Then how on earth do civil engineers manage to build bridges & buildings that have an excellent chance of not falling down for a reasonable price in a reasonable amount of time?
I can think of a few reasons:
professionalism
responsibility/liability
methodical
standardized etc etc.
In another post, someone compared the two possible faults, design/implementation - i.e. a design fault would be the designer didn't specify enough rivets for the load, an implementation fault would be if not all the rivets that were listed in the design were installed.
I'm not sure how we can apply this idea to code, but if people's lives are on the line, we must find a way.
We get so annoyed with spam/prudish about porn, that we institute spelling filters.
So everyone, including the spammers and the porn kings, learns to misspell to get around them.
Exhibit B.
We worry about network security so we firewall our networks except for port 80.
So everyone, including the virus writers, the script kiddies, & microsoft (.net) learns to use port 80 to do their work.
====
If we had grammer filters, the same thing would happen. People would use incorrect grammar or creative grammar to defeat it.
Everyone says we need more AI, or that filtering will work once AI is perfected. We've already had one better - during WWII, mail/telegrams/etc were monitored and censored by real people with RI (Ral Intelligence) and bad stuff still got through sometimes.
There is no end to this. The only way to win is not to play.
If you don't trust you employees not to surf porn online, maybe you should be thinking about new employees?
The only saving grace is that most people will never be cluefull enough to see this cycle, so the average employee, upon realizing his sexy email has been rejected by the system, concludes that computers are pretty smart and he'd better not try again.
Well, I have eliminated TV from my life, except from the odd Discovery channel show I watch with a friend of mine in the building, or maybe a movie now and again. You're right - it's here to stay, but it doesn't take that much effort to break the habit and life is so much better without. I encourage everyone to try.
I used to be ambivelant about whether prospective roommates of mine had tv's or not, until I realized that with a tube in the house, I became a total addict (CNN/Discovery/TLC etc). So I went cold turkey, and I won't room w/anyone w/a tv, and I don't miss it.
"... but when I'm not there, there's nothing wrong with leaving the kids in front of the tube instead of playing outside or reading a book..."
".. but the sad truth is that parents *choose* to let children watch a lot of TV, likely because they themselves were brought up wathing a lot of TV and can't get outside the system long enough to see how ludicrous is all is..."
"And no one would deny that simply blocking a whole ton of content by encouraging mindless tv watching over the various means children have a amused and educated themselves over millions of years without rhyme or reason is wrong and no excuse for parenting."
"So I'm not gong to let my child go through life with blinders on, everyone else watches 10 hours of tv a day, so I'm going to do my part to make sure my kid watches 10 hours a day to, so he can have the same blinders as his peers, and in fact myself..."
"But when he's seeing the violence, gratuitous sexual content, and drug users and thieves being glorified, and cops being made out to look like idiots, then I want to be there to legitimize the notion that his amazing machine of a body is made for nothing but sitting down and pressing buttons on a remote."
Will you also mention that people who sit around watching tv all day eat more junk, get alzhiemers (sp) disease more often, get less excerise and die of an early heart attack while dripping kfc down the front of their shirt, eyes focused tightly on the 60hz flicking image of the celebrity of the moment?
I may have been trolled, but I'm sure enough people think like this anyways. Turn off the TV, open your eyes, and walk outside. If you don't like what you see, start walking and don't stop until you do. Take your kids with you. We'll all be better for people waking up from their media induced comas.
An individual has the right to the pursuit of happiness and if that path leads him to create a corporation with like minded individuals, so be it. But whether or not they get paid is purely in the hands of fate.
It's thinking like this that lets people roll over & play dead when corporations demand compensation for some new law that would affect their business. Do we let hit-men sue the government for making their line of work illegal?
... usenet?.. you know, that place where, along with mailing lists, where we'll have our discussions after all the waste.of.breath.and.funding.com discussion sites dry up.
While certainly people abused usenet, perhaps none so much as Scientology, at least it's harder to shut down.
Maybe we'll have to graft a chat/newsgroup function onto gnutella/freenet to finally stop worrying about all this bullshit.
> These web sites have grown way beyond the realm > of affordable to operate by volunteers and > donors.
