The worst thing about discussing cell phone technologies is how hung-up everyone gets about 'Who's got the best?' and 'Who is the winner?'
That, combined with national pride (the US invented CDMA therefore it must the best), has landed the entire US cell phone industry in terrible trouble. There are four competing standards:
CDMA TDMA GSM & Nextel propreitary Motorola solution (boy, I wonder if the guy who chose that still has a job!)
What does four competing standards mean? It means there can be no meaningful consolidation in the US market, which in turn means that it is very hard to take cost out of the business. That's why the stock prices (and debt prices) for US wireless carriers have been hit so.
The most important things to decide when choosing a 3G technology should be interopability and technical feasibility. Right now, WCDMA (Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens) and CDMA2000 (Qualcomm and Samsung) seem to win in the first and second respectively.
That pride, and an obsession with 'winning' is getting in the way of a single global standard (which would mean MORE competition, not less - and if you don't believe me, look at Europe's mobile phone market) is an absolute disgrace.
Just my 2c's worth.
Robert
(A few irritations with the article: 'the addition of SIM cards made mobile phone theft a growth industry' - hmmm, like there isn't mobile phone theft and cloning in the US under CDMA; and no mention of the fact the CDMA had no support for international roaming. Grrrr. Please, don't get religious about mobile phone standards. Please.)
Here in the UK it was perfectly possible to buy an Iridium phone. Almost every electronics shop on Tottenham Court Road stocked them. I even once saw someone buy one.
The problem Iridium had was deeped. When the economics were first calculated in the mid-1980s, nobody envisaged a ubiquitious cell phone service and global roaming. (Nor did they imagine that cell phone services would price their minutes at $0.20 or less.) The key demographic of Iridium users - i.e. travelling businessmen - already had cell phones, and weren't prepared to swap them for larger devices, with lower quality sound, and which cost 30x as much per minute.
Clearly this is some new meaning of the phrase 'truely excellent' that I was previously unaware of.
Anyone who loved the radio series and the books found the TV series... well, disappointing at best.
There is just too much surrealism to make the transfer to cellulose, or even the small screen, all but impossible.
Take the moments after Arthur and Ford are picked up by the Heart of Gold: it is full of wonderful images like Southend washing up and down while the water remains still and the infinite monkeys that have just completed the works of Shakespeare. Remove the wonderful, joyeous surrealism and the books become suddenly much more ordinary.
That said, I will watch the movie. And probably cringe, too.
I don't mean to be sceptical, but most market research firms get their numbers in the flimsiest way. This is evidenced by the 'overly precise' nature of your numbers. Any understanding of statistics will tell you that - even if you could survey a representative sample of firms and homes to discover desktop usage - you would need to speak to 1,000s of people just to get a number with a greater than 50% chance of being within 0.5% of the 'truth'.
I don't mean to belittle your team, I'm sure they are all good, smart people, but I also understand that IDC is under commercial pressure to produce a 'story'. Saying that Linux has overtaken the Mac generates publicity, and publicity is good for IDC's sales. (Not to mention your career.)
That Google's numbers are so wildly different to yours adds to my scepticism.
I am always sceptical of numbers from market research companies - whether they be from Minitel, Gartner Dataquest, IDC, Datamonitor, or whoever.
Why? Because I used to work for a market research company.
We were a bunch of 22 year old kids, a year out of university working to such tight deadlines that we just made up the numbers. And guess what? Management had no problems with us doing that.
My favourite story was when I was reseaching a certain market in South America. Because I don't speak Spanish, I decided the way to work out the size of the market was to use some (probably wrong) number for the US, divide by the number people in the US, multiply by the number of people in Venezuela, and apply - say - a 80% discount.
Unfortunately, some where in my Excel formula I had managed to multiply the market size by 10. So, Venezuela appeared to have the largest market in South America.
When I realised weeks later, did I bring this to my boss's attention and risk a telling off? No, I just forgot about it.
Anyway, four months later I had left this job and got myself a proper one, and was reading a magazine. *Another* market research company was touting that "Venezuela [x] market biggest in South America!..."
