WAP as it is currently offered by european operators is crap because of the reasons you said.
However, once the GPRS (Packet Switched mode) service will be finally deployed (around next year), WAP should become much more interesting.
However, I still don't really understand why we could not just stick to HTML. After all most current mobile phones have enough computing power to run Lynx!
I beg to differ, but your definitions are not (totally) correct.
There are two main parameters that define a channel, its central frequency (sort of "how fast the signal changes on average") and its bandwidth ("how fast the signal changes around that average").
Narrowband, as you said, is a signal transmitted through a narrow band. That usually means that it's bandwidth is "small" compared to the central frequency at which it is transmitted. What is "small"? There is not an exact definition for that, but let me give you an example. The GSM wireless telephone system is considered to be narrowband. In it the central frequency can be around 900 MHz, 1800 MHz or 1900 MHz, while the bandwidth of each channel is 200 kHz (i.e. 5000 to 10000 times smaller than the central frequency).
On the other hand, wideband and broadband are more or less the same, i.e. the opposite of narrowband. The future UMTS wireless telephony system will be wideband, with a central frequency around 2 GHz (2000 MHz) and a channel bandwith around 5 MHz (i.e. 400 times smaller than the central frequency).
What you call broadband is in fact called "frequency multiplexing", "Frequency Division Multiple Access" or FDMA, i.e. using multiple carrier frequencies to diviede a medium into many different bands.
Baseband, as you said means that your central frequency is zero. However an Ethernet system is also able to have more than one user at a time. But instead of using Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) it uses Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), because all users use the same frequency but do not transmit at the same time.
This is in fact a simplicitation and sligthly inaccurate, because normally in a TDMA system there are "time slots" or times at which you can start to transmit, while in ethernet you can transmit anytime you want and you only stop if two or more users transmit simultaneously, thus causing a "collision" between them. In that case they will all wait for a random amount of time and try again. This procedure is often called Random Access.
I might be totally wrong, as IANAP (I am not a phisicist), but maybe the answer to your question is in Heisenbergs Uncertainty principle.
If you try to measure or specify the position of the pulse very exactly, then you can't know its speed and viceversa. If the speed of the pulse is measured very exactly, then the pulse could be in "both" sides of the chamber.
So in fact maybe you can really have it both ways!;-)
I'm sorry but I must say that I don't understand why some people considered this previous post as "Insightful"!
It is as insightful as saying that because each of our individual neurons has no intelligence, their "collective intelligence" is limited by that, and therefore that the brain they form can not be intelligent at all!
I'm sorry but that's plain wrong, because we are dealing with a very complex system here, where the total can be much bigger than the sum of the parts.
The limitation to the collective intelligence of the bees (or ants) will be limited by then number of beesn and the number and speed of the interections they can have wich each other, which is clearly smaller and slower than the interections of the individual neurons of our brain.
That's what they said today on one of France's main TV's.
They also say that 1 of every 10 american says that it has had a gun fired at him.
Even worse, one child or a teen is fired every two hours in the USA. More children die yearly in the US that in all the rest of "developped" countries together.
In my opinion that is unacceptable and I wouldn't like living in a country that allows that kind of situation. Don't get me wrong! I've been in the US once and I like it a lot (friendly people, interesting cities...) but all the importance that americans give to the right to bear arms seems outdated and difficult to understand to me (and for most of the people on the other side of the atlantic as well, I bet!).
Although the second amendment was probably very reasonable at the time the american constitution was written, times change, and I don't think it is very likely that the government of the US would try (or be able to) unlawfully try to control the citizens of the US. In my opinion the chances of this happening are so small that it would be much more reasonable to limit the right to bear arms in order to save so many children (and adults) of being shot.
Some said that trying to limit the right of people to bear arms would not stop criminals of using them. That is right. However an easy way to stop them is to punish very severly those that have guns without permission (if you were a criminal would you risk 4 years of prison for having a gun if you could use a knife instead? And a knife, although dangerous, is much less likely of killing a children that was just playing on the street).
