You're ignoring the fact that the relationship was Dave Cutler, and 20 of his team members.
I'm not really sure that that's all that relevent, it certainly isn't something I'm either ignoring nor considering important. Whether it's one programmer or a hundred, they either cloned VMS, possibly including source code, or they didn't. I maintain it's improbable that they did.
Microsoft then sapped up Cutler on the agreement that Microsoft would also hire all the team members who'd been working on the Next-Gen VMS project with him. Microsoft agreed, and development on "Windows NT" (which doesn't actually mean anything, the marketdriods just liked the "NT" letters) began in earnest.
Which makes the entire story even less of the "NT is just a clone of VMS!" (which is ludicrous, as anyone who's actually used both can tell you. NT and VMS have almost nothing in common except at levels where, frankly, NT and Unix have things in common.) Now, you're trying to claim I'm wrong in what I wrote by raising an entirely different argument, that:
It's irrelevant if that is true or not. (Though it might be, given the amount of resources directly transferred to Microsoft.) What's relevant is the fact that each engineer carried a metric boatload of proprietary technology to another company. That's simply not legal for employees, especially when they're under contract. Thus Microsoft benefitted from all the work that DEC had already paid for.
which may or may not be true, but it's irrelevent. The fact is people claim that NT contains VMS code, that it's based on VMS. It isn't. It's not true, it's ludicrous people keep alleging it is. Whether NT may contain similar concepts to an unreleased unfinished operating system intended to replace VMS is simply not relevent to that, and certainly no basis for arguing that NT is based on VMS.
No, I actually learned from a much more interesting source: DiskKeeper. They used to make Defrag software for VAX VMS, then converted it to run on NT when it came out. Funny thing that. You'd almost think that the two systems were so similar that it would be a natural port, now wouldn't you?
No, I wouldn't. Let's have a look at the APIs and file systems they'd have had to work with.
Under VMS, they'd have had to work with the VMS native API, and the VAX file systems.
Under NT, they'd have had to work with the Win32 API, and the HPFS (for early NTs) and NTFS file systems.
"Aha!" I pretend to hear you cry, "But NTFS must have been based on the VMS file system, right?" Well, probably not, the available evidence suggests NTFS's designers started with HPFS, something co-developed by IBM and Microsoft for OS/2 well before Cutler got a hand in. More to the point, try comparing them at some point. VMS's FS, while using crude uppercase 40.40 filenames, had some remarkable features, including complete indexed database features (you could specify the record structure of files, define indexes, even something as simple as end-of-line markers could be defined, or removed completely in favour of record-length words, all at an OS/file system level.) There's nothing like that in NTFS, which is much more of a desktop-oriented system, with a slightly modernised file naming convention.
Likewise, Win32 is based upon the Windows 3.x APIs, which in turn are enhancements of the Windows 2.x APIs (Windows 2.x's APIs largely supplanted the 1.x APIs, which remained largely for backward compatability, so I'm not going to continue the trail, but right now you presumably see where I'm going with this.)
In other words, neither Cutler, nor the programmers he brought over from DEC had much of a hand in either the API the DiskKeeper people were using under NT, nor the basis of the filesystem the DiskKeeper application was supposedly optimizing.
Fundamentally, I assume there was nothing easy about the port, certain principles would have remained the same (eg k
Probably not. There is actual OS/2 code in the NT series of OSes, relating to its original aim of being OS/2 V3. There's not much, because that plan didn't last for very long. But a lot of the original OS/2 1.1 sans-presentation manager code sits, unused, in the userland.
VMS's "relationship" with NT has to do with Dave Cutler, a respected former DEC engineer who worked on later versions of VMS, being the primary designer of the original NT kernel, and using many of the same ideas (as you'd expect him to do.) Some people, as you appear to suggest, have chosen to go further than this and claim there's code from VMS in NT. This is fairly ludicrous and the evidence behind it appears to be based upon innuendo (my God! They shared a designer!) and taking certain facts (such as some design decisions being similar) to mean far more than "Cutler designed both" and "Most OSes have equivalents anyway, dumbass" (dumbass label applied to "Mark Russinovich" - wow, both OSes have a kernel except VMS's is called "sys.exe" and NT's is called "ntoskrnl.exe", with proof like that, who needs intelligence? I mean, they've got to be clones! They both have kernels, and ASTs, and paged memory, and...)
I've seen this conspiracy theory repeated ad-nausium on Slashdot. It's stupid. It needs to die, quietly, as an anti-Microsoft myth that's entirely unnecessary given the real bad things they've done. All it actually does is hurt the reputation of Dave Cutler, and I don't think that's fair.
Drew Carey was proposing caffienated beer, not beer fermented from coffee beans. In any case, the fact he had the idea for an end-product doesn't mean he invented the product itself.
"A pair of chairs where if you sit in one and press a button, you automatically are transported to the other one, in less than a second, regardless of where it is in the world."
Did I just invent something? (Yeah, I've read similar ideas, but none involving chairs for some reason. Pretend, for the sake of argument, nobody's ever said anything about chairs before now) Was that an invention?
Of course it wasn't. And it will not be until I can at least describe how the chairs work. And that doesn't mean "I'd use wormholes", I mean I need to document enough that someone with adequate knowledge and equipment can put the invention together, at a bare minimum. One can come up with an argument that Arthur C. Clarke did invent the geostationary satellite, because he documented that, essentially, all you need to do is put an object in a particular orbit around the Earth (that is, have it a certain height from the ground, travelling at a certain speed) using basic Newtonian physics to prove the principle; if, however, he'd just talked arbitrarily about a satellite that, somehow, floated above the same point above the Earth without describing how (leaving his readers to wonder how the hell it stayed up there), he wouldn't be described as the inventor of anything of the soprt.
The MPAA may represent profit-making entities, but it's just an association and advocacy group by itself. So.org is reasonable.