I was astonished. We hadn't done any real work, and another market research company had just copied our 'work' verbatim.
And here ends my tale as to why Slashdot readers should avoid paying to much attention to market research.
"And do you think other Western nations dare not tow the line?"
Well, perhaps I'm not as pessimistic as you. In most Western countries copyright abuse (i.e. copying of copyright materials for individual use) is a civil rather than a criminal offence. Some countries have greater 'fair use' provisions than others.
It is unlikely the US can just 'force' other countries to protect the copyright of The Two Towers. There are numerous examples of companies (like MSFT) having severe difficulties chasing even serious commercial pirates in continental Europe.
Your figures are wrong. Sony, EA and every other MMORPG vendor have had terrible trouble turning interest into profits.
About six months ago, Sony On-line Entertainment *laid-off* almost half its staff. Hardly the act of a company making too much money from on-line gaming. At EA, Ultima Online 2 has been canned.
Video game vendors have no experience in running server centers with guaranteed up-times. They need to constantly patch offerings to prevent cheating (Sega's PSO has reputedly been spoilt by hacks which allow players to crash other players' boxes.)
If a corporation buys a Linux seat (or heck, downloads an ISO) then it has acquired an asset. Admittedly a digital one, but an asset nonetheless.
Now, if GE can revalue its pension assets upwards, when their value has gone down, then surely the corporation can revalue it to a 'market' rate of (say) $10,000 a seat.
Rolling it out to all the people in your organisation then, gosh!, your company is suddenly as profitable as Enron or WorldCom were.
Best of all, so long as you never run out of blank CDs, your company can continue to make massive profits.
Not, of course, your maths: 2002 - 1991 (ignoring a few non-recession years in the middle) = 11 years...
But: I remember in 1990 discussing with an American friend of mine (I'm British) that an Economist article said that Japanese productivity growth was significantly lower than in the US.
He laughed, and told me (basically) that the US was doomed and that we would all be speaking Japanese in 10 years.
Of course not. But, if you examine the lawsuits brought against (and the settlements with the states) the tobacco companies were done for:
* Saying cigarettes were not addictive, etc. when they had clinical proof they are. * Advertising aimed at minors. * Increasing the health care costs of smokers.
Cigarette companies have *never* TTBOMK been sucessfully sued outside these parameters.
It's like cars, if you drive off the road (your choice) into a concrete wall, then you made the choice not the car company.
I don't mean to be rude, but you haven't really answered the points raised by the (admittedly hysterical) poster.
The key question seems to be: should people be allowed to do things that harm themselves?
Your answer is no, they will "rapidly kill a person." There is no doubt in your mind that society would be worse off were drugs legal.
It is not clear whether this is true or not true. The war on drugs has many casualties: whether the people of Colombia, the helpless addict who overdoses on an unusally pure batch of cocaine, or the families of addicts.
We simply do not know whether things would be 'better' if drugs were legalised. What we do know is that they would be different.
Surely now is time for an experiment - just as prohibition was an experiment - legalise cannabis.
Yes it does harm (but so can mountain climbing...), but will it reduce criminality?
Given years of banging our heads against the wall, maybe now is the time to try something new. And if it doesn't work, at least we can roll the clock back.
I am not a Philip Morris employee, I would add, and this is largely conjecture.
But, why on earth would PM not sell heroin. The problem with cigarettes has always been that the tobacco companies lied to consumers ("no, of course they're not addictive", and "these cigarettes will actually help your lungs"). Even after the tobacco companies had definitive evidence their products killed people, allegedly, they continued to sell them.
Now with Heroin (brand name: Get-u-High?) that's hardly an issue. The packet of 12 syringes would contain a "are you mad? these things are more dangerous than... well, most things" leaflet.
In Europe we have one digital cellular technology: GSM. This means that I can use my phone on any network. The R&D cost per phone is lowered and the competition is increased.
To some extent, I believe, the same is true in Japan, with J-Phone and DoCoMo sharing the same technology. (And with DoCoMo being, by a mile, the largest cell phone company in the world.)
