Posts by Robert E A Harvey

Umm.

I started my working life as a ship's radio officer in the 1960s. All the gear was based on thermionic valves. Now most of the traffic was still WT and 'keying' used to close down the receiver to avoid overload. But we had these exotic things called RT that allowed telephony. And the gear allowed for simplex, half-duplex, & full duplex working. These folks are talking about full duplex.

The trick then was frequency domain separation. Any decent communications receiver had an IF strip with very steep 'sides' to the selectivity. A few tens of KHz separation on a 16MHz base worked just fine. People could talk & listen at the same time without messing about with pressels.

Now if they are trying to achieve full duplex on the same frequency, yes that is clever but I don't think even the proposed trick is novel. I think it was called 'RF bucking'

And it suggests that the people who did the original wifi band planning were twits.

And the idea of it doubling throughput is doubtful. Traffic is rarely symmetrical. Hardly likely to make the iPlayer stream 'Top Gear' any quicker is it?

(pressel == PTT)

The collaborative motive

I think all of this was best summed up by the 'Stone Soup' fable that used to be part of the documentation for Fractint. People achieve more together than apart.

Now it has been some years since I released code under the GPL but my motive whenever I did was to (unknowingly) get more value out of the work I'd put in. I had spent a couple of days solving a problem that I knew other people would need to solve as well. Why should they waste their time when a solution existed? And, of course, I got the chance to pay back something for all the GPL code I was using.

Look at Wikipedia. For all the lies, self-agrandisment, turf wars, and us tv series it is infected with, the core content is fantastically useful, and has been contributed to make the world a better place. I love where I live, and want to share that pleasure with other folk, so I freely give my photos to Geograph. No individual photo is worth anything to me, I still have it to look at. But together everyone's pictures becomes a special thing.

It seems to me that this is a very old idea. Mathematicians have usually been sponsored in one way or another, but their researches have been given away freely to benefit us all. The output did not become the private property of anyone.

In the 20th century people started keeping algorithms secret, proprietory. In the 21st century the trend continues. The world is a worse place fr it.

Bring back the stocks

I have a number of suggestions for them:

Bring back the stocks, for a start. Nothing like leaving someone out in the rain for two days to soil his pants and get laughed at by his mates as punishment for behaving like a dick.

Ban Lawyers in all cases not likely to result in a prison sentence. On both sides. let the Judge ask some searching questions, and allow questions from the public gallery.

Ban TV adverts for compensation lawyers, or in fact any sort of land shark at all.

Replace the insurance and banking ombudsmen with committees of other policy holders, chosen at random by computer.

Just repeal the law that costs pubs a thousand quid for a music licence for one night, and replace it with nothing at all. Then start to ask really serious questions about why we have any controls on opening hours. Find some way to stop Greene King buying up and ruining small hotels and make them concentrate on brewing good beer again.

Remove Sky's apparent monopoly on big screens in pubs. With any luck football will stop being broadcast at all.

Oh, and bring back the Sunday trading laws. I really like Sundays in Germany where all the shops are shut. You can sit and a have a few beers in peace instead of traipsing round buying sofas and shoes and sealing wax and soup and suits and sausage and suzukis and and Sauternes and spacehoppers and stuff and stuff and stuff...

Teaming up with Microsoft turns it into a “three-horse race”.

Oh? is he suggesting that it wasn't already? Sounds like tacit agreement that WP7 was going nowhere.

Its still WP7. does that mean we have a 3-horse race but rather less than 12 horses legs?

Delighted

I have been depressively predicting WebOs would be too little, too late. I have been excited by this announcement. if HP can pull it off, I'll be delighted. And, am already thinking of splashing out on the pad and the phone. Bring on the PC!

Anything that chips away at M$ smugness is good, too.

Battery life?

The complex processing has always meant that DAB is power-hungry. My Sony portable can eat 4xAA batteries in 8 hours.

What happens to the phones? what do nokia say happens?

Different focus

I think Nokia might have made more of a success of meego or QT if it wasn't continually distracting itself re-engineering the same phones over and over again as new indistinguishable handsets, if it had not so consistently whored itself to dodgy network operators who wanted things that ticked all the buzzwords, but were so cheap they didn't actually do any of the things on the box well enough to be useful.