As far as business practices go, whatever its members may do, I don't think the MPAA itself has any illegal business practices. Indeed, I don't think it has any business practices at all (I may be wrong, for all I know that certification thing might be a cash earner, but I doubt it.)
I apologize for the strength of my comment. I was getting pissed off. I need to stop ranting at 8am.
But, your original claim about a billion levels up still doesn't hold. It would be a pretty straightforward matter to take the aggregate tower switching data from various towers and come up with an approximate value of area freeway speeds. Implementation for a real-time summation of this data would be a bitch (the devil's in the details), but certainly feasible. The article's claim that you would know "instantly" is crazy, but this could be made to work fairly well with some good statistical work up front.
Freeway speeds? I guess it might work under certain circumstances. Given a cell will generally cover more than a freeway, that's a lot of hard work, and realistically, if you're trying to get an idea of that, rather than amounts of people (as has hithertoo been claimed) I can think of easier methods, including just driving on these roads at rushhour.
The GP is correct. You are making an unwarranted assumption that a cellphone communicating to the towers to determine where you are uses the same amount of power as talking on the phone.
No, the GP is incorrect. Do I have to quote ETSI standards to demonstrate it (and, God forbid, read the rantings of CDMA advocates too)? I am not making any such unwarranted suggestion. The GP is claiming that the cellphones are in constant contact with the towers. That's bullshit. If they were, then yes, we'd be talking about power usage similar to that of talking, because yes, it doesn't matter if it's voice, location data, or the bit "0" repeated over and over again, if you are in continuous communication with a tower, you're using the same power.
How do you think you receive incoming calls? Do you think that every tower in the country broadcasts trying desperately to find your phone? No. Your cellphone looks for cell towers, sends some data that basically says "here I am!" and the tower and its associated network take note of that.
What exactly was the point in this rant? I explained in the response to the GGP how the network determines which towers to use to page a phone. Do you want to point out where your rant contradicts my description? Here's what I originally said:
Cellphones for all modern popular standards do little but listen every few seconds for a paging signal when they're not in use. They do not generally transmit anything unless they're getting out of range of the tower or system of towers (depending on the standard) they're registered with, are turned off, or are about to become active (make a call, send a text message, etc)
That's factually correct. It's also enough activity that the mobile system knows enough to know which towers to transmit pages from in order to contact a cellphone. It does not constitute continuous communication with a cellphone, and as I said in my comment also:
At best, without the cellphone engaged in a call, you might be able to determine that a cellphone is within a few miles of a particular tower. That kind of precision isn't exactly useful if you're running anything but the most rural road networks.
which is also factually correct. So either the story is an exaggeration, or is plain wrong.
Or do you really believe that cellphones are in constant communication with the towers, giving towers completely unnecessary exact location information, as the GGP seems to think? If you do think that, you better start quoting chapter and verse from the respective standards. I can tell you that it's not true. Forget battery life, the towers would be swamped with entirely unnecessary bandwidth use. The networks do not need data of the form "Tower 2 is in range. Tower 2 is in range. Tower 2 is in range". They just need "Haven't talked to you in a while, I think Tower 3 is a little closer than Tower 2." once in a while.
Why thank you for repeating it. The fact you repeated the article means that it is entirely correct, and that all of a sudden, mobile phones are connected constantly to the towers reporting on their every position.
Which means we're all fucked because our battery lives are going to hell.
Bollocks. I stand by what I said. It is most emphatically not the case that phones are "always in contact" with the towers. If that were the case, your battery life would be the same regardless of whether you're on a call or not.
Cellphones for all modern popular standards do little but listen every few seconds for a paging signal when they're not in use. They do not generally transmit anything unless they're getting out of range of the tower or system of towers (depending on the standard) they're registered with, are turned off, or are about to become active (make a call, send a text message, etc)
At best, without the cellphone engaged in a call, you might be able to determine that a cellphone is within a few miles of a particular tower. That kind of precision isn't exactly useful if you're running anything but the most rural road networks.
Even worse, I don't see this working unless the cellphones are in use. Most of the time they sit there being quiet listening for a call from the tower. They're not constantly exchanging GPS information with the tower.
It strikes me that this is going to bias the results towards the groups that generally talk & drive. Makes little sense to me.
1. Contracts. Remember, ABC buys content from KangaMoo Corp to get its episodes of "Australians Behaving Carefully". KangaRoo is a distributor for a variety of production companies such as BruceTV and SheilaVision. SheilaVision produces Australians Behaving Carefully, using a theme tune originally created by Rolf Harris, licensed to them by Harris's publisher Canya, Giswot, & Isyit. SheilaVision employs various people, including the show's presenter. Meanwhile, when ABC gets its hands on it, it has the show shown via a network of affiliates. For example. WASP in Philadelphia shows this. WASP has exclusive rights to any show ABC licenses throughout its coverage area.
Now, of these groups, which has the right to put it on the web? SheilaVision? KangaMoo would say not, after all, KangaRoo gave it the production money in exchange for exclusive distribution rights throughout the United States. Well, what about Rolf Harris? Maybe not. KangaRoo? ABC will be furious, here they are trying to serve the show to an entire country they were supposed to handle exclusively and KangaRoo's now competing with them. ABC? KangaRoo would be pissed at it, as would WASP. How dare ABC allow people in WASP's coverage area to receive an ABC show without receiving it via WASP!
In practice, all these groups have contracts with each other, and, at the very least, there's going to be some renegotiating in various locations before a show can be put on the web. Even if SheilaVision reads the fine print on the contract and finds it can distribute the show without permission, KangaRoo, ABC, and various other companies will have no further dealing with them.
I'd like to apologize to all the Australians reading the above who are going "Strewth! What the fuck was that?" as they read it. The problem is that "Australians Behaving Carefully" was the first thing that came to mind when I tried to come up with a backronym for ABC. I have no idea why I even tried to do that, and it's probably undermined the point I was trying to make.
