"It's reliable, works well, and cheap." It's reliable, works well, but not cheap. It's heavy, and on an aircraft, weight = fuel costs. There are hidden costs to many approaches, and you missed one.
The reason Boeing and Airbus (and many others) are moving to AFDX and similar technologies is that an AFDX network is far lighter than individually wiring each sensor to a central point.
I'm fairly certain the 787 uses AFDX, which is heavily Ethernet-based and has standard protocols (UDP/IP, etc.) layered over it, but every component in an AFDX network is strictly controlled. Each device is given a very specific bandwidth allotment and AFDX switches enforce this quite strictly. You can think of it as QoS on stereoids. You can't just plug into an AFDX network, get a DHCP lease (or pick a random IP), and start talking to equipment on the network. The switches will block you.
There's a difference between "harmful" and "has an effect".
I still firmly believe that RF radiation at these low power levels can't have permanent harmful effects. Just like after a speaker "GSM bleeps", it suffers no permanent damage (unless the volume was cranked up WAY too high to begin with, in which case it would have blown on first use anyway).
GSM (which is a TDMA-based system, the official name for the non-GSM "TDMA" formerly used in the U.S. is "D-AMPS") IS different than CDMA. The RF is transmitted in pulses with a repetition rate in the audible frequencies. The end result is that while a human can't directly detect RF energy at all (unless it is at insanely high power levels), a human could possibly detect the audio that results if any portion of this RF is rectified. (And humans can easily indirectly detect it via its effects on the environment, such as interference with consumer electronics.)
"I believe cell phone power is significantly lower." I recall the specs of my first CDMA/Analog dual-mode phone was:
600 mW analog 200 mW (average?) CDMA
Not sure what GSM phones use.
Analog phones could be up to 3 watts (bag phones with an external power supply). CDMA and GSM phones at higher power levels than handhelds exist, but are VERY rare. For example, Motorola sells them for people who use vehicles in remote areas (their marketing shows a farm tractor.)
"You'll excuse if I am sceptical. Unless you live waaay in the boondocks, there are incoming calls all the time, just not for your cellphone. Shouldn't you wake up from those other calls as well?"
An incoming call to another phone won't cause your phone's radio to begin responding.
I've been a firm believer in cell phones having no ill health effects, but this particular study (and the OP's experiences) are far more likely to be possible than many of these "cell phones cause cancer" theories.
GSM cell phones happen to transmit in short bursts, and the repetition rate of these bursts is at audible frequencies. Many things in nature function as RF energy detectors, and while the effects a CW signal (or a CDMA one) is almost imperceptible, the effect of a pulsing one can be VERY perceptible. (Think of a GSM phone next to a speaker.)
RF can only do damage to a person's tissue via heating.
In this case though, GSM happens to use a TDMA channel access mechanism resulting in the phone transmitting "bursts" at a periodic repetition rate. If the RF is rectified and filtered by some sort of energy detector (many such circuits occur naturally or in other electronics that were NOT designed to behave as such), the output is a low duty cycle square wave at audible frequencies. This is why putting GSM phones near many models of speaker results in lots of "bleeping" when the phone rings or is in use.
I would not be surprised if the test results would be significantly different for a CDMA signal (CDMA2000 or UMTS) of the same frequency and average power, or a CW signal of the same average power (or even a CW signal with the same peak power and hence much higher average power). I would not be surprised if such signals caused no difference for the user.
The TDMA modulation scheme used by GSM is inferior to CDMA in many ways (which is why 3G GSM, aka UMTS, is a CDMA system), and EMI issues are just one of them. I do a lot of EMI testing/mitigation work at my job, and when someone asks me what EMI is, the example of a GSM phone near speakers is almost always understood.
That electricity had to come from somewhere. Now as to whether that electricity is "cleaner" than one from an internal high-efficiency engine designed specifically for hybrid use (can run in optimal powerband, etc.), who knows.
