First off, it seems like nothing more than even more "sounds all the same" corporate broadcasting than what's already available on my FM dial. How many more "new rock alternative" or classic rock stations do I need? Not to mention that the DJ inevitably are all fuckheads too; talking over every song. So IMO, the $9.99 or whatever for XM is not worth it.
But what really gets me is the fact that it doesn't even work everywhere! It seems to have a lot of holes in my area. (Bremerton, WA) I rode around with a friend who had XM in his car; it didn't work coming up the street where I live, it doesn't work at all in the Western part of the county, it didn't work in many places on a drive to Seattle, etc. Simply put, when I think "satellite radio," I expect a service that works everywhere a satellite can see (with the usual exceptions like tunnels, etc.).
Apparently Sirius is supposed to have much better coverage; they use three elliptical orbit satellites as opposed to one geosynchronous sat. The idea being your antenna gets a better signal due to the fact that the signal source is closer, and not so much on the horizon. But whatever the technical stats are, my real question is whether they can pull off good programming.
It seems like they're going a long way with commercial free programming, and they carry NPR. In fact, if they had KEXP (Experience Music Project's station), there is no question that I'd subscribe to Sirius.
Absolutely the best beginner's Linux book out there. Period. Because it doesn't really matter how many man pages or reference texts you read when you don't know how to make sense out of them. This book gives you the fundamental knowledge to be able to go on and gainfully use the howto's and other reference material.
Couldn't agree with you more as far as AMD underpricing stuff. While I like the fact that AMD has made ludicrously fast chips available quite inexpensively over the last few years, I've always wondered about their pricing.
I've always viewed Intel's strategy as "price the fastest available chip considerably higher than the rest, and that'll pay for R&D." This seems to have held reasonably true over the years, where the fastest chip out there is more expensive than the second fastest by 50% or more. If people really want that much more performance, then that'll give Intel the financial incentive (and more importantly, the finance) to go out and develop something faster.
AMD in the grand scheme of things, hasn't had a whole lot of experience with ground up development in the x86 arena (i.e. very complicated chips) until recently. (Note that this does not apply to other chips, such as the terrific 29xxx RISC processors they made for embedded control, and then dropped.) They started life in the x86 world as a second source x86 manufacturer. (I imagine IBM wanted more than Intel making 8086's, because Intel was pretty small at the time.) They built x86 chips under license from Intel (i.e. they got the masks from Intel and just ground out copies) up to and including the 386 to my knowledge.
Then Intel marketing really started to turn up the heat and realize that there might be something to that whole PC processor business right around the time the 486's were getting popular. The "Intel Inside" campaign started to take off sometime around then. Also with this came the fact that Intel was well established at this point as a manufacturer, and no longer felt the need to license to second source manufacturers, and AMD was sort of left holding the bag and scrambling to do design in the x86 market, something they hadn't needed to do before.
Right around the same time, Cyrix, who started in the PC biz making the notable "FasMath" math coprocessors (because Intel's weren't terribly fast until the Pentium; more on this later), started to make whole x86 procs themselves. With the 486, doing this design wasn't too bad for AMD and Cyrix because the 486 was mostly a logical extension of the 386 (with an internal math-coproc), and added things like more L1 cache (a few bytes vs. 256 bytes in the 386), higher speeds, some other things I don't remember, and clock multiplying (i.e. running the proc at some speed faster than the system bus). In fact AMD and Cyrix were typically bettering Intel's designs at the time due to this fact. (Cyrix, I think, had a write back cache before anyone else did, and AMD built some crazy fast version of the 486; up to 160mhz if memory serves me right!)
What really started to bring Intel forward was the Pentium. Intel, I think, has always seemed to have a gift for getting a feel for what's coming along in the next 3-4 years, and designing ahead of time to meet it. When the 486 came out with an integrated mathco, everybody was like, "only CAD weenies and the like need those; they just add cost!" Even Intel catered to that crowd and made the 486SX, which shipped (at much lower cost), with the mathco disabled, and later versions had it removed entirely. But that decision proved to be fortuitous in the fact that applications begin to take advantage of that power in the 486's lifetime.