2. Bandwidth. Yeah, BitTorrent "solves" that, but it doesn't really, because you proposed location specific ads. You'd probably have to build a media player to get this working that can use shared bandwidth BT style, you couldn't use off-the-shelf technologies.
Can we start prefixing acronyms, initials, and other re-used names, with the date they were coined or something? I'm reading this entire story and finding it hard to not think about ancient computers made by Apricot in the UK. Now you're blathering about CP/M's graphics standard, GSX? Argh.
Re:No firewire on Blue and White or FireLynx
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Mac OS X 10.4.3 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
He said a Blue & White G3. While the Beige G3s do not have built-in Firewire (or USB), the B&W's most certainly do. I have one sitting right next to me.
Symmetric, which is what you were actually refering to (as was the GP) is where one side is capable of transmitting at the same bit rate as the other side.
Synchronous means that the two bit streams (sender and receiver) are synchronized, so there's no necessity for breaking everything into bytes with start and stop bits.
Symmetric, which is what you were actually refering to (as was the GP) is where one side is capable of transmitting at a faster bit rate than the other side.
Nowadays, most serial modems simulate asynchronous operation at the RS232 port, but transmit data as LAPM packets over a synchronous connection, under V42 and its successors.
Asymmetry in modems predates V34 BTW. There were a myriad of 9600+bps modems made in the mid-eighties where one side was clearly faster than the other, as modem manufacturers adopted various proprietary ways to squeeze more and more bandwidth out of the phone lines.
In terms of ITU standards, the V23 standard (1200bps from content provider to you, 75bps back) was very popular in some parts of Europe, notably Britain where it was the basis for BT's Prestel system. Very suspectable to line noise, but it generally worked, and, being frequency modulated like V21, was cheap to implement with the techologies of the time.
Average tip in Britain is about 5%. Service is awful. Expect to wait up to twenty minutes in some restaurants before you'll even see a menu, and if you're lucky enough to get one quickly you'll still have to wait a similar period of time before you get to order. No leaving cash on the table and walking out at the end of a meal either, you have to obey the rules (which means waiting ten minutes for the bill, then waiting ten minutes for them to collect your money, then waiting a little more for them to come back with change.)
There are, obviously, some exceptions (especially Indian Restaurants), but generally the best in my home country isn't that great.
Average tip in America is around 17.5% (15-20%). Service is excellent. Expect to wait no longer than two minutes before you see a menu. Don't expect to have to wait very long before you can actually give your order. The check (bill) arrives soon after you've finished eating and indicated you're done for the day. If you have cash for the check and tip, you can leave it on the table and walk out without people chasing after you assuming you've just robbed them.
Now, I'm sure the tip isn't the only reason service is better. But I bet it's a factor.
I'll back you up because there seem to be a lot of people reading this who have an aversion to "cheap" stores and refuse to believe that something so obvious might be being done.
Forget WalMart, go to your local Dollar Tree (or other $1 or 99c store.) There are plenty of examples there. Sold in cardboard sleeves, MSRP $1. Mostly obscurer 1930s cartoons, pulp scifi and horror movies, "Superman" serials, and other similar content, mixed with a few more famous items like Abbot and Costello and I love Lucy.
No, this isn't close-out stuff. It's old content sold on cheap DVDs, because that's how you sell old content.
One of the reasons cameraphones are so despised by "classic geeks" and, yet, are absurdly popular, are because they are gadgets that appeal to "most people", something geeks are having difficulty understanding given they don't, at first, appear to be related things that fit together.
It's a little like the iPod Photo. I recall seeing the first reactions to it on/., most of whom where overwhelmingly negative, and then looking over at my fiance, with pictures of her nieces on her computer, and in her purse with pictures of her and of her parents, and all over her house, and... and, well, you get the idea. A portable device that you can use to take not just your entire music collection around with you, but your entire photo collection as well? Is that useful? To me, no. To you, most probably not. To approximately 51% of the population, yes, actually.
The big problem with a lot of geeks is that they assume too much about other people. According to the consensus, the "average" computer user is an idiot who cannot figure out how to do anything, holding up their mouse and using it to point at the screen, for example. The thing is that that's not true. The average user is not typified by, say, our mothers (my own has done the mouse thing) but by our bosses and other people who do amazingly complicated things in Excel (for example, ie have specialised in a particular technology that grabbed them at the moment) but cannot figure out how to set up a network. We assume that because we know that, for example, a web server does not serve pages from a different site when it links to one, that everyone who doesn't know this is completely ignorant of everything else. I mention that particular issue because it confuses the hell out of our tech services guy in charge of firewalls and load balancers, I've had to explain it to him several times now. You'd think he knows that. Proves "ordinary people can't get technology" right? Well, obviously not, otherwise he wouldn't be our tech services guy.
People can and do learn how to use tech stuff as long as they see a use for them.
I like your idea, I don't think it's a "mobile phone for the rest of us", I think it's a nice replacement for the calling card with potential for a bunch of other things. I do think the costs are more expensive than you imagine. Remember the third-world phones Nokia and Motorola are putting together for $40 are designed to sell in the tens of millions. They're the results of a huge amount of R&D into making phones cheaper and cheaper. I can imagine your idea of switching to AA batteries will reduce the cost a little more (that's the only thing I think I missed that'll make a serious difference), but I think we're still looking at a manufacturering cost of close to $20, before airtime and retailer margin's added, at that point. I'd like to be proven wrong though, it's a nice idea.
If you changed the power supply, you could make it credit card or business card sized. That'd be interesting.
Reading the comment he made, I believe he's essentially talking about a disposable cellphone, one you'd hand out like a business card. You would buy the phone with a certain number of minutes (or perhaps with airtime billed to the receiver) that dials a particular cellphone, brand them, and pass them out to people.
I can, actually, see these being relatively popular. Aside from the uses he suggests, such as men giving them to prospective dates, and salespeople giving them to clients, employers can give their employees such phones to call work at the employer's expense, parents can give them to their children, etc.
