Posts by Christian Berger 4851 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007
Today you can buy 20 Euro radios with _digital_ signal procession for FM-radio. There is no reason why we won't have DAB radios for a similar price with next to no power consumption in a few years.
The only problem is, that outside of the UK, DAB adoption is quite slow. In Germany the "gold standard" for receiving radio is DVB-S. This is how you can get the best reception with 320k MP2 streams for stereo and even more for surround.
As for economies of scale, I'd go for DVB-T. It's cheaply available and has most benefits of DAB.
There is a huge group of companies using and developing for Windows for which the similarity of the desktop and server OSes is key. Those companies switched from DOS to Windows 9x and 2000 and have never tried anything else. They don't know what tar is. They don't understand ssh and some of them don't even run TCP/IP on their networks.
Those people choose Microsoft because it's the only thing they know.
People use MS-SQL server because most software only support that single vendor, not because they have a choice. Just look at the web where people did have a choice.
I think we are currently in the "home computer" stage of mobile computing. We have lots of different plattforms, with many manufacturers trying to control their market.
In my opinion Meego/Maemo is the "Unix" of that period. Perhaps not the cheapest system, perhaps not the most polished one, but fans regard it as the only one to actually get work done.
The huge advantage of Meego/Maemo is that it's essentially Debian. You can run all your normal Unixoid software on it. From day 1 you had not only ssh clients but ssh servers for it. It's a full fledged unixoid system with root access. If you want you could probably even compile your own software on it. Or you could log into your computer at home via SSH and use its applications.
In the computing world there is (nearly) no C-64 or Amiga any more. Same goes with Atari. Even Apple had to change to something more unixoid. The only non-unixoid competitor is Microsoft with its Windows. Of course todays unixoid systems are from a different code base than those old actual Unixes, however you can still run the same software. Emacs is available on Maemo just like used to be available on a 1980s Unix.
I mean OK sure, once _all_ browsers support it it might have a chance, but seriously images don't take up much bandwidth anymore. When loading a website, the images often barely add to the loading time. Advertisements often add a lot more as they often require a domain name lookup.
So you might get 40% less traffic for images, which might amount to less than a percent of total traffic, but you loose compatibility. That's a fairly bad tradeoff at the moment.
Just look at the example of PNG. It just now has surpassed GIF. It's the only image format in widespread use not existing before the WWW became popular. It took 15 years for it to become popular. Maybe in a decade or so Google's format will have reached a similar popularity, but it's to early for it now.
The question is unixoid vs windowsoid. The Unix philosophy offers a very simple way to learn.
With very little effort you can write small shell scripts to get any job you want done.
On the other hand you have the Windows(-like) philosophy, where every bit of programming takes huge amounts of effort. Therefore you buy software even for trivial tasks, even when the cost of that software is a lot larger than writing a small shell script. So you spend more money then you would otherwise do and haven't learned anything.
The reason why we often credit the advantages to Linux is that it simply is the most common decent unixoid system. Unix vendors made the mistake of being to expensive in the past. The remaining vendors (like Apple) made the mistake of trying to copy Windows/MacOS. Today only open source software has the resource and will to bring out proper and usable unixoid software.
If Microsoft would have pushed their Xenix instead of Windows there would be next to no open source.
Just think about it. Who is the biggest looser of cloud strategies? Microsoft. If that cloud solution would have worked, they would have probably slowly migrated to cheaper desktop platforms. They might have gained a small bit of monthly income, but lost a big lump of bi-annual income coming from new OS licenses, as well as a firm grip on part of the market.
However investors demand from Microsoft that they also stay "competitive" by also providing cloud services. So the best thing they can do is to deliberately make it fail, and blame that on the cloud concept itself. Microsoft has always been good at imposing their world view into the rest of the world. Just look how many people believe code signing is a security feature.
Customers can be happy Microsoft didn't go ahead and close down the service before deleting it.
After all it wouldn't be the first time they just discontinued an important program they previously advertised the future.
Examples include "Recorder", the first automatisation solution for Windows which disappeared with Windows 95. Or Windows for Pen computing. Or VBX components. Or more current Internet Explorer 6 or that drive extension technology in WHS.
I think I may have found the reason why people seem to believe in a deity when it comes to Apples success. If you believe in a free market society, a company like Apple would have failed decades ago.
The point is that there is no free market. Markets are constrained by market research which tries to find out what people will buy by finding out what they already bought. So new products will never come to the market.
If there was a free market, we would stop bothering copying iOS/Android/WP7/Blackberry over and over again, we would have a more professional smartphone segment of phones running usable systems based on desktop OSes. Mobile devices you can actually _do_ something with.
In the 1990s we actually learned typing on old electric typewriters of various types. The rationale behind that was that you couldn't cheat with them by deleting your typos.
