shareholders own the company, but do not manage it (as a rule). they hire management employees, from the top and then recursively down, for that. more importantly, the idea that companies have no responsibility to their employees is a comparatively modern mis-feature of capitalism; it does not reflect Smith's capitalism, where the responsibility to employees was either explicit or very strongly implied.
most of the phones out there make it either impossible or exceedingly difficult to run server software - that is, to open up a port and listen on it. this is at least a limitation of all the software environments i've looked at; i'm not sure whether there's anything technical in the network which inhibits this as well.
BSD zealot? not hardly. if you need to dump me into a Unix camp, call me a v10 Research Unix zealot. but really, you should probably call me a Plan 9 zealot. both BSD and Linux are just ever-progressing incremental improvements (in most cases, anyway) to what's been there for a decade or two. but whereas the BSD communities mostly (not entirely, but mostly) just sort of get on with things, the GNU/Linux (it's mostly the GNU influence here, but there's so much overlap it's hard to tell them apart most times) communities talk about "innovation" and their grand philosophy of how things "ought to be" or "ought to have been".
please. you're re-implementing a unixoid system based more-or-less on 20-30 year old work and POSIX, an international standard. there's plenty of new ideas floating around, but not only does it mostly not come from the Linux camps, they're also slow to adapt/adopt. why is Linux just now getting things like 9P and private namespaces? the benefits have been shown widely in academic and research circles for a decade now (first Plan 9 papers talking about them came out in 1989; publicly-available system w/ source code available... 1993, i think). why is Sun of all places (god, aren't they dead yet?) the folks coming up with great things like dtrace and getting better filesystems into their kernels? you're bound to point out that the FOSS BSD folks didn't come up with those, either, and have been just as slow to adopt them; you're correct, but that's fine: the BSD folks admit their goals. OpenBSD wants to be the most secure Unix ever, and they do a damn good job. there's not a ton of system innovation going on there, but they get down to business and get the job done. those code audits aren't sexy or "innovative", but i'm sure glad they do them. FreeBSD wants to be fast; NetBSD wants to be portable. they understand their goals and they get down to it.
while you're doing what you're doing - re-implementing a unixoid system - you should be trying to do the best job at that possible. and by that standard, your select implementation is just broken. if you really think the behavior is that much of an improvement, put a wrapper around it or stick in one of those ifdefs you people are so fond of (there's already a bazillion, what's one more, right?). but there is a correct way to do select; do that.
there's nothing wrong with incremental improvements, stable systems, predictable results, and so on. quite the opposite: they're great things. but they're not the same things as innovation, invention, or research. admit which you're doing, and get on with that.
heh. he just used linux as an example of "a philosophy of "what ought the standard to be" and not just "what was it 10 years ago"." that's great! mod parent +1 Funny!
i think in general this is a well written and insightful post, but i have to raise a concern over this:
...(and I'm black so I can say something about this).
what does your skin color have to do with your ability to comment on revisionist editing, or the validity of those comments? i think the answer is "nothing". your comment would have been just as insightful, valid, and (IMHO) correct were it to come from someone of hispanic decent, or western european, or asian, or whatever. by suggesting that only people in one group can comment on an issue like this we effectively silence the voices of all those individuals outside that group who would otherwise support our position. it also inappropriately (and generally inadvertently) simplifies the complex issue of "racism" into a single facet thereof.
I highly doubt it. Or, more precisely, i highly doubt that money is a primary motivating factor. It's simply a notoriously bad way to get any sort of vision. I believe it of most corporate exec types (and lots of other people, too), but it's simply not consistent with what Apple produces or with what data we have on Jobs. the assumption that money is the (sole) primary motivating factor also indicates either a significant lack of vision or a very cynical (and mildly depressing) view of human nature.