On a related issue, I don't understand why many (americans) seem to believe that having a gun protects them. I'd think that having a gun makes you a much more likely target of someone else's gun...
I'd like to finish by saying that this is by no means to be interpreted as an "attack" to those (americans) that belive in their right to bear arms. I respect that, although I don't understand it, maybe because I am not american...
Ok, the whole thing is big and complex, but the initial idea that speed of light is constant and the existance of ether is not important must be one of the most simple yet clever ideas ever!
Or what about the way Archimedes found out that his king's crown was not made only of gold? Now, THAT'S CLEVER!
However I don't know it this can be considered benign, because I guess the guy that made the crown ended in prison if not something worse...
Using a cell (or mobile as we say in Europe) phone on a plane is not a matter of frequency, but a matter of how the network works.
Basically, the network is composed by a set of cells that (ideally) cover the area where costumers are. Those cells are served by Base Stations. The Base Stations have antennas, and those antennas, being non ideal, have a certain directivity.
As most users are on the ground, the antennas are designed to have their best response in the direction pointing from the Base Station to the ground (usually -3 to -10 degrees).
On the other hand, the antennas have the worst directivity in the areas that there are less users (you don't want to waste your power). So antennas do not send almost any power towars the air (or the ground below for the same reason).
That is mainly why you can't use a mobile phone in a (flying plane).
As for the data rates, they are in MegaBITS per second (Mbps), not MegaBYTES per second. And those claims are just theoretical.
All 3G (3rd generation) proposed architectures claim speeds up to 2Mbps when the user is still or walking at very low speed, and up to 384 Kbps at velocitis of up to 500 Km/h! (This is so that you could use your phone on a (future) high speed train to connect to the Internet).
But those are theoretical fields, and (almost)everybody working in this field (as I do) believes that the real data rates will be of 384 Kbps when STILL and about 114 Kbps when going at high speed (but probably not that high!).
About the frequency plan that somebody asked about I recomend to check the 3GPP and the IMT-2000 sites, where you'll find tons of info about 3rd generation mobile phones.
And, by the way, Qualcomms proposal is only one among many others, although most of them are based on Wideband CDMA technology, and the only comercial(narrowband) CDMA network is Qualcomm's IS-95, which is mainly deploid in the US, Brazil and some oriental countries. Qualcomm's CDMA proposal is called (last time I checked!) cdma2000, although the extension of IS-95 is cdmaOne, and I don't know if the one they are talking about in this article is the first or the latter.
I hope this clarified some of the issues raised here!
Using a cell (or mobile as we say in Europe) phone on a plane is not a matter of frequency, but a matter of how the network works.
Basically, the network is composed by a set of cells that (ideally) cover the area where costumers are. Those cells are served by Base Stations. The Base Stations have antennas, and those antennas, being non ideal, have a certain directivity. As most users are on the ground, the antennas are designed to have their best response in the direction pointing from the Base Station to the ground (usually -3 to -10 degrees). On the other hand, the antennas have the worst directivity in the areas that there are less users (you don't want to waste your power). So antennas do not send almost any power towars the air (or the ground below for the same reason).
That is mainly why you can't use a mobile phone in a (flying plane).
As for the data rates, they are in MegaBITS per second (Mbps), not MegaBYTES per second. And those claims are just theoretical. All 3G (3rd generation) proposed architectures claim speeds up to 2Mbps when the user is still or walking at very low speed, and up to 384 Kbps at velocitis of up to 500 Km/h! (This is so that you could use your phone on a (future) high speed train to connect to the Internet).
But those are theoretical fields, and (almost)everybody working in this field (as I do) believes that the real data rates will be of 384 Kbps when STILL and about 114 Kbps when going at high speed (but probably not that high!).