The big problem is I think he underestimates the costs of the things. Motorola and Nokia's cheapest, "We're targetting these at the third world", phones cost around $40 wholesale. Removing the keyboard and screen wouldn't cut that much from the price. You'd probably want to build the SIM card into the phone, a step backwards, but if cost is your issue, havinga separate SIM is going to add to the cost. Realistically, I think we're looking at a wholesale price of close to $30. That's without airtime, retailer's profit, etc. I can't see something at that price really selling, and relatively few people buying them "by the dozen".
One alternative, that is possible today, is selling SIM cards using the same idea (SIMs can be locked by the subscriber to dial only one number), but that relies upon the receiver having an unlocked GSM or UMTS phone. That's common in much of Europe, but not the UK or US.
First, THANK YOU for saying "could not care less" (and not writing "careless" instead of care less) - it's a small thing, but it made me take your comment seriously. Heh.
Now, to answer your question - yeah, the salesguy was an idiot. If you weren't after a camera, he shouldn't have gone on about them. But the major issue here is that cameras and cellphones are both devices you want to carry around with you, and to some extent, they both "compete" even if they perform entirely unalike tasks - they compete for pocket space.
I have this very real problem. I have an iPod and a mobile phone. I can't justify carrying both around with me, so I tend to leave the iPod at work. I also have a camera, which is now broken, which is also something I'd carry around all the time in an ideal world, but, well, has difficulty fitting in a pocket by itself, let alone with an iPod and a cellphone. And somewhere I have an Ericsson PocketPC thing (you know, with the keyboard, a clone of the HP units), but add that to an iPod, a mobile phone, a wallet, a camera, a... well, you get the idea. I have only so many pockets. I have too many gadgets. It's a PITA to take all of them, even though they're all the type of thing whose usefulness is defined by their portability. A mobile phone is worse than a landline if kept at home. A camera that you can't carry around with you is almost as useless. A PDA is worse than a desktop computer, unless you take into account its portability. etc. etc.
Enter "integration". As hardware gets smaller, they're able to integrate various devices into one. The first generation of camera phones were awful, but as I've said further up the thread, I recently got one that's an adequate substitute for my old 3MP Kodak and I couldn't be happier. Mobile phones with PDAs have been around for a while, and have largely not been as successful as they could have been because of the cost and they're still having difficulty getting the UIs right. The iPod Mobile Phone has yet to appear, though phones that play MP3s have started to come around (but none with the storage capacity of an iPod), but it's a matter of time. Eventually, all of these should evolve into a multipurpose device - like a computer - that's the size of a cellphone, has the capacity of an iPod, has a 2 or 3MP prosumer-quality camera, and is arbitrarily programmable. It will not be today, but it'll happen. Nokia has its prototypes for this, the latest being the 9300/9500 smartphones. But we're waiting on the size and UIs to become right.
Now some people will be old fashioned and only want a phone. That's fine, because as long as there's a market for them, those phones will continue to sell. Motorola makes a crapload of camera phones, but it's still updating the V18X series, identical to most of their other high-end phones, but without the camera. Nokia's still producing ultrabasic phones like the 6010, which doesn't even have USB or Bluetooth. Most of the phones made for the US prepaid market are cameraless, and I don't see that changing soon.
But, yeah, there's a good reason for camera phones, as long as the cameras are decent quality. They're a replacement for something you wanted to carry around with you like your cellphone, but just couldn't. And as time goes on, we'll see more and more of that. And that's a great thing.
The quality I'm getting, with reasonable consistancy, is closer to that of my old 3 megapixel Kodak than of the disposable film cameras I've had (the Kodak always beat those handsdown.) That's, obviously, at the V635's highest quality setting and with the pictures physically downloaded from the phone via USB or BT, rather than sent MMS.
Like I said, I was a cameraphone hater two weeks ago. This thing's changed my opinion 180 degrees. A good digital camera in a cellphone is a nice extra. That's what's happening now, they're moving away from the webcams.
They're getting better. My V635's camera may not be as good as my old Kodak, but largely it's a resolution issue now not a "This looks like an effing webcam" problem, and at 1.2 megapixels, with expandable memory via MMC-compatable "Transflash" cards, it's "good enough" (that is, better than I'd achieve with a regular disposable film camera) quality and overall vastly more useful.
"Aha", I pretend to hear you cry, "But if the Kodak's still better, why not use it?" Answer, because (a) the old Kodak doesn't work any more, and (b) (more importantly) I couldn't carry the Kodak around all the time, it was too big, and carrying it AND an iPod AND a phone AND a wallet is uncomfortable. So, from my point of view, despite being a cameraphone hater two weeks ago, the V635 is a vast improvement on what I had before. In addition to being a cellphone, it's a good-enough camera that goes where I go. And I'd imagine the same is true of the cameraphones reviewed here too.
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo - SHORT VERSION
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Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 1
It became legal to attach non-AT&T equipment to the network at some point in the mid-sixties. It was only the anti-trust action taken against AT&T in the mid-seventies that resulted in its break-up, and that was well after AT&T was required to allow customers to hook up their own equipment.
Also, while the leasing phones thing was clearly generally bad, you exaggerate the cheapness of the equipment. AT&T phones were built to last, they weren't the cheap, plastic, stuff you get for $10 today. The logic, and it was reasonable, was that the more reliable and solid the phones, the less likely they were (a) to go wrong and cause an AT&T engineer to have to visit a customer and fix them and (b) to go wrong and damage the actual network (not that that was terribly likely anyway)
If AT&T's phones ever cost $10, it would have been when $10 really was $10, representing a goodly part of factory worker's weekly income.
AT&T kept its monopoly on a lot of aspects of the network for a long time by using two arguments. The first, which is legitimate and still relevent today, is that a phone network is expensive and doesn't become much cheaper simply by reducing the number of customers. If you wire up a street, it doesn't matter if 100 or 50 households on the street take your service, it'll still cost around the same. As such, phone service (at least the local loop part) is a natural monopoly, because whoever has the largest number of customers will end up charging the lowest prices all other things being equal: and if the market's truly "free from government interference", the company with the 51% marketshare can also forbid interconnection, essentially killing competitors via network effects.
