I disagree with point 2. IS-95 interoperates better with AMPS. You can have an IS-95 network running on the A frequencies, and standard AMPS on the B frequencies. I'm not sure of this, but it may even be possible to run AMPS and IS-95 in A or B frequencies.
Bell Atlantic nee Verizon (which consumed Voicestream I thought) has been doing this for about 5 years. They were the wireline carrier in the mid-Atlantic area.
They also are getting ready to turn up their 3G1X stuff that they have been installing, so it gets muddy from here.
I am not convinced that CDMA2K will dominate. Let's see if Qualcomm sticks around long enough to be a factor and the F.C.C. finally gets half a clue.
Lots and lots of interesting things going on now and in coming months, aint it great to be alive?!
I am a novice GSM user and understand that there is a provision for the s.i.m. card that you purchase to write to the phone an identifier that prevents the phone from recognizing a s.i.m. card from any other carrier.
Is this in actual use in the world?
I searched the web for workarounds, but without exception I turned up the exact same paragraph copied verbatim at well over 50 sites, so I gave up looking.
If true, it would go a long way towards killing acceptance of this, in addition to exhorbitant rates.
Ideas? Comments?
What's wrong with a broken-down cabin in Montana?
on
GPS Meets PCS
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· Score: 1
You know, I drive around and see people come to fisticuffs over which lane they want to drive in, people rushing through their days yammering on cell phones still not feeling that they're getting enough done, rush, RUSH, RUSH!!!!
Maybe that broken-down cabin in Montana isn't such a bad idea, just don't write any manifestos and you're pretty much set. Somedays you can keep you're bloody technological wonders.
I think we have proven that long distance competition has been a boon for consumers and ultimately for those l.d. companies who had the stamina to survive the winnowing out process over the years.
Local service, on the other hand, is a natural monopoly: because there is really only one pipe coming into your premises, it doesn't make sense to have multiple providers yanking the other end of it around to this, that, or the other central office. As a prime example, I hand you the d.s.l. debacle. Tell me that great experiment worked!
The natural monopoly-ILECs did everythnig in their power to squash the so-called competitors providing d.s.l. over their last-mile circuits. I just saw a t.v. ad for some wannabe competitor to BellSouth Telephone the other night and just chuckled. I don't know how much longer they can stay in business promising discounts of greater than 50% off what B.S.T. charges. They are probably just reselling B.S.T. dial tone at wholesale rates, but why should B.S.T. sit there and let them rake in the bucks? I bet they'll do everything they can to delay orders, screw up orders, accidentally disable service, whatever they can to the competitor's customers.
I look for no substantive changes from the Supreme Court. Competition is good, except where natural monopolies exist, as in last-mile provisioning.
But imagine what it would be like to watch tv and have ads appear overlayed over the program you're watching, or in boxes that pop up and cover half the screen in the middle of a moving scene.... it would drive everyone nuts, and that's what online ads are doing.
You mean the way UPN and WB cram the closing credits of the show into a tiny corner of the screen in order to blast you with promos for the upcoming shows? Yeah, I know what you mean and it pisses me off, especially when I want to *read* the credits to see who played Admiral Futzelputz or enjoy the music that the producers chose.
Oh well, we're just captives waiting to feed the marketers, like so many 'Neos' curled up in tanks to feed the computers of the Matrix.
I started my experience with cable Internet when MediaOne offered the RoadRunner label. They brought out a General Instruments cable modem that looked like a 'leenear' for See Bee radio, good buddy, a big, heavy metal box with huge heat sink fins all over it. It worked about 60-70% of the time. I bitched and moaned, pretty much knowing that there was little they could do about it as the problems persisted.
Then, on their own, they magically upgrade the whole neighborhood to DOCSIS equipment and they swapped out the G.I. hunk-o-junk with a little, plastic Toshiba modem that looked like a traditional modem. Never once had a glitch after that.
Don't know if it was poor implementation and maintenance of the original junk or that General Instruments simply lost their minds when they built their version of the junk, but it was a night and day difference between old and DOCSIS in my experience of 1 year.