I'm getting tired of seeing this line repeated around town these days. Many people will remember that we had and still have, a functioning message forum system for the same tens of thousands of people who read slashdot. It's called usenet. If slashdot and sites like it go into the toilet, rest assured that usenet, moderated usenet & listserv's will be waiting for us. In fact, maybe someone will come up with a way to structure a newsgroup like slashdot.
(no -source option because this is Slashdot, and as we all know too well, the content is much more redundant than repeating html tags, much, much more redundant)
shelf:~$ ls -l slash.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 stu users 20394 Feb 12 21:09 slash.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 stu users 23750 Feb 12 21:09 slash.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 stu users 93867 Feb 12 21:09 slash.txt
shelf:~$
This gives a ratio of 0.22. Surprisingly, if you feed the same page to bzip2, but at +2, the ratio increases to 0.27, implying that there is more entropy and thus, more information, in higher scoring posts, which of course, we know to be false:)
Perhaps with this firm mathematical footing,/. can proceed to a new chapter in moderation - moderation by bzip2. Articles which receive high compression ratios are marked down automatically. Of course, this would make it possible to earn a lot of karma, simply by posting random garbage. oh wait..
If you read the business press long enough to see an article/interview/how-to on rebates, it's stated plain as day that rebates are an attractive alternative to actual price cuts because only about 10% ever bother to file for the cash.
Whose fault is that, the customers who make a stupid buying decision based on the after-rebate price, but then don't bother to send it in? Or the business people who exploit that tendancy? If your answer is the latter, then there will be a lot more wrong with the world that you will know what to do with, as exploiting one human weakness or another is the basis of most of our society.
Recognize that while rebates are genuine offers, they are simply bait for the purchase of the product. It's sad, but most of humanity will be swayed by the second of these two offers:
"You can finance the amazing low $10,000 price of the amazing troll-in-ator at only 5% per annum! OR! If you would PREFER to have COLD HARD CASH, we'll give you $500 cash back on every purchase!!!! (10% OAC)"
Or rather, it is not the function or substance of the price reduction that is important to the american "consumer" it is the form, fashion, or style of the discount that matters most. Getting cash back from a big corp is the average american's wet dream, so rebates sell like hot cakes even if the average rebatee loses in the end.
Re:Microsoft == bad partner, no multimedia savvy
on
Live Streaming Video?
·
· Score: 2
It's great that this "graphics god", Jim Blinn has a home page on microsoft.com, one of the largest companies in the world, a company with a vested interest in seeing people use ever more complex hardware & software....
... and he doesn't use anything on that page that would be unfamiliar to the first version of Mosaic:)
1. If you want me to pay for information, make me pay for information. It's not like all those thousands of people reading somethingawful.com are hacking their way in.
2. If you want to get me to read ads by providing interesting content, join the club. That's what newspapers, radio & tv do.
3. No one, in the long term, has, "done their part", by watching ads. To carry your analogy further, why on earth do you have the right to watch an ad that cost time & money to produce without buying something??
Do you buy products you hear advertised on the radio out of sympathy for the radio station?
a) a 300 hp car might do 20mpg, but a smaller engine would do more
b) distance means nothing without comparing load or weight moved. Your 300 hp car is moving 1 person (most likely in North America these days) or about 300 lbs (most likely in North America these days) By contrast, you do not need anywhere near 300 horses to move 300 lbs 100 miles - more like 1.
obOff-Topic: I just had the most horrible experience - as I finished the last sentence, I realized that MS Word grammar check would have flagged it, which disturbs me on 2 levels:
1) that I have spent enough time working around MS Word "features" that I recognize MS Grammar (New-Speak) on sight
2) the horrifying vision of the slashdot lameness filter paired with MS Grammar check.
... "It looks like you're posting a troll - would you like some help?"
Use CryptoPad! (no link, sorry - great blowfish based encrypted memo pad replacement)
Re:The real social implications of fusion power.
on
The Quest For Fusion
·
· Score: 1
While I don't doubt that cheap ubiquitous fusion power will change many things in the world, suggesting that it some sort of pancea for social & political problems is arrogant and dangerous.
The have-not's of the world exist because of social and political issues, like corrupt third world governments and growing cash crops for export instead of food for self-sufficiency.