The other reason was that if one network owns the entire network, they can make a commitment to quality and service that benefits society. AT&T, for the most part, was extremely careful to do this: the original universal service commitment wasn't a government imposed thing, it was part of a concerted effort of public/government relations from a monopoly terrified of the risk of nationalization, and also well aware of the value added to its network by the notion that anyone can be reached on it, no matter how poor or how out of the way they are.
The government saw through some of the excesses of the second part of the policy (of which the monopoly on customer equipment was one), and hit AT&T hard, starting in the 1950s. It wasn't this part that caused the break-up, it was the long distance issue that started becoming an issue in the '70s.
I believe the classic Pseudo-Libertarian argument against Microsoft is "Nobody forces you to use Windows". Well, I could avoid it, but then I'd have difficulty getting a job, I'd probably have to move, or accept a much poorer life. You don't need Microsoft Windows. It's just very, very, useful if you want to be an active part of society using the same systems the rest of society uses.
Likewise, nobody forces you to use SBC. SBC merely provides phone service. You don't need phone service. It's just very, very, useful if you want to be an active part of society using the same systems the rest of society uses.
As it happens, I use Windows minimally (only at work), but there's certainly no way I could get it out of my life completely. The same applies to (my dominant phone carrier), though, as it happens, I actually like BellSouth so it's not a problem. I mean, they serve a relatively reasonable product at a decent price. Sure, they don't do a reasonable ISDN (I don't think anyone in the US does) so I have to use POTS, but that'd probably interfere with my DSL anyway.
Network effects. Got to love 'em.
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo - SHORT VERSION
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Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 4, Informative
Any scenario I could imagine where AT&T was the only phone company providing cell service doesn't look good at all.
But it wouldn't have been. In most Western free-market countries, cellular service was deliberately un-monopolised. The dominant landline operator was usually given a franchise together with a competitor, because there's no reason why cellular should be a natural monopoly. It's cheap to deploy, a substantial proportion of the costs are per-customer (as opposed to landline service where it's more per-street)
In Britain, BT was given an effective monopoly on landline telephone service in 1984. At around the same time, the UK government set up two cellular franchises, and while it allowed BT to be involved with owning one of the operators, it actually insisted that BT own a minority share (Cellnet, for it is them, was majority owned by a company largely known for delivering parcels and money.)
In the early nineties, as this wasn't creating enough competition, they opened up three more franchises (though two franchisees merged early on), and the EU itself forced the UK to open up more (albeit resulting in only one more competitor) a few years ago for 3G services.
I can't imagine it being any different in the US. The AMPS network supported B and A carriers from the start. Would the FCC not have opened up the 1900MHz band in the mid-nineties?
Not that I think the break-up of AT&T did nothing. But the notion that AT&T having a regulated monopoly would have meant it would have controlled cellular too strikes me as unlikely. The only change I can possibly think of is that it's possible that the calling-party-pays scheme would have been more feasable in an environment in which one landline operator exists who sets the charges for every type of call. And, having lived under both regimes, I can't honestly tell you if that'd have been better or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not really sure that that's all that relevent, it certainly isn't something I'm either ignoring nor considering important. Whether it's one programmer or a hundred, they either cloned VMS, possibly including source code, or they didn't. I maintain it's improbable that they did.
Which makes the entire story even less of the "NT is just a clone of VMS!" (which is ludicrous, as anyone who's actually used both can tell you. NT and VMS have almost nothing in common except at levels where, frankly, NT and Unix have things in common.) Now, you're trying to claim I'm wrong in what I wrote by raising an entirely different argument, that:
which may or may not be true, but it's irrelevent. The fact is people claim that NT contains VMS code, that it's based on VMS. It isn't. It's not true, it's ludicrous people keep alleging it is. Whether NT may contain similar concepts to an unreleased unfinished operating system intended to replace VMS is simply not relevent to that, and certainly no basis for arguing that NT is based on VMS.
No, I wouldn't. Let's have a look at the APIs and file systems they'd have had to work with.
Under VMS, they'd have had to work with the VMS native API, and the VAX file systems.
Under NT, they'd have had to work with the Win32 API, and the HPFS (for early NTs) and NTFS file systems.
"Aha!" I pretend to hear you cry, "But NTFS must have been based on the VMS file system, right?" Well, probably not, the available evidence suggests NTFS's designers started with HPFS, something co-developed by IBM and Microsoft for OS/2 well before Cutler got a hand in. More to the point, try comparing them at some point. VMS's FS, while using crude uppercase 40.40 filenames, had some remarkable features, including complete indexed database features (you could specify the record structure of files, define indexes, even something as simple as end-of-line markers could be defined, or removed completely in favour of record-length words, all at an OS/file system level.) There's nothing like that in NTFS, which is much more of a desktop-oriented system, with a slightly modernised file naming convention.
Likewise, Win32 is based upon the Windows 3.x APIs, which in turn are enhancements of the Windows 2.x APIs (Windows 2.x's APIs largely supplanted the 1.x APIs, which remained largely for backward compatability, so I'm not going to continue the trail, but right now you presumably see where I'm going with this.)
In other words, neither Cutler, nor the programmers he brought over from DEC had much of a hand in either the API the DiskKeeper people were using under NT, nor the basis of the filesystem the DiskKeeper application was supposedly optimizing.