Then, due to changes in my personal and business life I moved away from there, but I sure do miss that Internet access. Now I'm stuck with Telocity's (oh, I mean DirectTV's) sometimes-always-on Net service. It works great until I try to use it, then the connection stalls and I have to unplug the phone line and plug it back in to reset it. All the time. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
> Oh, and as far as a legal team get the FSF (defenders of 2600 et al?) and lobby, lobby, lobby for *intelligent* laws.
Too late. You lobby *BEFORE* laws are passed, not after. You kill them in sub-committee. Failing that you kill them in committee. Failing that you amend the hell out of them in the full assembly. Failing that you amend them the best you can in conference. After that, it's too expensive and too futile to be worthwhile in most cases.
> what happens when we don't have a fucking choice?
You do what I did. You hike the Kalalau Trail on Kauai to the end and sit around a campfire on full moon night and play flutes, guitars, and dijridoos while getting stoned to the bejeezus bells under the stars.
Totally free, totally un-copy-protectable, totally cool, and a hell of a lot more fun than bitching about the D.M.C.A. and those big, bad record cumpnies.
Boy! I found only one other poster at score: 2 or above who didn't act like a preacher about this non-sex scene.
You want pertinent? I'll give you pertinent: Humans love to have sex and do warm, fun, fuzzy things with each other. It would have been *very* pertinent if Tucker had taken some gel in his hands, gotten all hot and bothered and grabbed Vulcan-babe for a good old-fashioned Kirk-style throat examination with his tongue.
Her reaction would have been interesting to watch, and would have instantly developed a tense sub-plot in the midst of the greater tension of the Captain's absence.
The surprise when she suddenly was swayed by her erstwhile lover's insistence to press on to Kronos instead of returning to Earth would have brought the house down under these more tense circumstances and raised questions about her ability to suppress those base emotions that Vulcans hate--er, eschew--so much.
I volunteer to be T'Pol's (that looks funny with the possesive, doesn't it?) personal decon gel applicator-guy for the run of the series. You think they'd go for it??
>Let some of the characters' personalities gell a little, and let some chemistry develop. They may even change the theme music.
I appear to be in the minority of non-puerile males who didn't bitch about the chemistry developing while the personality gel was being applied in decon. I fully expected Rick Berman to have a babe scene.
What I didn't expect was it to be equal-opportunity, with Trip joining Vulcan-babe for the jelly roll. It appears he enjoyed it in real life, as well.
I just let the scene pass in the same manner as a sci-fi faux pas would pass during suspension of disbelief, but I didn't mind viewing it, gratuitous or not. In fact, I find it quite refreshing that they seem to be abandoning this ridiculous prudishness that festered on Voyager over the simplest, most innocent feelings.
"Close the door, you're letting out the steam from this scene!"
This might not be news to you bleeding edge slashdotters, but speaking of Gartner group (farther up the page) they just recommended in a Computerworld article that corporate users who have been burned once too many times by MicroSoft's approach to coding and security jump ship.
Geez, you guys have all the time to sit around and fantasize about these what-if scenarios, like "What if a terrorist visits my house...?"
Well, duhhhhh!! Have you ever heard of guilt by association??!!
True story: I once was paid a visit by a phone phreak friend of mine a long, long time ago in a place far, far away. He brought along this strange young lady with him who proceeded to stick the suction-cup mirror that I ripped off from the Tephone Cumpny all over the wall, leaving behind nice little circles on the painted surface.
Needless to say, neither she nor he was welcomed in my house again. I didn't need no goddamned warrant, special order, or other law to realize that if he associated with inconsiderate people like this, he probably wasn't far removed himself.
The extrapolation of this anecdote to the topic under discussion is left as an exercise to the reader.
Hell, most of the Senators debating this amendment had not even *read* the thing, although they were quick to point out their support for it, along with many thanks to the distinguished gentleman from .
"I have no idea what you have said, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
It is far, far cheaper, easier, and more timely to defeat bad bills in committee or before they are passed thAn to attack them by lawsuits after they become law.
