Computer Engineering != CS. Computer engineering is a part of EE. Here's a single example of the price difference you can see on your first job: A friend of mine and I interviewed at the same company for similar positions. He was finishing his BS in EE and I was finishing my MS in EE. My offer was 18k more than his and was for a higher-level engineering classification. Given that the company average for raises was 3.5%, he would have been making around 4.5k more than when he started in 2 years with the company and wouldn't have been bumped up to engineer 2. Or he could have spent two years to get his MS, made 18k more, and started at the "engineer 2" level. He chose to get his MS.
Most places I looked treated a MS like a BS + 3 years experience. They stated this on the job postings. But my market/industry may be different than others.
Here are some reasons to do your MS now instead of later: 1.) I would have a hard time going back to school after a long break. When you get a job, sure you're at your office for 40 hours a week but you don't have homework, class projects, or finals. Your free time is your time. Some days I like coming home, shutting down my EE side, and playing with my son. And you don't know what will happen during your break - will you get married, buy a house, or have a kid? Each one of those things is a major drain on time, energy, and money. 2.) You like your field and want to learn. There's nothing wrong with expanding your skills. 3.) You don't want to completely enter adulthood yet. Grad school is a nice way to postpone real responsibilities.
But, DO NOT DO A CLASSWORK ONLY MS. If you don't have a research project that ends in a thesis, I will put your resume on the same stack as those who only have a BS. That's the biggest thing. If you can't handle the research, just get a job. Non-thesis MS degrees are for people who are working while getting their degree. If you're young and just going to school, there's no excuse for not doing research. Getting on a funded project can be hard, though.
From what I've seen, Python 3.0 is not supported by a good number of Python packages whereas Python 2.6 is which would make the "no Python 3.0 support" a minor issue for me. Python 3.0 is also not shipping as the default interpreter for Fedora, Ubunutu, or openSuSE yet so it won't really affect basic users for a while. I have also seen benchmarks (but I don't have references, so I welcome contradictions and corrections) that show that 3.0 is considerably slower than 2.6 so if the speed of Python is an issue to people they shouldn't be using 3.0 (I take issue with people who grumble about Python's execution speed anyway - if speed is that important stick to C/C++). If you have a good amount of existing Python apps that work under 2.5 getting them to work in 2.6 isn't hard. Moving to 3.0 is a much bigger step, especially if you relied on built-in modules that are either different now or removed.
I see the "no windows support" as a much bigger negative - if one of the biggest strengths of Python is cross-platform support and you need your programs to work on both Windows and Linux (as I do) that's going to be a problem and I'm only half interested (because half of my apps never leave Linux).
There's nothing special about Virginia being called a commonwealth - it's just a name it doesn't allow Virginia any special rights or make it any different than any other state.
They need to add food coloring to the processed silk to turn it into jam? If the astronauts are eating worms I'm not certain they'll care what color their jam is. Or do they also mash the silkworms and then put them in a McRib mold and smother them with sauce? That's how McDonald's does it, right?
Backwards compatibility is good but it was never a part of the plan for Python 3 from the beginning - that was declared from the start and has been known for years. 2.6 and 3.0 were released close to each other. The biggest worry I have is that 3.0 is SLOWER than 2.6 in the benchmarks I have seen.
It looks like one, but it's not one of hte white Intel Macbooks - the ports are slightly different. My macbook has on the left side: power, ethernet, mini-dvi, firewire, usb, usb, mic, headphone, lock. And no fan ports - those are hidden by the screen hinge. It looks like a decent attempt at a knock-off though.
Come meet the new boss, same as the old boss...
I'd prefer neither party have clear control of the legislative branch, then they would have to work together and couldn't push their own agenda through. Neither side has the right or total answer to any problem.
For GSM, it takes less time to send a regular text message than set up a call and wait for the other side to ring. In order to do both, the phone first requests a channel from the base station. It is then assigned a signalling channel on which the phone and the base station negotiate what's going to happen next. For a text, its simply transmitted as a set of messages on the signalling channel and then then phone leaves the channel. For a call, the mobile exchanges messages with the base station as to what services it can support and who it wants to call and is then assigned a traffic channel to wait for the other phone to answer or not. This takes way more time and resources than a text message - it gets even faster when the mobile can use a data connection like GPRS/EDGE or UMTS packet data.