If, in the UK, I wish to change my operator, I can go to one of the other three 'real' operators or one of a couple of virtual ones (which lease capacity off the real networks.) This has created price and service competition. That I can take my number with me between operators helps too.
And the 'half'... easy, I don't pay to recieve calls. There is no incentive, other that avoiding my ex-girlfriend, to turn my phone off.
I always thought that my search results with a certain on-line *travel* agent moved with *ocity* efficiency and would always give me the best price in its database.
Yet, when I restricted the search to my 'favourite airlines', I got different (ie better) results.
I thought it was a glitch. But you've made me think again...
Say I want to get one of these robots to guard my car. So I go into the store, and the robot sits by my 1988 Ford.
Arrive robbert.
"Robot, this is not the car you're supposed to be guarding." says the robber.
"This is not the car I'm supposed to be guarding." echoes the robot, thinking hard about Asimov's second law.
"Move along."
And the robot moves along: because that's the second law.
And even if the robber was dumb enough not to ask the robot to move along, then - by the first and third laws - it would be practially unable to do anything to stop the robber. Indeed, it might be required to get out the way of the cheeky chappy because that would endanger its own existence.
Bah! You won't catch me getting a robot for a security guard.
There is truth in your comment. But you devalue it by not providing examples, and making even more unsupported claims than Mr Joel.
"...studies consistently prove the lower cost of ownership of free software."
Really? Which software and which studies? Compared to which propreitary applications? I can believe Apache is cheaper (not to mention better) than IIS. But what about Star Office vs MSFT Office? Is this a study of technically proficient users, or not?
"The rest of the article is inconsequential after the false frame work has been applied."
OK. Now that is frankly ridiculous. Even if you disagree with some of his comments about OSS, that does not make the rest of the article meaningless. Indeed, the rest of the article is thought provoking, and contains more than a sliver of truth. (Ie, IBM wants OSS to be a success because then it can make money running your Apache server for you.)
It seems there is way too much religion in your post: "if you point to flaws in the OSS model [which I don't believe his does] then you must be against OSS. and those who are against OSS are ignorable."
SNCF lost an astonishing 1.7bn in 2000. *Plus* it recieved 1.6bn in subsidies, so it really lost 3.3bn. Below is from The Economist, 31 May 2001:
"In the mid-1990s, the European Commission was pressing the French to separate track and rail operations in the interests of greater financial transparency, and also to open the way for some competition on the tracks. Eventually, the French opted for separation in 1997, but for a different reason: SNCF as it was then constituted was going as bust as only a nationalised industry could, halfway through spending FFr300 billion on its TGV network. So the huge debts were shunted into the new state-owned company--where the grim financial picture is still tucked away.
The accounts for 2000 show RFF running at a loss of euro1.7 billion a year. But the true figure is in fact much higher, because there is, in addition, a subsidy from the government of euro1.6 billion. Now that SNCF is itself slipping back into the red, that means that the total losses on French railways are around euro3.5 billion a year.
And the future looks even bleaker. The long-term debt inherited by RFF has risen from euro20.7 billion four years ago to euro22.8 billion, and there is little prospect of reducing it by much. So, over the past three years, under a programme known as "reform of reform", the company has tapped the international capital markets for loans worth euro18.5 billion, not to spend on shiny new lines but just to refinance its old debts."
The SNCF requires *massive* state subsidies to do this. If the US government paid Amtrak anything like what the French paid SNCF, then you wouldn't just have TGVs and Bullet trains, you'd have MagLev's running at 1000mph.
Slashdot Mirror
The worst thing about discussing cell phone technologies is how hung-up everyone gets about 'Who's got the best?' and 'Who is the winner?'
That, combined with national pride (the US invented CDMA therefore it must the best), has landed the entire US cell phone industry in terrible trouble. There are four competing standards:
CDMA
TDMA
GSM
&
Nextel propreitary Motorola solution (boy, I wonder if the guy who chose that still has a job!)
What does four competing standards mean? It means there can be no meaningful consolidation in the US market, which in turn means that it is very hard to take cost out of the business. That's why the stock prices (and debt prices) for US wireless carriers have been hit so.