I'm an American. I was born and raised here. I use the US system (the not-quite-british system; why the heck do we have different values for the pint? bah!). when i drive to canada and see gas prices in CAD/litre, i have no idea what i'm paying, and km/h is barely a step better than reporting it in attoparsec/microfortnight. but c'mon... let's not pretend that this system we're using actually makes any sense. we use it because it's what we know, and because it would be expensive and time-consuming to change. real scientists know that SI is better... even the US Army knows it's better (a "click" is a kilometer). it's fine to be parochial here, but let's admit that's what we're doing.
also,/. has tons of non-American (or non-British) readers. converting to an international standard is probably the courteous thing to do.
but attending a non-public school is not a right. students (or parents/guardians on their behalf) agree to a certain set of terms in exchange for being allowed to. this is the same as professionals agreeing not to make bad statements about their employers in exchange for severance packages, stock options, or whatever. we can certainly talk about whether it's good or bad (i think it's clearly a bad policy on several levels), but it is not a constitutional/first amendment issue.
Parents are all-powerful with regards to their children, with the exception of a few things like abortion.
this is not true. parents have a large set of rights over their children, but the fundamental protections of the constitution still apply. this has been run through court in many cases. and i have a hard time figuring out what that abortion comment is about.
All in all, if I were running the school, I'd be far more worried about the clergy molesting the children than some outsider reading a web site.
and you'd be a misguided fool duped by a combination of sensationalist media and the human tendency to inappropriately generalize. while it is, of course, disgusting and possibly shocking that clergy, who we (as a society in general) expect to adhere to higher moral standards and to whom we entrust ourselves and our children to have any of this predatory behavior in them (as a group), the statistical occurrence is generally found to be in line with, often substantially lower than, the average in society in general. this does nothing to excuse the individuals who're abusing their position through these acts, but it's wrong (factually) to think that teachers in a Catholic school are more likely to molest or otherwise abuse their students than in a public school; statistically, the inverse is true.
this is stupid, overrated, and judgmental. there's nothing in the article or elsewhere to indicate that this is being done to prevent kids from discovering people have different ideas about things, especially religion. nobody seriously believes that's ever not going to happen, even in a Catholic school. the school claims this is an attempt to protect their students and, obviously misguided though it is, i've seen no particular reason to question their motives in this regard. aside from your own prejudice that all Catholics or Christians (or just religious folks, maybe) are out to control peoples' minds, does this come from anything factual?
i'm inclinded to agree in principal, except for some awful ambiguous and generally strange language in this paragraph:
Students who participate in extracurricular activities that require higher standards of conduct, such as cheerleading, band, and athletics, may face consequences for publishing inappropriate web photos or information that identify their role in the school.
it seems odd to me that students in extracurricular activities would have further restrictions on them of this sort, and "inappropriate" is always prone to problems. without this paragraph, i think this letter is an entirely appropriate example of an administrator advising parents of a risk they may not be aware of (lets face it: most parents of school-age kids have no idea what a "blog" is) and relying on the parent's/guardian's judgement in raising their children; with it, it sounds like he's still trying to retain some control over arbitrary restrictions. the overwhelming majority of kids are in some manner of "extracurricular activity".
i hope you're trying to be ironic (in which case you're failing) and don't actually believe this. the protections offered by the constitution apply to either all citizens or everyone (depending on which section and how you read certain things). except where entirely explicit (voting age, primarily), there is no age restriction on these protections. students in private/parochial schools are electing to adhere to an additional set of rules and restrictions. they're welcome to change their mind at any time... just stop going to that school. public schools are under the same restrictions as any other government organization, and their rules should reflect this. if not, they can be challenged and overturned (provided someone in the right jurisdiction cares enough).
not really sure. two friends of mine are legal guardian for a kid, and we've never been sure how to describe it. the best we could come up with was "ward", but it's scientifically impossible to call someone your "ward" without then wanting to dress him up in a Robin costume, and that's clearly something to be avoided.