New space micro-gravity enhanced nano-servers that can handle the/. effect:
Error: 500
Location:/studies/study_main.jsp
Internal Servlet Error:
javax.servlet.ServletException: JZ006: Caught IOException: java.io.IOException: Broken pipe
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.PageContextImpl.handlePa geException(PageContextImpl.java:386)
at studies._0002fstudies_0002fstudy_0005fmain_0002ejs pstudy_0005fmain_jsp_0._jspService(_0002fstudies_0 002fstudy_0005fmain_0002ejspstudy_0005fmain_jsp_0. java:104)
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(Http JspBase.java:126)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:853)
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.JspServlet$JspServletWra pper.service(JspServlet.java:174)
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.JspServlet.serviceJspFil e(JspServlet.java:261)
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.JspServlet.service(JspSe rvlet.java:369)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:853)
at org.apache.tomcat.core.ServletWrapper.handleReques t(ServletWrapper.java:503)
at org.apache.tomcat.core.ContextManager.service(Cont extManager.java:559)
at org.apache.tomcat.service.connector.Ajp12Connectio nHandler.processConnection(Ajp12ConnectionHandler. java:156)
at org.apache.tomcat.service.TcpWorkerThread.run(Pool TcpEndpoint.java:366)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable. run(ThreadPool.java:411)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:484)
And when you show off your new web site to the boss,
be sure to do it at 9600 or 14,400 baud (the rate "56K" modems run at over much of the nation).
Heh... this is my favourite. We were auditioning some web design firms a while back and I was sure to uninstall the flash plugin & nuke the cache an hour before they arrived, so that their demo times would be more realistic.
Nothing better than watching an overpaid 23 yr old wannabe flash hotshot stumbling through the flash plugin download & installation.
"oh.. you don't have flash.. ok.. well uh.. this will just take a second or two for most people.." (cue 15min of pain as he watches his asking price for his work sink)
Wasn't it the thrust to weight ratio? Sparrow/Swallow? I can't remember anymore.. I used to have the whole thing memorized - so much for my teen years.
Actually, $499 without a service plan is pretty standard. The provider cannot guarantee the phone will only be used on his/her network, so they cannot guarantee any residual income from selling you a phone. If they sold it far, far, far, below cost, as most phones are sold, you could walk across the street (or the border) and use your phone on someone else's network.
All those fancy PCS phones you can get for anywhere from $0 to $100 are actually worth many hundreds more, but the provider is counting on the phone to be used on their network. That's why the phones (gsm or not) are locked in some way to the network. If you buy an unlocked phone, you can use it anywhere, so it's not going to be sold below cost. And if you have service with a company that subsidizes the purchase price of your phone (aka all of the cell co.'s) then if you don't upgrade your phone every year to the most outrageous model, the air-time rates you pay are subsidizing those who do!
This has nothing to do with Handspring, unless anyone here thinks that a pda manufacturer is out there building GSM base stations.
They are simple repackaging someone else's GSM coverage, and as the faq says, one of the great things about GSM is, if you already have a gsm phone, just pop your sim card into your visor-phone & you're set!
So if coverage is weak, it's the coverage of whichever cell network they've bought time on. If you don't like the coverage of one network, choose another. (but of course, visorphone is gsm only, so you'll be sol, but then you did do some research before plunking down $300 USD, yes?)
Kind of ironic that the Eff/All Charities donation pages don't seem to work with linux at all (Netscape 4.51). All Charities just keeps giving me the same style-sheet munged home page, no matter what I try to do, and if I hit "join w/non US visa/mc" I get blank white page. I can view source and see everything, but nothing is rendered.
GSM/TDMA/CDMA/FDMA/etc are not really the same type of thing, and can't really be compared. CDMA/TDMA/FDMA are air interfaces - methods of moduating data & sharing spectrum among multiple users. GSM is an all-encompassing system for mobile phones which uses TDMA & FDMA to get it's data on the air. What most people think of as TDMA is actually a standard called IS-136 that happens to use TDMA, likewise IS-95 is often called CDMA, even though it is not the only system that uses CDMA and if things go well, GSM (3g) will soon use CDMA too.
Finally, the voice compression performance and quality is also, completely seperate from both the air interface and the over all system in place. GSM/IS-95/IS-136 can all use a number of different vocoders to compress your speech, all offering varying bandwidth/quality tradeoffs.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd need a bigger mouse, something that would accomodate your whole hand and perhaps part of your forearm, in this case.
