Wesley suggests to `Q' that Q might stand for Queer. The all-powerful being takes offense, turns Wesley into a giant testicle and hits him with a hammer, thus extinguishing him in the most painful way possible.
WiFi and EVDO are two entirely different things, for two entirely different markets. Sure, EVDO is not going to be able to compete with WiFi as a LAN solution. Probably not as a hotspot solution either. It is also true that EVDO cannot compete with WiFi as far as airspeed is concerned.
However, WiFi is severly limited by its limited range, and the fact that there is no model for billing/roaming. So when you leave McDonalds and go to Starbucks, you have to go through the disconnect/connect mechanism once again.
An EVDO tower can service about a 2-mile radius in a heavily populated neighborhood, and a 6-10 mile radius in a rural neighborhood. The provider has to pay for just once backhaul connection to the base station servicing the tower. In a dense WiFi deployment, the provider has to pay essentially for 1 backhaul to each access point. You would need hundreds to just provide the same basic coverage as the EVDO tower. These costs can mount very rapidly indeed.
Furthermore, EVDO supports full mobility. WiFi does not. Mobility is a necessary component of ubiquity. Once such a service exists, there will be apps that take advantage of it.
The people who develop EVDO/WiFi equipment seem to recognize that these technologies are complementary. For e.g., handoff between and EVDO network and a WiFi network has been recently demonstrated.
Granted, there is not much chance that EVDO will be deployed in the US, but it seems to be doing well abroad (e.g., Korea). There also appears to be interest from Latin America for use as a DSL replacement.
American 3G, (CDMA 2000) is doing very well indeed. It does not require new spectrum and has already been deployed heavily all over the world. European 3G (WCDMA) is in big trouble. It requires new spectrum, and the vendors are behind by years.
All the articles you see that claim 3G to be a failure are talking about European 3G. Ill-informed journalists fail to make the distinction clear.
Seamless handoff between 802.11 and CDMA was demonstrated at the recently concluded CDMA Americas congress.
Motorola is in trouble because they are missing the 3G-boat in a big way. Their infrastructure implementations of both 1xRTT and WCDMA suck, and they are getting no orders. They have chosen not to implement 1xEV-DO. So right now, they have no data solution to offer their customers. They are coasting based on their handset sales, and their proprietary lock on Nextel. This announcement is just another tactic to muddy the waters and to buy them time from relentless competition from Nortel, Lucent and Samsung.
Nortel and Ericcson also make CDMA2000 equipment. Cisco makes no base stations, but I am sure that they make networking gear for CDMA2000. Nokia is the only hardcore WCDMA vendor, AFAIK.
The fact that WCDMA has been so late to market has given a tremendous boost to CDMA2000. Lots of Asian/ Latin American countries, originally planning to go the WCDMA route, are now jumping on CDMA2000.
Of course, the real killer of WCDMA is that it can operate only over 5Mhz of CONTINUOUS spectrum. CDMA2000 operates over 1.25Mhz spectrum, so to get the same capacity, an operator can deploy 3 discontinuous 1.25 carriers. I believe that few carriers posses free 5Mhz chunks of spectrum in major markets. So, to deploy WCDMA, they need to either turn off existing services, or to acquire new spectrum. It is precisely such acquisitions that have nearly bankrupted the European carriers.
Right now, cellular-based data has a bad rep because of terribly bad speeds and round-trip response times. Hopefully these will change after 1xEV-DO starts getting deployed.
Unfortunately for the WCDMA camp, their vendors have not delivered on the technology so far. Handhelds are only available in limited quantities and are prohibitively expensive. Interop between different vendors is non-existent. In the meantime, CDMA2000 1x is charging ahead, and the economies of scale are driving down the costs.
In the US, Verizon is kicking the ass of GSM/TDMA -based providers; they can support much more users on the same spectrum and thus are more competitive. AT&T is on the run since their operating costs are higher and they cannot afford to wait till WCDMA is widely available.
I am currently working for a company in which the director of software, who has a major problem with Ph. D.s, feels like this. He proudly says that Ph. D. are useless and that he would not trust them to code unsupervised.
Well, over the past few years, he turned down lots of resumes just because they had "Ph. D." on them. He hired a bunch of people with BS from no-name colleges because of the experience listed on the resume and their supposed familiarity with currently popular coding methodologies and paradigms.