Am i the only one who thought this was totally backwards? I no longer pay much attention to mainstream news, but i've seen countless stories about viruses, trojans, system failures stranding US Navy ships, and so on, never with any mention of the fact that these problems are specific to Microsoft platforms. I can see some argument that in the case of things like ship navigation computers failing, the general public doesn't really care what OS the thing was running (i don't really believe that argument, but i think it could be made with a straight face). But the fact that end users could protect their home computer from the very threat that stories about viruses and the like are reporting on is directly relevant to the story at hand for the general public. The fact that i've never heard this mentioned at least suggests the existence of a pro-Microsoft bias in the stories.
current-generation CDMA networks offer better data rates and lower density (and thus capital investment) requirements than current-generation GSM networks. they offer better cell-to-cell handoff, meaning fewer dropped calls when in motion. the voice codec used by Verizon, at least, implements better echo cancelation than the GSM equivalent (which is why there's a much bigger market for signal processing add-ons in the GSM world). if by "personal mobility" you mean the interchangeability of SIM cards, yeah, i'll give you that (and if that's not what you mean, please explain), but that has very little to do with the network technology (indeed, card-based CDMA is likely coming widely, and already exists in some places). you say things like CDMA is "only" better than GSM in the air interface, but that's the single most important part, and the deficiencies on the GSM side are pretty damning.
i'm not sure what youre hate-on for Qualcomm is all about, but you're attributing my statements, those of the GSMA, and a GSM operator to them inappropriately. i've not heard anything out of Qualcomm regarding any sort of conspiracy.
i suspect you mean something different by "mobility" than i do. the issue in Pakistan was that the CDMA licenses were originally given out on the condition of no mobility - that is, no cell-to-cell handoff, and a given device registered with only a single cell - and the operators in that space wanted the restrictions relaxes (and, admittedly, sort of acted ahead of the legal curve). the entrenched GSM operators contacted the GSMA for support in lobbying the government to ensure the restrictions stayed in place. note that the operators who launched CDMA service did so freely; they were given a technology-neutral license. they all went with CDMA because of lower density and capital investment requirements.
and i'm not sure what sort of "freedom" and "advanced features" you believe the GSM network provides. commercially available data rates have been higher on CDMA networks for a few years now. okay, i'm not aware of any CDMA networks offering video calling, but given how limited this service is on GSM networks, i have no reason to believe that's a technical limitation rather than a market one. text or multimedia messaging is equally available on both. same with PTT, streaming video, and so on. so, what then? i'm honestly curious. i've used GSM networks in the US and GB, and i use Verizon now. i'm not aware of anything i'm missing out on, but if you can point me at things, i'd like to know.
the lower density requirements are a big deal in, for example, the american midwest, but are potentially huge in developing countries. the GSMA acted to protect the interest of its members, but in doing so sacrificed the interest of the general public.
If the US had gone down the GSM route - without messing around with the band allocation - you wouldn't have this problem.
yes, but we'd have only a GSM network, rather than our generally superior CDMA network, which has excellent coverage. it's the GSM network that has poor coverage, due in no small part to its higher cell density requirements and thus higher cost to the operator. yes, we generally have restricted phones, and i agree that's a problem, but that has nothing to do with the network technology - you get it on CDMA and GSM just the same. rather, it's about the corporate culture here. and we only have two incompatible standards, CDMA and GSM, unless you include legacy stuff like TDMA and AMPS, in which case you should include things like NMT in europe. the situation's far from perfect, but it's nothing near as bad as you're making it sound, either.