In the Pentium, Intel pushed farther by doing 2 big things to make the chip faster:
1. Making it superscalar (multiple exectition units that could perform operations simultaneously, for the most part)
2. The performance of the mathco really got good in the Pentium
Enter now AMD into the Pentium forum. Now they're beginning to get caught with their pants down. The stopgap solution to counter the performance advantage of the Pentium was just to make really fast versions of the 486. They would do a performance rating of equivalence to a given Pentium. I think the 133mhz version was equivalent to a Pentium 75, and the 160mhz version (anybody have one of these?) was I think equivalent to Pentium 90. After a while, it became obvious that this strategy wasn't going to work. So after much apprehension, AMD rolls out their home brewed competitor to the Pentium, the AMD K5, and in a nutshell, it ends up totally sucking.
In all fairness to AMD, it wasn't that bad a chip (I still have one in a rsync backup machine) but they made some short sighted design considerations, and fixed relatively minor problems while leaving larger ones untouched. Notably, they decided to spend their transistor budget (I'm talking physical transistor count on the chip, not money), which was slightly less than Intel's, but not a whole lot less, on fixing the 'u'/'v' pipeline interdependency problem (one of the pipelines on the original Pentium couldn't support every instruction the other could) and making considerations to make mixed 16/32 bit code (think Windows 3.11 and Windows95) run faster, instead of making their FPU go really fast. They sort of banked on the fact that the FPU performance still wasn't terribly important compared to integer execution speed. Which was probably true when they were developing the chip.
But all of a sudden the internet got big, and people wanted to do really FPU intensive things like 3D gaming, playing MP3's, and digital video. The fact that they had a shitty FPU and the fact that they were manufacturing on a process that was old, and consequently couldn't get the chip to clock as fast as Intel's offerings began to hurt them. The K5 was not going to cut it. Which brings us to the next important part of AMD's corporate strategy, buy your way out of trouble!
Lucky for AMD, a small company called NexGen was working on a comptetitor to Intel's x86's, but their offering, the NexGen 586 (anybody have one of these?) was not doing so well. They were also working on a fairly impressive chip that was basically RISC inside but chomped up x86 instructions into RISC sized bites, sort of like the Pentium Pro (and P2, and P3). This chip was the NexGen 686. AMD liked it so much that they thought buying NexGen out was a good idea, and the NexGen 686 became the AMD K6. Because NexGen had applied a modicum of thought to the design, it turned out to be relatively extensible too; over the course of its life it added a 100mhz bus speed (Super Socket 7) and some onboard L2 cache (64k for the K6-II, 256kb for the K6-III). While it still wasn't as fast as Intel's offerings, AMD could offer it quite a bit less expensively than Intel's stuff. They even managed to get the 3dNow! stuff going and sold a chip with inferior FP performance to the gaming crowd. An impressive feat.
But by the time the 450-500mhz chips were coming out, AMD was once again in trouble. Intel had figured out with the Celeron-A how much faster having an onboard full speed cache could make a proc, and more importantly they could get themselves into a much less expensive design to manufacture (Slot 1 was hella expensive to make). AMD's K6 was beginning to show it's age.
The solution to this, from what I understand, was basically to buy portions of the Alpha processor design (and maybe some members of the design team) to put the Athlon together. This theory seems to hold some water in the fact that the original Athlon (and maybe the later chips too) used the Alpha EV6 bus for I/0, so obviously there must of been some resemblance in design.
What AMD chose to do here is to crank out Athlons as cheap as they possibly could to try to sway consumers, PC manufacturers, and maybe some Wall Street analysts on their side and beat Intel in the raw numbers game. What they should have done was raise the price of their high end chips somewhat and started putting money in the bank for R&D, and get prepared for the time when the Athlon would start to fall behind. We're now beginning to see this, I think, with AMD having to shift away from the clock speed battle (probably a smart move) in the Athlong XP performance rating system. More recently, the setbacks with the Athlon XP 2800+ and faster seem to imply that AMD is starting to reach the limitations of the Athlon design.