About the frequency plan that somebody asked about I recomend to check the 3GPP and the IMT2000 sites, where you'll find tons of info about 3rd generation mobile phones. And by the way, Qualcomms proposal is only one among many others, although most of them are based on Wideband CDMA technology, and the only comercial(narrowband) CDMA network is Qualcomm's IS-95, which is mainly deploid in the US, Brazil and some oriental countries. Qualcomm's CDMA proposal is called (last time I checked!) cdma2000, although the extension of IS-95 is cdmaOne, and I don't know if the one they are talking about in this article is the first or the latter.
I hope this clarified some of the issues raised here!
Being Spanish and fluent in English (although my orthography shucs;-) I must say that "que pasa" is not really the same thing as "what's happening". In my opinion the real translation of "que pasa" would be "what's up".
So the question is, do those guys how the trademark of "what's up"?
As a side note, I must say that I don't understand how somebody can "how" a common sentence like that (like AOL's claims over the "You've mail" and even "You've men" sentences).
A final question: If I make a Spanish dictionaire, can I claim the trademark over an English dictionary containg the same words but in English?
This is a not very well known fact about France, but there people do not normaly use QWERTY keyboards, but AZERTY keyboards.
Just imagine a QWERTY keyboard were you swich the A by the Q, the Z by the W, the ; by the M, put the numbers in a way that you need to use the SHIFT key to type them and finally add some other smaller but not less stuped changes and you get an AZERTY keyboard!
Then imagine the pain of trying to type _anything_! Just try to writhe mama and you get;q;q !!!!
In my opinion this is the siliest thing ever. At least with a Dvorak keyboard most of the keys are different (I think!) and so you know you can not type as you would with a QWERTY keyboard. But with AZERTY they are close enought so that you end up typing as usual and making lots of mistakes.
Luckily most Unix stations do have proper English QWERTY keyboards!
Angel
P.S.- As an Spanish that I am, when I think that the European Union asked Spain to remove the from keyboards so that they were not different from the rest of the UE members, but nobody has said anything to France about their AZERTY keyboars I realize how stupid politicians can sometimes be...
P.S.2.- As a kind of discharge I must say that in theory AZERTY keyboards let you type easily in French by assigning keys to the accents like é or è, but for coding they are just terrible. And this could also be done by using a combination of keys, like in Spanish QWERTY keyboards.
THAT certainly created consumer confusion, because nobody wants to invest in a technology that will be beaten 2 or 3 years later.
And what about the VHS vs Betamax vs 2000?
Those are good examples that show that you can't make such broad generalizations like "Choice is *always* good". Instead you should say "Choice is very good most of the time".
But when a technoligy is still in it's first stages of development, and or it hasn't reased enough interest, choice can stop people from jumping into that particular technology bandwagon, and thus can eventually kill an otherwise nice technology.
To keep my opinion simple, this is just nonsense, and the author is either just silly or purposedly trying to get notoriety by misleading people.
It's amusing to see the perverse way in which the author uses the Fermi method (Enrico Fermis method to calculate very fast a quantity by guessing the initial values required to do the calculation).
This is the sentence that makes strikes me more: "And every time a computer freezes up in the workplace, at least one document is lost or damaged."
Come on! I agree that Windows crashes a lot. On the other hand Linux has never crashed on me, although twice the system performance degraded so much that I had to reset my PC, but saying that everytime Windows crashes I lost some file is plain nonsense or a lie!
Many people will not produce more than a document a day. It depends on their work of course, but this is common. It what the author says were true there would be more documents lost than documents created! It is impossible that people could work in that condition, and Microsoft would not be in the position it is now.