I don't see any reason for text messages to cost $0.25 (from Verizon at least). Their answer as to why they charge so much is probably "because we can." Unless there is such a high volume of texting that it is actually putting a strain on the data networks - the same networks that are being used to stream TV shows and music to phones. That's probably a stretch as it's cheaper in most European networks.
If I am directly responsible for procuring 100% of the business, and you are responsible for creating a product that retains that business, then I trump you anyday. This is what people don't understand: sales *is* hard. If it were easier, you'd get paid more.
I hate bullshit posturing "I'm better than you" statements like this. I got fucking sick of comments like these at my last job (electrical engineer at 300+ person company). Sales thought they were just better than engineering and manufacturing/test, the manufacturing/test group thought they were the real kings because they controlled the product flow, and engineering thought sales and manufacturing/test were annoyances. Don't you realize that it is not an adversarial relationship? As a salesman, you're not better than engineering because you procure 100% of the business and engineering is not better than you because they make the products. Sales might be hard, but so is engineering. I admit that I would be a terrible salesman as I wouldn't enjoy the whole "talking to other people" thing, but I challenge you to design and build and debug the hardware and software that goes into a military grade software radio receiver. Neither part is necessarily that easy, and without each other, there wouldn't be a product for you to sell or a paycheck to enable me to build stuff. It's a symbiotic relationship, not a parasitic relationship.
I'm an actual electrical engineer, though. Not some useless IT person. They are the real deadweight.
Hopefully I don't need to point out that the last few statements were sarcasm.
I've always felt that the cell companies weren't doing enough to build out their infrastructure to support big events. They'd just have enough in place to provide average service.
That's exactly how cellular networks are designed. Do you know why? MONEY. Cell providers build just enough capacity in certain areas to get as much money as they can while providing adequate service. Their delivered quality of service is just good enough to not drive people to other carriers. Their networks get completely saturated during emergencies like 9/11? Of course, because they never intended for them to be used by everyone at the same time. They never tried to be part of a critical infrastructure - there isn't any money in that.
If the POTS system had been put in place today, would we have the same level of service that we have with the system put in place by AT&T? No. The level of redundancy and reliability in the landline system would never have been profitable to anyone but a monopoly.
How does right-to-work laws apply to non-compete agreements? To quote wikipedia, right-to-work laws "prohibit agreements between trade unions and employers making membership or payment of union dues or 'fees' a condition of employment, either before or after hire." Unless Florida has added more to the concept of a right-to-work law.
Exactly what I thought. Unless I completely misunderstood everything, MySQL is not becoming "closed source", the enterprise version is just not going to be free as in beer any more. You can pay for the enterprise version, and you'll have access to the source code...that's free as in freedom. What is so hard for people to understand about that? From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html:
Selling Free Software
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.
Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
The word "free" has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of "free software", we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of "free speech", not "free beer".) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.
Free programs are sometimes distributed gratis, and sometimes for a substantial price. Often the same program is available in both ways from different places. The program is free regardless of the price, because users have freedom in using it.
Non-free programs are usually sold for a high price, but sometimes a store will give you a copy at no charge. That doesn't make it free software, though. Price or no price, the program is non-free because users don't have freedom.
Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price isn't more free, or closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.
Free software is a community project, and everyone who depends on it ought to look for ways to contribute to building the community. For a distributor, the way to do this is to give a part of the profit to the Free Software Foundation or some other free software development project. By funding development, you can advance the world of free software.
From "Walt Mossberg Reviews the iPhone":
But the iPhone has a major drawback: the cellphone network it uses. It only works with AT&T (formerly Cingular), won't come in models that use Verizon or Sprint and can't use the digital cards (called SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile's network. So, the phone can be a poor choice unless you are in areas where AT&T's coverage is good. It does work overseas, but only via an AT&T roaming plan. Thanks for pointing out that I was wrong (i'm not being sarcastic). From the earlier posted article that reviewed the iPhone, I took the above quote to mean that they didn't include a SIM card at all, which I completely didn't like. I'm actually pretty glad I'm wrong on this one - there will undoubtedly be some way to undo the SIM-lock in the future. Hopefully they'll start selling them in Europe at some point, where if I'm not mistaken it is actually against the law in certain countries to SIM-lock phones.