As I understand it, the EPA is beginning to consider a new rating system for pluggable hybrids, since 300 MPG is deceptive for a vehicle that needs an additional energy source in addition to gas or diesel. MPG ratings should only apply to vehicles which get 100% of their energy from combusted fuel (Whether or not that energy is stored in a battery, such as in a non-pluggable Prius), otherwise you have an apples to oranges comparison.
Note the comment that this only affected systems where XP/2000 was not on the first partition of the boot drive.
This really only ever happens on systems that are dual booting, it would be extremely rare for it to happen on a normal Windows box, most of the systems that were negatively affected were probably ones that were dual-booting other OSes from which the problem could be fixed.
It's just as much Windows' fault as CCP's if indeed Windows recovers fine when it's on the first partition on the hard drive but not otherwise. Every version of Windows I have used has been a whiny bitch when it comes to not being the only OS on a drive.
For example, XP install discs will give up and bomb if there's another OS other than XP on the first partition in the first place. I had to completely reinstall Linux on my current machine because I didn't install XP first, and XP wouldn't install if Linux was already installed on the machine (at least not if Linux was on the first partition.)
There weren't enough of such executives to keep Concord profitable - Why would there be enough to keep this more expensive and less fuel efficient plane profitable?
Also note that some of the recent experiments have been using the same fuel as an SR-71, and that fuel is EXTREMELY expensive. I recall once someone comparing it to fine aged $200-300/bottle Scotch in terms of cost per unit volume.
"Heck...even with a WiFi enabled PDA its pretty difficult to get anywhere - let alone CHAT with someone - be it Jabber or anything else, you have to be in the right spot, all connections running perfectly and to get in properly. Its just painted so "rosy" that it seems more like a staged scenario rather than real life."
Hmm.
Install zsIRC Type/server You're chatting
How hard is that on a WiFi-enabled PDA?
Even easier on this XO laptop - software is preinstalled and there is a preset chat server.
The problem with the DS (at least in terms of your complaints) is that chat is (as far as I can tell) local-only, or with people with whom you have already exchanged friend codes. The DS design in terms of multi-person communication is VERY paranoid in this regard - chatting with random people isn't what it was designed to do, and for all practical purposes it's not even capable of doing such a thing.
"On the CDMA side of things a least, if you have the lock codes, you can activate it anywhere."
Not true. Even if you have the MSL code to unlock programming, Sprint always had an ESN whitelist. If a phone was not in that list, they would activate it. Sprint also MSL-locked all their phones with random codes (stored in a database so only they could activate them, of course.)
Verizon, on the other hand, used an MSL lock code of 0000 on ALL phones. Didn't matter since Sprint would refuse to activate them. If you could get the MSL unlock code for a Sprint device and change it to 0000, you could activate Sprint phones on VZW though - for the 6-9 month gap between Sprint releasing the Treo 650 and Verizon releasing it, this is how VZW customers got Treo 650s. (Although I hear VZW may have started ESN whitelisting policies too sometime since 2005.)
A general thing with CDMA devices is that your account is tied to your phone's ESN. To change devices, you must activate the new device with your provider, deactivating the old one. (There is a standard for SIMs for cdmaOne/CDMA2000 devices, but I have yet to see a phone that used this, at least not in the U.S.)
You are correct in that all account/billing/identification info for GSM phones is stored in the SIM. It is indeed standardized. If a phone supports the GSM bands used in the U.S. (they differ from Europe, but quad-band GSM phones are the norm and not the exception nowadays, especially for higher-end devices.), you can just pop in a U.S. SIM and go. The one exception is that phones can be locked to only accept SIMs from one carrier, so you need an unlocked phone if you want to use a device not sold by the carrier. Examples of phones not sold by any U.S. GSM provider but usable on the U.S. GSM networks include the HTC Advantage, HTC S710, HTC S730, and some of the GSM HTC Touch variants. (Although older Touches were only triband GSM, same for the 710 I think.)
Note here that while the phones sold may not be open (may be locked), the network NEVER locks out particular devices (at least I have never heard of such a thing happening.)
As another person said in a reply, there is a good chance that this was a technical limitation and not a policy limitation. The phone was probably just so old that they didn't have the equipment/documentation to unlock it any more. (And as another person said, the Old ATT->Cingular transition was pretty rough.)