More advanced classes actually to the text-processing lab where there was a 386 DX 50 running Microsoft Works for Xenix on about 20 terminals. This was a donation from a company. It worked fairly well. The only problem was the software handshaking which meant that terminals could just fail whenever there was a glitch. They just wouldn't start transmitting anything until they got their xon character.
Handshaking was _really_ needed as that box often couldn't keep up with it's 20 users typing all at the same time.
Of course tracking individuals is something bad, and Apple could, in theory face prosecution in some countries.
However it's understandable from the perspective of Apple. After all they rent out millions of devices. It is only understandable they want to know where they are.
Most people forget that when they 'buy' an iPhone, they actually just rent it. It's like buying a house, but the previous owner still has unlimited access to it.
If you don't like that, don't buy Apple. There's plenty of alternatives.
It's currently a really bad time to make movies. I'd wait at least 10 years since we are just before one of those entertainment bubbles. The movies made today are like the thousands of musicals made in the 1960s. Hugely expensive and popular at the time, however soon to be overshadowed by smaller, more independent productions, with less budget and a lot more creativity.
For example you request a file, then the server connects to the client in order to deliver it. That is ingenious. That way a different server can deliver that file. You can build gigantic server clusters. Each one storing only part of the directory tree.
... but in order to succeed you need to have a marginally better product than the competition. Putting on more restrictions won't win over more customers.
When will legal content providers finally learn that the only way to beat pirates is to drop DRM. Just look at the music business. It boomed the moment DRM was dropped. The same thing happened with DVD. Once the encryption was broken, the format boomed.
They are usually not accountable for their actions. If BT was a person or a small company, they would have lost their license. It's the same with Deutsche Telekom. They were involved in a similar scandal in which they data-mined the connection logs of journalists in order to find a leak. In the end, only one person was prosecuted to a mild prison sentence. The whole thing just smells like sacrificing a pawn.
Simply put, the problem is that we as a society need to pay for the development of DRM and it's circumvention. Plus we need to pay for planed obsolescence. While you can still use an Apple II today and even maintain it, you already need DRM-circumvention to get songs onto the earliest iPods. (unless you somewhere have a computer capable of running iTunes)
Wireless promises immense bandwidths at virtually no cost. The only problem is that the world isn't ready yet and still thinks in terms of network operators and network users. Once we learn that fixed position mains powered stations can also act as infrastructure, and we have the MIMO technology needed to take advantage of that, it might find a use.
Other than that, wireless broadband is still just a pipe dream. It rarely works where you need it, and when it works, it's hideously expensive.
I mean it has no advantage over Android/Blackberry/iOS. Like the others, it's a deliberately locked down system without any actual usage scenario.
The problem is, yet again, that they made an "operator phone". As long as the devices are made to serve the interests of the operators, they will not be able to be different.
Nokia actually tried to escape that problem with Maemo/Meego. The N770/N800/N810 deliberately didn't have any GSM chips inside so they wouldn't be sold by operators. The result were the first mobile devices which were more than just a portable notepad or media player.
You cannot differentiate yourself by following the others.
Microsoft has recognized that while Windows/Office still contributes largely to it's profits, this will probably change in the mid-term future.
That's why Microsoft desperately tries to get into other markets. For example that's why the XBox exists, or why they have kept Windows XP alive for so long, and made Windows Vista Starter.
And that's also the reason why Microsoft so desperately tries to copy the iPhone.
Microsoft now rightly sees the World Wide Web as something which will become important in the future. That's why they have converted MSN from an online service with dedicated dial-in POPs to a web-based service. That is also why they need to deliver a proper browser as for many people accessing the web has become way more important than executing Microsoft Office. Without a proper browser, people might just switch to other operating systems.
Disk storage typically is high performance and random access. This means that disks need to spin faster and therefore consume more power. If you only do backup, you only have sequential accesses. You can use cheap desktop SATA drives connected to Atom or even Via C7 boards for that.
The different generations have different philosophies. 2G was all about providing isochronous channels for voice and data, no packets or asynchronous communications. 3G added packets, but still has "connections".
4G would probably skip the "connection" idea all together and every station would get a certain amount of packet count assigned so it can just start sending IP packets without having to set up a connection.
I'd expect 5G to finally get rid of the distinction between the network and it's users. Just like a meshed network. (Obviously battery operated stations would usually be excluded) Together with modern adaptive antenna system, this could, as a side effect, also provide much higher bandwidth. Plus it would be disaster proof and a _lot_ cheaper to operate.
I once looked that up. It's literally just a few houses near a road.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=New+York,+Lincoln,+Great+Britain&aq=0&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=51.841773,54.316406&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=New+York,+Lincoln,+United+Kingdom&ll=53.078868,-0.14117&spn=0.009693,0.021436&t=h&z=16
Transformer coupling only works for a distance of a few wavelengths. Once you are in the far field, you get a wave which needs an electrical component which cannot form in a conductive material.
Further more Eddy currents will greatly attenuate the magnetic fields at high frequencies long before that.
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