Don't forget that there is no SIM card in the iphone, so you can't grab an older GSM phone in a pinch if your iphone breaks...and this means there's no way you can ever switch providers...and international roaming will be problematic if you're in a place where AT&T doesn't have roaming agreements.
Don't get me wrong, the phone seems cool, but the whole tetheering of the phone to AT&T's service is pretty much contrary to the whole concept of GSM systems.
It's not that simple - a voice call requires a lot more network overhead to set up, maintain, and tear down the voice circuits and actual RF traffic channel. For an SMS, it requires a fairly short hop onto a control channel to transmit the message and receive the acknowledgment from the network that it was received. Then it's either routed through the operator's internal network to the receiver or sent off to whichever other operator is required, probably over IP. Reception of an SMS requires the mobile's response to a page from the base station and then it hops onto a control channel for a rather short period of time to received the SMS. Voice calls on the other hand require a considerably larger amount of resources from end-to-end. I think $0.15 is way over priced for an SMS due to the relatively slim requirements for delivery.
While I agree with you somewhat, this doesn't stop the RIAA/MPAA from going after every person they think "stole" a few songs and promoting this vast conspiracy theory that they're the little guy and the big bad consumers are trampling over their rights. If Linux wasn't commercially useful, some of the more extreme people at Microsoft could possibly start this shit against people who build their own computers and put Linux on them - picture this: "100% of the businesses on the planet buy our operating system and are quite happy with it, how can these people try to run their own computers without it? Obviously it's because Linux is nothing but a knock-off that is stealing our ideas. If they want to use their computers we have to give them permission!" said the Microsoft spokeslawyer.
The whole concept of suing people over money that you think you should be making give me a headache, which is what I think of the whole MAFIAA's case.
Exactly my thought - I have never had problems with any of the laptops with Intel graphics chipsets and Linux. In fact, Fedora pretty much kicks ass with the GMA950 on my Macbook as opposed to my desktop with an ATI card that has 2 DVI outputs (can never get both outputs to work at the same time in Fedora, but I freely admint I am probably screwing up the video configuration).
Their "Computer Science" grouping is odd - one of the "paradigms" is "multiple antenna, selective fading, smart antenna,..." which are not computer science topics, they're EE/wireless communications topics.
Some aspects of Computer Science and EE are definitely closely related, but this is kind of weird. Engineering seems under-represented - if there were a lot of engineering disciplines included (EE, Computer, mechanical, aerospace, etc.) but not under any sort of "engineering" heading, why is "applied physics" so small?
Cool chart nonetheless. This was a huge amount of info to sort through and graphically represent.
I'm pretty sure that the pricing for RHEL only allows updates and support for installation on a single PC or server if you buy one copy. If you install your purchased copy on numerous machines, you may violate the support agreement.
Of course, I freely admit that I may be wrong. Red Hat's website explains it all, I leave the legal deciphering to you. I just use Fedora instead - I can get the same server packages (I especially like RH's BIND config utility, system-config-bind) without the worry. I think I may check out CentOS 5 whenever they release it (about 2 weeks from what I understand).
What do you mean by complicated? You must not have seen anything about CDMA2000 or UMTS, each of which is orders of magnitude more complicated as far as physical layer stuff is concerned.
GSM is also fairly easy to spoof - doing a "man in the middle" attack where you pretend to be a base station is actually not hard to do. For that attack you don't even have to perform the authentication and encryption processes because in GSM the mobile is authenticated to the network, but the network is never authenticated to the mobile. Authentication and encryption isn't even mandatory!
Easvesdropping is a little harder but is still not impossible. They even designed one of the encryption algorithms to be weak - the algorithm known as A5/1 was meant for western Europe/Nato-like countries, whereas A5/2 was meant for Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere precisely because western governments wanted an easier time eavesdropping on those countries' traffic but increased security on their end.
Also, GSM security standards are not open standards - you have to be a member of the standards group in order to have access to them. For UMTS (GSM's successor), the standards are available to anyone.
Do a google search - the original authentication algorithm was cracked by university researchers without help from operators.