The most important things to decide when choosing a 3G technology should be interopability and technical feasibility. Right now, WCDMA (Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens) and CDMA2000 (Qualcomm and Samsung) seem to win in the first and second respectively.
That pride, and an obsession with 'winning' is getting in the way of a single global standard (which would mean MORE competition, not less - and if you don't believe me, look at Europe's mobile phone market) is an absolute disgrace.
Just my 2c's worth.
Robert
(A few irritations with the article: 'the addition of SIM cards made mobile phone theft a growth industry' - hmmm, like there isn't mobile phone theft and cloning in the US under CDMA; and no mention of the fact the CDMA had no support for international roaming. Grrrr. Please, don't get religious about mobile phone standards. Please.)
Here in the UK it was perfectly possible to buy an Iridium phone. Almost every electronics shop on Tottenham Court Road stocked them. I even once saw someone buy one.
The problem Iridium had was deeped. When the economics were first calculated in the mid-1980s, nobody envisaged a ubiquitious cell phone service and global roaming. (Nor did they imagine that cell phone services would price their minutes at $0.20 or less.) The key demographic of Iridium users - i.e. travelling businessmen - already had cell phones, and weren't prepared to swap them for larger devices, with lower quality sound, and which cost 30x as much per minute.
Clearly this is some new meaning of the phrase 'truely excellent' that I was previously unaware of.
Anyone who loved the radio series and the books found the TV series... well, disappointing at best.
There is just too much surrealism to make the transfer to cellulose, or even the small screen, all but impossible.
Take the moments after Arthur and Ford are picked up by the Heart of Gold: it is full of wonderful images like Southend washing up and down while the water remains still and the infinite monkeys that have just completed the works of Shakespeare. Remove the wonderful, joyeous surrealism and the books become suddenly much more ordinary.
That said, I will watch the movie. And probably cringe, too.
OK: I was 22, and as I am British I had left University at that age.
Don,
I don't mean to be sceptical, but most market research firms get their numbers in the flimsiest way. This is evidenced by the 'overly precise' nature of your numbers. Any understanding of statistics will tell you that - even if you could survey a representative sample of firms and homes to discover desktop usage - you would need to speak to 1,000s of people just to get a number with a greater than 50% chance of being within 0.5% of the 'truth'.
I don't mean to belittle your team, I'm sure they are all good, smart people, but I also understand that IDC is under commercial pressure to produce a 'story'. Saying that Linux has overtaken the Mac generates publicity, and publicity is good for IDC's sales. (Not to mention your career.)
That Google's numbers are so wildly different to yours adds to my scepticism.
Thank you,
Robert
Is my computing time-line out, or does this just not make sense.
You were running Win3.1 (from, say, 1994) on an Athlon 1500+ (from, say, 2002). Hmmmm.
Troll?
I am always sceptical of numbers from market research companies - whether they be from Minitel, Gartner Dataquest, IDC, Datamonitor, or whoever.
Why? Because I used to work for a market research company.
We were a bunch of 22 year old kids, a year out of university working to such tight deadlines that we just made up the numbers. And guess what? Management had no problems with us doing that.
My favourite story was when I was reseaching a certain market in South America. Because I don't speak Spanish, I decided the way to work out the size of the market was to use some (probably wrong) number for the US, divide by the number people in the US, multiply by the number of people in Venezuela, and apply - say - a 80% discount.
Unfortunately, some where in my Excel formula I had managed to multiply the market size by 10. So, Venezuela appeared to have the largest market in South America.
When I realised weeks later, did I bring this to my boss's attention and risk a telling off? No, I just forgot about it.
Anyway, four months later I had left this job and got myself a proper one, and was reading a magazine. *Another* market research company was touting that "Venezuela [x] market biggest in South America!..."
I was astonished. We hadn't done any real work, and another market research company had just copied our 'work' verbatim.
And here ends my tale as to why Slashdot readers should avoid paying to much attention to market research.
...from the last time this was posted then:
Will I get completely new Karma?
