Any hope the quality of a voice call will go back to where it was in 1980 (in North America, anyway)? I am constantaly amazed at (a) just how bad the voice quality of digital cellular is [yes, dropouts count as "poor quality"] (b) how willing people are to pay for such bad quality.
You will need the endpoint computers - it's not enough to route between routers, sometimes you need to route between networks. They are also useful for seeing the vagarities of odd protocols - you were going to learn IPX and Appletalk right - they're on the test.
Similarly, don't forget that whatever Microsoft may say, Novell still exists. I believe you can get a 2-license demo version of Netware for free from Novell; have at least one Netware/NDS server on your test net.
And of course, real audiophiles use grammaphone players and vinyl records. Hey, who needs this CD and DVD shit?
Well, I have always lusted after a vaccumn tube preamp;-)
Seriously, there is no law of nature that says that if there are two ways to accomplish a task, one analog and one digital, the digital way will necessarily be superior. Most of the advantage of programmable digital electronics lies in the greater flexibility of feature and manufacturing changes, not necessarily usability or quality improvements for the consumer.
While I agree that GSM (in particular) and other digital systems in cell phones are in the adequate to excellent range, so far as voice goes
Personally, I think that digital cell phones are an experiment to see how many customers can be persuaded to pay a large amount of money for terrible quality of service. Anyone who remembers the sound quality of the pre-breakup Bell Companies (in North America circa 1970 - 1980) should be laughing at the description of digital cell quality as "excellent". I would put digital cell at no better than 2.5 on the 1-4 scale, and more often it is around 1 or even 0.5. Remember - the chirps, pops, clicks, cutouts, and other digital artifacts count too.
While I don't have as much experience travelling in Europe, I do spend plenty of time talking to my EC coworkers, and I can't say I am impressed on that score either. Sorry.
Yeah, GSM. So I spend $400-$600 on a cell phone/organizer, plus steep monthly fees for cell phone/internet access. And to top it off, I'm locked into GSM, which here in the USA isn't exactly the leading protocol.
Just to preempt the tidal wave of comments from our EC friends:
While having a single standard is a good thing, having competition among multiple technologies is also a good thing
Many US cell networks were built before GSM was created, and must provide legacy support for the older standards
In terms of voice quality, no system out there beats the original Motorola analog
While GSM is an impressive technical and political achievement, do remember that one of its unstated purposes was to prevent Motorola from dominating the EC mobile market the way it dominated the US, and to give Ericsson, Nokia, etc. a competitive edge. In this it succeeded, with assistance from poor management at Motorola of course
As per my post toward the beginning of this discussion: that would be fine if there were a few hundred laws
I don't see how the number of laws is relevant.
if 99% of the population agreed on those laws and penalties
This also isn't relevant. Just because you disagree with a law doesn't mean you should be able to break it. You know the laws, you choose to live in this country, that's a fairly explicit agreement to abide by the laws. If you feel so strongly that a law is unjust you can go to court and a jury can acquit you.
Because there are currently several million laws on the books in the good old USofA, with legislators voting for giant "omnibus" bills that they later admit they haven't read. Then these laws go to executive agencies, where they are "interpreted" into hunderds of millions of regulations.
The result is that just about every activity you can think of is sort of illegal in some way or another. You did remember to get an EPA permit for exhaling, didn't you?
So whenever someone like John Ashcroft takes it into his head to put you in jail because you don't agree with his religious beliefs (see Oregon), he can find some law to use for that purpose.
But I am guessing you realize that, so there isn't much point to continuing this discussion.
The only argument you have made against automatic surveillance is that sometimes people should be able to break the law and get away with it.
As per my post toward the beginning of this discussion: that would be fine if there were a few hundred laws, if 99% of the population agreed on those laws and penalties, if they were all enforced evenly across the population, and if those doing the enforcing were only and always pure of heart.
Now, can you say "Richard Nixon and the IRS"? How about "J. Edger Hoover and Martin Luther King"? "My Lai"? Any clearer?
Case 2, I see typical slashdot slippery-slope paranoia.
I assume you are not (a) of Middle-Eastern descent (b) living in Detroit, MI, USA at the moment, eh? No slippery slope there: Just 5000 people being "invited" to report to the nearest police station for "friendly" questioning. And anyone who declines that "invitation"? 3000 people are currently being held in federal custody (up to 10 weeks now) with no lawyer and no communication with their family. Slippery slope for sure...