I see quotes in the article about AT&T unlocking phones for customers out of contract (or paying full price for the phone), I'm not sure if that's a change or "the way it has been", but the truth has been that if you have a device sold by Cingular or New AT&T, they'll happily provide an unlock code upon request if you tell them that you're going to be traveling internationally and you have been a customer in good standing for 90 days. People have been unlocking their Tilts right and left with zero hassle.
The iPhone is an exception, that's more of an Apple thing than an AT&T thing.
There's a difference between customers of other carriers roaming on their network and their own customers popping an AT&T SIM into any phone that supports the correct GSM bands (The U.S. bands are shifted slightly from the European ones, so European phones will only work in the U.S. if they support the extra bands - most phones nowadays do, quadband GSM is the norm and not the exception for new devices.) and work fine.
What Verizon said is "any customer of ours will be able to use any device approved by us sometime in 2008, we won't tell you the approval rules."
AT&T's reply was, essentially "Any customer of ours can take their SIM and put it into any FCC-approved unlocked GSM phone and it will work." An approval of some sort is still required, but note that the approval comes from an independent entity that AT&T cannot control. AT&T can't influence whether or not the FCC approves a particular device.
While it seems like this would cause MORE problems, I think in reality it causes drivers to have less confidence in their GPS systems than European drivers seem to have. European drivers assume their GPS systems can't have errors because errors are few and far between (and technically, this truck issue isn't even an error), while U.S. drivers assume their GPS system is going to do something wonky at any point in time.
Also, the nature of how roads are designed in the U.S. might happen to cause GPS systems to penalize small villages far more than in Europe. Bypasses and "commercial routes" are quite common in the U.S., in fact I've had great difficulty in forcing TomTom to go on state highways through medium sized towns instead of interstates through a major city to avoid traffic in aforementioned city.
WMA/WMV (Specifically, the ASF container format they are usually placed in) are essentially designed "from the ground up" to allow for DRM. This is more of an issue for many people than the "openness" of the codec itself.
MP3, on the other hand, does not permit DRM in any form. (It's a bit confusing here, MP3 is a codec, and the MP3 file format is, to my knowledge, a raw MP3 audio stream without any container format, with the ID3 tag appended to the end.)
Some of the apps are basically user experiments which only work on some devices, but some threads have links to more robust commercial apps.
(I don't use any of them myself, partly due to no need, partly because I'm one of those rare people that lives so close to work that they are probably in the same cell whether at home or at work.)
This exists for some Windows Mobile devices, in various forms.
The best example of using "rough location" is that there are apps that will change settings on your phone based only on which tower it is talking to. This can be a multi-mile range, but for many users this is enough to automagically switch between a "home" profile and a "work" profile.
Most cellular systems have additional information beyond signal strength for determining distance from the tower.
For example, GSM systems assign handsets to timeslots. A "near" handset and a "far" handset in an adjacent timeslot might actually interfere with each other due to differences in travel time. I believe GSM has an adjustment factor that will advance/delay the transmission time of certain handsets to take this into account. (IIRC, this is why GSM towers have a maximum range of something like 32 km regardless of LOS or signal strength - the adjustment mechanism maxes out at this range.)
With CDMA, the modulation scheme has a lot in common with the modulation used by GPS satellites, and allows for timing information to be extracted from the signal independent of signal strength.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, he probably means ARINC 664 (aka AFDX)
"It's reliable, works well, and cheap."
It's reliable, works well, but not cheap. It's heavy, and on an aircraft, weight = fuel costs. There are hidden costs to many approaches, and you missed one.
The reason Boeing and Airbus (and many others) are moving to AFDX and similar technologies is that an AFDX network is far lighter than individually wiring each sensor to a central point.
Yeah, the article is VERY short on details.