OPINION
I wonder if the Clawhammer (and other x86-64 designs) are going to be all that good because, clearly, AMD has less of an R&D budget to play with. My interpretation of their recent annoucement is that it is possibly some spin-doctoring to buffer the fact that when the Hammer comes out, it's not going to be in the same class as Intel's and will not to be able to compete. From a marketing/PR standpoint, and perhaps a relations with investors standpoint, this may make some sense because investors are less likely to have their faith shook if they think that competing with Intel on the desktop market wasn't part of the game anymore, as opposed to x86-64 failing while in open competition with Intel. Customers are also less likely to lose faith with AMD as well, and simply see them once again as a budget manufacturer of x86 chips, as opposed to one that offered better chips.
If AMD does focus less on making fast x86 processors to compete with Intel, the hobbyists will be disappointed, but I applaud AMD for having the business acumen to make that decision and try to stay in business doing what they can do, as opposed to trying to go for broke in a CPU performance "pissing contest" with Intel. In the early to mid '90s, AMD cancelled production of the very good (and reasonably well selling) 29000 series RISC chips because the cost of supporting them (making compilers, etc.) was too high to make any money from the chip. Maybe if AMD had priced the chips just a bit more they could still be in business of making 29xxx devices, and maybe, just maybe, if they had charged $5 or so more for each of their procs, they would have had the R&D funding to go after Intel, and keep up in the clock speed dept.
You're right, the splintering of carriers by various standards has not helped things here in the U.S.
But, what is interesting to note that the phenomenon you describe happening outside of the U.S. (notably unified GSM standards) is happening because nobody in Europe could agree on analog standards in the '80's, and consequently Europe was a pain to use a cell phone in (due to different standards in every country). The GSM consortium was put together sometime in the mid to late '80's to try to find a unified standard for Euro-cellular so this wouldn't happen when Europe started rolling out the 2nd generation of cellular systems, which turned out to be GSM.
The difference here in the U.S. is that no one really noticed that effect and learned that lesson when 2nd generation systems were being planned and rolled out in the U.S. This is probably because the problem hadn't really manifested itself yet, as it didn't really become possible for lots of people to have cell phones until the mid '90's or so. In the U.S., providers had the luxury of having a unified analog standard (AMPS), which AT&T spent a long time developing (from the '50's to the late '70's), and they managed to get that standard approved and solidified before the Bell System divestiture in 1984. Since US consumers and providers never had to deal with incompatable systems when they were using an analog system, nobody stopped to think about the problems that would happen in the 2nd generation, when the standard wasn't being developed by one company, and consequently, you get a bunch of competing carriers and system types, and the mess that we have here in the US.
For an interesting look at the development history (both technical and political, take a look at "Essentials of Wireless Communications" by Dr. William C.Y. Lee. He did a lot of the pioneering research on cellular, and the subtext of the book is that he makes a strong case for the fact that the divestiture of the Bell System may have done as much to hurt US telecommunications as it did to help it. While there was a lot of things that the Bell System did that drove people crazy (charges for extension lines, regulating types of equipment that could be connected, etc.), the advantage of a single telco (and standards maker) really did help things out (in terms of having single standards, and not competing systems), and I think that effect was taken for granted in the early years of divestiture.
There are a lot of prepaid plans out there that suck; notably Sprint PCS's prepaid plan (if they still offer it) where if you didn't use $29.95 a month, they'd bill you the difference each month so that you did use $29.95 each month from your prepaid balance. Gee, thanks Sprint! Why don't you just kick me in the nutz while you're at it!
I can only say that the prepaid market seems to be volatile. As soon as my 1 year contract was over with on Cingular, I started shopping around because the GSM coverage where I live really sucks. At that time (June 2002), I compared the cost of using Verizon's prepaid service (best prices at the time) to Cingular's monthly billing. The result was that for the minutes that I was using (about 150/month), I'd pay slightly less than the $29.95 per month for my 300 minutes of service with Cingular. If memory serves me right, this was with rates of something like.45/min peak, and.35/min off-peak. At the time, I decided that it wasn't worth the hassle and cost of switching, as I'd have to buy a phone, and I thought maybe I'd be using the Cingular service more.