Also, I just post a bunch of links to the last discussion of this, will I get +5, Informative?
"And do you think other Western nations dare not tow the line?"
Well, perhaps I'm not as pessimistic as you. In most Western countries copyright abuse (i.e. copying of copyright materials for individual use) is a civil rather than a criminal offence. Some countries have greater 'fair use' provisions than others.
It is unlikely the US can just 'force' other countries to protect the copyright of The Two Towers. There are numerous examples of companies (like MSFT) having severe difficulties chasing even serious commercial pirates in continental Europe.
Your figures are wrong. Sony, EA and every other MMORPG vendor have had terrible trouble turning interest into profits.
About six months ago, Sony On-line Entertainment *laid-off* almost half its staff. Hardly the act of a company making too much money from on-line gaming. At EA, Ultima Online 2 has been canned.
Video game vendors have no experience in running server centers with guaranteed up-times. They need to constantly patch offerings to prevent cheating (Sega's PSO has reputedly been spoilt by hacks which allow players to crash other players' boxes.)
But think how many 18 year old girls you can get to 'see' with fast Internet connection.
And they are all at college too - at least they are according to the emails in my in-tray.
If a corporation buys a Linux seat (or heck, downloads an ISO) then it has acquired an asset. Admittedly a digital one, but an asset nonetheless.
Now, if GE can revalue its pension assets upwards, when their value has gone down, then surely the corporation can revalue it to a 'market' rate of (say) $10,000 a seat.
Rolling it out to all the people in your organisation then, gosh!, your company is suddenly as profitable as Enron or WorldCom were.
Best of all, so long as you never run out of blank CDs, your company can continue to make massive profits.
Not, of course, your maths: 2002 - 1991 (ignoring a few non-recession years in the middle) = 11 years...
But: I remember in 1990 discussing with an American friend of mine (I'm British) that an Economist article said that Japanese productivity growth was significantly lower than in the US.
He laughed, and told me (basically) that the US was doomed and that we would all be speaking Japanese in 10 years.
Oh how times change...
Protected against lawsuits?
Of course not. But, if you examine the lawsuits brought against (and the settlements with the states) the tobacco companies were done for:
* Saying cigarettes were not addictive, etc. when they had clinical proof they are.
* Advertising aimed at minors.
* Increasing the health care costs of smokers.
Cigarette companies have *never* TTBOMK been sucessfully sued outside these parameters.
It's like cars, if you drive off the road (your choice) into a concrete wall, then you made the choice not the car company.
*r
I don't mean to be rude, but you haven't really answered the points raised by the (admittedly hysterical) poster.
The key question seems to be: should people be allowed to do things that harm themselves?
Your answer is no, they will "rapidly kill a person." There is no doubt in your mind that society would be worse off were drugs legal.
It is not clear whether this is true or not true. The war on drugs has many casualties: whether the people of Colombia, the helpless addict who overdoses on an unusally pure batch of cocaine, or the families of addicts.
We simply do not know whether things would be 'better' if drugs were legalised. What we do know is that they would be different.
Surely now is time for an experiment - just as prohibition was an experiment - legalise cannabis.
Yes it does harm (but so can mountain climbing...), but will it reduce criminality?
Given years of banging our heads against the wall, maybe now is the time to try something new. And if it doesn't work, at least we can roll the clock back.
Goddamit! I'm not paranoid. Everyone just wants to make me think I'm paranoid.
I am not a Philip Morris employee, I would add, and this is largely conjecture.
But, why on earth would PM not sell heroin. The problem with cigarettes has always been that the tobacco companies lied to consumers ("no, of course they're not addictive", and "these cigarettes will actually help your lungs"). Even after the tobacco companies had definitive evidence their products killed people, allegedly, they continued to sell them.
Now with Heroin (brand name: Get-u-High?) that's hardly an issue. The packet of 12 syringes would contain a "are you mad? these things are more dangerous than... well, most things" leaflet.
There is another reason (and a half) too.
In Europe we have one digital cellular technology: GSM. This means that I can use my phone on any network. The R&D cost per phone is lowered and the competition is increased.