Actually the UK is not the first European country to introuduce ADSL.Two or three months ago the Spanish government made a law forcing Telefonica (Our personal phone monopolistic company) to deploy ADSL befor 2001 (if I am not mistaken). This will be a 'low-end' ADSL (like the UK's), with a max. bitrate of 256 Kpbs in the downlink and 128 Kbps in the Uplink, but it's much better that todays modems! Also the prize will be arround 5000 pesetas (32.5 US$)). What we don't know is how the hell will ISPs be able to serve 256 Kpbps to everybody, nor which prizes will the charge us... It would be really fustrating to have such a bandwidth available and not being able to use it!:-( Anyway I feel this is a very necessary thing, if we want everybody to have a nice access to the Internet.
You can check a small story about the Spanish ADSL deployment here
Irish the best mathematicians in Europe?
on
HP49G is a reality
·
· Score: 1
From my experience, the best mathematicias in Europe are the French. Their educational system is based on maths. If you are french and you want to get an engineering job, you have to pass the most incredibly difficult maths and physics exams. So french best engineers are usually better at maths than most other countries mathematicians.
For the record I'm not French but Spanish, although I happen to be studying in France. And no, luckily I did not need to pass those maths exams! But I've seen the level those french students have in maths and its amazing. Its a pity that sometimes they seem to only know about maths, and not much about the practical issues of engineering
The Infrared was the _BEST_ feature the HP48 had, and the only real reason to purchase it instead of a slightly less powerful but much easier to use TI-92.
Some could say that the fact that there is a lot more of software for the HP than for the TI is another reason to buy it, but I think that if the HP software was so widespread was mainly because of the infrared link, wich made it extremely easy to get or give to your friends.
It's a pity they removed it. This looked like a great upgrade. Specially that it does not use the RPN by default, which many people do not like.
Also, why did they take so long to make a newer version? When it was out it was the best calculator you could possibly buy, but now the competitors like TI or Casio do really great machines. I'm not sure this will be powerful enough to beat them...
Slashdot Mirror
WAP as it is currently offered by european operators is crap because of the reasons you said.
However, once the GPRS (Packet Switched mode) service will be finally deployed (around next year), WAP should become much more interesting.
However, I still don't really understand why we could not just stick to HTML. After all most current mobile phones have enough computing power to run Lynx!
Cheers,
Angel
There are two main parameters that define a channel, its central frequency (sort of "how fast the signal changes on average") and its bandwidth ("how fast the signal changes around that average").
Narrowband, as you said, is a signal transmitted through a narrow band. That usually means that it's bandwidth is "small" compared to the central frequency at which it is transmitted. What is "small"? There is not an exact definition for that, but let me give you an example. The GSM wireless telephone system is considered to be narrowband. In it the central frequency can be around 900 MHz, 1800 MHz or 1900 MHz, while the bandwidth of each channel is 200 kHz (i.e. 5000 to 10000 times smaller than the central frequency).
On the other hand, wideband and broadband are more or less the same, i.e. the opposite of narrowband. The future UMTS wireless telephony system will be wideband, with a central frequency around 2 GHz (2000 MHz) and a channel bandwith around 5 MHz (i.e. 400 times smaller than the central frequency).
What you call broadband is in fact called "frequency multiplexing", "Frequency Division Multiple Access" or FDMA, i.e. using multiple carrier frequencies to diviede a medium into many different bands.
Baseband, as you said means that your central frequency is zero. However an Ethernet system is also able to have more than one user at a time. But instead of using Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) it uses Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), because all users use the same frequency but do not transmit at the same time.
This is in fact a simplicitation and sligthly inaccurate, because normally in a TDMA system there are "time slots" or times at which you can start to transmit, while in ethernet you can transmit anytime you want and you only stop if two or more users transmit simultaneously, thus causing a "collision" between them. In that case they will all wait for a random amount of time and try again. This procedure is often called Random Access.
I hope this helps. Cheers,
Angel
I might be totally wrong, as IANAP (I am not a phisicist), but maybe the answer to your question is in Heisenbergs Uncertainty principle.
;-)
If you try to measure or specify the position of the pulse very exactly, then you can't know its speed and viceversa. If the speed of the pulse is measured very exactly, then the pulse could be in "both" sides of the chamber.