This guy turned down people so brilliant that, in a just world, he would have been cleaning their socks.
However, one of the team leads here had enough political clout to resist this, and he packed his team with people with advanced degrees from good schools. Despite being specifically warned by the said Director of Software that he would be fired if his team slipped. The salaries offered to these people were up to 20% less than those offered to the "experienced programmers".
As you might guess, I am in this latter group. For my sins, I have a Ph.D from a good school.
Well, guess what happened?
It took longer for the Ph.Ds to "boot up", as it were, to become familiar with the development environment, to learn the finer points of C++ etc. But once that happened, they started outperforming the rest so much that it was not even funny. They delivered faster, their architectures were so much better designed, and their code had far fewer bugs.
Finally, when the product deadlines started slipping, the same Ph. Ds (whose component had less than 1% of all the filed bugs) were put to work to help the others pull their shit together.
I worked on fixing bugs in several components filed by the so-called experienced programmers. What I found was an appalling mishmash of poorly thought-out, poorly designed code held together by glue and duct tape. Race conditions and memory leaks abounded.
However, I also found that these "experienced programmers" were masters of political maneuvering, deflecting blame and of the ignoble art of covering their sorry asses. They had a good excuse for every bug found in their code.
However, over time, it became obvious to the higher management as to who are the really valuable people in the Software group. When the layoffs came (as they have done everywhere), they hit mostly the "experienced programmers". The Director of Software is now on the run trying to cover his ass for his choice of hires.
Verizon is currently conducting 1xEVDO field trials in the east and west coasts. 1xEVDO is an open standard, a CDMA-based technology developed by Qualcomm corp. In loaded sectors, it provides 300-500Kbps downstream and 9.6-76.8Kbps upstream. Peak rates are 2.4Mbps/sec downstream and 153.6Kbps upstream. Round-trip ping times are between 110-150ms.
In the CDG conference that took place in San Diego last week, a Verizon honcho said that EVDO is the only technology that he has worked with which delivered more than it promised.
In the same CDG conference, handoff between an 802.11 network and an EVDO network was demonstrated!
Vendors making base stations for EVDO: Nortel, Lucent, Samsung, Ericcson.
Vendors making handhelds for EVDO: Samsung, LG, GTran, Motorola.
EVDO is a fully-mobile technology. You can surf the web at 70Mph.
EVDO has already been deployed in Korea commercially. It has 50,000 subscribers, despite handhelds still being relatively expensive.
Furthermore, check out the comparable technology being developed by the startup "Flarion", http://www.flarion.com. Technically, this one seems to be on par with (maybe even better than) EVDO, but it is a proprietary technology like Richochet.
I am not sure whether these technologies will ever be widely deployed in the USA, but if they are, Richochet is a dead duck.
>> 6. Smart 'make' routine which can take advantage of compiled object files in other people's views.
> Oh yeah, I'll bet a LOT of people really make use of that one.
Have you any idea how incredibly useful this feature is? For example: let us say a developer checked out a heavily used.h file and modified something. Pretty much everything in his view will rebuild. For a large project having tens of thousands of files, this could take hours (if not days).
But once he checks his stuff in, no other developer in his team will have to go through the compile, since clearcase winks in all the object files from the first developer's view!
Suffice to say that this is one of the biggest selling points of Clearcase to people who know about this feature.
1) My last job: an all-unix network, where all the vobservers and clients were Solaris/linux, with a network administrator who knew what he was doing. The performance was excellent and clearcase really made a difference to the teams productivity. It was certainly better than CVS, which it replaced. Actually, comparing clearcase to CVS is like comparing Matlab to a 5-dollar pocket calculator.
2) My current job, where the vobserver is on Solaris, but all the clients are Win2000, with a drooling windows monkey for a network administrator. While the clearcase GUI on windows is excellent and much better than the unix equivalent, its performance is infinitely worse, with the performance of a view degrading in proportion to the amount of time the windows machine on which the view was created has been left turned on. Finally, we instituted a policy that all win2K machines have to be rebooted every monday morning.
It would be aweseome if IBM would make rational release a linux/unix GUI that is comparable to their windows version.
OK, I have had it up to here with all this FreeBSD worship. After putting up with this for a long time from one of my good friends who happens to be a BSD bigot, I made the mistake of wiping out my Mandrake 8.2 and installing freeBSD on my box.