i'm not aware of Qualcomm's FUD campaign here, but i believe you; they do engage in such tactics on the equipment production side. but keep in mind that the GSM operators, equipment manufacturers, and the GSMA is far from immune from this. i was just at the GSMA World Congress in Singapore where a representative from a Pakistani GSM operator gave a presentation in which he went on and on about how wonderful the GSMA was in assisting his company in lobbying the government to explicitly limit the utility of CDMA networks (basically, the current law is that you can run a CDMA network without mobility turned on; WTF?). the GSMA is very proud of their lobbying function. all the operators and vendors around me were nodding their silent approval, while i'm sitting there in horror at the blatant inhibition of competition to the detriment of the general public just to protect the entrenched operators. the CTIA performs a similar lobbying function, but is much more technology-neutral, and is very US-centric. CDMA also has a number of technical advantages over GSM networks. higher data rates, lower cell density, and a significantly better cell handoff protocol are the big ones. CDMA phones (at least those sold in the US) can pretty generally fall back to analog service, something i don't believe exists in GSM handsets (or at best is uncommon enough that i've not heard of it, and i work in this industry and look for such things). this is a huge deal in the US, where we were early enough adopters of mobile technology that we've got a huge installed analog network in place. converting that all over - and all the installed base of handsets - is no small feat. the analog tech also has very low density requirements, comparatively, meaning the operators would have to significantly increase their capital investment to retain the footprint in an upgraded network. the nordic countries did a very good job of managing this conversion from NMT, another early analogue mobile tech, to GSM, but of course they've got a much smaller area and user population to worry about.
you could easily support the gsm provisioning/billing/roaming features on top of a cdma transport.
this is true, but totally irrelevant. that's all back-end stuff, and the handset would still be pure CDMA. supporting GSM provisioning, billing, and roaming on a CDMA network is mostly about things like what record formats network elements and billing systems spit out. true inter-network roaming on the part of the customer involves dual-network phone, which, yes, Verizon offers.
GSM's got a lot of weight behind it globally, but i really hope CDMA continues to grow (with networks in a few dozen countries already, about 30-something of which Verizon roams with). poor international roaming is, in my mind, the biggest problem with CDMA, and that's just a service issue, not a technical issue. technically, it's far superior to GSM.
RTT service is more expensive than GPRS service for two primary reasons. first, it's faster in real world environments, generally about 1.5 times the speed. second the CDMA network on which RTT works is much more widespread in the US than the GSM network on which GPRS works. people are willing to pay for these two benefits.
some people do, in fact, use Verizon's EVDO service as their only net connection. people like, um, me! this is posted using it right now. i've got the card plugged directly into my laptop, but what is making you believe Verizon prohibits plugging it into one of those base stations (and how would they do that, anyway)?
also note that Verizon recently lowered the price of their unlimited EV-DO service to $60/month from $80/month. for unlimited, mobile, reasonably-high-speed data, that's pretty darn good in my book. if you want more economical, just use the RTT service on a plan where it eats minutes at no extra charge; that's what i did before i got the EV-DO service. unlimited nights and weekends makes this a particularly compelling low-cost option. i'm at work for most of the peak hours anyway.
and it has bluetooth, not partial bluetooth. unless it listed specific bluetooth profiles that it doesn't have, there's no issue with the labeling here. what, you're upset that it doesn't implement all the profiles? like, um, the mouse one? yeah! my phone can't act as a mouse, clearly the bluetooth is crippled!
and yes, of course things like OBEX are better fits than the mouse profile. but "bluetooth" does not inherently imply any given set of profiles. if you wanted a specific capability, you should have asked for it, or bought a product specifically labeled to have it.
are you honestly putting forward as a serious complaint the fact that Verizon doesn't sit back and let people hack their commercial, money-making service? if you don't like the service, don't use it.
