An interesting analogy, but GSM is an open standard, while CDMA is not (it makes a pretense, but that is all). The better analogy would seem to be GSM as Linux, and CDMA as Windows with Qualcomm playing the role of Microsoft.
You're not stating the theory clearly. If you look at Shannon's theorem, you'll see that capacity increases linearly with bandwidth, and only logarithmically with increased signal to noise ratio (power output). The easiest way to increase capacity is to simply increase bandwidth (as is the case here). There is no need to increase power.
The "passives" refer to components that do not have to draw current - capacitors, resistors, filters, duplexers, etc. In particular, there are a variety of passives required to condition the RF transmit and receive paths.
Keep in mind that though lower energy consumption in itself is not functionally different, it paves the way for integrating other components (bigger screen, camera, GPS, Bluetooth, etc...).
The problem is that the benefit from the incentive to obtain patents does not outweigh damage done by patents slowing development. In addition, there is no good way to approve software patents because of the abstract nature of the ideas involved. The link to Donald Knuth's letter near the top of this thread elaborates on these points very well.
I am well aware of many of our military's abuses of power. I was really just trying to get two points across:
1) Though it is inevitably flawed, our military tries as hard or harder than any to avoid unnecessary damage. We invest more effort than our forerunners or contemporaries in techniques to avoid collateral damage. It is far from perfect, but we are long way from Dresden and similar horrors.
2) If we don't try to give our commanders new options for achieving their objectives, our ability to avoid collateral damage will not improve.
You admitted that smart bombs were an improvement, even if they did not live up to their press. I expect that laser weapons are similar. Sure, the theoretical objectives may not be met, but if we get only part way it could still be a significant improvement.
As I mentioned before, it is important that more options be available. Without options, commanders will find themselves with much less pleasant alternatives than a risk of blinding their opponents.
Sadly, all weapons are inhumane. You may find this hard to believe, but our military is actually one of the most principled in the world when it comes to the Geneva convention and other humanitarian considerations. Granted, it's not perfect, but it is among the best.
There are no good answers to these questions, but a laser weapon would actually give the military a lot of new options for disabling targets without harming anyone. Let's say I want to stop a truck convoy from the air. Which do you think is the most humane approach:
1) Tear it apart with bombs.
2) Strafe it with high caliber automatic weapons
3) Systematically blow out the tires, with a small risk of blinding.
I'd take the small risk of blinding over being decimated by explosives any day. Of course this is just one example. There have many applications that can achieve military objectives while preventing risk of injury and death.
Not only are they supporting Symbian - most are agressively promoting it. All three of these companies are very worried of the MS threat on the horizon. MS would love to leverage its current market control to make an MS OS the defacto standard on portable devices.
Re:Carries have no money/people don't want it
on
Bad MEN Of Wireless
·
· Score: 2
To clarify the situation with AMPS-
Individual phones are not required to support AMPS, but carriers who operate in the 800 MHz band are still required to maintain AMPS compatibility on their networks. The theory being (at least in part) that anyone with an AMPS handset should be able to at least place an emergency call wherever there is an 800 MHz network. Hopefully the US will take the European approach and finally permit carriers to start turning this off soon and reclaiming some bandwidth.
I think the facts here are much simpler - the economy is down, and all of these companies are suffering. Even Nokia's stock is a small fraction of its peak despite consistent profitability. They aren't deploying new technologies as fast as some would like because these things all cost money (surprise!). Believe me, Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson, would all love to deploy new technologies because it would drive equipment renewal. In fact, all of these companies have been moving towards licensing more of their technology, so that others can develop upon it.
The article has it backwards: These three all rely on product renewal for growth.
You have to take frequency reuse into account. If there are stations broadcasting in your area, there is a much bigger area where the signal is not strong enough to be effectively received, but still enough of a problem to cause significant interference to other stations. For every square mile served, there may be 5-6 square miles where that station cannot be used effectively. This ratio is called the frequency reuse factor. The total number of channels you need is this factor times the number of channels you want to operate in any given area. So operating 5 channels with a frequency reuse factor of 6 requires 30 channels to be reserved for national use. 14-51 looks more reasonable in this light.
Why can't we create a technology that uses the UHF bands without television interference?
Communication theory shows us that there are limits to what we can send in a given amount of bandwidth. If you want to send information in a different way, it is much less hassle allocate a discrete part of the original band for a different purpose. You are going to detract from the available bandwidth anyway, so why not segment the space to avoid the cost of making two systems work together?
Realize though, that there will ALWAYS be a market for Analog. Don't believe me? Question: Why do record companies still produce LPs? Because they sound better...no, wait. Correction: they sound more real. Just like there was a bit of a surprise with the Slashdot article.
I may be wrong, but I thought most of the current LP market is actually for DJs to use on their turntables.