I have to wonder if people would be this uptight if the 2400 cameras were replaced with 2400 police officers.
Individual policemen at least have (a) human judgement (b) limited memory. Take an example: you spit on the sidewalk. Policeman sees you and decides in that time and place, under those circumstances, it is best to ignore that violation of the law. By evening he has forgotten about the incident.
Case two: you spit on the sidewalk. You are filmed by a video camera. Five years later Atty. General Ashcroft decides to put every member of your ethnic group behind bars with no recourse. All the tapes are run, you are spotted spitting on the sidewalk, hauled in, transferred to a secret prison in New York with no lawyer or contact with your family (it is happening today in the USofA, and its all over but the gang rape.
I *really* fail to see why it's a reduction in freedom. What can you not do in front of a camera, that you couldn't do before? Apart from commit a crime and get away with it? If you really object to being filmed, then don't live in the city.
If there were a few hundred laws, and 99% of the population agreed on those laws and their consequences, and if those laws were enforced evenly with no hypocracy or exceptions for the rich/powerful/politicians/children of politicians, and if the people making and enforcing the laws were truely pure of heart, with no emotions, personal agendas, desire for their own gain, or desire for power for its own sake, then you might be right (I would still disagree on pure philosophical grounds, but you might be).
In fact, there are millions of laws and hunderds of millions of pages of executive branch interpretation of those laws, people become politicians/police/Attorneys General because they enjoy power and think they know better than others how the others should live their lives, hypocrisy and self-righteousness are rampant among the powerful. Always has been that way in human history.
So for that reason, it is better not to be watched all the time, even at the cost of some safety.
So, if you bought that copy, and you own it, it is yours. And according to property law, I can do what I want with what I own, including disassemble it. Correct? So therefore, I can defeat any copy protectoin schemes on the software I buy. Correct?
The right to resell something does not imply the right to disassemble or reverse engineer it. You certainly buy a bottle of Viagra tablets, not license it (at least I wouldn't want the job of repossessing that license). However, you are explicitly prohibited from analyzing the composition of the Viagra tablets and manufacturing your own by various patent and copyright laws that modify your right to do anything at all with your possessions. Similarly, you can buy a house, but that doesn't give you the right to use it as a base for selling illegal drugs.
I had a lot of classmates who started with Motorla Cellular very early in the mobile phone game (and who have mostly been made redundent in the last six months). It was almost an article of corporate culture at Motorola that the StarTac (the first miniature flip phone) was specifically designed to look like a communicator from Star Trek, and that had been an explicit goal of their design engineering groups for quite a while.
But, OTOH, he has shown himself in the past to be a purveyor of utterly ignorant dogma, almost on the level of religious zeal, that, as such, I dont consider him a leader of anything. He does not stand for me. And, to be honest, I dont think he stands for anyone.
He stands for the unrealistic little bubble world he has created in his own mind.
I don't disagree, but the problem is that these statements describe just about anyone who was the catalyst for meaningful change in human society and/or commerce. Martin Luther, Larry Ellison, you name it. Change requires uncompromising, bull-headed obstinancy.
Making change palatable to the average Joe, though, is another thing...
No disagreement here. I remember standing in front of a Division Capital Expenditure Board to get approval for an enormous 1 GIGABYTE disk drive for my file server. It would fit in a wristwatch today...
I wouldn't have moderated it "troll" myself, but it was perhaps not the most informed comment ever posted.
If you are talking about stringing together some ATA drives to make a big storage pool for personal use, then 1 TB is do-able these days.
However, that's a long way from the configurability, scalability, reliability (99.99999% uptime) and managability of an EMC Symmetrix, HP XP256, IBM Shark, or similar systems in a datacenter environment.
For example, EMC claims that in 20 years not a single bit of data has been lost on any of their storage arrays where the installation has been approved by EMC field service. That's not an claim to claim to make lightly, nor something easy to accomplish with a string of drives from Fry's.
And technically, if you have the opportunity to buy a used Sym, then it is a semi-illegal sale, since EMC is the only authorized person to resell a Sym. Once you buy it, you're stuck with it.
Actually, in the US I believe that there is a federal law which prohibits prohibitions of that nature. Written to prevent automobile manufacturers from locking up the spare parts market, but applies to other resales as well.
However, that's not to say that the vendor couldn't make things unbearable for the buyer using perfectly legal means if they were of a mind to, which is what I am trying to scope out here.
