Re:No... a 64bit chip doesn't have to be 'slower'
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The guy insisting on not having a mode bit was Tom West, who was the head of the project (not sure if he did any engineering day to day). The reason was that any 'compatibility mode' not used by new software in the 'new mode' is a candidate for one day being removed. West (and presumably Data General) considered this a bad thing for customers, because it would mean old software had a limited lifetime. This was in direct contrast to Digital (DEC), who had introduced the VAX 32-bit architecture with a 'mode bit' to support PDP-11 code in compatibility mode.
AMD's approach is very like DG's, and also like Intel's approach from the 8086 to the Pentium 4 - don't allow the legacy software to become dependendent on a compatibility mode that is not used by new software, because the software base is a critical asset. Intel's move to the IA-64 architecture is a key opportunity for competitors to target its installed base - if you are going to have to port your software, why not port it to some other chip?
There are now quite a few Bluetooth headsets for mobile phones (meaning you have much less radiation close to your head, by the way), and many of these phones have speech recognition. I use the Motorola Bluetooth headset with an Ericsson T68 and it works well. The speech recognition is OK indoors but quite unusable on the street. One good feature is that you can keep the keypad while listening to IVR prompts for 'press one' etc.
And of course I can do GPRS, which is very useful for small web pages and email, even though I've clocked it recently at just 10 Kbps when doing a timed HTTP download...
See http://www.stand.org.uk/weblog/archive/2002/06/ind ex.php for details of how a UK group successfully mobilised over a thousand people to fax their MPs (members of parliament). This was in response to an extension of the government's surveillance powers (including who you are calling, faxing, emailing, and which URLs you visit) to a huge range of agencies include local government, the food standards agency, etc. The government tried to do this without debate or new legislation, which is possible through the RIP Act - however, that was made law with much discussion of the need to track criminals and terrorists, which is not exactly something that local government and food standards people are concerned with...
This mobilisation took just one week, and was incredibly effective - the use of fax means that the MPs treat it like a letter. My MP has sent me two letters in reply and followup, including the weasel words sent out by the government after they completely backed down.
See also www.faxyourmp.com, which makes faxing your MP as easy as sending an email - very, very smart idea to bypass the way that email is sometimes perceived by MPs as 'too easy to send, so not worth reading'. And every MP reads faxes even if they don't have an email address...
Sony had this set up at the Game On exhibition in London (still on at the Barbican if you're here in the next few months) - camera pointing at you, with some software that lets you 'grab' a control and do something on screen by waving our hands in front of it. You could get some nice effects such as rippling water, flames, etc, but I'm not sure it would work for precise control of a game. Interesting idea though, and Sony are planning to put it into future games, according to the video that went with it.
This is already happening in the UK - one of the best known local PC manufacturers, Time, is offering Linux as an option in a national press advert for a normally-Windows PC. The saving was something like 50 pounds = $75, and it included OpenOffice. I was quite stunned when I saw this as Time is a very commercial company - it must be feeling the cost of Windows licenses.
Their website is http://www.timecomputers.com/ but unfortunately doesn't mention this deal...
The trouble with multi-homing using BGP is that it is highly unscalable for the Internet's core routers - every site that has two or more ISP connections can't be summarised under a single ISP's routing (see 'CIDR routing' on Google). And 'smart routing' companies like netVmg only make this worse by making multi-homing more attractive for performance reasons, not just redundancy.
The IETF is trying to fix this in its ptomaine working group - see http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ptomaine-charter.html
The article makes it clear that they wanted the whole thing written in Perl - they only used the other languages because they couldn't find enough Perl programmers in Sweden.
IP was probably chosen because you could get an end to end link (most likely Ethernet at both ends of the satellite link). Satellite networks do clever things with TCP to make it work better on their high-latency links. Most video apps will be IP based these days, or require a single layer 2 (such as ISDN) end to end, which is restrictive.
PalmOS lets you put OS patches in RAM that apply to the ROM - this is how they patched the non-Flash ROM in the original Visor. This technique is also used by Palm because the binary patches are easily removed, unlike a full upgrade.
Try driving in London - it is a much larger city in terms of area than Boston, and the congestion is much worse, partly for historical reasons (imagine the twisty streets part of Boston then duplicate that across an area that's about 20 miles in diameter, with no freeways going right through the city.)