This company is a shit providor and I don't understand why anyone has their service.
then you're just not paying very close attention. the primary reason is that they have simply the best network in the United States. The've got equal or better coverage in most urban areas (not all, especially out west, but certainly most), far better coverage in most of the more sparsely-populated regions, and at least decent coverage in almost the whole country. as secondary reasons, they've also got the second largest subscriber base (was the largest until the Cingular buyout of AT&T, and it's on track to be the largest again soon), which is nice since in-network calling is free, and their customer support, while certainly not worry-free, isn't total crap. beyond that, there's the differences between CDMA and GSM. while GSM has some nice points (the biggest two being better inter-operator competition and vastly superior international roaming), CDMA has a number of fundamental technical benefits. the two that impact consumers most (like me) are the fact that equal generation data services (i.e. 1xRTT vs GPRS, EV-DO vs EDGE) tend to be up to twice as fast in real world environments on the CDMA side, and CDMA networks handle the handoff between cells much, much better, dramatically reducing the cases of dropping a call, looking at your phone, and finding you've got full or nearly-full coverage (particularly noticeable when traveling at high speeds, for example on a train).
i understand you don't like Verizon because their business model is based on charging for lots of little things, subscription services, and the like. i agree there's some serious problems with the business model, and i certainly don't use any of these subscription services, and minimize the use of their other charge services (i bought a transflash card so i could get pictures off without paying them). but this is, in fact, their business model. we have no inherent right to hack their service which they're getting in the way of, and these are all strictly optional services. if all you care about is phone (or especially data) service, Verizon is still the best choice in most of the country. and while the comparison between Verizon and the GSM operators is a valid one, acting like there's no valid reason to deal with Verizon just makes you sound, um, dumb.
When will the media companies learn that the globe is just a little bit bigger than the United States of America?
oh, they know all right. and they intend to milk you for all you're worth. controlling release dates, like region coding on DVDs, is a scheme to extract the most money they can from each release in each region. i'm not sure exactly what the math behind it is, but rest assured that it's all dollar-driven. it is a very rare movie that comes out at the same time worldwide (even ±24 hours).
The largest database vendor in the world just confirmed that the market for open source databases exists.
erm, no. they didn't. they confirmed that the market for open source database companies exists, but that's hardly the same thing. the later being true does pretty much nothing for the good of the users of open-source database technology.
while we're speculating (hey, this is/.), my bet is that Oracle has two goals: make MySQL's commercial licensing harder, and, more importantly, get access to the Innobase minds. they probably do not care about the InnoDB product.
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shareholders own the company, but do not manage it (as a rule). they hire management employees, from the top and then recursively down, for that. more importantly, the idea that companies have no responsibility to their employees is a comparatively modern mis-feature of capitalism; it does not reflect Smith's capitalism, where the responsibility to employees was either explicit or very strongly implied.
i have mod points, but i couldn't find the option for "Depressing".
most of the phones out there make it either impossible or exceedingly difficult to run server software - that is, to open up a port and listen on it. this is at least a limitation of all the software environments i've looked at; i'm not sure whether there's anything technical in the network which inhibits this as well.
BSD zealot? not hardly. if you need to dump me into a Unix camp, call me a v10 Research Unix zealot. but really, you should probably call me a Plan 9 zealot. both BSD and Linux are just ever-progressing incremental improvements (in most cases, anyway) to what's been there for a decade or two. but whereas the BSD communities mostly (not entirely, but mostly) just sort of get on with things, the GNU/Linux (it's mostly the GNU influence here, but there's so much overlap it's hard to tell them apart most times) communities talk about "innovation" and their grand philosophy of how things "ought to be" or "ought to have been".
please. you're re-implementing a unixoid system based more-or-less on 20-30 year old work and POSIX, an international standard. there's plenty of new ideas floating around, but not only does it mostly not come from the Linux camps, they're also slow to adapt/adopt. why is Linux just now getting things like 9P and private namespaces? the benefits have been shown widely in academic and research circles for a decade now (first Plan 9 papers talking about them came out in 1989; publicly-available system w/ source code available... 1993, i think). why is Sun of all places (god, aren't they dead yet?) the folks coming up with great things like dtrace and getting better filesystems into their kernels? you're bound to point out that the FOSS BSD folks didn't come up with those, either, and have been just as slow to adopt them; you're correct, but that's fine: the BSD folks admit their goals. OpenBSD wants to be the most secure Unix ever, and they do a damn good job. there's not a ton of system innovation going on there, but they get down to business and get the job done. those code audits aren't sexy or "innovative", but i'm sure glad they do them. FreeBSD wants to be fast; NetBSD wants to be portable. they understand their goals and they get down to it.