About a month ago, I finally reached the breaking point with bad coverage area (no GSM coverage on I-90 from Cour d'Alene, ID, until Sioux Falls, SD) and decided to take another look. Walk into Best Buy, of all places, and check out this new prepaid service by "Virgin Mobile." I'm also impressed by the fact that the BB guy can actually tell me things that I care about, like the fact that the phone (Kyocera 2119b) has a Li-ion battery (so no memory) and what network they're actually using (SprintPCS's network). I took a look at their prices; cheap! $0.25/min for the first ten minutes you use in a given day, and $0.10/min for any minute after that 10. Free voice mail, free receipt of text messages, and free long distance! They also have a web site that actually works! I fired up Mozilla, and activated my phone without having to talk to any customer service rep, which is a big plus as CSR's in general seem to bung things up any time I have to call. You can add minutes (90 day expiration time) by buying cards, or you can just hit "top-up" on the phone and it fires up a secure WEP browser and you can do it there. You can also do it on a PC at home with their web site. You can request balance updates with the phone anytime you like.
The bottom line is that I'm very happy with the service. Sprint's network (and consequentally Virgin Mobile's) is CDMA here, the coverage is much better than Cingular's GSM, and so is the sound quality. I deal with much less voice mangling than I used to with the GSM phone. Check Virgin Mobile out, and to preemptively answer those who might wonder, no, I don't work for them; I'm an unemployed student.
I need to build a cluster of these things. Then I could set it up with tons of babes in skin tight bikinis like one of those circa-1995 rap video pool party scenes.
We could call the women "research assistants!"
You're right, INEL is a nasty place. Bad stuff happens there; I included the SL-1 accident as proof of one of the most severe accidents that occured there. I also don't dispute that there has been contamination there, and that a large amount of cleanup efforts are in place.
But, in spite of all of this, the surrounding population (Twin Falls, Idaho Falls, Arco) has been kept safe. Advanced cleanup / decontamination efforts have been pioneered there, notably the bioremediation programs at Test Area North and at Argonne West, and there is no reason to believe that the environmental impact of the INEL can't be controlled or at least very mitigated.
My point is that this place is a three ring circus compared to what Yucca will be, and in spite of all that has occurred there, the civilian population has been kept safe. Yucca doesn't have the potential to explode and spew contamination (no critical facilities), and is underground, in a facility built to much more exacting standards than anything at INEL. So I don't understand why everyone is complaining about Yucca when confronted with the status of the current pseudo-permanent facility for much government waste. I completely agree with your concluding paragraph.
Ever hear about the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory? It was put together after WWII for alot of the nuclear projects. Most of the naval nuclear stuff was developed there, and the navy has kept all of it's used cores (think of how many nuclear ships and submarines there have been over the years, and many had more than one core over their lifetime), and you can read about that here:
So, effectively, there IS a long-term storage facility for waste in the U.S.
But what a lot of people don't realize is that there have been some fairly large accidents there. The army had a poorly designed reactor that basically blew up (steam explosion due to extreme power excursion) in 1961. Data on that is availible at the bottom of this page (big pdf's) under the freedom of information act:
There have been other accidents at the INEL and many have released radioactive contaminants to the environment. The effects on the environment, surrounding area, surrounding people have arguably been nil. The location of the INEL makes a lot of sense despite potential geological instability due to it's extremely desolate location. It continues to be a productive facility, and research from it provides valid and viable techniques for environmental cleanup/decontamination effort should an accident occur.
So why fight Yucca? The INEL facility is probably less secure and is certainly more prone to accidents (due to active reactors, testing, etc.) than a facility simply storing spent fuel. The severity of the accidents that have occurred (and the results of decontamination/cleanup) show that environmental impact can be controlled in the case of an accident. It seems like a buried storage facility makes a hell of a lot of sense, but I guess we could vitrify the waste in glass blocks and throw it into the sea as some less scrupulous countries have.
