To really be deployable in an un-metered fashion with a reasonable business model, you need something much more spectrally efficient, like ArrayComm'si-BURST for high-speed data service. A recent demo in South Korea shows it working at 1 Mbit/s. Two of South Korea's big telcos, Hanaro and KT, are planning to roll it out next year some time. Remember that Korea is where CDMA got its start.
ArrayComm licensed some spectrum in Australia, where they plan to roll out a wireless broadband service in the major cities in just 5 MHz of TDD spectrum. It looks like recent FCC rule changes have made some national TDD spectrum licenses available in the U.S. as well
It uses IntelliCell spatial processing and spatial channels to get multiple users on the same spectrum, at the same time. I've been lucky enough to see the i-BURST system in action, and it looks pretty cool, is real, and actually works. There are other smart antenna companies as well that are working on broadband data products, but I don't think any of them are as far along as ArrayComm.
It looks like the ZapStation from ZapMedia does many more things than this unit. I guess the focus of the two products is a bit different, though. This product seems focused on music (with the ability to burn CDs and download to portable MP3 players), while the ZapStation is basically an "everything" player, but doesn't seem to be able to record.
The last place I worked used the names of planets that exploded in works of science fiction. After Praxis, Alderaan, and Earth, it became difficult to come up with new names.
Another place named servers after characters from the "Andy Griffith Show." It becomes difficult to distinguish between obscurely named machines, though. Opie? Mabel? Eunice?
Perhaps this should be a SlashDot Poll...
I'm not against IP laws, but...
on
Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I think the existing laws are being abused by corporations who take advantage of back-logged and under-educated patent offices. I would support the exclusion of certain categories of intellectual property from the patent process. For example, I think the trend of patenting human genome sequences is a bad idea. I don't think you should be able to patent things that exist in nature, nor should you be able to patent mathematical or physical laws.
The patent process wasn't originally this dysfunctional. There was a time when it provided legitimate protection to inventors for a limited period of time. Now, I'm not so sure that the public is well-served by patent mechanisms (as was the original intent), given the short-lived nature of today's inventions.
Is the solution totally eliminating the patent system? I'm not sure. I would suggest that, in the time period discussed in the article, there was less up-front investment needed to produce a new invention or process. These days, in the drug industry, at least, the research costs are so high that I think some form of short-duration monopoly protection is required, just to insure that they can recoup their investment. We certainly wouldn't want research on things like cancer and AIDS drugs to slow just because of the risk of not recovering the research investment.
Re:What Difference Does It Make In The Long Run?
on
Palm OS 5.0 Preview
·
· Score: 1
I have to agree. I have one of the Samsung SPH-I300 phones, and the form factor is great. It is comfortable to use as a phone, and the screen is big enough, bright enough, and colorful enough to make it a great PalmOS-powered PDA.
The Palm PDA portion integrates very well with the phone features. In addition to the obvious address book integration, the Palm interface makes it easy to record voice-dial entries and access other phone preferences.
Earth-based solar stations have to put up with night. Orbital solar arrays only have a few hours of blackout each year.
Why does everyone think that we have to use solar power 24 hours a day? Wouldn't it be good enough to supply electricity to the grid when the sun is out, to power the air conditioners that are running at the same time, and just use hydro and fossil fuels at night and when the sun isn't out?
FMAC does not stand for Floating-Point Multiply-Adder Calculator. FMAC is short for floating-point multiply-accumulator. A MAC operation is a multiply followed by an accumulation. It is used to add the product of two factors to an existing sum, such as when computing the dot product of two vectors. MAC instructions are pretty common on DSPs where they are used in various signal processing applications.
The Motorola MPC555 embedded PowerPC has 32 KBytes of on-chip SRAM and 448 KBytes of on-chip Flash. Too bad it doesn't have an MMU, or Linux (other than uC-Linux) could be ported to it. The MPC555 also has heaping piles of I/O that make it extra tasty!