This bad amendment still must be debated in conference committee between the House and Senate. That is one more opportunity to get rid of the amendment. It is a shoo-in for passage as a final bill in the full House and Senate, so it won't be stopped there. Get rid of it now or forget it.
I don't know dick about crypto so I surely hope those in-the-know can make their ways to D.C. to bend some ears on Capitol Hill before this thing sees the light of day.
As I flipped across C-SPAN 2 the other night (yes, there actually was *ONE* channel not showing the same thing over and over), Senator Leahy (D-Vermont) was questioning an amendment to S.149, an appropriations bill, that he thought would greatly relax the requirements for getting a 'wiretap' order.
I'm pretty sure this appropriations bill sought money for the immediate crisis, even though it was reported out of committee back in July.
Leahy kept harping on the provision that any 'law enforcement or other authority' simply needed to certify to a judge that the monitoring was necessary. Of course, that old windbag Orrin Hatch took great umbrage at this questioning of the amendment in this time of dire straits, and how dare Leahy suggest that this might be overreaching by the government! Leahy wasn't particularly clear and Hatch made it sound like there was nothing in the amendment that didn't already exist in current law; but, then why would they need an amendment if there were no difference?
It all sounded like an opportunistic attempt (that passed) to seek an expansion of government wiretapping abilities.
This debate was either Friday or maybe Thursday evening and the amendment passed.
Beware.
Re:Let's start with rendering pages properly
on
Netscape 6.1
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· Score: 1
I see. So their error handling stinks.
I was under the impression that the folks from Netscape had a hand in steering the development of html and css. The 4.xx versions of their Navigator browser were around after these specifications had been available for a while, yet their software couldn't handle them correctly.
This does not bode well for their future (now current) software releases, hence my great reluctance to spend the time necessary to grab the code, install it, find out what doesn't work, etc. I've been burned badly previously.
If Navigator 6.1 receives rave reviews from even the skeptics, I'll consider it.
try burning a SafeDisc2 protected image on a new Plextor drive. Even a perfect data source can just be blocked by hardware, by detecting patterns.
Please elaborate. Are you saying that if I burn original material that I created using a new Plextor CD drive that it will nonetheless watermark it or otherwise munge my data?
The question is, will Congress permit anyone to create CD-R writers (for example) in the future that do not have firmware copy protection.
The Congress, nor any other municipality in the U.S., can only restrict what we allow it to. It is not up to Congress to 'permit' it. I know that you simply used a convenient phrase, but it's important to remember this key distinction. The U.S. system allows government to do only what we allow it to get away with, otherwise it must keep it's grubby, greedy hands off.
People have rights, government has limited powers. Too bad more of us don't remember this.
I can't remember the plot of 'Brazil', only that it gave me the willies and I *could not wait* to get out of that theater! Yes, I am old enough.
Maybe I'll go rent it, if it's available for rent. Maybe y'all should, too. (Probably banned by the government as inciting to insurrection or something.)
Let's start with rendering pages properly
on
Netscape 6.1
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· Score: 1
There is only ONE feature I would like to see in anything coming out of Netscape's doors: render html properly.
Not executing Javascript quickly, not even executing client-side Java applets without crashing, just do the most basic thing one could ever ask of a web browser: render the damned page properly!
It can't even handle tables or cascading style sheets properly, who cares about speed and so-called 'features'??!! It doesn't look the way I designed it, so Navigator gets the boot! SEE YAAAAAA!
I agree with/., Is Netscape still around?
Dictionary? How about a grammar checker!
on
Netscape 6.1
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· Score: 1
Who needs a dictionary that says "their" is spelled OK in the sentence "You won't find me their".
What the world needs is a good 5 cent grammar checker!
You've made my point for me. To expand a bit: machines created with a.i. will be imbued with those qualities of which we have knowledge and which we are capable of imbuing into them.
If Vinge puts that we are capable of creating evil machines, then we should be just as capable of creating kind, helpful machines.
Of course, this has been done already. It's called making a baby. They make us laugh, cry, clean up the chair and carpet, are generally unpredictable until they develop personalities...some become mass murderers, others become prize-winning scientists. Who knew?