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First off, it seems like nothing more than even more "sounds all the same" corporate broadcasting than what's already available on my FM dial. How many more "new rock alternative" or classic rock stations do I need? Not to mention that the DJ inevitably are all fuckheads too; talking over every song. So IMO, the $9.99 or whatever for XM is not worth it.
But what really gets me is the fact that it doesn't even work everywhere! It seems to have a lot of holes in my area. (Bremerton, WA) I rode around with a friend who had XM in his car; it didn't work coming up the street where I live, it doesn't work at all in the Western part of the county, it didn't work in many places on a drive to Seattle, etc. Simply put, when I think "satellite radio," I expect a service that works everywhere a satellite can see (with the usual exceptions like tunnels, etc.).
Apparently Sirius is supposed to have much better coverage; they use three elliptical orbit satellites as opposed to one geosynchronous sat. The idea being your antenna gets a better signal due to the fact that the signal source is closer, and not so much on the horizon. But whatever the technical stats are, my real question is whether they can pull off good programming.
It seems like they're going a long way with commercial free programming, and they carry NPR. In fact, if they had KEXP (Experience Music Project's station), there is no question that I'd subscribe to Sirius.
Actually, this is already happening. Check out this site for information.
Absolutely the best beginner's Linux book out there. Period. Because it doesn't really matter how many man pages or reference texts you read when you don't know how to make sense out of them. This book gives you the fundamental knowledge to be able to go on and gainfully use the howto's and other reference material.
Couldn't agree with you more as far as AMD underpricing stuff. While I like the fact that AMD has made ludicrously fast chips available quite inexpensively over the last few years, I've always wondered about their pricing.
/OPINION
I've always viewed Intel's strategy as "price the fastest available chip considerably higher than the rest, and that'll pay for R&D." This seems to have held reasonably true over the years, where the fastest chip out there is more expensive than the second fastest by 50% or more. If people really want that much more performance, then that'll give Intel the financial incentive (and more importantly, the finance) to go out and develop something faster.
AMD in the grand scheme of things, hasn't had a whole lot of experience with ground up development in the x86 arena (i.e. very complicated chips) until recently. (Note that this does not apply to other chips, such as the terrific 29xxx RISC processors they made for embedded control, and then dropped.) They started life in the x86 world as a second source x86 manufacturer. (I imagine IBM wanted more than Intel making 8086's, because Intel was pretty small at the time.) They built x86 chips under license from Intel (i.e. they got the masks from Intel and just ground out copies) up to and including the 386 to my knowledge.
Then Intel marketing really started to turn up the heat and realize that there might be something to that whole PC processor business right around the time the 486's were getting popular. The "Intel Inside" campaign started to take off sometime around then. Also with this came the fact that Intel was well established at this point as a manufacturer, and no longer felt the need to license to second source manufacturers, and AMD was sort of left holding the bag and scrambling to do design in the x86 market, something they hadn't needed to do before.
Right around the same time, Cyrix, who started in the PC biz making the notable "FasMath" math coprocessors (because Intel's weren't terribly fast until the Pentium; more on this later), started to make whole x86 procs themselves. With the 486, doing this design wasn't too bad for AMD and Cyrix because the 486 was mostly a logical extension of the 386 (with an internal math-coproc), and added things like more L1 cache (a few bytes vs. 256 bytes in the 386), higher speeds, some other things I don't remember, and clock multiplying (i.e. running the proc at some speed faster than the system bus). In fact AMD and Cyrix were typically bettering Intel's designs at the time due to this fact. (Cyrix, I think, had a write back cache before anyone else did, and AMD built some crazy fast version of the 486; up to 160mhz if memory serves me right!)
What really started to bring Intel forward was the Pentium. Intel, I think, has always seemed to have a gift for getting a feel for what's coming along in the next 3-4 years, and designing ahead of time to meet it. When the 486 came out with an integrated mathco, everybody was like, "only CAD weenies and the like need those; they just add cost!" Even Intel catered to that crowd and made the 486SX, which shipped (at much lower cost), with the mathco disabled, and later versions had it removed entirely. But that decision proved to be fortuitous in the fact that applications begin to take advantage of that power in the 486's lifetime.