After a few months of that, I am back back in Mandrake 9.0 with relief and no regrets. Why?
1) I found that, for the things that I do, FreeBSD offered no advantages at all. Performance and stability was no better than Mandrake 8.2. In fact, under heavy loads, my experience is that Linux 2.4.x is much better. (I run lots of octave math simulations and lots of fortran number crunching programs, often several at a time. )
2) For people used to working with linux, there are lots of annoyances to working with FreeBSD. I missed the convenience of RPMS. Many of my favorite programs did not compile properly.
3) When pitch came to shove, my friend had no suggestions as to why the FreeBSD install did not perform as well as linux, except to tell me that I must be mistaken in how well the linux install performed! Duh!
Now, maybe under some circumstances, it is probably true that FreeBSD does outperform linux. But I could not care less. For the work I do (mostly on the desktop, running simulations, running mozilla and xine), linux is demonstrably a better system than FreeBSD.
A lot of Columbian drug dealears give lots of money to catholic charities. Mother Theresa received quite a lot from them. Does that mean that we should ignore how these guys made the money?
If I steal a million dollars and give a hundred thousand to charity, does that make me immune to criticism?
Not that I am endorsing this particular study, but you are not going to get much traction by quoting the Economist as an authority. The Economist, Wall Street Journal and others of their ilk have, in the past, railed against:
1) De-segregation. 2) Abolition of slavery. 3) Civil Rights for blacks/minorities.
on the grounds that "we should let the market decide".
They keep quiet about it right now, hoping that no-one would remember their past positions. Papers like this have one purpose... to enforce the current "he who has gold should rule" philosophy. For e.g., see their positions as far as the US vs Microsoft case.
Mandrake 9.0 has been rock solid for me. I use it at home and on several servers at work. Not a single crash anywhere. Of course, DRI has to be turned off to get it to work on machines with ATI graphics cards, but this is a known problem with Xfree 4.2.x and not with Mandrake! I think this author is trying to gain hits.
One of the most useful things about Clearcase is its ability to "wink in" object files from other developers' views. That means, if one developer in the team has built a version with a certain time stamp, that particular object file never has to be built by anyone else in the group unless some dependency changes. It would kick ass if CVS had that capability.
WiFi is great as a LAN. But as a wide-area mobile data service? It certainly is not. For several reasons. Even as a nomadic service, it has several handicaps except in places like universities where money is not an object anyway.
For instance:
1) Need many more "base stations" since coverage is limited.
2) Since you need to run backhaul to each of these base stations, operational cost is higher.
3) No built-in "billing" model.
4) Not much security.
5) Cannot be used if the user is travelling at any speed.
and so on. There is standards work underway to address some of these issues, but not all.
Lack of personal mobility is a deployment issue, not something intrinsic to CDMA. The network operators don't want you to have the same number when you switch carriers... basically to increase the hassle of switching.
In the US, the cost of the phone is subsidized by the carrier. On the day you sign up for service with Verizon (for e.g.), Verizon spends about 100-300 dollars on you. The Motorola phone that costs 29.95 at Radio Shack probably costs $300.00 if you buy it yourself. That is why the cell-phone business model involves the lock-in period. You can blame the business model if you wish, but the fact remains that cell phones would be far less popular in this country if the user was expected to buy the phone.
As for the upgrade schedule of GSM... the next step is Wideband CDMA, which works over 5 MHz spectrum. Don't hold your breath waiting for it to arrive... the equipment is at least 2-4 years away from general availablility.
Meantime, the US version of CDMA (CDMA2000) is marching ahead. The voice part is well-entrenched. The 3G version (which works over 1.25 MHz, enabling carriers to use their existing spectrum as opposed to having to aqcquire new, continuous chunks of 5Mhz spectrum) is available today, you can buy service from Sprint and Verizon. Nortel, Lucent, Motorola and Samsung have mature Base Station implementations.
The data part of CDMA2000, 1xEVDO, will be available early next year in commercial versions. Nortel, Lucent and Samsung are trialing their implementations with different carriers as you read this. 1xEVDO provides a 2.4Mbps shared pipe over 1.25Mhz spectrum and kicks the ass of UMTS and Wideband CDMA. UMTS offers only a few hundred kilobits per second, and Wideband CDMA offers a max of 2Mbps over a 5 Mhz spectrum.