It can easily take me 1 hour to drive the 2-3 miles from home to work during the rush hour, so in many cases driving is not an option anyway. Congestion charging is a good idea - some sort of feedback to stop overuse of the central road system is the only way to go...
You can run it on some webhosts that have a decent email setup, e.g. Dreamhost, who are pretty good for both web and email hosting. See http://donkin.org/bin/view/Main/SpamAssassin for some setup tips for Dreamhost. I can now get de-spammed email via a browser or via IMAP4 to Mozilla, mutt, Palm or mobile phone:-)
Syncing is already there with SyncML (works well on the Ericsson T68 to sync with PCs), and alerts are there too in most modern phones such as this one.
As for web interfaces - wireless operators are planning to roll out 'unified messaging' in which you have a single mailbox to send/receive voicemail, email, SMS, MMS, etc. And quite a few already let you sign up for new services online (at least in Europe).
You can use MMS (basically an easy to use form of email with media attachments) to send pictures to your mailbox, or anyone else's of course. The 7650 is one of the first MMS phones, but the article mentioned it had problems sending to a T68 phone - clearly the phones still have some MMS interop problems despite lots of testing by the MMS-IOP interop group.
To try something close to MMS on a Palm device, download Pixer from www.electricpocket.com - it gives a good idea of how MMS will work when it's rolled out later this year (at least in Europe).
There is an open standard for picture/video type messaging - it's called MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and is supported by the 7650 and Ericsson T68i. This really only applies to the GSM world, but maybe it will extend out to CDMA etc as it is based on IETF/W3C standards such as SMTP, MIME, SMIL, etc (with a little WAP to present messages on handsets).
For more information on MMS, see http://www.nokia.com/mms/
Try SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org) - it's very easy to set up and requires very little configuration, and most importantly is very accurate, only occasionally letting spam through or mis-classifying real email. I just whitelisted a few email addresses and added a couple of rules to get rid of particularly annoying spam. I also got it to prefix a long '**** SPAM *****' prefix to the subject lines so I don't even have to read the tedious spam subjects.
It can even look at the Received headers so you can distinguish between email that is genuinely from yahoo.com etc, vs email that is using a forged From header saying @yahoo.com. I use this to add extra spam points to email received from an old email box that gets almost nothing but spam.
Read my post - I didn't say that landlines in the US were unreliable, I just said they were not *more* reliable than in Europe. So landlines are reliable in both places.
I already agreed that landlines in the US are cheap, but free local calls are one reason why mobiles haven't taken off there. I have lived in the US for a while as well as in Europe, by the way.
Landlines are very cheap in the US, but it's a myth that they are more reliable than Europe - I can't remember the last time I had a crossed line or line fault in the UK or in fact anywhere in Europe.
Your 'free' local phone calls (and not dedicating area codes to cell phones) are also why people have to pay for incoming calls to their cell phone - otherwise the caller would have to pay more to call some local-looking numbers than for others. So it's not all upside...
I have a Palm device (m515) connected via Bluetooth to a GPRS phone (Ericsson T68), and it works very nicely - I can install whatever Internet clients I want on the Palm, e.g. several web browsers, IMAP4/POP3/SMTP email with no size limits, ssh, telnet, SNTP, VPN clients, etc. This is probably the best solution for people who like the flexibility of a PC but don't want to be tied to a laptop the whole time. You can get mini keyboards (same width as Palm) or built-in ones (in Handspring and Sony models), or full-size keyboards for longer emails.
GPRS is great because it's always on - like a rather slow version of DSL, and you only pay for what you send/receive, not for time connected. CDMA2000 1x works in a similar way as long as you have Bluetooth on your phone.
I have been using GPRS for 6 months now in the UK, and speeds are quite low - just about up to 40 Kbps if you are lucky, but not as consistent as a good 56 Kbps dialup modem connection. Generally it works well, but think 40 Kbps rather than the mythical 115 or 170 Kbps. The reference to 2 Mbit connections is completely irrelevant, that's just the size of a backhaul pipe from the base station or whatever - the bottleneck is in the radio interface to the phone.
GPRS is a very handy service, but it will be the dialup modem of the wireless world - available everywhere as a fall back when you can't get a faster connection.