In the Pentium, Intel pushed farther by doing 2 big things to make the chip faster:
1. Making it superscalar (multiple exectition units that could perform operations simultaneously, for the most part)
2. The performance of the mathco really got good in the Pentium
Enter now AMD into the Pentium forum. Now they're beginning to get caught with their pants down. The stopgap solution to counter the performance advantage of the Pentium was just to make really fast versions of the 486. They would do a performance rating of equivalence to a given Pentium. I think the 133mhz version was equivalent to a Pentium 75, and the 160mhz version (anybody have one of these?) was I think equivalent to Pentium 90. After a while, it became obvious that this strategy wasn't going to work. So after much apprehension, AMD rolls out their home brewed competitor to the Pentium, the AMD K5, and in a nutshell, it ends up totally sucking.
In all fairness to AMD, it wasn't that bad a chip (I still have one in a rsync backup machine) but they made some short sighted design considerations, and fixed relatively minor problems while leaving larger ones untouched. Notably, they decided to spend their transistor budget (I'm talking physical transistor count on the chip, not money), which was slightly less than Intel's, but not a whole lot less, on fixing the 'u'/'v' pipeline interdependency problem (one of the pipelines on the original Pentium couldn't support every instruction the other could) and making considerations to make mixed 16/32 bit code (think Windows 3.11 and Windows95) run faster, instead of making their FPU go really fast. They sort of banked on the fact that the FPU performance still wasn't terribly important compared to integer execution speed. Which was probably true when they were developing the chip.
But all of a sudden the internet got big, and people wanted to do really FPU intensive things like 3D gaming, playing MP3's, and digital video. The fact that they had a shitty FPU and the fact that they were manufacturing on a process that was old, and consequently couldn't get the chip to clock as fast as Intel's offerings began to hurt them. The K5 was not going to cut it. Which brings us to the next important part of AMD's corporate strategy, buy your way out of trouble!
Lucky for AMD, a small company called NexGen was working on a comptetitor to Intel's x86's, but their offering, the NexGen 586 (anybody have one of these?) was not doing so well. They were also working on a fairly impressive chip that was basically RISC inside but chomped up x86 instructions into RISC sized bites, sort of like the Pentium Pro (and P2, and P3). This chip was the NexGen 686. AMD liked it so much that they thought buying NexGen out was a good idea, and the NexGen 686 became the AMD K6. Because NexGen had applied a modicum of thought to the design, it turned out to be relatively extensible too; over the course of its life it added a 100mhz bus speed (Super Socket 7) and some onboard L2 cache (64k for the K6-II, 256kb for the K6-III). While it still wasn't as fast as Intel's offerings, AMD could offer it quite a bit less expensively than Intel's stuff. They even managed to get the 3dNow! stuff going and sold a chip with inferior FP performance to the gaming crowd. An impressive feat.
But by the time the 450-500mhz chips were coming out, AMD was once again in trouble. Intel had figured out with the Celeron-A how much faster having an onboard full speed cache could make a proc, and more importantly they could get themselves into a much less expensive design to manufacture (Slot 1 was hella expensive to make). AMD's K6 was beginning to show it's age.
The solution to this, from what I understand, was basically to buy portions of the Alpha processor design (and maybe some members of the design team) to put the Athlon together. This theory seems to hold some water in the fact that the original Athlon (and maybe the later chips too) used the Alpha EV6 bus for I/0, so obviously there must of been some resemblance in design.
What AMD chose to do here is to crank out Athlons as cheap as they possibly could to try to sway consumers, PC manufacturers, and maybe some Wall Street analysts on their side and beat Intel in the raw numbers game. What they should have done was raise the price of their high end chips somewhat and started putting money in the bank for R&D, and get prepared for the time when the Athlon would start to fall behind. We're now beginning to see this, I think, with AMD having to shift away from the clock speed battle (probably a smart move) in the Athlong XP performance rating system. More recently, the setbacks with the Athlon XP 2800+ and faster seem to imply that AMD is starting to reach the limitations of the Athlon design.