You need 2.4mbs to co-ordinate a schedule?!?
Oh, I forgot, you use Outlook CE.
Then how on earth do civil engineers manage to build bridges & buildings that have an excellent chance of not falling down for a reasonable price in a reasonable amount of time?
I can think of a few reasons:
professionalism
responsibility/liability
methodical
standardized etc etc.
In another post, someone compared the two possible faults, design/implementation - i.e. a design fault would be the designer didn't specify enough rivets for the load, an implementation fault would be if not all the rivets that were listed in the design were installed.
I'm not sure how we can apply this idea to code, but if people's lives are on the line, we must find a way.
Exhibit A.
We get so annoyed with spam/prudish about porn, that we institute spelling filters.
So everyone, including the spammers and the porn kings, learns to misspell to get around them.
Exhibit B.
We worry about network security so we firewall our networks except for port 80.
So everyone, including the virus writers, the script kiddies, & microsoft (.net) learns to use port 80 to do their work.
====
If we had grammer filters, the same thing would happen. People would use incorrect grammar or creative grammar to defeat it.
Everyone says we need more AI, or that filtering will work once AI is perfected. We've already had one better - during WWII, mail/telegrams/etc were monitored and censored by real people with RI (Ral Intelligence) and bad stuff still got through sometimes.
There is no end to this. The only way to win is not to play.
If you don't trust you employees not to surf porn online, maybe you should be thinking about new employees?
The only saving grace is that most people will never be cluefull enough to see this cycle, so the average employee, upon realizing his sexy email has been rejected by the system, concludes that computers are pretty smart and he'd better not try again.
my C$0.02
Well, I have eliminated TV from my life, except from the odd Discovery channel show I watch with a friend of mine in the building, or maybe a movie now and again. You're right - it's here to stay, but it doesn't take that much effort to break the habit and life is so much better without. I encourage everyone to try.
I used to be ambivelant about whether prospective roommates of mine had tv's or not, until I realized that with a tube in the house, I became a total addict (CNN/Discovery/TLC etc). So I went cold turkey, and I won't room w/anyone w/a tv, and I don't miss it.
l8r
"... but when I'm not there, there's nothing wrong with leaving the kids in front of the tube instead of playing outside or reading a book ..."
".. but the sad truth is that parents *choose* to let children watch a lot of TV, likely because they themselves were brought up wathing a lot of TV and can't get outside the system long enough to see how ludicrous is all is..."
"And no one would deny that simply blocking a whole ton of content by encouraging mindless tv watching over the various means children have a amused and educated themselves over millions of years without rhyme or reason is wrong and no excuse for parenting."
"So I'm not gong to let my child go through life with blinders on, everyone else watches 10 hours of tv a day, so I'm going to do my part to make sure my kid watches 10 hours a day to, so he can have the same blinders as his peers, and in fact myself..."
"But when he's seeing the violence, gratuitous sexual content, and drug users and thieves being glorified, and cops being made out to look like idiots, then I want to be there to legitimize the notion that his amazing machine of a body is made for nothing but sitting down and pressing buttons on a remote."
Will you also mention that people who sit around watching tv all day eat more junk, get alzhiemers (sp) disease more often, get less excerise and die of an early heart attack while dripping kfc down the front of their shirt, eyes focused tightly on the 60hz flicking image of the celebrity of the moment?
I may have been trolled, but I'm sure enough people think like this anyways. Turn off the TV, open your eyes, and walk outside. If you don't like what you see, start walking and don't stop until you do. Take your kids with you. We'll all be better for people waking up from their media induced comas.
Good luck.
A business does *not* have the right to be paid.
An individual has the right to the pursuit of happiness and if that path leads him to create a corporation with like minded individuals, so be it. But whether or not they get paid is purely in the hands of fate.
It's thinking like this that lets people roll over & play dead when corporations demand compensation for some new law that would affect their business. Do we let hit-men sue the government for making their line of work illegal?
... usenet? .. you know, that place where, along with mailing lists, where we'll have our discussions after all the waste.of.breath.and.funding.com discussion sites dry up.
While certainly people abused usenet, perhaps none so much as Scientology, at least it's harder to shut down.