If we feel the need to create silicon-based Humans, it might be wise to understand better the carbon-based ones first. Maybe that's the point.
If such a machine makes a mistake, does that make it 'artificial stupidity'??:)
Go there today to vote for your favorite voice candidate. It used to be fun to listen to the weather broadcasts, but I can't stand the poor and uneven implementation of that system they use now. I hope the new system lives up to its promise.
Slashdot Mirror
Bell Atlantic nee Verizon (which consumed Voicestream I thought) has been doing this for about 5 years. They were the wireline carrier in the mid-Atlantic area.
They also are getting ready to turn up their 3G1X stuff that they have been installing, so it gets muddy from here.
I am not convinced that CDMA2K will dominate. Let's see if Qualcomm sticks around long enough to be a factor and the F.C.C. finally gets half a clue.
Lots and lots of interesting things going on now and in coming months, aint it great to be alive?!
I am a novice GSM user and understand that there is a provision for the s.i.m. card that you purchase to write to the phone an identifier that prevents the phone from recognizing a s.i.m. card from any other carrier.
Is this in actual use in the world?
I searched the web for workarounds, but without exception I turned up the exact same paragraph copied verbatim at well over 50 sites, so I gave up looking.
If true, it would go a long way towards killing acceptance of this, in addition to exhorbitant rates.
Ideas? Comments?
You know, I drive around and see people come to fisticuffs over which lane they want to drive in, people rushing through their days yammering on cell phones still not feeling that they're getting enough done, rush, RUSH, RUSH!!!!
Maybe that broken-down cabin in Montana isn't such a bad idea, just don't write any manifestos and you're pretty much set. Somedays you can keep you're bloody technological wonders.
I think we have proven that long distance competition has been a boon for consumers and ultimately for those l.d. companies who had the stamina to survive the winnowing out process over the years.
Local service, on the other hand, is a natural monopoly: because there is really only one pipe coming into your premises, it doesn't make sense to have multiple providers yanking the other end of it around to this, that, or the other central office. As a prime example, I hand you the d.s.l. debacle. Tell me that great experiment worked!
The natural monopoly-ILECs did everythnig in their power to squash the so-called competitors providing d.s.l. over their last-mile circuits. I just saw a t.v. ad for some wannabe competitor to BellSouth Telephone the other night and just chuckled. I don't know how much longer they can stay in business promising discounts of greater than 50% off what B.S.T. charges. They are probably just reselling B.S.T. dial tone at wholesale rates, but why should B.S.T. sit there and let them rake in the bucks? I bet they'll do everything they can to delay orders, screw up orders, accidentally disable service, whatever they can to the competitor's customers.
I look for no substantive changes from the Supreme Court. Competition is good, except where natural monopolies exist, as in last-mile provisioning.
Oh well, we're just captives waiting to feed the marketers, like so many 'Neos' curled up in tanks to feed the computers of the Matrix.
I started my experience with cable Internet when MediaOne offered the RoadRunner label. They brought out a General Instruments cable modem that looked like a 'leenear' for See Bee radio, good buddy, a big, heavy metal box with huge heat sink fins all over it. It worked about 60-70% of the time. I bitched and moaned, pretty much knowing that there was little they could do about it as the problems persisted.
Then, on their own, they magically upgrade the whole neighborhood to DOCSIS equipment and they swapped out the G.I. hunk-o-junk with a little, plastic Toshiba modem that looked like a traditional modem. Never once had a glitch after that.
Don't know if it was poor implementation and maintenance of the original junk or that General Instruments simply lost their minds when they built their version of the junk, but it was a night and day difference between old and DOCSIS in my experience of 1 year.
Then, due to changes in my personal and business life I moved away from there, but I sure do miss that Internet access. Now I'm stuck with Telocity's (oh, I mean DirectTV's) sometimes-always-on Net service. It works great until I try to use it, then the connection stalls and I have to unplug the phone line and plug it back in to reset it. All the time. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
> Oh, and as far as a legal team get the FSF (defenders of 2600 et al?) and lobby, lobby, lobby for *intelligent* laws.