while you're doing what you're doing - re-implementing a unixoid system - you should be trying to do the best job at that possible. and by that standard, your select implementation is just broken. if you really think the behavior is that much of an improvement, put a wrapper around it or stick in one of those ifdefs you people are so fond of (there's already a bazillion, what's one more, right?). but there is a correct way to do select; do that.
there's nothing wrong with incremental improvements, stable systems, predictable results, and so on. quite the opposite: they're great things. but they're not the same things as innovation, invention, or research. admit which you're doing, and get on with that.
or call me when HURD is worth another look.
heh. he just used linux as an example of "a philosophy of "what ought the standard to be" and not just "what was it 10 years ago"." that's great! mod parent +1 Funny!
I highly doubt it. Or, more precisely, i highly doubt that money is a primary motivating factor. It's simply a notoriously bad way to get any sort of vision. I believe it of most corporate exec types (and lots of other people, too), but it's simply not consistent with what Apple produces or with what data we have on Jobs. the assumption that money is the (sole) primary motivating factor also indicates either a significant lack of vision or a very cynical (and mildly depressing) view of human nature.
I'm an American. I was born and raised here. I use the US system (the not-quite-british system; why the heck do we have different values for the pint? bah!). when i drive to canada and see gas prices in CAD/litre, i have no idea what i'm paying, and km/h is barely a step better than reporting it in attoparsec/microfortnight. but c'mon... let's not pretend that this system we're using actually makes any sense. we use it because it's what we know, and because it would be expensive and time-consuming to change. real scientists know that SI is better... even the US Army knows it's better (a "click" is a kilometer). it's fine to be parochial here, but let's admit that's what we're doing.
/. has tons of non-American (or non-British) readers. converting to an international standard is probably the courteous thing to do.
also,
but attending a non-public school is not a right. students (or parents/guardians on their behalf) agree to a certain set of terms in exchange for being allowed to. this is the same as professionals agreeing not to make bad statements about their employers in exchange for severance packages, stock options, or whatever. we can certainly talk about whether it's good or bad (i think it's clearly a bad policy on several levels), but it is not a constitutional/first amendment issue.
and i have a hard time figuring out what that abortion comment is about.and you'd be a misguided fool duped by a combination of sensationalist media and the human tendency to inappropriately generalize. while it is, of course, disgusting and possibly shocking that clergy, who we (as a society in general) expect to adhere to higher moral standards and to whom we entrust ourselves and our children to have any of this predatory behavior in them (as a group), the statistical occurrence is generally found to be in line with, often substantially lower than, the average in society in general. this does nothing to excuse the individuals who're abusing their position through these acts, but it's wrong (factually) to think that teachers in a Catholic school are more likely to molest or otherwise abuse their students than in a public school; statistically, the inverse is true.
this is stupid, overrated, and judgmental. there's nothing in the article or elsewhere to indicate that this is being done to prevent kids from discovering people have different ideas about things, especially religion. nobody seriously believes that's ever not going to happen, even in a Catholic school. the school claims this is an attempt to protect their students and, obviously misguided though it is, i've seen no particular reason to question their motives in this regard. aside from your own prejudice that all Catholics or Christians (or just religious folks, maybe) are out to control peoples' minds, does this come from anything factual?
i hope you're trying to be ironic (in which case you're failing) and don't actually believe this. the protections offered by the constitution apply to either all citizens or everyone (depending on which section and how you read certain things). except where entirely explicit (voting age, primarily), there is no age restriction on these protections.
students in private/parochial schools are electing to adhere to an additional set of rules and restrictions. they're welcome to change their mind at any time... just stop going to that school. public schools are under the same restrictions as any other government organization, and their rules should reflect this. if not, they can be challenged and overturned (provided someone in the right jurisdiction cares enough).
not really sure. two friends of mine are legal guardian for a kid, and we've never been sure how to describe it. the best we could come up with was "ward", but it's scientifically impossible to call someone your "ward" without then wanting to dress him up in a Robin costume, and that's clearly something to be avoided.