Maybe we'll have to graft a chat/newsgroup function onto gnutella/freenet to finally stop worrying about all this bullshit.
> These web sites have grown way beyond the realm > of affordable to operate by volunteers and > donors.
I'm getting tired of seeing this line repeated around town these days. Many people will remember that we had and still have, a functioning message forum system for the same tens of thousands of people who read slashdot. It's called usenet. If slashdot and sites like it go into the toilet, rest assured that usenet, moderated usenet & listserv's will be waiting for us. In fact, maybe someone will come up with a way to structure a newsgroup like slashdot.
You're compressing html - html is much more structured and redundant than english.
lynx http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/13/024025 4&mode=nested&threshold=-1 > slash.txt
(no -source option because this is Slashdot, and as we all know too well, the content is much more redundant than repeating html tags, much, much more redundant)
shelf:~$ ls -l slash.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 stu users 20394 Feb 12 21:09 slash.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 stu users 23750 Feb 12 21:09 slash.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 stu users 93867 Feb 12 21:09 slash.txt
shelf:~$
This gives a ratio of 0.22. Surprisingly, if you feed the same page to bzip2, but at +2, the ratio increases to 0.27, implying that there is more entropy and thus, more information, in higher scoring posts, which of course, we know to be false :)
Perhaps with this firm mathematical footing, /. can proceed to a new chapter in moderation - moderation by bzip2. Articles which receive high compression ratios are marked down automatically. Of course, this would make it possible to earn a lot of karma, simply by posting random garbage. oh wait..
If you read the business press long enough to see an article/interview/how-to on rebates, it's stated plain as day that rebates are an attractive alternative to actual price cuts because only about 10% ever bother to file for the cash.
Whose fault is that, the customers who make a stupid buying decision based on the after-rebate price, but then don't bother to send it in? Or the business people who exploit that tendancy? If your answer is the latter, then there will be a lot more wrong with the world that you will know what to do with, as exploiting one human weakness or another is the basis of most of our society.
Recognize that while rebates are genuine offers, they are simply bait for the purchase of the product. It's sad, but most of humanity will be swayed by the second of these two offers:
"You can finance the amazing low $10,000 price of the amazing troll-in-ator at only 5% per annum! OR! If you would PREFER to have COLD HARD CASH, we'll give you $500 cash back on every purchase!!!! (10% OAC)"
Or rather, it is not the function or substance of the price reduction that is important to the american "consumer" it is the form, fashion, or style of the discount that matters most. Getting cash back from a big corp is the average american's wet dream, so rebates sell like hot cakes even if the average rebatee loses in the end.
It's great that this "graphics god", Jim Blinn has a home page on microsoft.com, one of the largest companies in the world, a company with a vested interest in seeing people use ever more complex hardware & software....
:)
... and he doesn't use anything on that page that would be unfamiliar to the first version of Mosaic
1. If you want me to pay for information, make me pay for information. It's not like all those thousands of people reading somethingawful.com are hacking their way in.
2. If you want to get me to read ads by providing interesting content, join the club. That's what newspapers, radio & tv do.
3. No one, in the long term, has, "done their part", by watching ads. To carry your analogy further, why on earth do you have the right to watch an ad that cost time & money to produce without buying something??
Do you buy products you hear advertised on the radio out of sympathy for the radio station?
No, I didn't think so.
ahh... ...no.
a) a 300 hp car might do 20mpg, but a smaller engine would do more
b) distance means nothing without comparing load or weight moved. Your 300 hp car is moving 1 person (most likely in North America these days) or about 300 lbs (most likely in North America these days) By contrast, you do not need anywhere near 300 horses to move 300 lbs 100 miles - more like 1.
obOff-Topic: I just had the most horrible experience - as I finished the last sentence, I realized that MS Word grammar check would have flagged it, which disturbs me on 2 levels:
1) that I have spent enough time working around MS Word "features" that I recognize MS Grammar (New-Speak) on sight
2) the horrifying vision of the slashdot lameness filter paired with MS Grammar check.
... "It looks like you're posting a troll - would you like some help?"
... "Passive voice - try bashing Microsoft"
... etc...