OPINION
I wonder if the Clawhammer (and other x86-64 designs) are going to be all that good because, clearly, AMD has less of an R&D budget to play with. My interpretation of their recent annoucement is that it is possibly some spin-doctoring to buffer the fact that when the Hammer comes out, it's not going to be in the same class as Intel's and will not to be able to compete. From a marketing/PR standpoint, and perhaps a relations with investors standpoint, this may make some sense because investors are less likely to have their faith shook if they think that competing with Intel on the desktop market wasn't part of the game anymore, as opposed to x86-64 failing while in open competition with Intel. Customers are also less likely to lose faith with AMD as well, and simply see them once again as a budget manufacturer of x86 chips, as opposed to one that offered better chips.
If AMD does focus less on making fast x86 processors to compete with Intel, the hobbyists will be disappointed, but I applaud AMD for having the business acumen to make that decision and try to stay in business doing what they can do, as opposed to trying to go for broke in a CPU performance "pissing contest" with Intel. In the early to mid '90s, AMD cancelled production of the very good (and reasonably well selling) 29000 series RISC chips because the cost of supporting them (making compilers, etc.) was too high to make any money from the chip. Maybe if AMD had priced the chips just a bit more they could still be in business of making 29xxx devices, and maybe, just maybe, if they had charged $5 or so more for each of their procs, they would have had the R&D funding to go after Intel, and keep up in the clock speed dept.
You're right, the splintering of carriers by various standards has not helped things here in the U.S.
But, what is interesting to note that the phenomenon you describe happening outside of the U.S. (notably unified GSM standards) is happening because nobody in Europe could agree on analog standards in the '80's, and consequently Europe was a pain to use a cell phone in (due to different standards in every country). The GSM consortium was put together sometime in the mid to late '80's to try to find a unified standard for Euro-cellular so this wouldn't happen when Europe started rolling out the 2nd generation of cellular systems, which turned out to be GSM.
The difference here in the U.S. is that no one really noticed that effect and learned that lesson when 2nd generation systems were being planned and rolled out in the U.S. This is probably because the problem hadn't really manifested itself yet, as it didn't really become possible for lots of people to have cell phones until the mid '90's or so. In the U.S., providers had the luxury of having a unified analog standard (AMPS), which AT&T spent a long time developing (from the '50's to the late '70's), and they managed to get that standard approved and solidified before the Bell System divestiture in 1984. Since US consumers and providers never had to deal with incompatable systems when they were using an analog system, nobody stopped to think about the problems that would happen in the 2nd generation, when the standard wasn't being developed by one company, and consequently, you get a bunch of competing carriers and system types, and the mess that we have here in the US.
For an interesting look at the development history (both technical and political, take a look at "Essentials of Wireless Communications" by Dr. William C.Y. Lee. He did a lot of the pioneering research on cellular, and the subtext of the book is that he makes a strong case for the fact that the divestiture of the Bell System may have done as much to hurt US telecommunications as it did to help it. While there was a lot of things that the Bell System did that drove people crazy (charges for extension lines, regulating types of equipment that could be connected, etc.), the advantage of a single telco (and standards maker) really did help things out (in terms of having single standards, and not competing systems), and I think that effect was taken for granted in the early years of divestiture.
There are a lot of prepaid plans out there that suck; notably Sprint PCS's prepaid plan (if they still offer it) where if you didn't use $29.95 a month, they'd bill you the difference each month so that you did use $29.95 each month from your prepaid balance. Gee, thanks Sprint! Why don't you just kick me in the nutz while you're at it!
.45/min peak, and .35/min off-peak. At the time, I decided that it wasn't worth the hassle and cost of switching, as I'd have to buy a phone, and I thought maybe I'd be using the Cingular service more.