To some extent, I believe, the same is true in Japan, with J-Phone and DoCoMo sharing the same technology. (And with DoCoMo being, by a mile, the largest cell phone company in the world.)
If, in the UK, I wish to change my operator, I can go to one of the other three 'real' operators or one of a couple of virtual ones (which lease capacity off the real networks.) This has created price and service competition. That I can take my number with me between operators helps too.
And the 'half'... easy, I don't pay to recieve calls. There is no incentive, other that avoiding my ex-girlfriend, to turn my phone off.
*r
Funny you should mention that.
I always thought that my search results with a certain on-line *travel* agent moved with *ocity* efficiency and would always give me the best price in its database.
Yet, when I restricted the search to my 'favourite airlines', I got different (ie better) results.
I thought it was a glitch. But you've made me think again...
Would be in the lounge/sitting room. It wouldn't clutter, or look out of place like a desktop or laptop.
You could use it to surf the web, or to control your Autiotron MP3 player. I want one!
OK. Now this is a serious point. Honest.
Say I want to get one of these robots to guard my car. So I go into the store, and the robot sits by my 1988 Ford.
Arrive robbert.
"Robot, this is not the car you're supposed to be guarding." says the robber.
"This is not the car I'm supposed to be guarding." echoes the robot, thinking hard about Asimov's second law.
"Move along."
And the robot moves along: because that's the second law.
And even if the robber was dumb enough not to ask the robot to move along, then - by the first and third laws - it would be practially unable to do anything to stop the robber. Indeed, it might be required to get out the way of the cheeky chappy because that would endanger its own existence.
Bah! You won't catch me getting a robot for a security guard.
the line between 'flamebait' and 'funny' is a narrow one.
this definitely comes down on the side of 'funny'.
There is truth in your comment. But you devalue it by not providing examples, and making even more unsupported claims than Mr Joel.
"...studies consistently prove the lower cost of ownership of free software."
Really? Which software and which studies? Compared to which propreitary applications? I can believe Apache is cheaper (not to mention better) than IIS. But what about Star Office vs MSFT Office? Is this a study of technically proficient users, or not?
"The rest of the article is inconsequential after the false frame work has been applied."
OK. Now that is frankly ridiculous. Even if you disagree with some of his comments about OSS, that does not make the rest of the article meaningless. Indeed, the rest of the article is thought provoking, and contains more than a sliver of truth. (Ie, IBM wants OSS to be a success because then it can make money running your Apache server for you.)
It seems there is way too much religion in your post: "if you point to flaws in the OSS model [which I don't believe his does] then you must be against OSS. and those who are against OSS are ignorable."
True and not true:
SNCF lost an astonishing 1.7bn in 2000. *Plus* it recieved 1.6bn in subsidies, so it really lost 3.3bn. Below is from The Economist, 31 May 2001:
"In the mid-1990s, the European Commission was pressing the French to separate track and rail operations in the interests of greater financial transparency, and also to open the way for some competition on the tracks. Eventually, the French opted for separation in 1997, but for a different reason: SNCF as it was then constituted was going as bust as only a nationalised industry could, halfway through spending FFr300 billion on its TGV network. So the huge debts were shunted into the new state-owned company--where the grim financial picture is still tucked away.
The accounts for 2000 show RFF running at a loss of euro1.7 billion a year. But the true figure is in fact much higher, because there is, in addition, a subsidy from the government of euro1.6 billion. Now that SNCF is itself slipping back into the red, that means that the total losses on French railways are around euro3.5 billion a year.
And the future looks even bleaker. The long-term debt inherited by RFF has risen from euro20.7 billion four years ago to euro22.8 billion, and there is little prospect of reducing it by much. So, over the past three years, under a programme known as "reform of reform", the company has tapped the international capital markets for loans worth euro18.5 billion, not to spend on shiny new lines but just to refinance its old debts."
The SNCF requires *massive* state subsidies to do this. If the US government paid Amtrak anything like what the French paid SNCF, then you wouldn't just have TGVs and Bullet trains, you'd have MagLev's running at 1000mph.