The rest of the World has already made up its mind as to what it prefers. Most carriers in North America and Asia (in particular, Korea) have decided to go with CDMA2000 as opposed to Wideband CDMA.
In short, Europe is not going to be ahead in wireless for much longer.
Magnus.
More than half of MS' programmers are immigrants..
on
KDE 3.1 Beta Released
·
· Score: 1
This is completely bogus. I am currently typing this from the first release candidate on a 550Mhz win32 machine. On my machine, mozilla is faster than IE on about 75% of all the web pages I have tried, and slower, but only marginally, on the other 25%. I know because I tried this out with our local MS lover. I don't see any problems with resizing the windows, javascript etc. I don't know where you are coming from, but I seriously doubt that your intentions are sincere.
Lawyers have been trying for an "in" to sue telecomm companies for years. Most of the studies exploring links between cellphones and tissue damage are directly or indirectly funded by lawyer lobbies. So far, dozens of studies have produced no causal link. But they will continue trying, and articles like this will keep coming.
They won't sue TV manufacturers or Microwave manufacturers because the average jury member would rather have his head cut off than give up eating TV dinners while watching "Friends". But cell phones... ah, that is a different kettle of fish altogether. Many interests coincide to want their demise. Suburban homeowners nervous that a cell-tower in the vicinity could reduce property values for a start.
This is untrue. 3G is an umbrella that includes 2 technologies. CDMA2000, which is used mostly in the North American continent and Korea, and Wideband CDMA, which is supposed to be used by the rest of the world. Verizon has a CDMA2000 network (1xRTT), which is very definitely 3G.
Slashdot Mirror
Wesley suggests to `Q' that Q might stand for Queer. The all-powerful being takes offense, turns Wesley into a giant testicle and hits him with a hammer, thus extinguishing him in the most painful way possible.
Magnus.
WiFi and EVDO are two entirely different things, for two entirely different markets. Sure, EVDO is not going to be able to compete with WiFi as a LAN solution. Probably not as a hotspot solution either. It is also true that EVDO cannot compete with WiFi as far as airspeed is concerned.
However, WiFi is severly limited by its limited range, and the fact that there is no model for billing/roaming. So when you leave McDonalds and go to Starbucks, you have to go through the disconnect/connect mechanism once again.
An EVDO tower can service about a 2-mile radius in a heavily populated neighborhood, and a 6-10 mile radius in a rural neighborhood. The provider has to pay for just once backhaul connection to the base station servicing the tower. In a dense WiFi deployment, the provider has to pay essentially for 1 backhaul to each access point. You would need hundreds to just provide the same basic coverage as the EVDO tower. These costs can mount very rapidly indeed.
Furthermore, EVDO supports full mobility. WiFi does not. Mobility is a necessary component of ubiquity. Once such a service exists, there will be apps that take advantage of it.
The people who develop EVDO/WiFi equipment seem to recognize that these technologies are complementary. For e.g., handoff between and EVDO network and a WiFi network has been recently demonstrated.
Granted, there is not much chance that EVDO will be deployed in the US, but it seems to be doing well abroad (e.g., Korea). There also appears to be interest from Latin America for use as a DSL replacement.
Magnus.EVDO is not faster than WiFi. That is a typo.
Magnus.
American 3G, (CDMA 2000) is doing very well indeed. It does not require new spectrum and has already been deployed heavily all over the world. European 3G (WCDMA) is in big trouble. It requires new spectrum, and the vendors are behind by years.
All the articles you see that claim 3G to be a failure are talking about European 3G. Ill-informed journalists fail to make the distinction clear.
EVDO is part of American 3G.
Magnus.
Seamless handoff between 802.11 and CDMA was demonstrated at the recently concluded CDMA Americas congress.
Motorola is in trouble because they are missing the 3G-boat in a big way. Their infrastructure implementations of both 1xRTT and WCDMA suck, and they are getting no orders. They have chosen not to implement 1xEV-DO. So right now, they have no data solution to offer their customers. They are coasting based on their handset sales, and their proprietary lock on Nextel. This announcement is just another tactic to muddy the waters and to buy them time from relentless competition from Nortel, Lucent and Samsung.