Fundamentally, I assume there was nothing easy about the port, certain principles would have remained the same (eg k
VMS's "relationship" with NT has to do with Dave Cutler, a respected former DEC engineer who worked on later versions of VMS, being the primary designer of the original NT kernel, and using many of the same ideas (as you'd expect him to do.) Some people, as you appear to suggest, have chosen to go further than this and claim there's code from VMS in NT. This is fairly ludicrous and the evidence behind it appears to be based upon innuendo (my God! They shared a designer!) and taking certain facts (such as some design decisions being similar) to mean far more than "Cutler designed both" and "Most OSes have equivalents anyway, dumbass" (dumbass label applied to "Mark Russinovich" - wow, both OSes have a kernel except VMS's is called "sys.exe" and NT's is called "ntoskrnl.exe", with proof like that, who needs intelligence? I mean, they've got to be clones! They both have kernels, and ASTs, and paged memory, and...)
I've seen this conspiracy theory repeated ad-nausium on Slashdot. It's stupid. It needs to die, quietly, as an anti-Microsoft myth that's entirely unnecessary given the real bad things they've done. All it actually does is hurt the reputation of Dave Cutler, and I don't think that's fair.
"A pair of chairs where if you sit in one and press a button, you automatically are transported to the other one, in less than a second, regardless of where it is in the world."
Did I just invent something? (Yeah, I've read similar ideas, but none involving chairs for some reason. Pretend, for the sake of argument, nobody's ever said anything about chairs before now) Was that an invention?
Of course it wasn't. And it will not be until I can at least describe how the chairs work. And that doesn't mean "I'd use wormholes", I mean I need to document enough that someone with adequate knowledge and equipment can put the invention together, at a bare minimum. One can come up with an argument that Arthur C. Clarke did invent the geostationary satellite, because he documented that, essentially, all you need to do is put an object in a particular orbit around the Earth (that is, have it a certain height from the ground, travelling at a certain speed) using basic Newtonian physics to prove the principle; if, however, he'd just talked arbitrarily about a satellite that, somehow, floated above the same point above the Earth without describing how (leaving his readers to wonder how the hell it stayed up there), he wouldn't be described as the inventor of anything of the soprt.
As far as business practices go, whatever its members may do, I don't think the MPAA itself has any illegal business practices. Indeed, I don't think it has any business practices at all (I may be wrong, for all I know that certification thing might be a cash earner, but I doubt it.)
Cellphones for all modern popular standards do little but listen every few seconds for a paging signal when they're not in use. They do not generally transmit anything unless they're getting out of range of the tower or system of towers (depending on the standard) they're registered with, are turned off, or are about to become active (make a call, send a text message, etc)
That's factually correct. It's also enough activity that the mobile system knows enough to know which towers to transmit pages from in order to contact a cellphone. It does not constitute continuous communication with a cellphone, and as I said in my comment also:
At best, without the cellphone engaged in a call, you might be able to determine that a cellphone is within a few miles of a particular tower. That kind of precision isn't exactly useful if you're running anything but the most rural road networks.
which is also factually correct. So either the story is an exaggeration, or is plain wrong.
Or do you really believe that cellphones are in constant communication with the towers, giving towers completely unnecessary exact location information, as the GGP seems to think? If you do think that, you better start quoting chapter and verse from the respective standards. I can tell you that it's not true. Forget battery life, the towers would be swamped with entirely unnecessary bandwidth use. The networks do not need data of the form "Tower 2 is in range. Tower 2 is in range. Tower 2 is in range". They just need "Haven't talked to you in a while, I think Tower 3 is a little closer than Tower 2." once in a while.
Which means we're all fucked because our battery lives are going to hell.
Seriously, why did you quote that?
Cellphones for all modern popular standards do little but listen every few seconds for a paging signal when they're not in use. They do not generally transmit anything unless they're getting out of range of the tower or system of towers (depending on the standard) they're registered with, are turned off, or are about to become active (make a call, send a text message, etc)
At best, without the cellphone engaged in a call, you might be able to determine that a cellphone is within a few miles of a particular tower. That kind of precision isn't exactly useful if you're running anything but the most rural road networks.
It strikes me that this is going to bias the results towards the groups that generally talk & drive. Makes little sense to me.
Now, of these groups, which has the right to put it on the web? SheilaVision? KangaMoo would say not, after all, KangaRoo gave it the production money in exchange for exclusive distribution rights throughout the United States. Well, what about Rolf Harris? Maybe not. KangaRoo? ABC will be furious, here they are trying to serve the show to an entire country they were supposed to handle exclusively and KangaRoo's now competing with them. ABC? KangaRoo would be pissed at it, as would WASP. How dare ABC allow people in WASP's coverage area to receive an ABC show without receiving it via WASP!
In practice, all these groups have contracts with each other, and, at the very least, there's going to be some renegotiating in various locations before a show can be put on the web. Even if SheilaVision reads the fine print on the contract and finds it can distribute the show without permission, KangaRoo, ABC, and various other companies will have no further dealing with them.
I'd like to apologize to all the Australians reading the above who are going "Strewth! What the fuck was that?" as they read it. The problem is that "Australians Behaving Carefully" was the first thing that came to mind when I tried to come up with a backronym for ABC. I have no idea why I even tried to do that, and it's probably undermined the point I was trying to make.
2. Bandwidth. Yeah, BitTorrent "solves" that, but it doesn't really, because you proposed location specific ads. You'd probably have to build a media player to get this working that can use shared bandwidth BT style, you couldn't use off-the-shelf technologies.
Can we start prefixing acronyms, initials, and other re-used names, with the date they were coined or something? I'm reading this entire story and finding it hard to not think about ancient computers made by Apricot in the UK. Now you're blathering about CP/M's graphics standard, GSX? Argh.
He said a Blue & White G3. While the Beige G3s do not have built-in Firewire (or USB), the B&W's most certainly do. I have one sitting right next to me.
Synchronous means that the two bit streams (sender and receiver) are synchronized, so there's no necessity for breaking everything into bytes with start and stop bits.
Symmetric, which is what you were actually refering to (as was the GP) is where one side is capable of transmitting at a faster bit rate than the other side.
Nowadays, most serial modems simulate asynchronous operation at the RS232 port, but transmit data as LAPM packets over a synchronous connection, under V42 and its successors.
