Stallman. My feeling is that he is held in VERY high regard by both the technical and political classes in every country except his own. The unfortunate fact is that in the USA, (which, BTW, is my home country) most people are anti-intellectual, and do not have the capacity to comprehend the magnitude of his accomplishments. Even most technical folks in the USA are so decidedly one-dimensional that their frame of reference in worldly matters is like a postage stamp.
In almost any other country, a man who has sacrificed his earning potential to pursue a larger cause is revered. In the USA, that is considered the sign of a loser or a crank. This is the root cause of the differences in perceptions.
Magnus
I grabbed the SRPMs from kicker and compiled it on my mdk9.2 box. Not for the faint-of heart, I admit, but the end result is good.
/usr/lib/rpm/rmprc
BTW, if you are not planning to use the version for multiple architectures, I suggest compiling with optimizations for the specific processor you are running it on. Compiling qt, kdelibs and kdebase with -mcpu=athlon -O3 (as opposed to -O2) has resulted in at least a 30% speedup on my box.
You can automate this by changing the file
to change the optflags of the i586 line to
optflags: i586 -mcpu=athlon -03 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe %{debugcflags}
if you are on an athlon box
and
optflags: i586 -mcpu=i686 -03 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe %{debugcflags}
on a PentiumII/III/IV box.
This will work for kdelibs and kdebase. Compiling qt with the opts will take more work and involves hacking the spec file.
The other libraries that you might want to recompile to see dramatic speed improvements are:
1) jpeglib
2) pnglib
3) libc
And for gnome apps
4) gtklib
For the life of me, I don't know why mandrake does not at least set the default optimization levels to -O3. I can understand them not wanting to specify an architecture.
Magnus
Actually, there is no difference.
It is just a matter of getting the audience to adjust their expectations.
The fact is, people expect that music played live, especially by a good-looking musician with a "life-story" would sound better than the "soulless" music produced by a machine.
The argument is as bogus as the DeBeer's argument about "fake" diamonds.
It is only a matter of time before the bulk of all music created/played will be by machines. The number of musicians will plummet.
Call it outsourcing to machines.
Magnus.
I'll take your word for it. Have not tried either myself for gaming, though I have browsed the web with EV-DO.
Magnus.
1xEV-DO, which is part of the CDMA-2000 family, has already been deployed on a large scale in Korea and Japan. If reports are to be believed, it is a smashing success. Verizon wireless is offering it in 2 cities right now in the US, and will roll it out nationally by the end of this year.
1xEV-DO, is a mature, commercially proven technology that is supported by dozens of Vendors. Several dozen phones/PDAs etc are available from several manufacturers.
I have friends who are using this in San Diego. Depending on where they are, they get speeds of 200Kbps-600Kbps downstream, and 40-100Kbps upstream. Round-trip ping times are 100-140ms.
This is on a real, commercial network with presumeably thousands of users.
I have not seen any corresponding "real-life" numbers on OFDM anywhere. Not to say that it is worse than 1xEV-DO, but Nextel definitely gets no credit for this, they are late to the party.
I would not worry about your job just yet:)
Magnus.
1xEV-DO, that Verizon has commercially available in 2 cities and plans to have available nationwide by the end of the year, is definitely not a 2-G or 2.5G technology. It is a CDMA-based technology that provides 2.4Mbps/153Kbps peak upstream and downstream, and 300-500Kbps/40-80Kbps upstream.
Round-trip ping-times are reputed to be about 100-130 ms.
EVDO has been rolled out massively in Korea in 2002 and Japan in 2003. It has more than 1.6million subs in Korea alone.
Nextel is really late to the party. I presume that the reason why this gets big coverage on Slashdot is due to the "WiFi" connection, though this is no more WiFi than a cellphone.
Magnus.
Someone predicts that a new standard will be available in 2005, with equipment presumeably following a year after, and it makes headlines on slashdot. In the meantime, hardcore 3G makes it to the United States and nary a peep out of the slashdot editors.
The most exciting telecomm development that I have seen in the last year is Verizon's announcement that they are going to roll out EV-DO in the US. This has already had serious consequences in the cellular industry, with AT&T/Cingular being forced to accelerate merger talks to compete with the offering.
I think the problem is that the slashdot editors are PC geeks who have played around with WLANs and so understand the technology somewhat, but have no clue as to the kind of technology uber-cooolness that goes into making a 3-G system. From a comm-theory standpoint, WiFi is a joke compared to the theoretical and technological miracle that allows you to make a call over a digital cell-phone.