I'm fairly certain the 787 uses AFDX, which is heavily Ethernet-based and has standard protocols (UDP/IP, etc.) layered over it, but every component in an AFDX network is strictly controlled. Each device is given a very specific bandwidth allotment and AFDX switches enforce this quite strictly. You can think of it as QoS on stereoids. You can't just plug into an AFDX network, get a DHCP lease (or pick a random IP), and start talking to equipment on the network. The switches will block you.
GSM dictates (to some degree) frequency and (to a greater degree) power level.
More importantly, GSM dictates that the signal is pulsed with a given repetition rate which is at audible frequencies.
There's a difference between "harmful" and "has an effect".
I still firmly believe that RF radiation at these low power levels can't have permanent harmful effects. Just like after a speaker "GSM bleeps", it suffers no permanent damage (unless the volume was cranked up WAY too high to begin with, in which case it would have blown on first use anyway).
GSM (which is a TDMA-based system, the official name for the non-GSM "TDMA" formerly used in the U.S. is "D-AMPS") IS different than CDMA. The RF is transmitted in pulses with a repetition rate in the audible frequencies. The end result is that while a human can't directly detect RF energy at all (unless it is at insanely high power levels), a human could possibly detect the audio that results if any portion of this RF is rectified. (And humans can easily indirectly detect it via its effects on the environment, such as interference with consumer electronics.)
"I believe cell phone power is significantly lower."
I recall the specs of my first CDMA/Analog dual-mode phone was:
600 mW analog
200 mW (average?) CDMA
Not sure what GSM phones use.
Analog phones could be up to 3 watts (bag phones with an external power supply). CDMA and GSM phones at higher power levels than handhelds exist, but are VERY rare. For example, Motorola sells them for people who use vehicles in remote areas (their marketing shows a farm tractor.)
"You'll excuse if I am sceptical. Unless you live waaay in the boondocks, there are incoming calls all the time, just not for your cellphone. Shouldn't you wake up from those other calls as well?"
An incoming call to another phone won't cause your phone's radio to begin responding.
I've been a firm believer in cell phones having no ill health effects, but this particular study (and the OP's experiences) are far more likely to be possible than many of these "cell phones cause cancer" theories.
GSM cell phones happen to transmit in short bursts, and the repetition rate of these bursts is at audible frequencies. Many things in nature function as RF energy detectors, and while the effects a CW signal (or a CDMA one) is almost imperceptible, the effect of a pulsing one can be VERY perceptible. (Think of a GSM phone next to a speaker.)
RF can only do damage to a person's tissue via heating.
In this case though, GSM happens to use a TDMA channel access mechanism resulting in the phone transmitting "bursts" at a periodic repetition rate. If the RF is rectified and filtered by some sort of energy detector (many such circuits occur naturally or in other electronics that were NOT designed to behave as such), the output is a low duty cycle square wave at audible frequencies. This is why putting GSM phones near many models of speaker results in lots of "bleeping" when the phone rings or is in use.
I would not be surprised if the test results would be significantly different for a CDMA signal (CDMA2000 or UMTS) of the same frequency and average power, or a CW signal of the same average power (or even a CW signal with the same peak power and hence much higher average power). I would not be surprised if such signals caused no difference for the user.
The TDMA modulation scheme used by GSM is inferior to CDMA in many ways (which is why 3G GSM, aka UMTS, is a CDMA system), and EMI issues are just one of them. I do a lot of EMI testing/mitigation work at my job, and when someone asks me what EMI is, the example of a GSM phone near speakers is almost always understood.
That electricity had to come from somewhere. Now as to whether that electricity is "cleaner" than one from an internal high-efficiency engine designed specifically for hybrid use (can run in optimal powerband, etc.), who knows.
As I understand it, the EPA is beginning to consider a new rating system for pluggable hybrids, since 300 MPG is deceptive for a vehicle that needs an additional energy source in addition to gas or diesel. MPG ratings should only apply to vehicles which get 100% of their energy from combusted fuel (Whether or not that energy is stored in a battery, such as in a non-pluggable Prius), otherwise you have an apples to oranges comparison.
Everything performance critical (i.e. the graphics engine) is written in C.
Python is used for all of the non-performance-critical stuff though.