So in fact maybe you can really have it both ways!
Cheers,
Angel
I'm sorry but I must say that I don't understand why some people considered this previous post as "Insightful"!
It is as insightful as saying that because each of our individual neurons has no intelligence, their "collective intelligence" is limited by that, and therefore that the brain they form can not be intelligent at all!
I'm sorry but that's plain wrong, because we are dealing with a very complex system here, where the total can be much bigger than the sum of the parts.
The limitation to the collective intelligence of the bees (or ants) will be limited by then number of beesn and the number and speed of the interections they can have wich each other, which is clearly smaller and slower than the interections of the individual neurons of our brain.
Angel
That's what they said today on one of France's main TV's.
They also say that 1 of every 10 american says that it has had a gun fired at him.
Even worse, one child or a teen is fired every two hours in the USA. More children die yearly in the US that in all the rest of "developped" countries together.
In my opinion that is unacceptable and I wouldn't like living in a country that allows that kind of situation. Don't get me wrong! I've been in the US once and I like it a lot (friendly people, interesting cities...) but all the importance that americans give to the right to bear arms seems outdated and difficult to understand to me (and for most of the people on the other side of the atlantic as well, I bet!).
Although the second amendment was probably very reasonable at the time the american constitution was written, times change, and I don't think it is very likely that the government of the US would try (or be able to) unlawfully try to control the citizens of the US. In my opinion the chances of this happening are so small that it would be much more reasonable to limit the right to bear arms in order to save so many children (and adults) of being shot.
Some said that trying to limit the right of people to bear arms would not stop criminals of using them. That is right. However an easy way to stop them is to punish very severly those that have guns without permission (if you were a criminal would you risk 4 years of prison for having a gun if you could use a knife instead? And a knife, although dangerous, is much less likely of killing a children that was just playing on the street).
On a related issue, I don't understand why many (americans) seem to believe that having a gun protects them. I'd think that having a gun makes you a much more likely target of someone else's gun...
I'd like to finish by saying that this is by no means to be interpreted as an "attack" to those (americans) that belive in their right to bear arms. I respect that, although I don't understand it, maybe because I am not american...
Angel
Tim, you seem to like adding arrays, so I think you should write his next engine in Matlab. Your program would be crossplatform then!
That must be THE GREATEST HACK EVER, according to the article, because:
Angel
So what about the Relativity Theory?
Ok, the whole thing is big and complex, but the initial idea that speed of light is constant and the existance of ether is not important must be one of the most simple yet clever ideas ever!
Or what about the way Archimedes found out that his king's crown was not made only of gold? Now, THAT'S CLEVER!
However I don't know it this can be considered benign, because I guess the guy that made the crown ended in prison if not something worse...
Angel
The reason why they do not open source their project is very simple:
There are very good coders out there that believe that FFT means FAT Fourier Transform!
*Grin*
Angel
Basically, the network is composed by a set of cells that (ideally) cover the area where costumers are. Those cells are served by Base Stations. The Base Stations have antennas, and those antennas, being non ideal, have a certain directivity.
As most users are on the ground, the antennas are designed to have their best response in the direction pointing from the Base Station to the ground (usually -3 to -10 degrees).
On the other hand, the antennas have the worst directivity in the areas that there are less users (you don't want to waste your power). So antennas do not send almost any power towars the air (or the ground below for the same reason).
That is mainly why you can't use a mobile phone in a (flying plane).
As for the data rates, they are in MegaBITS per second (Mbps), not MegaBYTES per second. And those claims are just theoretical.
All 3G (3rd generation) proposed architectures claim speeds up to 2Mbps when the user is still or walking at very low speed, and up to 384 Kbps at velocitis of up to 500 Km/h! (This is so that you could use your phone on a (future) high speed train to connect to the Internet).