I don't think this is quite the same problem. Ring cancellation is looking for a very particular sound with known characteristics. Echo cancelation has to supress the delayed versions of an aribitrary sound feeding back through the system.
Maybe someone at/. will find an answer for you, but I would be surprised to see this implemented in any kind of stand alone SW package. Because it is a specialized real-time application requiring fast feedback, it makes sense to implement it as an embedded system (i.e. in hardware).
XBox's problems could be seen before launch. They claimed they made their hardware by asking gamers what they wanted. Who/what/which gamers did they ask?
This may be a symptom of a common marketing problem - overuse of focus groups. Often companies bring together "representative" groups of customers to ask them what they want to see in a new product. While this can be a good tool for generating new ideas, the problem is that these groups only give you people's dreams. What you really need is studies about how people make buying decisions. You may pack all the features they asked for into a console, but that does not mean that the product will be the one they pick when it hits the shelves. What someone asks for in an interview or poll and what they actually pick when they look at it on the shelf are often very different things.
This article is really describing modeling using multiagent systems. Though very simple multiagent systems may resemble cellular automata (such as Conway's Life), they are not the same thing. Though they have been described in very convenient graphical representations using grids in the article, agents can model more complex behavior and need not be determinisitic (i.e. they may have a random element).
Another way to look at it is that cellular automata like Life use a single deterministic rule to govern the whole system. Agent-based systems, on the other hand, model goal-oriented behavior of the individual objects.
Again, Conway's game can be viewed as a very special case of an simple agent system, but the spirit of what is being done with agent systems is typically more involved. Comparing these systems to Conway's game of Life may create an incorrect impression for those not familiar with agent programming.
There seems to be a lot of confusion running around on this issue. I would recommend looking at this whitepaper. Admittedly, it is from the CDMA development group web page, so take some of the spectral efficiency claims with a grain of salt. Still, it is a pretty good introduction, and there are some other helpful papers on the technology there.
Even earlier, I believe was the "Starflight" series. The first, released in 1986, had several hundred fractally-defined planets in its "universe". The whole thing fit on two 360K floppies. A brilliant design given the storage space limitations of the day.
On a personal note, that game probably did more to get me hooked on PC gaming than any other.
Yes, frequency auctions (at least for cellular communications) have been regional in the US. The expense of taking on a whole frequency block over the entire US would have been a huge barrier to entry in the cellular market.
Actually the amount of spectrum currently allocated to cellular is similar in the US to many other countries. One of the main reasons we do not see 3G yet is the expensive of overhauling infrastructure on a massive scale compared to many other countries, combined with an economic slowdown in the communications sector. US users have also been historically slower to adopt new features, so carriers are more cautious. Its the classic chicken and egg problem of new technology - industry needs users to spur revenue for 3G development, but users want widespread 3G technology before adopting.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting analogy, but GSM is an open standard, while CDMA is not (it makes a pretense, but that is all). The better analogy would seem to be GSM as Linux, and CDMA as Windows with Qualcomm playing the role of Microsoft.
You're not stating the theory clearly. If you look at Shannon's theorem, you'll see that capacity increases linearly with bandwidth, and only logarithmically with increased signal to noise ratio (power output). The easiest way to increase capacity is to simply increase bandwidth (as is the case here). There is no need to increase power.
Keep in mind that though lower energy consumption in itself is not functionally different, it paves the way for integrating other components (bigger screen, camera, GPS, Bluetooth, etc...).
The problem is that the benefit from the incentive to obtain patents does not outweigh damage done by patents slowing development. In addition, there is no good way to approve software patents because of the abstract nature of the ideas involved. The link to Donald Knuth's letter near the top of this thread elaborates on these points very well.
Dictionary definitions are not legal definitions
No court is going to use dictionary.com's version as a legal definition of theft.
I am well aware of many of our military's abuses of power. I was really just trying to get two points across:
1) Though it is inevitably flawed, our military tries as hard or harder than any to avoid unnecessary damage. We invest more effort than our forerunners or contemporaries in techniques to avoid collateral damage. It is far from perfect, but we are long way from Dresden and similar horrors.
2) If we don't try to give our commanders new options for achieving their objectives, our ability to avoid collateral damage will not improve.
As I mentioned before, it is important that more options be available. Without options, commanders will find themselves with much less pleasant alternatives than a risk of blinding their opponents.
There are no good answers to these questions, but a laser weapon would actually give the military a lot of new options for disabling targets without harming anyone. Let's say I want to stop a truck convoy from the air. Which do you think is the most humane approach:
1) Tear it apart with bombs.
2) Strafe it with high caliber automatic weapons
3) Systematically blow out the tires, with a small risk of blinding.
I'd take the small risk of blinding over being decimated by explosives any day. Of course this is just one example. There have many applications that can achieve military objectives while preventing risk of injury and death.