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To really be deployable in an un-metered fashion with a reasonable business model, you need something much more spectrally efficient, like ArrayComm's i-BURST for high-speed data service. A recent demo in South Korea shows it working at 1 Mbit/s. Two of South Korea's big telcos, Hanaro and KT, are planning to roll it out next year some time. Remember that Korea is where CDMA got its start.
ArrayComm licensed some spectrum in Australia, where they plan to roll out a wireless broadband service in the major cities in just 5 MHz of TDD spectrum. It looks like recent FCC rule changes have made some national TDD spectrum licenses available in the U.S. as well
It uses IntelliCell spatial processing and spatial channels to get multiple users on the same spectrum, at the same time. I've been lucky enough to see the i-BURST system in action, and it looks pretty cool, is real, and actually works. There are other smart antenna companies as well that are working on broadband data products, but I don't think any of them are as far along as ArrayComm.
It looks like the ZapStation from ZapMedia does many more things than this unit. I guess the focus of the two products is a bit different, though. This product seems focused on music (with the ability to burn CDs and download to portable MP3 players), while the ZapStation is basically an "everything" player, but doesn't seem to be able to record.
The last place I worked used the names of planets that exploded in works of science fiction. After Praxis, Alderaan, and Earth, it became difficult to come up with new names.
Another place named servers after characters from the "Andy Griffith Show." It becomes difficult to distinguish between obscurely named machines, though. Opie? Mabel? Eunice?
Perhaps this should be a SlashDot Poll...
I think the existing laws are being abused by corporations who take advantage of back-logged and under-educated patent offices. I would support the exclusion of certain categories of intellectual property from the patent process. For example, I think the trend of patenting human genome sequences is a bad idea. I don't think you should be able to patent things that exist in nature, nor should you be able to patent mathematical or physical laws.
The patent process wasn't originally this dysfunctional. There was a time when it provided legitimate protection to inventors for a limited period of time. Now, I'm not so sure that the public is well-served by patent mechanisms (as was the original intent), given the short-lived nature of today's inventions.
Is the solution totally eliminating the patent system? I'm not sure. I would suggest that, in the time period discussed in the article, there was less up-front investment needed to produce a new invention or process. These days, in the drug industry, at least, the research costs are so high that I think some form of short-duration monopoly protection is required, just to insure that they can recoup their investment. We certainly wouldn't want research on things like cancer and AIDS drugs to slow just because of the risk of not recovering the research investment.
Some other PalmOS devices already have non-square screen resolutions, like: the virtual silkscreen on the HandEra 330 (supported by software like QuickOffice), and the Samsung I300 phone, which hides the Graffiti area to display a larger dialpad.
I have to agree. I have one of the Samsung SPH-I300 phones, and the form factor is great. It is comfortable to use as a phone, and the screen is big enough, bright enough, and colorful enough to make it a great PalmOS-powered PDA.
The Palm PDA portion integrates very well with the phone features. In addition to the obvious address book integration, the Palm interface makes it easy to record voice-dial entries and access other phone preferences.
Why does everyone think that we have to use solar power 24 hours a day? Wouldn't it be good enough to supply electricity to the grid when the sun is out, to power the air conditioners that are running at the same time, and just use hydro and fossil fuels at night and when the sun isn't out?
FMAC does not stand for Floating-Point Multiply-Adder Calculator. FMAC is short for floating-point multiply-accumulator. A MAC operation is a multiply followed by an accumulation. It is used to add the product of two factors to an existing sum, such as when computing the dot product of two vectors. MAC instructions are pretty common on DSPs where they are used in various signal processing applications.
Something like ArrayComm's i-BURST is more likely, since it will have the bandwidth and much greater range.
The Motorola MPC555 embedded PowerPC has 32 KBytes of on-chip SRAM and 448 KBytes of on-chip Flash. Too bad it doesn't have an MMU, or Linux (other than uC-Linux) could be ported to it. The MPC555 also has heaping piles of I/O that make it extra tasty!
Uh, I think Gary Gnu was part of the "Great Space Coaster" show, not the Muppets.
not retina scanning.