Either way, it definately depends on 3D hardware acceleration, which can't be virtualized easily/reliably.
95%+ of bugs encountered in software like this will be graphics-card-specific.
There are no solutions for running 3D accelerated apps (like EVE) in a VM that aren't still considered "beta/in testing" (like VMWare Fusion).
Technically it couldn't have happened on Vista for other reasons - Vista does not use boot.ini at all to boot up apparently.
Note the comment that this only affected systems where XP/2000 was not on the first partition of the boot drive.
This really only ever happens on systems that are dual booting, it would be extremely rare for it to happen on a normal Windows box, most of the systems that were negatively affected were probably ones that were dual-booting other OSes from which the problem could be fixed.
It's just as much Windows' fault as CCP's if indeed Windows recovers fine when it's on the first partition on the hard drive but not otherwise. Every version of Windows I have used has been a whiny bitch when it comes to not being the only OS on a drive.
For example, XP install discs will give up and bomb if there's another OS other than XP on the first partition in the first place. I had to completely reinstall Linux on my current machine because I didn't install XP first, and XP wouldn't install if Linux was already installed on the machine (at least not if Linux was on the first partition.)
There weren't enough of such executives to keep Concord profitable - Why would there be enough to keep this more expensive and less fuel efficient plane profitable?
Also note that some of the recent experiments have been using the same fuel as an SR-71, and that fuel is EXTREMELY expensive. I recall once someone comparing it to fine aged $200-300/bottle Scotch in terms of cost per unit volume.
"Heck...even with a WiFi enabled PDA its pretty difficult to get anywhere - let alone CHAT with someone - be it Jabber or anything else, you have to be in the right spot, all connections running perfectly and to get in properly. Its just painted so "rosy" that it seems more like a staged scenario rather than real life."
/server
Hmm.
Install zsIRC
Type
You're chatting
How hard is that on a WiFi-enabled PDA?
Even easier on this XO laptop - software is preinstalled and there is a preset chat server.
The problem with the DS (at least in terms of your complaints) is that chat is (as far as I can tell) local-only, or with people with whom you have already exchanged friend codes. The DS design in terms of multi-person communication is VERY paranoid in this regard - chatting with random people isn't what it was designed to do, and for all practical purposes it's not even capable of doing such a thing.
"thus giving no significant advantage to ogg"
At high bitrates, no. At lower bitrates (such as 64 kbps for streaming to mobile devices with EDGE service only), Vorbis blows away MP3.
If a phone was not in Sprint's whitelist they would NOT activate it. Missed the "not". :)
"On the CDMA side of things a least, if you have the lock codes, you can activate it anywhere."
Not true. Even if you have the MSL code to unlock programming, Sprint always had an ESN whitelist. If a phone was not in that list, they would activate it. Sprint also MSL-locked all their phones with random codes (stored in a database so only they could activate them, of course.)
Verizon, on the other hand, used an MSL lock code of 0000 on ALL phones. Didn't matter since Sprint would refuse to activate them. If you could get the MSL unlock code for a Sprint device and change it to 0000, you could activate Sprint phones on VZW though - for the 6-9 month gap between Sprint releasing the Treo 650 and Verizon releasing it, this is how VZW customers got Treo 650s. (Although I hear VZW may have started ESN whitelisting policies too sometime since 2005.)
A general thing with CDMA devices is that your account is tied to your phone's ESN. To change devices, you must activate the new device with your provider, deactivating the old one. (There is a standard for SIMs for cdmaOne/CDMA2000 devices, but I have yet to see a phone that used this, at least not in the U.S.)
You are correct in that all account/billing/identification info for GSM phones is stored in the SIM. It is indeed standardized. If a phone supports the GSM bands used in the U.S. (they differ from Europe, but quad-band GSM phones are the norm and not the exception nowadays, especially for higher-end devices.), you can just pop in a U.S. SIM and go. The one exception is that phones can be locked to only accept SIMs from one carrier, so you need an unlocked phone if you want to use a device not sold by the carrier. Examples of phones not sold by any U.S. GSM provider but usable on the U.S. GSM networks include the HTC Advantage, HTC S710, HTC S730, and some of the GSM HTC Touch variants. (Although older Touches were only triband GSM, same for the 710 I think.)