Use CryptoPad! (no link, sorry - great blowfish based encrypted memo pad replacement)
The have-not's of the world exist because of social and political issues, like corrupt third world governments and growing cash crops for export instead of food for self-sufficiency.
Error: 500
Location: /studies/study_main.jsp
Internal Servlet Error:
javax.servlet.ServletException: JZ006: Caught IOException: java.io.IOException: Broken pipe at org.apache.jasper.runtime.PageContextImpl.handlePa geException(PageContextImpl.java:386)
at studies._0002fstudies_0002fstudy_0005fmain_0002ejs pstudy_0005fmain_jsp_0._jspService(_0002fstudies_0 002fstudy_0005fmain_0002ejspstudy_0005fmain_jsp_0. java:104)
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(Http JspBase.java:126)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet .java:853)
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.JspServlet$JspServletWra pper.service(JspServlet.java:174)
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.JspServlet.serviceJspFil e(JspServlet.java:261)
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.JspServlet.service(JspSe rvlet.java:369)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet .java:853)
at org.apache.tomcat.core.ServletWrapper.handleReques t(ServletWrapper.java:503)
at org.apache.tomcat.core.ContextManager.service(Cont extManager.java:559)
at org.apache.tomcat.service.connector.Ajp12Connectio nHandler.processConnection(Ajp12ConnectionHandler. java:156)
at org.apache.tomcat.service.TcpWorkerThread.run(Pool TcpEndpoint.java:366)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable. run(ThreadPool.java:411)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:484)
Heh... this is my favourite. We were auditioning some web design firms a while back and I was sure to uninstall the flash plugin & nuke the cache an hour before they arrived, so that their demo times would be more realistic.
Nothing better than watching an overpaid 23 yr old wannabe flash hotshot stumbling through the flash plugin download & installation.
"oh.. you don't have flash.. ok.. well uh.. this will just take a second or two for most people.." (cue 15min of pain as he watches his asking price for his work sink)
oh and you forgot your end tag:
#end RANT_AGAINST_BAD_WWW_DESIGN
Wasn't it the thrust to weight ratio? Sparrow/Swallow? I can't remember anymore.. I used to have the whole thing memorized - so much for my teen years.
All those fancy PCS phones you can get for anywhere from $0 to $100 are actually worth many hundreds more, but the provider is counting on the phone to be used on their network. That's why the phones (gsm or not) are locked in some way to the network. If you buy an unlocked phone, you can use it anywhere, so it's not going to be sold below cost. And if you have service with a company that subsidizes the purchase price of your phone (aka all of the cell co.'s) then if you don't upgrade your phone every year to the most outrageous model, the air-time rates you pay are subsidizing those who do!
They are simple repackaging someone else's GSM coverage, and as the faq says, one of the great things about GSM is, if you already have a gsm phone, just pop your sim card into your visor-phone & you're set!
So if coverage is weak, it's the coverage of whichever cell network they've bought time on. If you don't like the coverage of one network, choose another. (but of course, visorphone is gsm only, so you'll be sol, but then you did do some research before plunking down $300 USD, yes?)
Wow! I think the parent is the highest rated and perhaps, first legitimate use of a goatse.cx link!
Kind of ironic that the Eff/All Charities donation pages don't seem to work with linux at all (Netscape 4.51). All Charities just keeps giving me the same style-sheet munged home page, no matter what I try to do, and if I hit "join w/non US visa/mc" I get blank white page. I can view source and see everything, but nothing is rendered.
GSM/TDMA/CDMA/FDMA/etc are not really the same type of thing, and can't really be compared. CDMA/TDMA/FDMA are air interfaces - methods of moduating data & sharing spectrum among multiple users. GSM is an all-encompassing system for mobile phones which uses TDMA & FDMA to get it's data on the air. What most people think of as TDMA is actually a standard called IS-136 that happens to use TDMA, likewise IS-95 is often called CDMA, even though it is not the only system that uses CDMA and if things go well, GSM (3g) will soon use CDMA too.
Finally, the voice compression performance and quality is also, completely seperate from both the air interface and the over all system in place. GSM/IS-95/IS-136 can all use a number of different vocoders to compress your speech, all offering varying bandwidth/quality tradeoffs.
All this and more can be explained here:
http://www.arcx.com/sites/
http://www.arcx.com/sites/CDMAvsTDMA.htm