Magnus.Nortel and Ericcson also make CDMA2000 equipment. Cisco makes no base stations, but I am sure that they make networking gear for CDMA2000. Nokia is the only hardcore WCDMA vendor, AFAIK.
The fact that WCDMA has been so late to market has given a tremendous boost to CDMA2000. Lots of Asian/ Latin American countries, originally planning to go the WCDMA route, are now jumping on CDMA2000.
Of course, the real killer of WCDMA is that it can operate only over 5Mhz of CONTINUOUS spectrum. CDMA2000 operates over 1.25Mhz spectrum, so to get the same capacity, an operator can deploy 3 discontinuous 1.25 carriers. I believe that few carriers posses free 5Mhz chunks of spectrum in major markets. So, to deploy WCDMA, they need to either turn off existing services, or to acquire new spectrum. It is precisely such acquisitions that have nearly bankrupted the European carriers.
Magnus.
You hit all the nails right on the head!
Right now, cellular-based data has a bad rep because of terribly bad speeds and round-trip response times. Hopefully these will change after 1xEV-DO starts getting deployed.
Magnus.
More likely, CDMA2000.
Unfortunately for the WCDMA camp, their vendors have not delivered on the technology so far. Handhelds are only available in limited quantities and are prohibitively expensive. Interop between different vendors is non-existent. In the meantime, CDMA2000 1x is charging ahead, and the economies of scale are driving down the costs.
In the US, Verizon is kicking the ass of GSM/TDMA -based providers; they can support much more users on the same spectrum and thus are more competitive. AT&T is on the run since their operating costs are higher and they cannot afford to wait till WCDMA is widely available.
Magnus.
OK, I'll bite.
I am currently working for a company in which the director of software, who has a major problem with Ph. D.s, feels like this. He proudly says that Ph. D. are useless and that he would not trust them to code unsupervised.
Well, over the past few years, he turned down lots of resumes just because they had "Ph. D." on them. He hired a bunch of people with BS from no-name colleges because of the experience listed on the resume and their supposed familiarity with currently popular coding methodologies and paradigms.
This guy turned down people so brilliant that, in a just world, he would have been cleaning their socks.
However, one of the team leads here had enough political clout to resist this, and he packed his team with people with advanced degrees from good schools. Despite being specifically warned by the said Director of Software that he would be fired if his team slipped. The salaries offered to these people were up to 20% less than those offered to the "experienced programmers".
As you might guess, I am in this latter group. For my sins, I have a Ph.D from a good school.
Well, guess what happened?
It took longer for the Ph.Ds to "boot up", as it were, to become familiar with the development environment, to learn the finer points of C++ etc. But once that happened, they started outperforming the rest so much that it was not even funny. They delivered faster, their architectures were so much better designed, and their code had far fewer bugs.
Finally, when the product deadlines started slipping, the same Ph. Ds (whose component had less than 1% of all the filed bugs) were put to work to help the others pull their shit together.
I worked on fixing bugs in several components filed by the so-called experienced programmers. What I found was an appalling mishmash of poorly thought-out, poorly designed code held together by glue and duct tape. Race conditions and memory leaks abounded.
However, I also found that these "experienced programmers" were masters of political maneuvering, deflecting blame and of the ignoble art of covering their sorry asses. They had a good excuse for every bug found in their code.
However, over time, it became obvious to the higher management as to who are the really valuable people in the Software group. When the layoffs came (as they have done everywhere), they hit mostly the "experienced programmers". The Director of Software is now on the run trying to cover his ass for his choice of hires.
Magnus.
In India, the carriers do not subsidize the
cost of the cell phone. Each subscriber
has to buy his own phone... at full price.
If you buy a cell-phone service from Verizon,
verizon spends $200.00 on you the day you
sign up... for the cost of the phone.
That is partly why the service is more expensive in the US.
Magnus.
Verizon is currently conducting 1xEVDO field trials in the east and west coasts. 1xEVDO is an open standard, a CDMA-based technology developed by Qualcomm corp. In loaded sectors, it provides 300-500Kbps downstream and 9.6-76.8Kbps upstream. Peak rates are 2.4Mbps/sec downstream and 153.6Kbps upstream. Round-trip ping times are between 110-150ms.
In the CDG conference that took place in San Diego last week, a Verizon honcho said that EVDO is the only technology that he has worked with which delivered more than it promised.