I think that you're exactly right - I bought a TI-89 in undergrad and the most I used it for in undergrad and grad school (EE) was for division and multiplication on tests and to play tetris in class.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. When you lay out cells (let's think about that hex board now, shall we) that is a geographic distribution. In certain cellular systems, frequencies are distributed amongst those hexagons - isn't that a geographic distribution? And when you go to CDMA systems (such as IS-95, CDMA2000, WCDMA, and UMTS) you can have adjoining cells operating at exactly the same frequency! The only difference now is a change in the spreading code that each base station is using. Or how about a GSM system using frequency hopping? Adjoining cells can all use the same frequency set and hopping sequence but each has its own specific offset.
So it is simply inaccurate to say that the cell part comes from frequency "cells". The cell part comes from having a bunch of spatially separated cells that allow multiuser communication while sharing some resource. The geographic spread of the cell towers is what facilitates the frequency planning you were talking about. When you are using your cell phone in a "cell," the "cell" you are in is described by numerous parameters, such as spatial coordinates, frequency, etc.
Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation (or, an elctric signal). They are all susceptible to noise and interference, it's just that the sources are different. For example, multipath propagation for wireless signals (i.e. your cellphone signal bouncing off different buildings and multiple "copies" of the signal arriving at the cell tower at slightly different times) is similar to refraction in a fiber cable due to imperfect manufacturing causing the signal to "split" and interfere with itself. Reception techniques in these two cases are similar.
And similarly, "noise" in a radio receiver is due to the finite temperature of the reception equipment. Signal to noise ratio is the ratio of received signal strength to this noise. Now, SNR can be incredibly high for a fiber system given lossless fiber and receivers kept at absolute zero, but we live in the real world. When compared to other channels, fiber may have less attenuation of the signal over distance, I guarantee you there is some. There has to be.
As I said in another post, visible light is not special because we can see it, it just seems that way. Radio waves, X-rays, and light are all the EM radiation at different frequencies. It is the characteristics of the medium, such as bandwidth and path loss, that define the communication system.
How does the "actual speed of the electrons" affect data rate (i.e. bandwidth)? It affects time delay obviously but you have to take into account other properties of the medium.
Let's get an idea of what we're talking about here - the distance from LA to New York City is approximately 3940km. Light travels at approximately 3x10^5km/s. This means that if light travels in a straight line that distance, it will reach NYC in about 13ms. There a reference that says that light travels down an optical fiber at around 70% that, which means that it will take about 18ms to reach NYC. "Current" traveling down a copper wire at 30% the speed of light over that distance will take about 43ms.
And remember, when you're talking about electro magnetic radiation, the only difference between "visible light", "radio frequencies", "microwaves", "X-rays", etc. is frequency. Visible light is not necessarily special, it just seems that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Computer Engineering != CS. Computer engineering is a part of EE. Here's a single example of the price difference you can see on your first job: A friend of mine and I interviewed at the same company for similar positions. He was finishing his BS in EE and I was finishing my MS in EE. My offer was 18k more than his and was for a higher-level engineering classification. Given that the company average for raises was 3.5%, he would have been making around 4.5k more than when he started in 2 years with the company and wouldn't have been bumped up to engineer 2. Or he could have spent two years to get his MS, made 18k more, and started at the "engineer 2" level. He chose to get his MS.
Most places I looked treated a MS like a BS + 3 years experience. They stated this on the job postings. But my market/industry may be different than others.
Here are some reasons to do your MS now instead of later:
1.) I would have a hard time going back to school after a long break. When you get a job, sure you're at your office for 40 hours a week but you don't have homework, class projects, or finals. Your free time is your time. Some days I like coming home, shutting down my EE side, and playing with my son. And you don't know what will happen during your break - will you get married, buy a house, or have a kid? Each one of those things is a major drain on time, energy, and money.
2.) You like your field and want to learn. There's nothing wrong with expanding your skills.
3.) You don't want to completely enter adulthood yet. Grad school is a nice way to postpone real responsibilities.
But, DO NOT DO A CLASSWORK ONLY MS. If you don't have a research project that ends in a thesis, I will put your resume on the same stack as those who only have a BS. That's the biggest thing. If you can't handle the research, just get a job. Non-thesis MS degrees are for people who are working while getting their degree. If you're young and just going to school, there's no excuse for not doing research. Getting on a funded project can be hard, though.
That's kilometers, not miles. After conversion, that's only about 354 yards, so it's not that bad. Determining proper placement is probably the key.