I'll be surprised if US operators deploy UMTS before European ones, given that there is no spectrum yet allocated for this in the US - it may happen in patches but it will be hard to get this to work consistently across the US without new spectrum, as I understand it.
According to this history of US PCS networks - http://www.gsmdata.com/es53060/history.htm - the first cellular network was in Japan in 1979, followed by Norway. The US was some years later.
All the early phone networks were analogue, so there was little advantage in copying each other when it came to building digital networks, which happened at roughly the same time in the early 1990s. The initial US TDMA standard may have been a bit earlier than GSM though, so you could be right on that one.
Coverage targets are based on population not area - the operator claims something like '95% of population covered', which lets them focus on large cities and towns while leaving very sparsely populated areas uncovered.
The size of the US is simply not a factor in the lack of mobile usage - China already has *more* mobile users than the US, with 90% of the land area but much more population density.
This isn't how mobile networks work - they consist of a huge 'backhaul' network linking cell towers, which finally terminates in a fixed-line network, usually optical these days. Calls within a single country or within Europe are very unlikely to use satellite, due to the added latency - there is already some significant latency due to the way voice is chopped up into small frames by the mobile phone's radio interface, and by transcoding between various voice-compression regimes.
The curvature of the earth is of absolutely no significance - what matters is latency, bandwidth and costs, and for everywhere outside the radio access network fixed lines are superior for these factors.
It IS about population density - with enough population density AND a suitable standard, it's easy for a number of operators to deploy compatible networks. This is exactly what happened in Europe.
And by the way, there is already a world standard for mobile phones - GSM has over 70% of the world market by number of subscribers, and it works in virtually every country you can name, including the US and Canada as well as most of Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa and Australasia.
Another example is TCP/IP - there were many competing network protocol stacks in the 70s and 80s, but IP has won out, resulting in a hugely competitive market for equipment and networks.
Standards don't necessarily impede development - for all its benefits, GSM will soon be superseded by W-CDMA, a 3G standard that will be implemented by most GSM operators.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy insisting on not having a mode bit was Tom West, who was the head of the project (not sure if he did any engineering day to day). The reason was that any 'compatibility mode' not used by new software in the 'new mode' is a candidate for one day being removed. West (and presumably Data General) considered this a bad thing for customers, because it would mean old software had a limited lifetime. This was in direct contrast to Digital (DEC), who had introduced the VAX 32-bit architecture with a 'mode bit' to support PDP-11 code in compatibility mode.
AMD's approach is very like DG's, and also like Intel's approach from the 8086 to the Pentium 4 - don't allow the legacy software to become dependendent on a compatibility mode that is not used by new software, because the software base is a critical asset. Intel's move to the IA-64 architecture is a key opportunity for competitors to target its installed base - if you are going to have to port your software, why not port it to some other chip?
There are now quite a few Bluetooth headsets for mobile phones (meaning you have much less radiation close to your head, by the way), and many of these phones have speech recognition. I use the Motorola Bluetooth headset with an Ericsson T68 and it works well. The speech recognition is OK indoors but quite unusable on the street. One good feature is that you can keep the keypad while listening to IVR prompts for 'press one' etc.
And of course I can do GPRS, which is very useful for small web pages and email, even though I've clocked it recently at just 10 Kbps when doing a timed HTTP download...
See http://www.stand.org.uk/weblog/archive/2002/06/ind ex.php for details of how a UK group successfully mobilised over a thousand people to fax their MPs (members of parliament). This was in response to an extension of the government's surveillance powers (including who you are calling, faxing, emailing, and which URLs you visit) to a huge range of agencies include local government, the food standards agency, etc. The government tried to do this without debate or new legislation, which is possible through the RIP Act - however, that was made law with much discussion of the need to track criminals and terrorists, which is not exactly something that local government and food standards people are concerned with...
This mobilisation took just one week, and was incredibly effective - the use of fax means that the MPs treat it like a letter. My MP has sent me two letters in reply and followup, including the weasel words sent out by the government after they completely backed down.
See also www.faxyourmp.com, which makes faxing your MP as easy as sending an email - very, very smart idea to bypass the way that email is sometimes perceived by MPs as 'too easy to send, so not worth reading'. And every MP reads faxes even if they don't have an email address...