In the same CDG conference, handoff between an 802.11 network and an EVDO network was demonstrated!
Vendors making base stations for EVDO: Nortel, Lucent, Samsung, Ericcson.
Vendors making handhelds for EVDO: Samsung, LG, GTran, Motorola.
EVDO is a fully-mobile technology. You can surf the web at 70Mph.
EVDO has already been deployed in Korea commercially. It has 50,000 subscribers, despite handhelds still being relatively expensive.
Furthermore, check out the comparable technology being developed by the startup "Flarion",
http://www.flarion.com. Technically, this one seems to be on par with (maybe even better than) EVDO, but it is a proprietary technology like Richochet.
I am not sure whether these technologies will ever be widely deployed in the USA, but if they are, Richochet is a dead duck.
Magnus.
SuperKendall wrote:
.h file and modified something. Pretty much everything in his view will rebuild. For a large project having tens of thousands of files, this could take hours (if not days).
>> 6. Smart 'make' routine which can take advantage of compiled object files in other people's views.
> Oh yeah, I'll bet a LOT of people really make use of that one.
Have you any idea how incredibly useful this feature is? For example: let us say a developer checked out a heavily used
But once he checks his stuff in, no other developer in his team will have to go through the compile, since clearcase winks in all the object files from the first developer's view!
Suffice to say that this is one of the biggest selling points of Clearcase to people who know about this feature.
Magnus.
I have used clearcase under two environments:
1) My last job: an all-unix network, where all the vobservers and clients were Solaris/linux, with a network administrator who knew what he was doing. The performance was excellent and clearcase really made a difference to the teams productivity. It was certainly better than CVS, which it replaced. Actually, comparing clearcase to CVS is like comparing Matlab to a 5-dollar pocket calculator.
2) My current job, where the vobserver is on Solaris, but all the clients are Win2000, with a drooling windows monkey for a network administrator. While the clearcase GUI on windows is excellent and much better than the unix equivalent, its performance is infinitely worse, with the performance of a view degrading in proportion to the amount of time the windows machine on which the view was created has been left turned on. Finally, we instituted a policy that all win2K machines have to be rebooted every monday morning.
It would be aweseome if IBM would make rational release a linux/unix GUI that is comparable to their windows version.
Magnus.
OK, I have had it up to here with all this FreeBSD worship. After putting up with this for a long time from one of my good friends who happens to be a BSD bigot, I made the mistake of wiping out my Mandrake 8.2 and installing freeBSD on my box.
After a few months of that, I am back back in Mandrake 9.0 with relief and no regrets. Why?
1) I found that, for the things that I do, FreeBSD offered no advantages at all. Performance and stability was no better than Mandrake 8.2. In fact, under heavy loads, my experience is that Linux 2.4.x is much better. (I run lots of octave math simulations and lots of fortran number crunching programs, often several at a time. )
2) For people used to working with linux, there are lots of annoyances to working with FreeBSD. I missed the convenience of RPMS. Many of my favorite programs did not compile properly.
3) When pitch came to shove, my friend had no suggestions as to why the FreeBSD install did not perform as well as linux, except to tell me that I must be mistaken in how well the linux install performed! Duh!
Now, maybe under some circumstances, it is probably true that FreeBSD does outperform linux. But I could not care less. For the work I do (mostly on the desktop, running simulations, running mozilla and xine), linux is demonstrably a better system than FreeBSD.
Magnus.
A lot of Columbian drug dealears give lots of money to catholic charities. Mother Theresa received quite a lot from them. Does that mean that we should ignore how these guys made the money?
If I steal a million dollars and give a hundred thousand to charity, does that make me immune to criticism?
Magnus.
Not that I am endorsing this particular study,
but you are not going to get much traction by quoting the Economist as an authority.
The Economist, Wall Street Journal and others of their ilk have, in the past, railed against:
1) De-segregation.
2) Abolition of slavery.
3) Civil Rights for blacks/minorities.
on the grounds that "we should let the market decide".
They keep quiet about it right now, hoping that no-one would remember their past positions. Papers like this have one purpose... to enforce the current "he who has gold should rule" philosophy.
For e.g., see their positions as far as the US vs Microsoft case.
Magnus.