From what I've seen, Python 3.0 is not supported by a good number of Python packages whereas Python 2.6 is which would make the "no Python 3.0 support" a minor issue for me. Python 3.0 is also not shipping as the default interpreter for Fedora, Ubunutu, or openSuSE yet so it won't really affect basic users for a while. I have also seen benchmarks (but I don't have references, so I welcome contradictions and corrections) that show that 3.0 is considerably slower than 2.6 so if the speed of Python is an issue to people they shouldn't be using 3.0 (I take issue with people who grumble about Python's execution speed anyway - if speed is that important stick to C/C++). If you have a good amount of existing Python apps that work under 2.5 getting them to work in 2.6 isn't hard. Moving to 3.0 is a much bigger step, especially if you relied on built-in modules that are either different now or removed.
I see the "no windows support" as a much bigger negative - if one of the biggest strengths of Python is cross-platform support and you need your programs to work on both Windows and Linux (as I do) that's going to be a problem and I'm only half interested (because half of my apps never leave Linux).
There's nothing special about Virginia being called a commonwealth - it's just a name it doesn't allow Virginia any special rights or make it any different than any other state.
They need to add food coloring to the processed silk to turn it into jam? If the astronauts are eating worms I'm not certain they'll care what color their jam is. Or do they also mash the silkworms and then put them in a McRib mold and smother them with sauce? That's how McDonald's does it, right?
Backwards compatibility is good but it was never a part of the plan for Python 3 from the beginning - that was declared from the start and has been known for years. 2.6 and 3.0 were released close to each other. The biggest worry I have is that 3.0 is SLOWER than 2.6 in the benchmarks I have seen.
It looks like one, but it's not one of hte white Intel Macbooks - the ports are slightly different. My macbook has on the left side: power, ethernet, mini-dvi, firewire, usb, usb, mic, headphone, lock. And no fan ports - those are hidden by the screen hinge. It looks like a decent attempt at a knock-off though.
Come meet the new boss, same as the old boss... I'd prefer neither party have clear control of the legislative branch, then they would have to work together and couldn't push their own agenda through. Neither side has the right or total answer to any problem.
For GSM, it takes less time to send a regular text message than set up a call and wait for the other side to ring. In order to do both, the phone first requests a channel from the base station. It is then assigned a signalling channel on which the phone and the base station negotiate what's going to happen next. For a text, its simply transmitted as a set of messages on the signalling channel and then then phone leaves the channel. For a call, the mobile exchanges messages with the base station as to what services it can support and who it wants to call and is then assigned a traffic channel to wait for the other phone to answer or not. This takes way more time and resources than a text message - it gets even faster when the mobile can use a data connection like GPRS/EDGE or UMTS packet data.
I don't see any reason for text messages to cost $0.25 (from Verizon at least). Their answer as to why they charge so much is probably "because we can." Unless there is such a high volume of texting that it is actually putting a strain on the data networks - the same networks that are being used to stream TV shows and music to phones. That's probably a stretch as it's cheaper in most European networks.
I hate bullshit posturing "I'm better than you" statements like this. I got fucking sick of comments like these at my last job (electrical engineer at 300+ person company). Sales thought they were just better than engineering and manufacturing/test, the manufacturing/test group thought they were the real kings because they controlled the product flow, and engineering thought sales and manufacturing/test were annoyances. Don't you realize that it is not an adversarial relationship? As a salesman, you're not better than engineering because you procure 100% of the business and engineering is not better than you because they make the products. Sales might be hard, but so is engineering. I admit that I would be a terrible salesman as I wouldn't enjoy the whole "talking to other people" thing, but I challenge you to design and build and debug the hardware and software that goes into a military grade software radio receiver. Neither part is necessarily that easy, and without each other, there wouldn't be a product for you to sell or a paycheck to enable me to build stuff. It's a symbiotic relationship, not a parasitic relationship.
I'm an actual electrical engineer, though. Not some useless IT person. They are the real deadweight.
Hopefully I don't need to point out that the last few statements were sarcasm.
That's exactly how cellular networks are designed. Do you know why? MONEY. Cell providers build just enough capacity in certain areas to get as much money as they can while providing adequate service. Their delivered quality of service is just good enough to not drive people to other carriers. Their networks get completely saturated during emergencies like 9/11? Of course, because they never intended for them to be used by everyone at the same time. They never tried to be part of a critical infrastructure - there isn't any money in that.
