Selected Daily Notes Archive (Home Page has current notes)
Oldest (Page 1) to most new (Page 52)
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) (23) (24) (25) (26) (27) (28) (29) (30) (31) (32) (33) (34) (35) (36) (37) (38) (39) (40) (41) (42) (43)(44) (45)(46) (47) (48) (49) (50) (51) (52)
September 25, 2004
A happy and blessed Yom Kippur to all of our Jewish friends, and especially to Sharon, Princess, my best friend. Although she now lives in Atlanta with her family she is never far from my thoughts and prayers. Do you know any Jewish people in Florida? The National Weather Service put out a thoughtful comment just recently, concerning hurricane Jeanne:
"WE ARE REMINDED THAT YOM KIPPUR...A SOLEMN JEWISH HOLIDAY...WILL LAST UNTIL SUNDOWN SATURDAY. SOME OF YOUR JEWISH NEIGHBORS IN THE WATCH AND WARNING AREAS OBSERVING YOM KIPPUR WILL NOT BE LISTENING TO RADIOS OR WATCHING TV...AND MAY NOT BE AWARE OF THE HURRICANE SITUATION."
September 24, 2004
Pay for privateline.com!#*!?
What do you think about privateline.com having a subscription side? Old content would still be free, new content would have a charge. Is there anything I could produce that you would be willing to pay for? More on new technologies? Self serving corporate press releases honestly analyzed? Or are there already too many telecom news' sites? Should things stay the way they are? Be honest. Let me know your thoughts by clicking here (internal link). Thanks in advance.
Patent filing
Q. Where's it best to file a patent?
A. (From Professor Richard Levine (internal link))
Simply put, in the countries you think you'll get the most money from your invention. The United States, certainly, but other country filings are more difficult to decide on.
Due to a treaty on patents in the European Union, an inventor can file a patent application at the EU patent office in Munich, Germany, in the English language, and specify which EU countries the patent should cover. Each country costs more, a lot more, but it is convenient and somewhat more economical to file just one European application instead of many different ones, if you are sure that the invention requires multi-national patent coverage.
Very few inventions are economically feasible to patent for all of Europe. Many inventors are forced, due to the filing and patent attorney costs, to chose just a few large European countries such as Britain, France and Germany, and merely swallow the disappointment of not being able to have patent coverage and royalties in Italy or the Czech Republic, for example. You need to estimate how much royalty income you could reasonably expect from each country in comparison to the costs of patent coverage there.
Regards,
Richard Levine
Down on the river
Spent a good afternoon prospecting in the canyon of the North Fork of the American River below Auburn. The canyon sports "foliated green walls from metamorphosed volcanic ash." Indeed. And it's pretty, too. :-) Once while trying to cross the river the current picked me up and swept me toward a set of rapids. A bit of quick swimming got Your Editor to the other side and all ended well. Beautiful day.
More on yesterday's comments
I can see Nokia's new products doing what the X-10 appliances do, but wirelessly and with an ability to easily network with our computers and other electronic devices. Ever heard of X-10? (external link) It's been around at least a decade and much of it works well. Nokia's new line could incorporate many X-10 features for the home, and then go beyond it. With Nokia's technology I can easily imagine your refrigerator taking a picture of its contents, then sending the picture to you at the grocery store. Or having your Bluetooth enabled car noticing it needs an oil change, then scheduling an appointment with the mechanic.
September 23, 2004
Nokia's 6670 smart phone's accessories (external link) should foster brand loyalty and creativity. Do I sound like a press release? Let me make a comparison. A camera's practicality and professionalism relies on a system, not just the camera itself. Nikon, Cannon, and Leica's lenses, film backs, flash accessories, autowinders, and so on make their basic cameras do an amazing host of jobs. You start collecting these accessories and pretty soon you have a bag of brand specific gear that works together well. You have a system.
Unretouched Nokia photo taken with a 6670. Resolution is 1152x864 pixels. Good enough for web work.
Nokia and others are now moving toward this camera model, coincidentally, and happily enough, with mobile phones that take pictures. Nokia's 6670's accessories include a wireless keyboard to compose documents on, a GPS unit, a flash unit, a wireless headset, no more stupid cords, and best of all, a remote monitoring camera.
The remote needs a power supply but connects wirelessly over the same GSM network your 6670 uses. Dial the remote with your mobile and see what it sees. Or have it send you an image on schedule or taken when activity trips its built in motion sensor. Has an infrared source to take low light or night time images, as well as a microphone to send you audio. Very cool. Read more by clicking here (external link).