But those are theoretical fields, and (almost)everybody working in this field (as I do) believes that the real data rates will be of 384 Kbps when STILL and about 114 Kbps when going at high speed (but probably not that high!).
About the frequency plan that somebody asked about I recomend to check the 3GPP and the IMT-2000 sites, where you'll find tons of info about 3rd generation mobile phones.
And, by the way, Qualcomms proposal is only one among many others, although most of them are based on Wideband CDMA technology, and the only comercial(narrowband) CDMA network is Qualcomm's IS-95, which is mainly deploid in the US, Brazil and some oriental countries. Qualcomm's CDMA proposal is called (last time I checked!) cdma2000, although the extension of IS-95 is cdmaOne, and I don't know if the one they are talking about in this article is the first or the latter.
I hope this clarified some of the issues raised here!
Cheers!
Angel
Using a cell (or mobile as we say in Europe) phone on a plane is not a matter of frequency, but a matter of how the network works.
Basically, the network is composed by a set of cells that (ideally) cover the area where costumers are. Those cells are served by Base Stations. The Base Stations have antennas, and those antennas, being non ideal, have a certain directivity. As most users are on the ground, the antennas are designed to have their best response in the direction pointing from the Base Station to the ground (usually -3 to -10 degrees). On the other hand, the antennas have the worst directivity in the areas that there are less users (you don't want to waste your power). So antennas do not send almost any power towars the air (or the ground below for the same reason).
That is mainly why you can't use a mobile phone in a (flying plane).
As for the data rates, they are in MegaBITS per second (Mbps), not MegaBYTES per second. And those claims are just theoretical. All 3G (3rd generation) proposed architectures claim speeds up to 2Mbps when the user is still or walking at very low speed, and up to 384 Kbps at velocitis of up to 500 Km/h! (This is so that you could use your phone on a (future) high speed train to connect to the Internet).
But those are theoretical fields, and (almost)everybody working in this field (as I do) believes that the real data rates will be of 384 Kbps when STILL and about 114 Kbps when going at high speed (but probably not that high!).
About the frequency plan that somebody asked about I recomend to check the 3GPP and the IMT2000 sites, where you'll find tons of info about 3rd generation mobile phones. And by the way, Qualcomms proposal is only one among many others, although most of them are based on Wideband CDMA technology, and the only comercial(narrowband) CDMA network is Qualcomm's IS-95, which is mainly deploid in the US, Brazil and some oriental countries. Qualcomm's CDMA proposal is called (last time I checked!) cdma2000, although the extension of IS-95 is cdmaOne, and I don't know if the one they are talking about in this article is the first or the latter.
I hope this clarified some of the issues raised here!
Cheers!
Angel
Being Spanish and fluent in English (although my orthography shucs ;-) I must say that "que pasa" is not really the same thing as "what's happening". In my opinion the real translation of "que pasa" would be "what's up".
So the question is, do those guys how the trademark of "what's up"?
As a side note, I must say that I don't understand how somebody can "how" a common sentence like that (like AOL's claims over the "You've mail" and even "You've men" sentences).
A final question: If I make a Spanish dictionaire, can I claim the trademark over an English dictionary containg the same words but in English?
Angel
This is a not very well known fact about France, but there people do not normaly use QWERTY keyboards, but AZERTY keyboards.
;q;q !!!!
Just imagine a QWERTY keyboard were you swich the A by the Q, the Z by the W, the ; by the M, put the numbers in a way that you need to use the SHIFT key to type them and finally add some other smaller but not less stuped changes and you get an AZERTY keyboard!
Then imagine the pain of trying to type _anything_! Just try to writhe mama and you get
In my opinion this is the siliest thing ever. At least with a Dvorak keyboard most of the keys are different (I think!) and so you know you can not type as you would with a QWERTY keyboard. But with AZERTY they are close enought so that you end up typing as usual and making lots of mistakes.
Luckily most Unix stations do have proper English QWERTY keyboards!