Too late. You lobby *BEFORE* laws are passed, not after. You kill them in sub-committee. Failing that you kill them in committee. Failing that you amend the hell out of them in the full assembly. Failing that you amend them the best you can in conference. After that, it's too expensive and too futile to be worthwhile in most cases.
You snooze, you lose.
> what happens when we don't have a fucking choice?
You do what I did. You hike the Kalalau Trail on Kauai to the end and sit around a campfire on full moon night and play flutes, guitars, and dijridoos while getting stoned to the bejeezus bells under the stars.
Totally free, totally un-copy-protectable, totally cool, and a hell of a lot more fun than bitching about the D.M.C.A. and those big, bad record cumpnies.
Boy! I found only one other poster at score: 2 or above who didn't act like a preacher about this non-sex scene.
You want pertinent? I'll give you pertinent: Humans love to have sex and do warm, fun, fuzzy things with each other. It would have been *very* pertinent if Tucker had taken some gel in his hands, gotten all hot and bothered and grabbed Vulcan-babe for a good old-fashioned Kirk-style throat examination with his tongue.
Her reaction would have been interesting to watch, and would have instantly developed a tense sub-plot in the midst of the greater tension of the Captain's absence.
The surprise when she suddenly was swayed by her erstwhile lover's insistence to press on to Kronos instead of returning to Earth would have brought the house down under these more tense circumstances and raised questions about her ability to suppress those base emotions that Vulcans hate--er, eschew--so much.
I volunteer to be T'Pol's (that looks funny with the possesive, doesn't it?) personal decon gel applicator-guy for the run of the series. You think they'd go for it??
>Let some of the characters' personalities gell a little, and let some chemistry develop. They may even change the theme music.
I appear to be in the minority of non-puerile males who didn't bitch about the chemistry developing while the personality gel was being applied in decon. I fully expected Rick Berman to have a babe scene.
What I didn't expect was it to be equal-opportunity, with Trip joining Vulcan-babe for the jelly roll. It appears he enjoyed it in real life, as well.
I just let the scene pass in the same manner as a sci-fi faux pas would pass during suspension of disbelief, but I didn't mind viewing it, gratuitous or not. In fact, I find it quite refreshing that they seem to be abandoning this ridiculous prudishness that festered on Voyager over the simplest, most innocent feelings.
"Close the door, you're letting out the steam from this scene!"
This might not be news to you bleeding edge slashdotters, but speaking of Gartner group (farther up the page) they just recommended in a Computerworld article that corporate users who have been burned once too many times by MicroSoft's approach to coding and security jump ship.
Geez, you guys have all the time to sit around and fantasize about these what-if scenarios, like "What if a terrorist visits my house...?"
Well, duhhhhh!! Have you ever heard of guilt by association??!!
True story: I once was paid a visit by a phone phreak friend of mine a long, long time ago in a place far, far away. He brought along this strange young lady with him who proceeded to stick the suction-cup mirror that I ripped off from the Tephone Cumpny all over the wall, leaving behind nice little circles on the painted surface.
Needless to say, neither she nor he was welcomed in my house again. I didn't need no goddamned warrant, special order, or other law to realize that if he associated with inconsiderate people like this, he probably wasn't far removed himself.
The extrapolation of this anecdote to the topic under discussion is left as an exercise to the reader.
Frank
Hell, most of the Senators debating this amendment had not even *read* the thing, although they were quick to point out their support for it, along with many thanks to the distinguished gentleman from .
"I have no idea what you have said, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
It is far, far cheaper, easier, and more timely to defeat bad bills in committee or before they are passed thAn to attack them by lawsuits after they become law.
This bad amendment still must be debated in conference committee between the House and Senate. That is one more opportunity to get rid of the amendment. It is a shoo-in for passage as a final bill in the full House and Senate, so it won't be stopped there. Get rid of it now or forget it.
I don't know dick about crypto so I surely hope those in-the-know can make their ways to D.C. to bend some ears on Capitol Hill before this thing sees the light of day.
As I flipped across C-SPAN 2 the other night (yes, there actually was *ONE* channel not showing the same thing over and over), Senator Leahy (D-Vermont) was questioning an amendment to S.149, an appropriations bill, that he thought would greatly relax the requirements for getting a 'wiretap' order.