These products may seem like vaporware now, Nokia won't introduce them for some months and then not in the America's just yet, I do think the company will gather a following. I don't expect my phone to do everything, I mainly want it for voice. But this a la carte approach, one accessory here and there, is very compelling. It lets us make the phone be what we want. Good things will have to follow.
September 22, 2004
"'Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head"!' George Orwell, 1984
A death cult
While al Qaida and their supporters are Islamic fascists I think divining Islam will not completely explain their motives, any more than understanding Christianity helped us know David Koresh or Jim Jones. We can only judge al Qaida by their actions. Their behavior, no matter how based, no matter how rooted, is totally unacceptable in a modern society. They are a death cult and they need to be destroyed.
In 1995 Aum Shnrikyo terrorists released sarin nerve gas into the Tokyo subway system. It's natural for us to ask why al Qaida and Aum Shnrikyo want to kill people but this is probably pointless; cults are notoriously difficult or impossible to understand. The 39 men and women of the Heaven's Gate Cult in 1997 killed themselves to ride the Hal Bop comet. Can we understand that? Do we need to?
A cultist cannot give us rational reasons any more than a mentally ill person can. Can you communicate in a rational way with a drunk? What will that profit you? Could Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, or Hess supply you with a coherent rationale for conducting World War II and killing six million Jews? No, of course not. These people were insane. We followed Hitler and his people to their last bunker and destroyed them, just as we need to do with al Qaida.
We may think we're being more understanding, more caring, more enlightened, if we do more analysis. When that's just being ineffective and ultimately stupid. Less intellectual. Leave the analysis to the historians after this war is won or reduced to a low level fire fight. I don't care how a rabid dog that is biting people got rabies, I only care that it dies. Not because I love its death, but because I love the lives of the people it is hurting. Is that hard to understand? al Qaida is a death cult. Kill the bastards.
September 21, 2004
Well organized writing
Confused about the new GSM oriented technologies?: GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, and HSDPA? So am I. But Peter Rysavy of Rysavy Research (external link) does an excellent job in this paper of explaining them (external link). Well worth a read. An industry paper, it promotes GSM services too much, overstates data transfer rates, and promises developments sooner than they'll occur. Still, that's expected, every industry group, in this case 3G Americas (external link), tries to push their solutions. In fairness, Rysavy does mention the CDMA 2000 variants, as well as WiFi and WIMAX. Contact me if the link to the paper dies, I have archived a copy.
Table from Data Capabilities: GPRS to HSDPA, by Peter Rysavy of Rysavy Research
September 20, 2004
The expanding wireless world
Wireless coverage will extend and improve once Voice over Wi-Fi, or VoWi-Fi, gets put into cellular phones. WiFi, a protocol for short range, wireless local networks, now in homes, many businesses, and your local Starbucks, can deliver voice once a call is packetized (internal link). That's an easy job for a cell phone, even if the chipset needed is expensive and at first difficult to design. If cell phone service is bad or non-existent in, say, a hunting lodge outside Laramie, Wyoming, you might use a WiFi hotspot to telephone out using the internet. WiFi hot spots are far cheaper to build than cell sites, consequently, we should be getting many more of them in rural areas than cellular connections. Limited mobility of course but at least a connection.
This marrying up of different networks, of which we should include Bluetooth (internal link), points to a problem the industry has now given up on, universality. Years ago we thought a single wireless operating system might be possible, today, for many practical reasons, that hope is gone. We may as well hope for a single, universal language. (Although I would argue that we do have a universal language now: broken English.) So, today the emphasis on getting along falls to the instrument itself, the cell phone, which will have to be so smart that it can operate on many frequency bands and understand many different wireless operating systems.
Two last things. The factor limiting cell phone size has been the keypad. We could make mobiles smaller but people still need enough room to press keys. Still, the units have become very small and light and battery life has increased greatly because of this. Now come camera phones and video streaming. This will mean bigger phones, heavier ones, and much, shorter battery life. Because video is limited by screen size, the bigger, the more clear, the more colorful, the better. Phones now will bulk up. Hmm.
September 19, 2004
A nice letter
Dear Tom:
I just read through your "Cell Phone Basics" article and wanted to say thank you for the information. I work for a national carrier, nothing special, just lower management in a call center. I want to work in the cellular industry and am currently working my way through school as well as building contacts in the industry. I just wanted to take the time to say thank you for the great resource. I learned more about cellular technology in the last 3 hours than I have since I became interested in the field. Thank you for your time and efforts, best of luck.