Mmm, an anthrax vaccine... just like the one they gave our soldiers over in the Gulf War?
I've read lots of reports tying that vaccine to the "mysterious" Gulf War Syndrome.
If necessary, yes. Although there is some indication that the vaccine currently used for cattle may be better than the the one approved for humans (more protection with less side effect).
But given what occured in Washington last month, yes, I would sign up for the current vaccine. A question that would need to be investigated is whether the whole 6-shot course would be needed to protect against casual exposure, now that we know that anthrax does repsond to treatment.
As for Gulf War syndrome, there is no causal link to anthrax. Proximity, sequence: yes. Link, no. And lots of other things were going on in that area at the time, including the bombing of suspected bio/chem warefare dumps.
That's true, if there is an outbreak. If there is not, then people are risking injury and death for no benefit.
Unlike cost/benefit analysis, which considers only what is known, decision tree analysis assigns probabilities to unknown events and computes a pseudo-"expected value" for various courses of action.
You don't have to assign a very high probability of occurance to a biowar attack to get a result that says go ahead and vaccinate.
Think about how many Congressional employees would volunteer for the Army's anthrax vaccine, even given what is known about its side effects to get a sense of the analysis that is required in this situation.
You see, I've never been given the smallpox vaccine, nor can I be. The allergic reaction would kill me. I have no idea how many other people there are like me in this country and the world, just that I'm one of them.
Sorry.
However, if the entire population less those not capable of receiving the vaccine were vaccinated, an epidemic wouldn't be able to spread through the population, so you would be much safer as well.
The vaccine can have nasty side-effects in some people, including brain damage, blindness, and death. Not many people, 1 in 250k,IIRC, but that would still be over 1,000 people injured by it if everyone were vaccinated.
I as aware of those numbers and considered referencing them in my original post, but did not in the interest of brevity.
Even the simplest decision tree analysis shows that the benefit from vaccinating far outweighs the potential side-effects.
And yes, I have been vaccinated, and yes, I would be first in line with my 2 children, even knowing the risks.
There is NO threat of smallpox being released into the public. By 1979, the WHO completely wiped-out smallpox in the wild. The only living strains of smallpox in existance are located a highly secured CDC laboratory, and in a lab in Russia.
Very reassuring. Perhaps you could help me understand why the US Gov't is shoveling 10's of millions of dollars into Russia (which should probably have been hundreds of millions) to help pay for cleaning up old Soviet biowarefare laboratories? And why ex-Soviet biologists have admitted that they used smallpox as a base for some of their research?
That the US government is currently working on a program to vaccinate the entire population against smallpox and anthrax, and that they just aren't talking about it because they can't do it immediately, and talking about a program they can't carry out would only cause panic.
But I doubt it. I am guessing the powers that be are hoping that the biowar threat has "calmed down" and that we are going "back to normal". In this scenario, mass vaccination won't be considered until after the next major outbreak, when it might be too late.
Slashdot Mirror
Any hope the quality of a voice call will go back to where it was in 1980 (in North America, anyway)? I am constantaly amazed at (a) just how bad the voice quality of digital cellular is [yes, dropouts count as "poor quality"] (b) how willing people are to pay for such bad quality.
sPh
sPh
you hit 25 and your eyesight starts its inevitable and irreversible decline. Then those 2" (5 cm) screens don't seem so wonderful anymore...
sPh
Seriously, there is no law of nature that says that if there are two ways to accomplish a task, one analog and one digital, the digital way will necessarily be superior. Most of the advantage of programmable digital electronics lies in the greater flexibility of feature and manufacturing changes, not necessarily usability or quality improvements for the consumer.
sPh
While I don't have as much experience travelling in Europe, I do spend plenty of time talking to my EC coworkers, and I can't say I am impressed on that score either. Sorry.
sPh
- While having a single standard is a good thing, having competition among multiple technologies is also a good thing
sPhMany US cell networks were built before GSM was created, and must provide legacy support for the older standards
In terms of voice quality, no system out there beats the original Motorola analog
While GSM is an impressive technical and political achievement, do remember that one of its unstated purposes was to prevent Motorola from dominating the EC mobile market the way it dominated the US, and to give Ericsson, Nokia, etc. a competitive edge. In this it succeeded, with assistance from poor management at Motorola of course
The result is that just about every activity you can think of is sort of illegal in some way or another. You did remember to get an EPA permit for exhaling, didn't you?