WiFi technologies are simply this: a desperate effort by the traditional "datacomm" companies to grab a piece of the lucrative cell-phone business. WiFi is their lever, and they are trying their best to use it to muscle into the business, by making wild claims and even wilder technological predictions. These datacomm companies do not have the technological knowhow to make real competitors to cell-phone systems, and they have latched on to WiFi as a drowning man to a piece of wood. Maybe when Flarion's product matures, they will have a better story.
While I sympathize with the objectives of the Ciscos, Broadcoms and Intels of the world, I can still see through their rather transparent claims.
Slashdot seems to have bought the WiFi line hook, line and sinker.
Magnus.
Dude, if you steal a million and give ten thousand to charity, that does not make you "noble". Robber barons and thieves like Gates have been giving money to charity for hundreds of years. This serves many purposes:
1) Confuse and cloud the issue in simple minds (like yours, apparantly).
2) Deflect criticism by re-directing it (insurance).
3) A way to "legitimize" your enterprise.
The money that Billy gives away is peanuts compared to what he would lose if the laws of the land were justly applied to his pack of thieves.
Magnus.
No idea, but EVDO latencies are said to be far less than latencies of 1xRTT, GPRS or EDGE networks.
Magnus.
Verizon is launching 1xEV-DO nationwide. This is a cellular (fully mobile) data technology that delivers 300-500 kbps average downstream thoughput, and 30-70kbps upstream. Peak rates are 2.4Mbps downstream and 153.6 Kbps upstream. The service is already operational in San Diego and Washington D.C and is marketed as Broadband Access.
Think Richochet on steroids. The US has caught up with and surpassed Europe on wireless with this one.
I tried to submit this story yesterday thinking this will of high interest to the slashot audience, but it was rejected. Oh well.
Magnus.
You don't have to be a hen to know when an egg is rotten.
You don't have to be a cook to know when food has spoiled.
You don't have to be a postmodernist to know that postmodernism is crap.
Magnus.
OK, here is a link to the "bus" story.
, 10 3575,00.html
http://business-times.asia1.com.sg/story/0,4567
The other story (deal b/w republican campaign and major corporations) is in the Wall Street Journal in December. Unfortunately, their archives are not online. I'll try to dig up the date from the library and post it here.
Magnus.
Which part are you accusing of being "drivil" (sic)?
The first part, about layoffs being postponed till after the elections, or the second, about buses in Bangalore?
Both of these are facts, and have been documented by multiple sources in the MAINSTREAM media, including republican-friendly Wall Street Journal.
Magnus.
If you think times are bad, just wait till the election is over. The Republicans have struck deals with several dozens of corporations to postpone their outsourcing decisions till the 2004 elections are over. Expect to see wave after wave of US layoffs in the wake of the elections... especially if Bush wins again.
There was an article in the WSJ last month about exactly this. Apparantly, huge companies like IBM and Microsoft are keeping a low profile in India. MS has gone so far as to remove their names from the buses that they use in India to ferry programmers back and forth to work.
Magnus.
Most slashdotters do not really understand what they are up against when it comes to outsourcing.
Yes, right now, Indian programmers are not so great at design. However, nobody is really handing "design" jobs over.
What the programming model is evolving to is this: companies will employ a handful of highly experienced, expert individuals in the US to do the design part. When a new project is scoped, these individuals will design the software down to the last detail, such that each individual component is simple enough to be handled by a reasonably bright, inexperienced "outsource".
The in-house designers will also design comprehensive and sophisticated test suites to test the compliance of whatever the outsources deliver.
To aid their efforts, the in-house designers will use sophisticated code design/development packages that are currently being developed by all the major software design houses. I understand that Microsoft and IBM, among others, are working on such tools. Think of tools that can turn very high-level UML diagrams into code, drag and drop algorithms into the right places etc, and generate testsuites to test the compliance of each module and subcomponent. The outsources will test the code that they generate against the same tools before delivering it to the parent corp.
There is too much financial incentive to do this. Even if companies experience initial hassles, they will keep plugging away until all the holes are plugged, just like how they moved manufacturing abroad.
So don't expect the complexity of our jobs to save us. Migrate up the ladder or prepare to be laid off.
Magnus.
that nobody would want to pirate them anyway.
I'm not kidding, have you seen any? Atrocious acting, bizarre themes, songs all over the place, fat, overweight actors/actresses playing characters 30 years younger than their real ages. Music blatantly copied from western movies. These movies make Gigli look like The Godfather.
Magnus.