If the POTS system had been put in place today, would we have the same level of service that we have with the system put in place by AT&T? No. The level of redundancy and reliability in the landline system would never have been profitable to anyone but a monopoly.
How does right-to-work laws apply to non-compete agreements? To quote wikipedia, right-to-work laws "prohibit agreements between trade unions and employers making membership or payment of union dues or 'fees' a condition of employment, either before or after hire." Unless Florida has added more to the concept of a right-to-work law.
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.
Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
The word "free" has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of "free software", we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of "free speech", not "free beer".) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.
Free programs are sometimes distributed gratis, and sometimes for a substantial price. Often the same program is available in both ways from different places. The program is free regardless of the price, because users have freedom in using it.
Non-free programs are usually sold for a high price, but sometimes a store will give you a copy at no charge. That doesn't make it free software, though. Price or no price, the program is non-free because users don't have freedom.
Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price isn't more free, or closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.
Free software is a community project, and everyone who depends on it ought to look for ways to contribute to building the community. For a distributor, the way to do this is to give a part of the profit to the Free Software Foundation or some other free software development project. By funding development, you can advance the world of free software.
Thanks for pointing out that I was wrong (i'm not being sarcastic). From the earlier posted article that reviewed the iPhone, I took the above quote to mean that they didn't include a SIM card at all, which I completely didn't like. I'm actually pretty glad I'm wrong on this one - there will undoubtedly be some way to undo the SIM-lock in the future. Hopefully they'll start selling them in Europe at some point, where if I'm not mistaken it is actually against the law in certain countries to SIM-lock phones.
Don't forget that there is no SIM card in the iphone, so you can't grab an older GSM phone in a pinch if your iphone breaks...and this means there's no way you can ever switch providers...and international roaming will be problematic if you're in a place where AT&T doesn't have roaming agreements.
Don't get me wrong, the phone seems cool, but the whole tetheering of the phone to AT&T's service is pretty much contrary to the whole concept of GSM systems.
It's not that simple - a voice call requires a lot more network overhead to set up, maintain, and tear down the voice circuits and actual RF traffic channel. For an SMS, it requires a fairly short hop onto a control channel to transmit the message and receive the acknowledgment from the network that it was received. Then it's either routed through the operator's internal network to the receiver or sent off to whichever other operator is required, probably over IP. Reception of an SMS requires the mobile's response to a page from the base station and then it hops onto a control channel for a rather short period of time to received the SMS. Voice calls on the other hand require a considerably larger amount of resources from end-to-end. I think $0.15 is way over priced for an SMS due to the relatively slim requirements for delivery.
While I agree with you somewhat, this doesn't stop the RIAA/MPAA from going after every person they think "stole" a few songs and promoting this vast conspiracy theory that they're the little guy and the big bad consumers are trampling over their rights. If Linux wasn't commercially useful, some of the more extreme people at Microsoft could possibly start this shit against people who build their own computers and put Linux on them - picture this: "100% of the businesses on the planet buy our operating system and are quite happy with it, how can these people try to run their own computers without it? Obviously it's because Linux is nothing but a knock-off that is stealing our ideas. If they want to use their computers we have to give them permission!" said the Microsoft spokeslawyer.
The whole concept of suing people over money that you think you should be making give me a headache, which is what I think of the whole MAFIAA's case.
Exactly my thought - I have never had problems with any of the laptops with Intel graphics chipsets and Linux. In fact, Fedora pretty much kicks ass with the GMA950 on my Macbook as opposed to my desktop with an ATI card that has 2 DVI outputs (can never get both outputs to work at the same time in Fedora, but I freely admint I am probably screwing up the video configuration).
Their "Computer Science" grouping is odd - one of the "paradigms" is "multiple antenna, selective fading, smart antenna,..." which are not computer science topics, they're EE/wireless communications topics.
Some aspects of Computer Science and EE are definitely closely related, but this is kind of weird. Engineering seems under-represented - if there were a lot of engineering disciplines included (EE, Computer, mechanical, aerospace, etc.) but not under any sort of "engineering" heading, why is "applied physics" so small?