Angel
P.S.- As an Spanish that I am, when I think that the European Union asked Spain to remove the from keyboards so that they were not different from the rest of the UE members, but nobody has said anything to France about their AZERTY keyboars I realize how stupid politicians can sometimes be...
P.S.2.- As a kind of discharge I must say that in theory AZERTY keyboards let you type easily in French by assigning keys to the accents like é or è, but for coding they are just terrible. And this could also be done by using a combination of keys, like in Spanish QWERTY keyboards.
I have a very good example for you:
What about the Minidisc vs DCC some years ago?
THAT certainly created consumer confusion, because nobody wants to invest in a technology that will be beaten 2 or 3 years later.
And what about the VHS vs Betamax vs 2000?
Those are good examples that show that you can't make such broad generalizations like "Choice is *always* good". Instead you should say "Choice is very good most of the time".
But when a technoligy is still in it's first stages of development, and or it hasn't reased enough interest, choice can stop people from jumping into that particular technology bandwagon, and thus can eventually kill an otherwise nice technology.
Just my two cents...
Cheers,
Angel
To keep my opinion simple, this is just nonsense, and the author is either just silly or purposedly trying to get notoriety by misleading people.
It's amusing to see the perverse way in which the author uses the Fermi method (Enrico Fermis method to calculate very fast a quantity by guessing the initial values required to do the calculation).
This is the sentence that makes strikes me more:
"And every time a computer freezes up in the workplace, at least one document is lost or damaged."
Come on! I agree that Windows crashes a lot. On the other hand Linux has never crashed on me, although twice the system performance degraded so much that I had to reset my PC, but saying that everytime Windows crashes I lost some file is plain nonsense or a lie!
Many people will not produce more than a document a day. It depends on their work of course, but this is common. It what the author says were true there would be more documents lost than documents created! It is impossible that people could work in that condition, and Microsoft would not be in the position it is now.
The situation is bad, but it is not that bad.
Cheers,
Angel
Actually the UK is not the first European country to introuduce ADSL.Two or three months ago the Spanish government made a law forcing Telefonica (Our personal phone monopolistic company) to deploy ADSL befor 2001 (if I am not mistaken). This will be a 'low-end' ADSL (like the UK's), with a max. bitrate of 256 Kpbs in the downlink and 128 Kbps in the Uplink, but it's much better that todays modems! Also the prize will be arround 5000 pesetas (32.5 US$)). :-(
What we don't know is how the hell will ISPs be able to serve 256 Kpbps to everybody, nor which prizes will the charge us... It would be really fustrating to have such a bandwidth available and not being able to use it!
Anyway I feel this is a very necessary thing, if we want everybody to have a nice access to the Internet.
You can check a small story about the Spanish ADSL deployment
here
From my experience, the best mathematicias in Europe are the French. Their educational system is based on maths. If you are french and you want to get an engineering job, you have to pass the most incredibly difficult maths and physics exams. So french best engineers are usually better at maths than most other countries mathematicians.
For the record I'm not French but Spanish, although I happen to be studying in France. And no, luckily I did not need to pass those maths exams! But I've seen the level those french students have in maths and its amazing. Its a pity that sometimes they seem to only know about maths, and not much about the practical issues of engineering
.Cheers,
Angel
You're totally right!
The Infrared was the _BEST_ feature the HP48 had, and the only real reason to purchase it instead of a slightly less powerful but much easier to use TI-92.
Some could say that the fact that there is a lot more of software for the HP than for the TI is another reason to buy it, but I think that if the HP software was so widespread was mainly because of the infrared link, wich made it extremely easy to get or give to your friends.
It's a pity they removed it. This looked like a great upgrade. Specially that it does not use the RPN by default, which many people do not like.
Also, why did they take so long to make a newer version? When it was out it was the best calculator you could possibly buy, but now the competitors like TI or Casio do really great machines. I'm not sure this will be powerful enough to beat them...
Cheers,
Angel