Asymmetry in modems predates V34 BTW. There were a myriad of 9600+bps modems made in the mid-eighties where one side was clearly faster than the other, as modem manufacturers adopted various proprietary ways to squeeze more and more bandwidth out of the phone lines.
In terms of ITU standards, the V23 standard (1200bps from content provider to you, 75bps back) was very popular in some parts of Europe, notably Britain where it was the basis for BT's Prestel system. Very suspectable to line noise, but it generally worked, and, being frequency modulated like V21, was cheap to implement with the techologies of the time.
Average tip in Britain is about 5%. Service is awful. Expect to wait up to twenty minutes in some restaurants before you'll even see a menu, and if you're lucky enough to get one quickly you'll still have to wait a similar period of time before you get to order. No leaving cash on the table and walking out at the end of a meal either, you have to obey the rules (which means waiting ten minutes for the bill, then waiting ten minutes for them to collect your money, then waiting a little more for them to come back with change.)
There are, obviously, some exceptions (especially Indian Restaurants), but generally the best in my home country isn't that great.
Average tip in America is around 17.5% (15-20%). Service is excellent. Expect to wait no longer than two minutes before you see a menu. Don't expect to have to wait very long before you can actually give your order. The check (bill) arrives soon after you've finished eating and indicated you're done for the day. If you have cash for the check and tip, you can leave it on the table and walk out without people chasing after you assuming you've just robbed them.
Now, I'm sure the tip isn't the only reason service is better. But I bet it's a factor.
Forget WalMart, go to your local Dollar Tree (or other $1 or 99c store.) There are plenty of examples there. Sold in cardboard sleeves, MSRP $1. Mostly obscurer 1930s cartoons, pulp scifi and horror movies, "Superman" serials, and other similar content, mixed with a few more famous items like Abbot and Costello and I love Lucy.
No, this isn't close-out stuff. It's old content sold on cheap DVDs, because that's how you sell old content.
It's a little like the iPod Photo. I recall seeing the first reactions to it on /., most of whom where overwhelmingly negative, and then looking over at my fiance, with pictures of her nieces on her computer, and in her purse with pictures of her and of her parents, and all over her house, and... and, well, you get the idea. A portable device that you can use to take not just your entire music collection around with you, but your entire photo collection as well? Is that useful? To me, no. To you, most probably not. To approximately 51% of the population, yes, actually.
The big problem with a lot of geeks is that they assume too much about other people. According to the consensus, the "average" computer user is an idiot who cannot figure out how to do anything, holding up their mouse and using it to point at the screen, for example. The thing is that that's not true. The average user is not typified by, say, our mothers (my own has done the mouse thing) but by our bosses and other people who do amazingly complicated things in Excel (for example, ie have specialised in a particular technology that grabbed them at the moment) but cannot figure out how to set up a network. We assume that because we know that, for example, a web server does not serve pages from a different site when it links to one, that everyone who doesn't know this is completely ignorant of everything else. I mention that particular issue because it confuses the hell out of our tech services guy in charge of firewalls and load balancers, I've had to explain it to him several times now. You'd think he knows that. Proves "ordinary people can't get technology" right? Well, obviously not, otherwise he wouldn't be our tech services guy.
People can and do learn how to use tech stuff as long as they see a use for them.
I like your idea, I don't think it's a "mobile phone for the rest of us", I think it's a nice replacement for the calling card with potential for a bunch of other things. I do think the costs are more expensive than you imagine. Remember the third-world phones Nokia and Motorola are putting together for $40 are designed to sell in the tens of millions. They're the results of a huge amount of R&D into making phones cheaper and cheaper. I can imagine your idea of switching to AA batteries will reduce the cost a little more (that's the only thing I think I missed that'll make a serious difference), but I think we're still looking at a manufacturering cost of close to $20, before airtime and retailer margin's added, at that point. I'd like to be proven wrong though, it's a nice idea.
If you changed the power supply, you could make it credit card or business card sized. That'd be interesting.
I can, actually, see these being relatively popular. Aside from the uses he suggests, such as men giving them to prospective dates, and salespeople giving them to clients, employers can give their employees such phones to call work at the employer's expense, parents can give them to their children, etc.
The big problem is I think he underestimates the costs of the things. Motorola and Nokia's cheapest, "We're targetting these at the third world", phones cost around $40 wholesale. Removing the keyboard and screen wouldn't cut that much from the price. You'd probably want to build the SIM card into the phone, a step backwards, but if cost is your issue, havinga separate SIM is going to add to the cost. Realistically, I think we're looking at a wholesale price of close to $30. That's without airtime, retailer's profit, etc. I can't see something at that price really selling, and relatively few people buying them "by the dozen".
One alternative, that is possible today, is selling SIM cards using the same idea (SIMs can be locked by the subscriber to dial only one number), but that relies upon the receiver having an unlocked GSM or UMTS phone. That's common in much of Europe, but not the UK or US.
Now, to answer your question - yeah, the salesguy was an idiot. If you weren't after a camera, he shouldn't have gone on about them. But the major issue here is that cameras and cellphones are both devices you want to carry around with you, and to some extent, they both "compete" even if they perform entirely unalike tasks - they compete for pocket space.
I have this very real problem. I have an iPod and a mobile phone. I can't justify carrying both around with me, so I tend to leave the iPod at work. I also have a camera, which is now broken, which is also something I'd carry around all the time in an ideal world, but, well, has difficulty fitting in a pocket by itself, let alone with an iPod and a cellphone. And somewhere I have an Ericsson PocketPC thing (you know, with the keyboard, a clone of the HP units), but add that to an iPod, a mobile phone, a wallet, a camera, a... well, you get the idea. I have only so many pockets. I have too many gadgets. It's a PITA to take all of them, even though they're all the type of thing whose usefulness is defined by their portability. A mobile phone is worse than a landline if kept at home. A camera that you can't carry around with you is almost as useless. A PDA is worse than a desktop computer, unless you take into account its portability. etc. etc.