So whenever someone like John Ashcroft takes it into his head to put you in jail because you don't agree with his religious beliefs (see Oregon), he can find some law to use for that purpose.
But I am guessing you realize that, so there isn't much point to continuing this discussion.
sPh
Now, can you say "Richard Nixon and the IRS"? How about "J. Edger Hoover and Martin Luther King"? "My Lai"? Any clearer?
sPh
sPh
Case two: you spit on the sidewalk. You are filmed by a video camera. Five years later Atty. General Ashcroft decides to put every member of your ethnic group behind bars with no recourse. All the tapes are run, you are spotted spitting on the sidewalk, hauled in, transferred to a secret prison in New York with no lawyer or contact with your family (it is happening today in the USofA, and its all over but the gang rape.
Do you see the difference?
sPh
In fact, there are millions of laws and hunderds of millions of pages of executive branch interpretation of those laws, people become politicians/police/Attorneys General because they enjoy power and think they know better than others how the others should live their lives, hypocrisy and self-righteousness are rampant among the powerful. Always has been that way in human history.
So for that reason, it is better not to be watched all the time, even at the cost of some safety.
sPh
sPh
I had a lot of classmates who started with Motorla Cellular very early in the mobile phone game (and who have mostly been made redundent in the last six months). It was almost an article of corporate culture at Motorola that the StarTac (the first miniature flip phone) was specifically designed to look like a communicator from Star Trek, and that had been an explicit goal of their design engineering groups for quite a while.
sPh
Making change palatable to the average Joe, though, is another thing...
sPh
No disagreement here. I remember standing in front of a Division Capital Expenditure Board to get approval for an enormous 1 GIGABYTE disk drive for my file server. It would fit in a wristwatch today...
sPh
I wouldn't have moderated it "troll" myself, but it was perhaps not the most informed comment ever posted.
If you are talking about stringing together some ATA drives to make a big storage pool for personal use, then 1 TB is do-able these days.
However, that's a long way from the configurability, scalability, reliability (99.99999% uptime) and managability of an EMC Symmetrix, HP XP256, IBM Shark, or similar systems in a datacenter environment.
For example, EMC claims that in 20 years not a single bit of data has been lost on any of their storage arrays where the installation has been approved by EMC field service. That's not an claim to claim to make lightly, nor something easy to accomplish with a string of drives from Fry's.
sPh
However, that's not to say that the vendor couldn't make things unbearable for the buyer using perfectly legal means if they were of a mind to, which is what I am trying to scope out here.
sPh
Intended to be funny I know, but when did that every stop a Slashdotter from posting a pedantic response?
Anyway, large pox is cowpox. Smallpox is called small in relation to the pox seen on cows.
sPh
But given what occured in Washington last month, yes, I would sign up for the current vaccine. A question that would need to be investigated is whether the whole 6-shot course would be needed to protect against casual exposure, now that we know that anthrax does repsond to treatment.
As for Gulf War syndrome, there is no causal link to anthrax. Proximity, sequence: yes. Link, no. And lots of other things were going on in that area at the time, including the bombing of suspected bio/chem warefare dumps.
sPh
You don't have to assign a very high probability of occurance to a biowar attack to get a result that says go ahead and vaccinate.
Think about how many Congressional employees would volunteer for the Army's anthrax vaccine, even given what is known about its side effects to get a sense of the analysis that is required in this situation.
sPh
However, if the entire population less those not capable of receiving the vaccine were vaccinated, an epidemic wouldn't be able to spread through the population, so you would be much safer as well.
sPh
Even the simplest decision tree analysis shows that the benefit from vaccinating far outweighs the potential side-effects.
And yes, I have been vaccinated, and yes, I would be first in line with my 2 children, even knowing the risks.
sPh
That whole episode had the mark of a fanatical loner, ala the Unabomber, from the beginning. And the FBI seems to be headed in that direction as well.
sPh
Probably part of the faked moon landing.
sPh
That the US government is currently working on a program to vaccinate the entire population against smallpox and anthrax, and that they just aren't talking about it because they can't do it immediately, and talking about a program they can't carry out would only cause panic.
But I doubt it. I am guessing the powers that be are hoping that the biowar threat has "calmed down" and that we are going "back to normal". In this scenario, mass vaccination won't be considered until after the next major outbreak, when it might be too late.
We'll see.
sPh