Not only are they supporting Symbian - most are agressively promoting it. All three of these companies are very worried of the MS threat on the horizon. MS would love to leverage its current market control to make an MS OS the defacto standard on portable devices.
To clarify the situation with AMPS-
Individual phones are not required to support AMPS, but carriers who operate in the 800 MHz band are still required to maintain AMPS compatibility on their networks. The theory being (at least in part) that anyone with an AMPS handset should be able to at least place an emergency call wherever there is an 800 MHz network. Hopefully the US will take the European approach and finally permit carriers to start turning this off soon and reclaiming some bandwidth.
The article has it backwards: These three all rely on product renewal for growth.
In many ways, I think that the mod community is a more grown-up version of kids using these types of games to build their own creations.
You have to take frequency reuse into account. If there are stations broadcasting in your area, there is a much bigger area where the signal is not strong enough to be effectively received, but still enough of a problem to cause significant interference to other stations. For every square mile served, there may be 5-6 square miles where that station cannot be used effectively. This ratio is called the frequency reuse factor. The total number of channels you need is this factor times the number of channels you want to operate in any given area. So operating 5 channels with a frequency reuse factor of 6 requires 30 channels to be reserved for national use. 14-51 looks more reasonable in this light.
Why can't we create a technology that uses the UHF bands without television interference?
Communication theory shows us that there are limits to what we can send in a given amount of bandwidth. If you want to send information in a different way, it is much less hassle allocate a discrete part of the original band for a different purpose. You are going to detract from the available bandwidth anyway, so why not segment the space to avoid the cost of making two systems work together?
Realize though, that there will ALWAYS be a market for Analog. Don't believe me? Question: Why do record companies still produce LPs? Because they sound better...no, wait. Correction: they sound more real. Just like there was a bit of a surprise with the Slashdot article.
I may be wrong, but I thought most of the current LP market is actually for DJs to use on their turntables.
From the article:
.
Echo-cancellation software algorithms are embedded in programmable DSPs
Though the article refers to "software" I think this is still refering to the kind of embedded solution the poster was hoping to avoid.
I don't think this is quite the same problem. Ring cancellation is looking for a very particular sound with known characteristics. Echo cancelation has to supress the delayed versions of an aribitrary sound feeding back through the system.
Maybe someone at /. will find an answer for you, but I would be surprised to see this implemented in any kind of stand alone SW package. Because it is a specialized real-time application requiring fast feedback, it makes sense to implement it as an embedded system (i.e. in hardware).
XBox's problems could be seen before launch. They claimed they made their hardware by asking gamers what they wanted. Who/what/which gamers did they ask?
This may be a symptom of a common marketing problem - overuse of focus groups. Often companies bring together "representative" groups of customers to ask them what they want to see in a new product. While this can be a good tool for generating new ideas, the problem is that these groups only give you people's dreams. What you really need is studies about how people make buying decisions. You may pack all the features they asked for into a console, but that does not mean that the product will be the one they pick when it hits the shelves. What someone asks for in an interview or poll and what they actually pick when they look at it on the shelf are often very different things.
This article is really describing modeling using multiagent systems. Though very simple multiagent systems may resemble cellular automata (such as Conway's Life), they are not the same thing. Though they have been described in very convenient graphical representations using grids in the article, agents can model more complex behavior and need not be determinisitic (i.e. they may have a random element).
Another way to look at it is that cellular automata like Life use a single deterministic rule to govern the whole system. Agent-based systems, on the other hand, model goal-oriented behavior of the individual objects.
Again, Conway's game can be viewed as a very special case of an simple agent system, but the spirit of what is being done with agent systems is typically more involved. Comparing these systems to Conway's game of Life may create an incorrect impression for those not familiar with agent programming.
This article mostly rehashes previous criticism about the Star Wars films.
There seems to be a lot of confusion running around on this issue. I would recommend looking at this whitepaper. Admittedly, it is from the CDMA development group web page, so take some of the spectral efficiency claims with a grain of salt. Still, it is a pretty good introduction, and there are some other helpful papers on the technology there.
Even earlier, I believe was the "Starflight" series. The first, released in 1986, had several hundred fractally-defined planets in its "universe". The whole thing fit on two 360K floppies. A brilliant design given the storage space limitations of the day.
On a personal note, that game probably did more to get me hooked on PC gaming than any other.
Yes, frequency auctions (at least for cellular communications) have been regional in the US. The expense of taking on a whole frequency block over the entire US would have been a huge barrier to entry in the cellular market.
Actually the amount of spectrum currently allocated to cellular is similar in the US to many other countries. One of the main reasons we do not see 3G yet is the expensive of overhauling infrastructure on a massive scale compared to many other countries, combined with an economic slowdown in the communications sector. US users have also been historically slower to adopt new features, so carriers are more cautious. Its the classic chicken and egg problem of new technology - industry needs users to spur revenue for 3G development, but users want widespread 3G technology before adopting.