Enter "integration". As hardware gets smaller, they're able to integrate various devices into one. The first generation of camera phones were awful, but as I've said further up the thread, I recently got one that's an adequate substitute for my old 3MP Kodak and I couldn't be happier. Mobile phones with PDAs have been around for a while, and have largely not been as successful as they could have been because of the cost and they're still having difficulty getting the UIs right. The iPod Mobile Phone has yet to appear, though phones that play MP3s have started to come around (but none with the storage capacity of an iPod), but it's a matter of time. Eventually, all of these should evolve into a multipurpose device - like a computer - that's the size of a cellphone, has the capacity of an iPod, has a 2 or 3MP prosumer-quality camera, and is arbitrarily programmable. It will not be today, but it'll happen. Nokia has its prototypes for this, the latest being the 9300/9500 smartphones. But we're waiting on the size and UIs to become right.
Now some people will be old fashioned and only want a phone. That's fine, because as long as there's a market for them, those phones will continue to sell. Motorola makes a crapload of camera phones, but it's still updating the V18X series, identical to most of their other high-end phones, but without the camera. Nokia's still producing ultrabasic phones like the 6010, which doesn't even have USB or Bluetooth. Most of the phones made for the US prepaid market are cameraless, and I don't see that changing soon.
But, yeah, there's a good reason for camera phones, as long as the cameras are decent quality. They're a replacement for something you wanted to carry around with you like your cellphone, but just couldn't. And as time goes on, we'll see more and more of that. And that's a great thing.
The quality I'm getting, with reasonable consistancy, is closer to that of my old 3 megapixel Kodak than of the disposable film cameras I've had (the Kodak always beat those handsdown.) That's, obviously, at the V635's highest quality setting and with the pictures physically downloaded from the phone via USB or BT, rather than sent MMS.
Like I said, I was a cameraphone hater two weeks ago. This thing's changed my opinion 180 degrees. A good digital camera in a cellphone is a nice extra. That's what's happening now, they're moving away from the webcams.
"Aha", I pretend to hear you cry, "But if the Kodak's still better, why not use it?" Answer, because (a) the old Kodak doesn't work any more, and (b) (more importantly) I couldn't carry the Kodak around all the time, it was too big, and carrying it AND an iPod AND a phone AND a wallet is uncomfortable. So, from my point of view, despite being a cameraphone hater two weeks ago, the V635 is a vast improvement on what I had before. In addition to being a cellphone, it's a good-enough camera that goes where I go. And I'd imagine the same is true of the cameraphones reviewed here too.
Also, while the leasing phones thing was clearly generally bad, you exaggerate the cheapness of the equipment. AT&T phones were built to last, they weren't the cheap, plastic, stuff you get for $10 today. The logic, and it was reasonable, was that the more reliable and solid the phones, the less likely they were (a) to go wrong and cause an AT&T engineer to have to visit a customer and fix them and (b) to go wrong and damage the actual network (not that that was terribly likely anyway)
If AT&T's phones ever cost $10, it would have been when $10 really was $10, representing a goodly part of factory worker's weekly income.
AT&T kept its monopoly on a lot of aspects of the network for a long time by using two arguments. The first, which is legitimate and still relevent today, is that a phone network is expensive and doesn't become much cheaper simply by reducing the number of customers. If you wire up a street, it doesn't matter if 100 or 50 households on the street take your service, it'll still cost around the same. As such, phone service (at least the local loop part) is a natural monopoly, because whoever has the largest number of customers will end up charging the lowest prices all other things being equal: and if the market's truly "free from government interference", the company with the 51% marketshare can also forbid interconnection, essentially killing competitors via network effects.
The other reason was that if one network owns the entire network, they can make a commitment to quality and service that benefits society. AT&T, for the most part, was extremely careful to do this: the original universal service commitment wasn't a government imposed thing, it was part of a concerted effort of public/government relations from a monopoly terrified of the risk of nationalization, and also well aware of the value added to its network by the notion that anyone can be reached on it, no matter how poor or how out of the way they are.
The government saw through some of the excesses of the second part of the policy (of which the monopoly on customer equipment was one), and hit AT&T hard, starting in the 1950s. It wasn't this part that caused the break-up, it was the long distance issue that started becoming an issue in the '70s.
No.
Likewise, nobody forces you to use SBC. SBC merely provides phone service. You don't need phone service. It's just very, very, useful if you want to be an active part of society using the same systems the rest of society uses.
As it happens, I use Windows minimally (only at work), but there's certainly no way I could get it out of my life completely. The same applies to (my dominant phone carrier), though, as it happens, I actually like BellSouth so it's not a problem. I mean, they serve a relatively reasonable product at a decent price. Sure, they don't do a reasonable ISDN (I don't think anyone in the US does) so I have to use POTS, but that'd probably interfere with my DSL anyway.
Network effects. Got to love 'em.
In Britain, BT was given an effective monopoly on landline telephone service in 1984. At around the same time, the UK government set up two cellular franchises, and while it allowed BT to be involved with owning one of the operators, it actually insisted that BT own a minority share (Cellnet, for it is them, was majority owned by a company largely known for delivering parcels and money.)
In the early nineties, as this wasn't creating enough competition, they opened up three more franchises (though two franchisees merged early on), and the EU itself forced the UK to open up more (albeit resulting in only one more competitor) a few years ago for 3G services.
I can't imagine it being any different in the US. The AMPS network supported B and A carriers from the start. Would the FCC not have opened up the 1900MHz band in the mid-nineties?
Not that I think the break-up of AT&T did nothing. But the notion that AT&T having a regulated monopoly would have meant it would have controlled cellular too strikes me as unlikely. The only change I can possibly think of is that it's possible that the calling-party-pays scheme would have been more feasable in an environment in which one landline operator exists who sets the charges for every type of call. And, having lived under both regimes, I can't honestly tell you if that'd have been better or worse.