I can only say that the prepaid market seems to be volatile. As soon as my 1 year contract was over with on Cingular, I started shopping around because the GSM coverage where I live really sucks. At that time (June 2002), I compared the cost of using Verizon's prepaid service (best prices at the time) to Cingular's monthly billing. The result was that for the minutes that I was using (about 150/month), I'd pay slightly less than the $29.95 per month for my 300 minutes of service with Cingular. If memory serves me right, this was with rates of something like
About a month ago, I finally reached the breaking point with bad coverage area (no GSM coverage on I-90 from Cour d'Alene, ID, until Sioux Falls, SD) and decided to take another look. Walk into Best Buy, of all places, and check out this new prepaid service by "Virgin Mobile." I'm also impressed by the fact that the BB guy can actually tell me things that I care about, like the fact that the phone (Kyocera 2119b) has a Li-ion battery (so no memory) and what network they're actually using (SprintPCS's network). I took a look at their prices; cheap! $0.25/min for the first ten minutes you use in a given day, and $0.10/min for any minute after that 10. Free voice mail, free receipt of text messages, and free long distance! They also have a web site that actually works! I fired up Mozilla, and activated my phone without having to talk to any customer service rep, which is a big plus as CSR's in general seem to bung things up any time I have to call. You can add minutes (90 day expiration time) by buying cards, or you can just hit "top-up" on the phone and it fires up a secure WEP browser and you can do it there. You can also do it on a PC at home with their web site. You can request balance updates with the phone anytime you like.
The bottom line is that I'm very happy with the service. Sprint's network (and consequentally Virgin Mobile's) is CDMA here, the coverage is much better than Cingular's GSM, and so is the sound quality. I deal with much less voice mangling than I used to with the GSM phone. Check Virgin Mobile out, and to preemptively answer those who might wonder, no, I don't work for them; I'm an unemployed student.
I need to build a cluster of these things. Then I could set it up with tons of babes in skin tight bikinis like one of those circa-1995 rap video pool party scenes. We could call the women "research assistants!"
You're right, INEL is a nasty place. Bad stuff happens there; I included the SL-1 accident as proof of one of the most severe accidents that occured there. I also don't dispute that there has been contamination there, and that a large amount of cleanup efforts are in place.
But, in spite of all of this, the surrounding population (Twin Falls, Idaho Falls, Arco) has been kept safe. Advanced cleanup / decontamination efforts have been pioneered there, notably the bioremediation programs at Test Area North and at Argonne West, and there is no reason to believe that the environmental impact of the INEL can't be controlled or at least very mitigated.
My point is that this place is a three ring circus compared to what Yucca will be, and in spite of all that has occurred there, the civilian population has been kept safe. Yucca doesn't have the potential to explode and spew contamination (no critical facilities), and is underground, in a facility built to much more exacting standards than anything at INEL. So I don't understand why everyone is complaining about Yucca when confronted with the status of the current pseudo-permanent facility for much government waste. I completely agree with your concluding paragraph.
www.inel.gov
Naval Reactors Facility
The accident report archive. SL-1 info at the bottom of the page in pdf format.
Ever hear about the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory? It was put together after WWII for alot of the nuclear projects. Most of the naval nuclear stuff was developed there, and the navy has kept all of it's used cores (think of how many nuclear ships and submarines there have been over the years, and many had more than one core over their lifetime), and you can read about that here:
So, effectively, there IS a long-term storage facility for waste in the U.S.
But what a lot of people don't realize is that there have been some fairly large accidents there. The army had a poorly designed reactor that basically blew up (steam explosion due to extreme power excursion) in 1961. Data on that is availible at the bottom of this page (big pdf's) under the freedom of information act:
There have been other accidents at the INEL and many have released radioactive contaminants to the environment. The effects on the environment, surrounding area, surrounding people have arguably been nil. The location of the INEL makes a lot of sense despite potential geological instability due to it's extremely desolate location. It continues to be a productive facility, and research from it provides valid and viable techniques for environmental cleanup/decontamination effort should an accident occur.
So why fight Yucca? The INEL facility is probably less secure and is certainly more prone to accidents (due to active reactors, testing, etc.) than a facility simply storing spent fuel. The severity of the accidents that have occurred (and the results of decontamination/cleanup) show that environmental impact can be controlled in the case of an accident. It seems like a buried storage facility makes a hell of a lot of sense, but I guess we could vitrify the waste in glass blocks and throw it into the sea as some less scrupulous countries have.