Mandrake 9.0 has been rock solid for me. I use it at home and on several servers at work. Not a single crash anywhere. Of course, DRI has to be turned off to get it to work on machines with ATI graphics cards, but this is a known problem with Xfree 4.2.x and not with Mandrake! I think this author is trying to gain hits.
Magnus.
One of the most useful things about Clearcase
is its ability to "wink in" object files
from other developers' views. That means, if
one developer in the team has built a version
with a certain time stamp, that particular
object file never has to be built by anyone
else in the group unless some dependency changes. It would kick ass if CVS had that
capability.
Magnus.
WiFi is great as a LAN. But as a wide-area mobile data service? It certainly is not. For several reasons. Even as a nomadic service, it has several handicaps except in places like universities where money is not an object anyway.
For instance:
1) Need many more "base stations" since coverage is limited.
2) Since you need to run backhaul to each of these base stations, operational cost is higher.
3) No built-in "billing" model.
4) Not much security.
5) Cannot be used if the user is travelling at any speed.
and so on. There is standards work underway to address some of these issues, but not all.
Magnus.
Unfortunately, they seemed to have gotten rid of all their "mature" titles after they went mainstream.
Magnus.
Lack of personal mobility is a deployment issue, not something intrinsic to CDMA. The network operators don't want you to have the same number when you switch carriers... basically to increase the hassle of switching.
In the US, the cost of the phone is subsidized by the carrier. On the day you sign up for service with Verizon (for e.g.), Verizon spends about 100-300 dollars on you. The Motorola phone that costs 29.95 at Radio Shack probably costs $300.00 if you buy it yourself. That is why the cell-phone business model involves the lock-in period. You can blame the business model if you wish, but the fact remains that cell phones would be far less popular in this country if the user was expected to buy the phone.
As for the upgrade schedule of GSM... the next step is Wideband CDMA, which works over 5 MHz spectrum. Don't hold your breath waiting for it to arrive... the equipment is at least 2-4 years away from general availablility.
Meantime, the US version of CDMA (CDMA2000) is marching ahead. The voice part is well-entrenched. The 3G version (which works over 1.25 MHz, enabling carriers to use their existing spectrum as opposed to having to aqcquire new, continuous chunks of 5Mhz spectrum) is available today, you can buy service from Sprint and Verizon. Nortel, Lucent, Motorola and Samsung have mature Base Station implementations.
The data part of CDMA2000, 1xEVDO, will be available early next year in commercial versions. Nortel, Lucent and Samsung are trialing their implementations with different carriers as you read this. 1xEVDO provides a 2.4Mbps shared pipe over 1.25Mhz spectrum and kicks the ass of UMTS and Wideband CDMA. UMTS offers only a few hundred kilobits per second, and Wideband CDMA offers a max of 2Mbps over a 5 Mhz spectrum.
The rest of the World has already made up its mind as to what it prefers. Most carriers in North America and Asia (in particular, Korea) have decided to go with CDMA2000 as opposed to Wideband CDMA.
In short, Europe is not going to be ahead in wireless for much longer.
Magnus.
OK, I know that this was supposed to be satire.
Magnus.
This is completely bogus. I am currently typing
this from the first release candidate on a 550Mhz
win32 machine. On my machine, mozilla is faster
than IE on about 75% of all the web pages I have
tried, and slower, but only marginally, on the
other 25%. I know because I tried this out with
our local MS lover. I don't see any problems
with resizing the windows, javascript etc.
I don't know where you are coming from,
but I seriously doubt that your intentions are sincere.
Magnus.
Lawyers have been trying for an "in" to sue telecomm companies for years. Most of the studies exploring links between cellphones and tissue damage are directly or indirectly funded by lawyer lobbies. So far, dozens of studies have produced no causal link. But they will continue trying, and articles like this will keep coming.
They won't sue TV manufacturers or Microwave manufacturers because the average jury member would rather have his head cut off than give up eating TV dinners while watching "Friends". But cell phones... ah, that is a different kettle of fish altogether. Many interests coincide to want their demise. Suburban homeowners nervous that a cell-tower in the vicinity could reduce property values for a start.
Magnus.
This is untrue. 3G is an umbrella that
includes 2 technologies. CDMA2000, which is
used mostly in the North American continent
and Korea, and Wideband CDMA, which is supposed
to be used by the rest of the world. Verizon
has a CDMA2000 network (1xRTT), which is very
definitely 3G.
Magnus.