Am i the only one who thought this was totally backwards? I no longer pay much attention to mainstream news, but i've seen countless stories about viruses, trojans, system failures stranding US Navy ships, and so on, never with any mention of the fact that these problems are specific to Microsoft platforms. I can see some argument that in the case of things like ship navigation computers failing, the general public doesn't really care what OS the thing was running (i don't really believe that argument, but i think it could be made with a straight face). But the fact that end users could protect their home computer from the very threat that stories about viruses and the like are reporting on is directly relevant to the story at hand for the general public. The fact that i've never heard this mentioned at least suggests the existence of a pro-Microsoft bias in the stories.
current-generation CDMA networks offer better data rates and lower density (and thus capital investment) requirements than current-generation GSM networks. they offer better cell-to-cell handoff, meaning fewer dropped calls when in motion. the voice codec used by Verizon, at least, implements better echo cancelation than the GSM equivalent (which is why there's a much bigger market for signal processing add-ons in the GSM world). if by "personal mobility" you mean the interchangeability of SIM cards, yeah, i'll give you that (and if that's not what you mean, please explain), but that has very little to do with the network technology (indeed, card-based CDMA is likely coming widely, and already exists in some places). you say things like CDMA is "only" better than GSM in the air interface, but that's the single most important part, and the deficiencies on the GSM side are pretty damning.
i'm not sure what youre hate-on for Qualcomm is all about, but you're attributing my statements, those of the GSMA, and a GSM operator to them inappropriately. i've not heard anything out of Qualcomm regarding any sort of conspiracy.
i suspect you mean something different by "mobility" than i do. the issue in Pakistan was that the CDMA licenses were originally given out on the condition of no mobility - that is, no cell-to-cell handoff, and a given device registered with only a single cell - and the operators in that space wanted the restrictions relaxes (and, admittedly, sort of acted ahead of the legal curve). the entrenched GSM operators contacted the GSMA for support in lobbying the government to ensure the restrictions stayed in place. note that the operators who launched CDMA service did so freely; they were given a technology-neutral license. they all went with CDMA because of lower density and capital investment requirements.
and i'm not sure what sort of "freedom" and "advanced features" you believe the GSM network provides. commercially available data rates have been higher on CDMA networks for a few years now. okay, i'm not aware of any CDMA networks offering video calling, but given how limited this service is on GSM networks, i have no reason to believe that's a technical limitation rather than a market one. text or multimedia messaging is equally available on both. same with PTT, streaming video, and so on. so, what then? i'm honestly curious. i've used GSM networks in the US and GB, and i use Verizon now. i'm not aware of anything i'm missing out on, but if you can point me at things, i'd like to know.
the lower density requirements are a big deal in, for example, the american midwest, but are potentially huge in developing countries. the GSMA acted to protect the interest of its members, but in doing so sacrificed the interest of the general public.
i'm not aware of Qualcomm's FUD campaign here, but i believe you; they do engage in such tactics on the equipment production side. but keep in mind that the GSM operators, equipment manufacturers, and the GSMA is far from immune from this. i was just at the GSMA World Congress in Singapore where a representative from a Pakistani GSM operator gave a presentation in which he went on and on about how wonderful the GSMA was in assisting his company in lobbying the government to explicitly limit the utility of CDMA networks (basically, the current law is that you can run a CDMA network without mobility turned on; WTF?). the GSMA is very proud of their lobbying function. all the operators and vendors around me were nodding their silent approval, while i'm sitting there in horror at the blatant inhibition of competition to the detriment of the general public just to protect the entrenched operators. the CTIA performs a similar lobbying function, but is much more technology-neutral, and is very US-centric.