I'm pretty sure this appropriations bill sought money for the immediate crisis, even though it was reported out of committee back in July.
Leahy kept harping on the provision that any 'law enforcement or other authority' simply needed to certify to a judge that the monitoring was necessary. Of course, that old windbag Orrin Hatch took great umbrage at this questioning of the amendment in this time of dire straits, and how dare Leahy suggest that this might be overreaching by the government! Leahy wasn't particularly clear and Hatch made it sound like there was nothing in the amendment that didn't already exist in current law; but, then why would they need an amendment if there were no difference?
It all sounded like an opportunistic attempt (that passed) to seek an expansion of government wiretapping abilities.
This debate was either Friday or maybe Thursday evening and the amendment passed.
Beware.
I see. So their error handling stinks.
I was under the impression that the folks from Netscape had a hand in steering the development of html and css. The 4.xx versions of their Navigator browser were around after these specifications had been available for a while, yet their software couldn't handle them correctly.
This does not bode well for their future (now current) software releases, hence my great reluctance to spend the time necessary to grab the code, install it, find out what doesn't work, etc. I've been burned badly previously.
If Navigator 6.1 receives rave reviews from even the skeptics, I'll consider it.
...in this Computerworld story.
It actually names MicroSoft as being negligent, or at least somewhat responsible. Maybe this one will open eyes despite the huge media machine?
---
Please elaborate. Are you saying that if I burn original material that I created using a new Plextor CD drive that it will nonetheless watermark it or otherwise munge my data?
The Congress, nor any other municipality in the U.S., can only restrict what we allow it to. It is not up to Congress to 'permit' it. I know that you simply used a convenient phrase, but it's important to remember this key distinction. The U.S. system allows government to do only what we allow it to get away with, otherwise it must keep it's grubby, greedy hands off.
People have rights, government has limited powers. Too bad more of us don't remember this.
I can't remember the plot of 'Brazil', only that it gave me the willies and I *could not wait* to get out of that theater! Yes, I am old enough.
Maybe I'll go rent it, if it's available for rent. Maybe y'all should, too. (Probably banned by the government as inciting to insurrection or something.)
There is only ONE feature I would like to see in anything coming out of Netscape's doors: render html properly.
/., Is Netscape still around?
Not executing Javascript quickly, not even executing client-side Java applets without crashing, just do the most basic thing one could ever ask of a web browser: render the damned page properly!
It can't even handle tables or cascading style sheets properly, who cares about speed and so-called 'features'??!! It doesn't look the way I designed it, so Navigator gets the boot! SEE YAAAAAA!
I agree with
Who needs a dictionary that says "their" is spelled OK in the sentence "You won't find me their".
What the world needs is a good 5 cent grammar checker!
You've made my point for me. To expand a bit: machines created with a.i. will be imbued with those qualities of which we have knowledge and which we are capable of imbuing into them.
:)
If Vinge puts that we are capable of creating evil machines, then we should be just as capable of creating kind, helpful machines.
Of course, this has been done already. It's called making a baby. They make us laugh, cry, clean up the chair and carpet, are generally unpredictable until they develop personalities...some become mass murderers, others become prize-winning scientists. Who knew?
If we feel the need to create silicon-based Humans, it might be wise to understand better the carbon-based ones first. Maybe that's the point.
If such a machine makes a mistake, does that make it 'artificial stupidity'??
Go there today to vote for your favorite voice candidate. It used to be fun to listen to the weather broadcasts, but I can't stand the poor and uneven implementation of that system they use now. I hope the new system lives up to its promise.
I'll never forget years ago at a trade show how a text-to-speech vendor was taken down several pegs when a smart-ass came up and typed
"If we convict him, he will be a convict"
into his nifty box and it did not inflect the two variants of 'convict' properly.
I'm happy to report that all but one of the above demos does so correctly, as does the Death Star demo that started this thread.
I'm sure there are other test phrases including words such as 'read' or 'lead' that reveal strengths or weaknesses of the parsing algorithms.