Thanks, a reader
Thanks to you! Mark van der Hoek has checked many of my wireless articles, without his invaluable help I could not accurately describe cellular radio. I used to archive my happy e-mail here (internal link), perhaps I should add more.
A ragged life
Spend a productive but depressing Saturday cleaning my back yard. Its neglect reminds me that I have far more interests than time. Do you have the same problem? I'm a driven perfectionist who can never do a job well because too many things need doing. Reading takes away from web work. Yard work takes away from house work. Fix the garden, the house falls apart. Take a long hike and come back to a house full of chores and undone tasks. The only time I can come close to a job well done is when I spend an insane amount of hours on a project. And then that means sacrificing progress everywhere else.
People might say, "That's life" but I'm not that casual. What's the point of doing 50% in life? Yet that's all I achieve. Cut down on tasks? Activities can't be reduced any more than ideas or interests, they come by themselves and multiply. People sometimes ask, "How do you come up with things to write about?" That's not the question for a writer. The real question is, how do I decide what not to write about? There's too many fascinating things in life to ever stop writing or thinking about them. The issue is probably management: how does one tolerate mediocrity when one is appalled by it? I don't know. I don't know.
September 18, 2004
Down on the river
Spent yesterday prospecting. Investigated an old gold mine, picked over an exposed quartz vein, looking for crystals, then hiked around the middle fork of the American River near Auburn, looking for nuggets with my metal detector. Didn't find any gold but I did see a water snake. And the small stones in the river were spectacular, colorful and highly polished, shining brilliantly in the clear, cool water. I like prospecting. It combines geology study, plant identification, exploring, hiking, and treasure hunting. A good excuse to be outdoors.
Thirty years old and still thought provoking
The always fascinating Arthur C. Clarke, from 1976, writing on the 100th anniversary of the telephone:
"For man is the communicating animal; he demands news, information, entertainment, almost as much as food. In fact, as a functioning human being, he can survive much longer without food -- even without water! -- than without information, as experiments in sensory deprivation have shown. This is a truly astonishing fact; one could construct a whole philosophy around it. (Don't worry -- I won't try.)"
"So any major advances in communications capability comes into widespread use just as soon as it is practicable Often sooner; the public can't wait for 'state of the art' to settle down. . ."
"In the early 1940's the late John W. Cambell . . . refused to believe that anything as complex as a TV receiver could ever be made cheap and reliable enough for domestic use."
"Public demand certainly disposed of that prophecy. Home TV became available . . . before the solid state revolution [L]et us take it as axiomatic that complexity is no bar to universality. Think of your pocket computers again and march fearlessly into the future . . . trying to imagine the ideal, ultimate communications system -- the one that would fufill all possible fantasies."
"[W]hat about telepathy? Well, I don't believe in telepathy -- but I don't disbelieve it either. Certainly some sort of electronically assisted mental linkage seems plausible; in fact, this has already been achieved in crude form, between men and computers, through monitoring of brain waves. However, I find that my mental processes are so incoherent that I should be very sorry for anyone at the receiving end. Our superhuman successors, if any, might be able to cope; indeed, the development of the right technology might force such an evolutionary advance."
"Perhaps the best that we could manage would be sharing of emotional states, not the higher intellectual processes."
Clarke's point in this last paragraph is that we may be able to communicate anger, joy, or difficulty, without being able to specify what experience or thought we are having to produce those states. In other words, I might communicate the idea of happiness without being able to say what I am happy about. More on this later.
Arthur C. Clarke, writing in the article "Communications in the Next Century of the Telephone." It is in this book, The Telephone's First Century -- and Beyond: Essays on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of Telephone Communications by Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Dertouzos, Morris Halle, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Jerome B. Wiesner T.Y. Crowe, ed. Crowell, with AT&T New York (1977) p.100 ISBN #: 0690014856
Selected Daily Notes Archive (Home Page has current notes)
Oldest (Page 1) to most new (Page 52)
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) (23) (24) (25) (26) (27) (28) (29) (30) (31) (32) (33) (34) (35) (36) (37) (38) (39) (40) (41) (42) (43)(44) (45)(46) (47) (48) (49) (50) (51) (52)
Free Telecom Magazines through TradPub.com. Click here to go there