CDMA also has a number of technical advantages over GSM networks. higher data rates, lower cell density, and a significantly better cell handoff protocol are the big ones. CDMA phones (at least those sold in the US) can pretty generally fall back to analog service, something i don't believe exists in GSM handsets (or at best is uncommon enough that i've not heard of it, and i work in this industry and look for such things). this is a huge deal in the US, where we were early enough adopters of mobile technology that we've got a huge installed analog network in place. converting that all over - and all the installed base of handsets - is no small feat. the analog tech also has very low density requirements, comparatively, meaning the operators would have to significantly increase their capital investment to retain the footprint in an upgraded network.
the nordic countries did a very good job of managing this conversion from NMT, another early analogue mobile tech, to GSM, but of course they've got a much smaller area and user population to worry about.
GSM's got a lot of weight behind it globally, but i really hope CDMA continues to grow (with networks in a few dozen countries already, about 30-something of which Verizon roams with). poor international roaming is, in my mind, the biggest problem with CDMA, and that's just a service issue, not a technical issue. technically, it's far superior to GSM.
RTT service is more expensive than GPRS service for two primary reasons. first, it's faster in real world environments, generally about 1.5 times the speed. second the CDMA network on which RTT works is much more widespread in the US than the GSM network on which GPRS works. people are willing to pay for these two benefits.
some people do, in fact, use Verizon's EVDO service as their only net connection. people like, um, me! this is posted using it right now. i've got the card plugged directly into my laptop, but what is making you believe Verizon prohibits plugging it into one of those base stations (and how would they do that, anyway)?
also note that Verizon recently lowered the price of their unlimited EV-DO service to $60/month from $80/month. for unlimited, mobile, reasonably-high-speed data, that's pretty darn good in my book. if you want more economical, just use the RTT service on a plan where it eats minutes at no extra charge; that's what i did before i got the EV-DO service. unlimited nights and weekends makes this a particularly compelling low-cost option. i'm at work for most of the peak hours anyway.
don't expect premium service at economy price.
and it has bluetooth, not partial bluetooth. unless it listed specific bluetooth profiles that it doesn't have, there's no issue with the labeling here. what, you're upset that it doesn't implement all the profiles? like, um, the mouse one? yeah! my phone can't act as a mouse, clearly the bluetooth is crippled!
and yes, of course things like OBEX are better fits than the mouse profile. but "bluetooth" does not inherently imply any given set of profiles. if you wanted a specific capability, you should have asked for it, or bought a product specifically labeled to have it.
beyond that, there's the differences between CDMA and GSM. while GSM has some nice points (the biggest two being better inter-operator competition and vastly superior international roaming), CDMA has a number of fundamental technical benefits. the two that impact consumers most (like me) are the fact that equal generation data services (i.e. 1xRTT vs GPRS, EV-DO vs EDGE) tend to be up to twice as fast in real world environments on the CDMA side, and CDMA networks handle the handoff between cells much, much better, dramatically reducing the cases of dropping a call, looking at your phone, and finding you've got full or nearly-full coverage (particularly noticeable when traveling at high speeds, for example on a train).
i understand you don't like Verizon because their business model is based on charging for lots of little things, subscription services, and the like. i agree there's some serious problems with the business model, and i certainly don't use any of these subscription services, and minimize the use of their other charge services (i bought a transflash card so i could get pictures off without paying them). but this is, in fact, their business model. we have no inherent right to hack their service which they're getting in the way of, and these are all strictly optional services. if all you care about is phone (or especially data) service, Verizon is still the best choice in most of the country. and while the comparison between Verizon and the GSM operators is a valid one, acting like there's no valid reason to deal with Verizon just makes you sound, um, dumb.
while we're speculating (hey, this is