Cool chart nonetheless. This was a huge amount of info to sort through and graphically represent.
I'm pretty sure that the pricing for RHEL only allows updates and support for installation on a single PC or server if you buy one copy. If you install your purchased copy on numerous machines, you may violate the support agreement.
Of course, I freely admit that I may be wrong. Red Hat's website explains it all, I leave the legal deciphering to you. I just use Fedora instead - I can get the same server packages (I especially like RH's BIND config utility, system-config-bind) without the worry. I think I may check out CentOS 5 whenever they release it (about 2 weeks from what I understand).
What do you mean by complicated? You must not have seen anything about CDMA2000 or UMTS, each of which is orders of magnitude more complicated as far as physical layer stuff is concerned.
GSM is also fairly easy to spoof - doing a "man in the middle" attack where you pretend to be a base station is actually not hard to do. For that attack you don't even have to perform the authentication and encryption processes because in GSM the mobile is authenticated to the network, but the network is never authenticated to the mobile. Authentication and encryption isn't even mandatory!
Easvesdropping is a little harder but is still not impossible. They even designed one of the encryption algorithms to be weak - the algorithm known as A5/1 was meant for western Europe/Nato-like countries, whereas A5/2 was meant for Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere precisely because western governments wanted an easier time eavesdropping on those countries' traffic but increased security on their end.
Also, GSM security standards are not open standards - you have to be a member of the standards group in order to have access to them. For UMTS (GSM's successor), the standards are available to anyone.
Do a google search - the original authentication algorithm was cracked by university researchers without help from operators.
I think that you're exactly right - I bought a TI-89 in undergrad and the most I used it for in undergrad and grad school (EE) was for division and multiplication on tests and to play tetris in class.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. When you lay out cells (let's think about that hex board now, shall we) that is a geographic distribution. In certain cellular systems, frequencies are distributed amongst those hexagons - isn't that a geographic distribution? And when you go to CDMA systems (such as IS-95, CDMA2000, WCDMA, and UMTS) you can have adjoining cells operating at exactly the same frequency! The only difference now is a change in the spreading code that each base station is using. Or how about a GSM system using frequency hopping? Adjoining cells can all use the same frequency set and hopping sequence but each has its own specific offset.
So it is simply inaccurate to say that the cell part comes from frequency "cells". The cell part comes from having a bunch of spatially separated cells that allow multiuser communication while sharing some resource. The geographic spread of the cell towers is what facilitates the frequency planning you were talking about. When you are using your cell phone in a "cell," the "cell" you are in is described by numerous parameters, such as spatial coordinates, frequency, etc.
Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation (or, an elctric signal). They are all susceptible to noise and interference, it's just that the sources are different. For example, multipath propagation for wireless signals (i.e. your cellphone signal bouncing off different buildings and multiple "copies" of the signal arriving at the cell tower at slightly different times) is similar to refraction in a fiber cable due to imperfect manufacturing causing the signal to "split" and interfere with itself. Reception techniques in these two cases are similar.
And similarly, "noise" in a radio receiver is due to the finite temperature of the reception equipment. Signal to noise ratio is the ratio of received signal strength to this noise. Now, SNR can be incredibly high for a fiber system given lossless fiber and receivers kept at absolute zero, but we live in the real world. When compared to other channels, fiber may have less attenuation of the signal over distance, I guarantee you there is some. There has to be.
As I said in another post, visible light is not special because we can see it, it just seems that way. Radio waves, X-rays, and light are all the EM radiation at different frequencies. It is the characteristics of the medium, such as bandwidth and path loss, that define the communication system.
How does the "actual speed of the electrons" affect data rate (i.e. bandwidth)? It affects time delay obviously but you have to take into account other properties of the medium.
Let's get an idea of what we're talking about here - the distance from LA to New York City is approximately 3940km. Light travels at approximately 3x10^5km/s. This means that if light travels in a straight line that distance, it will reach NYC in about 13ms. There a reference that says that light travels down an optical fiber at around 70% that, which means that it will take about 18ms to reach NYC. "Current" traveling down a copper wire at 30% the speed of light over that distance will take about 43ms.
And remember, when you're talking about electro magnetic radiation, the only difference between "visible light", "radio frequencies", "microwaves", "X-rays", etc. is frequency. Visible light is not necessarily special, it just seems that way.