Note here that while the phones sold may not be open (may be locked), the network NEVER locks out particular devices (at least I have never heard of such a thing happening.)
As another person said in a reply, there is a good chance that this was a technical limitation and not a policy limitation. The phone was probably just so old that they didn't have the equipment/documentation to unlock it any more. (And as another person said, the Old ATT->Cingular transition was pretty rough.)
I see quotes in the article about AT&T unlocking phones for customers out of contract (or paying full price for the phone), I'm not sure if that's a change or "the way it has been", but the truth has been that if you have a device sold by Cingular or New AT&T, they'll happily provide an unlock code upon request if you tell them that you're going to be traveling internationally and you have been a customer in good standing for 90 days. People have been unlocking their Tilts right and left with zero hassle.
The iPhone is an exception, that's more of an Apple thing than an AT&T thing.
There's a difference between customers of other carriers roaming on their network and their own customers popping an AT&T SIM into any phone that supports the correct GSM bands (The U.S. bands are shifted slightly from the European ones, so European phones will only work in the U.S. if they support the extra bands - most phones nowadays do, quadband GSM is the norm and not the exception for new devices.) and work fine.
What Verizon said is "any customer of ours will be able to use any device approved by us sometime in 2008, we won't tell you the approval rules."
AT&T's reply was, essentially "Any customer of ours can take their SIM and put it into any FCC-approved unlocked GSM phone and it will work." An approval of some sort is still required, but note that the approval comes from an independent entity that AT&T cannot control. AT&T can't influence whether or not the FCC approves a particular device.
It may be that in the USA, maps have more errors.
While it seems like this would cause MORE problems, I think in reality it causes drivers to have less confidence in their GPS systems than European drivers seem to have. European drivers assume their GPS systems can't have errors because errors are few and far between (and technically, this truck issue isn't even an error), while U.S. drivers assume their GPS system is going to do something wonky at any point in time.
Also, the nature of how roads are designed in the U.S. might happen to cause GPS systems to penalize small villages far more than in Europe. Bypasses and "commercial routes" are quite common in the U.S., in fact I've had great difficulty in forcing TomTom to go on state highways through medium sized towns instead of interstates through a major city to avoid traffic in aforementioned city.
WMA/WMV (Specifically, the ASF container format they are usually placed in) are essentially designed "from the ground up" to allow for DRM. This is more of an issue for many people than the "openness" of the codec itself.
MP3, on the other hand, does not permit DRM in any form. (It's a bit confusing here, MP3 is a codec, and the MP3 file format is, to my knowledge, a raw MP3 audio stream without any container format, with the ID3 tag appended to the end.)
Hmm, I forget, but try going to http://forum.xda-developers.com/ and searching for "CellID" or "Cell ID".
Some of the apps are basically user experiments which only work on some devices, but some threads have links to more robust commercial apps.
(I don't use any of them myself, partly due to no need, partly because I'm one of those rare people that lives so close to work that they are probably in the same cell whether at home or at work.)
This exists for some Windows Mobile devices, in various forms.
The best example of using "rough location" is that there are apps that will change settings on your phone based only on which tower it is talking to. This can be a multi-mile range, but for many users this is enough to automagically switch between a "home" profile and a "work" profile.
Most cellular systems have additional information beyond signal strength for determining distance from the tower.
For example, GSM systems assign handsets to timeslots. A "near" handset and a "far" handset in an adjacent timeslot might actually interfere with each other due to differences in travel time. I believe GSM has an adjustment factor that will advance/delay the transmission time of certain handsets to take this into account. (IIRC, this is why GSM towers have a maximum range of something like 32 km regardless of LOS or signal strength - the adjustment mechanism maxes out at this range.)
With CDMA, the modulation scheme has a lot in common with the modulation used by GPS satellites, and allows for timing information to be extracted from the signal independent of signal strength.