Sony had this set up at the Game On exhibition in London (still on at the Barbican if you're here in the next few months) - camera pointing at you, with some software that lets you 'grab' a control and do something on screen by waving our hands in front of it. You could get some nice effects such as rippling water, flames, etc, but I'm not sure it would work for precise control of a game. Interesting idea though, and Sony are planning to put it into future games, according to the video that went with it.
This is already happening in the UK - one of the best known local PC manufacturers, Time, is offering Linux as an option in a national press advert for a normally-Windows PC. The saving was something like 50 pounds = $75, and it included OpenOffice. I was quite stunned when I saw this as Time is a very commercial company - it must be feeling the cost of Windows licenses.
Their website is http://www.timecomputers.com/ but unfortunately doesn't mention this deal...
The trouble with multi-homing using BGP is that it is highly unscalable for the Internet's core routers - every site that has two or more ISP connections can't be summarised under a single ISP's routing (see 'CIDR routing' on Google). And 'smart routing' companies like netVmg only make this worse by making multi-homing more attractive for performance reasons, not just redundancy.
r .html
The IETF is trying to fix this in its ptomaine working group - see http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ptomaine-charte
The article makes it clear that they wanted the whole thing written in Perl - they only used the other languages because they couldn't find enough Perl programmers in Sweden.
IP doesn't imply the Internet, of course.
IP was probably chosen because you could get an end to end link (most likely Ethernet at both ends of the satellite link). Satellite networks do clever things with TCP to make it work better on their high-latency links. Most video apps will be IP based these days, or require a single layer 2 (such as ISDN) end to end, which is restrictive.
PalmOS lets you put OS patches in RAM that apply to the ROM - this is how they patched the non-Flash ROM in the original Visor. This technique is also used by Palm because the binary patches are easily removed, unlike a full upgrade.
Try driving in London - it is a much larger city in terms of area than Boston, and the congestion is much worse, partly for historical reasons (imagine the twisty streets part of Boston then duplicate that across an area that's about 20 miles in diameter, with no freeways going right through the city.)
It can easily take me 1 hour to drive the 2-3 miles from home to work during the rush hour, so in many cases driving is not an option anyway. Congestion charging is a good idea - some sort of feedback to stop overuse of the central road system is the only way to go...
You can run it on some webhosts that have a decent email setup, e.g. Dreamhost, who are pretty good for both web and email hosting. See http://donkin.org/bin/view/Main/SpamAssassin for some setup tips for Dreamhost. I can now get de-spammed email via a browser or via IMAP4 to Mozilla, mutt, Palm or mobile phone :-)
Syncing is already there with SyncML (works well on the Ericsson T68 to sync with PCs), and alerts are there too in most modern phones such as this one.
As for web interfaces - wireless operators are planning to roll out 'unified messaging' in which you have a single mailbox to send/receive voicemail, email, SMS, MMS, etc. And quite a few already let you sign up for new services online (at least in Europe).
You can use MMS (basically an easy to use form of email with media attachments) to send pictures to your mailbox, or anyone else's of course. The 7650 is one of the first MMS phones, but the article mentioned it had problems sending to a T68 phone - clearly the phones still have some MMS interop problems despite lots of testing by the MMS-IOP interop group.
To try something close to MMS on a Palm device, download Pixer from www.electricpocket.com - it gives a good idea of how MMS will work when it's rolled out later this year (at least in Europe).
There is an open standard for picture/video type messaging - it's called MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and is supported by the 7650 and Ericsson T68i. This really only applies to the GSM world, but maybe it will extend out to CDMA etc as it is based on IETF/W3C standards such as SMTP, MIME, SMIL, etc (with a little WAP to present messages on handsets).
For more information on MMS, see http://www.nokia.com/mms/
Try SpamAssassin (www.spamassassin.org) - it's very easy to set up and requires very little configuration, and most importantly is very accurate, only occasionally letting spam through or mis-classifying real email. I just whitelisted a few email addresses and added a couple of rules to get rid of particularly annoying spam. I also got it to prefix a long '**** SPAM *****' prefix to the subject lines so I don't even have to read the tedious spam subjects.
It can even look at the Received headers so you can distinguish between email that is genuinely from yahoo.com etc, vs email that is using a forged From header saying @yahoo.com. I use this to add extra spam points to email received from an old email box that gets almost nothing but spam.
Read my post - I didn't say that landlines in the US were unreliable, I just said they were not *more* reliable than in Europe. So landlines are reliable in both places.
I already agreed that landlines in the US are cheap, but free local calls are one reason why mobiles haven't taken off there. I have lived in the US for a while as well as in Europe, by the way.
GPRS is never going to go at 2 Mbps, you must be thinking of UMTS (which will probably not get that high either in reality) or CDMA2000 1xEV-DO/DV.
Landlines are very cheap in the US, but it's a myth that they are more reliable than Europe - I can't remember the last time I had a crossed line or line fault in the UK or in fact anywhere in Europe.
Your 'free' local phone calls (and not dedicating area codes to cell phones) are also why people have to pay for incoming calls to their cell phone - otherwise the caller would have to pay more to call some local-looking numbers than for others. So it's not all upside...
I have a Palm device (m515) connected via Bluetooth to a GPRS phone (Ericsson T68), and it works very nicely - I can install whatever Internet clients I want on the Palm, e.g. several web browsers, IMAP4/POP3/SMTP email with no size limits, ssh, telnet, SNTP, VPN clients, etc. This is probably the best solution for people who like the flexibility of a PC but don't want to be tied to a laptop the whole time. You can get mini keyboards (same width as Palm) or built-in ones (in Handspring and Sony models), or full-size keyboards for longer emails.
GPRS is great because it's always on - like a rather slow version of DSL, and you only pay for what you send/receive, not for time connected. CDMA2000 1x works in a similar way as long as you have Bluetooth on your phone.
I have been using GPRS for 6 months now in the UK, and speeds are quite low - just about up to 40 Kbps if you are lucky, but not as consistent as a good 56 Kbps dialup modem connection. Generally it works well, but think 40 Kbps rather than the mythical 115 or 170 Kbps. The reference to 2 Mbit connections is completely irrelevant, that's just the size of a backhaul pipe from the base station or whatever - the bottleneck is in the radio interface to the phone.
GPRS is a very handy service, but it will be the dialup modem of the wireless world - available everywhere as a fall back when you can't get a faster connection.
I'll be surprised if US operators deploy UMTS before European ones, given that there is no spectrum yet allocated for this in the US - it may happen in patches but it will be hard to get this to work consistently across the US without new spectrum, as I understand it.
According to this history of US PCS networks - http://www.gsmdata.com/es53060/history.htm - the first cellular network was in Japan in 1979, followed by Norway. The US was some years later.
All the early phone networks were analogue, so there was little advantage in copying each other when it came to building digital networks, which happened at roughly the same time in the early 1990s. The initial US TDMA standard may have been a bit earlier than GSM though, so you could be right on that one.
Mobile phone penetration in the US is significantly lower than all European countries - check the statistics.
Coverage targets are based on population not area - the operator claims something like '95% of population covered', which lets them focus on large cities and towns while leaving very sparsely populated areas uncovered.
The size of the US is simply not a factor in the lack of mobile usage - China already has *more* mobile users than the US, with 90% of the land area but much more population density.
This isn't how mobile networks work - they consist of a huge 'backhaul' network linking cell towers, which finally terminates in a fixed-line network, usually optical these days. Calls within a single country or within Europe are very unlikely to use satellite, due to the added latency - there is already some significant latency due to the way voice is chopped up into small frames by the mobile phone's radio interface, and by transcoding between various voice-compression regimes.
The curvature of the earth is of absolutely no significance - what matters is latency, bandwidth and costs, and for everywhere outside the radio access network fixed lines are superior for these factors.
It IS about population density - with enough population density AND a suitable standard, it's easy for a number of operators to deploy compatible networks. This is exactly what happened in Europe.
And by the way, there is already a world standard for mobile phones - GSM has over 70% of the world market by number of subscribers, and it works in virtually every country you can name, including the US and Canada as well as most of Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa and Australasia.
Another example is TCP/IP - there were many competing network protocol stacks in the 70s and 80s, but IP has won out, resulting in a hugely competitive market for equipment and networks.
Standards don't necessarily impede development - for all its benefits, GSM will soon be superseded by W-CDMA, a 3G standard that will be implemented by most GSM operators.